Quilt

Part One

In the middle of the night the phone rings, over and over, but I don’t hear it. First it is the hospital, then the police.

— These things happen from time to time, my father says.

He is lying on the bed, his single bed alongside the other which, still made up, was my mother’s, dying two years earlier, and the covers are off and I am trying to get him up and dressed, ready for hospital, but I’m weeping. Tears are streaming down my face making it difficult to see. Unenvisaged, embarrassing. Until now I have managed to remain quite calm, like him. I discussed the case over the phone with the doctor and agreed the best thing would be to get him into hospital where they could make him more comfortable.

— If it’s possible to persuade your dad, see what you can do, I know old folk don’t necessarily want to shift.

And for all the antiquarian power of his habits he could always amaze me, turn out to have been thinking or not, entirely elsewhere, for years impossible to get him to go somewhere, come out for a drink, walk by the sea, drive down the country lanes over the hills. I didn’t expect him to agree but he did without the faintest remonstrance:

— Yes, take me to the hospital.

He’s lying on the bed and he is my flesh, so simple, his body mine, and so difficult, so com-pli-cated he’ll say shortly in a portmanteau coming apart at the seams, just when it will have become to my mind most straightforward, so deluded. Give up the thought of the sentence, he seems to tell me, and I am in his grip, he mine, here and from now on, I prop him up, help him sit, help him remove his bedclothes and get him dressed, ‘stertorous’ is the wrong word but hangs in the air, a signpost to how the most ordinary thing, getting dressed, becomes impracticable fateful tangled up with words and images from a song or book, the grotesque persnicketiness of Edgar Allan Poe, the stertorous breathing of Monsieur Valdemar, figure of impossible, resuscitated putrefaction. It hangs in the air like a silent spy-plane, shadowshow of gallows. That is where living backwards begins: to pronounce dead is to murder, he wrote. All the time the other bed, by her, my father and I all the time aware, though we do not exchange a syllable, unoccupied.

Yesterday I called the doctor in, he asked my father if it would be possible to go upstairs so that he could examine him on the bed and we all went up together, one by one, three bears, me at the back, the doctor in the middle, each of us holding onto the handrail as we went, the doctor remarking with admiration on its crafting, smooth but knotty trunk of a young pine fallen in the garden years ago meticulously bolted to the stairway wall by my father. Solid silva, yes, silva silvam silvae, the way words twinkle to others’ uses, other to her, solid flesh, melting into dew, slivering into you. My father makes to lie down on his bed but the doctor asks him to lie down on the other bed, because it is closer to the window and he’ll be able to see better. My father is nonplussed, looking over at it he says:

— But that was my wife’s bed.

My wife, he says, pronouncing the words very carefully, his speech become fuzzy, especially in the preceding few days, and he strives to overcome it, I can hear the struggle. At innumerable moments in the past he has referred to her as me wife, in deliberate loving lapse of propriety, that was me wife’s bed, but he doesn’t venture it now, we seem to be embarked on some new phase of language. For some days there has been an eerie formality, an explicitness, almost disembodied, in referring to his anatomy and bodily functions, urinating, retraction of the penis, excreting, liquid stools, incontinence, as if this new emphasis on the proper heralds some strange homecoming, the rending mystery of my father. Is there fear and confusion or only loving respect, even awe when he objects, as if to say: But I cannot lie down there, that was my wife’s bed. Yet the doctor insists on that bed, it is closer to the window, he says, he’ll be able to see better, to see to see, what is it, magically thinking, my father complies.

But now it is today, nearly twenty-four hours later, and we say nothing about the other bed, unoccupied, constantly in our minds.

No, not stertorous, rather wheezeful, softer, gulping, an immeasurably beautiful strange ancient fish glopping glooping groping grasping rasping for air, at air, sitting up, slowly so slowly to get dressed, article by article, until the socks, I am dressing my father for the first time in my life, his, due to him melting to me all his body mine, mining me, me father. A miner, yes, that thought is never far away. Underground, he carries it within him, for three years during the Second World War a coalminer day after day deep down in the dark and apparently relishing it, sheer subterranean strength, coming up for air at the end of the day face blackened, hot shower, then tea at his digs, a couple of pints at the local, and bed, then before dawn down again into the earth, mole of my life. It’s as I help him dress now I have this searing sensation, smell and feel and look of his body mine, mined out, to have and to hold, every article exhausting and he has to rest, catch or fall back seeking breath respite resources from somewhere unrecognisable. He insists on a vest, shirt and two pullovers even though it is almost the end of July, a hot summer’s day. We get to the socks, he is lying down and his feet calloused alien corn swollen, one of them worryingly red, a rash that runs up over his right foot to above the ankle. I haven’t been aware of it till now, something else to be looked at in the hospital. I inch on the little soft gray cotton socks for him and the tears begin trickling down my cheeks. I try to conceal this, it is not the place for crying, not in the presence of my father, he does not weep, he whom, yes, incredibly only now for the first time it flashes, I have never seen weep, and he’s evidently not about to start now. But I’m blinded: the tears are pouring out of my face. Why merely this word, tears or teardrops, but no others, like Eskimo snow lexemes? Why not a new language invented every time? What’s pouring out of my face has never happened before.

I’ve succeeded in getting him dressed and can begin to negotiate the business of getting him downstairs and out to the car and drive him to the hospital but I cannot see anything, with all this streaming. I have to tell him, I have to bring myself under control, the thought steadies me:

— I love you, Dad, I say, now standing up between his bed and hers, holding him by the hand.

— I love you too, mate, he says, and the tears flow from me with renewed force, impossible to restrain, strain stain in tears. My father says: don’t worry, it’s alright. Or he doesn’t, no, not that exactly. The precise words are delivered as if from such an unfathomable distance I hardly recognise them:

— These things happen from time to time.

Not even his body which seems, in the wake of this remark, transported to another world, ventriloquism of his heart’s desire, not even his body knowing or himself, as if there could be another voice, a strange guardian of my father now remarking that these things happen from time to time; it doesn’t occur to me to ask him to clarify, the words might be dreamed, spoken in some walk-on part, picked up snatch on the radio. I came here yesterday, a couple of hundred miles across country, to be with him because in the past week or so, since last seeing him, I had been in regular contact with the doctor and neighbours and gathered from them, as well as from daily telephone conversations with him, a sense of his having significantly declined. A farmer’s wife down the lane told me over the phone a couple of days ago:

— He doesn’t have long by the look of him, your dad.

I help him sit and stand, finally, and we make our way downstairs. I collect a few things, a couple of books, a notepad, some money, mobile phone. Together we put his jacket on and attempt the shoes, but his feet seem swollen and his slippers are easier. Unspoken sense once more of a slip in the proper course of events, wearing slippers outside, these things happen from time to time. Hobbling out to the car, leaning on me step by step, a month ago he was mowing all the lawns, fit as you like. I help him lower himself into the passenger seat, both of us knowing he never likes to be in a car unless he’s driving. Only two days ago he was still making it down to the local shop to collect his newspaper: he’s too weak for that now.

I bring the car right up to the hospital entrance, find a wheelchair and ease him into it, stow him in the entrance way next to a large aquarium while I go to park the car. Then I wheel him through to the ward where a nurse welcomes us. We’re led to a room in which there are two other patients, a man who is blind and another who, I’ll later be informed, has learning disabilities. A couple of nurses shift and winch my father, after a struggle, onto a bed.

— The doctor on duty will come in half an hour or so and have a proper look at him, says one of the nurses pleasantly. Then they leave.

— Things are becoming so com-pli-cated, my father tells me, with a piercing smile of resignation.

And he is right, so viciously true, even though I want to tell him: no, this is simplifying things, it makes sense to be in the hospital, they’ll be able to examine you and with luck make you feel more comfortable, we need to find out what’s going on, and what can be done to make you stronger and better. But I can’t speak. I’m on the verge of streaming tears again. Translucent soldiers lining up, throwing themselves out without parachutes, come from some unknown zone I am struggling like a fish on land to grasp. What to talk about in this simple, abject desolation of a hospital, his body in a foreign bed, mine in a chair alongside? We watch the blindman: two words in the dark and wide, ‘blind man’, collide. In silence we watch him make his way without a hitch to the lavatory and back.

— No need to turn the light on in there, I’m fine, nurse, he says.

The other man restless, sitting on his bed in a dressing-gown, then walking about a bit, then sitting on his bed again. My father needs some new underwear and pyjamas. His incontinence, lack of time to get any washing done before coming to the hospital. Sentences stop, leak, caught, soil themselves short.

— I’ll go and buy some new underwear for you while we’re waiting for the doctor, I tell him. And he tells me about the one and only satisfactory brand and style of underpants and points out, with an ironic smile, that there are none to be had in the local town: I must drive to a specialist, old-fashioned hosiery shop in a village on the coast, about twelve miles away.

The ray lurks, impenetrably, around the origins of philosophy. In Plato, for example, it occupies the space of something like déjà vu, it disturbs thinking, dislocating the question of virtue. The ray seems to figure what is magical and uncanny about philosophy. Socrates asks Meno what is virtue. But what Meno already knows, before their first meeting, is that Socrates is not Socrates, he is not purely or simply himself, there is something of the ray about him.

