Dead Romantic

by C. J. Skuse

  I had triple History before I could go and see the body in daylight, so Pee Wee and I had to hop, skip and jump it to college. Louis wasn’t in History and I was a little annoyed that I’d made the effort and he hadn’t. Class was uneventful – I ran out of ink, got shouted at for forgetting who Goebbels was and tripped over a runaway hamster in the corridor. Pretty average day really.

  On the way back into town, I stopped at the pet shop and spent the last of my chambermaid wages on a collar and lead for Pee Wee, some chew toys and a bag of food, and then decided to treat myself to some fudge at the Fudge Shack as I’d had my eye on some strawberry short-cake flavour fudge since my last diet.

  When I got to Clairmont House, Zoe was in the freezing-cold kitchen, standing beside the kitchen table, upon which lay the naked, headless body of Luke the Lifeless Lifeguard. Only now he wasn’t just headless. He was handless too. And footless. And organ-less: his torso was wide open and red and empty. He was a sorry sight really, like a car that’d had its engine stripped out and its wheels taken off.

  ‘Yes, he’s a bit of a work-in-progress, I’m afraid,’ said Zoe, wiping her hands on a blue tea towel.

  I picked up Pee Wee and moved closer to the table to get a better look. ‘What . . . where are . . . why did you cut his hands off? And his feet?’ Luke’s wet suit was on the floor. Zoe had cut that off him as well.

  ‘Well, we have a problem,’ she said.

  I had a mouthful of fudge. ‘What problem?’

  ‘These . . . ’

  She held up a carrier bag and opened the top so I could peek inside it. There was a pair of blacky bluey feet, cut off at the ankle, lying at the bottom, on top of a pair of bluey blacky hands.

  ‘They rotted?’ I said with a grimace I just couldn’t control. The bag smell was utterly vile. If I’d had to describe it like my dad described wine, I’d have said there were notes of pork and blood and morning breath in it, and a rotting bin. I clamped my hand over my mouth.

  ‘’Fraid so,’ said Zoe, putting the bag on the floor. ‘I noticed last night as I was putting the serum in that they were slightly blue so I took them off straight away. No sense in delaying the inevitable. At least we know now he wasn’t embalmed.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I said, offering her my bag of fudge.

  She shook her head. ‘Sometimes funeral parlours embalm bodies to preserve them longer for family viewings. It delays decomposition and keeps the body looking like it did in life for as long as possible.’

  ‘Grim.’

  ‘Saves me an awful lot of work actually. Problem was, not only did I have to remove his hands and feet, he was also missing several key organs. Lungs, heart and kidneys have all been removed. Bloody organ donor. Luckily I had spares so I was just going to transplant some over now.’

  ‘Spares?’ I cried. ‘Where did you get spares from?’

  ‘You’re in luck – they’re all good specimens. Healthy.’

  The Marks & Spencer’s cool bag I’d seen her with that night in the graveyard was on the draining board and she went over to it and unzipped the top. I looked inside. Five plastic packages. Two kidneys in one. Lungs in another. All marinating in deep red blood. And two separate packages of hands. I put Pee Wee down on the kitchen floor, reached into the bag and picked out the top package.

  ‘This is the heart, isn’t it?’ I said, squidging the parcel. ‘The thing he’s going to love me with. His actual heart. I’ve got his heart in my hands.’

  ‘It’s just a pump,’ said Zoe, taking it from me and placing it carefully back in the cool bag. ‘It’s just a means of getting his blood from one part of his body to the other, that’s all.’ She went back to the table.

  I poked around in the cool bag to see the hands more clearly. They were as bloody as the organs but they didn’t look like they had just come out of a butcher’s window – they really did look like someone’s hands. There was even what looked like a little mole on one of the fingers. I snapped my own hand away pretty quickly, suddenly not wanting it to be anywhere near the bag.

  ‘The main problem is that his body is decaying much quicker than if he had been embalmed,’ Zoe explained, going back to her syringe. ‘In the freezer at the funeral parlour, he was probably kept at between two and four degrees. Decomposition will still have continued to occur, though at a slower rate. I’ve set the chest freezer temperature to minus twenty to reduce it further but without a cryogenic freezing chamber, we can’t retard it for long. That’s why I’m injecting him now. It should slow it down for a few days.’

  I turned to her. ‘I can’t have a boyfriend with no feet, Zoe. I just can’t!’

  ‘Well, yes, I realise that,’ said Zoe, moving around to the other side of the body with the saw and pinching at the skin on the body’s legs. ‘We will have to find some. I’ll need some blood too. Where can we get eight pints of blood, Camille?’

  ‘Um, um, um . . . Could you take some out of me?’

  ‘I could only get one pint from you on a good day. Anyway you’re A positive.’

  ‘A positive what?’ I said.

  ‘No, your blood type is A positive. He’s O negative. It’s better to stick to the same blood type in any severed part to reduce the chance of rejection.’

  ‘Oh right.’ Pee Wee squirmed to be put down so I let him. He immediately went over to the wet suit Zoe had cut off Luke’s body and started tearing it to pieces. ‘How about the hospital for the blood?’

  ‘Yes, good, now you’re thinking like a scientist.’

  I frowned. ‘How do you know I’m A positive? I didn’t even know that.’

  ‘I tested it when you had your nosebleed. Just in case.’

  ‘Oh right,’ I said, rustling in my fudge bag for, disappointingly, the last chunk.

  ‘You do still want this to go ahead, don’t you?’ asked Zoe. ‘To hold one of these perfect piano-player hands when he leads you into the gym on the night of this Halloween party? The perfect feet to trip the light fantastic with?’

  I nodded eagerly. My mouth was too full of fudge to actually say the word yes, so I just said, ‘Yug.’

  ‘Right, help me get the body back in the freezer and then we’ll take you to the hospital. Grab his arms . . .’

  ‘Me? I don’t need to go to the hospital.’ ‘You do.

  You’re going to have another nosebleed, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I am?’ Her medical genius never failed to amaze me. ‘How do you know?’

  She reached towards my face and gave my nose the quickest of tweaks. It crunched and the pain seared through my face like fire and the blood ran down my chin like rain.

  Feet

  So we left Pee Wee eating a Pot Noodle in the porch, locked in so he couldn’t attack the stuffed animals like I knew he wanted to, and headed down to the hospital in the van.

  It was very busy in A&E and my nose was still streaming. There were old people with broken arms, young people with broken collarbones, a couple of tombstoners who had fractured bones jumping into the sea off Madeira Cove, two pale-and-sweaties and a man with a beer gut who looked like he was fine, until he threw up black stuff all over the floor. Zoe knew what was wrong with all of them before they did. It was one of her talents, diagnosing any illness from a distance. She said it was why she never ate in public, even snacky foods.

  ‘The smell of cancer and toasted teacakes don’t really mix,’ she said.

  Three hours we were sitting in the dingy green waiting room, watching the doctors and nurses come and go, reading creased-up tea-stained magazines and ear wigging all the coffee-breathed conversations. I was holding a makeshift tea-towel-ice-bag combo over my non-stop nose. Zoe kept popping out. I thought she had bladder trouble she had excused herself so often.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked her, the fourth time she returned from ‘popping out for a moment’. I noticed she was now wearing a white doctor’s coat with one of those scopey things around her neck.

  ‘What are you wear . . . ?’

&n
bsp; ‘Miss Mabb. Come with me,’ she said.

  Zoe led me along the busy corridors until we got to a brightly lit area with lots of curtained cubicles and doctors rushing about. She took me right past them all, through a white door which led down another corridor. There were signs showing the way to pathology, oncology, radiology and maternity wards and, through another white door, a smaller sign read ‘Mortuary’ and an arrow pointed down a dim passageway.

  ‘What’s a mort-yoo-ary?’

  ‘It’s where they keep the supplies.’

  ‘What supplies?’

  ‘Bodies. It’s where we can find some new feet.’

  It had suddenly become the doorway into Wonderland. ‘Wow. You mean there are real live dead people in there?’

  ‘Of course,’ she whispered nonchalantly, like we had been shopping for cushions and now, logically, we needed the covers.

