9 Mourning

Grey April morning. Somewhere, elsewhere, perhaps not far away, blossom falls like snow, trembling in the stirring breeze. But in Ophelia Street day comes crawling through the curtains. People begin to stretch and reluctantly rise from their rest. Bedclothes are tugged out of sight. Milkman’s bottles clatter and postman’s letters settle on door mats. Inside houses cats pad their way to see. One by one doors open on the shrouding grey.

Inside the Johnson house no movement. No cat comes stalking no letter on the floor. Not much light either, with curtains still drawn from the previous night. In Robert’s room a shape lies bundled under blankets on the bed, gently breathing. On the rush-seated chair beside the bed, a Van Gogh chair, cigarettes, matches and ashtray; one stubbed out filter tip. A still life. A dressing table with cold, white marble top and a framed photograph of mother, smiling, in younger days. A pallid silence fills the house, spreading out, pushing against the walls.

Scratch. A scratching in the next room, scratching on the door. Time to get up, time for Mrs Johnson to be making breakfast, drinking tea. Her dressing gown, from Marks & Spencer, with the big, orange printed flowers, hangs limply on the back of the faded yellow door. Scratch. A scratching at the yellow door, a cat scratching and desperate to get out, mewing and pawing. Scratch.

In the adjacent room Robert stirred, and turned onto his left shoulder to face the dawn pushing through the drawn curtains. Dawn? Morning. Time, must be, to start waking. Time? Late. Gone eight. What is she doing? Where is she? She’ll make him late. Never has been yet. Never will be. But who cares, who really cares? He does, she doesn’t. It’ll be her fault. So turn over, go to sleep. Scratch. Go to sleep. Scratch, scratch.

Robert sprang out of his bed. He banged three times on his mother’s door with clenched fist, shouting ‘Do you know what time it is? What do you think you’re playing at?’

The silence swelled, the silence of emptiness. The house was still, holding its breath. Scratch. All at once he knew. He flung open the door, expecting something, it might have been his past, to scuttle by him.

She lay stretched under blankets on the bed, her face cold and white above the sheet, serene, even beautiful, in her peacefulness, and dead. There was no need to check, no need for holding mirrors to lips. The truth seemed to stare from her eyes.

He approached her with awe, as you would an altar. Standing above her, looking down, his eyes brimmed with tears, his mouth opened and shut with grief. Finally he threw himself down on the bed, lying there quietly crying into the eiderdown that covered her. And so he stayed, part of the stillness.

But the minutes ran on. The alarm clock ticked ever more insistently, as if, any second now, it would go off. And inside his head the same pulsing echoed, getting louder and louder, it too threatening, any second now, to explode into a scream.

Raising his head he faced the mirror on the dressing table. He saw himself, the red eyes; he saw his mother, pale and stiff; he saw the cat, Timmy, curled up next to his mother’s face, licking her face as if performing some final rite, the family priest offering his services. A fit of horror and resentment seized him: the cat lay there so snugly, so possessively, so full of care; his lifeless mother was so still, so contented. And he himself, what could he do, except sit quietly and sob gently to himself? No, there must be more, death must mean more than this, death must be more than a gentle descent of peacefulness, like the soft fall of night covering the day.

The cat’s pink tongue kept flickering over his mother’s face. It was intolerable. How could it be borne? He reached out, grabbed the cat round its bony, furry neck, and hurled it with savage fury into the mirror on the dressing table opposite. Slam, it met its own image with a cracking of bones and howl of pain. Pots and jars, bottles and brushes, pins and hair grips, photographs and diaries were sent flying across the polished wooden surface as Timmy fell among them and lay writhing, its front legs suddenly bent and jellylike. Robert grabbed it again, lifted it up above his head and once more hurled it across the room and into the mirror.

Robert ran out of the room, slamming the door behind him, and burst into the kitchen. Here everything was neat and tidy. Cups, plates, food, cutlery, teatowels, all the usual kitchen paraphernalia, were not to be seen; they were out of sight in the various cupboards that lined the walls. This perhaps more than any other room in the house, had been his mother’s room.

He walked over to the kitchen sink, inserted the plug into the whiteness of its immaculately kept glazing, and filled it to the brim with cold water, clinically clear. He waited until the water became completely still, gazing deep into it all the while, then backed away as if fearful to disturb it.

