The Discourtesy of Death

by William Brodrick

  ‘Did you sleep with her?’

  Cooper’s jaw tightened. ‘No. We were just friends.’

  Mitch angled the picture to the light.

  ‘Why did you leave London?’

  Cooper made no reply. Mitch continued. ‘Why come to Sudbury of all places?’

  No reply.

  ‘Why leave town shortly after Jenny died?’

  No reply.

  ‘You were there. At Polstead.’

  ‘I came and went before the others even arrived.’

  Mitch seemed to speak to the photograph: ‘You loved her, didn’t you? Only Peter Henderson got there first. You knew things hadn’t quite worked out and you came to Sudbury hoping to make up for lost time. Only time, once lost, can’t be found again. You ended up killing her, didn’t you?’

  Cooper moved sideways with slow strides, his eyes fixed on Mitch. One arm reached out for a chair at a cluttered dining table. Slowly he pulled it back and sat down, nodding at the other side of the mess, the heap of books, the bills and unopened mail.

  ‘I did nothing,’ he said as Anselm and Mitch took their places. ‘Only what Jenny asked of me. No more and no less.’

  The emails started coming a month or so after Jenny had returned home from hospital – sometimes during the day, at others during the night, often more than once in the same hour.

  ‘She asked me to kill her,’ he said, addressing Anselm. ‘Sent me a key to the back door. She wanted me to come during the night and end it all for her. Said Peter couldn’t change a lightbulb. Said I was the only person she could trust. Only person who knows what it feels like to be a dancer who can’t move her legs, can’t feel them any more … to be attached to limbs that …’ Cooper had drifted into quotation, revered territory. He stopped himself, spitting, contemptuously, ‘You know what she said. You read them.’

  Anselm’s eyes moved onto Mitch, and he was quite sure that Mitch hadn’t. But Mitch wasn’t surprised in the least.

  ‘I stopped replying to the emails and then I got the letters.’ Cooper sat back, arms folded tight. ‘Always the same thing. Please come and kill me. In the middle of the night, when she was asleep.’

  Anselm spoke quietly, like Cooper at the outset of his story.

  ‘Did you visit her?’

  ‘Yes, course I did. And it was worse … said the same stuff, wanting me to push her under.’

  Cooper’s throat was enflamed. A bulging vein snaked along his neck. He seemed to swallow a stone, nodding his head to get it down.

  ‘Why print off the emails?’ asked Anselm. ‘Why keep the letters?’

  Cooper stared back in astonishment. ‘What else could I do? She was saying to me what she couldn’t say to anyone else … not even her father … I couldn’t throw them away. This was Jenny, stripped naked. This was all that was left of her … she’d given herself to me. Those letters were all I had.’

  ‘Then why set light to them today?’ asked Anselm, again very low.

  ‘Because your friend here thinks that in the end I went and did as I was asked.’

  Cooper, too, had spoken softly, his voice charged with pain and injury.

  ‘Well, what did you do?’ Anselm glanced at the black curls of paper in the grate. ‘You told us a few moments ago that you’d only done what Jenny asked.’

  After about six months, the flow of emails and letters dried up, explained Cooper. Jenny never mentioned the subject again. She just lay there, not exactly peaceful but abstracted. Peter read her stories. They watched films together. Prior to Jenny’s accident, Peter had pretty much ignored her … not maliciously … he just didn’t see her; didn’t recognise who she was. But afterwards – in the front room of the cottage where the bed had been placed by a window – he was like a nurse and friend, a sad man, devoted to this woman who kept saying sorry. Sorry for holding him down. And then, unexpectedly, an email went ping on Cooper’s inbox. Jenny wanted to see him. She had a special favour to ask of him.

  ‘As soon as I arrived, Peter left the room,’ said Cooper, one hand easing the tightness in his throat. ‘And then Jenny explained … she was sorry for having asked me to kill her – she was speaking completely calmly, as if suicide was the same thing as changing the sheets or doing the washing up. She said that it wasn’t right to have asked me because it could never have been my job. The law wouldn’t help, she said. And it wouldn’t help Peter either. So they’d made a decision … a big decision, and I wasn’t to tell anybody.’

