Come Not When I Am Dead (26 page)

“I wish they would all piss off” I
said to Toby “piss off my beach and go home and take their pissing dogs with them.”
 
And I was striding along and Toby strode
next to me, trying to keep up with me, arm swings close to arm, steps in step,
and then I felt his hand catch mine, and although we said no words just then, I
settled my hand in his and I curled my fingers up a little to show him that I
liked it.
 
I felt small and that I
was being looked after.
 
I felt I
could climb up that hand to a safe place.
 
I felt tears rise to my eyes and I shouted at them ‘back, back, back in
those eyes’.
 
I gently held his hand
there as the wind settled down and we walked past noise and dogs and fury.
 
I looked up in to his face and smiled, a
smile from a small person who wants to be loved and is gentle and he smiled
down at me, a smile from a tall person who wants to love, who wants to love
me.
 
And I remember smiling like
that at Charlie once, right at the very beginning.
 
It was after the first time we’d had
sex.
 
He was standing in the
doorway, half light on him and I looked up at him and smiled and he looked
quite stunned, moved backwards and ran.
 
Pah!
 
He was gone.

“I have a lover” I said to him, to
the beach and the sand stopped rolling away and I’m pretty sure that the waves
ceased crashing, just for a second.
 
“And are you happy with your lover?” he didn’t look at me, but at his
feet, or my feet, or the sand and his words fell like a bomb in to the
sea.
 
I think that that’s a very
singular thing to ask.
 
“No I’m not
happy” and his hand pressed mine a little more firmly.
 
No, I’m not happy, I don’t think I’d
really realised it, not quite, not so definitely, not so disloyally, not so
starkly.
 
And all at once I felt
relief as if my strings had collapsed and I’m sinking to the ground.

I did think that Toby would be a
little too gentlemanly to make love to me that night, I didn’t think it would
all be so easy, but it was.
 
I
thought he would kiss my cheek, a lingering soft kiss and want to see me again
soon.
 
But he let me seduce him.
 
“You are not Charlie” I was thinking as
I undressed him, but it wasn’t guilt talking and I was glad he wasn’t Charlie.
 
And that night, as we made love, as I
sat astride him and ground down on to him, he pulled the duvet up around my
shoulders to keep me warm and protected and I pushed it off and away and I
roared out my lion’s roar, mighty and free and shook my huge golden mane.

“Tell me about yourself” someone once said to me “tell me
about this space, this thick air, this detatchment, this calm.
 
Just tell me.
 
Why are you different?”
“I don’t know.
 
Sometimes I know,
sometimes I don’t.”
“Is the air thick like soup?”
“No, it’s like particles in the air”
“And what does it feel like to be floating free?
 
Untethered.”
“I don’t know, but I like it.”
 
Don’t let me change, I am me.
 
But I am waiting an adventure.
 
I am waiting for birth, not loss.
 
There is so much space around me.
 
I’m waiting for someone to enter it.

It has been quiet but I have been
busy.
 
I have been seeing Toby, just
a little, gently and hesitantly.
  
I have been seeing Charlie.
 
I am colder with Charlie and he doesn’t notice.
 
I don’t ring him as much, and he doesn’t
notice.
 
I slink and slide out of
his life like a fox between trees and he doesn’t notice.
 
I haven’t told him I love him for a week
or maybe two and he hasn’t noticed.
 
I put my fingers up in the V sign when he turns his back and mouth ‘fuck
off’ and he doesn’t notice.
 
And
something is crumbling away.

Charlie, like a tiny spider walking
across a pond asked me about Toby.
 
He doesn’t come out with what he really thinks, he doesn’t say “are you
seeing him?” or “do you love me Gussie,?” he doesn’t question me as I would
question him and he doesn’t deserve a proper answer or any more than a cursory
lie, because I don’t think he really cares.
 
But I would care.
 
They say that absence makes the heart
grow fonder, but for me it makes me much more self sufficient and I think
I can do without him
my life is so much
easier without him.
 
My super power
may be instant anger and my super ability is aggressive independence.

And so I told Charlie I liked Toby
and Charlie narrowed his little eyes and stared, and that stare singed my
paper, but didn’t burn it.
 
He looks
haggard and his eyes are lined with pink.
 
He should talk to me.
 
How
many times do I need to say that to him?
 
For ever?
 
But he doesn’t
listen and I’m fading away, getting lighter and lighter and paler and paler and
soon you won’t see me at all.

I saw him today.
 
