Corpsing

by Toby Litt

  Thank you was all she said for much of the second half of the evening. Thank you emerging from under the neck of her sloppy cashmere sweater. For being here. For being you. For being lovely.

  When the moment seemed right, I put my idea to her: ‘I may have some work for you, just while you’re looking for something else.’

  ‘What kind of work?’

  ‘Well, you know I told you I had this idea for a film…’

  ‘Where’s the script?’ she said. ‘Can I read it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s mostly in my head at the moment,’ I replied. ‘I’m going to get some of it down on paper. Then what I’d like to do is audition some actors – you know, get them to read through a couple of scenes. And then I can work with them on getting the script into some kind of final shape. Fancy helping out?’

  ‘Love to,’ said Anne-Marie, perking up. ‘I’ve always wanted to move into film production. This could be perfect.’

  ‘I don’t want to see more than three or four of the best chances for each part. We can weed out the no-hopers early on.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I’ll pay you,’ I said. ‘But you’ll have to do exactly what I say.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Anne-Marie, with sexy irony – mimicking me exactly. She was a very good mimic. Not as good as Lily, but still pretty good.

  ‘It wouldn’t take much – placing a few ads, looking through the replies.’

  ‘Really, I’d love to. It would be just like booking, wouldn’t it? – looking through all the hideous photos.’

  Together we drafted the four ads. This was how the most important one read:

  WANTED: boy actor/young man. 16–18 for lead villain in no-budget short. You will be slim, dark, good-looking. No previous acting experience required. Please write enclosing CV and b/w photograph to Lazarus Productions.

  And then we gave the address of Anne-Marie’s flat. (We’d agreed that putting mine might just draw unwanted press attention.)

  Anne-Marie said she would place the ads the following day in the major trade papers: Stage and Screen, the Stage.

  It was late by the time we finished, so I stayed over.

  I didn’t sleep very well, and neither did Anne-Marie. She was made restless by my presence in her bed, and I was made restless by her restlessness.

  I remembered sleeping with Lily – the long perfect sleeps of Saturday and Sunday morning, where when it started to get light we’d wake up just enough to tell each other to go back to sleep. But I also remembered being out at sea with Lily’s tempestuous nightmares – how the mattress would twist and buck with her flailings – how I’d have to grab her, slap her, calm her down.

  Everything with Anne-Marie was returning me to Lily – I don’t think she had any idea of how much history I was regaining access to. It was like opening a forgotten folder on a computer and finding a hundred more forgotten files within it.

  Lily had created the pattern of my relations with women, probably for the rest of my life. Never again would the most important things be new, stunning, incomparable.

  Lily had left her scars everywhere.

  60

  Tuesday.

  I left early in the morning, guilty at how much I’d been thinking of Lily and how little of Anne-Marie. It sickened me to think how much Lily still dominated my life, my dream-life.

  For the first time I realized that I was never going to be able to reduce the amount of time I’d spent with her. It frustrated me – I wanted to phone her up and tell her to stop bothering me. She seemed constantly to be scattering images of our life into places where I would glimpse them. She was guilty of always pushing her presence forwards in my mind. I was full of a childish feeling of It’s not fair, it’s not fair, go away and leave me alone. I was being stalked by her and by her memory: I felt like accusing her of harassment, getting a restraining order.

  Anne-Marie had said she was going to spend the day job-hunting. I hoped she’d find something, and I hoped the something would take her somewhere far away from London. I wanted an end to this relationship, but an end for which I wouldn’t have to take any responsibility. Anne-Marie was becoming annoying. She wanted me to be present for her the whole time. All I’d wanted from her was the chance, for a few hours, to disappear completely from my own view. Anne-Marie couldn’t help but be a reminder of all she wasn’t, all she could never be, all that Lily had been. I’d begun to pity her, and that surely was telling me that it was time to end it. Something must come along that would allow me to look good even as I was dumping Anne-Marie. A job in New York or LA would be particularly convenient. I’d be able to make my speeches of pained splitting devotion. I would appear noble and bereft. She’d cry; it’d be over; I’d be free. But, of course, I still needed her around for the moment.

