by Toby Litt
I walked up the wide crunchy path, past Karl Marx’s tomb, towards the area of newer graves.
There was a slender female figure standing over the pile of rotting flowers that were Lily’s, that were lilies. For one uncanny moment, I thought that it was Lily herself. The figure was wearing a dress I recognized as identical to one that had belonged to Lily. Then, of course, I realized: it was Josephine.
I wondered why she would be there on this particular day – then I remembered that she didn’t need a reason: this was her dead daughter; she probably came here every day.
There was a bunch of fresh flowers, red roses, on the top of the decaying, spread-out pile.
I walked more heavily than necessary upon the gravel of the graveyard path, hoping Josephine would hear, glance up and take the chance to recompose herself before I came close enough to speak. But she was oblivious to all forms of tact. I’d seemingly come upon her during a renewed grief or a relapse into the worst of the old.
When I stepped up beside her she turned her head as little as possible, taking in – as far as I could tell – my shoes and my trouser-legs. Even so, through the tears, she was able to identify me.
‘Oh Conrad,’ she said. ‘You’ve come as well.’
Josephine stepped aside, allowing me to stand at the foot of the grave. Something in her movement made me realize that she expected me – as had she – to have brought fresh flowers. That I hadn’t became a sudden and awful embarrassment. The social forms were what had carried Josephine through – but they were also what she employed to make a public display of her grief. As far as she was concerned, it had been my duty to bring flowers. I felt ashamed even as I realized how ludicrous was the basis for my shame. As if the depth of one’s feelings should be measured by the number of trips one made to the florist.
When Josephine realized (from my immobility) that I hadn’t brought the apt tribute, she flinched away slightly – as if my failure had caused her real physical pain.
This was the son-in-law I would have made. (I don’t think she realized quite how far from becoming her son-in-law I’d always been. Marriage had always been the M-word, as far as Lily was concerned.)
Kindly, she saw that my grief needed to be acknowledged in some unfloral way – in words; and so she gave me the opportunity to speak my tribute:
‘Life just isn’t the same without her, is it?’
‘You can say that again.’
This was how I envisaged Josephine at the funeral: as honestly distraught as she had ever been, yet maintaining all the usual social forms. I didn’t know the forms as well; they had been invented and disposed of by earlier generations. My repetition of them was guessy and hollow. This made me feel childish – as if Josephine were my mother: my mother, specifically, when dealing with calamity. This is what being adult is about, my mother always seemed to be saying. You’re starting to learn – but, really, as yet, there’s no basis for us to communicate.
What I’d just said wasn’t enough. I tried for more – at the same time avoiding any variants upon, We’ll never see her like again – although that’s what I really felt like saying; along with, half of me at least, And thank God for that.
‘I feel as if I won’t be able to mourn her properly until I’ve worked certain things through – until I’ve found out just who she really was.’
Josephine looked at me sideways, head down. It was a shyer and far more girlish movement than I’d ever seen her make before.
‘I suppose you mean the baby.’
For a moment I couldn’t speak: cliché but true.
‘They buried it here, did they? Along with her.’
Josephine nodded.
‘Will they put its name on the headstone?’
‘The ground here is unconsecrated – we can do whatever we like, really.’
‘Have you given it a name?’
Josephine flinched away from the grave.
‘How can one?’ she wailed. ‘I mean, how can one?’
‘She not it,’ I muttered to myself.
‘I’ve finished here,’ said Josephine. ‘I’ll leave you alone.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to hang around. I just wanted to – you know – to see her.’
‘I know,’ said Josephine, as if I’d said something very tactless – as if I’d denied she was Lily’s mother.
