Corpsing

by Toby Litt

  Though I hated to admit it, I almost had to admire her for this. Stupidity has its advantages: it sometimes gets what it wants by doing completely the wrong thing but by doing it so remorselessly that something at least happens – and when something happens, due to the unpredictability of events and people, the outcome may accidentally be what was initially desired. It was the worst and final thing: that out of all this mess, stupid Dorothy had stupidly managed to achieve her stupid aims. Alun was with her again, enslaved – like the member of some totally unconvincing (to outsiders) cult. Dorothy’s terror at being unloved – unlovable, probably – was there for all others to see: Alun, however, now saw only the fake fact – the fact Dorothy wanted to impose upon him – the fact that she deserved to be loved. In every moment they were together she was abusing him more and more. Alun was a docile beast – his only stubbornness had come out of an intense desire: Lily had been something he truly wanted.

  A very nasty thought came to me, which – at the time – I dismissed almost immediately: if Lily had reached Dorothy’s age, she might well have become very like Dorothy. They both had their ways: their rages, their selfishness. No doubt part of Dorothy’s behind-the-scenes domination of Alun was, like Lily’s, a feigned bleating helplessness: ‘I’m useless – I’m awful – no-one loves me – everybody hates me.’ Alun’s life (as had been mine) was a matter of reassurance and more reassurance. He was the foundation-repairer of Dorothy’s built-upon-sand monument (to herself).

  A second even worse thought came: if Lily had lived, and I had got back together with her, and we had – as a couple – reached Alun and Dorothy’s age, would I have become as weak, as pathetic as Alun?

  62

  That evening I called Anne-Marie and she came round with two large bags of healthy food.

  ‘You’re not eating well enough,’ she said.

  She took over the kitchen.

  ‘Wild mushroom risotto,’ she said.

  ‘Great,’ I replied.

  ‘With asparagus,’ she added.

  ‘Mmm,’ I said.

  ‘I never used to have time to cook, but now I do. I’m going to get really fat.’

  For once, I really wanted to make an effort to listen to her. I was ready to pay great attention to everything she said. But everything she said, or so it seemed at the time, was hardly worth paying any great attention to.

  ‘I’m quite enjoying being unemployed,’ she prattled. ‘I’ve started watching daytime TV.’

  A few hours later, as we lay in bed eating strawberries, a brick smashed through the front window – crashing into my bedroom, landing on the record-player.

  Two feet to the right, and it would have been Anne-Marie’s head; three feet, it would have been mine.

  Wearing only pants and a T-shirt, I loped out the front door and into the street.

  A car was driving off rapidly towards Mortlake High Street. I couldn’t see what make it was. All I could discern were the red squares of the tail-lights.

  Back inside, Anne-Marie seemed to be calmer than I was. Her first instinct had been to start picking up broken things – the triangular fragments of vinyl. She turned the overhead light on (we’d been in candlelight) and looked at the smashed turntable. The deck was deeply dented. Anne-Marie carried the waste-paper bin over and started picking up pieces of the splintered record with her fingertips. She left the brick for me – as if the mere fact that it had been thrown through my window gave me sole ownership of it. It frustrated me that she didn’t touch it: Lily would have been over beside it in a second – examining it passionately, closely, empathetically, as she examined all things to which violence had occurred: smashed-up cars, roadkill, boxers, women in supermarkets.

  The brick had one simple word chalked on it: CUNT. This wasn’t good enough – I’d expected at least a letter, Sellotaped or rubber-banded to the brick’s body.

  I felt ludicrous, walking over to the bookshelf and placing the brick there – as if it were just another hardback volume, quarto or folio.

  Going back over to Anne-Marie I tried to stop her tidying up. ‘Aren’t you scared?’ I said. ‘It almost hit you.’

  Anne-Marie looked up at me incredulously. ‘But it didn’t.’

  She went back to the pieces of the stereo.

  ‘I suppose this has been happening quite a lot – since you were in the papers.’

  ‘Some things, you know – the paint.’

  ‘I’m glad I’m here. Are you alright?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re alright?’

  I realized that I was shaking. Everything inside me suddenly felt liquid. I sprinted to the toilet not knowing whether I was going to shit or puke. I solved the dilemma by doing both, extravagantly, at the same time.

  I hadn’t had time to lock the door, but Anne-Marie decently stayed outside. I could hear her there, though she didn’t say anything. It made me feel a little better and a little worse to know she was listening to me, too.

  The brick itself wasn’t what had set me off: it was the bang it had made smashing through the window. For the first time since the shooting, I was getting the kind of clichéd flashback that my counselling had warned me of: I was shell-shocked.

  I felt ashamed of myself, of my own psychology, for being so bloody obvious. In a way, I felt that some characteristic of mine – of intelligence, sophistication, wit – should have excluded me from trauma. Shouldn’t someone as self-aware as I was have been able to side-step all that? I was stronger than other people, wasn’t I? My whole psychology was less fucking obvious. Counselling was for people so stupid that, first session in, they had to have the concept of counselling explained to them. Maybe I should have listened a bit more, back in the hospital. For the first time I began to realize that being in denial means not just denying you’re in denial but also denying that you’re denying that you’re in denial. And so on. There was no arguing (psychoanalytically, intellectually, wittily) with my bowels: this was me, here, shitting myself. I might not like it – I might not approve – but here I was; and I was me; and me wasn’t as cool as I’d always hoped.