  Back in Mortlake the post and the papers were awaiting me on the mat.

  Ever since I’d begun appearing in the tabloids, the amount of junk mail I received had at least trebled. Every charity to which I’d ever made a donation now wrote me a begging letter. This post contained an invitation from a group formed to campaign for Healthcare Reform. They wanted me to become their spokesperson.

  There were other slightly more personal communications – old friends getting back in touch: hasty postcards with change-of-addresses on, long letters containing page-after-page of self-recrimination.

  I took all of it through into the kitchen and dumped it in my permanently-open-on-the-floor black bin-bag.

  I checked that day’s Mirror. Asif had ducked beneath their horizon of interest completely. A couple of days’ NHS bleating was all they’d been able to take.

  I phoned UCH, the Pathology Department.

  ‘Is Asif back from the Isle of Wight?’

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t give out details regarding hospital staff.’

  I tried phoning his mother, but she’d obviously had her number changed.

  It seemed I’d reached a temporary dead-end so far as finding out whether I was the father of Lily’s child.

  However, now that the journalists had left me alone, I could arrange my meeting with Alun and Dorothy.

  I called them at home. Laurence picked up, and I had a bit of a chat with him. Soon, though, Dorothy must have realized who it was. With a shrill cry, she grabbed the phone out of his hands.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ she said.

  ‘Mum,’ I heard Laurence whine.

  It took a few minutes to persuade her that I would now be able to go out without my retinue of followers and admirers.

  We arranged to meet on Hampstead Heath at three o’clock the following afternoon. It would have been nice to have been able to choose somewhere to put them less at their ease – like the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s, the Royal College of Surgeons Museum or even Highgate Cemetery, right beside Lily’s grave. But Dorothy made it clear that it was only there and only then that they would deign to meet me.

  So, there it was going to be…

  After sorting that out, I had a doing-stuff day.

  I was going to need a load of cash quickly, to buy the gun, so I phoned the bank and got all that arranged. Lily had left me the contents of her deposit account, but I needed to be able to get hold of the money at short notice.

  I called her solicitor, the greyly efficient man who’d sat at my bedside during my convalescence.

  ‘I’m afraid, Mr Redman, that you’ve rung at a rather inopportune moment. This is, in fact, my last day at work. I’m about to hand over all my current clients to a very capable colleague of mine. You see, I have a cancer of the terminal variety.’

  I offered my sympathy.

  ‘No, no, that’s quite all right. Good innings and so on. If you’ll just let me put you through.’

  I spoke with the colleague. He agreed to transfer Lily’s substantial bank balance into my current account as soon as possible.

  ‘I was sorry to hear about –’

  ‘Yes, we’re all going to miss him terribly.�
��

  ‘He was Robert’s solicitor as well, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Almost thirty years.’

  ‘Do you know if there was ever any mention of contesting Lily’s will?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t disclose another client’s business to you.’

  I wasn’t going to get anything here.

  As Lily’s flat might come in handy later, I phoned up and had the utilities turned back on. I also had the phone reconnected to Lily’s old number.

  In the afternoon, James took me and my wheelchair to visit the pubs of South-east London.

  Anne-Marie came round in the evening.

  ‘I’ve placed the ads,’ she said. ‘They’ll go in this week. Thursday.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said.

  ‘Not much else on at the moment. Plenty of advertising space. Easy…’

  ‘Good.’

  I had nothing more to say to her.

  61

  Wednesday.

  It was time to get ready to go and meet Alun and Dorothy. I wore tough clothes, somehow fantasizing my way into a kidnap scenario – with Alun sticking a Balaclava over my head and Dorothy roping my hands up too tight.

  James drove me up to Hampstead Heath. We talked about the way the newspapers had treated me. He sympathized.

  I don’t know whether they took pleasure in being late; leaving me to be cruised once every couple of minutes. Certainly when they arrived they didn’t apologize.

