I was met at the station in Canterbury, the West Station (the one that’s further East), by the same cop who’d left the message on my answering machine the day before. He apologized for that now, but I was in no mood for a discussion of police etiquette. What would be a good way to hear your sister’s dead? Sherry on the veranda, moats, deer, skylarks, ha-has, and him whispering in my ear, “I’m afraid I have something a little awkward to tell you”?
He asked me if I wanted to go to my hotel first, but I wanted to see Bee, so he took me to the half-assed English morgue they’d set up in a hurry at the hospital, to cater for all the bodies. For Bee was among many—you can really kill a lot of people if you put your mind to it. We wove our way through a crush of journalists, who stuck their long-lens cameras right in my face. (As James Joyce said, all journalists are heartless.)
The gunman liked shooting people in the face too. The cop warned me of this as we approached Bee on her stretcher. Then the sheet was pulled back so that I could formally identify her. They hadn’t even bothered to wipe the blood off! Maybe it was “evidence” or something. She was all messed up, but it was Bee.
All the way over I’d clung to the idea that they were wrong. Not my sister. Not that sculptress. Please, someone else. That ignoble hope gone, I searched her face for an explanation. What did she think when he came running at her with a gun? Did she have a chance to think? I pulled Bee to me and hugged her for a long time.
When I first got the news, I assumed she’d been run over on that stupid bike of hers, or stabbed trying to intervene in another street fight. Unbearable, but at least an accident. How was I supposed to come to terms with the fact that some creep had spotted my sister across a field by chance, and (whether with nonchalance or insane glee) gone out of his way to shoot her?
I must have signed some forms, but all I remember is wandering the hospital corridors, pestered by policewomen trying to give me sandwiches and cups of tea. Tea: the English answer to all emergencies. They really seem to think it helps! But this tea had scum floating on the top, the scum Bee told me about.
My personal, po-faced policeman asked me periodically if I had any questions. Yeah! What’ll I do without her? But I said nothing. When he tired of this, he offered a change of scene: would I like to see the place where Bee had died? But I’d had enough by then and asked to be taken to the hotel.
It was one of the tiniest hotel rooms I’ve ever seen, with a toilet that didn’t flush. I tried calling Mimi but got no answer, then attempted to achieve temporary oblivion with the help of airline miniatures, and tranquilizers provided by the hospital. I fell asleep staring at the green shiny curtain cords that held the ugly curtains apart: yet another futile fabric fiasco. Why must we have all this disgusting decor? I was perturbed by how tightly wound those cords were. What angry twisted mind had created these angry twisted ropes? They didn’t even go with the stupid curtains, which were yellow, with a kindergartenish peach pattern. It’s all so arbitrary, our decor. We decide a million things arbitrarily. But arbitrariness would never seem innocent to me again: people get murdered arbitrarily.
I woke to the smell of air freshener used in accusatory quantities. And on every surface, frantic laminated signs:
TURN OFF THE LIGHTS
BEFORE YOU LEAVE
TURN OFF THE TV
TURN OFF THE HEATING
DON'T TOUCH
VERY HOT!
ARE YOU SURE YOU
NEED A FRESH TOWEL?
DO NOT OPEN THE WINDOW
TEMPERATURE AND PRESSURE
MAY CHANGE
PLEASE BE CAREFUL
PHONE CHARGERS ONLY
There were guilt trips everywhere you looked, telling you everything you could and couldn’t do in that impossible room. All this attention to safety, in a city where people get gunned down willy-nilly! And still the toilet wouldn’t flush.
I assumed I was too late for the hotel breakfast, and would get my ass kicked for that as well (or my bottom belabored). But no, a whole sorry bunch of breakfasters were there, squeezed into what seemed to be the hallway, munching cold toast while being lectured by the hotel manager who claimed Conrad had lived in Canterbury at some point. I was hungry, but not this hungry. As I left, I heard one of the guests remark, “You never see pictures of Joseph Conrad smiling.”
