The Wake by Zoe Green / Fiction / Untitled Books

Dusk is fitting for the fifth act, the birds carolling forth my requiem beneath the dying sun.

The Wake by Zoe Green

When she and Laurence broke up she troughed her way from eight to twelve stone in less than a year. Like me, a person of appetites.

It is four o'clock on a warm August afternoon in Farley Green and I am sitting on my balcony with a cup of broken orange pekoe and one of those apricot biscuits Mina bakes me, and I am planning my funeral on the back of an envelope. 6.30pm, I scrawl on the smudged brown paper. Dusk is fitting for the fifth act, the birds carolling forth my requiem beneath the dying sun, and the audience hunched in winter coats beneath the naked trees, awed and tearful at the symbolism of the set. Where? I settled on burial some time ago, the noise of the crematorium conveyor belt being too reminiscent of the MRI scanner, but it would be hypocritical to have it in a church, and all the best churchyards are booked up anyway. Mina, my Macmillan nurse, says it's positive I'm planning the funeral; I suppose she thinks it demonstrates acceptance.

The girl who lives in the bottom half of the house - Hester - is in the garden watering courgettes and her black lab bounces in and out between them brandishing a stick. I watch Hester often; today she is talking to the dog as she waters, and her blue and white cheesecloth top looks Greek. The garden is built on three levels and tumbles down to the river where the dog likes to swim. When he swims he makes a honking noise and the hair on his head sinks flat like a seal's. Afterwards he stumbles out and shakes his shoulders so droplets fly everywhere and his fur sticks up in quills.

I'd like to say that I don't want anything big, but I'd be lying. The audience will require one last bow, a final curtain-call. Perhaps, at the very end, I shall convert; I've always fancied Catholicism, and I'm fond of the place at the end of the road with its perpendicular-style windows and the old Romanesque chancel. The acoustics are good, the choir is not bad, and the churchyard is of the briar and ivy variety; I think I would fit in. St Peter's? I scrawl. Incense? Verdi? Find priest.

I retired here from London five years ago just before Hester arrived to take up the post of Radford estate manager. Radford is the castle at the top of the hill. I saw her in the early mornings, sitting on a low bough at the bottom of the garden, staring out over the river. She had a boyfriend, a married teacher at the local college. Laurence held her not by her hand but by the arse and, in the evenings, their arguments brewed and boiled, hissing and fizzling under the dying sun. She - this dark-haired dryad - chucked stuff, plant pots mostly, and when she and Laurence broke up she troughed her way from eight to twelve stone in less than a year. Like me, a person of appetites.

The family I shall not invite to the funeral: they are either dead or disapproving. I daresay there will be enough glamour to whip up a smattering of media interest - though I shall only invite those who won't upstage me, which rules out the West End contingent. But Ferdi - here's the question - will Debrett's instruct me that, as at weddings, ex-lovers and ex-fucks are personae non gratae at funerals?

Hester is slicing away at the courgettes which, with their frilled yellow heads, remind me of the lanterns they hang in Soho at Chinese New Year. She saws at the stalks with a large blunt knife, muscles glowing in the sandy light. The dog has his muzzle underneath the hedge; his hind legs strain forwards while his forelegs crouch and scrabble; his tail whips back and forth, slashing at sunflower stalks. He is burying something. Or digging it up.

When she bought the dog, the four stone slid away. She called him Laurence, after the teacher. I heard her calling him in the evenings: "Si-i-it. Good boy. Lie, Laurie! Good dog." She walked him four times a day and he developed the contours of a racer. Her dark hair became shiny like his and I wondered if she realized her own capacity for Mediterranean glamour. It was at this time that they told me I was dying.

Ferdi, I write, question mark. And, in brackets, Marco, question mark. I was never glamorous. A director prefers to watch from behind the scenes, though Ferdi accused me of showiness in buying the apple green coat that, from afar at least, conjured the ghost of Monica Vitti in Il Deserto Rosso. Ferdi wasn't so much glamorous as coiffed, and his Givenchy glasses studied me from atop his straight marble nose. Shut away in his literary agency on Piccadilly on his tight narrow buttocks, he was surrounded by an aura of mystery, and I determined to peel off his skin and scoop out everything inside. I wanted to know him better than he knew himself; I wanted to live him and I wanted him to want to know and live me. I should rather have desired contentment for us both, but I didn't. I thought that to be in love was to fuck and to be discontented.

Hester is walking up towards the house, a bunch of courgettes under one arm, the dog galumphing behind her, its jaw dangling open and its rasping pant audible from where I sit. A yellowed nub of dried-out bone lies on the lawn by the hedge. It was January last year when she started on the garden: cutting back great swathes of hogweed and thistle, digging and weeding and raking and hoeing and sowing. She was, I thought, trying to bury herself. Nightly, I saw and smelt the orange glow of a cigarette on her patio, and I wished there was someone I could introduce her to, some young man of means and wit, but I knew nobody like that who was straight or kind.

It was at an olive market in Provence ten years ago that Ferdi slid the green rosemary-barbed picholine into my mouth and declared, tensely, that he loved me. But instead of echoing his words, I chewed around the stone and spat it into my palm. When he trudged back to his hole in Piccadilly and I to my perch at Wyndham's, I ignored his calls, stood him up for dinner and, when I did see him, serrated my conversation with references to exes. Exes who were more handsome, better in bed, more amusing, more famous, more extraordinary. I was testing him; he did not know and, when I found the note under the empty cafetière, I felt vindicated. He couldn't possibly have loved me: he had lied. He had tried to make me love him; he was vain, an attention-seeker, needy. He had betrayed me: he was going to Italy with Marco. With Marco, that silent wonder, that gawking nonentity, that effeminate clothes horse with his ridiculous bow ties, silly Edwardian moustache, and tiny pervert's hands. Marco, to whom I had introduced him, who was my friend, and my find.

The bell goes downstairs and the dog lets out a dominoes of barks. Garlic rubs itself against the evening air; Hester must have guests. I have little appetite myself - the drugs have subdued it - but I go inside to pour a sherry. When I emerge, Hester is standing in front of the sunflowers, holding hands with a man. He is taller, older, and his pinstripes out him as a servant of the City. Hester is explaining something, drawing pictures in the air with her fingers, and he gazes at her, rapt. Then he cups her head and covers her mouth with his. I watch; surely I can be excused this, now, at this time. It helps with the memories.

Ferdi doesn't know I'm ill. A perverse, bitter part of me believes that if he really cared he would. I want to have Spender's Farewell at the service and I think of the stern granite of Ferdi 's voice, and of how he would have been the natural choice to read. Hester and the man are still kissing - kissing and smiling secrets. I know that nobody will ever put their mouth on mine like that again. Pain, weakness, reliance - these traits of the disease are not attractive. When I crumple up the envelope, Hester and the man break apart.

She waves a braceleted hand at me and leads him inside. The door shuts and laughter trickles from within. The noise of furniture moving, then silence. It is cold out here now: the sun has dropped below the trees and my hands look ghostly pale in the half light. For the first time in weeks, I feel the nudge of hunger - but I know there is nothing in the fridge apart from Mina's biscuits and a clouded jar of olives. I smooth the envelope flat on the table, and add his name. There: it is done. To host one's own prehumous wake is, I know, unorthodox; but it is the only way to find out.

Tuesday, 7 April, 2009

In Short stories

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Untitled Books

Issue 24 / August - September 2010

Dusk is fitting for the fifth act, the birds carolling forth my requiem beneath the dying sun.