Authors: Aidan Chambers
He wanted me to go in, but I wouldn’t. I was bushed.
We parted at his door.
‘Don’t forget,’ he said. ‘I’ll be waiting.’
‘Waiting?’
‘For your answer. About working at the shop. I’ll be there all day from nine. Telephone when you’re ready.’
‘Okay.’
‘Better still, come in and tell me. I’ll take you to lunch. How about that? Very business-like!’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘You think too much.’
‘Sure. See you.’
‘See you.’
‘Night.’
End scene: walking away into the moonlight.
All say
Ahhh!
I played and replayed my mental video. Each time the me that is me detached a little more the me that was me from the me that is me. I became cold observer of me-that-was. Psychotechnology did pre-select close-ups of B.’s eyes and mouth, his hands, shifts of body, tones of
voice. Searching for ambiguities. Finding plenty. The lexigraphy of flesh.
Frisson. Of danger? Of passion? Either/or. Take your pick: danger in B., passion in me. Both probably. Which knowledge gave me a frisson of frisson. With which tingle in the testes I drifted into dozy cozy daydream slumber.
14/Surfaced again at the sound of catcalls and fibrilose yelling. The wind must be easterly, the time 10.40: break-time at school blown in gobs up Man. Dr. from the playing fields. Emotional tumbleweed.
My body was still corpsed.
What’s it like to be a corpse? Who cares? The point being, presumably, that no one inhabits a corpse, the who having departed for that bourne from which no who returns. A pity really, I thought; I rather like my body. I’ll be sorry when the time comes to leave it. Or will I? By then, probably, it will be wizened, my skin blotched and creased like old bark. My breath will stink like an incinerator, my body like a sewer. My hair will be thin as the fur on a baboon’s bum. My nose be purple veined, a blodge that dribbles like a leaking tube of glue. I expect I’ll be stuttering about on slippered scrawny feet, supporting myself with a cane clutched in a clawy mitt. My eyes will be palely vacant, staring with gaga incomprehension at all and nothing while weeping from no other sorrow than the blight of age. I will not be able to control my water; will spill my food down my chest where it will leave festering fungoid spots on my holey cardigan. And children will laugh at me in the street and call me unhappy names.
Will thoughts still worm in my cadaverous cranium? Will I still juggle with words? Will I remember enough
words to juggle with? Will pictures invade my mind with power to give my body some gyp? Will I still feel the rush of blood and the stiffening of sinew? Will I know anything except maybe the longing not to be?
Will anybody make passes at me then? Will geriatric men and women give me the eye? And who will rescue me then from drowning in death and wave my pants from a flashy yellow streaker?
15/No body.
Those hanging about me at that time will be waiting for the moment when my deceased flesh and bones can be stowed safely away six feet under, or be popped into the burning fiery furnace and reduced to manageable proportions, to whit: five ozs of fine grey ash, suitable for the making of egg timers.
3
And the only thing being waved will be a gravestone or memorial plaque upon which will be inscribed some pertinent epitaph.
GOOD RIDDANCE
, perhaps, or
GONE AT LAST
.
Epitaphs have interested me since that day in the churchyard (cf. Part 1 Bit 21). I collect them. How about this one from a postman’s grave:
NOT LOST BUT GONE BEFORE
. Dad found this one in a cemetery near where we used to live up North:
WHERE ERE YOU BE
LET YOUR WIND GO FREE
FOR IT WAS THE WIND
THAT KILLETH ME
I guess he remembers it because he thinks it gives licence to the explosive excesses of his frequent ventilations.
It really is incredible what some people write on gravestones. Viz.:
HERE LIES THE BODY OF ANNIE MANN
WHO LIVED AN OLD WOMAN
AND DIED AN OLD MANN
and:
HE HAD HIS BEER FROM YEAR TO YEAR
AND THEN HIS BIER HAD HIM
16/Back—again—to bed. The next thing I knew, the vacuum was scurling outside my room. My mother performing her daily spring clean with the electronic bagpipes. The paintwork on my door was sacrificed to a fistful of battering biffs disguised as vigorous dusting: a sign of my mother’s anxiety at my continued somnolence. Not that she was conducting the same campaign as my father. On the contrary, my mother’s preference is always that I should do exactly what makes me happiest—and if that is lying in bed ‘all the hours God gave’, then so be it.
