Sex and Death

by Sarah Hall

  The boy nudged the girl and whispered that it was her turn. ‘Is it okay if we record this interview, Mrs Imbody?’ the girl read, and then explained that a Post-it would be placed in front of the camera and only her voice would be recorded.

  ‘Where’s the camera?’ Lilia asked.

  The girl turned to the boy and he pointed to the top of the laptop, which was set facing Lilia, though she had forgotten to bring her reading glasses so nothing on the screen could be deciphered. It would be perfectly fine with her if they left the peephole uncovered; Lilia wondered if she could request that they remove the Post-it. What could they see, though, these children whose undiscerning eyes would not tell the difference between Lilia and Phyllis or perhaps their own nondescript grandmothers tucked away in some nursing home. If indeed their teachers wanted them to understand anything about the world, they should be trained to look and listen at the same time, but there was no need to further this discussion. Lilia could sense Elisa and her assistant unwrap packs of cookies in the kitchenette next door. The flyers advertising the morning activity – meeting students from a local school for their oral history project – had promised cookies, clementines and hot chocolates with marshmallows. Lilia imagined Elisa peeling a clementine and handing a smaller half to her assistant – infringing on the residents’ rights; a theft, strictly speaking, though no one here was strict with petty crimes. When you’re closer to death, you’re expected to see less, hear less and care less. Care less until you become careless, and that’s when they pack you up to the next building. Memory care unit: as though your memories, like children or dogs, are only temporarily at the mercy of the uncaring others, waiting for you to reclaim them at the end of the day. You have to be careful not to slip into the careless: the care-full live; the care-less die; and when you are dead you are carefree. ‘But who cares?’ Lilia said aloud.

  The boy studied Lilia’s face. The girl patted him on the back of his head and said again – she must have memorised the line – that they were only recording voices. Around Lilia most residents were talking with their interviewers one on one. Only she was assigned a precocious girl who could not wait to mother an infantile boy. Lilia leaned close to take a look at the girl’s ear studs. ‘Are they diamond?’

  The boy looked too. ‘Do you know there’s a diamond called Hope?’ he said, addressing the air more than Lilia or the girl.

  Normally Lilia would have reminded the boy that it was rude to speak when a question was not addressed to him. But somewhere in her body – Mrs Imbody’s body, she called it when it made mischief to inconvenience Lilia – there was a strange sensation. Sixty years ago she would have called it desire, but now it must be as wrinkled as she was – the memory of desire. Certainly the staff at the next building would be happy to confiscate it.

  The girl touched her earlobes. ‘These are crystal. My cousin in Vancouver made them for me.’

  ‘Are you Canadian?’

  ‘My dad grew up in Canada.’

  Lilia thought of saying something – so rarely did she get a chance to discuss the country with another person. On a second thought, she turned to the boy. ‘Cheaper than your Hope, aren’t they?’ Hope, the diamond that had once been the subject of a post-lovemaking talk with Roland – but any conversation between them had taken place after sex. Lilia wondered if she could locate the mention of Hope in his diary. Not that she would see herself on the same page – Lilia had appeared in the diary only three times, and all three entries she had memorised, page numbers included. Footnote from the editor on page 124: L, unidentified lover.

  ‘My mom took me and my brother to see the diamond last year,’ the boy said.

  ‘Did she?’ Put a woman and a diamond together and you get a thousand stories, all uninteresting.

  The girl nudged the boy. ‘Do you want to start with the first question?’ she said to him.

  Lilia would rather discuss jewellery with the boy. She regretted that she hadn’t thought of wearing something for the day. She could’ve shown him her favourite ring and quizzed him on the stone (green amethyst – he’d never have guessed that); she could ask him to venture an estimate about the ring’s age (fifty-six: a present naturally, not from Roland but one that had made him jealous). ‘I bet you a hundred dollars that your mother is one smart woman who knows how to raise a son.’ Men in training – no doubt that was why the mother had taken the boys to see a diamond instead of zoo animals.

  ‘I don’t have a hundred dollars.’

  ‘I don’t have with me either,’ Lilia said. ‘It’s just a way of saying.’

