Corpsing

by Toby Litt

  After being driven half mad by the deathly groaning and murderous snoring of the various terminal oldsters in my ward, I now found that I missed them.

  The stereo was in reach of the bed. I put on Radio 2, which helped a little. But it was too harsh. It wasn’t Hospital Radio.

  I flicked the dial to one of the message stations – bleeping out inexplicable bursts of non-Morse. This was the sound of the Cold War, echoing past its use. I closed my eyes in a world still divided up between the Russian Bear and the American Eagle, Leonid Brezhnev and Ronald Reagan. Jets boomed over, descending towards Heathrow. I imagined them to be B-52s carrying atomic bombs – and I felt safe and warm and protected. Nuclear anxiety was merely another nostalgia.

  Sleep came.

  15

  In the morning I got up before my mother arrived.

  From around the flat I gathered together everything I could find that had any connection whatsoever with Lily.

  I made a bonfire in the garden: an aerosol of Photo Mount, aftershave, an alarm clock, bank statements, books, CDs, a clockwork mouse, cutlery, diaries, dope, eau de cologne, a framed photograph of Francis Ford Coppola pointing a revolver into his head during the shooting of Apocalypse Now, Ikea things, letters, LPs, maps of our two holiday destinations (Dublin, Manhattan), medicines, newspaper cuttings, my NFT membership card, notebooks, pencils, pens, the photo album, Polaroids, postcards, Rizla papers, shampoo, the green Swatch she gave me, tapes, a toothbrush (special, for precoital brushings), a teddy-bear called ‘Pinter’ whom we’d always used as a prop to get past awkward silences, underwear (Calvins, not boxers), videos (‘Brandy: The Complete Humphs’), a wastepaper basket in aluminium from Habitat, 3½″ diskettes.

  I didn’t have any paraffin or meths, so I poured a whole bottle of vodka over the pile.

  Then I started to pick things off, thinking not this, not this.

  First a Polaroid of Lily dressed as a Playboy Bunny. Next a tape of Nick Drake. Then Pinter. And the Nurofen. And another Polaroid, of Lily standing like a pale-yellow already-ghost in a friend’s summer house. And the clockwork mouse.

  ~

  Lily and I almost-met at a funeral. Highgate Cemetery. She was family – Malcolm (the deceased) had been her second cousin: childhood holidays in Cornwall, a crush. I was friends – I’d done work experience with Malcolm on a short film for which he was DP. Malcolm and I kept in touch afterwards, me always hoping I could use him for my directorial début. He was due to start on an adaptation of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew two weeks after he died. The car mounted the pavement. Malcolm was killed instantly. If he hadn’t been listening to his Walkman (A Clockwork Orange soundtrack), then maybe. For a fortnight, flowers and polythene marked the spot. Speed-bumps were put on the local council agenda, again. There was a five-line obituary in Sight and Sound. Malcolm ‘possessed a rare visual acuity’.

  After the funeral, family went to the reception in cars, friends walked to the nearest pub. I watched Lily get into the Mercedes-Benz and thought she was lovely, even though black didn’t suit her. But she was one of those drastically gorgeous girls who are single for about five minutes every five years, so…

  Several times – enough to make a worrying pattern – I have fallen in love with a woman because she reminded me of someone else, someone that I hadn’t fallen in love with but felt I really should have. In Lily’s case it was her voice: she had the exact same voice as someone in my tutorial group at university – someone I idolized intellectually but found in no way sexually attractive. I used to think If only I were blind, then the fact I don’t fancy her wouldn’t matter. I could, I think, fall in love with the mere touch of her – but the sight of her, no. Lily was the voice of this her, in just the most beautiful body imaginable.

  The next time Lily and I met was in a kitchen, six months later, at a house party – totally unconnected to Malcolm. She was an actress, I was a film-person: we would have met, eventually – when old and married and bitter, maybe.

  ‘It’s Lily, isn’t it?’ I began. ‘You were at Malcolm’s funeral, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I introduced myself, and we talked about Malcolm for five minutes. Then her boyfriend came in from the living room. Lily introduced us.

  ‘We hardly know anyone here,’ he said. ‘We’ve been trying to guess what everyone does.’

  ‘Him, for example,’ said Lily, pointing out a man pouring a bottle of lemonade into the punch-bowl. ‘He invented those blue fizzy things they have in chip shops to kill flies.’

