Luck (11 page)

To look at Phil is why Sophie is here.

“I am sorry,” says this chubby, blue-eyed, professional observer of grief, “for your loss. It must be a shock. And for the widow. An unhappy business but, as I’ve said, I’m here to make it easier, at least in the most practical ways.” This sounds less unctuous face to face than it did over the phone. “Anything I can do.”

She thrusts the gym bag and Nora’s note into his hands. Sink or swim. “There
is
something you can do, as a matter of fact. I want to see him.”

He steps back. Looks at his watch. “If you come back late this afternoon, that should be possible. If you’ve decided to hold a visitation after all, I expect we could be prepared by then.”

“No. I mean now.”

His mouth loops into a downturn of distress. “I beg your pardon? Do you mean you want to
see
him now? Oh, but I’m afraid, no, he isn’t prepared, not by any means. In a few
hours, but now, no.” This must be a hard line of work. Although he chose it, and why would a person decide to make a living moulding cold stony flesh? In times and places of disease and starvation and violent hatred, there are acknowledgements of griefs, yes, but not so much in the way of elaborately manufactured arrangement of feature and limb. There are brief, desperate, profound obeisances to mortality and that’s it. Less than that, even, in times and places of slaughter. This man is lucky, whether he knows it or not. Probably not. People don’t.

“Now,” Sophie repeats. She thinks if he were as adamant as he sounds, or as adamant as she is, his mouth would not look distressed.

“I’m so sorry, but he’s not even in an area open to the public.” As if that is the most compelling argument he can make. Do mourners, or just people with secrets, never make odd demands? Do they, for instance, not sometimes express a desire to regard the dead as they are, not as they could be once made false and presentable?

On the other hand, if his profession is death, it must also be life. The lives, specifically, of the bereaved, most of whom likely do require protection from the most raw and bare aspects of their bereavements.

Which has nothing to do with Sophie.

Still, she is disarmed by appearance: that he is not what she expected. This Hendrik Anderson could belong to any glad-handing service club in the town—and is there a code of ethics for people who run funeral homes, to do with the privacies and indiscretions of mourners? Otherwise how irresistible to whisper tales of not only the non-wife’s unusual role in arranging proceedings and delivering clothes, but also of the same non-wife’s tasteless and unnatural insistence on
viewing the unprepared body. Even if he only told a couple of people, word would spread like Ebola, mutating freakishly along the way. That’s how things work here.

Well, anywhere, really. And does Sophie care? Not much. If she needs to, she will barge through the place, banging into one room after another in undignified, inflammatory search of Phil, with a flustered Hendrik Anderson skittering along at her heels. Of course, she would prefer not to do that. “Please,” she says. “I realize it’s unusual but honestly, dead bodies don’t shock me.” Well, he’ll wonder and speculate about
that
, won’t he? “I won’t be upset, and I won’t tell a soul. It’s a great favour, I know, but please. Trust me.”

Trust her? Why on earth would he? She touches his arm. She intends to look, not begging exactly, but plaintive and sad and also respectably in control of herself. A woman seeking one small morsel of help which only he can deliver. “Really,” he says, “you don’t know the state of things at the moment.” He frowns, but it’s hard for a man peering upwards to appear forbidding to Sophie. “I’m sorry to put it so bluntly but it’s not nice, a body that’s been examined but hasn’t yet been prepared.”

No doubt. “I can imagine,” she says, although she can’t, quite. “I know,” although she does not. “I can take that into account.”

“After, frankly, you understand, an autopsy?” He’s spelling it out and watching her closely, as if he supposes it possible to read fortitude or ghoulishness or cheap curiosity in expressions and eyes. Or he’s challenging her; and it’s true, the word
autopsy
is daunting.

“I’m very sure.” She makes her eyes large. “I understand your concerns, but please believe me, I will manage perfectly well, and you’d be doing such a good deed.” Her hand tightens
slightly on his arm. These impure, necessary tricks—what others does she still have? Phil didn’t need tricks, only lies.

