‘You’re saying he was just a figment of my imagination,’ I said, trying to laugh.
She smiled. ‘Maybe he was.’
‘Rubbish! He was there. I’ve been with him. Slept with him. So have you. You know he was there.’
‘Yes, someone was there. But not the person you believed was there. Or even maybe the person I believed was there.’
‘You’re saying we invent the people we know. That’s daft!’
‘But perhaps we do. Perhaps we even invent ourselves. Make ourselves appear to be what we want to be.’
I nodded. Shrugged. There was another silence, a long one this time, while we looked at each other across the length of my bed. Then Kari suddenly blushed, as if from embarrassment, the way people do when they think they have said too much, and she looked away, stood up, fidgeted with her clothes.
‘I have to go,’ she said.
I was speechless. Not tongue-tied, just without words to say.
She said, ‘You asked. That’s my opinion, Hal.’ She was trying to be her jaunty beach self. ‘I expect I am wrong.’
I nodded. ‘Ask a silly question—’
‘It wasn’t silly!’ she said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘just a saying—’
An awkwardness. Neither of us wanting to part. She hesitated with a hand on the doorknob.
‘Hey,’ I said, my turn to try breezy friendliness. ‘I really am grateful for helping me the other day. The morgue.’
She grinned, taking my cue. ‘Any time,’ she said. ‘What are friends for if they can’t get you into the morgue.’
She was gone before I could play the flip side of her joke.
37/When Kari had gone I slipped into a sort of stillness. My headache was properly gone for the first time in days. I meant to chew over what she had said. But instead I very soon drifted into a deep, undreaming sleep—also for the first time in days, or nights. I half-woke some time later, vaguely aware that someone—Mother, I expect—was rearranging the bedclothes around me, and then plunged deep again.
I finally came to suddenly, lying in the Corpse Position. My watch said nine thirty-five; morning light filtered through my curtains. No rampaging rhino; no agonybag scurl of the vacuum.
I stirred, my body cosily stiff from being too long in one place. Immediately Kari was in my mind. Snatches of what she had said replayed.
The bathroom. I needed to pee.
‘Is that you, love?’ Mother called from below as I crossed the landing.
‘No, sweetheart, it’s the milkman,’ I called back.
As I came back I realized I was walking without any trouble from my ankle. I stopped and looked. The swelling had gone down.
‘How you feeling?’ Mother asked from the bottom of the stairs.
‘Okay. I’ll get up.’
‘Take care, pet,’ she said, hesitantly climbing a couple of steps so she could look through the banister. ‘Your dad thought you should get plenty of rest.’
‘Makes a change,’ I said, but not acidly, only amused.
‘I’ll get your breakfast,’ she said, retreating.
I spent most of the rest of the day brooding on what Kari had said and scribbling in my diary.
38/That Monday night I waited, knowing I would dance as I had promised this time.
By ten-thirty my patience ran dry. I wanted it over.
The same pretext: I was going out for some fresh air and to give my foot some exercise.
‘You in training for a job on the night shift?’ Dad said. ‘Or is it that bird again?’ He had been chirpy ever since coming in from work, twitting me at every opportunity about Kari.
The same way into the cemetery (though being earlier there were more cars to dodge and one or two people on the road). The same path to the Jewish section.
I paused at the hedge, looking for movement among the graves. Saw nothing. Pushed my way through the divide and went straight to Barry’s grave.
At once, as I approached, I saw that his father’s headstone had been re-erected, firm and square now, and the hole I had dug had been filled in and the soil smoothed over. A new number plaque was staked at the foot.
The thought flashed through my mind: If they’ve repaired the damage maybe they’re on the lookout for me. But I paid no heed. Since then, I’ve wondered whether I wanted to be caught. Like they say criminals often want to be caught and punished for their crimes, and even unconsciously leave clues to their identity, and return to the scene and make themselves conspicuous.
Well, I was conspicuous enough that night. I just stood there at the foot of his grave, nothing clear-minded going on in my head, and my torch shining like a spotlight on the oblong heap of his deathbed in front of me. I was quite calm; none of that anger and madness of three nights ago. Tears started down my face again, but I wasn’t heaving or distressed at all, but making, I think, a kind of farewell. Letting him go.
After a few moments like this, I heard in my head the funny little tune that Laurel and Hardy films always begin with. Tum-ti-tum, tum-ti-tum, tumpetty-tum, tumpetty-tum . . . cuckoo! . . . cuckoo! . . . cuckoo! The Cuckoo Song. Ridiculous, sad; always makes me smile. It wasn’t exactly music I’d have thought of dancing to on someone’s grave. Not that I’d ever thought of dancing on anyone’s grave till now. But it was all I could hear. So I picked up my feet to its gawky rhythm and set about a knees-up as best I could. And soon the music faded and the beat became something of my own, quickened in pace and vigour, a tattoo In Memoriam of Barry’s needless death and in celebration of what he had been to me, which no one else could ever be again.
It was when my dance became more celebration than memorial that the black shape of the hidden B.-in-B. rose, like Death himself, from behind a gravestone only a row away and came swooping down upon me in a flying rugger tackle. We both crashed to the ground on the path by Barry’s grave. Instantly the B.-in-B. was on his booted feet again, grabbing me by the collar and an arm, and braying with evident satisfaction, ‘All right, sonny, that’ll do for now. You’re under arrest.’
What he, poor bloke, couldn’t understand, was why I burst into squalls of uncontrollable laughter.
39/You know the rest.
So I’ll add only this. Yesterday, after I’d written Bit 38, I wandered down to the beach by Chalkwell station, thinking my Record of Death was finished, and feeling happy-tired. Happy to have finished, tired because I’ve done nothing much else for three weeks now but write everything down and relive my seven weeks with Barry, and face his death again.
I was feeling relieved too, but sad, in a way, to be done with it all—except for my court appearance, which seems now like an irrelevance. I don’t care what they decide to do with me, because I’ve decided what I have to do with myself. I’m going back to school, for a couple of years in Ozzy’s Sixth. Not that I want the exam qualifications; and I don’t have any ambition to go on to university. What I want is the time. To let everything settle. I want to read more, and write some more too, because I’ve enjoyed doing that so much. There’s something ahead for me; I can’t see what it is yet, but I know it is there, waiting. And I just feel I’ll get to it better by staying on at school than by getting a job.
I was thinking all this as I sat on the wall between the beach and the esplanade gazing out at the sea, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. The sensational Spike, succulent as ever, and a paintbrush in his hand. He had pulled Tumble on to the beach and was overhauling her, ready for laying up during the winter.
I gave him a hand; I reckoned I owed him for borrowing his beloved boat and turning her over so ignobly. We laughed a lot and larked about while we worked, and talked school and sailing and sex and jobs. He’s starting as a labourer for a painter and decorator next week, and glad to be free of school. He’s been sculling about all summer, doing as little as he can, but now he’s broke and his father won’t stump up for him any longer.
He thought I was mad to be staying on, of course, and mad without hope of rescue for o
pting for Ozzy’s Sixth. I tried to explain, but it was all too confused still, and so I changed the subject.
All the time I was getting a charge just from being with him, but for the first time—and this is the important bit of this Bit—I didn’t wonder once if Spike might be a boy with a can of magic beans, the real and everlasting bosom pal. Because it doesn’t matter any more.
‘Look,’ I said to Spike, ‘how about a movie tonight?’
‘I told you I’m skint. I really am,’ he said.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m flush. I’ve done nothing for weeks. Feel like a night out. We could grab some land-and-sea somewhere when we’ve finished here and catch the five-thirty showing.’
‘What’s on?’
‘Couldn’t care less,’ I said laughing.
He looked across the upturned hull at me and laughed as well. ‘You’re crazy, you know that?’ he said.
‘So who wants to be sane?’ I said.
And that night I gave him a present from Southend.
Wish you were here?
40/I wouldn’t want you to think this is the end. How can it be the end when even I don’t know what the end is yet? Maybe it’s just the beginning. And not even the beginning either. Maybe it isn’t anything at all. Not beginning or end. But just a bit of the middle of something that has a beginning and an end so far out of sight you might as well forget about them, as if they weren’t there at all, which they aren’t when you come to think about it. I have written all this so you can see how I got to be what I am. But that is not what I am any more, because what I am now is someone who is making sure that he is no longer influenced by what made him what he has become.
The only important thing is that somehow we all escape our history.
* * *
1 When Osborn read this, he said, ‘If you go on like this you’ll turn religious, you know that don’t you?’ I said, ‘Only over your dead body, eh, sir!’ He said, ‘You really do have death on the brain, Hal.’ I said, ‘All unconscious.’ He said, ‘With death on the brain you would be.’
2 Cf. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. This is how I found out Kari had read it.
Acknowledgements
The passage quoted on see here is from Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut, pulished by Jonathan Cape Ltd; the lines on see here are from the poem ‘Lullaby’, reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. from Collected Poems by W.H. Auden.
The author would particularly like to thank Glenys Salway for her generous help with the social work background to this book.
About the Author
Aidan Chambers lives in Gloucestershire with his American wife, Nancy, who is the editor of Signal magazine. He divides his time between his own writing and lecturing which he does extensively in Australia, the USA and Europe. His provocative and challenging novels for teenagers and young adults have won him international acclaim.
Postcards from No Man’s Land is the fifth novel in what he perceives as a sequence; this starts with Breaktime, continues with Dance on my Grave, and carries on through Now I Know to The Toll Bridge.
A sixth book is planned. Each novel stands on its own exploring a different aspect of contemporary adolescence.
Also by Aidan Chambers
BREAKTIME
NOW I KNOW
THE TOLL BRIDGE
POSTCARDS FROM NO MAN’S LAND
DANCE ON MY GRAVE
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 409 01278 8
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Random House Group Company
This ebook edition published 2012
Copyright © Aidan Chambers, 1982
First Published in Great Britain
Red Fox 1982
The right of Aidan Chambers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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Aidan Chambers, Dance on My Grave
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