She called him once and he didn’t answer. The museum was quiet and the air was heavy and it had the smell of something that had been sat for months in the same place with the world turning sour around it. She tucked her nightie into a pair of jeans and did up the zip and the button and smelled the card with the long number and folded it up and stuffed it into her back pocket. On the handle of the door was Dad’s black tie that he had put back on and done up tight whenever he wanted to talk about the burial. She took it off and went through the door and into the hall where she found his black jacket folded on top of a box of swaying junk. Then she found the smart shoes chucked next to the front door and she went into his bedroom where he was not and she called him again but he didn’t answer and she couldn’t feel the weight of him anywhere inside the flat. She dropped his clothes and went into the living room and stopped when she saw the armchair that had been pulled in front of the fuzzing TV.
The light changed in the room from dark to grey and then back to bright yellow and burning orange as something threaded in front of the sun and back again to the start. Clouds. Weathermen. Satellites. Stars. Moon. Drifting things that lived in the freshly dug graves in her mind. She stopped there for a while looking at the back of the chair. His arms hung over the sides with the clean white shirt rolled to his elbows. The tattoos near his elbows and wrist bone had gone sour and blended into his skin. There was a bottle of vodka turned on its side underneath his left hand and the last bit of a cigarette burnt out and half gone in his right. Another wedding ring was wedged on his finger to join the one that had always been there.
The TV looked into the room with its wintery blinking eye and Dad’s chair was turned towards it but his face was turned to the wall and the patch of sea he painted for her once. She walked around his chair, stood in front of him and looked at him for a long while. She threw her hands on the top of her head and balled them into fists at the back of her neck. Her eyes ran. Her throat grated her voice into chokes and coughs. The doll-headed bird was silent for the first time in all its lunatic years. Plastic Jesus was still and quiet in his new place lain sideways on his chest like a sleeping child. She looked at him but he didn’t look at her. She looked at him but he was not there.
He wasn’t moving or breathing and his eyes were open but he couldn’t see the TV and he couldn’t see the waves of the painted sea and couldn’t see her. She called him. He wouldn’t answer. She leaned against the chair with one hand on top of the other and she pressed his chest and opened his mouth and stuck her fingers inside deep. Nothing came up. He didn’t speak or move and his tongue didn’t fight against the taste of her fingers. She tried again and again with her throat burning and the room turning watery. She called him again and again but he wasn’t there. She kneeled in front of him and threw down Plastic Jesus and wiped her eyes on the knees of his jeans and pushed her fists into his chest and took hold of his shirt and pulled his body and dropped him down and shook him. His head rolled and his mouth opened but he was not.
She rested her head on his lap and watched the light between the boards.
Where did you go, Dad? she said. I bet it’s somewhere nice. I bet it’s where Mum went when the hangman caught up to her. I bet it’s a place with rabbits and blue smoke. I think it’s good and clean there. I can’t see it, Dad, but I know it’s there. It’s like sometimes when I catch the outside and draw it in and look at it when the sleeping doesn’t come. I look at it with my head and sometimes I look with my stomach and that’s the way I’ll see you too, Dad, unless you want to take me with you. Why don’t you do that? Why don’t you take me too? I’ll lay down so nice and quiet and I’ll fall asleep and you can hook me with a fishing rod and lift me up. I’ll try to sleep. No I won’t. I’ll fall asleep.
The mad bird came out of its house. Plastic Jesus nodded on the floor and she reached down and picked him up and he nodded in her arms.
What do you want to say?
Fall awake. Fall awake. Fall awake.
She sat shaking and she cradled Plastic Jesus like a baby. She let the crying come. It rushed from her heart and straight into her head and out through her mouth. She held his hand and watched it change in the shifting light that rose up and fell down again behind the boards. He was so much older in the light. His ageing was complete. She saw the pain that had fallen from his thin cheeks and she saw the softness of the muscles that hung loose behind his skin and she held up the limbs that were like empty paper bags.
I think you went and died, Dad. You died good and quick because you were so sick and I think you were sick for a long time. Your heart was broken and I know you can’t ask for another one because the hangman doesn’t carry spare change. One side was for me and one side was for Mum and a heart only works with two good sides, Dad. Hearts break right down the middle when one side pulls away. I think that’s how you died. I think you’re beyond the rain and stars now, Dad. Happy. Lovely. Handsome like before. I can’t see you anymore, Dad.
She whispered to him all night and then she fell asleep when the sun came back to the room and lit the dust into specks of fire. Outside there were heavy ships that sailed through the streets. There were men who stood calling from the decks. They raised their hands up. She closed his eyes with her fingers like the dead in the films and she took out the needle and took off the belt and folded his arms over his middle. He was no man. He was not Dad. Dad had gone away sometime in the middle of the night with his eyes fixed on the wall and his arm wrapped around a Plastic Jesus and thoughts of rabbits in his head and.
She looked at the wall. The sea raged and was still and soundless. The boat chucked and the sun pulsed and the sand burned underneath the painted light. She lay her hand there and wiped her eyes with the hem of her nightie. She smelled the salt but she couldn’t feel the water.
