Remains of the Dead Read online

  ‘How much longer?’ I asked Chas as I sat down.

  ‘You won’t be up for the rally on Saturday then?’ he grinned. ‘Bikers come from all over the west. It’s a blast.’

  ‘Where’s that then?’ The hot tea began to unflex me.

  ‘Bodmin Moor, North Cornwall. It’s not that far from Stasia’s house. Have you never read Jamaica Inn?’

  ‘Wasn’t that a story about smuggling? Some vicar who turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.’ Like someone else I had known. Get thee behind me, Eddie, I prayed. For Christ’s sake, lie down and be still.

  ‘I’ve never read it,’ Chas said. ‘Woman’s book.’

  ‘Not worth reading, then?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ He bit into the doughnut I didn’t want. ‘I don’t have time for reading fiction.’

  ‘Especially romantic fiction?’ I snapped. ‘Yeah, well me neither. I read it when I was at school. I thought it was far-fetched.’

  ‘You’ve a prosaic soul, Louise.’

  ‘And you are Mr Soulful, I suppose? You’re a pathologist, for Pete’s sake.’

  ‘I’m also half Russian.’ He added another cube of sugar to his tea. ‘Sure I have soul. We call it dusha. You can’t have dusha if you’re English.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You got the stiff upper lips. Stiff upper lips just aren’t Russian. We’re stoics, but we’ve got dusha. You should read Dostoyevsky. He’d be about heavy enough for you.’ He tapped his head. ‘Psychology. The lower depths.’

  ‘Crime and Punishment,’ I said. ‘That’s apt.’

  Chas finished his tea. ‘You’re too hard on yourself, Louise.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’

  ‘It’s an opinion.’ He pushed the empty plate aside and stood.

  Before we got back on the bike, he turned to me and patted the locker. ‘Just how far-fetched is that?’ he asked. ‘You don’t think your life is stranger than fiction?’

  I clutched his waist, leaning heavily into a chicane as we turned back onto the motorway. We rode for another hour or so before quitting the major roads. There then followed an interminable meandering down narrow country lanes where hedgerows snapped and clawed at us, showering dead leaves in the bike’s wake. I could not believe Chas knew where he was going. Every time another vehicle approached, advertised only by its headlights searching out around the bend, I felt I was going to die in a head-on collision, pitched over the hedge like a forkful of hay. When Chas pulled over in a gateway to a field, I thought he really had lost his way. But he got off the bike and opened the locker behind me.

  ‘Not here, please,’ I said, my heart sinking down to my boots, in sympathy with Eddie’s.

  ‘Why not? It’s as good a place as any. See there?’ He pointed to a hole in the bank. ‘It’ll soon decompose. You know what viscera are like, left to their own devices.’

  ‘But something could dig it up and eat it,’ I said, once I had found my voice. Fate creeping up on Eddie to stick him from behind, the blood money he had leeched from Britfeed dripping out of the paper bag to suck him under once more.

  Chas knelt down and peered into the hole. ‘Nothing will touch it because of the formalin smell,’ he said. ‘Besides, this looks uninhabited. I think it was a fox hole. Maybe badger. They’ve gassed all the badgers round here.’

  I remembered what Eddie had thought of badgers. Spreaders of TB, he’d said. Infectors of cattle. A threat to the national health. As though his paymasters at Britfeed had not infected millions of shackled bovines with their deadly sheep mix. Vermin, he called foxes. Chicken-stealers. Leave them to the men in pink coats. He meant hunting pink, of course. What most people with normal colour vision would call red. Eddie was always a stickler for protocol. Whose protocol? I thought. Certainly not the fox’s.

  Chas was scraping dead leaves from the hole with his gloved hands. ‘What else can we do with it?’ he said. ‘I didn’t bring a spade. And I’m not leaving it in the jar. It’ll never biodegrade.’

  ‘There’s a stream here,’ I said, noticing a gully that ran beneath the gateway.

  ‘I’m not polluting the water supply,’ Chas said. ‘Come on.’ He turned to me and unscrewed the lid of the jar. ‘Time to say goodbye, Louise.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said faintly. The purple haze was coming down on me again. I stumbled back.

