Dance On My Grave (16 page)

+ the rest of Monolith’s bikers were doing their best to get drunk in the Forester’s Arms while waiting for the strip show to start. It never did because it only took place on Saturdays at lunchtime, which fact they would have known had they read the poster outside the pub more carefully. They ended up causing a fracas and being turned out, from where they worked off their pent-up emotions by having a punch-up on the beach with the Benfleet mob. The police wagon eventually carted off those too drunk or too mashed to scat when the B.s-in-B. arrived.

What a happy, busy world we live in.

39/Spike hauled me to my feet. Barry struggled from beneath Girl’s Head. The three of us crossed the road, leaving Monolith and Co. to the gathering crowd.

‘You two okay?’ Spike said. ‘No harm done, eh?’

Barry said, ‘Nothing a good plastic surgeon can’t put right.’

I said, ‘Like replacing a face.’ I could hardly bear to touch my left cheek; my nose felt like it was the size of a Christmas balloon; my top lip was swollen and split. Both my nose and my lip were bleeding enough to keep me swallowing in the way that makes you feel you’ll either choke any second or fill up and drown. Need I add, someone was blasting for rock inside my head.

‘You look a bit sorry,’ Spike said, inspecting me closely. ‘But everybody does in this light.’ He meant under the sodium neons of the street lamps. I hadn’t noticed till then that dusk had given way to dark.

‘What time is it?’ I said, dabbing with my handkerchief at my mouth and nose, wincing.

‘Half eleven,’ Spike said, consulting his wrist watch. ‘Bill’s party should be going nicely. What about it?’

I shook my head, and wished I hadn’t. The movement caused nuclear fission.

‘I’d better get him home and clean him up,’ Barry said.

‘Please yourselves,’ Spike said. ‘See you.’ He walked off townwards.

‘Hey, Spike,’ I called after him. He turned. ‘Thanks, mate.’

‘For you,’ he said, smiling, ‘any time.’ He waved and walked on.

Barry and I took the shortest way to his place. We decided to abandon his bike to its fate for the night. (The next day B. went to fetch it and there it was, just where we had left it. They’d been kind enough to restrict their revenge to slashing the tyres, busting the headlamp, and breaking his rearview mirror. But they’d left the helmets dangling from the handlebars. Nothing, those lads, if not honest.)

Luckily, Mrs Gorman was tucked safely in bed and wide to the world under the influence of her nightly sleeping pill when we arrived.

40/We stripped in the palace of mirrors. Tenderly inspected each other’s wounds. My swollen face and cut lip. Barry’s bruises on his sides and thighs and grazes on his hands and knees from grit on the pavement. Nothing worse.

And no other excuse needed for touching and holding and caressing the contours of our bodies for the first time.

We showered. I cleaned up his grazes with swabs. He patched my lip.

Lightheaded now, high on the smack of adventure and
finding each other, and knowing, we ate, drank beer, lay on the bed in his room, chewing over our evening.

‘And what was all that qwerty stuff?’ I said.

‘Typewriter talk, you goof!’

‘Typewriter talk?’

‘Q–W– E– R –T– Y – U– I– O– P–question-mark. The top row of letters on a typewriter.’

‘You’re crackers, you know that! We’re about to be taken apart by a gang of bikers and you remember the letters on a typewriter!’

‘Dad used to play a game with me. We called it Gormandising. Any time we were bored or, you know, feeling skittish, we’d talk to each other in invented language. Mine was Olympian.’

‘Olympian?’

‘After my typewriter. An Olympia.’

‘Olim Peer! God, their faces! It was all Greek to me as well! I guessed you had funny tastes.’

‘Including you,’ he said.

And gave me a present from Southend.

Wish you were here?

41/‘Stay,’ Barry said. ‘You might as well now.’

I looked at my watch. Two-thirty.

‘I can’t,’ I said, getting out of bed. ‘My mother will worry herself sick. And there’ll be hell to pay for being out so late.’

‘Then stay tomorrow. You can warn them.’

‘You mean today! Okay, but you’ll be the death of me,’ I said.

I was reaching for my clothes. He came to me naked still and serious as the night.

