A Dark Matter

by Doug Johnstone

  Dorothy put the lilies on the table then got a whisky tumbler from the cupboard and poured Craig a drink.

  ‘So when’s the funeral?’ Craig said, sipping.

  Hannah frowned. ‘We just did it.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now, in the back garden.’

  Craig look confused. ‘Wait, that’s the smoke over the house?’

  Hannah nodded. ‘Just us, no service.’

  ‘Are you allowed to cremate folk here?’

  Hannah shook her head as Dorothy sat down and refilled her glass.

  Jenny’s phone vibrated in her pocket and she pulled it out. Kenny from The Standard. He never called. Always email, a quick back and forth about her column, then copy submitted on deadline.

  She stood up and walked towards the door. ‘I need to take this.’

  She pressed reply in the hallway. ‘Kenny.’

  ‘Hi, Jenny.’ His tone of voice was not good.

  ‘Copy’s not due for a couple of days.’

  She walked to her childhood bedroom, now redecorated as a minimalist guest room, pine bed, stripped floorboards, narrow shelf holding the overspill from Dorothy’s book collection.

  She heard a sigh down the line. ‘There’s no easy way to say this, we’re cancelling your column.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know what it’s like here, Marie Celeste meets the Titanic. The numbers don’t add up.’

  She wasn’t surprised but she wasn’t prepared either. Everyone she knew who’d started as a journalist at the same time as her had wangled an exit strategy, gone into PR like Craig, or teaching or consulting, or even politics. A career in journalism was death by a thousand cuts, and here was the final knife in her guts.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Immediately.’

  ‘Kenny, I need this, it’s the only regular gig I have left, you know that.’

  She fingered a book on the shelf, pulled it out. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. She remembered seeing it around the house growing up, a flower blooming from a spanner on the front cover. She’d never read it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kenny said.

  ‘I can’t pay the rent as it is.’

  ‘Not that it’s any consolation, but I’m getting the bullet soon as well.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Jenny said. ‘That’s no consolation.’

  She walked to the window and looked out at the back garden. Archie was tending the pyre, which had reduced to a low pile of smouldering remains. Black and white and grey, ash and bone, Archie raking round the edges, dust sifting onto the body tray below. Jenny saw charred blobs where Dad’s shoes had been and wondered about his feet. Size eleven and thin, the second toe longer than the big one, something she and Hannah both inherited.

  ‘We’re slashing across the paper,’ Kenny said.

  ‘Freelancers first.’

  ‘You know how it is.’

  No contracts, easy to terminate at zero cost. Just shift the work of filling pages in-house, make the subs who are left write the columns and reviews and everything else, and if they don’t like it some bright wee sod from journalism school will do it for nothing to get their name in the paper.

  Out of the window Jenny saw Schrödinger stalking along the hedge line, his eye on a woodpigeon roosting in a bush. He leapt for it, but the bird fluttered to the top of the hedge and looked down at him. Schrödinger was nonplussed, life was all a game.

  ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do,’ Kenny said.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I have to go. Stay in touch, yeah?’

  Jenny ended the call. She was still holding that book, the flower and the spanner, one transforming into the other as if it was that easy to change your life. Maybe if she read the book she could come up with another way to live, another way to see the world.

  She returned the book to the shelf and went back to the kitchen. The three of them were sitting around the table sighing like people do after someone says something funny but poignant. Jenny always seemed to miss the joke. They lifted their drinks in unison as if hearing a telepathic message that Jenny was deaf to.

  Craig looked at Dorothy.

  ‘But what about the businesses?’ he said, as if continuing a conversation.

  Dorothy smiled. ‘I have Archie and Indy.’

  ‘Indy’s training to become a funeral director,’ Hannah said, beaming with pride.

  ‘That’s great,’ Craig said. He lifted his glass and pointed at the two whiteboards on the wall. ‘But there’s a lot to do. Jim was…’ Maybe he didn’t want to remind the women of their loss.

