Chapter One
Christian Tassin closed his eyes and inhaled. The mustiness of the church filled his head; ripe pages of old hymnals, wood, candles, perfume, damp, even a hint of incense.
This was the scent of redemption, forgiveness and peace.
It was cold too. It was impossible to heat such places. Maybe that was the way it was meant to be – a part of the penance. Maybe Hell, too, was cold, too cold to sleep, to relax, to take your mind off your sins. If it was warm here, there would be a temptation to sleep while the priest droned on. Eventually, he would become a part of that background noise, the sniffs, the coughs, the shuffle of feet, which took you like a blanket as you teetered on the edge of sleep.
That was the most perfect place to be. He remembered as a child, having an earache and laying his head upon the kitchen table, resting on a towel his mother had warmed for him.
In the background, he could hear her as she carried out her chores to the sound of the radio. He could feel the heat from the oven and the big cast iron radiator behind the table. As the pain subsided and he drifted away, the sounds mingled, became safety and comfort, a place of utter delight.
Hell was the deprivation of this state.
Yet nobody here was in Hell. Nobody came here as sinner or saint. They came by invitation, because they ought to or because they wanted to, some, maybe, because they needed to. The cold was just cold, to be expected in these underfunded bunkers.
Tassin scanned the faces. He knew no one. It didn’t matter; he didn’t really want to know anyone. What would one say at such an event? Do you come here often? Isn’t it sad? Long time, no see? What are you up to these days? If he saw a vaguely familiar face, his first instinct would be to duck down in the pew, drop to his knees and fake prayer, anything to avoid the compulsion to talk that came with confinement.
What surprised him was how many people knew the deceased. The man with whom he had shared the occasional drink for thirty years knew all these people and yet he knew not one of them.
That was a relief, but it was odd to think that the dead man had had a life outside the life Tassin knew. What did he expect? That people switched off as soon as he left them, that, like some computer program, they didn’t exist until his presence forced breath into their lungs and sparked their synapses into life?
Part of him felt a little jealous. It was as if his lover had been seeing all these people behind his back. She had shared her most intimate self with others while pretending that it was only he who entered her soul. He had thought he was enough for her, that he fulfilled her. What need was there to break the circle? Surely it was enough to have what they did. It was for him.
He didn’t want anything to do with these others, of course, but he had always thought that when he and his friend (for that is what he had been) sat at the table with empty glasses between them, putting the world back onto an even keel, that it was just them, that this only happened when they came together on a Friday night at the working men’s club.
He felt betrayed and had the urge to walk out. He wanted to shout, ‘Have him if you want him. I reject him and you. I’ll find another. There’s always another’.
His foot touched the nave, ready to flee, but he pulled it back and crossed his legs.
These people weren’t there on those Friday nights. No matter what claims they may have had on his dear, dead friend, they were not there on those Friday nights and were not part of that world. They were the dead ones. Without him, they did not exist. And who knows what they talked about? Certainly not changing the world. The cost of staples, perhaps, the next race at Ascot, the colour of the curtains in the lounge, wallpaper, how well their children were doing at school, cereals, the supermarket; they stretched out their hands and touched infinite dullness.
Thank God he wasn’t part of them. He preferred isolation. To mix with them would bring obligation. He would have to sit and listen to them fill the air with grey mutterings. In the end, he would loathe them. It was always that way. It ended in misery whichever way you turned. Either you ended up despairing of their presence or swallowing a soup of relief and loss at their funeral.
Yet, it was the only way that he could stay alive. When he loved, he had to love to the extreme; he had to be euphoric, sick with the feeling. When he loathed, he had to loathe with the intensity of love. He could not settle for the dreary in-between. He may as well measure for his own grave.
And the man they were burying today? He would be interested to know his name. He had spent many hours over many years with the fellow, tapping dominoes and sliding cards, building their philosophy of the world. They had talked and drank. They had shared the headlines, the truths and lies, hopes and fears, had seen the rise of the new Nazism and the revival of Communism, the shift from left to right and back again. They had battled commercialism, consumerism and the height of conifers, the right to light and lighting up times. They had removed fast food from the streets and sent it packing with the litter that infected and scarred the landscape like acne.
