Dance on My Grave

  12/Maybe I really was shocked. Mrs G. would come as a shock to any growing boy, never mind the calamity of a first-time capsize. At any rate, when she disappeared into the blue fog all I could do was stare after her gormlessly.

  Then I started what I thought must be hiccups, but which turned into a bout of pizzicato giggles. I also started shivering, despite the pea-soup steam and the Turkish-bath temperature of the room.

  And suddenly a hot bath was exactly what I wanted:

  a refuge a relief a restorative

  a relaxant a refresher a resuscitator

  a rest-cure a revivifier a reverberator

  a revitalizer a rehabilitator a reintegrator

  a reclaimer a reactivator a renovator.

  My mind went mad for the eighteenth letter and fourteenth consonant of the modern English alphabet, the alveolar semivowel, as in red, and its repetitive prefix re. Maybe I really had lost my reason, was raving, rambling, running mentally amok in a dizzying reaction to my recent reprieve from any requirement of a requiescat.

  Not to mention the relapse I must have suffered at the mercy of Ma Gorman’s predatory pickers and stealers.

  13/Bathtubs always remind me of coffins. The Gormans’, being so huge, reminded me of a sarcophagus. Its tomblike hulk had a memorial solemnity and was adorned with a profusion of bits and pieces. Handles to hang on to, soap-cups, a decorated plug-hole plug attached to a love-knot chain that would do terrible damage if you sat on it. A quilted cushion for your reclining head was stuck on with suction pads. A multi-compartmented tray bridged the sides, filled with lotions in exotic-shaped unbreakable bottles, as well as sponges and back-scrubbers and nail-brushes and face flannels and what-nots unidentifiable. Lost among all this was a cute little plastic duck that quacked when you squeezed it. And who, I asked myself, played with that in the bath at night?

  Come to think of it, the whole room reminded me of the grave chamber in a pyramid. During my researches into Death, upon which I mused as I lay soaking my derangements in this temple to personal hygiene, I read somewhere that the Great Pyramid of Cheops—biggest and best of them all—was built of more than five million tons of stone and rock, was 481 feet high, 755 feet square at the base, and covered in excess of thirteen acres of land. One pretty neat paperweight.

  Anybody who wanted a coffin that big had a lot of faith in Death. Most people these days can’t raise enough optimism about it even to bother with a headstone for their nearest and dearest. (It was headstones that first got me interested in Death, as I’ll explain later, and one of them is partly responsible for getting me into the predicament I now find myself.) I have, though, heard of a few modern memorials that amuse me. There’s one in Vancouver, Canada, for example. It is carved to look like an ice-lolly:

  Death licked her in the end.

  Which is the thing that bothers me most about Death and is one of the important reasons, in my opinion, for taking a healthy interest in the subject. Death gets us all. No exceptions. But every body. Yours too.

  14/I did not imagine, though, as I lay leaching in that steaming lavabo, that Death was quite as close as it was.

  Once I was warm again, and clean of cloying Thames gunk, I started to feel sane once more. Believe it or not, only then did the nuttiness of Mrs G.’s bathroom attentions seep into my skull. Other people might be able to go out every day worrying about nothing worse than Death and unimportant matters like how to spend the rest of your life, sanguinely borrow a friend’s boat only to capsize in a freak storm, be rescued in front of a crowd of entertained and unhelpful spectators, be taken home by a bloke whose mother is a bathroom freak with the hots for Mothering Sunday, and still know what’s going on when he meets up with someone like Mrs G. But me—I’m just ordinary. Things like all that don’t happen to me. I am one of those people who believes that nothing unusual or strange or exciting or odd ever happens to them.

  I am so convinced of this, am so used to thinking of myself as the perfect example of Joe Comatose, the story of whose life would kill you, that when something out of the ordinary does happen I don’t even notice. I could walk into the black hole of Calcutta and just think it was rush hour at the doctor’s.

