Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  Something that has been between us crumbles away so completely that it’s hard to remember what it ever felt like. Brydon’s face looks two shades brighter. I’m feeling myself differently, like gravity has just altered, lessened.

  It doesn’t happen right away. It doesn’t happen in a bad, rushed, or inappropriate way, but before too long we are cuddling, and the cuddles turn into foreplay, and the foreplay turns into lovemaking. Making. Love.

  We don’t make love on the floor, we use the sofa. And it’s not bitey-passionate-wordless as I’d imagined it, but it’s tender, committed, and heartfelt. It’s perfect for the moment.

  I spoke the truth and we are making love.

  I spoke the truth about my illness and we are lying on my sofa making love.

  I cannot believe my good fortune.

  When we’re done, we laugh and eat frozen meals. Brydon drinks beer and I sip minuscule amounts from his can. “Buzz,” I say, rubbing my head into his bare chest. “Buzz, Buzz, Buzz.”

  He strokes my head and neck with his free hand. When he belches, he smothers it and says “pardon.”

  We cuddle, mostly without words, for half an hour or more. Brydon is lovely, but I can also see that he’s taken aback by my Cotard’s. I don’t blame him. Anyone would be. It’s not a small deal. It probably doesn’t help him to remember that two days ago his new girlfriend killed one person and made a real mess of three others. That’s not your classic feminine love gambit.

  “Buzz,” I say, “I think maybe you need an evening off. Time to yourself. Think about everything. It’s a lot to take in. I know that and it’s okay.”

  He starts to protest, but I’m not having it, and he pretty soon sees that what I’m saying makes sense. Brydon’s nice about the way he does it, but he’s happy enough to leave.

  I see him to the door.

  There’s one more thing that I had thought about saying. I almost say it to him on the front doorstep. But I don’t. Only when he’s in his car, and waving at me, and off down the road and out of sight, do I let myself say it.

  “And my dear Buzz, there is one other thing. I think it’s possible that I’m falling in love with you.”

  That sounds so nice I say it again.

  “I’m falling in love with you.” The nicest words on Planet Normal.

  My to-do list is not quite done. Almost but not quite. One more call to make.

  I make the call. Mam and Dad are both at home. I tell Mam three times that I’ve already eaten, then drive on round.

  A strange feeling, this. There have been so many varieties of strange over the last few weeks, but this is a whole new one. Anticipation. That’s what the shrinks would call it when working their way through their lists of feelings. Anticipation, Fiona. You are thinking forward to an event in your future. You aren’t yet sure how that event will turn out. There is a range of possible outcomes. Some good, some bad, some mixed. The feeling associated with that state is called anticipation.

  Anticipation, Doctor. I think I understand. But may I check my understanding with you, to be sure I’ve got it right?

  Of course, Fiona. We’re here to help. [Glances enthusiastically at nurse.]

  Very well then, Doctor, let me review things. For the last three weeks, give or take, I’ve been working on a case where a little six-year-old girl had her head smashed in by one of those monster stoneware sinks. You know the sort I mean. You probably have one in your own kitchen. The rustic look. Expensive. Anyway, this little girl had the top of her head obliterated by a large chunk of kitchen ceramics, leaving just her little mouth to smile at me. And smile she did. For most of the last three weeks, I’ve had that little girl’s picture up on my wall or on my screen saver, or both. Haunted me, you could say, only it was a very nice haunting. I liked it. Invited it, in fact. And just to be clear, it was the dead girl who haunted me. I’m afraid to say it, but the live one never interested me all that much. Are you with me, so far?

  [Tightly. Through gritted teeth.] Yes. Yes. We were talking about anticipation, Fiona. A present tense feeling about some future event.

  I’m getting there, Doc. You can’t rush these things. Now, I felt like the little dead girl had something to teach me and I just wasn’t getting it, so I decided to spend a night with her in the mortuary. The big one, down at the University Hospital.

  Overnight? In the mortuary? [Tone of extreme shock. Nurse edges closer to door and fat red panic button.] Please try to focus on the subject. We were talking about anticipation. You wanted to check your understanding of the term.