He looked towards the door. People filtered in, some in pairs, some singly; all crept on velvet feet and searched for familiar faces or empty pews where they could stake their claim and mourn in secret isolation.
He wondered if there was a list of events for that day in the vestibule; morning worship, coffee morning held by Mrs Vanhoose to raise money for the local dog rescue charity, knitting circle, font-cleaning club. There may be one for this event. Surely, this had to be the gathering of the day. Cake baking and crochet couldn’t possibly come close to this.
He bobbed uncertainly in his seat. If he got up now, he would draw attention to himself. Suppose he got halfway to the porch and the coffin turned up? Should he scurry back to his seat or boldly carry on past the coffin to find out the name of its occupant? Would someone take his seat? Was it like a nightclub? Once you stepped across the threshold, were you allowed back in?
He decided to go. He removed his coat and put it behind him on the pew, then stepped as assuredly as he dared into the public gaze. He took certain steps, confident that if he looked purposeful, then he would be less likely to attract attention.
As it was, no one cared. Eyes drifted over him and moved on.
The porch lay in the dreadful half-light of late autumn. Golden leaves lay like beached fish upon the worn bristled mat in a pâté of mud. Beyond the porch, rain fell in a fine mist and oiled the polished flagstones. It was the kind of rain that lay on glasses and windscreens and windows and failed to roll away.
There was indeed a list of the day’s events. There was also a coffee club and a knitting circle. Half way through the morning was the service.
‘Well,’ said Tassin. ‘I’ll be.’
He made his way back to his seat, put his coat back on and sat down.
Behind him, someone blew their nose extraordinarily loudly. Tassin thought that a repeat performance may lead to some sort of haemorrhage and excitement among the pews.
The priest appeared at the door and bade them all stand.
*
Tassin unscrewed the lid from the bottle and poured himself a large glass of red wine. He immediately drank half of it and refilled the glass. He would regret it, he knew; red wine gave him a headache, but it also took the edge off quicker. There was always a compromise. He would go to bed with a headache.
After one more large mouthful, he set the glass down and rooted through his cupboard for food.
He didn’t much care for the stuff. He ate to live and didn’t quite understand those who lived to eat. He was like a rat. There was no pleasure in food for him. He doubted that a rat ever reasoned about its food. That was why they could be poisoned so easily. A rat scurried about, sometimes randomly, sometimes visiting old haunts where they had successfully found food before, but there was no pleasure in their success, merely the promise of further existence.
Tins stared down at him. Some were dusty, some without labels (bought cheap and with little hope at a local pound store), some, probably, collectors’ items. There was an open packet of cereal next to them. He had fallen for that before. It was all but empty, just the sandy remains left in the bag.
This was the one good thing about having a partner. When Ellie Trees had been here, he hadn’t had to go through the burden of preparing food. Each day she presented him with something and he ate it, with no more thought than the rat gave to the discarded chip at the back door of the fish and chip shop. Better still, he didn’t have to go looking for it.
He made the right noises, of course. ‘Oh, that was wonderful. Thank you, my dear’. It was the same as after sex or after a cup of tea or after a walk along the river.
It worked for a while at least. Then she noticed that, even though he had used the same words since she had known him, now they were said without feeling. They exchanged words out of politeness, out of convention. They were flat, meaningless rote. The same note played on the same line in two-two time.
He went to another cupboard and opened the door. He was running out of patience. If he didn’t find something soon, he would give up the idea of food. He would sit blindly in front of the TV and chew his wine thoroughly.
He heard the door to his flat open.
‘Pete?’
‘Who else?’
‘Who knows? You want some wine?’
Pete shook his head. ‘No. Later maybe. How was the day?’
‘Shit.’
‘Then why did you go?’
‘For the experience. To stretch myself. It didn’t have to be a funeral. It could have been a packed cinema, overflowing with the scent of body odour mingled with popcorn and cheap perfume. It could have been a bus in rush hour, full of hacking, disease-ridden zombies, the windows so steamed up that I couldn’t even escape with my eyes.’ He gave up on the food and flopped down on his threadbare sofa, feet upon his well-patinaed coffee-table. ‘What difference does it make?’
