Matters of Life & Death

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘Don’t go running ahead,’ she said. They walked beside her until they came to a doorway. She ushered them into a room where the blinds had been partially drawn. It was still light enough to see photographs on the walls – of the Sphinx with his lopped-off nose, the pyramids, boats sailing on the Nile. There was nobody else in the room. A glass case stood in the middle of the floor and Nora called the boys over.

  ‘Meet Takabuti,’ she said. The boys tried to see. ‘She’s been dead for two and a half thousand years.’ There was some kind of black creature in the case. Wrapped in biscuit-coloured bandages.

  ‘It’s a mummy,’ Tony whispered to his brother. Both of them stared wide-eyed. The thing was completely wrapped except for its head and a withered hand. It wore a cape of blue earthenware beads. The hand, thin as a backscratcher, had stained the wrapping it rested on. Her lips were liquorice black but slightly open showing white teeth. The nose, a snapped-off beak.

  ‘What’s it made of?’ the younger boy asked.

  ‘It’s a real dead person.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return,’ said Aunt Nora.

  Lying beside the mummy was the decorated lid of her coffin. The idealised face – painted with gold and black and scarlet. Beside it – the dead thing.

  ‘I don’t like it.’ The smaller brother pulled a face and walked away to look at something else. Tony followed him.

  Nora was left standing by herself looking down into the case. She was so small. Shrunken almost. But she could have been a beauty once – with such white teeth, skin of alabaster. Walking in sandals by the Nile. She said a prayer for Takabuti, that she might be in heaven no matter what her faith.

  She leaned her forearms on the glass and felt a great weariness come over her. The life she had lived now seemed barren and worthless. Everything she had taught would soon be forgotten. She had brought no children into the world. Maiden aunt to two boys was the most she could say. Today she had brought them to visit Takabuti and the lesson hadn’t worked as well as she had hoped. They were not as shocked as she had been when she first saw her. The children’s voices were now distant. Something was happening to the sounds. They were the way sound was when you listened to a shell. Distant seas. There was a sour taste in her mouth. Her heart skipped a beat and had to race to catch up again. She reached out and leaned her fingertips on the glass case for balance. Little haloes of condensation formed around each finger as she braced herself. She held on – until the dwam gradually disappeared.

  Tony’s voice was very close now.

  ‘Mammy said we should get home before the rush hour.’

  She looked at her watch. It was coming up to four o’clock. The light had almost disappeared. It was either night or the rain coming on. Or both.

  On the way home the boys went to the upper deck – by now she was only fit for downstairs.

  ‘Behave yourselves,’ she had shouted at the disappearing legs. The conductor was standing by the stairs. She said, ‘Old age is not for the faint-hearted.’ The rush hour hadn’t started yet so there were plenty of seats. The conductor came to where she was settling.

  ‘Are you going far?’ he said.

  ‘All the way,’ she said and laughed. ‘And the two boys upstairs.’ She paid the fares and arranged herself. It was warm inside the bus. The darkness and the rain were on the outside. The throb of the engine and the shudder was comforting. Warmth was a pleasure – whether it was in bed or beside the fire or with her hot-water bottle. The traffic lights changed and reflected their colours on the wet pavement. She began to feel drowsy and moved closer to the window.

  She tried to think about the mummy and the gilded case. The container and the contained. And it made her remember the Irish story – of the soul that kissed the body. At the moment of death. She had first heard it from Arthur McBride at a wake in Ballintoy. His eyes were bright trying not to be moved as he told it. The soul leaves the body and tiptoes to the doorway. Then turns and goes back to kiss the body that has sheltered it all these years. Day in, day out. In sickness and in health. In grief and in joy.

  And Nora imagines it happening at her own death. She sees it like cinema. The soul, in her own image, leans over and with tenderness kisses her empty body. Adieu. And each time the soul makes the journey to the doorway reluctance takes hold and it returns to kiss the body with its shrunken frame and its frail bones of honeycomb. Adieu. Three times in all. From one vital part of herself to another. Adieu.