  Cooper glanced at Mitch and Anselm as if wondering who deserved the focus of his attention. He settled on Mitch, the accuser.

  ‘They’d made an agreement that if things got so bad that Jenny couldn’t take it any more, then Peter would help her to kill herself. Their doctor was a guy they could trust. No one would ever ask any questions.’

  ‘When was this, in relation to the cancer?’ asked Anselm, removing his glasses to blink at the mess in front of him.

  ‘A few months before the diagnosis.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘I don’t know … three, four.’

  Anselm spoke to himself, his eyes raised high. ‘A long time after the paralysis.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Cooper, unthinkingly, not caring about dates or times. ‘She was completely resolved. Relieved, even. Like someone who can hear a train coming on the Northern Line.’

  ‘What did she ask you to do?’ asked Mitch.

  ‘Make an Exit Mask.’

  ‘A what?’ interjected Anselm, still brooding on the timings, still looking upwards.

  ‘An Exit Mask. She’d researched it on the internet. She’d seen videos on YouTube showing you how to make one … and a demonstration by an Australian on how to use it. I looked, too, later. Couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like Blue Peter for grown-ups … “Here’s one I made earlier.” Peter had printed off the assembly instructions and put some money in an envelope.’

  In accordance with Jenny’s wishes, Cooper had bought a helium gas cylinder from Amazon (designed to fill kids’ balloons), some electrician’s tape from B&Q, a roll of large freezer bags from Sainsbury’s and a long rubber tube from a home brew centre.

  ‘The idea is that you put a bag on your forehead, fill it with helium and then …’

  Cooper looked helplessly at his two inquisitors. The anger had gone. He didn’t look so strong any more.

  ‘You made this thing?’ asked Anselm, nonchalantly, restoring his glasses.

  ‘What else could I do?’

  ‘Refuse.’

  ‘They’d have made it somehow. I just helped them do what they didn’t want to do … not what they couldn’t do. And anyway, Jenny wasn’t committed to using it, just having it ready … a parachute, she called it.’

  ‘Okay, having made the mask, what did you do with it?’ asked Mitch.

  ‘Just a moment,’ interjected Anselm. ‘Did Jenny say anything else about her motives for planning her suicide, apart from things getting too bad?’

  ‘Yes,’ nodded Cooper as if he’d left out something obvious and important. ‘The son. Her boy. Timothy. She felt she had nothing to offer him any more. She didn’t want him to watch her get frightened and struggle.’

  ‘No,’ said Anselm, ponderously.

  ‘That’s why she didn’t want to go to Switzerland or Holland, where they pull the plug and it’s all legal. She’d have to explain to Timothy why she had to end it all. She didn’t want to … she couldn’t. So I did as she asked.’

  ‘Odd that, really, when you wouldn’t do it before.’

  ‘Because before she was depressed, whereas this time she’d thought it through, carefully. Like I told you: she was real calm. Completely sure of herself. All the thinking had been done.’

  Anselm made a nod. ‘So off you went to B&Q.’

  When Cooper brought the completed Exit Mask to Jenny, she told him to leave it in a small potting shed at the end of the garden. The plan was this: if Jenny ever made the final decision to end her life, Peter would simply coll
ect the mask and help Jenny to use it. Afterwards, he wasn’t to worry about getting rid of the evidence. All he had to do was put it back in the shed. When Cooper heard that Jenny had died, he was to come the same day and collect the mask, tube and cylinder and dispose of them.

  ‘She was protecting and helping Peter,’ explained Cooper, pushing aside more of the mess, and leaning on the table. ‘The doctor would look the other way, but if someone still had concerns they’d never find any evidence. The shed would be empty. Peter hadn’t bought anything. No one in the home brew centre would remember his face. Amazon hadn’t sent him any helium. It had all been kept simple, for him. He didn’t have to make anything; he didn’t have to dispose of anything. All he had to do was open that door on a plane that was losing height and falling to pieces in mid-air.’

  Mitch then said, ‘But she was being smart, too, in asking for your help.’

  ‘Unless it was Peter’s idea,’ interjected Anselm, who’d reached the same conclusion on smartness.

