by Robert Lock
“Well,” he stated, “we can’t let the undertakers see you in this condition, Mother. Let’s find you something more appropriate to wear, shall we?”
Colin pushed himself out of the chair and crossed to the wardrobe. It loomed over him, in some ways still the ogre from childhood, so much so that when he reached for the handles Colin half-expected some sort of angry reaction to his intrusion. Its doors were stiff, having clearly not been opened for years, so when he finally managed to yank them apart the vigour of his action was heralded by the clatter of empty wire coat hangers, several of which banged against the back of the wardrobe as though to alert their master to an intruder. Hanging to one side was a pathetic gathering of dresses, together with a camel hair coat, its fur collar conjuring up a memory of being on a railway platform, surrounded, or so it seemed at the time, by huge packing cases, and being terrified by the hissing and clanking of a steam engine as it drew up alongside. Colin reached into the wardrobe and stroked the fur collar, but physical contact revealed no further details; the coat clung on to the meat of the memory — what station it was, the contents of the packing cases, their destination — with a tenacity he could only admire.
“Which do you think?” Colin enquired, still facing into the wardrobe, which contained, he was surprised to note, the same ammoniacal freshness of the steam, which had engulfed him on that anonymous railway platform so long ago. “There’s a black one… no, that isn’t really appropriate, is it? We don’t want you to be mistaken for one of the undertakers. Well, it’s either the spotty one or the blue one. I like the spotty one best. We’ll go with that.”
He lifted the dress out of the wardrobe, hung it on the outside of the door, gave it a perfunctory brush with the back of his hand and stepped back, the better to assess its ability to contain his mother’s substantial bulk which had, he felt sure, grown somewhat since she last wore the dress.
“What do you think? This isn’t really my area of expertise, you know. It looks about right.” He shrugged. “We’ll just have to see. I might have to leave it unfastened, but whatever we do I am not letting you be seen by complete strangers in nothing but a nightie. There’s absolutely no reason why they need to mess about with you… no reason at all. I’ll get you ready and then they can do the rest.”
Colin took a deep breath. He thought for a moment of George Parr, who, despite living in an age more accustomed to the proximity of death, had been obliged, within the space of nine years, to bury the two people he held most dear, and yet somehow managed to step out onto that stage every night and make his audience laugh. How had he done it? Was every performance in some way a tribute to his wife and daughter, demonstrating to the world how they had helped him become the star that he was? Or was it a means of forgetting, for a few minutes at least, how alone in the world he was?
“Come on, Colin,” he admonished, “if George could do it so can you.”
He walked back to the bed. Gently lifting Edna’s arm, he slid the sheet off, letting it pool on the floor at his feet, unveiling, in that simple subtraction, the brutal mechanics of her illness, from the wasted, dimpled flesh of her legs, the catheter draining into a bag attached to the side of the bed, to her useless arm, which was angled, palm away from her body, so clearly a forsaken appendage. Gripping her shoulders, as he had seen her carers do, Colin rolled his mother onto her back, straightened out her legs and positioned her arms at her sides.
“Like a regimental soldier,” he commented. “Now, how am I going to get this dress on?” He laughed. “How do you put a dress on? Does it go over your head, or is it legs first? Bloody hell, Mother, why couldn’t you have preferred trouser suits? I don’t even know if I’ll be able to get it over your nightie. I won’t, will I? Even if I did it’d look a bit weird. I’m really sorry, but the nightie’s going to have to come off. I know, I know, but you’d rather it was me doing this than some stranger. I’ll be as quick as I can.”
The archivist began his work. First he drew up the night-dress, carefully lifting his mother’s body to one side, then the other, until the material was bunched under her armpits and across the top of her breasts. The mound of pillows which had kept Edna propped in a comfortable position for reading and watching television now assisted her son as he manoeuvred one arm at a time out of the nightie, a task made easier by the garment’s voluminous size, finally lifting it clear whilst taking care not to disturb her hair, which she had insisted on being neatly trimmed and styled once a month by a mobile hairdresser.
Encouraged by the success of this first stage, Colin returned to the wardrobe, opened the drawer at its base and drew out a bra. It looked brand new, crisp and white, though it appeared comically large in comparison to the only other bras Colin had any experience of, the ones belonging to Siobhan O’Connell, a skinny post-graduate researcher from Cork who had managed, after spiking his lemonade with vodka and impressing him by being the first person he had met to not only finish James Joyce’s Ulysses but also enjoy it, to finally deprive him of his virginity at the age of thirty. They had remained together for six months, until Siobhan returned to Ireland. She had asked him to come with her, but Colin declined, citing work commitments and a reluctance to leave his mother on her own. The real reason, however, was fear. The idea of moving to another country, and the commitment to their relationship that such a move would surely endorse, terrified him, and so they said their rather awkward farewells in a cold ferry terminal, where Colin promised that he would write, and Siobhan shook her head and replied ‘no you won’t’, and then he stood and watched her leave, watched the bright red of her rucksack until it was swallowed up in the black maw of the ferry, before turning away, bewildered by how such powerful feelings of both relief and regret could co-exist.