The reason she was thus indicating a desire for me to get up was entirely the result of her fear that my father might for some unexpected reason arrive home and still find me ‘lazing about the place’. In any case, she knew he would question her when he got in from work about every last detail of my day’s activities, including the very hour and minute of my arising.
I took pity on her.
17/I spent fifteen minutes in the bathroom inspecting The Body Beautiful in the mirror, trying to see it through Barry’s eyes.
To be honest, I have never been completely satisfied with my knees.
The bathroom mirror is only half full size, and is fixed to the wall at a height convenient for shaving. In order to inspect my lower quarters therefore I must either stand on my head, which causes certain features to dangle in an unflattering manner and is difficult to maintain long enough for a proper look, or I must balance myself on the edge of the bathtub. This is a moderately dangerous exploit as the rim of our tub is narrow and curved so that I have to perform something like a tight rope act, risking broken bones if I lose my balance and slip into the tub, or worse if my feet skid off in opposite directions causing me to fall with my legs astride the tub rim.
Knowing, of course, that I would shortly be called upon to display my knees—that indeed, when I came to think of it, I had already done so not only before a grinning crowd but, what was far more important, on three separate occasions before Barry yesterday—I thought I had better survey the limbscape and decide how
best to present myself on future occasions. So I climbed up onto the rim of the bathtub and began my inspection.
The problem I have with my knees is that they seem to be too far down my legs. This makes my thigh too long in proportion to the glutei of my nates—which have always struck me as nicely shaped, neat and well set under crests that might on some males certainly look too pronounced but on me seem just right. Of course, if your femoral quadriceps are well moulded and smoothly covered, a slight disproportion in their length doesn’t matter, at least when viewed frontally. They can even show off your genitalic drapery to good effect. Providing you are flourishing in that feature and not recondite.
I studied myself in that area from as many angles as my precarious platform would allow. On the whole, I decided, my genitalic modelling was passable, though I would have liked a bit more quantity as well as quality. But my rectus and lateralis were okay; the medialis were well developed but they gave too thin an appearance just above the knees, which I suppose exaggerates the boniness of my patellas and further pronounces the length of my thighs.
By stretching out my left arm and supporting myself against the wall behind the bath, I kept my balance while I bent my left leg upwards and viewed it in profile in the mirror. This had a distinctly improving effect, rounding off my scraggy knee cap and displaying quite attractively the gracilic line. But I could hardly hop about the beach on one trousered leg while holding up the other leg nude for public inspection and approval of my knee exhibited at its best angle.
In order to check the view from behind I had to turn with my back to the mirror and cautiously twist my head round to inspect my reflection. As far as I could see from this limited and wobbly position the appearance of the backs of my knees was greatly helped by a nice popliteal
upholstering, which saved them from the scrawniness some people suffer from. But I could not see very well, so I tried bending down far enough to look between my legs at the view in the mirror. This required a pretty skilled balancing act.
I was just about doubled up enough to see through my legs when my mother rammed the bathroom door with the vacuum agonybag. I lost my balance and crashed into the tub, barking various angles of myself on its hard enamel.
‘Are you all right in there, our Henry?’ Mother shouted above the noise of vacuum and calamity.
Further anatomical investigation had to be abandoned for that morning. And as it turned out for a few weeks after that life was made a good deal easier whenever the need to inspect my body came over me because I could, use the multi-mirrored walls of the Gorman bathroom which allowed the closest study of every detail from every possible viewpoint without any need for unnatural contortions or danger to the person.
18/Half way through my breakfast in the kitchen, Mother appeared, duster at the ready. She flicked absent-mindedly at the cupboard doors. Semaphore from a nervous wreck.
‘Why not have a cup of coffee,’ I said.
‘Maybe I will,’ she said.
