How the Dead Live (Factory 3)

by Raymond, Derek

  Much that I hadn’t been able to see on my last visit was now apparent. The hall was at least fifty feet high and rose to a glass ceiling. Three galleries ran round the hall, serving the storeys; soaring above them was the organ, the round windows of its loft like the portholes of a liner. Ranks of pipes spreadeagled upwards, leaning into or away from each other at absurd angles. Half-effaced saints painted on them in red, blue and gold indicated the Gothic script that described their sayings or lives; draughts cracked and snarled across the hall, booming into the pipes which responded with groans or howls. I turned slowly on the marble floor, half an inch deep in rain, listening to the branches thrashing in the wind against the walls, listening for anything.

  ‘Dr Mardy?’ I called out.

  There was no reply. I walked over to a wall on which a great canvas hung, its lower part half lost in the shadows. By my torch I saw that it was titled The Inspiration of Alphaeus – a young man with wings for hands and feet, demons yawning blackly after him, ascended to the ceiling. I walked off down the hall, opened a door at random and was met with all the desolation that I had seen before; I was in the remains of a dining-room. Chairs were pushed back from some ancient dinner party and ten glasses filled with rotten liquid stood on the table, cutlery lying where it had been flung down. The smell in that tight-shut, soaking place was terrible, like the smell of death itself. The poles at the windows had broken and collapsed, hurling the velvet curtains across the floor. The shutters had come unhinged and were shored up with planks; a rat nodded at me and scuttled into a corner. Beyond the cracked or absent panes, against the freezing dark sky, I watched the wild branches as they continued to sway and batter each other in the wind, and still Mardy did not come.

  At that moment I became aware of the voices again.

  I hadn’t been altogether sure about them the time before, but now I definitely was. Besides, they were louder. I couldn’t yet make out what they said because they were too far off but I could tell that a man and a woman were having some urgent conversation – was it a quarrel, or that violent pleading which comes almost to the same thing?

  ‘Mardy!’ I called out again. ‘Dr Mardy!’ But my voice only rang emptily back at me.

  I also wished immediately that I hadn’t spoken; my words seemed to have provoked a new sound, for there came the crash as of a fist on a table from upstairs and a man shouted, quite clearly now: ‘Don’t you see I can’t go on?’ There was a woman’s answer but it got fainter again, as though the people had moved into rooms further off.

  Now I was sweating, yet I felt icy cold. I was convinced that the woman’s voice I was listening to was dead, that it was Marianne Mardy’s; but that didn’t alter the fact that I was sure I was hearing it. She sobbed on as I stood in the dark downstairs and I felt as cold as we all do in the presence of madness and death.

  I thought: ‘I’ve got to find the stairs.’ I did find them and climbed until I found myself at the banisters of the second gallery. The moon shone for a moment, glaring through the glass roof; far down shone the marble of the hall floor, glittering in water. Around me, draughts groaned through the doors, many of them open, of what had been bedrooms; cold, bitter air blew in, mixed with the soft scent of decay. I shone my light into one of them as I stole past. Wet bedding lay tumbled on the floor; clothes from another age sprawled half out of a wardrobe. I went on, and the two voices got louder all the time until there was no further to go at the end of the gallery and I was faced by a shut door. As far as I could tell I was at the wrecked end of the house, and by putting my ear to the panels of the door I could for the first time listen clearly to what they were saying in there.

  ‘Do you trust me, Marianne?’

  ‘You know I do.’

  ‘Even if it comes to the worst?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m torn, Marianne.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear to lose you to the ground and yet I—’

  ‘I wonder at times if I really want your solution, William. I wouldn’t know the world I was coming back to any more, and how do I know if you’d be in it with me? I sometimes wonder if I know what it would involve, coming back – I couldn’t go through hell twice and please don’t let’s quarrel now, darling, I feel so ill.’

  ‘We’re not quarrelling. It’s just the state of your face, Marianne, and what must be done about it.’

