Leaning Close

Picture this. Your partner’s dead. Your wife, your lover. Lying there, looking shocked, shrunk, like life left suddenly, tried to get back in, couldn’t. So you had an argument last time you spoke? So she wasn’t faithful sometimes, but it was less hassle to stay? So her voice grated, an old iron gate on hinges, swinging in the wind, back forth back forth? So despite all that you were sort of comfortable, relaxed into her like she was a cushion on the sofa? You think one last kiss. One last time I’ll lean over her, brush the hair back from her forehead, kiss her, quick, before the lips shrink any further back, before I’ll just be kissing enamel.

You check the door’s shut. You put one hand on her chest, lean over, and for a second, through the hospital stink you can smell her powder, her scalp, her shampoo. You see her face over yours bending down to you, feel her sliding onto you when things were good, you stiffen. You run your hand over her breasts, feel her nipples erect. You lean closer.

Then you remember. Jim Crace’s “Being Dead”. You remember morgues full of gas-filled bodies sounding like a choir tuning up in the dark. You remember the image of loved ones leaning close for a last kiss, putting the slightest pressure on a dead chest, breathing in the putrefying food of forty years, air escaping with a rush, a sigh, a stink. The bereaved taking bodies home to care for, let them spend a last night in their own beds, let them leave gently. Warnings about leaving vaginal plugs, anal plugs, in place.

And you stand up, look down at her. You wonder about her body, your own. Neurones flash images of good sex, bad sex, babies being born, her vomiting after a curry, you with diarrhoea, piles, scurf, those little encrustations you meant to take to the doctor but somehow…you hear the roar of your own urine against tin, the tinkle of her embarrassed pissing behind locked doors, the tearing of loo paper to fill the pan so you (anyone) can’t hear the splash of faeces. You see red scratch marks over insect bites, bitten nails, a wart on a thumb, the black stipple of verrucae, the red shine of athlete’s foot, the itch of cold sores up and down. You see her defecating as she pushes your babies out, a thin brown trickle that had her in tears. You smell your own semen in the morning, stale chlorine. You see a life’s worth of body fluids collected in vats by some infernal Charon. Spittle. Semen. Sweat. Mucus from every orifice. Pus. Rivers of urine, faecal mudflats, blood…a flat red lake drying in the sun.

Her eyelid isn’t quite closed. A dead fish.You close the door behind you, pull your collar up, make for the pub. Now you’ve seen it. We make love to corpses, we kiss the dead, we are timewarp necrophiliacs.

Vanessa Gebbie

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© 2006 Vanessa Gebbie