Corpsing

by Toby Litt

  I walked through into the kitchen, wondering what exactly I was looking for. The room was quieter than I’d ever known it. It took me a moment to realize that this was because the fridge-freezer was off. When Lily and I had lived here, the thing had rumbled so earth-shakingly that I nicknamed it Rick Scale. Its two doors hung whitely open. There was no food inside, no ice, no cold.

  I checked the kitchen cupboards. A few tins were left: tomato soup, syrup sponge. My foods – crap I allowed myself when Lily was out rehearsing or touring; stuff she would never have allowed herself to eat but hadn’t got round to chucking away.

  I was very relieved to find that Lily hadn’t managed totally to expunge me from her life, her flat. What had terrified me most, before I came back, was the possibility that my love for her had left nothing behind. But I was still here – I was still here. And in some ways, I was more here than her: disorder had always been Lily’s trademark. (In our relationship, she was the Mess Monster and I was Tidy Heidi.) By clearing up, Josephine had reduced the flat to the minimalist paradise I’d always striven for – but never, in the face of Lily’s chuck-down mentality, come near achieving.

  These were the framed film-posters that I had chosen, because Lily was too busy to be bothered (Pandora’s Box, L’Atalante, Les Enfants du Paradis); this was the coffee-maker that I’d decided (after a weekend of consumer research) was the best on the market. This was the stainless-steel swing-bin that cost me a quarter of one month’s salary. Lily hadn’t let me take it when I moved out. She said I owed her so much money she’d just keep anything of mine she liked.

  She’d also taken over my taste in music (the only thing she listened to of her own accord was Joy Division). Most of the books, except for Lily’s mashed-up acting texts, were mine. I’d read dozens of interviews where Lily claimed to have discovered something – band or novel – which I’d handed to her the week before, with plaudits. When I objected to this, Lily said (so like her mother): ‘But, Conrad, I discovered you…’

  The two large bottles of blue-label Absolut stood on one of the work surfaces. I was still wondering about them.

  Lily’s mother had missed some digestive biscuits I’d stuck in the dark back of a high cupboard. I took them out, walked through into the living room. I opened the pack and started to crumble the biscuits on to the shiny pine floor. I didn’t know why. It just seemed like the right kind of absurd thing to do.

  So far, in all the flat, I’d found nothing to suggest that Lily was the kind of person who was likely to get shot. I don’t know exactly what I was looking for. But I felt there should be at least something unusual here – something that was probably already gone. An immense amount of tidying had been done – this became even clearer as I moved through into the bedroom.

  Lily’s clothes had always made their home either on the floor or in the huge metal laundry-basket. I don’t think I’d ever seen the floor without a single ringworm of pants or scab of flesh-tights upon it – that simply wasn’t the ecosystem within which Lily thrived.

  I guessed Josephine had put: things away in closets and drawers. I opened a few and found that I’d been right – everything was washed, ironed, ordered, stacked.

  A sudden image came to me: Lily’s mother, standing at the sink, handwashing the grunky stains out of Lily’s last six weeks’ knickers. Lily’s blood and urine and shit, perhaps even some of my run-out and dried morning semen, dissolving into the suddy water around Josephine’s working fingers. This was grief.

  I checked Lily’s secret hiding-place, under a couple of floorboards in the bedroom. I’d glimpsed inside before, but never dared open it. That would have been the instant end. Her diaries – all her diaries – (as I’d expected) were gone. The police, if Josephine were to be trusted.

  Lily wrote left-handed, the page turned so she didn’t drag her palm over the wet ink of her Rollerball. She wrote a page-a-day every day. Her distinctive handwriting slanted backwards and further backwards until – towards the end – it was an almost unbroken flat line. I couldn’t believe she could read it back to herself. But she could.

  Often, when she was writing about me in particular, she would lock herself in the toilet – just like an adolescent hiding their sex-thoughts from their mother and father. (Though Lily, of course, had shared, it sometimes seemed, every one of her sex-thoughts with her mother: I’d caught them at it. Lily guiltily putting the phone down as I walked in the door; Josephine smiling oddly the next time we met. Lily’s mother knew far better than I what was likely to be in those diaries.)

  In the bathroom, the mirrored cabinet was totally empty – all Lily’s drugs were gone: no Valium, Librium, Lithium, Prozac, Xanax. I ran my hands around, looking for one single pill of hers. There was something gunked on to the back of the top shelf. An easy place to miss things. It was a folded piece of paper. I peeled it off and sat down on the toilet to look it over.

  It was the instructions for a pregnancy-test kit.

  27

  I strolled back into the bedroom and lay on the bed, trying to think of something useful to do for the rest of the day. Nothing occurred to me – I was becoming more and more useless to myself. Even the most basic functioning was getting harder.

  After fifteen minutes or so, I got up and started to look through Lily’s wall-closets.

  I flicked the hangers along the clothes rail, going through a catalogue of memories: this, the launch party for her first advertisement, that, to her mother’s for a dreadful dinner party; this, hitched up under a tree on Hampstead Heath, that, thrown into the wastepaper bin in disgust (rescued and washed by me); this, bought in New York and never worn, that, still – I sniffed it to check – smelling mysteriously of seaweed; this, bought whilst touring The Ghost Sonata, that, in the week immediately before she dumped me.

