Come Not When I Am Dead

by R. A. England

  I hear the phone ring in the sitting room and, light as a feather, I run in to see who it is, I’m so happy, I’m just so happy, I am leaping gazelle-like through the garden, it’s all OK, it’s all OK. I will tell Charlie, I will cry with delight. I will smoke too many cigars by the sea tonight. I miss the phone and then it rings again and it’s Gabriel “Aunty Gussie”

  “Oh Gobber I’m so happy Gobber, just so happy”

  “Oh, that’s nice. Did you get the package?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you opened it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you set it up?”

  “No” my feet are dancing through the pile of the carpet as I sit down, my hands flutter through the air. “Why not?”

  “I haven’t had time yet, I’ll do it tomorrow”

  “but it’s important” nothing’s that important now

  “I’ll do it tomorrow, I promise”

  “Really? Can I really rely on you? There’s a curry in it for you if you do, well, one day”

  “what’s this one for anyway?”

  “Same thing, memory. “I don’t know how many experiments Gabriel has sent me through the post to test the Major’s memory, but I don’t mind. We talk about his new job, about the biography of Hitler that I’m reading, about the weather and the birds I’ve seen and the dead pole cat I found and then he said “Aunty Gussie, I have to go now, ring me when you’ve got the Major doing the puzzle, video it, OK? Don’t forget. Love, love.” When I put down the phone to Gabriel I sent a text to Charlie ‘you’re off the hook, it’s all ok, you know what I mean xxx’. When he was leaving, and the others were chatting and walking down the path, Frank shuffled me into the porch “I want you to answer me honestly now love. Don’t look so worried. You’re not seeing that vet are you?”

  “What vet?”

  “You know who I mean, you’re not seeing him are you?” and I was going to say Why do you want to know? But I didn’t think that would be a good idea, so I said “No. He’s married” and Frank said

  “that’s OK then. That is the truth isn’t it Guss? You’re not lying to me? I know you wouldn’t lie to me.” I can’t tell him because I don’t know why he wants to know. I can’t tell him because it’s not just my secret. I can’t tell him because what if he got angry and beat Charlie up too? He may do. I don’t know. And sometimes I think I have everybody, and sometimes I know I have no one. “Why do you ask anyway?”

  “because I’d have a few things to say if you were. But if you’re not, then that’s OK.”

  “Frank, why are you being so weird? And what if I was?”

  “You’re not so that’s OK” he said and then he turned his back and went to go. “Frankus?” I called at his back

  “what?”

  “what happened about Mark Davies? Did you see him?”

  “I did see him, and you can forget all about it if you can” but he was walking away from me and I was having to hop, skip and jump to keep up with him and try and hear him “Frank, just stay for a bit and tell me what happened”

  “got to go now dear, we’ve got lunch waiting for us.”

  “Will it be OK though? Does he know it’s got anything to do with me?”

  “You’ll be fine love, he’ll keep away from you. Any trouble, you call me right away, won’t you?” he said as he got into the passenger seat of Toby’s truck. Honestly, if he thinks that’s put my mind at rest, he’s absolutely bloody wrong.

  Chapter 21

  The wind is howling outside, a wolf engulfing the landscape, and his saliva drips from his mouth and is scattered over the fields. I’m lying on my bed and feeling shit. I feel sad and miserable and unloved and crap and horrible, just unloved really and everything feels rotten. I don’t know what I want really, apart from happiness, apart from perfection and perfection is always changing, with my mood. It is always slightly different and always trotting just a little way ahead of me out of reach.

  I was lying on my belly on the bed, reading a book about Churchill, I’d had too much of Hitler. Then, out of charm and privilege and cigars and cocktails I heard a car pull up outside and I just didn’t feel like seeing anyone so I turned the light off and peeped through the curtains and I saw Mark Davies on the drive, battling against the wind, his hands moving out in front of him, trying to make it change direction. And in the warmth of my room, my whole body shivered. A huge, dark velvet curtain fell before my eyes. He shouldn’t come here, he should never come here. I watched him walk towards my front door, take a cigarette out of his mouth and throw it in the flower bed. I hate that swagger that he has. I hate him, unclean and distasteful he is. He began to bang and bang at the door with his fist, I will scrub that door now. I felt every element of my home sullied. And when I didn’t answer the door he began to shout, loud and uncouth, vulgar and skin-creepingly revolting. I don’t want to hear his voice here. I don’t want to be scared. He should never have come.

