Book about death

to celebrate a new life,

the birth of

Summer Dawn Patricia:

may you know love and happiness

It was a Thursday and once again there was rancour in our back parlour.

I never cared for Thursdays, because I cared nothing for rancour. I liked things quiet. Quiet and peaceful. Wednesdays I loved, because my father went out, and Sundays because they were Sundays. But Thursdays, they were noisy and filled with rowdy rancour. Because on Thursdays my Uncle Jon came to visit.

Uncle Jon was lean and long and loud and looked a lot like a lizard. There’s a bit of an animal in each of us. Or a reptile, or a bird, or an insect. Or even a tree or a turnip. None of us are one hundred per cent human; it’s something to do with partial reincarnation, according to a book I once read. But, whether it’s true or not, I’m sure that Uncle Jon had much of the lizard in him. He could, for instance, turn his eyes in different directions at the same time. Chameleons do that. People don’t. Mind you, Uncle Jon’s eyes were made of glass. I never looked too much at his tongue, but I bet it was long and black and pointy at the end.

Uncle Jon was all curled up, all lizard-like, in the visitors’ chair, which stood to the east of the chalky-drawn line that bisected our back parlour. The line was an attempt, upon the part of my father, to maintain some sort of order. Visitors were required to remain to the east of the line, whilst residents kept to the west. On this particular Thursday, Uncle Jon was holding forth from his side of the line about pilgrims and parsons and things of a religious nature, which were mostly unintelligible to my ears. Me being so young and ignorant and all.

My father, or “the Daddy”, as I knew and loved him then, chewed upon sweet cheese and spat the rinds into the fire that lick-lick-licked away in the small, but adequate, hearth.

I perched upon the coal-box, beside the brass companion set that lacked for the tongs, which had been broken in a fight between my father and my Uncle Jon following some long-past piece of rancour. I was attentive. Listening. My pose was that of a Notre Dame gargoyle. It was a studied pose. I had studied it.

“Thousands of them,” rancoured my Uncle Jon, voice all high and hoarse and glass eyes rolling in their fleshy sockets.

“Thousands of parsons, with their lych gates and their pine pews and their cloth-bound hymnals and their pulpits for elbow-leaning and their embroidered mats that you are obliged to put your knees upon whilst praying. And what do any of them really know? I ask you. What?”

The Daddy didn’t reply. I didn’t reply. My mother, who lathered sprouts in the stone pot by the sink in our kitchen, didn’t reply either.

Nobody replied.

There wasn’t time.

“Nothing,” my Uncle Jon rancoured on. “Charlie is gone, and to where?” There was no pause. No space for reply. “I’ll tell you to where. To none knows where. Wherever that is. And none knows.”

My father, the Daddy, glared at Uncle Jon.

“Don’t glare at me,” said the Uncle.

My father opened his mouth to speak. But pushed further cheese into it instead.

“And don’t talk to me with your mouth full. They don’t know. None of them. Clerics, parsons, bishops, archbishops, pilgrims and popes. Pilgrims know nothing anyway, but popes know a lot. But even they don’t know. None of them. None. None. None. Do you know? Do you?”

I knew that I didn’t know. But then the question probably hadn’t been addressed to me. Uncle Jon had been looking at me, sort of, with one of his glass eyes, but that didn’t mean he was actually speaking to me. He’d probably been speaking to the Daddy. I looked towards that man. If anybody knew an answer to the Uncle’s question, it would probably be the Daddy. He knew about all sorts of interesting things. He knew how to defuse a V1 flying bomb. He’d done that for a living in the war. And he knew all about religion and poetry. He hated both. And he knew how to concentrate his will upon the cat while it slept and make it wee-wee itself.

I never quite understood the worth of that particular piece of knowledge. But it always made me laugh when he did it. So, if there were anyone to answer Uncle Jon’s question, that person would, in my limited opinion, be the Daddy.

I looked towards him.

The Daddy looked towards Uncle Jon.

Uncle Jon looked towards the both of us.

I really wanted the Daddy to speak.

But he didn’t. He just chewed upon cheese.

My daddy hated Uncle Jon. I knew that he did. I knew that he knew that I knew that he did. And Uncle Jon knew that he did. And I suppose Uncle Jon knew that I knew that he did and probably knew that I knew that he knew that I did. So to speak.

“You don’t know,” said my Uncle Jon.

I looked quite hard at my uncle. As hard as I possibly could look. I was young and I hadn’t learned how to hate properly as yet. But as best as I possibly could hate, I hated Uncle Jon.

It wasn’t just his eyes that I hated. Although they were quite enough. They were horrible, those eyes. They didn’t even match. Not that it was Uncle Jon’s fault. It wasn’t. My daddy had explained the situation to me. He told me all about glass eyes and how opto-something-ists (the fellows who dealt with this sort of thing) matched up eyes. They matched up a glass replacement eye to its living counterpart. Both of Uncle Jon’s eyes had left his head when a bomb from Hitler had blown up in his back yard. My daddy hadn’t had a chance to defuse that one. He’d been down at the pub fighting with American servicemen. These opto-something-ist fellows had bunged my uncle a couple of odd eyes, because they knew he wouldn’t notice. They looked horrible, those odd glass eyes. I hated them.

Being blind didn’t bother Uncle Jon, though. He’d learned how to see with his ears. He could ride his bike without bumping into people and do all the things he’d done before that needed eyes to do them. There was a special name, at that time, for being able to see without having eyes, as my Uncle Jon was able to do. Derma-optical perception, it was. There used to be a lot of it about, back in the days when people believed in that sort of thing. Back then in the nineteen fifties. People don’t believe in that sort of thing nowadays, so blind people have to go without seeing.

Uncle Jon travelled a lot with the circus, where he did a knife-throwing act that involved several midgets and a large stetson hat. The crowds loved him.

The Daddy and I didn’t.

The Daddy worried at the medals on his chest with cheese-free fingers and finally stirred some words from his mouth. “Cease the rancour,” were these words. “You’re frightening wee Gary.”

“I’m brave enough,” said I, for I was. “But who is this Charlie of whom my uncle speaks?”

“Yes,” said my daddy, “who is this Charlie? I know not of any dead Charlies.”

“Charlie Penrose, you craven buffoon.” My uncle rolled his mismatched peepers and rapped his white stick – which he carried to get himself first in bus queues – smartly on the floor, raising little chalky clouds from the carpet and frightening me slightly.

“Charlie Penrose is dead?” My father stiffened, as if struck between the shoulder blades by a Zulu chieftain’s spear. “Young Charlie dead and never called me mother.”

“And never called me sweetheart,” said my Uncle Jon. “And I have written to the Pope regarding the matter.”

My daddy opened his mouth once more to speak. But he didn’t ask “why?” as many would. Uncle Jon was always writing to the Pope about one thing or another.