Remains of the Dead Read online

  But since I had willed myself not to talk, I stuck my tongue in his mouth and tasted blood-pudding, his tongue coming up to meet mine like I had passed an electric bolt through it, like a dead frog in ether, jerking to life. Best not to ask, I thought. Talked out and thought out – wasn’t that what I wanted to be?

  Afterwards, he walked into the bathroom and fetched a towel out for me, pretty much as Eddie had done in the bad time, ten years ago. I took the towel silently, and held it over my tattoo.

  ‘I bet that hurt, didn’t it?’ Chas said. His hair was greased back with sweat. He had a tattoo himself, albeit barely discernible under the hairs of his right forearm, a monochrome Hope and Anchor, fixed, I fancied wildly, down in some dockyard dive in this naval city. I had often admired his tattoo, or rather the force of those arms, as they sawed into bone or peeled back folds of tissue from a person’s features, leaving them featureless, divested of personality: another cold stiff.

  ‘It’s the coloured ones that really prick, isn’t it?’ he asked, tracing the stem of the rose where it disappeared into my sweaty cleavage. ‘This covers several square centimetres. I bet it took a while to heal. It’s nicely done though.’ He laughed. ‘I remember when I was a kid, sneaking into the Jacey Film Theatre – yeah, that was it. Hanging out with the dirty mac brigade. Blue Movie it was called, though by today’s standards it wasn’t even coloured water. There was this woman who stripped off her top and stuck a thorny rose between her tits. Grotesque. Of course, my friends and I were too scared of getting caught in there to get much of a buzz. I never understood the difference between erotic and pornographic,’ he added. ‘What is the difference? You tell me.’

  ‘All material to you, I guess,’ I said, shyly voicing my fears. ‘Maybe August saw that movie.’

  ‘August Stockyard?’

  ‘He did my tattoo. He did one just the same for Gaia Kronenberg the other night.’

  Chas was silent. ‘You and this August were really an item once?’

  ‘Hardly an item.’ I was clutching the towel very tight to my chest. ‘I was never even friends with him really. Not good friends anyway. We just sort of latched on. August was too stoned to be dangerous – I mean to, you know?’

  ‘You didn’t screw him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you screwed Eddie Kronenberg.’

  ‘Where’s this leading to, Chas?’ I said. ‘I mean, where was this ever leading to? Maybe we shouldn’t have rushed into it – into sex, I mean.’

  ‘Why not? It gets rid of the tension. Wasn’t I any good?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. It’s me,’ I said. ‘I can’t be very good, not now.’

  ‘Go and get your shower,’ he said curtly. ‘Then we’ll go out. Let’s go visit the sharks.’

  I couldn’t look at my body as I ran the water. I felt numb and ashamed, as though someone had been watching me throughout, someone passing judgement and laughing. Get thee behind me Eddie, I prayed. For God’s sake, get thee behind me. Then I started muttering prayers to all sorts of saints whose names I knew, trying to pick the one with the right speciality. The only god of the dead I could remember was the Egyptian god, Anubis, a god who had taken the form of a dog. Well, Eddie was hounding me. Would he ever lie down? What was it I had done to him exactly that could not be expiated after all this time? I had rescued his heart after all. And then this new boss of mine, this lover who had parted my legs and laid me open to scrutiny, had chucked it into a foxhole.

  After I was dressed again, we walked out to the lift in silence, climbing steadily down towards the Barbican. We passed the Mayflower Steps, which even at that time of year were surrounded by a group of solemn Americans. The new aquarium lay out in the harbour across a swinging bridge. ‘Not yet,’ Chas said, steering me past. ‘I want to show you something else first.’

  We skirted the fish shops and pizza places and turned down an alley opposite the Plymouth Gin Distillery. Chas stopped outside a door announcing R.O. Lenkiewicz, Painter. ‘Intimations of mortality,’ he said. ‘Now you see how fucking unoriginal your Stockyard is. This guy’s been using a corpse for a paperweight for the last twenty years. See that ? There he is.’

  In the window of Lenkiewicz’s studio was a picture of an old tramp. Diogenes listening to Wagner. ‘That’s him,’ Chas said. ‘The paperweight.’ He rang the bell to the shop, but there was no reply. ‘Pity Lenkiewicz is dead,’ Chas said. ‘He could have filled you in about your shitty little painter friend. You know, Lenkiewicz had heart trouble too. He used to invite people in to talk to him about sex and death. You’d have liked him, Louise.’