She made herself one—half milk, half water, as always—and sat at the other side of the table, duster cocked for action.
‘It’s before my coffee time really,’ she said, looking guilty.
‘Give yourself a treat,’ I said.
She sipped from her cup. ‘It’s a terrible price, you know. Awful. I don’t know how they have the cheek to charge the prices they do.’
Silence. I finished my toast.
‘You’ll have to stop these late mornings, pet,’ she said, dabbing her duster along the edge of the table. ‘Your dad’s upset.’
‘How can me getting up late bother him? He’s at work.’
‘He always asks, love, when he comes in.’
‘Then don’t tell him.’
‘O no, I have to tell him. Can’t lie. Not to your father. Wouldn’t be right.’
Further polishing of the table edge.
Then: ‘He thinks a lot about you, does your dad. Wants the best for you. Wants you to get on.’
A dab at the cooker in arm’s reach from where she sat. Most things are in arm’s reach from the table in our kitchen.
Then: ‘It was after one when you got in last night. It can’t go on, Henry. Your father won’t stand for it.’
She stood up, made a sally against the cupboard doors again, sat down. Sipped her coffee. Began rubbing the table edge again.
‘You’ll have to make up your mind soon,’ she said. ‘About what you’re going to do. Your dad thinks it’s bad for you, lying about all day. Nothing to do. You know he told you to get a temporary job. To tide you over. Till you’ve sorted out what you really want to do.’
I pushed my plate aside. ‘What do you think I should do?’
She teased at her duster, picking dust specks from it. Dusting her duster. ‘I wish I knew, love. It’s beyond me.’
‘Stay on at school?’
‘Your dad thinks you’ll be best off with a good job.’
‘But what do you think?’
Her pause was as long as this page. Then she shook her head once with distressed slightness. ‘Whatever will make you happiest, pet. That’s all that matters.’
‘You always say that. But I don’t know what will make me happiest. How do you know till you do it?’
She sniffed. ‘Yes, well, you’re not alone. Most people don’t know. And never find out. It’s the lucky ones who do. Luckier still if they know what they want and get it.’
The duster fluttered. We sat in silence.
‘Osborn thinks I should stay on and take English.’
She looked at me. ‘What use will that be?’
I smiled. ‘Not much he says.’
‘Funny way of going on. Telling you to study something no use.’
‘He means for a job.’
‘It’s a job that matters.’
‘Yes.’
Silence. A rub at the table top.
‘I was good at English myself at school.’ She smiled at me. ‘Wrote very good poems the teachers said. I was good at spelling as well. Which is something I haven’t passed on to you, eh?’ She laughed.
‘I can’t be a genius at everything,’ I said, laughing with her.
She got up. Shifted my dirty plate from the table to the draining board. Polished the table with her duster. Sat down.
‘I never liked reading though. Not like you do.’ Her eyes drifted across my face. ‘I don’t know where you got that from.’ She made reading sound like a contagious disease.
‘Would Dad let me stay on?’
A sniff, drawing back inside herself again. ‘You’d better ask him, pet. I should think so. If he thought it was right for you.’
Back to Go.
I said, ‘Anyway, I’ve got a part-time job till the results come through.’
She was perky at once. ‘You have? Where?’
‘Gorman Records. Helping in the shop.’
‘On London Road? When did this happen?’
‘Yesterday. It was Barry Gorman I was out with last night. He runs the shop with his mother.’
‘Well, I say! Tell us about it then. When do you start and how much do they pay?’
I stood up. ‘I don’t know the details yet. Find out today.’
‘I’ll look forward to hearing all about it. Your dad will be pleased. They must have liked you a lot to take you on so easy.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think you could say they liked me.’
JKA.
Running Report
: Henry Spurling ROBINSON 21st Sept. Talked with Sue about the case, and whether we should include it on the agenda for the Team Discussion next week. She thought not. Suggested we go through the objectives together, as I might be losing sight of them because of the unusualness of Hal and the events involved.
Purpose:
Our statutory involvement and responsibility in this case: