How to Paint a Dead Man

by Sarah Hall

  They must have imagined that, subconsciously, something bad would have registered. That by the powers of gestational unity and the currents in your cerebella, you would already have known. But no. You didn’t know. All night your ear had been folded over like a clamshell on the pillow. You were switched off. Severed. Independent. Healthy. You didn’t sit bolt upright in bed, fumbling for the lamp and screaming. You didn’t even reach for the glass of water on the bed-stand as you usually do midway through the night, and feel, for one brief moment before falling away again, an inexplicable sadness, or phantom pain.

  You were standing naked and damp from the shower, holding the phone. You’d slipped on the bath mat in an effort to get to it before it rang off. You thought it might have been work-related. In the stillness after you hung up, you felt a bead of water trickle across your stomach and down your hip, and then you felt that dissolving feeling you have had ever since.

  Nathan had already left for work. You could have called his mobile and had him come home, but you didn’t. You stood dripping on the hall floor. You could feel your cells trickling away. Everything began to rush past. You put your hands on the phone table and the wood clucked under your grip, and you had to kneel.

  When it passed you went to the bedroom and got dressed. You put on your best dress in fact, the one with the empire waist and the red silk panelling. You pulled on your brown leather coat and your sopping hair began to make dark stains on it. The closest bag to hand was an old satchel destined for the charity shop, propped by the front door. You put a few random things inside-underwear, jewellery, and your passport, inexplicably. You left your Leica in the studio, then, changing your mind, you packed it. You closed the door to the flat, locked it. You told yourself you were standing on the outside. You told yourself to move.

  You have a car. It’s not often used in London, but it’s reliable. You could have driven, but you didn’t trust yourself to make the drive up country. Your hands were not working. You didn’t want to negotiate difficult traffic. You didn’t want to sit for hours on the carriageway in among the queues. And no, no, no, you did not want to pass the slip road on the motorway where Danny had begun his boyish joyride, which had led him, four miles later, to the axles of a lorry coming the other way.

  You did not want to see a shrine. Radio Cumbria was broadcasting the news at ten now that you had all been notified. Across the county people would hear the announcement and pause, hands to their mouths. They would shake their heads, and they would say, Ah no, not Danny Caldicutt, not dippy Danny, not Dan the Man. Not the crazy fella from the scrapyard. Not the bass player from Dogtale. Not him. There would be flowers laid at the spot, you knew it, because Danny was known and was enjoyed by all; he was one of Cumbria’s favourite sons. Danny with his manic street introductions, his talkative pub personality, and his unsolicited lectures on ufology. Danny with his hemp bags and colourful shoes, the rounds-on-him and the experimental lentils, his given-away savings. Danny with his vast, reasonless smile. And one or two people would surely have clambered over the motorway embankment, slipped across the lanes between thundering commuters, and left a simple bunch of flowers on the median.

  You made your way to Euston, stunned and silent, your body horribly disintegrating, but still cooperative. You found a discreet single seat on the Virgin main-liner, so that you wouldn’t have to face anyone. At Preston you were taken off by the train manager, then put back on the next one heading north, thirty-five minutes and one donated sedative later. You had cried so dangerously that all the other passengers had emptied from your carriage, as if they were afraid you were about to break the news, whispered in your ear by God himself, that the world was finishing, now, now, now.

  No. This wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was not your inability to predict events, your failure to receive that dark neural information. It was not the five-hour locomoting asylum that passed through Wigan, Warrington Bank Quay, Lancaster, Oxenholme. It was not finding your dad up in the lime quarry, later that day, with a pick axe, exhausted, his hands pulped and bloody from hours of breaking stone, or seeing your mum, his mother, your mother, for once in her steady, meditative life turned inside out by grief, totally overcome. Even the funeral, which Nathan drove up for, was not as bad as you’d expected. The arrangements for Danny’s interment were fuelled by the adrenalin of having to do what needed to be done. With familial cohesion and endless pots of tea you bore the awfulness together.