  When I emerged from the toilet, I felt myself to be less of a man – less than a man. Anne-Marie was all consolation. I’d thought that because of this, I would be less attractive to her. Again, I was wrong. This at least gave her something to do – she became my nurse. Taking my soiled pants and T-shirt and putting them in the sink to soak. Tucking me up in bed. Disinfecting the toilet floor and the toilet seat, and giving the toilet a clean for good measure. And then lying down beside me and listening to all my weakness flowing out – my weakness, my confessions of weakness, my confessions of the vanity of my belief in my own strength. And then, suddenly, I stopped speaking. Now I was underwater, fallen through the ice, freezing, drowning. She jumped in after me and swam down to me and grabbed hold of me. For a while we were underwater together – looking up at the ceiling of my room as if it were the underside of the ice. And for some reason we didn’t drown or freeze. We were surviving because our hearts had slowed and stopped. We lay there, looking up at the ceiling and watching where the bubbles trickled along the dark grey-blue underside of the ice. We were hoping for some of them to lead us back to the hole we’d fallen in through, to the way out, to air and life. And when we surfaced it was with horror and gasping.

  I’d fallen asleep, into a dream of the whole thing happening again.

  The night was quite warm, but the air moving through the fractured window made it seem chill.

  Anne-Marie was close beside me, comforting, giving me words of advice that at any other time I would have mocked. This was talkshow territory. I was being dragged into the world of Dorothy’s bedside table. I was feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

  Anne-Marie put the overhead light on, brought in some more candles, put on one of my Sinatra tapes. (I’d mentioned to her my belief in the-healing-power-of-Easy.) Slowly, she reassured me; recomposed me; reconstructed me.

  She w
as my angel of the obvious – I couldn’t have made it without her.

  63

  Thursday.

  In the morning, Anne-Marie told me that the only things I’d said, all night, were ‘She’s dead’ and ‘My baby.’ I would move the words around. ‘She’s my dead baby.’ Repeat them in different combinations. ‘My baby she’s dead.’ But I never altered them. ‘Dead baby dead.’

  ‘Weren’t you scared?’ I asked her. ‘Didn’t you think I’d gone mad?’

  ‘In a way,’ she said, ‘I was more worried that you wouldn’t go mad. I couldn’t see how you were going to cope, otherwise. Going mad almost seemed the safest option.’

  I felt much better: purged.

  When she was sure I was all right, and when she had arranged for a glazier to come round, Anne-Marie went out to buy a copy of the Stage. I asked her to buy the rest of the papers, as well.

  We’d obviously missed something. Last night, while we were under the ice, Tony Smart, despite his battered face and bruised body, had appeared on a TV chatshow.

  From what I could gather, he’d come on like a serious gangster (dark glasses and even darker hints). And despite the studio audience understanding even less of what he said than usual, his reception had been uproarious. Crime had simultaneously been seen to pay and not to pay. He’d made the reconnection with the street that he’d so desperately needed. Folk-hero status was beckoning. His broken face was on every tabloid – and every tabloid had sent along women with very large breasts and even larger smiles to comfort him. His appearances at the Comedy Store were all sold out – people wanted to make it along whilst the bruises still showed.

  ‘Here they are,’ said Anne-Marie.

  She unfolded the Stage and pointed out our ads.

  ‘No typos?’ I said.

  ‘Aren’t you excited?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You seem more interested in that other paper.’

  ‘No, I’m excited,’ I said.

  ‘When am I going to get to read this famous script then?’

  ‘Soon, very soon.’

  Anne-Marie was annoying, but she was right. It was time to get my script into shape.

  I did, in fact, have about fifty pages of something I’d attempted and abandoned a couple of years earlier. I’d written it just after meeting Lily, back before disparagement had replaced encouragement – back when she might even, for a few months, have believed in me. The idea was to make a spy-thriller set in London’s clubworld (I used to go to clubs, back then) – the drug barons would be the spymasters, the DJs the double agents. I’d even come up with a tide, Spaced Out. It sounded contemporary, low-budget, sexy, believably filmable. This was the project that attempting to work with screenwriters had driven me to.

  Re-reading it now, I was appalled to see that the work I’d done with the screenwriters had actually been a lot, lot better.

  The dialogue in Spaced Out was attempted-hilarious. There was, as far as I could see, no plot. My characters were cardboard cut-outs jump-cutting their flimsy way through a two-dimensional world. One of them (I blush), the love-interest, Nina, was a direct steal from Lily; another, Adam, the hero, was a flattering self-portrait – a version of myself that looked good with six o’clock shadow, lit other people’s cigarettes unthinkingly, could escape Rottweilers by scaling brick walls full-stop.

