Dance on My Grave

by Aidan Chambers

  ‘O dear!’ she said at the sight of my face. ‘You’re not taking that up, are you, love?’

  ‘Taking what up?’ I said.

  ‘Make-up and suchlike,’ she said.

  ‘No no,’ I said, scrubbing at my face with a kitchen towel, having forgotten by now I had any make-up on. Just trying something out—with a friend—for a play.’

  ‘I thought you might have taken to it permanent.’

  I laughed nervously. ‘Would I do a thing like that?’

  Mother said, ‘Your Uncle Jack did. Clothes as well. Women’s I mean. You never know, it might run in the family.’

  ‘I’ve never even heard of Uncle Jack.’

  ‘Your dad won’t hear him mentioned.’

  ‘Good God! Just because he wears women’s clothes?’

  ‘I should never have said anything.’

  ‘Don’t fret, I’ll say nowt.’

  She took up her duster from the kitchen table. ‘Give your face a good wash before he comes in, pet.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the garden.’

  ‘I’m going upstairs anyway.’

  ‘You’re all right, are you, love? You seem upset still.’

  ‘I’m okay. Really. Don’t fuss, eh?’

  I went. Locked my door. Never locked my door before. What/who was I trying to keep out? Or keep in?

  I sat at my table. Didn’t know what to do. Couldn’t read. Couldn’t bear the idea of music dinning in my ears. No one to talk to. Longing. For him, of course.

  As a kid I sometimes kept a diary. Like most people do, I guess, when they are kids. I always got sick of it pretty soon. Never knew what to say.

  Now it seemed like an instinct. I took a piece of paper, wound it into the typewriter, and started typing. Without pause for thought. Under remote control. A robot amanuensis rattling down all the things I wanted to say. A word processor pouring onto white pages black letters in minor key. I kept this effluent diary for the next ten days. Talking to myself about what had happened, what was happening. About B. On the tenth day I was arrested. The diary ends then.

  A lot of the stuff in it I’ve used to help me write this account—memories of Barry and what we did together. I think now that what I was trying to do with that diary was to write him back to life.

  I’m going to burn the pages of my diary as soon as I’ve finished writing this account, because they are too embarrassing to keep. Like keeping your own excrement.

  But some of the entries are about the time post mortem, and they tell that part of the story best, because they were forged by the present moment. They’re hot from the press of life, and I want you to have a glimpse of how I was then. The chewed-up mess that was Henry S. R. So:

  27/EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY OF A MADMAN

  Sunday: dead dead dead dead dead dead dead

  Never send to know for whom the bell tolls for who knows if life is not death, and death life, and silence sounds no worse than cheers after death has stopped the ears and I don’t think I can live without him for I know death hath ten thousand several doors for men to make their exits but why his now this way and me still here not gone with him because all I do is remember remember remember me remember when to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, and with old woes new wail my dear times waste; then can I drown an eye unused to flow for precious friend hid in death’s dateless night and weep afresh loves ne’er long cancelled woe and moan the expense of many a vanished night.

  Yes. But no drowned eye for me. No tears because my eyes have gone cold. Only know what I feel by watching what I do, hearing what I say, reading what I write.

  His face. I see his face. Not his living face. His death face. The skin like plastic, his tan gone flat, his hands the hands of a shopwindow dummy.

  I wish I had not gone to see him. His dead him is the only him I see in the dateless night.

  I want a photo. I want a picture of him before death set in. I need one. MUST HAVE ONE.

  Later: Went out and phoned Mrs Gorman. Said: I’ve got to have a photo, won’t you give me one, please give me one. I was polite. But all she did was swear and scream till a man’s voice came on, though I could still hear her yelling in the background, and he told me this was enough, stop phoning or else he would sort me out, or get the police. But, I said, there’s the question of the dance, I have to dance, you see. Dance, he said, what the hell are you talking about? On his grave, I said. WHAT!! this man said, all capitals and exclamations—WHAT!! (like an amorous bullfrog). I promised Barry, I said, to dance on his grave. He would have danced on mine, I said, if I had died first, it was an oath. WHAT!! this man shouted again, you’re crazy, get off this phone. I said, Only it’s hard, because now I can only see him dead and I want to remember him how he was, you must know that, must understand, surely?