  ‘We’re talking about life and death, William; we both know it. I’m very sick, just help me to die.’

  ‘I can’t do that; I want us both to go on for ever.’

  ‘I don’t see how that can be.’

  ‘Not now, but in fifty years. They’ll have the answer to everything in fifty years. Do you truly believe in me as a surgeon, Marianne?’

  ‘You know I do.’

  ‘Still, you realize there are people better able to help you, better qualified than I?’

  ‘But not better qualified to love me.’

  ‘Struck off as I am, I’m not qualified at all. And I haven’t the equipment, I haven’t the help I need for major surgery.’

  There was a silence and then she said, moaning: ‘It’s this terrible, unrelenting pain, William, and my face in the mirror, my mouth.’

  ‘There are no more mirrors, Marianne. I have destroyed every mirror in the house.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  There seemed to be a break at this point, because when they began again she was speaking in a different tone, as though it were some other day.

  ‘So we’re going to take the risk?’

  ‘There is no risk, Marianne. I’ve been studying cryogenics for forty years.’

  ‘But there is a risk. Where will you be in two thousand and thirty?’

  ‘With you, of course, and by the same means.’

  ‘Oh,’ she sobbed, ‘how can you turn base metal into gold?’

  ‘I need your decision, Marianne. Am I to carry out this last operation?’

  ‘Yes, of course, darling. You know I believe in everything you do. That’s why I live with you, that’s why I exist, and nobody is ever going to touch my body except you.’ She sighed and said: ‘I just wanted to talk about it, it’s for my confidence.’

  I heard tears grind out of his face and felt dirty listening to such things secretly behind a door, and believed that I knew everything that was most repellent then about police work. After what seemed a long time she sighed and said: ‘May I have my shot now? It must be time.’

  ‘Yes. Marianne, you realize you should be in hospital, don’t you?’

  ‘We’ve been over that hundreds of times, William. I believe in everything you do. If I die, I die. Oh, please, my shot.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ There was the sound of instruments, syringes being moved and she said: ‘All this must be costing a fortune.’

  ‘As if I cared.’

  Yes, I felt sick with disgust at my being in sone way present there as though I had, by the fact of listening like that in a hidden way, torn away the poor wall that stood between myself, the world, and the dignity of people’s lives.

  ‘Ah,’ she said after a little while, fading.

  When I could tell she was asleep I heard him say: ‘The truth is atrocious. A woman of such brilliance, my only love, her concerts, all her sweet outgoing, how can it be decreed that she should walk in public with her diseased face, watch her rotting features in a mirror?’

  Then I listened to him fall, shouting Marianne, Marianne! Our bodies mixed! Transpierced! Transpierced! – then I knew what agony between two people really was.

  After a time he began to mumble how her death had been a day of sunny nightmare. ‘August the fourteenth: I disentangled the diseased parts from her small head, smelling our love, our smell, both our flesh and her life while existence ignored her sickness – oh, it was such a fine day. I felt I was going to lose her from the start, and began working with a sense of chill and doom. I gave her her pre-med and she yawned comfortably in her lipless mouth as th
ough death were just a fine evening, the end of a busy day. She turned her face to the wall but I saw all kinds of things about her as I bent over to give her the anaesthetic – her breast and shoulders, her hands, part of her head, it was like plucking the bird of our memories while I straightened and prepared her but I thought, I mustn’t be nervous now, mustn’t flinch, must think just about the work that’s to be done. Dear Christ how I fought to buy us time when I felt her begin to fail and yet later, at the end, when she died uttering a little sound and was gone I found I now had all the time on earth to remember her, a timeless time, and I took her and held her to me as though that would prevent what had just happened, watching her eyes turning in ancient interest to questions that were now beyond both of us. I could not immediately understand that she had gone – that took me many hours and days – I only wept that I might have had that second more with her that I would never have any more, just one more chance, just that little time it would have taken me to explain my pettiness, my stupidity in many ways, perhaps my identity.’

