Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  He had never seen Stephen so agitated. Or so anxious to talk. He seemed not to want to leave the pub. It was nearly an hour and a half before they started to move towards the door because, as Esmeralda said, if Frigga was half as crazy as Stephen seemed to think she was, she had better not be left alone in Jessica’s empty flat.

  ‘You’re right,’ he kept saying, as he chewed his moustache furiously. ‘She may self-harm. You’re right.’

  George had an idea that, once he was outside, he might find it easier to appear to one or all or some of them, but as soon as he got outside, things became even more confusing than they had been on the way in.

  Almost immediately he had set foot on the pavement he found himself yanked up about sixty feet in the air and, with a strong sensation of dangling, watched Esmeralda and Stephen, Veronica and Nat climb into their cars.

  George saw and heard this, but he saw other things at the same time. It was a bit like watching one of those American TV shows in which the screen divides into a series of even smaller squares, each showing a different element of some critical situation. First he saw Frigga, alone in the flat. She was standing now and turning towards the door. Someone was coming in – or ringing the bell. It was hard to work out which. Was it someone she knew? It was hard to tell from her face – her expressions were always notoriously hard to read. She walked around most of the time as if she was about to be sick. Even when she smiled, which was not very often, she looked as if she was about to be sick.

  Who was coming in to see her?

  George was hoping she would say something but she didn’t. The frame froze and, in another part of the picture, he saw Stephen, driving immediately behind Esmeralda, Nat and Veronica. He looked angry about something. The money probably, thought George. Although the money was only half of it. This was all about family. The lies that people told each other. The fears and hatreds that lay buried for years and, with the horrible simplification that death imposes, emerged, like a drowned city rearing up as the waters receded.

  He was better off dead. He really was.

  He found, to his surprise, that he was flying. This time, for a change, he seemed perfectly in control. He roared over the roof of the Winchester Club, with its gardens that overlooked the river, wheeled left and struck out west along the line of the great bend in the Thames that leads the waters down towards Mortlake. The sun was still shining, lighting the way to Richmond, Twickenham and the first lock of the upper stream, hidden in the green outskirts of Teddington. Its pale beams lay clear on the black water as George swooped low over the outgoing tide, Hammersmith Bridge printed in antique colours against the afternoon sky.

  He was flying. When he was a child he had dreamed of flying. Now at last he was flying. In death there is dominion.

  The words of a long-forgotten folk song, first heard in the sixties when he and Esmeralda were young, echoed in the air around him.

  If I had wings

  Like Noah’s dove

  I’d fly up the river

  To the one I love …

  He was flying to see Esmeralda. He was flying back in time. He was flying back over their first fuck, in the back garden of her parents’ house in Barnes. My God, he thought, as he gazed at his own arse pumping up and down with youthful enthusiasm in the back garden of a house that was now, like its owners and usurper (him) long gone, my God, I was good.

  He was flying over the scene of one of their most spectacular rows. It had happened on the towpath. All George could remember about it was that at the end after they had both threatened each other with divorce they had tried to remember what the row had been about. Neither of them could.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Esmeralda had said, with a demure smile, ‘I called you a bad bank manager.’

  ‘If you’d done that,’ George had replied, ‘I would’ve strangled you.’

  He had, he realized, had a good life. He might have moaned about being a bank manager, a creature from a world now as definitively over as tsarist bureaucracy or the old Labour Party but, actually, he had enjoyed every minute of it. Curiously, the pleasure he had taken in his own existence made leaving it behind easier. He didn’t want, now, to ask any more questions of his marriage or career – all those things people are traditionally supposed to worry over as they croak. He was done with that. What he wanted was to resolve the mystery of why he had died, to be, at the very least, a helpful accomplice in the task of finding out who had had the nerve to cut him off so early in his retirement. For God’s sake! He had not yet been to the Great Barrier Reef! Or Machu Picchu!

  Machu Picchu. That set something off in the bundle of thoughts and ideas that now approximated to George.

  Frigga. It was Frigga. It had to have been Frigga. Stephen was right. As he dived back in a huge half-circle towards Putney Bridge he resolved that, as soon as he got into his mother’s flat, Frigga was going to get a bit of the kind of stuff Banquo dished out to Macbeth. He was going to gibber. He was going to lay his hands on some chains and put them to good use. Not even the Society for Psychical Research would be able to do anything for the hard-hearted bitch. The woman who had offed her own brother so she could open a vegetarian restaurant. And go to Machu Picchu – preferably after learning how to spell it. Wasn’t that what she had let slip earlier? Weren’t those her pathetic ambitions? Why should she achieve them and not him?

  Flying at speed now, he stormed in over the roofs of Lower Richmond Road and, braking hard, dropped down and found himself on the gravel drive in front of the familiar black door, with Stephen pressing hard on the bell.

