An Empty Death

by Laura Wilson

  What with the bomb-happy man, and several others who needed immediate assistance, Jenny was kept continuously occupied for almost four hours, and had no time to think about Mrs Ingram, or whether she was pregnant, or anything much else.

  On her way to Doris’s, she wondered whether to bring up the subject of last night’s ‘mistake’ with her sister. Doris was always pretty sensible about these things…All the same, she had a feeling that, if she voiced her fears about pregnancy, it would somehow make it more likely. While this did not make any sort of logical sense, it had far too much of the nebulous, paranoia-inducing power of superstition for her seriously to consider acting against it.

  Five

  The man, Sam Todd, took the scalpel – filched from the mortuary – from his jacket pocket. Too elated to sleep, he tested its sharpness with his thumb before laying it down on the lace-edged runner that lay across the little table in his dreary room. Next to it was a bundle of newspaper the size and shape of a large cabbage, which he unwrapped carefully, revealing the shiny, yellowy-grey convolutions of a human brain, saved from incineration at the hospital.

  He flattened out the newsprint around the brain to protect the runner. Strange, he thought, that this was now merely a piece of obsolete machinery that had once been operated by a conscious force. It was of no more significance than, say, a spent light bulb, and yet it had been the seat of control; the place where decisions were made and challenges were undertaken. It had contained likes and dislikes, and all the things that made its former owner – one Bernard Henry Porteus, auxiliary fireman, killed by falling masonry – what he was. This is what determines us, he thought. It’s what dies when we die. He’d no time for God, or souls, or anything like that – those were just inventions to keep credulous fools happy.

  He’d smuggled the brain back to his room to study it at leisure. He pulled his copy of Cunningham’s dissection manual – stolen from Foyles Bookshop – from his battered knapsack, and found the relevant page. At various times he’d brought back livers, kidneys, hearts and wombs to dissect in this room, but this was his first brain. He prodded it with a fingertip, gingerly, as if he expected it to react. ‘Hello there, Mr Porteus,’ he murmured. ‘Let’s find out what made you tick.’ He picked up the scalpel and jabbed the brain with the sharp tip. ‘Didn’t you like that, old chap?’ he asked. ‘You know, you really shouldn’t complain. Just think’ – he chuckled – ‘you’re helping to advance the cause of science in a way you could never have imagined.’

  After a couple of hours’ studying, slicing, and making notes, he dumped what was left of the brain in the basin, then sat back and took stock of his surroundings. The room was where he’d been living since he began his life as Sam Todd, mortuary attendant, back in April (the real Sam Todd, a two-year-old who’d succumbed to Spanish influenza in 1918, was lying in a Gravesend churchyard). It didn’t contain much that was his. Most of the few things he owned – the second-hand suitcase with the labels from foreign travels, the expensive cigarette case, and a large quantity of varied stationery – were mere props. For the rest, there was a high, narrow, single bed, scuffed brown lino on the floor, a battered table and chair, and a rickety washstand with a jug and basin of cheap white china. It was not home, merely a place he inhabited, the latest in a long line of many such that he’d inhabited since he had ‘died’, aged seventeen, in 1932, while on holiday at Camber Sands. He’d left his clothes in a heap on the beach and disappeared as completely as if his body really had slipped beneath the cold grey waves of the straits of Dover. So far, that had been his finest hour: sneaking out of the boarding house at night, depositing on the sand the clothes his mother had last seen him wearing, together with his watch, pocket-knife and wallet, and then donning the new things he’d carefully hoarded and walking away in the night, towards freedom, sloughing off his old self like an unwanted skin.

