by Sarah Moss
‘Jesus, Mim.’ Not that I hadn’t thought about it. Not that part of my mind was not always going down the other road, the one we nearly took. Not that I didn’t find myself, in the middle of filling the washing machine or putting tinned tomatoes in the supermarket trolley, planning a funeral, finding the words to tell Rose that her sister was dead. ‘Buried, I think. To have a place to go. Because—’ I swallowed. ‘Because I can’t bear the idea. Of burning.’
Her hair, her skin, her eyes, flame and ash. The body I had known in baby creases, the feet I had tickled before they were flattened by walking.
‘If it happens again and I don’t survive, burn me, OK? It’s better for the environment, there isn’t room for everyone to be buried.’
Wait a minute. ‘It can’t be better for the environment. Burning requires energy and generates smoke. Burial’s just entropy. Decomposition.’
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, with rocks and stones and trees. My mother was buried in the grounds of the village church, under a headstone paid for by her parents.
‘OK, but then I want a green burial. I’ve seen them, you can have a cardboard coffin that biodegrades fast and a tree instead of a stone. There’s no excuse for ripping up mountains to quarry stones for graves.’
The sky was still brown and starless. A heavier vehicle passed on the road outside.
‘Mimi, you’re not going to die. You survived. We don’t have to plan your funeral.’
She pushed back her hair in the darkness. ‘I am going to die. We all are.’
‘Yes. But not yet.’
‘You don’t know that. People keep saying everything’s OK and it’s not OK. No-one knows when they’re going to die.’
‘Not usually, no. Things can still be OK.’
‘Until you die.’
‘Yes, until you die. And maybe thereafter, who knows. But meanwhile you’re alive.’
She grunted. ‘That’s totally banal. People keep saying things like that. Live every day as if it were your last – no-one would ever revise for their GCSEs or do their homework.’
I was getting cold. ‘I didn’t say live every day as if it were your last, terrible advice, everyone would spend all their time drunk and scared.’ And having sex, which I hadn’t, not for weeks. ‘I said that mortality and things being OK were compatible. Mim, most people in most times and most places knew death much more intimately than we do. Infant mortality rates are in some places and were here until very recently fifteen times ours. Whole generations lost to war. It’s our normality that’s odd, not theirs. People still took exams and went to work and wrote books.’
She pulled her knees up to her chest under the duvet. ‘Does that make you feel better, thinking about dead people’s bereavements?’
‘I don’t know. Not better. More accepting. More grateful to live now. And here.’ And not somewhere where children die violently every day, as they still do all over the world, and that doesn’t stop people taking exams and going to work or even starting wars. ‘We should both get back to sleep. Mum’s going to be getting up in a couple of hours.’
I stood up and she lay down again.
‘Are you going to be OK now?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We’re all going to die. Good night, Dad. Sleep well.’
In our bedroom, Emma’s face was blue-lit by her phone. She looked up. ‘Are the girls OK?’
I got back into bed and stretched my feet into the warmth on her side. ‘Yes. Mimi’s awake. Thinking about death. She was a bit upset.’
‘She OK now?’
OK, all right, phrases to which we cling, the comfort blankets or blindfolds of our time and place. There is no pre-twentieth-century version of ‘OK’, which may or may not tell us that it is a modern delusion that normality is not frightening, that it is normal not to be frightened. I personally don’t like depressing subjects, people say, as if mortality is a lifestyle choice, disease and violence and sorrow a matter of taste.
‘She’s still scared of dying. But I think that probably is OK.’
Emma scrolled something on her phone. Put that bloody thing down.
‘Probably inevitable, anyway. We should maybe look at some psych support for her, there’s probably a bit of PTSD going on there.’
I moved back to my side of the bed. ‘I wish you could stop medicalising everything. It doesn’t have to be PTSD, she might just be scared because death is scary and she nearly died and now has to live with the idea that it might happen again.’
Emma put down her phone, though its glow continued to pollute the darkness of our bedroom. ‘Yes, and if she’s still too scared to sleep in a couple of weeks, a few counselling sessions might help her manage the symptoms.’
