Remains of the Dead Read online

‘You know who he was,’ I said. ‘Eddie Kronenberg. Sixty-two. Coronary embolism.’

  ‘I mean who he was.’

  ‘If you mean he was famous,’ I said, ‘I didn’t think he was especially, except in certain circles. He knew a lot of people.’

  ‘So do I,’ Chas said. ‘I bet he was lousy in bed.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Circulatory problems.’

  ‘You would know, of course,’ I muttered.

  ‘He was a classic case.’ Chas ticked off the odds against Eddie on his long white fingers. ‘Professional male, a stressful occupation, smoker, drank far more than was good for him, high blood cholesterol.’

  ‘Best cut out the chicken tikka then,’ I said. I hadn’t touched my vegetable biriyani. I was thinking about Eddie, growing stiffer in the fridge, his sectioned heart locked up with thousands of others. It was Dr Fell’s shift tomorrow and I didn’t want Yorkie, her assistant, appraising Eddie with his bone-headed stare. Yorkie had served six years for a crime of passionate revenge committed against the lowlife who had raped his eight-year-old niece. He had come home on leave from the merchant navy, ambushed the rapist outside the pub and shoved a broken bottle up his backside. ‘Which puts new meaning into the job of anal seamstress,’ Chas joked. Dr Fell was a semi-retired incompetent, but she kept her hand in, as she put it, thanks to her younger brother, a director of the hospital. Her older brother was something high up in the College of Pathologists. Chas referred to them all as The Fell Monsters and was vehemently opposing their proposals to privatise the mortuary by franchising it out to an American funeral home corporation on whose board, it was rumoured, sat the younger Fell brother, wearing his entrepreneurial cockade. ‘Although I’d be more than happy to see them sell off items from the archive to private collectors,’ Chas said, ‘if it meant raising money for waiting list patients, which it won’t, of course. The Fell Monsters will just get rich on the commission they make from Last Rites, where for a few dollars more the loved one gets a shot of forma in the neck to spruce him up nice for his mother.’

  These things considered, I knew I would have to go in to work tomorrow to watch over Eddie. Chas was off to a Harley-owners rally in Hertfordshire. I had a fleeting image of myself holding on to his waist as we sped along those country lanes, then dismissed it.

  ‘I’ll call you when I get back,’ he said. ‘Don’t let this thing get to you. It’s par for the course in this job. Think of it as a rite of passage, like fox hunters when they get blooded.’

  But it got to me. Of course it did. I kept on seeing Eddie’s jar in the bathroom of the house which overlooks the garden square, a bathroom from the Deco age when Funsters like Eddie’s grannie would sluice themselves down in Mitsouko and imbibe a glass of something pink. Only this was, strictly speaking, mistress territory, the bathroom Eddie shared with I-Am-It girl Mafalda. And it was Mafalda’s Oleg Cassini scent, reeking of Eighties excess, with which I had dabbed myself to hide the vomit smell of too much Kettners pizza, too much pink champagne, and too many brandy chasers. Never mix the grape and the grain, Eddie warned, which is why I had stuck with the grape up the scale of its fermentations and lived to rue the day.

  I took ages in that bathroom, cleaning myself up and growing increasingly anxious in case he came to get me. Only he never did. When I emerged, overlaid with scent of Oleg, he was sitting with his feet up in the drawing room, smoking a full strength Rothmans and nursing a brandy liqueur. There were some old African sculptures about the room and a Roman head. On the largest of the five sofas sat an automaton with Negroid features. I remember that, and the first edition of Saint-Exupery’s Petit Prince in the bookcase. Absolutely my favourite book, Eddie said when I commented on it. Absolutely was a word he used a lot, as in: Absolutely, this is an age of relatives. And Absolutely, I believe that you should do whatever takes your fancy, as long as you don’t hurt anyone in the process.

  Mafalda, it was implied, would not find out. I can’t remember where she was that night, probably away at a conference somewhere, testing the tide of public opinion, daring to express the views that others might hold but not speak of, views such as: in a free enterprise society, body parts must constitute a legitimate item for trade on a free and unregulated market. Market Forces Mafalda was the absurdly young director of the Think Tank to which the Funsters of Eddie’s party would rally for gourmet lunches and discuss the campaign tactics needed to capture the votes of those popular shareholding proles who would secure them a fifth, sixth, seventh term, until the rising generations truly knew no different authority than they, and they became a shining, thousand year Reich. That was the way to do it, Eddie said. We don’t need gas camps here. The wogs will just piss off and live in Euroland. Mafalda was beautiful, well-connected, brainy, and earned far more than he did on the face of it. So what was he doing with me?

