Remains of the Dead Read online

  Mrs Jury took a gown from a cupboard in the wall and pulled it over her sweetheart neckline. I wondered what would happen if I just left the carrier under the table here beneath Eddie’s feet, like those separately potted organs entombed with Egyptian mummies. Maybe the cleaners would throw it out with all the other entrails which Mrs Jury would have to remove in order to perform the full works. Seeing her fetch the rubber drainage tube, I clutched the bag tight in my hand and said I had better be going.

  ‘All right then, Louise,’ said Mr Byrne. Then, remembering what he thought I had come for, he shifted into business gear and offered me part-time hours at £60 per shift, which was twice what the hospital paid me. Mrs Jury looked up contemptuously as I said I would think it over. Her expression reminded me of my mother’s when she told me I was not a lady.

  What was a lady? Eddie had often theorised about this, and about what it meant in terms of essential subject positioning, of gradually positioning me where he wanted, which was under his thumb, socially, sexually and, naturally, politically. Because, I mean, there is always a moment, even with a man like Eddie, when you hold the keys to the kingdom, when the balance of power is tipped ever so slightly in your favour. There was a moment when he was genuinely fond of me, and I of him. I saw it in his eyes in Kettners. I saw it in Mani’s, when Mani himself sliced off the champagne cork with his scimitar and Eddie gallantly offered me the flute of something pink as though he was holding out the pretty glass slipper for me to try to gain admission to the fairytale ending, before I felt the iron growing in my soul, and filled my boots with what I had on him.

  I walked up from the Tube, my eyes fixed wide upon the carrier, as though his heart could sprout a mouth to answer for what he had done to me. But it was obviously suffering from seasickness with all the promenading I had made it do. When I got down my steps, I shoved it back in the bogey hole, even though the shadows on the blind upstairs told me that Ally and Rob were limbering up for a late night session. My probation officer, who fancies herself as a psychotherapist, had given me a relaxation tape which I now tried to play; but this only had the effect of making me more agitated. Automatic thoughts of Eddie’s busted chest and Mrs Jury’s torch-singer’s smirk kept me wriggling and squirming in a way I could not will myself to stop. And then I started crying. Not proper crying, not the good, cathartic, system-cleansing stuff, just a helpless greeting noise. I could not label the feeling which came over me. It was like nothing I had ever experienced, black and pointless. I had got into a stupid mess with the jar, but it wasn’t even that: it was the uselessness, the sense that something was over, but would never really be over for me because it would never now be put right. It felt too much like unfinished business.

  ***

  Chapter Three

  Sunday was hell. I hate Sundays anyway since they always remind me of not shaping up. And that Sunday I hated more than most. The stupid thing was, I should have enjoyed it. When I think of where Chas and I were going, or about to go, before Eddie’s corpse turned up, made me want to flush his heart straight down the sluice. It was Eddie’s heart, not my lonely one, that was coming between us, that was making me balk at, instead of welcome, Chas’s attention.

  He called me at ten to nine in the morning to say he had been late getting back from the Harley rally, which was why he had not phoned last night, when he said he would. Then he asked me round to his place to eat the vegetarian alternative to his shoulder of pork, which just meant apple sauce and greens.

  I said I couldn’t go because of Eddie. Chas wasn’t having any of it, although little did he know.

  ‘He fucked up the health service,’ he said, determined to persecute me.

  ‘He fucked me up pretty well too,’ I said quietly.

  ‘You lived to tell the tale.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting I sell my story?’

  ‘It’s history,’ Chas laughed. ‘It’ll only repeat itself.’

  ‘Not with Eddie and me.’

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I know what’s it’s like. It happened to me once, too.’

  ‘It did?’

  ‘Soon after I started working at Charity’s. They brought in a girl I used to date, a suicide. She was in medical school with me. When they put her on my list they didn’t know the history.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘So was I, but I got over it.’

  ‘Did you do the PM?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I took some time out, like you should. Come on, come round. I’ve got some Moroccan black. It should be made available on prescription.’