I tried to pretend, just to myself, just
for him, just to see, that it was as it was before, when I was fooled and my
basket was full of splendour for him.
 
But the far side of his moon is black.
 
He ate a sandwich with me in greedy
silence, too much noise coming from his mouth.
  
He brought some chocolate over, we
ate it together, me at a physical and emotional distance across the kitchen,
sitting on the broken hardback chair not knowing what to do with my toes.
 
And he still didn’t notice.
 
Then when we stood up, with bread stuck in my throat, feeling like it would
never go down, when he was about to go, he gave me a stupid peck on my lips
“let your lips linger there” I tell him, I am trying to make it better, he
tries but he doesn’t linger enough.
 
He is facing me, close to me, he grabs at my bosom and squeezes it, then
he turns me around by my shoulders, so I am resting against the sink, he lifts
the skirt of my dress, pulls my knickers down, stuffs himself inside of me and
fucks me.
 
When he is done he
doesn’t see the look on my face because he’s in a rush.
 
He thinks it’s all OK.
 
He is mad.
 
I am mad.
 
And sometimes, would I still let him
have me if I didn’t like him at all anymore?
 
I don’t know.
 
I don’t think so.
 
I suppose I am at the moment, because I
certainly don’t like him now, but maybe I will again soon.
 
Maybe, because I’m a bit of a drama
Queen it all seems so awful but it will be OK.
 
“When did you write that letter to
me?
 
It was in the pile of papers
you put in the log basket.
 
You were
trying to finish with me.
 
Why
didn’t you send it?”
“What letter?” And for a moment I doubted myself, he surely would have
remembered writing a letter like that, I was glad to see the puzzlement on his
face “it was on the back of a bank letter, you were trying to write a letter to
me, finishing with me.
 
But you
didn’t send it.
 
Were you going to
finish with me Charlie?”
 
I hate
this vulnerability and dependency and I saw the light go on in his head.
 
“That wasn’t a letter for you”
“it must have been for me”
“well it wasn’t” and still I have to squeeze and squeeze and milk him for
communication, and even then, just drips come, drip, drip, drip, why can’t he
see?
 
“then are you seeing someone
else?”
“don’t be stupid Gussie, of course I’m not”
“then who was it to?
 
If not me,
then who?” and my hand was on his arm, pushing him away from the door towards
the wall.
 
He will not go until he
tells me “it was to my wife” and then all my walls tumbled down and crumbled as
they hit the ground.
 
He does love
me.
 
I know he loves me and then,
ashamed of myself,
 
I cuddled him
with both my arms tight around his tummy, my head down, loving him and hating
myself and this repulsive insecurity, hiding my face while he explained it to
me and wishing I were as good, wishing I wasn’t so bad.
 
I am bad.
 
“What are you doing tomorrow night?” he
asked me to make things better
“seeing you?”
“I think it’s time to get those dogs from Mark Davies” he is buttoning his
jacket, head down, he is concentrating, he can’t do two things at one time “OK”
I say.
 
“I love you Charlie”
“I Know you do.”

‘Hello, hello, is there anybody in there?
 
Just nod if you can hear me, is there
anyone home?’

Last night I had a dream in three
parts.
 
I first dreamt that I was in a small, empty room, a square concrete room like a
garage, with Charlie, we were just standing there in the dark, when the door
opened a little and light poured gently through the opening, and in the light I
saw specks and pillows, billows of dust falling slowly down from the ceiling to
the floor.
 
And then a cat was there
looking around, she was pale coloured like Coningsby, but I didn’t think it was
Coningsby.
 
She was walking through
the door into the room, her tail held high, then she turned around to go out
again.
 
I said to Charlie that I’d
go out and stroke her.
 
I left
Charlie alone in the little room and went outside.
 
Suddenly it was almost a Mediterranean
landscape and the little pale coloured cat was walking towards the horizon and
there was another cat there, and then another and another and another, and
suddenly hundreds and hundreds of cats all walking the same way, all sorts of
different cats in a huge, straggling line.
 
It was so lovely and exciting and I just walked along with them for a
little and then I suddenly thought that I should be taking photos of them, so I
got my camera out and started taking these beautiful photographs of all these
splendid cats and I forgot all about Charlie in the room.

The next bit of the dream I was in
another small room and I was standing up with a wall close to my right
shoulder.
 
Toby was standing a little
behind me and to my left and uncle George was standing in front of me and a
little to my left too, facing me.
 
Uncle George was asking me to paint the wall, but I didn’t know how he
wanted me to do it and so I asked him how far down the wall I should begin, and
he leant forward and said to me, as if he were talking about measurements “5
pussy cats in the skies.”

