Bina

by Anakana Schofield

  I might say to you that if you are availing of the same right while reading this, that would be grand. That would be very fine indeed. If you might be lying down and exploring the glory of your own mind. You’ll find no judge in me. I won’t be snipping at your heels telling you the washing up is waiting and the net curtains need a wash and you should be eating more than three carrots and a slice of bread.

  I’d tell you look up at the ceiling and enjoy it.

  The difference with this woman and what I liked about her was that she wasn’t interested in taking over my mind or your mind. She didn’t want to occupy it. She’d no interest in telling me what to think or that she was right and her right was the only right and all else was left. Left out in the rain and rumble and be damned and be shut of it. Not at all. She was only interested in letting her own mind be fortified and plentified and to be doing its exercise. She wanted her brain to squeeze itself joyously out.

  Resignation is not acceptance.

  I think that was what the glorious-mind woman said on the radio.

  But if she didn’t say it there

  Well, I am saying it here.

  Women who leave, Phil said. What do you think of them?

  I was gearing up to answer her question. Had inhaled breath to commence when she changed it.

  I mean women who don’t leave, what do you think of them?

  I think of them the way I think of any woman, I replied.

  I hadn’t answered her question.

  Phil wouldn’t let me away with that.

  I could rely on her to come back.

  Come again, she said, you haven’t answered my question.

  Women who don’t leave, what do you think of them?

  Do you mean like myself?

  I do, she said. And I’m also talking about myself. I never left. Not properly.

  Ah but you figured out how to have a bit of fun.

  We’ll say no more on that, she said.

  I think women who don’t leave are very stupid. I think many probably kill themselves in the process and I don’t judge any woman for it because sometimes it is hard to see which way the door opens even when you’re looking at it.

  And what about you, I asked her. What do you think of it?

  Me, she said. I don’t know what I think about it at all. That’s why I am asking you.

  With hindsight Phil could be very unhelpful with these kinds of questions and I expect that’s why she thought it was just fine to leave that note on the kitchen table.

  I do talk to her, you know.

  Maybe that’s why I lie down.

  Now

  To talk to Phil.

  We’ll see.

  Soon.

  If I don’t get up again

  We’ll know

  Then

  That is why.

  That may not have been the same for the Tall Man. I am going to think about that while I am lying here and I’ll let you know.

  These are some of the questions I am going to think on.

  Did the Tall Man try to tell people what to do?

  Did the Tall Man ever tell me what to do?

  What would the Tall Man make of what I am now doing?

  Why am I even questioning the Tall Man, when I know full well he did an awful lot of good?

  Was it Phil being wrong that made me question the Tall Man?

  Should I instead be questioning Phil?

  Is it Phil these questions are for?

  And now I am back to the start again, because before I can think about the questions I have to figure out who I am questioning. To do that it appears I need to lie here, be still and maybe even sleep on it. That isn’t a question, in case I am confusing you. That is a remarking.

  And I will say this of the woman with the great head of hair and the brain on the boil, I would say she relieved me of every ounce of anything bad or any trace of guilt I had that we in the Group helped people carry out their choices about . At least, she relieved me of it until Phil went and did what she did. And Phil was wrong. I cannot accept Phil’s choice. I cannot accept Phil’s choice even though I have accepted every other stranger’s choice. I cannot accept it and perhaps the flaw is my own. But accept it, I will not.

  Always write down the name of the person saying intelligent things or who is relieving your burdens on the radio. This is a warning. Not a remarking. You’ll need the name later, maybe. Write it down.

  I want Phil undead.

  It’s as simple as that

  Phil was wrong

  I had no idea how wrong

  And now I have.

  And I want her back

  Undead

  Now.

  I want her on the phone

  I want Phil in my ear

  Being bossy.

  Oh, she could be bossy when she was well

  Telling me the things she told me

  Harassing me over there to help her

  I want her back so I can tell her

  What I was on my way to tell her

  The day she was took

  Or the day she took

  Herself

  By herself.

  I was going over there to tell her

  She was wrong

  And I had no intention of helping her

  Do to herself what was wrong

  To be doing.

  I knew she was wrong

  And I failed to show her she was.

  And that’s a fact.

  She disarmed me

  By talking

  She disarmed me

  Because she talked.

  She talked about what she wanted

  When none of us talked about what we wanted

  Which was her

  Undead.

  Alive.

  Back here.

  Now.

  Life’s all wrong

  With no Phil.

