The Iceberg

by Marion Coutts

  I had thought that death was a separate, foreign state. It is, but it follows the contours of our own terrain. And because we knew this terrain so intimately we were able to continue on through it as allies. What we need to know here is what we already know.

  On Tuesday, Tom goes to sleep. His breathing is natural and ordered. His face relaxed. I am here as ever and the others continue to arrive. Clichés of the bedside unfurl like mottoes out of our mouths. We are like medieval angels saying our allotted lines through the ages. We cannot help ourselves. He is so calm. See how he sleeps. If he could react truly he would roll his eyes, groan and tell us please to shut up. But it is true and mildly stupid at the same time. Just wake up. The colour in his cheeks is fresh. Daft. Like he could.

  When watched closely like this, watched out as if your own life depended on it, death is normal. It is a series of stages more or less known. Here is a person asleep who will not wake. His breathing is not unstable. One. Two. One. Two. I pat the belly curve and trace the angle of its rising that I know so well, higher now than it has been but still. There there.

  This quality of regard is not possible to maintain. It is beyond me to hold a coherent line or keep my thoughts in check. This becomes a prickly kind of ethical problem. It is a symptom of limbo. Concentrate. You may have no more time. Concentrate. But no, again, some nagging but persistent distraction has intruded: the new window I must order, someone who came recently, how hungry I am, thoughts of yesterday evening, my weeping right eye, where Ev is, the volume of the music playing … Maybe it’s not the right music, maybe I need to change it?

  Music. Perhaps his accompaniment, his exit will be against this manual work. The dragging of hair bows across strings, friction against tightness, reeds vibrating, air blown through holes, through tubes. Valves shut off and opening again, lips relaxing and contracting, finely calibrated objects hit. Metal on metal; wood on metal; leather on wood; padding on metal; pitch, tone, timbre; cylinders and coils, all shapes resonating. Sequences rising and falling, fingers, everywhere fingers. The warm brush of lungs. Creaking of buttocks on chairs, slight releases of air, stomachs against belts, clasps and buckles, skirts rustling, paper finely shifting. Dry skin on palms worn down and rubbing together. Bells, diaphragms, stools, rib cages, all bones in concert, felt and leather above and beyond.

  I shift in my seat. The desire to make things endlessly work has been my engine of action. I have been at war for so long. Failure is my best release. I am a gargoyle carved in stone: blasé, flippant, desolate. I do the things that are given to me to do: eat a bacon sandwich, drink a coffee, sit close and listen. One. Two. One. Two. In. Out. In. Out. I love being in position here. It is perfectly correct. This is where I should be. But I want him to stay with me. Stay, just stay awhile longer.

  When we are alone, my voice sounds hollow as I talk to him while he sleeps. We have had the narrowest sliver of time, one pewter-coloured winter day, perhaps one and a half, of Tom being awake without words to speak at all. Yes and No have gone. And what happened? Our routes remained open. Language splits, folds, diversifies again and becomes a repertoire of homemade sighs and groans. We are in the versatile region of tone and touch and pitch mapped by light pressure to the skin or a hand circling the face.

  Now, sleep is here. Sleep. No Yes and no No. No Ah, and no Oh God. Eggsaaactly, with such a long, drawn-out exaggerated aaaaa, went a while ago. It doesn’t matter. We are gone into the grain, the sub-grain. Here Yes and No are the same.

  I sound unnatural and false, like someone who is unsure to whom they are speaking and doesn’t know how they should be addressed. I have the embarrassment of talking to myself lest I am not really talking to myself, lest I am heard. Sorry. I cannot make my sentences work. They tail off. This is a dry run. A premonition of what it will sound like when my main hearer is gone. I have lost the second consciousness that powers mine. Lost my sounding board, my echo, my check, my stop and finisher. I am down to one.

  Tom said a corpse is potentially a comic creature. It is both active and passive object, an unstable hybrid of person and thing. What of the comedy of a man sleeping over three days and counting? It is so companionable this breathing, I wouldn’t mind if it would only continue. In. Out. In. Out. My thoughts run on. Maybe we could live around it. We could manage. I would move in here permanently. It’s a lovely room. Ev could grow up and become a teenager whizzing in and out, bringing his friends round for company and to keep the noise levels up or just out of sheer curiosity to check out the sleeping dad, the man in the bed.

  My eyes are greedy. They are attuned to all they can get but here is an intensity of seeing I don’t recognise. I know the room by heart but it’s not the room I look at. I have his face. What do I see? Indents at the base of each hair of the beard where they poke differentially through the skin, the stiff white ones and the grey. Then, the silky long brown and the black hairs of the head; the bruised little flesh mashed so tender under the eyes with the eyebrows above like awnings on display. Then, the fine pores of the cheek and the coarser pores of the nose. Then, the battered lashes at rest below the clear span of the forehead. Looking is familiar. I do not drop my gaze. I am used to looking, thinking, revisiting, looking again. For hours and hours, for days. This is what I do. But I have never looked this way.

