by Monica Ali
All you know, really, is that you are going to die. It’s the only thing you know and the only thing you don’t think about.
Well, he thought, shit. So what?
The Scandinavian couple came round for a second lap. Huw noticed the engagement ring on her finger. He was furious, truly furious, about the wedding. If he saw the vicar now he’d knock him down. He’d like to stamp all over that kindly face. For a few moments he fought it, trying to push the thought aside, then hatred, released, coursed warmly through his body and made him calm again.
It wasn’t too late. That was the thing. He would speak to Sophie, after the holiday, and she would be relieved. They’d take the wedding back, into their own hands, where it belonged.
There she was. Over by that tomb, that sepulchre, whatever it was. Standing on one leg with her other foot raised, pressed flat on the side of her standing leg, and it was a wonder how she stood like that and didn’t fall over. She saw him looking and kind of waved. ‘It makes you think, doesn’t it?’ she said, when he went across. ‘Certainly,’ he said, ‘it does.’
Huw went to pay for the petrol and Sophie sat in the car staring at the dashboard. The rain came in shudders, harder now then softer, unable to get a grip. An engine started up and a car pulled out and another took its place. She listened to the executive click of the door and the bellyaching pump and then the fumes rolled in and caught in the back of her throat.
Petrol smelled like remorse. Tasted like it too. It wasn’t usually as easy as this.
Huw banged on the window and put his face to the glass. His thick dark hair was plastered across his forehead and the rain ran off his nose. ‘Pull over,’ he shouted, and she turned the key and watched the needles float over the dials.
At the bar she swirled the whisky in the low glass tumbler. Huw wiped his face on the back of his hand. She stood close to him and felt drawn to him, the matter of him, as if what she had previously only imagined had suddenly taken physical form. He wore a navy-blue polo shirt that was soaked along the shoulders and down the front and a thin steam began to rise from his chest.
‘Let’s drink,’ she said and raised her glass. The whisky smelled like nostalgia or perhaps it was more like regret. Maybe a mix of the two.
‘That guy in our village,’ said Huw. ‘Remember him? The sad case in the café.’
They joked around and sipped their drinks and Sophie thought about the writer. He was the kind of person you felt sorry for but went out of your way to avoid. He was patronizing and probably misogynist and his mouth was unnaturally moist. What you wondered, always, about expats was not, why did you come here, but why did you have to leave?
She wanted to ask Huw what the whisky smelled like, but didn’t. It was a game she used to play with Oliver when he was the one she took to bed.
Huw laced his fingers through hers. ‘Shall we go?’ he murmured into her hairline. ‘I’m sorry about the weather. It’s not what I asked for when I booked.’
‘You don’t get out of it that easily,’ said Sophie. ‘You’ve got a lot more grovelling to do.’
There was nothing much to look at. The pale green fields yawning up ahead and on either side. A hundred or so svelte black pigs on a black mudflat. More fields. A plane tree heavy with seed balls. The fields going on, unadorned. Sometimes a cork oak. Wild rosemary straggling along. A field and then another. They were taking the scenic route.
Sophie switched the windscreen wipers off. At last the rain had stopped. She sighed and settled back in her seat and tried to think of something to say.
‘Yes?’ said Huw. ‘What?’
Dampness was settling around her and she tried to shake it off.
‘Mmm?’ said Huw.
‘Afternoon drinking,’ said Sophie. ‘Feeling a bit sluggish, that’s all.’
‘Want me to drive?’
‘No,’ she said, because she had that at least to do.
When they got there she’d feel better. Have a bath, put on a fluffy dressing gown, use all the lotions and creams.
‘I love this kind of landscape,’ said Huw.
He was joking but she didn’t make the effort to laugh.
‘Get the map. Let’s find the main road.’
