‘A nut contains a tree,’ responded Gustav in sepulchral tones. ‘It is cause and effect.’
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Chas said to me. He went off to his stable while Stasia escorted me up to my room. Her mistress of ceremonies role had made her effusive. ‘What an enchanting evening,’ she sighed, and indeed it wasn’t at all cold here for the time of year. Flowers still bloomed in the garden, big blooms, just dimming in the twilight. Smoke drifted upwards from bender camp-fires. I heard the chords of a guitar and some cheerless chanting. I knew that Gustav and Stasia got up twice in the night to meditate and wondered if the house was haunted. I had noticed a bunch of flowers on the princess’s grave as we came up the drive. Chas had still not given me a satisfactory answer about that. I had a nightmarish vision of his dragging the old woman’s body into the cellar below the house and sectioning her brain for his student experiments, like Frankenstein. Then again, what if he had, I thought. It would be no more than a job of work for him, a professional expedient, a windfall, such as those that had fallen to generations of anatomists. An opportunity. Only people like August or Stasia would colour dissection in as grand guignol. Maybe the old woman had gifted Chas her brain, as she had gifted Stasia the house. It didn’t really bear thinking about; but juxtaposed with the jollies going on outside till the wee hours, such morbid thinking kept me up all night, together with a bout of indigestion.
I had brought black to wear for Eddie’s burial, but the bender crowd were robed in highly coloured motley. Instead of blending in with the other mourners, as I had hoped, Chas and I stood out like a pair of monochrome allsorts as we followed the procession to the nearby woods the following morning, where land had been officially approved to bury corpses.
‘Stasia could really cash in on this natural death trend,’ Chas commented as we struggled to station the bike between a mellow-yellow camper-van and a old school bus sprayed psychedelic pink and green. And then a vehicle drew up which made my empty stomach flutter. I had lied to Chas about eating a packet of biscuits for breakfast before he came to find me.
August parked the dirty white van in the midst of all the other vehicles and went round to the passenger door which was obviously sticking. Gaia Kronenberg got out, wearing an old fur coat. She was accompanied by a slim blonde woman dressed in a military-style overcoat, who looked pale and irritable. The blonde moved up towards the trees, pushing her hair away from her forehead in a gesture I recognised. Her eyes were very blue and very bright. I would have known her anywhere. She must be Eddie’s daughter.
‘Come on, Louise,’ Chas said, nodding over at August, who had opened the van’s rear doors and was shouting for assistance from the motley-coloured revellers who crowded round.
But I hung back, transfixed by Eddie’s unacknowledged child. She must be twenty seven, Gaia had said. The childless widow and her husband’s ill-used daughter stood some distance from the crowd, Gaia dragging on a cigarette as though her life depended on it. The daughter seemed quite mesmerised by her surroundings. She wore a quiet grey trouser suit beneath her long coat, low heeled navy pumps and carried a navy hand-bag. I felt unspeakably sorry for her, and unspeakably sorry for myself. Through the corner of my stinging eye, I thought I saw Mafalda, also soberly dressed, weeping quietly behind a tree. She had more right to cry than I did, I thought, trying to pull myself together. Mafalda hadn’t sold him out. Mafalda could bury her dead and hold her head up. Mafalda could sleep at night.
‘Come over here, Louise,’ Chas shouted. ‘I want you to see this.’
Gingerly, like the Alias in the bug game which had crashed my system so many times I had finished by deleting it, I drew close to the white van. A cardboard coffin rested on a sort of trestle. Chas was prising off the lid. ‘Oh stop it,’ I murmured. ‘I can’t look.’
‘It’s him all right,’ Chas said, nodding at August and stepping back. The motley crew surged forward to get a look inside the coffin. Chas pulled me through them. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘This is what they do in Russia. They look at the dead, and then they say goodbye.’
‘Kiss the corpse!’ came Stasia’s voice from somewhere in the crowd.
I shuddered and looked down. It was no longer even Eddie Dead, but a bloated, greenish mask with features vaguely resembling Eddie’s. A powerful smell of formaldehyde and rotting skin came up from the cardboard box. I tried to block the box from the sight of the crowd. I didn’t want Mafalda and Eddie’s daughter to see him like this.
