Seeing Stars (4 page)

The arthritis in Kevin’s shoulder had been bothering him

of late, and the prospect of revitalising his tired and aching

joints was tantalising to say the least. Imagine crusading

once again through the unconquered landscapes of early

manhood, knowing what he knew now. But what about

Annie, the woman he loved, the
only
woman he’d loved in

his whole life? Could he really go swanning around with a

young man’s intentions and a fashionable T-shirt while she

slipped away towards undignified infirmity and toothless

old age? How cowardly, to let her walk death’s shadowy

footpath alone, thus betraying his every promise to her,

thus breaking every vow. And an image formed in his

mind—Annie with ghostly hair and faraway eyes, cradling

him in her limp, skinny arms, roses in a vase on the bedside

table next to the tissues and ventilator, his flawless cheek

against her grey cotton gown, his tiny mouth moving

hungrily towards her sunken breast. “I won’t do it.

Because of my Annie,” said Kevin, emphatically. The elf

said, “Kevin, you’re a gentleman, and God knows there

aren’t many of them around. And your Annie, she’s one in

a million.” He wiped a few crumbs of crispbread from the

corner of his mouth and added, “No two ways about it, had

the pleasure of breakfasting with her just a few months ago.

A stunning, captivating woman. And looking younger

every day.” Then with a shuffle of his silver slippers on the

hardwood floor, he was gone.

I hadn’t meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins

but he can be very persuasive. “Do you believe in God?”

he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. He said, “Right, so get

in the car.” We cruised around the cemetery with the

headlights off. “Here we go,” he said, pointing to a plot

edged with clean, almost luminous white stone. I said,

“Doesn’t it look sort of …” “Sort of what?” “Sort of

fresh?” I said. “Pass me the shovel,” he said. Then he

threw a square of canvas over the headstone, saying,

“Don’t read it. It makes it personal.” He did all the

digging, holding the torch in his mouth as he chopped and

sliced at the dirt around his feet. “What the hell are you

doing?” he shouted from somewhere down in the soil.

“Eating a sandwich,” I said. “Bacon and avocado. Want

one?” “For Christ sake, Terry, this is a serious business,

not the bloody church picnic,” he said, as a shower of dirt

came arcing over his shoulder.

After about half an hour of toil I heard the sound of metal

on wood. “Bingo,” he said. Then a moment or two later,

“Oh, you’re not going to like this, Terry.” “What?” I said,

peering over the edge. Richard Dawkins’s eyes were about

level with my toes. “It’s quite small,” he said. He

uncovered the outline of the coffin lid with his boot. It was

barely more than a yard long and a couple of feet wide. I

felt the bacon and avocado disagreeing with one another.

“Do you believe in God?” he said. I shrugged my

shoulders. “Pass me the jemmy,” he said. The lid

splintered around the nail heads; beneath the varnish the

coffin was nothing but cheap chipboard. The day I found

little Harry in the bath, one eye was closed and the other

definitely wasn’t. Flying fish can’t really fly. With both

feet on the crowbar Richard Dawkins bounced up and

down until the coffin popped open. But lying still and snug

in the blue satin of the upholstered interior was a goose. A

Canada Goose, I think, the ones with the white chinstrap,

though it was hard to be certain because its throat had been

cut and its rubber-looking feet were tied together with

gardening twine. Richard Dawkins leaned back against the

wall of the grave and shook his head. With a philosophical

note in my voice I said, “What did you come here for,

Richard Dawkins?” He said, “Watches, jewellery, cash. A

christening cup, maybe. What about you?” “I thought it

might give me something to write about,” I replied. “Well,

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, we’ve got a murdered goose

in a child’s coffin in the middle of the night, and mud on

our boots. How would you finish this one?” he said. I

looked around, trying to think of a way out of this big ugly

mess. Then I said, “I’ve got it. What if we see the vicar

over there, under the yew tree, looking at us? He stares at

us and we stare back, but after a while we realise it isn’t

the vicar at all. It’s a fox. You know, with the white bib

of fur around its neck, which we thought was a collar. A

silent, man-size fox in a dark frockcoat and long black

gloves, standing up on his hind legs, watching.”

A small, heavy man stuck his perfectly bald head

through the open door of Bastian’s barber’s shop and

said, “Do I need an appointment or can you squeeze

me in?” Trade had been brisk that morning and

Bastian had only just put his feet up to read the paper.

“Er, take a seat,” said Bastian. The man threw his

jacket onto the hat stand and jumped in the chair.

“What can I do you for?” asked Bastian. His bald

head was as pink as a pig. It was also a mirrorball set

with a hundred glistening beads of sweat. “You can

get this fringe out of my eyes for a start,” said the

man. “It’s like trekking through Borneo!” Bastian

giggled nervously. “Something funny?” the man said.

“No, nothing, just a tickly cough,” said Bastian. He

produced his scissors from the pouch pocket of his

apron and made a few tentative snips at the fresh air

in front of the man’s eyes. “Better already,” said the

man. “And take some off the top and around the ears,

will you?” Bastian embarked on a slow orbit of the

man’s naked cranium, darting in and out with the

scissors, even dusting a few imaginary hairs off his

shoulders with the brush. “So good, so good,” the

man muttered, then, “Didn’t realise how out of hand it

had got till I caught sight of myself in the butcher’s

window this morning. Said to myself—now there’s

a head in need of a haircut.” Bastian was getting the

hang of it now, warming to the task. “What about

the ponytail?” he asked. “Yeah, fuck it, why not,”

said the man after hesitating a moment. With his

biggest, shiniest scissors Bastian ceremonially lopped

off the nonexistent twist of hair from behind the

man’s head then held it up for inspection between his

finger and thumb. “Excuse me for being bold, sir, but

might I suggest a complete shave? Extreme, I know,

but very cleansing in this sultry autumn heat, and

increasingly popular with some of my younger

clientele.” The man, who was fifty if he was a day,

said, “Even with men as young as me?” “It seems to

be the fashionable choice, sir,” said Bastian. “Do it,”

said the man. He gripped the metal arms of the chair

as Bastian buzzed around him with the electric

clippers then finished the job with the cutthroat razor,

the stropped blade passing deliriously close to the

scalp. “It’s a revelation,” the customer proclaimed

upon opening his eyes, and for a minute or so he sat

there like a chimp with a mirror, dabbing his nude

skull with astonished fingers, genuine in his disbelief.

