On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory Read online

  “We need the telephone number of your next of kin Danny. And then we’re going to give you something that will help dull the pain and relax you—get you back to sleep for a while.”

  You see I need to tell him that I love him. And how very much I love him. And that finding him was the best thing that ever happened to me.

  Please.

  Besides, God. What about Suzanne? Who’ll be there to meet Suzanne?

  “This is Sunday morning?” I said.

  The doctor nodded. “Telephone number?” he asked. He paused—hypodermic pointed ceilingwards. The nurse, who had just swabbed a patch on my left arm, now retrieved her pencil.

  “But first you’ve got to tell me. I need to know what’s happened to Brad. Is Brad dead?”

  I saw his look of uncertainty.

  Yet even then I had to hear it put into words.

  “Please,” I said. “Just tell me the truth—I’ll give you the telephone number, you’ll give me the injection and then I’ll be your easiest living patient bar none.”

  Still he hesitated. We watched the excess fluid spurt out of the syringe.

  “Danny I repeat it’s you who are important now. And for Brad’s sake as much as for your own you’ve got to put all your energies into simply growing strong. But yes old man. I am sorry. Your friend is dead.”

  3

  The doctor and the nurse both left the room—maybe only to confer in the corridor but in that case I hoped their conference wouldn’t be too brief; I hoped the drug now pumping through my bloodstream would also allow me the several seconds that I needed. But this was slightly more in my control: mind over matter I told myself. Mind over matter!

  I’d noticed the jug of water and the glass. They were sitting on a bedside locker to my left.

  It wasn’t difficult to seize that tumbler. It wasn’t difficult to bring it crashing down against the locker edge.

  Much of the glass remained embedded in my palm—I was hardly aware of it; far more concerned about the noise of breakage. But the vital point was this: between my thumb and forefinger I now retained a good-sized shard.

  For I knew where the jugular was; Brad had once shown me when discussing the details of a thriller he’d been reading.

  And it seemed wholly right that it was from Brad I should have learned this. Because I couldn’t live without Brad. It was as simple as that. I just couldn’t live without him.

  So. I had assumed he’d died on impact. This would have given him a six-hour start. Roughly. But I thought it likely that if I set out fast enough I’d very soon catch up—my notion of the afterlife included an early reunion of people who had loved each other. Self-evident then: a need for the swiftest possible pursuit. Apart from all else I had to draw the sting out of that very last word he’d heard from me.

  ‘Apart from all else …’? What I cared about more than anything just then was the question of our being able to travel through purgatory together. I couldn’t bear the thought of his feeling either lonely or homesick or afraid.

  Through purgatory.

  Towards judgment.

  4

  Instinctively, I knew I was still visible. Therefore I had to hide behind the door when finally the nurse returned. In the end I’d been left alone for something like five minutes; she clearly hadn’t heard the shattering of the glass. But she gasped and very nearly screamed when she saw the nasty mess upon the bed: the mortal remains of the late Danny Casement wreathed about in blood and bandaging yet also (to my own eye anyway) wreathed about in tranquillity.

  And behind the door I was free of blood and bandaging and splints and saline drip. Free of hangover or headache. I felt light-limbed and even light-hearted. Liberated.

  Naturally I was sorry for the shock she’d sustained; and for the vast amount of trouble I might now be causing; but I wasn’t sorry when she ran out shakily to summon help. Then I made off swiftly in the opposite direction—at this end the corridor was clear. Through side-doors I saw patients propped up in their beds talking or reading or simply staring into space. Heard a snatch of music from one of the wards: Gladys Knight, “I’d rather live in his world than live without him in mine.” This seemed either a remarkably happy coincidence or else a positive message of encouragement—and, reassuringly, that midnight train to Georgia kept running through my head for at least the next hour. It beat time to my lookout for orderlies, beat time to my lookout for clocks. Just thirteen minutes to nine. Great. It hadn’t taken long.

  I avoided the lift and the obviously busy entrance hall. I was wearing nothing but a gown. I had no wish to be challenged.