  ‘No,’ said the boyfriend. ‘He’s actually a lumberjack.’

  The lemonade-pourer was wearing a big black and red tartan shirt.

  ‘What do you think he does?’ asked Lily.

  ‘Him?’ I said. ‘He’s the Stannah-Stairlift test pilot.’

  Lily snorted.

  ‘And her?’ said the boyfriend, indicating a very tall girl with a huge fuzz of hair. ‘I thought she was an air hostess.’

  The very tall girl was wearing navy blue.

  ‘I thought she darned the Archbishop of Canterbury’s wool-knit jockstrap,’ said Lily.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re both wrong. She’s actually an ex-Muppet. At the moment she’s suing Jim Henson for sexual harassment. He claims he was only putting his hand up inside her to make her eyes move. She says he was doing a whole lot more. The jury is comprised of six conventional humans and six foam-rubber-based entities.’

  (I’d played this game before.)

  Lily leant forwards as she laughed. She was wearing a tight baby-blue T-shirt with sporty white trim at the sleeves and collar. It suited her.

  ‘This guy’s good,’ she said to her boyfriend.

  ‘What do you do?’ he asked.

  ‘Me? I repair clockwork mice.’

  ‘Really?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been thinking of diversifying into cats, but the market is dominated by an extended Swiss family who’ve been in the business for four hundred years.’

  ‘What are they called?’ asked Lily.

  ‘The Von Mends,’ I said.

  Lily liked this a lot.

  ‘I’m going to get a drink,’ said the boyfriend, defeated. ‘Do you want one?’

  ‘No, I’m okay,’ said Lily.

  His eyes already on other women’s bodies, he walked away.

  Two hours later, I had Lily’s phone number, a date for Friday and a smile so wide I thought it would permanently disfigure my face.

  Harrods. Hamleys. Selfridges. It seemed there wasn’t a clockwork mouse to be had anywhere in London. Camden Market. Carnaby Street. Covent Garden.

  Eventually I saw a thing called a Go-Go Rat. It ran on batteries and didn’t have a key in its back – which I’d wanted for full comic effect. But the Go-Go Rat would have to do.

  I bought a big gold-papered box, stuffed it with cotton wool, placed the rat-mouse inside, tied it up with a silver ribbon – and on Friday, at the end of the meal, I presented it to Lily.

  As we walked from the station to her Notting Hill flat, we let the rat-mouse chase us down the road.

  After we got in through the door, we sat on her sofa and kissed through the whole first side of her tape of David Bowie’s Station to Station.

  (We were setting the first of our patterns. During those early days which followed, we kissed endlessly and did some epic smiling. We could just gaze at each other, perfectly amused, smiles widening until they cracked into laughter and we asked What? – each knowing already what What? was, and that it was us, and that it was also love, and that we were very glad it was so.)

  Lily had dumped her boyfriend by phone that afternoon. He was a lawyer, and had only ever given her presents of flowers and perfume.

  We lay in bed laughing about him – making up ridiculous jobs for him. Procurer of grey paint for the Royal Navy. John Major’s gag-writer.

  But I really shouldn’t have been laughing. Not if I’d understood anything at all.

  And as it tur
ned out I was – in movie-making terms – about as employable as a clockwork-mouse mender.

  The bonfire didn’t burn very well, but it did burn. Everything I’d thought about saving, I chucked back on.

  Gestures like this are the sort of thing I’ve always hated in others. In films, I cringe when something is destroyed which is old and has a history of love. It’s like when the stupid monster has its little doll taken away from it, and cries. I find these moments unbearable.

  The death of Cordelia, as far as I’m concerned, is as nothing compared to the bursting of Eeyore’s balloon.

  The bonfire didn’t make me cry – though I looked at it so hard and long through the black plastic-burning smoke that my eyes started to smart.

  I watched as the surface of the Polaroids bubbled, turned black and peeled upwards. I watched as the deep-blue see-thru plastic handles of the knives, forks and spoons dripped off in flaming gouts. I watched as the clockwork mouse’s synthetic fur turned to thick black smoke and its cheap inner workings of aluminium were exposed.

  When little was left that was recognizable, I pissed on the fire to put it out.

  ‘Is catharsis always this disappointing?’ I wondered.

