Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man

If she were to reach down now would there be a trail of saliva on the dusty path, drooled from the gaping hole of his mouth? If she reached out a hand would she find the face with its contortion of muscle and its rasping thorns? Would there be the bloody stump of castration between his goat-hair legs? She listens to the almost silent, heat-slow day. She listens to the swallows overhead and a hawk crying over a warren on the hillside, to the droning of a long-legged insect between patches of ragwort and to the far-off detonation of fireworks. She puts a hand to her throat, but the rosemary spirit-stopper Uncle Marcello made for her is at home, lying safe in the drawer of her dresser. She would like it now, around her neck, or in her pocket, instead of the wooden rosary.

She holds her breath and steps forward. And then she steps again. ‘Is it you?’ she whispers. ‘Where are you? What do you want with me?’

There is no reply.

Last time you were up north, you went to see Nicki in the hospital. The truth is, you’d been avoiding it. You didn’t think you could face it, not with everything else that had happened, another dark chore amid so many. With Nicki you have always felt the urge to confess, to verbalise your troubles. She lies benignly in the starched bed, as if ready with atonement, and it’s easy to talk to her, easy to unload. Over the years you’ve confided lots of things. The rejected marriage proposal. Your feelings of fraudulency. How you might have been instrumental in the dissolution of a couple of Danny’s relationships. There’s no come-back. You are never judged. You aren’t even issued with penitentiaries.

But this recent corruption of life. Your brother’s accident. The fatalism. The infidelity. Where would you begin?

Anyway, you felt duty bound to visit her. You felt guilty. You’d just been to the cemetery with your mum and dad. It was a beautiful late spring day, warm by mid-morning. A few stray pieces of blossom were drifting from the trees alongside the crematorium. In the grounds of the cemetery, everything was shooting and budding, and the new lushness was like a country garden. There was a disturbing firmness to the headstones. The dead were staked down. Danny had been gone for seventeen weeks.

Your dad was limping around with his hands rammed into the front pouch of his denims, not really settling or saying anything, occasionally clearing his throat. You watched him pace a taut circumference around the grave, coming no closer than a few feet. There were patches of white in his sandy hair, nicotine stains on his beard. It suddenly occurred to you that your dad was old. He was heading toward seventy. You saw him reach into his pocket, take out a flask, and have a nip, and then another. He was blinking, as if he had grit in his eyes. Your mum set a jar of damson jam down next to Danny’s monument. She kissed her hand and touched the stone. Then she went to your father, took his hand, and brought his arm around her shoulders. They held on to each other. We’ll see you back here in an hour, your mum called to you. Take your time.

You stood for a while, looking at the sprigs of grass trying to seed on the bald mound. There were cards and gifts, newly deposited. An unopened beer can. A takeaway fork speared into the earth. A ridiculous plastic toy with green troll hair. Debris left after a festival. There were messages too, like the notes that used to get pinned to the door of his flat at weekends-whimsical and un-profound. Great shakes, Danny Boy, you wazzock. Hope you’re good and wasted now. Mackie. Still owe you a pint of Best, Daz.

After a few minutes you turned and walked out of the cemetery, through the park to the back of the hospital.

Nicki was in the same room that she has been in for years. She was surrounded, as ever, by photographs, teddy bears and flowers. On the table next to the bed was her CD player and the stack of albums she had listened to as a teenager. You inserted one and pressed play. You wondered how sick she was of hearing Joy Division. You sat down, picked up the hairbrush from the bed-stand, and ran it once through a lock of her hair. It was still beautiful.

An intense nausea flushed through you. You felt your face tingle and your mouth water. You fought against the sensation. The discomfort passed. You were surprised, the feeling was unusual-your stomach is strong and you are almost never sick. You pulled the brush through Nicki’s shiny hair once more, working a tangle loose. You looked at her, lying there. Her thin golden eyebrows, her snub nose, the skin smooth around her eyes. She is your age, but she looked like a girl, the muscles of her face blissful and unused. Again you felt like throwing up. You put the brush down and cupped your hands over your mouth, looked towards the door.

It came out of nowhere, the rage. Suddenly you wanted to slap her so hard. You felt such anger towards her. Her apathy, her indecision, her refusal to wake, get up and reclaim her life, or once and for all shut off. Surely there was some choice she could make, you thought, some flickering pilot light in her brain, that could be turned up, that could take charge, rousing her wasted limbs? All the years of stand-by, her visitors held like hostages in this room, ransomed by the slimmest of hopes, and equal to her in their impotency. All the years of dependency and money, waiting for her second coming.

Looking down at her, you couldn’t remember her at all, only that sharp feeling of terror as she struggled for air on the moor, as she buckled to her knees, her chest rising and falling massively, her trachea hissing, the snow blowing upwards around her. You couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like, only the words, when she called, To you, Suze, and passed the netball into the semicircle of the court so you could shoot at goal. You couldn’t remember her laughter in the toilets when you had to borrow tampons.

But you could remember Danny. You could remember counting all of Danny’s milk teeth with a finger, and wobbling the front ones loose, and how those pink dental tablets you were given to chew at school showed where he was missing plaque after he brushed. You could remember how he turned the pages of a book, pinching the paper together in the middle, and bunching each leaf over, and how his eyes seemed to bruise in their sockets after he’d been on a massive bender, and the way he would sneeze three times, always three, never just once or twice. You could remember a million tiny indelible details about his life, and all of this was useless, an encyclopedia of the redundant, because he was gone.

But there she was, on her back, blushing prettily, her hair growing longer every day. Nicki, still connected to life by some stubborn filament, holding the gift of the present with the loosest grip.

While you were sitting there, trying not to be sick, wanting to strike her, one of the nurses came in to rub her legs and drop saline into her eyes. She recognised you, asked how you were, thanked you for still coming all these years later. She chatted to you indiscreetly. She said Nicki had stopped getting periods now. They had done tests but there was nothing conclusive. It could be early menopause. It could be loss of bone marrow. She began to clean around the hole her food tube slotted into with a cotton swab. Look. Your friend has brushed your hair, Nicki, she said. Isn’t that nice of her? I think it’s just like being Sleeping Beauty.

You wondered if that’s how the nurse really saw it: a coma like a fairytale curse. Meanwhile Nicki would be helped to eat and piss and cry. Her sores would be irrigated, her densities measured. Her family would bring her birthday cake and tell her the news and pretend she wasn’t catatonic. Inside the husk, she might be conscious of everything, the voices, the bathing, those morose repetitious lyrics. Her mind might be shrilling out its state of emergency in a pitch too high for the human ear to register. Get me out. Get me out of here. Or she might know nothing at all.