  Alun, wearing a battered greatcoat, was every inch the windswept Welshman; Dorothy, sporting brightly coloured Afro-patterns, was Menopause Ethnic personified.

  As we started to walk along, furtively talking, I knew that Alun and Dorothy knew that passersby would take me for their son. This pleased me: it was something they hadn’t thought of. Anyone seeing us might guess that I’d brought them here to tell them that I was gay, and that this was where I met my friends, and that they would just have to accept me for who I was.

  It was a delight to me that no-one ever seemed to recognize Alun and Dorothy. Life with Lily had involved a certain amount of standing to one side whilst she gave her autograph. But even though Alun and Dorothy had been on posters all over London for the past two months, no-one gave a toss about them. They were theatre; Lily had been TV. They were everything Lily had wanted to become – and, most: people, they were nothing.

  ‘Let’s get this over with as quickly as possible, shall we?’ said Dorothy, as much to Alun as to me.

  Take charge, she was implying. Be a man. Be the man I thought I was marrying when I married you. Be windswept.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ asked Alun, weakly.

  ‘When you arranged to see Lily that evening, what did you think you were meeting to talk about?’

  ‘What do you think?’ said Dorothy, waspishly.

  ‘… about us,’ said Alun.

  ‘But you cancelled. You told her that it was over.’ I said.

  ‘It was,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘Alun?’

  ‘As far as I was concerned, it was.’

  ‘But Lily?’

  ‘… was a little harder to convince.’

  ‘Tell me, Alun, had you lied to Dorothy before – told her you were going to stop seeing Lily but carried on?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  ‘Okay, another question: Did the police DNA-test you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘They took a sample of blood when they first questioned me.’

  ‘Were you the father of Lily’s child?’

  ‘They haven’t told me the results. But I’ve been subpoenaed to appear at the trial, and told not to leave the country without informing the police.’

  ‘We’ve had to cancel a Canadian tour,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘Have you been subpoenaed as well?’ I asked her. Her mouth went soft round the edges – like a false-toothed woman’s.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, mumbled.

  I asked her directly: ‘You had something to do with Lily and me getting shot, didn’t you?’

  Alun began answering, ‘That’s not true. What –’

  I continued to attack Dorothy. ‘It was about Laurence, wasn’t it? Lily was either having, or about to start having, an affair with him, wasn’t she? You couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘That isn’t true,’ wailed Dorothy. ‘I thought it was true but it wasn’t. I asked him – we asked him – confronted him – and he swore it wasn’t true and we believed him. He doesn’t lie to us, not when we ask him a direct question.’

  ‘What do the police know?’

  ‘We’ve told them everything,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘Everything you haven’t told me?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll hear at the trial,’ she said.

  ‘What will I hear about?’ I said to Dorothy. Will I hear about how Sub Overdale introduced you both to Tony Smart? How he wanted you to meet some real murderers? How you did? How you, Dorothy, got carried away? How, out of jealousy and fear, you arranged a real hit? How something went wrong? How Alun found out and cancelled the date, so he wouldn’t get killed? Or how you got scared and told him to cancel, leaving Lily to get shot with whoever she happened to invite along in Alun’s place?’

  ‘That is the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘But you have to admit,’ I said, ‘someone wanted both of the people at that table shot: Lily and whoever was with Lily. And if that person was meant to be Alun, then the only person I can think of who might have wanted that is you.’

  ‘Do you think I’d want my husband killed?’

  ‘Yes, at a certain point in time, I think you did.’

  ‘Lies, complete lies,’ said Dorothy. ‘It was a coincidence, that’s all. Alun cancelled the date. Lily arranged something else. How do you know they didn’t want to kill her and you.’

  ‘Only Alun and Lily knew they were going to meet in that restaurant at that time. If Lily didn’t tell anyone, then that leaves only one person who knew. You.’

  The wind had got up a bit. Thunder was introducing itself diffidently, mildly, just over the horizon.

  ‘Come on,’ said Dorothy to Alun. ‘We’re going.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Alun.

