Grave Truths

by Anne Morgellyn

  ‘That was old material.’ He reached for the keys, but I held on to them.

  ‘Louise, I found psychoactive traces in some of Veil’s patients that would have turned a fucking elephant into a mouse. And he still kept calling me up to see how he was doing! How about barbiturates? What’s the rate of atrophy in the brain of this teenaged amphetamine user?’

  ‘You’re saying it was the drugs that killed them?’

  ‘Not exactly, no. The teenager was probably a suicide. There’s a culture of that in nuthouses, and of drug dependency, of course, in other words, abuse. But Veil was sailing pretty close to the wind.’

  ‘I thought you were interested in the effects of hydroponic cannabis,’ I said.

  ‘Like I told you, that’s my choice.’

  ‘Like Dr Jekyll shooting up and morphing into Mr Hyde?’

  ‘You should take this seriously, Louise. Veil is one nasty piece of shit.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I lodged a complaint about him, although he still puts in minimal hours at The Nunnery. But it’s a low-budget Trust. He’s probably done some deal with them to raise their profile – Sammy Veil, Consultant Shrink. Our man at the head of the couch. How I survived my family and other fuckwits.’

  ‘You read his column then?’

  ‘Read it? I used to pin it up in the consultants’ washroom when it first came out. I hung a nice big roll of paper underneath, inviting feedback from his peers.’ He reached behind him for his jacket. ‘You know what I think about psychiatry,’ he said. ‘Keep well away from Veil, Louise. He’ll mess your head up. He doesn’t need drugs to do it either – he could do it blindfolded.’

  ‘I think I can look after myself,’ I said, determined to brick myself in, although I didn’t want him to go yet. I didn’t want him to go at all. ‘Look, I could make you some coffee before you go. You know, I miss the bike.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. I couldn’t live without her.’

  ‘What time is this reunion?’

  ‘They said they’d be there about nine. I’ll have to give it some throttle.’

  ‘Anyone I know?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ He looked me coolly in the eye. ‘A couple of friends from the old days.’

  ‘Harley riders?’

  ‘Man and boy. A Fat Boy, actually,’ he elaborated. ‘I used to have one of those.’

  ‘Well, thanks again. Thanks for the favour.’ I couldn’t bring myself to say thanks for Edith Woods’s PM report. What kind of favour was that?

  ‘Let’s touch base again soon, Louise.’ He kissed me on the cheek. ‘Just keep away from Sammy Shrink. And lay off the black.’

  ‘You watch that piracetam then,’ I shouted, but he was already up the basement steps.

  I couldn’t sleep when he was gone. I was plagued by too many shadows: Chas giving it some throttle in the dark, Dr Veil, a shyster with a sword held over mad people, Roy Woods, a madman without a face. Then I thought of where all this had started, with Edith, his old mother, a lonely corpse laid out for cutting. Chas would have fixed her on the cold steel table, her arms at her sides, her legs slightly apart, and wholly, wholly exposed to the bright white light above. He would have switched on the tape and stated her age, general appearance and condition, noting the wound on her head before making that first cut. He wouldn’t have bothered much with the viscera, nor the old scar on her tongue. It was her brain he was after, her poor, old, troubled brain, with its plethora of memories: a son with schizophrenia, a market stall with furs and faldelols, a dwindling group of elderly friends, a stinking flat, a cat, a mean and rapacious landlord, London in the year 2000, London before the War. How the hell did Chas expect to get an angle on this brain, on all these memories, on the essence of this woman? He had shown me sections of brains in the electron microscope. I had watched the neurones play out in a spidery network of spectacular connections. But what did that reveal, that the subject was mild-mannered or mean-spirited, a madman in touch with the powers of darkness? Could Sammy Veil have got an angle on that brain? Could he tell me what was wrong with me?

  I clasped my pillow to my head, willing it to foreground dreams of Brighton. I was walking on the beach with Chas, his batteries primed with smart chemicals: dopamine, androgen, and seratonin, testosterone, disinhibited by piracetam, testosterone – much. It was the fuel that drove the drives, steered impulses down crooked alleyways, into the valley of death maybe. Testosterone drove people crazy, from lust or from rage. But no one would call Chas crazy. No one would dare.

