Mimi (24 page)

She continued to expand her range of techniques. Two carved stone figures by Hanafan were recently installed in an underwater setting in Canterbury’s River Stour. The grace and ingenuity of these pieces demonstrate an artist of burgeoning power, ambition and imagination, whose work was about to take off in a wholly new direction.

Hanafan was Gareth Lode’s final victim. She leaves a brother.

My sister, “humane”—I liked that. But I never knew she could carve stone! And what was with all these awards she never told me about? I folded the newspaper and tried to swallow some more coffee—but at that moment the pianist started playing Bach (a bit of
Goldberg
), and I had to hold the paper up to hide the tears streaming down my face.

Back in the hotel, I tried phoning Mimi and flushing the toilet. No answer from either. It occurred to me now that Mimi probably knew nothing about what had happened to Bee, given her aversion to the News. American coverage of this English disaster was no doubt scanty: we like our gun crime
homegrown
. I hadn’t even told Mimi Bee
lived
in Canterbury, as far as I could remember, just that she was in England somewhere.

I sank into a poky little armchair and watched the News myself, but it was all about the gunman and the government, and the way they pronounced “gunm’n” and “gubm’nt” sounded exactly the same, to surreal effect. I gave up, stuck a piece o
f
Wrigley’s Dubm’nt in my mouth, and fell asleep.

Later, my cop picked me up and took me to Bee’s apartment (there was her studio at the art school to deal with too, when I was ready). Her home was on the first floor
(
ground
floor) of a small row house in a grim part of town, but Bee had done her usual number on it. She was always amassing stuff from junk shops, or the gutter, I don’t know which, and the place was one big altar to ephemera—though, I admit, it was kind of cozy.

This was what Bee worshipped: shells, coins, leaves, flowers, champagne corks, here a doll’s arm, there a small chipped china dog on a velvet cushion, and a colorful African basket. A lot of old dark-blue medicine bottles decorated the window sills. And on a table, a tiny clay man was selling clay sausages on strings from a tiny stall. Bee’s collages and photographs adorned the walls. The smell of Bee was there too. I had to sit down for quite a while.

But what was I going to do with it all? Bee’s obituary-writer might have appreciated her taste for “heirlooms” and domesticity—but I was the guy who’d have to
pack
it all up, or give it away! The sadness of her medicine cabinet, or her fridge, equipped with coffee beans, and bread and cheese for grilled cheese sandwiches; the pile of dirty laundry. The innocent signs of someone in the midst of life, who didn’t expect to die. Depressingly, I found several
fleece
garments. I couldn’t imagine Bee ever wearing them! But that’s what poverty and a cold damp climate can do to a nice Manhattan chick. She was so cold. She once told me she had to wear her
winter coat
just to cook in that tiny kitchen.

I was cold too, and didn’t know how to work the heating system (if there
was
one). I also had a sense of shame, in invading my sister’s privacy. I needed air. I felt like I was being buried alive in there! I reeled out of the building, gasping, and walked around the block. At least it wasn’t raining. Instead, they were having what they deemed a “heat wave” (a few sunny days); this fine weather was often mentioned in the massacre reports. Much was made of the paradoxical(?) fact that dreadful things sometimes happen during clement weather. “The sun was shining. It was a beautiful day. . .” Were they all insane? Would the massacre be more comprehensible conducted in sleet? Or were they suggesting Lode had been maddened by the heat? (Another fine excuse.)

Bee had described to me the way they all rush outside whenever the sun comes out, drop everything for twenty minutes’ sunbathing, and turn bright pink. For Bee it explained all of England’s problems. “No concentration skills!” Ah, Bee.

I turned a corner—and came upon the martyrs’ memorial that had so rattled her. It wasn’t grand or very antique, just a small concrete obelisk with a Maltese cross on top, plonked on a mound of jagged stones in the middle of a miniature triangular park.

