The Life of Death

by Lucy Booth

  But what burns at my insides, the thing that gnaws at my core, the small voice that whispers to me on the wind while I wallow in my own self-pity, my own sense of loss, is the overwhelming knowledge that I was right. The choice I made, the path I took, while sealing my own fate, was the right one. It wasn’t Ellie’s time. She wasn’t the one to die. I know that. But as we have learned before, knowing doesn’t make it any easier.

  And so, Death must go on, and I throw myself fully into my old life. Focus on the lives around me as they fade to black in their homes, their hospital beds, their heavens and their hells. Offer what comfort I can when the pain threatens to overwhelm and the end is so evidently at hand. When I think of Tom I duck my head, close my eyes, block my ears. Hum a tune to drive the sound of his voice out from where it has burrowed into the depths of my being. I’ve lost my chance, and in doing so, I have lost him. So on I go, from life to life and death to death, avoiding Tom and avoiding Him. On I dance, a twirling dance from one woman to another and on to another. Although I can feel that something has changed in this whirl, this swirl. A new weight that I never carried before, preventing me from passing as easily from one to the next, from leaving each story cleanly at the end of their final chapters. A weight that comes with having to concentrate on each and every one, where previously I had slipped into each new skin with the ease of donning a light jacket on a warm summer’s eve. But now these deaths hang on my time. I carry them from one persona to the next, the women I embody dragging in a chain behind me in their memory and their spirit. Their stories flow behind me in gossamer spider webs, anchoring me stickily to the ones who have passed before. And while those threads are fine, are light, and dance on the wind, they weigh on me these women, they slow me. They exhaust me.

  22

  A STRETCH OF MOTORWAY ON AN EARLY FRIDAY evening on a late May bank holiday in the Cornish sun. Visors pulled low to block a sinking western sun, drivers’ brows aching from the constant squint against the rays that spread across their vision.

  A foot hits the brake too quickly, a car slows too sharply. Red brake lights remain unseen from the cab of a lorry sitting high overhead, diffuse in the hazy late light. Momentum connects truck cab with car bumper, carrying them forward for one hundred yards, for two hundred, three. The articulated load behind, carried forward by its own inertia, swings into the lane alongside, sweeping a car stacked high with holiday hopes over the hard shoulder and into the earthworks. In the outside lane, a Mercedes zips past the unfolding carnage, the driver casting a glance in the rear-view mirror, ‘God, I’m glad I’m not going to get caught up in that’, before rearranging Ray-Bans and refocusing on the sunlit path ahead.

  Back at the scene, burning rubber worries at nose hairs, and the heavy stench of petrol douses the sweet smell of roadside wildflowers as cars and lorries and vans settle to a standstill.

  The first car, the braker, faces in the wrong direction, confronting the lorry’s cab in a matadorial stand-off, its front section crumpled and crushed. The single, unbroken blare of the horn drowns out roadside birdsong, the head of Pete Maxwell pressing down on his steering column pillow, his neck bent sharply to tuck chin to chest. The driver of the lorry has hopped down from his cab. Rushes to the car in front of him, fails to open the door and fumbles in his back pocket for his phone. To press three numbers and wait for the question. ‘Which service do you require?’ All of them. Now. Here. Now.

  Another car, the one swept forth by an articulated load before coming to a halt mid-clamber up the steep slope of the grassy roadside bank. Its occupants Brenda and Howard shake their heads as if to shake some sense into them. Clasp each other’s hands and check beloved faces for cuts and bruises before tugging valiantly at door handles to open doors that won’t budge. Howard winds down his window to pull himself free before trotting down the bank and back up on the far side of the car to help Brenda work her way clear. Not today for Brenda and Howard. Not here. Not today.

  Behind the jack-knifed load, a scene of confusion, of impending carnage. Two vehicles have come to a sudden stop with their noses jammed under the trailer chassis, their horns sounding a two-pitched mournful wail. To their rear a small van is wedged between their back ends. Alarm sounding, its driver sits motionless in his seat, hand over his mouth, surveying the scene ahead in disbelief. Not today for this local delivery driver on his way to his last drop of the day, not today.

