How to Paint a Dead Man (16 page)

She explored the bedroom with her hands. Everything felt as it had before the cool terracotta tiles, the vertical grain of the table legs. She could smell the last of her illness on the sheets, the wool of her coat in the closet, and the baked clay of the plant holder. She patted a hand underneath the bed and the slapping made a cave-like sound and a shape grew out of it, which was the shape of the space below the bed. She thought of the pulsing and pipping bats at night when they left the chimneys. This was how they mapped the dusk sky, and the tiled roofs of the town, and the trees along the avenues, she thought. The familiar room rose before her out of nothingness, made of textures and fragrances, echoes and holes. Its components began to reintroduce themselves. ‘Hello, I am the chair on which you sit your bottom-watch out for that splinter on the left-hand side.’ ‘Good morning, we are the little pine granules in the wash dish. Don’t use too many of us at once or we’ll foam uncontrollably.’ The two bells of San Lorenzo rang out across the town, saying ‘Ave, Annette, Ave.’ She pictured Father Mencaroni swinging from the tasselled cords in the bottom of the tower, puffing hard and curtseying, strung between two flat notes.

Over the next few days she made her way around Castrabecco. Her feet were automatic on the stairs-they already knew the distance and the dogleg midway and the gradient from their many previous journeys up and down. It was only when she thought too hard about the position of the bathtub in relation to the sink that she knocked her kneecap hard against the porcelain. Uncle Marcello simmered a pan of buttercups with Vaseline and applied the balm to her bruise. ‘Just a period of adjustment,’ he said. In the cool back room of the house she put a peg on her nose and ran an inventory, gently tracing the calyxes and sepals of the flowers that Uncle Marcello had brought from the gardens, until they were all identified. Inside them, the tight corrugated knots of unopened petals. Mauri decided it would be helpful if he gave her things to hold, and he delighted in her squeals and guesses. A pocket of sand. A lump of hairy clay. A soap bubble blown from a pipe, which popped on her jutting finger and splashed against her neck. A tiny frog caught in the courtyard, which pinged and tickled in her closed hand. A dead bird, bald on one side. A raw sausage, cold. A half-cooked sausage, warm. His tongue instead of a slug.

Soon after it was decided that she should no longer attend the school. It was decided in the kitchen between her mother and Uncle Marcello late one evening over a bottle of vin santo and some salty cheese. For two weeks Annette had been taken to school and collected by her mother, which was not their usual custom, but pleased Annette. She had been grazing her legs and dirtying her pinafore. In a letter home Signora Russo had explained that twice there had been a little commotion in class-no genuine cause for alarm, but Annette had disrupted the lesson through no fault of her own. It was innocent, wrote Signora Russo, and she felt confident that everything would settle down. Under the school’s policy, however, she was obliged to make a parental report.

That afternoon Annette had also developed a small stomach ache, and then discovered wetness in her underwear. Upon confiding to her mother that she thought she might once again be falling sick, she was questioned at length on the nature of the bloodstain. That it was blood shocked Annette; she had not hurt herself intimately. ‘How has this happened?’ her mother snapped. ‘What have you allowed to happen?’ She gripped her daughter’s shoulders tightly. ‘Tell me!’ Annette was at a loss. The day had been ordinary; no crime had been perpetrated either by her or against her as far as she could remember. After the initial panic, the task of explaining that all girls become the monthly brides of Christ fell to Rosaria Tambroni. Women must be adept, she said, at memorising the calendar and preparing themselves. Annette was given a belt and cottons, and her mother, rapidly, and with no small excruciation, explained how to use them.

And that night, in the kitchen, there was a difficult conference. ‘Florio is wrong,’ her mother said to her uncle. ‘It’s going to be too much for us to go on as before. There is no dignity in it. Everything is so public.’ ‘Is it the others?’ asked Marcello. ‘Are they asking personal questions? It’s gossip. They probably want you to talk about you-know-who. They want you to cry on their shoulders.’ There was a long pause in the conversation. ‘No. But things have become complicated. Annette has developed.’ There was another pause, and then a cry of exasperation. ‘Oh how ridiculous this is! She is of an age! Do you understand, Marcello?’ Uncle Marcello chuckled. ‘Ah, such a blessing visits her early.’ He refilled their glasses while Rosaria regained her composure. ‘Anyway, it is my opinion that a frame should be placed around her life so that everything is contained and manageable. She is at risk. She is vulnerable. I think it is our duty. A mother knows what is best for her children.’