  Dorothy nodded, acknowledging Craig’s diplomacy, then gazed into her glass, swilled the Highland Park, watched as it clung to the sides then slipped down.

  Jenny knew what was coming, she’d expected it since she got the news about Dad. She was surprised it hadn’t been mentioned earlier, but here it was, she was ready.

  Dorothy took a sip, stared at her glass. ‘I thought maybe Jenny could help out. Stay for a bit, keep me company.’ Now she looked up. ‘Just for a while.’

  Jenny thought about the phone call, her overdue rent, that stupid book with the flower on it. She could smell lily pollen and whisky and she thought about never seeing her dad again.

  ‘Sure.’

  3

  HANNAH

  Hannah took Indy’s hand as they walked through the front garden. She glanced back at the first-floor window knowing Gran would be there. She smiled and waved then turned away. It felt weird leaving her alone, but Mum was just nipping to her flat across town in Portobello to pick up a few things and coming straight back. It was good they’d be spending time together, they needed each other right now. Everyone needs someone. She leaned over and kissed Indy on the cheek.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘Can’t I kiss my girlfriend’s beautiful face?’

  Indy mimed being sick, fingers down her throat.

  ‘Piss off,’ Hannah laughed.

  They went past the gateposts at the end of the drive and Hannah smiled at the address carved into the stonework, 0 Greenhill Gardens. Number zero, just one of the things that marked this place as special. She asked Dorothy and Jenny about it when she was younger, but Gran just shook her head as if it was a cosmic joke, and Jenny shrugged like it never occurred to her that it was odd. Hannah did some research and it turned out their house was added to the street later than others, by an eccentric brewery owner in the late 1800s. In those days you could make up your own address, but instead of creating a new street name Mr Bartholomew plumped for number zero on the street already there, right next to the existing number one. Posties had been confused ever since.

  Something about it appealed to Hannah’s mind. Zero was hard to define mathematically and asking about it led into philosophical territory, which she loved. She was studying metaphysics as an optional course, and sometimes popped into lectures on category theory, the maths of maths, to get her brain fried. That abstract space, the way matrices, theories and equations interlinked, the way they mapped out a universe you could superimpose on the real world, she was into it.

  ‘What are you smiling about?’ Indy said.

  They were round the corner and into the park. The web of paths was full of students and workies heading home after lectures and the office. Hannah loved that everyone lived cheek by jowl here, she felt part of something.

  ‘Just happy to be alive,’ she said.

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘Which one?’

  A running joke, Indy a lapsed Hindu.

  The truth was Hannah really was happy to be alive, despite just watching her grandpa being cremated. Maybe because of that. Dorothy once told her that some people got horny at funerals, determined to get on with the business of living in the face of death. Hannah could relate.

  They crossed Whitehouse Loan onto the north part of Bruntsfield Links where the pitch and putt was. The undulations of the ground always made Hannah think of the ancient bu
rial site under the surface. She wondered how many of the kids and parents knocking golf balls around realised there were hundreds of seventeenth-century plague victims buried below. Another layer of existence beneath reality.

  They cut round the top of the Links to Marchmont then onto Melville Drive. The sun was still high this early in autumn, and the light through the chestnut trees strobed across her eyes. She looked at Indy’s face as it dappled between light and shade. In fourth year at school Hannah briefly dated an epileptic boy who had to cross the road when low sunlight flickered through railings. She wondered about that loss of control, reactions in the brain making you who you are. Depression, anxiety, love, hate, anger. She thought about neurons firing, particles shifting state, quarks changing their distributions.

  She caught the smell of charcoal and burgers from barbecues across the road. The Meadows were full of students exploiting the last warm days before the country shut down for winter. Frisbees, football, in the distance some girls playing quidditch. Harry Potter was before her time, she preferred The Hunger Games, stronger women for a start. But you couldn’t exactly play Hunger Games in the park.