  It had taken years since then to achieve his goal, but now he was in sight of it. His pulse raced and he felt warm all over and aroused with the excitement – the need – of it. The mortuary attendant, like all the personas before him, was merely a stepping stone to something better. After the first week in the job he’d taken all his clothing coupons and purchased the uniform of a doctor: black jacket and striped trousers. Wearing these beneath a white coat, and carrying a stethoscope, he’d walked about the Middlesex Hospital after his shift was over, trying out his potential new self. As he’d moved through the building, keeping a brisk but steady pace, looking calm and resolute, he’d enjoyed the deference of the nurses and the respectful looks of the matrons. In the Gents’, he had admired his wonderful new self in the mirror.

  He’d only dared appear dressed as a doctor once. It wasn’t likely that he’d be recognised but, with so much at stake, he didn’t want to risk it a second time. Now, he went across to the small square of mirror that hung on a nail above the washstand. Its surface made him think of a river in an industrial town, and gave his sandy hair and moustache and his nondescript features a brown, rather blurred look.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked himself, then stepped back to light a cigarette. There were only six in the packet to last the next two days, but he’d earned it. Squinting through the smoke, he saw, once more, the image of himself as a doctor, an educated man with dignity and authority, worthy of the esteem and regard of his peers. A man who would make his mark and be remembered. He felt a surge of power, like an electrical force, go through his body as he shouted a reply to his own question. ‘I am anyone I want to be! Anyone at all!’

  He stood for several minutes, watching himself smoke, and then, when the cigarette was finished, he bent over the basin and, very deliberately, stubbed the fag out right in the middle of what remained of Bernard Henry Porteus’s brain.

  Six

  Right from the start, Todd had loved the atmosphere of the hospital: the quiet efficiency, the routine, the firmness of purpose. The stone corridors, swing doors and neat rows of patients tucked beneath their bedclothes were all part of a beautifully ordered world. Even the names of the departments – Radiography, Physiotherapy, Infant Welfare – seemed like poetry. By the beginning of May – after a month working in the mortuary and, satisfied, finally, with the progress of his studies – he had decided to make the next move towards the creation of his ultimate self. This involved the mother of James Dacre, a boy from his first school who, almost five years ago in the early days of the blackout, had been fatally hit by a car a month after graduating in medicine. When Todd had heard about it, he’d realised the importance of the information, and filed it away for use when he was ready. So, one evening in the first week of May, he set to work in his room, drafting a letter on the back of an old envelope.

  Dear Mrs Dacre,

  I don’t know if you remember me, but I was a school friend of your late son, James. I have many happy memories of him, and I was so sorry to hear, recently, of his death several years ago.

  I am afraid that we had rather lost touch, which is why this letter has been so long in coming to you. As I have said, it was only recently that I learnt of the tragedy. It is a terrible shame that such a promising young man should be taken so young…

  Thus far, nothing but truth – or almost truth…But now he had to think…Nothing too exaggerated about James Dacre’s potential. From what he could remember, Dacre was a stolid, unremarkable type who would probably have made a competent physician, but nothing more. So…another sentence about him being a nice chap, a tasteful reference to the Almighty, and a suggestion that, as he was passing that way the following week, he might drop in for a visit. Mrs Dacre, he knew, had long been a widow, and James had been her only child. If she were lonely, she’d appreciate the company. Even if she were not, Todd thought, she’d probably welcome an opportunity to talk about her son. He put the final touches to his letter and then, from the supply of paper he kept in the battered desk, he selected a sheet of fine, heavy bond, and spent a few moments testing his fountain pens until he found one that felt right f
or the job. He copied the words out neatly with his address at the top, then paused. It was too risky to sign his real name – she’d probably have read about his ‘death’ in the local paper. Although he had met James Dacre’s mother briefly a couple of times – tea after prep-school sports – and had a vague memory of a well-fleshed woman in a flowered summer dress, he did not think she would remember what he looked like. After all, one small boy is much like another…

  He was as sure as he could be that she’d never met his own mother who, used – as she herself put it – to better society, would have thought it a comedown to be friends with someone like Mrs Dacre. The Dacres may have had more money than his family, but in his mother’s eyes they were vulgar and middle-class, and he was sure that her loneliness would not have overcome her prejudice.