  ‘Did you like him?’

  ‘I never knew him personally. Stasia did. She went off him though when he embalmed the old tramp. She doesn’t believe in embalming – says it kills the planet.’

  ‘Well it can’t be good for the soil,’ I said. ‘All that formalin leaking into it.’ The foxhole rose up again out of the dark. I closed my eyes.

  ‘Not as bad as the oestrogen from women’s pee that leeches into the water supply,’ Chas said. ‘No wonder we’re growing a generation of fannies, like August Stockyard.’

  ‘Can’t you forget about him?’ I snapped.

  ‘How can I? He’s front page news. You sure know how to pick them, Louise.’

  We made our way back towards the aquarium. ‘I never pretended that August was original,’ I said. ‘That’s his point. He doesn’t want to be original. He picks and mixes. He calls himself a post modernist.’

  ‘Do me a favour,’ Chas said. Which is what Eddie would have said, too.

  ‘August wouldn’t approve of that,’ I said, nodding towards the Fish and Chip café outside the aquarium entrance. ‘Bit close to the bone, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe it’s post modernist,’ Chas said. ‘An ironic gesture. Give you something to think about while you’re eating your battered cod. Or maybe it’s just practical.’ He looked at me. ‘They’ve got to dispose of the dead ones somewhere.’

  Once inside, he headed straight on down for the shark tanks, ignoring the shallow shoreline with its pretty fauna and flat fish and the seahorses hatching in their darkened gallery. But I let him go on alone as we descended the ramp to the deep reef. I was mesmerised by the wall of water, the cod careering purposefully several metres below the surface, the agile ray, the lumbering bass. A huge fish swam from the rocks at the back of the tank and eyed me through the glass. ‘That’s Caesar,’ said an attendant who smelled of Brut. ‘Boss-fish, he is. Lord of all he surveys.’

  I stepped back from the glass and sat on one of the benches. If I closed my eyes, I could still see the eyes of that fish and hear the taped sounds of the ocean. I must have been there for some time when Chas came back to get me. ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  ‘Fine. I’m enjoying the show.’

  He looked at the glass. Big fish, big bowl, but a bowl all the same. ‘I thought it was the breakfast playing havoc with your digestion,’ he said. ‘You should come and see the sharks.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen enough sharks,’ I said.

  ‘Sharks don’t deserve the bad press. That’s the anthro-pomorphic view.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Like your bad apples. What did nature ever do to you?’

  ‘I’m tired, Chas,’ I said. ‘I’m sick of all this pissing around. I want to go back to London.’

  ‘Already?’ he frowned. ‘You mean I failed to press the right buttons before?’

  ‘No, you didn’t. I mean you didn’t fail,’ I corrected myself. ‘I failed, Chas. I failed to come to terms with Eddie. This thing with August, this display. I just can’t get it off my mind.’

  ‘You need some more food inside you,’ Chas said. ‘Then a good night’s sleep.’

  ‘I could eat on the train …’

  ‘You mean you prefer a Britfeed burger and a cup of coffee? It’s a three hour journey at least, not accounting for sheep on the line.’

  I let him drag me up to a Thai restaurant
on West Hoe, empty at this time of day, apart from a clutch of ferry passengers enthusing about the landscape of northern Spain. It sounded like the place to go to me, but Chas was lukewarm.

  ‘What’s wrong with England?’ he said, signalling the beautiful waitress to fetch us two more Singha beers while we waited for the noodles he had ordered for me.

  ‘What’s right with it?’ In spite of myself, I speared into one of his fish-cakes, and for my sins heard Eddie clear his throat: Warm beer, cricket, sliced white bread, the Queen.

  ‘What’s right with Spain? Have you been to Spain?’ Chas wiped his mouth.

  ‘No.’

  ‘They change their skies but not their souls, they who cross the sea. Horace,’ he said, as I stared at him. ‘The Latin poet.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t have time for reading.’ But I remembered the altar of books above the stable at the mansion. Dark horse, I thought. Dark horse with hidden depths, who couldn’t distinguish between the erotic and the pornographic. Was that how he had seen me, I wondered? A sort of spread-eagled fuckpuppet to be poked about by a prick encased in latex, the same kind of fabric they used to make surgical gloves.