  Instead I took the stairs and charged down them two-at-a-time until I reached the basement. I was in the right area of the basement; almost at once I found a bolted door that gave onto the outside world: up from the nether regions into the late-October sunlight, a glorious Indian summer which we’d been enjoying for the past three days and had been hoping, Brad and I, would stay constant for Suzanne’s visit. So when I grabbed a raincoat hanging on a peg beside the door I was thinking less about exterior temperature than about youthful modesty: those gowns revealed a lot of butt. And I knew the location of the hospital where they’d have brought me—if I wanted to take the shortest route back to the scene of the accident I’d have to pass in full view of the house which served as police station. I had no idea why I needed to return to the scene of the accident. I only knew I did.

  I kept to the grass as far as I could; for much of the time on a bank above the road. It wasn’t a busy road; it was the same that Brad and I had joined last night, a little further on, out of a rutted and cross-country lane. During the next half-hour no more than a dozen cars went by. I saw two cyclists and an old man with his dog and a schoolboy wearing cap and tie and blazer—despite its being a Sunday. I strode out purposefully but at no point did I run: running would only get me into a sweat and I wanted to retain my cool. My cool, my street cred … I almost laughed. I could scarcely have imagined I’d ever be seen dead walking along the queen’s highway in nothing but a hospital gown and some grubby bit of gabardine, too tight and barely reaching to my knees. I remembered the perennial childhood cry of myself and my siblings when forced out on a weekend family tramp: “Hope I don’t meet anyone I know!” Fifteen years later I again proclaimed it, more cheerfully this time, but now followed it with its antithesis: “Hope I shall meet somebody I know!” In fact I actually shouted this more positive version as if I half-believed its sound or sense might carry on the wind to wherever Brad had got by now—maybe not so desperately far ahead—to let him know that I was bearing up. I felt pretty certain he’d be bearing up (gone was my earlier worry that he might be feeling scared). But then it occurred to me not only wasn’t there a wind, he wouldn’t even be aware of my being so hotly in pursuit. Wouldn’t be aware yet that neither of us need journey on alone. I hadn’t realized: I had it a good deal easier than him. I tried to push myself still faster.

  But despite my speeding and preoccupation I could hardly be impervious to the blue sky and warm sunshine which filtered through the trees. “You know,” I had said to him once, “I really can’t imagine the sun continuing to shine after I’m dead. I really can’t imagine things just carrying on as usual. People doing their shopping; looking to see what’s on TV. You’re going to say of course that’s being immensely arrogant.”

  “No perish the thought,” he’d told me. “I shouldn’t dream of saying any such thing.”

  “Which is just as well you fibber. Because if you think that’s arrogant I’m afraid you haven’t heard the half of it!”

  “Then go ahead: shock me. No I’m sorry. I mean educate me.”

  “I don’t know if I dare.”

  But naturally I did. It was pillow talk; one of those countless occasions when we’d rambled on under cover of darkness about all sorts of unimportant things—and yet who ever knows what might turn out to be important? “I can also find it hard to imagine that the sun ever managed to shine before I was
born. Honestly! I quite often look up at the sky and think, ‘Since the start of human life people have felt the sun on their skins and seen cloud formations just like this and gazed up in wonder at the sunset,’ and to say that each time it fills me with surprise might be slightly overstating it but it does give me a little jolt, or frisson. I shouldn’t even say since the start of human life. I only have to go back a couple of hundred years to find it all equally astonishing, the fact that people shared the same experiences as me—that other men for example all through the ages have enjoyed orgasms roughly the same as mine. Is that now getting arrogant enough?”

  “No you’re still an absolute beginner. Just paltry unambitious stuff.”

  “I think I can do better then.”

  “Indeed I should hope so.”

  “I used to believe that I was special—”

  “You’re intensely special.”

  “No Brad I mean like Jesus. When I was a boy part of me really thought I was designed to be another saviour; not to die on the cross, nothing uncomfortable like that; but put here on earth to be a fine example to all you sad and ordinary folk. How’m I doing?”