‘Close it, quick. I said you shouldn’t look inside,’ August hissed, wrestling Chas for the coffin lid.
‘I don’t trust you, Stockyard,’ Chas said. ‘For all I know, you could have put some dead animal in there.’
‘Well it’s him, OK, it’s him. Now let’s get on with it.’ August peered over the heads of the crowd and signalled to a tall man in flowing white robes.
‘Here come the Druids,’ Chas said, replacing the lid and slipping in the mud as he turned to me. I hit him on the chest and pushed my way out of the crowd. ‘You swine,’ I said, as he came up behind me. ‘You mean swine.’
‘You had to see it, Louise,’ he said. ‘Come on, you’ve seen worse.’
I leant on his shoulder for a minute, composing myself. ‘Mrs Jury ripped him off,’ I said at last. ‘What a mess. It’s not fair what they did to Eddie. It’s not fair.’
‘Ever seen a road accident?’ Chas said grimly. ‘Of course she ripped him off. Those embalmings aren’t meant to last for six months. They’re a waste of time and money. Of course, if you’re a soldier, and you need a bit of preserving to fly you home in one piece for your military funeral, that’s one thing. I can go with that.’ He smiled. ‘Like they did for the GI’s in Vietnam.’
‘Just can it, please,’ I said. The coffin was now being carried into the woods on the shoulders of six strong men. August and Gaia followed with Eddie’s daughter, the group of white-robed chanters bringing up the rear with the rest of the crowd.
Chas helped me up the slope, his chunky arm around my shoulders. After about five minutes, we came to a clearing where a hole had been dug. I felt the purple haze descend; tears sprang into my eyes.
‘It’s OK,’ Chas said. ‘So what have you got against crying?’
The crowd parted to let us have a ringside view. The white-robed man was reading a poem about the sun awakening the earth. My tears flowed freely. I could no longer make out the words. My head on Chas’s chest, I heard chanting and a rustling noise: the coffin was being lowered. Then the chanting grew louder, followed by a thudding noise: soil. I opened my eyes and looked round. Gaia was throwing clods of earth into the hole.
‘Katherine?’ she queried. Eddie’s blonde daughter bent forward slightly and threw a yellow rose into the grave. Her blue shoes, I noticed, were covered in rich red clay.
‘Louise?’ said August, gesturing to me from the opposite side of the hole.
‘Go on,’ Chas urged. I didn’t move, so bending down, he picked up a clod and held it out to me. At last, I took it and threw it down.
‘Goodbye Eddie,’ I whispered. Then, straightening up, I repeated the words in a clearer voice. ‘Goodbye, Eddie. Sleep tight.’ One short sleep past, we wake eternally. But to what? I glanced up at Chas. He didn’t believe in that either, no more than Eddie had. He believed in now, not the hereafter. Present mirth. But to my surprise, he bent to scoop up a clod of his own and threw it on top of mine.
‘Thanks,’ I whispered. ‘Thanks.’
The crowd shuffled forward, trying not to slip, and threw in their own tributes: soil, flowers, the odd white pebble, even feathers. When everyone had done, August picked up a spade and offered it to me.
‘Help plant a tree for him,’ he said. ‘Go on, Louise. For Eddie.’ I stared at him, swollen-faced; then noticed that he was crying, too.
I shovelled with a vengeance. A man in a blue pea-jacket knelt beside the hole and steadied a sapling on top of the tributes until I had filled in enough soil around its roots to let i
t stand alone. Breathless, I stepped back. August took the spade from me and carried on shovelling.
‘Let’s hope he grows into a millennium oak,’ he said, tears and snot mingling on his wizened infant’s face.
‘That’s if he doesn’t poison the thing with all that formalin inside him,’ Chas muttered. I hit him on the chest. He grabbed my hand and gripped it tight. ‘Shall we go?’ he asked.
I looked over at the daughter, Katherine. She didn’t know who I was. Why should she? It was best she never knew. She had never known her father, after all. But she had wondered about him, I thought. She had wondered and waited, perhaps for years. Now she had come to say goodbye, but Eddie had pipped her at the post. He had slipped his anchor and drifted off. Not my problem, he said airily. Chin, chin.