  What should he call himself? Nothing too unusual – or too common – as both might prove memorable. Something easily confused, he thought. A surname that was also a Christian name, perhaps? He pondered, tapping the end of his pen against his teeth: Oliver? Thomas? Norman? He jotted down the names: Oliver, Thomas, Norman. Thomas Norman? No, Norman Thomas. Entirely unmemorable. He’d use that.

  He found a matching envelope and wrote the address – copied from the post office directory – then he tucked the letter behind the clock on the mantelpiece. Lighting a cigarette, he sat down to rest for a moment before starting work on his next project: an identity card in the name of James Dacre. That was the main thing; a ration book could wait. His landlady kept his – or rather, Todd’s – and there was no reason why she should not continue to do so for the time being. As for clothing, he had everything he needed at present. The identity card would be a simple matter. He’d seen to this when, at the start of the war, he’d managed – this time as ‘John Watson’ – to secure a job as a lowly clerk in the National Registration Office. Over the course of several months, he had purloined a stack of blank identity cards, which had come in very handy, and he knew how to fill them in to look authentic. He tamped out his cigarette, reached under his bed for the trunk where he stored his most important stationery and papers, and undid the brown paper parcel where he kept the blank cards. Choosing a thick-nibbed pen, he filled the cartridge and was about to start writing when he remembered that he didn’t know if James Dacre had a middle name. He couldn’t afford to make stupid mistakes – completing the card would have to wait until he had seen Mrs Dacre.

  He slid the card under the blotter on his desk. In some ways, more paperwork made life more difficult, but in others, it was a godsend. For as long as he could remember, embossed papers had been substitutes for achievement, and nowadays identity cards had become substitutes for personhood, if there was such a word. His new medical qualifications would have to wait until his visit to Mrs Dacre, too; he wasn’t going to use counterfeit documents if the real thing turned out to be available. Besides, he needed to find out which university Dacre had attended. In order to create a convincing fiction, it was important to stay as close to the truth as possible. He had an idea that Dacre had studied at St Andrews in Scotland. This, if correct, would be excellent – as far away from London as possible.

  He opened the bottle of beer he’d been saving and stared at the end of the envelope that stuck out from behind the clock, praying that the widow Dacre hadn’t evacuated herself from Norbury. The sooner the wheels were set in motion, the better. Meanwhile, he’d continue to use his spare time well. Learning, he’d found, was easy, as long as there was a point to it, and he’d always had a good memory. So much for his mother, and the teachers who’d scoffed at his ambitions and abilities. ‘MB, ChB,’ he murmured to himself. Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Chirurgery. That was the old-fashioned word for surgery. ‘MB, ChB’. Lovely, resonant sounds, full of promise, but, for the time-being, they, and everything else he craved, were on the other side of the door of opportunity, and that was locked against him. Life had not given him the key, so he must force his way in by whatever means were necessary. It was as simple as that.

  Seven

  The four days after he’d posted the letter to James Dacre’s mother had seemed an eternity, but on the fifth, he came home to find a letter waiting for him on the japanned tray on the stand in the dingy, narrow hall. Beatrice Dacre (Mrs) would be delighted to receive him for tea on the date he’d specified.

  A week after that, the train had jolted him towards Norbury, clad in flannel trousers (pressed under the mattress), shirt, tie, and jacket, his hair neatly brushed. He’d given a lot of thought to a suitable present, and finally, with a great deal of luck and even more expense, had managed to obtain an oval tablet of pre-war Elizabeth Arden soap.

  The journey was risky – for all he knew his own mother still lived in Norbury. Supposing she spotted him? Would she believe the evidence of her eyes, or would she simply note, with sadness, the young man who so resembled her only child? It was a Saturday, so perhaps she’d be at the Tennis Club – provided, of course, that it still existed, the Croydon area having had it pretty badly. It occurred to him, then – incredibly, for the first time since the war began – that his mother might be dead. After all, he hadn’t seen her for twelve years.