  One of the younger characters was a clubber called Johnny. I hadn’t really defined him to any great extent – at the time, all I’d known about him was that he was going to end up dumped in the Thames with a Cellophane bag of self-raising flour stuffed back up his arse. (Not sure how I was going to film that.)

  It didn’t take much to change the script round and introduce the scene that I was going to require.

  Anne-Marie got very excited to see me tapping away at the laptop, and kept interrupting me with offers of tea – as if that was going to help ‘with my inspiration’.

  64

  Friday.

  Vicky came round unexpectedly in the morning, which was rather awkward. I introduced her to Anne-Marie. They were obviously checking each other out. My vanity saw jealousy but my sense saw curiosity.

  ‘How have you been?’ Vicky asked.

  ‘I didn’t enjoy the attention very much, if that’s what you’re getting at.’

  ‘That surprises me.’

  ‘How about your lot? Cope with the pressure?’

  ‘Oh, yes. We can take a lot worse than that. The journos can stand around outside the police station, getting themselves into a lather whenever anyone goes in or out – doesn’t bother us. They need us for the next story, and the story after that, and the story after that. They have to give the appearance of pursuing us – if only to themselves. In actual fact, the pressure’s been more off than on recently.’

  ‘You seem to have calmed down a little.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve calmed down a lot. Two weeks from now, and I’m moving on. You’ll have Victim Liaison Officer Mike Hughes to deal with. I think you’ll like him. He takes a different approach.’

  ‘Washing your hands of me?’

  ‘Just scraping the last bits out from under my nails.’

  Anne-Marie, who had been watching, horrified, now chose this moment to offer Vicky a cup of tea.

  ‘We enjoy it really,’ I said.

  ‘Do we?’ asked Vicky. ‘Speak for yourself. He’s made my life hell this last couple of weeks.’

  ‘Really?’ said Anne-Marie.

  Somehow they agreed to go off into the kitchen together for a private and extended discussion of my faults.

  I turned on the TV.

  Suddenly it hit me: Anne-Marie was going to blab something about the film script. It was very unlikely that Vicky would draw any correct kind of inference – but, still, I didn’t want her to know about my plans.

  I strolled casually into the kitchen, and the conversation stopped.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Anne-Marie asked.

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll bring it through,’ Vicky said.

  And – as little wanted as that – I fucked off back to the TV. I kept the volume low in an attempt to eavesdrop on them.

  Occasionally, I would catch Anne-Marie’s voice ascending some peak of indignation or abseiling some cliff of disbelief. ‘He didn’t!?’ They were really enjoying this – I could tell.

  It reminded me of when I’d just started to come out of the coma – how furious it had made me to have my limbs moved around as if I had nothing to do with the matter. I could grunt, by then. I was seeing blurry patches of light and starting to understand whole sentences. But the thing that annoyed me most happened a week or so later, when I asked – politely if a little slurredly – whether they could change my catheter. It had been leaky for ever, probably since they put it in. Now that I was conscious, though, it was starting to cause me some serious discomfort. I’d wake up, four in the morning, the rubberized undersheet forming a shallow bowl of urine around my buttocks. Slowly, it would go cold. When I shouted for a nurse to come and do something, they’d close the door on me.

  Having Vicky and Anne-Marie discuss me in the other room was like hearing the nurses laughing and chatting down the far end of the ward, always just on the frayed edge of audibility – so I’d never been sure if it was their distance or my brain-damage that was keeping me from understanding them.

  The nurses would be discussing my ways – using gossip as a means of getting to the end of their shifts. And I would hear their casual tone, and would be tortured by it – tortured by the absence of it in anyone’s exchanges with me. For as soon as one nurse went off shift, and the other came in to have a look at me, the tone would be gone. Instead, I’d be condescended to: ‘Change your catheter – you should count yourself lucky to be alive.’

  My mother – that almost constant presence, of TV-movie-scale devotion – was no better.

  ‘Do what the nurses say,’ she’d add. ‘They know best.’

  But they’r
e not reclining in a trough of their own stale urine, are they? And neither are you. If only they’d change the catheter there wouldn’t be this problem – they wouldn’t have to mop up after me the whole time.

  (Which came out as grunt-grunt-snort-grunt.)

  ‘I’m sure they know what they’re doing.’

  When Anne-Marie and Vicky came back in with a tray (matching teapot, tea-cups and saucers; tea-strainer; biscuits layered like armadillo scales on a matching plate) there was a terrible female knowledge in their eyes. I had been weighed in the balance and found wanting – oh yes. But, so far as I could tell, Anne-Marie hadn’t yet mentioned the script. I could either now – as I had in the hospital – give my testosterone-asserting moan-and-groan (which never got me anywhere) or I could lie back and allow them to baby me (which – in hospital – at least got my buttocks dry for a couple of hours). There was no choice. If I let Anne-Marie control the conversation, there was now even more chance she’d give me away. All the better reason to keep them on the safe subject: my impossibility. I decided to spill some tea on the carpet – just to illustrate what a mess-monster I was.

  ‘Look at you,’ said Vicky.

  And they both did. Then they each of them looked at the other. Then they laughed.