Dance On My Grave (17 page)

‘Don’t you mind?’

‘You’re a long time dead.’

‘What about her?’

‘She’s very good at knowing only what she wants to know. And medical science helps her blot out what she might not be able to help knowing. She’s taken sleeping pills since Dad died.’

But she had to have known. How could she not? Which is why I can’t understand the way she went on in court. Saying I’d led Barry astray, made him act wildly . . . all that. She has to be crazy.

3/‘Like a plate of ham?’ Barry said one night.

‘Thought you was a ten-to-two, squire.’

‘Don’t mess about.’

I hadn’t a clue what he meant, so ‘Help yourself,’ I said, and he gave me a present from Southend of a kind I hadn’t had before. He gave me a lot of those: new experiences. One of the things that was exciting about him. I never knew what was going to happen next.

I enjoyed this one, after the surprise had worn off.

4/One morning I woke just after dawn. I liked waking early with him. They were the nicest times. Quiet. Warm. The early morning sounds outside. The drift of sleep. Him. Looking at him. He slept like he did everything else. Flat out.

That morning he was already awake, and looking at me.

He kissed me, said:

I said, meaning thank you, ‘A poet and he doesn’t know it.’

‘So much for your budding genius,’ he said, laughing. ‘The lines are Auden’s. Mr W. H. by strange coincidence.’

‘What coincidence?’

‘Cor, Ozzy’s got his work cut out with you! Shakespeare.’

‘What about him?’

‘Dear, dear! The ignorance!’

I smiled at the condescension and looked smug. ‘Can’t have everything, can I? Not when I’m young and beautiful as well.’

‘Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets to Mr W. H., widely thought to have been his boyfriend.’

‘Ah, I see!’ Light dawning. ‘Wouldn’t have thought you’d go much on the guilt, though . . . “Mortal, guilty . . .” whatever.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Nor did Auden, I guess. But times have changed since he wrote that.’

‘When?’

‘I dunno. Nineteen thirties I think.’

‘How do you know it anyway?’

‘You aren’t the only one Ozzy ever asked into his Sixth.’

I lifted my head, surprised, to face him. ‘You too?’

He nodded.

‘So that means you were in his English Sixth when you left?’

‘He wasn’t very happy about me going either. I did have a certain flair.’

‘Bighead. But how come?’

‘Told you. He’s a fanatic. I’m sure he really does think Eng. lit. is more important than anything else. I told him I was leaving. He said I was betraying a talent, selling out to Mammon, giving in to a possessive mother. Didn’t mince his words.’

‘But you explained? I mean about the shop—how you feel about it. Surely he understood?’

‘Did you?’

‘Not at first. Now I do. After working with you.’

‘So I should employ Ozzy?’

‘Hey, that would be a laugh.’

‘A laugh it might be to you. Customers might not see the joke.’

‘He’d refuse to sell them stuff he didn’t approve of.’

‘One thing you’re going to learn, mate, is that Mr O. is human. And, dearest chuck, can be wrong.’

I let that go. We were too cosy to argue. I brooded instead on what it must have meant to Barry to drop out of the English Sixth. Looking round his room at the books, the pictures, the stacked music, the whole feeling of the place—why I liked it so much—I knew it had to have mattered.

After a while I said, ‘You still mind?’

He drew in a breath. ‘About Ozzy or about giving up Eng. lit.?’

‘Both.’

He took his arm away, stretched on his back, hands behind his head.

‘Both,’ he said.

There was bitterness in his voice.

We never talked about that subject again.

5/One morning in the third week when Barry wasn’t there and the shop was empty, Mrs Gorman, doing the accounts, said, ‘My Bubby hasn’t been so happy since before his poor father died.’

‘That’s great,’ I said.

This was the first time she had said anything about Barry and me getting together. At the beginning she treated me like a favourite visitor. I was pampered and overwhelmed with attention. Then suddenly, as if she had made a conscious decision about it, she started treating me like one of her family; I’d be asked for my washing, given chores to do, ticked off if I crossed her. But never mentioning what she must have known: that B. and I were sleeping together. I thought she was going to say something about that and I didn’t know what to say if she did.

