A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  Joanna rang in answer to her letter to say she would love to come down to the coast, but her father’s cancer, which he had fought for months, had invaded his whole body. They had stopped the treatment and sent him home but now he was back in; now even he had to admit it was the end. She had promised to be with him while he died.

  Every day she sat on the beach sketching ink edges around the pallor of it – a still scoop of water as thin as cold air, as if the bay were an empty shell, an earshell, pearl-pale and dotted inside with a line of rocks. When she was cold she walked on the sand. A wet spaniel’s head she found one day at high tide in the hairline of the marram grass turned out to be a drowned penguin, its dense wings folded under and hanging out like earlobes. Between them were hunched feathers and there, poking out of them on a fine chain of bones, waggled a small skull black-beaked, formed of fretty translucent folds like bloodstained paper. Carefully she snapped the chain and carried the skull home wrapped in a sheet from her sketchbook to dry in the sun. Every day there was sun, though a wad of fog materialised over the dunes and the sea in the afternoons and often was still there until late next morning. Her house was not far from the lighthouse on the point; the horn’s relentless hooting haunted her sleep. Waking, she read in the lamplight or wrote on scraps of paper.

  He slips on a muddy embankment. Beside him something emits a foul sweetish stink: a corpse swelling against its buttoned jacket. It has the head of a pig, blue-tinged, dark red on the cheeks and snout. Dark red means that it is decomposing, he reasons, proud that he is still capable of reason. Everyone is starving. This is a terrain of war, covered with the dead and the dying. What did he last eat? The jacket of his uniform has a blue and dark red hand stuck in it. He climbs the embankment to a railway platform. He is busking, juggling balls, reciting a patter. He is waiting, as is his audience, to jump in front of a train when one finally comes. Meanwhile he juggles. A train hoots, hoots on a double note. It is out of sight, very far away still. The audience exclaims. A ball falls onto the gravel. Squatting to grope for it he sees in horror a thick brown pipe of flesh come out of him and prod the gravel. It disgorges a shiny brown mass. He sticks his finger in it to confirm what it is. He groans. His death has begun. He will miss the train.

  After school on a dark afternoon. I am walking home from the railway station along the middle of the street between gutters full of puddles shining grey, rain-spattered, with silvery fish flickering to their surfaces. No cars come and none of the neighbours in front gardens has anything to say to me. The streetlamps blink on. I go to my room, collecting on the way clothes that my father has taken off and left on the floor. I hold his warm shirt and singlet to my face to breathe in the smell of him. My bed looks too small with him in it. There is sunlight in the flowers of the broom bush at the window; the rain has made them large and glossy as buttercups. His pyjamas are in a tangle on the floor. Scolding him, I pick them up. He turns his sleepy grey head towards my voice, his eyes still closed, waiting for a kiss. He has a grey fuzz all over his body except his knees and elbows, wherever the nap has worn off.

  Joanna rang early one morning to say that her father had died quietly a few hours ago, as day broke. ‘When I woke he must have just gone,’ she said. ‘That could have been what woke me, I suppose.’ She had sat nine days and nights holding his hand. She thought she might come to the coast for a day or two, now it was over. The funeral was in four days.

  Misty rain would cover the cemetery. Joanna would wear black. Old soldiers would hang around chatting, and old railwaymen, waiting for the priest to turn up; eventually a flustered substitute would arrive to mutter the words of the service while rain trickled from grey trees and a crowd of umbrellas. The box of darkness into which the coffin under its flowers would slip with a clunk was lined with creased, satiny clay.

  Joanna came at nightfall and sat unable to eat, drinking wine, crying, smoking with a tremulous hand that made her strands of smoke ripple; folding, unfolding her hands between cigarettes.

  When the lighthouse uttered a blast she yelled. Startled awake, a dog howled in the distance. Again it blasted; again the dog howled. They opened the window a crack and fog came wisping in. No question of sleep now. They pulled on boots to walk to the lighthouse, which was invisible but for the twisting lantern until they were on the last steps; then like a rocket on the launching-pad it showed thick white. The shed that held the foghorn pumped out flurries of mist as bellow on bellow slammed through the cement platform, through their bodies. Just under the lantern, red tide-lamps burned. The tide was out of sight. From over the bay an echo came in thunderclaps.

