The ray is stationary, lurking in the nether regions. It’s nature’s way, awry. The sway of nature makes for this singular, this solitary, this ray. There’s no getting around it. It’s necessarily this one. Irreparably, irrecoverably: it’s a ray of one’s own. How admirably now each eye is raised, its marvellously wide vision shielded by the lid that, traversing the eyeball as the ray buries itself in the substrate, stops foreign bodies (sand, mud, gravel) entering! Like a spell as yet uncast: Operculum pupillare! Even through a glass darkly the ray sees brilliantly, like an underwater cat. In submarine gloom guanine crystals make up tiny mirror-like plates that become visible as the light is fading, just at the outer edge of each eye. How inspirationally it blows and plays, the spiracle or blow-hole behind each eye pumping water like a heart as it lies, almost unrecognisably, on the sandy bottom! On it, in it, what you will. Everything about this brainy creature is so starkly strange, back-to-front and upside down, trapeze artist of deep time, feelings flattened, gravity in chaos. And how charmingly the marine savagery of its eating habits is occluded, since the crafty mouth is concealed, underneath! How readily it would ravage a Red Riding Hood granny, its mouth packed with tooth-plates, arranged in rows! No sooner does a tooth go missing, grinding up its hapless prey, than a new one is lined up in front of it: lifelong self-renewing spray! the original dragon’s army! The ray is stationary even when it moves, shooting through water at unnerving speed, propelled by the pectoral fins that form the hem of the body, close to complete circularity, as the axis of the body remains unaltering. How quickly its lurking quivers into larking!
They have to start somewhere and next day, as if the phone calls are staccato punctuation to a death-sentence uncurling in their ears, they get to work tidying up the downstairs, beginning with the junk mail. Out of order, over the edge, already perhaps too late, he realises there will need to be a reception after the funeral, and then before the reception there will need to be the funeral. It is as if they have lost basic forms of co-ordination, removing or replacing things in the dark, bumping into one another, making love like singed moths. And there cannot be a funeral until there has been a post-mortem. He talks to a voice, in the nearest city, about the body of his father. He has not seen, he will never see the man who performs the post-mortem, the one who sees, but he hears him. As if he might just as readily be talking about the delivery of a washing machine, the pathologist confirms that his father had a knock on the head.
– Which must be due to some fall, the voice concludes (as if he doesn’t know anything about what happened in the hospital, as if there was no communication between the two places, as if he would even be required to perform a post-mortem otherwise, the false dog, but)
– In any case, the voice says, this small gash would not account for cause of death.
The cause, the cause. Is it in a good cause, he wants to press, in a counter to all this pathology, to speak of cause of death? To my ear, your very voice is a lost cause, sir. Pause. In which the cause of the pause and the pause of the cause and the pause of the cause of the pause are all in abeyance, without pause or cause, for several days. And then he hears again from this faceless voice with his father’s body: the cause of death is two, two causes, and the two causes divide into three, just in case one or two wouldn’t suffice, and over the phone they are specified and the words fizzle and faint away, implausible as an electric brae. But they duly reappear, set in the watery strangeness of writing, just a week, less than a little week afterwards, on the death certificate: I. (a) Ischaemic heart disease (b) Coronary artery atheroma; II. Carcinomatosis due to carcinoma of the large bowel.
They collect this from the local register office one bright morning. The blank officious woman taps at her computer, then prints out the incredible document. Laugh or cry, flick a coin, or watch it melt abruptly in mid-air, it’s the hilarity, the nauseatingly absurd handing over of coins, bits of money to acquire more than one copy of the same piece of paper, the death certificate wanted dead or alive. For everyone wants sight of the death certificate, a certified copy, not a photocopy but a certified copy, triggering another chain reaction of phone calls and correspondence: the undertaker, the bank, the pension company, the solicitor’s office holding the will, and the vicar to conduct a funeral and the undertaker to liaise with the vicar and the body to be returned to the neighbouring town where his father can, after a week, be viewed in the chapel of rest (When you feel ready, sir), and a time established for the interring and therefore a time for the reception, not wake but reception, like a hotel or motor garage, report to reception, like taking or offering receipt, of what, by whom and how, like nothing. This is to happen at the house, a few minutes’ walk up the lane from the churchyard where his father is to be buried in a double grave already assigned alongside his beloved wife dead twenty-eight months earlier.
The house seems inconceivably full. Every room is a minefield of twilight, never enough light: the dust, the mouse-droppings, the spiderwebs, the sprawl and mounds of junk mail, pipesmoker’s paraphernalia, the little stackings and sub-piles, everything collectable collected, the free gifts, the mail order catalogues, the possibly some day reusable envelopes and plastic bags, the phones and TVs, watches and clocks, working or defunct, the habits of collecting keeping storing of a lifetime, the simplest word, a leaf tome. Put them together like chalk and cheese, not in our lifetime even more of a lunacy, as if synapothanumena were bread and butter, the height of fashion, the order and agreement of those that will die together, but life and time in truth never do. They are driving between, in transit perpetually between house and town, starting other collections, starting with all the paraphernalia with which to clean and remove (the cloths and sponges, scouring pads, rubber gloves, cleaning agents, refuse bags), and in transit too between the house and the local tip, day after day the transportation of black rubbish bags, black rubbish bag after black rubbish bag filled with anything and everything judged not to be indispensable. But how is that done?
