“Really, Colin,” his friend scolded him on finding the unopened envelope, “you oughtn’t be so cavalier. This is an important paper. Insurance on my life should my plane have gone down. You’d have stood to gain a hundred thousand.”
“Ta,” Colin Bible told him, “but if you really want to buy me a present, why don’t you just get me a ticket on the pools?”
After that, the policies Colin sent from Heathrow became more and more elaborate. Not only did the premiums and benefits go up but the contingencies they covered became increasingly diverse. Not only would Colin collect if Colin were killed in an automobile accident, if he were taken from him in a train or bus crash, but if he died in a hotel fire, if his plane was hijacked, if he was kidnapped or poisoned or sustained injuries inflicted by terrorists. There was a triple indemnity clause if he died in a foreign hospital that was no longer accredited.
“Really, Colin,” Colin said, “I don’t understand you. I really don’t. Do you know what a good all-in policy sets one back? Fifteen pounds! With the riders I take out it comes almost to twenty.
“And don’t look so indifferent, dearie! Do you have any idea how they drive in some of those countries? Have you even the foggiest how volatile the wogs are? Just the sight of a white skin inflames them!”
“Me too,” Colin said.
“It’s no joke. I could go like that.”
“Don’t you dare go like that.”
“Be a little more businesslike in future, please, Colin. There are real risks.”
“Don’t tell me about risks,” Colin answered, angry now. “I’m a nurse. I work in hospital. Don’t go all bogeyman on me and threaten me with your spoiled food and terrorists. You know why I don’t open those envelopes? Your snide remarks. ‘Get your hair done!’ ‘Towards a decent suit for the funeral!’ Who do you think you are, talking to me that way?”
“My adorable floozy.”
“Now there’s a policy I’d treasure! Floozy insurance. Herpes riders.”
“I don’t cheat on you, Colin.”
And he probably didn’t, Colin thought. Like himself, Colin was a decorous man. Even before they’d found each other, neither had been a chaser. (That probably explained his lover’s will — Colin’s inability to put down in writing or acknowledge in law what had been an open secret for all the time they’d been together, that their arrangement was serious, a commitment, a pledge, a relationship, a devotion lacking in nothing save what would stand up in court. It explained the Birmingham sister, the nephews, the uncles and aunts and distant cousins, all Colin’s trophies of vague, treasured legitimacy. Perhaps it even explained the ever more complicated travel insurance Colin took out each time he went away on business. Possibly he even intended, wanted, or was simply just willing to die out of town, as if the disasters he insured against, the bizarre deaths he underwrote in Heathrow, were only the ordinary extension of the sort of agreement undertaken by flatmates, like a side bet, say.) So Colin was no chaser. Indeed, it had only been Colin Bible’s extraordinary sensitivity to the sexuality of other persons which had brought them together in the first place.
They’d met in hospital. Colin had come in for minor surgery but had been having a bad time of it: painful though not dangerous — thank God — complications. Colin Bible had been taken off the pediatric ward and transferred to orthopedics during a temporary shortage of nurses there. He recognized at once that the man was homosexual, and Colin, seeing how uncomfortable his new patient had become from being forced to lie in one position, asked if he would like a back rub.
He ejaculated while Colin was still applying the lotion. The nurse hastened to reassure him.
“Don’t worry about it,” Colin told the man. “It happens all the time.”
“Extraordinary,” his future lover explained hastily. “I haven’t a clue why I should have behaved that way. That sort of thing has never happened to me. You must know special contact points — being a nurse and all. You must accidentally have rubbed against one of them.”
“It’s the skin,” Colin lied. “The skin’s especially responsive after trauma.”
“You must have a very bad impression of me.”
“No,” he said, and did something he hadn’t imagined himself capable of. He violated his professional ethics. He leaned forward and kissed his patient. He stroked his hair. The man didn’t move.
“I’m artistic,” the man explained irrelevantly. “I work for Madame Tussaud’s. I’m one of the new breed. Well, I suppose that sounds rather grand. All I mean is I’ve these bold ideas. Innovative,” he added nervously.
“Madame Tussaud’s was one of my favorite places when I was a kid,” Colin said. “I haven’t been there in donkey’s years.” He was still stroking his patient’s hair.
“You wouldn’t recognize the place. And once the new wing is in…do you recall the Chamber of Horrors?”
“Do I?” Colin Bible said. “I should say!”
“Jack the Ripper,” his new friend said scornfully. “Burke and Hare!”
Colin Bible shuddered.
“No,” the man said, “that’s just the point. They were merely aberrant.” He flushed reflexively. “I mean they had no social significance. What’s the point? They put fellows like that on display to titillate. What I’m after is something else entirely. I mean, would you like to know my dream, my vision for the place? God, I mean, just listen to the way I’m talking!”
“Of course I would,” Colin Bible said.
“Really? I mean you’re not just humoring an old poof, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“Well,” he said, “those fellows, that lot, they were just our own parochial, historical sociopaths. Freak show, is all. Hydras and kraken. Rocs and manticores. Stuff that goes bump in the night. I mean, even Hitler — and there was a do just to get him in at all. I mean, can you imagine? The old-timers on the Board of Directors were dead against it. Even after they came round, they propped him up in full-dress regalia like an entirely proper führer. Why, he looks like a Caesar. Hitler!”
Colin Bible nodded.
“Well, what is the point? My notion is to show what he did. I want the Holocaust represented. I think that deserves a room all to itself. A large room. We could show the ovens, we could show the showers and the Jews, naked, their blue numbers burned into their wrists, not knowing what’s going to happen to them. We could show the wasted survivors pressed against the barbed wire in their penal stripes. Their mountains of gold teeth, their piles of shoes.
“Hiroshima. Just one wall of a building still standing, a shadow of vaporized flesh imprinted on it like a double exposure.
“We should show cancer,” the man said, tears in his eyes and the bent index finger of the hand that, seconds before, Colin had been holding pressed between his teeth. “And I’m not an old poof,” he said.
“I know that,” Colin Bible said.
“I’m not.”
“I know,” Colin said.
“Actually, sexually I’ve never been very active.”
“I know it.”
“I haven’t.”
“I haven’t either,” Colin Bible said.
“Oh, dear,” his patient said.
What he told him was true, but when Colin was discharged from hospital Colin Bible moved in with him and they became lovers. They had been together almost four years.
Nevertheless, it was good to feel the odd sense of self-reliance imposed on him by the remote dangers of the speeding aircraft.
At Heathrow he’d been too busy with the children to give much thought to Colin — they did not accompany each other much to airports, and he’d been taken by surprise when his friend had shown up in the departure lounge at the last minute — and had come upon the flight insurance desk quite by accident. I really ought to take some out, he thought impatiently. Colin sets store in such things. He thinks he’s sending you a dozen long-stemmed roses. The girl began to explain the various plans. “No, no,” Colin Bible interrupted. “Just your basic ‘My God, We’re Going Into the Drink,’ ‘Three Hundred Feared Dead in Air Disaster!’ coverage,” he said. Take care of yourself, he scribbled hastily across the top of Colin’s copy.