Death looked away, embarrassed. It was his fault. Here he was, sitting about idly, and for what purpose? It wasn’t even sunny. How dare he feel sorry for himself ?
He stood up and walked briskly to his hotel.
8 March
Only Disconnect
First to go was the television. That wasn’t hard. It was mostly rubbish that came out of it anyway. And the news was better on the radio. No, not better, weightier. Yes, that was part of what she craved: substance.
Next, the computer. The daily wade through emails, the fatuous chatter of so-called friends on social networks – gone. She had to cancel her online banking facility, and arrange to receive bills by post and pay them by cheque, and this would be dearer but she didn’t care, there was something civilised about slowing down. She found her old typewriter in a cupboard but the ribbon was dry and the keys stiff, so she took it to the charity shop, and rediscovered the pleasure of writing with a fountain pen. Her first correspondence was with the TV licensing authority, who assumed she was either mistaken or lying.
The mobile phone went. One last text went out to everybody – AS OF NOW I AM NO LONGER AVAILABLE ON THIS NUMBER – and, once she’d chopped the SIM card up with the herb cutter and recycled the dead phone, she wasn’t.
For six days she lived in blissful tranquillity, sleeping, gardening, making soup and reading Anthony Trollope.
On the seventh day her daughter arrived, puce with rage. ‘So you’re not dead or lying helpless on the floor,’ she said.
‘It would seem not.’
‘And how would I have known? All my messages have bounced back and your answer-machine’s not working.’
‘It was, when I took it to the charity shop.’
‘What’s going on, Mum?’
‘I want to go back,’ she said. ‘I hate this world of gadgets. I hate that word “connectivity”. I don’t want that, I want human contact. And look, here you are. You’ve come to see me for the first time in months. I’ll make some coffee.’
‘This is pure hypocrisy,’ her daughter said. ‘I bet I know how you spend your days now – with your nose stuck in a book and your mind so far removed from reality that you don’t hear the phone ringing. What kind of human contact is that?’
‘You have a point,’ she said. ‘Come in and let’s talk about it.’
9 March
Closing Down
The store had never been busier. You could call this ironic, but there was no irony about it. It’s what happens when you have a closing-down sale. If we hadn’t been dying, the vultures wouldn’t have gathered. There’d have been the usual trickle of customers, and Ken, Jim and myself (we were the only ones left by then) would have been fighting over who was going to serve them. Yes, it was a bit depressing, but we were heading for the dole queue anyway, and at least with it being busy the last days went fast.
It was, weirdly, quite touching, the way people coming up to the tills with armfuls of CDs and DVDs kept apologising. They were sorry about our jobs, sorry about the shop closing, sorry they were picking up such bargains. (I’m lying, they weren’t sorry about that.) It was like hearing people saying nice things about you over your deathbed. ‘You’ll miss us when we’re gone,’ Ken told them. And they said they would, but they won’t. They’ll buy everything online, or download stuff for a fraction of what we used to charge. ‘Miss us?’ Jim said. ‘They won’t even remember our faces.’
‘Is there really another twenty per cent off this?’ one old guy asked, dumping a boxed set of Westerns on the counter. ‘It’s so cheap already.’
‘I know,’ I said, managing a smile. ‘But when we finally shut the doors on Saturday, we don’t want John Wayne still hanging around. Everything must go.’
‘Including us,’ said Ken, beside me.
‘Saturday?’ You could see the old guy’s cogs turning. ‘So it’ll be even cheaper then?’
‘If it’s still here,’ I said.
He started to say something else, but bottled it. ‘Okay, I’ll take it,’ he said, handing me a twenty, and I put the sale through and gave him his change and he toddled off with Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers and all the rest.
‘That old cheapskate was going to ask you to keep it aside for him,’ Ken said.
‘Shameless,’ I said.
The queue snaked round the display units. You couldn’t see the end of it.
‘Can I help someone?’ Ken shouted.
10 March
Memory
They were passing the end of a particular street when he said, ‘See that old tenement? I went to view a flat in there once. Must be thirty years ago.’
‘When you were with Martha?’ she asked.
‘Yes. We’d been looking for a while, and it sounded promising, so we made an appointment to see it. Didn’t I ever tell you this?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Everything else in the street is new,’ he said, ‘so it looks different, but that building hasn’t changed.’
They stood hand in hand on the corner while he talked.
‘After we rang the bell there was a silence, then this weird hissing noise behind the door. An old bloke let us in. He’d been spraying the place with air freshener, so much you could hardly breathe. The bloke was probably only about fifty, but he seemed old to us. Very neatly dressed, jacket and tie, but it was all wrong, kind of spivvy. The jacket was yellow corduroy, and the tie was a bow tie. And he had this music, cha-cha-cha stuff, going right through the flat, big speakers in every room. And instead of turning it down while he showed us round, he turned it up. We couldn’t hear a word he was saying.
