Corpsing (34 page)

A couple of weeks into my second stay at UCH, I got one of the nurses to bring me a phone. From my hospital bed, with the curtains drawn all around me, without really knowing what I was intending to say, I called Lily’s flat. After listening to my own voice on the answerphone (‘I’m sorry no-one’s here at the moment please leave a message and we’ll get back to you…’) I began to speak. Not exactly to Lily. Not exactly to myself. But not exactly to anyone else either. This, or something like it, is the message I left:

‘It’s probably a bit mad, but I know you’re still really there. I’ve been trying to work out whether, in all this time, you haven’t been more alive than me. In some ways, at least. You certainly changed more than I did – than I allowed myself to. As far as I can see, you’re a completely different person to the one I thought I knew. Almost, anyway. And even her, I didn’t know very well. That’s partly because you spent most of the time we were together lying to me and partly because I’ve spent most of the time since then lying to myself. I think I knew. Really, in most ways, I think I knew the whole thing. But there I was, just going on with it – letting you work out your revenge on me, through me. I feel like I’ve been chasing – I don’t know what I feel like I’ve been chasing. A ghost, I suppose. I don’t like that word. It’s not vicious enough for what you are. You’re something else. You’re more like, what? A bullet. Harmless enough by itself, held in the palm. But when following its trajectory, as you continued following yours, it’s pretty fucking lethal. Just by not being alive, you’ve done so much
damage. I wasn’t going to say I hate you. That seems so obvious. Of course I hate you – how could I not hate you? But, now I think about it, I think I probably hated you all along. It wasn’t you doing all this to me, I was doing it to myself. You might say that you knew that was going to happen, but you didn’t. You wanted me dead. The people that you wanted merely punished have been – or will be, pretty soon. But I’m still here, you know. I’m still here… Oh, fuck it… I’m bored with this.’

Even before I put the phone down I was already in hysterics.

That’s what I remember saying.

But it may not be completely accurate because when I went along to Lily’s flat a few weeks later to start clearing all her stuff out, the message hadn’t been properly recorded.

When I tried to play it back, all I could hear was the cackle-crackle of far-off static.

Invaluable in the writing of this book were: Vincent J. M. Di Maio’s
Gunshot Wounds: Practical aspects of firearms, ballistics and forensic techniques;
Ulrich Drews’
Color Atlas of Embryology;
R. M. H. McMinn, R. T. Hutchings, J. Pegington and P. H. Abrahams’
Color Atlas of Human Anatomy;
Elisabeth Bronfen’s
Over Her Dead Body: Death, femininity and the aesthetic,
Philippe Ariès’
The Hour of Our Death;
and J. G. Ballard’s
Crash.
Also, the exhibitions
Doctor Death: Medicine at the end of life
(Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine) and
The Quick and the Dead: Artists and anatomy
(National Touring Exhibitions).

The author would like to thank Simon Prosser; Lesley Shaw; Sarah Day; Harriet Braun; Mic Cheetham, Oliver Cheetham; Alex O’Connell; Dominic Hill; Lucy Till; Anica Alvarez; Julian, Caroline, Maisie; Georgina and Charlotte.