I expected a whooshing slam of Thomas the Tank Engine curtains after our last interaction. I do feel bad about laughing at Maud. Or was I laughing at Maud’s nanna? Or Fluffy, or Mrs Green’s tongue? Or, even more disturbingly, are they all the same thing? When Maud comes back to the window, at first I can’t tell what’s different about her, even with the binoculars. She looks sort of folded in on herself, and unclean. As if she hasn’t showered in days. (Probably been consoling herself behind the doll’s house in the middle of the night.) It’s her hair that is different. Sort of plastered down and matted. I’m not sure what I am looking at until she takes a tissue, dabs it at her temple, and then holds it up to the window.
The tissue is bloody. There is blood in her hair. She has the tissue tented around the tip of her index finger. She looks like a pilgrim at an execution, one of the inspired masses who dip their kerchief in the spilt blood of a beheaded saint. Now, there’s a symbol for you. She looks positively peaceful. I’m a bit disgusted at first; I feel as though she is showing me a tissue she’s picked her nose with. But only at first. Because then it occurs to me: I did this. My laughing has triggered this in her. I have made her tear out so much hair that she’s made herself bleed. And given that trichotillomania is a pleasurable act, I can only conclude that my laughing, or her interpretation of it, has given her this pleasure. I suddenly feel an irresistible craving for the tripe question. I want to answer it again so badly, my skin is prickling. I want Maud to crawl under the little table in front of her window and retrieve that page from Alice in Wonderland and press it against the cool pane just one more time, and I want to whisper: Yes, I want to touch it!
That night I make two decisions. The first decision is to try hair pulling myself. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t want to end up with bald or bleeding patches, and I have no intention of putting a hand in my jocks. At least, not for that. I want to know what it feels like. I want to know what Maud feels like when she does it. It’s the closest I can get to touching her.
I sit on the end of my bed and wind a few strands of my hair around one index finger. I have never really contemplated just how strong a hair follicle is. Given the right pressure, it bites like wire into skin. I tug very gently. My scalp itches a bit at first and then, as I pull harder, begins to sting. It is unsettling but not unpleasant. I try releasing and increasing the torque at various intervals and find that a small nervous current tweaks at the sensors in my neck and upper spine. My eyes begin to tear involuntarily. If I continue even pressure, will the roots slide from the scalp or will the hairs just break off? Break off, probably. Breaking off doesn’t seem like the real deal. Better go in for the grand tug. I take a deep breath and, during the exhalation, yank what turns out to be about ten strands of hair from my head. What a fucking idiot.
It hurts like hell. Do you know how much hair a dozen or so strands represent? Doesn’t sound like much, but it feels like they’ve been dug out with a spoon. I actually wail. Don’t know what I yell, but Merrill thumps on the bedroom door and tells me to knock it off. I am ultimately pleased with myself for having a go, however. If nothing else, it confirms for me that empathy is the worst kind of madness.
The other decision I make that night is to go to the burial of Maud’s nanna. I am fairly certain you don’t need an invitation to these things. Cemeteries are public places, after all. Of course, I’m screwed if they choose the torch method. Mrs Green was cremated. Nowhere to hide, you see. Small room, piped music, body taken away while the guests have a cup of tea and a sandwich. A stranger (or a laughing neighbour) stands out like a sore thumb in that environment. I just have to hope for a burial. A burial on a hill, under some kind of weeping evergreen; a steely sky with just a smidgeon of sun piercing the roiling clouds, coming to rest on the copper curls of my Maud’s slightly inclined head. Her shoulders bent with grief. Her tiny white hands clenched over an embroidered handkerchief. Yes, a burial.
FIFTEEN
It is safer to accept any chance that offers itself, and extemporise a procedure to fit it, than to get a good plan matured, and wait for a chance of using it.
—Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
Of course, she is wearing a hat on the day to cover her sins and the weather is a complete washout. Fine. Moderate south-east winds, shifting south to south-west by noon and freshening in the afternoon. The cemetery is a bit of a disappointment, as well. More plastic flowers than trees. The trees that are about look a bit worse for wear. I would have thought plant life in cemeteries would be lush and varied, verdant and shiny, if only because their roots are tapping into all that lovely decomp. I’ve got to stop getting my information about these things from nineteenth-century literature.
It was easy enough to find out when and where it was all happening. I didn’t ask Maud. I thought about asking her. I even wrote the question. But I didn’t ask it. There was every possibility she wouldn’t want me there. I’m not deluded: this isn’t a relationship, this is love. As such, Maud might find my wanting to tag along a bit weird. Basically, I didn’t want to give her the opportunity of telling me to stay away and/or drawing her curtains again. After all, this isn’t about her.
I knew death and funeral notices are listed in the paper because that’s the only part of the paper my mum reads. Death and funeral notices and the telly guide. Dad calls Mum a ghoul but listens with suspicious interest when she reads out notices about people they know or names that sound familiar to them. (‘Didn’t we go to school with a Carol Jenkins? She’s about the right age.’) They like to speculate, too, especially if the death was unexpected. Mum likes the ones that say things like ‘suddenly taken’ or ‘without warning’. (‘So young—what do you reckon, Merrill? Disease or accident?’) Dad will usually take a punt. (‘Maybe her husband killed her.’) It’s lovely, actually, this intimacy they share over the funeral notices. Merrill can be quite charming while discussing the caveats of death, for all his bluster and condescension. The dog’s always at his feet under the table, however.
I checked the papers every day after Maud broke the news. The funeral notice was in two days later, although the death notices ran for four. I had never read death notices before and so hadn’t realised how little you can tell about a person from them. Everybody’s are the same. Right down to the little symbols you can buy to put above your notice. The rose resting on its side (dead rose?); the gothic RIP; the cursive SADLY MISSED; and my personal favourite—the old English script ONE OF LIFE’S TRUE GENTLEMEN, which some poor sod had printed above their notice for Maud’s nanna. (I’d ask for my money back.) This led me to one conclusion: they had to be lies. If the grieving one is falling back on the linguistic and artistic generic in their final opportunity to farewell the loved one, they must be hiding something. Not only is death funny, it’s dishonest.
I got to the cemetery before the funeral party and kept a cautious distance following them to the burial site. I’d thought I could blend in at someone else’s hole in the ground, but as they aren’t doing a lot of business today, I am a bit more exposed than I would have preferred. I take a position behind a tree that looks like it’s been ringbarked, and I watch. Maud is wearing a hat but not one I would have chosen for her. It should be black, wide-brimmed and Dietrich. I could even go a couple of feathers. Instead it’s a crispy-looking straw thing with a navy-blue band. She is wearing a black dress, though. V-neck, three-quarter sleeves, button through, scalloped hem. It’s too big for her and is cinched in at the waist with a wide brown belt.
Real burials aren’t like the ones in books or on telly. I am disappointed. There’s no priest, or if there is he’s in civvies. If I’m being buried, I want someone officiating in a robe. Or at the very least in some sort of uniform. I don’t want the person in charge dressing, or behaving, like one of the guests. Speaking of guests, this lot are seriously underdressed. Several of the women are in prints and there are very few ties around. They look like they’re on their way to Sizzler. There’s a green cloth over
the mound of excavated dirt, which pleases me, and they have obviously put some dosh into the coffin. But it’s all over so quickly. No friends or family members speak, no one reads a poem, there’s no music (apart from some kid listening to an MP3 player), and there’s no committal. Maybe they don’t do that at real burials. Maybe that’s only in books, too. Like the good trees. I wait and wait for someone to pick up a fistful of dirt. Doesn’t happen.
The coffin isn’t even lowered until the guests have left. I don’t understand that at all. That’s the big finish, isn’t it? I watch it lowered. It’s smooth as anything, just glides downwards on this strap and pulley contraption. When I’m sure everyone is safely on their way back to their cars, I wander over to have a proper look. I even pick up a handful of dirt and throw it in. Seems like the right thing to do. The backfillers don’t seem to mind. They even stop shovelling to allow me access.
