‘Tell me why.’
‘It’s happened before. You didn’t make a song and dance those times. Leave off, eh?’
‘Not like this.’
‘Because it was a girl?’
‘That as well.’
‘As well as what?’
‘As well as dumping me. You were blatant. You made passes at her in the boat as if I wasn’t there. You walked off with her, leaving me to stow the gear and clear up after you. And while I was mooring the boat you disappeared and got yourself nicely lost with your new toy till you flounce in here at ten-thirty this morning expecting everything to be just like normal. Well, I’m not your bloody skivvy, mate, and I’m not your tame catamite neither.’
‘O, the words, the words! Have you done?’
‘No. I still want to know why you did it.’
‘I don’t think you do, sweetheart, not really. You’re a bit jealous, that’s all, and I don’t blame you, but you’ll soon get over it.’
‘Don’t patronize me, Barry.’
‘I’m not, I’m not. Pax! I’m explaining, for God’s sake!’
‘You think that’s an explanation!’
‘It’ll do for now.’
‘Not for me it won’t.’
He drew in a deep breath, leaned back against the wall. ‘Okay, okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s both calm down, eh? Let’s agree I behaved badly. Let’s not push each other about it any more. Let’s just forget it and enjoy each other. All right?’
I shook my head. ‘Sorry. Not this time.’
I don’t know when I had decided this. At that moment, I guess. But there it was, said. And I knew at once I meant it.
There was a calm before the storm. Whispering in the undergrowth. Deep silence. Eyes on eyes, waiting: a last gazing look that says this should not be but will be. The end of something. It is/was the saddest moment of all.
Barry said, ‘Some things are better left unsaid, Hal. Once they’re out, people can’t let you take them back.’
Hard and weary and bitter, I said, ‘Like oaths of undying friendship. Like swearing to dance on graves. Like those kind of things you mean?’
This brought a glower to his eyes and a blush to his cheeks.
‘You want to know? Okay, I’ll tell you.’
‘Good.’
‘I was getting bored.’
‘Bored?’
‘That’s right. Bored!’
‘What with?’
‘Not what. Who.’
‘Who?’
‘You asking or exclaiming?’
‘Both. So who?’
‘You.’
‘Me!’
Ridiculous not to have known; but that was the way of it. And I still didn’t take in what he meant.
I said, ‘I thought we were having a great time.’
‘That’s the trouble.’
‘Trouble? How trouble?’
‘You are. I was. We were. Not now.’
‘Why didn’t you say? We can do other things.’
‘That is not the point!’
I shouted, ‘Then what is the bloody point?’
He shouted back, ‘I’ve told you!’
‘Then say it again!’
‘It isn’t what. It’s you.’
‘What about me?’
This time he didn’t shout, he yelled. ‘You Bore Me!’ The words separated, pronounced, thrown like punches felt in my stomach. As my stomach was doing all my thinking at the time, they left me speechless as well as breathless and weak.
I turned from him and sat down—slumped down—in the swivel chair at the office desk. I stared, not seeing, at the invoices and catalogues, sample discs, tapes, spare sleeves, letters, accounts, stationery littering the desk top. I thought, irrelevantly, Mrs G. will be in tomorrow, do her weekly blitz, clear things up.
Barry was going on behind me. ‘We’ve had a few laughs, sure. Had a good time. But I like a change now and then. More than that really. I want to get into as many different things as I can,’ he chuckled, ‘as many different people. One is never enough. Not for me.’
He paused, waiting for me to say something. But I was in slow-motion shock.
He went on, ‘So I picked you up because I fancied you . . . but I liked you straight off. Liked you for yourself, I mean. I thought you wanted the same things I do. I thought when we’d got to know each other, we’d do it all together.’
Silence again. I was embalmed.
Then his voice again, quiet. ‘But that’s not you, is it? It’s not what we do together that you want. It’s me. All of me. All for yourself. And that’s too heavy for me, Hal. I don’t want to be owned, and I don’t want to be sucked dry. Not by anyone. Ever.’
