Remains of the Dead Read online

  Realising how useless it was to protest, I pocketed the notes and went to the door. To my amazement Yorkie was outside, looking nervously down the corridor. He pushed straight into the apartment without acknowledging me. ‘I was waiting at Zygo Junction,’ he told August. ‘You should have called at seven. We had an arrangement.’

  August came up to the door and propelled me through it. ‘Come up and see me sometime, Lise,’ I heard Gaia call. ‘We’ll have fun.’

  ***

  Chapter Eight

  I made my way to the lift through a mental fug. Where to go from here, what should I do? What could I do? What effect could I have on the situation, and why should I care? I had been still life myself after Eddie sent me to arrange that termination. I had been still life until I got to working with the dead. The dead make you see how alive you really are. The dead make no bones about that. I owed the dead, I thought. I really owed them.

  The lift discharged me into the ground floor entrance hall, its thick glass frontage reflecting the glittering lake. Theatre goers were pouring away from the current Shakespeare, their faces mirroring the tragic fallout. Just like my face must look, I thought: a study in horror. ‘Always excellent value for money,’ one man commented, shucking his shoulders into his overcoat. ‘I wonder how many gallons they pump into that?’

  I followed his gaze to the artificial lake and the floodlit fountains which gave it an illusion of life. But The Barbican development was far less thrusting, far less aggressive than the phallic sky probes of Docklands, or all those cock-and-balls shaped atrium windows favoured by the architects of Eddie’s decade. Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, I murmured, as though invoking his name in a guilty compassionate whine could mitigate what Yorkie had done, what I had done to the dead. August had lectured me once about the human body being like a cart: an aggregate of component parts and nothing more. And while this was true on a purely functional level (Chas would second that), this utilitarian thinking could not allow for personally-invested meaning, for what I persisted in thinking of as spirit, essence, shadow. There was a shadow behind me, cast by the lights of the lake, and icy hands on my shoulder, like the ghosts of those who had been pilfered, whose spirits could not rest because their mortal remains were still in bits. Why had Yorkie done it? I couldn’t believe he had stolen the organs for money. For money to buy alcohol, maybe. Yorkie was the kind who needed help forgetting, something to deaden the spirits of the dead. When Yorkie drank, he turned into a zombie. I hadn’t done it for that. I had taken Eddie’s heart because I wanted it put back. I wanted to bury all of Eddie. I wanted Eddie’s corpse to lie still.

  There was not a telephone box in sight. Pushing my way through the crowd of show-goers, I at last located a phone in a nearby wine-bar. The phone rang and rang, which meant the answering machine was off so he must have picked up his messages; but Chas wasn’t answering in person. Then I remembered the wad of tenners I had in my pocket and walked as fast as I could to the taxi rank at Liverpool Street Station where I took a cab to Chas’s house. The windows were dark. I’d had a wasted journey. Counting what remained of the tenners and discovering I still had a hundred and ninety pounds, I hailed the cab again as it was turning round, and directed the driver to Eel Pie Island.

  ‘You’re lucky I live over that way,’ he said, and drove me in a grudging silence. In ordinary circumstances this wouldn’t have bothered me, but a steady barrage of cab chat now would have been far preferable to the battery of questions I threw at myself. What would I do when I got there? What would August do to me? What would Yorkie do? At best, they would throw me out. At worst … You’re throwing your life away on a crooked stiff, August would tell me. But this wasn’t just about Eddie. This was about the store. I convinced myself that I was on a mission. A desperate mission to put things right with Chas. And I was probably doomed to fail.

  As the willow-bordered reaches of the river came in sight, the driver attempted a monologue. ‘I remember Eel Pie Island how it used to be,’ he said. ‘Proper den of iniquity it was in the old days. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards – they all used to go and get stoned over there. And the girls. Mini skirts you never saw the like of. They don’t make them like that any more.’ I made no comment. ‘I’ll have to stop at the bridge,’ he said shortly. ‘No motors allowed.’

  I handed him what he demanded and told him not to bother with the change. The timbers of the bridge creaked in the wind. The night was getting wilder. I pulled up the collar of my jacket and picked my way onto the boards in the high-heeled court shoes I had worn to work at Mr Byrne’s. Then I noticed a top of the range Harley parked lower down the embankment. I knew it was Chas’s bike when Chas himself came back over the bridge towards me.

  ‘Thank God,’ I said. ‘You got the message then?’

  ‘I got the message all right.’ He looked at me stonily.

  ‘He lives over the other side, behind the trees,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they’re here yet. I can’t see the van.’

  ‘Who can’t be here? Start again.’