  ‘I have a good memory.’ Chas nodded at the waitress as she brought the beers. Another waitress served the rest of the food which we had ordered. Chas could certainly put it away.

  ‘You can eat for England,’ I said.

  ‘I have big appetites.’

  ‘Chas,’ I began. ‘I’m not looking to be an item with anyone. Not now anyway, not in these circumstances. Being an item makes me nervous. I mean, it’s nice here. It was nice at the hotel, but it’s not the right time for me. I need to get back home and straighten out.’

  ‘Being an item means you have to trust somebody, right?’

  ‘Right, exactly,’ I said. ‘And how can you trust me, Chas, after this thing with Eddie?’

  ‘And how can you trust me after pinching organs to keep in my store?’

  ‘Exactly. I mean, where’s it going?’

  ‘Does it have to go anywhere, Louise? I fancy you, right? I haven’t exactly wanted to throw you over a section table, but ever since you started at our place, I fancied you. What can I say? You’re not the most beautiful woman in the world, it’s not that.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Well would you believe me if I told you were the most beautiful woman in the world?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right. But there’s something,’ he said. ‘There’s something. You sit well on the bike.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘OK, dismiss it, but there’s plenty of women who wouldn’t even get on the fucking bike.’

  ‘Maggie,’ I said. ‘She fancies you.’

  ‘Oh I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘We’re batting from different wickets.’

  ‘She’d have got on well with Eddie.’

  ‘Right. That’s what I can’t understand about you, Louise. That’s what doesn’t add up. I mean, an intelligent, let’s say hypersensitive woman working for a fucking right wing shyster like Kronenberg was. How could you sell out like that?’

  ‘Apathy,’ I said. ‘Let’s call it apathy.’ I held myself in check. It was apathy that had put me in Chas’s bed too. Which was not to say I didn’t desire him. I did. I wanted Chas, I wanted him. But this thing with Eddie, or maybe even before I met Eddie, was coming between us like a sandbag, like a bolster stuffed with sawdust down the middle of the bed. Maybe it was something in my bones? I couldn’t feel anything anymore, except the pain of August’s tattooing needle, and the pain when Eddie’s ring smashed into my lip. I had felt those things. But not pleasure. I can’t feel you, I wanted to say to Chas. Not even when you are offering me pleasure at the end of your tongue. So I kept quiet. I had promised myself no post-mortems with Chas, and definitely no prognoses.

  ‘We work together, Louise,’ Chas said emphatically. ‘Think Pierre and Marie Curie. This has to work out.’

  ‘You flatter me,’ I said. ‘You flatter me by putting me in the same boat as Marie Curie. I was thinking of Burke and Hare. They worked together, too.’

  ‘Sure, they did, and it worked out. Where would we be today without the Resurrection men? You know where medical training was at before they started robbing graves? A trickle of stiffs a year to practise on, and that was it. They didn’t know their arses from their elbows.’

  ‘Don’t get upset.’

  ‘You should be bloody grateful for Burke and Hare. I know I am.’

  ‘Maybe you should be grateful for Yorkie and Stockyard.’

  ‘Ah, but that didn’t work out,’ he said softly.

  ‘Body snatchers, body stitchers.’ I waved my free hand. ‘It’s all the same to me.’

  ‘Well it’s not the same to me,’ he said. ‘It’s not at all the same. I’m not a fucking crook.’

  ‘The Curies worked with radium,’ I said. ‘We work with dead people. We – you – spend our lives cutting up and bottling dead people. How can it possibly work out?’

  ‘Colleagues get attracted to each other, Louise. It happens all the time. The secret is in the management.’

  ‘Has it happened to you before?’ I meant before this business with Eddie and August, but didn’t dare say it.

  ‘Oh sure.’ He gave a sour smile. ‘Your predecessor was an Irish alcoholic with lung cancer. He came to us from Wormwood Scrubs. Then there’s Sara Fell. She rings my bell every time. But joking apart, we mortuary types are a closed circle, like the army. We’re all in it together.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t handle this right now,’ I said. ‘I can’t help thinking back to how it was with me and Eddie. He was the junior health minister. I was just the organ grinder.’ What price loyalty? Eddie had said. ‘I mean, it’s compromising, Chas. It compromises me. Unless I take up the offer of Mr Byrne.’

