Acts & Monuments

by Alan Kane Fraser

  In his head he knew he could relax now. Most of the money would be gone from Chris Malford’s account within a few days and would be available for Barry to spend somehow a couple of weeks later. He would have finished withdrawing the rest in cash by the time the payment was noticed to be missing.

  He was in the clear.

  Twenty-Nine

  Langley appeared to be agitated. He’d taken to hovering round Barry’s desk and asking for almost daily updates on voids and arrears. Whenever Barry left his desk, even for a moment, he would return to find a scribbled note left on his keyboard or another email query in his inbox. Langley’s eyes, those small, blackened coals, seemed anxious and wary. Improving performance was obviously not proving as simple as he’d hoped, and his glances seemed to be nervously scouring the landscape for a potential sacrificial lamb. But Barry didn’t care anymore because he knew that if everything went to plan, he would shortly have an insurance policy to fall back on.

  At about 11am one morning, Barry sauntered into the staff kitchen and made himself a coffee. He knew he ought to have taken it back to his desk and kept working, but, to be honest, he couldn’t be bothered. As it was mid-morning and everyone else at Monument knew better than to stay away from their desk for any longer than was strictly necessary, Barry found himself alone. He decided to grab five minutes in the break-out space, where there were some comfy seats and out-of-date magazines strewn across a coffee table, and a large window inviting Barry to enjoy the view over Kingsbury Water Park, where some Canada geese were skidding across the water. He had probably been away from his desk for no more than five minutes when he heard the door open behind him.

  “Oh, you are here. I didn’t think you would be.”

  Barry’s heart sank. He had just wanted to get away for a few moments, so as to not be constantly bombarded with Langley’s questions, but even hoping for five minutes alone with a cup of coffee now appeared an unreasonable expectation. Barry was pretty sure he wasn’t imagining it – things really had been different when Neville had been in charge. But that, of course, was why he’d had to go. In the twentieth century being a ‘modern’ employer meant treating your staff well, and driving up their terms and conditions in order to attract the best people, whereas in the twenty-first century it meant exactly the opposite.

  He turned around and was relieved to see that it was Jean. She had a sheaf of papers with her which she had clearly intended to discuss, but, seeing the expression on Barry’s face, she put them to one side.

  “Are you OK?” Jean asked.

  “Uh, yes. I think so…”

  “It’s just that… you don’t seem yourself lately,” she said, taking a seat next to him.

  Barry didn’t know how to respond because he wasn’t sure who ‘himself’ was anymore. For forty-eight years, he’d lived his life based on one set of assumptions, none of which seemed to hold true anymore. All of the things his grandmother had told him – that goodness was its own reward; that you could be sure your sins would find you out – all seemed self-evident nonsense now that it was clear that you could break the rules and no one cared.

  So, in a sense, Barry could see that he hadn’t been himself lately. He’d been someone else: someone who believed that if you wanted something then you had to go out and get it rather than waiting politely in a line. He’d wasted forty-eight years waiting politely in the belief that it was only by doing so that he would be rewarded. That was what Jean meant by Barry being ‘himself’. But now he was going to grab what he wanted, because he knew that no one would stop him. He also knew with a bitter, unshakeable certainty that following the rules didn’t stop bad things happening either. So it was a new ‘himself’ and, if he was being honest, he was still getting used to it. For the moment, it still felt like he was wearing his shoes on the wrong feet.

  But Barry knew that he couldn’t explain all that to Jean and so he dissembled to her. “Things are just very busy, Jean. And Langley has very clear expectations about where we need to be.”

  “It feels like it’s more than that, Barry. You’ve had a lot happen – lots of knocks – I’m just worried it’s taking its toll.”

  “I’ll be fine.” He hated lying, especially to Jean, but he couldn’t see another way.

  “Did you have that conversation with your wife?”

  Barry sighed and took a swig of his coffee. “I tried, but, to be honest, it didn’t go well. Our daughter went off to university a few weeks ago and I think that’s her main focus at the moment.”

  “Oh. And how are you finding that? It must be difficult, after what happened with your son.”

  “It’s not too bad, really. It’s just that I thought we’d find more time for each other and that’s not quite happened yet. I tried taking her out and talking to her, but… I don’t know, somehow the conversation didn’t quite happen.”

  “You ended up talking about something else?”

  “Not really. I talked to her about stuff. It’s just that…” Barry toyed with a shoelace whilst he tried to find the right words. “She didn’t seem that interested.”

  He knew the moment that he’d said it that it sounded harsh, but he couldn’t think of any other way to put it. He expected Jean to reprimand him, but she just looked at him like her heart was going to break.

  “Oh Barry, I’m sorry,” was all she could bring herself to say, and the silence that she left was filled with a compassion that washed over Barry like a tide.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said.

  “I know, but it’s so disappointing, isn’t it, when you want someone’s heart to echo your own and they just stare at you blankly?”