  ‘OK,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll do it for you. Do you think I have the time to mess around like this, with your fucking piece of toxic waste?’

  Before I could stop him, he had tipped the stiffened heart into the hole. The fox has its lair, I thought. And the birds of the air have their nests. But the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Chas straightened up, wiped his hands on his thighs and put the empty jar back in the locker. I started crying.

  This time it was proper crying. This time it was the real thing. It wasn’t because of the way Chas was disposing of Eddie’s heart, for some animal to drag away and disdain. It wasn’t because of the heart at all. I was crying for that other jar, the one on Dr Fell’s shelf, the jar we had rescued from August’s studio. The homunculus that couldn’t live, but which would live forever in the store now, unable to biodegrade, staring at me with its sightless, unforgiving eyes.

  Chas put his arms around me. ‘Let it go,’ he said. ‘Just let it go.’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ I gasped. ‘He paid me off, Chas. I let him pay me off.’

  ‘Let it go, Louise.’

  ‘Not Eddie. Eddie’s child. I had a termination.’ Now I had said it. It had been bad before, but now it was worse. Now the floodgates were open and I was drowning in it, drowning in amniotic fluid, drowning in what I had done. ‘I’ll never get over it,’ I said. ‘I never knew about the store when I had the operation. I mean, if I’d known about the store I would never have gone through with it. I would have kept it, Chas. I’d have managed. Three months. It was nearly three months.’ Which was long enough, I knew, for it to have grown eyes to see me with, ears to hear me with, arms to stretch out to me in supplication. A mouth to cry out mama.

  Chas sat me down on the side of the bike, his arm still around me. ‘I guessed as much,’ he said. ‘You have to put this behind you.’

  ‘But the store,’ I wailed. ‘I see the store, I see what’s kept in the store, I see what goes up to the incinerator. I just walked away from it, Chas. I didn’t know if it was boy or girl. I just walked away.’

  ‘It wasn’t the right time,’ he said. Which was just what Eddie had said. You’ll have another chance, my dear. You’re not old.

  But not with that one. It wouldn’t ever have another chance.

  ‘It won’t be in my store,’ Chas said. ‘I can guarantee it.’

  ‘How do you know? Rudyard kept scores of terminations. They could have sent it from the clinic.’

  Not a day had gone by when I had not thought about that. Thought about it, searched for it, regretted it. Regrets I’d had in plenty, but not grief. Regretting was not the same as grieving. Regret meant simply something you wanted but did not know you wanted at the time. Grief was something else. Grief was an electric shock, an amputation of some part of the cortex that made you you. But I had walked away from that feeling. I had no feelings for it at the time, except the thought of running away. So I let the clinic take care of it. I had drunk my tea with three spoonfuls of sugar in it, like the nurse told me I should, tidied my face and my hair, and taken a taxi to The Boho to meet August. I’ll do you a tattoo, he said. The last rose of summer. You’ll like that.

  ‘I can’t say Eddie made me do it,’ I told Chas. ‘Eddie was a powerful personality, sure, but he couldn’t make me do something like that. Like you both said, the time wasn’t right. But time passes, Chas, it passes.’ I wiped my nose. Chas had a frantic expression as though he was searching for right words to say. I looked down at my frozen feet. ‘August is anti-abortion,’ I said. ‘He thinks it’s a form of infanticide.’

  ‘That’s bullshit and you know it,’ Chas
said.

  ‘But I didn’t even think about it,’ I insisted. ‘I didn’t consider all the options. I just went along with it, like the far right politics and the paper bags and all those fucking meretricious parties. I just went along with it.’

  Chas looked away from me and at the foxhole. ‘It wasn’t really a baby,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t even viable.’

  ‘Viable? That’s what Eddie told me. And then he backed the anti-abortion bill put forward by one of his Catholic friends. How the hell do you know if it was viable?’ I hit Chas on the chest. ‘You’re a fucking male doctor.’

  Chas seized my hand as it was about to strike again. ‘I’d have done the same in your position. No kid needs a toad like that for a father.’