In the last part of the dream I was
in another small room and there were two single beds in the room, I was
standing up.
 
In one of the beds I
could see the too-blonde head of someone who I thought was my grandma’s friend
Peggy.
 
I went over to the bed to
see if it was her and peeked a little at her head and then suddenly it was
Coningsby and she was lying in the middle of the bed, deliciously, warmly,
contentedly fast asleep, all curled up with her book still open by her side,
she’d fallen asleep reading.
 
I woke
up and felt so happy with all my cat dreams.
 
I’m sure they mean something, but I
don’t know what.
 
I need to work out
how to get myself out of this bloody mess I’ve got myself into.

I went fishing.
 
I stood, knee high in the river and I
heard and felt a whishhhh, so close to my right ear.
 
And it must have been a fraction of a
second, although it felt like a minute before I turned my head in the direction
the noise went to see what it was.
 
I thought I must have been so slow that I would have missed it, but
there, so close to me a musket chasing a blackbird over the water, out they
went from the cover of trees, out over the water and back again towards the
land, furiously, frantically fast, a ball on a rope swung round and round, a
car on a fairground ride, wildly, only just in control.
 
A blackbird is rather ambitious for a
musket, but it was a musket and not a spar.

Sometimes I’m a little bit frightened
that all this means too much to me and that nothing else really does.
 
I fished badly though today, my hand was
wild and my head not there, my line was getting tangled and I lost a fly.
 
But I caught a lovely trout, and it was
so full of life, so energetically wild and oh, I don’t know, such a fighter
that I put it back again.
 
I cradled
it in my hands and when it was ready to go and swam from me I said “thank you”
like I always do when I finish a cigar and throw it away from me, and when I
throw them into the sea I say “thank you cigar, go and see Grandma, go and see
Coningsby now.”

Charlie and I are going to do the
dogs later on today.
 
I don’t want
to go, and my body hunches over, I puff out a deep sigh of discontent and my
tummy feels just a little bit sick.
 
I don’t want to go, but I don’t want to leave him on his own.
 
There is a bad feeling in my stomach
about this.
 

I started getting ready at 8pm to go
and meet him, putting on my boiler suit I kept thinking
I don’t need to go
.
 
Putting on my hat I thought
I can
just call him and tell him I don’t want to go
, but I know that if I did,
he’d go on his own.
 
And it’s not
the same tonight, not the same as the other nights.
 
I’m not laughing, I’m not happy, I’m not
full of mischief.
 
But I will look
after him.
 
I take no delight in my
padded out boiler suit or my balaclava.
 
I think it will be the last one tonight.
 
I disgust myself.
 
I am a fraud.

Mark Davies’s house is a horrible
looking house, at the end of a really horrible looking road of horrible
houses.
 
Mark Davies’s fence around
his garden has great big gaps in it that we slipped through in the dark of the
night, in the quiet of our stealth. Mark Davies’s garden backs on to fields
which is the only nice thing about that place, but even the fields are bare and
flat.
 
The night was still.
 
His house was dark and quiet and once we
were in the garden, Charlie pushed me gently towards a shed and said “you wait
here.”
 
I feel magic at his touch
“no, I’ll go with you.”
“No Gussie, you wait here” and his hands are firm on my shoulders.
“I do love you Charlie” and I do, I would do anything for him now.
 
I look up into his face and say to him
again “I do love you you know.”
 
I
am going to be good for ever now.
“And I love you too.
 
Stay here”
“but it’s more sensible if I go down with you”
“for God’s sake Gussie do as you’re told, wait here, you need to be on the
lookout.
 
If he turns up, let me
know.
 
Wait here.”
 
And so I had to, you can’t argue in a
horrible strangers garden when you’re not supposed to be there and you’re doing
something illegal, I suppose it’s illegal.
 
And he always does that, tells me something that he’s had in his head
for a while but I don’t quite know what he means.
 
He calls out instructions, half
instructions because the rest is in his head and I don’t know what to do.
 
And then I have a moment, two, three
moments of frustration and fury.

Charlie walked down the garden to the
lock-up where the dogs were, quiet as an owl, just his back in the dark I could
see, but I couldn’t hear him.
 
It
was very still and we could hear the town noises over the hills, not voices,
just rumblings, and the sky, a conjured up warm colour with the lights of
civilisation.
 
And I waited by the
shed, cold and impatient, a heavy stick in my hand.
 
And then I thought
how do I let him know if Mark Davies turns up?
 
