‘Esmeralda didn’t look very happy,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Stephen.
‘Murdered,’ she said. ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous.’
‘He had a heart attack,’ said Stephen. ‘He was overweight. He smoked. He drank. He did not go to the gym. I go to the gym.’
‘You do, darling,’ said Lulu. ‘You do.’
That seemed to dispose of George. Their car was turning into Hornbeam Crescent. The rain drummed on the roof. The windows were a field of trickling water; blunt and unfinished rivulets chased each other across the glass. The rain had almost blotted out the house fronts while the street’s gutters had been miraculously transformed into reckless mountain streams, brawling their way back down the hill.
‘For the moment,’ said Lulu, ‘I think we should keep this … codicil thing between ourselves.’
‘Indeed,’ said Stephen. ‘Indeed.’
‘Mullins,’ hissed Lulu. ‘Mullins.’
They were almost at the house. Further up the road from a line of cars, double-parked, graceful black shoes poked out into the rain, to be followed by black trousers, black skirts and coats and black umbrellas that flowered under the now torrential rain as the mourners made their way over the jostling waters in the gutter, past the pools on the pavement, up the sodden gravel path and into the hall that would never again be graced by George’s heavy footsteps.
George reached forward and pushed against Stephen’s shoulder. As he did so the fabric of the jacket yielded to his fingers and, beyond it, he had the uncomfortable illusion that he was penetrating his brother’s skin. It broke in ripples around his non-existent flesh so that it seemed he was clawing his way into the very heart of his mother’s other son. It was as if he was fitting his shadow into the living form of Stephen, pushing his right arm into his brother’s right arm, then the left arm into place and, finally, headbutting his way up through the neck until his temples, burned as they were to ashes, bumped up against the underside of the weaving on his brother’s toupee.
For an instant he had the impression of actually being Stephen. He seemed to see Jessica’s face, lowering over his, all maternal concern, in what he realized was the bedroom he and his brother had shared until George was in his late teens. Stephen’s bed was by the window and he could see the window and the green curtains and, in the other bed, make out the muffled shape of himself.
‘You don’t have to go to school if you don’t want to,’ Jessica was saying.
What George felt, and this was the most shocking and surprising thing of all, was anxiety. As he stepped out on to the pavement and trod with the measured authority of his younger brother up to the front door of number twenty-two, he felt terrible fear and guilt, the kind of sensation that floods over you when you realize you have forgotten a vital appointment, or somehow understand that a bitchy remark you made has reached the ears of a friend who was never supposed to hear it. This was Stephen, thought George, as his hand, which seemed to be protruding from a starched shirt cuff that came complete with golden cufflinks, prodded at the Banham lock with a key that might, possibly, once have been his. For a glorious moment his hand was inside Stephen’s as it turned the key, and George really thought he was making contact with a real object in real time, making it move all by himself. Then, as Stephen withdrew his arm and pushed open the door, George seemed to see his own phantom shape hanging in the air like a suit of discarded clothes. As he watched, it crumbled before his eyes and, once again, he was no one, nothing, nowhere, a helpless spectator in front of chairs he had once sat in, glasses he had once drunk from, plates and cutlery he had carried backwards and forwards from the dishwasher countless thousands of times.
What about the anxiety he had felt in Stephen, though? Was this his brother’s general state? Or was he anxious about something in particular?
Mabel Dawkins, the Mullins woman and Beryl Vickers were all heading for Stephen and Lulu. Lulu – keeping her head down – pushed through to the kitchen, where Esmeralda was spreading pies, sandwiches and big bowls of salad on the side. Doing this, George thought, was calming her. More and more guests were coming through the hall and George found himself still by the front door as Partridge wandered into view.
‘Don’t tell me to go out,’ went on the dog, ‘because I’m in.’
‘You can do what you like,’ said George. ‘You’re dead. Like me.’
Partridge thought about this for a while. Then he said, ‘How was the funeral?’
‘Not good,’ said George.
Partridge shook his head slowly. ‘You couldn’t be expected to enjoy your own funeral,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t be natural!’
‘I was actually looking forward to it,’ said George. ‘God knows why.’
Partridge gave him an accusing look. ‘I never got a funeral,’ he said. ‘I was just burned and put in a large cardboard box which they sent on to you.’
‘What about my murder?’ said George. ‘Did you see who killed me? And if you did, who was it?’
‘You you you!’ said Partridge. ‘It’s always about you, isn’t it?’ He brushed his two huge paws across his eyes with the affecting clumsiness George had always found so appealing. It seemed that George was getting more grip on his afterlife. Perhaps he and Partridge were really going to talk about their relationship, not just exchange banalities about Pedigree Chum.
‘Well,’ said George, ‘I think if you’d been murdered you’d want to know more about how it happened. About who did it, for God’s sake!’
‘I have been thinking,’ said Partridge, ‘and I may have seen who did it.’
There was a tantalizing pause.
‘But I can’t actually remember who it was,’ he added, sounding, George thought, genuinely contrite. George wondered whether to press him on the subject but he wasn’t sure his enquiries would yield anything. Instead, he turned away from the animal and, trying very hard to make his tread (or lack of it) as resonant and real as possible, walked back towards his, yes, his kitchen.
