Boots

by Phillip Donnelly

  ***

  The speech started well enough, with Churchill sounding only slightly slurred, but soon coming into his stride. An evacuation from Dunkirk, which a lesser orator might have tried to hush up or mention in passing, was dwelt on in detail, and so well described, that defeat became victory.

  And then Beaverbrook noticed a strange look come over Churchill’s face. He had seen it before, just before his collapse in front of the BBC microphone at Bush House, just before The Voice was hired to do all of his recordings.

  “We shall go on to the end …” he had said and then stopped dead. To the rest of the House, the pause was momentary, and merely an opportunity for Churchill to adjust his monocle, but Beaverbrook felt the moment stretch out into the eternal night of a Nazi victory, and his mind had enough time to allow him to feel the free world fall under the odious grip of Nazi tyranny that Churchill had just mentioned.

  He removed his monocle and Beaverbrook suspected that he was now too drunk to read and wondered what he would say next.

  “... we shall fight in France,” he said, but then seemed again to have forgotten the rest of his sentence.

  Again the comma turned into a rack for Beaverbrook, so long did it stretch. He wondered how many more things the old devil could think to fight against; and he saw that with each addition, the resolve of his audience to actually fight grew stronger and stronger.

  “... we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills ...”

  Beaverbrook glanced at the house and saw them to be mesmerised; ready if called upon, to charge at any enemy, to fly into the jaws of hell, if need be.

  “... we shall never surrender!”

  And with that exclamation, what had seemed so possible only a few hours previously became unthinkable. Churchill’s words became flesh and infused bloody valour into the dying heart the British parliament.

  Beaverbrook smiled at the old man and saw that in this speech, on which his drunken head had slobbered only a few hours previously, he had ensured not only his own survival but England’s too.

  The Undertaker’s Complaint

  D., the undertaker, was of the opinion that death was not what it used to be. 

  He had been in the business of selling death all his life, and although the market was still healthy enough — since people continued to die, recession or no — he still felt that recent advances in science had robbed the profession of some of its dignity. Death was no longer spiritual, but medical. 

  He was also worried that the death of God had taken all gravitas from his ancient vocation. Few of his current clients seemed to expect the cadavers they entrusted him with to rise again at the last trumpet call. The dead, he feared, would soon become nothing more than waste to be managed. Where was the VITAE ETERNUM in waste management?

  He was also slowly coming to the conclusion, only ten years from retirement, that his choice of career had been a mistake, that spending a life in the company of the dead had robbed him of his birthright, his life.

  Alone in his funeral parlour, to the ticking of the grandfather clock, as a haggard autumn aged and fell, he entertained himself with fantasies of what his life might have been like had he done something different with it. He could have been many things, he thought, if only he had not inherited the business from his father — that dour man, that shadow creature.

  Dong! Dong! And ten dongs more. The clock rang in midday, as it had done every day, for as long as he could remember. He hated the clock, he hated the deep-pile carpet, he hated the dark brown wooden furniture. He let his eyes run around the room, looking for something he did not hate, but there was nothing.

  “We are doomed by the choices we do not make,” he said to the grandfather clock, which was accustomed to suffer his observations on the ringing of the hour.

  Perhaps he should have gone to university and studied literature, he thought, tapping his silver pen in vexation on the oak counter, wondering why he had let his mother talk him into taking over the business on the death of his father.

  He paced up and down the parlour, his form only dimly visible from outside, through the smoked glass of the windows.

  His ruminations were interrupted by the ring of a bell which told him that someone was entering the funeral parlour. He nodded solemnly to her while walking backwards to resume his place behind the counter. 

  Instinctively, he hid the trade paper he had been doodling on, folding into it the bitter aftertaste of his life unlived, and with more difficulty than usual, he made his face take on an air of calm consolation. In his trade, he felt, it was essential to maintain decorum at all times. Histrionics were for the friends and relatives of the deceased — who had paid dearly for this privilege — but the undertaker had to remain above emotion and be as serene as the cadaver.

  The woman wore a dishevelled white dress and a great deal of make-up. Under the powder and the paste, it was hard to discern her age, but it was broadly similar to his own, the early fifties, but time had been even less kind to her than to him. She was thin and gaunt and there was something of the bat about her: the stretched skin, the hanging jowls, the shrunken lips and protruding teeth. 