How?
 
I listened to my breathing and I shifted
from foot to foot.
 
I wiggled my
toes in my boots, one at a time and couldn’t remember if I’d wriggled my little
toe on my right foot, so went through it all over again.
 
I felt the wood of the shed, splintered
and dry, I examined the way it was made.
 
I saw a rat skull in the compost heap to my right and a tattered target
and I counted 8 cigarette buts.
 
And
then I watched Charlie again, his back bent like some sort of large stone, like
the head of a great big scarred sea trout.
 
He was taking too long.
 
“Hurry,
hurry, hurry” I said deep down and low with each long breath.
 
I wondered if I wanted to do a wee and
as I wondered, I wanted to but knew I shouldn’t.
 
I couldn’t hear what Charlie was
doing.
 
I didn’t know if he was
grunting or straining to open the door.
 
And there was that song again in my head ‘love me or leave me, let me be
lonely’.
 
And I was staring ahead,
then worried that I’d gone into a daze.
 
I might have missed something and my eyes blinked and narrowed in on him
again, then I felt them going off again in tiredness and lack of stimulation
‘love me or leave me’.

And then I heard another noise, and
over my heavily beating heart, I opened my mouth to breathe easier,
quieter.
 
I heard what sounded like footsteps.
 
I was sure they were footsteps, but then
I heard the fence creak and I raised my eyes at my nervousness.
 
And then I felt my whole body clench
still and pull up tight as I definitely heard the footsteps again and from my
shed shelter I saw him.
 

All those years ago at school, he was
just the rough boy that I avoided.
 
All those years later when I was going out with Richard, he was the
rough boy who had a room in their house.
 
I wanted to find some good in him in those days, I wanted to find out if
there was any human link or if bad was just a thing on it’s own.
 
I won’t think about that now.
 
But, I don’t even think I see him as a
person now, but as menace.
 
I see
him as something hateful that shouldn’t exist.
 
In a world which should be evolving he
is debilitating disease.
  
My
whole body snarled and felt filled with creeping pus.
 
Everything about him looked dirty.
 
I don’t want to breathe the same air in
this garden that he breathes.
 
He
was creeping down the garden, creeping down past me, slowly, what’s the time Mr
Wolf?
 
Creeping towards poor dear Charlie.
 
I did not want him to touch Charlie or
to see Charlie.
 
One step, two
steps, and I saw something in his hands, a stick?
 
A bat?
 
A truncheon?
 
And he stopped still and the weapon (because
it was a weapon) went down, rested vertically with one end on the ground, then
he picked it up again and continued, eyes ahead.
 
One, two, three, what do I do?
 
One, two, three, do I go after him?
 
Do I shout?
 
And I had no idea what I was supposed to
do.
 
I didn’t want to open my mouth
in his presence.
 
What do I do?
 
And you don’t have time to think and you
don’t really have space to think and I felt my legs go towards him, shaking and
unstable with fury and hatred and disgust.
 
I felt my mouth wet with fear but stupid
blind bravery from somewhere propelling me forwards.
  
And I still didn’t know if it was
the right thing or the wrong thing, and I felt like a ragdoll in the
garden.
 
I am useless.
 
How long do you creep before you run and
attack?
 
I don’t know, but you just
guess, watching the back of his neck.
 
How long can I carry on following him before he hears me?
 
And then following him thinking that he
will get Charlie and then me, or me and then Charlie and before thought came
violence.
 
The swinging of the
stick, all lost in time, momentum and movement and pain in my hands.
 
Feel the texture of the stick and I was
holding it at the wrong end, but I swung it at the back of his head, I know
that.
 
He turned around and I saw
his ugly face and swung at it, I wanted to feel the stick crush him.
 
But his body kept moving towards me,
just his shoulders.
 
I heard a noise
and it must have been him and I felt myself fall.
 
How stupid.
 
I felt myself fall on my back, but he had
kicked out at me, and as I fell, as I saw his head get closer to mine, I do not
want him to touch me, and as I saw his shoulders get larger, closer to my face
and his body made the dark blacker, I saw white behind him.
  
I just waited, in what I know
was a fraction of a moment, but felt like an age.
 
I felt him collapse on top of me and I
know that I was shouting.
 
I heard
my voice.
 
And then I saw Charlie
and I felt Mark Davies’s pain as, on top of me his body shot backwards from the
middle and suddenly he wasn’t on me anymore.