  ‘Oh-kay,’ I said. ‘But won’t it be a bit suspicious, just wandering into a mort-yoo-ary and lopping off someone’s feet? And what if there aren’t any feet worth taking?’

  ‘I’ve looked already,’ said Zoe, pushing through another white door. There was a concrete staircase leading down and at the bottom was a long, dimly lit corridor. The door to the mort-yoo-ary was at the end of it. My clacky shoes echoed loudly on the cold ground as I walked. Zoe peered in through the glass porthole and tried the handle. The door squeaked open.

  Inside, the room was large and white and freezing cold and stinky with the bleachy Zoe-smell that always seemed to be in my nostrils these days. At the tops of all the walls were windows and the floor was wet. In the middle stood three really big steel tables, all with pipes attached and plugholes at the ends.

  ‘Why are there plugholes in the tables?’ I asked as Zoe made her way over to the other side of the room.

  ‘Fluids,’ she replied.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, not knowing what fluids she could have meant. ‘Where are the bodies?’

  ‘In there,’ said Zoe, pointing towards a bank of eight large, heavy-looking white doors. ‘There are supposed to be two technicians here at any one time. One is on a call; the other is at lunch. We have twenty minutes at best.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘What do you think I’ve been doing for the past three hours? I’ve been surveying the hospital of course. Obtaining eight pints of O negative blood. Locating some more suture thread. Studying lunch rotas. Finding our feet.’

  I got a little squiggle of excitement in my tummy. It must be all the death, I thought. And then I realised, it wasn’t excitement, it was sick.

  ‘Zoe, I think I’m going to throw up.’

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘I thought you said you weren’t squeamish.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said, rubbing my tummy. ‘It must be the fudge.’ I breathed in through my mouth, then out through my nose. And then the other way round cos that wasn’t working. The bleachy smell was so strong I could taste it both ways.

  ‘Okay, get some of those bags from down there,’ she said, pointing to a box on the floor containing a ream of yellow plastic bags marked ‘For Incineration’.

  I grabbed a bunch and tore one off. She opened the clasp on the first door and pulled out a long metal bed, clangy clink clank. On the bed lay someone dead, under a green sheet. Their marble-white feet were sticking out the near end.

  ‘How about those?’ Zoe asked.

  I read the toe tag. ‘Peter Simpson, 32, renal failure. No, he’s got a verucca.’ I pushed Peter back into the filing cabinet of death with a clangy clink clank and heaved out the drawer below. ‘Michelle Victor, 27, female, so no.’ . . . Clangy clink clank . . . ‘One leg.’ . . . Clangy clink clank . . . ‘Betty Brundle, 89, windsurfing accident . . .’Bang.

  I opened the next door and pulled out the first of the drawers in there. ‘Martino Lugosi, 97 . . . aww, that’s the old man from the pizza parlour!’

  Martino’s head twitched.

  ‘AAAARRRRGGGHHH!’ I shrieked, grabbing onto Zoe. ‘Oh my God. He’s alive! He’s alive!’

  Zoe shook her head. ‘No, he’s not. It was a muscle spasm. I should have warned you that kind of thing sometimes happens with cadavers. It doesn’t mean anything. I promise you, this man is very definitely deceased.’

  I nearly was too. My heart was going so fast I didn’t think the beats were ever going to catch up. I stood there and panted for a while before I could think about opening any of the other drawers.

  Zoe was having none of it. ‘Come on,’ she said.

  I swallowed down my fear and tried to concentrate on the job at hand: finding feet for my future husband. I pulled open another drawer, my hands shaking so much I couldn’t see them properly. ‘Frederick Benjamin, 74. Ugh, yellow toenails.’ . . . Clangy clink clank . . . ‘Samuel Popplewell, 49, RTA. Ooh, no legs or feet.’ . . . Clangy clink clank . . . ‘Oh, these ones are nice . . .’

  ‘They’re black,’ said Zoe.

  ‘Don’t be so racist.’

  ‘I’m just saying black feet on a white boy are not going to be the best look.’

  ‘They’re still nice. He’s got a better body actually, too . . .’

