Come Let Us Sing Anyway Page 7

  They all looked pretty normal. Like Val. No wounds. Perhaps a slight faraway look in the eyes. But nothing you could put a finger on, while continents declared states of emergency. One congressman asked if ‘they’ would be allowed to vote. Another talked worriedly about food stocks and freaking immigration. He had spittle on his lips and sweat on his chin. Later we heard it was his mother that came back and he hadn’t liked her much.

  ‘That won’t be a problem,’ said Val, watching him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t think we get hungry.’

  *

  She told me about Hell. It was bad. As confusing and hard to grasp as a dream – and changing all the time. She was forced to hunt food for a family. They were like something out of a bad dinosaur movie, all jaws and eyes and smell. They beat her. They told her to grab the rabbits that ran along nearby rock-faces, grab them by the ears and bash them over the head. She’d put two rabbits in a plastic zip-lock bag, their snuffling noses pressed hard against the clear plastic, hearts beating fast. She closed her eyes and swung them as hard as she could against a wall, but nothing happened, and horrified, she let them go.

  I passed my hands up and down her smooth arms, aching, but there was more. She was in Central Park running from rape gangs. It felt as if the world had imploded. She had no understanding that she was dead, just that she was surrounded by insane revellers, handfuls of pink and blue pom-poms, all wanting to hurt her. Hiding under bushes, bruised and terrified, she wondered where I was. Had I survived? How could she find me?

  By the time she did, she was nothing more than a disembodied head and fingernails, dragging herself along the ground like a slug, outside our apartment, clawing the walls, coughing up dust as I stood above her, opening my chest with a knife, trying to stem the flow of my blood.

  Whoever created Hell knew her better than she knew herself. Animals, rape, me.

  Hell: a personalised service.

  She wanted to watch The Sopranos on HBO, but there was nothing on except news.

  *

  I took the most unashamed sick leave of my life. I didn’t care that I’d just got back to the classroom. I loved the kids, but screw them. I mean, how often do you get a second chance at the love of your life, right? And the same love, the one you knew was working for you, even in between petty bickering and slight disagreements about how to bring up children and when to have them and what to say to them about religion, sex and food additives. So I called Burt, my boss. A good man; he’d always done his best by his staff.

  ‘I’m taking two weeks,’ I said.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Val, right?’

  I said yes. Then, because I had to: ‘Who’d you get?’

  He paused. ‘No-one. I thought it would be one of my parents. They’re the only ones…’ He cleared his throat again. None of us had worked out a language yet, a way to speak about the dead that didn’t sound like the kind of lies and platitudes spoken by the graveside.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  He paused. ‘Jeff…’

  I waited. His voice sounded like he’d been gargling with nails. ‘Is she… is she… you know… alright?’

  He meant something different, I think. He wanted to ask me whether she was rotting across our kitchen floor, whether she smelled bad, if she slithered under the bed at night or howled at the moon.

  ‘She’s fine,’ I said. Because it was true.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘So, a fortnight, and we’ll see how you feel?’

  ‘Thanks.’ I felt the need to comfort him. ‘If… if anyone comes I’m sure they’ll be OK too, Burt.’

  He laughed, but it was strained. ‘I hope so.’

  *

  We played like kids. We got romantic. We’d always done the candlelight dinners and the walks in the rain and the making love as much as busy lives let us, but now nothing delighted me more than normal stuff. Watching my wife cut her toenails, pretending she wasn’t chewing the clippings. Watching her hack apart pieces of oxtail for that stew I hated, but she didn’t care and made it every month. Watching her gossip on the phone with her girlfriends – one of them was back from the grave as well and this delighted her beyond measure. They talked a lot about being dead. Her girlfriend had gone through three abortions before she was twenty, and in her Hell her children had floated around her, screaming accusations and begging for their lives. Val cried when she heard that. ‘My God, that is exactly the thing that would upset her the most,’ she said. ‘What did we ever do to deserve that as an afterlife? I mean, forever?’

  We talked. We’d always done that, never stopped, all the way through meeting, courtship, engagement, through fights and squabbles and loving. It had been essential for this love affair between a Brooklyn boy and a girl from Jamaica. We talked to create frames of reference, to translate culture, to explain away stereotypes. To love each other. It was the kind of relationship I’d only dreamed of before I met her.

  I knew she wasn’t rotting because she told me – Wednesday, about 2 pm: ‘Jeff – look like I don’t need lotion no more. Maybe dead good for dry skin!’ Tuesday, one week gone: ‘So what, I never going to get a period again? I was due. You think it all dry up inna the grave?’ And my favourite, one night, staring into the bedroom mirror: ‘Jeff, come and look! My eyes keep changing colour!’ They did, too, from then on. Greens and blues and a curious kind of aubergine, and yellow one morning when she woke up and demanded toast and eggs – not because she was hungry, for she had no appetite – but because, ‘Lawd, I might as well eat at the table with you, baby. After all, I never did learn to wait for hungry then, so why give up the food now, especially when it taste so sweet?’

  I was wrong to say that the dead weren’t different. They were. It was as if death had made everything better. My wife’s skin gleamed. There was nothing more beautiful than Val, sticky with spare ribs and gravy, sitting in our back yard, calling to the neighbours, laughing uproariously with Mr Charles, a sixty-something liberal who’d come back from the dead quick enough to practically cry at the too-close-to-call jokes and George Dubya Bush in power. ‘I can feel everything so much more,’ she tried to explain. And it seemed to be true for all of them. You could pick out a dead person on the street from a hundred yards because they looked so goddamned happy. Dead-stare, we all started calling it. They tripped along like they were walking on air. Like they were all real happy just to be there. And I suppose that made sense.

  *

  I dreamed the accident; I daydreamed the accident. The awful, wrenching shriek of the brakes and the last blam! a kind of wet sound, and I remembered thinking: Those are her muscles, her flesh, that’s her bones breaking, that’s it, the end. The end. I didn’t want to think about it, but I thought about it.

  *

  Three weeks in, one morning, I reached over to her as I usually did. She rolled closer; she was in the mood, I could tell from the way she sighed through the tiny gap between her front teeth and got all silky under my hand. Traced my spine. Fingers searching, feeling, moving. I moved between her legs, smelling her. Fingers at my shoulder blades, thrumming.

  ‘Jeff…’

  ‘Hmm?’

  She shifted, raised herself on her elbows. I blinked.

  ‘What?’

  She pushed at me, making me lie on my stomach. I grinned, hard-on twitching. Still the fingers down my spine.

  ‘Look at how the muscles curve through your body,’ she cooed.

  There was something odd about the tone of her voice. I’d really never heard her talk quite like that.

  ‘It’s perfect. I wish you could see it. How the muscles curve. They fit, like a jigsaw.’

  ‘Um…’ My erection was wilting. ‘Baby, I’m glad you think I’m so beautiful, but…’

  ‘Oh, not just you,’ she said. ‘All people. All the bodies, just perfect.’

  Bemused, I lay down again. ‘A massage would be nice…’ I murmured into the pillow.

  ‘Just a minute, man. I just want to look.�
�

  I laughed, nervously. ‘And not touch?’ Though I wasn’t sure I wanted her to touch me anymore. Not with my face in the pillow.

  ‘Oh, I’m touching.’ Her fingers almost burned. ‘Just give me a minute.’

  I relaxed a little; her touch was familiar again. It was silly to be nervous. Of what? Of Val, who’d ripped through Hell looking for me? But there was a ball of something frozen in my chest, even as I dozed off under her ministrations. When I woke up, she was gone.

  I climbed out of bed and found her in the backyard, chewing a pear. She was gleaming and dishevelled, chewing with her eyes closed, head thrown back, as if she was listening for something.

  ‘Val?’

  Silence. Ecstatic chewing. The ball in me hadn’t melted. It was growing, threatening to fill my belly.

  ‘Val?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What are you doing?’ She looked so sweet. But so distant.

  ‘Eating a pear.’

  ‘I can see that. Want to come in for breakfast?’

  ‘The pear’s sweet.’

