Quilt (9 page)

Thinking at death is shared in music. Cut, stripped, loosened, shred, ripped and divided in raving madness. It is waiting everywhere, a word or phrase in a beloved voice, songs, refrains or intonations, symphonies or snatches without identifiable composer or musician, a bar, a melody, permanently interrupted, gone forever, Hubert Parry’s Blake and his father’s ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’, Bach’s second violin concerto caught in a Sunday evening ribbon of reminiscence flowing through his father’s ears, as the church sheds them and they file out towards the spot where his mother’s body was lowered just
twenty-eight
months earlier.

The couple in green shoes are exhausted. It has been the longest fortnight of their lives.

After the graveside blessing, people are to gather, if they wish, to look at the flowers sent from America, France and elsewhere. Time passes.

These things happen from time to time.

Politely but with an unmistakable hint of impatience, the undertaker asks:

– Would you move on away from the flowers now, sir?

You don’t stand gawking at the flowers on the grave beyond a fixed period. There’s other people would perhaps like to see them, sir, you set an example now, move away and everyone will know to follow, and we can all get on with the business of proceeding out of the churchyard. But for what reason, not only the beauty of the flowers and the afternoon and the breeze and earth and summer sunshine, his father and mother now for the
first time together again in name and body consigned?

Already people have begun to vacate the churchyard, however, and he needs to inform them of the reception. Some know already but others have not heard and he wants everyone to understand that they are indeed welcome. Exhaustedly dipping and stepping around gravestones, he tries to pick up on individuals or couples he doesn’t know or hasn’t expected to see at the funeral:

– Hello, I’m not sure we’ve met, please come to the house for a drink.

It is a ten-minute walk up the single-track lane. Parking outside the house being difficult, many go on foot. The churchyard resembles a theatre emptying of spectators. The vicar proffers her blandly earnest thank you but no thank you, and the undertaker also gives his excuses, another funeral to attend, a further nigh-on forty miles to drive that afternoon. Only the gravediggers remain. And the man in grief is struck, as with a spade to head or legs, by the scarcely concealed relief of a gathering never to be reconstituted regarding a departure that has perhaps not begun.

The reception is for her a treacherous experience of meeting many people for the first time, trying to keep one name or face apart from the next, as a stranger to the house and yet more affected by it now than anyone perhaps besides the son. She is the pristine remora, paradise-haunter, tip-haulage expert, bleacher and scrubber. She is also, this afternoon, chief tea-maker and sommelier of wine, at least until others offer to assist, while the son is still busied with taxiing folk up from the church and overseeing the arrangement of parking. Some people are too nervous to address a word to her, others dutifully say hello and ask where she comes from and what her plans are. She is staying a couple more days, she explains, then must return to her own country.

With so many strange friends and relations the event is at first, not surprisingly, muted. She pictures a specialist section in a music-store, a selection of soundtracks from funeral receptions from different countries, the English version impressive for the quietness of its opening. Bodies shuffle. Some file through to the kitchen, others
contend with the dining room. No one can stand in the centre. Voices operate at little more than whispers, amid clinks of teacups and teaspoons, and a furtive crunching of biscuit. But as the scene progresses, it attains a kind of macabre raucousness, rising to crescendos absurdly at odds with the way it began.

And for him the only thing is to let all the visitors see the pool, hardly difficult as it engulfs almost the entire space of the first room you enter as you come into the house. The surprise on some people’s faces seems diplomatically slight. With others the intake of breath is audible. Of course he misses so much of this initial impact because he is busy with sorting out parking in the drive and taxiing people up the lane, but the sheer size and scale of the equipment alone is evidently a cause for amazement. The aquarium fits into the oak-beamed room with space for a comfortable walkway around, with access to kitchen and drawing room as well as into the stairwell to the upper floor. The table with drinks and food has been set up in the one doorless corner. It is possible to hold a cup and saucer of tea or coffee or a glass of wine close to you and someone else pass without too much inconvenience, but still for at least a handful of guests it must be difficult not to sense that the gangways around the pool are like the space in the earth around a coffin.

– Well I never, just look at the scale of the thing!

– Did you know he was interested in aquaculture?

It’s bigger than the sort of pond children might dream of having in their garden.

– What’s in it anyhow?

– Looks like a couple of big rocks and a load of white gravel.

– Is there something in it?

– He’s taking after his father, wouldn’t you say? His dad always was making things and installing them somewhere or other.

– Like something out of Heath Robinson, to be sure.