  In fact, I have a theory that people are nothing more than the sum of the things they think they are. This is not an idea I thought up. I’ll be honest, I got it from Kurt Vonnegut, whose books I was reading all the time this last summer. The idea goes like this: If you think you are a handsome, six-foot-three, blue-eyed genius who writes better songs and sings them better than anyone else in the world, then you tend to behave as if you are a handsome, six-foot-three, etc. etc. This explains why there are so many homely, five-foot-four, putty-eyed popcorns gyrating about on stages all over the place, strutting and fretting and hankering after autograph hunters and managers anxious to sign them up for stardom. It’s what they believe about themselves that matters, you see. We are what we pretend to be, Vonnegut says, so we had better be careful what we pretend to be.

  And it works just the same the other way. I think of myself as an unexciting schlunk so I guess I act like an unexciting schlunk and so grow into an unexciting schlunk. Very attractive, eh?

  Now back to me entombed in the sumptuous Gorman wash-house.

  As soon as it sank in that Mrs G. might have a triflingly overactive Id, I started worrying about the bathroom door. I had not locked it, you understand. And she had promised (had I heard right?) to return with a cup of sweet steaming tea. (The day was becoming utterly precipitate.) Unfortunately she would, no doubt, return. bearing her sweet steaming Id as well. And I could do without the former if having it meant suffering a generous portion of the other. As you’ll gather very soon, I like having a bit of the other, but I also like choosing who I get it from. And Mrs G. didn’t figure in my list of preferences.

  I rose from the Florida blue intending to secure the door. My skin was glowing scalded red from the volcanically hot water and my blushing anxiety. I had one foot in the tub and one foot raised over the edge when the door opened. Expecting the re-entry of Mrs G., I snatched at a towel hanging from a rail just out of easy reach. In my haste I slipped and fell, plunging back into the depths of the sarcophagus and sending a tidal wave over the side.

  But it was Barry, carrying the promised tea, who witnessed this further cack-handed—correction: cackfooted—goof.

  ‘Swimming again?’ he said. ‘Want me to dive in and save you?’

  ‘I thought you were your mother,’ I said, attempting to retrieve my dignity by feigning a final rinse before leaving the bath. (Why is it when you’re embarrassed you act like an idiot? Answer: Because when you’re embarrassed you feel like an idiot. See—you become what you think you are.)

  ‘Relax,’ Barry said. ‘I heard you getting the treatment so I waylaid her on the landing.’

  ‘Not sure which was worse,’ I said. ‘Being upset in the ocean or tangling with your mother.’

  ‘Personally,’ Barry said, laughing, ‘I’d rather capsize any day.’

  He reached for the towel I’d missed and handed it to me as I stepped onto the prairie.

  ‘Soak a bit longer if you want,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep Mother at bay. Anyway, she has to go to the shop in a few minutes. It’s my day off so she has to see to things.’

  I took the towel. ‘I’m out now, and I’ve got to moor my pal’s boat. Then I have to be in school at two-thirty to meet a teacher.’ I glanced at my pile of dank clothes. ‘Don’t fancy wearing those again.’

  Barry said, ‘Forget it. Everything’s sorted. I’ll deal with the boat when I take care of mine. That gives you plenty of time. I’ve some clean clothes ready for you in my room. First on the left outside here. Come in when you’re ready.’

  15/AND THEN: In Barry’s room . . .

  ‘Luckily you’re nearly my size so this stuff ought to fit.’

  Laid out on his bed were a pair of light blue jockey shorts, a sweat shirt with narrow blue-and-white stripes (very français, very matelot
), light blue jeans, washed pale and worn, blue ankle socks. Too much of the symphonics for my taste, but beggars . . .

  ‘What size shoes?’

  ‘Eights.’

  ‘I take nines. Hang on.’

  ‘I’ll manage with mine. They’ll dry on my feet.’

  He was lounging against the edge of a bench-desk watching me dress. The desk ran the whole length of the wall opposite the bed. I was envious. Not just the desk space, but the rows of shelves underneath crammed with books and records and the gear for a sophisticated quadrophonic system.

  ‘Nice,’ I said, nodding at the gear.

  ‘Benefit of owning a record shop.’

  Gorman Records on London Road in Westcliff. I’d been there a couple of times searching for cut-price discs. I’d seen Barry serving customers. A small shop. But busy. A Saturday morning hang-out.

