“I’ve got something to tell you,” called Ellis. “A sort of message from the past. Can I come on up?”
“I’ll jump,” said Christo, though he sounded a little bored repeating this to Ellis. “And I’ll take the kid with me.”
“Yes, I know,” said Ellis. “It’s just that I wouldn’t mind being able to sit up. I mean, you know me.”
“What’s this message of yours?” asked Christo, his voice becoming the languid voice of the master.
“I can’t tell you from here,” said Ellis, in a tone that deliberately whined. “If I could just …”
“Oh, Jesus!” said Christo impatiently. “OK … come on up. Just don’t try anything.”
Ellis took a deep breath and began to wriggle upwards and onwards. Christo watched him with apparent amusement, sinking down on his haunches, then seating himself beside the backpack. By now, Ellis had lost the advantage of his original thrust towards the platform. He had planned to act an incompetent clumsiness, but found he did not have to act. His nails scraped on the tiles, his toes arched inwards, pushing as well as they could, though there was nothing much to push against. He slid backwards a little, flattening himself and closing his eyes as he did so.
Unbidden, the image of Leona advanced towards him through a tunnel of shadow and light. Abruptly, he imagined himself dead and Leona busy with his body, giving him the start of a smile with which to face eternity. Ellis scrabbled again, and this time found purchase on the tiles. The fingers of his left hand, straining upwards, hooked themselves around a section of orange scaffolding. Christo aimed a half-playful kick at him, but Ellis was prepared for that and bent his head sideways. Christo’s foot struck his shoulder, but he was holding on tightly by then. And after that, it was easy.
Without looking at Christo (for he knew it was important not to look directly at Christo in case he accidentally suggested a challenge, defiance, or even pity), he pulled himself up, then up again, until he sat panting at last, on the same platform Christo was occupying, one hand possessively grasping the top bar of the backpack which leaned between them.
Shelley, distracted by Ellis’s arrival, had stopped grizzling. She turned her head to stare at him. It seemed that every thread of her silver-fair hair stood on end, reminding Ellis vividly of the fringe of the shawl that had been wrapped around the stolen computer. How childish, how strangely innocent that chase across the hills seemed from up here on the platform, with Christo watching him across the head of the child. A strong smell assaulted him. Shelley was stinking, and he realised that Christo would not have fed or changed her all day.
But Ellis knew he must not look too interested or involved. So he sighed and glanced away, pretending that he and Christo were two mountaineers who, having reached the summit, were now entitled to rest and admire the view. He was looking down on an expanse of roofs, a geography of corrugated iron, hard angles broken by the pillowy green of trees. The hunched shoulders of distant willows marked the line of the river and, beyond them, the mirror-glass of a bank reflected blue sky and white clouds in a way that made them look more exact, yet somehow less real, than sky and clouds in a painting.
“Did you lot ring the police?” asked Christo sulkily.
Ellis, looking down into the street below, saw the roof of a police car, and people beginning to collect and stare upward. Incredibly, one of them had what looked like a video camera pointed towards them. The stage on which he found himself might be a little narrow, but he had what an actor needed most: he had a crowd ready to applaud him. It occurred to him that, deep down, Christo, too, might relish an audience.
“Ursa rang, I think,” he said, as if it didn’t matter too much, and found he had had practice with this sort of voice. He had used it recently, over and over again, when talking to people about Simon. For this was the voice that allowed him to acknowledge Simon’s death and yet prevented others from guessing just how Simon’s final expression dominated his thoughts and even his dreams. And once he had Simon’s image fixed in his head, Ellis took it prisoner, focusing on it. This time at least, Simon’s ghost could not set itself free from him. He was commanding it because he might well have a use for it. “Ursa’s frightened because …” he jerked his head sideways at Shelley, “because of the kid.”
“Yeah, well, so she should be,” said Christo. “I mean, Ursie’s nothing … nothing! She’s not as pretty as Leona, and she runs on and on about going to university as if it were a big deal or something. And she lives … well, you know where she lives, don’t you?” He broke off. “I wanted her to move in with me. I could have got away from my crowd and she could have got away from hers. She was so bloody lucky,” he cried suddenly. “She had the chance to get away from that dump she lives in. And that dreary old shit-head, Monty.”
Ellis did not know how to reply.
“Nice thought of yours – I mean trying to share your luck,” he began awkwardly, but Christo was unexpectedly infuriated by this.
“Share my luck?” he cried. “What’s lucky about me? You think I enjoy having parents acting so smart about getting separated? ‘Oh yes! We’ve screwed everything up! Let’s buy some champagne and make a joke of it.’ They’re so up themselves. And everyone behaves as if having money’s such a great blessing.”
“Be real! It is,” said Ellis mildly. “Especially if you haven’t got any,” he added.
“It doesn’t buy happiness,” said Christo, sounding as if this were a brand-new idea. He turned his head, frowning at Ellis. “You used to go around with Simon … Simon … Simon Carroll, wasn’t it? That kid who topped himself a few months ago. Well, his family was rolling. And it didn’t help him. You know, my old man is just walking away. He’s off to Wellington. Well, he’s not unloading it all on me.”