‘Then he showed us the bedroom. It was all pastels and frilly curtains and a satin bedcover, and on the bed, I’m not kidding, there were dozens of teddy bears, ranks and ranks of them. And he didn’t explain, he didn’t apologise, he just said, with a kind of flourish, “And this is the bedroom.” And all we could see was teddy bears.’
‘I think you did tell me,’ she said. ‘I remember now.’
‘Well, we got out of there fast. It was like, where are the bodies buried? It was a nice flat, but we couldn’t have lived there, not after that. Funny what sticks in your mind. If I’m ever in this part of town, it’s that flat and those teddy bears I think of.’
‘And are you?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Ever in this part of town?’
He looked at her strangely. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose I am, not often.’
11 March
The Abbot
It was the savage boys watching from the cliffs who warned the Abbot that they were coming. He thanked the boys, stilled their excitement, and calmly made his preparations. To the violence that was about to be unleashed he would offer no resistance, hoping thus to neuter it. One day, he thought, the blood lust will drain from these men of war, and remorse bring them to the God of those they have butchered.
With the books, the holy relics, the silver chalices and whatever else they could carry, he sent the younger monks and the savage boys deep into the hills. Although trembling with fear, the brothers at first refused to leave him, so he explained patiently why they must. ‘When they arrive, they will need to kill. It is who they are. If you remain, they will kill you because your youth and strength make you the nearest we have to warriors. But you must survive because you are the future. By killing us old ones they kill only the present.’
He kept with him Blind Eoin, and Osseine, who was deaf and so crippled that he could not have fled anyway. The Abbot blessed the young ones and kissed them goodbye. ‘Bury us on your return,’ he said. ‘Then begin again. Rebuild what they have destroyed, restore the precious things that speak of God, and prepare for when you too must die, perhaps in the same manner. Now go.’
Later, he led Eoin and Osseine down to the beach and helped them to kneel in the sand. He placed Eoin nearest the water, since he would not see death wading towards him from the boats. Furthe
r back he placed Osseine, who would not hear Eoin’s cries. At the high-water mark, he himself knelt. He would see and hear all, and know what was coming to him. Yet to die in this beautiful place of white and blue, of solitude and storm, where he had lived a pure and penitent life, was not the worst thing. And from here, so he faithfully believed, he would go to God; to whom, as the oars and sails approached, he made one last prayer for forgiveness.
12 March
The Skull
for Ange
‘Now,’ the old woman said, ‘before you go up there I want to introduce you to someone.’
She moved to the shelves lined with bits of stone and bone, the fragments of prehistory. She moved slowly, not because she was sore or stiff, but because she had passed the age of hurrying, for anything. Her face was like a pencil drawing, cross-hatched and grey.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Meet the ancestor.’
Her thin, strong fingers lifted it, the small brown skull like a helmet. The mandible missing, but five long teeth hanging from the upper jaw. The nasal cavity where a mouse might have made its nest, the eye sockets deep and sulky, and in their recesses tunnels back to where the brain once sat, sending and receiving messages, taking on and defeating the world day after day and storing its victories away. The mottled crown, pitted and smoothed, a stone rolled by a million tides.
It wasn’t an archaeological site, it was a croft with a tomb, and the house was not a museum. In a museum the curator wouldn’t be an old woman in a cardigan, inviting us to feel, to touch the past. Rain battered the window behind her.
‘Take it,’ she said, ‘she’ll not bite. Hasn’t bitten anything for five thousand years. Bonnie, isn’t she?’
And she was – that half-mouth’s grin, that cranium map of however many years she’d lived, that stony vault from which she’d seen an island of stone. I held the skull and felt someone’s breath on my neck, but there was only you and me and the old woman.
‘Follow the path along the fence,’ she said. ‘When you get to the entrance you will see a flat board on wheels, like a big skateboard, and you will lie down on that and push yourself in, then send the board back out for the other one. Lie flat and you will not bang your head.’
‘You’re not coming too?’ you asked.
‘Och no, I don’t go out these days, not in weather like this anyway. But you’ll be fine, it’s dry inside. Cosy, it would have been.’
She held out her hands for the return of the skull.
13 March
Insignificance
From an early age I was conscious both of my own insignificance and of the infinite nature of the Universe. One source of this sense was a game that my brother and I shared. It consisted of a road layout around which you had to manoeuvre a plastic vehicle without striking any objects, such as a pillar box, telephone kiosk and bus stop. There were also some pedestrians whom you were supposed not to knock down.
Each vehicle had a metal band on its base. By means of a magnet under the board, controlled by a joystick, you could jerkily negotiate your car or motorcycle round the corners and through the junctions of the roads. The idea was to avoid hitting any of the objects or pedestrians, but the cars and especially the motorcycles (which tended to fall over and travel on their sides) were difficult to control, so my brother allowed two collisions or one fatality per round before elimination. It was a good game, but it required concentration, which my brother had more of at eight than I did at five.
