by Heide Goody
Afterwards, he sauntered down to the little hardware store and then the charity shop to make some essential purchases before dropping into Ben’s shop, Books ‘n’ Bobs. Ben was at the counter with a customer, a book between them. Normally, at the prospect of actually selling a book, Ben would be beaming with delight, but Clovenhoof could clearly see that Ben was uncomfortable.
“Have you read this?” the woman asked. She was tiny and clutched a tartan shopping trolley. These women only came out during the day, menacing the ankles of Boldmere. Clovenhoof had often wondered whether he should buy one of those trolleys and perhaps enhance it with spinning knives on the axles, maybe even reupholster it in leopard skin or something equally tasteful.
“No,” said Ben. “I haven’t.”
“I need to know if it’s properly hardcore,” said the woman. “I don’t want it if it’s just soppy.”
“Hardcore?” said Ben, glancing at the cover. “Let’s see. Beating Around the Bush. The cover art makes me think that it might be a little bit, um racy, yes. A lot of leather there. What did you have in mind, when you say hardcore?”
“The usual. A bit of S&M, some girl on girl action, three in a bed maybe, raunchy actions with knobs on.”
“Yeees,” said Ben slowly. “All the trimmings, yes.”
“And knobs,” she said. “I want proper throbbing cocks, not just bulging manhoods. Surely it’s not too much to ask?”
“Of course. Why don’t you take a seat and have a flick through before you buy?” said Ben faintly, waving the woman across to an armchair.
“My kind of gal,” observed Clovenhoof as the woman pulled out her reading glasses and settled into the chair. “So, you worked out how to get the tax office off my case?”
“Nerys says she has a plan. Apparently, I am an integral part. No idea what it is but she’s dropping by later.” Ben looked down at Clovenhoof’s purchases. “And these? Integral to your moneymaking plans?”
Clovenhoof considered the wheelbarrow and spade he’d bought.
“Gonna make me a minor fortune.”
“And the black top hat?”
“To add a bit of dignity to proceedings.”
“You and dignity aren’t exactly well acquainted, Jeremy.”
Clovenhoof blew a raspberry. “Just because I’m a bold and dominant figure of a man, unafraid to cross social boundaries.”
“I like a dominant man,” came a quavering voice from over his shoulder. The old woman was out of her chair, looking him up and down. “No, I think I’ll give it a miss,” she said, inexplicably disappointed with what she saw.
“Hey, it’s not the state of the bodywork you should be looking at but what’s under the bonnet,” he said. “I’m a seasoned gigolo. And I specialise in the over seventies.”
She slapped down some money onto the counter.
“I’m bringing this back if it’s not got throbbing cocks in it,” she told Ben.
“I’ve got a throbbing cock,” Clovenhoof called after her as she left with her book and trolley. “Call Jeremy for all your gigoloing needs.” She didn’t even look round. “Can you believe that?” he said to Ben.
“I know. I’m sure little old ladies didn’t use to be so vulgar,” said Ben. “The world has become a cruder place.”
“We do our best,” said Clovenhoof.
Nerys entered the shop, hands full, looking over her shoulder. “Jeez, that blind bat nearly had me with her shopping trolley. Was she looking for the opticians?”
“No, she was looking for a little excitement in her life,” said Clovenhoof. “I could go after her. Do you reckon she’s got false teeth? I’ve always wondered how that –”
“Seriously, no!” said Ben. “Just take your barrow and go get us some cash.”
“What’s the barrow for?” said Nerys.
“The body, of course,” said Clovenhoof. He unfolded his morning newspaper. He’d circled a number of likely candidates. “Best be off. And what have you got there?”
Nerys held up the electrical device. It looked like a cross between a deep fat fryer and a foot spa. “Hot wax.”
Ben was shaking his head.
“Waxing yourself’s got to be painful. I’m surprised that women put themselves through it.”
“Yeah, about that,” said Nerys, giving him a very meaningful look.
