Come Not When I Am Dead (27 page)

I’m lying on a tarpaulin on wet
grass.
 
I’m lying on my side in the
middle of it, curled up like a growing creature, too early in my life to face
the environment.
 
I pull up one
corner of the tarpaulin to cover me, then another and another, until I am
totally covered up, alone and hidden.
 
And then I wake up.
 
I have
been having very bad dreams these last few days.
 

I called Charlie again and again that
night, ashamed of myself, needing to know if what he said was true.
 
I had hit him, not punched him or
slapped him, but that was a violent thing to do.
 
I have never been physically aggressive before,
not like that.
 
I am little and
nasty and that’s what he will be thinking.
 
I hate myself, dirty and base I am.
 
He will hate me.
 
He won’t be
able to forgive me for this, I know he won’t.
 
Everything is ruined.
 
I have lost his respect.
 
And whatever happened in my life, I
always needed his respect but that has gone.
 
And I know that sometimes I wasn’t very
good at it, but I did try to be always lovely with him.
 
I wanted him always to be proud of me
and to know that I would always be kind to him and gentle and good.
 
I wanted it so that when he thought of
me, he thought of me as gentle and little and smiling and kind.
 
But I know he will be hating me now.
 
He’s not answering his phone.
 
He won’t want to speak to me.
 
And I have to know if it’s true about
Frank.
 
And I think it must be
true.
 
And we have killed someone
between us.
 
I have let him down.
 
I have let myself down.
 
I have let Frank down.

I have sent a million texts to
Charlie, but he must have turned his phone off.
 
And so many times I’ve got Frank’s number
up on my phone to call him, but I haven’t.
 
I thought I could look after Charlie but
it’s me that needs looking after, I’m rubbish, everything I do is rubbish.
 
I ruin everything.
 
Everything.
 
And I’m writing this and my face is
lined and worried and my head is hanging down.
 
I am looking at my right hand held out
before me and it’s shaking and my writing is so, so tiny.
 
I have smoked far too many cigars.
 
I cannot breathe.
 
I haven’t left my house.
 
I will not see anyone.
 
I’m frightened Charlie.
 
I am uncomfortably numb.
 
I’m worrying about everything that I’ve
lost, and I’m the only one to blame.
 
I am fully aware now of all that I have
done.
 
I am not nice and no one will
love me.

I’m up on Dartmoor in a bit of a
gale, smoking a cigar and still no word.
 
The dead grass where I am sitting is wagging it’s fingers at me, telling
me I am bad.
 
The ash blows off the
end of my cigar and leaves me to myself and I feel deserted.
 
The pages of my book and the folds of my
skirt are blowing up frantically, trying to leave me because I am horrible, and
yet, no tears stray.
 
I’m in a
whirl, a tangle of wind and wildness and fear and isolation.
 
And the wind is still howling around me
and the night is drawing in and it throws old grass at my face in disgust and
on my hands and the grass tangles itself around my fingers and it won’t let me
go.
 

That night I dreamt that Edlyn my
sparrowhawk was flying bullet-like through the skies and Sergeant, the musket
was clinging on to her back, and she said to him “trust me, it will all be OK”
but the look on his face was terror and worry and he didn’t believe her.

“Jo” I said to her the morning after,
quiet as a mouse “I have hit Charlie” and sleepy-eyed she replied
 
“why?” and I told her that we’d argued
because he said that Frank was my father and I thought he was being nasty and
jealous and spiteful, and I didn’t mean to but my hand reached out for his face
and I wanted to hurt him “but I didn’t slap him or punch him”
“yeah, but you physically hurt him.
 
You were aggressive, that sort of man won’t stand for that.
 
You’ve fucked that up I reckon.”
 
I was silent, I have nothing to say “why
did you get angry with him about Frank being your father?
 
I’ve heard loads of people saying that”
“that Frank’s my father?”
“Yeah, just take it with a pinch of salt.
 
I would.”
 
I couldn’t say to
her
I’ve slept with Toby, my half
brother,
or,
Oh by the way I’ve
committed incest and oh yes, my other lover and I murdered a man between us the
other night
.
 
“You think if you
smile you’ll get away with anything don’t you?” one of the teachers said to me
at school and I probably always did, but never intentionally.

It has been four days and I still
haven’t heard from him.
 
I have gone
from intense worry, sickening worry to anger to despair.
 
“I will always love you” I had said to
him that night “and I will always protect you in any way I can and always look
out for you” and he said nothing back to me, just stroked my head.
 
And now I try and imagine my life
without him in it and I can’t.
 
I
don’t know what to say.

There is a heavy silence in this
house, I feel it’s milkiness all over me, drowning me, and then through it I
hear the clamour, the bash, bash, bash of the waves beyond me “don’t forget”
they say to me.
 
And all at once it is
night again and I still don’t know.