It is not only the junk mail, which in its mounds is always on the verge of toppling if not toppled into another mound before you can straighten anything out, with all the envelopes that his father has marked as possibles by putting the word ‘interesting’ and a ‘?’ on the outside of the envelope, together with a date of when the announcement of the prize-winner itself arrived. It is also the presence amid all this junk mail of bills, letters and other documents of significance, bank statements, correspondence with the company that supplies heating-oil to the house, the man who deals with the upkeep of the ride-on mower, letters from himself and from his father’s brothers, letters of condolence concerning the death of his wife, the official documentation relating to her death, and then the surfaces such as shelves and mantelpiece piled and bureau-drawers and other cupboards crammed with the entirety of the family’s past: photographs and correspondence, but also bits of artwork, bric-a-brac, birthday and anniversary cards, souvenirs, mementos, knick-knacks and other bobs.
Side by side, perched between mounds, they feel their way, murmuring or silent, occasionally seeking advice from one another. Here is a letter congratulating his father on having won fifteen thousand pounds, and another on having won a free holiday to Cyprus, here a bank statement from a year previously and there an invoice for a spare part for the mower. There are notes to himself and letters from others and drafts or copies of letters from himself to others. She is more inclined to jettison, but she also has a sharper eye for sorting potentially significant correspondence or documentation. She maintains the steadier pace, slowly but surely filling the black rubbish bag at her side. For him it is all a haze, she notices, a miasma over his eyes descending with virtually every scrap. Destroy or retain? Why destroy? Why retain? The shores of junk mail lapping at their knees, they proceed envelope by envelope, she the bold pragmatist, he washed over with the impossibilities of decision at the very canuticles of his fingers. And pervading everything all the time, though neither mentions it to the other, is the
smell. For her it is curious and alluring, unknown yet connected to him. For him, it recalls the love of life itself, this ceaseless smell of the house. Uncapturable but ubiquitous, on every surface, on every object are the residues, the residutiful, residentical odour that he recognises as not the father’s only but that of the house itself. He loves this signature of the house, an olfactory imprint different from anything else in the world, irreproducible and irreplaceable. He dreams of preserving it, bottling and selling it back to himself, privately, on a demented black-market of grief. In reality this smell, neither stench nor perfume, enveloping every object in the room, every item of their clothing, every inch of their hair and skin, endures scarcely longer than the time it takes to transport a car-load of rubbish bags to the tip.
They drive to the tip more times than they can think. In the unrelenting blazing heat of these uncountable, unaccountable days they drive to this place manned by whom or what? These men, what are they called, the workers at the municipal tip? His mother knew the name, he recalled, she would drop it into her conversation as something to be enjoyed by itself, like a mint. But it keeps defeating him, this word, never in his vicinity, repeatedly eluding him, as if with a mind of its own. Then finally, out of the heat and haze, like a little oasis in a mirage it shimmers into focus: the totter. He is the figure who attends a dump, who deals with refuse, the rag-and-bone man of the heart who tots, to totter the word, the tot to tot, to turn to itself, backwards and forwards, a stumbling, stuttering figure of refusal. There are two of them, in fact, every day one or the other and often both, always the same. One of them is a small frightening man, with vacuum eyes looking through your face as if nothing you could say or ask could ever register on his, as if your face were indeed already reduced to bone. They think of asking: Where do we put something like this old Swedish orthopaedic kneeling chair (bought from some mail order catalogue twenty-five or thirty years ago, unsat upon for all but two months of that time), made of steel and deckchair-style fabric? Does it go to metal recycling, or is it general household waste? But they know better. They learn very early on not to ask the tiny totter anything. One false move and he’ll melt your face off with a nice canister of stuff fit for purpose kept close in one of his numerous pockets, is how he makes them feel. But the other, oh yes, the other totter! What a brave and magnificent specimen, a totter to tot, a totter to take home to your parents and present saying: Look, I have never known whether I was gay or straight or what it meant to have a sexual identity, besides a fiction out now, as the hoax played day and night by the contemporary universal film company, but this man is a totter, folks! Just check him out – the height of the fellow, the flowing golden mane of hair, the stupendous beautiful dirtiness, mom, your tottering colossus roaming the refuse, the mounds, the tipping-effect, like a god to whom you could address any question, no matter how naïve or obvious, and he would tell you graciously, with simple but unfathomable courtesy, as if completely in your own shoes and in another world at the same time.