  My counselling books lay in an untouched pile beside my bed. I had neglected the theory in favour of practice, all those sessions at the class where we were meant to divide into threes and go off and counsel each other. Be sure to bring something real, enjoined Cassie, the tutor who had been a friend to me. Something real but safe still at this early stage. She didn’t want us letting something out that could not be contained, radioactive memories that might bubble up from the unconscious to infect our healthy egos with doubt and fear. We had to stay safe. We had to respect each other’s boundaries. So I’d brought the relatively safe but real issue of Bully Bubba. Why was I so frightened of my boss? Why did I let her get to me? Why was I craven in front of her, when I’d fail to cower before Chas when I first worked for him at Charity’s morgue? Chas was bigger and more caustic than the Bubba. He was far better educated than I was and he wielded a knife. But Chas had always liked me, whereas Bubba resented me from the moment I was appointed. Maybe I made myself craven, I thought, by settling for this underground, poorly-paid existence. I had acquired a criminal record for possessing drugs once, a silly thing, which could have happened to anyone, but which had sent me into free fall from a research job at the House of Commons down to the hospital morgue, where I worked as a technician, and now to the all time low of being a cleaner for the dead. Maybe it wasn’t the Bubba who was responsible for my lowly self-image after all. Maybe it was I who was responsible for me, and me alone. I had to pull myself out of it, go up over the hill into the sunlit valley. The only way was up now, up and out.

  I looked up schizophrenia in my textbooks. It used to be termed dementia praecox, when still applied mainly to the young folk whom it struck, though now it was officially classified, by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a book of books known in the trade as DSM-IV, as the catch all for any poor sod who heard voices or thought he was God. But neither of these appellations seemed to get it any further. The family context, the cause put forward by Veil, seemed plausible enough. It wasn’t Roy who was ill, but his tarot-reading mother. Mrs Blank had seemed to write Roy off, but she was Edith’s friend. Some friend, I thought, remembering the stolen scarf. An ambitious part of me saw Roy, the unknown quantity, as something of an opportunity, but this was dangerous ground indeed. I shut the textbook and prepared to go to sleep. I should have taken the time to reflect on what I was doing, perhaps. To know better.

  ***

  Chapter 5

  The Coroner called me in person the following morning, the Bubba not yet having arrived to poke her ample frame between the Big Cheese and the Mice, like Jack and me, who scavenged around the back office. Coroner Carey had already seen the autopsy report on Edith Woods and confirmed that there was no need for an inquest. Obviously, he murmured, Professor Androssoff’s conclusions were perfectly sound. When I laid on Dr Veil’s conclusions also, with a trowel, these were deemed to be equally well judged. I had a clear green light for Edith’s funeral. ‘If we spent all our time waiting for absent relatives to show up,’ said Coroner Carey mildly, ‘we’d long be in our graves by now, Miss Moon.’

  So by the time Bubba appeared with her breakfast bag of strawberry doughnuts and Styrofoam coffee, a cinnamon-flavoured brew that smelled as vile as it tasted, I was on the phone to Mrs Blank, inquiring about Mrs Woods’s preferences for burial or cremation, organised religion or something quirkily secular.

  ‘I don’t suppose that Edith would mind either w
ay,’ Mrs Blank sniffed. Her hay fever was worse this morning. ‘She liked a good ceremony. She used to come along to The Tuesday Club services, when she could get around more easily.’

  ‘Cremation and the Church of England are the default options,’ I told her, ‘unless there are strong objections.’ So cremation and the vicar it was.

  ‘If you are ringing the undertakers,’ Bubba interrupted, ‘get Mr Byrne to tell you what they’ve done with Mr Getty’s wedding ring. I told them to take it off before they cremate him. I’ve already accounted for that.’ The Bubba was proud of her ability to save the City money by garnering every last penny.

  Mr Byrne confirmed that he had put the ring aside and that Mr Getty was all spruced up for the furnace tomorrow. ‘And how are you this fine August morning, Louise?’ he bantered, always ready for a chat. I told him I was rushed off my feet as usual and, as was his usual response to this, he said that I should come and work for him. Byrne & Co had hit the big time since becoming a franchisee of Last Rites Incorporated, an American Funeral Homes conglomerate that had made its billions from the usually unnecessary (but always remunerative) practice of embalming. Our cases were rarely embalmed, unless the deceased had strongly stipulated this as a preference, but their numbers alone ensured that Byrne still made a profit on his City Specials, and we were always offered a bulk discount. The undertakers had even detailed two of their old hearses for our scheduled runs up to the crematorium, so it was easy to slot in Edith Woods after John Frederick Getty on the Friday afternoon.