I think that for a minute I blacked out and then, when I
went to get up, it took so long to move and the quicker I tried, the longer it
seemed to take, and I must have turned the wrong way because it felt such a
long time to turn my body towards the noise and see Charlie’s face, stretched
and lined and big and angry, so angry.
 
And so many snow flakes in the blink of an eye, so many cinders from a
burning fire.
 
He was ripping and grabbing
at the man on the ground, claws and talons and danger and poison, and his body bent,
his feet kicking and kicking and I measured the motion, I watched the rhythm as
in a dream.
 
It is all a whirl and a
whish and a tangle of things and you can’t quite understand what’s happening.
 
And then Charlie was sitting next to me,
big and tall and upright, a monument, his monument, his left arm around my back
sitting close but not looking at me.
 
Why doesn’t he look at me?
 
“Where is he?”
“He’s over there.
 
He’s dead” and
then I was sick.
‘Poor sweet baby’ Charlie Brown always wanted someone to say to him and pat his
little round head.
 
Pat my head and
hold me tight, tell me it will all be alright.
 
“Are you alright Gussie?”
“Yes” I said as I wiped the sick away from my mouth with my sleeve.
“Stay there.”
 
I was getting up to
see if he was really dead, but Charlie held me firmly down.
 
“Is he really dead Charlie?” why do I
sound like a child sometimes?
 
Why
am I a child sometimes?
 
“Is he
really dead?” I would feel sorry for me.
 
All I saw in the dark was a lump on the ground, a dead lump.
 
And Charlie stayed next to me, his hand
on my back and then it moved up to my head and pulled my balaclava off and he
stroked my hair.
 
I’m not used to
such soft and physical affection from him and I stayed there, loving it.
 
A dog stretched out by the fire with his
masters socked foot caressing him.
 
Give me more, give me anything, I love it.
 
Loving him.
 
I
know there’s a dead man there
I thought to myself,
 
but
I have found something here too, I have found tenderness in him now and it
could all be OK now
.
 
“Will it
all be OK?” I said to him.
“No, of course it bloody won’t.
 
I’ve just killed someone” and he still looked ahead.
 
And what would other women do?
 
Would they be shocked and
frightened?
 
Would they scream?
 
I don’t know, but I was calm and
snuggled closer to him “he is horrible.
 
But what will we do?” my voice is small, my hand was on his knee,
stroking his leg beneath his soft trousers.
 
“You’ll go home now and I’ll sort it out.”
“No, I’ll help sort it out.”
“You’ll go home, there’s no need for you to be involved, it was nothing to do
with you.
 
You’ll go home Gussie.”
I will address this in a minute
I
thought and said “but what will you do?”
“I don’t know yet, I think I’ll dump his body.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.
 
By the river.
 
I don’t know.
 
You go now.”
 
He is stone and there’s no words he
understands.
 
And I am a child
banging and banging and banging on a rock with little white fists.
 
But I am not a child and I was there to
save him.
 
And as I stood there
thinking, looking at his face and a dead man on the ground beside him he
whispered “Gussie, you haven’t been seeing Toby have you?”
 
I love his unpredictability, that is
like me and, naturally, I lied, what else could I do?
“No, of course not.”
“I hope that’s true.
 
I hope that’s
true, not just for me, but for you too”
“what do you mean by that?”
“You know he’s your brother don’t you?
 
You do know Frank is your father?”
“What are you talking about?
 
Why
did you say that?
 
Why did you say
that?”
“I didn’t think you knew, you must be the last person, absolutely everyone else
knows.”
“You fucking bastard, why are you saying this?
 
Charlie?
 
Why are you saying this?
 
It’s fucking rubbish.
 
Why are you saying this?
 
Why are you being so horrible to me
Charlie?”
 
Whispered fury sent into
space, stars bursting and planets colliding and collapsing and skies falling
down and suffocating me and black, black, black all around me “your mother and
Frank Gussie, you are his daughter.
 
I’m not trying to be horrible to you, but you should know, why do you
think he’s always looking out for you?
 
No one else is like that are they?
 
He’s your father and Toby is your brother.”
“No!
 
You’re a fucking nasty liar,
you’re a liar” and I remember pushing hard at his face with the palm of my
hand, too hard, I remember feeling his nose squish up and wet on my hand and I
remember seeing spittle coming from my mouth and hurtling through the air
towards his face and then I turned and ran, ran and ran until my lungs,
squeezed tight, hurt so coldly, that I couldn’t run any more and I found myself
bent double in the middle of a strange street on my own, my head clashing and
banging and whipping me from inside.
 
Why would he say that?