Because when I think about what it was like to live with you, it was like all these things. It was like living in a poem or a picture, a story, a piece of music, when I think of it now. It was wonderful.
Not that I wasn’t glad you were back, coming and going like you did over the weeks, the same you only slightly more ragged-looking every time, and every time coming in like I wasn’t even there and going straight over and sitting at the study desk, pulling your hair out over those talks you had been going to give about books and art. I never saw you doing any actual writing, I only ever saw you pulling your hair out.
You’ll be bald soon if you keep doing that, I said.
Like the nodding De Chirico heads in Sylvia Plath’s The Disquieting Muses, you said from your seat at the desk.
If you say so, I said, whatever they are when they’re at home.
It’s a poem, you said, about a frightening childhood vision which partly inspires a child to be an artist and partly leaves her no option but to be it. I should write about Plath in this talk on form. She’s someone who works so hard to master form in her earlier poems that in the later poems she finds a kind of formal liberation and can do anything she likes.
Right, I said. Uh huh.
It was like you had no idea you were dead.
It’s because of the tightness of stanza, you were saying, and the syllabic patterning in her early poems, poems like Black Rook in Rainy Weather, that when she gets to the final work, the poems in Ariel, she can fly completely free-form. But only because she’s understood it in the first place. It’s like the tightness of form in the early poet releases the openness of form in the later.
Yeah, and she lived a jolly life, didn’t she, happy and fulfilled and so on, I said.
You turned your black eyes and your blackening nose on me and you sighed.
I’ve told you a hundred times, the life is nothing to do with it, you said. The life is the least of it.
You were back on form yourself. You could speak again without having to stop and wonder what words meant, though you were a bit nasal-sounding now; you were sounding more and more alarmingly like your old self with each visit home, and you were staying longer with me each time, though your actual nose now was almost gone, was sort of hollow, and the smell you sent ahead of yourself was so much worse than the clean earthy smell you’d first had when you came back that when I came home from work and walked up our street now I’d always know several houses away if you were there or not, and also there’d been some notes through the letterbox from next door, about drains, and I tried not to mind that every time you left again more things from the house would have gone missing: my watch, almost all the pens, the remotes for both the tv and the dvd (which meant I couldn’t actually switch them on), the little onyx owl off the mantelpiece, the red pair of pliers, the recharger for the electric toothbrush, the tweezers, even once a whole table lamp went; and I tried not to mind that you seemed more interested, when you did come here, in spending time poring over those old unfinished talks you never even gave at a university than in me, since of course it was because of me, not them, you were coming back here at all, wasn’t it?
But if anything was imperfect about you it was my own doing. As you’d always said, the imagination can do anything. If only mine was half as original as yours had been I’d have been able to imagine you odorless, sitting up at the table with me like that good talking dog or hovering starlike above me wherever I went, through the supermarkets and train stations of life. But no, I couldn’t even imagine you a good permanent nose. I didn’t even have the imaginative grace to be able to do that. And there seemed nothing I could do to change it: though I tried to imagine it differently it always ended up the same every time you came home, through the door, up the stairs and straight into the study to pull out more of your hair over some old computer printouts.
At the moment the one that was preoccupying you was the one called On Form.
I wasn’t really sure, to be honest, what form meant. I asked Sandra, at work. It’s a thing you fill in, she said.
Ha, I said, because little did she know that right at that moment I was sitting there experimenting with some stiff paper, curving it into a cone shape for filling the place your nose had been, I was thinking that paper was better than wood, not too heavy and very easily replaceable and re-shape-able. I had noticed that you were having trouble, with no place on your face now to balance your glasses.
Yeah but Sandra, I said. What’s the form for if a dead person comes back from the dead and hangs out with you? What would you do if that happened to you? Ha ha, Sandra said, who’s been watching too many horror movies. Then she looked concerned and said: Are you all right sweetheart? No, I’m fine, I said. Well, we all thought you were on better form than you’d been, she said, we’re all glad about that, you’ve had a rough time. But you’re looking a bit pale these days again, I was wondering if things were okay at home. No, but really, I said, what if someone, what would you do with them? Sandra looked at me then looked hard at her computer screen. If it happened to me, she said not looking up from the screen, I’d tell someone. I am, I’m telling you, I said. I mean, I’d go and see a doctor, she said. That’s what I’d do if I were you.
She sent me out to check ten sycamores at the backs of some houses in Romsey to see whether there was a root problem when it came to the sewers (the sycamores were fine, though a leylandii clump was too close to the houses by far) and by the time I got back to work she’d sent me an email saying I’d been assigned next week off, on half-pay — in October, which is one of our busiest times.
I looked up hotels in Brighton. We’d always liked going to Brighton. I booked one we’d stayed in before. I walked home. You were home already; I could tell.
I’ve booked a holiday, I said. Want to come? We need some fresh air, you and me. But if you don’t want to, that’s okay. If you’d rather stay here with your work, I mean.
You didn’t hear me. You were busy working. I watched hair waft down lightly through the air in the bright of the anglepoise.
Two days later, two days into the holiday, two days of waking at 5 am and knowing there was nothing to have to get up for, two days away from the work structure hanging around a hotel room by myself with you, and I was losing the will to live.
On our first day I’d wandered round the shops near the hotel. When I got back I found you’d clearly been right behind me and had lifted a couple of books from the charity bookshop whose stock I’d had a passing look at. I began to worry. You were a figment of my imagination. That meant I must have taken those things.
Did you just take those? Without paying? I said.
You held up one of the hotel coffee mugs. Then you let it drop. It hit a bit of floor that wasn’t carpeted and broke into splintery pieces.