  Listlessly, I lay back on the bed.

  My eyes explored the upper half of the room.

  Up in the top of one of the closets was an overlooked box – flat, grey, minimal, dust-gathering. A single word on the outside: ghost.

  Immediately I remembered the frock that Lily had been wearing when we met at Le Corbusier – the floaty insubstantial thing that had so flaunted her accessibility (to others) and her inaccessibility (to me).

  I lifted the lid off the top of the box, expecting to find another dress from the same shop – another post-split present from Lily to herself.

  It was the same colour as the other ghost frock.

  I grabbed it.

  A receipt fell to the floor.

  Without Lily inside, it had almost no shape. In fact, it hardly seemed a dress at all – it was merely a waterfall of soft feminine material, draping itself off my hand and down towards the floor.

  I went over to the mirror and held the dress up in front of me. I was expecting to see some subtle variation in cut – it would be shorter than the original, or sleeveless.

  Shockingly, though, I saw it was – for all I could make out – the exact same dress Lily had been wearing when…

  Why had Lily bought two of the same dress? As far as I could recall, she’d never bought two of anything (clotheswise) – even her socks seemed to be purchased singly.

  I turned the dress around and looked at it front on: there was a message here. Not one that Lily had necessarily been expecting anyone to receive. But a message, all the same. If it was a message to me, then I was missing it. If to someone else, then…

  I picked up the receipt. The date was about a month before Lily’s death.

  I decided to visit ghost.

  28

  Taxi there.

  The exterior of the shop, a few hundred yards above Oxford Street, was poised neatly between matter-of-fact and prim. White paintwork. Four steps up to the door. A neutral window-display: three headless mannequins. This season’s more colourful designs (Purple and crimson. No more grey.)

  Once inside, I asked to speak to the manager. After she came out from the back of the shop, I explained who I was and who Lily had been
. She asked if I would like to sit down. I said I would. We went through into her office.

  ‘This has been very difficult for us,’ the manageress said.

  I had some idea what she meant: a few weeks previously the Face had done a highly editorial Lily-inspired fashion-shoot. In a warehouse apartment made to look as much like Le Corbusier as possible, slasher-movie special-effects had been used to turn the latest ghost outfits into an unwearable post-bloodbath gorefest.

  ‘As if your girlfriend’s death were some kind of fashion – or anti-fashion – statement.’ I didn’t correct her by saying ex-girlfriend. ‘That coverage is the last thing anybody wants.’

  Which was obviously why she had the entire eight-page spread pinned up on the noticeboard behind her desk.

  ‘Did the police ever contact you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Did they say why?’

  ‘I assumed they were trying to work out her movements the day she was shot.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she came into the shop that afternoon.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘She bought the dress she wore that evening. I served her myself. I packed it all up for her into a box. She seemed very pleased. It was the last one. The only reason I noticed at the time was that it was the third of these dresses – the exact same one – that she’d bought.’

  ‘The third?’ I said. ‘Really?’

  Number one, the one she’d been shot in, was presumably in the police’s possession; number two was back in its box in her flat; but where was number three?

  ‘Yes. She bought one right after they came out. That would have been about a year ago.’

  I tried to think back – I tried to remember her wearing such a frock.

  ‘Then another one about a month before she died. Then one on the day itself. “I just keep spilling things on them,” that’s what she said. But how are you? Have you recovered? You used to come in with her, sometimes, didn’t you?’

  I remembered stalking around the shop, proudly useless, very male, while Lily tried on outfit after outfit. (She said I had no taste in clothes, and she was probably right.)

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Did anyone else come in with her?’

  ‘Um…’

  ‘I know she was being unfaithful, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘There were a couple of men.’

  ‘Did you recognize any of them?’

  ‘One of them looked familiar. He was an older man. I recognized him from somewhere. He came with her once or twice. And there were some others. Friends. The man from her advertisement.’

  ‘Cyril?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know whether Cyril or this older man was with her the time – I should say the first time she bought that dress?

  ‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t me.’ She went out of the office door. I heard her walking away over the shop’s hard wood floors – the sound bouncing back off the hard white walls, hardly absorbed by the clothes at all. There were female voices, reacting; an oh; and a discernible don’t. She came back.

  ‘I’m sorry – I can’t really say. The person who I think served her that time’s just left. But I can tell you the dress was from last spring. We had them in until September. After the incident they sold out pretty quickly. Not to our usual customers, you know. Some of them even brought their dresses back – just to check they wouldn’t be wearing the one.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  ‘She was so beautiful, wasn’t she? Such a terrible –’

  29

  An older man.

  It made sense. The thing about me that most annoyed Lily was my lack of social adeptness. ‘Oh, you’re so unsophisticated!’ she used to groan, as I mismatched yet another outfit or praised her in the wrong way.

  But who?

