Corpsing

by Toby Litt

  I believed her.

  ‘I’ll try and find out what’s happened to them,’ she said. ‘As soon as I get back. I wish they wouldn’t keep doing this to me.’

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘Everyone,’ she said, looking to the side.

  I was in danger of starting to feel sympathy for her. To cut this possibility off, I launched into sarcasm: ‘Well, thank you for that, Vicky. How is the investigation going? Any progress since the last time we spoke?’

  ‘The investigation is progressing very satisfactorily.’

  ‘You sound like a school report.’

  ‘Just wait. Give us some time. God, we’re trying to fucking help you.’

  Now it was my turn to pause.

  ‘Fucking help me,’ I said. ‘I wonder which counselling course they taught you that on.’

  ‘After all the things you’ve said to me…’

  ‘I think this is getting personal. Can I have another Victim Liaison Officer, please?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Conrad, I realize that you’re very hurt and angry, and that you’re just taking all your hurt and anger out on me.’

  ‘Please don’t flatter yourself,’ I said. ‘I’m finding plenty of other uses for them.’

  ‘I think you should resume your counselling.’

  ‘No fucking-way – I’m working this through, and not by sitting at home in a wheelchair I don’t need any more.’

  ‘I hope that doesn’t mean what I think it means.’

  ‘You remind me a lot of Lily, do you know that? How old are you?’

  ‘Conrad, grow up.’

  Off down the path and into her car.

  42

  Monday afternoon.

  I made a call to UCH to check that Asif was on shift, then took a taxi down there.

  I was wearing my scruffiest clothes, and had bought myself some cigarettes and a lighter. I was getting into the part – I was a seedy tabloid journalist. (For this meeting, of course, the wheelchair was not required.)

  Hospital Security, as I’d guessed, was almost non-existent. The closer I got to Pathology, the easier it became. (It’s babies that get abducted, not corpses.) When stopped and questioned I merely asked where I could find my friend Asif.

  To my surprise Pathology wasn’t – as in films and on TV – down in the dark dungeons of the hospital building. In fact, it was on the uppermost floor – about as far, I thought, from the incineration tower as could be. It had natural light which came in through large windows. Seagulls could look in at unspeakable things on gurneys and stainless-steel tables then wheel away, keening. The pathologists weren’t at all cadaverous – some were as ruddy as butchers. (Which worried me, obviously.)

  Into Pathology, which I didn’t really want to see.

  I asked for Asif.

  They beeped him.

  I waited, looking up and down the long corridors.

  This hospital had been more than home to me for six months: it had been my mother – had made my heart beat, had kept my lungs pumping. On a less symbolic level, I’d got to know a large number of the staff here. Luckily, I hadn’t been recognized on my way up.

  A gingery-haired young man in a white coat walked up to us. The receptionist nodded at him, then flicked her head in my direction.

  ‘Are you that journalist?’ he asked.

  ‘Who are you?’ I said.

  ‘Asif,’ he said.

  When I didn’t move, still looking him in the pasty white face, he said: ‘I’m adopted, okay? My mother chose the name.’

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  We shook hands, me trying hard not to think of where his hand had just been and what it had just been doing.

  The receptionist was still looking at us. The word journalist had alerted her.

  ‘Isn’t that fairly rare?’ I asked, temporarily off track. ‘Being adopted by –’

  ‘This way,’ said Asif, not wanting to discuss his upbringing.

  I followed him down a side-corridor and then into a small white office. He sat behind a desk. There was no chair for me. This wasn’t a consulting room. Pathologists don’t consult.

  Asif didn’t seem particularly weird – apart from the fact he had ginger hair but spoke with a trace of his mother’s Asian accent. There were half-moons of raw pinkness under both his eyes. His fingernails were even more bitten down than my own. This was a permanently worried man.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he said, ‘and also as far as the hospital is concerned, this matter is closed. I don’t see you have any business coming here to bother me.’

  I brought out the cigarettes.

  ‘Fag?’ I said, offering him one.

  He hesitated – to give him credit – for at least two seconds.

  ‘Look, Asif,’ I said, when we’d both sparked up. ‘Let me be perfectly honest with you: this story of yours, it’ll run, it’s a decent enough story. You know how people have this preconceived notion of what pathologists are like? You’re flesh-cutters, you see. Ghouls. You do the stuff we don’t want to have to even think about. And you spend so much time with dead bodies that you end up juggling with testicles and playing table football with eyeballs and shit like that. So, people are going to believe whatever I write – and whatever you say won’t make a blind bit of difference. The only thing that really livens this story up is the fact that it was a minor –’ (I enjoyed calling Lily ‘minor’) ‘– celebrity’s mobile that you used. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be interested – or only from a health service stroke police incompetence angle. Put all of that to one side for a minute. Remembering that I will run it if I don’t get anything else. And then admit what we both know: that there’s a much bigger story here which – for some reason – no-one wants to talk about.’

  He looked at me as he took another drag.

  ‘When she died, Lilian Irish was several weeks pregnant. I guess you were at the autopsy, or you wouldn’t have phoned your mum to let her know you’d be late home. I want you to tell me about it. I want you to get me all the information you have about it.’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Hear me out,’ I said.

