Remains of the Dead Read online

  The Remains of the Dead

  Anne Morgellyn

  © Anne Morgellyn, 2012, all rights reserved

  Anne Morgellyn has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 2012 by BeWrite Books at SmashWords, 2003.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  For Cara

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  About the Author

  Anne Morgellyn was for several years a London-based broadcast journalist, covering soft news stories in Russia, France, and the former Yugoslavia. She has lived in France, Egypt and Finland and used her European Script Fund award to spend some time in a rainforest house in Dominica - the Caribbean Island which inspired Jean Rhys’s novel, The Wide Sargasso Sea. After moving to Cornwall, Anne continued to travel widely throughout Europe and the USA with her young daughter while teaching part time for The Open University and for Exeter University where she was Creative Writing Fellow. In 2009, she won an Arts Council award for her blog topicofcancer.blogspot.com

  Her blogs and network links are at www.about.me/annemorgellyn

  Prologue

  It sits there alone in the dark like a peach in brandy left over from Christmas. But now I will switch on the light, to shatter its illusion of uniqueness, to show it that there are others. This region of the hospital is packed with the oddments of two hundred years’ worth of patients, all of them pending, not all of them great or good. Glancing behind me to check I am not being followed, I make for the Hearts and Lungs cupboard. There are so many jars, I know that nobody will miss one.

  Gotcha, I say, sticking up to him for once, knowing he cannot get back at me. I load the jar into the Liberty bag I use for vegetable shopping and make for the double doors. Outside, the street is smelly and damp with last night’s rain. I like to pretend it is the stage door of a theatre that I am leaving, toting my luvvie rehearsal gear, an eye out for autograph hunters, but nothing plays this far east. No one gives me a second glance as I quit the mortuary, except old Elias from medical records out in the alley on his smoke break. I jiggle the bag at him and hurry by in case he pesters me for a date. My dating days, I think, are over.

  And so I make my way home, my head full of Eddie, his heart under my seat. It rides the Tube with me, becoming slightly agitated on finding the lifts out of commission on our stop on the Northern Line, a line which Eddie isn’t used to taking. What am I going to do with you? I say, but gently, with consideration for his feelings. And I feel that I am doing for him far more than he would ever have done for me. Because Eddie broke my heart. It was trashed, binned off, trodden loosely into the topsoil where the cat could dig it out and sick it up.

  Now there’s a notion, I whisper, as we wheeze up the steps from the Tube, crossing the bridge still emblazoned with the legend ‘Third Term – Third Reich’, which I wish I had sprayed on myself, except I was on the wrong side then, marking time with the wasted ticker I dangle under my hand. We reach my house, its multiple bells and flaking stucco signalling its long establishment as common lodging house in this street of newly gentrifieds. Before I unlock my door, I deposit the jar in the bogey hole at the bottom of the basement steps where it settles, peevish and cross, in the gap between the wall and the communal washing machine, posing a question to which I know already I will never have a proper answer: why did I not put it behind me?

  ***

  Chapter One

  People ask how I can work in a morgue, and I say there are good days and bad days and days of grey in between. Just like your job. And mine does have its advantages. The dead don’t steal your parking space or try to take you down a peg or two. The dead don’t jump you from behind, except in horror movies. The dead have no delusions of grandeur. In fact, the dead have no illusions whatsoever. Naked, it says, we come into this world and it is sure that we can carry nothing out. Working where I do has given me the necessary respect for this bald truth.

  But the day that they brought Eddie in, I can say I was feeling a bit off-colour. I had clocked on at eight and spent the morning labelling specimen jars, a troublesome task which prompted me to think about my lot. My sort of job is commonly thrown to the swine: old lags, the educationally backward, or – in Germany – conscientious objectors. I know a German, in fact, who worked his national service in a mortuary, doing what he termed the civil job of anal seamstress. I thought that funny-sick at the time, but now I justify to myself that it is not so bad here, that my boss is well and truly on my side, that with my record, I am lucky to have a job at all, that honourable services to the dead are a better way of earning a living than some ways I could mention. Politics, for instance. The butcher’s trade. Stocks. Cleaning up after the dead is like cleaning up after babies. Life, as they say, must go on.

  So I tried not to think about dishonourable services to the dead as I labelled my jars. I tried not to think about the other jars, huddled shoulder to shoulder behind the distempered walls. We look after them, sure: the worms and the rats are no match for preserving fluid. But they should have been dust long ago, interred with the cadavers that contained them. They should have been asleep, not kept up in this airless dungeon which has processed corpses since Robert Walpole ran the House of Commons and Henry Fielding speeded up proceedings on death row. The Charitable Hospital of St Roche Without-the-Walls, or Charity’s, as it is popularly known, was founded in 1750 by financier William Fenn, a shifty-eyed party whose portrait overlooks the staff canteen. Having enriched himself on the savings of Bubble investors, the lemmings of the first stock market crash, he tried to atone for his greed by establishing this place, which still screams scoundrels and gulls like a Hogarth etching. In fact, when I think of what some of the scoundrels upstairs in their surgical caps and gowns have done to the gulls who lie down for them, dreaming anaesthetised dreams, my mind is as dark as that unquiet grave.