Clovenhoof cross-referenced the notices page of the newspaper with his Google search and the satnav on his phone, wheeled his barrow up the right driveway and knocked on the door. At the last moment, he remembered the top hat and slapped it on his head.
A youngish woman in a black pant suit answered the door.
“Yes?”
“Pick up for Mr Douglas Cook,” said Clovenhoof.
The woman looked at the wheelbarrow, tried to process Clovenhoof’s words and gave up.
“Wh-what?”
“Mr Douglas Cook. He still here?”
The woman came onto the step, drew the door to a little behind her and lowered her voice.
“Douglas - my father-in-law – he’s dead.”
“Yes.”
“The funeral’s today.”
“That’s right.” Clovenhoof checked the notice he’d circled in the paper. “At eleven. I thought I’d get here early.”
“Early?” She still didn’t get it. “Who are you?”
“Jeremy Clovenhoof.” He tipped his hat. “Semi-professional funeral services.”
“You’re from the funeral directors.”
“I’m from a funeral directors,” he said. “Past tense. It burned down. A funny story. I was only sixty, maybe seventy percent responsible. Who did you go with for the funeral?”
“Manpreet Singh Funerals.”
“Ah, Manpreet set up by himself after the fire, did he? Excellent. Great chap. Real sense of customer service. Charges a pretty penny too though I should think.”
The woman didn’t look like any of this was sinking in. Her face was going all wobbly. Clovenhoof wasn’t a great reader of human emotion and couldn’t decide if she was going to burst into tears or punch him in the face. People had done both in the past, sometimes simultaneously.
“Are you familiar with the term funeral gazumping?” he said.
“What? No.”
“That’s because I just invented it. Now, I reckon Manpreet will have charged you around four grand for the kind of funeral service your old pop-in-law deserved. But, for the knock down price of three hundred knicker, I can have him in a hole before lunchtime and get in the first round at the wake. What do you say?”
The face-wobbliness continued. The woman was keeping it all in for the time being but Clovenhoof estimated that it would all come pouring out at high pressure very, very soon. Best close the deal.
“I’ve got a plot lined up, I’ve got the tools. All we need to do is slap the old man in the barrow and scarper before Manpreet’s lot get here. You don’t want to see a funeral service turf war. It’s not a pretty sight.”
At that point the woman hit him. First with her hands, then with a flowerpot and then with Clovenhoof’s own spade. She hit him so hard it snapped the spade in two. This was a bit of a disappointment and Clovenhoof had to nip back to the hardware store to buy a new one before trying the next house on his list.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Many individuals failed to realise how big a deal prayer was. With billions of faithful individuals on earth, many of them offering up dozens of prayers, spoken and unspoken, every day, the volume of messages, pleas and queries to the great hereafter was massive. The Celestial City contained an entire district devoted to prayer handling. There was the General Devotion Centre, the Intercessionary Plea Hub, the Non-Specific Prayer Assessment Unit, the Supplications and Applications Decision Force and a dozen other buildings, filled with call handlers, assessment committees and teams devoted to either granting or ignoring the prayers of the living. And, because this was a place of work, the district also buzzed with the coffee stands, lunch halls, restauran
ts and other little outlets that any workforce required during their downtime. That workforce, by tradition, was made up of minor angels and deleted saints who had no other function in the afterlife.
The Forgiveness Archives (motto, ‘Ask, and you shall receive’) was a long, low building staffed entirely by Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgin handmaidens who were martyred alongside her in third century Cologne. The Church on earth had decreed that, historically speaking, none of them had ever existed which Joan guessed was one of the reasons why every single one of the women there had a sour and miserable look on her face. The fact that St Ursula and an uncertain number of her companions were put to death by bow and arrow and here was the hunter Hubertus riding into their lobby on a stag probably had something to do with it too.
The investigative party of saints, angels and demons followed Hubertus in. At the counter, the patron saint of hunting vaulted from the back of his deer, landed drunkenly on the floor and overcompensated in his recovery, throwing in some jazz hands to mask his idiocy.
