Will Read online

  ‘The dogs licking a leper’s sores.’ Francis put Lazarus to bed and brought out more burgundy.

  They didn’t lick Jezebel though.

  ‘And the angels combing their golden hair and harps.’

  And just beneath them, just under that lovely rain of tears, a man sitting naked in the ash-pit, scraping the boils from his skin with shards of broken pottery.

  ‘Stop it, Will. Still, it taught you the patience of Job, I suppose.’

  Had it pleased heaven to try me with affliction –

  ‘Rained all kinds of sores and shames on your bare head?’

  Well, I had my share of those.

  ‘Where it doesn’t show, I hope.’

  Nor in the heart, nor in the head. Fancy’s like the fires of Venus – bred elsewhere. And I didn’t lack tutors. I must have been fed the complete works of God by the time I was three, narrated on the Snitterfield heights by a crusty old uncle. That was world history as far as I was concerned, starting with Adam – God’s chronicles handed down like tablets, complete with Henry’s catechisms.

  ‘What were they?’

  – What was the first corpse in the world?

  Its blood bubbling up from the ground like a voice. Murderer! A brother’s murder. What if this hand –

  – Who were swifter than eagles and stronger than lions?

  Bellona’s bridegrooms, slain on the high places, struck full of spears, left on Mount Gilboa, unburied, too gorgeous for the grave.

  – Who was the death-kisser?

  Hanging from an elder tree, the kiss and the corpse, his blood-money lying scattered where it fell, thirty pieces of silver, strewn like Christ’s tears to buy the potter’s field. If it were done when ’tis done –

  ‘Not exactly history without tears.’

  Who’d be without tears? There are tears for things, Francis. And if there weren’t, the actors would be out of a job.

  ‘Let’s talk about actors, Will –’

  And somewhere on the other side of the Snitterfield clouds sat God, the owner of the great globe, apart from it all, transcending child-time, transcending all time, toasting his toes in front of the white flame of eternity. He was waiting for history to end, so that he could stop the play.

  ‘Ah. And then what?’

  The serious business. Away with days, weeks and months, the old rags of time, and in with God’s great alternative –

  ‘What’s that?’

  The alternative to time, the new scheme. Starting with resurrection.

  ‘Do you believe in resurrection, Will? I mean – really, seriously, believe?’

  That’s a big question. And it filled my infancy with even bigger ones – the mind-bogglers, about how it was all to be achieved, in practical terms. I mean, difficult enough even if everybody died in one piece. But what was to happen to the leg you lost at Cadiz? to the head spiked on London Bridge, peeled clean of skin by the blistering air, whose birds had extracted the eyes like snails? Where were the bowels burnt by the Tyburn fire, the quartered criminals, the leg left in London, the arm sent to Wales, the gutted torso to Scotland, the discarded genitals chewed by some dog? Where was that hound now? And if you’d been drowned off the Azores and passed through the stomach of the ravined salt-sea shark – by what unimaginable feat would God re-assemble these fair sailors who’d ended their navy days as nothing more identifiable than fish excrement, a drift of shark-shit floating in the blind and listless sea? These were teasers that tore the brain in two.

  ‘I note you haven’t answered my question, though.’

  What question was that, Francis?’

  ‘The resurrection question.’

  I believe I’ve answered it.

  ‘Missed that somehow.’

  In my plays.

  ‘Oh, very clever. If you think I’m going to trail all the way to London –’

  Some of them are in print.

  ‘Indeed they are. And now, if we can return to the matter of your will, old friend, I’d like to get something in place in the first paragraph, if you don’t mind, something about that resurrection you’re so anxious to avoid.’

  Anxious to avoid? Au contraire, Francis. I’m all for resurrection. It’s death I’m anxious to avoid.

  ‘Anxious to avoid committing yourself to the concept, is what I mean, as you well know, old fox. I just want to get the formalities sorted out. Can we say, for example, First, I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting. How does that sound?’

  Sounds fine to me, Francis, if that’s what you want to say.