  Behind him, more vehicles lie strewn across the carriageway facing north, south, east and west. People step out of their cars, mobile phones lifted to every ear to make calls to the emergency services, to husbands, wives, sisters and brothers. To children, waiting for bedtime stories and friends waiting for the first glug of chilled rosé into a tulip-bottomed glass. These lucky few turn their faces to the sun and wait as the distant sirens get louder, get closer, get here.

  There are four. Here. For me. Four who sit crunched, broken and bloodied behind shattered glass and stricken metal. Pete Maxwell, his foot eternally pressed against the brake pedal that triggered this sequence of events, his neck snapped, a drop of blood snaking from his ear, another slipping from slack lips. Eyes open in an unseeing stare. I crawl in through the passenger door to stem the flow of blood. Wipe it from his lips and cup his cheek in my hand. At my arrival his body unfurls. His back straightens, stretches to lean back against the seat. ‘Mum …’ he breathes. ‘What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at work?’

  I take his hand, curl it and cosset it in one of my own. Keep my other hand cupped around a cheek caked in drying blood.

  ‘Because you needed me, my precious boy. Because you wanted me. Here. And now. So I came. Come on. Give your mamma a cuddle.’

  He shifts in his seat, leans his head into my shoulder. Breathes a shuddering breath.

  ‘But how did you know?’

  ‘It’s my job to know, my darling. It’s my job to know when you need me. When you need your mum. It doesn’t matter how old you are, how independently you live your life, how far away you are from me. I knew when you needed me. And I came.’

  He sinks down in his seat, leans back to look at me straight. The pain and shock of the first impact abates as life seeps slowly from his being, allowing limbs to soften and relax. Strong arms wrench open the driver’s door, shaking this cocoon in which we sit. Straighten a broken figure and release the pressure on the horn that has sounded relentlessly from the final resting place of the impact, at the final resting place of Pete. While those arms work, while they feel for a pulse and fasten strapping around an angled neck, he gazes at me. Tears brim in red-rimmed eyes before billowing forth to swim unchecked down blood-stained cheeks. We talk while they work. Talk about the kids, about his wife, the love of his life. About childhoods in the sun and the week ahead. About what will happen now. To them. To the ones he’ll leave behind. He never once asks me about what will happen to him.

  As his body is lifted from the wreckage, and an oxygen mask clamped over his face, he rallies. Neck held in place by foam blocks, face swathed in plastic and tubing, he rallies. Allowing me to move on. He will fight, will Pete. I’m not needed here – at least, not yet.

  Wedged beneath the metal frame of the lorry, fifty yards from where Pete rests on his stretcher, Ollie and Jenny Freeman lean forward in their seats, facing each other in a final loving gaze. Ollie’s arm thrust beneath Jenny’s body in a last-minute but ultimately failed bid to save and protect. In the back seat, one-year-old Alfie cries – an exhausted sob and scream of shock, a wail of despair. Thick straps that held him in place and held him in this life hold small arms pinned to his side and try as he might, he can’t strain forward enough to see his mummy’s face shining with the diamond sprinkle of shattered screen.

  An unknown pair of arms reaches into the back seat to unshackle him and carry him to safety. Whispered murmurings from beneath a yellow hard hat and behind a scratched visor scare rather than soothe and his solid little body twists towards the car, back arching in rage against the arms that hold
him close.

  When he’s clear of the car I shuffle to the middle of the back seat to lean my head through the gap and speak to each front seat occupant in turn. Facing Ollie, I am his beloved Jenny, my body healthy and strong in comparison to the broken physical presence in the seat beside him. These are some of the most difficult, these co-present deaths. Not that any are easy. But these tear at my soul. He sees her lying beside him while seeing her lean over him. He smells the scent of her perfume, feels the tickle of her hair on his cheek while smelling the iron punch of drying blood and feeling the dead weight of a lifeless body pressing down on his arm. She is life and she is death. She is here and she is gone.