She can see a shift occurring, there’s a small loosening of muscle in the arm she is touching, a clearing of eyes, a relaxation of mouth. Hendrik Anderson sighs. “Well, it’s against every rule, and I think extremely unwise, but … I am aware that you have experience in some of the harsher aspects of death.” She should have known—people do hear the histories, however garbled, of other people in this town. “And I understand how things left up in the air can be the worst part of death, in a way, in the long run.” What does he imagine has been
left up in the air?
Never mind. At least he’s familiar with the debris that bobs along behind death, its sharp bits sticking up into the living, refusing to sink. He sighs again, lifts his hands, lets them fall. “Follow me, then.”

Caught up in her ardent intentions, she lost track of actual meanings. This has happened to her before. Now she hears
autopsy
again, and is frightened. Phil will not be Phil. There’s that difference again between knowing abstractly and realizing. Next will come seeing.

She is different now, though. For one thing, she is no longer addicted to virtue, obsessed about the goodness of each tiny act—at least she hopes she has broken out of that trap, with thanks to Phil for the large last step in the process. It’s the powerful kind of thing that starts young and sneaks up, though, and who knows how thoroughly it’s been threshed and ploughed under? It may have only been biding its time for a vulnerable moment.

How does this happen, how much is nature, how much nurture? Eventually, what does it matter?

A childish aversion to pain begins with picking stranded snails from sidewalks and lifting toads from the paths of
lawnmowers. How eccentrically sweet, and hardly unusual: there is potential for pain, and one can act to prevent it, what could be more straightforward?

A child’s logic is blunt and untwisted.

The tendency then blooms at the dinner table as youthful ears take gravely to heart stories brought home by parents who are, as it happens, partners in a legal firm specializing in immigration and refugee law. Their conversations add wraiths to the table in the form of mysterious hard-working men with false papers, women tortured in ways so unspeakable they can only be specified by grim tone, not detail, and blank-eyed, or sad-eyed, scary children—all needing rescue, all needing Sophie’s mother or father to speak for them against the disbelief of immigration officials and refugee boards holding tight to the view that people must contrive these stories for shady purposes, that such lives could not be entirely true because if they were, what sort of world was this and what sort of person could bear not only being alive in it but making these life-and-death judgments?

Sometimes, too, the stories were not true; a fact that caused its own troubles.

How are parents to know which random gesture or unconsidered comment or fierce interest of their own can knock a child silly? How were Sophie’s to know she was locking like a laser on to their dinnertime conversations while her eyes skipped right over their many indulgences: big house, large lawns, fresh flowers, real china, genuine crystal glasses? How were they to know that rather than the moderately well-behaved and respectably kind-hearted person they intended, they were raising a zealot?

“We’re so lucky,” her mother said, and Sophie certainly saw this was true. Her father was uninjured, her mother
untortured, she herself had personally witnessed no particular sorrows, and also possessed everything she could want. Whereas misfortunes great and small were on display at the refugee centres and multicultural agencies patrolled by her parents, sometimes with Sophie in tow. How brightly those places were lit by fluorescence, how clean they were despite chipped paint and bare floors, how bustling with very busy people counselling, organizing language classes and medical treatment, filling out forms. In contrast how worn out the clients, even other kids, often looked; as if the strength and courage they’d used to get to those brightly lit places now had to stay focused on simply stopping them falling down onto those floors.

What a lesson in good luck and bad luck: Sophie’s good, theirs bad; although in the future, with the help of all their good helpers, their luck would possibly be good also. Meanwhile—meanwhile, what? Meanwhile she might—more of the inexorable logic of the child—ease, even fend off, misfortune with sacrifice.

Which meant a deeply desired and most fashionable doll went, within a week of her seventh birthday, to a baffled child at the refugee centre, who received it from Sophie’s reluctant, determined hands as warily as if its blonde curls might be explosive. Clothes, too, even favoured outfits—especially favoured outfits—off they went to donation boxes at the cultural centre. Just because among the many luxuries of Sophie’s family was the very real one that they had enough to give away. And that some form, however small and hard, of balancing things out might prevent a reversal, an upside-downing of events that could put her in their place, and so she gave and gave, more and more frantically: clothes, toys, games, pity. What insanity! Did nobody notice?