Marcello sighed. ‘OK. If it’s what you want, then she will be cultivated no further.’ There was the chink of wine glasses as the agreement was made. ‘Perhaps you are right, Rosa. She is the perfect age. We should arrest her vitality before it has a chance to wilt.’

After you’d taken care of Danny’s flat, and overseen the clearing of salvage from his back yard, you’d spent a few days with your parents. It was March. There was a late fall of snow, and in the fields the first of the lambs rocked against their mothers, red cords trailing from their underbellies. You’d walked over the scratched white moors, raising the peat where you trod. In the farm cottage the three of you had eaten soup for lunch and for dinner. Your mum cut vegetables, skimmed stock, kept busy. At night your father drank steadily, and cried in her arms.

The following week, you went back to the city. Nathan was careful around you, keeping the volume of the television low, speaking softly, standing up and sitting down with a dancer’s grace. It felt as if he had lined the walls of the house with insulation. On the fridge you noticed he had tacked a card with the number of a local support group, as if he imagined you might meet with them on Tuesday and Saturday evenings, and cry it out, then drink thin social tea. At night you dreamt circus dreams, of a man on fire cycling along a dark road. There was a voice,
Wave to Danny, sweetheart, he’s waving back.
When you woke you felt unawake, as if you were simply in another dream.

You tried to return to normal, to some semblance at least of normality. You tried to fight your way back into life. You swam hard against the strong current that wanted to take you the other way. You got up, got dressed, and went to work. You ate, you spoke, you participated, but part of you was gone. The hands pouring milk from the bottle were no longer yours. They felt numb, and when the bottle slipped from your grasp, smashed on the kitchen floor and cut your legs, the red drip-drip seemed inconsequential. That feeling of daily animus, that life-gust, which you had always taken for granted, was simply not there. Your body went about its business, but you were not the driving force. You were still alive. Danny wasn’t. It made no sense.

You had known to expect darkness, of course-the bleak aftermath, the dimming of the world’s light and colour and music. You had known that in the wake of tragedy comes sadness, spiritual adjustment. You’d seen it in Nicki’s family, in their sallowness, their troubled pronouncements, the way they never quite managed to let her go, or find anything else of commensurate importance. They were caught in a long elegy.

The current was so strong. You wanted to go with it. You wanted not to fight against it. Danny had left you behind. He’d gone somewhere deep, where air and sustenance were irrelevant. His corpse was in the fresh, yew-shadowed earth of the cemetery, but you knew this was not his locus. He was out there somewhere, somewhere thick and quiet; you could sense it. The pull, his note, your body’s dissolution: they were all inviting you to follow. And because you loved him, because you had always loved him, you went. You fell into a steep dive. You held your breath, stretched out your arms, and kicked hard after your brother.

You lay in bed with your back to Nathan and your head turned towards the heath, and you thought of that imaginary pyre. Danny, with his river-skin evaporating and his head of smoke. Danny with his mouth and eyes like chimney holes, hot coals packed around his ribs. You wondered what the smell of his burning flesh would be like. Like a slaughterhouse perhaps, with notes of fur and bowel, and intestinal cud, but not frightening, not sickening. There was almost peace in it. Nathan put his hand on your shoulder and turned you gently to him.
Hey, can’t sleep? Do you want me to read to you? Come on, love.
After he had drifted off, you left the bed and switched on the television. You flicked between channels, looking for scenes of violence and trauma and late-night horror.

At the gallery Angela and Tom were thoughtful. They gave you space to mourn, space to dwell in this strange, removed state. When they spoke to you, asking if you would like a coffee or a sandwich, the words arrived muted and echoing, as if spoken underwater. You responded with minimal gestures. A shaken head. A nod. The workload was light. A display of modern folk art was in its last few weeks at the gallery-a series of fairground etchings, barge-ware, treen, and decorated eggs. You sat at the heavy leathered desk, preparing paperwork for the forthcoming European exhibition, mapping the rooms, and drafting text for the labels.
The doll, a life-sized replica of his lover, Alma, was destroyed by the artist after it proved to be a disappointing substitute. The lock of hair, allegedly rescued by…
You typed the words, but your mind was on other things.