13
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
SHE HAD LAID three coats over him and returned Plastic Jesus to the Hi-Fi and pushed Dad’s chair to the corner next to the settee. She burned his mother’s picture in the fish tank and then she took the blackened pieces out of the tank and threw them down the toilet and let them turn the water grey. Dorothy walked with her and held her hand.
She turned the TV up loud so that she could hear the music over the silence that had grown every day since he had gone. The music grew over the sound of the outside. Sometimes she danced. Dorothy stood in front of her and held out her hands and she took them and spun around.
There was no food left in the cupboards except cereal and old beans and water from the tap that had turned a rusted yellow. She stood in the middle of the room with a bowl of dried cereal and yellow water and ate mouthfuls until her stomach twisted and then she didn’t eat for hours and hours and stood alone in the living room looking at the black roses. She was sweating and she didn’t know why. Her breath was gone. She ran past the stacks and into the bathroom and she was sick in the toilet where the black picture had sunk but had not washed away.
The light stopped coming into the room. Everything was always dark and slow and she had shadows stuck in her eyes and ghosts stuck in her head and even when the bird bashed or Plastic Jesus nodded they did it slow and soundless. She wiped the wet hair out of her face and rewound the tape and played it again. The Tin Man needed oil and Dad needed something too that would loosen his stiff joints and fatten out his papery skin and there was plenty of one in that world but not enough of the other in hers.
She whispered to him with her face on her knees while Dorothy took handfuls of her hair and smoothed it over her back again and again like any mother would.
Dad. I don’t think you’re coming back. I think when someone dies that’s the end and when you died that was the end for us both. You’re not here. You’re not here you’re not here you’re not here. How can you go away just like that, Dad? You’re gone. Everything is carrying on without you like you were never here in the first place, Dad. How do you like that? I have to go now, Dad. I can’t stay here and die
too because nobody will know it. I have to go now.
She wiped her eyes and lit a smoke and went into the hallway and stepped over the fallen boxes of junk and climbed bits of scrap that were sticking out of the top and she went into his bedroom. It was darker in his room than any other because not even the light liked to see what he did in there. Next to the bed was a chip of black coal mostly burned into that brown gel that took him into the garden where the rabbits were digging. At the foot of his bed was a purple pipe and next to that was an empty bottle and two empty cans that smelled stale and sour when she picked them up. Underneath his pillow was a magazine of women with large breasts and long choppy hair and fat lips and. She went into his wardrobe and took out one of his band tee shirts and she held it up to the no light and she smelled it and she took off her nightie and put it on over her dirty bra and she tucked it into her jeans. She found a pair of socks rolled into a ball next to the cupboard and a box of action videos and a book of band photographs from nineteen ninety-seven and she unrolled them and put them on. She put on his boots and tied the laces around her ankles and she put on his leather bracelet that was wrapped around his bedpost and the smell of it reminded her of.
She went into her bedroom and turned over her pillow and found the card that had been shoved through the letterbox and she looked at the long number with the single word above that she couldn’t read. The phone that hung on the wall in the hallway had been ripped away from the wall while he had tried to build up his museum. She climbed the pile of shifting junk and stood balancing on a stack of table legs and an old stuffed dog. She held the phone to her face and pushed the box back to the wall and heard the crackle of crumpled paper down the line and felt the heat of the sparks behind the box. She looked at the card and pushed the buttons in the order they had been written down and then she waited.
It rang.
It rang. It rang. It rang. It. And there was nobody on the other side. She balanced on the junk pile and she pressed the phone to her mouth and she twisted her hair in her hands and pushed the heel of her hand into her eye socket. There was no voice. There was only a chiming of bells. It rang. It.
Hello.
She was silent.
Hello. Is that you?
She opened her mouth but.
Hello. Is that?
It’s me.
She pressed the phone hard into her cheek. The stranger was breathing on the other side.
It’s me, she said. It’s me.
Then the stranger began to talk but she couldn’t make out the words. She pressed the buttons and tugged at the wire and said please, please, but at last the only voice she could hear was her own and there was no reason to keep talking.
She put the phone down and sat on the pile of junk with her arms over her legs looking down at the carpet below her. She smoked and flipped the stranger’s card around in her hand and held it to the light that spat through the place above the front door and she held her cigarette underneath the card and watched it catch. It burned up yellow and bright and rolled back like a hungry black lip. She held the cigarette to the other end and watched that burn too. Then the number was gone. The paper was ash. That was the end of the voice, and the stranger too.
*
She wouldn’t go back into the living room. The smell of him was too much. She stayed instead on the top of the pile where the air was stale but it was not soaked through with death or the little smells of his life that were so much worse than decay. Aftershave. Poppies. Leather. Sweat. Soap. Smoke. Apples. She could even smell the toast he burned a few weeks before he died. That was worse. She could still smell his life even though the living was done. She held her head in her hand and wiped her eyes and smoked another cigarette that she had taken from the table next to his bed. Outside the world was chiming and rattling and there were far away noises and close noises that were not as bad as the noise in her head.