I glimpsed the top of the cathedral. Assuming it to be in the center of town, I headed that way, trusting some bearable breakfast might eventually be found. Illogically or not, I wished Bee was there to show me around. The sidewalk was narrow, and ran right beside a busy two-way street full of assholes speeding by in cars, blasting me with their ignoramus pop music and calling out “Cunt!” as they passed. I may be a cunt, man, but you’re the one who has to be sung to all day by sissies on the radio.
As soon as possible, I took a quieter path beside a shallow river, and had to squeeze past a student with her parents. They were all looking down at the water and she was telling them, “It’s really clear. You can see all the traffic bollards and supermarket trolleys.”
What a dump. I got to the main street, but the only forms of food offered were “chips,” “burgers,” and something called “bacon butties.” I walked into some kind of café, but the frail girl sweeping the floor sent me away, on the grounds that it was “too oily” (which I could well believe). I found a small grocery store instead, and bought a load of English newspapers, all of which were bursting with gun massacre stats and stories: I felt I owed it to Bee to check what they were saying about her in there.
Canterbury really stank, whether it was from the oniony food outlets or the digestive gases farted out by the people who ate at them. The local populace certainly looked abdominally uncomfortable. As a plastic surgeon who thought he’d seen it all, I was left aghast by the medieval physiognomies of the townsfolk, a pasty race, vicious, gnarled, gnawed, and bloodthirsty. They liked a good massacre. There they were, milling around the main street to stare at spots where people had been murdered a few days before. These had been helpfully designated by police tape: “SCENE CRIME SCENE CRIME”—as if a crime had been committed against the picturesque, not people. Canterbury’s about as picturesque as my ass, unless you care about cathedrals. But this one’s a hell of a thing, a monstrosity.
How does a place like Canterbury recover from a tragedy? By shopping! Everybody there seemed to get a big bang out of carrying a big bag. But what was in those bags? Guns? Ammo? Souvenir mugs of the massacre?
Everything I saw confirmed the necessity of the American Revolution. How could Bee have lived here for a day, much less a year, a nice New York gal like her? But she’d never wanted to come. She hated the place! How she wailed about the weather, the water, the weariness and wariness. All that trouble with her stingy patrons. Jerks! The English are not a friendly people. She’d come all this way just to make a little money, and they let her down. And when that wasn’t enough, they obliterated her!
I found a little café called Saint something or other. Everything in Canterbury’s called Saint something. But this place was at least trying to be French in the manner to which I’m accustomed (coffee and croissants, though minus the Gauloises and Gallic charm). There I sat, reading the paper like I was some normal man, but the more I read, the more furious I got—with Bee, for getting herself into this! Couldn’t she have ducked? no. Just a few minutes either way, and it might never have happened. Why’d she have to go out on her bike that particular day, why that field?
The facts were these: Gareth Lode, a British soldier, had returned from Afghanistan to find that his ex-wife was refusing him access to their joint progeny, because of his violent outbursts in the past. Old girlfriends confirmed that he was violent—they’d reported him to the police years before. Lode was in trouble with the Army as well: he’d tortured too many prisoners, even by their standards, and his superiors considered him volatile and unpredictable. They’d warned the Canterbury police about him, saying that he was “nervy” and might do something weird. The police did nothing (of course).
Everybody was tiring of this asshole, in other words, but he wasn’t tired of being an asshole. So he stabbed and strangled his ex-wife in front of their children. The kids were next—neighbors heard them screaming and begging for mercy as he smothered them. Then he armed himself with a gun and went over to his mother’s house, somewhere in Canterbury, and shot her. A murderous tour around town followed, with Lode randomly shooting dozens of women in the street, mostly middle-aged women, always aiming for the face.
I knew from gun rampages in America that if a guy wants to do this, there’s no stopping him: you pretty much hand him the keys to the city and the Colonel Gaddafi Certificate of Permission to Wreak Mayhem. But it was still hard to believe that one guy had gotten away with this much death—“three years’ worth of murder in a single day,” as one paper put it. Afterwards, Lode hid in the woods, where he demonstrated several survival skills he’d learned in the Army before blowing his own brains out, surrounded by trigger-happy cops.