He held up the bra. “You could make four of Siobhan’s out of this.”
Before the onset of her illness Edna Draper had fought a long, arduous and ultimately unsuccessful battle with her weight. She was not greedy, but she belonged to a generation that abhorred waste, a habit which when combined with a family preponderance for the women to thicken around the waist in middle age meant that as the multiple sclerosis tightened its grip, limiting her physical activity, she inevitably became increasingly rotund. And after a particularly traumatic episode, when within the space of a month she lost nearly all feeling in her left leg, Edna sought comfort in buns and cakes, consuming them with an almost fatalistic abandon. Until her recent collapse it had been her habit to enjoy a vanilla slice or bag of doughnuts with her afternoon tea, a routine frowned on by her doctor yet actively encouraged by the district nurse, who regularly stated her philosophy that ‘a girl’s got to have some pleasure in her life’, and so, as Colin returned to the bedside carrying the bra, he saw, with new clarity, what a peculiar shape his mother had become. Edna’s soft white torso had settled into the equally white mattress, and with the evening sun blurring the boundary between flesh and material still further, it appeared she had morphed into a sort of bed/human hybrid, with her belly button and broad, pale brown nipples the only reference points marking out her former unconjoined self. Attached, as if quite arbitrarily, to this embryonic form were her limbs: the attenuated legs, made all the more meagre by their proximity to the broad spread of her stomach and hips, and the arms, more robust, but with the flesh sagging from the bones like sallow wattles.
Colin placed the bra on his mother’s chest, but the cups sat in a space occupied by nothing but her crucifix and the necklace with the pale blue stone, while her breasts drooped, like slabs of dough, towards her armpits. Colin’s hands dithered above the bra as he tried to work out the mechanics of large breasts, before reluctantly concluding that he would have to first fasten the clasps behind her back and then manoeuvre each breast into its respective cup.
“Brace yourself, Mother,” the archivist warned, “this is going to be far worse for me than it is you.”
Tilting Edna forward, as he had done so many times in the past when rearranging her pillows, C
olin positioned himself so that her weight was supported by his shoulder. He then looped the shoulder straps into place, pulling the elasticated band around her back as he did so, and to his surprise and delight managed to line up the hooks and eyes and fasten them securely at his first attempt.
“Well, that wasn’t too bad, was it? Now for the awkward bit.”
And then Colin hesitated. For the first time since making the decision to dress his mother the archivist considered his actions as if seen from the outside. Would people understand that his number one priority was to ensure her dignity? That his mother would not be mauled about by a complete stranger who, God forbid, might even take some sort of perverse pleasure in their work? What he was doing was surely right, and if certain individuals thought otherwise then that was their problem. He had tended to her for well over a decade; surely he had earned the right to perform this last task, and to discharge it with love.
Convinced of the righteousness of his actions, Colin lifted the bra’s right cup, which in itself was quite difficult as the elastic was surprisingly strong, and tried to shepherd the slack flesh of his mother’s breast underneath the material, but he soon realised that using the flat palm of one hand in an attempt to maintain a minimum of contact was hopeless.
“Bloody hell, Mother,” he muttered, “you’re not making this any easier, you know.” Colin tried to remember how Siobhan had put on her bra. She had fastened the hooks and eyes at the front and then rotated the whole assembly, he recalled that much, but her breasts had been little more than neat conical protuberances that fitted into the cups without the need for anything but minimal adjustment, nothing like his mother’s recalcitrant bosom.
“Right,” Colin said firmly, “I’m afraid this calls for rather more direct action.” His explanation voiced, the archivist spread his hand wide, took a firm grip of the breast, and tucked it under the bra’s cup, letting the elastic snap back before the contents had a chance to slide free. A sausage-shaped section of flesh bulged around the lower curve of the bra, which he poked under the elastic with two fingers, before standing back from the bed to admire his handiwork.
“There you go. Nothing to it.”
He repeated the technique for Edna’s other breast, then took her dress, guided her legs through the hole at its top and, by gently rocking her body from side to side and inching the dress upwards at the same time, eventually had the garment in position. Leaning her against him one last time, Colin reached behind and pulled up the zip, which came to a stop several inches from the top of its travel. “Oh dear, too many cakes, Mother.” He let her sink back onto the pillows and straightened the material. “Not to worry, you can’t tell from the front.”