They went past a long low cottage with a roof that sagged in the middle. An old couple stood in between lines of cabbages and watched them driving by. In a while Sophie turned on to the main road and changed gears. The traffic went at a pace unconnected to the land, moving in a different time, a different place. Huw started up an argument about peasants. She argued back but she was too tired, really, worn out. Do we have to, she thought. Will we always? Better that than be bored, she told herself, and squeezed her buttocks together to stop them going numb in the seat.
She thought about the old couple in the vegetable patch. The woman’s cheeks were apple-red; her mouth looked like it never opened, like she’d said all she would ever have to say. Sophie chewed the flesh inside her bottom lip. There was a hollow cave in her stomach. She wanted to curl round a pillow and never get out of bed.
It will pass, she told herself.
‘What will pass?’ said Huw.
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Sophie. ‘Or everything. Depending on your point of view.’
‘Oh, yes, wise guru,’ he said. ‘And tell me, what is the meaning of life?’
She pinched his knee and felt better and sailed along on this thought: we fit just right together and that’s all I need to know.
It was Jonnie Singh who started it. One of her Year 9s. ‘Dunno, miss,’ he said to her, ‘dunno what else to write.’
She’d set an essay on Lord of the Flies. Examine Jack and Ralph’s relationship. What happens to turn them into mortal enemies?
Jonnie handed in half a page. ‘Jack and Ralph could have liked each other but they don’t. It wasn’t the way it turned out. It’s all about fires and hunting. Piggy is the one that gets it in the end. There’s no reason why it should turn out like that. It could go one way or the other. This way makes a better story. Jack and Ralph hate each other and that’s why they are mortal enemies.’
‘What are we going to do with you?’ she said.
Jonnie Singh stood in front of her desk with his hands in his pockets. He had ketchup down his shirt and his tie flicked over his shoulder. ‘Dunno, miss,’ he said again.
He was a bright boy and no troublemaker but she couldn’t do anything with him.
‘It says in the question that they’re enemies, but you haven’t explained why. That’s what I wanted you to do. Explore what happens in the story and write down the reasons why.’
Jonnie shrugged and looked down at the floor. ‘That’s how people are, miss. Dunno why.’
‘I agree with you, Jonnie,’ she said. ‘That’s what makes it a good book. I just wanted you to . . .’ She stopped because all of a sudden she felt ridiculous. What was the point of it all? She thought of the lessons she would take that afternoon and the things that she’d say and the hands that would be raised and the answers she would hear and the praise that she’d give and the prompts and the chiding and the ring of the bell and none of it, none of it, held any meaning. That’s how people are. She stared at the page in her hands, the scrawly, childish writing and the blank lines beneath, and froze.
She’d go home tonight and eat and talk some more and lie down and close her eyes and get up again and eat and then talk and then walk down the corridor and enter the classroom and everything would begin again. It’s not my life, she thought, it’s just living. There’s nothing you can do about that.
‘Miss,’ said Jonnie. ‘Miss.’
‘Sorry, what?’
Jonnie looked at the door. ‘Please, miss,’ he said, ‘can I go?’
When she was twenty-one, after she had graduated, she spent some time in hospital. There was no reason for it. It was just a chemical imbalance. Nothing happened to make her depressed, no crises apart from the inability to get out of bed.
She spent a lot of time crying. S
he didn’t even feel sad. But crying was something to do, a kind of achievement, and she noticed her mother preferred it to when she sat and stared into space.
She came out of hospital in time to start at the teacher-training college. Of course she took the pills. After a couple of years she stopped taking them and the doctor said that was fine. When she told Huw about it he said it can happen to anyone and it’s just an illness and all the other things you’re meant to say. It still felt like she was hiding something, but only because it was impossible to explain.
They were away now for the half-term holiday and she had thought that she would shake it. It was beginning to be a concern.
There was a village, cleaved in two by the road, and Sophie slowed the car. ‘There’s a boy in my Year 9 class,’ she said.
‘You’ve got to have the patience of a saint.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘not really.’
‘OK. Go on.’
‘He wrote this essay. It was only ten lines long.’