  They reached the flat and bounded up to the top floor. Indy opened the door and they fell inside. Hannah worried that she was supposed to feel down because of Grandpa, but she felt full of possibility. Jim wouldn’t want her to mope around, even though she missed him. And maybe Dorothy was right, maybe death makes you horny.

  She grabbed Indy’s waist and spun her round, kissed her, stared at those brown eyes. ‘Love you, babes.’

  Indy looked at her sideways. ‘What’s got into you?’

  Hannah kissed her again, long and deep, eased her against the wall.

  Indy pulled back. ‘Just a minute.’ She called out. ‘Mel?’

  They waited for a reply.

  ‘She must still be at King’s Buildings,’ Hannah said. Though she knew lectures were over for the day, and it wasn’t like Mel to head to the pub afterwards, like some of their classmates. Hannah had skipped lectures on special relativity and quantum field theory this afternoon, Mel saying she would let her know if she missed anything.

  Hannah went to kiss Indy again and Indy responded, then a phone rang. It came from Mel’s room.

  ‘Leave it,’ Indy said, her hand on Hannah’s back.

  Hannah frowned. Classes were over. Mel was super-reliable and organised, and never went anywhere without her phone.

  Hannah unpeeled herself from Indy and went to Mel’s door, knocked twice. Waited. The phone kept ringing. She pushed the door open. Everything seemed normal, the single bed made, the desk neat with piles of notes and textbooks, Mel’s photo montage on the wall, pictures of her with friends and family.

  The phone was on the desk, still ringing.

  ‘Mum’ flashed on the screen.

  Hannah felt Indy at the doorway behind her as she picked up the phone and answered.

  ‘Hi, Mrs C, Hannah here.’

  ‘I told you before, call me Yu. What have you done with my daughter?’ Her voice was bubbly, strong Canton accent, but there was an edge.

  ‘I don’t know, me and Indy were out all day and just got in. I found her phone in her room.’

  ‘I’ll kill her,’ Yu said, in a tone that meant she would do the opposite. ‘She was supposed to meet her father and me for lunch. It’s my birthday.’

  ‘Happy Birthday.’

  ‘Thanks, dear, but I wanted to spend it with my daughter.’

  Melanie never missed appointments and she would never, ever miss her mum’s birthday.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Hannah said, trying to keep her voice light. ‘When I see Mel, I’ll tell her she’s in trouble.’

  ‘You have no idea where she might be?’

  Hannah looked out of Mel’s window. Her room faced onto Argyle Place, but you could still see a swathe of the Meadows, a sliver of Salisbury Crags in the distance. ‘We had classes this afternoon. I wasn’t there, it was my grandpa’s funeral.’

  ‘Oh, baby, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK. But I know Mel was going to lectures. She probably just got caught up with something at uni.’

  That was no excuse at all. The classes were in the afternoon, nothing to do with lunch, but Hannah couldn’t think what else to say.

  ‘OK, dear,’ Yu said. There was hesitation down the line. ‘You get her to call me as soon as she gets home, understand?’

  ‘I will,’ Hannah said. ‘Bye.’

  She hung up and turned to Indy, raised her eyebrows.

  Indy stepped into the room. ‘I heard.’

  She walked to where Hannah was standing, staring at the home screen of Mel’s phone, a picture of her with Xander from their year, the two of them dressed up for a Valentine’s Day dinner. Hannah remembered helping Mel decide what to wear that night.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ Hannah said.

  4

  DOROTHY

  Dorothy stood in the embalming room and stared at what was left of Jim. An outdoor funeral pyre doesn’t reach the temperature of a cremation oven, a couple of hundred degrees lower, so his remains were chunkier than they usually got back from crematoriums. Also, crems sift the remaining bone fragments and pulverise them in a cremulator, so the bereaved get a nice pile of grey sand for scattering.