‘You’re always talking about death.’ He put his arms round my waist, stopping me from dressing. ‘Does death bother you so much?’

‘No.’

‘Then why keep mentioning it?’

‘Because it interests me. Doesn’t it you?’

‘Not much.’

‘What about your father?’

‘What upsets me is not having him around any more. To be with, I mean. I loved him. Naturally I miss him.’

‘There you are then.’

‘You’ve missed the point, stupid.’ He kissed me. ‘What I’m talking about is me. Being alive and not having my father around. That’s all that ever really upsets anybody about death. Not having somebody they want any more. But what bothers you is the
idea
of death. Right?’

‘I guess so.’

I broke away; started dressing. He lay on the bed and watched.

‘What about the people who are dead?’ I said. ‘What about your dad?’

‘What about him? If dead means finis—nothing—what does he care? If it means anything else . . . Well, I’ll tell you: if it means anything else my father will be in there organizing himself a part of it.’

I finished dressing, waited for the moment to be right for leaving.
Correction
: Waited while I tried to make myself leave. I wanted to stay. Who wants to give up the can of magic beans when you’ve only just found it, even for a second?

‘You know what you should do about death?’ he said.

I shook my head, not thinking about death anyway.

‘Laugh at it.’ He raised his eyebrows asking: What do you think of that?

‘All right for us to say now,’ I said. ‘We aren’t exactly on the point of death, are we?’

‘Look,’ he said coming to me from the bed and smiling that dangerous smile. ‘I’ll make a deal with you.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll chance anything once.’

‘Whichever of us dies first, the other promises to dance on his grave.’ The raised eyebrows again.

I laughed and walked towards the door.

‘I’ve told you before,’ I said. ‘You’re crackers.’

‘You think I’m joking, don’t you?’ he said.

I turned to face him. He was standing in the middle of the room.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re just crazy.’

He came to me. Flicked at my hair with his fingers.

‘We’ve got to do something about that hair.’

‘Like what?’ I said, handing him my comb.

‘Not sure. I’ll have a go at it tomorrow.’

He finished sorting me out, stood back a pace and looked me over, head to feet. Smiled. Proprietorial.

Then he suddenly held out his hand to be shaken. I took it, not knowing why.

His grip tightened so that I could not easily pull away.

‘Promise,’ he said.

‘You mean—’ I said.

‘If I die first you dance on my grave.’

‘Look, Bee,’ I said, ‘don’t be daft, eh?’

‘I’m serious. Promise.’

‘You’ll live to be eighty.’

‘Don’t raise difficulties.’

We laughed.

‘But—’ I said when he still did not let go, instead adding his left hand to the grip of his right.

‘But me no buts. Just promise.’

‘Why?’

‘For me.’

I looked at him, wakened out of the mindlessness of the last two hours.

‘I’m tired, love. Let me go.’

‘No. Promise. Is it so hard?’

‘No—’

‘What then?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t understand, that’s all. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Maybe that’s why I want you to promise. Because you don’t understand. Because you always have to understand. Don’t you? That’s what you always want, isn’t it? To understand. But some things you can’t. Can you? Never. So promise. For me.’

There seemed no point in arguing any more. This was something he wanted from me; why say no? He’d just given me something I’d been wanting, hadn’t he? Now he wanted a ridiculous oath. A promise it was pretty unlikely I’d ever have to keep. So there he was, the boy with the can of magic beans wanting me to swear an oath. At that moment there was nothing I wouldn’t have done for him.

‘I promise,’ I said. ‘For you and for no other reason.’

And it was a split lip on a bruised mouth that sealed the oath, not cut hands in never-never land.

¹
For those who have yet the pleasures of Southend in store let me explain about the Ray, a most important feature of this watering place. At Southend the tide goes out a long way. Some people say it goes out all the way to the other side of the estuary. Be that as it may, when the tide is out an amusement often enjoyed by the resident locals, the younger of them especially, is to plodge through the gooey mud left behind by the receding waves until you reach, half a mile or so from shore, a deep, fast-flowing channel of water known on the maps with delicate felicity as the Ray Gut. Here only the brave and foolish swim, for the current is dangerously strong. Everyone cavorts on the comparatively sandy and hard Ray bank, having messy picnics or bottle parties (and, as you can imagine, much else besides) before trudging back through the sludge. Set off for home too late and you are likely to be trapped on the sandbank by the fast in-coming tide and be eventually drowned. So the jaunt is not without its frisson of danger. For a drunk to make the trip would therefore be unwise. But whoever heard of a wise drunk?