When the gallery quietened, you took the phone book out of the drawer and leafed through its membranous pages. Seventeen funeral directors were listed locally. One by one, you dialled their numbers, told them about Danny, and asked for help. In each voice was cool, elegant sympathy. You imagined Restoration blue walls, like the walls of the parlour where you and your parents had made the arrangements for Danny’s burial two weeks earlier. They asked about preferences-cremation, burial, home rest and were met with your silence. The questions were gently repeated. They offered to take your number and call back later, at an appropriate time, when you were feeling better. Still you did not reply. They could not give you what you wanted. You wanted to know his state, how it felt and tasted, how it was to be lost. You could not explain to them that in knowing was companionship. In knowing was finding Danny, somewhere in the brown vastness, asleep. When you gave no suitable answers, they politely hung up. You turned instead to the place where all depraved civilian requests are made and met: the internet.

You waited until Angela and Tom had gone home.
You really don’t mind locking up?
Angela had asked.
Please don’t feel you have to work late. We’re on top of everything.
You told her it was OK. She smiled, pulled on her coat.
Well, we’d better pick up the baby.
Tom lingered for a moment by the front door.
I liked him very much,
he said. The door of Borwood House closed and you locked it behind them. You opened your laptop, went to a search engine and typed in a few choice words. Thousands of links came up. You clicked on one at random, not knowing what to expect. Within seconds the Underworld had opened, and you had crossed the river Styx.

The entries were awful and mesmerising. Behind the densely pixellated doors was every facet of loss and longing, every mortal imagining. There were testimonies about what it was like to die and be brought back again, about sex with angels.
First he fucked me with the spur of his wing. When they come their eyes are like black fire.
There were holocaust museums, skull catacombs, funeral tailors, and fetishes. There were collectors of Nazi death certificates and exhumation jewellery auctions. Graveyard doggers. Cancer insurers. Psychics. Necrophiliacs, who only wanted one last embrace, the kiss of glued-shut lips, a lifted dress. There was autopsy pornography. Auto-strangulation pornography. Transplant donor pornography. There were joint-suicide stories, love murders, re-enactments. You watched a video of someone’s mother dying, and a grainy clip of a man climbing on to a pale, still body on a mortuary table. When his pelvis began moving whoever was videoing said,
Yeah, yeah like that.
There was no way of knowing if it was staged. The film paused a second later, and a window appeared asking you for payment details. With each click, there was death and sex, sex and death, hand in hand, over and over, in beautiful, appalling congress.

You could not stop. You stayed late into the evening, not moving from your seat and ignoring the buzz of your phone, the screen in front of you radiant.

When you left the gallery it was 2 a.m. You set the alarm and locked the door. The heath was dark, but for the row of orange streetlights along the central path. The battery on your phone had died, so you could not return Nathan’s calls, or ask him to meet you. You didn’t want to go back into the gallery to call a taxi. It was cold–the front that had left snow in the north had moved south–and your breath smoked in the night air. By the triangle of shops, a car door slammed, and someone shouted. There was the low rumble of the city in the distance; traffic moving elsewhere, jets up above.

You crossed the road and began walking home. Everything you had seen online began to flicker in your mind–the images, the accounts. The death masks. Live beheading of prisoners. The Victorian portraits of loved ones laced tightly into boots, their hair combed flat, tiny buttons fastened up their necks. The Ripper’s victims: black slashes across their throats, black stitching down their torsos, black cavities in their abdomens.
More the work of a devil than of a man.
You began to walk across the heath. You knew it was stupid and unsafe, but it didn’t matter, it wasn’t important. After a few hundred yards the orange pools of light seemed smaller and more contained within the dark expanse. You stepped off the path and walked across the grass. The ground shone with frost. You were not wearing tights and your legs tingled. You heard yourself breathing, heard the scuff of your shoes. When the illumination of the city began to fade either side, you stopped walking and stood still. It was damp and cold, but you stood there for a long time, until you realised what it was you wanted to see, what it was you had not yet seen.

Danny. Danny’s long, symmetrical form could not be displayed after he had died. It could not be handsomely arranged on the boughs of a bonfire, under the bitter glow of Orion. He could not be exhibited ever again. You would never see a last physical reflection of yourself in him, never take his hand, never kiss his forehead. The familiar markings-scar on his chin, scar on his leg, moles, bitten fingernails-were gone, skimmed off by tyre tread, diced between the axles. He was his remains. He was bits and pieces. He was annihilated, and there was no option available except the gathering up of his body parts by police officers from among the bicycle spokes, the slipping of red lumps into sealed bags-his hand, his scalp-and the hosing down of the tarmac. Your father was informed that body identification was inadvisable, no, it was impossible, so it was done from a neck chain and a ring, his back molars and his ever-empty wallet. Danny’s coffin was closed; it was roomy, providing a sympathetic optical illusion, though it was nowhere near to being filled.