— Even before I met you, says Meno, they told me that, in plain truth, you are a perplexed man yourself and reduce others to perplexity. You are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me, you are exactly like the flat stingray that one meets in the sea. Whenever anyone comes into contact with it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing that you seem to be doing to me now. My mind and my lips are literally numb, and I have nothing to reply to you.

— You’re a real rascal, Socrates replies. You nearly took me in.

Apparently realising that Meno is just fishing for compliments, or more precisely for being compared with something in turn, Socrates berates him:

— I’m not going to oblige you. And as for myself, he adds, if the stingray paralyses others only through being paralysed itself, then the comparison is just, but not otherwise. It isn’t that, knowing the answers myself, I perplex other people. The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.

Virtually Socratic and rascally at the same time, the ray is thinking’s quandary, paralysis of speech, an infection at the heart of philosophy.

Scholars seem perplexed by the word itself: how are they to translate Plato’s ray? It has them in a spin, as if it were narcolepsy reified, as if in a reality haze, language in drag, drugged, dredging up first one creature then another, out of a dead language a new respiration. It’s elementary: the stingray, says one, the electric ray, says another, the torpedo, the flat ray, the numbfish, the narky, the fish that numbs or narcotises.

For Pliny its narcotic qualities were reckoned a cure for headaches, the ray palliatively at play in the migraine. Pliny also knew, and so therefore very probably did Plato himself, that the torpedo ray or narcofish does not numb or paralyse itself. Still in this image of self-numbing there is the strange thought of autoimmunity, a couple of thousand years early. Socrates is the rascally ray, experimentally auto-narcotic. Whatever he may say, the ray remains. It is nature’s way, nature awry. Socrates looks like the flat narcofish in the sea, says Meno. (Regarded, at least by some scholars, as a reference to his snubnose, we are thus offered a rare glimpse of Socrates’ physical appearance.) And then Socrates is like the ray in relation to what he does to others. He numbs mind and mouth. The ray in Socrates generates aporia. The ray is the figure of the already. It’s what Meno knew all along, in an eerie way, the ray of hearsay, the paralysing figuration of all knowledge as recollection.

Down small familiar country roads I race in the late afternoon sun, finding the store still open and acquiring the relevant items. My father will be pleased, I think, he’ll appreciate my having tracked down the very thing, or not, perhaps no. No, this morning for the third time, why the fairytale precision, the cockcrowing fabulous knowing, for the third time in as many days, first over the phone the day before yesterday, then to my face yesterday, and then this morning a third time he said:

— I am beginning to see the attractions of euthanasia.

In the devastating lightnesses of his language, ghost-train supersonic in the airy turquoise gulf, for twenty minutes with a cold beer in a cliff-top garden hanging over the sea I sit wondering at his words. He makes euthanasia sound like a woman, or man, old as the hills. To be exact, this morning he said:

— I have begun to think that there may be advantages to euthanasia.

It’s like a pitiless game, euthanasia keeping a step ahead, having a better hand. On the phone and then again yesterday it was word for word the same:

— I am beginning to see the attractions of euthanasia.

Back at the hospital he is asleep but a nurse asks me along to another room to have a chat with the doctor. The doctor tells me she has examined my father and is concerned about his condition.

— Obviously he’s feeling not too special, she says, in one of those euphemisms I imagine she reserves for the seriously ill.

She has given him an ECG and discovered his heart rate is twice what it ought to be; no wonder he isn’t feeling too special. Also there appear to be some signs of jaundice, she tells me, which could mean, if there is cancer, it has reached his liver, but could mean a variety of other things. It’s too early to say for sure: gallstones, for example, can produce a similar effect. But for the moment, she says, she has prescribed something to slow his heart down and hopefully (yes, she uses the word in that hopeless way) make him feel more comfortable. She proposes keeping him in for the weekend and seeing how he is on Monday. He already has an appointment booked for next Friday to have a barium meal x-ray at the main city hospital, some twenty miles away. Cancer has been a suspicion for some time. For the past three or four months, he has complained to me of back pain but has refused to see a doctor about it.

Special beyond speciousness of words: my father has not been to the doctor’s, let alone a hospital, in more than thirty years. I try to take positives from this conversation with the doctor: perhaps it is not cancer after all, perhaps it is primarily a heart problem, the medicine she has prescribed will steady him no end, and he’ll be feeling much brighter in a day or two. The way a life shifts, paths reconstituted, scopes collide. Another thing, yes, collapsed. The ECG, she says, shows that my father probably had a heart attack about two years ago, around the time, in other words, of my mother’s death.

— Silent heart attacks are not uncommon, the doctor explains.

Typical of him to say nothing, I think, to have a heart attack and not even notice. I go back to the ward to find him awake but drowsy. The blind man’s wife is now present and the man with learning disabilities has taken his chair out through the french windows and is sitting in the sun. I tell my father about the ECG, the heart attack and steadying medicine. I’m not sure how much he has been told while I was away or how much he understands. Things are becoming so complicated. His face seems difficult of access, like approaching a mountain moving in fog. Yet his eyes are open as a child’s. I feel I am the only person in the world who really knows how to address him, how to be heard. And I experience this as something at once always felt and never registered till now.

Words for my father, to and of my dearest funniest Biblical father, dropping away. My beautiful father: tears starting once more to bulge in my eyes, I fight them off, order them back, this madness of lachrymosity. Lachrymimosa, as if I touch with words in my head and they shrink back, military tears standing to attention, veteran characters, starry-eyed, medalling, at a touch transported, bright young things just starting out, awaiting orders, ready to leap. What has made it possible in the past between us, to keep away weeping, all these years, is gone. Because it is going it is gone already. In his esoterically Buddhist way, he has always stressed the joys of silence, the turns of taciturnity. To tire the sun with talking and send him down the sky was never an option. Conversation with my father has always been a minimalist art. And from his eyes in all these years unwitnessed, it now occurs to me, even a tear of sadness shed. Unshed: the mountain of my father’s face, seen now going, the haunting cataracts.

Love in a hut become: Innocence, in a shed. My father’s shed, the small wooden edifice close to the house, humbly under lock and key, more or less unused now for several years, stuffed with a thousand tools and layered with sawdust, buried worktop, variety of vices, drills, files, knives, holemakers, hammers and chisels and axes and a hundred sandpapers, place of canny retreat. The years roll call back:

— Where’s Dad?

— In the shed.

Smallest room not in the house, tears unshed knowing not where. To shed — I shed tears for my father, shed past and present strange word I don’t say, only think, his word, his place, separating separated, parting from apart forever a part, to shed, the shed a shade, as if for the eyes, from all other eyes, in the shed sad, shade sad said, where’s Dad.

The funniest thing about the shed, the funniest thing about the whole house, the house beside itself, is the electric cable my father set up to run to the shed, at a height of perhaps seven feet, like a miniature telegraph wire, many years ago inadvertently severed by his wielding a ferocious hedge-trimmer, then almost as quickly mended not by replacing the cable but enclosing the damaged section in a transparent plastic bottle, shedding the house, shed or house on a drip-feed. Shedding tears for my father my English shadow, shadow words shadow wards, I, a doll with real tears, take his hand, holding hands, his breathing hard, as if he had permanent hiccups, a hiccius docius, hocus pocus, a struggle aspiring to expel air, right a blockage, surface a summit, or summat, his joky occasional pronunciation of some words, summit like that.

I tell him about the new pyjamas and underwear I managed to buy.

— How long am I going to be here? he asks, as if he hasn’t heard anything anyone’s said.

— Two or three nights and then we’ll see how you are, I say, with luck by Monday you’ll be feeling stronger and better.

They’re bringing round dinner now, cauliflower cheese followed by custard trifle. Breathlessly in tortoise slow-motion, pausing as if at every other moment to hiccup and every time falling short, he ingests perhaps three half-mouthfuls of the cauliflower cheese, once one of his favourite things to eat, so simple he even knew how to cook it himself. Perhaps three half-mouthfuls, a couple of sips of water, nothing more. I notice there’s a radio fixed in the wall above his bed and it’s almost news time. At home in recent years he has spent a good deal of time watching TV, dividing the time between 24-hour news programmes and, in the evening, a string of soap operas. I ask him if he’d like to hear the news. He shakes his head:

— There isn’t any these days, he says, it’s all just terrorism.

I sit with him quietly as he drifts, nods off then wakes, clear-eyed. While he sleeps I try to read one of the books I’ve brought along to the hospital. I wasn’t sure how long I might be here. Then he wakes again. I rest my hand on his. Up starts the theme-tune of the first of the soaps, on a TV that must be in the adjoining room. I decide to see if I can’t get a nurse to provide a television for him.

— So that, I tell him, you can watch your soaps.

— No, he says flatly, I don’t want to watch them, they’re not interesting any more.

Already he’s drifting off again, then coming to once more, innocent as a little boy.

— I’m going to go now, I say. I’ll be back in the morning around ten and hope you’ll be feeling better by then. Have a good night’s sleep.

— See you, mate, he gasps, propped up in the bed.

He’s held his right hand up in a kind of final salute and gives me a smile, as I make my way out. My father’s smile: he has often said how difficult it is for him. Laughter yes, in the past great waves of laughter, groaning writhing openmouthed, and yes, tears, of course, he would laugh to tears, tears of engulfing comedy. But to round his face up into a full and simple smile he is not able. With the result that there is no midway stopover between a somewhat straining almost sheepish half-smile, ghost or studied intimation of a smile, and at the other extreme a widemouthed beaming bordering on the maniacal. It is to this wavering accompaniment that I depart.