  He shifted in his chair.

  ‘If you help me, I won’t print the mobile-phone story – and I’ll make sure this doesn’t get traced back to you.’

  Like fuck I will. I was even telling the tabloid lies.

  ‘You can’t promise me that. It’ll be so flaming obvious to anyone –’

  ‘The truth is, I’m not especially interested in dead babies. What I am interested in is the fact that the father may have been another minor celebrity. What I really want is proof that they were having an affair.’

  ‘You know,’ Asif said, stubbing out his fag ‘your job really is a fuck of a lot more disgusting than mine.’

  ‘Now,’ I said, ‘I know you did DNA tests on the baby –’

  ‘It was an embryo,’ he said. ‘Not a baby and not a foetus.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning it was less than ten weeks old.’

  ‘You could tell that?’

  ‘Anyone trained could tell that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘All its organs and everything were in place. It was getting ready to do some serious growing.’

  ‘About ten weeks, you reckon.’

  ‘Nine or ten.’

  Casually – as casually as I could, I said: ‘Boy or girl?’

  ‘I thought you said you weren’t interested in that?’

  ‘It’s just the question you ask, isn’t it? Like when they’re born.’

  ‘I should go,’ he said, beginning to stand up.

  ‘My guess is – you did the DNA test here, but the police took it away to look at the results. So, although I’m asking as if you know, actually you don’t. And even if someone here does know, I’m wasting my time with you because you’re not senior enough. They let you do a bit of cutting, but not any of that serious analytic business.’

  ‘You couldn’t underst
and the information even if I told you. A DNA fingerprint isn’t much use to anyone except the police. And it’s not like I memorize them for fun. It would be like memorizing every number-plate in that car-park down there.’

  He was on his feet.

  ‘So, I’m assuming that the police were fairly surprised to hear that she was pregnant – and that they ordered testing almost immediately.’

  ‘Assume away, it won’t do you any good.’

  ‘Oh, it already has. You don’t think I really expected you to just toddle off and photocopy some confidential files? You’ve been more than helpful.’

  He became confused.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said. ‘I think I can find my way out.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing you can print,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll just go and talk to my friends in the police. The ones that tipped me off about the mobile phone. Hopefully, they’ll be able to give me what I need.’

  I opened the door and walked out into the corridor. He dodged out behind me.

  ‘But I won’t be involved.’

  ‘What would be the point in that?’ I said. ‘No-one’s interested in you. They want to know about Brandy’s Baby – or Embryo. God, I don’t think we could print that. It might have to be Baby, and offend the purists.’

  I concentrated on mundane things. The long corridor. The antiseptic smell. The red numbers above the stainless-steel doors of the lift. Chatting. Chatting easily. I wasn’t going to permit myself to break down. Casually, I asked: ‘Is it easy to tell their sex at that age?’

  ‘If you know where to look.’

  ‘Hah,’ I said. ‘Some things never change.’

  We stood waiting for the lift.

  ‘Come on,’ I whispered. ‘You can tell me – boy or girl? I’m just curious.’

  I held the fags out to him.

  Asif had a shifty look round, then said: ‘Put it this way – I didn’t fancy her much.’

  Bullet #4

  The fourth bullet skids across the skin of my chest and hits me in the upper left arm, the biceps brachii. The impact feels a little like the prod of a particularly bullying schoolteacher. Nothing more. The bullet first makes contact with me right in the middle of my sternum. It passes, half in half-out, down and across, making some little contact with the sternocostal pectoralis. As it is heading roughly in the same direction as the muscle fibres, it does less damage than it might otherwise. A bright white scar will be left across my sternum. Passing through my arm, the bullet misses the median nerve by about five millimetres and the humerus bone by about two millimetres.

  Later, I couldn’t believe it had happened this way. The thing was a phoney Hollywood injury. The kind of winging flesh-wound that allows the hero to strap on an improvised tourniquet and go on fighting bloodied but unbowed. This was the maximum amount of damage that a movie star could be seen to sustain. This, maybe, and a scar on whichever cheek emphasized their best side.

  Even as the shooting was taking place I was aware that it was something for which I had been thoroughly prepared. I liked this kind of thing – this was the video I’d rent, if Lily didn’t insist on something girlie. And if someone needed to get shot to get the plot going then I wasn’t going to complain. I was deep into the by proxy guilt of genre already. By now all of us have seen so many on-screen gun-killings that we judge whatever we see against a very rigid pre-existent canon.

  There are the stills: the apple spewing itself out around a brass bullet, Capa’s hand-grenade thrower during the Spanish civil war, Capone’s oil-slick sidewalk aftermaths. There are the black and white classics: going over the top and performing Chaplinesque pratfalls at Passchendaele and the Somme. There is the documentary: President John F. Kennedy succumbing to the magic of a bullet, that screw-faced Vietcong POW getting it side-on in the head, the US Congressman eating his gun at a press conference. There is the fictional: Straw Dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs.

