A Song Died

By Andrew McLinden

Look around this vegetarian café; see the women sitting at round tables, eating square cakes, talking about love triangles. Most of them are thirty plus. One or two are nudging fifty. Your sister was diagnosed when she was twenty four. Two years with chemo they told her.

You write the word diagnosed down on your notepad and see that it’s an anagram of a song died. You’ve had a thing about anagrams most of your life. As a child, when you looked at words, the letters seemed to shimmer inside the sentences. The main thing you like about anagrams is that they can reveal hidden truths. Your personal favourite is Clint Eastwood which yields the words Old West Action. Close second is Alec Guinness which gives you Genuine Class. Third is Arnold Schwarzenegger which makes he’s grown large n crazed.

The waitress comes over and you order tea for yourself and coffee for your sister. You also order her a side of Madeira cake because this was/is her favourite. You still go through this ritual every Saturday afternoon. Even though she’s dead, even though she’s not going to eat the cake or drink the coffee. Something about breaking the routine would mean admitting that she’s gone and you’re not ready to do that yet. The waitress gets it. She doesn’t charge you. She keeps it in its wrapper and then places it back on the display after you’ve gone. You know this because you watch sometimes from the window after you’ve stepped out onto the pavement. The waitress went to school with your sister, used to compliment her every Saturday on her head scarves.

These rituals: in July, which was the first anniversary of her passing, you bought your sister a plane ticket beside you on your flight to Majorca. The travel agent didn’t understand. Neither did your wife. Neither did the fat guy who tried to sit down in what looked like an empty seat. In the heat of the moment you asked him outside. He said, “You want to take me outside at thirty thousand feet?”

You pictured parachutes and a fist fight as you fell through the clouds. You compromised and met behind the luggage warehouse at Terminal 1. You stood there with your arms at your sides, conscious of body language, waiting for that moment when it started because no one had ever told you how a fight was supposed to start. And you saw him roll up his sleeves and spit onto his palms. And then he came for you and you stood there with your head bowed watching his brown shoes getting closer and your wife screamed and he knocked you down.

“Get up,” he said.

You brought one knee up, placed a hand on it, took a deep breath and heaved yourself up onto your feet. You stood there swaying and he knocked you down again, this time with a glancing blow to your chin. But you realised as you lay there, staring up at the ceiling lights that it was good to feel something again, and you raised yourself onto your feet once more. By the end you were panting and making bloodied palm prints on the wall. When you looked back your wife was throwing her fists against his chest.

Back inside the Pelican café you sip at the tea again and it tastes sweet. You place the cup back down on the saucer and think about it. Then you sip at it again. Sugar has never bothered you before but you imagine its corrosive qualities as it lays siege to your teeth. “Sugar,” you say, to the lady on your left.

She rolls her eyes and her friends start laughing as she folds the napkin down on the table. “Don’t call me sugar,” she says.

And you turn round and look for your kid sister because she would have put this lady in her place, but then you remember.

*

At your booth you fix the earphones around your head. The black flex coils up and bounces and as you straighten it out you say hello to the people nearby. They’re already taking calls because the shift started fifteen minutes ago and you’re late. Your boss stares at you from behind a laminating machine. He hates you some of the time. The rest he pretends you’re not there. Your problem is day dreaming and an inability to concentrate. This leads to mix-ups. People with houses on fire are connected to the coastguard. Men on boats are promised ambulances. They’ve tried to coach you but some things can’t be taught.

Every time you hear that beep in your headset it’s like an electric shock. At eight hundred calls per night you’ve heard it all and it’s always bad: the three car pileups on the motorway and the wheezing heart attack victims on the staircase. You hear the screaming mothers with the blue babies, you hear the fishermen on lifeboats just before the wave hits. You hear the last words of jumpers standing blown through on the chapped lips of empty office blocks. Worst of all are those lunatics who call in the middle of the night from mental wards. You hate those. The most disturbing thing about them is how sane they sound.

Your boss comes over with a laminated rap sheet showing coloured bars. His finger hovers over a red column.

“This is your call handling time,” he says.

You squint at the number 47 with the second digit leaning against a percentage sign.

“This is the highest call handling time in the entire centre. No bonus this month.” He places the paper down in front of you. “No bonus,” he says again as he walks off.

*

So you are in bed with your wife and it is getting on for seven years of sex. In the blackness of the room you are just two genderless shapes grunting and you’ve tried everything to get it going again. You’ve tried making love. You’ve tried role play. You’ve tried rough stuff. You’ve even tried shouting out the names of each other’s friends. This just led to her hiding behind the Cornflakes box at breakfast next morning; she placed that yellow-beaked cockerel in the middle of the table like a cardboard partition. “I can’t believe you’d fuck Christopher,” you said, “He’s like the complete opposite of me,” and then she lifted her bowl and carried it into the other room.