  ‘But my mother died.’

  By now the girl was more on the verge of tears than the boy. She looked around, searching for an intervening adult.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Lilia said. ‘But it’s okay. Everybody dies. It’s not up to you and me to say when.’

  The boy opened his mouth and looked straight ahead as though he had not heard Lilia. She turned around, and, not to her surprise, Phyllis was sobbing into a cluster of Kleenex. Elisa and her assistant had already arrived at the crisis scene, trying to calm her, and the teacher bent down and whispered to Phyllis’s interviewer, a girl who seemed too embarrassed to raise her eyes. The children around the recreation room gaped, but the residents tried hard to draw the interviewers’ attention to their own memories. Let Phyllis cry – this was the chorus that went unheard by the children.

  ‘Do you know –’ Lilia whispered to the boy and his companion. ‘That woman there, ask her anything she turns herself into a faucet.’

  The boy’s face, not expressive to start with, turned oddly flat. Look, here’s an exemplary child for Phyllis to learn a few things about stoicism: after a lifelong career of wife-ing and mothering and grandmothering she still could not forget that she had begun as an orphan.

  The teacher gestured to the children to go back to their work. ‘Mrs Imbody, when and where were you born?’ the girl asked. (Mrs Imbody, Lilia thought, has no use for obedient little girls.)

  The interview was shorter than Lilia had expected. Five questions, harmless (but for Phyllis) and uninspiring. Where and when were you born? What was your family like when you were a child? Who was your favourite teacher when you were in school? What was your hometown like when you were a child? What’s one thing you’ve done that you’re proud of?

  ‘One thing I’m proud of? Hard to choose. There are too many. How about I once knew a man who tried to borrow that diamond of yours –’ Lilia nodded at the boy, ‘– for an exhibition.’

  ‘Did he get it?’ the girl said.

  ‘I said he tried.’

  ‘And they wouldn’t let him borrow it?’

  ‘His country. They wouldn’t let his country borrow it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, ask your friend here.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the boy said.

  ‘I thought you saw the diamond with your own eyes.’

  ‘My mom took us there.’

  And your mom is dead. ‘Where did Hope come from?’ Lilia asked the boy, who shook his head. ‘Not from this country, you know that, right?’ Perhaps the boy didn’t know anything. ‘But once put into the museum, it rarely travels again. Remember, I say rarely, not never. It did travel, but not to my friend’s country.’

  ‘Where did it travel to?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Well, young lady, you should’ve asked where it was not allowed to travel,’ Lilia said. That was what mattered to the story. ‘Can you do me a favour,’ Lilia said to the girl. ‘Run to the lady there, yes, the one standing by the cart. Ask her if you could help her with the hot chocolate since we’re done with your interview.’

  Lilia moved closer to the boy when the girl went away. ‘How did your mom die?’

  ‘From a heart problem.’

  ‘What kind of heart problem?’

  The boy shook his head. The black and white of his eyes were never for a moment blurred. (Dry-eyed-ness, Lilia said to herself, is a virtue Mrs Imbody e
ndorses.)

  ‘Who do you live with now?’

  ‘My grandparents.’

  ‘And your brother, too?’

  The boy nodded.

  ‘Where is your dad?’ (Or: do you have a dad?)

  ‘He lives in San Diego.’

  ‘Did he move there before or after your mom’s death?’

  ‘Before.’

  Lilia thought of pulling the teacher or her young assistant aside and asking if the boy’s mother had killed herself (and if so, in which way). They might be horrified, but so what? A distinction was essential: a woman dying from heart attack was different from one dying from heartbreak. Lilia had earned the right to know every single detail even if it was a stranger’s death: enough people had died on her, starting with her parents. Too bad the boy was born at a wrong time when orphans were no longer an everyday phenomenon. Let me tell you a story from a long time ago, Lilia thought of saying, and this would then become one of those Russian stories she used to read with Roland, when an aristocratic soul, after enough food and drink, sat down by the fire and recounted the past, his or other people’s. By the end of the story the boy would pretend nonchalance and yawn, but Lilia would know that something in him was changed. You don’t just tell a story to a random soul.