Gaia was catching us up. ‘Lise,’ she called. ‘Lise, Lise.’ I walked as fast as I could towards the bike. I didn’t want to speak to her.
‘Go, Chas, go, go, go,’ I urged, jamming the helmet on my head to block out the noise of the chanting that was still going on around the grave.
The engine sprang to life. We sped off down into the Devon lanes.
***
Coda
Chas didn’t park beneath the Citadel but drove straight into the hotel car-park. The sea below was like a sheet of blue touch paper.
‘Is this really a good idea?’ I said.
‘It’s a wake,’ Chas said. ‘Isn’t that what people do at funerals?’
The room he had booked looked like the bridal suite. A huge bouquet of red roses had been posed beside an ice-bucket. Chas threw them over to me. ‘Put them in water,’ he said. ‘They might die.’
‘What’s this in aid of?’ I asked.
‘Winter Solstice,’ he said, sitting down on the bed and taking off his boots. ‘It’s time for you to light my fire.’ I went into the bathroom and put the rose stems in the basin.
‘There’s a telephone by the loo,’ I shouted.
‘In case of emergencies,’ he called. ‘In case I feel like making out with the rohypnol.’
I let that pass.
‘Where’s all this leading, Chas?’ I repeated, going back into the bedroom. ‘We were getting along just fine at work. Why complicate things? Besides, I’ve just buried Eddie.’
He had poured out two flutes of champagne. A dish of caviar lay on ice beside a plate of blinis and a bowl of whipped cream. My stomach rumbled. I was really hungry now.
‘I want to drink to your success,’ he said. ‘You’ve gone the distance with this.’
We drank. I made a caviar blini for both of us, and popped his in his mouth.
‘And now you drink to me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been offered a Chair at the medical school. It means promotion, of course, but most importantly, it means I can research away quietly without having to answer the fucking doorbell all the time.’ He looked at me. ‘Of course, I’ll need a technician.’
‘So that’s it? You’re offering me promotion?’
He refilled my glass. ‘What about it?’ he said. ‘You’ve got what it takes. You’re a hard worker. You’ve got initiative, Louise.’
‘Who’s funding this research of yours?’
‘Sir Anton Stockyard. He’s building a new annexe to house my collection. Out of sight inside the medical school.’
‘Your collection?’ I closed my eyes. Britfeed came into my mind, the open mouth of its logo meant to represent a hungry nation. Then I saw Eddie’s giggling face, clouding over when it dawned on him – too late – that I had told tales out of school. ‘So that was what was in your paper bag,’ I muttered, except a paper bag was too small to contain the store. Even the artist who famously wrapped the Reichstag building up in cellophane and paper would have been hard put to bury the store. ‘There are too many jars, Chas,’ I sighed. ‘Too many jars like Eddie’s.’
‘It was in your house, Louise,’ he answered. ‘At your door.’ He had taken off his leathers and was sprawled out on the bed in that yoga position known as the corpse. ‘Just try to see the bigger picture.’
‘Eddie just did it for the money,’ I said. ‘Eddie was just a greedy bastard with a minor Hitler complex.’
‘We could have fun, Louise.’ He reached out for me. His hand was white and bloodless. On the little finger he wore a gold signet ring with an eagle crest. He hadn’t stolen anything, I thought. Not technically at least. I was the tea-leaf in legal terms. What price loyalty? Eddie had fumed. Two coal-black eyes looked at me in reproach. Mercy wasn’t quantifiable, although material was – though not by moral niceties, what Chas would call abstractions. I thought ethics were for the weak, he had said. And still did.
I thought about time passing, the eggs slipping out of me, month after month. An egg contains an infinity of beings, Gustav had said. I had just planted a tree. I walked over to the window and pulled the curtains closed. The sea outside was a hard, cold blue. I didn’t want to look at it. I didn’t want to see.
‘You’re a long time dead, Louise,’ Chas said.
Which was all too true.