  It was going through Danny’s things in his flat in town that finally broke you. It was doing the job that people always say is the most difficult duty of bereavement. It was smelling him on his clothing, his signature odour: sweat, Obsession and pheromones. It was seeing his last cup of tea with its thick mouldering meniscus sitting next to the sink, half drunk–evidence of a man once thirsty, once living. It was dismantling the proof of Danny that hurt the most, pouring out the tea, washing the cup, packing his stuff up. You had, via the clearing of daily instruments and ordinary items, like his keys and his harmonica, his badly rinsed contact lenses and his strange vintage medical kit with its lint and gammy tube of silver cream, decreed that all the accoutrements of his existence were now meaningless, redundant. Not knowing his location, not knowing where to look, or how to find him, even though proof of his being lay all around, even though it seemed at any moment he might stumble home and be, as he always was, so pleased to see you: this is what put you face down on the floor, crying until you retched, crying until the corners of your mouth tore and bled, holding his old red trainers to your chest, and calling for him and calling for him. Some kind, internal mechanism saved you, provided anaesthetic. A switch flicked, your eyes closed, and your head went dark.

  Personal effects: how irrelevant they are, how sad, how lost, how vagrant, without the force that gives them purpose.

  He didn’t have much in the flat of course. He wasn’t one for hoarding junk, not domestically anyway. There was no extensive CD collection, no Dungeons & Dragons figures in their original boxes, no cufflinks belted down in their cases by elastic loops. His money went on other things: beer, dope, a pouch of Kendal Twist every week–like father, like son–buses to London, copper flex, a blacksmith course, and any piece of architectural salvage that spoke to him, demanding rescue. Chimney pots, stained glass, iron. Leaning against the walls of his yard were old gateposts and banisters, weather vanes and barbers’ poles. Stacked in neat piles under the washing line were painted Victorian tiles, enamelled cabinets and zinc watering cans.

  The wheel of a gypsy caravan.

  A brass pump-hose.

  Danny the barrow-man. Danny the champion of bespoke and bygone things.

  As you stood in the crowded yard you thought about that sixth-form trip to the V&A, when you and he had walked along the corridor of metalwork, under wrought black roses and ornate tulip brackets. Suddenly your dopey brother had woken up to the possibilities of art and craft. Look, Suze. Look, it’s so beautiful. How do they do that?, his pond-brown eyes wide open, pushing his dark carpet fringe to one side. He had sat down right there and written something in his dog-eared, doodled-over notebook, his legs sprawling out, getting in the way of tourists. Danny with his pubescent masculinity, who had only just grown into his chest and his height, whom the girls at school had only just begun to notice.

  He’d stood up, put his hands either side of a great Meccano angel, and pushed gently. You don’t know why. Maybe because he always had to put his hands on things. The sculpture rocked back and the tip of one wing hit the arbour at its side. It clanged like a dropped bell. Booooooong. The muse had spoken. The look on his face. Stupefaction. Pure joy. Cue the guards, and the pair of you were chucked out of the museum, to the mortification of your teacher, who thought better of you at least, Susan. A typically Caldicutt disgrace of course. Your dad thought it was brilliant when you told him, one for the proles, and he kept the letter the school sent home, sticking it up on the studio wall.

  Danny had a little yellow book–Wroug
ht Ironwork: A Manual of Instruction for Craftsmen-that he carried everywhere he went. He would quote bits of it like philosophy, in situations where he considered it pertinent. Metal worked on the anvil has grace which belies its strength, he’d say on someone’s birthday, as if providing the answer to the universe. You found it on his living-room shelf next to the bong. You kept it-it was one of the only things you did keep. The rest–the bedcover smelling of incense, the farmboy overalls, the rusty saucepan and wok-you boxed up for Oxfam. Danny’s old boss at the scrappy had agreed to empty the yard. He’d offered you money but you said no.

  Both Danny’s girlfriends had called round while you were packing things away, within fifteen minutes of each other, as if they’d coordinated their movements, and they probably had. Heather and Terry. Terry and Heather. At the funeral they had stood together, holding hands, giving each other tissues.

