Also by Salena Godden
POETRY
Under the Pier
Fishing in the Aftermath: Poems 1994–2014
LIVEwire
Pessimism Is for Lightweights: 13 pieces of courage and resistance
NON-FICTION
Springfield Road
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2021 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Salena Godden, 2021
Rabbit illustration © Gill Heeley, 2021
Family tree © Jo Dingley, 2021
The right of Salena Godden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 119 4
eISBN 978 1 83885 120 0
Contents
Disclaimer:
Mrs Death’s Diaries: The First Morning of the First Mourning
Mrs Death: The First Mourning
Wolf: The First Time I Met Mrs Death
Mrs Death: Here Are All Your Fears
Wolf: Here Are All Your Fears
The Desk: You Grow Into Your Shape
Wolf: The Dirty Young London
Mrs Death: The Tale of Tilly Tuppence
Mrs Death: I Know A Lot of Dead People Now
Wolf: Nothing Lasts, Nothing Is Finished and Nothing Is Perfect
Wolf’s Nightmare: The Red Tower
Oh to Be a Piano!
Wolf: Conversations with Mrs Death
Death Is a Rabbit
Mrs Death and Her Lover Time
The Desk: Mrs Death’s Office
Mrs Death in Holloway Prison
Mrs Death: Marsha and Martha
Wolf: The Vanishing
Wolf: The Vanishing
Mrs Death: Sun Kill Son
Mrs Death: Mother’s Milk
Mrs Death: The Moors
Mrs Death and The Doctor
Wolf: First Snow
Mrs Death: We Could Be Heroes
Mrs Death: Black Star
Wolf: Purple Rain
Wolf: Let the Worms Chew the Fat
Mrs Death: The Remembrance
Wolf: My Grandmother Rose Willeford
Old Man Willeford: The Tiger
Mrs Death: The Death Card
Wolf: Now You Are Gone
Mrs Death: Raven
Mrs Death Watches TV
Mrs Death: The German Hitchhiker
Everything Is Nothing But Nothing Is Worth Something to Someone
Wolf: The Tower
Wolf’s Tower Diaries
April 1st
April 2nd
April 3rd
April 4th
April 5th
April 6th
April 7th
April 8th
April 9th
April 10th
April 11th
April 12th
April 13th
April 14th
April 15th
April 16th
April 17th
April 18th
April 19th
April 20th
April 21st
April 22nd
April 23rd
Thank You . . .
Rabbit: The Last Words
Mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living
Disclaimer:
This book contains dead people.
This book cannot see the future. This book is dabbling in the past. This book is not about funerals although funerals are mentioned. You do not have to wear black to read this work. You do not have to bring flowers.
Caution: This work contains traces of eulogy.
Warning: This work contains violent deaths.
Spoiler alert: We will all die in the end.
This book cannot change the ending or your ending or its own ending. This book does not know how to switch on the light at the end of the tunnel. This book cannot contact the other side. This book cannot speak to the dead or for the dead. This book will not confirm if there is an afterlife or an alternative universe. This book will not improve your karma. This book will not nag you to live a healthier life. This book will not help you quit smoking. This book is not going to urge you to age gracefully. This book does not advocate the use of that funereal phrase ‘he had a good innings’. This book does not contain any person or persons clapping their hands and singing kum-by-yah-mi-lord. This book may be used for mild to moderate relief from grief, fear and pain, however if symptoms persist please buy a ticket to see a live reading of this work where you will find the others.
Caution: Do not exceed death.
This work has a very high dead and death count. Take with caution. Take your time. Do your lifetime in your own life time. If you are sensitive or allergic to talk of the dead or non-living things use this work in small doses. This is not a self-help brochure. This is not a guide to avoiding dying. If you think you are about to drop dead, please seek medical advice immediately.
This work has very little to do with God, the Gods, Goddesses, Satan or the Devil. This work is not focused on a battle of good and evil or right and wrong. This is not about morality or heaven and hell or sinners and saints. This book does not judge you or your choices. This book is not connected to or promoting any religion or cult. This is not a map to the way out of here. This is not a compass. This book does not contain directions to heaven or hell – see also Elysium, Valhalla, Gan Eden, The Fields of Aaru, Vaikuntha, Tír na nÓg, Cockaigne, Big Rock Candy Mountain or any other world versions of otherworld.
