The Dead I Know

by Scot Gardner

  ‘Mum’s fine but Dad’s losing his marbles.’

  ‘Yeah? What makes you say that?’

  ‘Oh, lots of things. Constantly misplacing his glasses and the car keys, can’t remember what day it is . . .’

  ‘Sounds like me!’

  They cackled, then went silent. Urine drummed on the stainless steel.

  ‘No, but Dad has always been so sharp. Never missed a trick.’

  ‘How old is he again?’

  ‘Fifty-two. Fifty-three in November.’

  ‘Bit young to be going senile, isn’t he?’

  ‘Didn’t know there was an age limit.’

  ‘I’m guessing. I don’t know much about that stuff.’

  Their voices trailed into the night and I was left with all the free toilet paper I needed and a sense that Mam and I might not be alone.

  That night, I used my JKB tie to bind my wrist to my bunk in the annex. I lay there for a long time, staring at the distorted green stars through the panel in the ceiling. I figured it would take more than a tie to hold me down, but less than a bunk dangling from my wrist to wake me as I wandered the night.

  16

  I trace the shape of a foot beneath the pink sheet and see a leg, the round of a hip. The body is twisted and the linen is drawn tight across the back. A time-lapse flower of red blooms there. The stain rushes out, threatening to fill the room.

  I hit reality as hard as if I’d fallen from a tree.

  I sat up, befuddled but still in my bed. The bed I’d gone to sleep in. One end of the tie was still hot around my wrist, the other draped across my blanket. It had come loose during the night but had obviously been enough to curb my somnambulism. I stared at the tie for a long time, quietly marvelling at how simple the solution had been and thanking the anonymous man – Mam’s friend the runner – for handing it to me.

  The toilets were empty. I was at the mirror shaving when Westy – from van 57 – entered. His face was drawn, probably from lack of sleep more than the early hour. Our eyes met and he smiled with all the warmth of an autopsy scar.

  ‘Hey hey! Row, row, row your boat,’ he sang. ‘I ’member you from school!’

  He slapped my back and laughed bourbon fumes in my face.

  ‘Told you I never forget that stuff. ’Member me? Westy? Dale West? Hey, they were prize pyjamas you were almost wearing last night, Rowie.’

  He moved to the urinal and farted as he relieved himself. ‘Mate, you were out of it. My mum thought you were hot. You’ll have to come over this afternoon and stretch out, if you know what I mean. Hey? Fancy a bit of the old Candy on a stick?’

  I couldn’t move, but I didn’t have to.

  Westy shook, tucked and wiped his hand on his jeans before slapping my back again and flashing a stained grin at me in the mirror. ‘My place is your place, Rowie, okay? Any time.’

  He grabbed at his crotch with both hands, adjusted his wares and lurched towards the door. ‘Any time!’

  It took a good few minutes for my heart to find its groove again. My breathing was sharp, like that of a wild animal having narrowly escaped a brutal death. I finished my shave in a kind of wide-eyed funk.

  The shower drummed on my neck and I rocked beneath its warmth. Had I really spent part of the night in the company of Westy and his mother? Perhaps the tie had failed? Maybe I’d undone it in my sleep? He had no obvious desire to hurt me and that had a jot of affirmation about it. He imagined I was stoned or drunk or both. Those states were a daily ambition for the crew in van number 57, so that somehow made me one of them. Unconscious, I’d been at their level. The thought of stretching out with his mother almost made me dry heave into the steam. Whatever really happened, the loss of that particular memory would never be mourned.

  The white van quietly burbled in front of the open garage, but nobody answered when I called inside. With my brain still fuzzy, I stood there on the gutter not knowing what to do.

  John Barton appeared from the office with his mobile phone to his ear and a grimness about his mien I’d never seen. What upsets you if death is your job? He nodded a greeting and ushered me into the van without a word. He juggled the phone and snapped his seatbelt home. With the phone shouldered against his ear, he took off. The tires squeaked and I gripped my seat as we launched into the traffic. He hustled from lane to lane and out onto the highway, the only clues to the cause of his desperation coming from broken bites of phone conversation.