  The mortuary, Doc. Where they keep dead people. Why? Are you bothered by the dead? Do you have uncomfortable feelings around them that you’re not sure how to deal with? Perhaps you should find someone to talk to. Anyway, I spent the night with her and her mother—her mother is dead too. Did I mention that? Lovely hair. Coppery. And skin like you wouldn’t believe—and I learned something very interesting. Something that I need to discuss with my parents. It’s funny, but I think that conversation may alter the entire way I view my own personal history. Possibly in a good way. Possibly not. There may well be—what did you just call it?—a mixed outcome. So I’ve got a feeling inside me now—tingly, excited, nervous, agitated—and I think I want to call that anticipation. Do you think that’s the right word? It feels like it is.

  Yes, Fiona. I think you’ve got that right. Anticipation. The feeling of looking forward to an event in your future. We’ll move on, shall we?

  That’s roughly how those conversations used to go. To begin with, I managed to freak the doctors out without having any idea of what I was doing to make it happen. I didn’t know what I was saying that made them do the whole she’s-a-freak exchange of glances with the nurse. I often used to end those sessions with the doctor telling me that my medication needed to be “adjusted” in order to “make me more comfortable”—which, roughly translated, meant they were going to increase the dosage of whatever I was on in order to make themselves feel more comfortable. At least once, and maybe more than once, I ended one of those sessions being “restrained” by two burly psychiatric nurses as the doc injected a sedative. The funny thing is, you’d think that people would go into mental health care because they enjoyed working with the mentally ill, but I realized that that wasn’t it at all. Maybe it was for a few people. The saints, like Ed Saunders. But most of them seemed to have entered the profession because they hated mental illness. Hated it and wanted to punish it. Drug it into acquiescence. Obedience. Yes, Doc. No, Doc. Is that what you advise? Then of course! I’ll open my mouth. Take the pills. Pretty little pink things on their white paper tray. Swallow. Smile. Thank you, Doc. I feel more comfortable already.

  Once I figured all this out—and this was probably around the time that my condition started to ease anyway—I used to go into those sessions and deliberately mess with the doctors’ heads. Jerk their chains. I’d say outrageous stuff that would upset them, but at the same time be careful to say or do nothing that would allow them to get out their needles or their frigging prescription pads. I started to get legalistic on them as well. Researched my rights under the law and started to challenge them about whether something they wanted to do was legitimate under paragraph whatever of the Mental Health Act. I was clever, well read, inventive, obstreperous—and a moody cow teenager, of course. Bolshie and argumentative. My dad’s never had a brilliant relationship with authority figures either, so if I started to get antsy and legalistic, he couldn’t help himself. He’d come weighing in with his lawyers on my side, writing letters, demanding judicial review, making complaints to the General Medical Council. Making a pest of himself. I don’t know if we achieved anything, but in a weird kind of way it was fun. I bonded even more closely with my dad because of it.

  Yet, years on from all of that now, I have to say that those doctors gave me something. Concepts and techniques I still use today.

  Anticipation. The feeling of looking forward to an event in your future.

  That
’s what I have now. Tingly. Excited. Nervous. Agitated. A feeling that somehow combines all those things and mixes them up into a confection that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Anticipation. What I’m feeling right now.

  I drive up outside my parents’ house and brake to a halt. Select neutral. Engage parking brake. Ignition off. Listen to the engine die. In-two-three-four-five. Out-two-three-four-five. Hold and repeat.

  Anticipation.

  Mam says, “I didn’t cook, because I know you said you’d eaten, so I just thought I’d put out a few bits, in case you wanted to pick.”

  Sausages. Potato salad. Tomato salad. Lettuce. Coleslaw. Salamis. Cold ham. French rolls. Caerphilly and Welsh goat cheese. Pickles. Bottled beer, including zero-alcohol beer for me. A few bits.

  Dad looks at the spread, and his eyes widen. On the way through, we had to stop to admire the “World’s Best Mam” trophy which now looms over the kitchen door like something about to collapse. I told Dad how wonderful it looked and made eyes at Mam to say how frightful it was. I give it about six weeks. Three months, tops.