  I have never really fathomed that one out. In the cavernous Victoria watering hole where we used to stop off for a pint, I remember some deadbeat coming up to us one night and asking Are you two in love? – Not yet, Eddie answered, quick as a flash. And he bought the guy a drink. To Percy Luckraft, who was Eddie’s researcher at the time, I was known as the secretary bird, though Eddie always presented me as his assistant. He introduced me jokingly to Mafalda as a mole, a card-carrying member of the opposition. She failed to get the joke, but never took me seriously. Why should she?

  I kept seeing him hitting the bathroom floor, slipping off the loo onto unyielding marble. Was he naked, dressed? Was he wearing an aggressive shirt and amusing braces? Those braces were a talking point. As I handed the dim sum at a reception once, I overheard him arguing the merits of leather straps with Count somebody or other. These, I thought, are the people who run the country, these vicious amateurs. It was OK then to be an amateur. In fact, you absolutely had to be an amateur to be in Eddie’s club. Woe betide anyone who took things too seriously, who appeared to work too hard, who showed that they were trying. Percy Luckraft took flak for this, although he had to try really hard to cover Eddie’s tracks. Percy is a creative, Eddie would jest. Sensitive type. Eats toenail bread.

  Had he hit the floor right after his morning shower? Was that before or after he’d shaved, before or after he’d put on his Floris cologne? Eddie liked nice smells, even though he joked about how poncy they were. Eddie was well groomed, a Fifties dandy in baggy salt and pepper suits, updated with aggressive shirts and migraine-inducing ties. He would never wear blue, even though it was the party colour, because all those he dubbed the new boys and girls had taken to wearing it with po-faced uniformity. The Meritocracy, said Eddie. Pause for laughs.

  Maybe he was dressed down for Fridays in his black polo neck sweater and slacks and grey-flecked sports jacket, absolutely my favourite of all his outfits. Maybe he was dashing off to work (he always took the first vehicle that came along: a taxi or a Number 9 bus) and he got taken short. Maybe, maybe. And where was Mafalda? Gone already to the Think Tank, I suspect, because it was the cleaning woman who found him. Or maybe Mafalda was out of town, rallying the hunting faction who had so lately been licking their wounds.

  Or maybe he died in the night because Chas had said that rigor was already established by the time they fetched him to us, and the cleaning woman, as far as I remember, came at nine in the morning. Maybe he died in the night, in which case, was he alone (Eddie hated sleeping alone) or was there somebody with him? Someone like me, who just threw up and sneaked off.

  He had asked me if I wanted to go to bed and cuddle. And I said, Oh, don’t make a pass at me, Eddie, please don’t. Which was stupid of me because why the hell else would he have brought me home? After it was over, I retreated to the bathroom, and when I emerged, he had laid a dressing gown and toothbrush at the bottom of the spiral staircase which led up to the guest bedroom. He had gone to the room he shared with Mafalda and had shut the door. And I crept away into the night, as though I had stolen something.

  ***

  Chapter Two<
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  The first thing I saw when I got to the hospital the following morning was the undertaker’s van (navy, unmarked) driving off with Mr Byrne himself waving at me from the offside window. Getting to know, and getting on with, all the undertakers is part of the job, and a pleasant bunch they are too, in the main. But surely Byrne & Co weren’t undertaking Eddie? Eddie’s Post Mortem examination wasn’t finished yet, so what was Dr Fell up to?

  She was in the path lab, squinting at a slide. There were no bodies on any of the section tables, which confirmed that Byrne had been collecting, not delivering. Ignoring Dr Fell, I made straight for Chas’s office where Yorkie sat eating a sandwich. The store keys were thrown on top of the desk.

  ‘You shouldn’t be working today,’ he said by way of greeting.

  ‘Who did you check out just now?’ I said.

  Yorkie swallowed. ‘Straightforward coronary. One of them straining-at-stools.’

  ‘Did Dr Fell check him out?’

  ‘She was only helping Rasputin.’ Yorkie always referred to Chas as Rasputin, or, in ironic deference to Chas’s politics, the big red boss. Eddie would have had Yorkie’s vote every time: Castrate the raping bastards. Throw them to the crows.