  I sat back in my chair and eyed the coffee machine. Hardly used these days because of Bubba’s Styrofoam addiction, it was encrusted with old grounds and slimy scraps of filter paper. I had just about decided to take a chance on it, even with half the office already down with food poisoning, when Bubba reminded me that I still had bagging up to do at Edith Woods’s. ‘Call in at Starbucks on your way back,’ she ordered, handing me a five pound note. ‘You know my order.’ ‘Know thyself,’ I muttered back at her under my breath. Know how fat you are, how rude and aggressive you are, how all this sweet stuff makes you smell.

  I took the van keys from my drawer and set off for Notting Hill borders, taking Jack along to dispose of the putrefied cat. But when we got to Mrs Woods’s house, we discovered that most of the removal work had been done for us. The landlord was out on the pavement, throwing sticks of furniture into a skip.

  ‘Aren’t those Mrs Woods’s things?’ I shouted, sprinting up to him while Jack looked on from the van.

  ‘She rented furnished,’ the landlord told me curtly. ‘Her stuff’s over there.’ He nodded towards three old leather suitcases, one of which had burst open, trailing a beady-eyed fur on the dusty path. ‘I want her keys,’ he said, extending his hand for them. He wore builders’ gloves, heavily stained and gritty.

  ‘I am mandated by the City to clear the flat on the tenant’s behalf,’ I began. But the arguments stumped me. Was it even worth an argument, given that Edith was being cremated tomorrow and her son was nowhere to be found, and not emotionally stable enough to deal with this now, in Sammy Veil’s view? The landlord’s haste to be shut of his old tenant was yet another expedient propelling me to close the case. So I ceded the keys; a formality, I guessed, on the landlord’s part since he would only change the locks and start again.

  ‘I made a note of what was in there yesterday,’ I told him, beckoning Jack over to give me a hand with the bags.

  ‘You think I want to go rooting in among that old bag’s knickers? Twelve quid a week she paid me, and that was when she could remember. You know what these places are worth on the open market, in the real world, darling? This is none of your council slums.’

  Jack grinned at me and slung the last of the cases into the van. There wasn’t much, but what there was smelled sweetly foul with rot. I drove to the covered yard behind the offices to do the inventory where there was an upwind draught. Most of it was rubbish, hardly worth the laundry bill for Oxfam.

  The Bubba came outside to examine the Deco scarves while I repacked the suitcase with some of the postcards and papers and Jack threw the rubbish into sacks. ‘Best give these a decent burial,’ she commented, gingerly shifting the fox fur tippets with her overstretched sandals. Mr Byrne had been back on the phone, she said. The body was now at his place if any friend of Mrs Woods’s required a viewing. ‘But they’ll have to cut it fine,’ she warned. I knew that the slot for viewing paupers was restricted to a few brief minutes in a corner of the undertakers’ chapel.

  Mrs Blank declined to take her leave in this way. ‘Best remember Edith how she was,’ she said comfortably, and I wondered if she would still be going to the funeral in that case. ‘Oh yes,’ she sighed. ‘All The Tuesday Club is going, except for Mr Wick because he’s going away to Tenerife. He made a generous donation towards the wreath.’

  Then the switchboard put through the call back from Samuel Veil. I told him I had now collected Mrs Woods’s effects, which we would store here till the funeral, after which he might care to take charge of them. He said he looked forward to seeing me there.

  ‘With The Tuesday Club, it’ll be quite a crowd then,’ Bubba approved. ‘Nice for her, the poor old dear.’

  ‘Very nice,’ I said, marvelling, as ever, how sentiment for the dead oozed from the Fat One like doughnut jelly, whereas for us, the living victims, she spat out nothing but bile. I didn’t believe it would matter either way to Edith Woods. She had been alone at the end, no one to squeeze her hand and say goodbye. But the Bubba was religious in her nasty way, a believer in hell and judgement, sin and retribution. Maybe she thought the dead were keeping some kind of tally for the day of reckoning, when absentees would have to stand up and account for themselves. I just wanted it all to be over. I had tried to do my best for the Edith Woods, but it still felt like I failed her somehow, and it felt like I was welching on my duty towards her son.