  Kay and Ant arrive to share the feast as well. Everyone present has already eaten, but Mam is the only one not to pick their way through a whole lot more. Before too long, Kay gets half a chocolate cake from the fridge, and she and Ant start to mine into its defenses and soon leave it pretty much ruined. Everyone talks about their own thing, and nobody cares much that no one else is listening too closely.

  The clock ticks to nine o’clock. Ant’s bedtime, and the signal for Mam to settle down with her box set DVDs.

  I say, “Mam, Dad, do you think I can have a chat with you?”

  Kay’s eyes widen. Whatever it is, she wants to be a part of this, but I tell her that it’s private, if she doesn’t mind. She does mind, but not so much that she can’t be persuaded to go up to her bedroom and spend the next two hours talking to her friends by phone, text, and IM.

  That leaves me, Mam, and Dad alone in the kitchen. We’ve clearly moved into some new social-emotional territory, and Mam’s instincts are slightly confused. For her, any new territory of this sort needs to be marked by the production of something edible, but we’ve just gorged ourselves on a second supper and even Mam can’t quite bring herself to do the same all over again. So she compromises by making tea. Dad rushes off to get port, whiskey, brandy, Cointreau, and some noxious-looking Italian liqueur whose name he can’t pronounce but which was given to him by one of his Italian contractors with some highly colored promises about its alcoholic potency and which he can’t wait to try out on someone. Since he knows I’m all but teetotal, that person is unlikely to be me, but he likes creating a show anyway. And the glasses look nice.

  Eventually the clatter is over. Mam and I are sharing herbal tea. Dad has a mug of builders’ tea alongside a tiny glass of the Italian liqueur. Truth is, even Dad doesn’t drink much these days. Ant’s in bed. The sound of Kay talking upstairs is just about audible down here. The kitchen clock ticks.

  “Mam. Dad.”

  I start out, then stop. In a way, I don’t want to make them tell me, I just want them to disclose everything of their own volition. But I know I have to prompt it, and I’m not sure how. I get a photo from the hallway next door. Silver-framed. A recent one of the five of us. Mam, Dad, me, Kay, Ant. I hold it face out, so that my parents can see it and I can’t.

  “I think it’s time we came clean with each other. Time you came clean with me. It’s okay. I’m ready for it. Really. I’d prefer it.”

  Mam and Dad look at each other. They’re worried, but I’m pretty sure they know what I’m talking about.

  I see that I need to nudge a little more, and so I do.

  “I’ve been spending some time with this little girl I came across because of work. The cutest little six-year-old, a real beauty. Anyway, I came to realize that this little girl had something. She was her mother’s daughter. That sounds so stupid, doesn’t it? Her mother’s daughter. But the mother had this unbelievably troubled life. I won’t go into it all, but her life wasn’t easy. And she made these huge efforts to keep her daughter with her. The authorities wanted to take the little girl away, but the mother always fought back. She wanted her daughter to have a better life than she did. In the end, she wasn’t very successful, but she tried. She gave it her all.

  “Anyway, as time went by, I felt increasingly sure that this little girl had something to teach me. Something really obvious, as it turned out. I felt the little girl was telling me that I wasn’t my mother’s daughter. Nor my father’s. That little girl had a terribly difficult life, but all the same she had one thing that I didn’t.”

  I hold up the photo.

  Dad is tall. Mam is tall. Kay is tall and slim and gorgeous. Ant is racing upward. And that leaves Fiona, the overintellectual, fish-out-of-water runt of the litter.

  “It’s so obvious really. I’m not like you at all. Not physically. Not—not in other ways too. And don’t get me wrong. I love you both so much. You and Kay and Ant. This family is by far the best thing that ever happened to me. But I need to know where I came from. Maybe I wasn’t ready before. But I am now.”

  I don’t say it, and I won’t say it, but there’s more to my intuition than April’s insistent hints. It was the thing that Lev said as well. And Axelsen. And Wikipedia.