  ‘It’s what you want to say that matters.’

  Does it? Well, I’ll go along with it. And can you add in there – and my body to the earth whereof it is made.

  ‘After everlasting?’

  After everlasting. That’s the one part I’m sure about, the earth bit – not the everlasting bit.

  ‘Good. We’ve made a proper start. After all, there are rules, Will, there is convention.’

  Long live convention.

  ‘Amen. And speaking of convention, now that you’ve assured me of the place God occupied in your young life, how much do you propose to leave to the church, and in what form?’

  By this time the fat man was mopping up the final drops of onion juice, and he put the last question to me with the remnants of a loaf poised at the open portals of his mouth.

  The church, Francis. I’m glad you asked that question.

  The portals widened into a smile of anticipation.

  As for the church, well now, the church can have that last crust of bread – if you can spare it, that is.

  The crust – it would have stuffed a goose – disappeared in a twinkling and the next words came out obscure and oniony.

  ‘What’s that you say? Nothing to the church?’

  Not a penny. And don’t speak with your mouth full. Or breathe on me like that.

  ‘Oh, but you know, it’s customary for a good man to leave even a small sum.’

  Am I a good man?

  ‘Your credit’s good, as your old Shylock would say. Look here, Will, it’s no skin off my nose –’

  Redder than ever.

  ‘But I think it would look good –’

  In as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren –

  ‘Ye have done it unto me. Yes, I know. But le bon Dieu wasn’t thinking of a will. It’s quite traditional.’

  Is it really?

  ‘Yes.’

  Traditional occasional or traditional common?

  ‘Well –’

  Ten pounds to the poor of Stratford, that takes care of it. Let the poor be my church – they’re always there. Churches come and go. They change their principles. They change their politics. They’ve been known to kill.

  ‘Are the poor so pure?’

  Sheep and chickens, harmless on the whole. I’ve known better poor folk than prelates.

  ‘So you’re quite –’

  Not a penny, not a penny.

  ‘I’d better make a note of that – lest there be questions later.’

  Note it down, Francis, if you will insist on wasting my ink and paper. But no mention of the church in the final deed, understood?

  ‘I’ve got it. But I’m noting it down.’

  Give Francis Collins a crust of bread and a stoup of wine and he’ll make notes on anything from here to doomsday, and on doomsday too. He’d make a good recording angel – if he weren’t too fat to fly.

  5

  My glass shall not persuade me I am old – so I once wrote, not believing a word of it. Now I can barely believe it’s really me in there, looking back out at what’s left of myself.

  ‘I need to make a great pee,’ said Francis, putting the quill into the pot.

  No running brook, I’m afraid, under the house of easement, but I like to keep it sweet as my parlour. That’s another thing
I had enough of in London – houses not of easement but of excrement.

  Francis went off to point his thing at the privy – to pluck a rose, as he politely put it in little Alison’s hearing. Her mistress came in behind her to watch her take away the clutter, Falstaff having cleaned up both trenchers, and to watch me watching her – with sixty winters besieging the furrowed brow. The sight of those pert tits and pouting belly makes me regretful, not lustful, all the more conscious of this dreadful physical decline.

  I got myself out of bed somehow and tottered over to the reflector, lifting the nightshirt to have another look at the poor bare forked animal. Off, off, you lendings! Jesus God, was that really me in there, trapped in that battered carcass? When you look at what confronts you, what you’re made of now, the crow feet and hen’s neck, the sagging sandbag belly with the sand running out, the shrunk shanks – yes, this is the sixth age all right, come too soon and almost over – then your ending is despair. And talking of endings, as Francis would say, behold that shrivelled radish, well past its use for the likes of Alison. And those hands, that tangle of blue roots dangling from corky arms, can you imagine them cupping her firm and pristine tits, as smooth as monumental alabaster – ?

  ‘That’s horrible!’

  Francis came clumping back in and looked over my shoulder into the mirror.