  “None too well. That’s just sweet and childlike and completely normal. You no doubt believed at least half the time that you were utterly despicable and quite beyond the pale. Much less deserving than any of us poor sad and ordinary folk.”

  “I did! I did! How can you know these things? How can you be so very wise?”

  “I guess because I was designed to be extremely special—oh far more special than yourself. You fake and fraud and upstart!”

  “I reckon I must love you then … you very wise extremely special man.”

  “I reckon I must love you too … you false and jumped-up boy.”

  I smiled—then was suddenly surprised to find that in the throes of reminiscence I’d passed unnoticing the place at which seven hours earlier we’d turned into the main road. Brad had been concentrating on all those potentially dangerous ruts; we had hardly spoken until we’d driven to about this point, when I’d lazily mentioned the irony of needing to be up so early on this particular Sunday. “Still. Always best to leave while you’re having a good time,” he’d said.

  And very soon I got to that vaulted section which had reminded me of smugglers but where there was no longer any grassy bank and I was forced for the sake of my soles to tread more carefully. When I reached the other end and came to the spot where we had pulled over and then gone to stand beside the lake, arm around shoulder, arm around waist, I experienced even now a sudden sharp twist of nostalgia—and thought, “My God how good we had it and how much of it I simply took for granted.”

  Experienced it even now despite my knowing our reunion couldn’t be that far off. It struck me forcibly how very blest I was. Under any other circumstances, with Brad gone, I’d have had to avoid this lake altogether, perhaps this whole stretch of road, certainly for the time being. To revisit … would have been much more than I could manage. Could I even have borne to go back into the house, although obviously I should have had to? But how did others cope in such a situation? To my shame I knew I’d never given it much thought. Maybe the closest I’d ever come was crying in front of some old movie dealing with bereavement. In my own life only one grandmother had died; and she had been someone to mimic rather than to mourn.

  Back in the car. By now we had been talking of Suzanne.

  Suzanne…! No doubt at this moment she was somewhere high above the Channel looking forward with a mixture of pleasurable anticipation and suppressed nervousness to a week of holiday spent with her father and his boyfriend. How would she react when no one came to meet her? When no one answered her increasingly panicked calls? Suppose for some reason she couldn’t get in touch with her mum back in Paris—and in any case what could Hélène reasonably advise? Suzanne was only twenty-two; she was going to feel so let down and lost and helpless. And all because some schmuck had called her father a bastard. Dear God look after her.

  Part of me, undoubtedly a part which needed to grow up, provided for her a young airport official, handsome and unattached and caring, who would tactfully take control. Man made in God’s own image. During slack periods at work—I’d worked on the reception desk of a small hotel in Uckfield—I sometimes used to read romantic novels; even, despite the teasing, Mills & Boon. I’d claim these made a change from heavier things like Gide and Kafka and Joyce and Pasternak though no one at the hotel ever saw me with Gide or Kafka or Joyce or Pasternak. (But you did Brad. You did. Sorry if in the end I had to return each time to the more lightweight stuff and never let you know.) But please God. Just for Suzanne. This once. You ever read a Mills & Boon?

  (Daft question. The million times you must have helped to write one.)

  The association of ideas inevitably brought into my mind Sebastian and Sally and Laura. Gosh would the three of them be shaken! Imagining this, made me almost laugh again. Oh to be a fly on the wall—my grandmother’s reiterated wish—when somehow the news got through to The White Hart! I reflected that throughout their lives they’d fleetingly remember me, those three; remember me as bright-eyed, blond and sexy and always in tiptop physical condition. Not bad, that; there were certain consolations in nearly everything; although I knew I shouldn’t care.

  I supposed I’d soon be seeing my grandmother. The prospect didn’t thrill me. “Don’t do this … don’t do that … I’d have hoped you would have learned by now!” My chief remembrance of her. Negatives.