  ‘How?’ snapped Cooper, resenting the hint of manipulation.

  ‘You already knew what Jenny was thinking and why,’ explained Mitch. ‘If she’d suddenly died, you might have said something to the police. You’d wanted to keep her alive. So you’d have told them your suspicions. And that would have led to an investigation and maybe Peter’s arrest. By involving you in the planning she tidied up those previous emails and letters.’

  ‘Or Peter did.’ Once again Anselm politely completed the diagram of due inference.

  ‘Jenny didn’t use me,’ explained Cooper, wearily. ‘She came to me because she knew I understood her. More than anyone. You name them … Peter, Emma, the doctor and, yes, even Michael, her father, none of them could even begin to understand her like I did, to understand what she felt like after her legs had been taken away from her. She didn’t need to explain a damn thing to me. Not a thing.’

  ‘Because you’re a dancer?’ offered Anselm.

  ‘Because I’m a dancer.’

  ‘Not now you’re not,’ threw in Mitch, dousing Cooper’s emotion. ‘You’re a mechanic who fixes second-hand cars that run on four star. What did you do with the mask after Jenny died?’

  Cooper appeared suddenly stunned.

  ‘You kept it, didn’t you?’ whispered Mitch. ‘Like the emails and letters, you couldn’t get rid of anything that had come from her mind or hand. No wonder you couldn’t throw away the bag that contained her last breath. Where is it, Vincent?’

  A flush of grief and surrender changed Cooper’s face. He stood up and left the room. A door opened and closed. Moments later he returned holding a white plastic carrier bag from Curry’s. He laid it warily on the table among the detritus of his life offstage.

  ‘You can’t prove she used it,’ he said, barely audible. ‘You can’t prove it killed her. Not now. You’re too late. You can only prove that I made it.’

  ‘Quite right, Mr Cooper,’ agreed Anselm. He stood up and gingerly opened the carrier bag, gazing intently at the homemade suicide kit: a crumpled freezer bag for those tasty leftovers, an orange rubber pipe to siphon off the young beer and a small gas cylinder with a picture of balloons on the side. ‘You’re all as safe as houses.’

  ‘A piece of advice, though, Vincent,’ added Mitch. ‘Don’t hide your spares under a plant pot. You’ll only invalidate your insurance.’ With a wink, he tossed the front door key high over the table.

  Cooper didn’t move at first. He just glared at the thief who’d stolen Jenny’s secrets. Then, without even blinking, he snatched the key from the air, his arm following the sharp and savage arc of a punch.

  Anselm sat in the passenger seat of the Land Rover with the carrier bag on his lap, astounded by Mitch’s performance. He’d sensed that Jenny’s friend was disconsolate. He’d seen into a grieving man’s vulnerability and then stunned him, brutally and without hesitation. It’s what QCs did. It’s why Anselm would never have made the grade. He looked at the plastic bag with distaste, wondering if the mask would fit Bede. For the time being he’d store it in the shed by his hives and later he’d—

  ‘I think we ought to go to the club,’ said Mitch, puncturing Anselm’s meditation. ‘I’d like to talk to you. On my patch.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  Anselm looked aside. Mitch wasn’t simply proposing a night of merriment. Far from it, he was showing more purpose and determination, still very much a man who knew where he was going and what he was going to do when he got there.

  21

  Michael ran and ran. The wind brought the sound of the sea over the Denes. Heavy tufts of grass struggled against the grip of the sand. Seagulls swooped low, skimming the track ahead, their wings outstretched and long and still …

  ‘She’ll never walk again,’ Emma said once more.

  She’d murmured the phrase repeatedly ever since she and Michael had left the ward. Down the hospital corridors and stairs, she’d been speaking to herself, and then to Michael and then, it seemed, to God. She’d moved from recognition to shock and then complaint; from disbelief to anger and despair.

  ‘She’ll never walk again.’

  All the consultants had agreed. They’d all come in with that quiet, careful tread, guiltily moving one foot in front of the other. They’d all spoken in that soft reassuring voice when they might as well have shouted out the shattering implications of their message. They’d all taken occasional refuge in technical language, trying to distance themselves from the meaning of their own words, to soften their impact on Jenny … wide-eyed Jenny, lying absolutely still, visibly crushed by the weight of their knowledge and certainty. Then, one by one, they’d walked out again.