‘How old is he? Fourteen? Must make you wonder why you bother.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Listen. Never mind.’ It wasn’t his fault anyway. A fourteen-year-old boy made you afraid?
A car overtook them, going so fast it sent a reverberation down the roof of their hire car.
Pulling past the village, Sophie pressed down on the accelerator. These fields are a deeper green, she thought, it must rain here all the time. The small of her back pressed against the upholstery. Faster, she wanted to go faster. Down her spine there was a draining sensation and her mind now was marvellously clear. She felt all the power of the engine. It connected directly with her pelvis. Her leg was the conduit. The power was in her. She stepped down harder.
Huw was saying something but she wasn’t distracted. She needed to get up more speed. How liberating it was to focus. She would take up meditation. That was it.
Whisky, she knew what it smelled like. Not a pure emotion, not a real one. There was something synthetic about it. Sentimentality. Yes. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.
A car in the way now but that was no problem; she would just swing out to the left.
Huw offered, again, to drive but she needed to hold on to the wheel. When she saw the bus she thought that was it, over, and her life did not flash before her eyes. She had one thought. One clear thought. She would miss the fitting next Thursday. The fitting for the dress.
After church, when she was small, she used to play with Alicia in the graveyard while their parents chatted in the porch with the Whitmores and the Clarkes and the Woods. ‘Find the oldest dead person,’ said Alicia. They ran around the tombs. ‘Find the youngest one.’ They found four babies. ‘Let’s put flowers on,’ said Alicia, and they picked daisies. ‘Now, we’ve got to say which ones went to Hell.
‘This one,’ said Alicia, ‘he definitely went to Hell.’
Sophie stood next to her sister and waited for her to explain.
Alicia put her foot on the granite slab. ‘See, it’s all black. And there’s no poem. Nobody cared about him.’
‘Why is he buried by the church then?’ said Sophie. Alicia thought she knew everything.
‘You’re a stupid baby,’ said her sister. ‘I’m not playing with you any more.’
Jasper died the next week. Daddy left him at the vet’s. At the church she hung back with her parents. The vicar came out after a while. ‘You want to speak to me,’ he said to Sophie. ‘Let’s go inside and take a pew.’
Sophie followed the black cassock, trembling, because she thought she was going to speak to God. For those few minutes she was confused, because he had known what she was thinking and because she always imagined God looking like him anyway, except with a beard of course.
‘Do animals go to Heaven?’ she asked when she found her voice.
He thought about it long and hard with his hands planted on his knees. That vicar was old and unmarried. He went into a home in the end.
‘It’s hard to say for certain. But I think they probably don’t.’
‘Oh,’ said Sophie, blinking. ‘Is it only for people?’
He smiled and held her shoulder. ‘Well, we won’t know until we get there ourselves. But if an animal doesn’t have a soul, then the soul can’t be saved.’
‘Don’t you know?’ blurted Sophie. She crossed her ankles and swung her feet and hoped her mother hadn’t heard.
The vicar didn’t seem cross. ‘I don’t know,’ he said gently. ‘I believe. That’s what we call faith.’
She carried on believing, into her early teens. She didn’t even notice when she stopped. One day, during prayers, she opened her eyes and realized she hadn’t believed for a long time. It was surprising, as though somebody else had done it, walked into her bedroom and taken something away.
I meant to ask him where animals go, thought Sophie. I never asked him that.
They were driving through a storm and there was thunder but it was bright outside, a whitish light. At the outskirts of the town now, the houses beginning to build up. A construction site at a standstill, an office block and a fan of parked cars.
What did I believe, though? What did I believe?
She was getting married in that church.
Alicia went to a register office.
The bus. There were children on board. It could go one way or the other.
She died and her last thought was the dress.
You didn’t die. You didn’t.
What did I believe?
‘Sophie,’ said Huw, ‘I think you should put the head-lights on.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said. ‘Stop fussing.’
In the morning they stood in the little marble-clad bathroom and looked at themselves in the mirror. Huw stuck out his hand. ‘Hi, I’m Huw Ridley. And this is my wife, Sophie. Sophie, say hello to these nice folks here.’
