by Clark, Simon
Then the Skinner would get Nigel too.
Out From Under
On the day he had to collect his father from the mortuary Robert Horobin saw the accident. It was going to be a bad day. He did not know it was going to be worse than he imagined. Already he felt unhappy.
First, he’d telephoned the office and lied that he was unwell and that he’d be taking the day off work. ‘Must’ve been the Indian takeaway, Mr Westerman. I’ve been up all night. I feel terrible.’ He’d lied badly and he knew that Mr Westerman had seen through it. Damn him! Let him think what he wants! Secondly, he’d found the carrier bags full of index cards in his bedroom which he had to sort into numerical order. It was extra work, he didn’t have to do it, but God knows, he and his mother needed the money now his father had gone. The cost of living? No, the cost of dying is higher.
Penny a card. There were nine thousand waiting to be sorted and bundled. And they had to be back by Friday or the shit would really hit the fan. For five minutes he stared at them anxiously in the hope they would somehow magically reorder themselves. It was as he lifted a bag to the window to look at the faintly printed cards more closely that he saw the accident.
A row of terrace houses faced his own, with a broad strip of rough grass in between. In one bedroom he saw a child, a boy of maybe four or five climbing up at the window. The window was open. Robert’s heart beat faster. He could see into the living room of the house. The rest of the family were downstairs watching breakfast television obviously ignorant that their child even now was swinging one chubby leg out of the window.
He wondered if he should wave or shout. He saw the child look up. For a second their eyes met, the child smiled, then slipped.
Robert had covered his face with his hands, a sick feeling squeezed into his tightening throat. When he looked again, the child lay still at the bottom of the bay window, its eyes twinkling in the early morning light.
The family in the room had heard something. The father went to the window and looked out.
Robert held his breath. The father’s reaction to seeing the dead child surely must be worse than seeing the accident itself.
The man’s head bobbed from left to right as he looked. Then Robert saw him shrug, mouth something, then return to the television. Of course. The child had fallen at the base of the wall. No-one could see it from the living-room window.
Robert tried to imagine himself going across to the house, knocking on the door and saying, ‘Excuse me, you don’t know me, but something awful’s happened.’ No, he could not do it.
As it happened he did not have to. The postman saw the body as he delivered the letters.
Robert Horobin felt acutely for the family and grieved for the child as much as any man can do. What he witnessed seared him with real emotion and when, at last, the mother came to the door, her scream seemed to bore a hole through his head.
* * *
‘I’ve come to collect my father,’ said Robert hesitantly. ‘William Anthony Horobin.’ The mortuary attendant didn’t look up from his crossword but merely pointed to twin rubber doors along the corridor.
‘Through there, mate. See the day officer.’
The day officer, a Vietnamese man, mid-thirties, concealing his clinical depression behind a desperate grin, pulled Robert by the arm through the stacks of processed corpses.
‘You’ve done the sensible thing, sir,’ said the day officer. ‘What made you decide on packing?’
‘Eh? Oh, the nurse at the hospital suggested it.’
‘Ah well, she would. A few years ago doctors received payment when they persuaded relatives to have their deceased cremated. Ash-cash the doctors called it. Now that’s gone, and we have packaging and they get pack-pay. This way please, sir.’ A moment later he stopped to kick at a stack of the shrink-wrapped corpses in their multicoloured vac-pacs.
‘Trouble is, relatives are still reluctant to pick them up.’ He kicked at the stacks. Hard, as if he really hated them, that they were responsible for his black despair.
Where his foot struck some packs burst. One revealed a greenish arm. The weight of those stacked on top had pressed the bodies flat. A lopsided face flopped from the tattered plastic. The pressure had pushed one eye back into the wizened face; as if to compensate the other eye squeezed out, proud from the head, like a fresh green olive.
‘Serves them right,’ chuckled the day officer bitterly, ‘can’t keep them here forever.’
At last Robert reached the point where his father was stacked.
‘There you go, sir.’
