I arranged drinks with Violet at Swansong. Violet, I deemed, under a fateful delusion of wisdom, was just what I needed.
‘Look this is ridiculous,’ she said. ‘I think the least you could do is introduce me. I mean is that going to fucking hurt?’
Pacific as ever. This is her mode, now: a curious oscillation between blunt impatience and cosy collusion with me.
‘That’s why I wanted to see you,’ I said. ‘I think it’s about time I introduced you to Trent.’
I’d given it thought. Likely outcome was, of course, that Violet wouldn’t get a part. If that happened, it would leave Gunn with the business of getting rid of her (that boy’s going to be trading up when he gets back into these boots) and Violet with bitterness straining the seams of her soul’s pockets. Violet in that state – having come close enough to fame to reach out and touch it, only to see it turn and whisk glamorously away – will be promising material indeed. Truly, there’s no telling what Violet close-but-no-cigar’d will be capable of. Certainly I’m seeing stalking. Certainly I’m seeing rage. Certainly I’m seeing a tag-duo of self-loathing and self-love with potentially fatal psychic consequences. Certainly I’m seeing a vast and hungry silence into which any number of my voices might enter . . .
‘Oh Declan you are horrid,’ she said, thumping Gunn’s humerus with what was intended as little-girl exasperation but which in fact dead-armed me for the next ten minutes. ‘Why do you let me? I mean why do you let me, eh?’
Alternatively, she might end up with a part. You never know. She’s not, after all, going to have to act that much. I’m seeing her as one of Jimmeny’s groupies or Pilate’s bits on the side. Maybe one of Dirty Mags’s pre-conversion colleagues (there’s some obvious two-girl action there that I’d trust Trent not to sidestep). Or maybe Salome, since she’s got the fleshy erotic puppyishness that would drive a dad mad. The point is it’s a win-win situation. What do you think Vi’s going to be like if she gets to Hollywood? What sort of a couple do you think her and Gunn are going to make?
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
‘Where?’
‘You need the loo.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘No, Declan, honestly I don’t. Oh I see. Oh.’
But damn me if Gunn’s . . . What I mean is despite Violet’s businesslike adoption of the requisite . . . One stilettoed foot up on the seat of the can, both reddish hands gripping the cistern, the Jane Morris froth tossed, as if with petulance, aside . . . Despite the charming attire of libertinage revealed under the hoiked-up skirt (’be prepared’ is Vi’s new motto, apparently) I find once again that . . . I find myself . . . Well.
‘This is getting ridiculous,’ I said, zipping, buttoning, tidying with compressed fury. ‘I mean this is –’
‘I’ve told you never mind. You look a bit under the weather if you want my opinion. Why don’t we arrange it for Friday.’
‘Friday?’
‘Trent Bintock. Friday evening. Where’s he staying?’
They keep the bogs spick and span at Swansong, but on a tile just to the left of the cistern a markered line had been incompletely erased. ‘For nothing’ it said.
‘At the Ritz,’ I said, a little wearily. ‘Where else?’
The day went from bad to worse after that.
I’d no plan to end up passed out on Declan’s kitchen table, yet that Heinz-flecked and mug-ringed board was where I woke, at the slaked end of the city’s afternoon, packed full of treats and delicacies – those 99s, man, can one ever have too many? – and woozy from hourly pub-halts, where single malts and fortified wines followed rowdy bloody Marys and chilled pilsners down my broadminded gullet. That afternoon drinking thing. And in such heat, too. Well, you know how it is. Did I feel terrible? I felt terrible. The body’s queasy lurch and roil, sure – but chiefly the mind’s curious deflation. Chiefly my irritation with myself. It’s a long time – really a very long time indeed, since I’ve felt irritated with myself. And why, in a month of Hadean Sundays, I thought of visiting Angela Gunn’s grave I’ve no idea. Did I think that was going to help?
None the less don’t laugh, because that is what I did.
There are of late these urges, peculiar blips that are taking me into all sorts of sudden and absurd gestures. Words like ‘irreducible’ and ‘occult’ nudge at the back of my brain. Wordsworth’s blank misgivings, fallings from us, vanishings . . . You’ve got to laugh, actually. One minute I’m sprawled on Gunn’s formica observing through the window the sky’s slow-mo parade of whipped and beaten clouds, the next I’m back in the stewed streets heading for St Anne’s, a heart murmur, an insistence laid against Gunn’s backbone like an icy palm. Images fluttered in and out: Angela’s face in the photograph. Mourners like dark menhirs around the raw grave. Gunn’s face – the pocked mirror in the loo at the funeral directors’ to which he’d adjourned mid-sentence, ambushed by the thuggish gang of his unspoken filial endearments. All this while I kicked my way through the remains of Value Meals and footprinted tabloids with my hands in my pockets and my guts gone heavy. Well, you’ve got to laugh. They’d piss themselves, Downstairs. I’m practically pissing myself now, just thinking of it. Teeny cemetery. No blue left in the sky by the time I got there. Less than a hundred headstones like . . . like what? Terrible teeth? Victory Vees? Damn and blast this language tries my patience. Anyway the little beds of the dead, some crisp and white, others gone to leprous ruin. Blurred dates. Even New Time’s got the clout to smudge the lines of who and when. Doesn’t take long. There was no one else there. The small, dark, and insensitively renovated church threw its shadow at my back. I did contemplate, briefly, popping in to see Mrs Cunliffe of the strabismal leer and compulsive polishing – but thought better of it in the end. She’s in capable hands. She’s getting worse. I felt chilly. I felt dreadful, actually, if you must know, what with the bare flesh of my throat turned tender and Gunn’s ticker doing its broken-winged bird thing in his chest, what with my bunch of bright daffs held headsdown, what with the dropped wind and suddenly attentive trees, what with being slowly flooded by the sense of how seldom Gunn can bring himself to come here.
D’you know what I did? I cried. Oh yes indeed. Cried my eyes out. Right there by her headstone. ANGELA MARY GUNN, 1941–1997, ETERNAL REST. You can laugh now. It was the eternal rest did for me. Not my fault. Gunn’s. He’s noticed in himself of late a vulnerability to venerable abstract nouns and hallowed phrases. Duty. Grace. Honour. Peace. Eternal Rest. Tears start. The bottom lip wobbles in that way that always makes an observer – no matter how compassionate – want to giggle. Grief. Home. Regret. He lives in mortal fear of Love. A child of his times, he buried these things away in some cellar of himself under sprawling cobwebs and drifts of dust. They lay there, the holy relics his sceptic had outgrown. Then his mother’s death, with, not long after, the discovery that even the most casual utterances of such words in the world he’d thought debunked could wake their awful magic. British Airways TV commercials, country and western songs, Hallmark birthday cards, hymns. Only two weeks before I arrived he was unmanned outside a church, arrested by the tune he knew.
Be there at our sleeping and give us, we pray
Your peace in our hearts Lord at the end of the day . . .