  ‘I thought we had sorted that one out. But maybe you’re right, Louise.’ He looked at me under his lids. I hadn’t touched my plate of noodles. ‘Maybe we should suck it and see.’

  He walked me back to the hotel, his large hand heavy on my shoulder, and ordered up champagne. I didn’t want it. I had drunk enough champagne to last a lifetime. I had filled my boots with the tipple Eddie called the pink stuff. I should have made my escape when Chas left me alone for fifteen minutes to fetch another pack of condoms from the bike or somewhere, but I hadn’t the energy to run for it, to confront those demons out there that lay ready to spike me with vexing questions. Why should it not work out? Was it the fact that Chas had said it had to work that bothered me? Why must it? Why should he care? What was it he wanted from me?

  Throughout it all, throughout all the sucking and seeing, I saw something else entirely. I was like the patient etherised upon a table, seeing but unseeing, unable to feel the knife going in. It was as though I had received a shot of forma in the neck, although I put in a good performance, I thought, worthy of the best of Mrs Jury’s painted stooges. Because I owed Chas. And the curious thing was, I was avid for him. I was avid for every single part of him. Every hair on his body I teased and counted; every muscle I tested for reflex; every vital sign I made sure of; every emission I swabbed and approved. And after all these avid ministrations I watched him sleep right through till a waiter came banging on the door with the breakfast he had commandeered the night before. Chas bounded up like a sprinter hot off the chocks and threw on my discarded bathrobe. There were two papers with the tray, the scanty tabloid and The Independent.

  ‘They cater for all tastes here,’ Chas said, handing me the broadsheet with a cup of tea.

  I reached over for the tabloid. ‘I want to read my horoscope,’ I told him. ‘What are you, Scorpio? Sting in the tail.’

  ‘You think?’ he said, running his hand up my leg.

  ‘Stop it, look at this.’ I had reached as far as page two where a caricature of a long-haired giant in surgical scrubs wielded a scalpel above the heads of a nuclear family group who appeared to be praying. ‘Angels of Death’, said the capt
ion. Running over the next two pages, beyond the busty blonde on page three, an indignant tirade railed against Butchers of the NHS. Chas snatched the tabloid from me and read in silence while I searched The Independent. A solemn discourse traced the aetiology of dissection from pre-Galen times, when it had been taboo, to the Anatomy Act of the 1830s which had legitimised the cutting up of paupers – hence the terror of a work-house death. Now, the article said, people were freely encouraged to gift their bodies to medical research; and while technically the storage of organs at Charity’s and other places was not a matter for the police, more regulation was urgently needed in the light of public opinion on the matter.

  ‘Time to go back,’ Chas said quietly, looking at me. ‘Time to face the music and dance.’

  The store is under siege, I thought. He is going to defend the store.

  ***

  Chapter Fifteen

  The wind was behind us all the way on the direct route back to London. We made one stop on the motorway, so that I could answer the call of nature, Chas standing guard outside the Ladies with his visor down. This is what sex does to friendship with the boss, I thought, paranoia replacing tension, a shadow-theatre of crude and twisted images that pop up to haunt you when you are taking the flak for this paper not filed, this slide not logged, this stiff not stitched by knocking off time. I had been there before, with Eddie. I had sweated it out, not knowing whether affection was in order or respectful distance. But how could you respect a man who couldn’t get it up and blamed you for it? Your underwear, Eddie had giggled. It is so, so childish. I think we’ll pay a trip to Janet Raeger. But Chas had the opposite problem. Chas was suffering from some kind of priapism. Chas had left me sore and reeling in more ways than one. I was glad that he wasn’t chatty for once. There wasn’t a lot to look forward to when we got back, except the battle at the hospital; and nothing to look back on, save mistakes. I wondered if he was regretting our encounter at the hotel as much as I was. And it needn’t have been like that, I thought. The pity of it, the pity of it, Louise. We could have come together with tenderness, not that rampant violent coupling, as though Chas was laying Eddie’s ghost as well. I didn’t know what to say to him. I couldn’t look him straight in the eye any more. But then I had felt cowed before Chas ever since I stole Eddie’s heart from him. He had helped me with that. He had concealed it for me. And I felt I owed him. But not with sex, not that. How base, though. How base and how cheap. Why couldn’t I just enjoy it? Enjoy a man again, a proper man. Lie back, Eddie would have said, and think of England.