  ‘Yorkie and August Stockyard. I know what’s happened to the missing specimens. August is planning an art show called Endings. It’s all about dead bodies.’ Chas looked impassive. ‘I’ve been with Eddie’s wife,’ I said. ‘When Yorkie turned up too about an hour ago, I worked out he must have stolen the organs for August to use in the show.’

  Chas laughed suddenly, short but not sweet. ‘So what’s your role in this horror show?’

  I swallowed hard. This was going to take some explaining. ‘I haven’t seen August for years,’ I said. ‘He was round at Mr Byrne’s today, taking Eddie’s death mask, which is how I got involved in helping him move Eddie to his wife’s place. I had to go, Chas, knowing the kind of person August is. I mean, how he felt about Eddie. It was August who phoned The Star about Eddie’s questions in Parliament about subsidising the meat industry. So much for paper bags. Eddie was given shares in Britfeed – you know, the plant that mixed the scrapie brains with cement to feed to cattle? August is prepared to bomb anyone who experiments on so much as a mouse, but he won’t swat a fly because of animal rights. Funnily enough, it was Eddie who introduced us. August’s dad was a friend of The Party. You must have heard of the Assisi Brigade?’

  Chas laughed. ‘St Francis never carried a Kalashnikov.’

  ‘It wasn’t funny, Chas. A woman was crippled.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Chas frowned. ‘So revenons à nos moutons. Stockyard’s lucky to have a friend like you to source his material for him.’

  ‘Political material, yes,’ I said. ‘The Britfeed payoff to Eddie was legitimate ammunition as far as I was concerned. There he was, cutting back on NHS funding while the rotten company that was paying him his backhanders was infecting the nation with CJD-filled meat. But not the organs, Chas,’ I said, swiftly changing tack. ‘That was Yorkie.’

  ‘BSE,’ Chas corrected. ‘It only becomes CJD when it jumps the species barrier.’

  Rain started to fall. He steered me to shelter beneath the willows, his breath coming up in deep pulls. I would have to tell him now about the heart. I sensed it was now or never.

  ‘Just so as there are no more misunderstandings between us, I did take one thing from the store,’ I said. ‘Eddie Kronenberg’s heart. But not for August. For me. Seeing Eddie like that, without his heart, it made me freak.’ I had a sickening vision of Eddie’s chest peeled open to the neck, a sight which Chas had actually spared me.

  ‘It was after Yorkie told me Dr Fell had checked him out,’ I went on. ‘I went into the store and took his heart because I knew you’d forget all about it. It was useless, Chas. You didn’t want it. Anyway, I took it round to Byrne’s place, but I couldn’t go through with it. And as it turned out, they were having him embalmed. I didn’t tell Mr Byrne I had the heart. He just offered me a job because he likes me.’

  ‘You made a smart career move there,’ Chas interjected. ‘It looks like Byrne and Co are taking over the mortuary. Over my dead body.’
/>   ‘I’m not really going to work there,’ I said. ‘I just wanted Eddie buried. I had good reason for that, Chas. Maybe I’ll tell you about that someday.’ Chas was inscrutable beneath the dripping willows. ‘I had no idea that August would be there this afternoon,’ I went on. ‘That was what Mr Byrne phoned up about when you were round at my place. That was the special request. Eddie would have had a fit if he’d known Gaia was letting August mess about with him after all that happened. I mean, it destroyed Eddie politically, election or no election.’

  ‘So how did Yorkie get to know this August creep? Went to school together, did they?’

  I had already considered this. ‘They could have met in the nick. I told you, August has done time for planting bombs. Unless it was through Dr Fell. Apparently, her little brother Simon is another friend of August’s father.’

  Chas nodded. ‘And I suppose you know it’s Simon Fell who’s trying to push the privatisation?’ he said. ‘As though you can privatise a public morgue. What happens if the relatives can’t pay? What happens if there are no relatives? Do we refuse to write up specimens because their donors are too fucking broke to merit treatment? Do we stack the pauper stiffs out by the bins? This is not going to happen, Louise,’ he flared. ‘You tell your Simon Fell and your fucking August Stockyard. If I have to lock myself into the mortuary and go on hunger strike, I’ll do it. This is still supposed to be the land of the fucking free. If I’d known this kind of thing was on the cards back here, I’d have stayed where I was when I finished my post-grad year at Harvard. I’m not in this game for the money, Louise. So what have you done with Kronenberg’s heart? Were you planning to sell it perhaps? I guess he’d approve of that. Pity it wasn’t a fresh one. Fifty thousand dollars for a heart over the internet, and rising.’

