On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory

by Stephen Benatar

  And on the other hand—in my case the utter reverse of all of this—where’s Philip? Where Jonathan (whose principle defect was merely his lack of age)? Where Mr Tibbotson? (Dead of course: at a bit of a disadvantage.) And where all those countless down-and-outs who never once held out their hand to me and found themselves rewarded for their pain? (Well ‘never once’ is maybe overstating it but only very slightly; ‘hardly ever’ would be fractionally more correct.) Why don’t such as they, those countless down-and-outs at least, now cut a swathe through our sitting-room lugubriously reminding each damp-eyed mourner that inasmuch as I hadn’t shown any compassion towards them what earthly right did I have to hope for, let alone expect, any to be shown towards me? ‘I was a stranger and you took me in …’; the quote goes something along those lines. My Macduff-and-Banquo-type accusers, many of whom have doubtless died from disease and exposure and lack of sustenance, would probably have learned the rest of it and could probably now declaim it with conviction and majesty and resonance.

  Hell it seems like some conspiracy. This is your house we are standing in; indirectly your champagne that is being drunk. By rights it should have been your commemoration a great deal more than mine.

  I’ve had enough of it. I go upstairs.

  In our bedroom I lie on the bed—my side of it. Then I move across to yours, wanting to see things as far as possible exactly as you yourself would have seen them: the underside of the light fitment with its metal clusters of overhanging grapes plus trailing leafstalk (sounds kitsch but isn’t—you the grandmaster of non-kitsch); the small threadbare patch in one half of the claret-coloured Victorian curtains, a flaw we’d been meaning for a long time to have invisibly mended and which is noticeable at the moment even though the curtains aren’t drawn; the smile of the fat cherub at the top of the gilt-framed mirror (okay, a fraction kitsch) whose gaze was levelled marginally more at you than at me. I jump up abruptly and pull back the counterpane, let my own head rest on the pillow where yours last rested. Turn and press my face against it. You very often slept that way—I thought I remembered you doing it for some of the time last Friday night—lying on your stomach with your hands clutching either side of the scrunched-up pillow and your nose buried somewhere in the centre.

  Oh Brad.

  Brad.

  I’m sorry for that farce downstairs. So well-meaning but so … so laughably selective; and though in some sense genuine … so laughably false at the same time. I wish the picture that it gave of me was true. I wish that you, not I, had been the focus of it. And above all else—I so much wish that you’d been here to hear it with me.

  Time passes. I get up and wander round. Just touching things. Your things. Go inside the study. Sit in the armchair near the window where in the evenings I sometimes sat reading whilst you—obsessed—worked fluidly at the computer. Normally when I wasn’t on duty we’d spend much of the evening on the couch downstairs watching a DVD or some programme on the box, frequently I with my head in your lap, frequently you with yours in mine; but from time to time the characters in the play you were writing simply demanded to be listened to and have you transcribe their words even after seven o’clock—and well after seven o’clock—when more typically at that hour we would decide the sun was over the yardarm.

  In any case always before we went to bed you’d read to me the work you’d done that day and over our ritual nightcap would often amend things according to my suggestion.

  “Yet don’t ever think you’re going to wrangle your name onto the playbills as co-author; I’m always fiendishly possessive of my babies. On the other hand though—when at last it comes to getting the script published …”

  “Some fulsomely heartfelt dedication?”

  “Possible. Just possible. How fulsomely heartfelt would you want it to be?”

  “‘For Danny. Always fiendishly possessive of my babies.’”

  I may have been a little drunk; that wasn’t at all the kind of thing I usually said. Highly unliberated. Even you Brad looked a bit surprised. (Though on the whole quite pleased.) In any event by last weekend the play still wasn’t finished: the twist ending—dramatic, poignant but mildly funny too—not fully worked out to author-satisfying standards. Despite your death, however, the chances are the play will be produced. The chances are it will get published. The certainty is … there’ll be no dedication. But I now feel wonderfully glad I made that tacky tacky comment.