  The woman wore dark sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat and most important of all, a wedding ring. The undertaker immediately classified her as an eccentric widow, his least favourite type of client. The recently bereaved talked incessantly of the lost one, as if these words might resurrect them, but widows in their fifties talked most of all. “Given the opportunity,” his father used to warn him, “they will talk until the end of time, rather than the face the butt end of a life that’s waiting for them. The only thing an old woman hates more than the company of her husband is solitude.”

  She approached him and he noted how unstable she was on her feet. He wondered if she was a little drunk and disliked her even more. His distaste increased yet further when she was near enough to smell, as she clearly had not bathed in quite some time, and the perfume she wore to mask this somehow only accentuated it.

  “Good afternoon, madam. How may I be of assistance?” he asked, holding the palms of his hands together and tilting his head slightly.

  “I wish to make a complaint,” she said imperiously.

  Her shrill voice make the hair on the back of the undertaker’s neck stand on end, but he maintained exactly the same professional demeanour.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, madam. May I enquire as to the exact nature of your query?”

  “It’s not a query, it’s a complaint.”

  “Indeed, madam, but might I be so bold as to ask for more particulars?”

  “I’m not satisfied.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “No, sir.”

  “No, madam.”

  “No, sir. Not satisfied at all. It won’t do, I tell you. It won’t do.”

  “What ‘won’t do’, madam?”

  “This won’t do! I’m not happy.”

  There was a small pause while D. waited for the anger within him to subside. He wanted to rail against the woman and tell her that he wasn’t happy either, that no-one he knew was happy, that the only time he ever saw happy people was at the end of American movies.

  His bile was partly due to his melancholy mood, of course, but even apart from that, there was something truly repellent about this customer, something altogether unnatural, and D. hated her with a passion that was not part of his nature. 

  But funeral parlours cannot reserve the right to refuse admission. “We all have the right to die,” his father had told him, with a smile, or as near as he could come to one.

  “Madam, I trust you will forgive my bluntness, but I would be more able to address your distress if I had more to assess.”

  “What?!” the woman shrieked. “Speak English, sir! Are you a foreigner?”
>
  “No, madam. What is wrong, madam? What is your ‘complaint’?”

  “I’m not happy!”

  In D.’s mind, he picked up a nearby brass paperweight and smashed it into the woman’s skull. The violence of the image shocked him, for he was not a man given to violent imagery — or imagery of any kind, for that matter. Even his dreams were mundane and rarely went beyond the quotidian. In the dream of the night before, for example, he had gone to the supermarket and completed his weekly shopping, all without incident.

  “Not happy with what, madam?” he persisted, looking her straight in the face for the first time and managing, only just, not to wince at the tautness of her skin and its glistening complexion.

  “My coffin.”

  “Your coffin?”

  “Yes, my coffin! Why do you keep repeating everything that I say? Are you a simpleton?”

  “No, madam. What seems to be the problem with your coffin?” he asked her quickly, unable to remember having ever met her before, let alone having sold her a coffin.

  “It’s not the right size. Far too small. You can’t even sit upright in it! I want to exchange it for a larger model. I want a deluxe coffin. One with a modern entertainment system, like they have on aeroplanes nowadays.”

  “You want a TV in your coffin?” he asked, hiding the incredulity in his voice.

  “Oh really, my good man. If I have to repeat myself to you one more time, I really will have to speak to the manager.”

  “That won’t be necessary, madam. But I might be better able to satisfy your needs if I knew why you wanted a television in your coffin.”

  “There’s not a lot to do when you’re dead, you know, and there’s all the time in the world to do it in. Death is longer than any cruise, you know.”

  “Yes madam, I know.”

  “No, sir, you don’t know. You’re still alive!” the woman spat, slamming her fist on the desk.

  The undertaker looked at the stretched skin on her hand and realised what had been troubling him since the woman entered his funeral parlour. What he had mistaken for old age, poor posture and infrequent bathing, was, in fact, the result of a poorly executed embalming procedure. And that smell, he now realised, was not the microbial effluent of living sweat, but the acrid fumes of leaking formaldehyde.

  The undertaker tried to calm himself. This, he knew, could spell the End of Days his father had prophesised.

  Embalming was not common in England, so the undertaker outsourced all such requests to another firm, which had recently been shut down by the government, after the popular press uncovered its use of unqualified illegal immigrant labour, several of whom were also implicated in a necrophilia ring. ‘Satanist Slav Sex Shocker!’ the headline read. The undertaker must have referred this woman there for embalming, but the workmanship was clearly shoddy, and he feared that his own funeral parlour might be held responsible. A lawsuit of this magnitude, he realised, could be crippling.

