Dance On My Grave (20 page)

I could look at Dad again and show nothing.

He said, ‘What about Mrs Gorman? How’s she taking it?’

‘Badly.’

‘You’d expect her to. You should think of her. She’ll be needing all the help she can get.’

Not from me; but that couldn’t be explained either.

‘I don’t know what I can do,’ I said, required to say something but hearing the flabbiness.

‘What about the shop? Something’ll have to be done about that. You could be a big help there.’

‘I suppose.’

‘You can’t just desert her. She’s been good to you. Taking you on, paying you well. You owe her a bit of support, a bit of loyalty at a time like this.’

Another pause. Uncomfortable, lengthy. Awkward for the eyes.

Dad sighed, stood up. ‘What d’you think then? You’ll get up and go to work, will you?’

Without impossible talk there could be no answer but, ‘Yes.’

He smiled. I was ten again. He said, ‘I’ll tell your mother you’ll be down in a minute.’ He went to the door, opened it, paused, glanced at me, sniffed. ‘If you want owt,’ he said, ‘any help like—you know where to come.’

I nodded, but could not answer.

‘Aye well,’ he said, and went.

13/Living it up in the bathroom with the Macleans, the thought occurred (i) that I still had a key to the back door of the shop; (ii) that maybe Dad was right: I would be a help to Mrs G. if I looked after the shop today; (iii) that helping her might make her like me again.

But there was something else far more important that I hardly dared admit to myself. I wanted to be where he had been. I wanted to touch things that were his. And I had a strange sensation, neither thought nor feeling, that I would go into the shop and there he would be, just like always, and we’d joke about our fight and—

I sluiced my face with handfuls of cold water.

I didn’t look at myself in the mirror. Couldn’t bear to see any part of me.

14/The sensation that he would be there was strongest as I opened the back door into the shop. So strong I believed it.

I even called his name. ‘Barry!’

There was no answer, of course.

I rushed into the office. All tidy. The desk neat. No trace of the mess I’d made on the floor. I smiled, for a splinter of time convinced he would be in any minute, that I’d just been dreaming. A nightmare.

Then I turned and saw the broken mirror’s empty frame looking blindly back at me from the wall.

I told you I had ways of making it talk.

15/From that instant I knew I
must
see him. Him? His body. His corpse. This was the proof I wanted to have.
Needed.
Of his death. Seeing wouldn’t just be believing. It would be
knowing.
And I needed to know. Desperately.

But where was his body? How could I see it? Was it at home? What did they do with people killed in accidents? When would they bury him? Today was Saturday, they’d not bury him today. Tomorrow, surely, the cemetery would be closed? Monday then?

One person knew the answers.

I picked up the telephone and dialled without a second thought.

‘Mrs Gorman—’

‘Who’s that? Is that you again?’

‘Mrs Gorman, please listen—’

‘Are you pitiless? Without all decency?’

‘I’ve got to see Barry, Mrs Gorman, got to—’

‘What! Are you tormenting me? Is that what you are doing?’

‘No no! I
must
see him. It’s important—’

‘You’re mad. That’s what’s happened. You’ve gone mad. I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘Tell me where he is. Please, Mrs Gorman.’

‘I’ll put the police on to you. I’m warning you. You deceived me. I trusted you and look what you did. How you repaid me and my Bubby. He told me all about you. All that you did. Throwing things at him. Breaking up our shop. I cleared up the mess myself. I saw it. Vicious. You’re a vicious nasty boy. You should be put away. You’re a hooligan.’

‘No, Mrs Gorman . . . you’ve got it all wrong. I can explain. It was only the mirror, that’s all I broke, and I’m sorry, I’ll pay for it, but Mrs Gorman you have to tell me where he is, I’ve got to see him, I loved him as well you know—’

‘How dare you! How dare you say such a thing! I know all about you. And now you want to add sacrilege to your crimes against my son. As if you haven’t done enough. He’d be alive now if he hadn’t gone after you. Forget him, I told him, but no, he wouldn’t listen.’

‘Came after me? How do you know?’

‘He told me. Telephoned from the shop. He told me about you making trouble, smashing the place up. He said he was going to find you. I went straight there but he’d gone and the office was a wreck.’

‘But, Mrs Gorman—’

‘And now you prey on me! The nerve you have! Well, my daughter will be here soon with her husband. See what happens if you plague me again, a defenceless woman. I should take care if I was you.’

She put the telephone down. I listened to the dialling tone, trying to make sense of what it was saying.

16/I flit the shop as soon as I put the telephone down, pushing my key through the letterbox to be rid of it. Mrs Gorman talking of police and sons-in-law made me fugitive. The empty shop, Barryless, made insistent the need to see him. How could I stay there?

The escape route. Room to breathe; time to think.

I cycled to the beach by Chalkwell station, walked my bike across the station footbridge (OZZYMANDIAS RULES OK some wit had spray-painted on the footbridge wall), dumped it by the esplanade, where I could keep an eye on it, found an empty space on the sand with my back against the heavy, grey ridge-grained wood of a groin, from where I could look along the beach towards Southend and the pier, and across the mud and water to the hazy horizon where the Kent coast lay hidden.

The sky was overcast, the weather dull, and almost no breeze. The tide was a long way out. A poor day for bathers and not time yet for sailors. Only a few people were scattered about along the sand, though there was plenty of activity on the esplanade—sightseers and kids on the loose and local folk exercising themselves and their babies and dogs. Not that I paid any attention at the time; I was all inwardness. In fact, I’ve had to think hard even to remember these few details, which I tell you only to fill in the gap around myself who was huddling from the psychic chill beside the wooden shield, barrier against stormy seas and shifting sands.