  And do you recall this further snatch of conversation?

  You had said:

  “Always my very greatest fear—well, within reason—is that I should die whilst still at work on something. I don’t demand to be there for the first night though I think I might regard it as a bit shabby if in fact I wasn’t; but I do pray that every word and almost every comma will be satisfactorily in place before I have to wing it. And preferably I won’t have any other plot in mind that’s starting to excite me.”

  “Well thank you very much!” I’d declared. “You don’t think anything of leaving me! Just some bloody uncompleted play.”

  And I’d brought you down onto the floor in the sitting-room and sat on you and tickled you and made you retract—or at least add to—the expression of your very greatest fear.

  “Remember,” you’d cried out between your yelps and pleas for mercy, “remember … I am … nineteen years older than you! And while you treat me like this … am no doubt aging rapidly. But. When finally I do have to leave … I promise you …”

  “What?”

  “I’ll expend more thought on you than ever I did on any of my plays. Will that do? Does that atone?”

  “So so. Not bad—for a pagan!”

  “And one day … at your own appointed time …”

  “What?”

  “I’ll come back for you.”

  “Oh, now, that’s just a little too glib! Judge me an innocent? You’re only pretending to believe.”

  “Not so, not so.” There were tears running down your cheeks. “You know when I’m being tickled I could convert to practically anything.”

  And eventually we’d stood up. “All right,” I had conceded, “I’ll take your word for it. But please don’t let me down.”

  I’d added: “Of course it rather assumes we’re still talking to one another at either of our appointed times.”

  “Which I agree is a pretty rash assumption; especially if you continue, my lad, in such sadistic ways.” I remember you’d been brushing yourself down. “But I do implore you Danny—the next time you feel impelled to act like that—first to think about whether there might be any play in progress.”

  “And whether or not, I suppose, you might have another plot in mind that’s starting to excite you?”

  You’d put your arms about me. “I have to admit it. Whatever your more barbarous inclinations you’re at least a fast learner.”

  And whether or not you might have got round yet to making out your will. No. Thank heaven. I had so very nearly said it but now couldn’t feel sufficiently grateful that at that final teetering turning-over second something had stepped in to prevent me. Something—God, good sense, my grandmother? It hardly mattered what. Money was the one thing which you never wholly learned to laugh about. Though I truly do believe that in time I might have got you there.

  Not money precisely. My own questionable attitude towards money. It was the one point on which you didn’t fully trust me.

  (But you could have done; you could have done. It was always you I cared about, you idiot, you not your silly money. I somehow feel it in my gut that even if you’d been poor, really poor, dependent on state benefits or something, I just feel it in my gut that we would still have got together, got most euphorically together, to share the sort of love for which I would have followed you to the ends of the earth—if ever strictly necessary—even though I knew when I got there I’d only find you in your catalogue clothing, even though I knew when I got there I should still have to face the world in mine. And I don’t mean just catalogu
e stuff either, charity shop would have done. But yes all right I know: as I must have told you a million times before, so easy for me simply to say something, my eyes all wet with sentiment, when there’s now no earthly way that I can give you proof. I don’t suppose you’d ask for proof any longer; or maybe ever would have. But I only wish there could have been some. For my own sake rather more than yours.)

  And money was the very thing of course which precipitated our two deaths. The love of money being the root of all evil. But it was my love of it—if anyone’s—and how unfair of God to punish you for that. Particularly at a time when you hadn’t yet finished your play.

  Yes Mum my life was a very fine example.

  All right, all right. Once again I know. Free will he’ll say. God will say. Say it all comfortably. Sitting back with his feet up. Sorry boys but you’re well aware there’s got to be free will. And try to be honest about this. You wouldn’t choose to be automata any more than I’d choose to have you so. Surely?

