by Jackie Kay
The cherry blossom tree we planted for Colman’s first birthday waves behind the curtains. I noticed the roots of it today, clawing their way towards the house. The roots like long arthritic fingers, crooked and damaged. I might have to get it dug up before it topples the house. I check my brand new locks. Who would have ever thought that I’d be changing the locks to keep out my son?
When I go into our bedroom, the bed is just lying there. As if to say, it’s only me again. I keep expecting that some miracle could happen, that I could just come up the stairs and find Joss in bed waiting for me. Each time I come into this room the emptiness of it punches me in the stomach. There is something so repetitive about grief. First the stupid hope, then the violence of remembering. The hope, then the carpet from under your feet. If Joss had lived and I had died. If Joss had seen a doctor. If I had made Joss see a doctor. The same things spinning every day and night. Each night I’m afraid to sleep. I know Joss will find me. I know I will wake up and forget and then remember.
Joss is wearing a pinstriped suit. His shirt has little buttons that hold his collar down. He wears the cuffs I bought him. He carries his trumpet. He motions for me to follow him, holding his long beautiful fingers to his lips. We are at Victoria coach station. Joss has got tickets which just say Scotland on them. He gives me a large plastic bag with Selfridges written on it. He shoves me into the Ladies and says, ‘Quick! Get changed!’ There’s a pale green dress in the bag, a bit like the dress I wore on my wedding day. I put it on. I go out and Joss looks horrified. ‘What do you think you’re playing at?’ he shouts at me, grabbing my wrist. I look down at myself and see that I am wearing a pinstriped suit. Not the dress at all. I look at Joss and giggle. He is wearing the green dress. But on his feet are men’s shoes and on my feet are women’s shoes. We both look ludicrous. I point at his feet, laughing hysterically. Now we are at the back of the bus frantically swopping shoes. I put my arm around Joss’s shoulder to comfort her. She cries and dabs at her eyes. Then she starts to shrink. I am terrified. I want to tell somebody, but there is nobody to tell. Everybody on the bus is a dummy from a shop. There are no real people. She shrinks and shrinks till she becomes a little girl in a green dress. We are out on the street and I am holding her hand. A big yellow and orange bus comes towards us. I look at the driver and the driver is Joss. He is heading straight for us. I shout to him, ‘Joss, you’re killing yourself!’ at the top of my voice.
I get up. I can’t stay in bed any longer. The sun is no up yet. But I want to get dressed. I put on an old pair of camel-coloured trousers. An apple-green cashmere sweater. I stare at myself in the mirror as if I am somebody else, as if I am just saying to myself, ‘Don’t I know you? Didn’t you go to Saint Catherine’s School for Girls?’
I sit down opposite Joss’s armchair. The last few days of his life keep replaying in front of my eyes, like a film. Like a special bit in a film that you watch over and over again. I can’t stop it playing. Joss stares at me. He isn’t trying to speak. He can’t bear the weight of his own eyelids. He closes his eyes and opens them. I mop his brow. I plump his pillows with the expertise of a trained nurse. I tell him I am at his side. I am not going anywhere. I tell him I love him. He doesn’t want the hospital. I know he doesn’t want the hospital. I plump his pillows and make sure the bottom one fits into the small of his back. Then I make the pillows rise up in steps till they reach the back of his head. I have to do this regularly, every time they slide down. If the pillows are right, he is more comfortable. If the pillows are comfortable, he might manage a weak smile.
He struggles for three days. I don’t sleep at all. I nod in and out of my own existence with him. Time is strange for us both. We have our own time now. The light glows and fades and glows again. Time is like a heron in the sky flying, gliding but not seeming to be moving anywhere, flying on the spot. Joss doesn’t eat now. He takes slow sips of water. His eyes are closed now most of the time. He knows I am here with him. He can feel me and I can feel him. We don’t use words any more. He can’t speak and I can’t either. We have gone beyond words. Out there – stranded, beyond time and language. He’s propped up by his pillows and I am sitting by his side. I feel his brow constantly. I stroke his hair. It is sweaty and sticks to his scalp. I can feel his death inside me. We are as close as sex, as birth. I feel drained by his illness. I feel as if I am giving him my blood.