  To cut a long story short, I spent Sunday afternoon at Chas’s place in Primrose Hill, picking at the greens out of politeness while Chas finished off the pork shoulder. I thought how different his place was to Eddie’s place, which was all about money and antiques, all the trappings of big-time fun. Chas’s place is empty, a bit like the mortuary really, with everything hidden away behind opaque glass doors, a domestic minimalism which sits uneasily with his overabundant personal presence, his hairiness, his height, and makes him more inscrutable. I don’t know what I had expected to find when I first went there, probably his bike in oily pieces on the kitchen floor. But the place is so pristine it makes me nervous, along the same lines as Cleanliness is Next To Godliness, which never fails to make me think I stink from inside out. I hadn’t, in fact, showered since the morning Eddie died.

  All the time I was at his place, I wanted to tell Chas what I had done, although I still couldn’t work out why I had done it, or what use there was in rescuing a busted heart. Chas had disposed of countless other organs which he judged to be superfluous both to medical research and funeral home requirements. The rest of Eddie’s innards would by now have been extracted by the awful Mrs Jury. But instead of pleading what I knew would be a shaky case with Chas, I began a heated attack on the provenance of the meat he had just eaten.

  ‘They don’t stun them adequately,’ I said, groping wildly for statistics. ‘Eighty percent of them recover consciousness, and then they’re shackled up and hung upside down so they have to watch themselves bleeding to death when their throats are cut. And you’ve just eaten one.’

  Chas had heard this sort of plea from me before. This time, he didn’t bother answering. He just moved beside me on the hard Scandinavian sofa and cupped my face in his hands. This is Chas, not Eddie, I thought, Chas whom I have wanted to hit on me for longer than I can remember; Chas with whom unrelieved conversation was becoming a bit of a strain. But he felt me stiffen, and pulled away. I told him it wasn’t that I wasn’t interested. It was just too soon.

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about the store,’ I said. ‘I mean, who owns these organs anyway? Who says you can just come in and strip the body? I mean it, Chas. It really bugs me.’

  ‘At this point I’d be lighting a cigarette,’ he said, ‘if I smoked tobacco.’ Pushing me aside, a little roughly I thought, he got up and fetched the lump of Moroccan black from deep inside one of the Perspex-fronted cupboards. He lit the edge of the lump then placed a heavy-bottomed tumbler over it. We watched the fumes accumulate beneath the glass. Lethe wards, I thought, remembering schoolgirl Keats. To cease upon the midnight with no pain. Chas offered me first hit.

  ‘I tell you what’s worse,’ he began, watching me gulp the smoke too quickly and choke. ‘What’s worse is taking organs from the living. I couldn’t do that, me. No way. They give the donors a shot of anaesthetic for form’s sake – because technically they’re supposed to be brain-dead, but no one has their story straight about what that’s supposed to mean. You see this massive reflex on the monitor when the knife goes in. The heart races, like you get with massive trauma. That’s worse, yeah? That’s just like your pigs.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said, suddenly fearful. ‘Oh Christ, Chas. Eddie was dead, wasn’t he, when you cut him up?’ The fumes were hitting my bloodstream now. I felt my heart rate soar as though I was whooshing into the air like some nuclear-powered r
ocket. Chas seemed a million miles below me.

  ‘He was dead all right,’ he said, inhaling. ‘I’m talking about living donors. How many of them know they have to be alive while their organs are being taken? I wouldn’t sign my bits away to surgeons at Charity’s. I wouldn’t want to be wheeled into theatre just before I bow out. As for those anal-retentive anaesthetists on fucking gas rations, don’t even ask. You can’t get theatre time for over-sixties with a reasonable chance of hanging on for another ten years or more, so who gives a shit about twiddling the tubes on the ones who are already dying? It’s a case of wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Then they pass them on to me to see what I can salvage from the rest of the cadaver.’

  ‘Have you said anything?’ I asked, with difficulty.