“You’re an awfully good kid,” said her father. “We’re really proud of you.” He and her mother must have considered her blissfully untroublesome, a miracle of good fortune.

Sophie’s secret was in the guilty, momentary hesitation, the persistent, sly sentence in the back of her head:
But I like that, I want it, I don’t want to give it away
, diluting, if not actually nullifying, her intentions. Selfishness was bad. She could never quite catch up to genuine generosity, the kind that appeared spontaneously and flowed without resistance like honey.

In high school she joined and eventually ran the club that organized food and clothing drives for the poor of the city. So much macaroni and peanut butter! She herself took cans of asparagus tips from her parents’ shelves, and added bags of expensive, weighty, nutritionally balanced breakfast cereals. Why should the poor have to eat dreary or unhealthy, sugary foods? Equally, why did she deserve them more than anyone else? Not that she would go without; her parents simply bought more. Was that cheating?

She was red-haired and lissome and clever and kind—how could she not be popular, well liked? So she set out contrary-wise to cultivate outcasts, befriending not so much those who were eccentric but the dull or unpleasant. Often enough they were outcasts for a reason; bad hygiene, say, or stupidity. They could make dull company and Sophie was depressed, if not discouraged, for most of her high-school years. And, too, that sardonic, unkind voice in the back of her head kept piping up, silently complaining,
For heaven’s sake, take a shower! Wash your hair! Read a book!

When she took her huge, confused, compulsive heart to university, it was to study political economics. In place of the step-by-step, case-by-case benevolences of her parents, and for that matter herself, she had a new, easier, more sweeping
aim: to help repair the world’s economies, and therefore its politics, and thus its problems of violence, poverty, hatred and suffering; possibly poor hygiene and stupidity also.

Another mad goal.

Not such a lonely one, though, but one miraculously shared—what were the odds?—by slim and fervent, dark-haired and electric Nick, who also wanted to turn the world over.

Of course they found each other.

Nick said, raising his head from between Sophie’s thighs—another happy revelation, oh, yes!—that it was just her sort of marginal do-gooding and patronizing, prideful sacrifice of overflowing possessions that “lets war and suffering go on and on. People like you just put on bandages, you won’t rip them off. You don’t do anything about real wounds, all you do is cover them up.” He could be awfully eloquent in that unlikely position, he was frequently, if intermittently, at his speech-making, rabble-rousing best down there.

“I do not,” she protested. He had no idea; how could she explain herself to him, much less prove herself? “I do so want to help.”

“Exactly,” he replied, satisfied.

As was she.

“Talk’s cheap,” he said when they were upright. Her sofa was as worn as any newcomer refugee’s, her secondhand Arborite-topped kitchen table as pathetically servile. They ate beans on toast and drank cheap red wine and were gratified by these tinges of volunteer poverty. Too, there was sometimes an element of tender self-regard in their love-making. At least there was when it wasn’t accusatory or challenging. “It’s arrogant to dip in and out of people’s lives giving a little nod here and there to what they need once they’re here. How about
taking a look at origins, how about helping them get the power to change their own lives in their own countries in their own ways?”

What if she didn’t like
their own ways?
What if
their own ways
happened to be vicious and brutal?

Never mind.

They went on, she and Nick, to postgraduate work since as he said, they would need unassailable credentials for their revolutionary future. That further long period of study felt like time bought, or maybe stolen, but of course the day had to come when he put his hands on her shoulders, his head tilted back slightly so he could look her in the eyes, and said, “Okay, what do you think about this?”

His proposal sounded brilliant. She was suitably thrilled.

“We’ll sign up for two years. We’ll get a good look at the real thing, we’ll do on-the-ground, flat-out, stay-alive stuff while we see for ourselves and make contacts and get an idea how basic systems need to be fixed. It’s just a couple of years, for a grounding. Then we can start our real work.”