This night you are trying to imagine she is someone else: Kylie Minogue, Scarlett Johansson, Sandra from the office. But they don’t get you going either. So your wife, and Scarlett, and Kylie, and Sandra, they all climb off and all five of you lie like that side by side panting on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

She says, “What’s wrong now?”

And you tell her that she should have an affair, that she should just take someone else for that side of things. You tell her you wouldn’t mind – that we all have needs. The shock of this statement sucks the air out of the room. It is the most shocking thing ever said between you, right up until she says, “I’m already having an affair.” Then someone starts crying there in the darkness. Could be you could be her could be the Hollywood actress. And the more this voice unburdens itself the more you think of sugarless tea and how you made the right decision to quit.

*

Next night at work you’re playing with anagrams. From eleven plus two you get twelve plus one. From a decimal point you get I’m a dot in place. From mother in law you get woman Hitler and you start to smile. How true, you whisper, tapping the pen against the paper. Her mother’s nothing if not generous. She’s always giving you free advice. When she sits down at the kitchen table and goes quiet you know it’s coming: maybe you should go to university, she’ll say, I hear they let anyone in these days. Then she’ll run a finger round the rim of the cup before adding that you’re making her daughter unhappy. You’ll top up her tea and she’ll mutter that she was warned.

At your break, you feel inside your pocket for your cigarettes and then stop because you realise that a carton of cigarettes = I got a taste for cancer. You crush the packet and throw it in the bin. You take a deep breath and pop a mint, then go back inside.

*

Glasgow is harsh and unforgiving in the morning light and your eyes crease as you walk out at the end of your shift. At the booth you buy an extra train ticket for your sister and come home on the eight forty from Queen Street. You sit there as the train goes in and out of tunnels, listening to the woman behind you as she talks to her friend. She says that someone called Archie is at death’s door. You turn round and stare at her.

“What does death’s door look like?” you ask her.

The lady and her friend exchange glances.

“I mean does it have a welcome mat? Does it have a brass knocker? How would you describe it?”

“It’s not something I think about,” she says. “It’s just a saying.”

“Ah,” you say nodding, “well I’ll let you into a little secret. Death’s door is actually a trap door. One minute you’re walking along the street texting and the next minute you’re hurtling through the darkness of space. Was it a car or a coronary? Who can say?”

As the ladies move to the other end of the carriage you realise that you’ve now become the type of person who makes people change seats on public transport. You think of moving to sit with her again but she shakes her head.

About a hundred yards from the house where you live, you see your wife in a man’s car. You stop and stare. They are kissing. When they’ve finished kissing your wife gets out and pats down her dress. Then she waves him off, and you can see by the way she’s standing – toes folded and heels off the ground – that she’s still reaching for him even as the distance increases. And even though you encouraged it in a way, even though you shouldn’t be bothered, you are terribly bothered.

*

In the Admiral you sit down beside Saint Michael. He is called this because every week he turns wages into wine. You like Saint Michael because he laughs at your jokes. It is very important to have a friend like this. You finish the last of your beer and place the empty glass down on the table.

“Are you all right?” Saint Michael asks.

“Sure,” you answer.

“Want another one?”

“No,” you reply, “I’m giving up.”

And he starts laughing, even though you haven’t told a joke.

*

“No stopping me now,” you say to the taxi driver on the way home. “That’s sugar, cigarettes and alcohol. My body is a temple. Well not a temple as much as a northern European Church – a northern European Church in the Gothic style. That’s what my body is.”

“Six pounds forty,” says the cabbie.

*

Back in the house your eyes settle on the television. She’s watching Titanic. You turn The Titanic Disaster into Death; it starts in ice just before the commercial break.

Adverts are the only time of the day when you feel someone is genuinely interested in you. So you watch them till the end. Then you unplug the television set and lift if off the stand. She opens the door to let you out but she’s biting her bottom lip. “You know how it ends anyway,” you say. You step out onto the patio and drop it to the ground. The television explodes and all the life and drama that was once housed within it is released. The ghosts of TV shows past and present are exorcised as the glass shatters: jet fighters shoot out into the night sky pursued by space ships. Ghosts and ghouls wrestle with each other as they fall into the hedges. Never ending rounds of canned laughter are released and they echo off the walls and windows of your housing estate before heading skywards, as newscasters, presidents, and gardening show hosts chatter their way towards oblivion. After it’s over the television set just sits there injured like a dumb animal, with circuit boards that no longer connect and buttons that no longer press with purpose.

You walk in and close over the door. You watch your wife as she runs the iron over a shirt. You see how unhappy you’ve made her. You get flashbacks to how it was at the start when you used to hug each other for no reason at all. You realise you’ve killed that and that everything’s crumbling and you need to get her out of the house before the roof collapses. She can have her boyfriend. He will be normal and successful. They can have sex that ends in climaxes rather than recriminations. Somewhere between the cuff and collar, sleeve says leave. At first it is awkward.

