Come Not When I Am Dead (29 page)

Later on, when I am in the police
station, a policeman’s fleece jacket draped around my shoulders, people being
kind to me, I try to be aware again, I want it all to be in slow motion once
more.
 
Rooms devoid of pictures, but
posters pinned on the wall, I squint and try to read them, handbags, cars,
theft, crime, they are all just words.
 
Someone sits me down at a table, blue biro scrawl ‘piss off pigs’ it
says, I see that.
 
There is a
screeching noise and I am aware that someone has pulled a chair away from the
table, a hand on the back of it and then I feel a slight breeze as he moves
himself into the seat of the chair.
 
I look up,
 
I see a face,
dark haired, too dark haired, his mouth is upturned and that is a smile, I know
that is a smile.
 
I shut my eyes, I
open my eyes.
 
It is Frank.
 
And then I find myself crying.
 
“Hey, hey, hey” he says “come on Gussie,
what would Kaye have said?
 
What
would your grandma have said?
 
Come
on darling, don’t cry.
 
Come on” and
my head is in his shoulder, he is next to me, he is taller and I am smaller, it
is not his shoulder, it is where his gun recoil protector would be, what is
that part of your body?
 
I cannot
breath.
 
I am in the police station,
this is Frank, he is in charge here, he was grandma’s friend and I have known
him all my life.
 
I start thinking
again whether they were lovers or not.
 
They couldn’t have been.
 
But
he will look after me.
 
He really
will and the black creeps up from the floor, what is that?
 
And even though I am watching it creep
up and up and up I know it’s inside me.
 
The black creeping up my legs, my middle, it’s got to my head and as it
is half way up my eyes I cannot see any more and I wake up being carried to
another room and people shouting and arms all around me.
   
I wake up and I am vomiting.

“Do you know the dead man Gussie?”
“Yes.”

“Do you know the dead man?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me what happened love.”
 
Frank
is being kind to me, and when people are kind to me I feel I don’t deserve it,
and if there’s something wrong before, then it’s doubly wrong.
 
How can I keep strong with tenderness
trailing after me, pulling at my umbilical cord and wrapping itself all around
me?
 
I am crying and Frank is
holding my hands across the table, but I want him nearer, I feel positioned
with the table there, it’s a barrier and I can’t be me if the table’s there, I
think I will be watching this rather than feeling this.
 
But I know I need to be living this.
 
“Do you know what happened darling?”
“No.”
“Do you want to tell me what you know dear?
 
Because I know you know something about
it don’t you?”
 
We are just two of
us in this still and heavy square room, there is no one else, there is no tape
recorder, no paper and pens, no solicitor or lawyer, nothing to make me pause,
stop and rewind.
“We’ll sit in here” Frank had said to me, shuffling me in, blind and deaf and
dumb, my head stuffed full to bursting with fear and upset, with white and with
black bulky substance, and shouldn’t there be someone else?

There is a smell of roast pork in
here, roast pork in floppy white bread rolls with stuffing and the smell makes
me feel sick, and I imagine eating it and know it would make me vomit.
 
And the thought came into my head that
if I fainted, if I vomited, if I broke down, on to my knees, Frank would look
after me and tell me what to do.
 
I
see strands of my hair before my eyes and those eyes are heavy and fat with
tears and twitching with lack of sleep, I am weary.

I breathe out and tell Frank about
the dogs, the garden, the footsteps, the fear, the beating, the death.
 
“No dear, tell me again, that’s not
right is it?”
“It
is
right” it’s so easy to tell
him now and it’s so obviously the truth, I don’t understand why he doesn’t
believe me.
 
“Come along dear, we
know that’s not right because Mark Davies isn’t dead is he?”
“he
is
dead” why is he saying
this?
 
and once again I go through
it all again, why is he saying he isn’t dead?
“Gussie love, we picked up Davies early last week.
 
He’s very much alive, he’s been in the
wars a bit, but he’s alive, unfortunately.
 
So, let’s start again shall we?”
 
But I can’t talk now, all I know is that he was dead, and Frank is
trying to help me or lying to me.
 
He wouldn’t lie to me.
 
