Chapter 33 
Outside the kitchen window, a small pale spider performs a rope dance in a beam of morning light. Holding its delicate limbs elegantly in the air, it resembles an eight-pointed Chinese character spinning on a glowing thread. Aided by invisible pulleys, it glides smoothly up toward a lichen-covered branch where, unseen for now, the magpie sits waiting. Benzene holds still as a snake as the spider pirouettes into range and then, with a single sharp snap of applause, she ends the dance, crushing the spider’s thorax and mangling its legs.
I blink and stare at the bird in a vacant sort of way as she celebrates her triumph over the spider with a dance of her own, slashing at the air with her beak and flicking victory with her tail. I feel almost totally blank. It’s two weeks since Heathcote died and all I’ve been able to summon up is the emotional equivalent of white noise. Considering how much time I spend dreading catastrophe, it seems odd to flatline like this when one actually comes along. Perhaps Heathcote just wasn’t a big enough part of my daily life to miss. I’d certainly notice this bird being gone more than I do him.
Other people seem to expect me to be totally catatonic. Friends have been sending kind messages offering to cook, or take care of the cleaning, or perform any other duties I might suddenly find myself incapable of; very tempting, but I’d feel like a con artist suckering people with counterfeit grief if I took any of them up on it. “Thanks,” I reply, “but I barely knew the man, so I’m not exactly bawling my eyes out.” The sadness of this statement has only occasionally broken through. I’ve tried to use music to make myself grieve in the right sort of way. I found out that Heathcote loved the Kinks, so I spent much of an afternoon listening to “Death of a Clown” on repeat until tears came, but even that felt hollow. I could make myself cry by listening to that song if it were a dog that had just died; there’s nothing about it that’s particular to Heathcote. If anything, I’m slightly suspicious of his death. The timing is uncanny. He dies the same day we had chosen to start trying for a child, as if his soul might be playing a game of intergenerational stepping stones.
Out on her branch, the bird scratches herself furiously and tiny feathers, gray and downy, fall from her nape and sink slowly to the ground. Next she picks and pecks at her tail, chipping away at the waxy tubes from which new purple-shining feathers emerge like amethyst from a cave wall. Shedding the old seems to be at once more painful and far simpler for her than it is for me. I wish I could just scratch off this smothering blankness I feel. I worry about not having the appropriate feelings, but I’m not even sure what the appropriate feelings might be in this situation. How do you let go of someone you never had? What I’ve lost isn’t a person—I’ve hardly spent twenty hours with him in the last twenty years—but the hope of knowing a person. Perhaps the funeral tomorrow will make things clearer.
Later in the day Yana and I drive to Oxford in a car laden with swathes of fabric and bunches of flowers. Heathcote is having a DIY funeral and somewhere along the way Yana got roped into helping make it look nice. Over the last fortnight, China and Lily have gone out of their way to include me in all the decisions about the funeral. At late-night meetings in their family friend’s basement studio in West London I’ve found myself being called on to help make all sorts of choices for Heathcote: what type of coffin he’d like to lie in, what music he’d like, how he’d like his body to be disposed of. It turns out the only thing that was stopping me from being a part of Heathcote’s life was him being alive. Now that he’s dead I’m deeply enmeshed in his affairs—and am quite lost. When China turns to me and asks, What do you think he would have wanted? I can’t work out if she’s being deliberately cruel, or trying to be kind, or if she’s simply as clueless as I am—or even if on some level she thinks I possess some sort of innate knowledge. If it were entirely up to me, I’d bake Heathcote into loaves of bread and feed him to the birds in the park. Or just burn the bastard and be rid of him.
I can’t imagine who all these preparations are for. Surely Heathcote was a friendless hermit, too obsessed with his poetry to bother much with people? China and Lily seem to think otherwise. They’ve printed hundreds of funeral programs and bought an orchard’s worth of apple saplings to line the aisle of the huge church they’ve booked for the ceremony, with the idea that people will take them home afterward and plant trees in memory of Heathcote. At their behest I’ve got an industrial-sized hot water urn in the trunk of the car for the mammoth cream tea China and Lily are laying out at the wake.
When we arrive at the wake venue, a charmingly decrepit event space near the church, to help set it up for tomorrow, we find China and Lily already hard at work lugging tables and putting out chairs. It makes me sad to see them doing all of this; doing more for Heathcote’s corpse than he probably ever did for them while he was alive. I can’t work out why they’re bothering. Or why I am, for that matter, although I feel compelled to. It’s certainly not because of anything I owe to Heathcote that I start unloading the car and fussing over the arrangement of the remembrance display; quite the opposite, in fact. This is something he owes me.
It’s early evening by the time we start to make our way over to Heathcote’s house for a small funeral-eve gathering. The place is almost exactly as I remember it from my last visit eight years ago. Hollyhocks sway tall outside the front door. Heathcote’s oil paintings hem you in as you walk down the corridor. But someone has cleaned the place up. There’s no cat food on the floor this time and no swarms of flies either, despite the dead body. Heathcote’s picnic basket of a coffin lies on a table in the cozy, book-lined living room, its wicker lid buckled shut with leather straps. Next to the coffin is a makeshift coffee-table altar, with tealights illuminating framed pictures of Heathcote. Heathcote as a cherub-faced young boy. Heathcote thumbing his nose at the camera. Heathcote holding court at an Arthurian round table with a jackdaw by his side.