  ‘You’re all the colours of the Pharaohs, my boy – a mummy gone rotten!’

  Not a pretty sight, is it?

  ‘Put your shirt down – you’ll crack the glass and give us all seven years’ bad luck!’

  I haven’t got seven weeks.

  ‘And get back into bed – you won’t get better by staring at your willie!’

  Better? Who said anything about getting better? I’m like Percy here – dust, and food for worms.

  Francis chimed in with me theatrically.

  ‘For worms, brave Percy, for worms!’

  You can’t be around a playwright without picking up a line or two. Even if you’re a lawyer, more into venison than verse.

  Well, what am I but a corpse waiting to be washed?

  ‘Here we go again. Call for cock-robin –’

  Don’t misquote.

  ‘And the sexton.’

  And don’t mention that old bastard.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  Sextons in general, I mean.

  ‘Somebody’s got to shovel us into eternity.’

  Yes, and some of them do it with relish. The one I knew really loved his job.

  ‘Might as well be happy at your work.’

  He gave me nightmares.

  ‘A frightener of little boys?’

  Terrifying. He laid it on. I can still see him, I can see him now among skulls and crosses, standing chest-high in some poor bugger’s new-dug pit, munching his bread-and-bacon break –

  ‘Oh, now that goes round my heart! A bit of bread and bacon would go down nicely!’

  Stuffing it in with fingers ringed by worms, the wet sexton – he was always black and damp and smelly, as if he were made out of kirkyard mould. I didn’t think he was made of flesh at all. A thing of earth.

  ‘I bet you just couldn’t stay away.’

  How well you know me. Attracted by what appalled, creeping even slower than to school, sidling up that long avenue of limes, on either side of which lay the long dead, the fresh dead of Stratford, scared shitless I was, but too scared to stay away. And there it was.

  ‘There what was?’

  The sacred storehouse of my predecessors, Stratford’s anonymous dead, and guardian of their bones.

  ‘Eh?’

  The charnel-house.

  ‘Ah. Can’t get that bacon out of my mind now.’

  The grass was seamless, like human flesh. But two or three times a week – oftener in winter – the sexton came along and unseamed it, unceremoniously, with a grunt and a curse and a fart or two, ripping it up with rude pickaxe and wounding spade, breaking into the sombre honeycomb beneath, invading what had seemed inviolable green.

  ‘Got new guests coming in,’ he’d say, scarring the earth with a shrug and a song and a fart gratis, ‘got new tenants for this here house, got to get rid of the old ones, see? Present incumbetents been in over long.’

  ‘Sounds cheery enough.’

  And the evicted bones he trundled over to the charnel-house and flung them onto the existing pile, just like a log-pile blown down in a gale. There must have been a few sextons before that old bugger, and a huge mound of bones had accumulated there, a cadaverous army, ready to rattle into action as soon as God gave the doomsday word. My feet drew me a thousand times to this awful edifice, protesting every step of the way, and my eye came up close to the rusty iron grille.

  ‘Charming habits you had.’

  Five years old, and all those black eye-sockets staring at you, like big black raisins in a cake, only they reeked of earth.

  ‘Well, they would.’

  Maybe that was it, the fact that death seemed so mundane, so deprived of metaphor.

  ‘You’ve just said – raisins in a cake.’

  You know what I mean. None of the softening euphemisms of art, transfiguring scripture. Death as a sleep is attractive enough, after all – balm of hurt minds, sore labour’s bath, the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. The undiscovered country carries the lure of exploration, the long journey –

  ‘Sounds tiring. Balm and baths are all right.’

  Even an everlasting cold feels bearable in its own way.

  ‘Curable with an infinite supply of friar’s balsam and plenty of tot, eh?’

  But the charnel-house had none of that, Francis. It reduced the king of terrors to a heap of mortal rubble, whole generations jumbled in an impossible jigsaw. Impossible to believe that those yellowed shanks had once leapt astride stallions and spurred them into battle, had parted in bed to wrap themselves around a lover’s thrusting buttocks, a slender waist –

  ‘Hey, steady on!’