  ‘Yes.’ I didn’t know what else to say.

  She chewed on. I watched her for a while, then went to eat breakfast alone.

  *

  My head filled with images, sounds and blood. Memories of that morning. I’d known she was pissed that I wouldn’t go for the milk, and so I’d followed her as she banged the apartment door shut. I hit the front steps as she strode away from me, head down, muttering: ‘Bloodclaaht man cyaan go get milk, imagine, milk weh him drink every morning…’

  So she didn’t see the truck as she stepped into the road.

  It was sudden, like a trick. Clear your throat and it was there, like a graceful animal. And in the moment she stepped off the sidewalk I knew she wasn’t going to stop, and I knew that the truck driver wouldn’t see her in time. I could feel my muscles rushing. I ran track in high school, and it was that rush that comes two seconds before the whistle, the moment when you ask your body to fly and it coils into obedience.

  I flew.

  Time is a strange thing. I could see the seconds racing and rushing by, an urgent countdown. I could not fail. I could see myself, pushing my wife across the street, see her stumbling, falling, scraping her knees and hands, eyes wide, safe.

  And then I saw me, a rag doll, in the body of the truck, dwarfed and soft. Could feel the smash and the promise of oblivion. That’s when I chose to abandon her. It wasn’t like she remembered it.

  If you had asked me, over dinner, replete with wine, whether I’d give my life to save my wife, I would have said yes in a fraction of a second. Bring on the asshole with the gun, the mortal combat, the poisoned chalice: me, first! But a fraction of a moment is a pure thing, and new temptations arise. And I didn’t want to die.

  So I chose. I timed my grab, like pulling a punch back to soften the connection. I knew my hand would flail in the breeze, close, but not close enough to save Val. Just the right distance to save me from that truck. Miss her, my mind screamed. Don’t die.

  And then the sound of body hitting metal and wire and the sound of her wailing my name.

  *

  My wife doesn’t talk to me anymore. She is lost in minutiae. She spends her time listening to sounds in the breeze, covering her hands in engine oil, eating a pear all day, reading a single sentence over and over again, sighing in pleasure. Her body sparkles. She has no wounds. She pays no attention to me, and it breaks my heart.

  I listen to the silence around me. It’s a perfect silence. I remember the sweet sound of Val breathing when she came back to me. I remember her wailing my name. I listen for my own breath, but I realise that nothing is there. Now that I turn to my own body, I notice, suddenly, that there is no rise or fall of my chest. Only a curious crunching of bone. I rattle. I think my legs are broken. My neck clicks and echoes. Perhaps it is broken too. I found a piece of wire in my thigh last night. And I am so cold.

  No matter.

  In her Hell, she was raped, she tried to kill bunny rabbits, her body was reduced to a monstrosity, her husband killed himself in a shower of gore. All very female concerns, you understand. Not surprising, really. A personalised service, you remember.

  I don’t care about being dead.

  It’s just that Val won’t talk to me anymore. She won’t talk to me anymore.

  She won’t talk to me.

  PHONE CALL TO A

  LONDON RAPE CRISIS CENTRE

  We are physically, sexually, intellectually entwined. He taught me that people matter in some ways but not in others. That feeling is not a cliché. He taught me how to tear apart poetry and then fix it; how to watch people; how to give up and start again. He taught me fellatio, and pretended in his turn that my body was edible; hummed northern soul when he sucked my toes, screamed when he climaxed and cried in his sleep. Coffee is just coffee, but when he made it, it warmed my lips and the smell…

  We had children, but only pretend. It did matter that people whispered. Sometimes we hid away from the gossip. Sometimes we kissed in public, hips grinding, wetness spreading, then ran, laughing, before we were caught. I wore pink ribbons longer than was ever seemly.

  He made sure I did my homework, bandaged my scrapes and gave me all the pets I ever owned. I bounced on his lap. At night he rolled me into a ball and tucked himself into the edges.

  His wife never understood him. She never understood me, either. I’m the only good thing that ever came out their marriage.

  We do have fun.

  We do.