‘After his father died,’ she went on, ‘he was miserable. Went a little wild, poor boy. Out all hours. And with—well, not nice people sometimes. Not good for him. Worried me sick, Hal. I don’t mind telling you; you’ll understand, I know. But now he’s so happy again. Properly happy. Do you know? His old self again.’

Pleased, embarrassed (why?) I picked up some disc sleeves from the counter and put them on the display rack.

‘You are so
good
for each other,’ Mrs Gorman said when I was behind the counter again. ‘Maybe
together
you could make the business better, eh?’

‘How d’you mean, Mrs Gorman?’

She put down her pen, turned me by the shoulder to face her. ‘I’ve been thinking. Why don’t you work here full-time? It’s a good job, good pay. Maybe in a couple of years, when you’re older, know the ropes, who knows?—we would open another shop. Have two. One down there in the precinct in Southend, where the trippers go. You could manage one. Or maybe we move to bigger premises in the best spot in town. Mr Gorman always wanted a place there. You and my Bubby together, you could do it beautiful. What d’you think?’

I didn’t know what I thought, only that it meant more of Barry.

‘I don’t know,’ I said; then, after a silence because it was the only thing in my head that I could actually say, ‘Is that what Barry wants?’

Mrs Gorman raised her eyebrows, shrugged. ‘He hasn’t said in so many words. But—I know my Bubby. He’s
thinking
about it, you bet, my darling. You too, why don’t you think about it?’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

6/This morning I reckoned up that during our seven weeks together we:

+ Sailed
Calypso
twelve times, once as far as the Kent coast, where we slept out in the boat for the night and sailed home the next day.

+ Read eight books.

+ Saw four films, including the one on our first evening together.

+ Ate one hundred and nineteen meals together: twenty-three breakfasts, forty-four lunches, thirty-one suppers, nine picnics, and two middle-of-the-night snacks in bed.

+ Motorbiked eight hundred miles approx., mostly just
mucking about, but one Sunday going as far as Norwich for the day.

+ Slept together twenty-three times literally and fifty-five times, one way and another, euphemistically.

+ Went by train to London to see a show (cf. Bit 11 following) and poked about the crap and con of puky Piccadilly.

+ Listened to hundreds of hours of music (because of the shop).

+ Wrote each other five letters. He to me, three; me to him, two.

+ Stayed up all night four times because we were talking so hard and didn’t want to stop. (To be exact, we went to bed about five o’clock in the morning each time, but it was dawn by then.)

+ Bought each other six presents—one each week. The present I gave him the seventh week was death.

7/Busy busy listed like that. But at the time, time seemed timeless. Except time apart, which seemed endless. So long as we were together time did not matter; what we did did not matter. We did things to do them together; nothing had to be done. There was only one imperative: the two of us together.

I thought.

8/’What frightens you?’ he asked at the end of one of our all-talking nights.

Without hesitation, thinking I meant a joke, I said, ‘You!’ And then knew I really felt it.

He was silent. I, too, waiting, having taken myself aback.

Finally, he nodded, smiled, said, ‘I frighten myself.’

9/His present to me the second week was a black sweatshirt.

‘Why do you always wear the same few things?’ he said. ‘Is it money?’

‘Not just.’

‘What else?’

‘I can never decide what I’d like to wear. I never know what’s right for me. I don’t know why. I see things in shops and I think, They look good and I try them on and they don’t seem right.’

‘Easy,’ he said. ‘I know just the gear that would suit you. We’ll kit you out.’

We did. I still didn’t feel right. But I wore them because he liked them.

The other day I took all that gear into the back garden and put it into the incinerator and burnt it. I stood there and watched till it was burnt to ashes.

10/I was going to write pages more about those seven weeks. I wanted you to understand what we were like together. What Barry was like. Like
to me
: how I saw him, knew him, thought of him.