  On that fatal word the voice stopped, yet I continued to crouch like a dog outside that door, disgusted with myself at having listened to such private, final matters; I can’t say how long I stayed. Yet in the end I did get up and remember turning the doorhandle, filled with comprehension and dread. The shrunken boards of the door swung freely away from me into the room, giving on to close darkness. There was no one in the room. I shone my torch in; its light picked out sodden sheets that trailed around a bed. It hovered on a dressing-table and the smashed glass of its mirror; I knew at once that it was her room; I picked out feminine clothes and several medicines in my weak light. Frightening and absurd words crowded and crossed through my head as I looked:

  ‘First we march in, then we stamp round

  With a scream and a stagger and a shout,

  We bang and we batter,

  We drum and we chatter

  As we dance all our nightmares out.’

  I called to Mardy through the frozen gloom of the house and said that I was coming down.

  19

  Mardy said: ‘I must tell you this; I had a revolting dream just two years before Marianne died. I dreamed I was walking on a common, it was a very fine sunny day. It must have been a Sunday or a bank holiday; anyhow, there were hundreds of people about.

  ‘All at once I noticed what I thought was a large grey dog rolling about on the turf, as though basking in the hot weather. But coming up to peer at it, as everyone was doing at its antics, I suddenly saw that it wasn’t a dog at all but something else, and that it was writhing in a transport of agony, not delight, surrounded by a heap of its faeces and foaming in some kind of fit. Yet nobody but me seemed to find it repellent; innocently they went up to the creature, petting it and stroking its matted fur. Others, in loose, intelligent groups, strolled around, discussing the phenomenon.

  ‘However, I was filled with loathing and disgust as I watched this sick thing – the fat grey woolly back that it kept snapping at in its dementia with its broken teeth; even though I was standing behind crowds of people I felt alone, filled with doubt and doom, and was glad I had a stick with me.

  ‘What I wanted to do was to kill it before its sickness could spill over to us, and I couldn’t understand why nobody else seemed to feel the same. No, instead, children, quite unafraid, were going up to it and fondling it. Convulsed in its fever, it was oblivious of us at first, and I could see no reason why, out of everyone, it should have singled me out. But once it had become aware of me it fixed its yellow gaze on no one else and seemed to take its health from me, rolling upright to trot towards me, threading its way intently through all the people.

  ‘Even though to begin with it seemed to nose its way up to me in a random way there was an inevitable quality in what it did and as it got closer to me the greater my hatred of it became, because now I could smell it and see how its pelt was teeming, putrid with lice. Yet still everyone stood politely aside, smiling, and encouraging it to come to me. Some even stooped to pat it as it passed, while I wanted to yell at them not to; I tried to shout at them not to touch it, only to find my voice had jammed in my throat. I implored them with my eyes to turn it away from me but they only smiled and waved – happy, peaceful faces.

  ‘I walked swiftly away from it, affecting nonchalance, but it followed me through bushes towards a series of distant hills, shambling after me under the cloud of flies that pursued it, saliva swinging from its muzzle in bright chains.

  ‘At last I found a bush tall enough to wait behind, took a firm hold of my stick and then when I judged that the beast was close enough I aimed a terrific blow at its head, only my stick was nothing but a stem of grass that broke off above my fist. As soon as it realized that I had failed to kill it this presence stood perfectly still and watched me for a measureless period of time; it knew its own turn had come now. I looked around for help, but everyone had got much further off; it was dark, and I watched a few scattered people making for home against a night horizon.

  ‘Then I began to run as I never have before.’

  Later he said: ‘One evening, not long after Marianne died, my dog ate one of my own teeth which had broken off, embedded in a piece of meat I had been eating. The dog ate it because I was sickened by the sense of my own mortality and so threw him the whole lot, tooth and all, whereupon he snapped that small part of my body up and looked at me expectantly, wagging his tail for more. Oh, I tell you, what I thought of myself as a lover, student, intellectual as I examined this new gap in myself!