  ‘Oh, that wasn’t a very good one,’ I thought, after the first bullet went into Lily. ‘That wasn’t at all realistic.’

  In the end, this wound didn’t really inconvenience me. By the time I came round out of my coma, it had mostly healed.

  Sometimes, when the weather is about to change, it aches.

  43

  I got into the lift, forgetting even to press the button to another floor. I was on the top floor so there was no way but down. Someone called the lift. The doors closed. They opened again on the second floor. ‘I’m going up,’ said the nurse. I didn’t reply. We went back up to the fifth floor. The nurse got out. Someone called the lift down to the basement. They got out on the first floor. Then someone on the third floor called it, and got out on the ground floor. I followed them – seeing the exit door, daylight, parked cars: a single taxi, waiting.

  ‘Mortlake,’ I told the cab-driver.

  I was the never-to-be father of a never-to-be daughter. Lily had landed another blow upon me. It made me wonder whether Lily had known the baby’s sex – almost certainly not.

  ‘Are you alright, mate?’ the cab-driver asked.

  ‘Mortlake,’ I said.

  How many times would I have to feel this grief? And not the same grief every time – it seemed to come back renewed, empowered, having changed shape. I had mourned Lily, then a possible child, then a definite daughter – and I had found, on each occasion, that none of them were truly mine to mourn. I was a long long way from being the right person. I was no longer anything like the person I had been when Lily died. With each decrease in my ignorance came an increase in my confusion. This last expansion, to be honest, left me more shocked than shattered. I wanted this – whatever it was – to stop. I wanted to be at the very end of it.

  Circumstances, cruel as they were, forced me to consider whether my reaction would have been different had the embryo been male. Terrible to admit, but its being female meant that I minded slightly less. What had been lost was, I felt, being of the opposite sex, just a little less intimately to do with myself.

  However, the thing that had died inside Lily was not only a possible human being but also my own version of what my life would have been. That version had been ailing and dying ever since Lily kicked me out.

  The version went like this: We would carry on living together. We might even have had children. We talked about children. I’d wanted them. She’d always put them off, on the grounds that she couldn’t afford to take time out at such a crucial point in her career. (For Lily, every point in her career was crucial.)

  And now I knew that she had definitely been prepared to sacrifice another human life – even if only a possible human female life – for that career.

  The taxi dropped me off. The driver gave me his card.

  ‘Any time, mate,’ he said. ‘I live local.’

  I remembered that I had something I had to do: I had to be at the Barbican theatre that evening by seven o’clock.

  I asked the taxi-driver if he could pick me up around six.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’ll have a wheelchair.’

  ‘No problem.’

  44

  The first night, Monday, I’d booked a seat right in the middle of the front row. Alun and Dorothy must notice me, they must come to associate me with certain noises, they must start to get really pissed off.

  For this production to have its full intended effect, it was necessary that the audience be cowed into total silence during certain key scenes. The actors had to feel they could create at will these precious pin-drop moments. Soliloquies… were… the most obvious… place. But there were other crucial moments of quiet: Banquo’s ghost, Birnam Wood. Having once already endured the performance, I knew where these significant silences were most required. My plan was simple: sit there and insert a loud, tension-destroying cough into every single one of Alun and Dorothy’s precious pin-drop moments.

  This being the RSC, there was plenty of competition between actors to see who c
ould produce the greatest number of silences. Which of them – we were implicitly asked to judge – really had their foot on the accelerator? And who the brake? Was it Alun or Dorothy, Macbeth or Lady Macbeth?

  This first night of my plan, I improvised. Whenever a silence seemed to be looming, I put in a preparatory hack and then tried to pitch a good throat-rasper in more accurately.

  At the same time I made a mental note where the hack should go, were it to be perfectly placed.

  Part of the plan required my cough to be particularly unmistakable: I therefore put on my Scottish spinster hack – half-hiccup, half-apology-in-advance.

  It was hard to tell how soon Alun and Dorothy noticed, but by the end I was certain they knew and were disconcerted.

  As I don’t wish to have to make too many more verbal visits to the Barbican, I will collect them all together.

  Here is my Cough Diary.

  Tuesday A good solid performance. Alun, I notice, is developing something of a facial tic. No doubt this is part characterization, but I have hopes that it is equal part persecution mania. I’ve also invented an important little marker: as the lights go down and the cast waits in the wings for the witches to do their business, I give a signature cough – just to make sure Alun and Dorothy know I’m in for the night.

  Wednesday Lost it a little today. They are trying to break up the rhythms of the production, and shorten the silences. As a result, the play has (through my indirect intervention) improved. I limited myself to unmissably sharp surgical strikes. I also began coughing on top of crucial words. As I’m no longer scared of the huge acoustic of the place, my volume is becoming quite impressive.

  Thursday Since yesterday a notice has appeared asking patrons to please refrain from making any unnecessary noise during the performance. An usherette had obviously been detailed to watch over me, to see how the man in the wheelchair behaved. I stayed silent throughout the whole of the first half. You could see Alun relaxing, getting into the flow. After the interval, the usherette had gone – and I launched in without mercy.