  I brooded on the store as I finished the stale samosa which was all the canteen could offer me by way of a vegetarian lunch. But it was the mortuary, not the jars, that required my services that afternoon. The lights were up full when I returned and Doctor Chas Androssoff, the chief pathologist, was stamping into his rubber boots, his crow-dark plait already up and netted. Chas is to the scoundrels upstairs what chalk is to cheese, as fish to fowl, as a whale to hammerhead sharks. But his bark is far worse than his bite, which means the scoundrels never take him seriously. He looks less like a senior doctor than a cross between a Russian priest and a Hell’s Angel, with fervent blue eyes like Rasputin’s. Living patients wouldn’t have him near them – not because he is dirty (no one in this job can afford poor hygiene) but because he is unconventional. And there is nothing so conventionally unchallenged as the medical profession, at least at this stuffy London hospital, which has been a law unto itself long before Rasputin was a twinkle in his father’s eye. But I feel all right around Chas. He doesn’t patronise me much, and he obviously appreciat
es the way I respond to his charnel house humour, suitably impervious, suitably unfazed, like a Hollywood butler.

  ‘Another one gone on the job,’ he said, nodding at the stiff on the section table, still zipped in its body bag. It was my job to unzip it. ‘His cleaning lady found him on the bathroom floor.’

  I started prepping instruments, an acid sensation in my stomach which I at first put down to the rancid excuse for a meal. A purple haze seemed to fill the room, which I attributed to the faulty strip lighting and the greasy windows several feet below street level. Chas switched on the tape and told me to look sharp. Sometimes, if I’m favoured, he allows me to close the corpses up after he has done the business, cause of death determined and duly set down, but I really wasn’t up to it that afternoon. In fact, when I unzipped the bag, I felt my legs give way like the first time I saw a dead child lying there, but now the purple haze stretched out its arms and broke my fall. There is a scabby little bump on the back of my head to prove I hit the freshly swabbed tiles, but I don’t remember that. Just Eddie: I remember saying his name in a slurred, gutted kind of way. Then, nothing.

  When I came to, I was slumped in the office chair with Chas’s chunky arm about my neck and something astringent in my nose. Through the frosted glass of the mortuary door, I glimpsed a rigid mound which used to be someone I knew – someone who had been very wrong for me. Then I knew my biliousness had nothing to do with either the hospital air or the rotten samosa. I was simply experiencing the morgue technician’s worst nightmare: being asked to prep the corpse of someone known to you. Eddie I knew all too well. In fact, it was Eddie’s face I saw now, superimposed upon Chas’s broad shoulders like Marley’s ghost. It was Eddie’s mouth, purple and open, quivering over mine with sight of tongue. It was knocking back a glass of pink champagne. It was laughing at me.

  ‘You want to tell me, Louise?’ Chas said, pulling off his hair-net and beetling his brows. I expect he was thinking, pig of a shift on Monday if we don’t clear this by tonight. We had had a glut of sudden deaths to deal with recently, as well as all the tumours and suspect organs Chas was supposed to write up for the scoundrels upstairs. They called him Dr Rush-off, jibing at his Russian name and his Harley Davidson. But he seemed to suffer them gladly.

  ‘You carry on,’ I said. ‘It’s just something I’ve eaten.’

  So I sat, gulping brandy, and stared at the frosted glass door, which became a kind of personal monitor for the scene going on behind it. Break through breastbone, pull chest apart like the seam of a peach, expose heart.

  ‘He only has one lung,’ I called, but Chas was already stuck in, the buzz of the saw assailing the firmly-shut door. It’s just a job, I told myself. Routine Post Mortem examination. We get a lot of coronaries, source of much hilarity from the collection men, who make snuffling, laddish jokes like how stiff was the stiff?

  I waited until I heard the hose, and then I forced myself to go into the mortuary. I wanted to see Eddie, even though I had long ago sworn to myself that I never wanted to see him again in this world or the next. As though death gives a shit where you buy your ties, Eddie, I thought, or fasten your aggressive braces with those little leather straps from Jermyn Street. As though death is some kind of gentlemen’s club.

  Slowly, I approached the table, my throat swelling up with ululations. For very oft we pity enemies. Eddie had been what is known in certain circles as A Fun Person, and I had had fun with him once, riotous fun, which went as suddenly sour like a bottle of dud champagne. Chas had already covered his ruined chest, but before I covered his face, I smoothed his clipped moustache, still more blond than grey, like the rest of the hair on his body. Then I lingered, wavering, until Chas put his hand on my shoulder. His gown was undone and the hairs on his chest were black and vigorous.

  ‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he said. ‘Put that jacket to its proper use.’

  Harley-man Chas always gets a rise out of my biker jacket, though in a friendly way, not mean like Eddie. I watched Chas wheel him over to the fridge, as it were putting him to bed for the night. And then I noticed the jar, solitary and glistening on the bench. I had often called Eddie heartless, now this was a physiological fact. ‘What’s this for?’ I asked Chas. ‘What was wrong with him?’

