What do you do, what does anyone actually do with the possessions of the dead?
Oh, you can put the house on the market, shred the accumulated paperwork of decades, pass on the physical bequests and give the books to charity. Roll up the carpets and leave them out in the alley; someone will come by before the council can, to carry them off for uncertain purposes. Invite people round for a takeaway, have them take away anything they fancy. First come first served, finders keepers, no returns.
And still, after all of that, you find yourself left with things. Less than a skipful, and you can’t just chuck them anyway. These are the things that no one wants because they’re claimed already, they still belong to the one who’s gone. You see them, you touch them, you know. They’re invested.
Some of them are obvious. The love letters from thirty years ago, the painfully erotic ones all heedless of what’s coming, seeds of mutual death inherent in the text? You can’t shred those, nor publish them, nor pass them into hands less scrupulous or tender than your own. The recipe book half filled with his mother’s handwriting, half with his own. The photographs from forty years ago, unindexed, unattributed: people in hats, people in jeans, people in formal poses or high good humour, people who used to mean something. The silver napkin-ring inscribed with the name he never used, a gift from godparents he never saw, perhaps the last object on the planet to record that name and that relationship.
The teddy bear, of course. What can anyone ever do with an orphaned bear?
And then there are those things that he collected or kept that are orphaned of intent now, sometimes orphaned of meaning. An odd assemblage of brass tubing and blu-tak that he could take to any party, that turns any innocent empty wine-bottle into a bong for the better smoking of dope, except that he hadn’t smoked for years and nor do any of the rest of us, but still. A wooden half-shell under a pewter lid, with indentations chiselled into it, never quite the right size for a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches; it used to be a party game of two parts, trying to figure out what it was really meant for and any other use it could practically serve. A game without a winner, always his favourite.
A dog lead that always hung on his bedroom door, although he never ever had a dog. Try not to think about that one.
The shells he used for coquilles St Jacques, that weren’t scallop shells at all; he claimed them for river oysters, said he swam for them himself when he was young. We were always careful not to let a marine biologist anywhere near, for fear of hearing that story disavowed. Some myths are a pearl beyond price, where the truth is a shabby bead.
Shabby beads, strings of them that he might have worn to any of a dozen festivals he might have gone to. We all knew too many stories that didn’t quite jibe with each other, that couldn’t all be true. But still, the beads were true.
Stories coil and tangle like beads on a shelf, dusty and inextricable. Take them by the handful, or not at all.
Things accumulate. Once there’s one that can’t be thrown away, there’s always more than one. Another and another, a man’s life expressed in what he loved or kept or couldn’t throw away. So what do you do, with things you do not love or want to keep and cannot throw away?
Stow them, for now. Find a cupboard, make space, think about it later. Promise yourself that, promise each other. Later…
I made space for myself by leaving. Leaving them all, leaving everything; crossing oceans, working away.
A promise is a promise, though. No escaping that. I’ll be back, I said: and here I was, coming back. Flying in on a warm front, while snowmelt flooded the ground below; the metro and my own feet carrying me to Gerard’s new front door. Slogging over damp and grimy pavements, thinking as I went about the persistence of ice. How time and change had cleared the way—by and large, give or take—but still there was ice beneath the puddles, still great stubborn slabs of filthy snow at random at the roadside.
It ought to be a metaphor for something, I remember thinking that. As though it mattered, as though it were foreknowledge, ominous.
Gerard’s door. My feet wanted to go the old way, to the old house; my mind had to keep remembering that wasn’t his any more and wasn’t ours, that we had no claim now, we’d sold up and walked away.
I had to check his e-mail more than once for directions how to walk this new way, where to turn. Which door.
And even so I found myself reaching for my own keys on his doorstep, and having to remember once again that I was a stranger here myself. And ringing the bell instead, and even that made the wrong sound. I knew the call of Gerard’s bell; this wasn’t it.
Still, it called him and he came. He opened the door and we were instant family again, awkward and uncertain with each other. Did we kiss, did we hug? We used to, but that was then. Should we shake hands, perhaps, like an acknowledgement of distance travelled? With strangers and with friends, these matters resolve themselves. It’s family that you have to think about. Even when that family is a tribe of choice, brothers by adoption. Someone else’s choice, but hey.
