Stephen Volk
WHITSTABLE
A Novella
Smile for the camera.
He couldn’t face going outside. He couldn’t face placing his bare feet into his cold, hard slippers. He couldn’t face sitting up. He couldn’t even face opening his eyes. To what? The day. Another day without Helen in it. Another day without the sun shining.
For a moment or two before being fully awake he’d imagined himself married and happy, the luckiest man on earth, then pictured himself seeing her for the first time outside the stage door of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane: she a shining star who said a platypus looked like “an animal hot water bottle”—he in his vagabond corduroys, battered suitcase, hands like a Dürer drawing, breath of cigarettes and lavender. Then as sleep receded like the waves outside his window, he felt that dreadful, dreaded knot in his stomach as the awareness of her no longer being there—her non-presence—the awful, sick emptiness, rose up again from the depths. The sun was gone. He might as well lie there with his eyes shut, because when his eyes opened, what was there but darkness?
Habitually he’d rise with the light, drink tea, take in the sea view from the balcony, listen to the wireless and sometimes go for a swim. He did none of these things. They seemed to him to be activities another person undertook in a different lifetime. Life. Time. He could no more picture doing them now than he could see himself walking on the moon. The simplest tasks, the very idea of them, seemed mountainous. Impossible.
Yet it was impossible, also, to lie there like a dead person, greatly as it appealed to do so. It was something of which he knew his darling would so disapprove, her reprimand virtually rang in his ears and it was this that roused him to get up rather than any will of his own.
His will was only to…
But he didn’t even have the strength for that.
She was his strength, and she was gone.
Helen. Oh, Helen…
Even as he sat hunched on the edge of the bed, the burden of his loss weighed on his skinny frame. He had no choice but to let the tears flow with the same cruel predictability as his dream. Afterwards, weaker still, he finally rose, wiping his eyes with now-damp knuckles, wrapping his dressing gown over baggy pyjamas and shambling like something lost and misbegotten towards the landing. A thin slat shone between the still-drawn curtains onto the bedroom wallpaper. He left the room with them unopened, not yet ready to let in the light.
A half-full milk bottle sat on the kitchen table and the smell hit him as soon as he entered. The sink was full to the brim, but he poured the rancid liquid in anyway, not caring that it coated a mound of dirty plates, cups, saucers and cutlery with a viscous white scum.
He opened the refrigerator, but it was empty. He hoped the milkman had left a pint on the doorstep: he hated his tea black. Then he remembered why he had no groceries. Joycie did it. Joyce, his secretary, did everything for “Sir”. He pictured again the hurt in her eyes when he’d told her on the telephone she would not be needed for the foreseeable future, that she needn’t come to check that he was all right because he was all right. He’d said he needed to be alone. Knowing that the one thing he didn’t want to be was alone, but that was not the way God planned it.
Nasty God.
Nasty, nasty God…
He shut the fridge. He didn’t want food anyway. What was the point? Food only kept one alive and what was the point of that? Sitting, eating, alone, in silence? What was the point of that?
He put on the kettle. Tea was all he could stomach. The calendar hung facing the wall, the way he’d left it.
The letter box banged, startling him, shortly followed by a knock on the wood. It was Julian the postman, he thought, probably wanting to give his condolences in person. He held his breath and had an impulse to hide. Instead he kept quite still. Julian was a sweet chap but he didn’t want to see him. Much as he knew people’s wishes were genuine, and appreciated them, his grief was his own, not public property. And he did not want to feel obliged to perform whenever he met someone from now on. The idea of that was utterly repellent. How he dealt with his inner chasm, his utter pain and helplessness, was his own affair and other people’s pity or concern, however well-meaning, did not make one iota of difference to the devastation he felt inside.
He stood furtively by the doorway to the hall and watched as a package squeezed through and fell onto the welcome mat, and beyond the glass the silhouette of the postman departed.
It had the unmistakable shape of a script.
His heart dropped. He hoped it was not another one from Hammer. He’d told them categorically via his agent he was not reading anything. He knew Michael had newly found himself in the chair as Managing Director, and had a lot on his plate, but could he really be so thoughtless? Jimmy was a businessman, but he also counted him a friend. They all were. More than friends—family. Perhaps it was from another company, then? Amicus? No. Sweet Milton had his funny American ways, but would never be so callous. Other companies were venal, greedy, but not these. They were basically gentlemen. They all knew Helen. They’d enjoyed laughter together. Such laughter, amongst the gibbets and laboratories of make-believe. Now, he wondered if he had the strength in his heart to meet them ever again.
He picked up the package and, without opening it, put it on the pile of other unread manuscripts on the hall stand. Another bundle sat on the floor, a teetering stack of intrusion and inconvenience. He felt no curiosity about them whatsoever, only harboured a mild and uncharacteristic resentment. There was no small corner of his spirit for wonder. They were offers of work and they represented the future. A future he could not even begin to contemplate. Why could they not see that?
He sighed and looked into the mirror between the hat hooks and what he saw no longer shocked him.
Lord, the make-up job of a master. Though when he sat in the make-up chair of late he usually had his hairpiece to soften the blow. Never in public, of course: he abhorred that kind of vanity in life. Movies were different. Movies were an illusion. But—fifty-seven? He looked more like sixty-seven. What was that film, the part written for him but one of the few he turned down? The Man Who Could Cheat Death. But he couldn’t cheat death at all, could he? The doctors couldn’t, and neither could he. Far from it.
Dear Heavens…
The old swashbuckler was gone now. Fencing in The Man in the Iron Mask. The Sheriff of Nottingham. Captain Clegg of Romney Marsh… He looked more like a Belsen victim. Who was it said in a review he had cheekbones that could cut open letters? He did now. Cheeks sucked in like craters, blue eyes sunk back in deep hollows, scrawny neck, grey skin. He was positively cadaverous. Wishful thinking, he thought. A blessing and a curse, those gaunt looks had been his trademark all these years, playing cold villains and erudite psychopaths, monster-hunters and those who raised people from the dead. Yet now the only person he desperately craved to bring back from the grave he had no power to. It was the one role he couldn’t play. Frankenstein had played God and he had played Frankenstein playing God. Perhaps God had had enough.
The kettle whistled and the telephone rang simultaneously, conspiring to pierce his brain. He knew it was Joycie. Dear Joycie, loyal indefatigable Joycie, who arrived between dry toast and correspondence every day, whose concern persisted against all odds, whose emotions he simply couldn’t bear to heap on his own. He simply knew he could not speak to her, hear the anguish in her voice, hear the platitudes even if they weren’t meant as platitudes (what words could not be platitudes?) and, God knows, if he were to hear her sobs at the end of the line, he knew it would tip him over the edge.