  Right then God. So far so good. But if I ran the world I’d devise some plan whereby the decent people didn’t have to suffer because of the free will of the bastards. Haven’t you ever thought of that?

  Oh but I suppose blasphemy can hardly constitute any proper answer. I’m sorry God.

  I’m sorry Brad.

  But in any case Brad please don’t go so fast that I shall never catch up with you; or at least not catch up with you for a long time. Oh please. Can’t you see how very much I need you?

  It’s all a bit ironic really. You told me you’d come back for me but in fact it doesn’t work like that does it? Shame! I would give anything I had—which I know of course is nothing—to see you walk into this room. Then we could go on together hand-in-hand and I should never again, ever, ask for any other single thing. (Though I seem to have made that promise once before. Maybe more than once.)

  From downstairs now—perhaps from someone standing on that very spot where we once wrestled—I suddenly hear laughter: either some heavenly comment on that potentially hollow pledge I’ve just made or a sign that the meeting below me is beginning to chill out. I return to the sitting room in time to see your Scottish uncle, with the help of Mr Kenworthy, folding up copies of the national broadsheets: The Times and Telegraph, Guardian and Independent. And on overhearing a scrap of someone’s conversation I quickly realize what’s been happening. Your uncle has been reading out from your obituaries. Probably everyone in the room has already seen at least one of these for himself (stupidly somehow I haven’t given any thought to your obituaries) but I get the impression that all four of them have just been read in full and each one, in this very sharing context, pondered and appreciated. (Damn it, then, why couldn’t I have come down a bit earlier!) Apparently the piece in The Times actually suggested you might have been in line for a knighthood—or anyhow thoroughly deserving of one! I don’t think my family ever recognized just how highly you were thought of in some quarters. I used to proselytize like mad but naturally you just had to thin down all my rhapsodies with your boring old modesty although didn’t I keep on telling you that people would only take you at your word? Besides which of course a prophet in his own country … or even in his partner’s country…!

  But at least I’ve come down in time to hear my father say, “Yes like Tom joked just a minute ago I wish I could have seen these obituaries long before Brad had to die. Hearing them now I feel immensely humble. For although I valued him highly I clearly didn’t value him enough. I wish I could have had a second chance.”

  It’s an unrehearsed little speech and some might understandably find fault: the idea that a person’s worth can be increased only after you’ve learned the views of the professionals. But I’m not prepared to feel that sensitive about this; I know what Dad was trying to say.

  And it’s directly afterwards that the toast he proposed earlier is finally taken up. The climax to the whole occasion. Soon everyone will start to take his leave.

  “Raise your glasses please and I repeat it. Bon voyage to the pair of them! The very best journey any of us could ever possibly imagine!”

  Well it’s hardly likely to be that is it? But I go and kiss my father on the cheek and thank him. Do the same to my mother and to the rest of the family; and to everybody else as well. Thank them both on my own behalf and yours—though I hope this doesn’t sound rather too much like the Queen being gracious. “Have a happy life; see you in heaven”: a sort of general wish.

  “My goodness.” It’s one of the three Miss Cottons—Miss Hester Cotton. “Is it only me being silly or does anyone else here feel it?”

  Those nearest look around inquiringly.

  “Danny seems at moments just so close,” she says. “Danny and Brad. Both of them. So very close.”

  17

  I was alone in the house—with the tables cleared, the plates, cups and glasses all washed, the downstairs carpets vacuumed; everything put back to rights. Mainly by my own family. Sadly though when they had left they had taken those four newspapers—or at least somebody had. That was disappointing. So what was I to do now? Return to Richard and Isabella; report back for my next set of instructions? Yet neither of them had intimated that I should and I simply didn’t feel like going back. No. But for the moment I didn’t feel much like going forward either. It was more than a sense of apathy which had overtaken me. It was darkness and depression.