In the middle of the night the phone rings. It rings and rings, but I don’t hear it. The hospital calls. Then the police call.

I get up in the morning oblivious, shower and breakfast, and I feel even faintly upbeat. I managed to get my father into hospital, where he’s being properly looked after. Put aside thoughts of the silent heart attack, the disaster of the past, thumping on. The drug prescribed by the doctor will with luck stabilise this and in a day or two he’ll be much perkier. The other doctor, the one who came to the house the day before yesterday, surprised but comforted me when he suggested Dad might benefit from taking some antidepressants for a while. Well looked after all might be well.

I picture arriving, my father awake bright-eyed propped up, very glad to see me, and I walk through the main entrance of the hospital quite clear about where I am going, along the corridors down to the ward, making to walk by the desk staffed by nurses on duty, with only the thought of seeing my father in mind. But a woman, with long dark hair, a nurse is standing in front of me, asking would I follow her, back down the corridor. Expressions on other nurses’ faces suggest they know who I am, even though I don’t recognise them. She opens the door to an office and shows me in. And then the light, there is no light, only so-called natural light suddenly awry. As if it were a magical trick, a party piece: How did you do that? I almost ask aloud. But to whom: the nurse, my eyes, the light itself? The room in absolutely bizarre light, with a couple of chairs, a desk and computer, filing-cabinets with nurses’ forenames on different drawers: it is a telegram. Transparency’s night letter, stop. Catastrophe of the eye, stop.

I’m not going to tell the nurse not to open her mouth but I imagine, before and after, the unprecedented encounter in this poky little office, a lapidary telegram, as if the light preserved in stone, a miracle. I have never seen anything like it. I could literally cry out, My God! Look at the light! What’s happened to the light?

— Sit down, please.

I see from the identity card on her chest that she is called Mary. But it’s too late. Everything is so too late. I hear myself saying: We could walk around this, inspect it, dance or run from every angle, stand on the chairs, the desk, crawl inch by inch up the walls, don’t speak to me, Mary, I’ll never see you again, we know that, you’ll never see me or me myself. By requesting I sit down, Mary, you have destroyed the world.

In the event, she doesn’t do a fine line in gentleness, something brittle and hard in the voice. My father is dead. Yes I can read, but: they don’t know how he died.

She’s very tensed up, conscious that this is her duty, the one who has been singled out. (You tell him, Mary.) As the senior nurse on duty this morning she braces herself, treading the shaky border between compassionate delivery of the news and adminstrative care to minimise any suggestion of negligence, any possible grounds for litigation.

— I’m sorry to say, she begins, speaking at last, long after the end. I’m sorry to say your father passed away in the night. We tried calling you a number of times, and the police also tried to contact you.

— Oh, I say, oh.

(We’ve tried to contact you more times than we care to remember: that line, telephoning home and I don’t hear.)

— The phone is downstairs, I didn’t hear it, I never heard a thing. Did the police phone or did they actually call at the house?

— I believe, she says, they came to the house.

This has to be a lie, I think, or at least highly unlikely, since the front door is directly below my bedroom window and the doorbell is piercingly loud, inside and outside the house. What does it matter, not sure I understand you, you can, can you explain please? Your father fell out of bed in the night, there were no witnesses, the only other people in the room were two gentlemen, one of them is blind and the other has learning disabilities, brackets hanging in silence so neither could give evidence in a court case should you find yourself meditating on the idea of mounting one brackets. A nurse had checked the room only a little while earlier, brackets a silent barrage of questions, as in a game of hangman the gallows steadily rising: a little earlier than what? when? how do you know if you don’t know, as you say? earlier than his death, you mean? or his dying? there’s a difference, isn’t there? brackets, but evidently he fell out of bed and bumped his head, brackets and couldn’t get up in the morning that is certainly singsong merrily on high what we are both thinking, brackets. The nurse on duty brackets name not supplied, no night letters for her brackets found him, unfortunately, on the floor, brackets brackets: why were there no brackets attached to the sides of the bed as there often are in hospitals, precisely to ensure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen brackets brackets brackets exclamation mark query. Interrogation mark today and from now on, because, how many times does she say this I wonder, is it only once, and couldn’t get up in the morning, because there were no witnesses and, does Mary this virgin speaker say and or or, or if not or something like in any case:

— There were no witnesses in any case we don’t yet know the cause of death. I’m afraid there’s going to have to be a post-mortem.

I have no notion when, how or why the nurse leaves me, perhaps it is to inform the police so they know to stop calling me, stop telephoning home, stop calling round, like a herd of storm-troopers, at any rate she leaves me in this night letter slowly stop disintegrating into thundery light stop pointing out the dark green object on the table with the words:

— There’s a telephone here. If you want to call anybody, please feel free.

So this is it. I am the winner of some competition, or runner-up, my consolation prize, however long I want to make phone calls courtesy of the National Health Service to whomsoever I please, no expense spared, no bourn ruled out. He’s where? I want to ask. And did the blind man not hear anything? Unable to move I make my way mentally through the door, down the corridor, to the room, and I see the blind man and the gentleman with learning disabilities and there, in the corner, the bed empty, remade already, without the lightest trace of previous occupancy.

Nary Mary quite contrary: call someone, yes. In Tibet for instance, my father always had a fondness for Tibet. Calm caves and mountain monasteries. He never went there, but it’s the thought that counts, nary that. Or in Madagascar. Or is it on? An island so immense: does anyone say on England? Never went to Madagascar either, no matter, all the same, any random number, put me through, chance following the international country code, speak English, no, not a word, nary that, all awry, telephoning home, no, never mind, already impossible, hallo, my father has died, he’s gone, given the world the slip, I am sorry I can’t linger, Tibet, I haven’t phoned Madagascar. So many calls to make, call alarm system that is me, not in, not on, no one dead-end no answer, not a word. I remain, unmoving in my seat.

To follow this yarn you have to go back into what is called deep time (as if there were any means of doing so). Once upon a slime, before the creation of the Andes, prior to the earliest fossils (naturally, cartilaginously, not a leg to stand on in that department, today any more than of yore), over 220 million years ago, ranged the ray. No yarn without ray: long before the dinosaur, or anything of ragged claw. Anticipatory of the pterodactyl, but how softly, how irenically! And in the sea, the sea itself so strangely kin: for what other creature so accurately mimes or seems already shadowing it, the seeming flatness, swell and roll, the curl and lapping of its wave-wings? In the sea, in the seas, though not ceaselessly. For it came to pass that the Andes were raised up and waterways earlier radiating into the Pacific met up with nowhere to go, the Amazon now reaching into the Atlantic through other hydraulic routes. It was party time. As it became increasingly difficult to juggle life between the Pacific and the brackish or freshwater, as the great sea was gradually, over millions of years, sealed off, the ray developed the capacity to tolerate and finally make itself at home, chez the ray, in freshwater. The anal gland ceases to function. There is scarcely any urea in its blood. A ray without urea in its blood and tissues is not one to get in a flap for salty waters. Ray segregation accordingly: freshwater over that side, marine over this. And all of this, keep in mind, took place in what is called deep time (as if there were any other).

Mary comes back with two green plastic bags with little white name-sticker bracelets on the handles, my father’s belongings, and then I leave.

My father’s house is the family home of twenty-five years, a cottage dating back to the eighteenth century, situated half a mile or so up a single-track lane, standing in seclusion in an acre of what were once beautifully tended gardens and a small piece of woodland, with fine views of the valley below. In recent years especially, the garden has gone to wilderness. My father managed to cut the lawns in the immediate vicinity of the house, but beyond that the grasses, cow parsley, nettles, brambles have grown above head-height. Even his shed, only a few feet from the house, is inaccessible, with brambles and nettles and the side of a huge hedge overgrown across the door.

I drive back there with surprising calmness. I put the green bags of belongings down just inside the front door. I see someone at the hospital has written on a slip of paper the date, his name, the letters R.I.P. and a list of contents, duly signed:

1 pair slippers

5 pair pants

1 pair pyjamas

1 vest

1 Belt

1 jacket

2 Hankies

2 Jumpers

1 Polo Shirt

1 Pair trousers

Why do some of these words merit capital letters and others not? Did the nurse who wrote them unconsciously suppose, as the text went on, it would be more dignified for these articles to have caps, words cap in hand, begging not to be read too carefully, while also not to be overlooked? As the priest says, we bring nothing into this world and it is certain we take nothing out. Naked and crying we come, in darkness invisible go, leaving two green plastic bags as today’s riposte to Egypt’s ancient dreams, as if, as if

— I’m sorry, sir, you can’t do that.

— Couldn’t I at least take my glasses? No one will notice I’ve got them on, and it’ll make such a difference if I can see. (Through the departure gates, not even a boarding pass.)

— No, madam, I don’t care if your name is Cleopatra, he’s already gone.

— There was something I had to give him.

