And it was all too, too easy. I grabbed him by the shoulder, turned him around, and slammed him into the wall. He was saying “no, I’m sorry, we didn’t mean it, you’re all right, really, let me go” in a jumble, his voice rising to the same prepubescent wail as that of his friend, as though shock and fear had emasculated them both.
It was all just too tempting. Holding him against the wall with the weight of my body and with a fist pushing into the space between his shoulder blades, I wound the stupid rat’s tail around my hand twice and with surprisingly little effort—though maybe the intent behind it fueled my strength—ripped it off. So then there were two of them squirming in pain, and the smaller one took up the shrieking where the other one had now stilled to a shuddering whimper. For a moment I looked at them, thinking what a lot of noise was coming out of them and whether what had happened had entirely justified it, and then I looked at the rat’s tail in my hand. A small patch of bright white skin had come away with it. The other end still secured neatly with an elastic band.
The smaller one was clutching the back of his head with both his hands as though he were under arrest for something, eyeballing me with an expression I couldn’t define, his eyebrows furrowed, tears pouring from his eyes, cheeks bright red. He was glaring at me, and I was looking casually back. Blood was seeping through his interlaced fingers, their knuckles white with effort.
I shook the stupid rat’s tail from my hand and it fell to the floor. “Good night, ladies,” I said, leaving them to their sobs.
I was suspended for a week, but not expelled. The two boys were notorious bullies, although of course I’d had no idea about that. When I was sent to see the head teacher (not a master, here, although male, he was a middle-aged homosexual who encouraged liberal attitudes toward teaching and hoped by doing so to have a supportive following among the staff), he all but thanked me. He certainly wasn’t angry.
“It’s not the way we do things,” he said. “Causing injury to your fellow students, it’s not the right thing to do, is it? Not the right choice to make?”
“I suppose not,” I said.
“What were they doing?”
I considered what to reply. In truth, they hadn’t been doing very much at all. “Standing in the way.”
“Did they say anything?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Were you afraid of them? Is that what it was?”
“I’m not afraid of anyone.”
“That’s good, Colin. That’s the right way to be.”
“Aren’t you going to cane me?”
“No,” he said. “I prefer not to. And I think you’re sorry for what you did, aren’t you?”
I didn’t answer that one. He wouldn’t have liked the response and I wasn’t prepared to lie: I was neither sorry, nor ashamed of myself. In fact I’d rather enjoyed the encounter; it had relieved the boredom of the day.
“Well, in any case, you realize I will have to suspend you.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“A week?” As though he were asking me rather than telling. If I give you a week, will you promise to behave afterward?
“All right,” I said.
“I’ll write a letter for your mother. I did speak to her on the phone earlier. I asked her to come in, but . . . anyway. Go and collect your bag and coat, and then come back to the office to collect the letter.”
I turned to go.
“Colin?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t do it again.”
I didn’t do it again, at least not on school property, because in a strange sort of way I liked the head teacher. He wasn’t as weak as he appeared; he was a fair man who was trying to do the right thing in very difficult circumstances, and I wanted him to like me. Besides, by then my mother, who had been through what she later described to anyone who’d listen as “a very trying time,” was starting to recover. While the head teacher seemed incapable of genuine anger, my mother was not.
My mother had spent a good couple of years in a semiofficial state of mourning after my father’s death. It was the sort of person she was. Eventually she’d realized that people had stopped paying attention when she had a tantrum and so she’d decided it was time to be brave and move on. She had never been a patient woman, however, and now that it was just the two of us she was even less so. Her friends, my father’s family, even her sister, had all reached the point of wanting nothing more to do with her; therefore I was the only person who was still available to whom she could direct her frustrations and her ire. She stopped taking the anti-depressants and moved on purposefully to medicating herself with alcohol.
We hated each other with a fury that was as powerful as it was unspoken. She was violent until the point when she realized I was big enough to fight back, and then her bitterness was restricted to verbal assaults that were in many ways just as damaging.
“You killed your father,” she said one evening. “You know that? I always knew it. It was the stress you put him under, always answering us back, never doing as you were told.”
We were both sitting in the living room, having had dinner together in silence. This happened with increasing frequency—civility giving way to hostility with no apparent warning. She’d had wine with dinner, gin before it, sherry before that, but, even so, she was not what anyone would describe as drunk. The television was on in the background, and, because we’d disagreed over what to watch, the tension in the room had risen. She blamed me utterly for my father’s death, just as I blamed her. It passed the time.
“You killed him, you little piece of shit. He was so happy with me until you came along.”
I searched for a suitable weapon to use in response, and settled on Kafka.
“ ‘To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to a nothing.’ ”
“Kafka again?” she said. “What a load of nonsense.”
“Kafka was a nihilist,” I said. “And if you take his views on board, whether either of us is to blame for his death is rather beside the point.”
“I wish you’d never been born,” she answered coldly.
“So do I,” I said.
