Nicola Barker - Love Your Enemies

John’s mother clattered her teaspoon around in her saucer. After a short pause she said, ‘Am I correct in assuming that this is a … that this is some kind of a coffin? I don’t know what else to think.’

Melissa nodded at her. ‘He’s been making it over the past few weeks. Every time I came to see him it was all he talked about, all he could think of.’

She stared at it again, nervously. After a short silence Steve said, ‘It’s a real work of art, a real show of craftsmanship. Every detail is spot on. He hasn’t quite finished the lettering, though.’ He noticed a small bit of the material that John had asked for peeping out of the corner of the coffin. ‘Is it lined yet? Did he manage that?’

Melissa turned on him. ‘Steve, John’s dead now. I don’t think his mother wants to talk about this thing. It doesn’t matter any more.’ She felt angry at Steve, but the sharpness in her voice, like the top note on a penny whistle, was derived chiefly from her disappointment at finding out that John had deceived her in order to try and make her take him seriously. She got a sort of black gratification from finding out that her initial impressions of him had been accurate. She stared at the coffin with hatred and wanted to destroy it. John’s mother was saying, ‘Well, that is actually part of what I don’t understand. I want to know what made John do this, it just doesn’t make sense.’

Melissa answered gently, ‘Maybe this project was just like a symptom of his illness. Maybe it was just a distraction.’

Suddenly her words were like weapons. She heard her voice speaking in this room, John’s room, and it was as though she was listening to someone else, and this person was destroying all the things that John had said before, covering up his ideas and aspirations, burying them. John was dead now and what he thought no longer had any bearing. It didn’t matter.

Steve turned to her, surprised. ‘I don’t think that’s very accurate or fair, Melissa. John was always perfectly coherent whenever we … you met him. He obviously wanted to do this thing, to create this coffin. It was like a parting gift, an avowal of intention. It was obviously very important to him, given that in the end he sacrificed everything for it.’

As he finished speaking he turned to look at John’s mother. Her face seemed puffy, as if she wanted to cry. She said, ‘I can’t pretend that I’m not bitter about this. There was a letter that I wrote him on the doormat when we got into the house, a whole pile of letters there that he never bothered opening. It’s like he knowingly denied telling me that he was dying, like he gave all that he had left into making this thing and forgot about me. It would be untrue to pretend that I don’t almost hate this coffin for that reason.’

Melissa nodded immediately. ‘I think that it was a destructive and ugly idea in the first place. It trivializes everything, it pretends to be frivolous, but look what it did to John, how it cut short what little life he had left to live.’

John’s mother was frowning as she listened to Melissa. She looked uncertain and worried. Steve saw this expression and felt compelled to interrupt. ‘I think Melissa’s wrong. John has created something very wonderful here, something that has lived on beyond him, that explains how he felt, that gave him purpose. I think that this coffin is almost like a gift to all those people that knew him and loved him in life …’ He knew that he was essentially talking rubbish, but felt that it was suddenly necessary. ‘That’s why he must be buried in it; it must be completed and used.’

Melissa turned on him, aghast. ‘You’ve got to be kidding! There’s no way that this thing can be used now. After everything that’s happened it would be obscene. This coffin is just a bundle of ideas, it shouldn’t really have been constructed, let alone completed at such a cost.’

John’s mother stood between them and stared at the coffin. She was unsure as to the relationship between the two of them. She wondered if they were a proper couple or if they were just friends. They were dressed in such strange clothes, in her eyes, that they seemed to slot into the same nightmare part of her consciousness as the coffin; somewhere modern and foreign and inexplicable. She wondered how much John had actually liked the girl. In the end she wanted only to do what was best for him.

Melissa was speaking again and she tried to listen to her. She said, ‘When we first met John he was buying the material to line this thing. Even then, in retrospect, he was obviously unwell. He wanted to pretend that he was fine, but he wasn’t. He said that he was building this coffin for someone else then, and I believed him. I think that was true.’

She knew now that this wasn’t true, but didn’t care.

Steve laughed. ‘Of course that’s not true! It’s bloody obvious that John was building this for himself. He knew that he was dying and he wanted to leave his mark. It’s perfectly laudable.’

Melissa frowned. ‘I don’t think that your artistic pretensions are appropriate here, Steve. This situation is more serious than that, more is at stake than a few silly ideas.’

Steve slammed his tea cup down on to the work-bench next to the coffin and a small portion of the tea spilled into the saucer and followed the base of the cup into a closed circle like a dyke. He saw this and thought, ‘Eventually my lips will be the drawbridge.’ Then he turned on Melissa. ‘I can’t believe that you’re being so stubborn and thoughtless and insensitive. All that matters is that we do what John would have wanted, that we do what would have made him happy. This coffin is what he wanted, it’s the thing that made him happy before he died.’

Melissa started to cry and shouted, ‘But John’s dead now, isn’t he? Nothing can make any difference to that. He’s done what he wanted and now it’s time for other people to do what they want.’

John’s mother looked at both of them and then said firmly, ‘For God’s sake stop arguing. I know what’s best for John. What’s best for John is that we remember him and respect what he’s made; maybe that we even make use of it. I don’t care if it’s embarrassing, I don’t care so long as it would have made him happy.’

Steve touched her arm gently and said, ‘I’ll finish the coffin for you if you like, and then you can make up your mind properly. I’ll start now.’

He unzipped his tracksuit top, slung it on to the sofa and said to Melissa, ‘Was he going to line the coffin on top and bottom using those silver tacks?’

The tacks were by the side of the coffin, glossy and ready for use. Melissa was still crying. She said, ‘How the hell should I know? I don’t want to stay here now, I want to go home.’

John’s mother handed her a tissue and watched as she wiped her eyes. Then she said to Steve, ‘Just do the best you can.’

Melissa was worried that her make-up had run, and went into the bathroom to blot her eyes. After a few minutes she returned and watched Steve in silence as he opened the coffin and unfolded the material to see how much there was. John’s mother sat on the sofa and was staring past Steve and out of the window where the light shone in through the nets and glimmered on the coffin’s lid.

Melissa thought, ‘I’m going to do so much more with my life than this.’ In her mind were a dozen plans. She debated setting up a clothes stall on Camden Market or going to work for Oxfam, ‘To do some real good,’ she thought.

After a few minutes she turned and left the room and then the house without saying anything else.

The silence in the room was interrupted only by the sounds of Steve working on the coffin, draping material and pushing in tacks. He debated how to mix the colours to complete John’s work on the label. Under his hands the coffin felt like a crystal or a diamond, cold and complete, infinitely beautiful. As he worked, he couldn’t stop smiling.