His last stand in the woods, along with his apparent hatred of women, had earned him his own little fan club, many of whom had raced to place garish bouquets and controversial condolence messages outside Lode’s Canterbury barracks, saying, “RIP Gareth,” and, “Gareth, you wuz wronged.” One guy traveled down from the North of England somewhere with his three sons to lay a wreath at the Lode shrine. He described it as a good day out for the kids, and educational! In his opinion, Lode had done what any man would do when pushed too far: explode.
But it was the newspapers’ exultation in the story that really got me. I wasn’t used to it: in America, this kind of crime gets one day of front-page coverage, tops, then it’s as if it never happened. It was now two days since the Canterbury event, and the papers were still slobbering over every detail, tracking the guy’s every move from birth to death, offering blow-by-blow, bullet-by-bullet chronologies of his progress, maps charting his route, “interactive graphics” (whatever they were), diagrams, satellite photos, and full-color pull-out sections to keep for posterity. Now and then, an editorial in which some lone fool asserted that there was no reason to tighten England’s already tight gun laws. No, of course not. Why deprive everybody of another massacre? The Queen’s beleaguered subjects need their entertainment.
The papers were thrilled with the death rate: they could barely contain their glee. “Savage” Lode had outdone many mass murderers of the past. By killing twenty people, twenty-one if you counted Lode himself, he “beat” all their previous gun massacres, “leaving the charming streets of Canterbury stained with blood.” The what? And the death rate might rise yet, they cheerily warned, given all the injured now screaming for their lives in a variety of charming hospitals.
They made a killing spree sound like a shopping spree! In fact, Lode himself had paused to pick up a new pair of trainers in the middle of it, while sales staff cowered in a corner.
Now came the tales of lucky escapes—people who’d sensibly hidden as Lode passed them on the street, people who’d been perilously close to the areas he covered, people who’d merely thought of going to Canterbury that day, and various characters who’d known Lode at some earlier point in his life. There were pictures of him as a baby, as a boy, and talk of his fixed stare, his many grievances, his money worries. What about my grief, my grievances, my fixed stare?
Lode’s brother had been unearthed and interviewed: he insisted Lode was one of the nicest “blokes” you could ever meet, who’d fought for his country while the divorce lawyers were giving away his visiting rights. It was all their mother’s fault, the brother said, for being severely depressed when they were young. He didn’t like Lode being described as “violent and controlling” either—to him Lode had been “sweet.” But isn’t beating up all your girlfriends, stabbing your wife, smothering your children, and shooting dozens of women in the face about as violent and controlling as a man can get?
With espresso-fueled nausea, I waded through these outlandish documents, not even sure what I was looking for. There was hardly a single reference to Bee individually. Compared to their exhaustive treatment of Lode, the description of his victims was perfunctory. They were defined by their ages and occupations: barmaid, housewife, hairdresser, Health Visitor, university lecturer, receptionist, waitress, sculptress. . . A treatment that seemed to reduce them to almost nothing—when they were people for godsake, people on whom other people counted! It really doesn’t matter if they were bookish or banal. They meant something to somebody, and to themselves. (Maybe even to a few pets, who’d now have to be rehomed or put down.)
everybody means something.
But at least we were spared all the claptrap American gun outrages inspire, with the candlelight vigils, extremist defenses of gun ownership (as if owning lethal weapons were a good thing, rather than an incontrovertible sign of barbarism), and mawkish talk of god. After the Tucson murders, Obama had to lay it on thick, with “Scripture tells us this” and “Scripture tells us that.” Everybody said it was his best speech ever! Come to think of it, there probably was some dumb religious rigmarole going on in that hokey cathedral of theirs—but I wouldn’t be going.
A young guy with long black hair and a face like the Mona Lisa sat down at an upright piano, in the corner of the café, that I hadn’t even noticed, and started playing 1960s tunes with some panache. The joint was jumpin’, in an English kind of way. Customers became more animated, clapping politely between numbers. . . and I felt myself relax for the first time since I heard of Bee’s death. Not because music is some goddam relaxant, but because it gave me another metaphysical plane to be on. I needed that more than coffee.