***
If you enjoyed The Remains of the Dead, you might also enjoy Ward 19 by John Llewellyn Probert, also published by Endeavour Press.
One
There are a million different ways to die. Tricia Leonard, staff nurse in the emergency department of St Margaret’s Hospital, knew many of them from the three years she had spent working there. She had seen young men brought in having bled so much from road traffic accidents that not even the fastest expert surgery could save them. She had seen young women who had been knifed by abusive husbands finally dragging themselves along three days after the actual injury, when the pain from their punctured guts leaking into their insides could be borne no longer.
She had seen old men die of strokes, and young men too - their last words the feeble mumbles of those with no control over their lips and tongue. She had seen deaths from heart attacks and seizures, from burns caused by fire and by chemicals, from inhalation of toxic gases and from the most mundane of household accidents.
None of what she had seen, however, could have prepared her for her own death that Thursday evening.
Admittedly she was young, and unless faced with it the last thing the young wish to be reminded of is their own mortality. She was also late, and nothing was more distracting than leaving work half an hour after you were supposed to, especially when your boyfriend had told you that this was the last time he was going to wait more than a quarter of an hour at the restaurant he had booked.
Tricia strode down the exit corridor and past the ambulance bay, her head down, cursing Sister Evans for keeping her longer just because Wendy bloody Jennings hadn’t turned up for the night shift. She sniffed. Wendy was always late, and it was always because of trouble with the latest of Wendy’s never-ending stream of boyfriends. Well, this was the last time she was going to agree to cover, never mind what that old Welsh dragon said. Tricia had been late leaving work every night this week because of Wendy’s prolonged and increasingly crazy bedroom sessions (which the girl insisted on boasting about in the changing room as they swapped over shifts) and Tricia’s Richard was less than pleased about it - hence tonight’s ultimatum.
One more late appearance and she was going to have to seriously reconsider her position in their relationship, he had said, in the kind of voice that had made her wonder why she was bothering in the first place. But he was better than nothing, she thought, and that was what she would be left with if she didn’t get a bloody move on.
The glass doors labelled ‘Staff Exit Only’ slid noiselessly apart only for her to find the daytime staff car park in darkness. Tricia groaned. Works was supposed to have fixed the lighting three days ago, especially after all that fuss about what had happened to one of the secretaries last week.
Tricia stood at the exit, suffused by the neon glow of the hospital lights. Their startling brightness only made the darkness beyond seem all the blacker. She took out her mobile, thinking for a min
ute that perhaps she could text Richard, apologise profusely for being late again, offer him the prospect of something really filthy in bed and perhaps persuade him to come and pick her up. Then she remembered she’d run out of both minutes and texts for the month and that the phone was next to useless. So much for modern technology coming to the rescue, she thought, as she slid it back inside her handbag.
She jumped as two porters pushed past her, wheeling one of the rectangular metal boxes that she knew would contain the body of someone recently deceased. The white sheet draped over the white painted aluminium fooled no one, or at least no one who worked there. The two men made a left turn and began to trundle their burden past the parked ambulances and over to the mortuary. Tricia smirked. In most hospitals the place where the dead were taken wasn’t signposted, and St Margaret’s was no exception. Anyone who needed to know its location was already aware, or was soon told.
It was also emphasised that they shouldn’t broadcast that knowledge, so to avoid problems with the sorts of weird people who liked to hang around them. In most places, because of the stigma attached to it, staff usually referred to the mortuary by an appropriate nickname. At St Margaret’s it was Ward 19. There were eighteen actual wards for living patients and, as the mortuary was the next step for a certain percentage of them, some wag had deemed it only fitting to continue with the numerical labelling. The nickname had stuck.
Right, said Tricia to herself, that’s quite enough stalling. Time to get to your car or there’ll be no nice warm boyfriend to keep away the chills tonight. She took a deep breath and stepped out onto the tarmac.
All that gossip and speculation about that secretary not falling but being attacked was probably rubbish anyway, Tricia thought as she made for her car. At this time it would probably be the only one parked where she had left it and she crossed her fingers that security hadn’t locked the gates like they sometimes did.
Remains of the Dead Page 19