This work calls the righteous spirits of all of our mighty ancestors now and in the hour of our need. We take a breath and look back in amazement and wonder at how our ancestors survived so we may also survive. We take another deep breath, we feel our hearts beating inside our bodies, and we celebrate that the same empowerment and spirit runs in our blood now and can be found in our DNA today. We give thanks to our ancestors, thanks for giving us life, for being alive to feel alive and to share this one magnificent connection to life and all living things.
This book does not mention every person that has ever died – if you wished this book to have mentioned another death, we can only apologise now in advance, for not knowing which death or dead celebrity you wanted mentioned and celebrated in this book at time of writing and printing. At the time of writing this book mourns for Prince, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Toni Morrison and Aretha Franklin. And this book sincerely hopes there aren’t any more inspirational human beings, bold souls, brave hearts and super-heroes to add to that dead list before we go to print. Amen.
This book contains traces of ghosts. This book may contain bones and other human remains. This book has been haunting me. This book may haunt you. This book is about you and me and all of us. We will use the term ‘human’ or ‘human being’ to mean people who identify as human, that is being ‘alive’ and ‘living’, and furthermore discuss how they are now ‘dead’ and use the word ‘dead’ to mean that the heart stopped beating and the brain ceased functioning and they are not bre
athing any more. This work does not contain zombies but has no prejudices against those that choose to be living dead.
This book knows loss and feels your pain. This book shares your fears and anxieties. This book will explore the worst-case scenarios. This book is afraid of death, but not afraid to speak about it. This book is in mourning and trying to understand this process of grieving. This book sends you all its love. This book says it’s alright to cry on its shoulder.
This book is short because life is short. The time it took for us to evolve from Homo sapiens to modern civilisation, from the first cave paintings and words and stories and songs to the first book and the first bookshop, is a wonder and also relatively short. Any book with the word Death in the title must be light enough to carry in your hand luggage. It must be short enough to be read cover to cover on a train up from London to Liverpool. It must be loud enough to read during the length of a good belter of a thunderstorm, then when the storm passes and the clouds clear and the skies open up, the train doors open, and so will your heart.
These are the collected memoirs of Mrs Death, edited and compiled by me, Wolf Willeford. I’m a poet and I live in the attic rooms of the Forest Tavern in East London. Contained here are some of Mrs Death’s private diary entries, some stories, poems and pieces of conversations I have had with Mrs Death; she who is Death, the woman who is the boss at the end of all of us. I share this hoping that it is the beginning of your own conversation with yourself and with your own precious time here.
When writing this I found that when people die, we write about them differently; it is as though we can speak freely; it is as though they have left the room. When writing about Death you soon realise it isn’t all about Death and that you write about Life and the living: this is what I have learned whilst creating this work for you. This is a work of both fiction and non-fiction, a work of dreams and nightmares. Some names, dates and details have been changed to protect the living and amuse the dead.
This book is a matter of Life and Death.
Mrs Death’s Diaries:
The First Morning of the First Mourning
Present day
When I called for change, did you pass by me? Did you see me today?
I sit on a bench outside London’s King’s Cross station. I like train stations and airports best. I like to sit in places where people come and go. I sit and watch you come and go, you say, goodbye and hello, come and go, goodbye and hello. It’s as though you are not connected to each other. Goodbye, you say, clinging on to that last glance, you give a funny little wave. You don’t know that you don’t have to touch to touch, to see, to feel each other. Human beings were designed to be in contact without being in contact, to communicate without words, to call each other to each others’ minds. Humans still have so much to learn about connection. But when you are in transition and whilst travelling you are tuned in to this, you are alive and alert. When you travel you wake up. You’re awake and aware of changes, differences and sameness, strangers and each other. In transit you are occupied by Time and Space, by clocks and miles, by separation and reunion, your chance and your fate. Humans were built to travel, humans were made to move, to share and to migrate, just like butterflies and birds.
The history and the geography of human migration is nothing less than phenomenal.
The greatest trick man played was making you believe I was a man. They erased me and made you all believe that Death was male in spirit – the Grim Reaper in a black hood with a scythe. Remarkable that nobody questioned it really, don’t you think? For surely only she who bears it, she who gave you life, can be she who has the power to take it. The one is she. And only she who is invisible can do the work of Death. And there is no human more invisible, more readily talked over, ignored, betrayed and easy to walk past than a woman; than a poor old black woman, a homeless black beggar-woman with knotty natty hair, broken back, walking ever so slow, slow, slow, pushing a shopping trolley full of plastic bottles.
Death is plastic, plastic is death.
