Notes & Queries Response: When I die which religion will offer the best deal?
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The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site.
I am replying here instead because it is too good a writing exercise to give up: How quickly can you go from a prompt, a blank mind, and a blank page to a finished piece? And how good can you make it?
This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use.
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When I die which religion will offer the best deal?
A few weeks after Liz Kearle died, I went round to her house in Kensington to assist her son with the clearance. When I arrived, the door was ajar. Michael was just inside, speaking on the wall phone. He was resting one leg against the door. It took him a few seconds to realise that there was somebody on the opposite side attempting to gain access.He was in good spirits, as I assumed he would be. He had done his grieving during his mother's long illness. I imagine that her death, following many months of irrevocable decline, had come as a relief. Liz was not a woman who would allow herself to be loved. It was impossible to forge any kind of deep emotional attachment with her, though many tried and failed. Sadly, I think that is as true in her relationship with her son, as it was with her friends.
Michael was in the process of inventorying the contents of the house.
“I am getting rid of the whole lot,” he announced. “If there is anything that you fancy, just write your name down next to the entry on the list. If I haven't got around to cataloguing it yet, then just leave me a note.”
Although there were plenty of things that I would have rather liked to take home with me, I would have felt awful making off with some keepsake under my arm, as if I had burgled the place. I could well imagine Liz's outrage, watching from the afterlife as her friends picked over her personal effects. I thought it better to suppress any magpie instincts and to instead present myself as a supportive friend in a time of need.
While we were upstairs, the doorbell rang. I went down to see who it was. By the time I opened the door, the caller was gone. Resting squarely on the doormat was a large, well-taped cardboard box with battered corners, its flanks papered with customs labels.
Michael had ventured halfway down the stairs.
“I am trying to get rid of things, not acquire anything new,” he cried in exasperation, when he saw me dragging the box inside.
We set it on the kitchen table. It had the look of having been opened and then resealed at least once. While I carefully cut through the overlapping layers of tape with a carving knife, Michael craned his neck past my shoulder, studying the labels from foreign ports.
“Oh, God, I know what this is,” he said.
After a couple of false starts, that required further intervention from the carving knife. I managed to manhandle the flaps open. Lying on top of a close-packed treasure trove of bubble-wrapped items was a fresh bouquet of rice violets, the rubber-banded stems wrapped in moist cotton wool.
“It's mum's death package, from the church,” said Michael.
~
Upon her return home, she handed in her resignation at Deutsche Bank. She put her possessions into storage, under the care of Roome & Wise, of Mayfair.
Leaving her house in the care of a renting agent (Roome & Wise, again), she relocated to the island of Lima O Ke Kai, where she purchased a beach bar. She remained there for the next 14 years of her life, only returning permanently to the United Kingdom when her health began to deteriorate.
“They did nuclear tests out there during the 1950s,” said Michael. “Not right on the doorstep, but close enough.”
He did not follow his mother to the South Pacific, but remained in England with his father, though he spent most of his teenage years at Huxters – a single-sex boarding school, in Buckinghamshire.
During her time on Lima O Ke Kai, Liz adopted the island faith – a localised animism that mutated into a pseudo-cargo cult.
American missionaries set their sights on the islanders around the same time that the US military was scouting out viable locations for atomic tests. Unwilling to have their authority usurped by these Christian interlopers, the local religious leaders launched their own charm offensive. One of the tactics they deployed involved offering care packages to worshippers of the indigenous faith on auspicious occasions, such as births, weddings and deaths. The contents of these packages seldom varied. They were drawn from a list of items that were either obtainable on the island, or could be easily sourced from elsewhere.
From the late 1960s onward, the population of Lima O Ke Kai began to fragment and migrate from the island. In response, the indigenous religion, that had once been a nebulous system of beliefs founded upon strong community ties, formalised itself into the Lima O Ke Kai Spiritual Foundation. This allowed its leaders to take advantage of a fund that had been established by the Americans as compensation for the atomic tests. The Foundation began to branch out from the island, establishing places of worship in other countries, while continuing to honour the tradition of providing care packages to adherents of the faith.
That is why, on a Wednesday afternoon, in early Autumn, Michael and I found ourselves standing over the opening of a large cardboard box, carefully removing and unwrapping each item in turn, and pondering on what possible use it could have beyond the context of a remote island in the South Pacific.