Any music was a help, but what I really wanted was Bach. So I struggled to my feet, went over and put a bit of money in the guy’s tips teacup on top of the piano. All I said was, “Bach,” and then sat down. But he didn’t play me any Bach. Maybe he didn’t do classical music, or he hadn’t heard me, or he never played requests. Whether I’d blundered into another faux pas was of little concern to me anymore, since I’d now spotted on the front of one of the papers a reference to an obituary of Bee. I turned to the appropriate page, trembling.
The American sculptor, Bridget Hanafan, who has died age 53 as a result of the mass killing in Canterbury on 23 May, produced some of the most appealing public sculptures of recent years.
Born in the American Midwest in 1958, Hanafan studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she gained a reputation early on as one of the foremost sculptors of her generation.
After a hiatus caused by an unhappy marriage, Hanafan started producing works in clay, culminating in her first one-woman show in 1994. Commissions for installations and public projects soon followed, along with a number of prestigious awards and fellowships.
Recently, Hanafan had relocated to Canterbury, in order to take up a post of artist-in-residence. There she enlarged on a series of assemblages begun in New York, which she dubbed Coziness Sculptures, life-size re-creations of domestic and rural scenes intended as “a glimpse of something good”. Hanafan was exploring sculpture as a means of contributing to a sense of well-being in the spectator.
By including lighting and audio elements as well as family heirlooms and other found materials, Hanafan combined an awareness of personal struggle with a delight in the textures of everyday life. In touching works that are autobiographical in nature, she promoted the pleasure principle, revealing a newly humane approach in contemporary art.
She continued to expand her range of techniques. Two carved stone figures by Hanafan were recently installed in an underwater setting in Canterbury’s River Stour. The grace and ingenuity of these pieces demonstrate an artist of burgeoning power, ambition and imagination, whose work was about to take off in a wholly new direction.
Hanafan was Gareth Lode’s final victim. She leaves a brother.
My sister, “humane”—I liked that. But I never knew she could carve stone! And what was with all these awards she never told me about? I folded the newspaper and tried to swallow some more coffee—but at that moment the pianist started playing Bach (a bit of Goldberg), and I had to hold the paper up to hide the tears streaming down my face.
Back in the hotel, I tried phoning Mimi and flushing the toilet. No answer from either. It occurred to me now that Mimi probably knew nothing about what had happened to Bee, given her aversion to the News. American coverage of this English disaster was no doubt scanty: we like our gun crime homegrown. I hadn’t even told Mimi Bee lived in Canterbury, as far as I could remember, just that she was in England somewhere.
I sank into a poky little armchair and watched the News myself, but it was all about the gunman and the government, and the way they pronounced “gunm’n” and “gubm’nt” sounded exactly the same, to surreal effect. I gave up, stuck a piece of Wrigley’s Dubm’nt in my mouth, and fell asleep.
Later, my cop picked me up and took me to Bee’s apartment (there was her studio at the art school to deal with too, when I was ready). Her home was on the first floor (ground floor) of a small row house in a grim part of town, but Bee had done her usual number on it. She was always amassing stuff from junk shops, or the gutter, I don’t know which, and the place was one big altar to ephemera—though, I admit, it was kind of cozy.
This was what Bee worshipped: shells, coins, leaves, flowers, champagne corks, here a doll’s arm, there a small chipped china dog on a velvet cushion, and a colorful African basket. A lot of old dark-blue medicine bottles decorated the window sills. And on a table, a tiny clay man was selling clay sausages on strings from a tiny stall. Bee’s collages and photographs adorned the walls. The smell of Bee was there too. I had to sit down for quite a while.