  It’s how it is and how it will be, until we too are all dead and are, maybe, with the help of God, able to tell her straight into the eyes: Phil, you were wrong, there was no need for you to go, your time wasn’t up, not even a bit up, only momentarily appearing to be up, but we could have sorted it. Oh, we could have had that sorted.

  Sorted? I can hear her reply. Would you give over? Be quiet. Shut up, you, I’m napping. Take the top bunk there. Are you cold? Take the extra blanket off my feet.

  She’d give you everything, Phil. Except the thing you want now, which is herself.

  Here.

  (Still.)

  Alive.

  Undead.

  The Tall Man said he always asked the same first question.

  I have a first question, he said.

  Every time.

  Why do you want your life to end?

  If, the Tall Man said, they don’t tell me they can no longer do the things they used to do and the things that gave them pleasure then I won’t help them. He stretched his back in the chair when he said don’t.

  What if they tell you they can’t do things that they never previously mentioned or never previously did?

  He paused.

  They’ve never said that. He placed a blank tile on the Scrabble board.

  Well, how would you know what they could or did do, if you hadn’t known them for years?

  I trust people to tell me the truth, he replied.

  I don’t want to help anyone not needing nor asking for my help. We are not out actively recruiting. They come for us, it’s not the reverse.

  He was right.

  I nodded.

  But he didn’t know Phil.

  This was the difference.

  He wouldn’t know the way I do that Phil was wrong. That when Phil said she couldn’t bake anymore, he wouldn’t know that Phil was terrible at baking and was being denied nothing by not being able to bake. She didn’t even like baking. She should have been stopped from baking in the interests of the fire brigade.

  But somehow looking at that blank tile

  There didn’t seem much point


  In talking about a dead woman

  Who couldn’t bake

  And who was awful at baking.

  I swapped an e back into the tile pouch.

  I had four e’s.

  You always get the e, he observed.

  Bee, seem, unseen, he muttered. Before catching himself and shutting up. He was giving me clues. He had warned us all about the dangers of clues. You know nothing. You hint at nothing and you leave with nothing and leave nothing behind you, he’d said when he gave me the envelope with the first address I was to visit, before adding, you’ll say nothing and as far as you’re concerned you’re at nothing and all will be well.

  He said all will be well as though he’d read it in a greeting card.

  Like he didn’t actually believe it.

  At all.

  And like he’d said it a hundred times and never believed it and walked out the door every single time not believing it, but relieved he’d gotten away with it.

  Stop roundabouting it, Bina.

  That’s me

  To myself.

  I’m roundabouting again, amn’t I.

  Need to keep straight.

  Not be dizzy in circles.

  Need to tell it straight

  Have to find a way to tell it all, with or without me in it.

  Keep it straight, Bina

  Or you’ll confuse them.

  That’s what the Solicitor keeps telling me too.

  Not unlike the Tall Man, the Solicitor says answer only the question you’re asked.

  Not more, nothing less.

  Am I in the way?

  I’m only in the way.

  This wasn’t unusual heard. It wasn’t unusual to hear it. You could not at all it. You could not at all them. But you couldn’t eradicate the thought of it. You couldn’t get at the part of them that had started to feel it or had maybe felt it all their lives. You wouldn’t even know what someone felt all their lives and whether it was now or then they were feeling it and when was then and how was now? Maybe they could barely arrive at now because of then.

  You could only go in, deliver the meal or give them a lift and the signal that someone cared that they carried on, at least long enough that the dinner wasn’t wasted. Even if you didn’t care. Even if you’d never cared. Even if you couldn’t care less.

  Even if it was raining, your feet were wet & you wondered whatever possessed you to volunteer for Meals on Wheels in the first place when you’d have been happier in your own bed.

  What often struck me going in with Meals on Wheels was this. First, I was useful. I like to be useful. Second, because I was coming in, they felt they were going out. But it was never going to be clear why and what I was bringing in with me.

  I’ve gotten awful down on the Tall Man

  Lately

  I don’t know why this is.

  I think it’s because I am here

  And he’s there

  Wherever there is

  And we haven’t heard a word from him.

  That’s not unexpected.

  He warned me about that.

  If anything goes down, don’t expect to hear from me ever again.

  I will disappear. I will have to.

  He laid down his single planks.

  Do you know how many years I’d serve?

  His eyes said life.

  You should plan to do likewise, he said.

  And where would I disappear to?

  That’s the great thing about disappearing, he said. No one will know in advance. Not even you.

  So

  Don’t ever need to disappear, he said.

  It’s very complicated, disappearing.