He peered at the badge pinned to the woman’s tunic.
“Handmaiden four-four-oh-six. What a lovely name! I’m –”
“We know who you are,” she said curtly. “What do you want? We’re very busy.”
Joan looked at the hundreds of virginal clerks wheeling trolleys of paperwork between shelves and filing cabinets. None of them appeared to be in any kind of hurry.
“We’ve got some absolution flags in the Moral Records Centre that we’d like to cross reference.”
“Details,” said the virgin.
Hubertus pulled out a glass tablet device, swiped it and a hologram of informational representation appeared in the air above it. It spun like nightclub lights.
It took Joan a moment to realise that Hubertus instinctively gave the display a little background beat, a throaty “boots ‘n’ cats ‘n’ boots ‘n’ cats” soundtrack. Next to her, Rutspud threw in an accompanying “um-cha, um-cha, um-cha” and some rhythmic footwork.
“Stop that,” said the virgin.
Hubertus stopped. He pointed at a number of white call-out boxes in his data. “These. There’s quite a lot of them.
The virgin assistant began to copy down numbers and called out to one of her colleagues to help.
Joan turned to Rutspud. “You said you had an idea about how we could deal with our… less virtuous guests.”
“I did,” said Rutspud. “It’s quite clever, even if I do say so myself.”
“Yes?”
“I was thinking that you don’t want these people in the City.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you don’t. You want them out of the picture. You want rid of them.”
“I think we should always be willing to welcome people with open arms and hearts filled –”
“Okay, drop the lovey-dovey crap, Joan. I know what you’re obliged to say but you want them gone. You want to exclude them.”
Joan bit down on the words that came too naturally and found what she really wanted to say.
“Yes,” she admitted.
“And these are people who want to live the lives of sickening excess the rich and powerful enjoy back on earth.”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s good news,” said Rutspud. “You see, the rich and powerful like anything that’s ‘exclusive’.”
Joan frowned. It was a frown of near-comprehension, the wonder at seeing a jigsaw puzzle half done.
“Explain.”
Rutspud rubbed his hands together. “I’ll just need some paper, something to write with and access to a photocopier.”
Belphegor had sidled up to listen in, although it was hardly sidling given that he was driving a chugging piston-powered wheelchair.
“I’ve got a photocopier in here somewhere.” He pulled out a lap tray from the arm and spun it round to reveal a glass scanning surface. “Used it make copies of demons’ poker work for analysis. Ah, the number of damned arses I’ve had sat in this lap… so, what’s the plan, Rutspud?”
“It’s not very complicated but I will need some help. To work, it relies on the rich thinking they’re going to get access to something available to no one else.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Clovenhoof had spent the entire day trying to gazump funerals with zero take-up. It wasn’t a complete bust, because one angry widow had thrown a whole Edam cheese at him. He sat on the wall outside the crematorium, eating cheese and wondered why the bargain-hunters of Sutton Coldfield were so resistant to a last-minute change of plan when it could save them so much money.
“What have you been trying to do, Jeremy?”
He turned to see his old boss approaching. His benign face was distorted into a frown.
“Manpreet! Good to see you. Have some Edam. What sort of drugs have you been slipping your customers? There’s brand loyalty and then there’s blind devotion.”
“Funeral gazumping?” said the usually chilled out undertaker. “It’s a new low, even for you. Did you ever stop to wonder why you never hear of such a thing?”
“Because I am the first genius to come up with the idea?” ventured Clovenhoof.
“No, because it’s ridiculous. Ethically, you couldn’t really get any lower.”
“Why thank you, my friend.”
“Take funeral crashers,” said Manpreet, clearly on a roll now. “I always thought they were the lowest form of life, but you...”
“Funeral crashing?”
“People who go to the funerals of people they don’t know just to get free food and drink,” said Manpreet. “Taking advantage of the recently bereaved –”
“– and that all-important English politeness,” said Clovenhoof thoughtfully.