  When she arrived at the flat, Terry had a piece of paper with her, on which Danny had constructed a ridiculous pissed-up last will and testament. He’d done it one night when they’d gone dam-diving at Thirlmere, she said. She thought it should be handed over, given to a solicitor, to see if it was valid. It was sealed, folded in half, and cruttered. She didn’t know what was in it, she said she hadn’t looked; she wasn’t that sort of person. You told her it probably wouldn’t be applicable if it wasn’t officially notarised, but you thanked her anyway.

  You’d met her once before at the flat, her composure soft-soaked on Danny’s couch, smoke curling from the sides of her mouth as she let go of the pipe. She was pretty, wide-eyed, blonde. Wow, you two look dead similar, she’d said. It’s a bit spooky. Then she’d giggled. I’ve never been with a woman. Now she was looking at you soberly through strands of corn-yellow fringe, and again must have been seeing a lot of him in you. Your facial slopes and tones were always just about the same, give or take his square chin, your refined brows. You both wore a red blush just above your jaw-line in cold weather. You still do.

  Terry wondered if she could take one of his photographs of the two of them together, to remember him by. She knew where there was one tucked in a dresser drawer, and it was a bit rude anyway. You didn’t tell her you’d already found it, under the ragged chaos of his T-shirts, that you’d seen the two of them, naked, in front of a Lakeland river, a place you recognised because you had swum there every summer of childhood with him. It was a place where the golden mouths of fish blew upwards in the brackish water while you sprawled on your stomachs on the bank and flicked them bread. The reeds grew long beards in the shallows, and you and he would wade through them in your plastic sandals. When you came out your legs would be covered in tiny green worms. You used to pick them off each other, as slowly as you could, seeing who could stand to wear the tickling creatures longest. It was in this place, aged eleven, you’d discovered how you were different, putting a hand there carefully, and describing what you felt. Like a Chinese finger trap. Like gone-down balloons.

  In the photograph they were wet-skinned after swimming and pink-shouldered from the sun, her with extraordinary chestnut nipples, his genitals like catkins. You’d put it back in the bureau face down, embarrassed, disarmed by its erotic quality. You’d wondered who had taken it, or whether it had been timed.

  As Terry was leaving, she’d hugged you and said that Danny had gotten her off junk, and away from a man who used to clobber her senseless in Harraby. She said he was a darling to her; he made her think about being OK and being free. And as far as she knew he was always a darling to Heather too.

  That was the thing. Danny never went in for monogamy. He never chose. I can’t do conventional, he used to say. They’re all so nice. And I’m way too weak with the booze in me. He told them all very early on that his love was a shared commodity, and went with the ones who didn’t mind. The liberals, the hippies, the partygoers, and those girls for whom casual consensual sex was a step up in a relationship. There was something about it you took comfort in: his refusal to prioritise, his being un-winnable. Sometimes you felt guilty, for the connection between the two of you, for having had an unfair advantage all those years-as if, after you, none of them could stack up. True enough, they were all variably inferior. You knew it when he said things like, She’s a babe but she’s just not on my wavelength, Suze. She doesn’t totally get what’s in my head.

  There was never any damage done in the end. He was considerate. He talked them through it, said goodbye in bed and out of it, let them stay an extra day or two. He remained in contact, a semi-reliable friend, an occasional subsidiser of rent. He was simply Danny, a joker, a drinker, the sweet-hearted, sensitive, un-marrying man. Shallow, but for his depth.

  Your parents grew used to meeting one pretty fool-stung girlfriend after another. They got good at temporary welcomes, the remembering of names for bumpings-into at the supermarket and the bank. It was very amicable. Hello, love. Hello, Shelley. Hello, Caroline. Kat. Della. Pamela. Amanda. Clare. Alison. Gillian. Rachel. Freya. Fiona. Lorraine. Rosie. Sharon.

  At the flat you waited for Terry to go, then you opened the envelope and unfolded the paper. His handwriting was as bad as ever, made worse by the influence of whatever they had taken, and the idiotic anticipation of tombstoning thirty feet down into pitch-black water. There wasn’t much to read–just three lines. You’d expected a thicker tome, reams of loopy, mushroomy crap scrawled across the page, because it usually took Danny a good few goes to find the meaning in what he was trying to say. Danny had never quite arrived at maturity. You’d assumed that he’d be eternally juvenile and harebrained, and you’d always have the task of dismissing his crackpot notions or humouring him. Danny never quite got to grips with the real world. He always thought things could be knocked together somehow, towed or balanced, spun or floated or flown, when it was obvious to any halfwit that they could not.