  ‘What about his tests?’ I asked.

  ‘What tests? He was an open and shut case. I’ve seen the notes.’

  ‘Dr Androssoff removed his heart for analysis. Did Dr Fell replace it, or what?’ I knew she would not have done so. Dr Fell was strictly a microscope person, what Chas called a bench worker. ‘Did you replace it?’ I asked Yorkie wildly. At least Yorkie was a competent stitcher.

  Yorkie looked at me blankly. ‘What’s the big deal?’ he said. ‘It happens all the time.’

  My mind was racing. Byrne and Co took him. I considered how odd it would be for Eddie’s family to choose an undertaker as lumpen as Mr Byrne. But then I thought of Eddie’s wife, betrayed and bitter. There were others, too, who would want to bury Eddie quietly and turn the page. I thought of his lonely death and his ravaged heart and felt quite sick for him.

  I told Yorkie I’d check it out, and shut the door behind me. Still ignoring Dr Fell, who at any rate didn’t see me, I went into the store. Someone had been in there already that morning. Yorkie, I guessed, to sneak a cigarette, because there was a fresh dog-end on the floor. Eddie’s jar was still on the last shelf, an icon without any candles. I considered it reverently for a moment before depositing it in my bag. I get like that sometimes: a feeling as though I’m not really all there. It was as though a gap had opened up in my head through which I floated off.

  The rest of that day I kept vigil in my basement home, listening out for people coming down the steps with loads of washing. I was concerned that the vibration of the spinner would prise the jar from its hiding place and break my cover. But then so what? Were Rob and Ally, A-class fornicators from the flat above me, likely to know it was a human heart I had put there? Would Cury-Holmes, the shifty-eyed lawyer, who rented the drawing room floor? Would deaf old Mabel from the top flat who lived only for her television? We often found bottles of foul-smelling liquids dumped by the washing machine. People were always leaving the bogey hole door open even though the landlord warned us all that this would only invite the unwanted. I had had plenty of unwanted around the place when I was going through my wild abandoned stage, post-Eddie. The shit we smoked down there. The crates of dead men we left out by the bins till Cury-Holmes complained about the smashed glass. Then I was busted for possession, and my probation officer introduced me to the job with Chas, in possession himself more often than not. Can I really be doing this? I wondered, the first time I assisted at a PM. Can I be hosing blood off a section table and not be sick? But I was never sick until I saw Eddie ready for cutting. In fact, the mortuary cured some of my anxiety. I stopped having bad dreams. I stopped thinking everyone was down on me. In fact I thought of little but my work amongst the dead.

  But now I had acted against my own best interests at the mortuary by taking Eddie’s jar. Because of Eddie, I had committed an act of theft, another felony to add to the list of dishonest dealings in which he had implicated others. But clearly something had to be done about his heart. I couldn’t simply leave it in the store for Chas to pick at, then lock away again in embarrassment because he didn’t know what else to do with it. It was really Dr Fell’s oversight, of course, and Chas himself was more than ready to blow the whistle on that old ghoul. I would make it all right with Chas. He would understand. He had said himself it was a clot that had struck Eddie down, which Yorkie confirmed from the notes. In fact, once I had straightened out my plans for the heart, I considered them wholly ethical. It was the execution of the plans, not the plans themselves, that was bothering me. I was putting it off, trying to lose the idea of what had to be done in pointless displacement activities like smoking some of the shit I keep stashed amongst my CDs, and washing my two wine glasses until one of them cracked. Then I switched on my computer. I am not a chat room person, nor a surfer: games are my thing. I started the old Mac (one of Chas’s discards) and set off from the gate at Level Four, determined to kick seven bells out of the virtual spiders. Only every time my little Alias slammed open a nut, it wasn’t a shield or a sword or a health-giving raspberry she was finding, but Eddie’s heart chilling out in my bogey hole. She hit a real snag here, of course: zero health points and completely at the mercy of a giant bat. So I switched applications and logged on to Byrne and Co’s website.

  Enter, it said,

  We are Open Day and Night for A Sympathetic Service at All Times.

  E-mail us now or call toll free.

