Remains of the Dead Read online

  ‘I never eat breakfast,’ I told her. ‘Coffee will do just fine.’

  While she was making it, I mapped out a time-line for Chas’s medical training. If he had studied at Charity’s on entry level, then he would have done his anatomy class at the school of medicine behind the path lab. I had seen the pickled cadavers they gave to students. Old cadavers, skin like dirty hide, completely bloodless. They took the embryonic doctors on tours of the store as well. So Chas had been familiar with the store in the heyday of Dr Rudyard. Now that’s a turn up for the books, hissed an all-too familiar ghost. Get thee behind me, Eddie, I said, in what was becoming a kind of mantra. But when I turned round, it was Chas, not Eddie, at my back.

  ‘I’ve been on to Maggie,’ he said. ‘I’m not to talk to the press.’

  ‘So what’s new?’

  ‘Jacques has been in touch. She wants a full inventory of what is missing. It really shouldn’t take her long to sort the bits and pieces out. The sheep from the goats,’ he grinned. ‘But the police are there. They’ve closed the mortuary, which means the stiffs are stacking up. Sara Fell is back on bench work, though she’s next to useless. Brother Simon is getting a visit from the cops, as is Rudyard. He’s only just out of the clinic after his cancer treatment.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I said I’d be happy to make a statement, which had her screaming come-backs down the line at me. They think I’ll blow the whistle on the lot of them. Confidentiality, doctor.’ He was mimicking Maggie. ‘You agreed to the clause in your contract.’

  He sat down at the kitchen table, where Anastasia served him a big bowl of coffee.

  ‘And where’s Louise’s?’ he asked. ‘She’s meant to be on holiday here, not washing your fucking dishes.’

  ‘I offered to help,’ I said in an undertone. ‘Just chill out.’ My cloth was sopping. There was still a stack of plates to deal with, but noting Chas’s mood, I left them to drain and sat down next to him at the table.

  ‘You were a student at Charity’s in Rudyard’s time,’ I said, as Anastasia hovered around me with the coffee pot.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘So you’d have known about the store.’

  ‘Of course I knew about the store. Everybody knew about the store. It’s a legend in its own lifetime.’

  ‘That’s why you came back to Charity’s then?’ I said. ‘From America, I mean?’

  Anastasia was looking frantically at me, as though I had dropped her in it. My face creased back at her, puzzled.

  ‘I returned from America because I happen to think more of medicine than monetary issues,’ Chas said. ‘It’s a gravy train over there. Besides, the bigger your pay packet, the bigger the insurance premium. You can’t sneeze over there for fear of litigation.’

  ‘That’s not exactly the case with your job, is it?’ I said. My patients are beyond reading your paper, Chas had told the derelict-reporter. ‘And what about the research opportunities? American funding knocks spots off the NHS.’

  ‘My research was back at Charity’s,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the oldest collections in the world. It would take years to collect the samples from scratch at other places, whereas at Charity’s, we can run a trial in months with all that old material. It was an opportunity for me, an opening, Louise, an exciting prospect.’ He took a sip of coffee and made a face. ‘Any tea, Anastasia?’ he called. ‘None of that herbal shit – real tea.’

  She scuttled away into a corner.

  ‘What’s exciting about it?’ A shadow crossed my mind. A foot walking over a grave. ‘What trial? What are you talking about?’

  Chas shot me a look of withering derision.

  ‘You mean the store,’ I said. ‘You wanted to use the store?’

  ‘I came back because I like London. I came back because Charity’s is a reputable place, in spite of the Rudyard and Inch regimes. OK, I came back for the store. I had a dream,’ he said. ‘I thought I could help diagnosis. Take cardiology for instance. That’s a subject that interests you, isn’t it? Well, Charity’s has two hundred years’ worth of hearts to observe, mostly from the 1800’s. The Victorians had more dead bodies than they knew what to do with. The graveyards couldn’t cope with all that infant mortality and raging disease. That’s what happens when you sentimentalise death. You end up with a surplus of useless stiffs. Have you any idea what the bodies were doing to the London water supply until they built the sewers and the new municipal cemeteries? That was progress, Louise, in the interests of public health.’

