Acts & Monuments

by Alan Kane Fraser

  Jean went over to have a chat with the minister. Barry wondered why, but, before he had a chance to ask, the hearse arrived and everyone went inside. There was a generic service book provided for the occasion, without any personalisation. Barry wondered why he felt slightly unsettled and then realised that there was no organist, so the chapel was held in a rather eerie silence that spread its tentacles across the room and had begun to wrap them around Barry’s heart when a voice came from behind him.

  “Please stand.” It was clearly an instruction, but it was said with such warmth and yet such seriousness of purpose that Barry wanted to comply anyway. The mourners all stood.

  “‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ says the Lord,” intoned the minister as he led the coffin down the aisle toward the front of the chapel. “‘Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.’”

  This had always struck Barry as quite a strange claim for the Church to make, particularly given the fact that everyone was gathered around a coffin. Further verses of scripture followed, some of which seemed fairly brutal in their assessment of the situation (“We brought nothing into the world, and we take nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”) and others of which attempted – none too successfully in Barry’s view – to offer some comfort (“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning. Great is his faithfulness.”). But none of them seemed self-evidently true, particularly under the circumstances. Barry felt as though he at least understood why the woman from social services was so granite-faced – if she had to sit through this kind of stuff all the time, he could imagine it would get a little wearing. All this talk of God and His goodness toward humanity, our obligation to think well of Him, and of resurrection and not dying, seemed to be in wilful defiance of reality. And of his own raw pain.

  Eventually, the coffin reached the front of the chapel. The funeral directors bowed to the minister, turned on their heels and walked out. Clearly their fee didn’t extend to actually having to sit through the service.

  The minister stood at the lectern and looked out over the few hardy souls who remained. “We meet in the name of Jesus Christ,” he began.

  That seemed somewhat of a presumption from Barry’s perspective, and Granite-faced Woman certainly didn’t look impressed, but he said it as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  “We come here today,” the minister continued, “to remember before God our brother, Christian; to give thanks for his life; to commend him to God, our merciful redeemer and judge; to commit his body to be cremated; and to comfort one another in our grief.”

  It all felt a long way away from Section 46 of the Public Health (Control of Diseases) Act 1984.

  The minister said a prayer, then, much to Barry’s surprise, he said, “I’d now like to call upon Jean Adam, from Monument Housing Association, to deliver a brief tribute.”

  Granite-faced Woman suddenly looked up in alarm – this was clearly not on her agenda and had not been agreed. Jean simply glided past her, oblivious, and headed toward the front of the chapel. Barry looked at his service book for some clue as to what she might be expected to say.

  According to the brief note he found at the back, it appeared that Jean was supposed to “proclaim the gospel in the context of the death of this particular person”. Under the circumstances, it felt like quite a challenge, even for someone of Jean’s undoubted rhetorical skills. But, as she took her place at lectern, she didn’t appear in the least bit fazed.

  “The first thing to say is that I am neither a friend nor a relative of Christian, so I can’t recount stories about his excitement at Christmas as a child or of some private act of kindness that I’ll never forget. I’m just a housing assistant at Monument, and part of my job is to go through the tenancy agreement with prospective tenants and make sure that they understand what they’re signing. It’s not a particularly thrilling job, but it sets the foundations of the relationship between the landlord and our tenant. It also gives me the opportunity to talk through other things too – issues or problems that I might pick up on, or which they might disclose – and to let them know that those things matter too; that we care about more than just their rent money.”

  Barry couldn’t help wondering what Langley would think if he found out about this.

  “So, it feels like one of the most important things we do – so important, in fact, that I can’t quite believe that they let someone on my lowly grade do it.”

  Of course, Monument always said that going through the tenancy agreement was one of the most important things that they did, but Barry had always assumed that no one actually believed it. They just said it to make the housing assistants feel important, when what they were actually doing was a job that the housing officers didn’t want to do. Bizarrely, however, Jean didn’t see it as an imposition at all, but as an honour.

  “I first met Christian nearly five years ago, when he signed up for his flat at Neville Thompson House,” she continued. “He’d lived with us before, as a young man, so he knew the drill and wasn’t particularly interested, if I’m being honest. In those situations, the thing you have to do is to make sure that you listen to them before you expect them to listen to you.”

  Barry felt this was a tip Jean ought to pass on to Taneesha.

  “When you looked at his application form, it was clear that he’d had a tough life. He’d been in care, then a young offenders’ institution and then in one of our specialist housing schemes, The SHYPP in Chelmsley Wood. There’d been addiction problems and more run-ins with the criminal justice system. When he came to Neville Thompson House, he’d just been released from prison again. But the thing that struck me was that he didn’t have a family. Oh, there were plenty of professional agencies involved in his life (some of whom are represented here today), but there was no one who loved him or cared about him in a purely personal sense. It seemed so sad; genuinely a tragedy. He was fully grown up physically, and yet, sitting there in front of me, he was still, in an emotional sense, a child. He so desperately wanted to be loved and yet he didn’t know how. The world of love seemed closed to him. And so, sadly, he had closed himself to it.”

  This had clearly been a tenancy sign-up meeting unlike any that Barry had ever attended.

  “So often we say of people like Christian, ‘The problem with him is he’s into drugs’ or ‘into crime’. We look at their lives through the professional lenses that we approach them with, not through the loving eyes that a mother or a friend might. But Christian was not a drug addict or a criminal – although these things played a part in his life, they were not the totality of who he was. At root, as today’s service reminds us, he was a lost soul looking for love. In that sense, he was not so very different from all the rest of us. His issue was that he never found it; he never knew that he was lovable because none of us were able to tell him. He never found himself in love.

  “As we went through his form I came to the bit where we record someone’s religion or belief. ‘Do you have a religion?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t believe in nuffink,’ came the rather terse reply. I was disappointed, but not surprised. ‘Do you want me to tick “atheist”?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe in that neither.’”

  The minister chuckled. Granite-faced Woman cast a surreptitious glance down at her watch.

  “It struck me as a beautifully naïve answer, but also one that contained an unintentional germ of truth. Christian was not anybody’s idea of a religious person, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to entirely abandon hope. He, quite literally, couldn’t believe in nothing. So, in a rather animistic sense, he did have a kind of faith. It was the faith of the psalmist who rails against the inscrutability of God, whilst hoping for a change in fortune; and the faith of Job, who stands there wanting
to know why God has allowed him to be afflicted, and hoping for an answer. And maybe it was the faith of Christ himself, demanding to know why God had abandoned him on the cross, whilst hoping for a resurrection.

  “And who wouldn’t forgive him for that? Christian’s life contained no great successes, no brilliant triumphs against the odds. According to any worldly measure, his life was an abject failure. Even his victory over drugs was cruelly snatched away from him at the last. Simply surviving for thirty-three years was about as much as he could claim. But today, we honour him in all his failure because – as all those of us who came into contact with him can attest – he was a person of intrinsic value. His worth came, not from success, but simply from the fact that he was human. So often we would have battles with Christian – as I’m sure some of you did too. People would complain about him or his visitors; there were sometimes problems with his rent. But he would always come back to us and demand – sometimes very bluntly – to be treated fairly because he knew, deep down, that he was of equal value to everyone else and he wanted people to recognise that. He had faith that something, somewhere, gave him that value, no matter what people said or how they treated him.

  “It was an angry faith, certainly. And it was the faith of someone who believed in God, not so that he could love Him, but so that he could hate Him – for His silence and His apparent passivity in the face of Christian’s many travails. But it was, nevertheless, a faith that I believe will be honoured by God. So it is my faith that the resurrection he never experienced in life will be God’s gift to him in death.”

  With that, she was finished. Suddenly the world of faith seemed tantalisingly close. Like the glass walls of the exec team’s offices, Barry could see glimpses of it through the frosting. But he couldn’t quite touch it, although he could see that it was just millimetres away. And, because he couldn’t touch it, he knew he had to shut his eyes and pretend it wasn’t there.

  The money – that was real. He could feel it in his pocket. That was the truth he had to follow. He’d felt the truth of Jean’s words for a moment, but then it was gone. He wanted to grasp it, but when he looked at his hand he saw that it was empty.

  The probation officer leant over from behind and put a hand on Jean’s shoulder before mouthing, “Thank you.”

  Granite-faced Woman seemed less impressed. She looked at Jean as though she’d committed some terrible act of betrayal – introducing God into the equation was not what social services were paying for; it was bad enough that the minister got to do it, without anyone else joining in.

  The service continued with the kindly minister gently leading the congregation through the prayers. Eventually, they reached the Lord’s Prayer. Barry had not had to recite that since he’d been at school, and it appeared that, at some point in the intervening thirty years, someone had changed the words, which caused him some anxiety. He was pretty sure it was only our trespasses we needed forgivness for when he was child, but now it seemed that it was our sins. That felt a lot more serious – it seemed to cover a much broader range of infractions.

  Barry looked over his shoulder, but there was no one there.

  None of it seemed to throw Granite-faced Woman, though, who merely continued to stare ahead silently.

  It didn’t seem long before they reached the end, and the kindly minister stood by the coffin and prepared to send it into the flames. Even as he did so, he spoke like someone for whom Christian Malford’s sad and lonely life actually mattered; as though the service mattered in and of itself, and wasn’t just a nice way to dispose of a body.

  “We have entrusted our brother Christian to God’s mercy and we now commit his body to be cremated; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” he said, before discretely pressing a button, whereupon curtains began to close around the coffin.

  Suddenly, Barry was transported back three years. No longer was it the light-oak coffin of Chris Malford heading toward cremation. Instead, it was a white coffin disappearing into the flames, while his wife crumpled into him and sobbed uncontrollably.

  He hadn’t cried at the time; he couldn’t. It had all happened so quickly that he hadn’t had time to take it all in. And everyone had kept telling him how he had to “stay strong” for Lauren and his wife. But he cried now. Barry didn’t know why, but all of a sudden he couldn’t stop himself. Big, loud, full-throated sobs were emanating from somewhere deep inside of him, such that he could feel every spare ounce of fat on his gelatinous frame wobbling in sympathy.