He walked towards his mother’s room, pausing on the way to throw off the jacket of his pyjamas into his own room. Inside his mother’s room he found Timmy, terrified, agonised, bleeding, dragging itself towards the bed from which it had been ejected. He stepped up to the cat, stooped down and lifted it by the midriff, ignoring the cat’s pitiful attempts to defend itself, and carried it into the kitchen.

He held it in his two hands over the sink as the cat squirmed and screeched in desperation. He plunged it deep down into the icy water, holding the body under until the bubbles had long ceased to rise to the surface. Then he released the sodden fur, and stepped back as if admiring what he had done. He gazed, transfixed, into the once pure water that was now pink, streaked with darker threads of red, with a scum of dark hair floating on the gently rocking surface.

Time passed, and sounds started to chip into the silence of the April morning; the canary chirping from the front room, the kitchen clock hammering out its loud seconds, the humming of the fridge and, outside the closed cell of that house, the factory bell ringing shrilly. Robert was suddenly shocked back into consciousness. He stared deep into the cloudy water, searching past the reflection of the sky that lay upon the surface, and saw the drifting body of fur. Almost without realising what he was doing he retched and vomited into the dustbin at the side of the sink.

He walked with groggy, drunken legs into the bathroom. But his head had cleared, the constant pounding inside his head had stilled, and this was such a relief. He almost felt like laughing; and he did smile to himself.

He washed slowly and carefully, relishing the warm water as it trickled down his skin. He brushed his teeth, enjoying the minty taste of the toothpaste. It was a memorable day, there was much to savour. He went to the kitchen and took a carrot from the vegetable rack; he liked raw carrots; he crunched into it, its freshness starting to clean away the taste of vomit from his mouth.

Steps needed to be taken to impress the various scenes upon his memory. If this was the most important day of his life, and he believed it was, then it had somehow to be frozen and preserved for future reference – like the stills his mother used to collect in a scrapbook, pictures from her favourite films. First of all he walked, more steadily now, into his mother’s bedroom. He stopped, walked out again with the curious weak smile on his skull-like face, and closed the door. He stood outside, holding the handle, for a few seconds, then threw the door open so that the room and the scene was revealed to him in a sudden flash. There his mother lay on the bed, the grey and brown blankets torn away from her cold body, a figure of tranquillity among the debris, a strange almost deified figure, a creator surrounded by the derelict remnants of her creation; the glass that had covered a photograph was in tiny fragments on the dressing table and floor, a bottle of hand cream dripped its contents onto the flower-patterned carpet, a paperback lay open, stained with the cat’s blood, its spine broken and spitting out loose pages. The son walked to the bed, and stood above his mother. Turning his head sideways he looked into the mirror, fixing his own place in the picture. He stood stiffly, reflecting upon his own person, the bare torso above the loose pyjama trousers, the skeletal trunk and face with ribs and cheekbones thrusting their presence into view, the biceps of his scrawny arms which he twitched nervously, yet defiantly, even admiringly. And he smiled.

Robert then walked through to the kitchen, where the tap water had begun to drip monotonously into the grimy water in the sink. He stared at the surface but the greyness of the day prevented him from seeing more than a black outline of his head and shoulders. He grasped the chain of the plug and pulled it out, peering into the slowly draining water. The changing texture of the animal fur intrigued him: it was only when the texture ceased to change any more below a certain level that he noticed that the water was no longer draining away, for the cat’s body was blocking the hole. Faced with the need to touch the animal, to shift its body, Robert’s complexion lost the colour it had recently regained. He retched once more and tried to be sick, but this time there was no relief. The cat still had to be moved. Averting his eyes from the sink, he searched for some instrument to use and found a wooden cooking spoon in one of the drawers. With his face turned away still, he prodded the cat and lifted its body, heavy and sodden, just enough to let the water seep away underneath.

Now he was faced with a greater problem: how to dispose of the cat’s body? With a feeling of sickness more uncomfortable by far than the actual physical release of vomiting, with his emotions suddenly jumbled and painful, with the scratches on his skin inflicted by the struggles of the cat beginning to smart, Robert groaned and leant back against the cold, white wall of the kitchen, his bare shoulders pressing against it as if seeking comfort from the contact. For five minutes he stood, unable to think, unwilling even, suddenly overwhelmed by his feelings of grief, of pain, of guilt, of fear, weeping now and then, and whimpering unintelligible words.