  They walked under blurred white lamps along the leggy pier, its piles gnawed black at the ankles, above black rocks and the sandy sea floor, a thong here and there of black kelp winding in a net of ripples. The lighthouse flared, boomed, flared, boomed. Under, the last lamp they were met by a huge groan. The lighthouse spoke, and the echo. The whole wide shell of the bay, seafloor and lip of cliff, reverberated. They leaned on a wet rail as with a groan, a roar, a groan, a cluster of lights came into sight, slid past the end of the pier and disappeared. Chord on slow chord sounded over the water. Their two shadows stretched along the seabed as far as the whirlpool of light where the ship had been.

  The metal staircase up the cliff face from the beach spilled rain with a jingling at each step. The moon was a high bright smudge. A secretive soft dripping of water from the black trees seemed to fall silent whenever they halted; frogs were creaking. They came back in after midnight with their lips salty and their hair dank and strung with bright drops, having taken the rhythmic booms so far into themselves that they were no longer hearing them, they were no more bother now than breath, than heartbeat and eyeblink. They were soaked with fog, booming. Once or more than once in the night they woke to the deep music of a ship passing the lighthouse. Loud crows in the pines woke them when it was well into the white midmorning, and still the horn was sounding.

  They flung up their sleepy white arms and stretched and yawned and drank strong tea in the kitchen. ‘Waking up in this house is like waking up on board ship,’ Joanna said.

  The lighthouse horn hooted all night on two notes [she wrote in her notebook], while I dreamed of a wrecked ship sunk into a pit so deep no light could wake it. Now in the sun the fog is lifting. The pines creak, heavy with crows.

  I opened the book by my bed and found this in a letter from Boris Pasternak to Marina Tsvetaeva in July 1926, a summer letter. ‘The groan is the loudest note in the universe. I am inclined to believe that outer space is filled with this sound rather than with the music of the spheres…’

  At lunchtime Joanna leaned forward into a hood of sunlight, offering a damp paper bag in her hands, which though large and strong always looked helpless; and they still had their slight tremor. The bag was full of large bruise-purple figs, with a red crack in each one, a glow of seeds.

  ‘The last of them and look, I’ve squashed them. I put them in the fridge and forget all about them,’ Joanna said.

  ‘They’re only a bit squashed.’ She kissed Joanna’s cheek in thanks and washed them in a bowl under the tap, watching seeds move on the surface. ‘I associate you with figs, you know, ripe figs, for some reason,’ it occurred to her to say.

  ‘Fat and seedy. That’s me.’

  ‘Opulent. Purple. Abundant, syrupy and gritty, bursting –’

  ‘They called me the Purple Lady in at the hospital, did I tell you? I was a fixture. Everyone knew me. Here she is, they’d say. Hullo, Purple Lady.’

  ‘You wore all purple clothes?’

  ‘I wore this one dress. I’ve had it on day and night for the last two weeks. Do I stink? No? I didn’t have the time to change. No, it wasn’t even that – in my tiredness I just couldn’t think what else to put on. Last night I could hardly walk. How did I get through it?’

  ‘You’d put your mind to it.’

  ‘The family are all against me. Anyone’d think all of us weren’t Ray’s kids t
oo, only you were – that’s what they’re saying.’

  ‘It’s the strain.’

  ‘You might as well go home, they said. It’s not as if he can see or hear you, he doesn’t even know you’re there. But I promised Ray I’d be with him.’

  ‘Yes. And you were.’

  ‘He never came out of the coma.’

  ‘Whether he knew or not, you had to stay. But I think he knew.’

  ‘I’d lie in the armchair holding one hand then the other. I’d fall asleep and wake up holding a hand, listening to him breathe. Sometimes I dressed his wound. It was black and it stank. They stopped giving him water, did I tell you? For ten days we were wrenching his jaws apart and dabbing inside with swabs. He had a leather strap for a tongue.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have been in pain.’ She tore a fig open and licked and bit flesh from its dark lining, pushing the bowl forward. Joanna grinned and shook her head, her eyes blurring again. ‘Like a ripe fig, am I? I feel as dead as Ray inside.’

  They went down the stairs and sat on the strip of sand in the sun while the tide washed in and the shadow of the cliff flowed down to meet it. Rocks raised their brown backs, scaled or furry, and dived under; weeds strayed in and out of channels. Joanna puffed at a cigarette. ‘I keep thinking I have to get back,’ she said. ‘To the hospital.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I was worried every minute I wasn’t in the ward. I would have to be asleep when he finally went, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Don’t you always have a feeling who’s with you when you’re asleep, though? In a coma, mightn’t it be the same?’

  ‘I keep feeling that the death happened to someone else, Ray’s still in there waiting? There was always someone dying. I got to know them all, the visitors too, everyone talked in there. All of us smoking our heads off nonstop, funny, isn’t it?’ She sighed smoke. ‘I’m stopping when this is over.’

  ‘Is the funeral still on Wednesday?’

  ‘Wednesday. Yes, Wednesday at ten. Oh God. You do still want to come, then?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Thanks. You never even got to meet him. I used to wish – oh.’

  ‘No.’ She poured more tea. ‘I had a weird dream the other night. I keep having these dreams – horror dreams, some of them, and wish dreams. I try to note them down, if I wake up in time. There was this old man in a railway uniform –’

  ‘That’d be Ray. I have frightful dreams all the time. I’m scared to go to sleep.’

  When she had seen Joanna off she put the skull of the penguin, which smelled like salted cod now, on a sheet of paper beside a shell she had found and taken at first for another small empty-socketed skull, so many birds there were now washed up on the sand. A hole in the dome of it opened the shadowy ribbed chambers and the white column inside. Carefully with a fine pen she drew the skull and the shell and washed over them, blurring lines to make a watery shadow. I am an empty shell, she thought, not bothering with a signature; while my friend is brimful of feelings which spill out of her, words and tears, hour after hour.

  Later, in the flickering room, beside a glass of daisies that had curled up like dead yellow spiders, she scrawled on the back of the sketch.

  Dear Joanna,

  I wish I could take on some of your pain. You would have taken your father’s on, if pain could be shared. There you are overflowing with suffering, while I sit on the beach, empty, an empty shell.

  My own father died fourteen years ago. We hadn’t been close since I was small. We were shy and uncomfortable alone together.

  I remember as a very small child waiting in the bathroom one winter afternoon so dark that we had lights on, waiting for him to come home from work and punish me for some misdeed that had angered my mother. I heard the front door and their cheerful voices suddenly lowered. When he stepped wearily into the bathroom I was cowering under the basin out of the greasy lamplight. He unhooked the razor strop from behind the door. I have no memory of the thrashing (of which we were never to speak), nor of the pain. I cried, I suppose. What I remember is disbelief: each of us staring at the other afterwards in a consternation of disbelief. He was never to thrash me again, and that might have been in his face as well.

  My father had a heart attack one winter afternoon twenty-five years later. He died suddenly, alone in the house.

  The page was full. She wrote her initial, and sent it to her friend, whose white hands, folded, quivering, filled her mind. The day of the funeral she drove into the rain and back. Yellow day lilies opened and closed in the garden, a curled blue iris here and there, and daisies. In a low fork of the bare prunus tree she found a twig cup with nothing inside but dead leaves and broken shells, snail shells. Brown leaves lay all over the grass. Wandering into a garden shop one day – by then it was July, midwinter – she saw among plum and apple and apricot saplings a grafted stick with loose roots and no branches, as slender and dry as cane or dark bamboo. The label fluttered, a printed butterfly: a picture of figs, and a name a woman might have, she thought, in a book about the deep South: Black Genoa. She bought it and planted it where it would screen the sun at the kitchen window, digging a hole with four glistening brown walls, packing the roots in hard. As night fell the fog fell also; the lighthouse hooted. In the fuzz round the porch light, wet and cold, the skin of Black Genoa shone. Green hands would reach out of it one day, loose on spread arms; and a thousand pouches, purpling, oozing, burst apart.