– Used to drive his dear old wife round the twist, with that filtering system he set up for the drinking water supply. You’ve seen that, haven’t you? Take a stroll into the kitchen and have a look, it’s still there. Lord knows how many filters and containers he used to purify the water come from a spring in the field above the house.

– Very father like son, wouldn’t you say?

– Only look at the size of it!

– Are there fish in it?

– What’s this all about?

Gradually his own voice takes up a place in the room and attention is more sharply focused on the remarkable tank.

– No, it’s not empty. They are rays, the son explains. There are four of them. They are
Potamotrygon motoro
freshwater stingrays, from South America.

His aunt is at him, his mother’s youngest sister, accusing him of being mad as a hatter. He is smiling, speaking quietly, but everyone is listening now.

– You used to have an aquarium yourself, he reminds his aunt. Though I admit
this
is something of a departure.

– Freaky if you ask me, says the aunt, not one to mince her words, and mildly guilty too at the recollection of her own late husband’s insistence on keeping aquarium fish and the palaver of feeding them and cleaning out the water, ensuring the light is kept on for specific periods to eliminate the growth of algae and so on.

– It’s a lot of work, young man (an irony this, since he is in truth no longer young, and every day since his father’s death has felt like a month and more). How are you going to manage it? I assumed you were going to be selling the house. You can’t sell it with a great tank like this
kerplomp
in the middle of it.

The rays, it seems, divide the company like goats and sheep. For some the sight of these creatures, especially when the son opens up a section of the lid and they come truly flap-slapping up to the surface, all too evidently eyeing the wine-sipping peanut-crunching crowd, is just too weird. A wave, or to be more exact, a cold current of strangeness passes through the audience, as if in collective registration of an extravagancy out of keeping with mourning, beyond any normality one might reasonably associate with a funeral reception, a kind of crazy ensnarement, yes, an unacceptable, improper spectacle best reacted to by the quickest practicable exit, but a wave that, the girl senses, once gone gives way to more diffuse and diverse predicaments of being stranded and uncertain. No one, in fact, leaves. And then there are others, it becomes clear, who are simply in awe, astonished at what the son has done.

– Not only me, he says to a murmur along the line of all those gathering around the pool: I could not have done it without
her
.

He gestures towards the pristine dark girl by the door off to the kitchen.

– It is necessary, he goes on, to confront a ghastly deception. Triumph is a terrible delusion that must nonetheless be reckoned with. To pretend that it is not there would be as nauseating as to accept that it is. I
cannot speak for her (and here he gestures once again towards the beautiful stranger scarcely anyone present has previously met), but I am not going to deny a sense of achievement at having conceived and constructed this ray pool, with its spillway design and lipped feature, at having lined it with the correct quartz sand, after picking over and assessing it, stone by stone, day after day, at having carefully selected the, I think it’s thirteen, individual, perfectly sized rocks, and at having installed the highest-quality filters, pumps, lighting and heating. Everything has been done here that could have been done to ensure an appropriate supply of water and to establish the correct mechanisms for the upkeep and replacing of water, and for the weekly gravel-cleaning and
hydrovac
. But any feeling of triumph here is at once also its opposite. To achieve is to lose. To suppose that you are winning is to be undergoing absolute defeat.

He pauses, somewhat perplexed at where this speech has come from. Then he carries on with a view to relating as briefly as possible the acquisition of the rays themselves, the initial quandary he had been thrown into by the dealer who encouraged him to buy a number of so-called teacup rays.

At which point at least one local woman, a farmer’s wife, glances down in fuzzy consternation at the teacup and saucer in her hands.

– The teacup ray, the bereaved man adds, as if picking up the demur, is sometimes advertised as a sort of miniature version as of some pigmy species, but really it is just a baby. Don’t be fooled by the teacup talk. I wasn’t, for I had read and talked to plenty of people on these issues, and I wasn’t going to be fobbed off from
my original desire to get
motoro
rays of fair proportions which, as you may be able to see, is what we did eventually manage to do. Not that they are as big as they might be: a stingray of this variety can, in appropriate conditions, grow to a diameter of three feet or more, but these I hope will be happy to stay closer to the size they are now.

– It’s been hard, he goes on, unexpectedly swallowing a word or two, more emotional now than he had been in presenting his speech at the church, not having anticipated that he would make any particular speech at all at this point, in this revolutionised dining room, in the presence of so many family and friends, as well as a handful of more or less complete strangers.

– It was hard, especially at the end, a matter of such precarious hope – as any of you will know who may ever have bought and kept rays… I don’t know, is there anyone here?

And he looks up, surprised at his own question, to a tide of blank faces.