Sometimes these exchanges were even funnier. She was so easy to respond to. The more she hated me, the more amusing she was. And yet we continued living together in the same house, even after I left school. She cooked dinner, sometimes, when she wasn’t too drunk to stay upright. I did most of the washing and cleaning. She did the shopping, so that she could buy alcohol. We had a strange, symbiotic, and oppositional relationship that served a purpose for both of us.
I usually find myself thinking of my mother on a Wednesday evening, and occasionally I used to wonder why this was, until I realized that of course, with Wednesday being my laundry and housekeeping evening, doing these menial tasks reminds me of our time in the house together after my father died.
The woman from the nursing home called again half an hour ago. My mother needs a new bathrobe, apparently, and she has been asking after me. This last part I know to be a lie. Why are they so insistent that I visit? I have nothing to say to her, and, if by some miracle she were to be compos mentis at the moment I chose to arrive, the chances of her having something of consequence to say to me are very slim indeed.
One of these days I will shout something down the phone at the matron, or whatever she is. I will be driven to madness, to fury by her lack of sensitivity. The woman abused me, I shall cry. She ruined my childhood and has therefore made it impossible for me to form a functioning adult relationship with a woman. I don’t want to see her. May she rot quietly and stinkingly in her wingback armchair.
See how quickly she calls back after that, shall we?
In the meantime, while I am terribly distracted by the thought of the next edition of the newspaper and what delicious details it may contain, I am also very aware of the fact that at the moment I only have two on the go, and it is becoming my custom to have three. Three is manageable, a beautiful, stylish, and balan
ced number. When one of them finally goes, then I always find a replacement. I’m getting so good at spotting when they are close. Sadly, however, I have been a bit distracted of late and I had to hurry the last one on a bit.
So—where to next? Back to the university? That place has been especially productive; I met three of them there. Who would have thought that the foyer of a university building would attract such a high proportion of depressives? The doctor’s office—I had several from there. But that is a dangerous place—any more and they will see the pattern. The supermarket is always a good bet, and there are so many of them that the chances are no link between them would be made. There’s a trick to it, and it’s the time of day. Between half past six and nine at night is when they come out.
You can spot them, too. Discard the harassed parents escaping to the store once the partner is home from work to do the kids’ bedtime—in the shopping carts: diapers, frozen dinners, colic drops. The executives, single maybe, but they will have good jobs—quality meat, small packs of exotic vegetables, stir-fry sauce, still wearing a suit and tie.
The ones you want are those who look as if they are wearing the clothes they wore to bed last night. The ones who come out at night because they can’t bear the crowds. They don’t shop during the daytime because they think the noise of babies yelling might burst their eardrums, and it makes them want to cry themselves. They shop at night, when it’s quiet and dark and nobody will stare at them, nobody will notice them, nobody will give them a second glance. They work their way around the supermarket as if they are invisible because that’s how they feel. In their carts will be frozen food, mostly, because they’ll only shop once a month, if that. They will have a list, because they don’t want to have to come back if they’ve forgotten something. They will not make eye contact. They will not talk to anyone.
Thinking about the supermarket reminds me of the one I saw earlier in the week. She looked almost ready. I might go back there to see if I can find her. Cat food, though—that was a problem. Cats have a habit of drawing attention to themselves if they don’t get fed. Dogs are worse, of course, since they will bark if they have to. But cats—they add an element of risk, and risk is something I try to eliminate at all costs.
There are plenty of them out there who do not own cats. I shall keep looking.
I need a public place where sad people go.
Annabel
I didn’t know the first thing about planning a funeral, but when I went to the register office this morning to get Mum’s death certificate they gave me a leaflet with a helpful checklist to work through, and another one with a list of local funeral directors. Back home, sitting at the dining table, a pad and pen next to me, I listened to answering machine messages about out-of-hours services and how much they would like to call me back. The third one I tried—Co-operative Funeralcare—had a live person on the other end of the phone.
“My mother died,” I said, by way of introduction.
The woman who answered was very professional and calm. She told me she was deeply sorry to hear that, and that the best way forward was for them to come and see me to discuss possible options for the funeral.
I looked around the living room, at the state of it. “Can I come to your office?” I asked. “I could do with the fresh air.”
I felt dazed by all this, the suddenness of it, and all my routines had been profoundly disturbed. I’d hardly slept, hadn’t really eaten, for what must be days. Last night I had gone to bed early and after two hours of restlessness got up and watched television until four o’clock. Then I went back to bed and the next time I woke up it was ten to eleven. I felt adrift, as if I lacked any sort of plan or purpose, feeding the cat—who wasn’t interested—then making toast, which I never got around to eating. I decided to get my act together, starting with planning Mum’s funeral.
As the day dwindled I drove to the small shopping center on the outskirts of town, a concrete walkway lined with stores, at the end of it the Co-op where I used to stop on the way home from work to get groceries for my mother. Next door to it, to my surprise although it must have been there for years upon years, was the Co-operative Funeralcare.