My stomach decided it was an atomic reactor. Barry’s words split the atom. Explosion time.
Suddenly the clutter in front of me was unbearable. So with one sweep of my right arm I scythed the mess to the floor. A compulsion of history: my father assaulting the tea table after a row with my mother flashed as an after-image in my memory.
I did not stop there. Standing and turning to confront Barry was part of the same belly-blasted ballet. And hurling a sea stone at his face was a clone of my father-flashing memory. For as my arm swept the desk my hand caught and gripped in its clawing anger a pearled rock we had found one day on the beach. Barry kept it on the desk as a paperweight. Now it was a bullet for his head.
He saw it coming and ducked.
His dodging body revealed the mirror on the wall behind him.
For a sharp split second I saw my own face snarling back at me before the pearly brickbat shattered the glass and my face fell in splinters to the floor.
6/The slivered glass cut words to the quick. There was no more talk.
A fractured moment let silence in. Then silence too became unbearable.
I turned and ran from the shop. I had cycled to work that morning. I grabbed my bike and pedalled away without looking back.
In my head, now and since, a cry has echoed: Barry calling my name at my back, ‘Hal! Hal!’ as I sped through the mid-morning traffic.
Did he really call to me? Or is it the voice of his ghost raised by my regret? I never know.
7/Fifty minutes later he was dead.
They say his motorbike left the road, hit a tree.
They say. Who say? The police. The newspapers. The radio.
What do they know?
He was on the Arterial road just outside town travelling towards Southend. Where had he been?
An eyewitness said, ‘It was like he was trying to fly. Just took off. Unbelievable. Maybe he was drunk or stoned or something. Or just plain crazy.’
None of that, as a matter of fact. But all of it at the same time. Drunk in his timeless time bubble. Stoned on speed. Crazy because he wasn’t himself at that moment of lift-off into flight.
He had dreamed true. Or had made his dream come true. Which?
I keep thinking: It was because of me. He died in anger, because of me.
I keep thinking: No, it was because he was glad to be rid of me. He was celebrating, proving his freedom.
I keep thinking: It was nothing of that. It was because of Kari. Because he was pleased with her.
I keep thinking: Yes, it was because of Kari, but not because he was pleased with her, but because he regretted her. He died in remorse.
I keep thinking: Whatever it was, it was all my fault.
I keep thinking: I wish I had been on his bike with him. I should have been. If I had gone back when he called, maybe I would have been. But did he call?
I keep thinking: I wish he was still here.
Whatever else I keep thinking, the only thing I keep thinking all the time is that I wish he was still here.
That’s why it is me that’s mad, you see; that’s why I’ve got death on the brain.
8/I heard about his death on the early evening local news.
From the shop I had cycled home, told my mother I had a queasy stomach (not short of the tr
uth), couldn’t work, would stay in my room.
Stayed in my room, cans gripping my ears, listening to tape after tape, anything, whatever came to hand, loud stereophony obliterating the soft centre of my cerebrum, eyes staring nowhere, everywhere.
Tea time. Necessary to put on a show of mild suffering bravely ignored. My father’s view is: If you’re properly ill you go to bed and get a doctor; if you’re not, you shut up, put up, and work.
So downstairs I went, shutting and putting. The radio was playing in the kitchen—it always is because otherwise, my mother says, she can’t stand the noise in her head. Her mind doesn’t have a built-in Dolby.
I wasn’t listening.
‘. . . Barry Gorman, eighteen . . .’
And then I was.
The news turned me into a compound oxymoron. Hotly cold, limply rigid, mind-racingly stunned, a mess of emotional lack of feeling, I wanted to sit down and walk about, hide in my room and race round talking to everyone who knew Barry and anyone who might know exactly what had happened.
Mother, listening but not attending, made no connection, went on sizzling steaks under the grill.
Food was obscene.
I shook, trembled, a spasm spreading out from the fork of my legs.
