' " … Married Joan, the 'Fair Maid of Kent'." There you are, Lenny, he got spliced to a Joan an' all.'
Lenny touches my arm while Vince reads. He holds out the bag for me to take. Vince lifts his eyes, noticing, as if he's the teacher and we ought to listen. Pay attention at the back.
I take the bag.
' " … Died in 1376." '
Well Jack, if it's any consolation, if it means anything to you, we had you rubbing shoulders, so to speak, with the Black Prince.
Ray
It smells of stone and space and oldness. The pillars go up and up, then they fan out like they're not pillars any more, they've let go of their own weight and it's not stone any more, it's not material. It's like wings up there, arching and reaching, and I know you're supposed to gaze up and think it's amazing and feel yourself being raised up too, and I'm gazing, I'm staring, I'm peering hard, but I can't see it, I can't make it out. The next world.
But I reckon I could fly to Australia. Cross this world. Money I've got. Save Sue the trouble of doing it, other way. When. If.
Though I reckon she would, Fd lay odds she would. Though you'd think it'd serve no purpose, you'd think it'd be immaterial, and there's a hundred things you could better put the fare towards. New car, swimming pool.
It's a far sight further, Sydney to London, than London to Margate, a far cry further. And when she got here she'd only wonder why she ever came, it wouldn't be like the place she left years ago, roots, there wouldn't be no country churchyard with birds tweeting, God knows where I'll get shoved. But someone's got to do it, you've got to have someone, and I bet she would.
But I could save her the trouble.
Lenny
I found that doc to do the job. O'Brien. I'd like to know what register he was on or had been struck off of, I'd like to know how he washed his hands.
Doctor. Butcher more like. Family butcher.
Which strikes me as funny now. You shouldn't joke in church. Because when Jack in that bag there was still up and breathing, or not up but still breathing, flat on his back like one of these holy Joes but not yet turned to stone, he went and said to me that he always wanted to be a doctor.
I stared at him, a bit lost for a comment- He said, 'You know, a doctor, a quack, a sawbones. Cure the sick, chase after nurses, that sort of thing. I'd say live meat's better than dead meat any day, wouldn't you?'
I looked around at the other bed-cases and I looked back at him, because I thought he must be having me on, and he said, 'What are you sniggering at, Gunner?'
I said, 'Well it's a turn-up, Jack.'
This Black Prince feller don't look like he ever smiled.
Vince says, studying that guidebook, 'I say we should take a gander at the cloisters, then make tracks.'
I say, 'Okay, Big Boy, you lead on.' Vie and I have a quick smirk at each other and we traipse on, following Vince, like we can't leave till we've done the lot, it's obligatory.
You shouldn't joke in church, or in hospital, it seems. But it's either a crying shame or it's the biggest joke out to end up wishing we was something we aint. And I'd rather laugh than cry. And, thinking it all over and sizing it all up, I'd say Big Boy there's got the last laugh, since he knows he aint Vince Dodds, he knows he never was, though it's looking like he'd like to change his tune over that. But there aint none of the rest of us know who we really are. Boxer, Doctor. Jockey.
Except Vie.
We're slipping through the doorway that leads to the cloisters. It looks like we've lost Raysy.
Live meat's better than dead meat, that's what he said, though we'll never know June Dodds' honest and considered opinion on that. And Sally'll always have wanted to have had that baby, that pillock's dead baby, though she could've done without some of the live meat she's lived off since. It's a thin line sometimes between the one and the other. But flesh is flesh. It can't be denied.
Maybe the first thing I ought to do after we've done our duty by Jack here is go and pay Sally a visit. It's me, girl. It's your old dad, remember? It aint just another passing prick.
It can't be denied. It shouldn't be encouraged either, sometimes, but it shouldn't be denied. It's like I shouldn't be thinking right now, when I'm taking a turn in the cloisters, of Amy, forty years ago, when Sally was a nipper, fresh back from the seaside. But I am all of a sudden, I am. It don't do when you're escorting her dead husband's remains for their final disposing to think of the way her tits used to point and the way her frock used to hang on her. But I am. You shouldn't ever have wicked thoughts in church, but you do, you want to have 'em, like it's an encouragement. You shouldn't think such things when you're an old man of sixty-nine with no breath in your lungs and nothing but a penny whistle between your legs, but I do, I am, like I'm free to, seeing as Jack's in the bag. I'm thinking of how she'd kiss and pet Sally and I'd be jealous of my own daughter, and how I used to think Jack was the luckiest bastard alive.
And this was my idea, to come here. Dose of holiness. It wasn't for him. Who's he going to tell, who's he going to brag about it to over a slow beer at the end of the day? My mates did me proud, they carried me round Canterbury Cathedral.
It was for us, to put us back on our best behaviour, to clean up our acts. Seeing as how Amy aint here.
I'm undressing her in my heart.
It's just as well your thoughts don't show in your face, though that aint such a let-out with my mush. Face like a fire alarm. But you can't help your face, even less than your thoughts. You can't help flesh being flesh.
It's like lack used to say, I can see him holding forth now in the Coach, that there was more than one meat market at Smithfield once, bad old good old days. That night he was extra merry and Raysy wasn't, bad run with the nags I suppose. It was Vincey's birthday, Vincey's so-called birthday. And that new barmaid. You shouldn't think of a barmaid's bum. Raysy trying to make some joke about the Coach never going nowhere. Everyone tanked. And Jack saying, 'Cock Lane, Smithfield, famous for it once. You wonder how they think up the names. Cock Lane off Giltspur Street. We've all been there, aint we, Raysy? Cock lane, cock alley, cock passage, we've all driven the coach up there.'
Vie
So I said, Til just have to go myself.'
Trev looked up.
I said, 'That was Tony. Won't be in. Looks like he's down with the same bug as Dick. They're dropping like flies.'
Trev said, 'There's Roy. There's me.'
I said, 'It's out beyond Sutton. You've both got to be at the crem at three thirty. It's pushing it. Til have to go. Can you deal with the Harrises?'
Trev nodded. 'And if you're not back before I go to the crem?'
'You better put the Closed sign up. Late lunch. We can't ask Maggie here to hold the fort/ I was standing by the window, and I smiled. 'Unless you want to ask Jack Dodds to swap trades for half an hour. He's often said.'
And it was only then that I realized: the Fairfax Park Hospital and Home, Cheam. That was where June was. Where Amy went, where Jack didn't.
'It's all right, I'll go. Make a change for me.'
So a little after half past one I took the forms and the keys and went round to the lock-up and drove off in the black van with the blacked-out rear windows, what we called the Black Maria. The hearses were more friendly: Doris and Mavis. A ship is always she.
It wasn't as though I expected to see her. It wasn't as though it would look any different, because June was there, from all the other homes and hospitals that are an undertaker's regular port of call. Homes, Hospitals and Hospices, where people hexpire. And the worst are the Homes, since you know they aren't homes at all, it's just a sweet-sounding name for a clearing-station for the handicapped or the old, or a stand-in for that word you mustn't use any more: asylum. And you know that for lots of them it wasn't such a short stay, that this was where the deceased lived maybe most, maybe all of their life, and that life, in this case, meant a kind of death, a kind of not having a home to go to.