  ‘I want to bury it,’ I said. ‘It’s at my flat. Well, not in the flat. I couldn’t bring myself to take it in. Look, I know I can’t make you believe me, Chas, but I swear Eddie’s heart was the only one I took. I’m sorry I took it. I just wanted to put an end to it. I wanted to put it to rest. Will you believe me?’ I asked. ‘Just so there’s no more misunderstandings.’

  ‘Oh, there’ll be no more misunderstandings,’ he said. ‘You can count on it. So what’s happening now, with this Stockyard?’

  I led him along the muddy path to August’s piece of the island. Rain gushed down from the rotten gables of the studio, the gutters and drains choked with leaves. My shoes were like paper boats, sodden and wrecked. I slipped on the wooden steps which led up to the entrance. But Chas was right behind me.

  ‘You’ve laddered your tights,’ he said.

  ‘So smile. It can’t get worse.’

  ‘It just did.’ He hammered on the door, but no one came. The place was in darkness and apparently unoccupied. We went round to the back where a window jutted open on the latch.

  ‘We can try climbing in,’ I suggested. ‘If anyone asks, we can say we’re friends of August’s.’

  Chas frowned. ‘Remind me why we are doing this?’

  ‘For the organs,’ I said. ‘We’re looking for the evidence.’

  ‘What makes you think I want anything to do with this?’

  ‘You’re here for me, right?’ I said, putting my hand on his arm. ‘I mean, you came to check I was all right, didn’t you?’

  He stepped away from me again. ‘And supposing this August turns up?’

  ‘You’ll make three of him,’ I said.

  ‘And Yorkie makes two of me.’

  ‘It doesn’t look as though they’re coming,’ I argued. ‘They would have been here by now. They may have been and gone.’ With Eddie, I thought, although now I had confessed to Chas about Eddie’s heart, I felt less bad about what happened to the rest of him.

  ‘All right,’ Chas said. ‘You go through the window and open the door. I’m not prepared to break in.’

  There was quite a drop from the window ledge down to the studio floor, but I kicked off my shoes and managed the jump without falling. The studio was big and dark, and in groping my way across it, I kicked something over which smashed and spilled. Skidding over whatever it was I had disturbed (a human liver or a baby’s lungs?) I proceeded to feel my way like a bomb disposal officer, step by blood-chilling step.

  ‘Louise?’ Chas called from outside, his muffled voice giving me direction. At last I felt the shape of the door and clawed at shoulder height for the light switch. It was positioned just below a shelf on which I bumped my head, dislodging a jar of brushes and showering myself with a fluid that smelled like turps. Then I found the switch and unlocked the door.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Chas said, looking beyond me into the studio.

  The first thing that struck me was an original Assisi Brigade poster depicting a life-size pig hung upside down and bleeding from its throat into a pit of gore. This was old material of August’s, but it still packed a gut-churning punch. Below the poster was a trestle table supporting a few half-modelled clay heads and what appeared to be a real human skull painted green and wearing a sort of toupee which closer inspection revealed to be liver. Chas touched it. ‘Tacky,’ he said. ‘Very tacky.’

  I looked beyond an empty coffin, beyond a rack of pink and blue shrouds, beyond a coil of rubber tubing. And there, in a dark corner, I found what I was seeking. There, a group of neatly-labelled jars were huddled comfortingly close together, like scared nocturnal creatures hiding from the light. One of them contained a tiny humanoid form. The purple haze hit me again as I thought of the termination, specifically the child Eddie had forced to be terminated. He had said he would pay.

  ‘Congenital defects of some sort,’ Chas said, picking up the jar and shaking it slightly so that the foetus shivered in its pickling fluid. ‘This looks like one of ours certainly. So what do we do with them?’ he said to me. ‘I can’t take them all on the bike.’

  I couldn’t see for the purple haze. I sat down on the filthy chaise longue on which August had failed to seduce me years ago. Chas had put down the jar with the baby and was examining the liver toupee on the skull.

  ‘This looks like pig’s. It’s hard to tell without taking a sample.’

  A computer terminal winked on standby from another trestle in the corner of the room. Chas clicked the mouse and the machine revved up, bringing a page of text onto the screen. ‘This looks like a press release,’ he said. ‘I suppose you know what it says.’

  ‘No, I don’t know,’ I insisted. ‘I told you, Chas. This is news to me too. I think it’s disgusting.’

  ‘You’d have preferred these to stay in the store then?’ he asked. ‘Even though you don’t approve of it, or me?’ He was reading the screen. ‘Just listen to this: Embargoed for 1 November, All Souls’ Day. That’s two days from now.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Looks like the dead are going to rise on Hallowe’en. He’s calling it Unhappy Endings:

  “A SIMULTANEOUS PRESENTATION AT TRAFALGAR SQUARE, THAMES EMBANKMENT AND THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY. AN EXHUMATION OF CONTEMPORARY FUNERAL PRACTICE BY INSTALLATION ARTIST AUGUST ALEXANDER STOCKYARD.”