I walk right up to the border with him, supporting the weight of him on my shoulders. He is light now. I feel him crossing over. I know I have to turn back. I leave him there and at the same time I carry him back. I go to the bathroom. I can’t stop myself. I try to move my heavy feet fast up the stairs. When I come back down, Joss is dead. His eyes are not flickering. His heart is not beating. I listen for ages to make sure.
I stare at myself in the mirror as if I am somebody else. I don’t know what feeling like myself is any more. Who is Millicent Moody? Joss Moody is dead. Joss Moody is not Joss Moody. Joss Moody was really somebody else. Am I somebody else too. But who else was Joss? Who was this somebody else? I don’t understand it. Have I been a good mother, a good wife, or have I not been anything at all? Did I dream up my own life?
I open the bureau in the small dark hall and get out the shoe box. The old holiday photographs are in here. I look at snap after snap of Colman. Colman with his two front teeth missing. Colman holding up a pike by the bottom of its tail, grimacing. Colman in his oversized wellies. Colman and I smiling in our anoraks right into the future; the look on our faces, self-conscious, awkward, as if we knew this photograph would be still there years later, smiling the same smile of its time. Joss and I, lopsided, taken at an odd angle by Colman, holding hands. Joss adoring me. Me smiling at the camera, my small son. I can still see him the day he took that photograph, battling behind the camera, trying to keep steady. I can see him standing to the side as clearly as if I had taken that photograph. I wish I had. Sometimes you remember your life in photographs that were never taken. A moment after or before the camera’s shutter. I wish we hadn’t posed all the time, holding up a fish and a smile. It makes us look unreal, as if we were acting. Look at this one: Joss and Colman, playing at being chieftains. Colman has a tartan tammy on his head and a stick. Joss has our tartan blanket wrapped round his shoulders. I remember Joss joking that day, telling Colman that they were Black Jacobeans, that they could fight in any battle. This one is of all three of us. Colman is smiling up at Joss admiringly as if Joss has just invented something. Joss is squinting into the light. The sea is behind them. You can smell it.
Joss would never swim in the sea. He’d hardly take any of his clothes off on a baking hot day. He wouldn’t take the risk. So I’d laze around in my variety of swimming costumes, ruffled ones, stripey ones, polka-dot ones, and Joss would be wrapped up in his layers. Colman jumped over the waves like hurdles and whooped like a cowboy. I tell myself I had a life, a family, family holidays. I tell myself to hold on to it. Not to let anybody make me let it go. Not even my son. I find myself staring at the photographs of Joss in search of something. I find myself looking at these pictures trying to see him differently. But I can’t. Age made the biggest difference – some of these photographs are thirty years old. Joss has the look of the young in photographs, a kind of a permanence, a confidence, as if he didn’t believe in old age, as if it was something that would never happen to him. That’s all I can see. I can’t stare at these pictures and force myself to see ‘this person who is obviously a woman, once you know’ – according to some reports. I can’t see her. I don’t know if I’ll ever see her. The photographs of Joss on his album covers are the same to me. I can’t change him. I can see his lips. His lips pursed when he played the trumpet. His lips open to talk. Him leaning over me, kissing me softly with his lips. All over my face. His dark full lips.
PEOPLE:
The Funeral Director
Albert Holding handles the dead. He is used to making them look as nice as possible. Some people were born ugly, like him. Som
e people look more beautiful dead than alive. It is true what they say: there is nothing like a face at peace. Those who spent large parts of their lives moaning, blaming, cursing and regretting, look particularly beautiful dead. Sudden peace is an extraordinary sight. The rage, the remorse, smooth in a moment. The whole face opens out as if it has finally been understood.
