Waking the Dead

The car’s headlamps revealed a mound of grey blanket like a grave, freshly filled and covered, blocking our front door. I could smell him before I saw him. It was not the smell of dirt, or alcohol, or disease – it was more than pestilential – the smell of death while life is still in the fight. The smell of Lazarus in the cave, before the miracle. He woke as I approached, dazed, sat up slowly. “You can’t stay here,” I said. “This is my house. You’ll have to go.” A beard: a pirate’s, a Lear’s, a foul fiend’s beard. Eyes like Gloucester’s, but still in their sockets. “Fuck off,” he said. “Nobody lives here. Okay, I’m going. I’m going! No-one, you hear? Nobody except the black widow. The spider will fucking eat you.” And so he stumbled off, with curses, spleen and bile; stumbled into visible and imagined worlds, as that night and for days afterwards I expected to see him at every turn: his rage commanding fear his condition demanding sympathy his fatigue telling my guilt and indifference to fuck off. The dirty foam mattress he slept on had crumbled, leaving chips and flakes on the clean concrete, between neat paving bricks, even inside the pot plants. I swept them away or picked them up and threw him into the rubbish bin with them. After a while, he took his place in my chronicle of vagabonds – between Richard the refugee from Zimbabwe and a tall, nervous, stumbling consumptive from whose cough I kept my distance; alongside the anonymous homeless always looking for food, money, work. But the black widow? She had me puzzled. Why did he pick our driveway, our doorstep? I weaved a tale in which, some years ago, there lived in our house a lady – not just a woman, a lady – who loved him, whom he loved, who told him one day to fuck off. The end of an affair could drive anyone mad, send the spurned one into frenzy into the wilderness.    I couldn’t imagine it was sex that got him I couldn’t synthesise that smell with lust or desire, with the passion of lovemaking or a lovers’ quarrel. He, too, had loved. I didn’t care, if I am honest; I was just curious. (Sex had got him, once, of course; but his parents, accursed fornicators, were long gone.)

 

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