DEATH
Halloween 2007 – by Jaye Morgan
I saw Death for the first time one afternoon in early summer. It was June and the world was full of flowers. The motorway was a mile distant but from my seat I could still hear the faint growl of motors. The smell of the road outside, the road that I’d cycled over on, which had felt sticky and yielding to the bike’s tyres now added its scent of melting tar to the rising perfume of summer flowers. Oddly, the combination worked, the black tarmac’s cloying force providing a solid under note to the headiness of the flowers. I’d cycled over to Chloe’s house from the English Department only to find that she’d proved as unreliable as ever: by half past two I was still waiting, still sitting, half-stupefied by the warmth of the day, outside her house, on the taller of the two stone steps, formed, like the house itself, of yellowed (desert-deposited) Northumbrian sandstone. It was a properly organic house that looked ready to fall through the baked and cracking earth that lay facing it.
I’d known Chloe since the beginning of the academic year and while we were friends in an unfettered, easy fashion. It puzzled me that when in the second year our friendship crashed and burned I felt relief and not distress. But that day in mid-June she was much as she had been in the previous October, diffident and nervous, intelligent but uncertain, quite kindly but often abstracted. Her personality, which I later saw would be demolished and reconstructed when the exam results came out, was her least reliable aspect. Her essays – I’d seen a couple to give an opinion on and I had been impressed by what I read – were a dozen times better than she believed them to be, and a dozen better than mine, too. That year, the first of our acquaintance, I’d visited her home pretty regularly. That afternoon’s invitation had been issued early that morning, as we passed one another in the department’s reception area, me en-route to a tutorial on Anglo-Saxon literature, Chloe headed to a lecture on Restoration Comedy. “Come over this afternoon. We’ll talk. Drink some wine. Come by after one.” And so I had done as she asked, and gone round, and found the house to be empty.
The house itself – one of a tall, Victorian-built terrace – faced to the west, and it wasn’t long before the sunlight had intoxicated me. I leaned back against the blue-painted door, feeling the prickle of ageing paint flakes through the fabric of my shirt, and closed my eyes. The night before there had been a party in hall; I had impressed myself by waking up that morning, let alone studying.
I was 22 and I cannot remember a time when I felt so at ease with the world or so content with my lot. The exams I had to take I had taken, and while the experience was far from pleasant, it had not been fatal: the earth continued to revolve. It was the sort of day to make one believe in eternity, or in happy ever after, or in hope. But in another year’s time, in just over six months, I would be standing, cold and shaken in the college library, another friend beside me, as we discussed the politic situation and wondered whether either of us would be alive in a week’s time. Death seemed suddenly very close at hand.
At that point in time politics were been played out in massive and deadly style and there seemed every possibility that none of us would see out the week. As a teenager I had joined CND, being unable to shake off the simple, heart-slowing belief in the threat of a nuclear war. The friend and I met downstairs in the coffee house to discuss the matter further. Drinking my coffee I decided to go south to visit my parents before we all died. It was a period of simple, cold fear that nothing could shake. Every morning for a month I woke wondering if that day would be my last.
When, after another month of intense negotiations between the powers that were, war didn’t happen, student life returned to something like normal. But the fear had wrought changes in me, and my world was never again quite the same. The aftermath of that time, or the shadow of it, continued to hang over me in the same way a failed relationship might have done. The knowledge of that intrinsic vulnerability coloured my life; it was like the cold, damp feel of autumn as it hung about the shady areas where a wintering sun couldn’t reach; an endless damp shadow through which I cycled each day at half-past six, when the library emptied and shut, winter hours in the ascendant.
But before the weeks that changed everything, I had to myself that self-contained and sweet afternoon in the sunshine, when there was no need for any covering thicker than a shirt. And I began to doze, the wood at my back warm, the strains of days of exams beginning to slip away from me.
When I next opened my eyes it was to stare down the length of the garden, toward the gate, which had swung open to show the pavement and the road outside. Each house in that terrace faced onto a narrow strip of garden and another two stone steps up toward the soberly-painted gates (Chloe’s gate was a desultory green) and the pavement beyond. The gates had a latch; they could not swing open when the latch had been engaged, and I knew that I’d engaged it that day. But for all of that, the gate swung open, and there stood Death.
Death was male, sexless but male. How could that be, and why did it matter? This was the grim reaper in person, or in essence. I’d never thought to wonder if Death was corporeal. Perhaps it was. A skull shone whitely at me from within the folds of the black cloak, while a set of metacarpals clutched the handle of a wooden scythe, the top of the curving blade was slung point-first over the left shoulder, the blade shining white as the skull in the fierce afternoon light. It struck me that I should not have been capable of seeing the outline of that face, with the light falling from behind it, but such earthly rules and applications seemed to have no relevance that that moment.
We regarded one another for the shortest but most intent of times. I heard the words spoken though there was no movement of the bony jaw. Then Death went away. I stared after the shadow of that figure, but the gate swung shut and the latch clicked again with a note of awkward reassurance, and the moment was over.
I was twenty two then and I understood that I had not been granted the saving of a few months or a year. I had as much time again, and at that time the allowance seemed more than sufficient. Hadn’t my maternal grandmother told me, over and over again, that old age brought with it no virtues at all. Hadn’t she recommended to me – at least a hundred times – not to grow old? In another twenty years time I would hear my mother speak the same words and add to them the hope that she would not be called upon to endure her nineties. She was fairly fit at eighty eight and her sight was still good. But she had had two serious falls in a short space of time, both of which had required medical aid, both of which had left scar, and sent her confidence off into a crisis of its own. My grandmother had stretched out her allotted time to two years short of a century, the final decade of which had been played out in an atmosphere of boredom and dullness; her only remaining pleasure coming from tales of human disaster that permeated the daily news. Disasters apart, no other stimulus animated her in her final decade. The announcement of a nuclear strike would have given interest to her last four minutes.
I never forgot seeing Death. I didn’t share the sensations I encountered that June afternoon firstly because I didn’t want my listener to think I’d lost the plot, and secondly because the encounter had felt more personal and intimate than anything I had – or ever would – experience. It had been a moment of strange compassion and benevolence mixed; on that sunny afternoon I had not been chosen, and I was not about to die. The death that did occur that day took place next door, in the aftermath of illness and suffering, and an expectation of mortality. It had seemed an unlikely day on which to die.
And until this moment I have maintained that secrecy. I never even told Chloe what happened in the garden of her city house that bright afternoon. I mention it now only because today is my forty fourth birthday, and there is a shadow at the door.
THE END
© Jaye Morgan, October 2005