  Earlier I had professed I was in hell when having to listen to all those things that had been said about me. In hell—what an imbecilic sort of expression; so impoverished, so totally bankrupt; it was like when people spoke about the cross they had to bear: how arrogant, how smugly unimaginative … how impossibly cheapening was that? It was only my self-disgust that had been talking though; my growing awareness of just how much I loved my parents and my siblings and of how much I was going to miss them, the realization that while I’d had the chance I had never properly appreciated them. All that and my disappointment over not finding you here. I might have claimed in my juvenile self-dramatizing way that it felt like hell but I knew far better now.

  For this stealthily augmenting and solidifying depression made me almost wonder if I was ever going to find you again? Anywhere. Perhaps it wasn’t meant that I should catch up with you? What had I known about hell an hour or two ago?

  What did I know about it now?

  I decided to switch on the TV. I stood in front of it and merely channel-hopped.

  (And who knew, I thought sardonically, perhaps that was the way some message would finally get transmitted? Proceed to the Shop at Sly Corner or the House on 92nd Street. There you will be met by …

  My luck was surely in! (Still sardonic you understand.) There was a western showing on TCM.

  I would lie on the sofa and make believe my head was resting in your lap.

  I looked for the remote; that was one of the things we were always looking for—with each usually blaming the other for its absence. However, secretly we both knew it was your fault you basically untidy git. (You basically untidy git whom not so very secretly I loved. And do love. And shall love. For ever and ever amen.)

  I found the thing, increased the volume and returned my attention to the screen. A ghost town—I thought at first it was a ghost town—with tumbleweed rolling down its main street and precious little sign of any townsfolk. I wondered if maybe there was going to be a shootout.

  But a shootout usually came at the end of a movie and because the camera was still pulling back in a very leisurely style it seemed more like a beginning—yes hadn’t I even caught a word or two of exposition? Obviously it couldn’t have been Autumn 2005 but very much that kind of thing: a place and/or a date, first in blazing red script, then running down the screen like blood.

  Before long however the camera came to a standstill.

  Outside some run-down sort of rooming house.

  18

  I suddenly knew why I was there.

  Beyond question.

  Proceed to the
Shop at Sly Corner or the House on 92nd Street. There you will be met by …

  But somehow I knew this wasn’t just a place in a movie any more.

  And equally I knew it wasn’t anywhere that I would find my friend Clem sitting back with his feet up in the sheriff’s office. I knew that it was literally miles away from any place like that. Miles and miles away. Maybe on the other side of the universe.

  This was the Rooming House from Hell.

  Or more exactly—make the definite article indefinite and change the preposition to ‘in’. (And yes now I’d got it absolutely right. This was the real thing. No overstatement. No self-pity. Nothing.)

  I had to go inside; I had no option. The lobby clerk was reading a glossy-paged magazine when, with my shoulder, I’d pushed open the swollen front door and approached the counter behind which he sat. I suppose they might have had sex magazines in the Old West too but the glimpse I caught of this one, even in the present murky light, seemed entirely modern. Certainly this pasty-faced unwholesome-looking specimen of roughly my own age was so immersed he scarcely even bothered to glance up.

  “Yes? And what do you want?”

  “I’m here to see Mr Tibbotson.”

  “Why?”

  I found I was in no mood to be conciliatory. “Quite frankly is that your business?”

  And now he did look at me. Our moment of eye contact made me feel quite sick. “All of it’s my business. Every bloody fucking detail.”

  “Your brother’s keeper are you?”

  We stared at one another; my revulsion only fuelling my hostility.

  “Yes as it happens. Yes!”

  Then he shrugged. Shrugged his exceedingly narrow shoulders.

  “Oh anyway who gives a shit? Smartass. You’re welcome to that toe rag. You with your posh la-di-da accent. Room 5 second floor.”

  Perhaps he thought he’d been a little too forthcoming. He spat as if to conceal an overgenerous nature. The spittle missed my trainer by an inch. I hoped The White Hart in Uckfield—especially when I myself was on the desk—had seemed just a fraction more welcoming.