— That’s what they all say. There’s always something: a bite for the journey, a few last words, a kiss, a clasp of the hand, iron grip, rip, no, rules is rules. Rip into the world under strict orders, nothing extra out, not a sausage. Try all sorts these days, seen some fine cases I can tell you. It’s no good, same as it ever was as far as we’re concerned, Up and down the City Road. Easy to see why you think you come in, In and out the Eagle, but just because you come in doesn’t mean, That’s the way the money goes, pardon me for singing, doesn’t mean you actually go out, like there is some plane for you to catch, or even any departure gates, Every time when I come home, it’s a lonely job this, I tell you, most people these days think of us as machines, I think I’m gonna be sad, no, in peace we say, daft, the rest likewise, She’s got a ticket to ride, I says to her I says ticket, you don’t need no ticket, it’s all free, completely free, not a bean, I says to her, But she don’t care, receding hair, wispy silverwhite and gray. Lovely man as a matter of fact: Pop goes the weasel.

Unless that’s wrong. Yes, I’m skipping. It’s still Saturday. The green bags don’t come till I pick them up on the Monday morning.

Now that he has died, I no longer know how long anything takes.

As if on stage, I try to say that minimal palindrome so close to ‘dead’ perhaps lisped from the start with that skip in view: ‘dad’.

I stand in the main room just inside the front door, the dining room we called it, though no one ever dined in it, dining died out before we moved here. I open the door to my left, it’s been a habit for two or three years now to keep doors closed in the house, part of his strategy for keeping mice out, or perhaps in, for the strategy has never struck me as very coherent, at any rate to minimise their movement. He has even constructed precisely measured, tried and tested, weighted rods of wood and aluminium for sliding into place once a door is closed, especially last thing at night, having discovered the little creatures can easily scoot under. I walk into the drawing room and draw my breath, absurd to reason, dining and drawing, all these dying words, rooms in tombs, for drawing breath, withdrawing-breath-room. I stare about this large and splendid space, with its oak beams and windows on three sides and fireplace on the fourth. There are armchairs and sofas, tables and sideboards, but most of all there is post. What a word. And now the tears come to my eyes for the first time since it happened, alone:

— These things happen from time to time.

The tears surge like waking up in Eden, in need of Eden. In the wings all this while, yet it was only yesterday they ran down my face as my father lay upstairs in his room, dying it can now be said, dying in neither the dining nor drawing room, can be said post, post saying past, all post past past the post. The room is almost knee-deep in junk mail, a choked sea of pointless post. My father never, so far as I know, sent any money to any of these scam-mongers, but he seems also never to have given up believing that somehow some day one of these proclamations that he was winner of the lucky draw, sitting in the lucky drawing room, would come true and a cheque for some huge amount of money arrive in the post. He would receive up to twenty items a day, meticulously open and read them, then replace the letters in their envelopes and annotate the envelopes with a summary of what the senders were promising, the amount of money they wanted from him first of all, the date of receipt, and the deadline for response. In the past six months the mounds have risen dramatically, he stopped bothering to throw the stuff away. But he kept up this barmy archivism, annotating and specifying dates. Now the post is so deep you can hardly cross the room, his armchair the solitary accessible island, humble sedentary fortress lapped by postal tides.

It’s Saturday morning, the day of my father’s death: he would have wanted details of the date and hour, the precise time. His obsessive love of time, his fascination with the hour meant manual, radio-controlled or atomic, battery or electric, clocks bought by mail order, watches received as so-called free gifts on the waves of junk mail, clocks and watches all over the house, the most accurate and reliable of all of course strapped silver on his wrist, bright bracelet of time as he stood in the kitchen day after day, year after year, at the appointed hour listening to Big Ben or the pips on the radio, checking his watch and commenting on how on or out of time it was. His love led me once, years ago, to the caustic comment that I could imagine his last words, on his deathbed, looking in my eyes and asking:

— What is the time, please?

The post is past. Words come away. Letters capsize. She is digression, syncopation, asyndeton, ontradiction. Her ‘c’ curls off invisibly, leaving the shoreline of a new language: ontra. She touches all the words, she’s amid them, mad as Midas, without a trace. Of course the matter is impossible:

— Everything you write about me, she says, is old and worn out. I am just a character in a book to you.

She is due to arrive this morning, from a great distance. Originally it was the other way round. Reality ontradicts. Because of my father’s condition I cancelled my flight:

— He is very weak, I cannot leave him. Will you come to me?

She is pristine. I would like this word to do justice to her, in her absence. I picture this job vacancy, taking a position as an overly well-dressed man who leads people around some local caves, not with a view to telling them about matters of age and rock-formation, what the caves were used for during wartime, how effective they once proved for the cultivation of mushrooms or for clandestine royalist meetings during the civil war or for haunting by a demon lover, but in order to address, soften the audience, explore aloud and without interruption the angelic oddity of pristine. Say it, in the dark, to be prised aurally. Pristine. Paid by the local tourist board to conduct small groups about in almost pitch-blackness, underground, I am investigating the subject of pristine. Strange well of feeling, curvature of space, unseen the caves except for a single hurricane-lamplight held aloft.

— You might think they know you inside out, I begin. In these caves nothing is what you imagine: everything becomes pristine. Listen. In these delicate clinkings prised, I add, with a kind of irritating emphasis.

I need to get their complete attention. Tin lamp on wrist, cavernous prudence, intestinal possession. Enormous difficulty of trapezoid act of speech to get the punters to listen properly. It’s a nightmare of a job: rush nothing, slow down to a speed that might just ontradict everything a man or woman has thought, treading carefully in the lamplight. Cold air always the same temperature. Pristine bazaar.

— If I attune my mouth with sufficient precision, and align my ear, I can reveal the names of everyone in this cave, at the drop of a pin, I say to them as a warm-up.

It is necessary to come up with something, after all, and I no longer see the point of saying anything unless it is in the form of a pronouncement made effectively with my dying breath. Many auditors could be forgiven for having already abandoned me, but I have a job to do, in the employ of the local authorities, not a significant salary but I wouldn’t be doing this for the money would I, for me it’s about supporting a new phenomenon spreading far beyond any cultish local initiative, for the authorities it goes without saying it is also a previously unheard-of tourist money-spinner, how to get grockles, that is the dialect term in this part of the world, how to get them, or the locals themselves, down into the otherwise out-of-bounds and commercially pointless caves and allow them to experience something to set their ears ringing, have them recall and talk about it to family and friends, like so many echoes, long after listening, generating notable future income of ear and pocket.

— What on earth is he talking about? I overhear a disgruntled fellow asking.

That’s it, I say to myself, I don’t take offence. I request that the gentleman repeat the question and I listen with the special attentiveness that I have acquired from spending innumerable and improbably long hours in the caves and, after a pause, I say simply:

— Your name is Thomas Swarovski.

And the man in question is of course awestruck, as are others in the group, and the problem then is to quieten them down so that the event doesn’t turn into an audio-freakshow of clamouring infantilism, what’s my name, tell me, tell me, or conversely, for this can also happen, to placate any listener who should then voice their surmise that Thomas is just a plant and I knew his name before we entered the caves. In truth, however, it is an easy thing to do: if you attune your hearing properly in the silence of the caves and listen, most people are speaking a more or less audible version of their name in most of the things they say. It consists in a sort of layered or side-on effect, like the skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors, a kind of private embassy of the ear, hallucination’s jinn.

But in the ordinary run of affairs how many people go out of their way to pass even five or ten minutes in a good deep cave completely cut off from the outside world and take the opportunity to hear themselves speak and really listen to themselves? It can come to seem strange that people pay good money to entertain or instruct themselves with drugs or sex or universities or even submit themselves to psychiatric counselling when they could just as well spend a few free minutes in the silence of an impressively tucked-away cave and experience this ordinary auditory apocalypse, discover themselves as never before. And so, in this foolhardy attempt to unearth something astonishing resonating in the depths of their being, I submit to the group’s special attention the word or rather the sound: pristine.

By this point they are of course a divided crowd, some receptive to the angelic oddity, intrigued, even rapt, others who just cannot be doing with it, riled and stirred to opposition by all appearances of magic or conjuration for, as I happily avow, it really is a kind of hocus pocus, of a weird but utterly innocent variety. They won’t be going back to tell Jack or Nina about this fiddle-faddle some fellow tried on them in some caves one rainy afternoon when they were at a loose end for something to do away from the beach, or perhaps they will mention the thing but they won’t have twigged, they won’t have gathered that this, yes, this little outing to the caves is the closest thing they will ever have to an apprehension of what it is to hear oneself and ‘be someone’.

And if I were absolutely to clamber up on my soapbox, an obviously ridiculous piece of equipment for a cave, indeed just what the spelean setting ecstatically slides from under you, if I were to ski or be skied in this way, I might go further. I might very readily proclaim that it is here, in the sonic simplicity and purity of these subterranean environs, that it becomes possible to return, yes, for there is always some echo-effect, to return to that conjectural snatch of what it is to be at the very threshold of life, being born, in amniotic oblivion, and in this moment think, and speak.