I dreamt last night that I was
building a house, a little child’s igloo sort of a house and I’m inside it,
building it with bricks, up and around me.
 
Keeping me in, imprisoned and alone and cut off from everybody.
 
The walls are going up and up and I
can’t see over them and there is no doorway and I just don’t feel fit to be
with other people.
 
I feel alone and
I don’t belong with them and I don’t want them near me.

When I woke up I went down to the
beach.
 
I am sitting on the rocks
now, my knees tucked up under my chin and my arms wrapped tightly around them,
tighter and tighter, caressing myself.
 
The tide is almost in.
 
There’s a pair of men’s black socks that have been washed up from
somewhere and are five feet away from me.
 
There is a fat man in a wet suit being tossed about in the waves, like a
swollen seal.
 
The sea is
rough.
 
I finish my cigar and toss
it into the open mouth of a ravenous wave and call after it “thank you cigar,
go back to Grandma and Coningsby” and inside my head I hear
what do I do?

“Everything will always be OK dear,
you wait and see” grandma would say to me.
 
I’m tired and I have a head cold, I’m
thick headed and so, so tired, I just don’t know what to do.
 
I am so weary.
 
I would that I could lie here and let
someone look after me.
 
Tired that I
am.
 
Weary that I am.
 
Too many thoughts that I have.
 
Work to be done.
 
The sun has gone in and the sea is grey
and charcoal with the white foam from a mad dog shaken off and spittled on the
surface.
 
I think he’s gone.
 
I think he’s abandoned me.
 
I think he’s gone off and left me.
 
And I said once that my love could
easily turn to hate, and maybe it will, but at the flick of a switch, it could
turn back to love.
 
He wouldn’t just
have gone.
 

Slowly entering my head, thoughts of
what I have to do.
 
He is stupid to
do this to me, stupid as well as cruel, we have killed someone.
 
I have to make it alright.
 
We need to be alright.
 
Ideas straying tentatively into my head,
but I’m not ready yet and out they are pushed.
 
I am not ready yet.
 
But fragments of ideas I am trying to
get a hold of.
 
I will look after
us, and all of a sudden an image of us dark and subdued and broken in court, in
trouble.
 
That can’t happen.
 
That won’t happen.
 
I will get us out of this.
 
And stupid though he is I will look
after him, and careless though he is, he won’t put me in any jeopardy.
 
And kind though I am, gentle though I
am, I will do anything to get us out of this.

I dreamt that night that I lived in a
ramshackle higgeldy piggeldy house with Douglas, Joseph, Gabriel and Jo.
 
Everything was in bad repair and falling
down, but it still somehow managed to stay up.
 
Only just.
 
I was sad and worried in the dream and I
went for a walk along the cliff, and down, far below, I saw dolphins in the
bay.
 
It was so lovely that I
started running back to the house to tell the others, I knew they’d want to see
them too, but before I’d got very far, the dolphins started coming up the cliff
towards me, and it wasn’t just dolphins, it was seals and whales too.
 
They were big and beautiful, soft and
plastic and inflated.
 
They moved on
their tails like feet and they surrounded me, bumping into me, bouncing around
me, suffocating me, knocking me over.
 
Clamouring with each other to knock me down.
 
It was too dangerous, I couldn’t get up,
I was desperate to escape them and I woke up struggling for breath.

I should have nothing to do with anyone.
 
And I feel myself shaking off one skin
and crawling beneath another one.
 
I
am sand tumbling into a new shape after it’s been walked over.
 
I am melted snow turning from ice to
water and I don’t quite feel that I belong.

Will Charlie get in touch with me
before he goes to the police, or before the police find him?
 
I imagine him now shaking and quaking
somewhere on his own, trying to summon up the courage to go to the police, a
slowly rotting corpse in the boot of his car.
 
But it’s the corpse of a bad man,
thoroughly bad, you don’t need to worry about him.
 
If he goes straight to the police, or
they find him, he will blurt out the truth (but leave me out of it), I know he
wouldn’t betray me whatever happens to us.
 
But I expect that they will find out, that I was there too, I think they
always do.
 
I expect.
 
And my mind is drifting off, thinking
(with irony) of my historical admiration of the almighty power of the
police.
 
Rescuing the dogs can’t be
an illegal thing to do, the dogs were probably stolen or illegally bred in the
first place.
 
So, a vet rescuing
them has to be a good thing.
 
I
attacked Mark Davies first and Charlie (in rescuing me) attacked Mark Davies
and killed him.
 
He did use too much
force, of course he did, but what’s done is done.
 
I fainted, that’s a good thing, I wonder
if Doctor’s can do tests to see if someone’s fainted?
 
Because we can say that I fainted when
Davies attacked me (and Davies did obviously attack me) and Charlie ran to my
aid and had to use excessive force because he saw me in a faint and thought I
was dead, so he had to stop a murderer from getting away, from killing again,
from escaping the police, for killing his mistress.
 