  “Oh Chris… Chris,” Barry cried through his tears. “I’m sorry I let you down, son. I’m sorry; I’m so sorry.”

  The minister looked up in slight alarm. He certainly didn’t appear to have expected tears. Jean however, quickly intervened. She sat down next to Barry and held him softly, whilst he continued to cry.

  Thirty-One

  Jean had suggested they go for a coffee and a chat, but Barry wasn’t in the mood. Or, rather, he would have very much valued a chat with Jean, but he didn’t know what to say. It had all been terrible, but it had happened three years ago, and it seemed pointless picking at the whole thing again like a scabrous wound.

  But, more than that, he also recognised that there was a whole area of his life that he couldn’t now discuss with Jean. How could he talk about how he felt without also talking about what he’d done? And talking about what he’d done didn’t seem like a good idea at all. There was only one solution, and that was to deal with the situation alone. Jean had been surprisingly amenable to this suggestion. She agreed to get a cab back to the office, and let Angela and Langley know that Barry needed some ‘time out’.

  The minister offered to take him to a side chapel if he wanted to be alone there.

  “Thanks for the offer,” Barry said, “but to be honest, I think I’m going to go to the museum and art gallery.”

  “Oh, do you like art?”

  “Love it. Even went to art college.”

  “That’s great. It can help at times like this – being a spiritual person.”

  “Well, I’m not sure that I am really. It’s art I like.”

  “Yes, but art is just spirituality in drag, isn’t it?”

  Barry looked at the minister quizzically.

  “It fools you into having a spiritual moment,” the minister explained. “You think you’re looking at one thing, but then you suddenly find you’re looking at something else. And then you start to think about the things that matter to you and how you make sense of it all. Or at least, you do if it’s any good.”

  Barry felt relieved. He had never thought about it like that before. He’d always thought of spirituality as being the preserve of churches and chapels, so he was delighted to discover that he could, apparently, still have a spiritual moment whilst doing something he actually enjoyed.

  And so it was that he found himself wandering through a gallery of ‘Seventeenth-Century Art in the Dutch Republic and Flanders’.

  Nicolaes Pickenoy had been Amsterdam’s leading portrait painter until he had the misfortune to be eclipsed by Rembrandt. He carried on for much of the 1630s, turning out some striking portraits, with their sharply penetrating light accentuating the features of the sitter in a way that seemed to illuminate not only their skin but also something of their soul. But by 1637 even he seemed to have acknowledged that he was up against one of the great portrayers of the human condition, and he pretty much stopped painting after that. However, before he did, he managed to turn out Portrait of a Woman, and Barry had always been rather grateful that he had.

  As Dr Potter had once noted, the history of Western art was, at least in part, the history of men looking at women. Even when the subject was ostensibly something else, or women only formed part of a larger whole, Barry had to agree with his erstwhile tutor that underneath it all there was a pretty clear subtext, which told you a lot about how men looked at women and what they thought women were for.
The worst of French and Italian art seemed to view them as little more than titillating decoration.

  But the Dutch seemed to have no truck with such fripperies. Maybe it was, as Dr Potter had suggested, their puritanical Reformation instincts, but the women of Protestant art seemed more inclined to fix you with their stare and demand that you view them on their own terms, rather than invite you to see them as a means of achieving your own sexual fulfilment, as their Catholic counterparts did.

  Or so it seemed with Pickenoy’s unnamed sitter, at least. She was clearly a wealthy young woman, dressed as she was in a fine, black tabbaard, with gold-embroidered sleeves and an elaborate ruff. She wore gold jewellery and held an expensive, folding fan, all of which was painted beautifully. But the thing that really held Barry’s attention was her face.

  There were no ‘come hither’ eyes inviting you to cast your eyes upon her ample charms; no visual surrender to a rapacious male gaze. Instead, there was a stare that was at once both determined and yet also somehow brittle. She was undoubtedly attractive and she was clearly confident in her social position, but the fragility of her half-smile made her also appear vulnerable in a way that humanised her rather than making her seem weak. Pickenoy had captured perfectly that dichotomy in a way that reached across the centuries and made this woman speak in a register that Barry could still recognise.

  The thing he liked most though, was the fact that she reminded him of Lauren. It wasn’t just the slightly ruddy cheeks and dark brown eyes that both women shared. Lauren could look at her father with burning defiance, and yet there was also something in his daughter’s look that, despite her best endeavours, betrayed a fragility in her self-esteem.

  Of course, Pickenoy’s portrait was a pendant to another portrait, almost certainly of the woman’s husband. That, it seemed, had been lost, and so she hung on the wall on her own. But understanding that there was an unseen figure looming over her, and that that figure was male changed Barry’s sense of why she might have looked as she did. It wasn’t the fact that she was alone that intimidated her; it was the fact that she wasn’t. The space she inhabited wasn’t her own, but shared with a protector – her husband – who was the source of her wealth and status. It wasn’t the viewer she needed to appease, but him. And, Barry thought (considering the fact that her black dress betrayed a certain Protestant mind-set), maybe even Him.