I turned over. Don’t say it. It won’t help. ‘Em, it’s not about sessions and symptoms. She nearly died. She’s scared of death. She’s actually being pretty bloody brave and clever about being scared of death.’
She sighed. ‘I didn’t say she wasn’t brave and clever. You can be brave and clever and have PTSD, in which case a brave and clever response might be to seek professional help.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘OK. Let’s talk about it another time.’
‘Sure. Fine. I’ll get back to sleep.’
And to all appearances, she did, but after a while I went downstairs, made a cup of tea and opened my laptop.
azure and purple and gold
He had won, but he was an architect; he knew that no-one possesses a building, especially one that has not been built. He had to present his design to the Royal Fine Art Commission, where he had enemies as well as friends. The Commission interviewed him, and postponed its decision. He had to appear before the Central Council for the Care of Churches, which convened in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. He spoke there for two hours, of sacrifice and resurrection, and the next day they told him to proceed. He presented his designs to the Reconstruction Committee, and they allowed him to approach his chosen engineer, Ove Arup, and his chosen weaver, Graham Sutherland. Arup accepted immediately, perhaps with the mathematics of the pendant pillars already sparkling in his mind. Sutherland wasn’t sure, wanted to talk about it, was living in Villefranche-sur-Mer and thought Spence ought to come out for a week or two.
It was January in the West Midlands, rationing still in force. He went.
*
Boats painted red and yellow and green nosing the edges of the Mediterranean, white houses under a blue sky, terraced vineyards climbing the hills above the sea. Bouillabaisse, aoïli, sharp-crusted bread, papery ham. Wine rough from the salt air and sun-bleached soil. They read the Book of Revelation together, he and Sutherland. Behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. They, between the deep sky and the faded hillside, under the sun, spoke of colour. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone; and there was a rainbow round about the throne in sight like unto an emerald.
They went to Matisse’s chapel at Vence: white marble, such thin glass stained azure and purple and gold that it was like being inside a lantern.
They went to the Musée d’Antibes, a white shell for Picasso’s tapestries. Like that, they said, yes, like that.
whatever he was looking for
My father left.
Don’t take me to the station, he said, I can walk, it’s not far, I’m going to be sitting for the next seven hours on the train. We’ll walk with you, I said, Mimi and I, we need the exercise and we can pick up some bread from the good bakery on the way back. You do your work, he said, and Mimi said, you stay here and write, Dad, and I’ll walk with Grandpa, if you give me some money I’ll get the bread too. But— I said. But you haven’t been out alone since it happened, I did not say. But what if despite our knowledge that you have often eaten toast and butter and Marmite for breakfast and then climbed a mountain or played netball or swum fifty lengths, in fact walking to the station after this meal once again combines the fatal ingredients? But what if you drop your epipen somewher
e, or you carry it but anaphylaxis strikes too fast for you to use it? Thank you, Miriam, my father said, that would be very kind, and when she went to put her shoes on he said to me, it’s the first time I’ve heard her volunteer to leave the house, she’s going to be all right, Adam, you’ve mitigated the risks as far as you can and now you have to let her be fifteen again. I can’t, I thought, I need to check with Emma, we can’t just let her walk the streets alone. OK, I said, all right. Take your phone, Mimi, and for goodness’ sake keep the damn thing turned on, you’re not in hiding, no-one’s after you, the whole point is that we can contact you when we need to. Keep your hair on, Dad, she said, and what kind of bread do you want?
Come visit, my father said, OK? Come and see me. You need to see the sea. The children need the beach. Promise me you’ll come, at Christmas or in the spring, and he hugged me in his easy, American way, a thing I never quite learnt from him.
The house sat cold and tight around me, as if the walls had inched inwards when everybody left, as if the cold water evaporating from the clothes drying in the bathroom were a chill fog drifting down the stairs. Traffic passed outside like waves breaking on a shore, an implacable rhythm of people going places, and from the hall I could hear the woman next door emptying her dishwasher. My father and Miriam would be crossing the main road now, under bare trees with the drifts of dead leaves damp under their feet; I remembered gathering the fallen leaves in the orchard at Bryher Farm with Petroc and James, raking up piles of amber and yellow and red and scooping them into a wheelbarrow, the brandy smell of windfall plums in the long grass and James, who was the smallest, riding with the leaves in the barrow until we tried to tip him onto the compost heap. They would be walking along the avenue, where people our age who bought their first houses twenty years ago instead of ten tend to their vegetable gardens and buy new gravel for the drive. They would be all right, probably.