  The woman dragged her clenched fist from the counter, which make a squeaking sound, since the force of her blow had ruptured the skin around one of her knuckles and fluid was trickling from it.

  “What I want to know is why there is no entertainment provided!”

  “Well madam, death is a time for repose, a time for —”

  “I’ve never been so bored in all my life!”

  “Quite, madam, but we’ve had no complaints before. The dead have been perfectly happy with our services up until now.”

  “Well times are changing, sir. We’re setting up a Resident’s Committee at the cemetery, I’ll have you know. The dead worm has turned!”

  “Indeed, madam. One must air ones grievances, but —”

  “And some kind of ventilation system needs to be set up down there.” 

  “But you don’t breathe, madam. The dead don’t breathe.”

  “I am well aware of what the dead do and don’t do, sir. I am, as you should have noticed in your professional capacity, quite, quite dead.”

  “Yes, madam, I am aware of that.” 

  “And are you aware of how badly a coffin smells after a few days, sir? Do they teach you that in funeral school? I demand that Air Conditioning and a shower be installed down there, toute de suite!” No-one ever thinks of the needs of the dead AFTER burial. What about some post-mortem care, that’s what I say?!”

  The undertaker wondered if his firm should offer a ‘deluxe package’ of some kind, providing all the services the woman had requested. In this way, he saw, a monthly charge could be exacted, leading to a more steady income. One of the downsides to the funeral trade was the absence of repeat business, since the dead only die once. But if the undertaker could provide a range of services after the funeral, there might be no end to the profitability of the deceased.

  He made a mental note to draw up a business plan later on, but for the moment, he had to return his attention to his erstwhile and yet current client. 

  She droned on.

  “… just like my husband. And that’s another thing. I want him to be relocated to another part of the cemetery. I couldn’t put up with him when he was alive and I’m damn well not going to put up with him now he’s dead. I want a divorce!”

  “But the dead don’t divorce, madam. It’s simply not done.”

  “Will you stop telling me what cannot be done and start doing something! My late husband has been tom-catting around with every shrouded harlot he can lay his decomposing hands on and I intend to divorce him. I have grounds, sir. Now, please instruct your lawyers to begin legal proceedings at once. And I shall, of course, expect the coffin improvements I require to be free-of-charge. The dead have no discernable income, I’m afraid, and all my savings were eaten up by death taxes and medical bills.”

  The woman who was staining his carpet, he now realised, was a penniless deadbeat, but on the positive side, she would not possess the financial wherewithal to employ a lawyer, so he need not worry about an embalming lawsuit. The dead, he was sure, could not qualify for legal aid. 

  He determined to be rid of her as soon as possible. 

  “Ah, well, madam. I’m afraid all sales are final and we have a strict policy of no-refunds.”

  “I’m not asking for a refund. I want better after-sales service.”

  “Yes, but if you check the small print in your contract, madam, you’ll see that our services clearly end at burial. You should, perhaps, enquire at the Cemetery Maintenance Department. This really is their concern, you know.”

  “But the Cemetery Maintenance Department sent me to the Department of Health, and they sent me to the Morgue, and they sent me to the Church, and they sent me here. I’ve been running from pillar to post all day, and in my condition, that’s not an easy business. Do you know how uncomfortable corpse life can be, sir? Do you? Do you know the pain of death?!”

  “Well, of course not, madam, but —”

  “But nothing! Life is wasted on the living, I tell you. Wasted!”

  “Forgive my brusqueness, madam, but I really must insist you return to the Cemetery Maintenance Department and lodge an official housing improvement claim with them. It’s a CMD matter and has nothing to do with this funeral parlour. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have other pressing matters to attend to.”

  The undertaker busied himself with shuffling some papers in an officious manner. Losing heart, the woman creaked her way towards the door and hobbled out of the funeral parlour. 

  “You’ll be dead too one day, you know. See how you like it!” she said, before slamming the door.

  When she was gone he cleaned his counter and inspected the damage to his carpet, which took less time to clean than he had feared, unlike the smell, which lingered for days.

  The grandfather clock struck one and the undertaker spoke to it.

  “Bloody dead people — never satisfied anymore. When I was young, dead people were different. Death isn’t what it used to be.”

  Proppland

  It was a dark place, darker
than dark matter.

  Character X turned his head this way and that but there was nothing to see.

  A perfect blackness in all directions

  An immaculate absence of form

  Absolute nothingness

  A void of adjectives

  A total abyss

  Zero

  Zip

  No

  0

  .

  “Hello!” he hollered, vexed by the silence.

