Authors: Jackie Kay
The registrar had seen everything. Wild scenes of grief. People unable to write their own name. Trembling, blaming hands. People who seemed to think he was responsible for causing the death. That he somehow had attended the deaths of the anonymous, that he personally turned off the machines, pulled out drips, refused morphine; that he administered pain. There was nothing Mohammad Nassar Sharif could do to reverse the terrible finality of a death certificate. If he could hold the piece of paper between his fingers and shake it until it brought the dead back to life, he would. The certificates were not simply pieces of paper with names and numbers on them. There were people in there. Mohammad never let himself forget to imagine the dead person. He was not cynical, but the dead were easier to imagine than the living. Just one sentence, and Nassar Sharif could see them before him. ‘He was a man who kept his thoughts to himself.’
When a person walked into Mr Sharif’s office, he could tell whether that person was a death, a marriage, or a birth. He could often be even more specific than that: quickly he could assess the type of death – old person, young person, sudden, slow. One swift look at the person
entering his office was enough. He could predict what kind of marriage – first, second, third or fourth; first for the wife, third for the husband. He was never wrong. Four times in his entire career as registrar, Mr Sharif had presided over the sixth marriage certificate of some dandy. In all instances, he was a red-cheeked man with white hair, tall with cream trousers and a fairly modern sporty checked jacket. The wife was always thin, inevitably, unbearably young. Mohammad Nassar Sharif rarely read books any more. He preferred to remember the great books of his childhood, to reimagine himself reading them, when he thought the world was going to be bigger than it turned out to be.
Now, Mohammad read faces. The face of a pensioner coming in to register the death of a ninety-year-old parent was often elated. The pensioner might try to disguise her joy, but the minute she took up his beautiful marbled fountain pen to sign in the allotted place, her signature swept across the entry book with unmistakable pleasure. At last, the pen seemed to say, at last, a chance to enjoy retirement. The worst for the registrar was the death of children. He had children himself and worshipped them. To see the faces of those women was to see the worst sight in the world. Some of them forced themselves to come so that they could attempt to believe the unbelievable. He gave those women his pen gently, trying to pour as much love into the gesture as possible. Mr Sharif had kind eyes. His kind eyes and his elegant hands were all he had to offer the bereaved. He kept a tidy office. Every person was special to him; the crucial moments, a privilege. There
surely can be few moments to compete with the awesome finality of Mohammad Nassar Sharif’s birth, death and marriage certificates.
He had heard of registrars in other parts of the city that more or less had a factory going on in their office – in and out with conveyor belt brutality, cancer, divorce, stillbirth. With ferocious, unfeeling speed. Whirling the names down. Spinning with grief. Mohammad believed everyone in his office needed a moment of quiet. He sat with them for a moment of quiet after they had signed their names with his beautiful marbled fountain pen.
Whatever the weather, whether it rained on the registrar’s window, or whether the sun shone mercilessly through the registrar’s window, Mr Sharif made sure everyone had their moment. As a consequence, people had to wait a little longer outside his office. Birth, death or marriage, the signature on paper was momentous. Some people were in a hurry. Perhaps it was their seventh birth or their seventh death. Mohammad tried to intervene with those people. Gently, he asked them if they had given enough thought to the name, or if they were in possession of the deceased’s medical card. Strictly speaking he did not need the medical card; but it was a way of getting them to slow down, to take a moment.
It was not fun for Nassar Sharif to see such emotion every working day of life, yet he enjoyed his job. He liked his splendid office. He loved the paper; it was of a fine quality. He knew his handwriting was elegiac; there could be no registrar anywhere in England with such perfect calligraphy. He had practised his writing since he was a
boy in Bangladesh. His parents had told him if you write well you will go far. His parents would be proud of him having his own office now. Every name he wrote, even the most ordinary and banal of names, looked glamorous when Mohammad Nassar Sharif wrote it down with his fountain pen. He particularly enjoyed a long unusual name. A name that had some character. The stories that Mohammad had heard about names! The arguments he had witnessed about names! On one occasion there was even a fight between a man and woman in his office. A proper fight with slaps and punches. He had had to buzz his tough secretary that time to come and sort things out. The woman was a heavyweight. Mohammad loathed violence. He was talented at coaxing couples to avoid the violent outcome.