I began to put away the shoes dropped at the bottom of the stairs and pushed under the shoe cupboard. I shook out Rose’s purple coat and hung it on the hook I’d put up at child-height so she would be able to hang her own coat. The floor needed sweeping and mopping again and there was another chip in the woodwork. Not that the mud on the floor and the chips in the paint are not, after all, signs of life.
put your bloody shoes on
I had an email from Simon Godnestone-pronounced-Gunston, saying that he was glad to hear that my daughter was out of hospital and wondered if he might now ask me if I could join a project meeting next Wednesday? Everyone would understand of course if I was still needed at home, but if I could spare a couple of hours it would be good for the team to share their work and progress since the last meeting.
I’d stopped between taking the laundry out of the washing machine and hanging it on the airers in the bathroom to check my phone, to see if there were any messages from the world beyond the kitchen and other people’s dirty pants. Dampness from the load in my arms began to press through my jumper and T-shirt. A meeting. I used to believe that friends who’d stayed in academia, Anna Bennett and Tom who’s now at Cambridge, exaggerated about their colleagues’ behaviour, until I attended the first of these meetings. I understand now why the derangement of senior professors forms a significant proportion of my friends’ conversation, but for a visitor with little at stake it is all highly entertaining, and makes me feel better about not having a proper job in which such behaviour would be normal. I needed distraction. And the meetings take place in a meeting-room with coffee urns and pairs of biscuits in tartan wrappers, where people who do not think about death all the time become exercised about the politics of procedures. There are some adults, interested in ideas. I understand that the novelty of these things wears off, but the thought that someone considered my presence worth coffee and biscuits and carpet and central heating was exotic. But Mimi, I thought. There seemed to be no progress with her Individual Health Plan and she was still spending her days at home, lying on her bed reading or communing with her laptop except when I compelled her to run errands or walk in the park and along the canal with me. I could perhaps leave her in the university library, where she could read peacefully about man’s inhumanity to man while I ate the free biscuits and, if anyone cared which they wouldn’t, defended my use of long words in a geolocative media app.
I hung the clothes and then went to find her. Her bedroom door was shut and inside the air was thick with the smell of nail varnish. She was lying on her stomach on the floor, doing something on her laptop which she closed as I opened the door. Come on, Mimi, I said, I told you we need to go into the town this morning, we’re out of fruit and there won’t be any dinner if we don’t get some ingredients. You can choose if you like, the spinach and feta thing or the green pancakes you liked last time, the ones with the lime yogurt? Yeah, she said, in a minute, I’m just doing this. But you’re always just doing something, I said, please just stop now and come and put your shoes on, you’ve already closed the window, whatever it was. No, she said, I told you, in a minute, I need to finish something, please stop annoying me, I don’t actually care what we have for dinner and you wouldn’t like it if—OK, I said, but please really just a minute, I’m going to go to the loo and then I want you to come downstairs and get ready without any more nagging. You’re too old for this, I didn’t say, it was faster when you were a toddler and I had to take a spare set of clothes in case you wet yourself and a sippy cup of water and a couple of healthy snacks and get you into a puddle suit and wellies or cover you in sunscreen and argue about a hat, it was faster when your sister was a baby and I had to replenish the nappy bag and make sure that I had enough of Emma’s expressed milk stored and carried at the correct temperature but not so much that it would be wasted, and all those years I thought it would only get easier. And in truth, I thought, going down the stairs, into the bathroom, many things are easier, I must remember that, it is only leaving the house that seems to remain inexplicably harder than arranging the invasion of a small country. I went down to the hall and put on my own shoes and coat, remembered to take two from the flock of cotton shopping bags whose advance through our cupboards has no effect at all on the number of plastic bags we require, and of course she still did not come down. Miriam, I called, Miriam, come here, come down now, you’ve had nearly ten minutes, we’re only going to the greengrocer, please come down. I could have written enough articles to get a job in the time I spend waiting for the girls to put on their shoes and coats; multiply by most of the parents in Britain and the time spent waiting for children who are not putting on their shoes and coats probably constitutes a significant economic loss to the nation. Miriam, for – for the love of little green apples, put your bloody shoes on when you’re asked.