  I slid across the room to get my mobile phone and call Frank. And all I would need to do was to wait in my room until Davies left, knowing that Frank would take care of it for me. I wish Frank lived here. And then, whilst I was crouching down by the corner of my bed; when I was getting carried away in a little vision of loveliness, of my dear old Frank always being here, marmalade on the breakfast table every morning; I began to hear some words, flung by the wind up to my windows. Assortments of words, bits of words, words I would never put together, tapping at the windows and trying to get in, words that I did understand. I knew to put the phone down and listen. Quiet as a mouse in my house. Not even breathing lest he should hear. And Frank with his instant suspicion of foreigners, it would make me laugh if I wasn’t almost crying. And dawning on me like an elephant dropping down from a tree and crushing my body was that it was Mark Davies in the truck that Charlie shot.

  You cannot lie down and be scared of anyone or anything I thought as I crept across the room and put my boiler suit on. You cannot allow other people to scare or scar you I thought as I put my socks and boots on. You have to erase badness if you can, destroy it when you can I thought as I crept down the stairs, toes first and put my old anorak on over my boiler suit. And even though he’s scary, I know, that if it comes to it, I can be more scary, that’s what I kept in my thoughts. And ignoring the whimpering in my head, I set out to talk to him, propelled by fear, tripping over my gibbering guts, dragged back by quaking limbs. I hate him. The image of him had firmly entered my head and I spat it out on the floor. Creeping in fear in my own house. I have no one to look after me but myself I thought as I doubled back and I rummaged around in the chest of drawers in the hall and my shaking fingers found my knuckle duster knife, pushed to the back by Jo, sheets of paper over it, trying to hide it from my view. And I silently opened the front door as only I know how to do and crept out to confront him. He is nasty. He is a big, muscled dog straining at the lead to get me, pulling himself back but propelling himself forward. He had two black eyes that when he heard me, he turned around to stare at me with. And I found myself staring back at the purple on his face, he’s really ever so ugly. “You stupid fucking cow” he said to me, quieter now and I could feel his spit on my face “you fucking shot me.” And then, like a prat, I found myself backing away from him, and I watched him coming towards me, but it shouldn’t be like that, this stupid dance of a foregone conclusion. “I didn’t”

  “Yeah? Well who the fuck else did?” his pupils as black as his soul.

  “What were you doing here?”

  “Never fucking mind that, you fucking shot me. I’ve got fucking lead in my fucking shoulder” this will get better or it will get worse, but it won’t stay the same, and water splashes off rocks as it tumbles from high to the ground. “What were you doing here?”

  “we got fucking lost.”

  “You didn’t get lost, you were trying to rob me.”

  “So it was you” the coward in me would like this to be nice, but it can’t be, of course it can’t. “I
t wasn’t me. SHUT the fuck up” a shower of his spittle touched the top of my cheek near my left eye it was disgusting, shouting, shouting in my face again. Yap, yap, yap, his mouth open and continually moving. And then more of his spittle, from his disgusting body landed on my top lip and, shaking with the repulsiveness of it I pulled out my knife. I only wanted him to be gone. I have never used this knife as a weapon before, it is lovely to have it in a hand of aggression and strength. Go! Go! I jab, jab, jabbed it at his face, not too close, by the outside corner of his left eye, tick, tick, tick, what will happen now? And he started moving away from me and I found I could breathe easier, and like a mass exodus of rats I said to him “if you come here again I’ll kill you. I didn’t shoot at you, I wasn’t here, someone else was looking after the house for me, but if you come here again I really will fucking kill you.”

