Remains of the Dead Read online

  ‘Hello, boys,’ Gaia cooed to the dusty-booted gang whose eyes were popping at the coffin. ‘Hello, Lise,’ she said to me, and offered her hand. Either she did not remember my name, or she was slurring it because of the alcohol she had consumed. Gaia, Eddie joked, could always drink him under the table even as a girl, his eyes very cold as he said this. ‘Well, let’s get the bastard up the apples and bears,’ she went on. ‘I’ve been just dying to see him.’

  August sniggered. ‘Apples and pears,’ he corrected. ‘Apples and pears is stairs, Gaia. If you’re going to be an honorary Cockney, my old china, get it right.’

  ‘China?’

  ‘China plate … mate. Simple eh?’

  ‘Want a hand with that, love?’ said one of the builders, coming forward.

  ‘No,’ August snapped. ‘We can manage.’

  I squeezed into the lift as August pressed the button to ascend. ‘Nosey gits,’ he spat, as the doors closed on the coffin.

  ‘Nasty boy, they’re only being helpful,’ Gaia drawled. Her musky perfume filled the tiny space. There was something of the cave about it, of sweat and hair and blood and pheromones. She herself manoeuvred the trolley through the door of her penthouse. Skins of wild animals lay everywhere: cowhide, Persian lamb. Across the sofa, the pelt of a small brown bear showed furry ears. What would August make of this, I wondered? August with his PVC jackets and plastic shoes. He unscrewed the coffin lid while Gaia poured us all a shot of Jack Daniels.

  ‘Here’s hoping,’ she said, watching while I knocked it back. ‘Put hairs on your chest, Lise.’

  August stood stiffly at Eddie’s head, as though greeting guests at a show, which I suppose it was really. But I was sick of it by now. It had been three days since Eddie died, and the effect of seeing him dead had now subsided. It was time Eddie was laid to rest.

  Gaia fetched a dish of peanuts and stood at the foot of the coffin, shovelling the nuts into her mouth and dropping some of them on Eddie’s suit. ‘He hasn’t changed,’ she said. ‘Same old sheepsie face.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ I asked, wondering how she could possibly think that the preened and painted features in there looked anything like Eddie’s. The point about corpses is that they are inanimate: all the nuances of expression, all the subtle shades that pulsing blood and quivering muscles can bring to a personality are lost on cadavers. A Roman legion of Mrs Jurys cannot reorganise them as still life. Without the benefit of the fridge and the formaldehyde, Eddie’s face would have been bloated and black by now. That would have been the ‘real Eddie’, whatever that meant, because I realise that my real Eddie was someone who had never existed, except in my imagination – which meant that he existed all the more for me. It was a kind of affect which I needed to bury: something abject and inexorable in myself, which Eddie had made me feel. His body meant nothing at all. I was used to the quirks of cadavers. Chas had trained me well.

  Indicating that I should take the sofa, Gaia settled herself in one of those swinging chairs, so beloved of Sixties trend-setters, but which always put me in mind of an instrument of torture: a hanging gibbet, say, or iron maiden. Gaia certainly looked like a figure from Valhalla as she swung gently to and fro, her blonde hair crackling with static.

  ‘Do you know the Internationale?’ she asked August. ‘The People’s Flag. La la la la.’

  August tittered and filled my glass with Jack Daniels. ‘Show her your rose, Louise,’ he said.

  I gestured towards the coffin, meaning to imply that this was neither the time nor the place.

  ‘I tattooed this red rose on Louise,’ August explained to Gaia. ‘She wanted to make a statement after she left your man there.’

  ‘Let me see, Lise,’ Gaia commanded. ‘Go on, let me see.’

  Before I could stop him, August was at my side on the sofa and pulling down the neck of the best silk T shirt I wore with my working skirt. I tried to push him away, but Gaia came over to help.

  ‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘What have you got that I haven’t? A lot less by the look of things. Clever boy, August,’ she approved, pronouncing it Avgoost in the German fashion. ‘It’s a beauty. Did it hurt?’

  ‘Yes, it hurt.’

  ‘No it didn’t,’ August said. ‘You just do a bit at a time.’

  ‘Do me too,’ Gaia told him. ‘Just like hers.’

  ‘You serious?’ August’s eyes lit up. ‘I’ve got the gear in the van.’