  His sister handed him a cup of tea and backed away. Like a servant, I thought, like some sort of handmaiden. What was going on with him and her? It was disturbing me.

  ‘Rudyard took babies and wombs in the 1980’s,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. And ten years earlier, the other guy took brains from schizophrenics.’

  ‘What other guy?’

  ‘Marian-Hynes. He was there when I was a student. An expert on neuropathology. They used to send over the bodies of schizophrenics from the old asylum. Under cover of darkness.’ He winked at me – an attempt at lightness which jarred unpleasantly, I thought, with his sour mood.

  ‘When you were a student?’

  Chas nodded. ‘I assisted Marian-Hynes. He was looking at brain tissue. He wanted to monitor enzyme activity in the brains of the clinically mad.’

  ‘Did their relatives know?’

  ‘I didn’t ask.’

  ‘And you came back to that? Christ,’ I said. ‘You came back for that? You call that research? Now I know why you didn’t speak out against Rudyard.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong. I did speak out against Rudyard, only Marian-Hynes had already put me forward for the senior post. I thought as chief of operations I could do something to stop the rot, as well as working quietly away on my own research. I did stop a lot of the rot, Louise. My shelf is empty.’

  ‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘There was Eddie’s heart.’

  ‘Are you kidding? You know I’d have put that back once I’d taken the samples. I’m not interested in viscera. I keep only what is necessary, you know that. Kronenberg’s heart was clinical waste as far as I was concerned. What are you putting me on the line here for, Louise? Don’t you think you’re skating on thin ice?’

  ‘OK, forget it.’

  ‘Hey Stasia,’ he called. ‘Louise wants to see the old princess.’

  ‘Oh Charles.’ Anastasia came forward from her Cinderella-station and looked at him sorrowfully. ‘Can’t you let her rest in peace?’

  ‘OK, fuck that, bad idea,’ he muttered, looking away from her to me. ‘I thought Louise and I would go to Plymouth. I want to see the shark tank at the new aquarium. We can see you’re busy busy, Stas.’

  ‘I don’t like zoos,’ I said. ‘It’s cruel, keeping them all in tanks.’

  ‘They’re a darn sight safer there than in the sea.’ He got up. ‘Come on then, let’s get out of here.’

  But I remained sitting where I was, with the dead schizophrenics. Sectioned in a lunatic asylum, Chas had said. A place of retreat. A place of peace. Then sectioned again, in a morgue.

  ‘Is there a station at Plymouth?’ I asked Anastasia.

  ‘Bus and rail, yes. And an airport. Why, are you thinking of leaving?’

  ‘Leave us a minute, Stas,’ Chas told her, and she scuttled away to her corner.

  ‘I don’t feel comfortable here,’ I told him. ‘You seem to have upset her.’

  ‘She’s always like that. It isn’t you,’ he said loudly. ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’

  ‘I think she’s scared of you.’

  ‘Of course she is,’ he laughed. ‘She thinks I’m the Antichrist, don’t you, Stas? You think I bring Bad Karma. Please come on, Louise, she needs to get on with her duties.’

  I followed him back to his apartment, where we got into our leathers. As I was putting on my helmet, he reached over for me.

  ‘We don’t always get what we think we want,’ he said grimly. �
�We all start out with big ideas, but they get smaller as we come to see the bigger picture. We grow up, Louise. We open our eyes. We put a check on ourselves. I wouldn’t do it all over again – the Marian-Hynes thing, I mean. I wouldn’t ask a student of mine to assist me with something like that, even a bright spark like I was. I was like fucking Raskolnikov,’ he laughed. ‘I thought I was Napoleon and Macchiavelli all rolled into one. Ethics were for the weak – for the arty-farties, like you. But then I got to see the bigger picture. That’s why I want to keep Last Rites away from our place at any cost. With a private outfit like that, there’d be no regulation at all, except the servicing of the Turner embalming machine and Health and Safety checking the ventilation for safe formaldehyde levels. For insurance purposes, of course, for monetary consideration.’

  ‘Forget it, Chas,’ I said. ‘Just forget it. Apologise to your sister. You never even said goodbye to her.’

  ‘Stasia’s a lost cause. Let’s just get out of here.’