  “Suck my fucking cock” he didn’t mean to say that, not to me, his fast dawning uncertainty was blatant and really quite funny. It’s nice to laugh. You are stupid Mark Davies, really thick and you shouldn’t wind me up. I have no control over my temper I thought as I held the knife at his face again, imagining the tip sliding off his teeth, cutting in to his lip. Trying to get rid of his jeering smile. I should like to see his blood flow, slow in patterns across his face. And with his eyes white as a bull’s with fright he said “you’re a rough bitch for a posh girl you are”. I know I am but he was moving backwards and I seemed to be in the most fascinatingly transparent dream. I will use this on you I was thinking and I could see he knew that I would. I don’t care. I was fencing, drifting, dancing almost. And yet I felt I was in complete control and I am so little, he is far bigger than me in every way, but I was in control. And then I was suddenly conscious of my tiredness and the horrible, hateful calm spread evenly through my body, diluting my blood with a dawning realisation of my physical self. “If I’d pulled that trigger I’d tell you, you know that.”

  “You gonna get the filth to bash me up again are you?” and then I knew I’d won and for the tiniest moment, I felt sorry for him. “Just go Mark” I am tired of this “I’m going to call them now if you don’t leave within three seconds. 1, 2..” and on 3 he turned and went to his car, still swaggering. I looked at his stupid back and thought I could run at him now and bury this knife in the back of his head, just where his head meets his neck. But I just watched him, tired, very tired. When he was in his car, he opened the window to talk to me, and he put his seat belt on before he turned the engine on, that was funny, and he said, conspiratorially “it was a stupid thing to do you know, we could have been anyone, you shouldn’t go shooting in the fucking dark” and I said

  “I know, he shouldn’t have a gun, it’s awful, I’m sorry” that was funny too. Strip away formalities, strip away conventions and strip away politeness and snobbery and pasts and what do you have? And everyone wants the bully at school to like them so they won’t bully them, but it’s not so black and white but I can’t be bothered to think about that now. And then he went and I know he won’t come back again. I did that, all on my own. I can look after myself. And I will have to tell Charlie, but I don’t think I should tell Charlie what I told Frank, and I can’t tell Frank about this because of Charlie.

  I’m going to take a sleeping tablet in a minute just to make sure that I do sleep. I said before that maybe the natural, the beautiful, the creature side of my life is too important to me, means too much to me, it just struck me because this hasn’t really. It doesn’t penetrate me, or move me as much as the other does. I have to make myself understand that this is real, but it is just people and stupidity. It is not real, it is a play, the hate and the aggression, for a moment they were real, but then it disappeared.

  I dreamt then that I was disloyal, to myself and to everybody that I came across. There were three giant robins in the garden, but I pretended to Charlie that they were three jays. And then Charlie had gone and my brother was there, by a children’s play area and I made sure no one could see me and then I talked to him and he was good fun, like he could be sometimes and I enjoyed his company, but I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been talking to him. Then I went in to my house to have a drink and there was a cocktail glass, half full with dirty, murky water and a thin dead rat in it, it’s head in the bottom of the glass. I picked the rat up by the tail, threw it in the log basket and then drank the water. I knew that no amount of dirt and filth could hurt me. When I woke up, I lay in bed for ages just staring up at the ceiling wondering what to do and the mask on the back of my head was Mark Davies. And then I had to think about how to tell Charlie later on, or what exactly to tell him.

  We were talking about the shooting as we put our rods together. We were talking about his wife as we selected our flies and we weren’t looking at each other’s faces. My head felt heavy and stuffed full of knotted grass and lined with dock leaves. My eyes looked straight out and saw nothing. And I hate arguments, everything spat out into the open and floating around poisoning the atmosphere, and those things can never be unsaid, but are waiting, like jacks in boxes, ready to spring up again. So, I have to be careful how I speak to Charlie. And when I am low I tell him so he can be kind to me, but he still doesn’t understand and he meets my vulnerability with hostile disgust. And when I have to put him right, he isn’t used to people standing up to him and he shrinks within himself and labels me as a bully. And he has gone through his life emotionless, brought up by emotionless parents, he chose an emotionless wife and I am a terrifying shock of electricity and that is dangerous. I don’t know why he loves me. I don’t know if he can love me really. I have to be careful how I talk to him and that always makes things worse. I raise my eyebrows and look around, stupid bloody thing all this is. Bloody nonsense of people.