Then he paid Bastian with pretend money and set off

down the street whistling a happy song.

By the time he came to lock the door and put the

CLOSED
sign in the window later that evening,

Bastian had forgotten the hairless customer. But after

sweeping the linoleum and shaking the curls and

locks of a day’s work into the dustbin in the

alleyway, he was dumbfounded to notice a long,

golden ponytail tied neatly with twine, then to find

nails and thorns, and also what looked like teeth,

and the suggestion of a small black moustache.

He got up and went for a walk. It was 4 o’clock in the

morning. There was no one around except for a drunk

sleeping it off in the doorway of Vidal Sassoon. Then an

orange came rolling towards Ricky down Albion Street.

It trundled in his direction before clipping a kerbstone and

jumping straight into his hands. The orange was dusty and

slightly misshapen from its journey, but after a quick polish

with his cravat and a bit of moulding in his hands, the fruit

was restored. He stared at it under the glow of the

streetlamps. It looked very appealing indeed. In fact at

that second Ricky was seized with the overpowering notion

that all his bodily cravings could be satisfied by the

quenching juice and zesty pulp of that ample citrus fruit

sitting in his palm, so without hesitation he plunged his

thumbnail into the pithy skin and squeezed its entire

contents down his throat. It was then that he heard

footsteps. He slipped the mashed-up orange into his jacket

pocket and looked ahead. A small girl in bare feet came

running up to him. She was wearing a torn, grey pinafore

dress and a dirty white blouse. She couldn’t have been

more than eight or nine, and was clearly distressed. “Sir,

have you seen an orange heading this way?” “No,” lied

Ricky, licking the tangy residue from his lips. Her

shoulders dropped. She said, “They say my father is an

illegal immigrant and tomorrow they will deport him to

Albania. I went to Armley Prison tonight for one last hug

but they turned me away. I stood outside the prison walls

and shouted his name. Through the bars of his cell he blew

me a final kiss and threw me an orange. But I stumbled on

the sloping streets of this steep city and my orange has

disappeared in the night.” Obviously she had a heavy

Albanian accent, almost unintelligible in fact, and for the

sake of comprehension her remarks are paraphrased here.

She fell to her knees and sobbed. “What colour was it?”

Ricky asked. At school, humour would often mitigate his

wrongdoings. “I wanted to eat every morsel of that orange,

even the skin. Its juice was my father’s blood and the flesh

was his spirit,” said the girl. “Why don’t I help you search

for it?” Ricky offered. The girl looked up at Ricky with a

face like a silver coin at the bottom of a deep well caught

by the momentary glimmer of a footman’s lantern. “No

one can replace my father,” she said, “but maybe one day

someone will find it in their heart to care for me. A kind

and honourable man. Someone like yourself.” A perfectly

spherical tear trembled on her eyelash, and there was

nothing Ricky could do to stop his hand from wiping that

tear away, as if all humanity were pulling on a puppet

string connected to his wrist. As his sticky hand neared her

face, her nostrils flared at the scent of the orange. Then her

eyes widened as she saw the fleshy strands of fruit clinging

to his fingers and thumb. She said, “Sir, was that my

orange?” Ricky knew there was a great deal riding on his

answer. It was like chaos theory: the wrong word here and

the tremor would be felt all across Europe. Quick as a flash

he produced the mangled fruit from his pocket. “This?” he

said. “Do you mean this? Oh, no, no, no. In England we

call these apples. This is an apple. Try saying it after me.

Apple. Apple.”

Boris was sitting in a field of bullocks above the

house where he’d lived as a boy, trying to be a

writer. There were many wild flowers waiting

patiently to be described. But every time his pen

made contact with the paper his hand skidded and

jumped. Boris had to wonder about the spasms;

were they the onset of epilepsy or some terrible

motor-function illness? Or variant CJD perhaps—

he’d certainly eaten a lot of dubious meat dishes in

his younger years, including a cow’s brain and also

a cow’s heart, though not at the same meal.

However, this sudden loss of muscle control wasn’t

in any way unpleasant, in fact it felt a bit trippy, and

after a time he gave up fighting it and let the pen

wander at will. And although arbitrary, the peaks

and troughs it produced had a confidence about

them, something you couldn’t argue with, like a

cross-section of the Alps or a graph of Romany

populations over the centuries. Eventually Boris

found himself quite detached from his notepad,

gazing down at the small end-terrace, at the frosted

window of the bathroom where his handsome father

had handed him his first disposable razor. “The

knack,” said his father, “is to …” But his advice on

shaving was drowned out by the siren which blared

from the roof of the village fire station, and the old

man bolted from the house, racing along the road on

his bicycle, jumping from bike to fire engine like a

bareback rider switching horses at the circus,

heading for the mushroom of black smoke

mushrooming over a distant town. And there he

entered the Inferno. Boris put his hand to his throat.

The flowers were still waiting. Then James Tate, a

poet much admired in America, went by in an

autogyro, flicking Boris the V-sign.
North
America,

I should say, though for all I know he might be the

toast of Tierra del Fuego, and a household name in

Bogotá.