‘The difference is that it was a funeral.’ Pete sat down in an equally ropey chair. ‘Bit of a treat for you really. All that shared misery. Did you find out his name?’
Tassin nodded. ‘I did. And, I tell you, I wouldn’t have guessed it in a hundred years. I sat opposite this man almost every Friday night, never even considered the fact that he had a name, never mind what it would be, but now I know, I’m surprised.’
‘What was it?’
‘Want to take a guess?’
‘Jacqueline? No, I don’t want to take a guess. Tell me.’
‘Jacqueline would have been less of a surprise, I think. And clearly easier to guess. Vernon. His name was Vernon. Can you believe that?’
Pete crossed his legs. ‘That’s really not so unusual.’
‘Really? I might have said Arthur. Or Henry. Or Jimmy. Yes, Jimmy would have suited him. But, he did not look like a Vernon.’ Tassin drained his wine and put the glass down on the table.
As if on cue, Pete got up and poured himself a glass of wine. ‘Vernon what?’
Tassin crossed his arms. ‘Price. Vernon Price. Can you believe that? Vernon Price. I knew a man called Vernon Price for all those Fridays and yet I had no idea who he was.’
‘That’s a lot of Fridays.’
‘It is,’ said Tassin emphatically. ‘How many would that be? If you take an average of fifty-two a year and times that by...’ He lit a cigarette. ‘What? Thirty years?’
Pete nodded. ‘Roughly.’
Tassin leaned across to a sideboard and grabbed a pen and a stray piece of paper. ‘Fifty-two times thirty is...’ He played with the figures on the scrap paper. ‘One thousand, five hundred and sixty. Is that all? One thousand, five hundred and sixty? That’s it? I thought it would be more.’
‘It’s still a lot of Fridays.’
‘It is.’
‘You’ll miss him.’
Tassin shook his head. ‘There’s another fellow there. Took over from him the week after he died. You believe that? Just slotted into his place as if he’d been there forever. You know what he did? He bought two beers, came over to the table, winked at me and dealt the dominoes. I swear, the chair was still warm.’
‘What did you do?’
‘What could I do? I drank the beer and played dominoes. He seems like a nice man.’
‘Does he have a name?’
‘I’m sure, but I don’t want to know it. Not yet. We haven’t built up that closeness that Vernon and I had.’
‘Give it time.’
Tassin got up and went back to the food cupboard. ‘That’s what I thought. You want something to eat?’
‘Do you have any pilchards?’
Tassin moved a few tins about. ‘No. There’s a tin of mackerel and one of anchovies. Any good?’
‘No. I’ll finish my wine and go. I just wanted to see how the day went.’
‘It was shit.’
*
For breakfast the next morning, Tassin had a tin of custard. It was the good stuff, so the sugar and the creaminess were welcome; it helped damp down the acid from the red wine of the previous night.
He wondered if he should do without the wine for a few days. He was afraid of addiction.
After the custard, he lit a cigarette and finished his coffee. He looked at the news and as he did so and felt repulsed by the world. He washed his cup and spoon and looked out of the window. It drizzled. That was all it seemed to do lately. Why didn’t it just rain? Whump! All at once and get it over with, drown the world, then move aside for the sun for a while, then rain again. This constant drizzle ate away at a man’s soul.
He belched then rubbed at the area beneath his ribs as a pain punched him in the side. He decided that he would not forgo the wine. It was his reward at the end of the day.
He put his jacket on, switched the TV off, closed the door and left the flat in mourning. He imagined it would pine for him like a dog until his return, a dog he hated, that he would gladly have thrown under a bus had it not been for the fact that he was afraid to be alone.
He lit another cigarette and let it hang from the corner of his mouth as he walked to the bus stop. When he was fifteen, he had seen a picture of an author he had admired. The author had his collar turned up and he looked at the camera as if he had been caught by surprise, and yet his face said that he knew it all, that he knew everything about this world and that there was nothing that could surprise him, not anymore.