No, I had meant to stop doing this, to live in a state of grace bequeathed by the state of emergency. She is alive, she is clever and brave still, undiminished by her probable four minutes of hypoxia, and we are vanishingly lucky, other families whose children stopped breathing would give anything at all to have someone able and unwilling to put on her shoes. She came thudding down the stairs, her feet threatening to crash through the matchstick bones of our house. Chill, Dad, you’ll give yourself a stroke, look, I’m here, and here are my shoes, on my feet, it’s OK now.
I opened the door for her. ‘I have a meeting on campus next week. I thought you could come and spend some time in the library.’
She zipped up her coat. ‘Won’t I be back at school by then?’
‘I’m working on it. I need to phone people again.’
I had phoned people, the school and the school liaison nurse, but only once. Almost as if I didn’t want her to go back.
‘I need to go back, Dad. I’ve missed almost half a term.’
‘Quarter of a term. But yes, you do, and I’ll call them again.’
‘Then you’ll be able to go to your meeting. And if not, you can just leave me at home.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We’ll see.’
wherever you want singers
He wanted to get the music right. He wanted the building to sing. The Reconstruction Committee told him to talk to a famous organist and professor of music, but the famous organist didn’t like his building. The volume of the nave was too great, the professor said. There was nowhere for dust to accumulate and so the acoustics would never work. The congregation wouldn’t be able to hear the priest, he said, much less the organ or the choir. Hopeless, the whole thing, what’s the point of a cathedral if you can’t hear the words? Drop the roof by ten feet, he said, and while you’re about it do you really think that roof will keep out rain?
A friend passed him along to a man who’d worked on the Royal Festival Hall. That was better. They found a firm of organ-builders and appointed a panel to write an organ specification. But meanwhile the new expert thought the two choir stalls were too far apart. Bring them closer together, he said, or the music won’t sing, but bringing them closer together would have blocked the congregation’s view of the altar and there had already been years of argument about the congregation’s view of the altar. He thought maybe the Bishop and the Expert could sort it out between them, but they didn’t. The Bishop thought the music was secondary to ecclesiastical ritual and the Expert thought you couldn’t have ecclesiastical ritual without music. In a 1950s episcopal and professional way, they turned red-faced and shouted at each other.
He made the choir stalls movable. Far apart, close together, rearranged so you can get a brass band or an entire orchestra between the altar and the congregation, or indeed right up under the West Screen. Push them around like chairs, sing wherever you want singers.
before it was too late
Emma had worked the last two Saturdays and so had a Thursday off; it is the men in her practice who take Mondays and Fridays as time off in lieu and she is unable or unwilling to challenge this convention. Emma’s days off are rarely successful, for while by Sunday she is usually able to sit over a second cup of coffee for up to half an hour after breakfast, midweek she is too much in the habit of producing a quantifiable outcome and a new patient every ten minutes. The night before a day off, she makes a list of objectives: essential, desirable, ideal, and I have never known her not reach at least the middle of the desirables. We could go out to lunch together, we used to agree, but on the rare occasions when we did Emma kept her phone on the table and wanted to leave as soon as we’d finished the main course. We could have had afternoon sex of the kind unknown since Miriam’s birth and rare before that, but when I came to find her, on the phone or computer switching our utilities providers or booking a cottage for half-term or arranging her annual quota of Continuing Professional Development, sorting through the girls’ outgrown clothes or steam-cleaning the oven, she patted my hands and pushed them away. I know I always say later, but I really have to finish this, it’s been bothering me for weeks. A reproach, a ball-withering reproach: I work sixty hours a week and then have to spend my day off doing your jobs.