  When it came to their stop the two boys ran down the stairs. They shouted to their Aunt Nora on the lower deck but she seemed not to hear. Tony went to her and she was still, her head in its hat pressed against the window, her skin a grey colour. The conductor came to see if he could help but there was nothing he could do.

  WINTER STORM

  He was wakened by the noise of the heated air rising from the vents in the bedroom floor. He got up and opened the curtains. The windows looked out into a wood of silver birch. Here and there were patches of snow which had not melted. Two squirrels were careering from one tree to another across the thinnest of branches. Up or across – it seemed to make no difference to their speed. From the other side of the house bamboo wind chimes created a faint but constant sound. Above the garage was a clock face with a single hand for temperature. It was twenty-two below.

  It was amazing how folk had found ways to live in such inhospitable places. There was another bedroom where the owner had switched off the heating. For weeks now the windows had been opaque with patterned frost – on the inside. Each screw-nail in the wood frame had grown ice crystals as long as eyelashes.

  On the wall above the bed was a modern painting by a Pawnee artist. There was Native American Indian stuff all over the place – wood carvings, a woven war shield and in the hallway a pair of snow shoes like bad tennis racquets pinned to the wall.

  He checked that the telephone was firmly in its cradle. He picked it up and listened for the dialling tone then, on hearing it, replaced the receiver.

  He was the only one at the bus terminus with grey hair. The others around him were Asian students. People his age and American students owned cars. When the bus arrived he got a seat by the window and flipped back his hood. The window seat mattered little because everything in the American Midwest looked the same. He found it hard to get a sense of history. The motor car dictated everything, swept everything aside. Businesses and shops had to have acres of parking space so that the town appeared spread out, flat, diluted – little more than a series of neoned fast-food places, telephone wires and car parks with the huge sky arched over everything. Buildings from the turn of the century were rare. People had told him of the prairies before the first colonisers came through. This was territory to be crossed as quickly as possible – the wet lands, the bogs, the seven-foot-high grasses. The air black with midges and flies. It was hard for him to imagine the place they described. Then one evening, as he stood waiting for his bus, he looked up high into the sky and saw countless thousands of crows, flapping slowly homewards out of the sunset. A huge flock with stragglers and outriders edging across the yellow sky. And he was aware that this was a thing that had happened every evening for thousands of years. He could have been – not a Scotsman at a bus-stop – but a Kiowa-Apache on horseback looking up, moving south, anxious to be away from such a winter.

  Before the stop on the north side of the campus the girl beside him put on her mittens, covered her mouth and nose with her scarf and pulled her hood up. He got off behind her, tugging his black woollen hat well down over his ears. At home in Scotland he would be laughed at for such headgear. But here in Iowa, Midwest people seemed to wear anything in winter – even Norwegian knitwear. Which meant that he had difficulty lusting. It was hard to tell the sex of students from the eye-slit they left in their clothing. Bright colours were no indication that the wearer was female.

  His room was on the south side of the campus, as far away from the bus-stop as it was p
ossible to be – far enough away for him to classify it as ‘exercise’. He burrowed down into his coat for the long walk. The university buildings were around the perimeter of a central green space, large as a public park. At least it was called a green space even though the winter grass was dead and biscuit-coloured.

  Paths criss-crossed the park forming a lattice-work from one building to another. Between classes the central acres became thronged. The students reminded him of skeins of geese – moving Indian-file. At the intersection of several paths he always thought it remarkable that, like birds, they didn’t bump into one another. Every time he came to a junction he was wary, measured his step, slowing down or speeding up as need be, to avoid a collision with another person.

  The halyard on the flagpole clacked loudly as he passed and the Stars and Stripes stood out straight in the wind. It made a noise almost like rattling. The clock in the campanile chimed ten but he didn’t look up because the icy wind was coming from that direction and it would sting his eyes. He kept his face turned away. At the halfway point he passed the emergency telephone.

  As he entered his department building the first snow was beginning to blow in the wind. He cleared his throat. From past experience he knew his voice sounded peculiar when he didn’t use it for a long time – it could shift a whole register or not come out at all. The last thing he’d said was ‘Goodnight’ to the girl in the office the previous evening.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. The throat clearing had worked.

  ‘And how’s our Scottish poet today?’

  ‘Professor to you.’

  She smiled. It was she who had typed his name into a slot on his door – ‘Professor Andrew Younger’ – when he’d first arrived.

  ‘Thanks for the promotion,’ he’d said. His room was on the lee side and before he took off his coat he went to the telephone. He tapped in the voicemail code fully expecting to be told, as he had been told almost every morning of his stay, that he had no messages. ‘You have one new message,’ said the female recording. He had to sit down when he heard Lorna’s voice as clear as anything from Scotland. She was sorry but she’d mislaid his home number – surely he hadn’t changed houses again? The point was she’d been offered another subbing job at the same school – somebody else was pregnant. Whether or not it was because it was a Catholic school she hadn’t a clue. But it was an offer she felt she had to seriously consider. The money was excellent. So it was a real possibility that she wouldn’t be joining him in sunny Iowa. She had to say yea or nay by the end of the day. It could have been such an adventure. However she would see him when he came back in the summer. Maybe she would try and ring him later.

  He sat in the chair for some time, then replaced the receiver. At the window the snowflakes rose and dithered. He took off his jacket and knitted headgear. He wore his hair in a pony-tail – had done since he could remember. There was a small oval mirror beside the door and he checked his appearance before going along the corridor to the kitchen beside the office. It was empty. He poured himself a coffee in a borrowed mug and dropped one of the larger coins into a basket – was it a quarter or a dime? This was the brush-off. How could she do this – after what they’d agreed? She was so obdurate. He’d said that to her one day, ‘You are so fucking obdurate,’ and wondered why she had laughed out loud in his face. Back in his room he sat down in front of his screen.

  He switched on his computer and while it went through its warming-up noises he sat with his head in his hands. He had promised to write a CV for a campus radio show he was to be on. He gave a minimum amount of his history and listed the titles of his collections of poems – his ‘slim volumes’ as Lorna called them. ‘Weight watchers’ poetry.’

  Now and Again

  Holidays of Obligation

  Making Strange

  Like Everything Else

  How futile all this was. How was anyone to deduce his life from such fragments? He’d been married to a girl called Cathy for three years in the sixties. She’d worked for the Abbey National but it had all broken up when she went off with her branch manager, himself married. The only good thing was that there’d been no children. After that he’d had a succession of occasional relationships – until he’d met Lorna. She was widowed with two grown-up sons who were away at university – in Hull. Then in her early forties she herself decided to go to university. That was where he’d met her, one night in the bar after he’d done a reading. Andrew wanted to settle down with her but she was wary of commitment and wanted to keep her own place. And her own pace. So he visited a lot. And slept over. After a couple of years they began to become routine and still she wouldn’t commit. She seemed to say, ‘This is fine as it is – but don’t push it.’ When he was offered the poet-in-residence at Iowa State he hesitated but Lorna said he MUST take it. It was too good an opportunity to miss. Besides it was only for a year. Not even a year – September to May. Lorna had said it with such conviction that he wondered if she wanted rid of him – that this was the moment she’d been waiting for.

  She was now a Modern Studies teacher but did mostly subbing because of the freedom it gave her. Her present contract was due to have run out sometime after Christmas and she had promised to give serious thought to following him to Iowa. Then they had this terrible falling out. Fights are never about what causes the fight. They are always about something else – something in the past, an irritation, a vengeance, a reprisal. He’d gone round to her place to watch A Doll’s House on television. They’d settled with a glass of wine, she curled up on the sofa beside him. Then the cat had wanted out. That had to be made absolutely clear. And the other fact – that the outer storm doors were bolted shut because of the kind of night it was – is also relevant. If the storm doors were not closed against an east wind then the porch inevitably flooded. That wonderful actress Juliet Stevenson was in the lead role of Nora. It didn’t seem like a long play but it was – and the only thing that distracted Lorna’s attention was the rain against the windows. And the wind. She kept remarking it. Then the play ended with the boom of Nora closing the door as she left. Lorna went to look for the cat and, not finding her anywhere in the house, opened the front doors and it came streaking in, thin as a greyhound because of the wet.