  He brought the bike around from wherever he had stowed it last night. I heaved my leg over the back. ‘Look to your left, half way down the drive,’ he said. ‘There’s an iron crucifix marking the spot.’ The bike ticked almost to a stop as we rode past.

  ‘See it?’ Chas asked. ‘Nothing much to see is there, not enough to justify the fuss we had to bury her here. We had to get special permission, although nobody would have known if we’d just gone ahead and dug the hole, like I wanted to. But Stasia insisted on going by the book and making a big production of things, and so it caused a lot of trouble with the local Council. You can imagine what the muppets round here think of Russians, not to mention dead ones in the garden. There was a priest, a choir, about three hundred mourners, and the local paper turning up. They said we were a bunch of ghouls because we kissed the corpse, although that’s standard practice if you’re Orthodox. Vechnaya pamyat,’ he said, nodding towards the grave and revving up the bike.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Eternal memory. Oh well, she was a good old lady.’

  But as we sped away through the gates, I closed my eyes to what was really going on down there beneath the cross. That busy busy process: putrefaction, liquefying viscera, the insects coming in to bat; then decomposition, muscle letting go of bone, bone crumbling, crumbling, going, going …

  gone.

  ***

  Chapter Fourteen

  It only took us half an hour to get to Plymouth. We by-passed the city centre and headed for the Hoe where Chas stationed the bike beneath the Citadel. I took off my helmet and gazed at the sweep of Plymouth Sound. A ferry, bound for Spain, was sailing out to sea. ‘This is some view,’ I said, thinking of Francis Drake. He would have seen those Spaniards coming from miles away.

  ‘Marian-Hynes retired here,’ Chas said.

  My stomach churned. ‘You’ve not come here to visit him?’

  ‘He’s dead. He died last year.’ He smiled at me. ‘The last of his line.’

  I leaned back against the bike. My legs felt weak and unsteady, as though I had been at sea for several days.

  ‘Did you eat breakfast?’ Chas barked.

  ‘Just tea, and your sister’s coffee.’

  ‘Low blood sugar. No wonder you’re fucking depressed, Louise. You don’t exactly help yourself.’

  He put his arm around me and walked me up the hill across Hoe Park. ‘Let’s check in there,’ he said, indicating a huge Victorian hotel that overlooked the Sound. ‘They do a proper breakfast.’

  ‘Check in?’

  ‘You weren’t comfortable around Stasia, I could see that. I’m not letting you go just yet, Louise.’

  ‘But that’s stupid,’ I began. ‘Besides, it’s got nothing to do with your sister. It’s me, Chas. My old stuff. Just put me on the train to London.’

  ‘So you can get stoned and get us both into all kinds of shit? No way.’

  ‘What kind of shit? I’ll keep my head down.’ Believe me, I thought. If I’d had a hole to crawl into, I thought I would never come out.

  We were in sight of the hotel doorman. He obviously didn’t like the look of our leathers but Chas pushed on through the revolving door and steered me towards the desk. Once she had clocked his American Express card and his professional title, the desk clerk thawed to maritime breeziness. ‘Are you in the HOG, Dr Androssoff?’ she asked. ‘My brother’s with the local group. Off to the rally on Saturday are you?’

  ‘We’ll see. Will my bike be safe in your car-park?’

  ‘Oh quite safe,’ she said. ‘Shall I have your luggage brought in?’

  ‘No thanks, we’ll sort it later.’

  ‘We haven’t got any luggage,’ I whispered, as he led me towards the lift. ‘I thought we were just having breakfast.’

  The clerk had given us a room on the second floor, a room that promised a view. It helped to be a god of the medical profession. If I had signed us in, we’d have been at the back of the building, somewhere above the kitchen. My heart started to pound. My mouth felt dry.

  ‘What’s the HOG?’ I asked Chas as the lift began its climb. ‘Sounds unpleasant.’

  ‘Harley Owners’ Group.’ He pulled me down the corridor towards room 207. There were red plush curtains, a balcony and two queen-sized beds. I made for the one nearest the window. As I was resting my head, Chas got on the phone to room service. ‘Full English breakfast,’ he ordered. ‘Twice – Oh, yes, you can.’ He looked round at me. ‘Service,’ he said. ‘Why is that an alien concept in this country? I mean, it’s not because of fucking socialism, is it?’

