by Carys Bray
Bodies
Aunt Esther lived in America. She found God there. When I was small I thought that was where He lived. Unfortunately, it seemed that Aunt Esther had found the wrong God. I imagined her thumbing through the Yellow Pages, trying various numbers, selecting an incorrect one by mistake. Dad appeared to think that she had done it on purpose. He thought the same about the pregnancy which led to the tragedy of her life. Already a mother of five, she found herself expecting again in her forties. The baby’s name was Michael. He died when he was four. ‘And that’s what you get,’ Dad said sagely when relating the story.
People got all kinds of things for not living the way Dad thought they should: illness, divorce, badly-behaved children; every kind of personal calamity you could imagine. ‘The world is full of tragedy,’ he said, shaking his head sadly, as if the world was nothing to do with us.
The fact that people everywhere were beset by tragedy gave my mother a great deal of purpose. Tragedy spurred her into frenzies of housework and bursts of hymns: This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it! Gratitude was her shield. She hid under a tortoise shell of appreciation, hoping to divert God’s attention and consequently suspend the long-imagined, anxiously-anticipated tragedies of her own life. ‘We’re so lucky,’ she would say after something particularly dreadful had happened to someone else’s family. ‘We’re so blessed.’
‘It helps when you’re living right,’ Dad used to reply, which made me feel pleased for us and a little worried for everyone else.
Tragedy meant piles of cut flowers wrapped in soggy newspaper on the kitchen table awaiting Mum’s arranging fingers. Tragedy reeked of yeast and furniture polish. It meant trays of raspberry buns and spice loaves wrapped in cling film, accompanied by sympathetic notelets addressed in Mum’s hesitant, spidery hand.
Aunt Esther had beautiful cursive writing. When Dad first started to say that she had gone loopy, I thought he was talking about her coiling letters. She sent sporadic postcards as if she was on an extended holiday. She had been sending them since long before I was born. Mum kept them in a shoe box under the bed. There was one of the Grand Canyon with the word Amazing!! written on the back. Another showed the Hoover Dam and was accompanied by a scrawled Wowzers!! Aunt Esther liked to use exclamation marks. They waved from the backs of the postcards like little arms. Single exclamations gave a thumbs-up, like The Fonze. Double exclamations made me picture Aunt Esther with her arms above her head streaming down a rollercoaster track. Dad disproved of exclamation marks. ‘The most amazing sentence ever written is: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” And if that doesn’t need an exclamation mark, nothing does,’ he said.
Every Christmas Aunt Esther wrote a proper letter and enclosed a photograph of her family. These letters and pictures were also kept in the shoe box under the bed. Her first five children were born within seven years of each other and each child’s name echoed the initials of her husband Billy-Ray: Bettie-Rose, Benny-Roy, Bailey-Rane, Billy-Reed and Becky-Ruth. Aunt Esther must have moved around a lot because none of these annual photographs seemed to have been taken in the same place. One year the family were pictured wearing padded coats and bobble hats, standing on a cleared path, a foot of snow on either side of them. Another year they were dressed in shorts and T-shirts, smiling into the camera through teeth that gleamed out from brown, freckled faces. In 1970, the year I was born, Aunt Esther sent a photograph that didn’t include Billy-Ray. She mentioned that he had gone away in the accompanying letter, but she didn’t say where. In the photograph which she sent at Christmas time in 1975, Aunt Esther was holding a new baby. He was wearing a blue coat. There was no accompanying letter. On the back of the photograph she had scribbled Surprise!! It was a whole year before we knew his name.
I was probably five when I first found the shoe box. Perhaps I had gone looking for it after the fuss which followed the surprise of that year’s Christmas photograph. I couldn’t read the letters, but I loved looking at the pictures and postcards. My favourite was one of Aunt Esther and Billy-Ray standing outside a yellow and green hotel in Las Vegas. They were next to a sign which read ‘Baccarat Daily’. When I was old enough to read I asked Dad who Baccarat was. He harrumphed, leaving me to conclude that Baccarat was someone else he disapproved of.