‘Got to go out,’ I said, making for the door. ‘Phone call.’
If she protested I didn’t hear.
9/I cycled to Cliff Road.
The curtains were drawn.
I rang and rang the front door bell; thumped the door.
No answer. Finally I lifted the letterbox flap and peered through. She was standing just behind the door; she was dressed all in black.
‘Mrs Gorman,’ I said into the letterbox.
‘Stop that! Stop that noise, d’you hear!’ she hissed.
‘It’s me, Mrs Gorman. It’s me—Hal.’
‘I know who it is.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘No.’
‘But, Mrs Gorman—’
‘Go away.’
‘—I have to talk to you.’
‘Don’t you know my son died today!’
She began to weep. Not profusely, but with a searing kind of abandonment.
‘I know, Mrs Gorman. That’s why I came. I just heard.’
‘My son is dead.’
‘Mrs Gorman, please open the door.’
Then she let out a strange, strangled wail, and howled at me, ‘And you killed him!’
I let go of the letterbox flap. It snapped shut.
10/Such a thing is not said to you every day. It comes as a shock. Even when you have already thought the same words yourself. I had already thought those words: a spool tape of that same sentence, you killed him, played in my head all the way from home to Cliff Road. But it is different when someone else says it, aloud, without contradiction.
I gawped at the door. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Will-less.
There was a long silence. Of course, the silence can only have been in my self. Cars must have driven by; people, talking and laughing perhaps, must have walked past. Did wandering dogs sniff at me? Birds at least had to have been singing. Children were playing on the pavement two doors away—I remember them now—when I arrived; were they not still squawking at each other? An evening in August: lawn mowers must have been burring grass; open windows must have been mouthing inner dealings. But none of that penetrated. And none of it was changed or affected for one second by unhappiness.
Then I heard Mrs Gorman saying sternly on the other side of the door, ‘. . . do you hear? Go away. You want me to call the police?’
Cold winter came in muggy August. I started shivering. All I wanted was to curl up warm away from people, and not-think.
Zombie fashion, I got home, climbed the stairs to bed, went on shivering between the cocooning sheets, for hours playing scrabble with my tortured sadness.
11/Sad (sæd) adj. 1. feeling sorrow; unhappy. 2. causing, suggestive, or expressive of such feelings: a sad story. 3. unfortunate; unsatisfactory; shabby; deplorable: her clothes were in a sad state. [Old English sæd weary; related to Old Norse sathr, Gothic saths, Latin satur, satis enough].
Sad: unhappy, unlucky, accursed, unfortunate, doomed, condemned, pitiable, poor, wretched, despondent, melancholic, cut up, heart-broken, sorrowful, woebegone, dejected, weeping, tearful, lamenting, displeased, disappointed, discontented, chagrined, mortified, resentful, sorry, remorseful, regretful.
All of that in the long following night sleepless.
A dictionary is a word mine. Dig and bang.
But says nothing.
12/After dawn I slept, warmed at last and exhausted by my own hellfire.
Seven-thirty, enter the rhinoceros (for those who have no memory: cf. Part Two, Bit 12) but not stampeding today; not even tearing open the curtains. Instead he stood by my bed, rattled a cup on a saucer, pushed at my shoulder in a manner which, from him, had to be taken for gentleness.
‘Your mother’s sent you a cup of tea,’ he said as I stirred (forgive the pun), on this occasion genuinely surfacing from unconsciousness.
He waited a too brief moment for me to take the unaccustomed gift, then put it on the table by my head.
I squinted at him through eyelids of ovenhot fibreglass.
‘You all right?’ he said. ‘Only your mother’s a bit worried. You didn’t even speak to her when you came in last night. Didn’t eat your tea she’d kept for you either.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was upset.’
‘Aye well.’ He fidgeted his feet. ‘Owt the matter?’
‘Don’t you know?’
I couldn’t believe he didn’t. When you’ve been thinking about the same thing for hours on end you get to thinking everybody else has been thinking what you’ve been thinking. Like your head was the only radio station in the whole world and everybody has been listening in.