His father had done the same thing with cigarettes, just let them hang from the side of his mouth as he talked to friends or worked or fell asleep in a chair on a Sunday afternoon. Tassin wondered if he was dead yet. Maybe. Maybe not.
He made his way to the bus stop. It sat opposite a pub that had seen better days. The paint was peeling like dead skin, the windows no more than sad and empty eyes that gazed upon a passing world, no longer interested in its fading beauty. People had once paid to enjoy the secret pleasures inside, now they cast it aside in favour of a 50-inch TV and a quiz. It had closed two days ago. It was like a bloated corpse, discoloured by the lividity of liquidation, shunned by passers-by who had known it intimately in life but now denounced it in death.
The bus stop was abandoned. This was partly why he chose this time to catch it. He did not like to stand in silence with strangers. There was always the temptation to smile and, by doing so, to risk something deeper. Lives changed upon the twist of a smile. Children were born and houses bought, straitjackets willingly adorned, simply because of a passing moment of fake, forced, fatal politesse.
He leaned against the post. The rain fell like dust, sent into furious waterspouts each time a vehicle passed. It fell against his skin like a cold sweat. He took a final long drag on his cigarette, then threw it into a puddle. It cracked the glass meniscus. The image shattered.
In the distance, he saw the bus. It loomed like a dinosaur chasing its prey. It seemed to barely move, teasing him with the promise of a little warmth and shelter. It made him shiver. The wait made the day colder by ten degrees, made the rain that tiny bit more irritating as it tickled his face like a hundred newly born spiders.
He fished through his pocket for change. He begrudged the cost. He had worked it out one day while watching the news.
He took home two hundred and thirteen pounds a week. His rent took up one and a half of those week so, for every months he had in his hand five hundred and thirty two pounds. He tried not to think of that. It was money down the drain. For a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen and a lounge. If he lay down on the floor in any of the rooms, his feet would be almost touching the far wall. Apart from the bathroom of course. There was barely enough room to shit in there.
The whole place was about forty-six square metres. If you were a midget, that was fine. Tassin was six foot something with size twelve feet. If he straightened up his round shoulders, he could add a couple of inches for sure. His bed, which was six feet long, was jackhammered into place between two walls.
Wine was four pounds a day. That was twenty-eight pounds a week, one hundred and twelve pounds a month. Cigarettes were twenty pounds a week. Eighty a month. He rolled his own. He set aside time each evening while watching TV and drinking wine to make the next day’s allocation.
He had considered giving them up, but what else was there, once they were gone? They were his wife, his family, his car, his mortgage, his dog. All those things that came as natural to other men came to him in a fifty-gram pouch and a bottle. And they probably gave him more pleasure too.
He ate out of tins. It was quick and easy and, with the supermarkets selling their own brands or having special offers every other day, he could always pick something up.
Food never bothered him anyway. He ate to live. He found no pleasure in food. It was fuel for the fire – no more. Perhaps if he were rich, he could concern himself with the taste, the texture, the bite at the back of the throat or the cleansing of the palate, but a tin of skipjack tuna was not something that warranted such attention.
He liked to mix the tuna with Cadbury’s Smash. This was done for practical rather than pleasurable reasons. The two could be mixed together in a bowl and eaten with a fork. That saved on cutlery and crockery, which saved on water and washing up liquid. It also saved time and fuss. These cooks on TV annoyed him. Sure, he appreciated the artistry of what they did, but food was not what he considered something that had any right to an aesthetic value. Why eat something that is good for the soul? Why would you spend two hours preparing something that was in the end going to be dropped like an owl pellet into the sewer and never be seen again?
After food (say twenty-five pounds a week, one hundred pounds a month), rent, wine (one hundred and twelve pounds a month) and cigarettes (eighty pounds a month) he had to find money for the bus fare. If he bought a weekly pass, it was twelve pounds, thirty-six pounds a month.
Altogether, simply living cost him three hundred and seventy-two pounds a month. That left him about one hundred and sixty pounds a month to fritter on luxuries. A drink on a Friday night at the club would set him back about fifteen pounds – another sixty pounds a month – which left him a hundred. That’s when the bills fell into line, fat cuckoos that demanded more and more, until you had to starve yourself in order to keep them alive.