A couple would come in with a baby in one of those pouches that made the mothers look rather like kangaroos. The baby would often be crying. Mr Sharif’s office had witnessed many a sore cry from a tiny outraged baby. The mother would spend a bit of her moment looking down at the soft hair on the baby’s head. Then she would look up and say the name to Mr Sharif. At this point the father would suddenly intervene. The father would say something like, ‘That is not what we agreed. I hate that name. I am not having it.’ And so Mohammad, in these instances, would offer to choose the name himself. Both parents were usually so surprised at this that they would agree. Mohammad, delighted, would get to pick long or unusual names. You couldn’t come from Bangladesh and not realize the significance of names, what they told you,
the occupation they gave you. Sharif would not be a registrar today were it not for his name. He liked names of characters that had appeared in the novels he had read. Or names of the authors. He remembered some of his best choices: Thackeray Brown; Demetrius Duffy; Ayala Lucy Grey; Bovary Okafor. Once or twice, this intervention of Nassar Sharif’s backfired on him. A couple of weeks later, the couple would return, united against the registrar, demanding that he make a new certificate, demanding that tiny Thackeray be renamed. This time the couple would be absolutely together in their choice; they would both want Nigel. Of course changing a name is a complicated business and Mr Sharif would wisely advise the irate couple to keep the certificate the same, but simply call their child Nigel.
But Mohammad Nassar Sharif had never in his life seen a medical certificate where male was crossed out and female entered in red. On the grounds of pure aesthetics, Mohammad found the last minute change hurtful. The use of the red pen seemed unnecessarily violent. He knew of coroners and doctors who were overfond of the red pen. Compared to his beautiful black Indian ink, the red biro was a brash, loudmouthed, insensitive cousin who ought not to have received
anything
in the family fortune. Nassar Sharif would go further: the red biro should never have been born. It was a cheap impostor, an embarrassment to the fine quality paper used on such certificates.
Here was a woman sitting in his office whom Mohammad judged to be about sixty or so. A woman who seemed to him to be terribly efficient. She had come with all the
necessary information and she had come within the time limit. A lot of people came after five days, traipsed down to the office ten days later, seemingly unaware that a death must be registered within five days. Goodness knew why the doctors and nurses don’t inform these poor ignorant citizens of the correct procedure. Mr Sharif could only tell them, gently, that they should have come quite some time ago. He would not reprimand the late death people, or, for that matter, the late birth people. Many mothers came well after the generous three weeks. Many mothers have lived with babies with ridiculous names for anything up to twelve weeks. Frog, Tumshie, Bellybutton, Chicken Pie, Poom, Bubba and Wean were amongst the catalogue of names that babies had suffered until the moment the mother arrived at Mr Sharif’s office to transform Wean into Hamish, Bubba into Ella, Chicken Pie into Charlotte, Tumshie into Matthew and Frog into Aaron.
The woman sitting quietly in Mr Sharif’s office had come on time with all the correct documents, with even more documents than she actually needed. She had a birth certificate for the deceased bearing the name Josephine Moore. A medical card for the deceased that is fifty-two years out of date under the name of Josephine Moore registered with one Doctor Miller in Greenock, Scotland. No pension book. Three rather lucrative insurance policies. A marriage certificate for the deceased bearing the name Joss Moody. It was all fascinating stuff for Nassar Sharif. She didn’t say a word. She handed the documents over. Mr Sharif looked up at her from behind his half-moon spectacles. He couldn’t read her face. He couldn’t
tell if she was embarrassed or not. She looked just like a widow to him. She had the widow’s sad skin. A widow who had come to get the piece of paper that would tell her, because she still didn’t believe it, that her husband had really died.