“Yes, it’s despicable. Now back off. I don’t want you bothering any more of my customers, understand?”
Clovenhoof nodded absently as Manpreet stalked off. His thoughts turned immediately to free food and booze and he pulled the newspaper back out to see where the next opportunity would be. Frustratingly, the notices didn’t always include details of the after-party, but Clovenhoof prided himself on his lateral thinking skills. There was a service underway at the crematorium right now. Maybe funeral crashing was just a case of light speculative fishing.
He wandered back into the crematorium and slipped into the back row, knowing that an invite to ‘join us for some light refreshments’ would follow the main event.
He settled down for a spot of people watching. The assembled mourners were dressed in the manner of the wealthy upper classes, which meant that the men favoured ancient woollen suits with an acrid whiff of mothballs while the women formed two groups. Some were skinny and wore fashionable dresses with high heels and others wore more matronly garments with large chunky necklaces: definitely upper-class types or super-upper-middle-class types. And yet, his time working at the funeral parlour, Clovenhoof recognised a coffin that was so cheap it wasn’t even in the standard brochure. It looked like a piece of flatpack furniture. Interesting.
A middle-aged long streak of piss of a man walked to the front as the vicar finished talking reedily about the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Clovenhoof had always assumed it was an ancient euphemism for a bum crack, especially with those outrageous ‘rod and staff’ references. He’d never got round to asking the Almighty about that; he made a note to do so one day.
“Well we all know the score for today, don’t we, eh?” drawled the long streak of piss. “Old Claymore Ferret’s bought the farm. Probably bought it for a knock down price and paid off the surveyors to lie in their report. And he’s finally promoted yours truly to the position of senior Ferret. Watch out, ladies! Maldon’s at the helm. Now, I’m pencilled in to talk about the many ways in which I loved and respected him, blah blah. Sounds all a bit touchy-feely to me. Don’t think I ought to do that. A rum thing and no mistake. Might catch gay or something. No. The only way I can think to describe our relationship is to borrow a saying from the bumper st
icker he had on his favourite safari jeep: ‘How can I miss you if you won’t go away?’.”
There was a brief flurry of nervous laughter throughout the room. Clovenhoof wondered why more funeral services weren’t this good.
The younger Ferret warmed to his theme. “So, unlike the cancer, he finally has gone away, and so far, I haven’t missed him at all. But, as the bumper sticker on his second favourite safari jeep said ‘I told my ex-wife I missed her. But I’ll get her next time’.” He laughed at his own joke and slapped the lectern. “Right, I think we can conclude our business here.”
The vicar gave a brief nod of respect and walked back to the lectern.
“No,” said Ferret. “I mean we don’t need any more hymns or prayers or anything. Let’s wrap things up, shall we? Press the button, pater, and then we’ll go and soak up some booze to remember the old goat.”
The vicar looked appalled, but he reached for the control panel on the wall anyway.
“Come on, chaps,” said Ferret, waving his arm for the guests to join in. “Three! Two! One! Blast off!”
The vicar pressed a button and a curtain slid slowly toward the coffin.
“How bloody slow is that?” Ferret huffed impatiently. “No wonder we didn’t win the space race.” He went over to the control panel and stabbed at all the buttons. While the curtain hadn’t got halfway round, the coffin slid backwards into an opening.
Ferret beamed at the congregation. “Right! Cars are outside. We’re off for some light refreshments at a place called the Boldmere Oak. Last one there’s a socialist.”
Clovenhoof followed the small crowd out to where a row of limos was waiting. The first two were quickly filled with a chattering crowd, leaving a small group of couples. An elderly gent touched Clovenhoof’s arm.
“You’re one of the Westley-Burroughs lot, I’ll wager?” he said.
“Yes?” tried Clovenhoof, not sure what he was agreeing to.
“I knew it. That ruddy complexion of yours is a dead giveaway. Come and ride with us and I’ll tell you some tales about your Auntie Ray that’ll make yer hair curl!”