Nobody knew what the protesters were planning. Nobody was even sure what they wanted, apart from change, and perhaps that’s all they ever wanted to say. Wherever they came from, and whatever their specialist interests, they all had reform in common. They didn’t believe the world had to stay the way it was, even if none of them had quite fixed, at least not yet, on a readily workable alternative.
The challenge to this demonstration, like every other, was the news. Without publicity, all the effort and organisation and the cycling from Southampton finished as an early-evening one-minute montage, contrasting the dignity of mounted police with a pretty Czech anarchist, sitting on her boyfriend’s shoulders, advancing popular freedom by taking off her top.
How could they make this one new? They’d be up to the usual pranks, blockading and banner-hanging, and cementing volunteer Germans to parking meters. Apparently a French group called Farmageddon would be transplanting corn across the entrance to the UN, hoping for some digital pictures of crushed wheat beneath the alloy wheels of diplomats.
But they’d done this before.
Every protest needed its one memorable event. Something entirely original, and also sensational.
‘Like a crucifixion,’ Helena suggested. ‘Same principle.’
‘Though not a crucifixion,’ I hoped, ‘not an actual one.’
‘Obviously not. Not an actual one, no. But something like it.’
Without that, it was just thousands of young people brave enough to oppose the unchecked licence of a powerful media and business elite, again, and again seeing their claims for change ignored.
Already, several days before the protest, there were smaller, special-interest demonstrations. And inside the cemetery of kings, in with the small yellow digger and the amateur shrines glinting and flapping with letters and plasticked flowers, about twenty people were standing in a circle holding hands. Like many other single-issue organisations (Stop the War, Actors Against Aids) this group inside the cemetery was taking advantage of the larger protest to publicise its own concerns. Three policemen, a pair of photographers, and a TV camera looked on as cultural loyalists from Buenos Aires continued their campaign for the repatriation of the body of Jorge Luis Borges. On his headstone, over the insensible Old Norse inscriptions, they’d taped angry open letters (Jorge Ven a Casa!), and sheets from lined yellow jotters: Maestro, You Belong in Buenos Aires.
They did this about once a year, and traditionally it was a good-natured occasion, but from our point of view it was a disaster. Any trace I might have left in the grass was now trampled and lost. Also, the Cuban heels of a Borges protester were sinking slowly into the grass right next to Calvin’s plot, which Helena had expressly wanted to investigate.
Ignoring the enthusiasms of Argentina, we acted the innocents and peered scholastically at Calvin’s headstone, with its simple inscription J.C. It looked completely untouched. There were no scratch-marks on the raised recumbent, and the white pebbles between stone and grass were neat and tidy, only an inconclusive handful spilling over. That was how it was supposed to look, both before and after. This was the benefit of practice, and Elizabeth Taylor’s dogs.
‘I bet you didn’t even try.’
‘I did.’
‘Calvin’s still down there.’
‘He’s not. I swear. I looked, and he isn’t there.’
‘So where is he then?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
Apart from the Borges direction, which was impassable, we had a close look at all the graves within a reasonable distance of Calvin. I might have tried any one of them, though I’d probably have chosen one of those nearest. Calvin wasn’t in a row, not even approximately, and there were several graves which could qualify. Some of them had candles in jam-jars, and letters in tattered homage. Many of them didn’t.
I closed off my nostrils between fist and thumb, opened, exhaled. I bumped a central knuckle down the kinked bone of my nose, walked a little, and stopped at François Simon, star of early French cinema, who for acting purposes had taken the name of his son, Michel. His son Michel was now also a film-actor, and used the screen name François. It was an intriguing equation, time turned upside down, but there was no incriminating mark or scratch anywhere on François Simon’s stone.
‘Come on, Jay. You must have more of an idea than that. Who was it?’
‘I really don’t know. I was drunker than I thought possible.’
‘But you must have looked,’ Helena said, ‘surely? How could you not have looked?’