  ‘Just keep quiet,’ said Dorothy. ‘He can’t prove anything.’

  Alun put his arm around Dorothy.

  ‘I know this may sound bizarre,’ he said, ‘but I’m very grateful to my wife for doing what she did.’

  ‘Stop!’ said Dorothy, but he went on. For once he was windswept.

  ‘My relationship with Lily was foolish and immature and wrong and dangerous. Someone would have ended up getting hurt – more than just emotionally. Lily wasn’t stable: you of all people should know that. Sometimes she just lost control. She was madly jealous. In fact, I was caught between two jealousies – but one was the jealousy of love, the other of possession. Lily couldn’t stand to lose me, and certainly not to my wife. It was more than her pride could take. You know the kind of things she was capable of. She terrified me, sometimes – the way she would hurt herself to hurt other people. Everything with her was a declaration or an ultimatum. Nothing existed on a sensible, domestic level. And that’s where I live: I save the fireworks for the stage. You don’t really need them – not when you can be mad in Shakespeare, anguished in Chekhov. Most actors and actresses live very quiet, suburban lives. But Lily couldn’t stand that. Dorothy realized what was happening – and Dorothy saved me. She gambled. The stakes were high. She won. Lily lost. But that was what Lily wanted all along – impersonal tragedy wasn’t enough for her, she needed it all to herself. She wanted to be the victim that no-one could deny. Really, Dorothy was just helping her fulfil her vocation. But now I think we’ve told you all we know, and can. The police have taken extensive statements from both of us. We’re innocent – and so are you. Just get on with your life. Stop living in the past.’

  Dorothy took him roughly by the arm and hustled him off down the hill. I
could hear her, chiding him for giving so much away.

  Now, I had my final version: Alun had arranged the dinner meeting with Lily; Dorothy had found out; Dorothy had gone into a mad rage, everything coming together at once – jealousy, hate, fear, anger; Dorothy had arranged to have a hitman put on Lily and the man with her; the hitman had known what she looked like anyway – from the TV; Dorothy had then told Alun not to go; Dorothy had told him that if he did, he would die; Alun had believed her; Alun had cancelled with Lily; Alun hadn’t told Lily about the hit, he’d just told her not to go to the restaurant; Lily, stubborn and piqued, had kept the booking; Lily had invited me along as the only person she could get that late on a Friday evening; for some reason, the hit still went ahead…

  A stupid mistake, but Dorothy was still the one who had caused Lily’s death to occur.

  I felt very calm as I walked away from the meeting with Alun and Dorothy. But slowly the crackling white noise of hatred began to interfere with the smooth transmission of my thoughts.

  Dorothy was stupid – a stupid woman: self-pitying, self-justifying, self-centred. I would have hated her anyway, on principle, even if I’d had hardly anything to do with her. But the stupidity of her actions; her lack of remorse; her continued and continuous and continual attempts to excuse what she’d done; the ignorance of her own real motives – jealousy of Lily’s beauty and success. Everything more I learnt about Dorothy made me hate her more.

  Alun I didn’t despise – him I merely pitied. He was a weak man; weaker even than I’d thought. But I could see that – along with myself – he had genuinely been in love with Lily. Enough in love, I believed, to have given her up to save her life. Enough to have lied to Dorothy about stopping seeing her. Once, twice – my guess was he’d done it a number of times before.

  This threatened contract killing had been the act of a woman who no longer knew what to do. Dorothy had obviously tried every other way she could think of to keep Alun away from Lily. Some of the likelier methods it disgusted me even to think of. But she’d also been ingenious: persuading Alun to accept a tour away from London. And then getting him to star alongside her in Macbeth – so she could keep an eye on him every evening. She’d been planning ahead, but it hadn’t worked. Lily’s hold over Alun was too strong. From what I could see, that hold seemed to have been broken now, by Lily’s death. Alun was a guilty man, a man full of regret, but he didn’t appear to be a man in mourning. Dorothy really had managed to have her way and win him back. The price had been – incidentally or accidentally – Lily’s death and my near-fatal wounding.