  A beam of light lit up his face. A car drove slowly past us; a hideous mask glared out from the passenger window, a witch’s face with hatchet mouth and fluorescent warts. The driver beside it had a head of shaggy fur. Chas stood tall and glared back, a leather-clad knight of the road with streaming black hair and yellow eyes that said don’t mess with me. The car sped off. ‘Shit,’ I said.

  Chas shoved the heart further into the fox-hole, toeing it over with leaves. Then he got back on the bike and jerked his head for me to do the same.

  ‘I’m not up to facing anyone, Chas,’ I said. ‘Not anyone new. I just want to curl up and die.’

  ‘You want to spend the night here?’

  An owl hooted up in the trees. Ruminants coughed in a nearby field. The hedgerows snickered. Sounds of the countryside on an autumn night, on Hallowe’en. I wasn’t used to the country. I had always been scared of the silence, the paucity of people, the utter lack of distraction.

  I wiped my nose on my hand. ‘I can’t fit in the fox-hole,’ I said.

  ‘That’s better.’ Chas started the bike. ‘We’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

  But in what seemed like half that time the road came down into a valley where a pair of wrought iron gates opened inwards onto a gravel driveway. Two jack-o-lanterns lit up the darkness. Through the intercom I heard Chas curse. ‘I forgot it’s Hallowe’en,’ he said. ‘Looks like they’ve got a house-full.’ As the bike turned through the gates, the headlamp picked out a large house amongst the trees. It was a perfect cube, except for its sloping roof. It looked like a Queen Anne mansion: an authentic Grade 1 pile. A number of cars were parked before the front steps and the long windows in the front elevation blazed with light. Chas bypassed these and turned the bike into a courtyard at the rear of the house where he stopped before what I imagined was the stable block, though this building was in complete darkness. I pulled up my visor. Faint partying sounds came from the main house behind us.

  ‘We’ll catch them in the morning,’ Chas said. He produced a key from somewhere inside his leathers and unlocked the door to the stables.

  ‘I thought you said this was a B & B,’ I told him. ‘Shouldn’t we check in?’

  ‘This bit is off limits.’ Chas turned to usher me inside. ‘This belongs to me.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘A place in the country, everyone’s ideal.’

  ‘Stasia needed the investment.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m her only brother.’

  We went up steps to another door which also needed unlocking. Chas switched on the light. We were in a long room, every surface of which seemed to be covered in books. At the far end was a sofa and a TV set. To my left was a kitchenette cupboard, reminiscent of many studio apartments – or bedsits for one of my parlance. A door on the opposite wall led in to what was either a bathroom or bedroom. ‘I don’t use it much,’ Chas commented. ‘This place is a magnet for New Agers, moon worshippers, space cadets, the lot. Good for Stasia’s livelihood, of course, but not my scene.’

  ‘How did she get this place?’ I asked.

  ‘It belonged to an old Russian woman. The Princess Lydia Sherbatskaya. She was a friend of our grandma’s. She’s actually buried in the garden.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Why not? It’s what she wanted. Stasia had some priest come down from Oxford, an Orthodox priest. Not that Stasia herself is into that kind of thing. She’s a Buddhist.’ He laughed. ‘She’s done them all. She’s been through religion like a dose of salts. I was never what you call spiritual. Anyway, the Princess wanted Stas to have the house.’

  ‘Some house,’ I said. ‘Does she live here alone, apart from the guests, I mean?’

  Chas was unzipping his leathers. ‘Sit down,’ he told me curtly, indicating the sofa. ‘She has what she calls a companion. I told you Stasia was gay, right?’ I nodded. ‘Right, well the companion is also gay, only he’s a man. A celibate gay man and a celibate lesbo. Would you call that an alternative couple?’

  ‘Sounds pretty civilised to me,’ I said, then wished I hadn’t. Chas went through the other door and shut it. Water trickled. Was he having a pee, washing his hands of me? I went to the kitchenette and filled the kettle. Where was the bed, I wondered, or were we both going to sleep on the sofa? I wouldn’t mind that. I really wouldn’t mind that. I would have to convince him.

  Chas pulled open the bathroom door. ‘Water’s hot if you want a bath. Are you hungry? Shall I fetch you something from the house? Do you want to crash the party?’