Aunt Esther’s most memorable letter arrived during the Easter holidays in 1979. It was definitely Easter because Dad had only recently made us sit in the lounge while he gave the glove presentation. He gave the presentation to us every Easter, but that Easter he gave it twice. Once after he caught Timmy and I playing Holy Ghosts with the freshly laundered bed sheets and a second time after the arrival of Aunt Esther’s letter.
I didn’t like the glove presentation. Dad would hold up one of his hands and wriggle his fingers saying, ‘This is your spirit.’ Then he would put the glove on and say, ‘The spirit has entered the body.’ More finger wriggling ensued before his hand fell flat onto the arm of the sofa: death. He would slide his hand out of the glove and say, ‘The spirit has left the body.’ There was an extra part that year about how the Holy Ghost was a spirit and did not wear a sheet or say Whoooo. I hated it all. My body was not a glove. My body was me. I knew exactly where I lived in my body: on a little platform right behind my eyes. I directed everything from there remotely, like a forklift truck driver. I dreaded the day when I would be peeled, drained and separated from myself, hollowed out like the empty glove.
It was Mum who opened Aunt Esther’s unexpected Easter letter and she was soon murmuring, ‘What a tragedy.’
I wasn’t particularly worried by this. I was used to tragedies. Everyone in the neighbourhood came to our house when they had a tragedy. The tragedies ranged from adultery to flat tyres. Dad helped people eagerly, but he was always disappointed when his ministrations didn’t lead to conversion. He didn’t want to be popular, he was canvassing for God.
‘Listen. Oh listen,’ said Mum. ‘It’s Esther’s youngest, Michael.’ And she read: ‘We couldn’t find him and then I thought about the river, well it’s more of a deep stream really and he liked to play there, but he knew he mustn’t by himself.’
She stopped at this point, mindful of my presence. Little pigs have big ears was one of her favourite sayings. But I know what the letter said next:
And I ran faster than I knew I could and he was in the stream and I pulled him out and hollered for the kids and blew in his mouth. He was wet and I was wet and I was yelling and walloping his chest, but it was too late. God must have needed him more than I did. The Requiem Mass was beautiful. I enclose a photo. He looks so peaceful. Pray for us won’t you, and write me so I know you’ve got this letter. Esther.
There were no exclamation marks. I read the letter while Mum wasn’t looking: she was spraying pine-fresh polish on the piano and Dad had retired to the lounge to compose a reply – Aunt Esther had actually included a return address. As I slid the letter back into the envelope, I saw the photograph. I didn’t know that some people took photographs of their dead relatives. It seemed like a very rude thing to do, like taking a picture of someone without their clothes on. I instinctively knew that the photograph would meet with Dad’s disapproval. It would come into the category of things that we mustn’t do, like drinking alcohol and having fun on the Sabbath. I‘d never seen Michael so clearly. His face had always been one of several smallish circles in the Christmas photographs, fuzzed with distance and eclipsed by his more exotic-sounding, double-barrelled siblings. He was lying in a white coffin, wearing a white shirt, surrounded by white flowers. There was a graven image of the Virgin Mary propped at the head of the coffin. The white shirt had a frilly collar. In real life, Michael might have refused to wear it. It was the sort of shirt that a little boy would only be seen dead in.
One of Michael’s eyes was closed, but the other doll-peeped. I couldn’t see it properly. Just a floss of white. Enough to suggest that he might be doing it on purpose. The same thing happened to
Dad sometimes when he fell asleep on the sofa on Sunday afternoons, I could see a slice of white as he dozed with one eye open. But Michael was dead with one eye open, which seemed absolutely deliberate and incredibly clever. His mouth was sealed shut in a curl that was not quite a smile. His head pressed into the pillow heavily and his chin tilted forwards so that it was almost touching his chest. It looked as if he might sit up in a moment. His hair was auburn and curly. It was dry. I wondered if Aunt Esther had blown it with the hair drier after she pulled him out of the stream. I was so absorbed in the photograph that I jumped when Dad snatched it from me. ‘Stop looking at that picture of your cousin’s body.’