And
then I remembered when once grandma fell down the step outside and had to go to
hospital and Frank picked me up from school and said she’d gone off to visit
friends.
 
He lied to me then
I think as my eyelids half close on my tired
eyes, as my lips slam shut, heavy and straight, as my head moves up and I
realise it was hanging down, as I feel the breathing from my heart and I feel
tangling coming up from my throat, ripping through my body, grasping out from
within.
 
And now he is talking
again.
 
“OK, I’ll tell you what we
know shall I?
 
we’ve got his dogs,
RSPCA’s got them.
 
Now, we know that
your Charlie took them there, we know that.”
“But then I don’t understand.
 
I
don’t understand.
 
How come he isn’t
dead?”
 
I read the word ‘Avon’
scratched out on the table and the date, we used to write ‘4’s’ like that at
primary school.
 
And I hear myself
saying, as if it were somebody else “how come
Charlie
is dead then?
 
How did he die?
 
Why is he
dead?
 
Why?
 
Did he know that Mark Davies wasn’t
dead?
 
It is all wrong.
 
Why is
he
dead?” something is galloping, something is out of control,
someone is trying to steer a course, but something is hurtling to disaster.
 
“I don’t know darling” and somewhere in
my head, somewhere far away, but echoing faintly is a little voice saying
you’ll be ok
.
 
“Will I be in trouble?”
 
I am a child, I hear myself sound like a
child “you won’t darling, but we need to get this straight don’t we?”
“Yes.
 
But what happened?
 
What did he do?
 
How long’s he been dead?
 
Did he drown? He was fishing, he had grandpa’s
waders on” and then I felt that slightly scorched feeling I always felt when I
mentioned my grandpa in front of Frank.
 
The back of my head is hurting, heavy, pulling me down.
 
I am whimpering “he was wearing
waders.
 
Did he drown Frank?
 
Did he?” I am jelly, I have no bones, I
am rivers running after a flood through a mountain range.
 
I am so many dead things and deserted
places.
 
I am the lost look on
survivor’s faces.
 
“Was he coming
back to me Frank?
 
How long has he
been dead?” and I will work it out.
 
And the dim room seemed all at once so much darker and the table
dominating everything with it’s size and formality, taking the words from my
mouth and screwing them up in my head and throwing them, carelessly,
scornfully, hatefully to the floor.
 
He wouldn’t go fishing, he wouldn’t have gone fishing.
 
“Did he have the belt on his waders
Frank?
 
I can’t remember.”
“He didn’t darling, that’s probably how he drowned.”
 
He did it on purpose, I know he
did.
 
And as if he read my thoughts,
Frank said “It was an
accident
darling, he drowned.
 
His wife won’t
need that divorce now but those little boys of his have lost a fond father.”
 
And I remember him telling me statistics
about the children of suicides.
 
He
is trying to protect Charlie’s children, like Charlie wanted to but
couldn’t.
 
He is collecting them
under his wing and delivering them to safety.
 
And I am just looking on again.

Frank stared at my face, as if working
something out, and without taking his eyes from mine, he pushed a paper across
the table to me, in age-long thin silver silence.
 
I was watching something sleeping but alive.
 
The paper was torn from a notepad,
crumpled and folded and wet.
 
“No
one needs to see this but you dear, you keep hold of this for yourself”
 
he is whispering to me.
 
He has shrunk within himself, he is
beige where once he was brown, he is silk where once he was steel, he is love
and his first finger on his right hand rested on the paper as he pushed it
towards me.
 
And all I hear is my
breathing and all I feel is sleep reaching up to me to drag me down and around
and escape this.
 
Escape this
dormant thing that I know will tear through the room, leaping wildly into life
with chaos and destruction.
 
And
somewhere, somewhere in the distance I hear a blackbird singing, faint and
sweet ‘won’t be long, won’t be long’.

I looked down at the paper and all at
once a glimpse of when Frank and I used to play shove ha’penny on grandma’s dining
room table, shining deep, deep, deep, dark, with decades of polish and
polishing.
 
I could smile in that
table and see it smile back at me.
 