In the end I did kiss him, yes, dry and perhaps ironic. Then I handed him the dutiful litre of duty-free whisky and let him show me around.
Kitchen, bathroom, utility. His bedroom, the spare bedroom which was mine for the duration. Dining room, living room, hallway. That was it, neat and spare and functional; and all the way there was something missing. One more door, a false wall, something.
He knew. Of course he did, we were family. Even so, he waited; I had to say it myself. That’s what family does, leaves things lying until it’s almost too late, except when it is actually and absolutely that.
I said, “No piano?” and his face twisted into something that might almost be called a smile, if a smile is a measure of what’s bitter.
“No,” he said, no more than that. What he meant, what we both meant was that there was nothing of Quin’s, nothing visible, anywhere in the flat. All the years I’d known him Gerard lived with Quin, in Quin’s house, amongst his stuff. This, now: this was more than different, this was opposite, an exercise in absence. I could look and look and only ever see what wasn’t there.
It was…almost overwhelming. It was what Quin did while he was alive, he dominated, he overbore us all; he was older for real and bigger in our heads, he had a longer reach and a stronger voice, he had opinions and taste and experience where all we had was grabby hands and appetite.
Dead now and gone away, moved out, Quin was still all-encompassing. Still not letting go. He used to fill Gerard’s life with artefacts, with evidence; now he had me searching for it. Which turned out to be the same thing in reverse.
Gerard knew. He put that whisky to the best use possible, a glass in my hand and another in his, the bottle between us and the cap lost somewhere, left behind, tossed out. You maybe can’t actually drown jetlag, but you can surely drown it out.
Other things, questions, are also not susceptible to drowning. I said, “Where are you keeping his stuff, then? It has to be somewhere here.”
“Of course. There’s a cupboard. In your room, as it happens. We can swap, if you like. If you don’t like the thought of it.”
“No worries,” I said. I was the one with inbuilt distance, thousands of miles’-worth, years of time. He had to live with things daily, nightly;. If he chose not to sleep with them at hand, I wasn’t about to force him into it.
Besides, I really wasn’t worried. Nothing of Quin’s had ever worried me in his lifetime, so why should it start now?
Whisky, then. and words, talking, the way we hadn’t talked for years. It was my first true sight of Gerard without Quin, and he concerned me. He was like the flat, I thought, marked out by absence: nurturing the hollow at his heart. He hadn’t lost weight in the body, but in his mind, in his substance, yes. Everything he said seemed to delineate an edge, a new limit to his reach, thus far and no further, I can’t go there; and all those edges together made the shape of Quin, an emptiness exquisitely cut out.
Or I was over-imagining, seeing what wasn’t there in more senses than one. Whisky and death and reunion: they’re notorious all three for stirring up sentiment. Add the toxic shock of displacement, crossing half the world to find an old friend in the wrong place, and small wonder if I thought he carried damage. Of course I would have expected loss, if I’d come with any overt expectations. Grief is lossy by its nature. And after so long seeing Quin at the heart of everything we did, the puppet-master for us all, of course I’d see his absence writ large all around me. Of course I’d see Gerard reduced, missing the better part of himself. Of course I would.
Two positions, two points of view, and I oscillated between them until the bottle was empty and my giddy mind couldn’t keep a grip on either one. My feet were steady enough to carry me to bed, so I went there.
Shift half around the world, it takes time for time to catch up with
you. My body-clock was running hours slow, and pouring whisky in the works didn’t help at all. I did sleep, or at least I passed out for a while; but I still woke up in the deep dark, in the heavy silence of a sleeping house.
Woke up cold, densely and deliberately cold. That was how it felt, at least: that I was cold by intent, someone else’s purpose.
That would be the whisky talking. I could feel it still seething in my system like the suck of a salt tide, tangled up with jetlag and exhaustion and whatever dreamstate I’d been stumbling through.
Stories tangle like shabby beads, and so do legs and sheets. I made a sorry mess of scrambling out of bed. And stood there violently shivering as I grabbed clothes at random in the dark, my own grubby travelwear and a bathrobe my fingers found on the back of the door as I jerked it open, as I groped my way out of there.
I was moving almost by instinct, just to get away. Logic said that the rest of the flat would be just as cold, but logic was wrong and my legs knew better, seemingly. Even the hallway felt warmer, an end to that vicious chill. By the time I reached the living-room I was comfortable, at least on the surface, skin-level. The bitter icicle bite in my marrow took longer to ebb. I was still shuddering as I blundered about the kitchen trying to boil a kettle quietly, making instant coffee as an act of desperation, drinking it black and hot enough to scorch.