‘It wasn’t that I didn’t look. It’s just that I can’t remember.’
‘Was it someone famous?’
‘This is Geneva. Switzerland. They’re all famous.’
Left and right of Calvin, behind and in front of him, with no obvious trace of recent disturbance, most of the other stones belonged to Mr and Mrs Smiths, who neither of us had ever heard of.
‘And that’s the skeleton you have in the closet?’
‘No. That’s Richard Burton.’
‘I mean in the bin-bag in the kitchen. You know what I mean.’
‘I can’t say. I shouldn’t think it’s a nobody, a Mr Smith.’
‘But definitely not John Calvin?’
‘Definitely not. Absolutely categorically one hundred per cent not.’
By this time, one of the policemen overseeing the lively Argentines was watching us suspiciously. After walking once more past the nearest graves, we prudently headed for the exit.
‘Great work,’ Helena said. ‘It could be anybody.’
I didn’t appreciate her sarcasm. If nothing else, at least I’d confirmed my talent for digging up the dead, discreetly, as if their stones had never been disturbed.
‘The bones themselves should tell us,’ Helena decided. She wasn’t a quitter. If she was, we wouldn’t still be together, and it was Helena who’d hurried us back to the flat. In the kitchen she unzipped her puffa, and peered into the bulky brown bin-bag. ‘Yes, well. Maybe the bones can tell us something. But probably only after we’ve cleaned them up.’
At first, I planned to take half the bones and wash them in the bathroom, while Helena did the other half in the sink. Then she decided this was unfair on Burton, who apart from his leg-bone was still encased in mud in the kit-bag at the back of the closet. So she started on Burton at the sink.
And I grabbed Mr X in two hands and swung him through to the bathroom, lifting him into the shower. It was easiest to join him, and I sat naked for a long time beneath the steaming water, cleaning off one bone after another with a nail-brush. I didn’t hurry. I took my time, spitting out the streams of water which sometimes found out my mouth.
There wasn’t any flesh, as such. However, I did discover some dark and surprising flitters of matter, like scraps of black web, which hung about the joints and disconnected vertebrae. It was like flesh without substance, the blackest earth. It was human moss.
I put each clean bone on the bathmat, and after pulling on some jogging pants I rolled up the bones and carried them through to the living-room. In the kitchen, Helena was finishing off Burton, holding his skull under water until it stopped bubbling and drowned. The rest of him was already in the drainer, and I looked for evidence of his influence on Helena, something unexpected, like say a bottle of sherry down from the cupboard. But either relics didn’t work on women, or I had a particular gift, because even from this distance I could feel a suggestion of Burton’s intercession as my eyes were drawn down the back of Helena’s polo-shirt to the exquisite curve of her buttocks, and her hips sliding East West East.
She turned round, and snibbed her hair behind her ear with soapsudsy fingers.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ she said.
She turned back and shook the water from between Burton’s ears. ‘Don’t even think about it.’
‘What?’
‘You can scrap that idea right now. These bones have no special powers. They’re just bones. They have no discernible influ
ence.’
Taking care to keep the two skeletons apart, we dried them off in the living-room, sitting cross-legged on the floor and using opposite corners of the same large towel.
‘What about this black stuff?’ Helena asked.
‘It’s pretty stubborn. I couldn’t get it off.’
Helena took Burton, all clean now and wrapped in towels, back to the closet. I kicked aside the rug, and laid out the other set of bones according to size on the grained yellow wood of the floor.
Scrubbed and buffed, they’d come up a porous colour between yellow and grey, with various intermediate shades of brown. The mouth had no teeth, we noticed now, and the skull was bulbous at the forehead, but still it was unmistakably the intense skeletal face of a homo sapiens, an actual human person.
It didn’t scare either of us. It wasn’t a dead body; it was older than that, and old bones were deceptively lightweight, and out in the open there was a palpable thingness about them. They were just things. Helena picked up an arm-bone. She smelled it, then put it back.