The first thing he saw was a group that included Mullins, Vickers, Mabel Dawkins, Stephen and Lulu. Stephen was, quite clearly, trying to separate himself from the Mullins woman, who was standing right at his elbow and peering into his face in a quite threatening manner. Esmeralda, Barry and Maurice were over by the french windows, trying to deal with the press of relatives who were crowding in to be served with food.
‘Did you reach in to touch your mother’s face?’ Mullins was saying to Stephen, ‘I thought I saw you do that. I was very moved.’
Stephen looked at Lulu. She looked straight back at him, her face offering no help. She likes to see him beg, thought George. She enjoys watching him flounder because, for some reason, she’s disappointed in him. Was this always the case – or had he done something recently to make it so?
‘Yes,’ said Stephen, ‘I did feel the need to, er, touch her one last time. She was a very tactile person. I often used to, er, touch her.’
He started to pat his pockets. He was looking for his phone. He found it. He didn’t, this time, take it out and look at it or try to prod it. He just folded his fingers over it and held on to it, the way, George remembered, he had held on to the ragged piece of cloth he’d used as a comforter when he was a small child. George had always teased him about it. In a minute Stephen was going to make some excuse and move away and the moment would be lost. It was crucial that Mullins got to see that codicil.
George ran at his brother in the way he remembered Stephen had once run at him to be picked up in earlier, happier times. He threw himself, full tilt, up into the air and rose effortlessly above the crowd of mourners until he was suspended above Stephen’s shoulders; he seemed to have a very precise control of every movement and, though his notional feet were no more than six inches from his brother’s upper body, when he lowered himself down through the fabric of his Armani jacket, through his freshly pressed and starched shirt and, from there into the very heart of him, he did so with the f
orce of someone jumping off the high board into a swimming-pool. As he began to course through Stephen’s veins, George felt every fragment of him pedal furiously as he drifted downwards through this alien frame. He elbowed his way into his brother’s elbows and kneed his way into both of his knees. He seated himself in his brother’s buttocks and headed into his head with the force and speed of a great footballer gluing his temples to a ball as he nodded it into the goal mouth. When his fingers wriggled into Stephen’s hands, as if they were two gloves, he found, to his surprise and joy, that as he reached the tips he had the real sensation of hitting something. He forced each hand to the lapels of the Armani jacket and flipped them open, as if Stephen was actually – as he might have wanted to do – stripping off his outer garment because of the heat of the room, the press of people or, perhaps, the emotional strain of being at his brother’s and sister’s and mother’s wake.
‘What the…’ Stephen began. He seemed, as we so often do, to be doing the very thing he least wanted to do. He was flashing his jacket open so that the large piece of paper in the top left-hand interior pocket was suddenly clearly visible to Mullins, who was immediately on his right. Not only that. The paper rode up as George forced his brother’s hands wider and wider apart and, though Stephen fought him, George, as he had been in life, was the stronger of the two. He held both arms out as Mullins, reading aloud the obvious word ‘CODICIL’, reached across and, with astonishing neatness, lifted the paper from its hiding place. In front of George’s bewildered sibling and his even more bewildered wife, she read, ‘In the event that my eldest son George should die before the wishes expressed in this will are carried out I ask that all my estate be passed to my oldest friend, Audrey Mullins. Mullins has always been a tower of strength to me and I am sure she can be relied on to divide my estate fairly between those who have a claim on it.’
When Mullins had finished reading she looked around the group. Stephen was in a state of complete confusion as his hands were allowed back into his control. He was like a man who had just suffered a stroke. Mullins gave a grim little smile as she turned to her lifelong companion and said, ‘I think we’d better hang on to this. Don’t you, Beryl?’
Chapter Nineteen
George had not felt the need of a drink since he had breathed his last, but he had experienced an intense longing for what his old friend Dave Macready had always called ‘a sharpener’ from a fairly early stage of his wake. Dave, from the look of him, had had a few before the thing started.
Almost as soon as Mullins had made her discovery, quite a few other mourners seemed fairly keen on getting totally and utterly plastered. It may not have been what they had come to do. Until the moment when Stephen, for no apparent reason, had thrust open his jacket with the enthusiasm of a flasher putting his equipment on display, everyone had been doing exactly the right mixture of gloom, wistfulness and respect, but from the moment of the reading of the codicil, becoming ‘unstuck’ – another Macready phrase from his days as the Daily Express’s labour correspondent – was the only game in town.
Stephen, George thought, was clearly entitled to a couple of large ones. He had just said goodbye to twelve million pounds. His brother did not attempt to answer Mullins’s remark to her companion, but watched her stow the codicil in her handbag with the dull, dawning comprehension of a man watching a traffic accident in which he is the principal player. For a moment, George thought Lulu was going to reach out and snatch it back, but she contented herself with compressing her lips and giving her husband the kind of look that constituted yet another reason for him to reach for a large one.
How this plays out, thought George, is the important thing. Something is sure to happen and I need to be there when it does.