When this all began, or when I began, was when life began, and that was when death began. Death is a bitch, Life is a bitch, but it’s in poor taste to speak ill of the living. My sister cannot help herself but be Life and living and lively. LIFE! Oh she is abundant and demanding of all of our attentions. My sister is an over-achiever, laying eggs and fertilising life, shitting life everywhere, muck-spreading fertile life. Life shits life! Life is life everywhere!
I remember when this earth world was once a rock and a cold and dark place. I was there, we were there. I can recall the terrible smell of eggs; that’s the main thing I remember, the stench. My sister is stinky. Death may stink of Death and of rot and decay but Life stinks too. Life and birth was always about eggs and shit. Volcanic. Sulphur. Fertiliser. Farts. The vagina awakes, yawns, stretches and burps and there we have blood, and from blood is life and love. And where there was blood there was life, and where there was life there was love, and where there was love there was life, and where there was life there was blood and where there was blood there was death. Around and around it goes, life and blood and love and death and time and space, around and around we go, spinning on this pretty blue rock in space we call planet earth.
Fish grew legs. Birds grew wings. Monkeys walked upright and tall. And that’s when things got interesting for me. Because then came the first fires and the first stories, the first poets and the first songs, the first paintings on cave walls, daubed in ash and charcoal. Life and Death, we sisters, sat side by side together and warmed ourselves by the very first fires, with the first souls dancing in the first firelight, the first handprints, stickman images of their own selves on the walls of the caves. These were the first mirrors, man capturing man’s own image. The smoke rising, the charcoal pictures telling us stories of life and death, long tall tales of hunts and kills, boasted of around the fire and scratched into the cave walls. And what do they tell us? What does the painter ask us with these cave paintings? Why, surely just variations of the same questions that painters and poets have always asked us over the centuries: Who am I? Why am I? What is life? What is death? Can you see me? Will you hear this? Do you feel me?
I am she and she is here. I see you. I hear you. I was always here, there and everywhere. Here was I and I am I and I am she. And you might want to ask me this:
Mrs Death, who was the first person to ever die?
OK. Let us picture that first morning of the first mourning.
That first longing, that first grief, the first heavy silence, the first missing shape, the spare fur in the circle in the cave, the first empty seat by the fire. The first time a human being grieved for another human being: the missed voice, the terrible pain, ache and longing, and there we have it, the first morning of the first mourning. And you, you’re only human. Mankind. Womankind. You only have one job:
Be kind.
Kin.
Here is your proof, your evidence, the evidence you lived the life you lived, here in this time, in these words, in this story, in this song, in this painting. It is human nature to try to stop time, to try to capture a life, a shooting star, to pin the butterfly wings and snap the lid shut.
What do you have there in that box? Look, you say, I have captured time, I have trapped a moment. Here I have my lifetime documented, a timeline made palpable, digestible, linear. Here I was born and I did grow teeth. Here I did love, and here were my tribe, my family, my lo
ves and my loves lost. Here was my toil and struggle, my monsters, my Gods, my triumph and failure and passion. And here is my end, here my last thrill, my dance with you, Mrs Death.
With me?
Yes, with you.
Let us dance, dance, dance.
Mrs Death: The First Mourning
Mrs Death sings:
the first fires, the first fires
the first morning of the first mourning
the first shape of the first loss
the first fires, the first fires
the first birth, the first blood
the first kill, the first blood spill
you’re only human
you’re only womankind
you’re only human being
you’re only mankind, be kind
the first sunrise, the first sunset
you’re only human, you’re only woman
you’re only man, human, be kind
human being kind human being
the first stars in the first skies
the first stars in the first skies
you’re only human, human being
be kind
the first cave, the first cave painting
the first word, the first art, the first heartbreak
the first morning of the first mourning
the first loss, the first blood, the first war
you’re only human, you’re only woman
you’re only human, you’re only man
you’re only human, human being
humankind
be kind
Wolf: The First Time I Met Mrs Death
Can you smell smoke?
Yes. That was what she said.
Wake up, Wolf . . . Can you smell smoke?
I was a child the first time I met Mrs Death. I was a soft, curly-haired kid filled with wonder and milk, busy with daydreams, cartoons and riding my bike. I was preoccupied with stories and comic books and gazing up at the moon. I remember the first time I met Mrs Death was also the day I lost my front tooth. I stared in the mirror and wobbled that loose tooth, wiggled it, jiggled it, pulled and poked at it until it was free and I could taste blood on the tip of my tongue. My tongue flicked in the hole, the flap of skin, the gap where once was tooth was tender. Gum. Salt. Blood. Skin. Hole. I stared at the tooth in my fingers, examined it, the blood at the root, at the root of everything is blood.