  It was indeed. That was exactly how Barry felt, but he hadn’t realised until Jean had told him. It released him from the need to pretend.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

  “The thing is, Barry, the more intimately we know someone, the more likely they are to disappoint us. It’s just the way it is. We’re all deeply flawed creatures. We don’t like to admit it, but we are. We just hope nobody notices. And most of the time they don’t. But the people we’re closest to see it – and it disappoints them. But they can’t say because they know that they’re flawed too.

  “Oh, when we first meet someone, we think that they’re wonderful and perfect, and so much better than us – that they can make up for all of our flaws. But they’re not. Nobody is. They’re just another lost soul looking for someone to hold on to. We all are.”

  “You don’t seem to need anyone.”

  Jean fixed Barry with a hard stare. “Let me tell you this, Barry: we’re all just beggars scavenging for love. All of us.”

  And the way that she said it, Barry believed that she really understood.

  “Do you have a family, Jean?” he asked.

  “Oh yes. I’m one of three sisters – the Adam Girls. I was the youngest. ‘The Last Adam’ my father used to call me – I think to try and emphasise to my mother that he really didn’t want any more, rather than to suggest I was the Messiah!”

  She laughed again at the memory of it.

  But Barry wasn’t laughing. “I don’t feel like she loves me anymore, if I’m honest. If she ever did, really.”

  “Oh Barry, people get themselves in all of a mess because they confuse that tingly feeling in the pit of their stomach with love. Love isn’t a feeling we have; it’s a choice we make. Love is choosing to serve another human being, knowing that they’re going to disappoint us. Love, as St Paul said, is choosing to be patient when we want to scream in frustration; it’s choosing to be kind when we burn with the urge to be cruel; and it’s biting our tongue when we’re desperate to point out someone’s failings to them. Love is looking into the filthy, black heart of another human being and defying the urge to jump ship – and hoping to God that they’re looking at us and doing the same. Love, as St Paul didn’t say, is bloody
hard work.”

  “I guess so. It just seems very sad. The best feeling in the world is knowing that you actually mean something to someone else. That’s what I think about when I think about love. It seems a bit depressing to think of people only staying together out of a grim determination.”

  “That’s not what I said – or, at least, it’s not what I meant. I understand we need someone to believe in us. It’s just that, in reality, sometimes it takes an effort of will to keep believing. It’s a tough time for your wife, after everything that happened with your son and now your daughter moving out… You just need to keep going. I’m sure it’ll be all right.”

  It was the first time Barry felt a sense of disappointment with Jean. That was her advice? Barry had been “keeping going” for three years since they’d lost Christopher, but it still wasn’t “all right” yet. He had no reason to believe it would suddenly change now. Even the money couldn’t change that.

  The door to the kitchen opened and there stood the angular frame of Langley. He seemed slightly surprised to see Barry there, despite the fact that someone had clearly told him that’s where he was.

  “Ah, Barry! You are here. Taking a break?” he asked, pointedly. “Anyway, message from the police. They’ve released that flat at Neville Thompson House. Given how long it’s been empty now, can you get Lee on to it straight away?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he turned on his heels and was gone. Barry would, of course, get Lee on to it straight away, but there was a lot to do before a new tenant could move in. The whole flat would need deep cleaning and the stain on the floor where Chris Malford’s body had lain would need particular attention. They would need to clear out all of his belongings and then probably redecorate, at least in the living room, to try to get rid of the stubborn stench of death.

  But after all that, some poor, desperate soul would be offered a tenancy there. Maybe people would mention to him or her what had happened, but they would bring in their own furniture, perhaps redecorate the other rooms, hang up a few pictures, and Chris Malford would be forgotten about. Just as he was for those two weeks when his body had lain undisturbed. There would be no blue plaque outside the door; no memorial within. There would be no permanent record that he had ever existed.

  “I wonder if people would miss me if I was gone,” said Barry.

  “What a ridiculous thing to say,” said Jean. “Of course we would.”

  “It makes you think though, doesn’t it? This whole Chris Malford thing? Everything just moving on like he never existed.”

  “It’s all terribly sad.”

  Barry knew that it really was terribly sad. Not just the fact that Chris had died, but the fact that no one had noticed and no one seemed to care. It could have happened to him – an accident, a heart attack, an irate tenant attacking him. And the fact was that he was less sure than Jean was that he would be missed. Oh, of course, everyone would make a big fuss for the first couple of weeks. But then they’d get a new area housing manager in and things would carry on as they had before. People would move on and all trace of Barry Todd ever having served at Monument would be lost. It re-emphasised to him the necessity of following through with the plan he’d embarked upon, whatever misgivings may have been lurking unacknowledged in the shadows of his heart.

  Thirty

  The following Thursday was an unusual day. It was both Saleema’s last day at Monument (and thus a cause for modest celebration) and also Chris Malford’s funeral. Under Section 46 of the Public Health (Control of Diseases) Act 1984, it was the duty of the local authority where a body was lying to fund a funeral if there was no next of kin and the deceased had insufficient funds to pay for the funeral out of their estate. It was, Barry felt as he drove through the gates of Woodlands Cemetery and Crematorium, indicative of a certain esprit de l’age that the reason the poor and unloved of Britain were guaranteed a funeral at the taxpayers’ expense was not, as one might have supposed, because of a Christian desire on behalf of the state to ensure that all its citizens, no matter how apparently insignificant, were allowed to depart this life with due dignity and decorum. Instead, the statute under which the local authority was required to act suggested a rather grudging acknowledgement that if the state didn’t pay for the proper disposal of a deceased person’s body it would, in due course, become a public health hazard. The difference between these two positions could be summed up in the architecture of Solihull’s two main cemeteries.