‘Nothing. No effect whatsoever.’
‘On you.’
‘It’s in the past, Jay. That little phase is over. You are never going to wake up and find yourself a completely different person. You are what you are.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Suggestible, mainly. Now let’s see who we’ve got.’
Helena sat on the front edge of the armchair and bumped it forward to look directly down on the bones, her hands flat between her thighs. After a long time, weighing the bones very carefully in the balance, she said: ‘It could be anybody.’
‘Don’t be daft. I wouldn’t have dug up just anybody. It wouldn’t make sense.’
‘There must be clues. We should be able to figure it out.’
‘How?’
For the next hour and a half, we worked at reassembling a human skeleton, mixing, matching, making the shape. On all fours on the woodblock floor, we circled the bones like insects, and gradually, the human skeleton began to defeat us. Chips and sticks of bone were left spare, probably from the feet or the tricky fingers, or the hollow section of spine backed up from pelvis to skull. We couldn’t make it all fit.
The bones, in our provisional arrangement, were running. Flat out, glancing behind, jaw dropped open, eye-sockets wide and aghast.
It wasn’t very big. And all the teeth were missing. I went to check in the shower, and poked through what was left of the mud in the bin-bag, but I didn’t find any teeth. Back with the bones, I stared hard at what we actually had.
‘Stop,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve got it.’
‘Who?’
‘Charlie Chaplin. Look at him.’
Without any discussion, our first instinct had been to assemble the makeshift skeleton in full flight, like Charlie in a Keystone caper, scarpering from a livid fat flatfoot. Now why would we have done that?
‘Durr,’ Helena said, tapping the side of her head with a finger. ‘Chaplin’s in Vevey, not Geneva. Try again.’
‘It’s quite small,’ I said lamely. ‘Maybe that’s important.’
‘You’re right. It isn’t very big.’
‘But celebrities are famously smaller than they look.’
‘Or maybe not. There might be pieces missing. He might be bigger than he looks.’
Helena was back on her knees, rethinking the legs, bringing the feet down flat, heel to heel. The bony arms she assembled close against the body, with the skull now straight on so that its empty eye-sockets looked directly upwards, its jaw still open and awe-struck. Helena closed its mouth. It now looked stubborn, jaw set, determined not to reveal any secrets.
‘Let’s be honest,’ Helena said. ‘This isn’t working.’
‘No.’
‘And we’d only make the situation worse if we put the bones back in the wrong grave.’
‘Probably,’ I said. ‘Though we could always just chuck them.’
‘Show some respect. I have a better idea.’
During her night alone at the hotel, and then again when she’d been rubbing and scrubbing at Burton, Helena had seen the truth that bones were just things, inanimate objects. They weren’t a unique point of contact between man and God. And they definitely weren’t people. Of course, she herself would never personally have dug anyone up, but seeing as we already had these bones, and they were already up, who would we actually be hurting if we decided to make the most of them?
‘Don’t think about the bones,’ Helena said. ‘Briefly, just for a moment or two, think about the money.’
‘We’re going to be a family,’ I agreed. ‘We’ll be needing some money.’
‘Even more so than usual. Just to get us a start in life.’
‘For the future.’ (And our baby, and my life as Jay Mason Minor at last finding its own unique shape.)
‘Our life,’ Helena insisted, ‘our life taking shape. We can’t rebury this skeleton for the simple reason that we don’t know who it is. Now think back to everything Moholy’s ever said. Is there any way we can exchange these bones for a decent amount of money?’
I went over to the window and looked out. It was dark now, but the cloud was higher, a solid all-night block rebounding the glare of Geneva’s street-lights. From the terraced lawns of his villa, strolling down to the lakeside, Moholy would be assessing the same overcast sky, the prospect of rain forever delaying the promised resurrection of Calvin.