  I still had this idea of Roy Woods, the faceless madman, imprinted on my mind when the hearses, transporting Mr Byrne, his driver, and the bodies of old John Getty and Edith Woods arrived to take me with them to the crematorium. On the return trip, the empty transport would drop me off at Byrne and Co’s Camden premises from whence I could walk home or take the bus. I was determined to clock off today at the proper hour. Bugger the Bubba.

  The Humanist speaker, who had taken up so much of my time with the booking arrangements and questions regarding his expenses, did not turn out for Mr Getty after all. But a number of people were already here for Edith Woods; The Tuesday Club, I guessed, since most of them were elderly, although I noticed one young woman, well under thirty, hanging around the back of the crematorium chapel. She had a shaven head and wore builder-boy boots, but even these conscious disfigurements could not disguise the striking beauty of her face. She had symmetrical features, set in creamy, blemish-free skin, but her eyes were vacant. Not reddened with hay fever, as Mrs Blank’s were, nor twinkling on all they surveyed, like Mr Byrne’s, but large and limpid. The term moon child came to my mind – which was what the Bubba called me in her kinder moments. Anyhow, she didn’t look all there.

  The undertaker didn’t miss a trick. When I told him that the speaker hadn’t shown for Mr Getty, he produced a black-edged card from his breast pocket and asked me to read it over the old man’s coffin. An all-purpose eulogy, it had obviously been cribbed from the stock-in-trade of religious ministers. I felt terrible about reading it at all since Mr Getty had requested strictly no prayers on his last journey from this world. In the letter we’d found at the back of his pension book, the solitary old man had scribbled a nihilist verse by The Earl of Rochester:

  Nothing thou elder brother, even to Shade:

  Thou hadst a being ere the world was made,

  And well fixed, art alone of ending not afraid.

  The verses now unfolded in my head, a noble counterpoint to the vacuities I was obliged to read out from Mr Byrne’s card: ‘We are here to give thanks for the life of …’ I glance
d hastily down at the tin plaque screwed to the coffin. ‘John Frederick Getty. It was a purposeful life, with many joys and tribulations, like all our lives, and in the midst of life we are in death. So we say good bye to John Frederick, who will be fondly remembered by us all.’ I could hardly get this last sentence out. No one present had known Mr Getty from Adam. All the same, it was a Son of Adam here, a brother in corruption, departing now through the fireproofed purple curtains in his cheap pine box. And that’s it, I thought. Getty, John Frederick. I glanced at my watch. We were fifteen minutes ahead of schedule.

  As though reading my thoughts, Mr Byrne stepped forward and asked those now assembling at the back of the chapel if they were here for Mrs Woods. Mrs Blank detached herself from the arm of an elderly man with watery eyes and urged them forward. I noticed she was wearing the Deco scarf she had taken from Edith’s flat. ‘We’re all here,’ she told me in a stage whisper. ‘We booked two taxis on The Tuesday Club kitty. Edith deserved no better.’

  They had brought a wreath of lilies and chrysanthemums, which Mr Byrne took from them and placed on top of the second cheap pine coffin as it was escorted up the aisle. Just like a bride, I thought, wondering how Edith’s wedding day had gone. I had seen her bridal photograph amongst the items her landlord had tossed in the old leather suitcases. She had worn a well-tailored gown, in the style of the late 1940s, and a lavish enough veil, in spite of rationing and clothing coupons. Her husband wore a tight morning suit and spats over his polished shoes. They had looked like a radiant couple, affluent even. So how had Edith come to this, a pauper’s funeral? What had happened to Mr Woods? Was it Roy? I wondered. Was it down to the prodigal son? Had the father, unable to cope, just taken off and left her to it, to build up her anger against Roy until they pushed each other into opposite trenches? Was that what had made Roy hit his mother so hard she nearly bit her tongue off, his mother’s anger and frustration, the lack of a father’s restraining hand? My counselling training had taught us to look for a context. Even Dr Veil had said it could have been a family thing that sent Roy into the secure unit. Or was he aping his father? I thought suddenly of Chas’s remark (she had a forked tongue) and felt a flutter in my chest.