  Then the dialling tone. He must have put the phone down.

  This is followed by a very long entry all about my first meeting with Barry and what I thought of him and what we did together the first night. I remember it took me hours to write, well into the night, and that I only stopped when my father came pounding in, livid, and storming about the noise keeping him awake. So I packed up and went to bed, but as soon as I lay down, this awful fierce headache started, so bad I was moaning and tumbling about. It went on all the rest of the night, till my mother heard me spewing in the bathroom about five o’clock and came to see what was happening.

  Next day I wrote about it in my diary and went on:

  Monday, late: That headache was a migraine. So the doc says. I spewed and groaned and shivered and couldn’t stand a light on because it was like having needles pushed through my eyes into my brain.

  Mother called the doc this morning. All day I lay in bed drained. The headache abated to a rumble like a departed thunderstorm circling on the horizon of my mind. The doc arrived sometime this afternoon; I don’t know exactly when, I didn’t care. Peering, prodding, poking, tapping, questioning: the usual routine. Mother standing at the foot of the bed, watching, crumpling her pinny between her fingers, even answering. ‘You should tell the doctor about poor Barry Gorman, love.’ ‘And then there’s his exam results, doctor. He’s worried about them, I think.’ ‘And his career. He’s worried about that as well.’ ‘When he was little he had a nasty fall. Cut his head badly. You never know.’

  Pills, of course. ‘To relax you.’ And: ‘Keep rested. Nothing seriously wrong. Stay in bed a day or two.’

  Outside the door: ‘Just overwrought, I think. Nothing physically the matter as far as I can see. Watch his diet. No cheese . . . Keep him quiet for a while . . . If the headaches go on I’ll put him in hospital for a few checks . . .’

  They muttered their way downstairs. Why do adults always think that a door is soundproof?

  Then Mother waitressing the invalid with boiled egg and thin sliced bread-and-butter on a tray. And blooming. Not a fluttering duster in sight.

  But I can’t bear the cans on my head and music is like road-drills, and the only way I can write this is with a pencil on a pad as I sit up in bed because I can’t stand the sound of the typewriter and if I get up I feel dizzy and the headache starts coming on worse. It is still there, rumbling in the back of my head.

  Barry. Barry. O Barry.

  There is a long passage of badly scrawled stuff after this, all jumbled memories and descriptions of us together in bed. I’ll spare you the details, Ms A.!

  Tuesday: Are they burying him? Will I know? Will I know where? Will his be the only new grave? How many Jewish burials are there every week in this town?

  I’ve just looked up in my death book about the customs for Jewish funerals. They don’t put up memorial stones for at least a year after burial. How will I know which grave is his?

  The headache is getting worse again. Later: Dad has taken to sitting by my bed when he gets home from work. The weather. The garden. Work. How am I? Then silence.

>   He sits avoiding my eyes, except for occasional curious glances. As if he were trying to weigh up a stranger he can’t quite understand. This evening he tried talking about the books, the music in my room. But abandoned the attempt after ten minutes. He was here for an hour. An hour!

  I studied him tonight as I sat up in bed. He’s a littler man than I thought. He seemed to shrink as I looked. I’m as tall as he is. His face is fatter than mine, his body is thicker, tougher as well. But he’s always seemed to me bigger than he really is. If he were a stranger, I’d pass him in the street and not even notice him: a middle-aged, tired-looking, balding little man.

  I am surprised by this discovery. When I look at him again he will seem a different person. Someone I hardly know.

  I felt sorry for him.

  Wednesday: Headache again, all day. Spewing.

  Thursday: His burial is in the paper. Mother showed. And a report of the inquest. Accidental death. Accidental!

  Gone. All that weight of soil on top of him. The darkness in his coffin. But he isn’t there? Is he? Is he in his bubble of speed?

  This bloody rotten stinking puking headache again.

  Friday: Seven weeks.

  And seven days ago.

  We fought.

  He died.

  I live.