That’s bit’s OK.
 
But why did he take the body off?
 
He got scared.
 
He’s been under a lot of pressure and he
didn’t know what to do.
 
And why
didn’t I call the police?
 
I wasn’t
there, Charlie was on his own then.
 
Why didn’t I call the police?
 
Because I was waiting for Charlie to?
 
No.
 
Because I didn’t want to get Charlie into trouble?
 
But why would he be in trouble?
 
Because it would look bad even though it
wasn’t.
 
Oh God.
 
Why did he say he would dump the
body?
 
Why did I let him do
that?
 
It is not just him that is
mad, it is me as well.
 
How
stupid.
 
Why didn’t I say there and
then “no, Charlie, we’ll say he attacked us first and you had to protect
me”.
 
Why didn’t I say that?
 
And why have I only thought about it
now?
 
Days after?
 
Why?
 
I am stupid.
 
I am an idiot.
 
He said he would dump the body and I
said “Where?”
 
Where is our reality?
 
How could either of us be so
stupid?
 
How could our senses have
so left us?
 
This isn’t a good way
to think.
 
It’s happened.
 
It’s no good talking like this now.
 
He went to dump the body, that’s a bad thing,
but I think we can only say that we are peaceful people, we were so terrified
by what had happened that neither of us thought about calling the police.
 
We just didn’t.

Jo hates all the earrings down my
right ear, she can’t bear to see me folding clothes, she hates it that the only
films I like are gangster and war ones and that I like skinhead music, she
doesn’t understand all of that about me.
 
She didn’t see the looks of fury I would give people when they tried to
put me down as a child, and she doesn’t know that feeling when I am so full of
hate that I lose control of my mind and all I see is a wild and thick red mist
and the only thing I understand is that fury.
 
All those things she blocks out because
they don’t fit her image of me, or anybody else’s image of me.
 
I am feeling very sorry for myself, I’m
writing this with stupid tears in my eyes, but, as always, they stay there and
don’t run down my face.

I am pregnant.
 
I write it again, I am pregnant.
 
There is a baby in my belly.
 
I had waited and yearned for this moment
for so long.
 
I wanted this feeling
swirling inside me like a raspberry ripple, like pale pink bubbles floating up inside
my body and sliding out of my mouth.
 
Delicate as honesty.
 
A
carpet rolled out for me, silken and unseen for me to walk upon and grass
growing tall all around me, protecting me, caressing me.
 
But I don’t feel like that now because
it shouldn’t be there.
 
This great
moment that I was looking forward to for so long makes me feel as if I am
injected with something wrong and alien.
 
I feel it now, a speck, a little brown speck deep, deep down inside,
cushioned densely by warm rich blood, deep, out of reach.
 
A fragment of my hideousness growing
inside me out of control.
 
I am
pregnant and a fine line hangs heavy with a fat fish on a thin wire hook, gaudy
and indelicate.
 
“Don’t say pregnant
dear” said grandma
“what should I say then?”
“With-child” she said and I laughed.
“I am with-child grandma” I whisper to the unreal blue sky.
 
And I didn’t want it to be like this and
at the back of my head is a rat nibbling through wood.
 
There is a bird singing above my head
now, an incredibly brilliant, complicated trilling song and I can’t see what it
is, and I can’t recognise the song.
 
The sky is a ridiculous and unreal blue,
unbroken by clouds, it’s not nice.
 
And Charlie?
 
He drifts away
like the bee humming past me. And inside me, mixed with this beautiful feeling
of tenderness and potential life, is this awful, awful dread.
 
I feel like sinking to my knees and
vomiting.
 
I need to be punished
because I am bad.
 
And now two
sparrows hop on the branch above me and ‘tweet tweet’ together, a language I
can not understand.
 
I drag myself
up and walk into the sitting room “I am with-child” I say to Jo
“With-child?
 
Do you mean up the
duff?”
“I mean pregnant”
“who the fuck with?”
“Toby.”
“Fucking hell.
 
Toby?
 
Toby who could be your half-brother?”
“The very same”
“have you heard from Charlie?”
“No”
“what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know”
“you’re going to have to get rid of it, you don’t want a three legged child
running around the place do you?”
“No.”
“I’m a conundrum” Charlie once said to me
“you’re a fucking cock” I said back to him and that’s what I think he is now, a
fucking cock for leaving me like this.
 
For ignoring me.
 
But it is
my
fault.
 
And everything feels like a lie.
 
And here am I left lonely and broken and
pregnant, and somewhere else is Charlie.
 
Where are you Charlie?
 
Where
are you my dear and lovely darling.

‘I need to talk to you.
 
I’m pregnant’ I text to Toby and we will
see.