  And then, when I did tell him, that Mark Davies had come to my house and it was him that Charlie had shot, he was silent, just held his lips together and looked down at the wooden balcony of the fishing hut and I couldn’t tell him anymore, if he can’t cope with this he wouldn’t be able to cope with that. “But it’s OK Charlie. He’s OK, you don’t need to worry and he’s not going to do anything about it because he was up to no good.” But he still didn’t say anything. And then I started to feel sorry for myself, he is so selfish, or so stupid. What is it? Why isn’t he worried for me? Why isn’t he sorry for me? I really frightened myself last night, and it’s not just that. I have a lover I cannot talk to. My Coningsby is dead. I have no money and lots of bills and I am utterly miserable and alone. And all he’s got is some stupid awful wife who’s going to leave him and he doesn’t like her anyway. But I stood there, seemingly strong and contained and I didn’t say to him don’t be always thinking about yourself, ask me about me, how do I feel? How am I? Douglas said “you wouldn’t really want people wailing and crying at your funeral because you’re not like that”

  “what am I like?”

  “You’re stiff upper lip” and he’s right, I’m stiff upper lip, but I want everyone to love me with that same passion that I feel. “I’m sorry you had to go through that” he said to the wooden planks under his feet “when it was my fault” and his left arm went out to give me a half hug. A half hug, not a proper hug or even a cuddle. I am being fed on scraps. And I can’t imagine what life would be like without him, but at the same time I don’t know how far I can survive before I starve. And I look at his long and sad face and want to hate him, or even dislike him, but he is wire running through me, he is a green leaf on a forest floor and a shaft of light coming through the trees, but I suppose the light is falling somewhere close to me, where I can see it, but it’s not falling on me. We spent the night in the hut and held each other tight and in the morning I looked at him, anxiously, he thought, and I said “it is alright isn’t it?” and he told me it was and I believe him. “Look after me Charlie” I whisper to him, but I don’t think he heard and I don’t think he can anyway.

  And now I am sitting down at the kitchen table looking at the bill for my car, it is almost �
�600, the vet’s bill for Coningsby is £170, the council tax bill is £180 and there are various other bills here to pay. I’m too frightened to look at my credit card bill, and it is a worry. And I can’t tell Charlie about all of this because he’s got so much money and he just doesn’t understand.

  I am outside in the orchard now and I’ve got a big cigar with me, on my own, to cheer me up a bit. I have pen and paper and am making notes, crapness in my life and how to solve it.

  Subject…Charlie. Problem…Freaking out over divorce, won’t leave his house, won’t talk to me properly, acting weirdly. How to solve it…Can’t, so that’s no good.

  Subject…Money. Problem…Don’t have any. How to solve it…Get a job, but that’s just stupid because I wouldn’t last. I’ve been sacked from every job I’ve ever had. It hasn’t helped much, but the cigar does. And I’m lying on the grass, naked under my big padded anorak and I have big heavy work boots on. The grass is whispering against my skin, feeding me soft and secret thoughts and making me gently aware of it. I lie on my back and open up my legs and the breeze hits me and I welcome it, it is a good shock to the system. I open up my coat and lie there, under the starlit sky, on my own, content in my solitude. I run my hands over my belly, my breasts, my inner thighs and hold the cool night air to me. Press it to my flesh. My hair is spread out all around me, curling quietly in the damp like tired sunflower petals. I hear Raffle Buffle yowl, just once, in the house. I turn my face towards the sound and see yellow soft light, but I am outside in luxurious dark and solitude. My legs wide open, my thighs wantonly spread and I think about Charlie, always Charlie as my hand wanders over my body. My cigar held in my mouth and I smoke it like a fish would smoke a cigar, and it makes me feel as if I rule the world and no one can hurt me or harm me or tell me what to do. I am a bloody-minded bastard who can’t be arsed with anyone else, it is so, so, so, so, delicious. I am so delicious, and I roll over on to my naked belly, I suck up the chill on my flesh and take bites at the grass, rub my cheeks on to it and feel the soft, the wet, the prickles, every single point and every single blade and know every single colour and shade in this black, black night.