Stephen broke away from the group and headed for the stairs. George followed him and realized, very quickly, that he was looking for something in George’s study. For a wild moment he contemplated the possibility that his brother was after some memento of his older sibling, perhaps that photograph of him doing a V sign outside the Vatican with fourteen- and fifteen-year-old Maurice and Barry or even – who knew? – the poem George had written for Stephen in the year he’d married Geraldine. He had shown it to him at the time, and although Stephen hadn’t actually said he liked it or was in any way moved by it (he had, as far as George could remember, used the word ‘interesting’), it might have grown on him since George had passed over to the other side.
Stephen was actually looking for the whisky.
The half-empty bottle of Famous Grouse was still on the mantelpiece where George had left it on the evening of the Tuesday before he died. He found the sight of it strangely moving. It was only one of a number of things he had left unfinished. The novel about the execution of Charles I – already three hundred pages long, most of which was a description of the King having breakfast. There was that wooden post in the front fence that he had promised Esmeralda he would fix last November. There was the holiday in Morocco, already paid for. George was fairly sure that little things like death due to murder by poisoning were not covered by his insurance.
Somehow, however, that half-empty bottle of Scotch summed up the pointlessness of it all.
No one else in the family drank Scotch. Dave Macready drank Scotch but George could not imagine a situation in which Esmeralda bequeathed it to him. He was probably one of the many people she would never see again now George was dead. Not that she disliked him – she didn’t – but they simply didn’t have enough reason to stay in touch. If Stephen hadn’t located it (he had now picked it up and taken a deep draught straight from the bottle), it would have stayed on the mantelpiece for at least a year, and then, one day, when Esmeralda was, hopefully, starting to recover, she would have taken it downstairs to tip it away and, perhaps, be reminded of things her husband would do before pouring himself a large one.
Of how he used to talk, in slightly sententious tones, about the cruelty and horror of the world beyond his comfortable suburb. Or analyse the faults of his friends or try to find virtue in his enemies. Or sing those Irish songs he loved so well – ‘The Mountains of Mourne’ especially because its sentimental, faux-naïf view of exile (written as it was by a fairly sophisticated journalist about a simple country boy) expressed his own hopeless feeling of estrangement from the world around him. He had always, he now saw clearly, absurd as it seemed, felt exiled in the land of his birth. He had never really been the plump, comfortable Englishman he had seemed to be.
She would put the bottle into the recycling because she was a well-trained suburbanite like him and perhaps cry a very little bit – tears that are only the slight weeping that accompanies grief changing to sadness and the realization that life must, somehow, begin again.
Lulu had appeared at the door, just as Stephen took another swig.
‘Come downstairs,’ she said. ‘Now! We have to do something about this.’
Stephen took another drink. ‘I’m sure you’ll think of something, dear,’ he said, with an undertone of violence that surprised George. He had never thought his brother fought back against Lulu. She had a glass of white wine in her hand and she, too, took a deep draught of it as Stephen sat, heavily, at George’s desk.
As a junior reporter, she had been a legendary drinker. She had famously done an interview with a celebrated alcoholic that had ended with the two of them crawling around the studio on all fours, barking like dogs. She had been one of the instigators at that famous night at the Labour Party Conference in 1982 that was later dubbed by the media ‘Projectile Vomiting Gate’. George had never seen her in serious drink before. There was, of course, something intimidating about the way she’d rapped out her order for a glass of champagne on the rare occasions when he and Stephen, Esmeralda and Lulu had found themselves in the same restaurant but, on the whole, there was something terrifyingly controlled about the way she absorbed alcohol.
Not today. As she came into the room George realized she was carrying a full bottle of Chardonnay. She f
inished her glass and poured herself more as, with a hard glitter in her eye, she said, ‘What on earth was that display about? Were you having a fit?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Stephen. ‘I don’t know what happened. It was like I was … like I was…’ He looked dully at his hands, as if they did not belong to him.
‘Drunk?’ said Lulu, taking another swig of wine. She gave him a look of pure dislike.
‘We’d better get back downstairs,’ said Stephen, eventually. Then, in a voice that displayed some of the real terror George had felt in him as they’d come into the wake, he whispered, ‘It was like I was being taken over by something. Or somebody.’
‘If ever I suspect an alien intelligence is trying to take over my mind or my body,’ said Lulu, ‘I tell it to fuck off. I suggest you do the same. We have to do something about this, Stephen. And if you won’t, then I will. I do just about everything else around here, don’t I? Jesus!’
She turned to go out of the room and Stephen followed her. As they came down the stairs, Mabel Dawkins staggered out of the kitchen. She, too, had located a bottle. Her drink of choice seemed to be vodka. It was only a half-bottle but she had already drunk three-quarters of it.
‘I wouldn’ta minded someone leavin’ me a windersill!’ she said to Lulu, in a way that suggested she thought Lulu had had something to do with her mother-in-law’s surprise bequest. ‘I done a lot for Mrs Pearmain. I done a lot. ’Er fam’ly never bothered ter show up to take ’er to the Falls Class or organize the Zimmerman. Where was they when she fell off of the sofa I’d like ter know? In the Soufa France was where they was. Drinkin’ Pasty in one of them caffs!’
Waking Up Dead Page 24