  ‘Yet I soon learned to smile in a new way, sideways; we are all quite alone.

  ‘So time drops on us all like a shadow.’

  We stood in the icy hall, talking. ‘We married in a fragile spring,’ he said. ‘I always felt afraid for our love as though the weather on our wedding day – cloud, blossom, rain and some sun, all these constantly changing, too much going on in the sky at once – threatened our love. But you think that I’m perhaps being sentimental?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘just go on talking.’

  ‘Now I’ve started,’ he said, ‘it’s a relief to talk. I had to make you listen to that tape just now. I felt there was no other way I could get you to understand.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘it’s all right.’ While I listened to him I found I was also thinking about a report I had found on my desk the other day at the Factory. It droned: ‘Murderer, convicted, of three old women, no recommendation for release, this individual is unfit for any prison work and now rarely leaves his cell at Wakefield prison. He had one friend, another killer, a transvestite, but they quarrelled over a cassette-player and the friend killed himself.’ Nobody at the Factory would have cared one way or the other, of course, if he hadn’t been wanted as a witness in another case. But if it had been me – unfit for prison work – I’d have thrown a spade at the bastard and thrown it hard and told him to get on with murdering a few sacks of cement for the rest of his days: I don’t see why the taxpayer has to work for these people and keep them. Eight hours solid in all weathers, like the rest of us, or else no snout soon makes you forget your wanking habits and gets you to be of use to someone. At least better to build a wall or paint a traffic sign than strangle, rape and rob some blind old biddy for twenty quid. These charmers often blind the victims so they can’t be identified.

  ‘You can’t grasp the music of the dead,’ Mardy was saying. ‘I remember Marianne’s, but can’t seem to catch it, not really. Every tragedy is in the past; I hold that those who live after the dead suffer with them. Mine carries on; hers is over.’

  ‘All right, Dr Mardy,’ I said. I knew the moment had come. ‘Where is your wife?’

  ‘Downstairs.’

  ‘Shall we go and see her together?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  We went silently through the house, and I thought the long flight of steps into the basement would never end. Mardy said only, as he held his gas-lamp up for us to see by: ‘I’ve felt like
a hunted beast up to now.’ He looked even more frail in that fluttering light, crouched in his anorak; wet walls shone around us. At last we got down to a cellar with a concrete wall built across half of it; there was a steel white-painted door set into this wall. Mardy took keys out of his pocket which opened two locks in the door; at that point he turned to me and said: ‘You heard our tape.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Before we go in,’ he said, ‘it’s very important that you should remember what you heard.’

  ‘I remember it all.’

  ‘I’m appealing to you as a human being,’ he said, ‘whatever happens to me, whatever you do to me, you have heard Marianne and me argue our situation out.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wonder if I’ll get justice for my wife and me?’

  ‘We seldom do, but still.’

  ‘Wait till I switch the light on,’ he said, unlocking the door and going through it into the dark. ‘Of course, I know this place by heart.’ Yet it seemed to me to be a long moment, as the uneasy beam of his lamp ran along the wall, before he found it. Then a small square place was filled with ruthless light which focused on a deep-freeze in the middle of the floor. The device was chained and locked, its motor whirring. A green light glowed from its control board and a bouquet of wild flowers lay fading on the lid. ‘I pick them for her every day,’ he said.

  ‘Would you open it, please?’

  ‘Yes, but it won’t be a long look,’ he said, pulling out another key, ‘will it? Not very long. The bulk to be kept chilled is considerable and the temperature must never rise above minus sixty-five centigrade, it kills the tissue.’

  Now I understood everything about the delivery of dry ice. ‘Was there an electricity strike at some point?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Life is so complex, we can none of us know each other’s problems.’

  ‘Some of us profit from them, though,’ I said, ‘don’t they, Dr Mardy?’