Numbly, Robert took the package. It was lighter than he expected, something to do with the processing he supposed. Like those vacuum packed trout you buy, he could feel the shape of the body beneath the tight plastic – the head, the limbs, the lumps and the ridges – all rigid beneath its snug wrapper.
He could see nothing through the plastic. Printed on that were lilies and carnations and where the face should be was the photograph of a beautiful model, features relaxed, her lips pursed as if to deliver a moist kiss, eyes lightly closed.
‘Sir. Don’t forget your wreath.’ The man peeled the adhesive tabs and stuck the saucer size wreath onto the pack.
The man smiled grimly and nodded. Obviously it was time for Robert to go. But he stood awkwardly wondering how to frame the question he wanted to ask.
‘That’s all there is, sir. Can you find your way back to the car park?’
‘Yes, uh, thank you.’ Reluctantly Robert started to walk away. As he did so the words came in a rush. ‘What do I do with it now?’ He turned but the man had gone, whistling away, away, away through the stacks of shrink-wrapped dead.
* * *
Robert drove back through the rain to find his mother waiting. She stood behind the table snipping the air with scissors.
‘Come on, come on,’ she said impatiently. ‘Let’s open him up and see what we’ve got.’
‘No!’ Robert was shocked. They could never remove the wrapper. He’d seen enough of the compressed carcasses at the mortuary to know what his father looked like now. The idea repulsed him. He took a deep breath. ‘No, mother. We have to leave the bag intact.’
She sighed. ‘Suit yourself, lad.’
He carefully laid the pack on the settee. Something was wrong apart from the lack of weight. When his father was alive he used to lay on the settee after his lunchtime beer sessions, resting his head on the cushioned arm with his slippered feet hanging over the other end. Now he barely took up two cushions. A sick disappointment soaked through Robert. ‘You know what they’ve done, mother?’
‘What?’ She squinted at it through her glasses.
‘Well, just look!’ He snatched up the telephone and began looking for the mortuary number. ‘They’ve gone and tricked us, that’s what.’ His voice cracked. ‘Look, the head’s the right size, but – but his body’s too small. It’s a dwarf or a – or a doll.’
His mother prised the handset from his fingers and replaced it. ‘Robert,’ she said softly. ‘Remember. In this place they do things differently.’
He sat down heavily beside the pack. She was right. He nodded miserably. ‘But five hundred pounds for that. What are we going to do with him?’
His mother squeezed his hand. ‘This has been a very trying time for us all. But life must go on. In a minute I’ll go and make us a nice dinner.’ She picked up the scissors and looked at them thoughtfully. ‘Robert, we could just snip a hole in the corner.’ A glint came into her eye as she snipped at the air once more. ‘Just a tiny one and take a little peek.’
‘No, no. No!’
Grumbling, his mother disappeared into the kitchen.
* * *
That night Robert dreamt he stood on the bank of the river watching the pack float by. Boys were pelting it with stones – they were laughing. The plastic burst open to expose something wrapped in strips of grey tissue which the water slowly unravelled to reveal part of his father’s deeply lined forehead. Another
strip peeled away and Robert looked down into a single naked eye. Wide open. Bloodshot. Staring.
A stone splashed near the pack making it bob lightly. Robert looked up at the boys. ‘Stop that!’ The heavy weight of the authority in his voice surprised him. And the boys did stop. ‘Go on,’ he ordered firmly. ‘Clear off.’ Without answering back they ran away.
Robert awoke. 3am. And it was as if he had really woken from a bad dream that had lasted nearly all his life. He twisted himself out of bed and looked round at the dismal room. God, how had he lived in such a dump? Window frames rotted, giving off a mushroom smell, wallpaper hung down like scorched skin. He tested his balance on his toes and breathed deeply, feeling his blood hammer.