“This is a friction sponge,” he said, holding up what looked to me to be a soft, brown lump of dried brain matter. “You use it to light fires. You rub it up and down a shin of wood and it draws in the heat. When it starts to glow, you hold over some kindling and give it a squeeze. The fire pours out like a liquid. It's really weird.”
“I would like to see that in action,” I remarked.
“Well, I suggest that you look for a video online. It's really hard to master. The last time I tried it, I burned my hand and had to go to A&E.”
He popped open the tabbed flap of a narrow, white box. Inside, a stoppered test tube, swaddled in cotton wool, was filled with water and a downy white sediment that resembled the inert contents of a snow-globe.
“Snow pollen,” said Michael. “It's actually the spores of a floral coral, but it will grow on land too under the right conditions.”
"Is this beeswax?" I enquired, holding up a squat jar of pale ointment.
“I think it's probably ivory paste. It's legal because it's been partially passed through the digestive system of an animal, usually a hyena, before being regurgitated. The French army still use it to inlay their ceremonial rifles.”
Together we hauled out a large, coarsely embroidered blanket that had filled at least half of the box interior.
“This is a cardigan divan. You can turn it into a bed by stuffing it with rocks and plants. You make it up in layers with the stones and the rough leaves towards the bottom to provide support and cushioning. I never found it very comfortable.”
He reached down to retrieve a ziplock bag of what appeared to be home-grown weed, that we had shaken out onto the kitchen floor.
“This is laureate moss. It's a natural amphetamine. It gives you focus and makes you talk a lot. All the island politicians use it. It's the reason why the political debates between the rival islands are so verbose and go on forever. Some people say that it's the reason why the local dialect is so rich in terms of vocabulary.”
He returned to rooting around in the bottom of the box.
“I think this is probably a bag oven stones. They conduct the heat of the sun really well. You can use a pile of them to cook food instead of a fire.”
“This is a cardigan divan. You can turn it into a bed by stuffing it with rocks and plants. You make it up in layers with the stones and the rough leaves towards the bottom to provide support and cushioning. I never found it very comfortable.”
He reached down to retrieve a ziplock bag of what appeared to be home-grown weed, that we had shaken out onto the kitchen floor.
“This is laureate moss. It's a natural amphetamine. It gives you focus and makes you talk a lot. All the island politicians use it. It's the reason why the political debates between the rival islands are so verbose and go on forever. Some people say that it's the reason why the local dialect is so rich in terms of vocabulary.”
He returned to rooting around in the bottom of the box.
“I think this is probably a bag oven stones. They conduct the heat of the sun really well. You can use a pile of them to cook food instead of a fire.”
“I don't think they'll be getting much use here,” he sighed, glancing through the kitchen window at the grey sky beyond.
I had managed to cut through a wad of taped bubble wrap, to reveal an over-engineered set of false teeth, incorporating secondary and tertiary jaws and a gated filter. I was afraid to put them in my mouth in case I couldn't get them out again.
“Those are hewer teeth,” said Michael. “When the Christian missionaries arrived on Lima O Ke Kai they handed out false teeth. There is a fish that lives in the water around the island that has very sweet, tender flesh, but is also very bony and difficult to eat. Somebody – I don't know how it happened - invented these teeth as a way of getting around the problem. I've seen them in action and they really do work. People who use them a lot tend to develop pronounced muscle build-up around the hinges of the jaw.”
He held up a small net with openings in the mesh that appeared to constrict and then widen as it moved, like a choir of tiny mouths.
“This is a mire net You drape it over wet sand or swampland and it snares crayfish. These days a lot of them are embroidered into shawls.”
I unwrapped an egg-shaped object, about the size of a rugby ball. Before I had the bubble-wrap off, I had assumed that it was ceramic. In fact it was formed from some strange cement and riddled with holes.
“They form from barnacle and plankton deposits in the ballast tanks of big ships,” said Michael. “On Lima O Ke Kai they repurpose them as beehives.”
The doorbell rang. I answered just in time to see the back of a figure climbing into the driver-side door of a dark-blue van. There was another long, cardboard box resting askew on the doormat. When it proved too heavy for me to lift, I pushed it from behind with my knees, shuffling it along the hallway carpet to the kitchen entrance. As I re-entered the room, Michael tossed a bag of fish skeletons at me.
“Sea bones. You can grind them up and make good savoury bread with them. And the great thing is that it will rise all by itself. No need to add yeast. Also, look at all this white tin-ware. It's good for storing ice-cream in hot climates... Now, this I might hold onto.”
