August

by Bernard Beckett

  ‘You then.’ Anger came on him without warning and Tristan let it flow. ‘Why not organise ourselves properly? We could find more fuel if we had a system. I walked past a building site yesterday. With twenty men we could empty it in a night and be warm for a month. It’s…this place, it’s haphazard. You just leave people to wander where they will. There is food to be had behind the restaurants, but they change their routines to foil us. If we had people watching all the time, then we’d—’

  ‘Shhh, boy. Shhh.’ His raised voice had brought attention to them. Annie pulled Tristan close and placed a hand across his mouth. She rocked him against her shoulder as if he was a child. The others, satisfied it was grief they had heard, turned back to the body.

  ‘It’s not how we do it here, Tristan,’ she whispered.

  ‘Why not?’ he demanded.

  ‘Because they are not fighters.’

  ‘They fight all the time.’

  ‘With each other, not with fate. That fight has gone out of them.’

  Tristan knew there was no point. She understood where this argument would lead as well as he did. All the way back to Augustine and the free will they could no longer believe in. Annie rubbed his back and her voice softened.

  ‘I could try what you say, Tristan, but how long do you think it would last? One week maybe, or two, before it fell apart. Do you think that’s what they need right now, more hope followed by failure?’

  ‘So you offer hopelessness instead?’

  ‘I don’t offer anything, Tristan. They come to me.’

  ‘You can’t just accept this,’ Tristan said.

  ‘We all die, Tristan. The believer and the nonbeliever alike.’

  ‘No. You’re wrong. You make us sound like animals. We’re not. We’re not just animals!’ It wasn’t her argument, he knew that, but there was no one else he could throw it at.

  ‘No, Tristan, we’re not just animals. Look at your friend. Look at William.’

  Tristan turned back to the group. Where others stood awkwardly, half turned from the corpse, hoping to hide in a sputtering conversation, William had eyes only for his fallen friend. It was over an hour since Tim’s heart had stopped, yet William remained perched at the edge of the couch, his long frame unfolded over his friend, his warm cheek resting on the cold face of death. Tristan watched a bony hand move slowly across Tim’s face, stroking an eyebrow, the nose, the lips.

  ‘Come on,’ Annie whispered. ‘Get your prayers ready. A brother needs burying.’

  That night Tristan performed the first of the season’s burial ceremonies. Uttering prayers he barely believed over men he hardly knew was to become his special role. They dug holes when they could but the winter ground was hard and for every man on the shovel another was needed to stand guard, watching for the authorities, who insisted on taking corpses away for burning. When the grave was ready word would spread and the mourners would arrive: sometimes as many as thirty, other times a smaller, sadder number.

  No two funerals were the same. Drink, old enmities, even the weather could nudge the story from its path. Still a ritual of sorts emerged. Someone, usually but not always a friend, would attempt to take on the voice of the deceased and tell his favourite story. There was drinking, naturally, and often a fight. More than once an enthusiastic mourner climbed down into the hole and had to be dragged back amongst the living. Eventually the energy would seep from the gathering just as it had seeped from the departed, and Tristan would recite the prayers. Then those who knew the deceased best would drop a few of his favourite things onto the body: a flask perhaps, a syringe, a battered copy of a book he had carried, once even the body of a small dog— the donor swore it had not been sacrificed for the ceremony but nobody believed him. Some insisted on a tradition they claimed had its roots in antiquity and pissed on the body before filling the hole back in.

  No ceremony took place without Fat Annie’s contribution, usually a short eulogy in which she displayed a remarkable ability to remember the departed as they would have wished to be remembered. Annie was the tugging mass at the centre of their makeshift world and they couldn’t imagine it turning without her.

  But it did.

  Tristan woke shivering. It had become his habit to lie beside Annie, for warmth, he told himself, but this morning the great lump had turned cold. At first he registered only that there was something wrong: noises and shadows his sleepy mind couldn’t piece together. Dazzling white shafts diffracted through the ventilation slots; shouting jostled in the air. Tristan rose slow and muddle-headed, aware that the noise was getting closer. By the time he had gained his senses a terrible wailing was pulsing through the emptiness.