‘It’s a picture of Michael,’ I said. But as far as my parents were concerned, he was no longer Michael. He was Michael’s body. Dad had called it, ‘That picture of your cousin’s body.’ Yet Michael wasn’t flat like an empty glove, he wasn’t hollow, he was full of Michael. I could tell.
‘What happens if Michael wakes up?’ I asked at lunch time.
‘People don’t wake up after they’re dead,’ Dad said.
‘Will you take a picture of me when I die?’ Timmy paused between mouthfuls to find out.
‘We don’t take pictures of dead people,’ Dad said.
‘Of course not, darling.’ Mum gave Dad a look. ‘And anyway, you won’t die until you are a very old man.’
I looked at Mum and Dad. ‘Maybe we will take pictures of them when they die,’ I said to Timmy.
‘We don’t take pictures of dead people,’ Dad reiterated.
‘What was wrong with him?’ Timmy asked.
‘He drowned,’ said Mum.
‘Yeh, but what was wrong with him?’
‘Nothing was wrong with him until he drowned,’ Mum explained.
‘What if he gets hungry?’ Timmy wondered.
‘People don’t get hungry after they’re dead,’ Dad said.
‘Is it cold in the ground?’
‘No,’ Dad said.
‘How do you know?’ Timmy persisted.
‘Because I do,’ Dad replied, which of course indicated to Timmy and me that he knew no such thing.
The Holy Ghosts game was not nearly as fun as our new game, Dead Bodies. Because Timmy was a boy and only slightly older than Michael, he got to be the body. Our back garden was stuffed with flowers in preparation for inevitable tragedies; Mum picked and distributed them when necessary. As it was Easter, Timmy and I had to make do with daffodils, a few tulips and the crocuses that quivered shyly around the trunks of the fruit trees. Timmy lay on the grass next to the fence with his hands clasped across his chest. He peeped out of half-shuttered eye lids. I collected the floral tributes and arranged them around him. It was hard to pick flowers without scissors or shears and sometimes I ended up with fists full of petals, which I duly sprinkled over him. Neither of us had been to a funeral before, but we’d spent enough of our lives in church to imagine what one might be like. I conducted the service, which by rights ought to have been done by Timmy because he was a boy. But I was older and he was dead.
I began with the opening hymn, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, and found that I knew four out of the five verses quite well. This was followed by a very long prayer with lots of pleading and gratitude in it. It seemed appropriate to say a few words about the dead and I began to offer my tribute to Timmy. By this time he was starting to fidget.
‘Timmy was six. He liked trains. He had lots of them.’
‘I had sixteen,’ Timmy interrupted. ‘But that one with the yellow funnel got lost.’
‘Shh.’ I signalled to him to lie still. ‘Timmy’s favourite dinner was chicken and rice and his favourite pudding … What’s your favourite pudding?’ I asked.
‘Angel Delight,’ he said with a giggle.
‘Angel Delight. Timmy was quite good and didn’t do very much sinning, so he will probably go to heaven and not be punished, though it’s hard to say. Look at Job and God liked him.’
‘I’m bored,’ said Timmy.
‘Shh.’
‘I’ve had enough.’ He started to sit up.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll be dead now.’
We swapped places. I lay on the warm grass and closed my eyes while Timmy picked flowers. I didn’t peep. I breathed slowly and tried to imagine what it would be like if the ground opened beneath me. Would the soil be wet or dry? Would it crumble or stick? What would it smell like?
Timmy’s flower picking was worse than mine. He sprinkled me with torn petals and segments of twigs which he had broken off the fruit trees. He welcomed the congregation to the funeral with the same upside-down, singsong intonation Dad used at church. He opened the service with ‘Alice the Camel’s got Five Humps’ before changing to ‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam’ after I gave a deathly cough. He offered a prayer that we had learned from an older boy at Sunday school but never dared to say in front of Dad. ‘Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks-for-the-grub.’ I pulled a face, but kept my eyes closed. ‘Oh, all right.’ He tried again, this time asking for a blessing on the sick, the afflicted and the dead that they would get better soon and be at church next Sunday.
I was anxious to listen to his tribute to me, but he was fed up.
