Read Quilt for Free Online Page A

labyrinth of calls, family, friends, former work colleagues and of course official bodies, official bodies of death, the hospital to arrange the collection of clothing and other personal items, the doctor to thank her for her help but will he ever make that call, what help, she was so pleasant and clarifying and let him die, the coroner, the man who will actually be carrying out the post-mortem, the people who organise his father’s pension, organised, that yawning gap of tenses keeps coming over, gone, no longer to be organised, the bank, the electricity company, the phone company. And then there is the incredible world of the cottage, dead and surviving, stuffed with the past now present, the present now past, in a convulsion of lunatic tranquillity. It’s an impossible coincidence, at once a celestial creaking galley, quiet as the moon, and amine turned upside down with all its shafts, riches and debris suddenly at the surface and no one in charge. No one and nothing is in charge. That’s the true madness, as Polonius should have pointed out, had he not been a father himself: the sudden and absolute obliteration of authority. Not that his father was authoritarian, on the contrary he was the least a man could be, but that makes the chasm all the more appalling, into which he now sees he has begun falling. It’s not a question of a yes or no regarding this or that thought or desire, this instant of decision or that impulse to act, it’s the basis of everything: it’s the dissolution of law, truth, rationality, sense, logic, light itself. That’s the wizening mimosa, the madness of the truth, seeping into view before the nurse had even told him what had happened, the magisterial, blankety trick-photography of the changing of the light.

    The ray is stationary, lurking in the nether regions. It’s nature’s way, awry. The sway of nature makes for this singular, this solitary, this ray. There’s no getting around it. It’s necessarily this one. Irreparably, irrecoverably: it’s a ray of one’s own. How admirably now each eye is raised, its marvellously wide vision shielded by the lid that, traversing the eyeball as the ray buries itself in the substrate, stops foreign bodies (sand, mud, gravel) entering! Like a spell as yet uncast: Operculum pupillare! Even through a glass darkly the ray sees brilliantly, like an underwater cat. In submarine gloom guanine crystals make up tiny mirror-like plates that become visible as the light is fading, just at the outer edge of each eye. Howinspirationally it blows and plays, the spiracle or blow-hole behind each eye pumping water like a heart as it lies, almost unrecognisably, on the sandy bottom! On it, in it, what you will. Everything about this brainy creature is so starkly strange, back-to-front and upside down, trapeze artist of deep time, feelings flattened, gravity in chaos. And how charmingly the marine savagery of its eating habits is occluded, since the crafty mouth is concealed, underneath! How readily it would ravage a Red Riding Hood granny, its mouth packed with tooth-plates, arranged in rows! No sooner does a tooth go missing, grinding up its hapless prey, than a new one is lined up in front of it: lifelong self-renewing spray! the original dragon’s army! The ray is stationary even when it moves, shooting through water at unnerving speed, propelled by the pectoral fins that form the hem of the body, close to complete circularity, as the axis of the body remains unaltering. How quickly its lurking quivers into larking!

    They have to start somewhere and next day, as if the phone calls are staccato punctuation to a death-sentence uncurling in their ears, they get to work tidying up the downstairs, beginning with the junk mail. Out of order, over the edge, already perhaps too late, he realises there will need to be a reception after the funeral, and then before the reception there will need to be the funeral. It is as if they have lost basic forms of co-ordination,