  There are two outcomes.

  One, they catch you or two, you make yourself uncatchable.

  He meant dead.

  Why didn’t he say dead?

  These were the conversations where he started to trouble me

  When he spoke in roundabout language

  The way I have started talking in roundabout language.

  But roundabouting is no good to anyone.

  Is it?

  I prefer emphatic

  And in lying down there’s no roundabouting

  It’s emphatic.

  I’m going no place and you’ll have to come for me.

  Come and find me.

  Was Eddie emphatic?

  Or was he just bone- and boom-headed?

  Eddie was a lump

  A lump isn’t emphatic.

  A lump is an excuse for whatever is underneath it.

  We investigate lumps.

  It’s an error.

  We should emphatically not investigate them when the excuse beneath them is a whole human.

  You know what brings people down in the end?

  This was the Tall Man as he was about to play his turn.

  And then he played it.

  His word?

  Empathy.

  Don’t get involved

  And don’t give out too much information

  That will have you involved.

  Another thing, the Tall Man said.

  Once you are involved

  Very hard to be uninvolved.

  He used to annoy me with these snippets.

  Because he was reminding me that the error of involvement was snoring in my spare bedroom.

  His comments only turned the snores up louder

  And had them ricochet around the place howling, laughing at me.

  And me, I’d be roundabouting to myself that I’d only taken Eddie in because otherwise he would have unloaded himself onto Tomás, who might never reach for the alarm or alert again. He would have been unfathomably trapped in a way that I was not. I could still open my back door and leave daily. Tomás was stuck in the bed.

  Were you ever involved? I asked him.

  If I told you that, I’d be giving out information, the Tall Man said.

  And if I give you information, you might find yourself passing it to another.

  And on it would go

  And that’s how people fall.

  He said.

  I don’t intend to fall.

  The next day I heard he’d left suddenly.

  The Group were talking about it.

  The Group were phoning and asking each other if anyone had seen him.

  The Group were puzzled.

  I wasn’t puzzled.

  I had begun to see exactly what this man was about.

  I was unsure if I liked it or I disliked it

  I was sure a part of it troubled me.

  But here I am.

  And there he is.

  I’m wrong

  And a curse upon him that I have to admit it

  But he was right.

  Nothing further to be said

  If you don’t heed the warnings

  from the Group phoned.

  Have you heard anything? she said.

  Not a word, I said.

  It’s not right, she said.

  What are you expecting? I said.

  That he’ll come out waving a big sign about where he is so they can lock him up?

  Yes, she said.

  Well, you’re very foolish, I said.

  Then I felt foolish because here was she phoning me and she on trial for nothing and me…

  Well.

  We need to talk about the mess you’re in, said.

  There’s nothing to say.

  Nothing to be said about it at all.

  And now I can see that this is probably the Mole.

  She is likely the Mole if there is a mole in this casserole

  If she ever phones again

  I should probably go ahead and ask her

  Are you the Mole,

  Does it matter who the Mole is?

  Does it?

  I think that was a warning.

  Or maybe a remarking

  I think it doesn’t matter who the Mole is

  Just expec
t there is one and then you won’t be a bit surprised.

  Does it matter whether it’s a warning or a remarking at this stage?

  Would warnings prevent remarking?

  I have no idea.

  That’s up to ye.

  I’m in here

  You’re out there.

  That’s where we are

  Now.

  This is where it’s at.

  Right?

  Have I that part right?

  I don’t know if I’m lying down too long and it has all gone to my head.

  The problem is you can’t answer me, so I’ve to answer for you.

  I should have figured was the Mole on account of what she said about my curtains.

  I think you can do better than those curtains, she said. They don’t do much for the place.

  That’s a suspicious thing to say, isn’t it, when you’re only calling in to drop off a plastic bag.

  How can you wade so handily into the territory of how someone’s curtains should be?

  Unless you are bringing them new curtains, that is

  Inside that plastic bag

  Then you lay into them.

  I asked Phil about the curtains.

  You’re overthinking it, she said.

  It’s not like you to overthink things, Bina.

  You’re right, I said.

  Has Forty Guts been insulting your curtains?

  Probably. But it was a woman who said something that set me off.

  A woman?

  Yes.

  And did you know this woman?

  Not very well.

  Well now, why would you let a woman you barely know into your kitchen to insult your curtains and then actually listen to her?

  You’re right, I said

  I am, Phil replied. Sure I’m always right.

  Phil was wrong.

  She was wrong about the other

  But she was right about the curtains