It’s a select circle: a few locals, a few friends of China and Lily’s mother making small talk over the top of the coffin. The man from the corner shop pops in to pay his respects. The mailman comes by too, and fondly recalls the hours he used to spend chatting with Heathcote. A young woman who grew up a few doors down tells me about how kind Heathcote was, how generous he was with his time, how he was, in fact, just like a father to her. I hear for the first time about Heathcote’s open-door policy: His front door was literally always unlocked and open to anyone who wanted to stop by, which explains why, when I came to visit seven years ago, it swung open at my touch. I get a lump in my throat. In the garden I smoke pot with someone whose name I immediately forget and down a few glasses of wine.
When nobody’s looking, I go back into the living room and lift the lid of the coffin. Heathcote resembles a waxwork that’s been left lying in the sun. I extend my index finger and give his forehead a slow prod. The cold skin slides over his skull like octopus flesh. I feel nothing but disappointment at my own lack of feeling.
I had a plan to take one of Heathcote’s fingers; or perhaps it wasn’t a plan, just a sick fantasy, but if that’s true then it was quite a detailed one. The pruning shears are waiting in my bag. A psychoanalyst might point out the obvious Oedipal connotations of this, and they’d probably be right to do so. I wanted his finger as an object of power, a relic of sorts, a small part of Heathcote that could be mine and mine alone. China has already snipped off a lock of his hair for what are, I imagine, similar reasons. But now, face-to-face with the corpse, I find that the impulse has left me. Not because of any particular squeamishness on my part. It’s just that the power this body once contained seems to have all leaked away. China and Lily’s mother, Diana, enters the room and I quickly and guiltily pull down the lid of the coffin. I was worried about meeting her after our cold phone conversations so many years ago but, since then, dementia has stolen her away. She gives me a childlike smile and tells me how lovely everything is, and then breezes into the kitchen.
The framed image of the jackdaw flickering in the candlelight catches my eye. The bird is less of a mystery now—or at least it’s become a small part of a greater mystery. Clearly Heathcote was more than able to care for many things and many people: for the elephants, for dolphins, for the mailman, for the little girl up the road, for the children of friends, for the chickens he kept in the garden and allowed to perch on his head, for the mangy street cat who took full advantage of his open-door policy. It was only with his own children—or at least with his own son—that his ability to exhibit care came unstuck. He could be like a father, but he struggled when it came to actually being a father.
The jackdaw winks at me again. It has been badly captured by the camera, smoky and out of focus. Perched inside its frame next to the coffin it brings to mind the odd spectacle of corvid funerals. Magpies and jackdaws both appear to do exactly what I am doing right now as I stand beside Heathcote’s body. They have been observed holding funerals for their dead, or at least conducting death rituals of some kind: raucous gatherings whose exact purpose—an expression of grief, or anger, or an attempt to learn from the misfortunes of others—is unclear. They congregate alongside the bodies of their dead and examine them closely, noisily calling others to come and do the same. More sentimental observers have claimed that the birds are mourning, and that their cries suggest emotional pain. My time with a magpie has taught me that these birds are capable of great emotional complexity. But they are also practical creatures. The interpretation that makes most sense to me has it that they are interrogating their dead, carrying out a sort of group postmortem to ascertain what killed their comrade in the hope that this knowledge will allow them to avoid the same fate.
When I open the coffin lid again I search Heathcote’s cadaver for a similar lesson. What went wrong in this man’s life? And how can I stop myself from repeating his mistakes? The only lesson I can read from his ruined body is a caution against being an alcoholic and a heavy smoker who refused to do any exercise. There are posters up on the walls in my local GP’s practice that tell me all that. Whatever it is I’m looking for, this corpse can’t provide.
I shut the lid again and go up the narrow wooden stairs, opening the first door I come across, which, as luck would have it, happens to be Heathcote’s study. In front of me is a dark wooden desk with a green leather top. A single bed is pressed up against the wall and there are disposable cardboard potties scattered around in conveniently placed piles. It looks to me like this was a room from which Heathcote very rarely emerged. I think back to the image of him at Port Eliot, filling vases and saucepans with piss, and wonder how a person can be so incapable of change. I turn to an enormous filing cabinet with hundreds of narrow drawers and start opening them at random. One contains half a dozen fake thumbs, hollow as the finger I wanted to steal. Another is full of magic coins. In one is a muddle of pictures of Heathcote and in another a cardboard box, in which I discover a modest collection of used condoms. I hesitate for a moment, then take one out and examine it, trying to determine whether it has been recently occupied, although I am unsure what the prophylactic equivalent of a cigarette smoking in an ashtray or a cinder still glowing in a fireplace might be. I stretch out the old latex and the contents flake. I have no idea what this means. I think about his loyal partner downstairs: here, but not really here. My mind goes in other directions. I cast my thoughts back to his last few public appearances. There was a woman, only a few years older than me, who often seemed to be by his side and whose absence now seems conspicuous. Maybe he really was a bastard until the end. Or maybe he just liked to masturbate into a Durex. The more I discover, the more of a stranger he seems.