  You couldn’t even say what sex they’d been, or known. And now this boneyard – showing you what you really were.

  ‘Frighten you to death.’

  I died a thousand deaths at the charnel-house door, picturing myself on the other side of that grille, a bundle of bones, shut in there one day by the farting sexton, subject to his contempt.

  ‘Not worth a fart now,’ he’d say.

  ‘Surprising choice of image.’

  And he’d toss my skull aside as I’d seen him lob many another out of the ground and send it rolling over the turf – not worth a fart, my lord!

  ‘Suiting the action to the word, no doubt. Letting it rip.’

  The sexton himself would never die. He’d see me into the ground, all right. He was Death with spade and pickaxe, and bread and bacon for breakfast.

  ‘Stop talking about bacon!’

  He was too busy to die.

  I remember once I stood there clasping the grille, my nose between the bars, my eyeballs out on threads, staring into those empty sockets, and he crept up behind me, the bastard, pinned me to the bars, thrust the rusty old key up my nostrils and threatened to turn it in the gate and lock me in for the night.

  ‘How’d you fancy that, young sir, eh? Shut in there all night long with all that lot – them as has seen the secrets of the grave and are raging sore at having been torn up from their eternity, where they belong. Yes, I tell you, each one of them bones is filled with rage. Look at how they be all jammed up. There’s a powerful pile of anger packed in there, I tell you. How d’you think you’d get on, all the hours from dark till dawn, with all them spirits screeching like mandrakes at you? My God, boy, I think you’d take up one of them big yellow shanks and dash your desperate brains out long afore light, that’s what I think. If not I reckon you’d be white-haired by sunrise and a raving bedlamite to boot!’

  ‘Nice man.’

  And he laughed so much he let loose a whole string of farts and let me go, hugging his sides while I ran for the gates
, terrified. Ran all the way to Asbies to ask old Agnes if what the gravedigger had said was true. Uncle Henry butted in.

  ‘Don’t you pay any heed to that old farter! Time turns us all to shit, boy, and that demented freak has spent so many hours shovelling it, his brains have turned already! Forget him – and eat up your mutton! Bones without marrow in them got no strength to harm you.’

  ‘Marrow. Why do you always come back to food?’

  But Agnes knew differently. She knew well enough what went on with the tormented souls of those who’d been denied a decent burial. Murderers and suicides and such like of the damned, buried at crossroads with stakes through their black hearts. Or rattling in chains on lonely gibbets. Or thrown to the winds and waves. Spirits like these wandered the earth forever, like Cain, with not a grave to call their own. It was an alternative hell. Worse perhaps – even hell is preferable to no place at all. You can get used to any place in time. But to have not even your own two paces of the vilest earth to lie down in. The old sexton was right. You could hear the yells of exiles like these on dark nights, wild on the winter wind, and it froze your blood to hear them. Seamen had heard them shrieking over the waves, howling like sea-wolves in the grey mists, making their ships shiver from topmast to keel, causing the helm to tremble and the rudder to turn to stone. ‘Stay away from the charnel-house then,’ said Agnes, ‘be a good child, and make sure you earn a good burial. Safe from the spade of some rude knave in centuries unborn.’

  ‘And did you?’

  Stay away? What do you think? But when your bones lie defenceless in their grave, when you’re prey to a posterity that knows nothing of you except your faded name and maybe not even that, when brazen tombs fall foul of cormorant devouring time, and brass eternal slave to mortal rage – what can you do to escape the fate of the exile and the ultimate indignity of the charnel-house? Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear…What can a man do? What more can he do, Francis, than to curse the spade that stirs his dust? The hand that moves his bones.

  ‘What are you getting at, Will?’

  I’m saying I want provision made here and now for what happens to my bones.

  ‘What sort of provision?’

  I don’t want to be dug up again – simple as that. I don’t want to be knocked about the bonce with a dirty shovel. Keep those sextons and their spades away from me. Make a note of it.