  In comparison, the bone fragments and dust in front of her were real. And it was dust, not ashes, that was a misnomer. She was thankful that the fire hadn’t left any large bones for her to deal with, nothing longer than a few inches amongst the dirt. She imagined lifting an intact skull from the pile, addressing it like Hamlet. Or one of Jim’s femurs, waving it around like a cavewoman.

  She looked up from the table. It was too bright for this, but it was a workplace after all, Archie needed plenty of light. Apart from Jim on the table, the place was spotless, Archie always made sure of that. The six body-fridges along one wall hummed, the names and details of the dead inside written on magnetic cards stuck to the front of each fridge. Arthur Ford, five foot eleven, viewing required, embalming needed, no jewellery, removed from the Western General. It tied in with the whiteboard upstairs, and for a moment Dorothy had a flash of the business as a single giant organism.

  She turned back to Jim’s remains. Picked up a four-inch shard of white bone. It was as light as balsa wood but solid, all the organic content and moisture vaporised. She held it up to the light, turned it in her fingers. It had one straight edge and one gently curved, and was wider at one end than the other with a round indentation at the wide end, like it might’ve been a socket for a ball joint. The narrow end was sharp, and she pushed her thumb against it, felt the pain. She kept pushing until it broke the skin, watched as a droplet of her blood spread along the tip of the bone, darkening it. She sucked her thumb and put the bone in the pocket of her cardigan.

  She thought of all the atoms from Jim’s body now floating in the sky across Edinburgh, rising into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. She thought of other atoms from his pyre dropping onto the soil in their garden, their neighbours’ gardens. She thought of the atoms in the brush Archie used to tidy up, the atoms stuck in her own hair, on her clothes, her shoes, in her nose and ears and throat. She licked her pinkie finger and dipped it in the dust on the tray, then sucked it.

  He tasted of bonfires and dirt. All that was left of fifty years together. She breathed deeply and looked at the embalming table alongside, bottles of chemicals and pumps lined up on the far workstation, razors, scissors, creams and sprays, the collapsible gurney they brought the bodies in on. Collecting bodies was a two-person job, Jim and Archie for years. Now someone else would have to step in, maybe her. She’d done the funeral arranging together with Jim for years but she hadn’t got as involved with the body side of the business. She was good at logistics, good with people, had worked for the company part-time on and off her whole life, while raising Jenny at the same time. Indy could step up, she was training to be a funeral director anyway, she was small but strong, tough in a way none
of the Skelfs were. Dorothy saw it in her the moment they met, same with Archie. All part of their extended surrogate family. A family that had now lost its heart.

  She left the room, switching the light out on her husband, the ashen taste of him still on her tongue, his sharp bone with her blood on it nestled in her pocket.

  She sat at the desk in the small office and frowned, paperwork scattered in front of her. She took a sip of whisky and sucked her teeth. She’d been drinking too much all week, since she found Jim on the bathroom floor, eyes open, pyjama trousers at his ankles.

  She picked up the bank statement again, adjusted her glasses, and compared it to another piece of paper. She needed more light in here, or better glasses. She thought about Jim’s eyeballs, evaporated into nothing. She looked at an open book of accounts and squinted as she ran her finger down the page. Something didn’t add up.

  Jim always handled the business side of things, Dorothy was hopeless with numbers. Hannah got her love of maths from him. Maybe Dorothy was misunderstanding it, but there seemed to be money missing. Not a big lump sum gone wandering, but a steady amount leaving the business account for months. No, years. Into a sort code and account number she didn’t recognise, with no reference name. She shuffled papers, looked again, took another hit of Highland Park. The whisky wasn’t helping.

  She sighed. Maybe she was overlooking something simple, something that would explain the five hundred pounds coming out of their account every month for years. She must know about this, Jim would’ve told her. Because if he didn’t tell her, that meant it was a secret, and she couldn’t cope with that. She needed to speak to someone but the person she always spoke to when something was wrong was Jim.