  Like the time, aged fourteen, he decided to paraglide off Skiddaw using an old sailcloth tied to his belt, and they had to pin his leg in two places at the local infirmary.

  Like last year, when he entered the river Eden paddle race, with an oil-drum yacht–The Dirty Sanchez. You and Nathan had tracked his progress from the bank, cheering him on as the kayaks made off downstream. You’d watched him float along at a glacial pace, the various agricultural inflatables bulging below the planking. She’ll pick up speed, he’d reassured you, grinning, she just needs to build up a head of steam. He was wearing flip-flops, a Hawaiian shirt, and blow-up armbands. He’d roped a four-pack of beer to the deck and he pulled it up from the water and opened a can. When the raft ground to a halt in the rapids, Danny had leapt into the water, splashing around and drenching himself, and he’d managing to tug the rusty hull free. The other supporters had laughed and cheered as your brother gave the thumbs-up. Two hundred yards further on the vessel had begun listing badly. People yelled at Danny to abandon ship. In the end it was Nathan who had intervened, heroically jumping off the sandstone bluffs into the water, and helping your brother to tow the sinking Sanchez into an inlet, where she was hastily dismantled. The two of them had swum to the finish line with a tractor tyre floating between them. Then Danny had chased you down, picked you up, and thrown you in the river, as if you were eleven years old again.

  You loved this quality about him. His yaw. His silliness. His lovely, lofty profundity. He was a boy with a brain full of gorgeous, ludicrous thoughts, even at the age of thirty-five. He didn’t understand doom. And you so badly wanted him to succeed. Just once. To build his machine, ride the rapids, fly. In Danny you could see a wonkier version of your dad, the progeny of those adventure-inventor Caldicutt chromosomes. When Terry handed you the will, this is what you expected–more of the same. Obscure quotes and hip musical instructions, the desire for sloe poteen to be passed round in some nude forest ceremony. You’d have put good money on it. But you were wrong.

  Don’t stick me in the ground. I want Suze to make a big bonfire. Toss me on.

  You read it and you felt your heart drop inside its bone cavity. All
he wanted in the end was you. It was extraordinary to be reminded in that single moment of who he was and who you were. Compatible birth mates, biological repeaters. Closer than anyone else could ever be to you, and you to he.

  You sat on the floor of his flat, now empty and smelling of mildew, and folded and unfolded the note. You read it again. You thought about Dr Dixon and the insects in his aquarium trees, their bodies damp with mucus after crawling from their skins. Say I do, Sue. Say I do. You remembered how as a child you had gradually lost a sense of what Danny was doing in the next-door room–pulling off his socks, watching a spider scuttle, picking his nose. You retuned the channel, started broadcasting on another frequency, clean and static-less and one-way. I, I, I, you repeated, me, me, me.

  And you thought about the time Danny had run away. It was at the end of that six-month period of treatment at the clinic. He had slipped out of the cottage and on to the moors one afternoon, and had hidden under a thorn tree. He was upset because you weren’t playing head-talk any more, and he thought you were angry with him. When it became apparent he was missing, you went out with your parents to try to find him. You called his name. You tried to think where he would be–you tried to know where he would be–on the huge brown expanse of the moor. You had never felt so lonely. You had never been so sorry. After what seemed like hours, your dad found him curled under a blackthorn, his arms scratched and bleeding. He was sound asleep. When he was lifted out he woke up. He took your hand. You were forgiven.

  Occasionally there were reminders, a residue of some kind. He’d laugh out loud if you were thinking something funny, and say he wanted tuna mayonnaise for his lunch if you had planned on having it. The day you got your first period he seemed aware, if not of the uterine aches, then of some kind of general malaise, because during your next lesson together he handed you a Disprin tablet from the chalky stash of pills he kept in his pencil tin.