  Facing Jenny I morph into a childhood best friend. Twenty-seven years of history bundled into this car – first kisses, first days at school, first dates, last words. Tears run down Jenny’s cheeks and my own and a solemn promise is extracted to look after Alfie, to love and to cherish and to tell him every day how much he is, was and always will be loved.

  But I must leave them now, alone together, while heroes work to free them from death, to keep them in life.

  And so on I move to the final car, to Ben. Brought up by his gran and on his way back to a Devon cottage with roses round the door and chickens in the garden. This was his first visit home after joining the Navy and being posted to Portsmouth. His first visit, taking his final journey. Home.

  He doesn’t expect to see Gran here, on this hot and smoky motorway. In her crocheted cardie, with tights-clad legs in soft-soled shoes poking out from under a stiff, pleated tweed skirt. Doesn’t expect to see her and can’t bear to see her when I appear, tapping at the window and bustling into a compacted passenger seat. He withdraws as I settle in, tries to pull his hand away as I take it gently between mine. Tries not to breathe in the whiff of pressed powder and lavender that clouds around her. But my presence, my scent, my touch overwhelms him and he crumbles. Sagging on to a soft and solid bosom clad in wool to sob, shudder and sigh. I rock him gently, cuddle him to my chest. On the threshold of becoming a man, he is still a boy to me.

  While the emergency services work – cutting, sawing, breathing life into struggling lungs, I follow them. From car to car. From Pete to Ollie. Ollie to Jenny. Jenny to Ben. Through tears and laughter, leaving them as chests are pumped and bodies surge, returning as lungs choke and a simple breath is out of reach. I follow those rescuers in a constant whirl between a mum, a lover, a friend, an anchor. Between a mum, a Jenny, a Karen, a gran.

  Back in Ollie and Jenny’s car, Jenny turns to look at me, perched on the back seat, and starts. Eyes wide, mouth hanging open. ‘Who … ?’ But before she can finish the question, I am gone, summoned by Ben whose heart is failing and who needs his gran. But it is not his gran who clambers into his passenger seat, and he wonders who exactly is this blonde girl pulling his head to her chest. Before he can speak I am moving on to Pete, whose heart rate has dropped and who has never before seen this old lady who smells of pressed powder and lavender, and who cups his cheek in her hand and wipes congealing blood from a split lip with a spit-wetted, soft aged thumb. His lips hang slack, his brow curled into a question mark. Where has his mother gone? Who is this old lady, and where is she going now? He watches as I disappear up the carriageway towards Ollie and Jenny, confused still further to see my morphing complete as I reach their car and watching from his prone position as his mother climbs into the back seat of a stranger’s car.

  Back in Ollie and Jenny’s car, Ollie is still struggling to comprehend the presence of his beloved wife by his side and behind him. He turns to talk to me, to understand the situation he now finds himself in and recoils at the sight of a middle-aged woman crammed in next to Alfie’s crumb-strewn car seat. He leans as far away from me as he can manage, body pressing once more against the horn, feet scrabbling in the footwell for a hold.

  ‘Who are you?’ he shouts. ‘Get out of my car! Where’s … ?’ He turns to look at Jenny, so beautiful, so restful, with rainbows that dance on the shattered shards of screen in her hair. ‘Jenny! Jenny! Wake up, baby. Where have you gone? You were just here!’ He strokes her face. His voice drops to a whisper. Pleading. ‘Jenny? Baby?’

  ‘Darling!’ I interrupt from behind. ‘It’s me, Ollie. I’m here. Look at me, darling – I’m here. I love you. Please, my love, please. I’m not going anywhere. Not without you.’ But the voice coming from my mouth is not the voice of the woman whose words I speak. The hands in my lap are not those of the slim, manicured fingers I expect to see, instead they are age-spotted, twisted by arthritis and resting on legs clad in checked trousers. The very trousers I wore when I first arrived in Pete’s car those never-ending minutes ago. Looking in the rear-view mirror, not the thick, dark hair I expect to see, but grey, curled, closely cropped.