  ‘No,’ Zoe sang-sighed, like my Mum did when I’d been keeping on for money.

  I banged the drawer back in and pulled out the next one down. ‘William Pratt, 17. . . Ooh, Zoe, here we are. These are perfect.’

  ‘Really? You sure you want those?’ she said, looking at the tag on his toe.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, looking at the name on the toe tag again. ‘I know that name. Why do I know that name? Of course! He’s in our Biology class. Oh my . . . when did he die?’

  ‘Must have been very recently,’ she said, turning to a tray of sharp implements, and then to a table on which lay what looked like an electric carving knife, like the one my dad used to slice up the Sunday roast.

  ‘That’s so sad,’ I said, again and again.

  ‘Why?’ said Zoe.

  ‘Because I knew him . . .’

  ‘Did you like him?’

  I thought hard. ‘Well, no, not really. He was a bit of a . . . he was one of the ones filming me in the poo pool on freshers’ night. And he laughed. No, I didn’t like him much at all actually.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Zoe, plugging the electric knife into a socket on the wall.

  ‘I wonder how he died.’

  ‘Tombstoning, I believe it’s called,’ said Zoe, starting up the buzzing meat slicer. ‘I’ve seen them up there before at the top of the cove. Another world beater in the brains department.’ She pointed to the toe tag. ‘Rock fall. Now move out of the way, I’ve got fourteen minutes left to bag these.’

  ‘But hang on, Zoe, we can’t take these. We knew him. Don’t we have to mourn and stuff first? It wouldn’t be right.’

  ‘You didn’t mind us using the lifeguard’s body and you knew him.’

  ‘Yeah but he was older. William is, was, our age. He had so much more life left to live.’

  She turned off the electric saw. ‘Yes, well, his spirit can live on in his feet, can’t it?’

  She was so cool about it. So calm. So . . . doctor-like. She didn’t care that she had probably walked past him at college or spoken to him or paired up with him for an experiment. She just didn’t care. But I did. I really did, even though I knew nothing was going to stop her now.

  She barged past me with the meat slicer and began sawing, just above the ankle to where you’d pull a sock.

  Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz nnnnnggggggggggggggggg.

  ‘Wow, there’s quite a lot of blood, isn’t there?’ I said. My mouth was so dry. Zoe said nothing. ‘Not like chicken,’ I said. ‘It’s really bloody, isn’t it?’

  I watched Zoe at work – in awe at her concentrating face, the buzzing, gnashing sound of steel sawing through cold bloody meat, through bone.

  Nnnnnnnnnnnnzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz gnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.

  The sight of the frozen red flesh, the first foot as it came away
. . .

  Hospital car parks can be so romantic

  Iwoke up to whiteness and the sound of rattling. Wheels rattling. Tube lights flashing by on a long white runway. I was on a hospital trolley. Windows and walls were passing me at speed. I looked over to the side and saw Zoe was pushing me along.

  ‘Zoe?’ I croaked. I looked towards the end of trolley. My body was covered in a sheet. My feet were sticking out the end. They were big. And they were most definitely not mine.

  ‘Zoe!’ I cried.

  ‘Shh! You’re fine.’

  ‘What’s . . . did you saw me up? Please don’t say you sawed me up!’

  ‘Keep still. We’ll be out in a minute.’

  ‘Out where? Where are we? And what’s wrong with my feet?’

  Zoe leaned down to speak into my ear, pushing the trolley along all the while. ‘We’re still at the hospital. You fainted in the mortuary. Just as well you did, because one of the technicians came back and I had to pretend I was a junior doctor and you were a patient that had been brought down by mistake. I always find if you say something with enough conviction, people will believe it. And they’re not your feet.’

  ‘Where are my feet? What have you done with them?’ I cried.

  ‘SHH!’ she said, all cross and speaking into my ear again. ‘I haven’t touched your feet; they’re further up the trolley a bit. Just concentrate on being dead so I can get us out of here.’

  It took me a minute before I realised the feet poking out of the sheet were the ones Zoe had just chopped off William Pratt. ‘Oh my God. I think I’m going to be sick.’