  ‘I just want to crash,’ I said. ‘I get scared in the country.’

  He fixed me with that hypnotic stare. ‘Put the TV on if you need background noise. I’ll have to go and see to the bike.’

  ‘Do I disgust you, Chas?’ I said. ‘You know, because of …’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Louise. You don’t disgust me, OK? You don’t disgust me.’ He bit his lip. ‘Look, I’ll be back in a minute. There’s no such thing as ghosts.’

  ‘You must be …’

  ‘I’m not joking,’ he said. ‘I know. Listen to the voice of reason, why don’t you? You work with the dead. You know that there is nothing left to fear.’

  But of course I was scared. It was All Hallows Eve, in darkest Devon, in a house that must be haunted. There was a funny smell in the air. The musty books, I thought, left too long to themselves. The literary association made me think of Pushkin’s tale, The Queen of Spades. Chas was just like Hermann. Chas wouldn’t give a shit if the old princess came back from the dead and cut him on a three card tip. He’d use it scientifically, like Gray’s Anatomy, as a key to a system. But look what happened to Hermann: madness, dreams, visitations by demons. I shivered and resolved to keep the leathers on till Chas returned.

  There was a fresh bottle of milk in the fridge so I made two mugs of tea, leaving Chas’s black in Russian fashion. Then I hit the TV remote which I found amongst the cushions of the sofa. A late chat show was being aired live with a Hallowe’en theme. It felt incongruous hearing all those tinny London voices in a place like this. There was something cold and aloof about it, although the heating appeared to be working. Lack of use, I thought. Lack of Chas’s company. I forced myself to focus on the TV set and tried to listen to the mindless chat. The host was dressed in a wizard’s cloak and a silver jock-strap, which the current guest, a pop star I couldn’t place, kept trying to snatch. I tried switching channels, but got Salem’s Lot on one and Francis Coppola’s Dracula on the other – the part where Gary Oldman brings a sackful of babies for his undead houris to feast upon. Unable to countenance that, or a debate on the fourth channel about the meaning of blood rituals, I switched back to the chat show.

  Gaia Kronenberg appeared, though she was billed as Gaia Malstrom. Mesmerised, I leaned towards the set and turned up the sound. Gaia had screen presence, big screen presence, which was spilling out over the edges of the chat show set, with its fake spooks and its silly host. She looked as though she would eat him for breakfast.

  ‘So, Gaia, I hear you have a body in your lounge,’ he said, popping his eyes at her.

  ‘Yes, my husband,’ she levelled. ‘Though he’s not in my lounge. He is in the study. We use him as a paperweight.’

  Silver jock strap fronted the audience, eyebrows raised
to heaven, egging them on. ‘Must be a bloody big one then,’ he breathed.

  Gaia inclined her head. ‘It’s the work of a friend of mine, a very great artist, August Stockyard.’ Ignoring the studio audience, she turned her gaze straight at the camera. She was looking right at me. ‘You must all go and see his show. It is called ‘Unhappy Endings’.’

  ‘Here comes the plug,’ the host interjected.

  ‘Shut up,’ Gaia told him. ‘Unhappy Endings is very serious. It is all about body snatchers.’

  ‘Would you count yourself as one?’ the host asked. And to the audience: ‘You’re telling me!’

  ‘I am not a body snatcher. My husband’s body belongs to me. My body belonged to him once. Isn’t that what happens when you get married?’ she asked the audience. ‘When you think you are in love, you give your body, no? Well he promised his body to me, and so I kept it. He looks far better than he did in the House of Commons. His make-up – just so. Perfect.’ The audience stared silently back at her. Blood was roaring in my ears. I thought about the heart in the fox hole. I had colluded in this outrage. I felt sick.

  ‘But are you allowed to do this, Gaia?’ the host asked. ‘I mean, isn’t there a law against it?’

  ‘What law?’ she asked. ‘No law can take away your husband’s body. If hospitals can take bodies, why not wives, mothers, sisters, girlfriends, brothers, husbands, fathers, daughters, pets, cats, dogs? I mean, who wants a dead body?’