by Rosie Thomas
They left the party. As soon as they had taken a single step out of the room, there was no going back. Every evasive action that they had both taken over the years now seemed to have been leading directly to this moment.
Instead of extricating herself and sending him home to Jeanette, Connie took Bill home with her.
All Bill’s careful structures of duty and responsibility were burning down, and he let them blaze and then collapse into ashes.
They stumbled into the refuge of her flat, and the heat of passion melted and fused them.
He said, ‘I want you. I can’t sleepwalk through one more day.’
She tightened her arms round him and he kissed her as if he were a starving man.
‘I have been so lonely without you,’ she whispered.
‘I’ve been like a machine. But without you, everything’s starting to break down and run out of power.’
He undressed her, there in the hallway. She pulled off his clothes, just as greedy as he was. Reckless, laughing, they scattered a trail of discarded shoes and shirts behind them.
Bill was familiar to her, the shape and even the scent of him, but he was also brand-new. She had never seen this insistence in him.
‘Connie, Connie,’ he whispered. He marched her backwards, step by step, until they fell onto her bed.
There were no miracles, but Bill’s presence in her bed, in her body, closed a circle. Connie felt for a brief few moments that she wasn’t searching the landscape for signposts or trying to decipher a mysterious language. For the first time in her life she was at home, where she belonged, in a place that wasn’t defined by time or history.
Afterwards she held him against her.
His breathing slowed and steadied.
‘Why tonight?’ Connie whispered.
‘Because I can’t go on persuading myself that what’s true is not. And you?’
‘Truth and reality aren’t necessarily compatible, are they? The truth, if I’m going to admit it, is that I fell in love with you the minute you walked into Echo Street on your first date with Jeanette. Before I even saw you. As soon as I heard your voice.’
‘Look. You’re blushing,’ he smiled. His finger touched her cheek.
‘We’re talking about truth, remember? It’s often embarrassing. Reality is that you are Jeanette’s husband. But tonight the truth is that I still love you and you are here with me. I don’t know about tomorrow. I don’t even care.’
He held her closer.
‘Remember the day of the picnic? The motorbike accident?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘You were such a contrast to Jeanette. Jeanette was sunny. You were so dark and intense, coiled up in the back of my car.’
His mouth moved over her face. ‘And do you remember the wet night just before the wedding, when we kissed on the way to the tube station?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘That was a shock. You were supposed to be just a kid.’
‘I was seventeen.’
‘And then I took you out to find Constance Crescent, that empty street that didn’t tell your story, and afterwards I couldn’t stop thinking about you. You wanted so much to find where you came from, and I wanted to tell you that it mattered much less than where you were going. I don’t know if it was then that I realised it, or if it came to me more gradually, but I was beginning to suspect that I might be marrying the wrong sister. I told myself that it was absurd, plain wrong, imagination, a trick of the light, a vertigo sufferer’s compulsion to haul himself to the edge and pitch himself over the precipice…all kinds of explanations. Justifications. But I couldn’t escape the conviction. It was there.
‘It wasn’t that I didn’t love Jeanette, because I did. I do still. And Noah. I have to tell you that now, Con. But how many variations of love are there? I kept seeing you and wanting to know you more; it wasn’t desire precisely – even though it was that too. Sometimes I could hardly be in the same room with you, I had to go outside and walk up and down until the urge subsided and it was safe for me to venture back again. It was more a certainty – I’m putting this very badly, and it isn’t as if I haven’t thought about it constantly – that if I could get close enough to you, if you would allow me to, if I could suspend all the other realities, then I would find – I don’t know – yes, I do – the love of my life. I’m making this sound so narcissistic, I’m sorry. All I can do is try to tell you the truth. The truth as it seems to me, in my heart. I know that your truth is likely to be different. Jeanette’s will be totally other, God knows.’
Connie tried to interrupt, to tell him that she knew what he was trying to say and that it was the same for her, but he gently put his fingers to her mouth.
She understood how much he needed to talk.
‘You seemed opaque. But inside here, Connie,’ he touched his fist to her forehead, ‘I knew you were as clear as spring water. Does that sound fanciful?’
‘No. Although I don’t think I’m either clear or opaque. Just a mixture, like everyone.’
‘It’s a matter of contrasts. You see, Jeanette is the opposite of you. Is this presumptuous of me, telling you what your own sister is and is not?’
‘No.’
‘On the outside, Jeanette is translucent. Her pale skin. That smile. But I made the classic bloke’s mistake of confusing looks with character. Jeanette’s inside is your outside. It’s dark. Of course she’s angry, that’s understood. You would be, I would be, if either of us had to contend with what she does.
‘I know it’s her anger that gives her the will to shape her life the way she wants it. That’s all right, it’s admirable. It’s just the silence, Con. It’s the silence I can’t bear. Not the deafness. In a way that’s only external. I mean the real silence.’
He tightened his arms, as if she might try to escape from him. His face was hidden in her hair but she could hear the grief in his voice.
‘I know,’ Connie said.
Echo Street had bred that deeper silence. It was rooted in the cultivation of appearances, the fear of exposure, the pin-neat, net-curtained, buttoned-lip and averted-glance rebuttal of the unwieldy and passionate world, as invented by Hilda and upheld by Jeanette.
After Tony died, those standards had gone so much against the grain for Connie that she had run away as soon as she was old enough to be alone.
‘At Noah’s birthday party. You saw what happened when he smashed the bowl.’
‘Yes.’
‘You or I would have yelled at him. Or just yelled. But that’s not what Jeanette does. Her only outlet is me. Everything is channelled through me. I am her lightning conductor.’
‘It looked for a second as though you hated each other.’
‘We do, sometimes. I don’t want to be a lifeline, Connie. All I can be is a man.’
There was a break in his voice that she had never heard before. She couldn’t see Bill’s face, but she was sure that he was close to tears.
In all the time she had known him, she had never before felt that he needed her or that she could help him, instead of the other way round. The wash of tenderness that came with the recognition was as powerful as desire. She hadn’t guessed that it was possible to love someone so much.
She rocked him gently in her arms. She talked in a low voice, words that were hardly connected, telling him that everything would be all right.
She couldn’t see how, but maybe they would find a way.
After a while he collected himself.
‘I have to go soon,’ he whispered.
‘Please don’t go yet.’
‘Con, what are we going to do? This is all we’ll ever say to each other.’
‘I know.’
‘Just a few more minutes.’
He made love to her again, roughly this time.
‘I want to go on holding you for ever,’ Bill said.
‘I want you to.’
She stretched herself beneath him.
She was discovering that it was
possible to be wildly, exotically happy, even when you were in despair.
Connie walked back through the village, calculating that Jeanette would be awake by now. People had emerged from beneath their awnings and were hurrying to the market, and the street was noisy with the buzz of scooters. The puddles gaped like lunar craters. She jumped aside to avoid a tiara of spray as a scooter shot through the nearest one.
She found Bill and Jeanette sitting in their accustomed places on the veranda. The low sun had emerged into a broad band of pistachio-green sky, and the margins of the banana palm leaves were glinting gold. Steam gently rose where the sun struck the thick-knit vegetation and the frogs were clearing their throats for a long night.
Jeanette pointed, beyond the greenery, over towards Wayan’s house.
The upper storeys of the thirty-foot-high cremation tower constructed over the past weeks that had been shuddered and tipped sideways. Jeanette’s hands flew to her mouth as the whole edifice lurched and threatened to topple over. There was an echo of shouting and laughter before it righted itself again.
‘Don’t worry,’ Connie said. ‘Now they are decorating the wadah, ready for tomorrow.’
As the dusk gathered, Wayan emerged from his house compound. Two bamboo poles, one tall and one short, were planted beside the entrance. From the shorter one hung a bird woven from bamboo and decorated with coloured feathers, and from the taller a coconut-oil lamp covered with a white cloth. Wayan used another pole to unhook and lower the lamp. He cleaned the wick and filled the oil reservoir, then made sure that the flame was bright before he raised the lamp into its place once more. It made a pale glow in the fading light.
The bird was the watchman and the lamp was kept alight to guide his father’s soul back to its home. It would burn until the cremation was over.
FOURTEEN
At midday Wayan unhooked the coconut-oil lamp from the pole at his gate. The lane was so packed with people he could hardly turn.
‘Everyone from the banjar is here,’ Connie said. ‘The whole neighbourhood.’
The latest arrivals noisily greeted her as they passed her house. Kim and Neil the property developers waved from the other side of the lane and Werner the sculptor accompanied by his latest boyfriend positioned themselves in the best place for taking pictures. Drums and gongs were pulsing from inside Wayan’s compound. Some of the young girls began dancing.
‘It’s like a huge party,’ Bill said.
‘That’s just what it is. A send-off for the spirit.’
A big group of laughing young men pushed by. They wore long tunics with bright yellow sashes, and head-cloths knotted round their foreheads.
Jeanette’s eyes glittered as she watched. She was holding Dewi’s baby in her arms. Dewi was wearing her best clothes, a brocade skirt with her upper body tightly bound in pale gold cloth. Her head was crowned with flowers and the baby reached out his fat hands and tried to pick off the petals. Jeanette stopped him by whirling him away and burying her face in his brown neck. He turned his attention to her hair and she let him tug at it with his fists.
In the middle of the lane towered the wadah. It was decorated now to the tip of the highest tier with a mass of coloured streamers, tinsel and branches and garlands of flowers, and on the back of it a grotesque painted mask bared its fangs over the heads of the crowd. The monster had huge paper wings on bamboo frames that flapped and creaked.
‘Look,’ Bill pointed. Out of the house compound came a group of relatives, carrying an object wrapped in white cloth. Two dozen pairs of hands grabbed it and hoisted it onto a shelf within the level of the tower that represented the world of men. He muttered, ‘That’s not the body?’
‘An effigy. The real body’s been buried in the ground all these months, so it’s impure and can’t be brought to the house. They’ll have dug it up and it’ll be waiting in the cemetery.’
‘I see.’
The tower shook as two boys scrambled up it. They wedged themselves among the decorations and waved to the cheering crowd. There was a fresh burst of shouting and laughing and further down the lane the throng parted. A pair of horns was all that was visible at first, but then a larger-than-life carving of a black bull appeared, standing tall on four splayed legs and borne on a platform of bamboo poles by yet more of the dead man’s family and neighbours.
The carving of the bull was realistic, down to the last detail. One of the men obligingly demonstrated that its large penis was moveable. The streamers and strips of cloth with which it was decorated fluttered and everyone laughed and cheered.
A loose procession began to form. Kadek waved his plump arms to marshal the crowd. At the head of the line, a young cousin lifted the coconut-oil lamp to guide the spirit to its destination. The bull came lurching and capering to the front and another boy jumped up onto its back. The sweating men carrying the platform tilted and swung it to try and throw him off but he clung on like a rodeo rider. The rows of women in their gold and best brocades came next, balancing silver dishes heaped with rice cakes and fruit and with flowers on their heads. Dayu and her sisters were carrying bamboo poles speared with carved pineapples and papayas. Dewi held out her arms for her baby before taking her place, and Jeanette reluctantly handed him over. He surveyed the scene with mild interest.
A long white cloth was unfurled over everyone’s heads. A mass of people rushed underneath it, reaching up to grab a handful of the cloth. Connie explained to Bill and Jeanette that the cloth was for everyone who couldn’t carry the tower itself to share in bearing the dead man’s remains to cremation. At the tail-end of the procession the strongest men were straining to lift the poles supporting the tower onto their shoulders.
The bull sarcophagus, the pyramids of multicoloured offerings, the cloth, the tower and the hubbub of supporters began the journey through the village. The procession moved slowly enough for Jeanette to keep pace without difficulty because the bull kept wheeling away from the route and making feints into the crowd. The bearers capered and spun in circles to confuse the spirit, so it would never be able to find its way back to the house and haunt the family.
Jeanette clapped.
– So remember, twice round the roundabout on the way to the cemetery for me, she ordered Bill. He caught her hand and kissed the knuckles.
Under its own momentum now, the procession roared through the market, past the clicking cameras of packs of tourists. The boys in the tower pelted the crowd with handfuls of rice and the crowd threw flowers. The bull danced under rows of coloured penjor flags, and a man with a forked pole hoisted low-slung power lines along the route so the wadah could pass beneath. Young men in the procession chucked water at each other and soaked the onlookers, and the fighting spread until dozens of hooting people were scooping handfuls out of the puddles and splashing it over everyone within reach. The insistent rhythm of drums and metal gongs grew louder and the men carrying the tower sweated and staggered beneath the weight.
As they came to the cemetery, they could see three more towers bobbing over the low roofs of the houses. Wayan’s family procession merged with the other three funerals and hundreds of people surged towards the cremation ground.
Connie gasped as a scattered handful of rice stung her cheek. She took Jeanette’s hands and they guided her away from the mob.
– What happens now?
Connie pointed.
In a quiet corner under the shade of a huge tree, the robed priests were waiting in a circle of musicians and dancers. The bull and the wadah were manoeuvred into place.
The musicians began to play. As the chains of notes swelled against an expectant hush, the people pressed round a pavilion hung with plain white draperies. The bull was carried into its shelter and set down, with a collective groan of relief from the bearers. At the side, on a low platform, a bundle wrapped in white cloths lay waiting.
The music grew louder and the whole crowd surged three times round the pavilion. Wooden cages were opened and chickens flapped and squawked to f
reedom, with dozens of pairs of hands waving them off in the auspicious direction.
There was a roar from the crowd. The hinged back was torn off the bull as the body was snatched up from its resting place. As it was manhandled to the sarcophagus, the cloths fell back to reveal a little heap of bones and hair and leather skin.
Bill put his arm out to shield Jeanette but she shook her head. She was watching intently.
The family piled the remains into the belly of the bull. More people tore the shrouded effigy from the shelf within the tower and crammed it in alongside the real bones. A jingling skeleton of human form made from pierced coins was thrown in on top. The priest poured holy water from an earthenware jar, then smashed the jar to fragments.
Now Wayan and Kadek and the other men packed kindling and logs into the space that was left. Brushwood was piled between the bull’s legs and the two boys reluctantly jumped from their perch in the wadah.
The stench of kerosene was momentarily overpowering.
Wayan stepped forward with a blazing torch. Flame leapt in a sheet and tore a long aaaaah from the throats of the crowd. They stumbled backwards as heat singed their faces. The wadah was torched in the same way, causing the monster’s paper and bamboo wings to arch and swoop just once as the heat rose, as if the creature would take flight from the fire. Flames licked from the snakes and serpents twining at the base and up towards the pagoda roofs of heaven.
Black smoke swirled through the crowds, and the brass music rose as the funeral dancers chopped and sliced with their swords, defending the spirit from evil as it made its way upwards.
Connie and Bill and Jeanette sank down, huddled together against the trunk of a tree, mesmerised by the blaze and showers of sparks that shot over the treetops. The other pyres were blazing too and the cremation ground became a nether world of drifting smoke, gyrating dancers and milling soot-blackened faces split into white smiles of elation.
The priest leapt onto a platform in the midst of the crowd. Over the crackle of the fires and the patterns of drums and gongs he shouted mantras at the sky. Processions of women laid their offerings in the flames as the bull and the tower and the bones were gradually consumed.