Eventually his emotions began to abate, and his head was filled once more with the heavy ticking of the clock. He pulled himself up straight, steeled himself, and stumbled over to the sink where he found a pair of yellow rubber gloves which his mother had used to wear for washing up the dishes. His hands were scratched in a criss-cross pattern and the cold grip of the rubber on his skin was comforting as he drew on the gloves. With both his gloved hands he lifted the limp animal off the bottom of the sink, holding it at arm’s length as it dripped. He grew tired of waiting for the water to stop dripping off the cat, and let it drop back into the sink. In the cupboard underneath he found a plastic bucket, in which he deposited the cat and locked it out of sight.

There was a lot of clearing up to be done. The kitchen floor had a thin, slippery covering of water, which he mopped up first. Then he scrubbed the smears off the sink. Removing his gloves, he washed his hands again in the bathroom, flinching and gritting his teeth as disinfectant stung the shallow wounds. In his mother’s bedroom he drew the sheet and blankets over her face, first removing the rings from her fingers. One was a plain platinum wedding ring, the other was an engagement ring with a single, large diamond in a gold setting. He brought in a cloth to wipe the spilt hand lotion and a dustpan and brush to sweep up broken bits of glass. The photographs – one of his mother and father on their wedding day, one of himself as a baby – he picked up and put away in a drawer.

Then he dressed himself: dark grey suit, white shirt and dark tie, not because these seemed the appropriate clothes for the situation but because they were what he always wore. His everyday clothes were his mourning clothes, as if every day of his adult life he had been in mourning for his lost mother. He would wear them still.

Robert realised that he would have to contact the doctor without further delay. Slipping on his raincoat, for heavy drops of rain were now tapping against the window panes, he dashed across the road to the phone box on the corner opposite The Lady Ophelia. He arranged for the doctor to call on his rounds and returned home to wait for him.

It was a long day before him, a long day of sitting and waiting and being alone. The rain fell steadily outside, and he sat watching raindrops running jerkily down the window pane as if in their movement, their pursuit of each other, he would see some revelation. But there was nothing, nothing except the waiting. The doctor came, and later on the undertakers. He began collecting bits of paper, certificates, receipts, proofs that, yes, once she had lived and now she was dead and there was no going back. And it was a comfort, strangely: the mundane did not intrude, the trivial details of the rituals of the living for the dead did not grate against his grief. He began to understand it now, how life carried on. It was not callousness or lack of respect; rather there was something triumphant in survival itself, and this needed to be asserted. He had always thought it would be so different from this. As a small boy he had often thought of death. The possibility of his mother dying had been more to him than a vague, mysterious fear that kept him awake one or two nights of his childhood, but a waking dread that absorbed his imagination. Much of his time had been spent in making plans which had slowly congealed into a determination to kill himself if his mother should die. But she had not died: until that morning she had lived, loving and protecting her son with undiminishing jealousy and increasing reserve. Now she was gone, and it seemed that little more was demanded of him than to make arrangements for her removal from sight with the minimum fuss and to carry on working at his job, the job of surviving, making sure that his life went on still.

That day he sat, for the most part, and thought: remembering the past, inevitably. He spent a long time watching from his window. On the window sill the prickles of a cactus held the hem of the curtain, inviting him to watch, or so it seemed. The rain eased, the sun glimmered, then disappeared, the wind got up, black clouds blew in again, a steady drizzle set in. In the interlude from the rain two small girls played with a ball in Hamlet Close opposite. They bounced the ball from pavement to wall to their hands and back again, monotonously, until, finally driven to fury by the regular thudding on his wall, Len the shopkeeper raced out and chased them away. Seeming to leave, hanging in the air, only the sound of the ball bouncing and bouncing.

Later in the day in the falling drizzle of twilight, in the golden glow of the lamps, Robert made his way outdoors with the cat wrapped in a black polythene bag. It no longer seemed important to make elaborate attempts to hide death. He had planned to bury the cat, but now there seemed no point; death seemed to bury itself well enough. Robert Johnson ended his day of grey April mourning by dropping a polythene bag into a wooden orange box.