But what was I going to do with it all? Bee’s obituary-writer might have appreciated her taste for “heirlooms” and domesticity—but I was the guy who’d have to pack it all up, or give it away! The sadness of her medicine cabinet, or her fridge, equipped with coffee beans, and bread and cheese for grilled cheese sandwiches; the pile of dirty laundry. The innocent signs of someone in the midst of life, who didn’t expect to die. Depressingly, I found several fleece garments. I couldn’t imagine Bee ever wearing them! But that’s what poverty and a cold damp climate can do to a nice Manhattan chick. She was so cold. She once told me she had to wear her winter coat just to cook in that tiny kitchen.
I was cold too, and didn’t know how to work the heating system (if there was one). I also had a sense of shame, in invading my sister’s privacy. I needed air. I felt like I was being buried alive in there! I reeled out of the building, gasping, and walked around the block. At least it wasn’t raining. Instead, they were having what they deemed a “heat wave” (a few sunny days); this fine weather was often mentioned in the massacre reports. Much was made of the paradoxical(?) fact that dreadful things sometimes happen during clement weather. “The sun was shining. It was a beautiful day. . .” Were they all insane? Would the massacre be more comprehensible conducted in sleet? Or were they suggesting Lode had been maddened by the heat? (Another fine excuse.)
Bee had described to me the way they all rush outside whenever the sun comes out, drop everything for twenty minutes’ sunbathing, and turn bright pink. For Bee it explained all of England’s problems. “No concentration skills!” Ah, Bee.
I turned a corner—and came upon the martyrs’ memorial that had so rattled her. It wasn’t grand or very antique, just a small concrete obelisk with a Maltese cross on top, plonked on a mound of jagged stones in the middle of a miniature triangular park.
Everything in Canterbury’s tiny—except the murder rate. The place was made for midgets and maniacs!
The names of the forty-one martyrs were carved into the sides of the monument but, sure enough, two were listed merely as “Bradbridge’s widow” and “Wilson’s wife,” showing the disrespect that had infuriated Bee. To me, their anonymity gave these two women a kind of confederacy the other martyrs lacked. But they did seem somehow forlorn.
I walked on, past Fryer Tuck’s Fish & Chips (shut) and into a leafy lane that seemed almost bucolic in the sun, full of bumblebees and purple stinging nettles. I avoided getting stung by either and continued down the alley. It reminded me of one of Bee’s graveyard inscriptions I’d found among her papers:
WHEN YOU WALK THROUGH
PEACEFUL LANES SO GREEN
REMEMBER US AND THINK
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
I did.
They were speeding up the preliminary inquest and Bee’s autopsy for my benefit, so that I could take her ashes home with me. But it would be a few days yet. Meanwhile, I sorted through her stuff, arranged for it to be packed and shipped to my apartment, and settled her bills. Her landlady offered to give me back Bee’s deposit on the apartment, but I told her to keep it. This couldn’t be easy for her either, having a tenant get slaughtered.
Finally I went to the art school, explained who I was to a frightened secretary, and asked for access to Bee’s studio. Nobody knew what to say to me, nobody knew what to do with me in Canterbury (apart from the guy who played me Bach). It’s frightfully ticklish to have the brother of a murder victim hanging about. But after a long wait, they showed me into Bee’s studio and left me there.
My first tired reaction was one of horror, at the abundance of junk in there: I’d just have to get somebody to take it all straight to the city dump! There were stacks of wood, Perspex, corrugated iron, cardboard, and other materials. Bags of plaster, piles of cloth, lace, kelims, and other fancy items that might have belonged to one of Bee’s aborted Coziness Sculptures. . .
There was such a weight of work in there—it was like coming across Schubert’s unfinished symphony and wondering, What the hell? There were clay maquettes of sculptures Bee must have been planning to make, and many drawings and sketchbooks that I wanted to look at (later). And then, something I truly loved, positioned atop a grandiose plinth: the neat nest of some tiny bird, labeled with the words, “How cosy they must be.” This was something Auden had said, in response to seeing birds in a nest, and I’d told Bee about it (knowing how much she liked to be kept informed of all references to “coziness”). This heirloom I wrapped carefully in a lot of paper, to take home with me.
Then I made a list of what, as far as I could tell, needed to be done in there, and was about to go when I noticed something soft and white peeking out from behind a partition. I scrambled over some boxes and peered through a gap—and there was my mother’s bed!