  ‘Of course. Yes. I guess that’s to be expected when you’re dealing with an impact of this nature. Thank you, Sergeant. Rest assured we won’t be leaving until our job is complete. My pleasure. Goodbye.’

  His phone hit the dash with a crack.

  ‘This may be one of the few vehicles on the planet where there are actually gloves in the glove box,’ he said. ‘I’m going to need a pair and so are you.’

  Surgical gloves. He thanked me, snapped them on and then apologized.

  ‘Start again. Good morning, Aaron. It is good to see you.’

  I nodded and squeezed a quarter-smile.

  John Barton looked at me strangely. There was an expectant moment; then he said, ‘And you reply, “Good morning, John, good to see you too”.’

  ‘Good morning, John,’ I echoed. ‘Good to see you too.’

  Uneasy chuckles on both sides of the van.

  ‘You are allowed to stay in the van for this pick-up,’ John sighed. ‘Motor vehicle collisions are the stuff of nightmares for the emergency services and the funeral directors. Chances are we’ll be, quite literally, picking up the pieces.’

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ I said, and I knew I would be. I could finally see the line drawn in my head. The animal side of death – the gore and the smell and decay – could make me feel sick but not really keep me from doing what was required. The parts of my new job that filled me with abject and irrational fear, that twisted me in all kinds of knots, were the raw emotions of those left alive. It was the living who were the great unknown.

  A galaxy of red and blue lights. An ambulance, a fire tanker and several police cars. A truck on the gravel with a mangled metal appendage on its bumper that was more modern art than motorcycle. John opened his window.

  ‘Morning, Mr Barton,’ the policeman said.

  ‘Morning, Grant. Anywhere we can park?’

  ‘Hope you’ve brought a bucket,’ he said. He moved a traffic cone and ushered the van through. The small crowd of service personnel parted at the sight of us and John crawled to the roadside and parked on the grass ten metres from the front of the truck. The oil stains I’d seen from the road weren’t oil.

  ‘Okay?’ John asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  The door alarm chimed and we were among the police and the firemen. We collected a hard plastic container from the back, like a small, sleek fibreglass casket, and carried it between us over to the truck. We were steered by the police past paramedics tending a bearded figure huddled under a silver blanket. At the back of the truck, basking in a private lake of crimson, was the mangled body of the motorcyclist. Bones protruded from the black jacket and it took me a few seconds to realize there were bits missing. The jacket sleeve seemed intact but its contents had been delivered elsewhere by the impact. One leg was considerably shorter than the other.

  ‘Ah,’ John said. ‘Probably won’t need to check for a pulse.’

  That’s when I realized the motorcyclist had mislaid his head.

  We lowered the casket on the edge of the pond. It unlatched like a toolbox and the lid opened with a disinfectant huff.

  ‘Right,’ John said quietly. ‘We’ll get as much as we can with one lift.’

  There were no obvious handles – like feet or square shoulders – to hold. John circled the tangled remains and bent beside the intact arm. He looked up at me, reading my face.

  ‘Grab the jacket,’ he said, and I found some purchase. A heavy lift – a true dead weight – and we couldn’t get the whole body off the road. It scraped and grated over
the tar, bumped bloody on the rim of the casket and eventually came to rest on the plastic tray inside. John straightened the limbs and wiped his gloves and the fibreglass with a small dark towel.

  ‘We can’t leave until we’ve completed the jigsaw,’ he said. ‘No missing pieces.’

  So began an hour of sifting through the scrub and grass on both sides of the road. We had police help, but the point of impact was more than a hundred metres down the highway. A boot – with a foot inside – had turned up in the paddock about seventy metres from the asphalt. Between us, we collected every bit of bloodstained clothing, every dark human scrap and every shard of bone. Still, one significant piece eluded us. The search area grew wider and more ridiculous until we were combing a swampy drain nearly a kilometre from the truck. Every empty drink can and ball of takeaway wrapper gripped at my stomach. Every old shred of tire suddenly became mortal remains.