  ‘So go and get it. Lise can keep me company. But we need a bit more fortification.’ She topped up the Jack Daniels. ‘Keith Richards turned me on to this,’ she said. ‘So what’s your poison?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have it,’ I said, rearranging my clothing.

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I’m not a drinker,’ I said, attempting significance.

  Gaia laughed. ‘You couldn’t be in Eddie’s gang and not drink,’ she said. ‘What did he do for you, Lise? You weren’t his type.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I said. I couldn’t begin to explain to her. There were so many things I disliked about Eddie, my reasons for sticking with him when he fired his far more deserving PA were incomprehensible. We had fun, I wanted to say. But looking back, it wasn’t fun at all. I gazed at the coffin, as though that violated corpse could cancel out what Eddie had wanted from me.

  ‘There’s a wrap in that sideboard over there. Help yourself.’

  ‘I’m not into hard drugs.’ I said.

  ‘Me neither. I like easy ones.’ Gaia hooked the strap of her handbag with her toe and yanked it towards her, producing a mirror and a credit card. ‘Go get it,’ she said, flaring her nostrils at me. ‘On the top, beneath the knives and forks.’

  I went over to the drawer and found a tell-tale twist of paper. Gaia shook its powdery contents onto the little mirror and started chopping away at it with the credit card. But I had no intention of snorting or chasing, or whatever it was she intended to do with the stuff. Then August returned with his toolbox.

  ‘You’ll ruin your nose,’ he said to Gaia. ‘I’m through with all that shit.’

  She ingested the line of powder in a series of short, sharp sniffs, then shook her long mane like a huge dog emerging from a puddle. ‘You kids are so boring,’ she gasped. ‘You think you can save the world. Well, we thought we’d save the world too, but we knew how to have fun. You mean to tell me if I went to the hospital and some doctor or somebody gave me a painkilling shot, you would say that was ruining me?’

  She had a point, of course, in wanting to anaesthetise herself from the sting of the thorny rose which August now fished from his box of tricks. The lid was flipped back to reveal a set of inks and the tattooing needle. I remembered the buzzing noise it made, and the movement of the point as it seared under my skin, and the bubbling blood which mingled so quickly with dye. It had bloody hurt, yes, but then so had Eddie. You little cow, he had said. And after all I’ve done for you. Then my head hit the mirrored cabinet in his office, shattering the glass, and although I ducked from his next blow, he caught my lip with his signet ring, and that bled too.

  ‘Can I go out?’ I asked Gaia. ‘I can’t watch.’

  ‘You are shitting me,’ August laughed. ‘You’re a fucking mortician.’

  ‘That’s different,’ I said. ‘Corpses don’t bleed, don’t you know that?’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Gaia, unbuttoning her leopard-print blouse to point a magnificent décolleté in the direction of the coffin. August positioned the transfer.

  ‘The heart stops pumping. The blood just settles and the skin turns black.’

  ‘Go and get a towel, Louise,’ August told me. ‘The bathroom’s through there. Then you can wait in the bedroom if you’re going to be a chicken.’

  I kept him waiting while I splashed cold water on my face. The towels were a deep magenta, which would help with the stains. Ink, blood – it would be hard to tell the difference. In my mind’s eye, I saw Shylock, baring his breast for the knife in the most dramatic courtroom incident in fiction. Mercy
wasn’t quantifiable, and Eddie had always discounted pity as something for the wimps, for the boys who ate breakfast. He ate breakfast, of course: he was speaking rhetorically, in the hectoring tones of the Party. Pity had no value, unlike eyes or kidneys or other body parts which could stand up and be counted. A rush of anger hit me as I thought of my misplaced pity for Eddie. After all, he was out of it, as he had always been: aloof. All this, as ever, was My Problem. But then, a problem shared was a problem halved.

  I threw the towel into the living room and shut the door. Then I called Chas at the hospital from the phone on the bedside table. The extension rang and rang. There would be trouble at the morgue today, I thought, considering Yorkie. Chas would be venting his fury in meetings upstairs with Maggie and the Trustees. Terminating the hospital call, I rang Chas’s answering machine at home and left August’s Eel Pie coordinates with the promise of a treasure trove. Then, above the buzzing of the needle next door, I heard the doorbell sounding the Valkyrie theme. The buzzing stopped.

