Back in England in a run down pub in Wigan, I fall into a discussion about people of the past with a cousin. He mentions I name I remember. "Gary Fairhurst! I remember him!", I say. He was a bad tempered pupil but he was good on the rugby pitch. I recalled the day he leant me 50 pence, of breaking through some opposition lines and of him laughing at a teacher. My cousin frowns and says that he died last year. I am taken aback - he was only my age. I ask what happened, "They don't know. They found him at the bottom of his ladder one morning. He was a window cleaner." I ask whether he had just fallen off or had a heart attack or something. "No apparently not." He finishes his pint. "The autopsy couldn't tell what had happened." He shrugs. "It was a big funeral." After a pause, he gets up to buy another round.
Later, we walk down a road toward the old school. But instead of the 60's building, the doorway with ' Manners maketh Man' engraved over it, and the two acres of playing fields, there is a small estate of semi's with gravel drive ways and neat compact lawns. "That place?" He looks at me quizzically. "They knocked it down years ago." We drift past the houses and their well trimmed hedges. I tell him that I can't quite believe the school is not there anymore. "I still have a half finished cloth mouse I was supposed to finish for art homework from here. And I don't think that Fairhurst got his fifty pence back either." Then, like seeing someone's face for the first time in years, the memory is over ridden, that is how it is, the houses have always been there. A twin engine plane drones faintly somewhere over head. I am left with a void. "It wouldn't happen to an Oxford college.", I say but he just half laughs through his nose.
Autoposies can only find physiological causes of death - how would you search for 'boredom' or 'shame'? How could you conduct an autopsy on a ghost?
|