  I walked in a line with two policemen. Their radios barked and fizzed with static. They yelled back and forth but their words barely made it to my ears. My head rang with the strangeness of the situation and the sense that we might be searching for the rest of the day; and then I found it.

  Pressed among the bright green rushes growing in the drain was an arc of shiny black. I could just reach it without getting wet – the dome of the motorcyclist’s helmet, with his waxen head inside. I lifted it by the chinstrap.

  ‘Ho!’ one of the policemen said. ‘That’s what we’re looking for. John’s boy wins the cigar!’

  I carried it like an odd valise to the casket and laid it gently in position. John – puffing from his own searching – nodded his approval. We fitted the lid and carried the container to the van. I became aware, as John closed the door, that although we’d been conducting the same search, the policemen and I had been looking for different things and for different reasons. They were hunting mortal remains to finish a job, I was hunting the still countenance of someone’s son, perhaps their brother, maybe even their father, to bring him a final grace. By giving him grace, I found some of my own. The police protected the living, ambulance officers protected the injured and we protected the dead. All as it should be.

  17

  JOHN ANSWERED HIS mobile as the garage door closed. With one hand, he helped transfer the casket containing the motorcyclist’s remains to a gurney and sent me off to the coolroom with it.

  I flicked the light switch and opened the door. The tubes strobed and the darkness between the flashes seemed cosmic. I rolled the gurney inside and the chill tap-danced on my spine. I could smell a hint of Amanda Creen; at least I thought I could – something turning in the back of the refrigerator. I propped the trolley beside her pale coffin and shut the door behind me on the way out.

  I had the sudden urge to clean, to scrub and vacuum and polish until everything sparkled – but everything already sparkled with yesterday’s effort. I craved some simple and tangible task that might steer my mind away from the questions it wanted answered. How do we care for the broken man? Undress him? Wash him? Free his head from his helmet? Left to my own devices, I’d build him a box and screw the lid on tight. A little privacy. Somewhere to get changed into something more . . . elemental.

  ‘Change of plans,’ John said upon his return. ‘We’re to take our most recent addition to the coroner for post-mortem.’

  I lit up the coolroom again and retrieved the trolley.

  John steered while I pushed.

  ‘I wonder . . . with all that modern science . . . if they’ll be able to ascertain the cause of death?’

  I looked at him askance, unable to work out if he was being sincere or . . .

  A smile bent his lips.

  I smiled too, involuntarily. He knew he’d got me.

  ‘They need to test his blood. Why they can’t send someone around I’ll never know. I get the feeling they’re all too important for that.’

  A fifteen-minute drive, a ten-minute wait and we were rolling the gurney back to the van with the full casket on board.

  ‘Now, about your driving,’ John said, as he merged into the traffic. ‘How much experience have you had? Has your . . . someone taken you for a cruise in the car park on a Sunday?’

  I shook my head. Mam didn’t drive.

  ‘Then that’s where we’ll start.’

  He drove us to the golf club. There were a few cars in the car park but they were bunched around the entrance to the clubrooms. He parked the van away from the other vehicles and we swapped seats, my fingers shaking as I took the wheel.

  ‘Controls,’ he said. ‘Go pedal. Stop pedal. Gearshift. Handbrake. Windscreen wipers. Indicators.’

  I wondered if my heartbeat disturbed him; it was certainly a distraction for me. He told me to start the van. With the gearshift firmly in N and the handbrake on hard, I revved the engine, as instructed. By lunchtime I’d reverse-parked. It was that easy. Apparently, there are people for whom driving seems natural.

  ‘I had to drive the length of the town with one of the local cops on board in order to get my licence,’ John said. ‘Just a lap of the main drag.’ He shook his head. ‘Somehow, I managed to fail three times.’

  He poked at me with a single finger. ‘Not a word of that to anybody, you hear?’

  I zipped my lips.

  ‘Not . . . a . . . word.’

  We had a deal, as long as he didn’t mention the fact that my first driving lesson was conducted in a golf club car park with a mangled corpse bumping around in a box in the back.