  ‘Embolism. Common as muck, though hard to predict until it’s rubbed under your nose.’

  ‘So why are you keeping his heart?’

  ‘This is Eddie Kronenberg, Member of Parliament, a junior health minister, no less, under the late-lamented leaderene. You remember Eddie, don’t you? – Private healthcare, only way to go. In view of who he was, and what he thought of the Service, I think we’d better cross his t’s and dot his i’s. Let’s get you home now.’

  I didn’t like the sound of this at all, although it would be fair to say that Chas wasn’t one for keeping viscera. In fact the numbers going into the collection had dwindled under Chas’s regime. He had been on and on to the Trust about the question of the store, particularly about the overzealous stocking of his predecessor, Dr Rudyard, who during the 1980s, (Eddie’s Reich, in fact) had removed and stored some three hundred uteri, all perfectly healthy as far as Chas could see. We keep the jars in the dark like the stolen eggs of rare birds, praying that no one will bring them to light. So Eddie’s heart, and the business of replacing it, was in the forefront of my mind as the Harley raced through traffic on Camden Road, the cold air forcing up under my helmet. I wanted to yell slow down, because however well things may have been going between Chas and me, I needed to consider this alone on the sad old sofa which still smells faintly of my landlord’s grandma. But Chas stopped off to get a bottle and a take-away. A message was recording on the answering machine as we went in. It was Callie from Party People, offering me a taster event at the bargain price of fifty pounds. Now Chas would know that I was a lonely heart too.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked. ‘Animal, vegetable or mineral?’

  Callie, it is true, has the voice of a man on a sex-change programme, the female hormones presenting. I explained that he ran a dating agency for quality people.

  ‘Explain quality,’ Chas said, handing me a glass of white Burgundy.

  Party People does not take time-wasters. Only the well-spoken pass the initial telephone interview. You must be under size eighteen and younger than forty six, unless you are a gentleman, in which case you must be over five feet eight and under seventy five. Statistics sanction this exclusivity. Statistics prove that men will not respond to size eighteens over forty-seven years old who speak like characters from Eastenders or, God forbid, from Coronation Street or Brookside since that implies the outer limits of the known world where quality is non-existent. And on an intellectual level, Callie says, there are millionaires on his books whom he could not introduce to me because they are just barrow boys at heart.

  Chas said: ‘We don’t live in a perfect world.’

  ‘Some of it makes sense,’ I argued. ‘At least he was right about the types I attract, like The Ratbag and The Weakling, and the one you did the PM on today.’

  ‘Ah.’ Chas fixed me with his mad monk eyes. ‘Not you and Eddie Kronenberg, MP? There’s quality for you.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ I said, meaning he could not know that Eddie had got beneath my skin as surely as the red briar rose I had tattooed below my collar bone, as though to disassociate myself (I see it now) from Eddie’s plans to dominate the nation. But it was an innocent enough mistake, I told Chas, to meet a man like Eddie through the temping agency I worked for which specialised in unambitious graduate women who hadn’t a clue what they wanted to do after college. While the clued-up ones bought power suits and had their hair cut in a serious style and competed for trainee positions in PR and Marketing, I carried on like a pillion rider, dying my short crop black and wearing my biker jacket to assignments, over the skirt, of course, a tailored stipulation insisted upon by our booker. I treated it all as a joke until around the time I met Eddie, when I was beginning to realis
e that the odds of finding a permanent job were stacked pretty heavily against me. At least I knew, from several recent attempts to secure an opening, that doors to PR and Marketing were bolted shut.

  And so I ended up at The House of Commons. Eddie Kronenberg (Conservative) should have been a short-term assignment since his superannuated PA took exceedingly short holidays, even working throughout the recess to service his business dealings. But in less than a week, I managed to undo the delusion the old bag had given him for twenty years that she was indispensable. No one is indispensable, Eddie laughed, and it never crossed my mind that one day this would mean me. I guess I was a talking point for him, with my punky hair and leftish inclinations: an incongruously comical addition to the ranks of Fun People – not just Eddie’s confreres in Fun at the House, but all the Funsters of his business acquaintance, those whom the opposition would later term the paper bag brigade. It started after my first day in the job when he peeked his blond head around the office door and asked if I was finished with typing that nonsense. He wanted to eat, and he didn’t like eating alone. So we trekked along the river and up to Kettners. Eddie may have already been an MP for fifteen years when I met him, but his heart remained in Soho. It was not, strictly speaking, cappuccino Soho, nor the bondage shop Soho that peddles rubber underpants with inverted tails. It was more of a good old boho type of place, circa 1959: an attitude of mind which Eddie shared with many of his contemporaries. They thought they were liberal at heart because they had stood next to Francis Bacon in the gents. They thought they would live forever.

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’ Chas asked, when I had finished my somewhat overwrought history.

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Say who he was.’