Come Not When I Am Dead (13 page)

‘Summer, you old Indian Summer,
you’re the tear that comes after June-time laughter.
 
You’ve seen so many dreams that won’t
come true, dreams we fashioned when summer time was new’.

There is an animal look to Charlie’s
new-born eyes now.
 
Not the looking
for reassurance like a juvenile buzzard, not the playful questioning of a fox
cub, but the potential brutishness of the badger.
 
I am learning all over again.
 
Sometimes he makes me a little bit wary,
maybe that’s how he’s always felt with me.
 
But he never tells me.
 
When we were at school, the first day I
met him he pulled me out of the stream running through our playground.
 
Mark Davies the school bully had pushed
me in and he pulled me out.
 
When it
was his 10
^th
birthday I bought him a big box of malteesers and he
said it was his best birthday present.
 
When he left school I used to see him with the other big boys walking
through the village, and although he didn’t talk to me, he was still
Charlie.
 
We went to different
secondary schools and then I didn’t see him for years and years until he came
back, with a wife and children.
 
He
bought the vet practice and one day, when he was giving Coningsby her
vaccination, I said “I love you Charlie” I didn’t mean to say it, but I’d been
thinking about it and it just popped out.
 
I didn’t expect anything back from that, I didn’t expect him to look up
from Coningsby’s neck and say “I love you too Gussie,” but he did.
 
Whatever happens between us, whenever it
happens, I will look out for him for ever and defend him for ever and protect
him for ever and love him for ever, but that love will change.

“What’s happening with the divorce?”
I say, head down so as not to see his face.
 
My tone is low and is not a threat “It’s
all going ahead, not much to say, I’d rather not talk about it”
“but would you like to come and live with me?
 
I’d love that.
 
Wouldn’t it be easier than staying in
your house still?”
 
I am pussy
footing around him
“No Gussie, that’s very kind of you, but it would make things worse, but thank
you, I think I’ll just stay where I am” but he didn’t really think I was very
kind, he wasn’t thinking about it, he was programmed for brush offs.
 
When Charlie says ‘I think’ and ‘maybe’
and ‘probably’ they are not variables, they are definites and he does
know.
 
I know too .
 
He changes the subject “how many rats
have you caught then? It must be enough by now?” and in my head I swear at
him.
 
I have caught ten rats over
the last few days, ten rats that I can hardly bear to look at, in cages in my
workshop.
 
Jim gave me 8 rats that
he’s caught for me too, and Frank gave me 3 and didn’t ask any questions.
 
“We have 21 rats” I tell Charlie.
 
And he says to me
“Shall we do it tonight?
 
I can do
tonight” our roles have reversed.
 
My
badger of a man has a drive that he didn’t have before.
 
When he makes love to me, it is more
charged, it is a little wild and not quite so lovely.
 
He wants to fill me with himself as if
he would die if he doesn’t.
 
Sometimes it’s a little bit frightening, sometimes it’s a little bit
sad.
 
There is a little bit of him I
think would not just pull me out of the stream now, but would throw me across
the playground in the same movement.
 
There is a little bit of him, which increases very gradually that is on
the edge.
 
“Shall we do it tonight?”
and we do.
 
We are night-time
crusaders, we are crashers through meanness, we are bashers and lashers and
everything is a little bit turned upside down.
 
We are full stops.

We drove with our dishevelled,
riotous army of rats in his car, it is larger than mine, and every noise from
them made my face twist in disgust with a too strong sense of imagery.
 
We took the rats five miles off where
there is a woman who keeps chickens in the dark and filth, in a tumbled down
revolting little barn, where they can’t all get to water, and before she knows
if any of them need it or not, she cuts all their beaks right, right back, they
don’t need that.
 
It makes me angry.
 
She is the filth the rats back-flick on
their back-turned escape.

We get there at 4am, there is chicken
pooh pouring out of the side vents, the chickens are on tables, raised up and
they don’t have enough room to stretch up to their ceiling, they are cramped
and unhappy and unnatural and it’s horrible.
 