I get the bus home and think about Nanna and how little you can tell about her from her mourners. Mourn (verb; Middle English, from Old English murnan, akin to High Old German mornan to mourn, Greek mermera to care): 1. to feel or express grief or sorrow; 2. to show the customary signs of grief for a death. It occurs to me that the mourners at a funeral are the Pandora charms of a life. The little bits and pieces of people we either collect or create from go to whoa. The symbols of who we are. ( She was one of life’s true gentlemen.) How sad. Poor Nanna.
By the time I get home, there are quite a few cars outside Maud’s house. I guess they didn’t go to Sizzler, after all. Dad is all pissy because a couple of cars are parked on our verge. He even goes out and puts notes on the windscreens. Dobie Squires is all antsy because he always is when Dad’s pissy. Mum is smoking at the kitchen window, flicking ash into the sink, describing to Dad what she can see of what’s going on. They should ask me. By that time, I’m upstairs with my binoculars.
SIXTEEN
Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes 8:15
Lionel is on our doorstep by the time his final guest is manoeuvring his car off our verge. I say manoeuvring because Merrill dragged the bins up for collection while Li’s guests were still out back consoling each other over curry and profiteroles. I’ve never known Dad to take the bins up so early before. In fact, Mum is usually hollering at Dad about ‘getting the bins up’ right until bedtime. But here we are, middle of the afternoon, and Dad’s ‘getting the bins up’. He wedged them in on either side of the cars on our verge. It wasn’t easy for them to pull on to the street—the recycle bin was nudged hard and tottered threateningly for a second or two—but ultimately Dad seems pleased with the inconvenience he imagines he has caused. I know he’s pleased because he stood at the lounge window watching, rocking gently back and forth on the balls of his feet, muttering to himself. What he isn’t pleased about is Limo-Li turning up on our doorstep as the last of his guests is manoeuvring away.
Lionel is pointing and yelling before Dad has even opened the front door. So is Dad. They don’t realise immediately that they’re yelling about different things. Dad’s going off about damage to his verge grass (he’d never been much into his verge grass until someone else wanted to use it) but stops short when he catches ‘that creepy kid of yours again’ in the middle of Li’s tirade. That’s when Mum gets involved, gesticulating wildly with her tumbler of red gripped in one hand and a fag in the other. It gets really rowdy when Li calls Mum a ‘soak’ and Dad calls Li a ‘poofter’. (A poofter? Merrill is obviously panicked if that’s the best he can come up with.) Mum is hissing, ‘Just punch him, Merrill,’ when I start my retreat. The actual fisticuffs begin when Dad says: ‘My kid creepy? If you don’t rein that girl of yours in, she’s going to end up as bald as that fucking cat.’
I had humiliated Lionel. This is how it started.
Mum downstairs ashing into the kitchen sink. Dad writing notes in his best printing to slip under windscreen wipers. Me upstairs talking to Maud:
—Why you not at wake?
—IT IS NOT A WAKE IT IS A PARTY
That’s when I turned my attention to Li’s backyard and had a really good look. I suppose it was a party: a couple of people had already taken their shoes off. The mourners were all sitting on plastic chairs in the sun, drinking beer and wine out of plastic cups. There was a trestle table set up near the back steps of the house, covered with dishes of food. Someone (Li?) had twisted crepe paper into long streamers and stuck them around the edges of the table. There was music playing. Only thing missing was the keg. Yup. Party.
I think the guest of honour should always attend the party. Might stop gaffes like the crepe paper streamers. That’s what they used to do, you know. You’d get your sandwich and booze for attending the funeral but you’d have to eat and drink in front of the corpse. Corpse-watching, they called it. Lykwake. I read a book once about people accidentally buried alive. One of the solutions to the problem was to watch the corpse for a few days, just to make sure it didn’t wake up. Now, that would be a party.