“Unloading what?” asked Ellis, without any clear idea what Christo was talking about.
“Everything,” said Christo with a sort of confused discontent. “My mother! All that stuff.” His tone was one of loathing. “You ought to hear her. ‘We’ll really have to get to know each other now,’ she keeps on saying. (Laugh! Laugh!) ‘We’ll have such a lot of fun.’ What she means is, I’ll be there to do the housework and be her chauffeur and feed the dog if she decides to stay out all night. Well, fuck it! I might just do a Simon Carroll on them.”
He rattled the backpack, though this time with less conviction, Ellis thought. And he felt himself feeding on that uncertainty. He felt himself silently growing in power.
“Not worth it,” he said softly.
“Not worth it for a wimp like you!” declared Christo, his mouth pulled down in an aggressive sneer. And, at last, Ellis, catching Christo’s restless gaze, looked deeply into his eyes and smiled. Involuntarily, Christo leaned away from him. Ellis promptly leaned forward across the backpack.
“I’ll tell you why it’s not worth it,” he said, his voice calm, even quiet, the voice of a master. “Just shut up and listen!” he went on with soft urgency. The skull tattoo suddenly stung under his sleeve. He thought he could actually feel it smiling sympathetically as he smiled himself. “Because it might prove that you’re the wimp, and a bit of a voyeur, too!” he added triumphantly.
He saw he had confused Christo. “I mean,” he went on, desperate to work on what felt like an advantage, “I’ve had thoughts like that … that dying is the great, exciting, ultimate act, beyond anything else that anyone can do, and that everyone would be sorry when I was gone, and so on. The thing is, sitting up here, you’re thinking – you can’t help thinking – that you’ll be around to lap up other people’s misery … I mean, you’re imagining your dad suffering and being sorry at last, and your mum crying over her dear little boy. And you think they’ll suddenly realise how precious you were, and that you’ll have the fun of hearing them moan about how much they loved you, and how much they wish they’d been nicer to you, and how terrible it’s been for them to lose you. And so on! But you won’t hear anyone crying for you, and you won’t see anyone being sorry, becau
se you won’t be there at all! You won’t be anywhere, and you won’t be anything, and even the people who love you will begin to forget you almost at once. People don’t mean to forget – they just can’t help it. You’ll just start fading.”
And now Ellis felt himself filled with the power of true knowledge. Though he had missed the chance to say these things to Simon, his persistent but fading friend, strangely enough, he now had the chance to explain what he understood to Christo, whom he had always hated. Bits and pieces rushed together, drawn from the present and the past, to fit into a single, unswerving form. Voices that had never had anything to say to one another in real life ran together inside him so that Leona’s words sang through Simon’s. He must use everything he knew, showing no secret awe, no hidden respect for Simon’s choice.
“Big deal!” Christo was saying. “I don’t want to be anything. That’s the point.”
“Listen!” said Ellis, daring to interrupt him now. “Simon drank half a bottle of whisky, then poisoned himself … and all I can think is what a stupid, fucking idiot he was.”
He was surprised, not by the sadness in his voice, but by his own savage scorn. It sounded utterly genuine. (And it is! he thought almost simultaneously. Suddenly, out of the blue, this is exactly what I think of Simon choosing to die. I’m sad, but … what a fool he was.)
“He dreamed about making people sorry,” Ellis went on. “And they were sorry. But he didn’t enjoy any of it in the way he thought he would. Because he was nowhere. All anyone could do for him was to push the fluid out of his body – that’s called purging – and fill him with embalming fluid so he wouldn’t stink too soon. Of course, they closed his eyes, they tidied him up – they can use cosmetics with lead in them on dead people. Did you know that?” He looked at Christo critically. “Might improve you a bit. And someone … someone gave him a nice expression, but all that was for his mum and dad.”
“Shut up!” protested Christo. “Anyhow, you don’t know if he could see himself or not,” he added in a sulky voice. Ellis could feel, almost as if it were happening to him personally, that energy and excitement were draining out of Christo, just as the summer daylight was beginning to drain out of the sky above the city.
“He was dead,” said Ellis, nodding his head slowly and deliberately. “If there is a life after death, it wasn’t what Simon imagined it would be. It can’t be imagined. All we can truly understand is real life, and in real life Simon was a fool … a dead fool.”
“You haven’t the least idea, have you?” Christo suddenly screamed at him. Though his voice had regained its desperation it had lost all its earlier confidence. He grabbed at the chrome bar at the top of the backpack, tilting it down over the sloping tiles so that Shelley must have stared down into the balcony where Jackie, Ursa and Leona were clustered, staring up, mouths open. Leona hid her face against Ursa, and Ursa, Ellis saw, took a breath and put her hand out to Jackie.
But Ellis put out his own right hand and grabbed the nearest part of the backpack frame himself, which Christo had, in a way, given him the chance to do. As if he were now somehow set free from any responsibility, Christo promptly gave the backpack a push – a rather indecisive push which would have been enough, however, to topple Shelley into the void had Ellis not been holding the frame so tightly. The backpack made a half-spin on the rounded, lower corner of its frame. The corner pivoted on the platform, and then slipped inwards. Shelley stared down into the abyss but remained silent.