17/This morning I read what I wrote during the last couple of days about the aftermath and it is
useless
. Doesn’t tell anything like I really
felt.
Which was mashed, minced, chopped, granulated, flensed, mangled, mortified.

That’s the word:
mortified
.

Latin
mors
death and
facere
to do, and thus via Old French (in case you didn’t know) from church Latin
mortificare,
to put to death: i. to humiliate or cause to feel shame; 2. to cause or undergo tissue death or gangrene. (Cf.
Collins English Dictionary
.)

What a wonder is language! All that in one word. And still tells you nothing.

I had put to death and was being put to death. But there is no way of telling you about the tissue death of my own self, or about gangrene rotting away my dreams of bosom palship.

Hell, let’s take it as read.

JKA.
Running Report
: Henry Spurling ROBINSON 8th Oct. Requested and got a two week postponement of Hal’s next court appearance on the grounds that reports are not yet satisfactorily completed. Emphasized the unusual nature of this case. Impressed on Hal the urgency of his completing his written account for me to see.

11.45. Telephoned Mr Osborn. Told him of the postponement. Asked him to try and expedite matters with Hal. Mr O. said that Hal is agitated because, Hal says, he can’t get into his account all the details he feels ought to be included. Keeps telling Mr O. ‘the words are never right’, and constantly rewrites passages because after a couple of days he is dissatisfied with his first drafts. But apparently he is scribbling obsessively all day. Mr O. is certain writing the account has started to have a beneficial therapeutic effect, and that in addition the act of writing about himself is giving Hal a new and
purposeful focus in his life.

I suggested to Mr O. that I might see some of Hal’s account so that I could begin to see what is involved. But Mr O. was very strongly against this on the grounds that it might stem the flow and disturb Hal again. I asked whether he couldn’t let me see pages without Hal knowing, and received the kind of scornful reply about trust and confidentiality he gave me during our first interview.

I pressed on Mr O. the urgency of Hal finishing the task soon. Mr O. told me he is seeing Hal every day after school, when they discuss Hal’s progress, and Mr O. comments on any passages Hal brings for him to read. ‘You’d think he was writing a novel,’ Mr O. said, and I felt he was as pleased about this as he was about the serious aspects of Hal’s case. I tried to explain that all I want is a straightforward record that explains what Hal and Gorman did. I didn’t, I said, have time for novels, and said that I hoped Hal wasn’t inventing anything.

9th Oct. Received this letter from Hal in today’s post:

DECLARATION TO MS J K ATKINS
by Henry Spurling Robinson aka Hal

This is to certify that I, Henry Spurling Robinson (hereinafter called The Author, acronym TA), being of unsound mind and disturbed body, am working to the fullest of my capacity, and seriously intend completing and delivering to you, Judith Karen Atkins (hereinafter called The
Impatient Social Servant, acronym TISS) a record of my crazy actions relating to the Death and Burial of one Barry Gorman (hereinafter called The Encomiumed Dead, acronym TED) with as much dispatch as TA can muster. TA must however herewith point out to TISS that the tiss TISS has put TA into regarding his aforementioned account of TED because of The Court’s impatience to know The Truth and pass sentence on TA about TED must mean that from this Bit on in the story of TED TA will only be able to describe for TISS the actions TA engaged in without adequate explanatory detail, and that this gives TA cause for concern about TISS understanding, or rather not understanding, everything about TED and TA.

18/Kari almost literally stumbled across me on the beach.

She had heard the news from Mrs Gorman when she telephoned that morning, wanting to speak to Barry.

‘I came here to calm myself,’ she said. ‘Hal, it is terrible. I just burst into tears. I couldn’t stay in the house. Mrs Grey was wonderful. She tried to comfort me. She
couldn’t understand why I was so upset, and I couldn’t tell her, you know. But she let me come out here because Mr Grey was not being so nice. He told me to stop blubbing—blubbing?—and get on with my work. But I couldn’t do anything with the children anyway. It was all rather awful.’

She was in jeans and a white sweater, with a tired old brown mac over them, too loose—probably one of Mrs Grey’s—which she hugged round herself as if the day was cold and wet.

It wasn’t. Outward expression of inner feeling. She slumped beside me, glum, on the sand.

Not far from us two boy children of three or four were playing naked in the sand while a woman in a summer dress sat on a towel nearby, watching them. While Kari was talking I watched the children, thinking how I would like to be four again making castles in the sand.

ACTION REPLAY

The image that remains strongest in my memory from that first Barryless day is this still life, like a snapshot, of two naked children kneeling in the sand, their faces bright with pleasure. A mnemonic that revives every fractured sensation of the time. Strange that a mind-frozen moment in the lives of two happy children should memorialize so vividly something so sad. Nor does it simply provoke, this picture, remembrance, for the children seem to embody in themselves the distress I felt as I looked at them. Why should that be? As though every smallest pleasure in the world contains within it all the world’s sadness.

19/‘We must visit Mrs Gorman,’ Kari said. ‘Don’t you think? When I phoned she sounded very upset.’

I shook my head. ‘She won’t let me in.’

‘Not let you in? But why? You and Barry were so much friends. He talked about you all the time the other day. I was rather envious to have such a friend, I must say.’

I said, ‘We weren’t just friends.’

She turned her head to look closely at me, her eyes touring my face, searching for a message. She found none in that tundra.

‘Weren’t
just
friends?’ she said. ‘Perhaps that is your English way of saying
more
than just friends?’

I nodded.

The children were breaking down their sandcastles with relished violence, the woman laughing at them.

Kari turned from me so that now we sat as replicas, backs bent against the rough groin, legs jacknifed, feet dug into sand.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said bleakly. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Why should you?’

‘I ought to have guessed. But it is rather a shock.’

‘Moral, or a surprise?’

‘O, not moral, not at all. No, a surprise.’

‘Because he slept with you?’