Maud was sitting at her little table, pulling at her eyelashes. I sat, too, resting my elbows on my desk, pressing the binoculars hard into my forehead, as if that could bring her closer. When Limo-Li opened her bedroom door, I stood up so quickly, my chair fell over backwards. I positioned myself off to one side, my shoulder squared against the window sash, my neck craned just enough to see without being seen. Li was talking quietly to Maud, or I should say to the back of Maud’s head. She hadn’t moved at all. Then suddenly she laughed. I could tell she was laughing, not only from the contortion of her own face but from the expression on Lionel’s. He was angry. He grabbed Maud’s wrist and yanked her out of the chair, forcing her to stand in front of him. She wasn’t laughing now.
The thing about binoculars is that although they make objects appear closer than they really are, they also have a strange distancing effect. Li had Maud’s head between both his hands. His knuckles were white and his lips were pulled back in a growl. He was twisting her head from side to side. I knew what he was looking at. He was closer than I’d ever got. He could probably smell the blood. I had surprisingly little reaction to all this manhandling. I didn’t feel particularly protective. I wasn’t even overly interested beyond the normal curiosity one feels when involuntarily confronted with a private melee. I really just wanted them to get on with it so I could have Maud back to myself. I put all this down to the binoculars.
Don’t get me wrong. I was concerned about Maud. I do love her, after all. I suppose I felt the same way I feel when Dobie Squires has Mum cornered. And although I wouldn’t have enjoyed watching Maud get hurt, it was really the opportunity to humiliate Li that motivated me. What did I do? I stepped out of cover and into the wide open frame of my bedroom window, binoculars and all. When Lionel saw me, I waved.
We went to a local circus once. It was pretty dismal, from what I remember. The sort of place that ends up on 60 Minutes for health code violations and ferris wheel injuries. At one of the shows, a bloke dressed like Jack Sparrow was coaxing all these little dogs into jumping through flaming hoops. I swear you could smell singed pelt. And when I say coaxing, I mean cajoling, wheedling and bullying. He had a miniature whip that he kept cracking and we were all supposed to be laughing because it was funny (wasn’t it?) that he was emulating a lion tamer with these skinny mutts. Jack Sparrow was clearly very pleased with himself. Then an interesting thing happened. One of the dogs, rather than leaping through the fiery hoop, turned tail and launched itself at Jack Sparrow. Jack started flailing his whip arm about in a frenzy, but it was all too late to prevent the dog from hitting Jack in the belly like a javelin and sinking its teeth in.
People were laughing and cheering, but I was watching Jack Sparrow’s face. He looked ashamed. All of his authority, all of his control, draining out of his eye sockets, leaving his head
deflated and his body mortified. He stumbled out of the ring with the dog still attached. That’s who I saw when I waved at Li. Jack Sparrow from the circus, with a little dog clenched onto his flesh. Except I was the little dog. He was bitten and, at that moment, too ashamed to have any other response than to drop his hands from Maud’s head and stumble out of her bedroom. I knew I had to execute the next part of my plan while Nanna’s guests were still eating, drinking and making merry, so I wrote and placed the following without thought or preamble:
—Meet me at the side fence
I ran downstairs as quickly as I could. I was still picturing Lionel removing my teeth from his belly when I reached the fence. I could just see between the pickets. I could smell curry and see profiteroles. There were some decent looking salads, too. Some music I didn’t recognise was playing on a portable CD player. Panpipes? Bloody hell—cheerio, Nanna! No music at the dig site but panpipes at the party! As I waited at the fence, I wondered for a moment if she would really come. Then I saw her coming down the back steps on the other side of the trestle table. She crossed the lawn quickly and arrived at the fence a little south of my location. I adjusted my position accordingly until we would have been face-to-face if not for the picket fence between us. We had never been this close before.
I could hear her breathing. I reached my hand up and over the top of the fence. She stood there for a minute, not responding, then she reached up and I felt her fingers graze my fist. I opened my hand and dropped the little gold apple charm into her palm.
Creepy and Maud Page 6