What, Colin wondered, was the accepted protocol for the deceased’s arms? Should they be at their sides, or crossed over their chest pointing slightly upwards, or crossed horizontally, hands overlapped? He tried all three poses, concluding that whether or not it was the norm the horizontal cross-over looked best; the ‘by the sides’ seemed overly formal, whereas the ‘angled cross’ made Edna look like an Ancient Egyptian mummy. He arranged her hands so that her fingers interlocked, and it was during this careful placement that Colin realised she was not wearing her wedding ring. He vaguely remembered there being some medical reason for its absence, but equally he knew Edna would want to be buried with her ring on.
“Where did you put it?” He wondered out loud, looking round the bedroom, but its spartan furnishings offered no clear answer. He returned to the wardrobe, searched through every pocket, lifted out every blanket and pillowcase in the bottom drawer, but all he found was a dry cleaning receipt and an empty perfume bottle. Had she entrusted the ring to his safekeeping? Colin racked his brains. If he had tucked it away somewhere with his most treasured possessions and then forgotten its location he would never forgive himself. “Think, Colin, think,” he nagged. What were his most treasured possessions? Might he have put the ring with them? This train of thought quickly led him to the surprising and, for someone who regarded himself as a political radical, gratifying realisation that he had no such things, at least not anything of significant monetary worth. In fact the body of cross-referenced documentation, postcards, photographs, letters, articles, newspaper cuttings and ephemera which he valued most highly Colin did not see as a possession at all; it was, rather, an archive in the literal sense of the word: a store or repository, assembled by him, certainly, but not, ultimately, for him. One day he would offer the archive to the town, and on that day it would become public property. Colin also hoped, because he was not quite as devoid of ego as he liked to think, that the archive would contribute in some small way to the resort’s cultural heritage; he saw his carefully constructed assembly of disparate parts as his own pier: a gestalt creation brought together by the vision of one man for the enjoyment of many.
And just as Colin was enjoying his moment of gentle hubris the location of the wedding ring popped into his head. “Of course! It’s in the pot in front of Dad’s photo on the mantel.”
He plodded across the hall and into the living room, reaching under the shade of the standard lamp as he passed by to switch it on, as he did every day on returning from work, because the living room faced north and remained fixed in a gloomy half-light no matter what the time of day, and after saying hello to his mother the archivist would, without fail, make himself a cup of tea and spend half an hour with the paper before starting tea. He would also follow this routine today, having dressed his mother’s corpse. He would slump in the armchair next to the standard lamp, sip at his tea, and read every headline, study every photograph, without any of it seemingly registering, and yet in twenty years time he would be able to recall every detail of the front page, as though the newspaper had been reporting the death of Edna Draper rather than the start of an official enquiry into the Hillsborough disaster.
Malcolm Draper was grinning his lopsided grin, pale blue eyes framed by black plastic spectacles. His checked shirt was partially unbuttoned, revealing the inverted triangle of suntanned chest and the pale skin that surrounded it which marked the limits of his casualness. He was leaning on the wooden handle of a garden tool, its precise function lost beyond the photo frame’s border, but Colin always imagined it to be a spade, judging by the soil under his father’s fingernails.
“She’s all yours now, Dad,” he said, addressing the picture.
Colin lifted the lid of the Wedgwood dish, retrieved Edna’s wedding ring and replaced the lid, its ceramic clink so very loud in the room’s hush. He returned to her bedroom, brandishing the ring. “Look what I found,” the archivist said. “Can’t have you setting off without this on.”
Gently lifting her left hand, Colin slid the ring onto her third finger, but it came to a halt at the second joint. He thought for a moment, then remembered a tip his grandmother, or an aunty, someone, had mentioned, so it was out of the bedroom again, this time turning left and into the kitchen, the fridge, to return with a tub of margarine. He rubbed a little of the margarine on the knuckle and thickest segment of Edna’s ring finger, then manoeuvred the slim gold band into position, before finally wiping off the greasy film with his handkerchief. The archivist unfolded a duvet cover, draped it over his mother so that just her head and shoulders remained uncovered, and stepped back to admire his handiwork.
“All done,” he announced. “You’re fit to be seen out now.”
The brilliant evening sunshine that had filled Edna’s bedroom with light the entire time Colin was dressing her faded abruptly as clouds began to build, and the sensation of an ending, like the lowering of stage lights at the conclusion of a play, was so powerful that it made his presence seem intrusive, as though he was impeding some vital moment of transition. The skin of Edna’s face, which had been kindled into a semblance of life by the sun, now revealed its truth. Colin could hardly bear to look at the waxy mask thus exposed, and he realised that without the lambent effect of the sunshine, which had warmed her skin as well as lending it col
our, he would never have been able to perform this final service. Now, in the sudden twilight, Colin looked on his actions in amazement; where had he found the objectivity, the composure, to dress his mother’s lifeless body? Had she too become, in effect, an archive? Had he subconsciously deemed the bra, dress and wedding ring as necessary codicils to the far greater anthology that was Edna Draper’s life?