  He turned back to Annie and saw death painted on her face. Her lips had turned thin and dry, and her wide eyes were empty of understanding. Instinctively Tristan wrapped his arms around her. Just when he had come to believe he had nothing left to lose, here he was, falling again.

  It took them a full day to agree on a course of action. They could all claim to be Annie’s friend, and that left everything open to disagreement. William perhaps was the closest to her but he was reluctant to assert his privileges. She had shown Tristan a special regard, it was true, but he was too recent an arrival. Some turned to Little Cam, the remaining purrer, but all he had to offer was his fervent wish to take her place in the hole.

  They all understood that when they buried Annie they would bury their fragile peace, and the funeral negotiation became a cautious, trustless affair.

  They talked themselves to drink and eventually sleep, with Fat Annie’s body cold on the ground. The next morning one of the men made good a drunken promise and returned with a work gang to which he had once belonged. They used a jackhammer to break up the concrete where she lay. The idea was to make a mausoleum of their shabby home. The workers left them to dig the hole. It took a team of ten the rest of the morning. Then they levered her into her grave.

  There was much anguish and accusation when Fat Annie landed heavily, face-down, offering the world her preposterous rump in farewell. The brawl between those who wished to turn her and those who wished to leave her as she lay was fierce and they were lucky not to have needed a second grave. The turners won the battle, but lost the war; Fat Annie’s weight and the snugness of the fit foiled their attempts to move her.

  Mourners came from all around, and by the middle of the afternoon hundreds filled the basement. The vagrant army shuffled through the space like penguins; without prompting they had happened upon a system of spiralling that ensured each a turn at the centre to gaze on the body. Tristan moved through the warmth and stench with William at his side. Even if he had wanted to escape he couldn’t have. The crowd moved as one, unwinding its grief as the day ran down.

  Five times Tristan found himself at the centre and each time the hole had changed a little: tokens dropped, regathered, stolen, rearranged. On the third pass he noted that the body had been turned. Later, they would all swear no one saw her moved, that a miracle had occurred.

  There was no ceremony because they had not been able to agree on the details. Somewhere in the shrunken hours the crowd began to thin. People left without farewell just as they had arrived without welcome. The only ones still circling were those with nowhere else to go. Little Cam walked a circuit beside Tristan and when they reached the open grave he said, ‘Do you think there should be a prayer now?’

  Tristan looked at the boy then down to Annie. He knew no words to bring her fleshy face back from the dirt.

  ‘Would you like one?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  There were fewer than twenty people left in the basement and the sound of the prayer drew them together. Tristan spoke the words slowly, automatically, feeling only their echoing emptiness:

  Lord, you teach us that in death you embrace us. In trial you carry us, in uncertainty you guide us and in sorrow you comfort us. We ask you now to embrace our friend Annie, as she embraced life. We ask you to welcome her into your home and to give u
s the strength to live in a world of loss, a world held together by your great love. We cannot know your ways, Lord, but we ask for the courage to accept your plan for us. For the woman we knew, we thank you, and for the hope you offer us, we thank you. Amen.

  A long silence was broken by the clang of a shovel on concrete and they began filling the hole. William approached Tristan.

  ‘You need to take over now,’ William said. ‘It’s what she would have wanted.’

  ‘No,’ Tristan replied. ‘There is nothing left here. It is finished.’

  ‘What will you do?’ William asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ As he spoke the words Tristan felt his sadness grow heavy within him. ‘I have never known.’

  Tristan’s head throbbed and his vision, still without colour, held its focus only in moments before returning him to a world of floating debris. Talking had become a terrible drain but there was no denying the story’s momentum. He took her hand. Soon she would push him away.

