Extract from Thomas Moore - A Certain Kind of Light:
To set up a new profile I have to set up a new email address. I’m registered with the same site that Craig uses but I haven’t used it for a year, which is about as long ago as the site was originally in vogue. My interest peaked after a couple of months and I forgot my password. I’m floating anonymously somewhere now, I guess forever. If the site goes bankrupt then my page will disappear. I chose a stupid name anyway – and I used a weird picture instead of a photograph of myself. But if I did the same again, then I’d be able to talk to Craig without worrying what would happen if I passed him in the street. That feels like too much to think about at the moment.
For the first two hours of the day I fight the urge to call Luke. I want to talk to him and tell him that everything is going to be ok, even though I don’t think it is, but use that to make it convincing, because at the moment it feels like he’s thinking a lot about his dad which makes our friendship feel almost non-existent and I want to remind him that I can help him out with things like this, I mean, life.
I get the feeling that Emma isn’t helping him much either maybe because he won’t let her and I sense this is my chance to feel close to them both again.
The only way I can imagine Luke’s dad being cremated is if I make it look like something from television. The camera would be at the bottom of the coffin, so that the shot is from his feet looking up at the rest of his body. The camera would have to be slightly raised. I don’t know much about dead bodies; less than I do about living ones, at any rate, which are things that I think about a lot more. I’m sure that when someone dies their body relaxes and everything drops. They shit everywhere. I guess piss would come out too. And all the other ... stuff. Whatever else comes out, I mean. I’m sure there’s more. The body would be cleaned up before it’s put in the coffin. It would be dressed. What do they do with the face? Put make up on, I guess – subtle stuff. I think about Luke’s dad’s corpse wearing lipstick and eyeliner and stop because it looks horrible and part of me wants to laugh at just how horrible it is which makes me feel guilty.
Dead bodies are all over the internet. Someone says they’ve got a picture of the dead actor, dead, so I look but it’s nothing really; another joke – just an old photo of him with fake stitches and crosses drawn over the eyes. There are some dead actors on there, actually as corpses: one that I thought I was in love with when I was eight years old because he was in a film playing the sort of character that I thought I would like to be friends with at the time. I tried to shape all the other boys my age into someone like him at that point, with the way that I thought about them. He was probably about fifteen then. He had a certain expression on his face – like he was mad, only he wasn’t good at being angry, so he looked more crestfallen than anything else; a mixture, I guess. Craig has the same kind of look about him. Maybe that’s why he’s sorry.
*
It’s crazy how you can make people seem like exactly the person that you want them to be if you think about it enough. Sometimes I don’t think I think about anything else.
*
Someone told me that ashes are a lie. Apparently when a family gets given the urn at the end of the funeral, it’s only a little bit of the person that they think it is. I was told that they burn all the dead people together, and the ash all just gets split up, so you don’t know who you’re keeping the pieces of. If you’re lucky then I guess you might end up with a couple of handfuls of what’s left of the person you loved.
http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/please-welcome-to-world-thomas-moores.html
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