  ‘Louise?’ August called. But I wasn’t going to play housemaid too. I pretended to be asleep, a stratagem which more than likely saved my face from a resounding slap when they admitted Eddie’s live-in girlfriend.

  ***

  Chapter Seven

  I had often wondered what I should do if I came across Mafalda again. She had vowed revenge on me for Eddie’s disgrace, and I even suspected her of having had a hand in my drugs conviction. If Gaia was a tigress, then Mafalda was a cat, a clever, condescending bitch whose low-pitched locution dared all hearers to question its measured authority. Getting up from the bed, I turned the key in the bedroom lock, glued my ear to the partition and shut my eyes. It was unmistakably Mafalda in person who was querying Gaia’s unseemly removal of Eddie’s remains. I could imagine her Paloma Picasso lips and her sleek bobbed hair, her expensively-cut grey suit slit just high enough at the thigh to give fond hope to past-it Party bankrollers like August’s dad. Eddie had called her his Secret Weapon in more ways than one.

  ‘Get out,’ I heard Gaia scream. A throaty caw that came straight from the rainforest. ‘This is none of your business. Didn’t you have enough of him while he was alive? He’s mine now. Everything he had is mine. We were never divorced. He would never divorce me for you, you silly cow.’

  I thought this a lame insult, considering Gaia’s training on the silver screen. Jezebel was the obvious term of abuse for a conniving husband-stealer like Mafalda. How Eddie had enjoyed Bette Davies in that role.

  But Mafalda would not be sidetracked into a slanging match. ‘Members need to know where they should pay their respects,’ she said coolly. ‘It’s obvious they can’t come here to pay them. This is disgraceful. You would never have taken him if I’d been there. I told that undertaker. Eddie held government office.’

  ‘He was a crook,’ August put in. ‘You must think people have short memories.’

  ‘Do I know you?’ Mafalda asked him.

  Gaia was triumphant. ‘Avgoost’s daddy pays your wages, you tarty bitch.’

  That was more like it, I thought, though tarty was hardly the right qualifier in Mafalda’s case. Mafalda was a junior Iron Lady, a True Blue. I decided to dare an appearance. I wanted to see if the iron maiden could cry.

  ‘You,’ she gasped as I opened the bedroom door. For one sweetly bitter moment, I thought I had moved her to tears; but she quickly regained the power of speech. ‘It isn’t enough,’ she said, ‘for his wife to cavort around his casket, drunk, with some punk terrorist. His time-serving, completely-lacking-in-integrity secretary is here too.’

  I could see that she was losing it, so let her carry on.

  ‘You are possibly the worst person I have ever met,’ she said to me. ‘Eddie took you in out of the goodness of his heart, and what do you do? You sign a confidentiality clause, and then you twist and smear the facts about his work all over the gutter press.’

  ‘That was August,’ I said, giving credit where it was due. ‘And Eddie didn’t take me in out of the goodness of his heart, as you put it. I hired out my time and got paid for it, just like you do. My only mistake was in going against my own better instincts. I made that clear to Eddie from the very start. He made it clear to you, too. In fact, he thought it was funny.’

  ‘He isn’t laughing now,’ August said. ‘Looks to me as though he’d like to cry at his own wake.’

  We all glanced over at Eddie’s grim grin. ‘You haven’t heard the last of this,’ Mafalda said, although I couldn’t see that there was much she could do about it. ‘I am organising a service of thanksgiving at The Commons Church,’ she told Gaia. ‘I hope you will come.’

  ‘It will look funny if she doesn’t, won’t it?’ August commented.

  ‘I accept that the funeral itself should be a quiet affair,’ Mafalda conceded. ‘But you must accept that he lived with me for ten years. I have a right to be there.’

  ‘You have no right to be here,’ Gaia said. ‘He will have a private send off, family only. That means me, his wife.’

  ‘So you won’t even let me say goodbye to him without behaving like some superannuated drama queen? It’s lucky for you he has no other relative who might object.’

  ‘He does, actually,’ Gaia retorted. ‘And they haven’t objected. He has a daughter whose existence he never would acknowledge. And I helped him! I persuaded her mother to keep it out of the public eye. I mean, that man of the family party, who never would have children with his wife.’ She drew breath. ‘Anyway, his daughter knows he is dead and she told me to spit on his grave.’