The backpack was surprisingly heavy. It jerked on Ellis’s arm. It dragged at his shoulder. As he was tilted forward he felt some sinew in his neck tightening like a guitar string, but he did not let go. Instead, he flung his free arm around one of the orange pipes that rose behind the platform and, struggling, he once more straightened the backpack, little by little. Then, feeling in control at last, he turned and smiled at Christo.
“You going to pull ME back?” asked Christo threateningly, staring at Ellis as if he had been transformed into a supernatural stranger.
“Save yourself,” said Ellis. Then he added, “Corpses fart sometimes. Did you know that?” He had only known it himself for about three hours. Christo, who had been bending his knees a little, quickly straightened them. “You could donate your organs to someone who really needs them,” Ellis added. “It could be the best thing you ever did.”
They continued to stare at each other, up there on the platform above Foley Street. Then Ellis spoke again.
He did not use the voice he had used in the Shakespeare scene that had marked the end of his school life, or the sort of dramatic horror that had won him such applause, but a puzzled voice – the voice of someone working out their true thoughts and coming to a dreadful conclusion.
“Aye, but to die, and to go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot …”
“Poetry?” yelled Christo, trying to break the spell that was settling over him.
“No, no – just listen! Listen,” said Ellis.
He was not talking so very loudly, but his urgency, the sibilance of the ‘S’ in ‘listen’, somehow accumulated authority – certainly more authority than his companion was able to command with all his shouting.
“Just listen!” repeated Ellis. “You need to know. You need to know more than anyone.”
“To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;”
(The word ‘rot’ emerged like a bullet, shot from the trigger of his tongue.)
“This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod;”
Ellis, with one arm crooked around the scaffolding and one hand grasping the backpack, jiggled a little, emphasising the words, and allowed his feet to dance in the air below the platform which shook to the rhythm of his movement.
“Hey!” cried Christo in alarm, grasping the nearest orange pipe himself, and clinging to it as if the dance were more dangerous for him than it was for Ellis.
“and the delighted spirit,” Ellis continued,
“To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of the thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst” (cried Ellis, puzzling it out, for Simon as well as for himself.)
“Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling! – ‘tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.”
The puzzling voice changed as he spoke the last Lines. Ellis spat out the final word, grimacing a little at Christo who now cowered before him.
Yet Ellis was speaking in a state that, later, he was to describe to himself as exaltation. For the first time, he thought, he had the words completely right. The weight fell from his shoulders, the tension vanished from around his throat. In the back of his mind, Simon smiled faintly and went out like a light.
Christo’s stillness altered. His nose wrinkled as if he might be about to cry, but the sound that came out of his open mouth was the sort of laugh that might have been laughed by a wind-up doll.
“Are you trying to counsel me with Shakespeare?”
(“Timing’s everything,” said the director’s voice, speaking out of Ellis’s memory.)
Then, somewhere out in Foley Street he heard a clock chime … the same clock he had heard round about this time the night before, just before meeting Jackie. The clock struck the quarter-hour with a soft but significant chime. “Now!” that final fading stroke declaimed.
Twenty-four hours, thought Ellis in amazement. It was saying, “Once upon a time” last night, and now it’s telling us to live happily ever after. He released Christo from his stare and glanced down at Shelley.
“She’s asleep,” he exclaimed. “Doesn’t say much for my acting.”
> His voice suddenly trembled. It was as if the clock had chimed the end of a magic day, and ordinary life was moving in on him once more.
Christo relaxed and became more ordinary, as well. “I don’t know!” he said in the voice of a weary man. “There’s no point in anything. Home’s coming to pieces. And there’s nothing I want to do. My father says I’m thick. He says it over and over again. And Ursa thinks I’m thick. I know she does.”
“You probably are,” said Ellis. “Me, too! But at least we’re both brighter and better off than poor, bloody Simon. Let’s go down.”
He drew his legs up, knelt, and began, very cautiously, to slide the backpack down the sloping tiles towards the eager hands below, expecting the child to wake at any moment. But Shelley’s head simply bobbled to one side and she slept on.
“Gawd! Be careful,” yelled Jackie scrambling on to the table and stretching up towards him. “Slowly! Slowly! Don’t blow it now!”
“Don’t you dare fall backwards,” said Ursa, but she was talking to Jackie, not Ellis.
Ellis guided the backpack safely into Jackie’s extended hands, and Jackie edged it down, obviously finding it heavier than he had anticipated.
“Hang on!” cried Jackie, and then, taking a breath, he slid the backpack over the guttering into the other arms stretched out to receive it. Ellis straightened.
“Hey,” he called a little facetiously. “Make us a cup of tea, will you?”
“There’s beer in the fridge,” mumbled Christo. Ellis saw that in taking over Christo’s drama, he had also stolen Christo’s energy.
And he found that he had dissolved; not his sadness over Simon’s death, but its oppression – its power. He was free, and this freedom, coupled with exhaustion, made him feel so light he half-believed he could fly. He could leap from the building’s slate eyelid and swoop down mockingly over the police car below. Careful, he told himself, and turned to Christo.
Twenty-Four Hours Page 13
