Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

*

Willow had an old laptop with a sporadic internet connection. Their commitment to utopian mediaevalism was inconsistent at best. She talked me through Facebook and I was able to use her account to peek at Lucius’s. It was strange to see it — I still think of him as a little boy, which he is, but he passed himself off as a kind of sophisticate on it. I wanted to send him a message, but I knew that way lay madness, or worse, so I asked Willow to change her password to remove the temptation.

Everyone there was reinventing something about themselves, even if all they were running away from was just a background that seemed reprehensibly ordinary. My air of authentic disaster gave me a kind of kudos.

*

I ended up with a bed in what must have once been a broom cupboard on the second floor. Willow came past with dandelion coffee each evening, and scrupulously said goodnight.

‘You love to read,’ she said, one night soon after I’d arrived.

‘It’s my life.’

The following night, she asked if she could read with me.

She sat heavily on the edge of the bed with a copy of Dr Zhivago. I could tell she was dissatisfied with her book. There was something forlorn and fidgety about her. It made it difficult for me to concentrate.

Eventually she sighed. ‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘Give me a bit of your blanket.’

‘Please don’t take this the wrong way,’ I said, ‘but are you trying to seduce me?’

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Maybe.’

She kissed me and her tongue flickered in my mouth like a tiny bird.

I pulled away.

‘Don’t you like me?’

‘It’s been a very long time since I was with anyone,’ I said.

‘How long?’

‘Longer than I can remember.’

‘That’s okay. We can just cuddle.’

She moved up awkwardly next to me. I admired her persistence. I held her close to me and breathed in her smell of hand-rolled cigarettes and patchouli.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.

‘I’m thinking about all the people who never get held like this.’

She stroked my face. ‘Read me something.’

‘It’s Edmund Gosse,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t excerpt terribly well. But I can tell you a poem if you like.’

‘I’d like that.’

The opening lines of ‘Lycidas’ floated through my head.

‘Why are you smiling?’ she asked.

‘I’m thinking about an old friend who loved poems.’

The bed frame creaked under us as she nestled closer with her back towards me. ‘Whisper it,’ she said. She put her ear close to my lips. It was as small and pretty as a seashell and smelled of gingerbread.

I didn’t even voice the words, I let my breath alone carry them across the four inches of silence between us.

‘Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew

Himself to sing and build the lofty rhyme.’

She wriggled around to face me delightedly. ‘Go on,’ she said.

*

The ankle knitted up completely, though it remained swollen-looking. It turned out that I had the knack of outdoor work, particularly scything — they’re scrupulous about their carbon footprint at Knowle Court. Leonora would have found it hilarious. Some muscle-memory in me seemed tuned to its rhythm. The blade snicked back and forth across the pasture and the cut grass fell in windrows beside the swath. ‘You’re a natural,’ said the livestock man.

They were all gentle ruminants there, Willow and the rest of them. I feared for them. Centuries on a more or less peaceable island had left them without any instinct for self-preservation. I found their lack of intellectual acuity frustrating, but their optimism and good faith moving in the extreme.

*

The sun came out strongly one day towards the beginning of December. Half a dozen of the residents got into the stockman’s Land Rover and went to the beach for a barbecue. It was stony and the water was freezing, but there was a competitive bravado about going in. I felt self-conscious about my tattoos and scarring, but they were, if anything, approved of. The displacement of light through the water made my swollen ankle look huge and kinked. I stared at my white feet in the green murk thinking: whose are these? Then I plunged in. The cold was so intense I experienced it as heat. I swam away from the shore, pulling strongly. On my shoulders, the water felt like broken glass or jellyfish tentacles. I thought: death can’t be more painful.

It seemed as though the others had been happy to immerse themselves and then return to the shore and the fire, but I became aware of someone swimming near me. A shiny dark head broke the water. A seal. For a second, it spared me a curious look and then plunged into the icy depths below my feet.

*

Willow helped me dry off. The after-effect of the freezing water was a rush of endorphins.

After we’d eaten, someone lit a joint. I demurred. I mentioned its association with mental health problems. That raised a few ironic eyebrows. Of course, in their eyes I’m a baffling square.

On the way back, Willow fell asleep in the car with her head on my shoulder.

I knew the best thing I could do was disappear. So why was I staying? Addressing her body with my carcass that night, I understood the answer. It wasn’t the wild, hopeless love I felt for Leonora, but it was love all the same.

‘What do you think you know about me?’ I asked her as we lay in my tiny bed staring at the luminous paper stars someone had pasted to the ceiling.

‘I know you have children. I saw your son’s Facebook page. He looks like you.’

‘Really?’

She affirmed the remark, but with noticeably diminishing conviction.

It puzzles me. I can’t see any physical resemblance between us. It’s true that Malevin claimed that eighty per cent of what we recognise in a face originates from the core complex and isn’t somatic at all. But on reflection, I think Willow was just trying to be nice.

*

At night, I come to the library with her computer. There is a poetic justice in finding myself here.

My most passionate friendships have been with people who are biologically dead. I call on them for succour and advice. I discuss my life with them. I feel I really know them in ways they would undoubtedly have found surprising.

But the dead are dead. That may be the truest and most definite fact about human existence. Death is the bass ground that gives everything else point. Every generation seems to know this except ours. I feel I’m entitled to say this. Who on earth is deader than me?

And the dead are dead for good reasons, profound reasons, that we ignore at our peril. There’s a reason why the old father in The Monkey’s Paw turns away his dead son when he comes knocking. The world belongs to the living: to Lucius and Sarah, to Leonora and, though it pains me to say it, to Caspar.

In the past few weeks, I’ve noticed the clock on this carcass ticking down. The first signs were episodes when I briefly lost all sense of time. These days I can see from my handwriting that my fine motor skills are deteriorating. Working outside in the cold, my hands constantly seize up into claws. One morning, I blacked out in the shower and lost a tooth from the fall.

I didn’t — I don’t — expect to see the turn of the year.

Weighing it all up, the complications that would arise from my death, the attention it would focus on these gentle people, I think it would be best for me to leave.

Three days ago, before dawn, I took the van that was parked on the narrow drive that leads up to the old entrance hall. It sat in the shadow of the untamed trees that make Knowle Court feel so dark and inward-looking. Willow had left the keys in the kitchen. I wrote her a note, but I wasn’t able to tell her anything that I felt could sufficiently explain the betrayal.