  ‘How old is she now?’ I asked, trying to picture Eddie’s daughter.

  ‘She must be twenty seven.’

  ‘There was another,’ I said. ‘A termination. It would have been nearly nine by now.’

  ‘Bastard,’ Gaia shouted. ‘Abominable shit.’ A blob of tobacco-brown spittle fell forward of me, into the coffin.

  ‘Shame on you,’ Mafalda said, her voice loosening the chains of many elocution lessons. She went across to Eddie, but couldn’t bring herself to touch him. Then I noticed her clutching a gold signet ring.

  ‘Shall I put that on him for you?’ I asked, but she ignored me.

  ‘Go on, give it to her,’ August said. ‘That’s part of the service.’

  Without looking at me Mafalda handed over the ring which I slid over Eddie’s varnished nail. Then I stood back, arms pressed close to my sides, wondering if I should bow. But Eddie looked such a clown, such a dummy-faced clown. Mafalda rubbed her dry eyes. A strand of dark hair slid out of place over her ear. She pushed it back and straightened her shoulders.

  ‘People always get overwhelmed in these situations,’ August commented. ‘Pomp and circumstance, hey? The grieving widow and the women bearing myrrh.’ He winked at Gaia, who was dabbing at her bleeding shoulder with the dark red towel.

  ‘The Thanksgiving Service is at eleven o’clock on Friday,’ Mafalda said. ‘If you have any decency, you’ll be there, Mrs Kronenberg. Not you,’ she said to me. ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t dare to show my face.’ She looked under her eyelashes inside the coffin. ‘Goodbye, Eddie,’ she said faintly, and let herself out. Was that all she had to say? What could she say to the man who had shared her bed for ten years in front of his widow? I imagined it would all come out discreetly in Eddie’s eulogy. What a Party man he had been, in every sense of the word. What a diplomat, no edge to him, loyal to his friends. A gentleman of the old school. Bastard, I said, but nobody heard me.

  Gaia poured another round of whiskey. She seemed to suffer no discomfort from the half-baked tattoo; but it would take several sessions to finish the flower properly, each one, I knew, more painful than the last.

  ‘Time to wind up here, I think,’ August said. He looked at his watch. ‘You can go now, Louise. You’ve been a great help to us, thanks.’

  ‘But what happens next?’ I asked. ‘To him, I mean.’ We all looked at Eddie, oblivious to any plans, his jaw set forever in that say-ch
eese rictus Mrs Jury had helped fix for him. But if there is another plane to which the dead pass over while awaiting judgment, I believe it wasn’t very far from the Barbican then. I believe that Eddie was watching us from a kind of upper mezzanine bar, his blue eyes narrowed before the champagne flute, his bony knee twitching as it always did when he was under pressure. And who’s that tyke down there with you? he’d ask. He looks like a spiv. He looks like he’s been trying too hard. That’s you, Eddie, I told him silently. You’ve been caught with your pants down and no mistake. Who’s sorry now?

  ‘Where’s your purse?’ August said to Gaia. ‘I told Louise you’d give her a big tip.’

  ‘Yes, of course you did, darling.’ Gaia bent down to rummage again in her copious handbag. ‘Take it, Lise,’ she said, offering me a fistful of ten pound notes.

  ‘I want to know what’s happening to Eddie,’ I said doggedly.

  ‘Family only, didn’t you hear?’ August said. ‘Try crashing the thanksgiving service. You might catch up with some old colleagues.’

  ‘I mean where are you putting him?’ I said. ‘I take it cremation’s out, and you haven’t got a garden here.’

  ‘He’ll be well taken care of, don’t worry.’ August started scratching his nose and digging in his ear, sure signs that I was beginning to needle him.

  ‘Isn’t it enough?’ Gaia asked, peering at the wad of notes in my open hand. ‘Here, have more.’

  ‘I’d like to know where he’ll be,’ I insisted. ‘I might like to visit him, if that’s OK.’

  ‘No, it isn’t OK,’ August snapped. ‘You’ll get to know, OK? But not now.’

  The Valkyrie motif sounded again. ‘Just go, please,’ August flapped his hands. ‘Go, go, go. We won’t leave it so long next time, Louise. I promise you.’