  Yet now the thought came rushing: I had no right to mimic her as cruelly as I did. Admittedly, only in front of my brothers and sisters but not merely before she’d died—even afterwards as well. Soon afterwards. And with the same total lack of understanding. I wished I’d never done it. I really wished I’d never done it.

  Something else, not simply a thought, that came rushing on me just as unexpectedly: that bend in the road where the bark of a massive lone oak was jaggedly damaged near its base—the naked wood savagely indented; where there were tyre marks on the verge, and bits of broken glass among the fallen leaves.

  Yet that was all. They had removed the Porsche with commendable efficiency; I briefly wondered where. Less briefly I wondered where they had taken the body of its driver. Most likely to the same place where they had taken mine; or now were taking it. But what would happen to us after that?

  Of course if I had an actual preference we would both be buried side-by-side in the nearby peaceful pretty churchyard—St Leonard’s which I had from time to time attended—with a gravestone common to the pair of us; but even if there’d been room in the churchyard and the coupling of male lovers on a single stone could now at last be countenanced there still remained the problem that Brad had been a non-believer. I would willingly have gone with him to the nearest cemetery, naturally, though the nearest cemetery couldn’t start to compare aesthetically with the churchyard at St Leonard’s but I had never made a will—what had I to leave?—I didn’t know if Brad had either, and never having discussed with any of our friends or family the issue of interment as opposed to cremation (had Brad ever done so in the days before I knew him?), I now wasn’t at all sure where any of this muddle finally left us or whether indeed—

  Oh Christ!

  Brad wasn’t a believer.

  How could I have forgotten? How could I have overlooked that glaringly important point?

  He had been such a good man.

  God! God! God! He was such a good man. A dozen times better than me. More! Oh Lord you can’t refuse him his salvation just because he honestly couldn’t understand why if you existed you permitted such a quantity of suffering. It would be so petty to deny him. To deny membership to someone merely because he didn’t tug his forelock when in every other way, apart from the actual card-carrying bit, he practised all your teachings just as truly as any person ever could! You can’t deprive him of the same chances which you’re supplying to a nobody like me! Oh Lord, Lord. You who so clearly understand everything. And i
sn’t understanding the same thing as forgiving? You can’t possibly be a lesser soul—a meaner, touchier, stubborner soul—than whoever it was who said that. Wasn’t it a Frenchman?

  Arrogance? I’m afraid you haven’t heard the half of it.

  And listen God—Lord—I’ve never known which one I should be talking to. If you insist on sticking to these rules … belief, belief, belief!… then count me out. As of this minute. I don’t want to be in any place where Brad himself can’t be. I don’t want any part of a life which he himself can’t share. I don’t want any further dealings with a God who’s so very obviously a clubman.

  No thank you. I’ll just go along with Gladys. I’d rather die in his world than live without him in mine.

  I licked my lips realizing I had made a declaration of such life-threatening seriousness I ought at least to formalize it.

  If Brad isn’t somewhere on the road ahead I hereby give notice that as of this moment I’m officially withdrawing my allegiance. It’s as if I no longer believe.

  There now. Come on and strike me dead.

  In spite of everything I rather enjoyed the wording of that last command. The situation hardly permitted of a grin; I was well aware of that; but it got one just the same. My whole approach must seem so vain, my puerile little ultimatum so irredeemably … puerile. Yet so far I was still standing. So far I was still breathing. No thunderbolt, no interruption to that gently warming sun. What could I do but hope then that I might have had my answer?

  Yet like nothing short of an overindulged brat I again decided to test how far I’d be allowed to go.

  I said: Then just so long as we understand each other? No crossed fingers; no dirty tricks; no pretending afterwards you hadn’t fully grasped my meaning.

  Some sort of a sign wouldn’t be bad. Some little token of good faith.

  Like a bit of skywriting perhaps? Brad lives! You don’t even need an aeroplane. Only dip your finger in a trailing wisp of cloud or else some garden bonfire smoke. Brad lives. Just follow the yellow brick road.