I don’t want to hear it, Dorothy. I don’t want it. I’m done and gone and buried in a pile like all this junk. I think I’ll never die though. Dad died after he was done living but I never started so I can’t go ahead and stop because there was no starting. I think I’m a ghost. I’m tired. Look at my hands.
Dorothy stood in front of her with her little dog in her arms and she looked down the hall at the piles of junk and she looked back and she opened her mouth to sing but nothing came out.
She fell asleep and when she awoke she was so hungry she couldn’t think and. Slow down. Stop thinking. Listen to that lovely ugly sound. Don’t. Listen to the sound of the sea rising in the living room and listen to the other sounds. So pretty, like you. She listened and then she heard it. Fast little clicks. It sounded like the inside of a clock or the hidden sound of the mechanics that twisted the dancer in the music box and it came from the other side of the door that had disappeared when she fell half asleep and half awake. The hallway began to lean to the left. She rubbed her eyes with a piece of cloth that had once been wrapped around a doll and she looked again at the front door. The moths in her head were quiet and she sweated even though the hallway was cold. Everything was cold. She twisted her arms around her body and stood up on the junk pile and watched the door.
Nothing happened.
She let herself slide down the side of the junk mountain with one hand on her head to soften the storm behind her eyes and the other on her stomach to stop her guts from playing tunes. Dorothy sank into the air like the poppy smoke.
Is someone there? she said. It’s me. I can’t.
The door knocked and the knocking made her knees drop. She fell for days and days and. Caught a slice of the door opening and the fresh air pouring in and so many thousands of boots and apple cider smells. The ground came up to smack her hard on the face and somewhere in the back of her mind Dad told her that Judy Gee used to get slapped all the time. Judy Gee got slapped when she was off camera. She was trying to act and the acting wasn’t working so she got slapped and the slapping was. In front of her the door opened wide and the air rushed in. She saw the knees of a man pressed into the carpet. He said oh my God and his hands smelled like rain and petrol.
There’s no off camera, she said. There’s no.
It was raining inside. She raised her hand and waved her fingers and felt the little drops falling on her skin and felt them on her tongue too when she opened her mouth. Her mouth tasted sour but she couldn’t remember throwing up. She looked into the face of the weather that was round and fat and connected to a long silver neck that came even longer when she rubbed the sweat out of her eyes. There was a little red light and hard ceramic sides and a curtain weighed down with water and grown over by a black garden.
The weather came from the shower that had been turned on and fixed so that it pointed at her where she lay fully clothed underneath it. She wiped the water out of her face and dragged the black fat hair out of her eyes and sat in the middle of the bath with the water going over her head. The curtain was drawn to the end of the bath so that she couldn’t see behind it. All she could see was the shape of him sitting on the lid of the toilet, smoking a firefly that he brought to his lips and took away again.
She watched him. His head was bowed and his back was bent and he brought his hand to his head once or twice and then opened his legs and rested his elbows on his knees. His shadow was tired. Worn into blurred edges. Her stomach swelled into her heart and her lungs shrank to the size of tangerines. He brushed the hair out of his face and sighed so long and gentle. Watching him. Whoever he was. She realised. Whoever he was. She knew then that she was furiously in love with him.
14
Emerald Green
SHE HEARD THE sizzle of burning tobacco and the sound of the lips and throat that contracted to pull the smoke deep. She saw the glow of the little nicotine fly and watched the grey clouds come over the curtain only to get machine-gunned into nothing by the spitting shower. She wrapped her fingers around the curtain and pulled it back. Gentle. Slow. He was sitting on the very edge of the toilet seat wit
h his elbows on his knees and his long legs wide and his rusted blond hair falling into his face and he was picking something off the inside of his hand. Around his neck and falling into his shirt was a silver chain with a cross hanging off the end. She went closer and concentrated. Sprawled on the cross and looking out in amazement was a small polished man, a richer kind of Jesus.
She watched him over the top of the bath. He spoke to the floor.
Are you all right, Girl? he said.
I’m okay.
You fell.
I wasn’t feeling well.
You’re all right now?
I think so. My Dad is dead.
He is.
Will it change?
No, it won’t ever change.
Oh.
What’s done is done and that’s just life.
Okay.
Okay.
Are you here for me?
I was here for him. I didn’t know about you.
Did you hear me on the phone?
The line was bad. I couldn’t tell who it was.
Are you the hangman?
He took another puff of the fly and brushed his hair from his face and he looked at her where she sat with her feet curled underneath her and her arms hung over the sides. There was not a twitch about him. He was calm and his movements were small and gentle and soft and even the smoke above his head didn’t swirl with the kind of dust that usually flowed about the ceiling when Dad was in the room. He was still and he commanded the room to be still also. He moved his hands between his knees and twisted his fingers together and she saw a flash of white on the inside of his wrists, a little slice of moon. She thought on a silver fish that warped its body in the agony of the waterless air and she looked again and saw it clear when he left the amber fly glowing in his fingers. On the back of his wrist was a silver scar cut straight across, just above the heel of his hands, like the still wave on the wall in the living room. He watched her watching him and he turned in his wrists so that the slice of moon was gone.
The Insomnia Museum Page 5