Those that died before they were ready to go are often difficult corpses. Tetchy and irritable, stiffer than the rest, harder to move and handle. He puts powder on their faces and it slips off. Closes the mouth and it falls open. Has trouble with the eyelids. He is not one to find the dead unsettling. He does not get unnerved. But those who have been taken ‘too soon’ can be unpleasant. There is no doubt about it. Clenched fists. Clamped teeth. Frozen jaw. No matter what Albert Holding does, he can’t loosen them up. Pity the families of those taken too soon; they always look appalled when they come to pay their respects. They never spend very long. In and out, quick as you like. A dart of a look then a rapid exit. The parlour door banging.
Of course there are always opposite personalities, even with the dead. There are those who have waited all their lives to be dead, who have spent their entire years on earth yearning to be on the other side. You can tell those ‘Can’t Waits’ a mile off. In life they were pessimists, sure to make a mountain out of a molehill. Martyrs. When they die, their spirit is out of Holding and Son’s so fast it leaves sparks on the parlour floor. The face left behind is empty, vacant, naive. Their corpses don’t stiffen in the same way. They are soft, pliable. They practically float. Easy as pie to dress and move; when he is powdering them, Holding often catches the tail end of a smile. The families of those who couldn’t wait to die will sit for ages as if they are just starting to get to know them properly, as if death suits them better than life. They relax into his parlour chairs like deckchairs on a beach. ‘Stay as long as you like,’ he tells them. He will offer a tall glass of cold water, ice clinking.
The friends Albert Holding used to have would never let him talk about his work. Too morbid, too depressing, they said. He thought his friends shallow, silly. Every one of you will die some day, he’d say, and you won’t have a clue what’s hit you. He has bodies come in here that didn’t, by the looks of them, realize there was such a thing as death. There are people that deny death to such an extent that their corpse tries to feign life. Those are the corpses that sit up and burp and suddenly open their eyes to stare at you. People who say that’s a reflex don’t know what they are talking about. Albert knows what he knows. Knows the many differences of the dead. Can tell more about those distinguished, idiosyncratic personalities than he can about the cause of death. It is the character of the dead that fascinates Albert. Astounding, how much he can tell instantly. The death of some people, the exact manner that they have chosen to exit is often apt. Above Holding’s door on the inside of Holding and Son’s is a sign that he had specially made:
Death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits
Written on a brass plate, it is the last thing anybody sees before they leave Holding and Son. If they were still in any need of confirmation, Holding thought the quote from The Duchess of Malfi would do the trick. He’d come across this quote when he was a student. It had always been his dream to put it up in his very own funeral parlour. There are as many different deaths as there are different people. Personality – people are born with one; people die with one. It might be the same one. Or it might change suddenly at the last minute in time for the next life. Most people die with the same personality that they were born with, only in extreme form – sometimes even a grotesque exaggeration of all their qualities. A naturally fussy person will become fussy beyond belief when they are ill, dying.
The undertaker had a girlfriend once who was a midwife. She told him she could tell the personalities of babies the minute they were born. He told her he could tell dead people’s. He confessed to her one night, over a bottle of wine and a candle, that some people change personalities the moment they die. That’s why, he told her, getting all excited and knocking back his wine, that’s why you hear a lot of people say that the dead are unrecognizable. The reason the families can barely connect the dead person to the living person is because the dead person has changed! He clinked his glass down, triumphantly, and looked into his midwife girlfriend’s eyes. What he saw made him reach for the bottle and pour some more. Her eyes were shining. It was only when he was walking her home that he realized the look was one of complete terror.
For twenty-five years, Albert has run Holding and Son even though he has no son and his father was not an undertaker. (The name So and So and Son is reassuring no matter whether it is a butcher’s or a cobbler’s.) He welcomes his newcomer to her temporary abode. He prepares those who need it for the long, long journey ahead. He takes their hands, and he says, gently, ‘This is going to be the longest journey you have ever been on. Did you have a tendency towards travel sickness when you were living?’ If they nod, wink, or give him some other sign, he parts their lips and pours in a little Andrews Liver Salts. If he gets no reaction at all, he knows they are ready.
