Don’t thank me, thank the moon’s gravitational pull

Christine was managing the office relocation, an opportunity to take her mind off the break-up with Malcolm. Malcolm, however, was health and safety, and everything had to be approved by him.

She indicated with a polished fingernail the position of the new building but Malcolm moaned, shook his head and did nervy jazz hands.

‘You’ve forgotten something vital. The building’s relationship to where staff live.’

Christine explained about public transport.

‘I was wondering whether it’s east or west. I only ever work west of where I live, so that on the way to and from work the sun is never in my eyes.’

‘But you come to work on the tube.’

‘I have a strong sense of the planet. Even underground I know where I am in relation to the sun.’

She agreed to go with him to a cellar bar so he could demonstrate this skill, and it did explain something. The time he’d consulted a compass before making love, claiming the moon’s gravitational pull enhanced his performance, he’d been lying.

Everlast

Kathleen pressed her face against the glass. An inch from her eye, in viscous, green fluid, Doherty’s pale fingers were curled into a claw, as if forming a final chord. This was the hand, the very hand, that tugged her through London streets to a terraced house for a secret gig the police broke up after three songs.

She rocked the case and a tiny hair on Doherty’s knuckle trembled.

Why did it have to be like this?

She looked at the other case, where the rest of Doherty was suspended. His corpse had been sliced vertically down the middle, both eyes staring straight ahead forever. Kathleen wondered if his soul might have been happier had the cases been arranged the other way round - at least one eye would be looking towards the rest of his body.

She threw her arms out sideways and touched both cases, drawing breath sharply. Pete Doherty’s body. She was standing between the two halves of Doherty, almost inside him, the closest she’d been to the man, and the only time she’d seen him naked.

His heart looked like any heart, his liver too. His intestines were red, like anybody’s, his kidneys brownish. His skin looked perfect - the many pockmarks and bruises gone. Why was this perfect body not alive? Surely they could stitch the halves together, throw some electricity through him and jolt him back to life? Back to the Doherty we’d loved - the tipped trilby, the torn T-shirt, the eyeliner.

But this was what Doherty had specified. Some left their bodies to science; Doherty left his to art.

One arm had been arranged to trail down, in the manner, the artist stated on the interpretation panel, of The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis. Around the room, other figures lay in the same Chatterton pose; the same purple-blue silk breeches, the same window half open, the same curtain moving in the breeze, the same burnt-out candle with its smoke curling up, the same single fading rose, petals dripping onto the window ledge. Curtis, Cobain, Hendrix, Presley - the list went on.

Tonight had been the private view and it had been easy to hide whilst the other guests went home. Kathleen needed one last kiss - formaldehyde or no formaldehyde. The hammer was designed to break safety glass and it worked - each blow shattered another layer and soon vile vapour seeped from the cracks making her sneeze, gasp, then double-up coughing as though she might retch herself inside out. But she went on, until the glass case collapsed and Doherty’s carcass flopped onto the floor. She fell upon him, gripped his hair and lifted his half-head towards her lips. Chemicals scorched her skin, and the knives in her heart were not love. She felt a violent shivering fit, a pounding in her ears, flooding her brain, and all the way to her toes and fingertips. Something brown throbbed behind her eyes.

Chatterton looked down from the wall and Kathleen tried with her last gasp to arrange her arm to drape down the way his did, and she thought, as her eyes closed, that she managed it just in time.