  How old would she be now? Fifty-something? Sixty? He’d never been entirely sure. He felt no guilt – she’d have thrown his life away if he’d let her, with her grim satisfaction at ‘having come down in the world’.

  The train pulled into Streatham Common. He stared out at the station, with its taped windows and sandbags piled on the platform, and the desire to jump out and head back into London was so overwhelming that he had to grip the edge of the seat and grit his teeth in order to stop himself rushing for the door. It wasn’t the risk – in the past he’d always got a kick out of that – it was being far, far too close to the place he’d once called home.

  Norbury, at first sight, seemed the same. Shabbier, but everything was still there: the cinema, the Express Dairy, his old school, and the sweetshop that sold fancy chocolates in beribboned boxes that they could never afford (and now with a cardboard wedding cake and empty cartons in the window).

  He walked up the hill towards the avenues of mean, semi-detached villas, identical post-1918 suburban architecture, coated in stucco, with creosoted gates. They looked even smaller than he remembered, and the corner of his old street was upon him before he realised exactly where he was. Catching sight of the road name, he stopped, making sure he was hidden behind a privet hedge. He craned his neck to look down the street. As far as he could see, all the houses were still there.

  He stood still, rooted to the pavement. He hated the cheapness of the little houses with their box-like spaces and thin internal walls. His family had been forced to move here from a bigger, better, double-fronted house with a circular driveway, a car, a cook and a maid. His lip curled as he remembered how, as a young boy, his father had introduced him to approving business associates as the third generation. ‘One day, son, all this will be yours,’ he muttered in mocking imitation. When he was eight, the second generation had managed to lose the family business, and with it the house, the car, the servants and all the money.

  The memory of his father telling him they’d lost everything still sickened him. He hadn’t understood. ‘It’s our home,’ he’d told his parents, ‘they can’t take it away from us.’ But apparently they could. ‘I’ll make some more money,’ his father had said. ‘We’ll have our house back again.’ His mother had said in a cold, hard voice, ‘Don’t lie to the boy. The fact is, we don’t belong here any more.’ The silence after that had been painful, like a piercing high note singing in his ears, making him swallow and run from the room.

  They didn’t belong in the little house, either. They were no good at being poor – not that it was actual poverty, like living in a slum, but a desperate sort of lower-middle class gentility. Their furniture was too big for the pokey rooms, but there was no money left to buy smaller pieces. As a result the attic and one of the upstairs bedrooms were stacked high, and he was r
elegated to the box room with its small window overlooking a meagre strip of garden that didn’t even have enough space for a proper tree. He thought of the decanters standing empty on the sideboard beside the rows of unused tumblers, and the pathetic fire, never quite catching or going out, but filling the room with smoke.

  His mother had never let them forget that they’d slipped several rungs, and his father, growing ever more stooped and miserable, had tried, ineffectually, to ‘make the most of it’. His father had finally managed to secure, through the recommendation of one of his remaining friends, a job as a clerk. Then he’d died – a perforated ulcer – when his only child was fifteen. By then, Todd’s wish to become a doctor had already been dismissed by both his mother and his teacher.

  Remembering his mother’s thin smile of wintery contempt, and Miss Dunster’s patronising moue (‘Perhaps something a little less ambitious, dear. Why not learn a trade?’), hot and sickening fury made his stomach lurch. There was nothing more galling in the world than being expected to fail. How dare they, the bitches? I never belonged here, he told himself, never. He must get to Mrs Dacre; get what he needed, get out, and never return. He spat, savagely, on the pavement, and turned away.

  He still felt the rising bile as he stood on Mrs Dacre’s small porch, his hand on the ornamental knocker, letting it fall smartly, twice. Hearing footsteps, he straightened his hat, and then the door opened and there she was: a thicker version than he remembered, the curves having solidified to a tubular bulk, with eyebrows raised in delighted surprise. ‘Come in! I was so pleased to get your letter!’