Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

But Denny did not look beautiful. Clive and Rickard knew it — Rickard’s face was warped in terror. Rickard was grey. But then Rickard had not looked right since his return from his trip out west.

It could have been worse: there might have been no head there. There might have been some botched attempt to cauterise the hole in the middle of the shoulders. But it was horrible all the same. It was not easy to look at. In place of Denny’s head was a bung of white wax. No effort had been made to shape the bung into the form of a normal human head; and there was no neck, as such. It was all neck: round in its girth, and a foot long, and tapering suddenly at the top to a chiselled end, like a lipstick. Two pockmarks for eyes and a simple blip for a nose and a zigzag frown made a hideous mockery of the hominid face.

‘He aged very well, it must be said, God bless him,’ said Geraldine, surprising Clive again with her pronounced Dublin accent. ‘That’s over fifty years now since I last seen Denis, and he hasn’t changed, not much at all. He always had a great complexion. I was jealous of him, Karen, I was. He had this gorgeous creamy white complexion, it was like a girl’s, and the smoothest most flawless skin, not a line or a wart on him. He could have modelled for a Parisian make-up house. And that awful bitch, Aisling, God forgive me for using language like that in the presence of the dead, but she couldn’t appreciate what she had. If he’s beautiful now, a dead man of eighty-three, can you imagine how he looked in his twenties?’

Jeremiah held Bit upside down over its master’s body, gripping it by its soft belly and delicate hind legs; its little leather triangular ears flapped about and its front paws paddled the air in panic. He gently let the animal on to the corpse’s chest whereupon it took one sniff of the wax column of a head and flinched. Whimpering, it turned itself in the tight space and examined the hand; the whimper levelled to a low, distressed oboe-note, and rose to a grumble. It began to gnaw at the knuckles and fingers. Jeremiah scooped it away.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘in its grief, all it can think to do is eat him.’

Or in its hunger, thought Clive — in its hunger . He put his own hand to Denny’s. As he’d suspected: cold, cold, colder than cold, and not firm enough for a human, living or dead, compressing to beyond the point where the bone should have been. Like putty. Protein. Meat.

This was not Denny, but a gimcrack, fobbed off on them — a shambles left in his place. A changeling, yes. The real Denny was being put to use somewhere, somewhere still, on this earth here.

A changeling , he thought, touching his face. This could have been for me. (His face was as cold as the meat; his flesh thin and numb against the cheekbone.) It was true. Or am I the changeling, he thought — left behind? What is my status now, in the sweep of this and the parallel life? In life, such as I have been given and stolen more of for myself?

He slowly lowered himself into a chair, into the rustle of a crispy fabric.

‘Mind that feckin’ dress,’ said Geraldine.

‘Hey, Mam,’ said Karen. ‘These lads have another brother. Emmet was saying there’s a fella called Breffny down in the basement. Says he works out and that he has the best arse of the lot of them. Get him up here, Emmet!’

‘Yeah! Get him up here!’ said Geraldine. ‘And bring an extra one for me!’

‘Would you like me to invite the other super we’ve got?’ said Emmet.

‘Yes!’ said Karen. ‘Call Superman, call Limahl Ataturk, call Don Bon Johnson. Bring them all up here and tell them they must be six foot eight and ripped and we’ll have a proper Irish wake.’

Breffny came to the door, his eyes propped wide open in pretend sexual agitation, and sputum pouring over his stiff bottom lip and down his Punchinello chin. He was banging a handheld brass Eastern gong, much to the amusement of Emmet. Emmet had also brought with him Denny’s record player and a box of LPs that had been gifted to Jeremiah after the clear-out.

‘In remembrance of the old man,’ said Emmet, dropping the needle on a Richard Tauber record.

‘Oh get that off!’ said Karen, not a minute into the first song. ‘So bleedin’ miserable. This is a wake, for Jesus’ sake.’

She began twiddling with the MP3 player that Denny had bought to replace his record player.

‘He never got around to loading that up,’ said Jeremiah, and so Karen planted her own portable MP3 player in the stand, and the sound of the ubiquitous ‘Sexy Taxi’ by Much Ass Gracias feat. Luzette vroomed into the room, completely drowning out Tauber.

By late in the evening several of Denny’s neighbours had joined the party. The room filled with peaty-smelling cigar smoke and the sweet smoke of fried bacon. The music turned mellow; Jeremiah had swapped his own machine for Karen’s, and now McCormack came from the speakers. And Karen hadn’t the energy to object having danced herself silly, and her mother was more or less passed out, lying over the back of a chair into an empty bookshelf, while Breffny mimed the movement of a horse jockey behind her bottom.

‘McCormack?’ said Clive to Jeremiah.

‘Yes. Denny’s favourite.’

He was singing a Chauncey Challoner song — ‘We Will Leave This Vale of Tears One Day’. And from the other room came another Challoner song.

‘Mister Franco down the hallway has brought the record player inside,’ said Jeremiah.

‘And is that still the Tauber record?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

Tauber was singing ‘Wild, Wide, Uncrossed’, and the two songs together — discordant, words falling on and between words — were a memory bank gushing empty to the sound of a punctured accordion and made the rhythm of a heart, it was like, or a wheel, buckled, with one vane, beating through smoke, that compelled a person to rest.

‘Whoo,’ said Clive. ‘It’ll put me in the mood to sing myself before too long.’

‘Yes!’ said Jeremiah. ‘Sing for us!’

‘Jeremiah,’ he said, leaning forward on his knees. ‘Do you know what my name, Clive Sullis, means in the Gaelic language? It means “sword of light”. Don’t you think it’s strange that a man’s complete name would translate to something? Almost as if he made it up himself?’

‘I knew what it meant all right.’

Jeremiah gave a great yawn.

‘Jeremiah — now. Now. The time has come, I think. We must tell our stories. This is a wake. We must tell our stories about Denny.’

‘Sing first!’

‘No. There’s a great elephant in the room, as they say, and we’re ignoring him and we must talk about him. He is why we’re here, let’s remember.’

Clive got up, and in this movement quieted the room. And as he was standing, looking into the casket, he remembered again with horror that the elephant in the room was a different one to the one he thought it had been a moment before, and that it was one that did not bear talking about. In horror he sat down again.

‘Yes indeed,’ said Jeremiah, standing up himself, and loudly cupping his hands together, while he had everybody’s attention. ‘Who is the person that we have gathered here to remember? Well, I’ll tell you who.’

But where is this person we have gathered to remember? That is the question.

Thought Clive, staring at the blank white side of the casket from his seat: Where is he, Jeremiah?

Where are you, Denny?

As Jeremiah went at his brothers fists and feet flying and the room exploded in a burst of broken bottles and the casket was knocked off its stand and the Turkish curtains were ripped from the rail.

***

Oh blessed mother undoer of knots what was this? Blessed mother daughter of Ephesus elected intercessor and buffer of wrath give me strength.