  I’ve been in shock for most of my life. I’ve ticked almost every symptom box. Indeed, if you think of my Cotard’s as being simply the most extreme, the most extravagant form of depersonalization going, then you could argue that I’ve also suffered from the most extreme, the most extravagant form of shock around. When it comes to my mental life, I’ve seldom done things by halves.

  The only problem with the Lev-Axelsen-Wikipedia hypothesis was the single box left unticked. The one box that absolutely had to have been ticked. The event. The terrifying or traumatic event. The event that never happened.

  What I said to Lev was true. I know that my family was safe. No physical or sexual abuse. No alcoholism. No hint of divorce. Very few marital arguments. No threat from outside. No dodgy uncles. No assaults on me from strangers. No family in Wales could have been safer. Dad’s money, his energy, his reputation were walls thicker than concrete. Any hypothetical evildoers would have preferred to mess with any other family in Cardiff sooner than make an enemy of my dad. All my life, I’ve been as safe as anyone can wish to be.

  All my life, for as long as I can remember.

  But traumatic events can reach far back into the past. Further than childhood. Further than memory. What happened in the first year or two of my life? Why can I recall my childhood only through a fog of forgetting? Why did my Cotard’s stalk out of nowhere to ruin my teenage years? Why do I sometimes wake with night terrors so strong that I am drenched in sweat and lie, lights on, awake and shaking, through the rest of the night, sooner than risk going back to whatever it was that visited me in my dreams?

  I don’t say these things out loud, and I will never say them to these two people who have loved me so dearly, but it is time for answers and they know it.

  They look across the table at each other. Dad puts his hand on Mam’s and rubs it briefly. Then he gets up, says “One moment, love,” and leaves the room.

  Mam and I are alone with the ticking clock.

  A ticking clock in a silent room.

  She smiles at me. A brave, uncertain smile. I smile back at her. I feel okay. The anticipation I felt before has quieted down. I’m not quite sure what I feel now. Or to be precise, I’m in touch with the feeling, I just don’t have a word for it. It’s like a melting inside. A liquefying of something solid. It’s not a bad feeling. I don’t mind it. I just don’t know what it is. I don’t think that even my doctors could give this one a name.

  Dad returns to the room.

  He’s carrying some things. A photo and an old plastic shopping bag.

  He sits at the table. Smiles at me, at Mam, back at me.

  The clock ticks too loudly in the silence.

/>   We’re all nervous. It’s as though the room itself, the empty space, the entire house is in a state of anticipation. The doctors would probably scold me for saying that. They’d say that empty space can’t have feelings. But they’ve never sat here as I am doing now. They’ve never known what it’s like for the whole of your life to sit trembling on the cusp.

  Dad shows me the photo, passes it over.

  It’s of me age two or three. Pink dress. White bow. Tidy hair. Shy smile. A small white teddy bear. I’ve never seen this photo before, but I recognize the car I’m sitting in. It’s Dad’s old green Jaguar XJ-S convertible. The top is down. The day looks reasonably sunny. I can’t see enough of the street to tell where it is. I’ve got no reason to think there is anything odd about the photo at all.

  I look at Dad.

  “Fiona, love. That photo was taken on the fifteenth of June 1986. It was taken by this camera here.”

  He takes it from the bag and passes it across the table. A small brown camera in a leather case, with a leather neck strap attached. The camera looks older than 1986. Maybe a lot older.

  “We found this camera the same day as we found you. We’d just gone to chapel—your mam still had me going in those days—and when we came out, there was the car, just as we’d left it, only with a little miracle inside. You. We came out and there you were. Sitting in our car with this camera round your neck. When we had the film inside the camera developed, there was just this one photo. A photo of you. There was no note, no nothing. Just this amazing little girl in the back of our car.”

  I hear all this. It makes no sense at all and it makes perfect sense at one and the same time. It’s like that moment in a theater when one stage set is revolving in from the left as the last one is disappearing on the right. You see both things at the same time. See them in their entirety. Understand them. But you also know that one thing is replacing the other. That the thing you thought was your world is about to disappear, never to show itself again.