  Bullet# 2

  The second bullet takes the top off Lily’s head. It mashes through the gold-red hair on her white forehead. It passes into her right frontal lobe, about an inch and a half above her right eye. Due to the angle at which her skull presents itself at the moment of impact, the parietal bone is split from side to side in a horizontal line. As the bullet comes through the scalp it leaves behind a comma-shaped shard of metal. This will be clearly visible in X-rays during the autopsy. A trail of small lead fragments will evidence an internal ricochet, as the bullet strikes the back of Lily’s head and rebounds. The entrance wound it creates is what is known as an explosive wound. This means that a great number of secondary fractures occur. The paper-thin temples crack. The top of her skull appears to flip open. Lily is wearing baby-blue contact lenses. The force of the second bullet’s impact causes one lens to fly off the moist surface of her left eyeball. It is later recovered from the crime scene, fished out of Lily’s glass of Chardonnay. Her head is snapped backwards, though her eyes remain focused on me. Because of the peculiar aerodynamic effects of the bullet, what happens when the missile enters the cavity of Lily’s cranium is something like this – a temporary vacuum is created (cavitation occurring), around and behind the bullet, as it makes its way through the right frontal lobe. Because of the strength of this vacuum, Lily’s brain tissue is sucked in towards the bullet – pulling away from the skull wall, sucked inwards, pulling away. The tissue of Lily’s cerebrum is floppy, grey, not really like the conventionally imagined cauliflower or sponge. It is more like a sponge-cauliflower created out of a mixture of muddy jelly (neatly sliceable) and muffins. Lifted out, removed, it would wobble on a stainless-steel weighing tray. It would juice off in your hands, a little like a half set treacle pudding. If you dropped it, it would slide sideways on its various seeping liquids. The bullet continues. Lily’s thalamus is distorted, elongated, pulled out of shape by the created skull-vacuum. (Lily will face no more jokes about being an airhead.) The hypothalamus, deep hippopotamus in the lowest mud of consciousness, is obliterated. The pineal body suffers passing damage.

  Gunshot wounds come in two main categories: penetrating (which enter but do not exit the body) and perforating (which pass completely through). Skin is a remarkably tough material to puncture. Much harder to go through than muscle. Tests have been carried out on the lower extremities of human cadavers in order to determine whether or not skin was more resistant to projectiles than muscle.

  However, something very unusual happens to the bullet after it enters Lily’s cranial cavity: a vascular embolism. After the bullet ricochets off the inner table of the skull, it penetrates down into the right straight sinus. Following which, it is carried through the venous system, down the jugular vein, through the right atrium and ventricle, and into the pulmonary artery. It eventually comes to rest lodged in a major branch of the left pulmonary artery.

  All this happens during the twenty or so minutes after Lily has been shot but whilst her heart is still pumping.

  During the autopsy they will take over four hours to find the bullet.

  At first, when Lily’s head exploded, the gesture appeared so extravagant and party-trickish that it seemed no less likely, unlikely, that she’d be able to do it just as well backwards as she’d done it forwards – unexploding her head into talking wholeness. It was impossible for me to accept what I was seeing. That was when I began to giggle.

  The damage the second bullet caused was enough to render her technically brain-dead from very shortly after the moment of impact. But I was convinced, sitting watching her from across the table, that her eyes were looking into mine.

  One thing I have not been able to decide: what was going through her mind – what was in her mind – what was her mind still capable of thinking – when that second shot, the headshot, crested her, pluming red into everywhere?

  I guess that, cognitively, there was probably just enough of her left to apprehend me and recognize me and remember who I was and assign me an emotional place in her past (passing) life and to see what I was doing, what my expression was. But that still doesn’t explain how I heard her say bastard bastard bastard.

  16

  Two weeks after coming out of hospital, I’d got myself into some kind of a routine: I stayed home all day, spending equal amounts of time reading (books on anatomy, firearms and bullet wounds) and playing very violent computer games. There were certain games they hadn’t allowed me in the hospital – mainly the ones featuring gunplay and gore. Many happy hours were spent in the zombie-infested sewers of Resident Evil 2. I was just executing a particularly troublesome biomutation when the telephone rang. As always, I didn’t pick up. Call-screening, or so it sometimes seemed, was my only power over the outside world. I hadn’t returned any old friends’ inquiring calls.