I put the condom back with its friends and turn to Heathcote’s desk. His laptop is there, but I don’t touch it. It would make it too obvious, reveal why I’m really here too starkly, if I opened it and searched for my own name. I turn my attention to a plastic basket containing his personal effects from the hospital instead. A few notebooks, a few loose scraps of paper with jotted messages in an increasingly illegible hand. Nothing strikes me, except for one phrase that pops up several times in both English and Welsh: Y Gwir Yn Erbyn Y Byd. The Truth Against the World. The motto of the Druids, according to Heathcote. He told me that his father had taught him the phrase, which still seems strange to me. I struggle to imagine that miserable judge having had any druidic connections or magical tendencies. I trace Heathcote’s calligraphy with my finger and wonder what it meant to him, wishing that I’d thought to ask. How can truth stand in opposition to the world? I think about Heathcote’s stubborn refusal to admit he was dying, his deafness to the doctor’s prognosis, his infuriating determination against all evidence that he would live to 120. Clearly truth meant something else to him. The Truth Against the World. The power of the word, the power of belief, the power of self-deception, as a weapon against reality. Y Gwir Yn Erbyn Y Byd.
I haven’t been lurking at Heathcote’s desk for long when someone appears at the door. It’s the man I smoked pot with in the garden whose name I still can’t recall. I scowl at him, trying to communicate that I’m having a moment and want to be left alone, but he comes in and sits down regardless. He’s another one: another one to whom Heathcote was like a father, an older brother, a wise old man with infinite time. He tells me what a huge fan he was of Heathcote’s work, how he heard about Heathcote’s open-door policy and just turned up at the house one day, how honored—and slightly surprised—he was to be allowed to become a permanent fixture in Heathcote’s life.
I can’t help but resent this man, which is unfair of me because it’s hardly his fault. In fact, thanks to him things are starting to make a bit more sense. Heathcote was happy to let this man, this unabashed admirer, in because it sounds like he was grateful for everything he got, that he would never have challenged Heathcote or made him feel bad. Like a stupid dog, I think, then catch myself. There’s something in that hateful thought, though. Like an animal—like the jackdaw—this man was never going to ask any awkward questions. I get up and leave him alone with his grief. Everything feels the wrong way round.
The funeral the next day passes by in a sort of blur. We pull the coffin out through the living room window and parade it through the streets for a mile or so to the church. People swap in and out as they tire of carrying Heathcote’s weight, but I refuse to let go, letting the coffin dig deep into my shoulder. In front of us someone bangs an enormous drum. Yana and my mum follow close behind. I worry for my mum. It’s twenty-seven years since she last saw Heathcote and most of the people swarming around the coffin are no friends of ours. There have been moments over the years when Heathcote’s badmouthing of my mum has reached even my ears, so his attacks on her must have been vociferous indeed. While watching out for my mum, I see the mob of mourners beginning to swell. I keep having to glance back over my aching shoulder, unable to believe that Heathcote had this many people in his life.
When we get to the church the size of the crowd hits me like a slap. The rows are packed. This man was no hermit. We set the coffin down in front of the altar as a piece of classical music plays over the PA, and then Heathcote’s sonorous voice booms from above, filling the church. Heathcote describes the planet as seen from on high, from a heavenly perspective, godlike. “From space the planet is blue…” It’s a recording I’ve heard before; the first few stanzas of Whale Nation, the poem he had just finished writing when he met my mother. His voice is so familiar, so alluring, so hypnotizing, and I feel a familiar longing rising up as the priest takes to the pulpit.
When the service ends I automatically trail after the coffin as it’s picked up and carried out of the church, leaving everyone else standing in their rows. A hearse is waiting to return Heathcote’s body to the mortuary. There are no immediate plans for the corpse. My sisters seem to have a block on the subject, so he’s going back on ice. I stand in my toe-pinching leather shoes on the rough gravel, unsure what to do. I don’t know how to be in this situation. Others emerge from the church. When they stop to talk, I find myself trying to pretend that I really knew Heathcote, telling a joke I found in one of his notebooks about the difference between a cat and a comma over and over again. (What’s the difference between a cat and a comma? One has claws at the end of its paws, the other is a pause at the end of a clause.) “Isn’t that so Heathcote?” I keep saying, until my mum taps me on the shoulder and pleads with me to stop.
At the wake, I don’t know what to say to people, and people don’t seem to know what to say to me. I try to encourage those who knew him to write more than “best wishes” in the book of remembrance. I want essays. Clear, detailed, intense memories. I’m still trying to find a way to take my piece of this man, to understand him. People seem confused. It reminds me of being a child and meeting people who said they knew my father. “Oh really,” I’d reply brightly. “What’s he like?” They would quickly back off, finding themselves in a more intense situation than they bargained for. I know from experience this is a futile exercise. This all feels very familiar. Hunting for Heathcote in the places he isn’t. I leave Oxford feeling even more empty than when I arrived.