Dad hadn’t. ‘How the hell can we know what’s matter if you never tell us nowt?’
No denying that. But telling meant I’d have to say it out loud. For the first time. I didn’t know if I could and stay in one piece.
He perched himself on the edge of a chair where I chucked my clothes at night, and leaned towards me, elbows on knees, hands clasped in front of him. I panicked. He’d never sat down in my room before, not since I was about six.
‘You’ll have to say something, son,’ he said. ‘Your mother—. You know what’s she’s like.’
Easing myself up, motion covering emotion, I said sharply, sounding like tetchiness but not wanting to, ‘Barry Gorman’s dead.’
Dad raised his eyebrows and pulled down the corners of his mouth. ‘Yesterday?’
I nodded.
‘How?’
‘Bike crashed.’
I wasn’t looking at him now; but could feel him watching me closely. For days, months, we hadn’t spent so long alone together.
After a while he said, ‘Taking it a bit hard aren’t you? I mean, you haven’t known him that long.’
‘Seven weeks.’
‘Aye well, things like this happen. You can’t let them get you down.’
Silence. A creak on the stairs.
I could have explained then. Wanted to. Everything. The closest I got to trying to tell him. But there was so much to say. And at that moment, the creak on the stairs sent all the willing part of me into deep freeze.
I could look at Dad again and show nothing.
He said, ‘What about Mrs Gorman? How’s she taking it?’
‘Badly.’
‘You’d expect her to. You should think of her. She’ll be needing all the help she can get.’
Not from me; but that couldn’t be explained either.
‘I don’t know what I can do,’ I said, required to say something but hearing the flabbiness.
‘What about the shop? Something’ll have to be done about that. You could be a big help there.’
‘I suppose.’
‘You can’t just desert her. She’s been good to you. T
aking you on, paying you well. You owe her a bit of support, a bit of loyalty at a time like this.’
Another pause. Uncomfortable, lengthy. Awkward for the eyes.
Dad sighed, stood up. ‘What d’you think then? You’ll get up and go to work, will you?’
Without impossible talk there could be no answer but, ‘Yes.’
He smiled. I was ten again. He said, ‘I’ll tell your mother you’ll be down in a minute.’ He went to the door, opened it, paused, glanced at me, sniffed. ‘If you want owt,’ he said, ‘any help like—you know where to come.’
I nodded, but could not answer.
‘Aye well,’ he said, and went.
13/Living it up in the bathroom with the Macleans, the thought occurred (i) that I still had a key to the back door of the shop; (ii) that maybe Dad was right: I would be a help to Mrs G. if I looked after the shop today; (iii) that helping her might make her like me again.
But there was something else far more important that I hardly dared admit to myself. I wanted to be where he had been. I wanted to touch things that were his. And I had a strange sensation, neither thought nor feeling, that I would go into the shop and there he would be, just like always, and we’d joke about our fight and—
I sluiced my face with handfuls of cold water.
I didn’t look at myself in the mirror. Couldn’t bear to see any part of me.
14/The sensation that he would be there was strongest as I opened the back door into the shop. So strong I believed it.
I even called his name. ‘Barry!’
There was no answer, of course.
I rushed into the office. All tidy. The desk neat. No trace of the mess I’d made on the floor. I smiled, for a splinter of time convinced he would be in any minute, that I’d just been dreaming. A nightmare.
Then I turned and saw the broken mirror’s empty frame looking blindly back at me from the wall.
I told you I had ways of making it talk.
15/From that instant I knew I must see him. Him? His body. His corpse. This was the proof I wanted to have. Needed. Of his death. Seeing wouldn’t just be believing. It would be knowing. And I needed to know. Desperately.
But where was his body? How could I see it? Was it at home? What did they do with people killed in accidents? When would they bury him? Today was Saturday, they’d not bury him today. Tomorrow, surely, the cemetery would be closed? Monday then?