  I pull back from the divide between the seats. Reach up to feel my face, my hair. Force open the back door of the car and stagger backwards across the tarmac, watching the flurry in front of me as emergency workers continue their fight against death, against my inevitable arrival. From the driver’s seat, Ollie stares out at this imposter, this stranger, who tugs at her own hair and pinches at her own cheeks.

  The women I embody are dragging, being pulled by me from one death to the next – the gossamer thread binding me to the last for too long, the ties too strong. The lag lasting long enough for each person to lift their head, pull back in confusion, question the presence of this stranger in those very final, those most intimate of moments. But such is my distraction, the speed at which I work, the delusion that I am working as well as I ever have done, the arrogance that it must be they who are confused, and not I, that I haven’t noticed.

  I’m horrified. I can’t bear that I’ve done this, can’t believe that I’ve exposed these four people to an ending that asks more questions than it answers. For them, for their first meeting with me, their only meeting with me, I have brought confusion in the place of clarity, replaced a final tranquillity with tumult.

  I slump down on to the hot asphalt, elbows resting on knees, head resting in hands. Eyes screwed tight against the pain I’ve brought about. Light fades, air cools and I lift my head to watch from a distance as four souls fade to black in the summer skies above the knot of vehicles. One by one they float, ultimately unaccompanied. They have found their own way, fading slowly, messily, without direction. The souls are bruised – pulsing through yellows, purples, blues. Before slowly, stutteringly, unguided … to black. They are alone and lonely, these souls.

  Left by themselves, to their own devices. Confused, hurt and hurting.

  The carriageway clears and traffic begins to move – slowly at first until, mere minutes after the cordon has been lifted, normality has resumed and there is nothing to denote this patch of land, nothing to suggest what has so recently passed. I lift myself to perch on the metal barrier, feet tucked up beneath me, hair blowing with every passing car. I wince at every lorry that rumbles past inches from my face, but I can’t move, can’t leave. Who am I and what have I become?

  Dusk passes into a violet darkness and the traffic thins until minutes stretch after the passing of each searching headlamp. To the west, deep navy gives way to a slender tongue of pink that laps at the horizon.

  In the night silence, the clipped scrape of footsteps on dusty tarmac gets closer until they stop dead beneath my bowed head. Facing my own feet, two black leather loafers, side by side at the end of long, slim legs in tapering charcoal grey.

  ‘Enough, Little D. Enough.’

  I say nothing.

  ‘You’ve been avoiding me.’

  I have.

  ‘I’ve been watching you, these past few weeks. You’ve been avoiding me, you’ve been avoiding him. So what was the point, Little D? Hmm?’

  No reply.

  ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you!’

  I tip my head back. Close my eyes and stretch my neck, looking up to the stars. I’m exhausted. Lower my chin to look Him in the eye.

 
‘Why start this whole rigmarole in the first place? Eh? You’ve wasted my time. Taken Hywel’s, what little time he had left. Ripped Rose from her family and friends. Stolen Rob from his wife and children. Given Ellie nightmares that will last a lifetime.’ He’s pacing, voice rising, speeding up as He works through my victims.

  Then He pauses, stops in front of me. Lowers His voice to a whisper. ‘One step wrong, Little D, and you run. Down tools and run. Pathetic. You obviously don’t care as much as you thought.’

  ‘Of course I care! I do! I just …’ My voice gets smaller after the initial burst. Ashamed. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I saw you. In the woods that day. I saw the look on your face and the way you shook your head and … I knew. I’d lost everything. I’d lost your game. And if I can’t have him, and I have no hope of getting him, then I can’t keep watching him go through that pain. So … I …’

  ‘You hid, Little D. You buried your head in the sand and you hid. And in doing so you went off half-cocked and started letting down the deaths you were tending to. You failed them – these four aren’t the first. I’ve been watching you, Little D. You failed yourself. You failed … Tom, is it? And you failed me.’

  ‘I know! I don’t need telling! Why are you even here?’ Once more, a petulant child responding to His confrontation.

  ‘You’re very quick to get chippy, you know. When this little … “situation” is all your fault. When you have let us all down. You are very quick to snap at me.’