  Chas laughed. ‘Do me a favour.’

  I began to shiver. ‘That’s where they’ve taken Eddie.’

  ‘Do you think we should call the police? Or would that compromise your confession?’

  ‘I’ve confessed to all I did,’ I said, becoming weary of this. ‘Maybe we should just let them get on with it.’

  ‘Maybe we should … Listen.’ He had scrolled to the next screen and was reading the rest of the release:

  “THE INSTALLATION WILL HIGHLIGHT THE PROFITEERING AND POLLUTIONARY PRACTICES OF FUNERAL HOMES. NATIONAL HEALTH HOSPITALS ARE ABOUT TO CASH IN ON THIS GAME BY TIPPING OFF THE BIG BOYS OF THE FUNERAL BUSINESS ON A STIFF COMMISSION BASIS. THUS VULNERABLE AND GRIEVING RELATIVES, STUNNED BY THE DEATH OF THEIR LOVED ONES, ARE CONNED INTO SPENDING FAR MORE THAN THEY NEED ON THE UNNECESSARY PRACTICES OF EMBALMING AND PAINTING THE DEAD AND STASHING THEM IN COFFINS WHICH DEPLETE THE FORESTS. THE TARTED UP CORPSE AND E
XPENSIVE HARD WOOD COFFIN ARE VOLATILISED IN FOSSIL FUEL-BURNING CREMATORIA WHICH POLLUTE THE ATMOSPHERE (THUS ADDING TO THE CORPSE ROLL!!) AND ZAP INTO THE PRECIOUS OZONE LAYER.”

  ‘He has a point, I suppose.’ Chas looked round at me. ‘Now for the nitty gritty.’ I put my head in my hands.

  “THE ORGANS OF THE DECEASED ARE REMOVED FOR THE PROCESS OF EMBALMING WHICH ALSO ENTAILS CUTTING THE CAROTID ARTERY AND SWILLING OUT BODY FLUIDS TO REPLACE THESE WITH CHEMICAL PRESERVATIVE. EMBALMING IS TOTALLY UNNECESSARY IN OUR CLIMATE, ESPECIALLY GIVEN THE INDECENTLY SHORT BUM’S RUSH BETWEEN COLLECTING THE CORPSE THEN EMBALMING AND CREMATING IT. WE PROTEST AGAINST THIS INDUSTRIALISATION OF DEATH WHICH HAS NEITHER DIGNITY NOR CARE, EXCEPT FOR THE PROFIT OF THE FUNERAL HOMES. WE ABHOR THE WASTE OF ORGANS REMOVED AND THROWN AWAY IN THE EMBALMING PROCESS WHEN THEY COULD BE USED FOR VALUABLE RESEARCH.

  INSTEAD OF WHICH FRESH ORGANS ARE TAKEN FROM HEALTHY, LIVING BODIES, OR FROM PATIENTS WHO DIE ON THE OPERATING TABLE, WITHOUT THEIR RELATIVES’ CONSENT, THEN ARE SQUIRRELLED AWAY IN NHS HOSPITALS, NEVER TO BE RELEASED.”

  ‘Their take on tissue viability is about as rough as their use of English. Stiffs … dying without consent!’ Chas turned from the screen and stared at me. ‘But I guess that can’t hurt.’

  ‘Can’t it?’ I said.

  ‘You tell me. I expect you knew about this.’ He frowned this time as he read on:

  “WE HIGHLIGHT THE SCANDAL OF THE STOLEN ORGANS WITH THE SHOCKING CASE OF LITTLE EMERYS YORK. IT WASN’T ENOUGH FOR THIS EIGHT YEAR OLD GIRL TO HAVE BEEN RAPED AND MURDERED BY SOME EVIL PAEDOPHILE. NO, THE NHS CONTRIBUTED TO HER FAMILY’S GRIEF BY FORCING HER TO UNDERGO NO LESS THAN FIVE POST MORTEMS. AND THEN A BUNCH OF RAPACIOUS DR STRANGELOVES STOLE HER HEART AND LUNGS WHICH THEY HAVE NEVER RELEASED FOR BURIAL. SHAME ON THE NHS. SHAME! SHAME!”

  ‘Emerys York!’ I cried. ‘Yorkie’s broken bottle up the child rapist’s bum. So this is Yorkie’s message in the bottle.’