I would look and see if I did have an imp face, that’s what Frank used
to call me, a cheeky imp.
 
I must
keep a tight hold of myself or I will lose me.

I looked from the paper to his face
and he smiled at me, a slow, straight, sad smile and all the time in the world
slowed down and my head glided through the atmosphere to look down at that
paper and my hands in slow motion to take it up from the wood.
 
I was dead leaves falling, drifting from
trees, I was a dusty old heavy rug being heaved away from the floor.
 
I was a tyre getting flatter as you look
at it.
 
I was a plug being pulled
out of a too cold bath.
 
And there,
held between my fingers, Charlie’s precious and unformed hand
‘
Gussie, I am falling apart, I can’t
think of any other way.
 
I’m
sorry.
 
I do love you and only you
with all my heart. You are truly lovely and I do appreciate you in so many more
ways than I suspect even you can guess.
 
I am sorry I am so bad at communicating this and so much more.
 
I’m sorry’
.
My hands, still holding his letter, slid off the table and went to my belly and
caressed the slight roundness there.
 
“It’s not a game dear, life that is, you appreciate what you’ve got now,
because it can go, just like that” and he clicked his fingers, a thunderous
noise in the room.
 
“Now you go and
take care of my grandson.”
And then I heard a great roaring and screaming, and it was coming from me.
 
My soul bellowed forth for love and hate
and for mischance and misadventure and for Charlie and for grandma and for
Coningsby.
 
My body a pool in that
dry and empty room.
  
And all
the mean tricks life’s played on me, all it’s taken away from me, and they have
gone.
 
They have gone.
 
And my tears came and came and flowed
burning hot down my cheeks, on to my hands, down my dress, drenching me,
drowning me and I couldn’t breathe, my head back, my mouth open, I couldn’t
speak, I cannot breathe, my head shaking.
 
I am treading water and suddenly there is a strong current and my body
becomes feeble in it.
 
The sky is
deep and black and low and begins to choke me, smother me and a thousand rooks
grumble all around me, unseen in the dark.
 
And the water now entering my mouth, dripping down, slipping down,
crawling through me and I can’t keep up and I gulp and start and my wild eyes,
so many terrified horses, close and I give up.
 
I give up and I am being carried away,
beaten and buffeted, turned upside down, turned inside out and thrown about,
and deeper, deeper and deeper I sink.
 
“Are you my father?” I try to say, but all I hear are animal cries too
loud and too wild ripping through the walls, bringing them down around my ears
“are you my
father
?
 
Is Toby my brother?” again and again “is
Toby my brother?”
“Are you mad?
 
How could I be your father?”
and now he is standing over me pushing me back into my seat, hands gripping my
shoulders, too hard.
 
“You and my mother”
I am screaming now “and Toby is my brother”
“Keep your voice down.
 
I am
NOT
your father.
 
Who told you that?”
“It’s what everyone thinks”
“you think I could be your father when the only woman I ever loved was your grandma.
 
Do you?
 
Are you not ashamed of yourself?
 
It’s not me who’s your father you stupid
girl and it’s not
Toby
who is your
brother.”
“What do you mean, it’s ‘
not
Toby’
who’s my brother.
 
What does that mean?
 
Do I have a brother?
 
Have I got a brother?
 
HAVE
I
?
 
Tell me
NOW.
”
“
No.
 
No,
of course you haven’t got a brother.”
 
His steel has left him, seeping out of
his body, he is silver, he is gentle “you’ve got me I’m afraid.
 
That’s it.
 
You’ve got me and you’ve got Toby, but
as far as I know that is it” but my ears don’t hear now and there is a blanket
of deafness in the room, smothering me, clinging to me and my breath sinks back
in to my body and stays leaden there.
 
My self is falling away from me, layer by layer, pale and transparent
all over the floor, sliding off me, sinking to drown itself, moving out of
reach, falling away to leave me with nothing.

“And what is vulnerability?” someone once said to me
“It’s lying on the ground” I said “and there are boots kicking and kicking me
and I’m curled up on my side trying to protect myself.”
“And then what happens?” he said
“And then I get up” I said “I get up and walk away and think that I’ll never
let that happen again.”