  Headache again. Spewing again.

  dance dance dance dance dance dance.

  Dance of Death?

  Dance for Death?

  Whose dance? Whose death?

  Dance.

  28/That night I danced the first dance. Didn’t know then, of course, that I would dance a second time. All I knew was that I had to dance because I had sworn an oath that I would.

  I woke at ten past two, headache registering about force seven on the Richter scale. I thought: I’m stuck with this till I’ve kept my promise, I just know it. Might as well get on.

  I pushed a couple of the doc’s pills down my throat and got up.

  Night was the only time: I would have been stopped and caught during the day.

  ‘What are you doing up?’ My mother, sotto voce from their bedroom, its door always at the ready, half-open.

  I paused on the dark stairway, my shoes in my hand.

  ‘Having a rest,’ I sotto voced back.

  The rustle of bedclothes, and my mother, ghostly, on the landing. ‘You shouldn’t be up. You’re in bed to have a rest.’

  ‘I want a rest from having a rest. I’m sick of it.’

  ‘What have you got on? You’re dressed!’

  ‘I’m just going for a walk. Some fresh air.’

  ‘At two in the morning! You’ll catch your death.’

  ‘I’ll wrap up.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d better ask your dad.’

  Reaching up, I put a hand over hers on the banister.

  ‘No, leave him. He’ll only create if you wake him.’

  She waited. Put her other hand over mine.

  ‘You’ve got me properly worried, pet. I never know what you’re up to these days. You never tell us anything. And these migraines . . .’

  ‘I’ll be all right.’

  ‘There’s sommat wrong.’

  ‘Growing pains,’ I said, trying to smile through the dark.

  ‘We should never have moved,’ Mother said.

  I crept downstairs. She followed, her slippers plopping behind me.

  ‘Leaving the place we knew,’ she said. ‘I never felt right about it.’

  ‘Well, we’re here now,’ I said pulling on an anorak. ‘You go back to bed. I’ll be okay. Honest.’

  ‘Let me make a cup of tea.’

  ‘I just want a change from lying in bed.’

  ‘Put something warm inside you.’

  ‘I don’t feel like eating.’

  She waited. I could feel the anxiety coming out of her like heat from a radiator. I thought: All the time she worries about something, about somebody—me, Dad, what’s happened, what’s going to happen, what’s not going to happen. Expecting disaster. And who worries about her? I never do. She’s always just been there, when I wanted, ready. If I think of her when I’m on my own, she’s like she was when I was little. Laughing, busy, always on the go, and talking all the time—to me, to Dad, to her friends who were always popping in, to shopkeepers.

  I thought: But she isn’t like that now. Now she’s a frightened woman who hides. I knew I had seen her changing. I must have done: I was there. But I hadn’t noticed. Hadn’t wanted to notice, I guess. Because I didn’t understand? Because I hadn’t wanted to do anything about it? Because I didn’t know what to do? Because it embarrassed me? Or got in my way?

  She said, snuggling my clothes, ‘Don’t know what the doctor will say.’

  ‘Then don’t tell him. I’ll take care.’

  ‘Don’t stay out long. And don’t go far. This time of night, you don’t know who could be about.’

  She reached up and felt my brow. Leaned further, kissed me awkwardly on the cheek.

  ‘Go back to bed,’ I said.

  She looked at me, a featureless wraith in the dark, then turned, slipped back upstairs.

  29/Getting into the cemetery was easy. I cycled a safe distance past the entrance, because the lodge at the gate is lived in. The stone wall is about waist high; I lifted my bike over to hide it from any stray police patrol. A grave length behind the wall is a man-high hedge, too thick to push through. But an avenue of trees grows between wall and hedge, their lower branches lopped off. I scrambled up one nicely supplied with amputated knobs in just the right places to assist a climber, grabbed a branch, swung from it and pitched myself onto the ground inside the cemetery. I didn’t bother to wonder how to get out. By this time all I felt was a desperate determination, a singleness of mind that left no room for any other thought except getting to Barry’s grave and dancing.