It is always the speech of a stranger, of course, that is doubtless why Jack and Nina are never any the wiser. In this chamber, in such darkness, by the simple light of this lamp, scrabbling about in your minds for memories of similar experiences or correspondences, from cunts to Plato and beyond, you will understand nothing, no, nothing will come home to roost. But in the blissful disappearance of soapbox merely say pristine, this quaint idiocy almost pretty, almost philistine, almost christian, and none of these but odd, yes, above all in the jets of its pure, clean, fresh, unused, untouched effects, the house, sports field or voice in pristine condition, for example, and in the same breath, as was, formerly, the original, ancient, most olden days and nights, living daylights of night’s day. Pristine: fresh and ancient.

— Listen.

Predictable hushed silence. Shuffling of a foot or two, someone vaguely stifles a yawn or cough. Day’s work done. At least until the next group. Rarely applause. Group-clapping in a cave is never to be advised: undesirable confusion of amassed bats stirring.

The ray is stationary. You wouldn’t even register it there, retracted into its environs. It sees you before you see it. The ray lies on the substrate. On it, in it, what you will. The ray is prone, adoringly, to a decent bottom. Without an appropriately sandy, muddy or gravelly one, the ray cannot bury itself, which it does both in self-protection and with a view to prey. Vivisepulture is its lifestyle. Now you don’t see it, now you do. Then not now again. The ray blends in with the substrate, altering appearance, what is around disappearing into it, eye encrypting camouflage.

All these words, ravaged from scratch.

You say the ray, concerning this solitary surreal tea-tray, this creature of clairvoyant charactery, and all is lost already. The ray is stationary, as if invisible, a nocturnality. You call it it, and ditto, lost already.

To say the ray is stationary is to invoke the question of singularity, this solitary ray, straightaway. It is a great problem, shield-shaped, you might suppose. Really, it is enough to put the world in disarray. To bring such a creature to account, to arraign it: that’s out with the bathwater in advance, when it comes to the ray. It’s categorically different from man or woman. The woman is this one, a writer, for example, not woman, the man this man, a lawyer, say, not man. ‘The ray’ operates incommensurably. It can be understood generically, as a term for all the rays that ever existed, including the countless millions in deep time, bearing in mind that deep time at once somewhere no one will ever be visiting and, to coin a phrase, the substrate of the present (see above). Or ‘the ray’ can mean just this or that one, singularly. Language wrecks the ray. Revealingly perhaps, the comparison doesn’t hold in the same way in the case of children. The child is closer, in this respect if not in others, to the ray. But the ray is a problem, insuperably so. Or rather, it is an aporia. The ray wrecks language. The revolutionary ray: you reach for words, you riparate. You dream of a new vocabulary, a new reality. Or it dreams you.

What does a man do on the day his father dies? Outside the sun has taken up the baton for another hot summer day. But the relay has stopped. He wonders if he is capable of driving. He thinks at the time he manages it quite well. Later he will receive a speeding ticket, for driving too fast that morning to collect her from the bus station some twenty miles away. He arrives an hour or so early. He parks close to the station and walks around a crowded Saturday morning country town. Like an altercation developing in his peripheral vision he becomes aware that time has slowed down to a catastrophe. Whatever is occurring is occurring with unbelievable, piece-by-piece, falling-apart diffusing diffracting lentissimo decrepitude. No cinema, mental or mainstreet, could capture it, the jostling soundless shopping centre crowds, the lentic swamp, the shattering lens. What he is trying to make out has slowed down to something grinding but imageless, weightless as the noiseless rip of detaching a retina.

And at the same time, in this life-ending slowness, this being a mollusc under someone’s descending shoe, he finds himself walking into a clothes store with a MASSIVE UNBEATABLE SUMMER SALE. Disturbed by his own calmness and foresight, he buys a pair of black trousers and a lightweight black raincoat he can wear to the funeral.

Back at the bus station it is restless, people milling about, dull but strange oppression. He asks does anyone know about the bus from Heathrow. Because it is a Saturday the ticket office is shut. Gradually it emerges that there has been a pile-up on the motorway and the resulting chaos means indefinite delays. He manages to establish that the crash occurred too early for her coach to have been involved. He tries to shrug off the thought that the day is imitating itself. It’s something quite alien, he thinks, to that falseness in the impressions of external things that Ruskin called pathetic fallacy. It’s as if perception itself were a strange mimosa. Everything seems shadowed, shadowing something else.

It should be hallucinational news.

He sees a man, a blind man, standing at the very edge of the pavement, in danger of stumbling off the kerb or being swept into the air by the next passing bus. He is wearing an intolerably hot, shabby brown winter coat and bearing a sandwich board with the announcement:

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER NEW MIMESIS

This waiting at the bus station is an orchestrated revision of what happened in the hospital, in someone else’s mind’s eye. He anticipates, open-mouthed, the reappearance of Mary, even darker-eyed than earlier:

— Sorry about this, she says, this sort of thing happens from time to time. You just have to wait for it to pass. It is the aleatory procession, you can never tell how long it is going to last. And when it is over is when it begins. Just wait and see.

It is as if the people who are waiting in vain, either to collect family or friends or to travel themselves, are in truth, unaware, waiting for test results. The gloom of uncoming buses is repeated in the sky. The brilliant sunshine is inexplicably smacked on the back of the head. Big clouds tumble over, clowns without coherence. The darkness spreads like strong, spilt medicine. Gusts of wind scrap, a chill has crept in. Is this his father’s work? There is nothing eerie about it, everything is simple and matter-of-fact. He goes back to the car park to put more money in the meter and pick up something warmer to wear. In the back of the car he notices the unbeatable knockdown sale-price black trousers and black raincoat he has bought. The sky looks so black it must open.

Back at the bus station news has filtered through that no one has been injured in the accident, and other bus arrivals have been held up by two to three hours.

When she comes it is as usual as if she had beaten him to it, been hiding round the corner and sprung out like the return of the dead that she always will have appeared.

She sees the blank pall of a man undone. He takes her in his arms. She observes his trembling and waits for his speech. He says, already weeping into her shoulder and neck and ear:

— He’s already gone.

It is as if she knew, gathering it thousands of feet in the air, over the night ocean. For some minutes he is fixed, like a piece of paper blown onto her, senselessly secured by the wind. Then he falls back, still speechless. He becomes aware of her baggage, a suitcase and other bags, and wonders how it got there. She tries to take in his stooped, stopped-up form, his strange display of tears in a public place, his frighteningly wiped-out face.

— It was this morning, he says.

On the way home, the sunshine comes back, as if televised, as if the relay were again real, breaking out of a period of implausible interference. Passing through a quiet village, she points out the pretty church and he suggests they stop and have a look. The path up from the lychgate is shady and they pause in the cool of the porch. Her eyes run over the pinned-up notices, her own language but foreign: flower-arranging, organ practice, an announcement for the village fete already two weeks ago. Everything is destroyed. She knows he wants to kiss in the porch, always yes, kiss, the portal, find her lips in the cool shade of the threshold before entering and she lets him, she has him touch her mouth with his fingers, stroke her beautiful face, longing to throw herself into the mirror of his grief while herself already effaced, happy, yes, that she will have been just a character in a book, unrecognisably old and worn away. Nothing of her will get through, not a name, not the faintest vestige of a gesture. She insists on the truth, therefore nothing more can be said. But of course now more than ever with his father dead, she cannot give him up, she cannot leave him. He holds her in his arms in the cool of the porch and runs his fingers through her hair, eyes bulging in stupefied speechlessness gazing into hers, as if she is going to let him be who he had imagined himself being before any of this happened. She lets him kiss her, on the cheeks and lips, she lets her lips be affronted, comforted by the thought that for him she is just a character, she has made that abundantly obvious, and will never be the subject of anyone’s attention and all their love-making, so wild and singular and untranslatable, will pass unrecorded.

The house is inconceivably empty. There is so much to do it seems more logical to leave again, evade the emptiness and perhaps, when the bright day is done, return in the cool of summer dusk. They drive down to the coast and walk up a cliff-path they have taken once before. She feels paralysed. She can only stay a fortnight. In that period she will do everything she can to make things less unbearable. But there is so much to do. He doesn’t tell her about the mimosa, fearful of what she would think. The order is impossible to disentangle. There are all things at once. There is the phoning, the labyrinth of calls, family, friends, former work colleagues and of course official bodies, official bodies of death, the hospital to arrange the collection of clothing and other personal items, the doctor to thank her for her help but will he ever make that call, what help, she was so pleasant and clarifying and let him die, the coroner, the man who will actually be carrying out the post-mortem, the people who organise his father’s pension, organised, that yawning gap of tenses keeps coming over, gone, no longer to be organised, the bank, the electricity company, the phone company. And then there is the incredible world of the cottage, dead and surviving, stuffed with the past now present, the present now past, in a convulsion of lunatic tranquillity. It’s an impossible coincidence, at once a celestial creaking galley, quiet as the moon, and a mine turned upside down with all its shafts, riches and debris suddenly at the surface and no one in charge. No one and nothing is in charge. That’s the true madness, as Polonius should have pointed out, had he not been a father himself: the sudden and absolute obliteration of authority. Not that his father was authoritarian, on the contrary he was the least a man could be, but that makes the chasm all the more appalling, into which he now sees he has begun falling. It’s not a question of a yes or no regarding this or that thought or desire, this instant of decision or that impulse to act, it’s the basis of everything: it’s the dissolution of law, truth, rationality, sense, logic, light itself. That’s the wizening mimosa, the madness of the truth, seeping into view before the nurse had even told him what had happened, the magisterial, blankety trick-photography of the changing of the light.