Everything
in Canterbury’s tiny—except the murder rate. The place was made for midgets and maniacs!

The names of the forty-one martyrs were carved into the sides of the monument but, sure enough, two were listed merely as “Bradbridge’s widow” and “Wilson’s wife,” showing the disrespect that had infuriated Bee. To me, their anonymity gave these two women a kind of confederacy the other martyrs lacked. But they did seem somehow forlorn.

I walked on, past Fryer Tuck’s Fish & Chips (shut) and into a leafy lane that seemed almost bucolic in the sun, full of bumblebees and purple stinging nettles. I avoided getting stung by either and continued down the alley. It reminded me of one of Bee’s graveyard inscriptions I’d found among her papers:

WHEN YOU WALK THROUGH

PEACEFUL LANES SO GREEN

REMEMBER US AND THINK

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

I did.

They were speeding up the preliminary inquest and Bee’s autopsy for
my
benefit, so that I could take her ashes home with me. But it would be a few days yet. Meanwhile, I sorted through her stuff, arranged for it to be packed and shipped to my apartment, and settled her bills. Her landlady offered to give me back Bee’s deposit on the apartment, but I told her to keep it. This couldn’t be easy for her either, having a tenant get slaughtered.

Finally I went to the art school, explained who I was to a frightened secretary, and asked for access to Bee’s studio. Nobody knew what to say to me, nobody knew what to
do
with me in Canterbury (apart from the guy who played me Bach). It’s frightfully ticklish to have the brother of a murder victim hanging about. But after a long wait, they showed me into Bee’s studio and left me there.

My first tired reaction was one of
horror
, at the abundance of junk in there: I’d just have to get somebody to take it all straight to the city dump! There were stacks of wood, Perspex, corrugated iron, cardboard, and other materials. Bags of plaster, piles of cloth, lace, kelims, and other fancy items that might have belonged to one of Bee’s aborted Coziness Sculptures. . .

There was such a weight of work in there—it was like coming across Schubert’s unfinished symphony and wondering, What the hell? There were clay maquettes of sculptures Bee must have been planning to make, and many drawings and sketchbooks that I wanted to look at (later). And then, something I truly loved, positioned atop a grandiose plinth: the neat nest of some tiny bird, labeled with the words, “How cosy they must be.” This was something Auden had said, in response to seeing birds in a nest, and
I’d
told Bee about it (knowing how much she liked to be kept informed of all references to “coziness”).
This
heirloom I wrapped carefully in a lot of paper, to take home with me.

Then I made a list of what, as far as I could tell, needed to be done in there, and was about to go when I noticed something soft and white peeking out from behind a partition. I scrambled over some boxes and peered through a gap—and there was my mother’s bed!

Not the real one, no, that was long gone. This wasn’t life-size either, but
bigger
, so big that when I twisted my way through the gap in the partition and stood beside it, the bed was shoulder-height—just as Mom’s bed used to be when we were kids. Kind of spooky to find yourself suddenly dwarfed by your mother’s bed,
forty years later
. But it wasn’t icky, it was cozy! The bed was covered in the same kind of soft white knitted bedspread Mom always had but bigger, with the same kind of corny bobbles all over it. I was tempted to bury my face in it, it looked so warm, so
real
.

I patted it to see if it really was as soft as it looked, and all I could think about was the
crap
Mom went through on that bed of hers, something only Bee and I could know; our kind mom who
saw us through
, for what good it did her. Her sad end came to mind, and her funeral. When I started wondering what Mom would have said, if she’d lived to know what happened to Bee. . . I laid my head against my mother’s bed and bawled like a baby.

I was accompanied to the inquest by my faithful policeman, who helped me push past the reporters at the door. “Keep those reporters away from me or I’ll kill them,” I told him.

The inquest was handled with unexpected kindness, but they couldn’t save me from the results of the autopsy. Even though I’m a doctor, I’d never expected to have my sister’s entrails described—all to confirm that she had died instantly as the result of a bullet to the head, which had passed through both hemispheres of the brain, causing the inevitable series of organ shutdowns.