– Perhaps not. But the trickiest part is bringing a ray home in its transport basin. You have to give it time to acclimatise to the change in water, introducing the creature to its new environment with all the care in the world not only for its own wellbeing but also for your own, since these, after all,
are
dangerous creatures. It is usual to cover the ray’s sting with a piece of plastic piping during transport, but at the other end, I mean back here at the pool, it was then a matter of removing the plastic hose from each. Not to do so is to invite infection, but to do so is at least as hazardous to the handler as to the ray itself. It was, I confess, a slightly hair-raising operation and I couldn’t have done it alone. So far, at any rate, it
would seem to have been effective, but naturally it should be stressed (as the speaker now notices one of his cousin’s youngest children, a boy of perhaps seven, wander up to the edge of the pool and try to peer in), I should have stressed at the very beginning that these beautiful creatures can also be very dangerous, and when you lift up a section of the lid, as I have just done, and they come to the surface like a club of old wraiths having been stirred by some unexpected knock at the door, don’t for one moment suppose that it would be safe to put your hand in and give them an affectionate stroke (the cousin now calling the boy away from the edge) as you might have considered doing if you’d encountered similar rays in a so-called touchpool at a sea-life centre. These rays have not had their stings removed and this is not, I repeat,
not
a touchpool.

It may be, after all, that to the bereaved speaker, as to a storyteller, a peculiar authority befalls. Yet he pauses once more, curious as to how long he can continue without someone, perhaps his aunt, breaking into ridicule, or at any rate passing some kind of comment.

– What do you feed them on? blushes the teenage daughter of another cousin.

– On shrimps, he replies, a little snappily. Fillets of whitefish, trout, river perch, with occasional live food such as earthworms and red mosquito larvae.

– What’s a touchpool? asks the small boy still lingering near the lip of the unroofed section.

– A good question, declares the grief-stricken man, in a voice louder and more trembling than he might have wished.

He realises in a flash how careful he must be in his choice of words now, already risen up inside all his hatred
for the commercialisation of rays that has, in so many coastal resorts around the world, reduced the experience of seeing to one of touching, as if they were puppies to be stroked or rabbits to have placed in one’s lap, um likkel inkydinky strokey. No, he has to rein himself in here – otherwise he will frighten the young boy, not to mention appear quite crackers to this gathered group of friends and loved ones. He must, if only for the sake of a certain decorum, fight against the impulse to spit out the euphemistic and quietly nauseating compound phrase ‘touchpool’ and denounce in the most vituperative terms all those who have ever been responsible for participating in,
or merely encouraging
, a state of affairs whereby visitors to an aqua-life centre can feel at liberty, or feel even that it is their
right
, to touch these creatures, when all the research stresses that rays have extremely sensitive skin all too readily susceptible to trauma. Still the words rush out of him.

– The last thing in the world you should do to a ray, he says, is stroke it, not to mention exclaim aloud, as I have heard people do in marine-life centres around the world,
Ooh, it doesn’t feel like anything I felt before,
or
It feels, ugh, like fondling a giant frog,
or
Just like wet rubber
, and so on. The sooner the world is rid of touchpools the sooner people might start properly respecting these extraordinary creatures. I say the last thing in the world, but (and here his gaze wanders away beyond the church-goers, and beyond the cousin and wife who had been stuck in traffic on the road from London but have now appeared at the door and mutely joined the others)
actually
I have witnessed worse something
even more disgraceful
in the case of a sea-life
centre on the eastern seaboard of the United States. An official was seated right beside the touchpool, with a cap pulled down over his eyes, while a group of boys not all that much older than
you
, I shouldn’t imagine (his raised right forefinger here directly trained on the cousin’s boy near the edge), played at pulling their tails as they went gliding past. The boys thought this was just
such a hoot
and the official, employed it should be said by a company purportedly committed to
the preservation of our great marine world and all the inhabitants of our oceans
, merely maintained a blind eye. They were trying to catch then tug along the rays by their tails, worse than swinging cats, and of course the only reason why these little
horrors
, these
mindless shrimps
who might have taken a different attitude to the whole thing if they had been warned in advance of having testosterone
whipped out of them with piano-wire
, the only reason why they were able to do what they did – besides the grotesque and wilful neglect of the fake-dozing official – was because the stings of these rays had been removed. I allude here to an act of barbarity regarding not just the spines but the bulk of the tails altogether, a barbarity most readily appreciated by visiting one of these marine concentration camps, I choose my words carefully, these commercialised marine torture chambers, and witness for yourselves the amputations and the torture chambers and for the ray, for the rays –