Not the real one, no, that was long gone. This wasn’t life-size either, but bigger, so big that when I twisted my way through the gap in the partition and stood beside it, the bed was shoulder-height—just as Mom’s bed used to be when we were kids. Kind of spooky to find yourself suddenly dwarfed by your mother’s bed, forty years later. But it wasn’t icky, it was cozy! The bed was covered in the same kind of soft white knitted bedspread Mom always had but bigger, with the same kind of corny bobbles all over it. I was tempted to bury my face in it, it looked so warm, so real.
I patted it to see if it really was as soft as it looked, and all I could think about was the crap Mom went through on that bed of hers, something only Bee and I could know; our kind mom who saw us through, for what good it did her. Her sad end came to mind, and her funeral. When I started wondering what Mom would have said, if she’d lived to know what happened to Bee. . . I laid my head against my mother’s bed and bawled like a baby.
I was accompanied to the inquest by my faithful policeman, who helped me push past the reporters at the door. “Keep those reporters away from me or I’ll kill them,” I told him.
The inquest was handled with unexpected kindness, but they couldn’t save me from the results of the autopsy. Even though I’m a doctor, I’d never expected to have my sister’s entrails described—all to confirm that she had died instantly as the result of a bullet to the head, which had passed through both hemispheres of the brain, causing the inevitable series of organ shutdowns.
I left the courtroom barely conscious, shaking all over. It would have been a good time to shoot me: I couldn’t have defended myself. It was then that an enterprising journalist sidled up and asked me if the inquest had proved conclusive or provided “closure”. I pushed the bastard away.
“You want closure. I want my sister!”
I hoped I’d be all alone at the crematorium, but a few of Bee’s friends turned up, whom she’d never told me about: three women who taught at Kent University and hated it, for reasons they were too furious to go into. They took me to a pub, where an unseen parrot squawked all evening; I could barely speak at all. They bought champagne and told me great stuff about Bee, fun stuff. We didn’t talk about Lode.
I liked these gals, and was pleased for Bee that she’d known them: the Champagne Girls were truly nice to me, and saw me through that terrible night. In retrospect, I think they must have been driven to become exceptionally nice, to compensate for the exceptional nastiness of Canterbury: everything must have its opposite and antidote.
Hungry and hungover the next day, I went for a walk in what seemed to be Canterbury’s only real park, the Westgate. It was full of winos and wedding parties, and featured the most unhealthy-looking tree I’d ever seen. The trunk was squat and bulbous, and covered in carbuncles—its bark looked like bubbling lava, frozen mid-eruption into a pretense of wood. Branches stuck out above at odd angles in all directions, and from their tips hung a million little brown balls. What fresh hell was this?
A kid caught me staring at it and told me the tree had long ago eaten a bench that used to be at its base. In my present agitated state, I immediately imagined it consuming an old couple sitting on the bench as well, as they innocently marveled at its ugliness.
I went on beside the shallow meandering river until the path became muddy and sylvan. I had to duck under huge willows, their trunks twisted in ancient agony, like squeezed-out laundry. I was composing a Canterbury chant for myself as I trudged.
Who took the cunt out of
Canterbury Kent?
Guys yell “Cunt!” from their cars in
Canterbury Kent.
Count the corpses in
Canterbury Kent.
They litter the countryside in
Canterbury Kent.
It’s all buns and guns and whoresons by the ton, in
Canterbury Kent.
Christians concentrate on cant in
Canterbury Kent.
The cuntstabulary can’t cuntrol
Canterbury Kent.
Men hunt women down without relent in
Canterbury Kent.
So who took the cunt out of
Canterbury Kent?
Who took the CUNT out of
CANTerbury KENT?