Nassar Sharif could not make head nor tail of all this information. It was as if she had brought to him the certificates and papers of two completely different people – a woman and a man. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the sealed medical certificate contained that violent red pen, he would indeed have assumed he was dealing with two people, not one. Mr Sharif showed the woman the medical certificate. ‘You were aware of the last minute change that the doctor has added here?’ he asked, pointing to the large ‘female’. The woman in front of him clearly was not. She asked Mr Sharif if he could be registered as a man. She said, rather enigmatically, it appeared to Mohammad, that this would have been important for her husband, to be registered in death as he was in life. Mohammad Nassar Sharif had never been shocked at anything he had seen in his years as a registrar, but something about the woman’s fine composure shocked him. This woman had been married to the deceased for years. She had been married to someone who clearly had lived her life as a man, who had seen no doctor up until the moment of death, who had claimed no pension. Nassar Sharif was very curious. He wanted to ask the woman sitting quietly in his office how it was done. He wanted to ask her if she had found her spouse very attractive. Mohammad had learned never to indulge his curiosity. He
told the woman that he could not lie on a death certificate. He gave the woman a certificate for Burial; the deceased had a plot already saved, known commonly in his trade as The Green Form. This gave her permission to bury the body. He told her to take it to her funeral director.
Knowing what he knew, comparing the certificates of the life before him, Mr Sharif had a problem with names. He asked the woman if Joss Moody ever formally changed her name to Joss Moody. The woman told him she didn’t think so. In other words, Mr Sharif concluded, one day Josephine Moore just plucked the name Joss Moody out of the sky and called himself this name and encouraged others to do likewise? The woman nodded, smiling shyly, proud of her spouse’s achievement. The woman was an interesting person, Mohammad hadn’t had anyone so interesting for some time. He had a problem, he confessed, in deciding what name to put on the death certificate, given the name Joss Moody was never officially sanctioned anywhere. The woman leaned forward towards Mr Sharif. She looked at his hands. She looked out of the window at the sun. A few drops of sweat appeared on her forehead. She didn’t say anything for a moment. There was total silence between them. The silence had an unusual quality to it today because the woman’s spirit was so fine. Mohammad could sit silent with this particular woman in his registrar office for a year, maybe two. One of his secretaries could simply come in and out with food and the two of them could sit there like this looking out of the window, watching the odd bird swoop and swoon before them, or the odd tree tremble.
Mohammad did not even have to impose his moment on this woman. The woman took it for herself, completely aware of the significance of the certificate. That woman would not take his lovely handwriting for granted. She would be happy she had a beautiful death certificate. He did not want it spoiled. He said nothing to her. He dipped his marbled fountain pen in the black Indian ink and wrote the name
Joss Moody
on the death certificate. He wrote the date. He paused before he ticked ‘female’ on the death certificate, then handed the pen to her; it was as if the pen was asking her to dance. She took the pen carefully and looked at it, twirling it around slowly as she did so. Then she wrote her name in the registrar’s entries of deaths book on the anointed line. She looked as if she was praying as she wrote. He looked over to see if her writing was as lovely as he was expecting it to be. It was; she had a beautiful hand.
The woman smiled at him. The intimacy between them had been like love. Mohammad would miss her. She said, ‘Thank you’ to him. She put her certificate and official papers in the Please Do Not Bend envelope that she had brought with her. She paid the fee for her own copy of the death certificate which she looked at before putting it away, as if to check that everything was all right. She picked up her brown leather handbag, putting the strap over her shoulder. She said, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ opened his door and closed it quietly behind her.
The second letter has arrived in the same hand. Details only Colman could know. I’ve lost faith. Everything is out of focus. The sea is a blur. People pass by this window, fuzzy around the edges. The cobbles have no lines. There is nobody I can trust. When I go out I put my collar up. I have no idea how many people know. Someone came up to me yesterday and said she’d heard about Mr Moody and wanted to tell me she was sorry. I didn’t recognize the face. It was a big round face, it looked scrubbed. Why can’t I play the trumpet? I washed my hair this morning and clumps of it came out in my hand. I am moulting like an animal. ‘My late husband,’ I say to myself. ‘My late husband,’ to try to get used to the expression. If I could meet somebody like the woman with the scrubbed face and say, ‘My late husband loved this kind of weather,’ I’d feel better. I know I would. The sea is fog and mist and secrets and lies. It is all out there in the bad weather. I can feel myself coming down with something. Coming down a long way. It is like walking slowly down endless steps in a dark cellar, round and round. Dizzy. Out of kilter.