  ‘I don’t know if you will understand what happened next.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Sometimes you think you understand a thing—you can turn it into words and the words seem to make sense—but then true understanding arrives, and you realise that all you’d ever seen before was the shadow of the idea. Death was not new to me, and I understood that even Annie would one day return to dirt. But to see her there, so completely reduced, when only a day before it had been impossible to imagine our world without her…

  ‘Something left me then. Not hope, but the thing hope rests upon. Belief. William walked away without saying goodbye, as if he had already sensed I was gone. I watched the shovels of dirt land heavily on her body and I felt nothing. I was nothing. I had nothing. I drifted into the path of the oncoming day.

  ‘For three days I staggered through the streets. I stopped eating. I was fading into certainty. You know those streets, you know how full of life they are, but I couldn’t see it. All I could see was a thousand balls, each rolling through the maze: people reduced to movement, movement reduced to pattern. The rector had tried to explain it to me, but even at my lowest moment I hadn’t properly understood. Not until those slow dying days, when the knowledge became a part of me. I would have died. There is no doubting it. I walked without eating or drinking, but the physical fatigue was such a small part of my pain that I barely noticed it.

  ‘And then I saw you.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she said. There had been a change in her silence. As if she sensed how close she was to knowledge.

  ‘There was nothing about me you would have noticed. I was just another beggar fallen on the far side of a street you had no business in. I could see, though, from the way you walked, that you had fallen too.’

  ‘When was it?’

  ‘Three days ago.’

  There was pause as she struggled to remember. ‘It was raining,’ she said.

  ‘This was before the rain. It was afternoon.’

  ‘I was going to work.’

  ‘I know. I followed you. I didn’t mean to. But there was no mistaking you, even at that distance. My heart lurched in the familiar way, a distant, nostalgic sensation I was too thick-headed to make sense of. I left my few possessions on the street wrapped in a blanket, and I followed you.’

  ‘You should have called out.’

  ‘It’s becoming our theme,’ he said, but neither of them smiled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tristan continued. ‘I don’t know if I can explain this. I walked helplessly along the path you laid. Slowly, as if fighting my way through mud. My mind was sticky with the memory of another night in another world, when I should have…But I’d stopped believing in should.

  ‘A strange thing happened as I walked behind you. For the first time in days my fragmented self moved with a single purpose. No, not a purpose, a yearning. A memory. You found your place beneath the canopy just before the rain came. I was huddled in an alley opposite. I whimpered when you removed your coat. A rat beneath a pile of boxes scurried at the sound, instinct taking it deeper into the maze.

  ‘Do you remember the car that stopped? It was long and black with silver spokes in its wheels. I didn’t see him, but I shouted as you drove away. “Don’t hurt her, you bastard,” I called out like a madman.

  ‘As the car moved off, I felt as if the last piece of the puzzle was sliding into place. You turned a corner and disappeared from view, and my life turned rigid again. I did not move, I could not move, but I thought of him, the stranger in the car with money in his pocket and flesh on his mind. I had never properly met you, we had never spoken, and yet I knew that if he harmed you I would hunt him down. Just imagining it filled me with a rage that could never fade to forgiveness.

  ‘And that, that single realisation, completes the puzzle. Do you see ? Do you understand?’

  Tristan waited but Grace gave no sign of having heard the question. He did not blame her. It had taken him too long to see it as well.

  ‘Remember what the rector told me? If none of us is responsible, then none of us is past forgiveness. He had planted it there, don’t you see, the solution to my conundrum. Only the free act can be unforgivable. I stood alone on a wet street and watched you drive away, and I finally understood. To commit the unforgivable act is to be free. And it wasn’t too late. It’s never too late.’

  His words tumbled together, a muddy mash of reason and desperation. You are crazy, she would be thinking. You have lost your mind. But that was the opposite of the truth. It was the exact opposite.

  ‘I did not have a car, or the money to pay for one. But I had an obsession and I would not be denied. The suit I’m wearing belongs to a businessman who swims each morning at the public pool. The car is hired under his name. That part wasn’t difficult. The difficult part comes now. The difficult part is in the explaining.’

  She had gone still beside him but he knew she was listening. For a moment he felt powerful again. A fierceness came over him, a kind of determination he had experienced only once before. It was happening.