“But I don’t want to go,” she says.

“Go live with your boyfriend,” you tell her.

“I don’t know if he’s ready for that.” As she says this her eyes well and she brings her hand to her mouth. “You need to let go of your sister. It’s because you hold onto her that you have to let go of everything else.” She rests the iron upright and takes a deep breath. “You can’t just spring something like this on me out of the blue. We need to talk.”

*

“We need to talk,” says your boss.

“It’s the elephant in the room,” says the woman from HR.

“We’ve tried everything we can think of,” says your boss.

“Now it’s time to get our ducks in a row,” says the woman from HR.

“If you leave without going to the union we can still give you a reference.”

“No need to shoot the puppy.”

“It’s company policy that I escort you from the premises.”

“Let’s just deal with the crocodile closest to the canoe.”

*

When you walk back into the empty house you look around at the space where the television set had stood and the places where your wife had once walked. In the kitchen you open up the cupboards and look at all the ingredients and instructions but it is too complicated and you decide that you’d be as well giving up on food as well.

*

Three days you lie in bed waiting. All around the floor you look for that trapdoor. You know how busy he is so you decide not to be too critical. He’s probably hovering over an earthquake in Latin America. The earthquakes = that queer shake. You move onto longer anagrams. To be or not to be: that is the question, whether it’s nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, turns into: In one of the Bard’s best thought of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.

This one delights you. Next you try this: That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap from mankind. You get: a thin man ran; makes a large stride, left planet, pins flag on moon! On to Mars!

You force yourself up onto your feet to take your own giant leap and examine yourself in the mirror. Your beard is coming in thick and black. It suits you. You rub at it while ruminating on an idea. This idea being that how you give up says a lot about your character.

Exhibitionists

exhibitionists ‍ ‍

exhibitionists

exhibitionists

They jump off tall buildings with crowds watching below – showmen to the last. Nihilists crave annihilation and give head to the double barrel of a shotgun. Pessimists choke down pills with strong liquor and then lie back on a sofa, with framed photos of family clutched to their chests, and sob their way towards oblivion.

You don’t know what type you are. You just want to give things up: sugar, cigarettes, beer, television, work, love, life. You breathe onto the glass and draw a smiling face. Maybe that makes you a Forsakavist. It sounds Russian. It sounds good. As you smile into the glass you think of how a psychiatrist would most probably say you are crazy. Well, maybe not crazy, but he’d have some fancy university word that meant the same thing.

Shrinks they are called in America and that sounds about right to you because every time you meet one you feel diminished. In many ways you feel sorry for them because all psychiatrists end up infected with the mental illness they hope to treat anyway. Just like all cardiologists end up dying of broken hearts and plastic surgeons wake up one day and don’t recognise the face looking back at them in the mirror. But as you stare in the mirror you do recognise the face looking back. You recognise it just fine. It is you: John Fitzhenry and you are giving up. Then, as you stroke that beard, you remember that you’ve one more thing to do.

*

So you’re sitting in the café looking at the wicker chair. You smell bad and you look bad. Women sprayed scent as soon as you sat down. As they left you watched those perfumed particles hanging heavy in the afternoon air. The waitress comes and lays down a pot of tea before you and a slice of Madeira cake. You nod and wait for her to walk away. But you hear the legs screech as she sits down in the wicker seat opposite you, the chair that no one sits in because it’s your sister’s. By now you’re too weak to feel offended so you just watch as her bony painted fingers tear open the wrapper around your sister’s cake. Then you see her slice it into small pieces with a bread knife. When she’s done she slides the saucer across the table. “Eat it,” she says.

“It’s my sister’s,” you tell her and you slide the saucer back.

“Eat it,” she tells you and this time she keeps her hand on the china plate to stop you from moving it.

You pick the first piece up and chew. And it must look terrible the way you’re eating, with your mouth open, feral, crumbs spiked onto the bristles of your beard. But it tastes so good and she doesn’t seem bothered so you take another piece. She takes a packet of cigarettes from her pocket and lights one. She draws her cheeks in as she inhales, unblinking eyes on you as she slides the packet and lighter across to your side of the table. You take one out and light it. She pours tea into your cup. “Sugar?” she says, holding the sachet in between her forefinger and thumb.

“Don’t call me sugar,” you say, grabbing another slice of cake, and as she laughs the smoke escapes from her nostrils in long tusks before bending upwards to choke those perfume particles. You take out your notepad and ask her for her full name. She tells you it’s Stacey Phillips. You try to find a meaningful anagram and you can’t. You begin to panic.

“Do you have a middle name?” you ask her.

“No,” she says, and she smiles as she tips the sugar into your cup.