How to gauge this disappearance of themselves every time they ask the totter a question? In due course, after a dozen or so visits, they are both in love with him. He is a dreamy but inextinguishable part of their cryptic, shared biography. They pack the odoriferous refuse bags, having separated the rubbish into what can and cannot be recycled, and drive to the tip frankly yearning for a sight of this man, and find themselves deflated, absurdly down-at-mouth on leaving, on any occasion when he isn’t there (or is concealed in the totter’s marvellously mysterious hut, on a tea or lunch break), as if the tip were another home, a home-making possible thanks to the lion-man who doubtless quit the premises everyday at sundown or earlier but seemed nevertheless to be the very premise of the premises, the king they would like to have invited back to the house, wined and dined, twinned and dazzled, sinned and binned, idylled and idded in an impossible fantasy loved as no one had evidently ever loved him.
And all the while gnawing, denying nothing everything, in at the entrails parsing and combining, nibbling and morselling, filling black bags in the summer heat, stacking them in the car, driving them down to the tip, hour after hour, things for nobody, breaking off for lunch then back to filling black bags, hour after hour, in order to turn the downstairs into a space that could reasonably accommodate thirty or forty people on the day of the funeral, in the midst of cleaning and clearing always the phone calls, the practical arrangements, the line of authorities and officials stretching out to doom in a hall of cracked mirrors. After the post-mortem it is necessary to set up the date of the funeral and arrange what kind of burial, what kind of service, what time of day, presided over by whom, and on what terms. The vicar who, over the phone, was agreeable to doing it, seems outwardly at ease when she comes to the house to meet the bereaved son and his friend, the beautiful totter-grieving girl, and talk to him about the arrangements, but becomes less comfortable with every passing second, inwardly no doubt from the beginning unsure of just how Christian this burial is going to be. Always a little tricky, so often these days, a problem to combine sympathy with the bereaved with the sneaking sense that these people are not church-going, these people want a so-called Christian burial not on account of their own faith nor even of the faith of the one to be buried, but merely on account of what to call it, I’m flummoxed now, I always get flummoxed at this point, best not analyse it, an aesthetic question really, a matter of appearances after all. Me too, I suppose, the way I drive up to the door and ring and introduce myself as the local vicar, the character who has never met this chap let alone his father but is, within two minutes of getting inside the front door, referring to the dead person by the affectionate diminutive version of his first name, as if I’ve been a family friend for decades. (Or as if he is still alive sitting in the next room patiently filling his pipe with rhododendron leaves, for that was what he had discovered in recent months he most enjoyed smoking, and the easiest thing to do, fetch a few leaves from the rhododendron bush just outside the front door and dry them out on a plate on the little table next to him.) And as I am standing here discussing the funeral arrangements, what he would like, what he wouldn’t, what he would or wouldn’t because his wife would or wouldn’t have wanted (‘like’ for the man unburied, ‘want’ for the woman in the ground, subtle but valid distinctions, in my book), because it’s a double grave after all, lest we forget, it’s your mum’s wishes too, there is something about the way the chap holds back, doesn’t speak when I would expect him to speak, something about the other person, where does she come from?
– Are you family, my dear?
– No, I’m not, the girl replies.
So who is she? Not going to get a satisfactory answer there either. Something about the man wavering over the standard deals we offer, service in the church or service at the grave.
– Will it be a big event? Many coming? Was your father well known locally? I expect he had a lot of friends.
And the son feels impelled to inform her that his father was a Buddhist who practised no recognisable form of Buddhism, unless you count smoking rhododendron leaves, and his mother was an atheist of the sublime party, and then to complain about the apparent impossibility of setting up a decent burial in this God-bemobbled country, if she’ll excuse his language, unless it is a good Christian burial conducted by a bona fide priest such as he takes her to be, and the vicar feels impelled to ensure that she is not dealing here with some strange species of satanist, for there is after all just a flicker of doubt in her bones, she won’t call it by name but the chap’s chemicals are sending out warning signals. Proceed with caution. Consign to unconscious exorcism.
And the son would like to point out that ‘satan’ is a rich and beautiful word that indeed need not be invested with a capital letter but can be understood in a sense cut free, if he may put it this way, from all religiosity, as a noun in its older or, perhaps, more pristine sense meaning simply an adversary, someone who opposes or plots against. Not forgetting also of course that the wor
d has been used of some of the funniest characters in literature. Think of Falstaff, that old white-bearded satan.
But she wants to know now what extracts from the Bible and what hymns his father liked, if there is anything special the son wishes to have in the service. Otherwise she’ll be happy to suggest something.
Yes, the bog-standard programme, he thinks, with the lord as my shepherd and an excerpt from Revelation he almost starts reciting to her on the spot, And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel, and did eat it; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey; and when I ate it my belly was embittered; no, don’t wind the woman up, she’s only doing her job.
So he is havering, yes, she can tell there is something not to be trusted about the bereaved man.
– I’d like to be able to think about this and perhaps suggest a passage or two, perhaps read a poem and say a few words of my own if that is OK, he says.
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