  ‘What can I say? There are less experienced pathologists than me who’d jump at the chance to work at Charity’s. Besides, there’s no other way round it. You know enough of pathology now to realise how fast these organs deteriorate, which is why I don’t have any problem with the absolutely dead ones. They’re no use to anybody, except me, and I don’t hurt them. Look, Louise,’ he put his arm around my shoulder, pulling me back down to earth. ‘The job is getting to you, I can see that. And I don’t want to lose you sweetie, because you’re good at what you do and I’ve grown used to all your little hang-ups. Get this Kronenberg thing out of your hair. I’ll sort out sick pay. You need a couple of weeks at least. Go and see your doctor.’

  ‘You’ll be telling me I need to see a counsellor next,’ I said, sitting forward.

  ‘You know I don’t have time for all that psychoshit, but if it helps, it helps. And you can always talk to me.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. But I knew I was alone with this, alone, as I had been alone before. Alone with, and because of, Eddie Kronenberg.

  I asked Chas to put me into a taxi, where I settled back in the seat and thought of all the cab rides I had taken with Eddie to Mani’s and The Boho Bar and all the other funspots on his ambit. Eddie had never ridden further north than Regent Street with me and considered NW3 a very suspect place, full of arty types and toenail bread. Michael Foot lives in Hampstead, he said, as though that put it firmly beyond the pale of any proper people’s settlement. Michael Foot, Glenda Bloody Jackson… I wondered how he had reacted to her becoming an MP. Get this out of your head, I told myself. Get a grip. You would be getting a grip of Chas right now if you had left all this alone.

  The heart sat heavily upon my conscience. I could bury it, burn it, chop it up and eat it, or chop it up and flush it down the loo. But it would never really leave me. I knew that now. This is a heart we are talking about, I reminded myself, not a piece of meat; though technically, of course, it was a piece of meat. But it had also been part of a person, a construct known as Eddie. Slipping it to Mrs Jury was out of the question. What she would do with it, unless Eddie’s wife had specifically asked for it to be embalmed as a separate item, did not bear thinking about. What did they do with them incidentally, I wondered? A heart was too big to put down a sluice. We had our hospital chimney, still puffing out its terminations and its tumours in spite of the Clean Air Act. And we had the store. Could the store be a friend to Eddie in this case? At any rate, it looked like the safest option. I didn’t want the jar in the flat, and it couldn’t stay much longer in the bogey hole before one of the other residents noticed it and put it out with the bins.

  There were candles in the table drawer. I thought of lighting one before the jar, as a sort of last rite; and then it could take its place amongst the legions of others. I would sort it out in the simplest possible way. I would sneak into the store and put it back, then I could climb on Chas’s bike again and cleave to his waist with abandon, without any blot on my conscience.

  That was the theory. Practically, of course, not to mention emotionally, I still had some way to go.

  ***

  Chapter Four

  I am usually up bright and early on Mondays, but the black I had smoked, not to mention the stress I was under, must have retarded my body clock by at least two hours because I overslept, thus having little time to sprint to work and replace the jar without Chas noticing. In fact, the first person I saw was Maggie Nicolli from Management. She stood talking up at Chas, her head cocked high above her padded shoulders, her heels spiking into the lino. If ever anyone embodied the dictum l’état c’est moi, it was Maggie. Chas was still in his biker gear, his arms folded across his chest, not bothering to interrupt her flow. When he spotted me, his face compressed into an expression reading silly bloody cow.

  ‘Is this your assistant?’ Maggie asked Chas, although she knew perfectly well who I was. Chas nodded.

  ‘Go home, Louise,’ he said wearily. Then Yorkie came out of the office, escorted by a man in a grey suit whom I recognised from his mug shot on the staff Who’s Who board as James Alistair McWhistler, head of hospital security.

  ‘I said, go home,’ Chas repeated. And to Maggie: ‘She’s supposed to be on sick leave.’

  ‘Oh indeed?’ Maggie queried, her eye on the Liberty carrier.

  I retreated the way I had come, the bag now glued to my hand. Elias was outside rolling a cigarette which he offered to me with a rueful smile, even though I had told him before that I only smoked joints.