But this morning I got up and read everything I have written so far, and particularly what I wrote yesterday (all the Bits in Part Three up to this one) and I knew straightaway: It can’t be done. The words are not right. They just
ARE NOT RIGHT
. They won’t say what I want them to say. They tell lies. They hide the truth. I read the words and I can feel—
FEEL
—what they should be
saying and they aren’t. The meaning is hidden behind them. They are like bricks. They make a wall. A wall hiding from view what’s happening behind. You can hear muffled noises coming through but you can’t quite, never
quite
, make sense of them. They might be coming from someone being murdered, or from a child playing, or from a couple making love, or from someone playing a game trying to trick you into believing something is happening that isn’t really.

I almost tore everything up, all these pages. I’ve sat for an hour, telling myself I am an idiot.

And then I thought: What it all comes down to is this: I do not understand myself. That is why the words don’t say what I want them to say.

But there you are again. What did I just say! Look at that sentence:
I do not understand myself
. Does it mean: I do not understand
about
myself . . .? Or does it mean: I do not myself understand about Barry . . .?

Actually, when I put it like this I see both meanings are true. But I meant the second. You wouldn’t have known though if I hadn’t explained. Not for
certain
. The words just are never
right
.

So I’ll start again.

When it comes down to it, I do not understand Barry, or about Barry, or about myself, or myself.

So how can I make
you
understand? I thought at first that if I wrote it all down as it had happened, telling as much of it as I could, I myself might get to understand, as well as explaining. But it isn’t working. I can’t get enough of it down. There is always more. And what is written doesn’t ever tell enough, doesn’t really explain anything, not anything at all. And so the longer I go on the harder it becomes to understand anything.

A few days ago while I was sitting here trying to fight not-understanding, I suddenly realized I couldn’t see
Barry’s face in my head any more. After only this short time, a few weeks, I can’t see him in my head. I can
feel
what he looks like—isn’t that strange?—but I can’t picture him. He comes faintly, in flashes, right at the back of my head, and then is gone again before I can look at him properly. Like a camera shutter opening too fast for the film to record the image. There’s only a faint blur. A ghost that just didn’t materialize.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I had a photograph of him. But we never took any of each other; never thought of needing them. We were always together so why bother?

I just went off to Mrs Gorman’s house. I thought—hoped – maybe she would have calmed down by now. Might see me again. Talk to me. Let me try and explain. I was going to ask her for a photograph. But she wouldn’t answer the door to me. Just shouted from inside. I told her what I wanted. She nearly went hysterical. Yelled and stormed. She isn’t any calmer. She’s just like she was when it happened that day. So I came away.

11/Which reminds me, I wanted to tell you—though it doesn’t matter now anyway—about when we went to London that once to see a show. The show we saw was
Hamlet
at the National Theatre. When we came out a woman just ahead of us burst into tears. Her friend fussed around her, embarrassed, and some people coming out of the theatre saw and laughed. Barry went up to her and said, ‘Are you okay? Can I do anything?’ And the woman looked at him, tears streaming down her face, and she smiled and shrugged her shoulders and shook her head and said, ‘No, no. It’s just the play. Just the play.’

We left her to her friend who we could see didn’t
understand and walked from the theatre across Waterloo Bridge towards the West End. We were both silent. Half way across the bridge Barry said, not looking at me, ‘The remembering is what is so hard.’

I couldn’t think what he meant so I said nothing. A little further on he said, glancing at me this time, knowing I was confused, ‘The trouble with Hamlet. His father’s ghost telling him, “Remember me”. He can’t, you see. That’s why he feels so guilty. Why he wears his father’s picture round his neck: to remind him. Why he forces his mother to look at it. He says his mother has forgotten his father. But he’s talking about himself really. It’s his own guilt that’s driving him mad, not his mother shacking up with his uncle.’

We turned into the Strand, going towards Trafalgar Square.

‘That’s why that woman was crying just now, I think,’ he said. ‘She knew. You can’t remember and you think you should. I mean, you remember in one way. But you can’t recall the face, and the remembering doesn’t upset you any more and you feel guilty.’