She crossed her eyes and put out her tongue.
He put his arm around her shoulders. ‘How do we look together?’
She leaned into him. ‘I think we look just fine.’
He turned on the tap and picked up his toothbrush.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘about yesterday.’
‘Forget it.’ He applied the toothpaste. ‘Feeling better today?’
‘Much better, thanks. I’m going to get dressed.’
‘You realize,’ he called out to the bedroom, ‘that you’ll have to mend your lippy ways. Because when I’m your husband I’ll want a lot more respect out of you.’
‘Come here and say that, pussycat.’
Huw appeared in the doorway. He struck a bodybuilder’s pose.
‘Idiot,’ she said. ‘Come here.’
‘I said that when I’m your husband, I’ll want a lot more respect out of you.’
He was close enough now for her to pull off his towel, so she did. ‘What’s this?’ she said. ‘What’s this?’
In the Capela dos Ossos Sophie left Huw by the altar and went back to the entrance, wanting to read the guidebook as she walked round. She began, instead, to read the graffiti on the skulls to the right of the gate. Nuno, Gary, Lena, Justin B, Pinto, Paulo, Marie Rosta, Susana Alforas. Kiss me, it said on one skull. I’m hungry, on another in pink felt-tip.
She opened the book.
An anthology could be compiled on the subject of the Insight of Death, the perception of which has preoccupied Mankind from time Immemorial.
There indeed should be no great need for the Church to remind us every year on the first day of Lent that thou art dust and to dust shall thou revert, this being as it is probably the foremost of eternal verities . . .
She paused and looked around and tried to imagine the monks who had built this place, fitting the bones together, choosing from a pile, sizing and stacking and balancing. Did they shiver? Did they sing? Did they work in silence?
Taking a deep breath and rolling back her shoulders she tried to assess how she was feeling today. It was hard to tell. Am I feeling normal? A litt
le heavy perhaps. Everyone feels low sometimes. Especially in a place like this.
She pressed her teeth together. If you think about how you feel then you inevitably start to feel bad. Forget it, please, stop fretting. Do you want to make yourself ill?
Flicking forward a couple of pages she began to read from the tombstone inscriptions.
This is a tomb
and beneath this slab
lies Antonio de Macedo
reduced to dust and dark ashes
he was a very noble gentleman
abundantly rich of worldly wealth
in the end, he took nothing with him
and here he lies in complete destitution
Died in the year 1565
At St Dominic’s Monastery in Lisbon:
I was a renowned learned man
and I read most every book
but to sum up I came to die
like any brainless fool does.
She looked up at Huw, who was studying the ceiling. She wanted to laugh. She wanted him to come and read over her shoulder and say something to make her laugh. He had his hands on his hips and his head tipped back and she thought he looked very fine.
She didn’t know what to think about this place. Huw would know what he thought, he always did, and later she would argue with him until she realized what it was that she felt. She liked the way that worked.
Only with the wedding it was different. All the church stuff, he hated it. To him it was just telling lies. She couldn’t argue with that but she wanted to; she realized now that she wanted to. How do you know? she wanted to say.
She looked at him; his brown suede shoes rimmed with tidemarks from yesterday’s rain, his dark jeans and tan belt and the blue check shirt he hadn’t bothered to iron. Huw moved and she looked away, guilty, as though she had been spying on him.
Father Antonio Vieira S.J. wrote a masterly definition of the boundary between the living and the dead:
‘The living are dust that stands and the dead are fallen dust. The living are no more than dust that walks as the dead are dust that lies.
‘In summertime the squares in town are full of dust as dry as powder; there blows a puff of wind, the dust is raised in the air and what does it then do? What the living, and very alive for that matter, do, for the dust will not settle down nor can it stay still. It walks, runs, flies . . . The living are dust that is blown and therefore inflated with conceit; the dead are windless dust, there is no vanity left in them.’