He could barely afford to live by himself. Any relationship would starve in his poverty. Love came second to money. If he stopped his pleasures, he would be better off, but he might as well be dead. He would have sleep and work and that was it. What was the point of waking up if all you had was eight hours labour to look forward to? It would make him no different to an ant. How insignificant we were without the little quirks that gave us the illusion of wholeness.
The bus winked its eye and pulled into the concrete cutting. The doors hushed open and the driver looked expectantly at Tassin. What he expected, Tassin was unsure. It was as if he teetered on the edge of reaction. It was the curse of the public servant, to wait for a cue, for permission to respond. Those who anticipated it were doomed. It was pointless to bring high expectations or personal feelings, for they would soon be stolen by others and shredded like dead sonnets. The truth was that the distant emotion of the pavement bore no relation to the emotion on that first high step onto the bus. Smiles died on the short journey up. Benevolence withered. The smell of sweat and diesel and cheap perfume mingled to create a nauseating clagginess that bit the back of the throat and raped the nostrils.
Tassin pulled out his pass and held it up like a prisoner returning to the penitentiary after day-release. The driver scanned it briefly and nodded. A half-smile crossed his tight lips. Tassin could see the man’s shoulders relax, his eyes soften, as he realised that this stop would not be one of confrontation, of degradation, of the humiliation that led to the dark, midnight searching of his soul.
Tassin looked at the other passengers as the body of the bus rocked like a consumptive. He could see the suffering in their eyes. They had the air of dogs on their final visit to the vets, only they had to relive this death every day until, in a strange twist of irony, death relieved them of this loathsome repetition.
Now he had twenty precious minutes of freedom left. These were the sweetest moments of the day, their sweetness heightened by the anticipation of their loss. The last bite of the peach was always the best because it was the one that was savoured, that was lingered upon. So it was with this final freefall into gloom. Savour the glory of near flight before hitting the ground, he told himself. Revel in the walk to the scaffold. Take in the breeze and the smells and the sights and the colours before, in the slipping of a rope, it was all taken away.
The windows of the bus were beginning to steam up. The silence inside lay heavily. On the way home, people would talk and be happy, free of the manacles, but on the way out, their thoughts were inward, of all the years lost to their obligation to need. Or maybe that was not the case. Maybe they were thinking about what to have to eat that night, of new shoes, of holidays, of last night’s love and the sensation of cold, rough tongues against their dry, grey skin.
But there was, he could see in the deadness of their gaze, no light in the darkness. The food would be the same as last week. Of course, they would look forward to their grey burgers or their dry chops, but they knew that it wasn’t so much about the taste as the comfort of the routine. The shoes remained as unaffordable as before, the holidays no more than stained Polaroids and love no more than a routine affirmation of a commitment made by two different people a different world ago.
They had all settled, one way or another. They had settled for mediocrity instead of putting flesh on their dreams. They had met their limitations before even knowing what those limitations were. They had agreed that the need was more fulfilling than the realisation and that the pretence of love was better than no love at all. They had compromised risky, reckless greatness for numb comfort, for the dullness of fragile security.
Inside each of them was a grain of shame with which they had to live, that every now and then would surface and bring a lump to their throat and tears to their eyes. Their hearts would stutter with the realisation of it. Then they would swallow down the regret and fear and carry on. They would suppress their ghosts with the clubs and spears of reality and push on within their mortal flesh, turning their thoughts away from the gap between now and then, the beginning and the end. By denial, we were all immortal, all gods, all supermen, until our blood became dust and the memory of us less than the breeze than blew the dust away.
He ran a hand across the window to clear some of the condensation. Through the streaky wetness, he saw that they had reached town. It stood like a tombstone, grey, monolithic above the dead and dying. People walked with the determined mindlessness of the undead. He wanted to break the window and scream at them to wake up, to snap out of their comas and be more like him.
Be more like him.
His own shame rose like bile. He swallowed and tasted the bitterness and felt the burn.
I am already dead, he thought.
I am already dead.