He held up some kind of legal document.
“These are the deeds to a vegetable hill. The soil isn't great on Lima O Ke Kai. They used to import it from the mainland and build these massive allotment mounds.”
“That's a long way to go for your vegetables,” I said.
“Oh no, this one is just down the road. The Foundation owns land in London.”
He turned his attention to the new arrival in the hallway.
“That's probably a York Pylon. It's a generator that is powered by sand cascading down a see-saw platform that pivots up and down. It creates enough of an electrical charge to run a couple of lightbulbs.”
I stayed with Michael for the remainder of the afternoon, sorting things into piles.
“Nothing you want then?” he said, as I was leaving. “Go on, take a vase at least. You can put those rice violets in water and take them with you too.”
I selected an elegant red glass vase. In the kitchen, I filled it with water and added the violets, which were beginning to dry out.
On the journey home, the Underground train lurched from side to side, as if it was attempting to derail itself, while I struggled to keep the vase and its contents upright. At some point, probably while I was exiting the station, I chipped the rim.
I hope this is of help.
I had managed to cut through a wad of taped bubble wrap, to reveal an over-engineered set of false teeth, incorporating secondary and tertiary jaws and a gated filter. I was afraid to put them in my mouth in case I couldn't get them out again.
“Those are hewer teeth,” said Michael. “When the Christian missionaries arrived on Lima O Ke Kai they handed out false teeth. There is a fish that lives in the water around the island that has very sweet, tender flesh, but is also very bony and difficult to eat. Somebody – I don't know how it happened - invented these teeth as a way of getting around the problem. I've seen them in action and they really do work. People who use them a lot tend to develop pronounced muscle build-up around the hinges of the jaw.”
He held up a small net with openings in the mesh that appeared to constrict and then widen as it moved, like a choir of tiny mouths.
“This is a mire net You drape it over wet sand or swampland and it snares crayfish. These days a lot of them are embroidered into shawls.”
I unwrapped an egg-shaped object, about the size of a rugby ball. Before I had the bubble-wrap off, I had assumed that it was ceramic. In fact it was formed from some strange cement and riddled with holes.
“They form from barnacle and plankton deposits in the ballast tanks of big ships,” said Michael. “On Lima O Ke Kai they repurpose them as beehives.”
The doorbell rang. I answered just in time to see the back of a figure climbing into the driver-side door of a dark-blue van. There was another long, cardboard box resting askew on the doormat. When it proved too heavy for me to lift, I pushed it from behind with my knees, shuffling it along the hallway carpet to the kitchen entrance. As I re-entered the room, Michael tossed a bag of fish skeletons at me.
“Sea bones. You can grind them up and make good savoury bread with them. And the great thing is that it will rise all by itself. No need to add yeast. Also, look at all this white tin-ware. It's good for storing ice-cream in hot climates... Now, this I might hold onto.”
He held up some kind of legal document.
“These are the deeds to a vegetable hill. The soil isn't great on Lima O Ke Kai. They used to import it from the mainland and build these massive allotment mounds.”
“That's a long way to go for your vegetables,” I said.
“Oh no, this one is just down the road. The Foundation owns land in London.”
He turned his attention to the new arrival in the hallway.
“That's probably a York Pylon. It's a generator that is powered by sand cascading down a see-saw platform that pivots up and down. It creates enough of an electrical charge to run a couple of lightbulbs.”
~
I stayed with Michael for the remainder of the afternoon, sorting things into piles.
“Nothing you want then?” he said, as I was leaving. “Go on, take a vase at least. You can put those rice violets in water and take them with you too.”
I selected an elegant red glass vase. In the kitchen, I filled it with water and added the violets, which were beginning to dry out.
On the journey home, the Underground train lurched from side to side, as if it was attempting to derail itself, while I struggled to keep the vase and its contents upright. At some point, probably while I was exiting the station, I chipped the rim.
I hope this is of help.
~
This is list of items that were received by Michael Kearle on the occasion of the death of his mother.
A bouquet of rice violets
A friction sponge
A vial of snow pollen
A jar of ivory paste
A cardigan divan
A set of hewer teeth
A quantity of dried laureate moss
A bag of oven seeds
A mire net
A ballast hive
The deeds to a potato hill
White tinware
A quantity of sea bones
A York Pylon (sand see-saw) electrical generator
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| image generated by Craiyon |
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