  ‘There’s trouble in there,’ he said. ‘Someone been doing something he shouldn’t.’

  ‘Can’t stop,’ I muttered, and kept on going. Silly little bitch you are, aren’t you? said the thing in the jar. Running home with your tail between your legs. What is Comrade Androssoff going to say to that, I wonder?

  But I did not have to wait too long to explain myself to Chas because by eleven o’clock he was knocking on my door. ‘Any chance of some tea?’ he said. ‘Preferably with reinforcement.’

  I bustled round the kettle and fetched the dregs of the Napoleon two star he had given me for Christmas. What do I say? I kept thinking. What do I say? I glanced at Chas, but his face gave nothing away except the weariness I had noticed at the hospital.

  ‘Don’t you want to know what happened to Yorkie then?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. I was seeing to you.’

  ‘See to me then,’ he grinned, but without much warmth. He took a sip of tea and grimaced. ‘Yorkie was caught on camera. The evidence is irrefutable.’

  My heart missed a beat. ‘What camera?’

  Chas withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his Harley rider’s jacket and threw it across the table. It was an inventory, in his own hand, itemising sundry organs: hearts, lungs, kidneys, brains, even a three-month-old foetus. ‘Twenty-seven,’ he said, as my eye scanned down the list. ‘I’ve had my suspicions since Christmas, but the Trust only got around to installing the camera yesterday. They were on to Yorkie before I got to work this morning, but McWhistler soon changed his tune when I told him what was missing. Now get this. They won’t be calling the police, or pressing any charges. They just want Yorkie out of the way and for me to forget all about it. What they mean is the shit will really hit the fan if the press get wind of this, and I refuse to take the fall for those creeps. Rudyard’s nearly dead from prostate cancer anyway, and the Fell hag looks like she’s already crossed over. I guess this is what as known in certain polite circles as a scandal.’

  ‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ I said, and went to lean over the sink. Like he’ll believe you now if you tell him about me, sneered the item in the jar. The joke’s on you, Louise.

  ‘You should be in bed,’ Chas commented above the running tap. ‘What the hell could he be doing with them?’ he mused. ‘Maybe he’s selling them to Michael Jackson.’

  ‘I haven’t got a clue,’ I gasped, rubbing at my mouth with the tea towel. ‘Yorkie never struck me as the thieving type. I don’t know. He’s so intense.’

  Chas looked at me sharply. ‘So why did you go into work on Saturday?’

  ‘Because I thought you hadn’t finished Eddie’s PM. I thought Dr Fell would be taking over. I
couldn’t stand for that, Chas. Not the Fell hag. I thought I could put her off.’

  ‘See anything?’

  ‘No, such as?’

  ‘Kronenberg’s heart is on here.’ Chas drew my attention to the last item on his list. ‘If they’d started going missing from the back shelves, I’d probably not have been too worried. I mean, who cares about a hundred year old heart when left to its own devices it would have been soup long ago? But the heart of a former junior health minister, that’s hot, Louise. You see what I mean? Maggie, of course, sees what I mean, looking at it pragmatically, of course, which is why all the action they’re taking on this matter is to frog-march Yorkie off the premises with a one way ticket to the Dole Office.’

  ‘The hospital shouldn’t keep those things,’ I ventured.

  ‘If you mean the Abominable Rudyard’s balls-ups, I agree with you, but that is not the point.’

  ‘I wonder what the relatives would say if they heard you calling them that?’

  ‘You think Yorkie was acting on behalf of the relatives? Well, he sure is a man to bear grudges. Is this another message in a bottle?’ Chas put his head in his hands. ‘Don’t laugh at that, it’s not funny.’

  ‘I don’t know, Chas.’ Tell him, screamed my wound-up nerve strings. Tell him. Get it over with.

  ‘And here’s another fucking scandal,’ Chas said. ‘Byrne and Co are now officially a franchisee of Last Rites, the death industry multi-national where dear Dr Fell checked out Eddie the NHS slayer. This looks very much to me like their mortuary bid is going ahead too. Shares all round, I don’t doubt, for Fell and the boys.’