  ‘Did you know the cat was out?’

  ‘Yeah, I let her out earlier.’

  ‘Why didn’t you let her in again?’

  ‘We were watching the play.’

  ‘She’s been out for hours. In the rain.’

  She got a towel and began to rub the cat down in front of the fire.

  ‘You’re shivering, pet.’

  ‘Cats don’t shiver.’

  ‘Tell him. You’re shivering, aren’t you, darlin.’ The cat’s fur looked jagged. ‘He’s a bastard of a poet. Cares about nobody but himself. Here, love. Easy.’

  ‘I hate the way you utterly sentimentalise animals.’

  ‘Then you can fuck off. Back to your own place.’

  He thought of Juliet Stevenson when he slammed the door on his way out. Before he left for America he’d tried to patch things up. But only with limited success. She seemed cold – couldn’t care less whether they got back together again or not. As for him, he couldn’t wheedle because . . . well, because it was wheedling. There were certain things couldn’t be said out loud – ‘I want someone to talk to, to share things with. I want sex and companionship. I want you, Lorna, to be with me. To complete me. You have all the things I lack.’

  There was a knock at his door.

  ‘Come in.’

  It was the cleaner. Twice a week she excused herself and emptied his waste-basket. She was a Native American Indian woman, very big with a solemn leathery face. She had a trolley loaded neatly with brushes and shovels, sprays and polishes. She didn’t smile when he greeted her but adjusted the muscles of her face to show him that she was returning his greeting. She reminded him of the tall Indian in the movie of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The one who never spoke. She took his waste
-basket to her trolley and upended it. Nothing much came out.

  He said, ‘It’s so cold today.’

  She set the basket back on the floor.

  ‘You betcha,’ she said and went out. Her metal shovels clanged like low-pitched wind chimes as she moved down the corridor.

  He finished the CV and began to type up his notebook from the weekend. He’d written quite a lot. When he ate out he’d choose from the menu then jot things down until his food arrived. It was a way of having a conversation with himself. Writing in the notebook was a way of not being alone:

  Shop at the Hy-Vee just as it’s getting dark. The clear sky is amazing, almost like a tinted windscreen – pinkish rising to green then to navy. The evening star is low and as bright as a plane headlight coming at you straight on.

  Met a girl student today called Ellen Lonesome.

  Walking down Hickory Drive I look up and see that in this country Cassiopeia has become an M rather than a W. And somebody has upended the Plough onto its handle.

  Here people don’t cook food, they fix it.

  Remembered a phrase of rejection of my mother’s today at lunch. ‘The back of my hand to you.’ If I failed to keep a promise to her or let somebody down and she was really disappointed she’d say it.

  The snow fizzed as the wind whipped it at the window pane. He looked up but could only see the leaden grey sky. ‘Will it lie?’ In Scotland it was the first question asked when the snow came on. Here it always did.

  At lunch-time he went along to the kitchen for another coffee. The last woman in the office was putting on her coat. All the others had gone.

  ‘Didn’t you hear the weather warning?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh really?’ she said. ‘Campus Radio have been at it since morning. They don’t expect it to quit until after midnight.’

  He went back to his room and stood looking down through the window at the snowstorm. The paths were covered now. He sipped his coffee and sat down in front of the computer again. He checked the phone in its cradle. He should write to Lorna – put it on paper. Elegantly. To see if she could be tempted by words. But then it would be too late. This afternoon decisions would have been taken. He could ring her but she would be in class. And if there was one thing she hated, it was to be phoned at school. Trekking along corridors behind that stork of a school secretary.