The rugged path suddenly turned into a fancy new cycle route through semi-wilderness. It was dotted with fuzzy brown caterpillars that I tried to avoid stepping on. The sun was low and a bend of the river gleamed in the distance like a knife. There was no sound but birds, and my steps, and a dog barking at his own echo under a railway bridge. And then I could go no further, because the path was sealed off with twisting police tape: “ENTER CRIME SCENE DO NOT. . . ”
I had hit upon it myself, by accident: the spot where Bee had died! No one could see or stop me, so I stepped inside the taped-off area and sank to my knees, searching for any trace of her, even blood—head wounds bleed—but they’d washed it away, or rain had. The thought of her lying there, in pain, completely maddened me—Bee, whose sculptures were devoted to pleasure! I looked around at what Bee must have seen last before she died—the field, the low line of trees around it, the river, the sun, the sky?—and I wondered again what she thought at the end. Did she just give up, deciding life isn’t worth living, in a world in which such things happen?
But she was wrong, WRONG. Golden light was hitting the opposite riverbank, and the green and gold trees were doing their reflection trick in the river, as if to say: I can face up or down, in a world that is both this and that. The water was clean and clear enough for ducks, who tootled to and fro, the Appassionata was playing in my head, and I longed to tell Bee that there’s Bach and Beethoven and birds and bees and MIMI, Bee, Mimi, the greatest thing.
Don’t give up, Bee, don’t give up! The world needs to be BETTER, not gone.
My feet dragged all the way back through the park. How was I going to go on without Bee? How was I even going to get past the Cankerberry Tree, or “Onion Corner,” without dying?
The heat was getting to me. Them and their heat wave! I stood for a while by the entrance gate to catch my breath. Some people had gathered on the bridge and were pointing down at something in the water. Another ditched shopping cart or baby buggy? Once they’d gone, I went over to see what they were all so fascinated by, and found two small naked female figures, carved in stone. Lithe, young, smooth-skinned girls, less than life-size. They lay stretched out on their backs under the surface of the water, their heads resting on their raised arms, ankles crossed—and they looked happy, relaxed, as if they were enjoying the sensation of the water flowing down their bodies and the weeds slowly brushing against them. They looked content to stay there forever, unfazed by being underwater, unfazed even by death.
A plaque on the bridge confirmed the sculptor’s name—Bridget Hanafan—and the title: Bradbridge’s Widow, Wilson’s Wife.
My last morning in Canterbury, I thought I’d do the hotel manager a favor by telling him about the failing toilet in my room—sotto voce, to save him and his breakfasters any embarrassment.
“Your toilet?” he responded in mock surprise. “Your toilet’s not working?” I recognized that tone of disapproval tinged with hysteria, from all the laminated signs that lay in wait for you throughout the hotel. If it even was a hotel—seemed more like a boardinghouse to me.
The total silence among the hotel guests at their little tables suggested they were busily envisioning a nice English toilet bowl besmirched and clogged by my oafish American turds, while the manager kept tsk-tsking and banging stuff around irritably on his desk. “Your toilet. . . your toilet. . . ” he grumbled. I just stood there, astounded. Surely other toilets had broken down at some point in this shithouse? Finally, he said he’d have a “look” at it later, sighing deeply—the horror, the horror. That’s when I flipped.
“Look, it’s not my toilet, you ass, it’s yours. And as far as I’m concerned you can shove that stupid head of yours right in it, or I’ll do it for you, and then you can have a really good ‘look at it,’ what do you say?”
I slapped some money down on the reception desk, grabbed my suitcase and left, slamming the door behind me loud enough to shake those toast racks good. On my way out, I caught sight of one of the laminated signs and decided, for the benefit of others, to hang it on the front door of the hotel:
DO NOT DISTURB
On the sidewalk I nearly bumped into a strange young woman with two great big pink dots painted on her cheeks. She had quite an outlandish get-up on, involving several brightly colored dresses over a couple pairs of baggy pants, and she was wheeling a stroller full of empty plastic bags. She looked like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And then I suddenly remembered Bee telling me about a sort of miswhelped Molly Malone who wandered the streets of Canterbury all day and was never seen without that stroller full of junk. Bee had seen her once in the public library, asking for a map: “Not a map of everything, just the universe we live in. Where would I find that?”
GOOD QUESTION.