  The whole room was very neat. Modern furniture arranged almost geometrically in a careful pattern. There was a repro of a picture by David Hockney above the bed, one of his California swimming pool paintings, ‘Pete getting out of Nick’s pool’. I knew it was Hockney because I liked his work too. Barry’s room reminded me, then, of the rooms in some of Hockney’s paintings of people in their houses. The way he stood and sat always reminded me, that day and afterwards, of those Hockney people. All part of an arrangement, like a still-life, a little too posed for real life, very clean, bright, clear-cut, airy. I liked their sharp-focus quality, and the feeling that there was something elusive, something waiting behind all that studied informality.

  For a second, with Barry leaning there watching me dress, I felt like a Hockney person myself. I quite enjoyed that. But—and I can’t explain this—I felt a twinge of fear too.

  The clothes fitted near enough. His jeans were an inch or so too long; I had to turn up the bottoms or I’d have been tripping over myself.

  ‘You’ll do for now,’ Barry said. He fished a comb from his back pocket and handed it to me. ‘There’s a mirror on the wall over there. You hungry?’

  ‘Beginning to be. Thought I’d nip home and grab something on the way to school.’

  ‘Soup and cheese ready and waiting downstairs.’

  I glanced at him in the mirror. Mirror mirror on the wall . . .

  ‘You’ve done enough. I’d best get on.’

  ‘All arranged. Courtesy of my mother before she left for the shop. She’s taken a shine to you. If you don’t eat it there’ll be hell to pay.’

  I handed him his comb. ‘Do you do this for everyone who turns over?’

  He led the way onto the landing. ‘It’s my day off, so I can look after you.’

  We went down to the kitchen. Like the bathroom, huge by my standards, and shining with all mod cons. A scrubbed wood table in the centre was set with a lot more than the promised cheese and soup. There were thin slices of cold beef, demure on a plate; a tossed green salad, fetching in a wooden bowl; tomatoes, fruit, chunky brown bread; cans of beer; mugs for coffee that was percolating on an Aga stove, where the soup was simmering in a pan, a thick broth of vegetables.

  ‘Dig in,’ Barry said serving me a bowl of soup.

  No second invitation needed. Capsizing and Mrs G.’s bathing cure were hungering work.

  16/With one appetite being satisfied another surfaced.

  Curiosity.

  Who was this guy who rescued me from the sea and brought me home to be coddled by his mum and dressed me in his clothes and fed me in his kitchen?

  I had never met him before; he didn’t know me. Why was he doing all this? Out of the goodness of his heart? Pull the other one. Which one of the two? Was that what all this was about?

  I knew nothing about him. Except:

  ‘Isn’t your shop Gorman Records on London Road?’

  He nodded. ‘My father started it twenty years ago.’

  ‘And didn’t you go to Chalkwell High?’

  ‘Till last summer.’

  ‘Good soup.’

  ‘She’s not a bad cook.’

  We slurped together.

  I said, ‘You left to work in the shop then?’

  He looked across the table at me deciding whether I was fit to be told. He used to do that: gab away to people till they started getting too close to him, too inside. Then he’d stop and stare at them, and think, and if he decided they were okay, he’d answer; if he decided they weren’t okay he jossed the question aside.

  I passed the test. He said, ‘My father died suddenly last year.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, wishing I hadn’t asked.

  ‘It’s over.’

  I could see from his change of mood that it wasn’t.

  He took in a deep breath. ‘Mother and he ran the shop. Mother looked after the accounts, Father was the music expert and the one that was good with customers. People liked him. He could sell anything if he wanted to. When he died, Mother hired a man to take over Father’s work. But they kept having rows. Nobody can replace Dad as far as Mother is concerned.’ He smiled to himself. ‘And she isn’t exactly the easiest person to work for! . . . So I started helping out on Saturdays and after school. But it wasn’t enough. Things went from bad to worse. In the end, the problem solved itself. The man left after a row one day, and I knew there was nothing else for it. I left school and went into the shop full-time.’

  ‘But you hadn’t meant to?’