  On the way to the office, John stopped in the loading zone in front of the newsagents, ducked from the car and returned with a bag that he unceremoniously dumped on my lap.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said.

  Christmas? In May?

  It was a guide to the learner-driver test.

  ‘Read it. Cover to cover. Let me know when you want to do the examination.’

  He looked across, his eyebrows raised expectantly. When I didn’t get the hint, he cupped his ear.

  ‘Thank you, John. You’re very kind,’ I said.

  He beamed.

  He parked at the shopping centre. I waited in the car while he visited the post office and the bank. He handed me a fold of cash.

  ‘Payday,’ he said. ‘More next week if you behave.’

  I couldn’t bear to look at it. I beamed back, stuffed it in my pocket and thanked him in a whisper.

  I studied the guide between eating sandwich fingers, and again in the afternoon while John discussed arrangements with the families of Amanda Creen and the late Eamon Walsh – the motorcyclist. The road rules seemed logical for the most part; the only real challenges were remembering safe distances and the meaning of obscure signs. I carried the book with me everywhere that afternoon – to the storeroom while I made up Eamon Walsh’s coffin (another Crenmore Eternity), to the toilet and to the main residence for afternoon tea. I was flicking the pages and testing myself when Skye got home from school.

  Without hesitation and without greeting her parents, she flopped beside me on the couch. ‘What are you reading?’

  I showed her the cover and she read aloud.

  ‘Ooh! Can I test you? Taylor let me test him when he was . . .’

  I handed her the book. Somehow John Barton’s generosity seemed diluted by the knowledge that he’d done this before. This was a well-worn route. Who was I to challenge the natural process of things? Perhaps I should be buying presents for Skye and giving her my pay? Perhaps I should be in the mortuary fondling men? The thought made me shiver.

  ‘Are you okay, Robot?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Talking about Taylor.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You can talk about him as much as you like.’

  She nodded once, unconvinced, and then flipped the book open. ‘Where are you up to? Which questions should I read?’

  ‘Any. All of them.’

  She made an O with her lips and clappe
d her hands.

  For half an hour she did her best to trip me up. I was concentrating so hard that I didn’t realize we’d attracted a crowd. When I looked up, John and Mrs Barton were staring from the kitchen.

  I stood, reflexively, with the blood charging to my cheeks.

  ‘What?’ John asked.

  ‘I . . . perhaps there’s something else I should be doing?’

  He waved for me to sit. ‘When you’re done with the questions, perhaps you could give Skye a hand with her homework? Only fair, after all.’

  He was joking, but Skye jumped on the idea and flipped my book on the couch.

  ‘Skye?’ Mrs Barton chided.

  John patted her hand, then gave his daughter a grin.

  We did surface areas of simple squares in mathematics. We deduced the culprit in a whodunit exercise for science. We shaded the continents on a world map and I listened to her read from her reader.

  ‘That’s enough, Skye. You’ll wear him out!’ Mrs Barton said.

  ‘He’s fine, aren’t you, Robot?’

  I felt that Mrs Barton was talking to me, so I stood. ‘We have a little more work to do,’ John said. ‘Nearly time we let the boy go home.’

  Skye groaned.

  I thanked her, collected my book and followed John to the office. He ushered me into a seat and I had the uneasy feeling a lecture was coming.

  He was shaking his head again, but smiling at the same time. ‘You really are a mystery, Aaron Rowe.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. It was half-question, half-apology.

  ‘No, I mean . . .’

  He sighed and took a folder from a drawer.

  ‘Your school counsellor, Andy Robertson, is a close friend. We’re from the same church. When we discussed you, he warned me that you could be reticent, moody and unreachable. That you struggled with every aspect of schoolwork and no amount of personal intervention changed that.’

  I bowed my head. It was true, of course. Robertson had seen the worst of me for more than a year. He knew more than most.

  ‘He forgot to mention that you’re as sharp as a needle, naturally dexterous and wise beyond your years. Where was that hiding when you were at school?’