Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man

You tried to return to normal, to some semblance at least of normality. You tried to fight your way back into life. You swam hard against the strong current that wanted to take you the other way. You got up, got dressed, and went to work. You ate, you spoke, you participated, but part of you was gone. The hands pouring milk from the bottle were no longer yours. They felt numb, and when the bottle slipped from your grasp, smashed on the kitchen floor and cut your legs, the red drip-drip seemed inconsequential. That feeling of daily animus, that life-gust, which you had always taken for granted, was simply not there. Your body went about its business, but you were not the driving force. You were still alive. Danny wasn’t. It made no sense.

You had known to expect darkness, of course-the bleak aftermath, the dimming of the world’s light and colour and music. You had known that in the wake of tragedy comes sadness, spiritual adjustment. You’d seen it in Nicki’s family, in their sallowness, their troubled pronouncements, the way they never quite managed to let her go, or find anything else of commensurate importance. They were caught in a long elegy.

The current was so strong. You wanted to go with it. You wanted not to fight against it. Danny had left you behind. He’d gone somewhere deep, where air and sustenance were irrelevant. His corpse was in the fresh, yew-shadowed earth of the cemetery, but you knew this was not his locus. He was out there somewhere, somewhere thick and quiet; you could sense it. The pull, his note, your body’s dissolution: they were all inviting you to follow. And because you loved him, because you had always loved him, you went. You fell into a steep dive. You held your breath, stretched out your arms, and kicked hard after your brother.

You lay in bed with your back to Nathan and your head turned towards the heath, and you thought of that imaginary pyre. Danny, with his river-skin evaporating and his head of smoke. Danny with his mouth and eyes like chimney holes, hot coals packed around his ribs. You wondered what the smell of his burning flesh would be like. Like a slaughterhouse perhaps, with notes of fur and bowel, and intestinal cud, but not frightening, not sickening. There was almost peace in it. Nathan put his hand on your shoulder and turned you gently to him. Hey, can’t sleep? Do you want me to read to you? Come on, love. After he had drifted off, you left the bed and switched on the television. You flicked between channels, looking for scenes of violence and trauma and late-night horror.

At the gallery Angela and Tom were thoughtful. They gave you space to mourn, space to dwell in this strange, removed state. When they spoke to you, asking if you would like a coffee or a sandwich, the words arrived muted and echoing, as if spoken underwater. You responded with minimal gestures. A shaken head. A nod. The workload was light. A display of modern folk art was in its last few weeks at the gallery-a series of fairground etchings, barge-ware, treen, and decorated eggs. You sat at the heavy leathered desk, preparing paperwork for the forthcoming European exhibition, mapping the rooms, and drafting text for the labels. The doll, a life-sized replica of his lover, Alma, was destroyed by the artist after it proved to be a disappointing substitute. The lock of hair, allegedly rescued by… You typed the words, but your mind was on other things.

When the gallery quietened, you took the phone book out of the drawer and leafed through its membranous pages. Seventeen funeral directors were listed locally. One by one, you dialled their numbers, told them about Danny, and asked for help. In each voice was cool, elegant sympathy. You imagined Restoration blue walls, like the walls of the parlour where you and your parents had made the arrangements for Danny’s burial two weeks earlier. They asked about preferences-cremation, burial, home rest and were met with your silence. The questions were gently repeated. They offered to take your number and call back later, at an appropriate time, when you were feeling better. Still you did not reply. They could not give you what you wanted. You wanted to know his state, how it felt and tasted, how it was to be lost. You could not explain to them that in knowing was companionship. In knowing was finding Danny, somewhere in the brown vastness, asleep. When you gave no suitable answers, they politely hung up. You turned instead to the place where all depraved civilian requests are made and met: the internet.

You waited until Angela and Tom had gone home. You really don’t mind locking up? Angela had asked. Please don’t feel you have to work late. We’re on top of everything. You told her it was OK. She smiled, pulled on her coat. Well, we’d better pick up the baby. Tom lingered for a moment by the front door. I liked him very much, he said. The door of Borwood House closed and you locked it behind them. You opened your laptop, went to a search engine and typed in a few choice words. Thousands of links came up. You clicked on one at random, not knowing what to expect. Within seconds the Underworld had opened, and you had crossed the river Styx.

The entries were awful and mesmerising. Behind the densely pixellated doors was every facet of loss and longing, every mortal imagining. There were testimonies about what it was like to die and be brought back again, about sex with angels. First he fucked me with the spur of his wing. When they come their eyes are like black fire. There were holocaust museums, skull catacombs, funeral tailors, and fetishes. There were collectors of Nazi death certificates and exhumation jewellery auctions. Graveyard doggers. Cancer insurers. Psychics. Necrophiliacs, who only wanted one last embrace, the kiss of glued-shut lips, a lifted dress. There was autopsy pornography. Auto-strangulation pornography. Transplant donor pornography. There were joint-suicide stories, love murders, re-enactments. You watched a video of someone’s mother dying, and a grainy clip of a man climbing on to a pale, still body on a mortuary table. When his pelvis began moving whoever was videoing said, Yeah, yeah like that. There was no way of knowing if it was staged. The film paused a second later, and a window appeared asking you for payment details. With each click, there was death and sex, sex and death, hand in hand, over and over, in beautiful, appalling congress.

You could not stop. You stayed late into the evening, not moving from your seat and ignoring the buzz of your phone, the screen in front of you radiant.

When you left the gallery it was 2 a.m. You set the alarm and locked the door. The heath was dark, but for the row of orange streetlights along the central path. The battery on your phone had died, so you could not return Nathan’s calls, or ask him to meet you. You didn’t want to go back into the gallery to call a taxi. It was cold — the front that had left snow in the north had moved south — and your breath smoked in the night air. By the triangle of shops, a car door slammed, and someone shouted. There was the low rumble of the city in the distance; traffic moving elsewhere, jets up above.

You crossed the road and began walking home. Everything you had seen online began to flicker in your mind — the images, the accounts. The death masks. Live beheading of prisoners. The Victorian portraits of loved ones laced tightly into boots, their hair combed flat, tiny buttons fastened up their necks. The Ripper’s victims: black slashes across their throats, black stitching down their torsos, black cavities in their abdomens. More the work of a devil than of a man. You began to walk across the heath. You knew it was stupid and unsafe, but it didn’t matter, it wasn’t important. After a few hundred yards the orange pools of light seemed smaller and more contained within the dark expanse. You stepped off the path and walked across the grass. The ground shone with frost. You were not wearing tights and your legs tingled. You heard yourself breathing, heard the scuff of your shoes. When the illumination of the city began to fade either side, you stopped walking and stood still. It was damp and cold, but you stood there for a long time, until you realised what it was you wanted to see, what it was you had not yet seen.