  And I might as well have been guided by radar—controlled by whom? Barry’s ghost?—because I have no memory of the weather or the kind of night it was. Not a memory I could swear was accurate. No rain, because I would remember being wet. But how dark? I close my eyes, try to recall. I see the wall, grey, shadowed deeply but catching a glim of light from a street lamp some distance down the road. (Subconsciously I must have chosen this spot because it is in a darker patch of road.)

  When I drop onto the ground on the other side I am among graves. Older ones. Stately and aged. Their headstones stand like old folk parading in an ordered silent crowd. The night is even darker here; gloomier, even more shadowed. Now, remembering, I am afraid. This is, after all, a burial place. But then, all I worried about was the living. Me being caught.

  I waited, listening. A car purred by on the road, its headlights flooding the trees. After it, no footfall, no cough, no voice, no husp of breath. Rustlings among fallen leaves. Mice?

  I’d brought a small flashlight. Shading its face with my hand, I switched it on. Let a beam find the ground at my feet. Guide me through the graves to find the path, a warm sandy glow in the night. Switched off.

  The Jewish burial ground lies at the back of the main cemetery, separated by a hedge. The path, worming through the lines of graves, would take me to it. I set off, keeping to the grass at the path’s edge so that my feet would not give me away on the crunchy gravel.

  Pain thumped in my head at every step. But there was relief in knowing I was doing what I had promised. Somehow it was easier to breathe; and the cool night air on my forehead was soothing too.

  30/Looking across the dark line of hedge, the Jewish part was a ruckled white sheet laid over the centre of a square field of cropped grass. I had no difficulty pushing through the loose bushiness of the privet, and did not pause for thought. I was urgent, spelled. Wasn’t even wondering any more how I would know Barry’s grave; I felt I would when I saw it.

  Began searching along the first line of graves, walking down the row. Inspecting the troops. Stand by your graves. Most were decked out with white headstones and surrounds, black-lettered epitaphs in Eng
lish and Hebrew scored into the faces. Some were topped by a plain slab of stone, like a lid on a box. A few were marked by shiny black memorials, lettered in gold. One or two leaned precariously, as if the body beneath had turned over in its bed and tipped the stone askew. Singles, doubles; here and there gaps between, waiting no doubt for relatives to join them. And every so often a mound of soil, mostly unmarked except for a little metal stake at the foot with a number printed on a disk. They looked like big lollipops, and marked the new graves occupied during the last year.

  Barry’s had to be one of these. In the first three or four rows none was new enough to be his. Their soil was dry, crusted. But then came one that was fresh. I switched on my torch. Played it over the hump of dark earth. Barry’s. But how to be sure?

  The grave was at the end of a line, on an aisle that separated the square patch of burial ground into two blocks, like seats in a theatre. The lollipop stake was no use. I pulled it out, inspecting it closely back and front. But nothing; only the number. And what’s in a number?

  I walked round the grave, hoping to find some sign, as though Barry, before they stowed him away for eternity, might have dropped some clue, telling me he was there. Ridiculous. Nothing, of course.

  The headstone on the grave next door was larger than most, and one of those that leaned on its side. As I edged past along the narrow strip of grass separating it from Barry’s grave, the light from my torch spilled across its white face.

  The black letters of the name DAVID GORMAN spoke out at me. I had found Barry; this man next to him had to be his father. The dates on the headstone fitted. And on the other side was a grassy gap, space for two more graves before the next memorial staring ghostly into the night.

  31/I don’t much like telling what happened next.

  I started crying. Stood there between Mr Gorman’s grave and Barry’s, staring at the pile of earth spotlit at my feet, tears began streaming down my face. At first I thought they were beads of sweat caused by the exertion of getting here. But my eyes filled, my nose ran, my breath erupted in my throat, and I knew in the numb core of myself that I was weeping.

  The thing is, I didn’t know what I was weeping about. That probably sounds crackers. (But I am—I told you so at the start of this.) What I mean is, I wasn’t crying only because of sadness. I was also crying because of anger. In fact, I felt angry more than I felt sad. I didn’t know why—not then. (I do now, I think. But if I am to keep everything in its right order so that you’ll understand properly, I can’t tell you why here; it comes later.)