Things were starting to go really wrong; I needed to say something, and quickly. Josephine got in before me:
‘You know, this whole experience – I suppose you might call it an experience – has brought me back to religion.’ I remembered Lily’s Christmas Catholicism. ‘I had to convert to marry Robert. That should have been the first sign, shouldn’t it? Of what he was really like. You’d think I would have noticed something as big as that. But, at the time, I just thought it would mean a bigger, more exotic wedding. And I went along to see the priest and everything – learn the catechism. But I never thought that it would actually mean anything to me. I’ve been going back to see that same priest, you know. He’s still there, in the same smelly flat. And half the comfort, I’m sure, is that nothing in his flat has changed at all. I mean, I’d swear in a court of law that he’s wearing the exact same slippers he wore thirty years ago. (I got to know them quite well, you know: I spent most of our sessions staring at them to avoid his eyes. Virgin birth, all that.) And that seems to symbolize for me the continuity, the very staying-there-ness of the Church.’ (I could see this was becoming a speech; there was no way I could stop it.) ‘I think it started coming back to me during the funeral. I’d always resented the fact that the Church used these big ceremonial occasions – christenings, marriages, funerals – to get their mental claws into you. It seemed a bit sneaky. But now, I think, I understand, and even agree that it’s right. Because those are the points – don’t you see – when people reassess their lives. The Church is just there to give them an opportunity, through its rituals, to think and – perhaps – to change. And I have taken that opportunity. You may think I’m speaking of it rather lightly, even perhaps a little blasphemously. But I wouldn’t have made it through without it. I do feel a bit of a cheat – what with the Christian religion being one of suffering and martyrdom; and I ignored it for so long, until I myself was suffering.’ (I expected her to acknowledge her own martyrdom as well.) ‘But there’s no resentment from the Church about that. They’ve been around for a while; it’s what they expect – what they prepare for. And, in a way, over all those years of ignoring them, they do prepare you for it, also. It’s them you’re ignoring, specifically – not anyone else. Not the Protestants. You’re ignoring priests and mass and the Virgin Mary. When I went back, I was surprised how much of the catechism I still knew by heart; and I must only have thought of it it eight or nine times in all those years.’
I could see already that Josephine Irish’s next novel was going to be unbearable – and, probably, unbearably successful. She had a hook now (grief) to go along with her line (long and lilting) and her sinker (the dying fall at the end of each long and lilting line). If she didn’t end up writing educational literature for the Jesuits, she seemed doomed to a future of tearful talkshows and pathetic phone-ins.
I realized that I’d been silent for so long that Josephine would feel no qualm about continuing.
‘It surprised me that I was able to keep on writing, through it all. But, you know…’
The weather that afternoon was unfairly colluding with Josephine’s frogmarching me towards pathos. Mayflies were transporting their sunshine halos around the cow-parsley. The ivy was gently trying to shake off its winterdust. It was enough to turn any two walkers-together into friends, lovers or – at the very least – co-reminiscers. This was the weather of childhood photographs – before the blonde hair turns mousy, before the clear skin is prinked by spots. This was the weather in the photograph on Robert’s desk. I didn’t believe in it. I wanted absurdist weather to suit my absurdist emotions: hailstorms at 90°F, sub-zero horizontal rain. But
the afternoon was on Josephine’s side, not mine. She was terribly suited to this moment of light; it warmed and softened her face, smoothing out the lines. I could see Lily in her, just as I’d seen Lily in Robert – but this was more lyrical, more sexual.
She was talking on and on, but I think she could tell I wasn’t listening. Instead, she took the opportunity to make certain flattering expressions, to turn her face towards and away from the shadows. I felt as if I were being wooed – something Lily had never done; she’d never felt the need to ask me to come to her. I was always half-way there well before she’d even started to think of it – if she ever had.
It seemed natural, at the time, however abhorrent afterwards, to take Josephine’s hand. It seemed inevitable to stop and turn and face each other, in tears. It seemed, before we even kissed, that we’d already kissed, kissed many times, kissed through kissing Lily.
Josephine’s mouth was very soft, granny-soft. I knew she had dentures, and – even in the soft-focus haze of our coming together – I tried to see if I could tell the difference between them and real teeth – Lily’s, say. The edges where they met the gums seemed a little thicker and cruder, but that was all.