First things first. The cards. For the next four hours he worked. They seemed to dance into order beneath his suddenly dexterous fingers. As he snapped a rubber band around the last bundle the sunlight came slicing through the curtains. Jumping up, he ripped them aside, then wrenched up the sash window. It groaned, creaked, juddered but up it came and he thrust out his head to a chorus of singing birds that had to sing, for if they did not sing then they would burst with joy. And they sang because the sun annihilated a cold, and a dark, and a pitiless night. His elation expanded like a bubble and rose within him. His flesh could not contain it and it rose upward and outward to join with the birds that soared toward the heavenly blue sky.
The man from the house opposite, the same one from which the child had fallen, was walking across the grass, no doubt on his way to work, his snap bag over his shoulder, Thermos in his donkey jacket pocket. He was whistling.
Insight blasted through Robert’s head, bringing with it apostle-strength conviction.
‘How’s the boy?’ called Robert cheerfully.
The man stopped and smiled up. ‘Not too bad now. But he’s got hissen a bump on ’is head like an egg.’
‘He’s home then?’
‘Aye, they X-rayed ’im and that was it. Right as rain he is. Anyroad, it’s learned ’im not to go and bloody well do it again. Sithee.’
With his bare elbows resting on the window-sill Robert Horobin stood there for a while until the sun had burnt the accumulated damp from his bones. After that, he went to his bedside table and took the blade from his razor. It was sharp enough. And he knew exactly what to do:
He would go
down
and find out what
his father
was really like.
Over Run
They arrived.
One by one.
Across the daisy-spattered meadow.
The moonlight cast their shadows, cold as eternity itself, towards the solitary house that stood by the black hump of the ancient burial mound.
Black dots within a greater darkness.
They approached. Some walking upright, some hopping, some limping, some rolling over the lush spring grass. Over barbed wire fences that sagged beneath their weight, cracking posts. Then they snapped open the gate to the paddock.
One by one they collected around the house in a circle.
These were the dead.
The long dead, the recent dead, their dry paper faces moon-kissed and awful. These faces they raised to the sky. Three thousand mouths cracked open and –
Graham Palmer looked up. ‘What the hell’s that bloody racket?’
John Palmer paused in the act of pouring two hefty brandies. ‘A cow,’ he suggested, and handed a glass to his elder brother who sat in the armchair by the fire.
‘Funny sounding cow.’
John grinned. ‘Okay. A sick cow with a chronic speech impediment.’
Graham Palmer doubted it.
‘You’re supposed to be the country bumpkin, Graham. These groans and things that go bump in the night’ll be commonplace to you now.’
They listened. Then the sound faded.
Satisfied, John nodded. ‘Yup. A cow. Hey, bruth, are you supposed to be drinking this stuff so soon after?’
Graham smiled. ‘They changed my heart, not my liver. Anyway, this isn’t boozing – it’s medicinal.’
‘You’re the boss. Right, before I settle down to my dollop of Sainsbury’s finest can I do anything for the invalid? Warm broth? Change your incontinence pad?’
‘Stop taking the piss.’
‘Yes, I suppose I would be. Literally.’
Graham laughed. ‘Sit down you daft bastard, before I forget I’m a lawyer and say something defamatory.’
Graham watched his brother drop back and carelessly sprawl his left leg over the arm of a three-thousand-pound sofa.
This was the best medicine. Liberal doses of brandy. Plus a massive injection of his brother’s irreverent humour. Already he’d heard more dirty jokes than he could ever remember again. Graham was glad that Jenny had taken the kids to Scarborough for the weekend. Okay, she got on well enough with John but she cramped his free-wheeling style.
Anyway, the only danger he faced was bursting his stitches with an almighty belly-laugh. No worries about his heart now. It ticked away smoothly inside his ribcage with a firm beat he’d not known in years.
‘When’s my kid brother going to get married and settle into some nice comfortable rut, then?’
‘You know me, bruth. I’ve still to see the world.’
‘See it? There can’t be much left that’s not had your filthy great boots all over.’
John shrugged. ‘Oh … I don’t know. I still feel there’s something out there waiting for me.’
