THERE was once a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house the people who were giving the dinner party.
I don’t like it when the summer goes and the autumn comes, she said. Daniel took her by the shoulders and turned her round. He didn’t say anything. But all across the landscape down behind them it was still sunlit blue and green. She looked up at him showing her how the summer was still there. Nobody spoke like Daniel. Nobody didn’t speak like Daniel.
Thank you for having me, death. Please excuse me, must get back to it, life.
Now that he’s up on his feet he is hungry. Can you be hungry and dead? Course you can, all those hungry ghosts eating people’s hearts and minds.
Look at that. He can sew. Not something he could do while he was alive. Death. Full of surprises.
It’s funny to be sitting on such an uncommunal communal chair.
The man creases up. It seems he was joking; his shoulders go up and down but no sound comes out of him. It’s like laughter, but also like a parody of laughter, and simultaneously a bit like he’s having an asthma attack. Maybe you’re not allowed to laugh out loud behind the counter of the main Post Office.
Hello Mr. Gluck, she’ll say if he does. Sorry I’m late. I was having my face measured and rejected for being the wrong specification.
All the other houses have been pulled out of the street like bad teeth.
Excuse me, ladies, Hannah said. This is where I get off.
That’s why you need to go to collage, Daniel said. You’re using the wrong word, Elisabeth said. The word you’re using is for when you cut out pictures of things or coloured shapes and stick them on paper. I disagree, Daniel said. Collage is an institute of education where all the rules can be thrown up into the air, and size and space and time and foreground and background all become relative, and because of these skills everything you think you know gets made into something new and strange.
I like the idea of blue and pink together, Elisabeth said.
I hear them. But am I going to let it stop me reading?
So you were advised to go to Snappy Snaps already but you chose not to go, the woman says.
He turns to go – and that’s when he gets kicked in the head by the half of the pantomime horse it’s slipped his mind to shoot. He falls to the ground, dead himself on top of the pantomime fallen. It’s a surrealist vision of hell. What’s surrealist, Mr. Gluck? This is.
You came back from the dead to watch tv? I said.
The vintage cars fume along through England; outside the car windows the passing cow parsley is tall, beaded with rain, strong, green. It is incidental. This incidentality is, Elisabeth finds herself thinking, a profound statement. The cow parsley has a language of its own, one that nobody on the programme or making the programme knows or notices is being spoken.
Elisabeth is faintly perturbed. She realizes this is because she likes to imagine her mother knows nothing much about anything.
The nettles say nothing. The seeds at the tops of the grass stems say nothing. The little white flowers on the tops of their stalks, she doesn’t know what they are but they’re saying their fresh nothing. The buttercups say it merrily. The gorse says it unexpectedly, a bright yellow nothing, smooth and soft and delicate against the mute green nothing of its barbs.
Why should we imagine that gender matters here? the tutor said. That’s actually my question too, Elisabeth said.
Even in the timeless zone of the average day of an unwell person invisible to the rest of the fast-moving world there was Deirdre at four o’clock.