  ‘Not till I was eighteen anyway. Maybe not till after university or something. Dad was keen on me going to university. He hadn’t had the chance, you see. Thought it was the thing to do. Wanted me to have all the benefits he never had, etcetera etcetera. Have some more salad.’

  ‘Thanks . . . Wasn’t there anyone else—anyone in the family I mean—who could have gone into the shop?’

  ‘I’ve an older sister, but she’s married, lives in London, got a kid. And her knowledge of music gets about as far as “White Christmas”.’

  ‘Yuk!’

  ‘Granted.’

  ‘Bit hard on you though, leaving school when you didn’t want to, just to serve in the shop.’

  He smiled. ‘I don’t just serve in the shop. I run it.’

  ‘But if you wanted to stay on.’

  ‘The shop comes first.’

  ‘Why should it? What you want to do with your life should come first, I think.’

  ‘The shop happens to earn our living.’

  ‘That’s important, yes, but your mother could have managed somehow. From my brief experience I’d say she’s pretty good at getting her way.’

  ‘It’s difficult to explain to people who haven’t owned their own business. I had the same trouble when I was trying to explain to the Head why I was leaving.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Coffee or beer?’

  ‘Some more beer, please.’

  ‘My father and mother started the shop from nothing, right? They wanted to do something where they could be together all the time. Dad liked music. The shop seemed the answer. They built up a good business. Regular customers. Big stock. They put a lot of work into it. Now the place is a kind of centre for people interested in music. It was Dad’s life really.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean it has to be yours, does it?’

  ‘No. But I do feel some kind of loyalty. Music means a lot to me. The business means a lot to the family, and to the town as well. It would be a waste to let it fall to pieces or to sell it off. I just felt I had to carry on what Dad had started.’

  ‘You were right. I still don’t understand.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever thought about following in the paternal footsteps?’

  ‘My father’s a baggage handler at the airport.’

  ‘So you don’t want to be a baggage handler at the airport. What do you want to do?’

  I shrugged. ‘Haven’t a clue, to be honest. That’s the current problem. Get a job or stay on at school. I think that’s what Osborn wants to see me about this afternoon.’

  ‘Trust Ozzy. He’ll want to have his say.’

&nbs
p; ‘Why not? Everybody else does.’

  ‘Have some more beef, you’ll need it.’

  ‘Ta. But I like Ozzy.’

  ‘A minority taste.’

  ‘People grumble because he makes them work, that’s all. He knows his stuff and I think he makes it interesting. Anyway, if I get through O-level lit, it’ll be because of him.’

  ‘I’ll grant you he thinks Eng. lit, is the only thing that matters.’

  ‘Sounds like you drew blood.’

  ‘Now and then. Drink up.’

  ‘I’ve had enough, thanks.’

  He started clearing the table of the dirty plates. ‘When you’ve seen him you tell me all. Just to see if I’m right.’

  I looked at him, the question unspoken.

  ‘Well,’ he said breezing it up, ‘you’ll have to collect your clothes. Mother’s already got them in the washer. And you’ll be bringing my stuff back, won’t you? You can tell me then . . . Okay?’

  17/That was how it was.

  Correction: That was how it was not.

  We said all that. But there was more going on behind our faces so to speak.

  But if I’m going to get it right—and I have to get it right or why bother with all this in the first place?—I’ll have to make a cringing confession that will help explain. The sort of confession people only make when they are drunk or hypnotized on a psycho’s couch. Or are mad. Loony. Like me. The sort that wakes you up afterwards, in the middle of the night, shaking your head and groaning ‘No, no!’ in an agony of sweaty regret. But what the hell, I’ve told you too much now anyway. You might as well hear the rest. And you can’t skip it because if you do you’ll miss something that makes sense of everything that happened.

  When I was a kid of about seven I watched a television programme, I’m not sure whether it was a play or an old film, about two boys. If I saw it now I’d probably rupture myself laughing at the incredible banality and pukiness of its story. But when you are seven, if you can recall those far-off days of last year, a TV sci-fi monster made from plastic foam and kitchen foil is frighteningly convincing; even the newsreaders look real. In short, at seven you still believe.