They cannot speak, they cannot complain
in a language that someone like her would understand. “You poor old things” I
whisper to them “but it will all be OK.
 
Everything will always be OK.”
 
We have poultry crates, I am little and
lithe, I slither in and scoop hens in to the crates, on my belly in wet and
hard filth. It is difficult to breathe in there and I feel the smell will
pollute me, will seep right through my skin and stain me within.
 
I fill the crates up with sad, confused,
featherless hens and pass them out.
 
They go from dark to dark, they are oblivious to what is happening and
they don’t make much noise.
 
I get
every hen out of there and once I have wormed my way backwards out again, we
start putting the rats in.
 
Quiet,
quiet, quietly. We are a stream of silent movements, we are pistons and cogs on
the same machine.
 
We have arm
guards, we have armoured gloves.
 
We
cut a hole in the door, just a little hole, push the rats through it (which is
no easy matter) and screw a sheet of wood over the top of it, with my swiss
army knife.
 
But what you wouldn’t
be able to do is to open the door and shoo them all in.
 
I think of herding cats, I would love to
herd cats.
 
We got the hens out one
by one, we put the rats in, one by one, we smiled and laughed silently through
our balaclavas and fattened bodies.
 
I am filled with tingling excitement and lust, I could suck him up now
and keep him within me for ever.
 
We
slink through shadows and creep along walls.
 
We dart out of sight of headlights and
walk, quiet as mice through fallen leaves and crisp grass, through sodden grass
and long dead dry grass, season after season, day after day, night after night.

I would love to see the woman’s face
as she realised there were no hens in her house, open the door and rats come
flying out at her from all directions, fat from corn all night.
 
Brown and grey with dirty yellow razor
teeth and glimpses of scaled tails swishing through the air, conducting a
symphony of fear and filth, of terror, of dirt and shock and horror.
 
I would really, really love to see the
expression on her face as she fell to the ground and rats running over her in
their panic for escape, darting off into the dark.
 
I have just remembered something an old
lover said to me, we were lying in bed together and he said we were both ‘dog
souls’.
 
Well, my dog soul is at
peace with this.

Charlie and I got back to my house
and went straight to bed, the hens safe and sound in crates in the back of his
car.
 
He stayed a couple of hours before
he scurried off back to his unhappy home and his confused children and his
hostile wife.
 
I wonder, I just
wonder if he is hoping that she will change her mind and they can all pretend
to be happy again.
 
I wonder if they
were happy before.
 
I snuggled down
deeper in my duck down duvet, I smelt his earthy skin scent on my pillow, I
rubbed my cheek in it like a dog rolling and rolling in badger pooh. I have his
scent all over me.
 
I smelt the pure
smell of the patchwork bedspread that had been dried on the washing line,
frooshing around in the wind, clapping and wrapping itself together and now
holding me tight.
 
I snuggled deep
down and fell asleep thinking about Charlie.

I dreamt that I had a dead quail for
the hawks, I plucked it and skinned it, I cut it’s wings off with my dress
making scissors, and then for some reason, I opened up it’s chest cavity with a
scalpel, I was sitting, all this time, cramped, in a cage.
 
I looked through it’s insides, through
blood and organs, when suddenly I found a precious ring that I’d lost three
years ago in the tortoises pen.
 
I
carried on rummaging around in dark purple blood and guts and found some other
really precious oddities.
 
My great
great grandma’s red cross badge and other thing that had been missing for
years.
 
I put them all on my finger
for safe keeping and then I sewed the quail back together again.
 
When I had done the last stitch and put
it down, suddenly it was alive, it had feathers and wings and skin, it stood up
and walked off, looking perfectly healthy and fat.
 
Then in the dream I was looking through
photos of me looking after the sheep, me shearing, carding and trimming,
lambing, feeding, all those things I used to do and in all of the photos
Coningsby was there.
 
She was
sitting on top of a fence, or slipping in at the bottom of sheep hurdles, or
sitting on the roof of my truck, and what I saw was that she is always there,
even when I thought she was in the house or somewhere else.
 