When I was steady again, when I could think again, I wanted to think that it was just dreamsickness, an act of unconscious imagination. Of course the room couldn’t have been that cold.
And yet, and yet. I couldn’t convince myself: not without going back. Which I was weirdly reluctant to do. I had all the excuses I needed, jetlag and caffeine together; I was obviously not going to sleep any more, so why go back to bed? But I have a lifelong habit of doing those things that are branded by my own reluctance.
Back I went, then, with a second mug of coffee in my fist. Opened the door and stepped inside and felt it instantly again, all the chill of winter. And laughed at myself for leaving the window open when there was snow on the ground, and drew back the curtain—and found the double glazing closed and locked, and ice on the inside of the glass.
On the inside, and too chill to melt when I dragged my finger through it. Not frost, not condensation: clear ice.
Bewildered, I gazed around the room and saw of course the cupboard in the corner, waiting for me. Never mind the chest of drawers and the bedside cabinet and the bookshelf, never mind anything. The world is all that is the case; in that room, right then, the world was in that cupboard.
When Quin came into a room, he drew the eye.
The eye and then the body after, irresistibly. We used to cluster around him, all his acolytes, his fanboys: quarrelsome and jealous of each other, sparring for his attention. He’d scold, but privately I always thought he loved it.
The cupboard’s handle burned with cold. I snatched my hand away, then shook my head, reached back, gripped again and tugged.
And here, yes, in the fall of lamplight: here were all Quin’s things. The essence of him, what makes or describes a man. Here they were, arrayed on shelves and caught in a nimbus of air so cold it was almost visible, almost tangible.
My mind wanted to play with thoughts of deep freeze, of cold storage, suspended animation; but the animus coming off those shelves was nothing playful. Hard and bleak and savage, rather, frost on an iron blade.
It was terrifying, appalling, it spoke grimly to the grimmest heart of me; and it was very real, no whisky-dream, no fancy of the night; and I was very, very glad I hadn’t agreed to swap rooms with Gerard, because it was also pure Quin. Once gone, what else would he do but rage? And where else do it but here, among his things? Accustomed to our worship, he always did hate to be left out or left behind, those rare times we did that to him; and he always did have a temper like a whip.
Standing there, shivering in that bitter fall of air but not running this time, thinking it through, I almost felt that I faced him down; but it was Gerard I was angry for, and not myself. He didn’t deserve this. Knowingly or not, he’d shifted all Quin’s things as far as he could bear to, nowhere near far enough. Months and years he’d lived here, on his own, no one close to notice as Quin flayed him from within. What we did see, we’d all put down to widowhood and grief. I had myself. Who’d think of a flensing-knife, all ice and malevolence, cutting that perfect hollow replica, eating out the core of a good man…?
Or I was over-imagining, seeing what wasn’t there, only a cupboard full of relics and an old familiar sorrow—but this I knew for certain, that I was bloody cold. So I closed the door and went back to the kitchen, kept myself warm and worried until the world turned and the sun rose and so did Gerard.
I didn’t say a word to him. Stories tangle, words knot themselves into muddled meanings, and our own history was too complicated to pick apart even without Quin’s winding through it and through it.
I did hug him, though, and felt how brittle he was. And wondered if I were too late already, but there was nothing I could do about that. He needed to rebuild himself; he might or might not have the chance.
I fed him breakfast the way I always used to after we’d been up all night with Quin, and saw him off to work, and let him go away thinking that it was only jetlag that had me so wide awake and restless so early in the morning, only whisky that had made me so sentimental.
And then when he was safely gone I went down to the corner shop and bought all the padded envelopes and all the wrapping-paper they had, all the packing tape and all the labels. Then I came back and started making parcels. One by one, all of Quin’s things, each one separately addressed to any one of Quin’s many friends worldwide. I had them all, listed in my laptop. I sent them e-mails to warn them, and then I carried packages to the post office, in batches. Stood in the queue and sent them off, this way and that, local and long-distance and international, by common post and carrier and courier.
His teddy bear I kept, my contribution.
Stories tangle like strings of beads, but you can always cut the string.