‘To boldly go where no man has …’
‘Yeah, that kind of crap.’
Graham shook his head. His brother’s wanderlust mystified him. John could never settle in one place. He couldn’t settle with one girl. It’s as if his life – and it was the foot-loose and fancy-free life most men would sacrifice a testicle for – didn’t satisfy him.
John craved something. Just what, his brother did not know.
‘One thing I meant to ask you, bruth.’ Mischief glinted in John’s eye. ‘How long before you recommence the old conjugals?’
Graham raised his eyes to the ceiling, pantomiming long-suffering.
‘I mean – with that new heart thrusting all those red blood cells to your extremities, you’ll be horny as … Oh shit. It’s doing it again.’
The lights flashed. In the corner of the room the fax machine Graham had installed so he could work from home began its eccentric clicking.
‘Jesus …’ The lights imitated a cheap disco. ‘This is what estate agents describe as rustic charm?’
Graham frowned. ‘Peculiar. It’s never done this before.’
But then the entire evening had been peculiar.
Peculiar enough to sit there with a dead man’s heart pumping in your chest. That was the long-term peculiar that would take months, maybe years to get used to.
The short-term peculiar had taken the shape of the electric acting up with lights flickering or sometimes dimming right down until the elements glowed a dull red in the bulbs.
Now the fax machine had joined the peculiarity game, too.
Out came page after page of gibberish.
COME
OVER ALL ALONG
IT IS OVER
WE WANT WE WE WE WANT
COME
Pages of words in huge black letters that looked as if they’d been stencilled in aerosol.
COME COME COME
Then meaningless black streaks as the paper rolled from its slot.
Now came black and grey pictures. Distorted faces with impossibly wide mouths and eyes that looked as if they’d been cemented over. Chaotic images tumbling over one another in a crazy tangle.
It was the sort of thing an artist driven mad by crack would draw.
‘What a load of crap.’ This kind of thing delighted John. ‘These are so bad you’d probably qualify for an Arts Council grant.’
‘Peculiar,’ murmured Graham. It was a stock word now. Peculiar. But that was preferable to the only other word that
picked at his brain.
Disturbing.
* * *
Three thousand … four thousand … five thousand …
Five thousand corpses temporarily charged with life. A crackling, electric kind of life that twitched limbs and lips and eyes in spastic jerks. Hands crusted thick with milk-mould shielded eyes against the acetylene glare of the moon.
Abruptly – limbs and faces went slack. The twitching stopped. They watched the house. Waiting.
Two hundred sat on the burial mound where the voices of the five-thousand-year dead vibrated faintly through the clay to tickle the two hundred shrivelled rumps.
Soon – the time would come. The feeling rippled through the multitude. Soon.
Limbs began to twitch, hungry jaws chewed the night air.
Cancers that had died with their human hosts erupted, exploded into life. Dead men and women alike gave birth to tumours in a gush of pus and water. Their babies palpitated grotesquely among the nettles and the dandelions; or they struggled to suckle at nipple-like ulcers that covered the bare legs of a headless corpse.
Soon … they sensed it.
On the burial mound a slab of rotting meat that had once been Thomas Henry Wood, salesman of fancy goods and life insurance, jerked to his feet, hands outstretched to the moon.
His face was alive with post-mortem growths. They looked like ripe strawberries, all glossy and red, crowding around his eyes and nose. As the quasi-life flashed through dead muscle the trembling growths swelled and burst, dribbling thick juices down his dusty funeral suit.
His mouth opened. Five thousand mouths opened, too.
Then they sang.
* * *
‘Oh, there’s that bloody awful racket again,’ groaned Graham Palmer.
John grinned. ‘Sounds as if that sick cow’s brought its mates. They’ve formed a frigging choir.’
‘Well …’ Graham carefully stood, trying to ignore the twinges in his back where the surgeons had clamped open his ribs. ‘There’s only one way to find out what it is. John, switch off those lights and open the curtains.’