I woke up and sat up and there was
Coningsby stretched out on my bed, between my feet, a slim shaft of sunlight
straying across her body.
 
“You are
the only thing that is real” I say to her.

We have most definitely settled back
in to our forms Charlie and I, like two tawny coloured leverets hiding from the
harsh sunshine, hiding from the feet of people walking by.
 
Waiting for quiet and emptiness and then
we will pop our heads up and leap into the long dry grass, chase each other
around, seed heads dusting about our faces and then settle down curled up
together and sleep.
 
Secret and
silent and unseen.
 
It does seems to
be like it was before, but of course it’s not because there are so many
barriers up, so many things we can’t talk about, my unfaithfulness, his
divorce, his wife, his children, the progression of our relationship.
 
But if I studiously avoid all those
things and only talk about other things, then I can pretend that it’s all
lovely, and 60% of it would be.
 
I
know that we have an expiry date, but I don’t think that Charlie knows it.
 
We are in the desert, all ways are open
to us, but he is struggling through open sand and wide horizons where
everything looks the same.
 
He is
crippled by sun and thirst and weariness.
 
But I have sat down and I am saving my energy and waiting for someone to
save me.

Today is bitty.
 
I’m sitting in the kitchen listening to
‘Gang Warfare’ by ‘The Strike’ “Turn that fucking crap off” says Jo and turning
it off herself.
“Put it back ON.
 
And don’t throw
food away, I’ve found loads of stuff in the bin, give it to the chickens”
“you shouldn’t go rummaging around in the bin like a fucking tramp” she
says
 
“what do you reckon?
 
Gold or Amazon?”
“silver”
“Oh, OK” she says she’s made £320 this morning so far and she’s buying us a
curry tonight.
 
Mind you, yesterday
she lost £783.

At 11am I had a sitting for a little
girl, little girls can be awkward because they feel they need to pose all the
time, and what I want is something natural.
 
Little boys feel they can pose none of
the time and sometimes it takes ages getting them to put their hands down and
straighten their faces out, but still, they’re easier than the girls.
 
Adults, especially women ask me to get
rid of their double chins, smooth their skin and make them better looking and
that sort of thing fills me with despair.
 
The sitting today was made by email for a little girl who is 7 years
old.
 
I like people to be punctual.
 
I hate people being late, every minute I
have to wait for them seems like half an hour, it puts me in a very bad frame
of mind.
 
So I wasn’t very pleased when
at 5 past the hour a very shiny, show-off range rover came up the drive.
 
I watched it slink up in all it’s flashy
glory, I was the spectre at the window, waiting with furrowed brow and tapping
foot.
 
After about 2 minutes the
door opened and a man got out, pinky looking shirt, denim coloured trousers,
but not jeans, from where I was standing he looked immaculate and pressed and
expensive, and repulsive.
 
His hair
was blonde and there was a lot of it on top of his head, a bit bouffy, and he
had on soft tan, expensive looking shoes.
 
He looked like he loved himself.
 
I watched him run his finger around the inside of his collar, shook his
legs in his trousers as if he was putting on a bit of weight and his trousers
weren’t quite as comfortable as they were last week.
 
He put his hand through his hair and he
looked up at the house as if he was thinking about buying it.
 
He looked out towards the sea and over
towards the garden, he was speculating.
 
“Yuk” I said and made a sick noise in the empty room as if I were
vomiting.
 
Then he sidled around and
opened up the right hand side back passenger door and out came a little girl,
all frills and slides and red and white polka dots “blimey” I said and
instantly felt sorry for her.
 
There’s no hope for a girl like that.
 
She’ll never be real.
 
Then in this ridiculous social ballet,
it was my turn, I looked in the mirror and took off my glasses.
 
My hair is looking lovely, my eye liner
is nicely slicked with no smudges, my dress is pretty and elegant, and I smiled
at myself, a sophisticated smile (I think), then swung down the stairs,
confident and scary and waited by the front door for a split second before it
knocked.