  AUGUST

  NOW THAT MY work table is in the front room with its double long windows that look out at tea-trees, I’ve hung E’s Ondine painting in there between two Chinese prints: her blue-green water is flanked by their gold – although the Chinese bird and the flower branch are in air, they look like reflections in golden water. The sky turned that colour – ternie, the tarnish of old brass – over the western beach last night.

  By the light of the lamp I am kissing a man I know but have never kissed, a man who has never been my lover and whose head now sinks into my pillow. I press my mouth on his until it opens and the flesh and its moisture shrink away from me. I start back and stare. His mouth gapes open, dry, strung with waxed brown integuments like the cavity of a spit-roast chicken. There is no tongue in there. Transfixed with horror and pity I lie over him, so that, eight-limbed, we make a spider sprawled on the bed. I am still in this embrace when a hand grips my shoulder. My eyes open to grey daylight in a room where everything is smaller than in the other dream. Then there is no hand; no one here.

  In bare apple boughs

  beyond the pane, a candle’s

  spear of light rears up.

  Mirrored itself, the mirror

  touches a flame to dark wood.

  Bedside books I keep to read under the lamp these sleepless nights – Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, her heavy Diary, Alvarez’s The Savage God with the Aztec skull carved out of starry rock crystal on the cover.

  Vincent Van Gogh, June 1890: in one of his few letters to his mother (one month before he shot himself) quoted in Van Gogh: A Documentary Biography:

  As through a glass darkly – so it has remained; life and the why of saying goodbye and going away and the continuance of unrest, one does not understand more of it than that.

  For me life might well continue being isolated. Those whom I have been most attached to – I never descried them otherwise than through a glass, darkly.

  For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known. This text had always fascinated him. He saw the glass as being above all the mirror, the Hammachers say, quoting in support St Paul in the Dutch version: ‘in a mirror, by a dark reason’. (Does ‘reason’ mean ‘mind’ here?) They go on:

  Van Gogh knew himself to be impelled by unconscious emotions and forces (sans le savoir), and craved ultimate knowledge of himself. Borges quotes a telling passage from Bloy: ‘The terrifying immensity of the abysses of the sky is an illusion, an external reflection of our own abyss, s
een in a mirror…If we see the Milky Way, this means that it truly exists in our souls.’ Surely this is what Van Gogh saw as he peered into his looking-glass.

  ‘If the symbolic function functions, we are inside,’ said Jacques Lacan…‘We are so much inside that we cannot get out.’ To get out, to leave – this, presumably, was how Vincent interpreted St Paul – was the action required if he was to pass from his isolation to an inner universe…

  The maturing of his will to escape from the mysterious process of dying a natural death was wholly in tune with his character. He had always broken tensions by forced departures or forced decisions. He could never wait and see, either in his work or in his life as an artist. As Maurice Blanchot wrote in his subtle analysis of the subject, ‘there is in suicide a remarkable intention to abolish the future as a mystery of death; one wishes in some way to kill oneself so that the future may be without secrets…’

  Dieu a tout fait de rien. Mais le rien perce.

  Paul Valéry

  In The Survivor Terrence Des Pres quotes Alvarez on the concentration camps: ‘these places, these crimes, have an existential meaning beyond politics or shock or pity. They have become symbols of our own inturned nihilism…’

  ‘He means,’ Des Pres goes on, ‘that the dark, unspoken passion of fantasy and desire, the whole of life’s demonic undertow, has found, at last, its specific image.’ Life’s demonic undertow.

  NB: The moment before orgasm: analogies:

  (a) the rumble of Greek coffee while it heats in the briki subsides, the closer it comes to the boil, to a low growl. Its crust of brown froth twitches, quakes all over once, twice, and patches open in it like black eyes – at which point you grab the handle and whip it off the flame, or it boils over. If you want more froth, you can put it back again, once, twice, until again the surface convulses…

  (b) the South Indian raga named ‘Kalyani’ on Side Two that I often work by. The vina buzzes more plangently than the sitar, with a twanging, animal whine that repelled me at first. About halfway through, a passionate tempo having built up, there comes a premonitory pause – then, off the beat, a loud deep thrummm breaks out, then another – the undertow slaps the surface, a second burning involuntary clench follows, out of the depths, the body’s centre. The two voices continue, interjangling…As often as not I catch myself sitting with held breath.