handful of dust, / And the wheels go over my head, / And my bones are shaken with pain, / For in a shallow grave they are thrust, / Only a yard beneath the street, / And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat, / The hoofs of the horses beat, / Beat into my scalp and my brain, / With never an end to the stream of passing feet.’ He could see why Bunyon’s had chosen to call this room the Willow Chapel rather than the Coal Cellar or the Shallow Grave. ‘Hello, love, your Mum’s in the Coal Cellar,’ muttered Patrick. ‘We could release a dove in the Shallow Grave, but it would have no chance whatever of escape.’ He sat down and rocked his torso over his folded arms. His entrails were in torment, as they had been since hearing about his mother’s death three days ago. No need for ten years of psychoanalysis to work out that he felt ‘gutted’. He was doing what he always did under pressure, observing everything, chattering to himself in different voices, circling the unacceptable feelings, in this case conveniently embedded in his mother’s coffin.
She had left the world with screeching slowness, sliding inch by inch into oblivion. At first he could not help enjoying the comparative quiet of her presence, but then he noticed that he was clinging to the urban noises outside in order not to be drawn into the deep pit of silence at the centre of the room. He must take a closer look, but first he really had to turn down the lights that were glaring through chrome grids in the low polystyrene ceiling. They bleached the glow of the four stout candles impaled on brass stands at the corners of the coffin. He dimmed the spotlights and restored some of the ecclesiastical pomposity to the candles. There was one more thing he had to check. A pink velvet curtain partitioned the room; he had to know what was behind it before he could pay attention to his mother. It turned out to hide a storage area packed with equipment: a grey metal trolley with sensible wheels, some no-nonsense rubber tubes and a huge gold crucifix. Everything needed to embalm a Christian. Eleanor had expected to meet Jesus at the end of a tunnel after she died. The poor man was a slave to his fans, waiting to show crowds of eager dead the neon countryside that lay beyond the rebirth canal of earthly annihilation. It must be hard to be chosen as optimism’s master cliché, the Light at the End of the Tunnel, ruling over a glittering army of half-full glasses and silver-lined clouds.
Patrick let the curtain drop reluctantly, acknowledging that he had run out of distractions. He edged towards the coffin, like a man approaching a cliff. At least he knew that this coffin contained his mother’s corpse. Twenty years ago, when he had been to see his father’s remains in New York, he was shown into the wrong room. ‘In loving memory of Hermann Newton’. He had done everything he could to opt out of that bereavement process, but he was not going to evade this one. A cool dry part of his mind was trying to bring his emotions under its aphoristic sway, but the stabbing pain in his guts undermined its ambitions, and confused his defences.
As he stared into the coffin, he felt the encroachment of an agitated animal sadness. He wanted to linger incredulously by the body, still giving it some of the attention it had commanded in life: a shake, a touch, a word, an enquiring gaze. He reached out and put his hand on her chest and felt the shock of its thinness. He leant over and kissed her on the forehead and felt the shock of its coldness. These sharp sensations lowered his defences further, and he was overwhelmed by an expanding rush of sympathy for the ruined human being in front of him. During its fleeting life, this vast sense of tenderness reduced his mother’s personality to a detail, and his relationship with her to a detail within a detail.
He sat down again and leant forward over his crossed legs and folded arms to give himself some faint relief from the pain in