  VELVET MAN

  Ghosts know who best to haunt. An old Jamaican friend once told her that. She thinks about this idea a lot, after the velvet man leaves. About what it is to be drawn to something just for you: a perfectly fashioned event, a person, or a moment. It is the kind of thing that people write about – this flawless sense of fate – but she’d never understood it. She was a sensible woman. Better to do your nails, steam your face and cook for the week on a Sunday. To read the material two weeks in advance of the meeting, then a few days before to refresh the memory: that was success. To buy pak choi in the local market and better quality cuts of meat at the butcher; extra money-saving lightbulbs; keep numbers for the plumber and the local hot-line for nuisance neighbours by the phone; insure the dog.

  Iron your skirt, because.

  *

  She was late for work that morning, smoothing her fingers over her knees and her well-ironed blue skirt when the velvet man entered the empty train carriage, sat down right next to her – when he might have taken any of twenty other battered, orange and blue patterned seats available – and murmured something softly under his breath.

  She was not troubled in the first few seconds, nor even surprised at his long limbs or his sudden proximity. If forced to say, she might have explained that it felt like an old friend had wandered onto the train, after years of absence, and she’d recognised his saunter or the back of his head.

  The man murmured again. His eyes made her think of those black velvet paintings that were all the craze in the seventies. Her mother had kept two in the drawing room, one of John Wayne, the other of five dachshunds playing poker. When she was a child she’d been smacked more than once for pulling a chair up below them so she could stroke their soft edges.

  ‘Pardon me?’ she said to the velvet man.

  He smiled. She could smell his healthy, wheaty breath, took in his thick, white-blonde hair and his large hands that were spread over his denim knees. She looked down at his clean, well-shaped fingernails. Those eyes: oddly black where you’d really expect blue, given his colouring. She might poke her finger inside and suck something sweet off the tip of it.

  ‘Tell me what I can do for you,’ he said.

  His face was open; eyes steady and perfectly calm. It was a kind face, and she thought there was a sort of bravery in exposing that to a stranger. She opened her mouth to ask him all the obvious questions – who are you, don’t talk to me, move away, what could you possibl
y mean? She could feel where the muscles in her wrists and thighs should be tensing for movement up out of her seat and away.

  Instead, she paused. He was joking, of course. It was mere hyperbole – like those Nigerian men who told you they were princes in their countries; or like a new song that runs out of steam after it started so well.

  ‘Tell me what I can do for you,’ the velvet man said patiently.

  His expression was solemn, watching her carefully, as if this might be the most important thing he would say today, or this week.

  Suddenly, hotly, she considered the idea. The deliciousness, the expansiveness of it assailed her. She could be important, different; she felt a lurching in her chest. She was late on the train, heading for ordinary: the job, the lunch-break, the colleagues, the wishes, the dreams, all so irreparably dull and chipped.

  The train pushed into the station and she knew what she wanted – at least, where to begin. She grabbed his hand; he rose up with her, and there was joy on his face.

  *

  The market was in full swing with mid-morning bargains, the scrape of bottles and boxes, smells of best meat and fish, and she’d never seen the city sky so blue, amplifying every blush in the arcade: melons hacked open, sides of salmon strewn with black peppercorns; strawberry tarts glistening in syrup.

  And the peonies at the flower stall.

  She came to an abrupt stop in front of them, dropping the velvet man’s hand, tucking her palms together like a little girl, teeth in her bottom lip. She was rocking slightly, almost breathless. Her parents had thought cut flowers a bourgeoisie affectation.

  She looked up at the velvet man: he was beaming, waiting.

  ‘But of course,’ he said.

  More flowers, she thought later, than anyone had ever got in the world. Armfuls of the pink peonies first, because she liked their little cabbage faces peeping up at her; fat roses next, ringed in sprays of eucalyptus, and the velvet man instructed the flower stall owner to make sure every thorn was taken off. He’d opened his mouth to say you’re having a laugh, mate, but then the velvet man gave him enough money to make him grin and set his assistant picking. Urged on by both men now, she chose huge daisies the size of her hand, laughing delightedly; a long box of cerise anthuriums, their bright plasticky stamens reminding her of hot places.