I stood outside for a minute, as I was early, window-shopping for headstones. Most of them were sculptures of Mary, her hands out in welcome, or Jesus pointing to his heart. Or an angel looking sad. At the edge, a plain headstone made out of red granite, the only words carved upon it, in a garish gold lettering, IN LOVING MEMORY. Not, as I would almost have expected, YOUR LOVED ONE’S NAME HERE.
I went inside.
“Ms. Hayer?” The woman behind the desk was soberly dressed in a white blouse and dark gray skirt, a bleached-blond bob tucked neatly behind ears that sported a single diamond stud. She regarded me with sympathetic blue eyes, head tilted to one side.
I’m not going to start crying I wanted to say. You don’t need to worry. I’m not going to cave in.
“Yes,” I said, holding out my hand. “You must be Jackie?”
She took me into an office next door that was decorated like a living room, comfy but upright sofas, a coffee table that held several leather-bound albums, and a box of tissues. On the wall, there was a large framed print of a woodland shrouded in mist. A big, solid-looking Swiss cheese plant dominated one corner. The window looked out over the parking lot at the back, people coming and going with their shopping.
Jackie talked me through the options for running a funeral. They could do the whole thing for me, she said, from the coffin to the cars, taking care of the deceased, planning the service in conjunction with the crematorium or the church of my choice. Or, if I preferred, and some people did nowadays, they could do a very nice humanist service and arrange a natural burial in a forest specially designated for the purpose. And it could all be done for one simple cost, with interest-free payment options if need be.
I wanted to sign up, get it over with. She glanced up at the clock on the wall above my head and said I could probably do with thinking about it, and if I wanted to go ahead she could see me the next day. She gave me a brochure with the different coffin designs and wood colors in it, a brochure about woodland burials, and a sheaf of other pieces of paper.
When I got back out into the shopping arcade, it was chilly and nearly dark. Most of the stores were closing. I stood there for a moment, disorientated, wondering what had happened to the day.
“Are you all right?”
I looked around, surprised, to find a man standing next to me. He was tall, in a brown jacket with a scarf around his neck, and although his head was shaved he was younger than he looked. He wasn’t smiling and yet he seemed to know me.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m OK.”
“Very well,” he said.
He hesitated next to me for a moment. Did I know him? I felt as if I should have known his name and I tried some out, experimentally, in my head. Ian? No, that wasn’t it. Dave? Simon? The trouble with recognizing someone unexpectedly was that it was possible I knew him from work—not as a colleague, but rather as a subject—someone I’d worked on, some nominal whose face was familiar and yet I’d never spoken to him, never would.
He put a hand on my upper arm. “Now,” he said, gently, “it’s just that I think you look as though you might be lost.”
His hand was still there, on my arm, warm and quite firm. It felt as though I was leaning against him. As though I’d initiated the contact, not him, and it was such a curious thing. At the same time as knowing that this was strange, unwarranted, being touched like this—even with layers of clothing between his skin and mine—it was comforting. It was comfortable. I felt a little struggle inside between the part of me that thought this was unnecessary and intrusive, and the part of me that needed to be comforted.
And the word bubbled up inside me like it had been held down and suddenly released. “No,” I said. “Not lost. I’m not lost. I’m just . . .”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Annabel,” I said. “
What’s yours?”
His hand was still there and then it slipped away from me. My upper arm felt suddenly chilled, as though a draft had passed over it. All around us people were hurrying home, carrying bags of shopping, bundled up against the breeze that blew around the walkways. It felt like coming around. I could hear noises, people talking; two older ladies came out of the hairdressers next door laughing, and fit clear plastic rain hoods over their newly set hair.
“Ed,” he said. “I am Ed.” His eyes were dark green. I couldn’t remember ever looking into a pair of eyes and being aware of their color before. If you’d asked me what color my mother’s eyes were, Kate’s, Sam Everett’s, I couldn’t have given you an accurate response. But his eyes were green.
“That doesn’t sound right,” I said.
“What do you mean?” he asked. The tone of his voice had changed: he sounded suspicious, wary. I didn’t like that at all. It was as though there had been some sort of test and I’d failed it.
“That doesn’t sound like your name.”
He laughed, exposing his teeth. “Well, I assure you that it is.”
“Ed,” I said.
“That’s right,” he said. “You need to remember that.”
“Yes,” I said. “Well, I’ve got to come back here tomorrow morning.”
“Yes,” he said. “I will meet you here tomorrow.”
“All right,” I said.
I think he said more. There were other things he said, too, things I couldn’t remember.
A few minutes after that, or maybe it was an hour, or maybe it was a whole day, I was back in my car in the parking lot, and the engine was running. The heater was on and it was warm in there, and I was looking out through the windshield into the darkness and the parking lot was almost empty. There was nobody else around. I looked at the clock and it was just after six o’clock. What time had I left the funeral people? It felt like just a few seconds, as though I had walked away from the place and gotten into my car and started the engine and then waited for something to happen. It was as if time had slipped out of my reach.