‘I’m hungry. I can smell raspberry buns. Mum can’t post them to Aunt Esther in America, can she?’
I shook my head.
‘Then they’re for us, for tea. I’m going to lick the bowl.’
He ran back into the house, leaving me lying on the grass. I lay there for a while, shrinking into the space behind my eyes, trickling out of my limbs until all of me was right there on the platform in the hub of my head. I breathed slowly and quietly. I wondered how Michael would breathe and then I remembered that he couldn’t. I heard the garden living around me. I was warm and fuddly. I fell asleep.
When I woke up I was sticky and heavy. It took me several moments to crawl out of sleep and back into my body. I blinked into the brightness. My hands were still clasped across my chest, empty until I found the command to move a finger and send the life prickling back into them. As I pushed myself up I saw the crisscross pattern of grass stencilled on my elbows, and I saw Dad, bent over, peering through a knot in the fence, further down the garden.
‘What are you doing?’ I called.
‘Nothing,’ he said and strolled back into the house.
I got up and brushed myself down. I walked to the spot where Dad had been standing. I had to balance on tiptoe in order to look through the knot and into next door’s garden. Mrs Rigby was lying on a rug on the grass. She was as brown and shiny as a sausage. She was wearing bikini bottoms. Her hands were crossed over her chest just like mine had been. I thought that she might be dead. I didn’t realise I was holding my breath until she lifted a hand to scratch her nose and the air galed out of me.
Later on, at tea time, I let Dad know. ‘It’s all right,’ I told him. ‘Mrs Rigby is alive.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘She looked like she was dead. But it’s okay, I saw her move.’
He dismissed me with a wide hand-sweep and asked Mum to say grace. She prayed for Aunt Esther. She asked God to bless our food, thanked Him for our health, and fervently petitioned Him to continue to keep us from harm, in particular drowning. It was quite easy for God to do this because there wasn’t a small river, or even a stream next to our garden. There was only Mrs Rigby, lying parallel to the fence, her juicy legs popping out of her bikini bottoms. But Mum probably wasn’t thinking about Mrs Rigby as she tucked into a still-warm raspberry bun, determinedly grateful for what she was about to receive.
I will never disappoint my children
She looks like an evacuee, sitting on a chair outside the school office with her lunchbox clutched to her chest. She smiles when she sees you. But it’s the sort of exasperated smile that your parents used to give, a smile that speaks of loving you anyway and despite.
‘Sorry,’ you mutter to the teacher whose smile also fails its w
elcome.
You need the loo. You are tomato-faced, sweaty. When you removed your cardigan earlier during the meeting that made you late, you were appalled by the sight of your milky arms and their thick winter coat of flesh; you immediately re-covered them and kept the cardigan on afterwards, in the greenhousing heat of your car.
You hold her hand as you leave the school together. It is warm, stickied by hot classrooms and wax crayons. She tells you a story about a boy called George who might love her. You buckle her into the car seat and listen to more about George.
‘He let me use his best eraser in the shape of an aeroplane, and he didn’t tig me at playtime …’
She doesn’t stop talking as you walk around the car to the driver’s side. You have a little time before you need to pick up your sons from high school: twenty minutes to counteract your lateness. When you reach the end of the road, you turn right.
‘Where are we going?’
‘For an ice cream,’ you say.
You drive along the coastal road, past wet ripples of sand that stretch for miles. You can’t see the sea, but Blackpool is visible in the distance through the quivering heat-haze.
You went to Blackpool once on holiday with your family. Your dad promised to buy everyone an ice cream, a proper one from a shop. He held the shop door open as you spilled inside, sunburned and sand-speckled. He shepherded you into a huddle and made a show of counting everyone, including himself.
‘That’ll be eight ice creams, please.’ He smiled his wide, pumpkin smile, revealing zigzag gaps of absent molars. ‘Can you do a discount?’ he asked as he emptied the contents of his wallet into his hand. ‘No? An extra small scoop for a reduced price, then?’
You reach the roundabout by the pier and turn off into the car park. The fast-food restaurant is enveloped by scaffolding.
‘It’s closed,’ your daughter says firmly, as if she was expecting to be disappointed.