  ‘I hope they’re not bringing bacon,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, and black pudding. Blood pudding. You eat it, Louise. You need the iron.’

  ‘I wouldn’t presume to tell you what you need.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry about Stasia,’ he said. ‘Mistake. I hardly ever go there these days. She’s getting worse.’

  ‘She seemed pleasant enough to me. You were so abrupt with her, Chas. I bet you were mean to her when you were a little boy.’

  ‘That’s the prerogative of brothers.’

  ‘Fine, only she looks as though she never got over it.’

  ‘Stasia fusses around me because I invested so heavily in the place. It’s all signed over to her, of course, signed and sealed, but she still fusses around me like I’m about to pull the plug. She’s like a hen on hot bricks. She gets on my nerves.’

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet her partner.’

  ‘I’m not.’ He flung his jacket into the corner and started stripping off his leather trousers. His hair had come loose from its tie and was crushed by the helmet. ‘You’d have got on well with him, though. Gustav’s the kind of guy who thinks a carrot has a soul.’

  ‘Maybe it does.’ I looked at my watch. Eleven forty five. ‘I’m not surprised they mind serving breakfast at this time.’

  ‘What’s mind got to do with it?’ Chas went to the door, yanked it open and stared up and down the corridor. He was nervous. Why? Because we were in a hotel room with two beds in it? Because we were going to go to bed in one of them? As in let’s go to bed and cuddle? Yes, I thought. Chas is nervous. That’s because he cares for me. If he didn’t give a shit, he’d have hopped on me the other night, when I was still cut up about Eddie.

  But I was still cut up about Eddie.

  I owed Chas, I thought. I really owed him. Reasoning this way, I slowly took off my leathers. A waiter arrived, wheeling a trolley laden with food. The bacon smelled so good. How long had it been since I had eaten bacon? Nine years, ten? It would be stupid to go back to all that now, to all that fat and scrapie brains, to the threat of CJD. But it smelled so good. I had had relapses, of course. Like the time I maxed out on my credit card with a trip to the Greek islands. As soon as I got on the ferry to Alonissos, my thoughts were honing in on a plate of squid and a lamb kebab. I had washed it all down with a couple of Metaxas, watching the sunset; an old priest at the table next to me clacked worry beads. But I
wasn’t worried by then. I was simply replete.

  ‘Try some,’ Chas said, holding out a forkful of black pudding.

  ‘I think I’ll skip straight to the toast and marmalade.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Then I made the mistake of switching on the TV. I thought it might be a good idea to catch the midday news, but it was a bad idea; it made me bilious. August filled the screen outside the National Portrait Gallery, a crucified Christ dragged by a couple of hatless policemen. The saviour of the animals was soaked with blood. Round his neck dangled the painted mask of a human face. I didn’t need the camera to close in on that. I had seen that face before, its mouth a carmine smirk, its eyelids dusted with blue. And then Yorkie was in the frame, chained to the gallery railings. Next to him, a placard bore the picture of a little girl with letters spelling RIP in tearful red.

  Chas switched off the set and went to draw the curtains. I decided not to talk. What can you say in such a situation? I wanted to get into bed with him and get up again a different person. I wanted to cross back over the Styx and regain the land of the living.

  As he stroked my breast and traced a line along my stomach with his tongue, I tried not to think about Y-shaped cuts, about the other flesh that he had invaded as part of post-mortem procedure. I didn’t want him to think of me as dead meat. I wanted him to warm me up. But it’s hard, when you’ve been dead, to come alive. If I just concentrate on him, I thought. I’ll be all right. Chas was hard and natural. He didn’t believe in complexes. He didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t see. He saw things pretty much in black and white. He made clear distinctions. There was death and there was life, Eros and Thanatos, necrotic tissue and healthy cells. His sister had said he was a dark horse. Well, I thought, there’s nothing wrong with that. Relax, I told myself, unfurling my clenched fingers and trying to imagine myself as an electric ray in deep, deep water – buoyant, airy, floating free. Then I remembered the dead schizophrenics, the skull cap drilled and removed, the brain tissue grey and contorted like old bits of chewing gum. ‘Chas,’ I said, tugging him up by his hair. A snail trail of saliva glistened in the dark hairs of his chest.