I left the courtroom barely conscious, shaking all over. It would have been a good time to shoot
me
: I couldn’t have defended myself. It was then that an enterprising journalist sidled up and asked me if the inquest had proved conclusive or provided “closure”. I pushed the bastard away.

“You want closure. I want my sister!”

I hoped I’d be all alone at the crematorium, but a few of Bee’s
friends
turned up, whom she’d never told me about: three women who taught at Kent University and hated it, for reasons they were too furious to go into. They took me to a pub, where an unseen parrot squawked all evening; I could barely speak at all. They bought champagne and told me great stuff about Bee, fun stuff. We didn’t talk about Lode.

I liked these gals, and was pleased for Bee that she’d known them: the Champagne Girls were truly nice to me, and saw me through that terrible night. In retrospect, I think they must have been driven to become exceptionally nice, to compensate for the exceptional nastiness of Canterbury: everything must have its opposite and antidote.

Hungry and hungover the next day, I went for a walk in what seemed to be Canterbury’s only real park, the Westgate. It was full of winos and wedding parties, and featured the most unhealthy-looking tree I’d ever seen. The trunk was squat and bulbous, and covered in carbuncles—its bark looked like bubbling lava, frozen mid-eruption into a pretense of wood. Branches stuck out above at odd angles in all directions, and from their tips hung a million little brown balls. What fresh hell was this?

A kid caught me staring at it and told me the tree had long ago eaten a bench that used to be at its base. In my present agitated state, I immediately imagined it consuming an old couple
sitting
on the bench as well, as they innocently marveled at its ugliness.

I went on beside the shallow meandering river until the path became muddy and sylvan. I had to duck under huge willows, their trunks twisted in ancient agony, like squeezed-out laundry. I was composing a Canterbury chant for myself as I trudged.

Who took the cunt out of

Canterbury Kent?

Guys yell “Cunt!” from their cars in

Canterbury Kent.

Count the corpses in

Canterbury Kent.

They litter the countryside in

Canterbury Kent.

It’s all buns and guns and whoresons by the ton, in

Canterbury Kent.

Christians concentrate on cant in

Canterbury Kent.

The cuntstabulary can’t cuntrol

Canterbury Kent.

Men hunt women down without relent in

Canterbury Kent.

So who took the cunt out of

Canterbury Kent?

Who took the CUNT out of

CANTerbury KENT?

The rugged path suddenly turned into a fancy new cycle route through semi-wilderness. It was dotted with fuzzy brown caterpillars that I tried to avoid stepping on. The sun was low and a bend of the river gleamed in the distance like a knife. There was no sound but birds, and my steps, and a dog barking at his own echo under a railway bridge. And then I could go no further, because the path was sealed off with twisting police tape: “ENTER CRIME SCENE DO NOT. . . ”

I had hit upon it myself, by accident: the spot where Bee had died! No one could see or stop me, so I stepped inside the taped-off area and sank to my knees, searching for any trace of her, even blood—head wounds bleed—but they’d washed it away, or rain had. The thought of her lying there, in pain, completely maddened me—Bee, whose sculptures were devoted to pleasure! I looked around at what Bee must have seen last before she died—the field, the low line of trees around it, the river, the sun, the sky?—and I wondered again what she thought at the end. Did she just
give up
, deciding life isn’t worth living, in a world in which such things happen?

But she was wrong, WRONG. Golden light was hitting the opposite riverbank, and the green and gold trees were doing their reflection trick in the river, as if to say: I can face up or down, in a world that is both this and that. The water was clean and clear enough for ducks, who tootled to and fro, the
Appassionata
was playing in my head, and I longed to tell Bee that there’s Bach and Beethoven and birds and bees and MIMI, Bee, Mimi, the greatest thing.