  Two small elliptical points of light shone in front of him. Slowly the loose outline of a body grew around them, but it was almost transparent and lacked substance. It was a shining silver ghost of a form whose light came from within.

  In a circle around Character X, seven large tablets of ancient rock grew in luminescence.

  Beyond the henge of stones, a mist ensued, but through it X could make out paths winding their way through eternity. Like worms, they wriggled and squirmed and attached themselves to this or that rocky tablet.

  Character X counted the paths and noted that there were 31 of them, each beginning and ending with a small signpost that said Function, followed by a number.

  Above and below the inner circle of stones and the outer circle of worming roads, bathed in a cold fog, there was only the starless inky night.

  Character X focused on the tablet nearest him. It was two-metres tall, one-metre wide and one-metre deep. It seemed to breathe, this curious rock, creaking as it expanded and contracted. X listened hard, and thought he heard a hollow rocky heartbeat coming from within the stone.

  As the heartbeat grew stronger and the breathing more pronounced, the light from the stone became more powerful and he saw the word ‘Hero’ had been etched into the rock. He looked to the other six rocks and saw that they also had words written on them: ‘Villain’, ‘Helper’, ‘Dispatcher’, ‘False Hero’, ‘Princess’, ‘Donor’.

  Character X walked from one stone tablet to another, and as he got nearer each rock, its breathing grew deeper and its heartbeat faster. As he moved away, the rock dimmed and lost its life force.

  When he had completed one rotation, the ghost-like form in the centre addressed him.

  —I am Propp, chief architect and morpher of tales

  His voice was deep and filled with a pulsating reverb, a voice that carried the stain of dark energy.

  “I am … how odd! I can’t seem to remember my name. Well, anything’s possible in dreams, isn’t it?” Character X mused, more to himself than to the figure.

  —This is no dream, Sphere of Action

  This is the Chamber of Rebirth

  You are to be moulded

  “Rebirth? But I’m not dead yet. There must be some kind of mistake!”

  —Silence role creature!

  You are dead and you will be reborn

  Choose your role for the Introductory Sequence

  “I am not a role! I am an individual … it’s just that I can’t remember who I am at the moment. I want to see a doctor. I have rights, you know!”

  —Roles have no rights!

  You are secondary nothings

  You are props for the Creator to hang his garments

  “Well, we’ll see about that! I want to speak to this Creator right now, if only to deny his existence.”

  —We do not dictate to the Creator: he dictates to us.

  He is the Creator and we are his creations

  All following the dictates of 7-7-31

  He commands and we perform

  He is the story master

  “I’m no-one’s puppet! I’m a human being. I’m … oh damn, I wish I could remember who I was. I mean, who I am.

  —You are a million still-born dead fantasies

  You are the psychic jelly of carrion past

  You were once The Ministry Fox

  You were once David Vincent

  You were once Inaction Man

  You will be moulded

  You will be reborn

  You will be

  Will be

  Will

  “But I …”

  —Hark!

  The Creator types

  It is the time of Rebirth!

  All of Proppland shook as the hammer blows were belted out on the keyboard. Lightning filled the skyline. The seven stones spun and dizzied Character X. He looked beyond them and saw the serpent paths coil and uncoil with a frenzied determination to reproduce.

  The air filled with words and a thousand voices spoke at once. Character X fell to his knees and covered his ears to block out the crushing chaos of noise.

  —Surrender to the void and be reborn!

  Propp’s eyes were now a burning red, his hands transformed into claw-like fountain pens.

  “No! I am … I am me … I … I …”

  —There is no ‘I’!

  There is only the Story.

  Even the Creator cannot create

  Even the Creator is only a cipher

  In the end there is only seven, seven and thirty one

 

  7-7-31: 7-7-31: 7-7-31

  The rocks spinning slowed and they began to chant the number. The paths rose up and coiled themselves inward toward the centre of the circle; 31 of them staring at Character X and whispering “7-7-31” over and over.

  “Stop!” Character X begged them, but they continued.

  Propp hovered toward him and wrapped him in his cloak.

  —There are seven story types

  There are seven story characters

  There are 31 roads we call functions

  I release you from your former role:

  I condemn you to another

  There is nothing new under the sun:

  There is no escape from the

  Trinity of the Story

  Propp lifted his cloak and Character X rose to his feet and walked toward the rock called ‘Hero’. He opened his arms and was swallowed by the rock, which took his form and dissolved it.

  All light faded and the blackness returned.

  ***

  Character X opened his eyes and saw nothing. After a while six rocks were visible.