  Robin Hood Cemetery and Crematorium, built in 1931, had been designed in a Romanesque style to look rather like a medieval Franciscan monastery. The myriad of small, arched windows, each separated from the other by its own colonette, could hardly be described as the lowest-cost design option if the building’s primary purpose was to prevent the spread of disease. If, however, the purpose of the building was somewhat larger – if it was, for instance, to surround the ugliness of death with beauty, in faith that human life did not fully end with death, but somehow maintained a relationship with all eternity – then putting an apse with colonetted blind-windows at the east end of the building made perfect sense. Which is presumably why the architect had done precisely that.

  If, however, you were part of a culture that could no longer bring itself to believe that beauty had any purpose other than to hide the underlying meaninglessness of life, then you would fail to see the point of such architectural niceties and would probably produce a building of unadorned functionality, which is exactly what the architect of Woodlands Cemetery and Crematorium had done. Built in 1984, the building paid a surely unintentional homage to the ideology of human body disposal encapsulated in the Public Health Act of that same year. Rather than suggesting that ‘death was not the end’, it suggested, rather apologetically, that death was very much the end, so there wasn’t a huge amount of point in investing much effort in varnishing the truth. In contrast to its older sibling, Woodlands echoed not so much the glories of Assisi as the rather more limited charms of Tibshelf Services. It wasn’t ugly, nor could one honestly say it was badly designed, if one understood its function as being to ensure the protection of mourners, not only from the elements, but also from the idea that the deceased was just one of a long line of truncated lives stretching back from time immemorial and on into the future. If that was what Woodlands was for, then it fulfilled its brief better than most. It was all just rather… banal.

  Barry had always been slightly disappointed by contemporary architecture – just as, at college, he’d always been disappointed by contemporary art – without quite being able to put his finger on why (or, at least, not in a way that seemed to satisfy his tutors). As he pulled up outside and took in the building before him, however, he finally understood his disappointment: it was that contemporary art and architecture refused to pretend. All this time, Barry had acted as though the rules mattered in some fundamental sense that was written into the structure of the universe, and he’d struggled to understand why life didn’t seem to work out the way he thought it should. The answer had been – quite literally – right in front of him, in the buildings and works of art of the post-modern age. “None of this matters,” they said. “You’re on your own. Get on with it.” Which was exactly what Barry now intended to do.

  But, first, of course, there was the small matter of the funeral service itself. Barry was accompanied on his journey by Jean, who, when she found out about Chris’ funeral, had insisted that she join him.

  There weren’t many people gathered to await the arrival of the coffin, but the few who were, all huddled under the canopy to protect themselves from the mournful November drizzle. The chief mourner was the relevant employee from social services, who had the look of a woman whose work wardrobe consisted entirely of outfits in black. It looked to Barry as though she’d been given the job largely because of her ability to adopt the look of someone whose face was hewn from granite. She was joined by an older, bearded man in a rather unfortunate fau
x-leather jacket, whose lanyard indicated that he came from the National Offender Management Service, so Barry assumed he was Chris’ probation officer. There was another woman whom Barry couldn’t identify, but who was talking to a police officer whom Barry recognised as PC Rathbone.

  And, of course, there was the minister. Chris Malford had never been baptised, let alone confirmed, and had not, as far as anyone was aware, ever attended his local parish church. But, for the purposes of the day, he would be buried as a loyal Anglican. This was not because of any belief on the part of social services that all paupers should be granted in death the dignity that had been denied them in life and that could only be found in a Christian funeral conducted with due ceremony by the Established Church. Frankly, they’d have much rather had a default position of everyone being given a secular funeral. But the problem was that secular officiants all required paying. The Church of England was the only institution that was prepared to provide social services with officiants for free, and, in a time of public-sector austerity, that meant that it won hands down over the competition. It also meant that the Church got to choose the rite that was used. This meant, as far as social services were concerned, the tooth-grindingly awful prospect of twenty minutes of unexpurgated Christianity.

  The minister was an older man – Barry guessed in his late fifties – with a balding pate and an angular poise. A greying beard and moustache neatly dressed his chin and upper lip. He wore a cassock and surplice with a black preaching scarf. And he had the shiniest black shoes Barry had seen in a long while, as if he’d polished them especially for the occasion. He looked suitably sombre, which impressed Barry for some reason. The probation officer was taking the opportunity to smoke a cigarette, rather emphasising the fact that he was only there out of professional obligation. The minister, however, stood tall and straight, looking ahead with an intensity and seriousness of gaze that belied the fact that there were only six people there preparing for the funeral of a man they didn’t really know.