I found the box it came in at least as fascinating as the game itself. On the lid was a picture of two boys playing the game, and next to them lay the lid of the box, on which was a picture of the same two boys playing the game. Logic persuaded me that within that picture, though too small to see, must be another lid with the same image on it. Extrapolating outwards from this progression, I speculated (aloud) that my brother and I might be portrayed on the lid of a box larger than ourselves, and that somewhere outside our sphere of consciousness two enormous boys were playing the same game … and so on.
My brother did not like my theory. He grabbed the lid from me, accused me of always spoiling his fun, and punched me in the face. He then pointed out that the smaller boy on the lid did not look like me, nor did he have a bleeding nose. I admitted through my tears that this was true, but secretly I knew I was onto something.
14 March
Birthday
He heard the toilet flush and then her feet padding back from the bathroom. It was very dark. He sat up and drank some water. When she saw that he was awake she began to sing.
‘Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you …’
‘What time is it?’ He was hot. He pulled off his T-shirt and dropped it on the floor.
‘Three o’clock,’ she said. ‘Were you born yet?’
‘Aye, I think so. I should ask Mum, in case I ever want to get my horoscope done or something. They need that, don’t they? The exact time of birth?’
‘Who?’
‘Astrologers.’
‘You’re never going to go to an astrologer.’
‘I might. It might be interesting.’
She gave a little snort of disbelief as she settled herself back into bed.
‘Aye, you’re probably right,’ he said.
‘So you reckon you were out by now?’
‘Well, I know it was during the night anyway, because she had me at home, and Dad was camped in the other bedroom with my sister and brother. And when they woke up in the morning and heard me crying he told them there must be a chicken in next door with Mum.’
‘And that was you, a few hours old.’
‘That was me.’
They lay side by side in silence for a while. His eyes having adjusted to the dark, he could make out the familiar shapes of wardrobe, chest of drawers, chair. A little moonlight seeping round the shutters made the cracks in the ceiling plaster seem to move, as if across shell.
He touched her hand and said, ‘Fifty-five years ago, I was naked, just like I am now, pushing myself out of her, into the world.’
She laughed. ‘You were a lot smaller.’
‘And not so hairy.’
‘It’s incredible,’ he said after another silence, ‘to think of that baby being born, and me here, and all that time stretching between us. And we’re the same person.’
‘Creation is incredible,’ she said. ‘Life is incredible.’
‘You couldn’t make it up,’ he said.
She laughed again. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘My point.’
A few minutes later he wondered if she was asleep, but he didn’t say anything, in case she wasn’t.
15 March
The Last Elephant
Nobody could be a hundred per cent sure about the last tiger. There were pockets of forest in Indochina and Sumatra so dense and inaccessible that they might hold a few specimens as yet undetected by poachers or zoologists. Unlikely though it was, most conservationists conceded that the survival of the last two subspecies of tiger could not be disproved beyond all doubt. But with the African elephant, no doubt remained. You cannot hide an elephant.
A TV comedian made a few feeble jokes along those lines: the elephant in the room, the elephant in the cherry tree, the elephants in the telephone kiosk. (‘What’s a kiosk?’ younger viewers asked.) It was like watching someone kicking a corpse.
After a day or two, the headlines changed and the world moved on. It wasn’t, after all, as if anyone could do anything about it.
A politician keen to show what a tough, realistic guy he was said, ‘Listen, things become extinct. Languages die out. Civilisations collapse. There are ten billion people in the world, nearly two billion of them in Africa. What are we supposed to tell them, that they can’t have that land because elephants matter more than they do?’
Others said it was a tragedy, a disaster, a wake-up call to humanity – all that guff. An online farewell documentary received millions of hits, but somebody did the analysis and found tha
t after three visits most people never came back. Wildlife porn, some smart commentator called it. You get off on it once or twice, then it stales. What were you watching, really, when what you were watching didn’t exist any more? Elephant ghosts? Whatever they were, they were never again going to do anything different from what they did on that film. So how long did the baby have to swing its trunk in boredom before you too got bored? How many times could you watch the big bull desperately trying to mount the female that was just too small, too young, before you switched off ? You felt dirty, ashamed. You wished you didn’t recognise what you were watching. You wished you didn’t know that such a creature as an elephant had ever existed.
16 March
Jack and the Witch
Jack was an easy-going lad who mostly lived without a thought of Death, but sometimes that thought would pop up like a big black question mark right in front of his eyes.
He went to see the local witch. The witch’s cottage was low and dark, and unpleasant smells issued from the pots on the stove, but she herself was friendly enough.
‘Aye, Jack, whit can I dae for ye?’
‘D’ye hae a spell so Death canna kill me?’ says Jack.
‘Och, that’s a hard one,’ she says. ‘I can cure most aches and pains and fevers, but I canna stop Death gaun aboot his business.’
‘That’s a shame,’ says Jack. ‘It seems tae me he must be a right bad character. He causes nothing but trouble and grief. Even just thinkin aboot him makes me feart. Is there nothing tae be done aboot him?’
‘Did ye ever see him?’ says the witch.
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