  Being a true actress, Lily was intense but shallow in all her relations. (Except those with her analyst and her agent.) She had worked with dozens of older men. Once, in Norwich, she had played Juliet to a Romeo clearly in his forties. Most of her romantic leads needed some form of wigging or corseting.

  I could go back through the cast lists of the ten or twelve productions she’d been in. But those were only the ones that had taken place since we’d started going out. Perhaps she’d met him before then. And, even so, there was nothing to say the older man hadn’t met her backstage, or at the stage door, or somewhere completely unconnected with the theatre.

  If anyone knew – if Lily had told anyone – it was her mother. But I doubted that Josephine would be speaking to me for quite some time. I needed to have something to offer her first – the flat, perhaps. At the moment, though, the information wasn’t worth that much. Particularly as I’d thought of another way I might get at it.

  I went straight round to Cyril’s. It was a huge warehouse conversion on Old Street, right above the offices of Dazed and Confused. Stripped pine floors. Windows the size of cinema screens. Enough wall space to hang his six faux-Rothkos. It was everything I’d ever aspired to, and I hated it.

  Lily and I had been round a couple of times for dinner with Cyril and his partner, Utne. They were intense seminars in awkwardness. Cyril always seemed to spend the entire evening exposing how completely dull my life was by showing an exquisite interest in every single aspect of it.

  Since then, Utne had left him for a 2nd 2nd Assistant Director. When she did her topless tell-all story in the tabloids, she complained that Cyril had treated her like ‘a body without a brain’. And she added: ‘I have a very good brain.’ (The readers were given ample opportunity to draw their own conclusions as to the quality of her body.)

  It was two in the afternoon. Cyril was an actor: therefore he was likely to be unemployed and at home and bored. He was.

  He answered the door looking casually handsome in khaki shorts and a Ben Sherman shirt. I couldn’t believe it: he actually had a bowl of breakfast cereal in his hands. Not the one he advertised, though. He was eating CoCo Pops.

  ‘Conrad,’ he said. ‘It is Conrad, isn’t it?’

  He walked back into the vast stage that was his kitchen before I’d had a chance to reply.

  ‘It was terrible about Lily, wasn’t it?’

  Terrible for your career, I thought.

  I remembered the cuttings: Cyril’s Grief for Co-Star: ‘We were leaving behind a body of work that people respected us for. They were closely following the development of our relationship. Sadly, no-one now will ever know what could have happened.’

  I could smell toast.

  ‘How can I help?’

  ‘I’d just like to know – sorry, this is a bit embarrassing, but were you having an affair with Lily before she died?’

  ‘Um,’ he looked into the chocolatey milk in his bowl. ‘No.’

  ‘You weren’t?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you did, at one stage, have an affair with her, didn’t you?’

  ‘Look, don’t get cut up about it –’

  ‘I’m not. I just need to know.’

  He looked at me closely, assessing if I was likely to try attacking him – and probably concluding that, even if I did, he could easily take me.

  ‘Yes. We saw each other now and again. Not just for sex. We went out for coffee. We went shopping. We talked.’

  I felt empty. This was the first confirmation I’d had of Lily’s unfaithfulness.

  The toast popped up out of the stainless-steel toaster.

  ‘So the tabloids were right? You’re saying it was an “on-screen off-screen romance”.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I miss her, you know.’

  ‘You think I don’t?’

  ‘No, man. I can see you do. You look like shit.’

  I was determined to hold myself together until I was out of his sight.

  ‘Can you answer a few simple questions? It would help a lot.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘When did you stop s
eeing Lily?’

  ‘I guess it must have been about a month after the last ad. When was that? Spring; some time. Things would cool off after we’d worked together. But for a month or so they’d be – sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. So, you didn’t have sex with her after that?’

  ‘Maybe once or twice. I was away in June and August – doing this TV series.’

  I remembered it now: some rural idyll of fucking in haylofts and fighting local developers. Lily had been up for a part.

  ‘How can I know whether that’s the truth?’

  ‘Because I’m telling you. I was seeing someone else down there. My co-star.’

  ‘A bit of a habit, that,’ I said.

  He smiled to himself.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Someone came out of the door at the end of the room. A woman, wearing one of Cyril’s shirts. She called his real name in a whiny voice.

  ‘Coming,’ he shouted.

  ‘And I want lots of marmalade on it!’ she cried, then turned back into the dark bedroom.

  ‘One last question,’ I said. ‘Did you ever go shopping with Lily to a shop called ghost?’

  ‘She wants marmalade,’ Cyril smarmed.

  ‘It’s a clothes shop.’

  ‘I know that. What, do you think I’m stupid or something? Of course I know that.’

  ‘Did you?’

  He thought seriously for a moment. I got ready to catch him, in case the unusual effort made him fall over.

  ‘I can’t remember. We went to a lot of places. I don’t think so.’

  Another whine from the bedroom.

  ‘It’ll be cold!’

  Cyril and I nodded our goodbyes, walked to the door.

  ‘How was it, you know – being shot?’ Cyril asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  When I got home, I called Le Corbusier and asked for a booking – at the table where…

  They told me it wasn’t free in the evening for the next fortnight, and then only on a Monday.