So many people seem to die nowadays. Holding is constantly up against it. They might be resting in peace, but he never gets a moment of it. If the terrible truth be known, most of the people are not at peace anyway. At least not when they first arrive. It takes quite a bit of talent and ingenuity on the undertaker’s part to talk them into being dead. Some people are just not prepared to go through with it. Sometimes, he resents the time it takes up. He is not paid to be a counsellor! Like so many other people these days, his job involves more than what was on his job description. He has to be everything to everybody. It is not easy. The dead are rushing Albert Holding off his feet. The dead are so demanding. The dead are larger than life.
They might have been pronounced dead by a doctor but, as far as he is concerned, it’s a slow business. It is a process. People don’t suddenly die. Death is not an event. Not even when they have suffered a heart attack or been in an accident, do people suddenly die. There is life long after the heart has stopped beating. Of this he is certain. Years ago people knew this. They would sit around the corpse for nine days before burying it, just in case. Years ago, people feared being buried alive. Death is not the finite moment that we are told it is. Death is the infinite moment. People want to believe that death is quick because they are scared of dying to the rigid core of their being. But the truth is that death messes about, prevaricating, putting things off, being unreliable, carrying out several tiny displacement activities. Out with the dustpan and brush. The polish. The big yellow duster.
Several minutes after the heart has stopped beating a mini electrocardiogram can be recorded. Three hours after the heart has stopped beating, the pupils can still contract. Twenty-four hours after the heart has stopped beating, it is possible to do a decent skin graft. Forty-eight hours after the heart has stopped beating, it is possible to do a bone graft. It is small wonder the atmosphere in Holding and Son’s is crackling. It can take days for things to quieten down. A new arrival will have the others agitated and attention seeking, like a new baby on a baby ward. It used to be even worse in the days when burials were more popular. Death, like everything else in our society, has speeded up.
Holding is not one given to much gasping himself. He rarely gasps. Nothing ever shocks. When he is walking home in the early evening, a big man shouting at a small woman will shock him; or a boy battering another boy; or a glaring tabloid headline. But death, once you are used to the teasing, the prevaricating, the loitering, death is certainly not shocking. When his own mother died, he wasn’t shocked. He tended to her personally. Gave her the full treatment. Didn’t want her to go in the furnace. Buried her and wrote her stone. Still spends a small portion of every day at her grave. She is at peace, he knows. Lucky to have a son in the profession, to get a little special treatment, to land on her feet.
Holding is rarely shocked. Never gasp
s. But at one stage in his life, he seemed to have collected a bunch of gasping friends who were forever putting their hands over their mouths, or rushing for the toilet whenever he spoke about his work. It seemed a little unfair. Even his pathologist friend, Dr Norman Snell, found his conversation unseemly. Norman Snell is the one who says, ‘I have a wonderful collection of livers,’ as a chat-up line. The mystery is that it always works. The man has had a succession of good-looking men. One after the other. Holding has seen them, stroking his hair and laughing. Yet his conversation rarely veers from livers. He never goes anywhere without a jar of them to show people what a liver looks like that has suffered the devastating effects of alcohol abuse. It is Snell’s crusade, like the dead are Holding’s. He cuts livers up in front of appalled, hysterical friends. ‘Look how the fat rises to the top, like fat on mince,’ he says to uproarious laughter. ‘The liver soaked in whisky is very, very fatty.’ Then he brings from his jar of horrors his second sample from an even worse alcoholic than the first. ‘The tough liver is worse than the fatty one. To cut it you have to stab through the thick skin as if it were a haggis.’ His friends’ tears pour down their faces. ‘The skin becomes tough like this when alcohol abuse has reached its heights.’ The heavy drinkers knock back their bitters, looking, frankly, terrified. ‘And then the smell is worse than a brewery.’ There have been times after Dr Norman Snell’s talks of livers when Holding has not been able to touch a drop for weeks.
Holding’s friends do not laugh like the friends of Dr Norman Snell. Holding is always told to shut up or get out. Or worst of all, he is disbelieved. The old friends, who went to university with him, and once thought he was a good guy who had been driven barking mad by the company he kept, have mostly crossed him out of their address books. They used to joke that he couldn’t stand up to the stiff pressure at work. Only when they are dying themselves will they believe him; and then it will be too late.