  ‘Why on earth did she go back to dancing?’ pleaded Emma.

  Michael gripped the steering wheel and kept his eyes on the rear lights ahead. It was raining hard. A misty spray obscured the camber of the road. Headlights appeared like dull moons. Emma knew very well that a return to the stage had been Michael’s idea. He’d told her. And now she wanted to be angry with him, only she knew that wouldn’t be fair. But that left her rage and unhappiness internalised and without direction. It could only harm her. Without for one second minimising Jenny’s situation, Michael realised that everybody was gravely injured now. That everyone was paralysed in some way, unable to move into the future.

  ‘She’ll never walk again.’

  Emma spoke as if she hadn’t said it before. They were silent for a while, appalled by the words. The tyres hissed upon the bitumen. The wipers flapped back and forth. The red lights flickered in the haze.

  ‘Michael … did you hear what Jenny said?’

  Emma didn’t need to say any more. Michael knew what she was talking about. Jenny had grabbed her father by the arms and almost hauled herself upright, straining forward, bringing blood to swell her face and lips. The hospital bed had creaked and clanked.

  ‘My life is over … I’ve nothing left … I can’t move … I’ll never take Timothy to school again. I’ll never collect him … or put his meals upon the table. I’ll never put him to bed, or get him up. I’ll never go to him if he gets scared in the night. What can I show him about life? What can I teach him? What special message have I got for him … something to recite and remember me by … after I’m gone?’

  Michael had said, ‘No, no, no, no, no …’ gently lowering her onto the bed. Choking and inadequate, he hadn’t been able to reach her desolation. He’d had nothing honest to say. Jenny’s head had turned to one side upon the pillow. Life and warmth had ebbed away from her fingers. In an awful parody of her legs, they’d seemed incapable of further movement. Her long black lashes had slowly closed and opened again, closed once more and opened again. She’d been staring at the rest of her life.

  ‘The thing is … Jenny’s right,’ said Emma, her face averted to the misted window. ‘Her life is over. What has she got to live for now? If she was an animal, I’d gently put her down. It would be the right thing to do.’
r />   ‘But she’s not,’ whispered Michael. ‘She’s our girl.’

  Emma just looked at the spray from the oncoming traffic. But her comment – brutal and sincere – worked like leaven between them. Everything that neither of them would ever dare to think or say foamed quietly in the darkness of their minds. It was true: no animal would ever be left to suffer like that. Emma always told a crying child that putting a whimpering pet to sleep was part of loving; that ending a life was sometimes the only way to be compassionate. But, paradoxically, those words of comfort just made Jenny’s situation all the worse, for she was worth so much more than any wounded spaniel. And, being worth so much more, she would have to accept the suffering that comes with being human. She was entitled to a very different kind of compassion … only for the moment, in the aftermath, Michael didn’t know what it was; and neither did Emma. They were driving home in the pouring rain, desperately asking themselves what could be done and what they might do. Neither of them dared to say what they were thinking … that the answer might be ‘Nothing’. ‘We’ll find a way,’ said Michael, through his teeth, refusing to give up. ‘We’ll help Jenny get to the other side of what’s happened … somehow. We’ll do whatever’s necessary.’

  Michael had found something honest to say, even though it didn’t quite mean anything. But he’d expressed all his fervour and protest and love. This accident would not defeat his hope.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Emma, reaching out and taking one of Michael’s hands. She was crying now, hating herself for being angry with the man who’d only ever wanted the best for his daughter. ‘We’ll find a way and do what’s necessary, regardless.’

  Michael ran and ran while the gulls screamed high overhead, gliding across a cloudless sky. Emma had spoken about killing as a duty. She’d spoken of animals, but Michael, privately, had known all along that in certain circumstances, it could apply to a human being. He’d learned that lesson from Eugene, long before Jenny had fallen off the stage. Every so often the configuration of events called out for radical action – the type of action one would never dream of taking; but it was necessary, to resolve a crisis. Sometimes you had to think beyond the troubled voice of your conscience.