²
I said this to Ozzy. ‘Not such a fool,’ he said. ‘Tolkien grew rich on his fantasies.’ ‘A fool made rich by bigger fools,’ I said. He laughed. ‘There’s hope for you yet,’ he said. ‘But you’ve misjudged Tolkien, as time and greater wisdom will show you.’ Crunch.

³
I have not yet decided whether my mortal remains shall be buried or cremated. Some people of religious scruple hold strong objection to cremation and others to burial. So there is no answer in the multiple voices of God. Without such authoritative aid, I cannot decide whether I prefer to rot in the ground, providing food for worms and fertilizer for dandelions, or to be reduced to the aforesaid ashes and dispersed to the four winds. I guess it is some primordial instinct which sometimes makes me prefer burial so that at least my bones will stay together in case of any chance of future need, such as resurrection. But then I get a social conscience about being a nuisance. I mean, if everybody insisted on a six-by-four plot of ground to lie dead in, the country would very soon be covered in graves and become a vast cemetery. Apart from the sneaking suspicion I have that bodies rotting in the ground, however regulated and well-behaved, pose something of a threat to the already unpalatable water supply. All I can say is I hope I’ve made up my mind before I snuff it.

Death is the greatest kick of all.

That’s why they save it till last.

Graffito

1/FROM BEGINNING TO
end was seven weeks.

Forty-nine days from me being soaked in seaweed to him being dead. He becoming It.

One thousand one hundred and seventy-six hours.

Seventy thousand five hundred and sixty minutes.

Four million two hundred and thirty-three thousand six hundred seconds.

And all that time, and a lot of the time since, I wondered: Why Barry? Why him and not, say, Spike? It can’t have just been that I liked the look of him; it can’t only have been physical; not sex alone. Can it? Was it? It might as well have been Spike if that was all there was to it.

Maybe I loved him. I thought I did. As much as I knew what the word means.

How do you ever know? I used to think I would know when it happened. Know immediately, without having to wonder about it.

But all I knew for certain was that I couldn’t get enough of him. I wanted to be with him all the time. And yet when I was with him that wasn’t enough either. I wanted to look at him and touch him and have him touch me and hear him talk and tell him things and do things together with him. All the time. Day and night. For 4,233,600 seconds.

A for instance: He would leave me alone in the shop. I’d wait on edge for him to come back. Customers must have thought I had some sort of convulsive twitch because my head and eyes would keep darting towards the door every few seconds. But they couldn’t have been mistaken about what was going on when Mister Wonderful hove into view again, because then I went to pieces. Lost my grip entirely on what I was supposed to be doing
and had eyes for nothing but him till I got used to him being there again.

Sounds like a pet dog. And I knew what was happening to me even while it was happening.

At first I tried to stop myself. But I couldn’t. It was a compulsion, an obsession. Irresistible. After a while I gave up caring how I behaved or who thought what about me. Trying to hide how I felt was too much strain, and I wasn’t succeeding anyway. I was just making a fool of myself. So I let it show, let it happen. I felt easier straightaway. More natural. More in charge of myself. If that was the way I was, I told myself, why pretend anything different?

We never discussed any of this. All the time we talked. But never about this part of us. I knew anyway what Barry would say: ‘That’s the way I feel, so that’s the way I am. End of story.’

Now, I keep going over and over in my mind everything that happened. Everything we said. And did. Every detail. Every little bit. Trying to fit the little bits into one Big Bit. Into one whole that makes some kind of sense. Some kind of meaning. A Meaning. Capital M. Something that explains him to me, me to myself. Explains what it was all about.

These Bits coming now are some of the Bits from the good times. From the Monday after we got together, with me working in the shop and us spending every evening together and most nights as well, to the Friday it came to an end.

2/After the first week I stayed with Barry every Saturday night and most week nights.

‘Your mother,’ I said, the first time.

‘What?’