  Here are permanent fires. We are frenetic and at the same time stilled, without motion, in wait for the main event. All our energy is burnt up in the one spot. We do not mind or notice this. All the high points and markers, the excitements, the visits, the work, the excursions, the exhibition, Christmas, a birthday, New Year, all these are merging, rolling together softly under a blanket of wool stitched with our names. Today, as yesterday, there are no markers at all. There is one more marker to come.

  3.17

  The body mechanical is subject to failure. The chest rises and falls. In and out, up and down, breath and pump, opposites in motion, apart and together, fuelling each other, breaking down, pausing, stalling, false-starting, flooding, jagging, getting cold.

  Everything I see and feel is incompatible. What to do: stop or keep going? Stop now, or go awhile? Will my mind clear sufficient to the event? Enough. What is my mind anyway? No good to be had in it, stuffed with nothings, irrelevancies. Preparation will never be sufficient. We both knew that long ago. There is not clarity enough. The event is here, but now it has come I see it is here for me only and not for us. Tom is already elsewhere, gone on his own sometime in the last days. He glided so delicately out, his absence so continuous with his presence, with us and without us, that I didn’t catch the moment and immediately it happened it had already gone and was behind me. So. Just me.

  I am in place when there is a click and a discreet hum. A grey electronic blind outside the window smoothes down like a fourth wall, obscuring the sky and closing us in the room. I watch it without blinking. What can it mean? Is it a cue? A sign? Is it some anthropomorphic quirk of architecture that mimics the closing of an eye in homage, an electronic ritual of deference to the dying? Does the building know? How can it know? It is impossible. I must leave my pitch to find out. What does this mean?

  It means nothing. It is a malfunction. The building is new. Its circuits are febrile and oversensitive and the vapid winter sun has activated all the sensors on the south-east face, making the blinds go up and down like semaphore all along its length. I find the operating button and raise it. Minutes later it eases down again. I raise it, furious now, jabbing with my finger. You see! The great bastard sun-star, the whole firmament contingent in opposition crowds in on me to distract and sap my attention. It will not leave us alone. It is just an endless interruption of small things. Leave us. Leave us please at last.

  And now, something else: voices in a broil outside the door. Friends have arrived and I see them milling and crowding, their gestures blurred by the frosted glass. Among them is Ev. I have called them and not called them. It is the usual muddle. I stop the door open with my foot.

  Ev is bei
ng handed over from one to another but I don’t want to talk to them, only to him. I beckon and he zooms over. Without speaking I pull him in through the slit of the door. Now we are three. Three! How forbearing and bold he is. How gallantly he sets his face. His happiness is always at the ready to be pulled out of his belt and waved around like a plastic sword. He goes to the bed and pats Tom. He leans his head on Tom’s arm. I salute him and release him and send him away. Go now, I hiss to the door. They must all leave, even he. Stay, stay awhile, I whisper to the bed. Go away, I speak to the door again. We have come so far I fear intrusion, someone bursting in on us with clumsy warm breath. Go. We want no vigils other than our own for each other. No waiting, no sitting, no row of mourners, no people slumped with faces set in readiness for news. I flick between the bed and the door willing them all away. My skin is live.

  Finally they are gone. Everything happens anyway. Time is refreshing itself. I want this death to happen because it is the end and I will finally rest. I don’t want it to happen because it is the beginning and I will finally understand. We are together on the bed. It is familiar. Like how we were.

  Except no, the action is familiar but not the place. We have stopped being anywhere at all. We are way outside, out of culture, place, gender. I do not know where we are but I feel very sure of myself here. Time is refreshing itself, that’s all. It is simple. Duration is the rope that drags and keeps us. Time is the fundament we have never left, so powerful is its agency and pull, so direct and strange. There is nowhere in the world like it.

  How precious, I tell him, we are here and I am seeing you off. I am sending you. My hand is on his body. In and out. I am with you. In and out. My hand is on his neck seeking the place where it goes and finding it warm. I whisper something in time with his breath. My hand is in his hand. Go. I hum something, not anything. Go. I speak words, not anything. Go. I am not anything. Go. I am.

  SECTION 4

  4.1

  10 January 2011

  Dear Friends

  Tom is dead.

  He died yesterday, January 9th 2011, at 2.15 at Trinity Hospice.

  With love

  4.2

  Two days after your death, in a dream you text me many times. I read the first of them.

  ME!

  And so are the living comforted.

  4.3

  It was snowing on the day we buried you: small flakes, wide-spaced, tugged hard by the wind. Unplanned, we formed a circle around your grave and stood as the words went up. Your child and his friends were everywhere present in our procession, threading lightly through the lines of mourners. I scatter earth over you and so does he, fingers splayed back, palm flat. You have moved through us and now you are gone, leaving us standing. And so are the living comforted.

  A Note on the Author

  Marion Coutts is an artist and writer. Her works have been exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including at Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and The Wellcome Collection, London. She has held fellowships at Tate Liverpool and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. In 2001, she married the art critic Tom Lubbock. After his death in 2011, she wrote the introduction to his memoir Until Further Notice, I am Alive and is the editor of English Graphic, an anthology of his essays. She is a Lecturer in Art at Goldsmiths College and lives in London with her son. This is her first book.