If only the moon would break through, and the clouds crack apart like vertebrae.
Calvin’s Hip
‘The imitation of the saints will be useful in shaping life, if we learn from them sobriety, chastity, love, patience, temperance, contempt of the world, and other virtues.’
John Calvin, Commentary on Romans 4:23
HELENA WAS ASLEEP on the side of the bed nearest the window, breathing deeply and evenly. Personally, watching the pale violin of her back, I was thinking I like this very much, but still I couldn’t sleep. The moonlight was taunting me, a thin silver line between the curtains. This and the ache at my earlobe and almost everything else was making me anxious.
I slipped quietly out of bed, and padded through to the living-room, wanting to make certain that no phantom power lingered in the bones of the dead. In the curtainless window, a three-quarter moon was high and bright, flouting the absence of cloud. The ghostly light picked out our skeleton, rigid on its back, arms stiffly by its sides. I lay down next to it, close but not touching, like a new and considerate lover. And then I waited for its energy to make itself known. Come, now.
Nothing.
I turned on to my stomach, hands between my legs, cheek crushed against the woodblock floor, and squinted side-on at our amateur solution to the human puzzle. A rib was actually a forearm, I noticed. And that finger was a toe.
If I just shuffle that rib. If I give a little more space to the elbow. I had a sudden flurry of ideas for radical new solutions, and I was soon on my knees making the changes, all of which ended in failure. I put the bones back how they’d been before, with only minor adjustments, still some way from all the bones in all the right places, making the best connections. I tinkered a little at the edges, made superficial alterations, always aiming at the perfect skeleton as a kind of universal answer, a summary of the entire universe.
And once I had the bones true, some time soon I hoped, then between the flat rack of ribs I’d project a veined heart the size of a small fist, a garnet-coloured thing, blinking, beating. I’d join its clutched rhythm by arteries like plastic tubing to other major organs, to lungs creasing and billowing, to a liver trembling, to a curved palette of lamb-of-God kidneys. Then skin, going over twice at the elbows and knees, the slack sexual organs, adding hair on the legs and the backs of the hands, leaving clear the rising and falling chest.
Finally, most delicately, the face, the mouth, the tender eyelids, the eyes. Blue. Blue-green. I stopped at the face, concentrating, using the contours of the bones as a guide, eager to make it
right.
It was a thin face, about thirty-four, thirty-five at the most, a troubled face under darkish hair swept upwards in uncombed handfuls. The forehead was broad but the chin a little spent, the nose long and pointed from the pinch of three generations of vexed clerical fingers.
And I grimaced, gritted my teeth, and softly banged my clever forehead against the hard wooden floor. No, no, no. I was doing it again, always the same thing. That was me, I was describing myself, Jay Mason Minor, a selfish and unremarkable man of God.
It was no one special, with no special powers. We could do what we liked with it.
The next morning, I’d already cleaned out the shower by the time Helena came through from the bedroom, rubbing her eyes and yawning, wearing the stretched Jesus T-shirt I kept for jogging. I was now sweeping up in the living-room, where mud had dried in footprints across the woodblocks. It was a bright morning. The weather had held, and early sunlight flooded the room.
Helena stretched out her arms, frowned, then rearranged the skeleton in a stern, no-nonsense manner, bony hands on chipped hips, head slightly to one side, a foot raised and ready to stamp its Calvinist reproach on any suggestion of frivolity. The foot had a few pieces missing, undermining the effect.
‘Why not?’ she asked, admiring her work, checking it from different angles.
‘Why not what?’
‘You did actually dig up John Calvin. You blanked out. Why wouldn’t it be Calvin?’
‘Because his bones weren’t in the grave marked J.C., where they should have been.’
‘You were very drunk. Admit it, those bones could be anybody.’
‘I’m not disagreeing. The bones could be anybody.’
‘Ergo therefore hence. They could be the grim John Calvin.’
Dry Bones Page 19