The ray is stationary, lurking in the nether regions. It’s nature’s way, awry. The sway of nature makes for this singular, this solitary, this ray. There’s no getting around it. It’s necessarily this one. Irreparably, irrecoverably: it’s a ray of one’s own. How admirably now each eye is raised, its marvellously wide vision shielded by the lid that, traversing the eyeball as the ray buries itself in the substrate, stops foreign bodies (sand, mud, gravel) entering! Like a spell as yet uncast: Operculum pupillare! Even through a glass darkly the ray sees brilliantly, like an underwater cat. In submarine gloom guanine crystals make up tiny mirror-like plates that become visible as the light is fading, just at the outer edge of each eye. How inspirationally it blows and plays, the spiracle or blow-hole behind each eye pumping water like a heart as it lies, almost unrecognisably, on the sandy bottom! On it, in it, what you will. Everything about this brainy creature is so starkly strange, back-to-front and upside down, trapeze artist of deep time, feelings flattened, gravity in chaos. And how charmingly the marine savagery of its eating habits is occluded, since the crafty mouth is concealed, underneath! How readily it would ravage a Red Riding Hood granny, its mouth packed with tooth-plates, arranged in rows! No sooner does a tooth go missing, grinding up its hapless prey, than a new one is lined up in front of it: lifelong self-renewing spray! the original dragon’s army! The ray is stationary even when it moves, shooting through water at unnerving speed, propelled by the pectoral fins that form the hem of the body, close to complete circularity, as the axis of the body remains unaltering. How quickly its lurking quivers into larking!

They have to start somewhere and next day, as if the phone calls are staccato punctuation to a death-sentence uncurling in their ears, they get to work tidying up the downstairs, beginning with the junk mail. Out of order, over the edge, already perhaps too late, he realises there will need to be a reception after the funeral, and then before the reception there will need to be the funeral. It is as if they have lost basic forms of co-ordination, removing or replacing things in the dark, bumping into one another, making love like singed moths. And there cannot be a funeral until there has been a post-mortem. He talks to a voice, in the nearest city, about the body of his father. He has not seen, he will never see the man who performs the post-mortem, the one who sees, but he hears him. As if he might just as readily be talking about the delivery of a washing machine, the pathologist confirms that his father had a knock on the head.

— Which must be due to some fall, the voice concludes (as if he doesn’t know anything about what happened in the hospital, as if there was no communication between the two places, as if he would even be required to perform a post-mortem otherwise, the false dog, but)

— In any case, the voice says, this small gash would not account for cause of death.

The cause, the cause. Is it in a good cause, he wants to press, in a counter to all this pathology, to speak of cause of death? To my ear, your very voice is a lost cause, sir. Pause. In which the cause of the pause and the pause of the cause and the pause of the cause of the pause are all in abeyance, without pause or cause, for several days. And then he hears again from this faceless voice with his father’s body: the cause of death is two, two causes, and the two causes divide into three, just in case one or two wouldn’t suffice, and over the phone they are specified and the words fizzle and faint away, implausible as an electric brae. But they duly reappear, set in the watery strangeness of writing, just a week, less than a little week afterwards, on the death certificate: I. (a) Ischaemic heart disease (b) Coronary artery atheroma; II. Carcinomatosis due to carcinoma of the large bowel.

They collect this from the local register office one bright morning. The blank officious woman taps at her computer, then prints out the incredible document. Laugh or cry, flick a coin, or watch it melt abruptly in mid-air, it’s the hilarity, the nauseatingly absurd handing over of coins, bits of money to acquire more than one copy of the same piece of paper, the death certificate wanted dead or alive. For everyone wants sight of the death certificate, a certified copy, not a photocopy but a certified copy, triggering another chain reaction of phone calls and correspondence: the undertaker, the bank, the pension company, the solicitor’s office holding the will, and the vicar to conduct a funeral and the undertaker to liaise with the vicar and the body to be returned to the neighbouring town where his father can, after a week, be viewed in the chapel of rest (When you feel ready, sir), and a time established for the interring and therefore a time for the reception, not wake but reception, like a hotel or motor garage, report to reception, like taking or offering receipt, of what, by whom and how, like nothing. This is to happen at the house, a few minutes’ walk up the lane from the churchyard where his father is to be buried in a double grave already assigned alongside his beloved wife dead twenty-eight months earlier.

The house seems inconceivably full. Every room is a minefield of twilight, never enough light: the dust, the mouse-droppings, the spiderwebs, the sprawl and mounds of junk mail, pipesmoker’s paraphernalia, the little stackings and sub-piles, everything collectable collected, the free gifts, the mail order catalogues, the possibly some day reusable envelopes and plastic bags, the phones and TVs, watches and clocks, working or defunct, the habits of collecting keeping storing of a lifetime, the simplest word, a leaf tome. Put them together like chalk and cheese, not in our lifetime even more of a lunacy, as if synapothanumena were bread and butter, the height of fashion, the order and agreement of those that will die together, but life and time in truth never do. They are driving between, in transit perpetually between house and town, starting other collections, starting with all the paraphernalia with which to clean and remove (the cloths and sponges, scouring pads, rubber gloves, cleaning agents, refuse bags), and in transit too between the house and the local tip, day after day the transportation of black rubbish bags, black rubbish bag after black rubbish bag filled with anything and everything judged not to be indispensable. But how is that done?

It is not only the junk mail, which in its mounds is always on the verge of toppling if not toppled into another mound before you can straighten anything out, with all the envelopes that his father has marked as possibles by putting the word ‘interesting’ and a ‘?’ on the outside of the envelope, together with a date of when the announcement of the prize-winner itself arrived. It is also the presence amid all this junk mail of bills, letters and other documents of significance, bank statements, correspondence with the company that supplies heating-oil to the house, the man who deals with the upkeep of the ride-on mower, letters from himself and from his father’s brothers, letters of condolence concerning the death of his wife, the official documentation relating to her death, and then the surfaces such as shelves and mantelpiece piled and bureau-drawers and other cupboards crammed with the entirety of the family’s past: photographs and correspondence, but also bits of artwork, bric-a-brac, birthday and anniversary cards, souvenirs, mementos, knick-knacks and other bobs.

Side by side, perched between mounds, they feel their way, murmuring or silent, occasionally seeking advice from one another. Here is a letter congratulating his father on having won fifteen thousand pounds, and another on having won a free holiday to Cyprus, here a bank statement from a year previously and there an invoice for a spare part for the mower. There are notes to himself and letters from others and drafts or copies of letters from himself to others. She is more inclined to jettison, but she also has a sharper eye for sorting potentially significant correspondence or documentation. She maintains the steadier pace, slowly but surely filling the black rubbish bag at her side. For him it is all a haze, she notices, a miasma over his eyes descending with virtually every scrap. Destroy or retain? Why destroy? Why retain? The shores of junk mail lapping at their knees, they proceed envelope by envelope, she the bold pragmatist, he washed over with the impossibilities of decision at the very canuticles of his fingers. And pervading everything all the time, though neither mentions it to the other, is the smell. For her it is curious and alluring, unknown yet connected to him. For him, it recalls the love of life itself, this ceaseless smell of the house. Uncapturable but ubiquitous, on every surface, on every object are the residues, the residutiful, residentical odour that he recognises as not the father’s only but that of the house itself. He loves this signature of the house, an olfactory imprint different from anything else in the world, irreproducible and irreplaceable. He dreams of preserving it, bottling and selling it back to himself, privately, on a demented black-market of grief. In reality this smell, neither stench nor perfume, enveloping every object in the room, every item of their clothing, every inch of their hair and skin, endures scarcely longer than the time it takes to transport a car-load of rubbish bags to the tip.

They drive to the tip more times than they can think. In the unrelenting blazing heat of these uncountable, unaccountable days they drive to this place manned by whom or what? These men, what are they called, the workers at the municipal tip? His mother knew the name, he recalled, she would drop it into her conversation as something to be enjoyed by itself, like a mint. But it keeps defeating him, this word, never in his vicinity, repeatedly eluding him, as if with a mind of its own. Then finally, out of the heat and haze, like a little oasis in a mirage it shimmers into focus: the totter. He is the figure who attends a dump, who deals with refuse, the rag-and-bone man of the heart who tots, to totter the word, the tot to tot, to turn to itself, backwards and forwards, a stumbling, stuttering figure of refusal. There are two of them, in fact, every day one or the other and often both, always the same. One of them is a small frightening man, with vacuum eyes looking through your face as if nothing you could say or ask could ever register on his, as if your face were indeed already reduced to bone. They think of asking: Where do we put something like this old Swedish orthopaedic kneeling chair (bought from some mail order catalogue twenty-five or thirty years ago, unsat upon for all but two months of that time), made of steel and deckchair-style fabric? Does it go to metal recycling, or is it general household waste? But they know better. They learn very early on not to ask the tiny totter anything. One false move and he’ll melt your face off with a nice canister of stuff fit for purpose kept close in one of his numerous pockets, is how he makes them feel. But the other, oh yes, the other totter! What a brave and magnificent specimen, a totter to tot, a totter to take home to your parents and present saying: Look, I have never known whether I was gay or straight or what it meant to have a sexual identity, besides a fiction out now, as the hoax played day and night by the contemporary universal film company, but this man is a totter, folks! Just check him out — the height of the fellow, the flowing golden mane of hair, the stupendous beautiful dirtiness, mom, your tottering colossus roaming the refuse, the mounds, the tipping-effect, like a god to whom you could address any question, no matter how naïve or obvious, and he would tell you graciously, with simple but unfathomable courtesy, as if completely in your own shoes and in another world at the same time.