  ‘You are it, Grace. You are my destiny. From the moment I first saw you I knew this simple truth. When the car pulled away, the fear of you being harmed found its way to my core. I could never conceive of it, Grace. I could never even think of hurting you.’

  ‘Do not say it.’

  ‘To hurt you would be unforgivable. I could no more doubt this than I could doubt the existence of my own hand. And that is how I could prove him wrong.’

  ‘You are mad. This is the talk of a madman!’

  ‘I did not choose you, Grace. Fate chose you. And I chose to deny my fate.

  ‘I drove the block twice tonight, the first time just to look at you, the second to harden my resolve. You could not have guessed at the mighty urges that clawed and writhed within me. I smiled at you. You smiled back and my heart soared. I wanted to save you. I wanted to save us both.

  ‘I chose the road carefully. I drove it earlier today: I needed to be sure. The corners came fast, each folding into the next, pushing back a little harder. It is addictive, the thrill of speed, approaching that point where skill and danger are delicately balanced. I heard your breathing quicken with my heart. You wanted to speak out, to ask me to slow down. But you did not. As if it was written. As if you knew.

  ‘I felt my history rising up against me, urging me to caution. I beat it back. I have never faced a more daunting opponent but my resolve was strong. I denied my love for you. I say “I” but now we see the word is no longer adequate. I speak of something more, of will alone. It pulled at the wheel, fought against the road. The car lost traction. I accelerated. Did you feel it? There was no ice.

  ‘I meant to commit the unforgivable act, Grace. I meant to kill us both.’

  ‘But you didn’t kill me,’ she said. ‘I am still here.’

  Tristan took her throat in his hands and felt it soften beneath his thumbs. He pressed down, feeling the corrugations of her windpipe, experimenting with its elasticity. Sh
e stared grey-faced back at him, treating him at last to the hatred he had earnt.

  ‘So this is how you do it, is it?’ she hissed. He pushed harder, and she made no move to fight him. ‘You would rather choke an argument than counter it.’

  ‘You have no argument,’ he said.

  ‘I do. You’re just not willing to hear it.’

  He loosened the pressure; her rasping was too terrible to bear.

  ‘We all know we will die, Tristan,’ she said. ‘Dying doesn’t frighten me. But I always thought it would be for something more noble than one man’s vanity.’

  He closed his one good eye against her accusation.

  ‘You won’t do it,’ Grace taunted, sensing the fraying of him.

  ‘Why won’t I?’

  He looked at her again. Her lip curled back, revealing the gap in her teeth. She snarled.

  ‘Let me go, Tristan. Let me go. It’s not too late.’

  ‘Too late for what?’

  ‘Learning from our mistakes.’

  ‘I am not mistaken,’ he insisted.

  ‘So why are you shaking?’

  ‘Talk and I will listen,’ he said, regretting at once the bargain. But how could he demand she stop talking when all he craved was the sound of her voice? ‘But be quick. My fingers know what they must do.’

  ‘I cannot speak like this.’

  ‘Then do not speak.’ He pushed harder, tasting blood in his mouth, his throat, his imagination. She spat at him. He felt its warmth slide thickly on his cheek.

  ‘I hate you for this.’

  ‘You should,’ he replied. ‘You must.’

  She leaned into him and he felt her weight straining against his fingers. Her face was too close for him to make out any more than her burning eyes.

  ‘Do you think any but the St Augustine’s student thinks twice about the nature of his will?’ she challenged. ‘Do you think there are any others who have the luxury of giving a shit? I knew a girl on the street called Francis. She died of a cough because she couldn’t afford medicine. Each evening she faced the same choice: whether or not to risk the cold of the streets in search of the money that might keep at bay the symptoms of that coldness. I sat with her as she died and she described snippets of her childhood. Not once was her fading mind troubled by Augustine’s stupid paradoxes. But now you lie here with your fingers to my throat, seeking to make some college boy’s point that means nothing to either of us. And all because you were too frightened to talk to me. If I die now it is only because you are a coward.’