  Elisa clapped her hands and herded the residents to the snacks. The boy looked at Lilia uncertainly, so she prompted him to thank her for the interview. He did, and instantly rolled on the carpet with another boy.

  Elaine went from one resident to the next, making sure they had co-operated with the children. ‘Do you notice that there’s no middle ground with your niece’s students?’ Lilia said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Elaine said, and Lilia pretended that she had lost interest in the conversation. From neck up Elaine was made of marble, and Lilia was not a craftswoman to make anything out of that beautiful dumbness. Had Roland been here, Lilia would have pointed out that the children were either too skinny or too plump. No middle ground – children at this age were like politicians he used to laugh at: they had made entertaining subjects for post-coitus conversation. Children would do, too.

  From the corner someone started to play a Bach minuet, tentative at first, but when even the noisiest boys quieted down to listen, the pianist became bolder. Ever so expectedly, it was Lilia’s girl interviewer who was enchanting the roomful of people. Always eager to be more than what she was, Lilia thought. Already she could hear Elaine and her two wayward sisters expressing their amazement afterwards; Phyllis must be drowning in a fresh flood of tears; those who had finished their snacks were looking for a spot to sit down; Walter Berns, one hand on his cane, was conducting with the other arm. When you’re closer to death, you don’t need much of an excuse to play at being alive again.

  Lilia shuffled around the room, looking for the orphan. He was sitting under a table, on which sometimes cut flowers would be on display but today the vase was empty. Again his face took on the obtuse look. Lilia beckoned him, and he, defeating her in a staring contest, did not move.

  Had she been alone with the boy Lilia would have crawled under the table. There was a lesson for him, which nobody but she could teach him at the moment: any other person’s death would be his gain. It was never too early to instil the wisdom in a child. The world might not love him; the world might not ever be in love with him.

  ‘All I ask you is to be unselfish,’ Roland had once said to Lilia. ‘Always let me be the selfish one.’ To be absent and present at once was what Roland had demanded: Lilia was not to be in the newspaper clipping where his bride held birds of paradise in her hands (26 January 1947; what a cold day in Ottawa that must be, for the flowers and newlyweds alike); Lilia was not to be the minor poetess whose decades of love letters to him had elevated her to some infamous status (‘Sentimentality seems to calm her sexually,’ one reviewer, not without malice, said of her letters). But didn’t Lilia defeat them all by staying alive, present long after they had vacated their worldly positions?

  Boy, let me tell you something your teachers and your elders don’t know: one can – and should – live on a minimal diet of feelings. People expect you to always remember the sweetness of your mother’s affection or the bitterness of losing her; they will come into your life with offers of other food and unnecessary spices. But trust Mrs Imbody’s words: the days after love are bound to be long and empty. Let others seek in vain to satiate themselves; you and I know that only a cleansed palate prevails.

  WHERE HAST THOU BEEN

  Jon McGregor

  When I first met God I was desperate and lost and my balls were leaping about within me from the lack of use. I was twenty-two years old and I’d never been laid. For a time I was stoical about the situation but that time had passed. I’d taken to scanning the faces in whatever room or street I was passing through as though looking for someone I’d lost when in truth there was no one to lose, and in this way I’d come to see how many people were odd-looking or sad or turned-in-upon in their own special way. My face was looking much the same and I tried to hide it but the hiding only made it worse. The state of most people it was a wonder anyone ever got laid. I was twenty-two years old and I felt that time was passing. University had finished and I was stuck for ideas. It was the summer time. There was a party and I went because the others were going. Tony the Dutch and Jimmy James and X, the X-Man. Tony was from the Netherlands so we called him Tony the Dutch. The X-Man’s name was something Greek that no one could pronounce. We were living in Leeds and the party was in Hebden Bridge so we took the train, shunting past the back-streets and burning wastelands towards the narrows of the Calder Valley. There was a watery light washing over the hills and the air was charged. Jimmy James was already on his second can. Tony the Dutch was quiet and he kept rubbing his hands like he had a plan that would soon come together. X-Man was rolling a joint. He was saying a lot of words but it was a job to know what all of them were. The train crossed a canal and in the middle of the canal was a boat so slow it could have been there since the day before. The man at the tiller was watching the train with a patient kindness as though he’d always known our paths would cross and he would one day see us with our faces turned to the glass. We went into a tunnel and there was darkness and we came out into the light.

  At the party the kitchen was full so we went through to the back yard. We couldn’t see anyone we knew so we just stood around for a while. There was corduroy and there were conversations about Derrida and Brazilian dams. It was an academic crowd. Whose party is this anyway, X-Man wanted to know. Tony nodded through the doorway towards a woman with black hair and thick lashes who was holding up a long cigarette and tilting her head back to laugh. He said her name was Sofia and she was teaching Silent Cinema at Leeds Met. A smile crept over his face and he wiped it away with his hand. X choked on a laugh and the smoke streamed out of his nose. Jim opened the fourth of his cans and fell back into a white plastic chair. He was on a teacher-training course and the workload always had him wiped out. I went inside for a drink of my own. As I walked through the kitchen I heard the German Expressionist talking softly about the next on her list. I took a beer to the back room, where there was food on a table and Nick Drake on the stereo and still nobody I knew. I edged through the crowd and by the time I reached the buffet I could tell this was another night I wouldn’t get laid. I had an instinct for it. There was a pattern I couldn’t get past. I saw a large bearded man at the savouries and before he’d even turned towards me I knew this was God himself. For a moment I was afraid to look upon his face. I’d known him by reputation long before we met and what I’d heard hadn’t led me to expect that we’d be friends. Full of himself, was the impression I’d formed. The kind of northern chancer who turns up at parties empty-handed and is drinking the best wine by the end of the night. His real name was Godfrey but he never answered to that. A big lad, with a beard he’d grown to go with the name and talk that he could handle himself in a fight. No one I knew was likely to handle themselves, in a figh
t. Those weren’t the circles we moved in. We framed this as a question of non-violence but in truth we were sheltered and overfed. We stayed out of the town centres in the evenings and we kept our eyes lowered in the poorer neighbourhoods where we lived. God didn’t sound as though he lowered his eyes for anyone. He turned to face me. His mouth was full and when he spoke he spat pastry flakes.

  ‘Eh up,’ he said. ‘You tried these vegan sausage rolls? They’re well mint.’

  Later there was djembe drumming and God said there were better places we could be. We followed him and we didn’t ask where. As we left there was a girl with red hair who looked like she thought she knew me but I hadn’t seen her before so I nodded and followed the others. The streetlights were just coming on. There were seats on the train but I couldn’t sit down. There was something urgent clicking through me. I asked X-Man did we know the girl with the red hair and he said he didn’t think so. I wondered if I should have stayed behind to talk or if I would have been wasting my time. I watched through the window the lights of Hebden Bridge slip away around the corner and I didn’t know how I would ever get laid. The ache of it was all over me. God took us off the train at Bradford and led us through the littered streets. He had a light-footed swagger that didn’t fit with his size. The swagger was from Manchester, though he’d done his growing up in towns further north with far less spring in their stride. We ducked round some bins and down an alley and he knocked on a red steel door. When it opened there were handshakes and God introduced us and we followed him down some stone cellar stairs. There was a wet heat coming up to meet us and a noise that was mostly bass. We asked him what this place was and when he said it was the Mormon Social Club it took a moment to realise he was kidding us on.

  *

  That was the summer I worked at a bread factory on the edge of town, one week on night shifts and one week on days, and the havoc this played with my sleep only added to the trembling state of confusion I was in. The work was lifting tins and wheeling trays and sorting the subs from the batches as they hurtled down the line. It was heavy work and hot. The line moved fast and there was a fear of falling behind, the bread backing up and tumbling to the floor while the mocking shouts rang high. I thought the hours of work would make me stronger but they only made me tired. I lost weight. Most nights I spent the whole shift thinking about sex. I once made the mistake of mentioning this to God, while the two of us stood by the punch bowl at a Green Party fundraiser near Roundhay Park.