How to gauge this disappearance of themselves every time they ask the totter a question? In due course, after a dozen or so visits, they are both in love with him. He is a dreamy but inextinguishable part of their cryptic, shared biography. They pack the odoriferous refuse bags, having separated the rubbish into what can and cannot be recycled, and drive to the tip frankly yearning for a sight of this man, and find themselves deflated, absurdly down-at-mouth on leaving, on any occasion when he isn’t there (or is concealed in the totter’s marvellously mysterious hut, on a tea or lunch break), as if the tip were another home, a home-making possible thanks to the lion-man who doubtless quit the premises everyday at sundown or earlier but seemed nevertheless to be the very premise of the premises, the king they would like to have invited back to the house, wined and dined, twinned and dazzled, sinned and binned, idylled and idded in an impossible fantasy loved as no one had evidently ever loved him.

And all the while gnawing, denying nothing everything, in at the entrails parsing and combining, nibbling and morselling, filling black bags in the summer heat, stacking them in the car, driving them down to the tip, hour after hour, things for nobody, breaking off for lunch then back to filling black bags, hour after hour, in order to turn the downstairs into a space that could reasonably accommodate thirty or forty people on the day of the funeral, in the midst of cleaning and clearing always the phone calls, the practical arrangements, the line of authorities and officials stretching out to doom in a hall of cracked mirrors. After the post-mortem it is necessary to set up the date of the funeral and arrange what kind of burial, what kind of service, what time of day, presided over by whom, and on what terms. The vicar who, over the phone, was agreeable to doing it, seems outwardly at ease when she comes to the house to meet the bereaved son and his friend, the beautiful totter-grieving girl, and talk to him about the arrangements, but becomes less comfortable with every passing second, inwardly no doubt from the beginning unsure of just how Christian this burial is going to be. Always a little tricky, so often these days, a problem to combine sympathy with the bereaved with the sneaking sense that these people are not church-going, these people want a so-called Christian burial not on account of their own faith nor even of the faith of the one to be buried, but merely on account of what to call it, I’m flummoxed now, I always get flummoxed at this point, best not analyse it, an aesthetic question really, a matter of appearances after all. Me too, I suppose, the way I drive up to the door and ring and introduce myself as the local vicar, the character who has never met this chap let alone his father but is, within two minutes of getting inside the front door, referring to the dead person by the affectionate diminutive version of his first name, as if I’ve been a family friend for decades. (Or as if he is still alive sitting in the next room patiently filling his pipe with rhododendron leaves, for that was what he had discovered in recent months he most enjoyed smoking, and the easiest thing to do, fetch a few leaves from the rhododendron bush just outside the front door and dry them out on a plate on the little table next to him.) And as I am standing here discussing the funeral arrangements, what he would like, what he wouldn’t, what he would or wouldn’t because his wife would or wouldn’t have wanted (‘like’ for the man unburied, ‘want’ for the woman in the ground, subtle but valid distinctions, in my book), because it’s a double grave after all, lest we forget, it’s your mum’s wishes too, there is something about the way the chap holds back, doesn’t speak when I would expect him to speak, something about the other person, where does she come from?

— Are you family, my dear?

— No, I’m not, the girl replies.

So who is she? Not going to get a satisfactory answer there either. Something about the man wavering over the standard deals we offer, service in the church or service at the grave.

— Will it be a big event? Many coming? Was your father well known locally? I expect he had a lot of friends.

And the son feels impelled to inform her that his father was a Buddhist who practised no recognisable form of Buddhism, unless you count smoking rhododendron leaves, and his mother was an atheist of the sublime party, and then to complain about the apparent impossibility of setting up a decent burial in this God-bemobbled country, if she’ll excuse his language, unless it is a good Christian burial conducted by a bona fide priest such as he takes her to be, and the vicar feels impelled to ensure that she is not dealing here with some strange species of satanist, for there is after all just a flicker of doubt in her bones, she won’t call it by name but the chap’s chemicals are sending out warning signals. Proceed with caution. Consign to unconscious exorcism.

And the son would like to point out that ‘satan’ is a rich and beautiful word that indeed need not be invested with a capital letter but can be understood in a sense cut free, if he may put it this way, from all religiosity, as a noun in its older or, perhaps, more pristine sense meaning simply an adversary, someone who opposes or plots against. Not forgetting also of course that the word has been used of some of the funniest characters in literature. Think of Falstaff, that old white-bearded satan.

But she wants to know now what extracts from the Bible and what hymns his father liked, if there is anything special the son wishes to have in the service. Otherwise she’ll be happy to suggest something.

Yes, the bog-standard programme, he thinks, with the lord as my shepherd and an excerpt from Revelation he almost starts reciting to her on the spot, And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel, and did eat it; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey; and when I ate it my belly was embittered; no, don’t wind the woman up, she’s only doing her job.

So he is havering, yes, she can tell there is something not to be trusted about the bereaved man.

— I’d like to be able to think about this and perhaps suggest a passage or two, perhaps read a poem and say a few words of my own if that is OK, he says.

— Yes, she says hesitating, that would be perfectly all right, so long as it is in keeping with the occasion.

And as for in the church or at the graveside, he says quite firmly:

— By the graveside.

But later he phones her and changes this, having considered the possibility of rain and elderly or less able mourners obliged to stand at length in the graveyard, and would the sound carry, he wonders, in the event of a hymn or reading ‘in keeping with the occasion’? What would be the point of it if no one can hear anything?

In the event the rain holds off and they proceed to the side of the double grave standing in grass unmown for weeks, following his reading of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ inside the church, he repeating in himself, to the syllable, the as if satirically stern, always surprising force of his father’s rendition, its loudness so much at variance with his diurnal taciturnity, a storming on the heights as at school carol services when the son was a boy, blindly cherubic with unbroken voice blushing in a sea of voices, buoyed up by his father’s among them.

Then there is the vicar and the frog. At the omega of her call, at the denouement of what is to be the vicar’s first and last visit, all pleasantries ending, without quite going so far as to say lovely to meet you look forward to seeing you at the funeral, he opens the front door, there’s plenty of space for her to pass through, but then she retracts more fully the porch door already sufficiently ajar, and he detects a slight sound absolutely out of place, a faint crunch. She hears or seems to hear nothing, evidently too busy in the world of her own virtuous thoughts and feelings, or thinking about lunch, but he knows he hears something. Only after she has driven away does he look down and see in the jamb, close by the rusty hinge, a frog, or what remains of a frog, with possibly a final throe, the throe as he goes to touch, no, not a throe, a cast of the light, a fantastical last contraction. The vicar killed the frog as she was leaving.

What is the frog’s place in the yarn? What is this leap of faith into the door jamb and wait for the final crunch, as if that frog is indeed another forgery, a hopping mad music or rhythmic throe, like slime, like a caul, over eyes and ears, like the rhapsody of sky and shadows at the bus station or the feeling of being a mollusc under someone’s descending shoe?

And all the while leaping backwards, in an analepsis of ranarian lucidity, through the entire entraining of funeral arrangements and making the downstairs of the house clean and tidy enough to accommodate the reception after the service, at every turn and totting up of post-mortem preparations the bereaved man and the girl-stranger are, merely on his say-so, his implacable, irrefutable position on the topic having become evident to her over a series of evenings following her arrival, his laying out of the design, the vision he has, in order to do what has to be done, on his insistence they are at the same time making way for an impressively large aquarium, to be installed in the dining room. It needs to be longer than it is high, four by two metres and just sixty centimetres deep, the desirability of a pool as large as possible scarcely requiring specification, not only from an aesthetic point of view but in practical terms: if one of the creatures should die, it has far less effect in a large space. Inevitably, in the case of a small aquarium, products of decay from a decomposing body contaminate the water and can rapidly bring about the death of other creatures, but if you think big, if you reckon on the worst with a big showcase space, you can have one be dead and decaying for twenty-four hours or more and it have no unduly adverse effect on the life of the other inhabitants.

These are not his words but she extrapolates them, in ironic form, from what he tells her.

Not to mention the possibility of an electrical fault, say a heater or pump breaks down, and you don’t notice because it happens in the middle of the night, or you go away for the day, and come back to find the calamitous aftermath of power failure: with a large aquarium everything is more survivable, changes in temperature or pH level more gradual, salvation is plausible and no creature need die.

— What creatures? And how many are we talking about here? she not surprisingly wants to know.

— Four, he replies, South American freshwater stingrays: Potamotrygon motoro.

There is no certainty as to which variant of the type. They might come from Peru, Brazil or Colombia. Many of these species remain unnamed, even undescribed in the scientific literature, but they are distinctive for the beautiful eyespots on their backs, like leopards, peacocks, chameleons or butterflies, and their bellies white as ghosts. He shows her some photographs.

— I’ve already ordered them, he says.