  The site was not secure, nor did I feel like discussing a matter of such delicacy on the phone with Mr Byrne’s telesales staff. I would have to go round there. I would have to take it to the top. Checking that everyone upstairs was out, excepting Mabel, of course, now safely ensconced in front of her boom-bang set, I removed the jar from its hiding place and toted it round to the undertakers, asking the taxi driver to drop me at the end of Parkway to save a few pence on the fare. A discreet mauve light signified that Byrne & Co were in commission. Keeping my eye on the cab till it turned around and drove off, I approached the deep blue gates of the funeral directors’ yard, much as my failure of an Alias had gingered the boundaries of the bat kingdom. Mr Byrne himself answered the bell dressed in a plain black suit, his silver hair combed flat, his chin smelling faintly of lemons. He had waved at and chatted to me on undertaking business for more than three years, but when I appeared after dark at the door of his premises his expression told me he was wondering how to play it: professional attention (the Deepest Sympathy treatment) or Are you behaving yourself, Ms Moon? which was his usual greeting to me.

  You are crazy, I told myself. Think carefully before proceeding.

  I slid into the chair he placed for me, carefully standing the carrier against the leg of the desk so that its contents would settle.

  ‘Mr Byrne,’ I said, ‘I realise this puts you on the spot, but I thought I’d approach you now, you know, while it’s quiet.’

  His face switched at once to Full Sympathy mode. ‘You’re not tired of Dr Androssoff?’ he said. ‘He thinks the world of you, Louise.’

  Spit it out, I thought. For Christ’s sake, just tell him we checked out a corpse without its heart. Like Yorkie said, it happened all the time.

  The undertaker nodded. ‘Your boss would not believe the facilities we’ve got back there.’ He indicated a door in the panelling. ‘Would you like to be having a look now?’

  It seemed as though I had reached a checkpoint here: fast forward or wind back to Level One. Picking up the carrier, I accompanied Mr Byrne into a room of sparkling white and chrome with the same lemony smell as Mr Byrne himself, only stronger. Eddie now lay under a green surgical cloth on which someone had carelessly thrown a coiled rubber tube. Mr Byrne removed it, tutting, and placed it on the counter by the sink.

  ‘Mrs Jury?’ he called. In the distance, I heard a lava
tory flush. ‘Mrs Jury’s come in tonight especially,’ he said. ‘She’s a specialist embalmer, trained by Last Rites in America. The wife doesn’t just want a simple plumping up for an open coffin, you know, to straighten out his laughter lines a bit. She wants the work to last a lifetime, like they did for Eva Peron. Unbelievable, Evita’s corpse. Grown men wanted to kiss her. Here’s another political figure, Eddie Kronenberg, MP.’

  A woman came in, wearing a fitted black dress, discreet gold cross and panstick make-up. She looked like Edith Piaf after a very bad night on the tiles. Ignoring Mr Byrne and me, she drew back the surgical cloth, exposing the wound on Eddie’s chest. ‘I see they’ve made a start with clearing the chest cavity,’ she said. ‘An elephant could have made a better job than that. What a fright.’ It was true that Chas’s stitching would have seen poor Eddie through a screen test for Frankenstein.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Mr Byrne, as we all considered the subject. He was both Eddie and not Eddie: he was Eddie Dead, and he looked dead now, not asleep. I felt sick, knowing he was about to be invaded all over again, and not just by big needles through neck and chest, draining all his fluids and replacing them with formaldehyde, tinted pink to give his skin a rosy flush, but the whole works. Yet even had Mrs Jury not been required, and I had told Mr Byrne what I had in the bag and he had given me a chance to prove myself, I could not have opened that flap of breast tissue and shoved back Eddie’s heart as though I was stuffing a dead chicken with its plastic-wrapped lights. The flesh of his torso was white and bloodless, the blood around the stitches, what we call degraded blood, crawling with greedy bacteria. I closed my eyes against the purple haze. Unlike those layers-out of yesteryear, who washed and combed and put silver pennies over closed eyes, the bereaved of the twenty first century are spoilt by the titivating niceties of Mr Byrne and Co who plump up the dead so that they won’t look dead at all. But I work with the dead. I know what a car accident does to them, or a cancer, say, or a lonely passing away in a basement where they can lie alone for weeks before anyone finds them. I knew what they looked like after Chas’s knife had been at them. Even if they had been spared all that and died peacefully in their sleep, with their wife or somebody cheerfully making breakfast, they still looked dead.