Most of my mind was off and away – thinking how odd it was that this was happening; thinking – already – of possible excuses Josephine (and I) might be forced to use afterwards: ridiculous, the moment, grief, something.
I was infuriated by the thought that Anne-Marie was at my flat in Mortlake, and that I couldn’t take Josephine there.
This is silly, I almost said. We know exactly what we’re doing – and we’re still doing it.
I reached up to brush a lock of hair out of Josephine’s eyes, then remembered how many times I’d made this same attempted-tender gesture with Lily. I deflected it (at the same moment, almost deflecting the entire encounter).
Josephine was choked, more exposed than I was.
‘Where were you going to go?’
‘I was going to go home,’ I said.
‘Can we go there?’
‘No, that wouldn’t be a good idea.’
‘Alright,’ she said, softly. ‘Mine. I have a car.’
For my own sanity (later), I needed to say something preventative: ‘You’re sure?’
But Josephine’s pathos prevailed.
‘What’s the point in being sure?’ she said.
She took my hand, kissed it, and led me to her Volvo.
68
Josephine’s body – in preparation for the old lady’s body it was soon to become – had begun to swathe itself in fragrant powders. When I got close enough to kiss it, which I did (it must be admitted) more than a few times, I began coughing frantically. The powders, no doubt, were intended to be anti-offensive rather than offensive; but they served to warn me off from approaching too closely-in any sense. Josephine’s house, too, was a collocation of powders and other desiccated things: dust, mainly; little display bottles full of coloured sands, collected from various deserts and beaches; a myriad of potpourri; jars of rice, beans and pulses. Even Snafu and Glitch seemed dehydrated, making the milk Josephine poured out for them bubble with their furious tongues. (Josephine took some pleasure in pointing out that the cats didn’t seem in any way to recognize me.)
I’d been to her house before, of course – but never alone, always strainedly accompanying Lily.
From the photographs of her beautiful self (none including The Mistake) that I saw around the living room, Josephine – unlike Lily – had once been full-fleshed. I’d seen the images of Lily here before: Lily had always been stalky-stringy, even as a baby.
The lines of Josephine’s figure were crisp now rather than curvaceous. The bone-structure of her face was so delicate that one felt if one blew on it too roughly one would alter its basic structure. Her pubic hair was dusty – like tumbleweed on a soft grey desert. At the time, the density of my desire for her had bent the usual coordinates of my sexual universe sufficiently out of shape for me not to find all of this repulsive and motherly.
Yes, I spent a great deal of (mental) energy trying not to think of my mother. Not crying out to her. Not fucking her.
Josephine, or so it seemed to me at first, was something (an object) I had to treat with extreme care. Her skeleton was more than immanent within her – it was a presence very close to the surface, rising. But she obviously felt herself to be more resilient, and more in need of mistreating.
‘Don’t be gentle,’ she said, during. ‘I can’t stand gentleness. I’m sick of it. I didn’t bring you here for that.’
I couldn’t help but think of Robert – had this been her way with him? And had he, ever the gentleman, refused not to treat her gently – in a gentlemanly way?
I flashed disgustingly back to a honeymoon not my own. Was this her great disappointment?
Occasionally, when Lily and I were together, I used to get the feeling that, once upon a time, Lily’s father had done something terrible to her – and that that was the real reason Josephine had left him. This would certainly have explained Lily’s resentment of him. But now I tended to think that this resentment could be explained by the fact that he hadn’t abused her, and had thereby deprived her of any obvious, immediate, clear reason for being as completely fucked up as she was. (I had no doubt that Lily blamed her father totally for fucking her up, whatever he had or had not, really or in her fantasies, done.)
What a terrible involvement in Lily’s pre-psychohistory this was. It felt like incest: taboo was half its attraction. The other half, I suppose, was healthy perversity: I didn’t want to be doing this, and so I was doing it. The perversity of choice – the exercise of choice over desire: that was what was being proven here.
Josephine’s fingers progressed rakingly down my back.
I had started to let some of my hate of her and my resentment of her livingness, her daughter’s deadness, come through into the style of my fucking her. And she seemed to appreciate this expression. It was what she’d wanted, been referring to.
No longer were we thumping in such sweet congress; jazzy, I set up counter-rhythms – trying to anticipate her clenchings and frustrate them; trying to forestall her easy-early orgasm.
‘Better,’ she said. ‘Much better.’
Josephine’s self-hatred was finding its expression in having my unwanted cock slamming up towards her infertile womb.
The bones of my pelvis mashed against hers, slowly becoming slickly lubricated. The easier it: became, the harder I fought against its becoming easy.
The forms and folds of Josephine’s body, now it had gone slack, reminded me more and more of Lily, when she had sex-relaxed. It was more difficult to maintain this illusion (and my erection) with my eyes closed: with my eyes closed, Josephine’s old-lady perfume came to dominate everything, and I imagined myself the Beast Boy raping a whimpering pensioner. And so I kept my eyes open, staring at the narrow Y-shape that her arms made at the armpit. This was the thing about her most like Lily.
Whilst we were fucking, Lily had always wanted me to pull her hair back, scratch her, dig my fingernails into her buttocks, slap her face, pinch her nipples, draw blood somehow.
‘It helps,’ she used to say, by way of explanation.
It disturbed me that Josephine was the same.
Where had Lily picked this up? In some archetypal childhood sex-interruption scene? If so, had her mother been with The Mistake or with some stranger? Or had she and her mother simply discussed the specifics of sex (gone into what they were into)? Or was it coded out somewhere in her genes?
Josephine and I were learning things about each other – things so obscene that, I felt, there was no way we would be able to meet again. The dinner table would be an abhorrence. A glance across the street would be blushing and cries for a taxi. The mere memory would be knees hitting the toilet floor and hands clutching the sides of the bowl. But that was for the future we were struggling against each other to deny.
Our bodies were rubbing themselves raw at e
very point of contact. Our pubic hair was brillo-padding the skin down hard against our pubic bones.
Josephine was on her way – over and out. All she needed was more of the same, more of the same, more of the same. And I needed to finish this – I needed to slay her totally. This wasn’t enough.
I thought of Dorothy – of how easily this could have been her I was fucking. But I wanted to send bullets up inside her, not slops of spunk. Velocity was required: hardness, mass, heat – all the damage-causers. Bullet-headed, my cock was a poor parody of the real fucking that somebody was going to get.
In sixes, I counted my thrusts.
Frustratingly, Josephine began to come on a three and a half. I kept going till the six, and the next, and the next, were complete.
Then I pulled out of her, climbed up her and started to wank off over her face. I was going to put an end to these powders; liquid was coming her way – unexpected face-cream, good for the complexion; give her back some of her youth.
But Josephine (perhaps deliberately) misunderstood me. Not wanting the facial, her mouth went round my cock, her fingers cupped my balls, and when I came it was into the roof of her mouth. This was the oyster of her disgust, and she knocked it back without hesitation. Whatever was allotted to her, whatever she had self-imposed, whatever internal baulks and hesitations there might be, the performance would pass uninterrupted.
I, on the other hand, pulled away from her immediately. There was no way I was going relax, treat this as anything even half-way towards domestic, towards relationship. Even a glass of water would have been hospitality accepted, indebtedness hinted at, reciprocation begun. Already I was off the bed, looking for my trousers.
‘What is it?’ asked Josephine, wiping her mouth unnecessarily: she knew that it had all gone in.
Being slutty, lying naked on the destroyed bed, gave her an air of whorish possession; and I was her punter, spent, embarrassed, rushing back out to the stability of his life; sweating, guilty. If I had had a realistic amount, say £100 cash, I think I might even have left it for Josephine on her bedside table, tucked under the magenta edge of the porcelain lamp.