They are due to be collected on the eve of the funeral and, as if for children to be adopted and brought home to a house where nothing is prepared, with winter coming and no wood chopped or food laid up, they must work like demons to ensure a welcoming environment.

Sometimes he says they, sometimes we, he says things, she notices, that fray or slide off at the edges, splashes of grief paint, verbal splay, semantic bubbles, mimosaturated existence popping before you can adjust your vision to see inside. In the evenings when there is nothing to do besides sit in exhaustion, dusty fusty musty in the twilight of the increasingly empty drawing room, dining room or kitchen, or outside on the garden bench to no sound besides sheep in the field above the house and a washing vaguely up of distant traffic on the road running like an unseen wound along the valley below, they discuss at great length the materials required to be ordered or purchased the following day. Gradually they clear and clean, emptying the dining room sufficiently to paint it.

— We are getting ready for them, he says laughing, slapping it on.

She is surprised at how many of the materials are available locally or at short notice from elsewhere, and at his passion to have the thing done, the rigour of his researches and enquiries, the forays to builder's merchants and aquarium shops in nearby towns, sea-life centres strung along the coast, online companies for aquaculture supplies and aquarium systems.

— I never dreamed we’d custom-build a ray pool, did you?

He makes her face light up with laughter. He works out the volume in cubic inches, divides by 231 to establish how many gallons of water: 2,078. He insists on making the thing out of acrylic, not glass, despite the drawbacks. Acrylic sheets are more easily scratched but they don’t crack or break so easily and, in any case, it’s much simpler to drill acrylic. When it comes to installing an individual filtration system the last thing anyone wants are dead-spot areas of water. Lack of circulation means anaerobic conditions. The spillway design is likewise crucial. We need to make sure there are appropriate corner overflows to take away the protein waste that tends to collect at the surface. Despite the fact that acrylic constructions come with a significant lip to help prevent any creature escaping, we really need a covering. Of this last he explains:

— No problem. I’ll just cut it from egg-crate plastic.

Putting together the frame he shows an expertise and dexterity she has not anticipated in him, forcefully snapping together, securing, screwing, drilling the construction of the stand, taking care to ensure sufficient space inside to enable work on the filter as and when required, tilting and adjusting and finally firmly bedding down the acrylic plates. It makes her laugh at least once a day with an absolutely unexpected pleasure, as if this were really how to live, what to do.

And then everything is ready, as if fairies have been in labour, the day breaks, the downstairs of the house is clear, everything that needed to go to the tip has gone, everything that could be put out of sight in this or that cupboard has been put out of sight, the drawing room and dining room and kitchen and downstairs toilet have been cleaned and vacuumed and scoured and washed. The dining room in particular has been especially arrayed for the occasion, the table moved off into one corner, the candles, cups and saucers, glasses, plates and napkins set forth, the wine, soft drinks and food all in preparation. Everyone who could reasonably be expected to have wanted to know knows this is the day, the church at two o’clock, friends of his parents and family arriving from far and near. He has written his speech and the two of them are ready, he dressed in the black clothes he bought on the morning of the death and she in black picked up on a later outing to the town. They stand clasping one another in the dining room clad in black amazed at what it seems they have done, disbelieving, as if supernatural forces or forgeries must have been at work; it is time to walk down to the church.

They have no black shoes. They have been aware of this for some days but failed to take action. Their shoes by chance are green, and this is the first thing the undertaker and pallbearers notice, by the hearse outside the lychgate, some twenty minutes before the official start of the proceedings. The undertaker shakes the hand of each in turn and looks them in the face, but his primary focus is the shoes. His gaze drops to the ground, bright green trainers, both of them wearing green trainers: what is this about, why for the life of him hasn’t the gentleman got black shoes and the lady for that matter, the sylph-like slip of a girl who must be half his age? What does it mean, this green, this dividing of green shoes among the two of them? It’s a conspiracy, a sign, something not right.

It’s a hot day and the undertaker is sweaty already, a corpulent man liable to feel the heat even without all his clobber on, and whether it is the sun or something about the couple, he is not one to be fazed in the course of things, but he is having trouble with these green shoes on the both of them. And what is their relation in any event? Is she his daughter? No, that can’t be right, nor his sister, no resemblance there either. And those green shoes in which they are conjoined, up to what could an undertaker like himself ever suppose to be other than no good! What a colour! He’ll tell his wife, even more than himself massively overweight, dying off the fat of the land, he’ll regale her with the details tonight. After the second funeral and the forty-mile round trip, that evening back in the flat over the funeral parlour, upstairs from the chapel of rest where the son had gone just the day before with the same girl, the wife saw them then, remember, the son come in to pay his respects and the young woman followed like a cat. He never thought anything of it at the time, regarding what their relation was, but the gentleman come in and the undertaker conducted him through to the chapel, a surreal little living room with no television or other furnishings of the living but a chintzy wallpaper with no windows besides one curtained-off interior window that would, were the curtain drawn back, give view onto the stuffy little corridor. It resembled a retro-room in a shabby provincial museum, how life looked decades ago, or so the son thought. Reproductions of landscape paintings are pinned to the walls, lepidopterously; there is a little table with artificial flowers and a faded doily; and crème de la crème, you look up to see a little picture of Jesus, the crucial accoutrement to the designation of chapel of rest. What else?

Anything else?

Yes, of course, no twitching at the curtain of the interior window needed to catch that. It is the labyrinth at the centre, the bier or bed or bearing point of life. The day before the funeral and this is the one and only opportunity to see his father reposing, almost prostrate, laid almost horizontally but with a slight propping up of the upper body, the shoulders and head just as he had been last time ‘in life’. All our yesterdays a fortnight of solemnity. Day fought to death, seems only yesterday, but then propped up perhaps a shade more, and smiling that faintly Mona Lisa cryptic valediction about which he will never tell anyone unless in a touch, a certain squeeze of the hand, and now so strangeways, all awry, all away, utterly not. As she said when he invited her to come in and stand a moment with him:

— That is not your father.

You expect to see the one who has died, instead this bier, this base, this resting-place empty but for this untenable tenant, intolerable not least because all the time you are acutely aware that the laying out and propping up is but the exhibition of a moment and no sooner will you have vacated the office at the front of the funeral parlour than your lumbering undertaker with the help of his brother-in-law will be carting that one out and bringing in the next for some other’s viewing an hour hereafter, and the body not the body but gone away, imprisoned without weight, the air heavy with lilies, the strange starched white shirt sported by the corpse not his father, his face drawn, yes, hollowed away and weirder than waxwork, with eyelids sealed and stitching too on the forehead, a word he always hears in his father’s voice, the suppressed aitch introducing a sort of naval charm, familiar as a fo’c’sle, for’ead with the proper dropping of the aitch pronounced deep in a forest of id, not head, stitching not only of the surrounding of the face but for the gash, the foregashed forehead a couple of centimetres long, the trace of the wound sustained when he fell from the hospital bed, unattended and unnoticed for who knows how long, onto something he imagines sharp as gravel.

So digging into that steak and potatoes his wife cooks that night the undertaker will remark on the son as is bereaved and the slip of a girl with him both wearing spring-green shoes and what is the meaning, in a lifetime of working on the sward, turfing up and turfing back down, he never asked himself about green as such and now with this strange couple it is written all over the churchyard. The vicar arrives and they exchange a few practical and time-of-day remarks, suitably subdued. Neither says anything about being ill-at-ease with the manner of the man and the woman in green shoes, but both are troubled, the undertaker now in particular, by suspicions of superstition, a supernaturalistic greenery jarring with the homely Christian calling that goes with the territory, as of grace omitted before the steak. There’s a lifetime’s mistaking brought up in a moment like this, spotting the green shoes and wondering quite out of church bounds, and it’s a blessed relief he considers, as the pallbearers maintain their shuffles of conversation looking at the ground, that he can keep his thoughts to himself and imagine the place where it’s already not possible, what with all the newfangled technology, a man’s privacy approaching the verge of extinction.

The church, once they’re all ensconced (besides a cousin who is stuck in traffic and only makes it to the reception shortly before everyone leaves), is cool and surprisingly calm out of the August mid-afternoon heat. There are more people than the son had suspected or could even recognise. Presiding over the proceedings, the vicar has comfortably internalised a modus vivendi for dealing with this slightly odd occasion: the bereaved man, evidently not a church-goer, wants nonetheless to read a speech. Complacently she introduces this, after repeatedly invoking in first-name terms the dead man she has never met. In lucid and collected fashion, determined to remain straightforward, neat and audible, he proffers a few remarks about his father’s love of words, his gifts with language, his extraordinary precision with syntax, grammar and spelling (he had worked as an editor and proof-reader over many years), and also about his father’s passion and inventiveness with things, his skill as a maker of objects and contraptions sometimes more Heath Robinsonian than others might tolerate let alone admire. The speech then moves on to a truncated version of an anecdote about the church in which they are standing, concerning a period around twenty years earlier, when the vicar had no connection with the parish.

One day a builder came and erected scaffolding around the lychgate, presumably with the intention of painting or reroofing or otherwise repairing it, but no one ever followed it up, the days passed and the weeks and months and no one came and no one seemed to mind, besides the son who saw it as a daily eyesore and defacement of the church. Eventually he took it upon himself to type out a statement on the subject, on a single sheet of paper: