Linger Awhile

41 Grace Kowalski

5 February 2004. Irv’s dead. What do I do now? Just the other night he said he loved me but even then I didn’t know what he was to me. Now that he’s gone there’s an Irv-shaped empty space that’s bigger than he was.

And while mourning him and missing him I’m really pissed off at him because it was his thing for Justine that started all this. How fucking old does a man have to be before he stops being an adolescent? There were four of us involved in the Justine business. Now half of us are gone and Rose Harland’s dead and there are two Justines out there.

Artie is Irv’s only living relative and when Irv was in intensive care at St Eustace he told Artie that he wanted to be cremated in a cardboard coffin and his ashes scattered at sea. No funeral procession, no service of any kind, just him in a box to the crematorium. So those were the arrangements Artie made.

From Fulham the streets unrolled behind the hearse through the everydayness of the living; from south London to North London and Hoop Lane with Irv in his cardboard coffin. The day was cold and grey. At the crematorium our footsteps on the gravel had a funereal sound. Some buildings stand, some sit; Golders Green Crematorium abides. It abides in its red brick and the seniority of the bodies it has swallowed. The cloistered entrance to the chapel looked as if hymns should be coming out of it but Irv had said no music so there was none.

When we were inside the chapel and Irv was ready to roll Artie put on a yarmulke and said Kaddish: ‘Yiskaddal ve’yizkaddash she’may rabboh …’ The words had the colours of strangeness and the strangeness was heightened by the guttural sound. It was as if Irv were all dressed up in Jewishness for his final disappearance. We watched the coffin slide through the doors. No music, just the hum of the mechanism. See you, Irv.

The next day we collected the ashes. When we got back to my place I threw out the plastic urn and put them in a biscuit tin.

‘It might take me a couple of days to get the next part sorted,’ said Artie.

‘Where at sea are we going to scatter the ashes?’ I asked him.

‘Knock John,’ he said.

‘What’s Knock John?’

Artie handed me a postcard. ‘It’s a sandbank in the Thames Estuary,’ he said, ‘and that thing you’re looking at is a derelict World War Two fort that was built there.’

‘I guess it must have meant something to him.’

‘Must have. I’ll ring you up when I know more.’

I pictured the Thames Estuary: grey water widening to the sea. The fort in the picture looked sad in the postcard sunlight, pale and faded, a gunless platform standing on two hollow legs that were the round towers where the crew had lived. It looked haunted. I imagined the creaking cries of gulls wheeling over it but there’d be nothing to eat so they probably wouldn’t. I guess we all have oceans in our minds. Now Irv was all gone, all his days and years and the oceans in his mind.

And in the meantime there were two Justines out there and I’d probably have to deal with one of them pretty soon. The last I saw of J Two she was snoring away in a chair at my place but she woke up and saw Irv standing over her ready to knock her out of the park with my Louisville Slugger. She did a real vampire snarl, sent us both sprawling, and was gone. We were bound to meet again one way or another. I thought I’d go looking for her before she came looking for me.

I picked up the Louisville Slugger and took a good grip. It was made of ash, thirty-three inches long, and it was thirty-four ounces of eraser. I could feel the power of it coursing up my arms. I didn’t want to be seen cruising the streets with a baseball bat so I wrapped it in brown paper with one end left open for a quick draw. It wouldn’t quite pass for a french bread but it would have to do. I thought I might have a look-in at Gaby’s Deli and thereabouts. At first I was pretty scared thinking of what would happen when we met but then it came to me that I was just as dangerous as the one I was hunting. Maybe more so.

The bat had been left behind a long time ago by an old boyfriend who was over here for a while, Jerry Benson. He went back to his wife in Poughkeepsie eventually. We used to play softball on Sundays in Hyde Park with some of the Americans he knew. ‘You’re a sucker for those high outside pitches,’ he told me. ‘If you have to reach for the ball you probably won’t get any wood on it and even if you connect you won’t have enough power in your swing.’ OK, Jerry, I thought, I’ll tell her to come at me right over the plate and not too high.

I went slowly down Berwick to Broadwick, pausing every now and then to look around the way they do in cop films. This was a Thursday night, fairly quiet with a little rain. The Blue Posts looked warm and welcoming, a safe haven from the cares of the world. Certainly a peaceful pint in there would be a lot nicer than walking around with a baseball bat. I can’t even remember the last time I was in a pub; I feel more lonely in cosy surroundings, I’m more comfortable drinking alone.

As I headed east on Broadwick towards Wardour Street I had one of those moments when I don’t know who or what I am, don’t know what’s looking out through my eyeholes. I stopped under a street lamp and took my bit of The Heart Sutra out of my shirt pocket. ‘“Here, O Sariputra,”’ I read,

‘Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness.’

‘OK?’ I said to myself. ‘Are we straight now?’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I answered. ‘Straight is crooked and the very crookedness is straight. Let’s just get it done.’

‘I have a thing for older women,’ said some drunk who came weaving towards me.

‘And I have a thing for creeps,’ I said, easing the bat half-way out of its brown paper. He disappeared.

Very lively night in Wardour Street, lots of people, flashing blue lights, and two fire engines outside the Pizzeria Bar. Past The Intrepid Fox and its rock music, a batwinged gargoyle over the door but not enough rain to make water come out of its mouth.

Down Wardour Street to Old Compton with its melancholy gaiety and The Admiral Duncan where some anti-gay planted a nail bomb a while back. PLAY 2 WIN with nobody looking like a winner. Lion City and Lesbian & Gay Accommodation Outlet. Now that Old Compton Street is famous as a gay centre I think it’s become more of a tourist trap than anything else. Bugbug pedicabs cruising for business. Form and emptiness and Grace Kowalski with a baseball bat. Mamma Mia! still playing at the Prince Edward.

Charing Cross Road then and Cambridge Circus, the Palace Theatre and Les Misérables. By now I wasn’t paying much attention to what I passed and what passed me. I could feel myself getting closer to what was waiting for me, and Charing Cross Road with all its lights and colours became a long darkness where the Leicester Square tube station appeared after a while, then Wyndhams where Dinner was flaunting its reviews. I’d intended to look in at Gaby’s Deli but something was pulling me towards Cecil Court so I went with it and turned left at Café Uno. The paving was glistening under the lamps and the darkness funnelled me forward.

There she was, leaning against the Watkins window and crying. ‘You don’t know,’ she said, ‘you just don’t know.’

I was close enough to smell her toad breath. ‘That’s how it is,’ I said,‘I’m sorry.’When she saw me take the bat out of the brown paper she came at me right over the plate and I took a really good swing. THWOCK! Her head flew off across the court and a jet of blood shot up from her neck. I heard the head bounce off the building opposite as the body went to black-and-white, then flattened out, then vanished with a little sound like the ghost of a belch. I looked for the head but that was gone too. No blood anywhere on the ground. Nothing at all left of J Two. ‘That’s all she wrote,’ I said, and walked home in the rain.