  My outgoing message played – it was digital, so made me sound as if I were drowning. In a sense, I was – I hadn’t redone the recording since before the shooting. The voice that spoke was that of Conrad two days after moving in to a bedsit, on his own, having been dumped by The Love Of. Recording my new single-person’s message on my new single-person’s answerphone was about the worst of my post-split moments. It took two plays of Carole King’s Music before I was capable even of making a cup of tea. (The California sound was always my post-break-up therapy – an early warning sign of how badly Hospital Radio would take me.) My outgoing message ended. There were six and a half rough beeps, then:

  ‘Hello, Conrad. Good to hear you. This is Robert, Lily’s father – you remember, I’m sure. At least, I hope you do… Oh, dear. Well, what I wanted to say was that I’ve been thinking we ought to – I hope you don’t mind me ringing like this – your parents gave me – Conrad, there are things I think we should discuss. Call me at work. My number is –’

  I picked up.

  ‘Oh, you’re there, Conrad.’

  I explained about the wheelchair, difficulty getting to the phone, et cetera.

  We arranged for him to come round the following day, after work.

  The only thing I could think of that Lily’s father might want to discuss was Lily’s last will. She’d written it about six months into our relationship. In it she’d made everything she owned over to me. At that point, her everything (apart from the flat) didn’t amount to very much. The gesture was symbolic – I’d made my everything over to her as well. But in the time that had passed before her death, Lily’s career had taken off. Her bank account was probably full enough to become an issue, even for someone as wealthy as her father.

  I could never think of Robert without thinking of him in relation to Josephine, his ex-wife, Lily’s mother. This was because, between Lily and myself, he’d always been referred to as The Mistake. Lily had thought of her father in this way ever since
she was a child. But it was only after a particularly disastrous dinner party, at which her father and one of his interchangeable post-Josephine women had been present, that Lily (with my help) managed to nail him.

  ‘Mum should never have married him.’

  ‘But then you wouldn’t have been born.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I would’ve – any child my mother had would’ve been me. I’m inevitable –’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said, and kissed her – feeling particularly accidental myself: especially so as she hadn’t said anything to the contrary about me.

  We were lying on top of her bed, fully clothed, TV on with the sound down.

  ‘– and he’s a mistake,’ completed Lily.

  ‘That’s a bit harsh. It makes him sound like an abortion or an unwanted pregnancy or something.’

  ‘Mum doesn’t make many mistakes.’ Lily sent a thin stream of cigarette smoke up to kiss the lucky ceiling. ‘In fact, I think my father is the only one.’

  ‘He’s her only mistake?’

  ‘Yes, he’s the mistake.’

  ‘The Mistake?’ I said.

  ‘The Mistake,’ Lily said.

  Here, I’m giving her the credit, but when she was alive we used to argue over which of us said the words first. (It’s a nickname, and I’m always giving things nicknames. Whereas Lily’s usual trick was to abbreviate words to the shortest form she could think of.) Whatever the real truth of the actual conversation, Robert became and remained The Mistake.

  Lily had told me long before this how her mother and father had originally got it together. The year was 1967. The month September. In the aftermath of Sergeant Pepper’s, everyone was wearing uniforms – bright red and gold Boer War jackets, dark blue Prussian marching-band outfits. That The Mistake’s uniform was of a different mark only made him appear all the more original. He wore a pinstripe suit and carried a bowler hat. But not only that, on any given commuter train his were the shiniest black leather uppers, the most sharply creased pinstripe trousers, his was the most tightly rolled umbrella. He was of the generation that had once, secretly, found the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth the most erotic object of contemplation in the social galaxy. When The Mistake happened into Josephine’s circle – a young auctioneer who met painters as a matter of course and who, by them, was introduced to photographers, minor pop stars and coming young opera singers – she actually mistook him for a dangerous revolutionary. Josephine thought The Mistake, by his dress, bearing and overt opinions, was satirizing the establishment. Every reactionary comment he made, she took as immensely accurate caricature. Such a dreadful misrecognition could, perhaps, only have taken place at that exact moment of social incoherence. For a short time, graduations of class – lost in parody and parade – could no longer accurately be judged. People, people like Josephine, still believed that things were really changing. She envisaged him at that time as burying himself deep within ‘straight’ society only to explode it with colourful countercultural insurgency a few years later – when the revolution came, as it would, as it must.