  Frigga did not seem to be answering.

  ‘She may have gone completely round the bend,’ Stephen was saying, ‘or maybe…’ his voice dropped ‘… maybe she’s found the codicil. My God!’ He leaned against the bell, screwing up his face and chewing his moustache furiously.

  What was it with human beings and money? They seemed to think it bought them freedom. Looking at Stephen’s face now, George, who would never have to go to a cash machine again, saw more clearly than he ever could have done in life how money made people its prisoner. Why did none of them understand how sad and pointless it is? Because, of course, they’re alive, he thought, and felt, for a brief moment, a pang of sadness for all of the living as they walked unaided through the world.

  Stephen pressed the bell again. Nat was peering in through the net curtains in a very determined manner. Veronica was, as usual, readying her profile for some imaginary fashion photographer. Esmeralda was staring glumly at the ground – perhaps, George thought, musing on what a great bloke he had been, what a loss he was to the world in general and to Putney in particular.

  Stephen put his face to the letterbox and called, ‘Frigga, are you there?’ She still did not react.

  There was then a long discussion about the key. Jessica was always having keys cut for her flat. The Mullins woman had three, to George’s certain knowledge. Esmeralda had had one, then lost it – but Stephen, he was sure, had at least two, even though he never went to see her. Today, for some reason, he did not seem able to find any of them. He patted his pockets. He probed his wallet. And, as he searched, he seemed to become more and more nervous and irritable. Of course, George thought, his brother was one of those people who believed he could control things by setting them out neatly; he had always viewed George – slightly condescendingly – as someone who needed ‘sorting out’ yet the inside of Stephen’s head was probably in far greater disarray than his brother’s. Ideas and emotions had been thrown in there like junk into some unvisited attic and—

  What was the matter with him? He looked as if he had seen a ghost! Maybe he had. Maybe George was at last going to have the opportunity of saying a few words. He’d better think of something good. Some pithy, compassionate and subtle phrases about how it felt to be dead. Much like living, actually. Except you were dead. That wasn’t quite it. He needed something magisterial.

  Stephen wasn’t looking at him. He was looking into the living room.
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  Frigga was hanging from a small hook in the middle of the ceiling. George had never noticed the hook before. Perhaps it had been put there to hold up a now long-gone chandelier. A dining-room chair had been kicked away to the side. She looked, George thought, like an oversized rag doll, but, then, Frigga had always looked like an oversized rag doll. Her head was at a crazy angle, though that, too, was nothing unusual where Frigga was concerned. George had the vague idea that people who hanged themselves allowed their tongue to loll, grotesquely, from their open mouths. Frigga had done nothing of the kind. She was just hanging there quietly, like a pheasant in the window of a butcher’s shop, waiting for someone to cut her down.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ said Stephen. ‘Oh, my God!’

  George’s brother had already been in at the death of two other members of his family and none of them – as far as George could tell – had made that much impression on him. Perhaps he had seen too many corpses in his professional life. Perhaps the impression he gave of someone energetically acting out shock, horror, surprise, grief, incomprehension, etc., did not mean that he was unmoved by the sight of his mother, brother and sister, respectively battered to death, poisoned and, now, strung up from a hook in the living room. Inside it might well be that Stephen was hurting. He actually looked as if he had been told about a mildly shocking by-election result.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ he said again, really trying very hard indeed to make this ‘My God!’ sound less wooden than the two that had preceded it. ‘Oh, my God!!’

  He gave this one two exclamation marks but even that didn’t convince George that his brother was going through anything more serious than the kind of staged disgust put on by backbenchers in the House of Commons to greet proposals of which they disapproved.

  ‘This,’ said Nat, in the carefully modulated tones he used if anything vaguely medical turned up, ‘is strangulation.’

  Clearly his morning at the morgue had given him an appetite for this kind of thing. Either that or he was keen to make up for his earlier pronouncements on the subject of George’s death. This is one, his expression seemed to say, that not even I can get wrong. Stephen finally found one of his keys. They trooped, nervously, into the flat.

  Veronica stared at her husband, aghast, as he strolled up and down in front of the body, like a man keen to show off his expertise in the area of hanging.

  ‘There is cyanosis,’ he said incisively, ‘and evidence of petechiae on the face. It looks superficially as if she got up on the chair, then kicked it away.’

  ‘She was fine when we were here,’ said Esmeralda. ‘She was absolutely fine. Well, as fine as Frigga ever was. I cannot believe she just watched us walk out to the pub and then…’

  ‘You can sometimes tell,’ said Nat, who was standing on tiptoe and squinting up at Frigga’s neck, ‘by the ligature.’

  Before he could give them the benefit of any more of his technical knowledge in this area – a short lecture on the Austro-Hungarian pole method, perhaps, or fragments from his unpublished paper ‘Domestic Suicide by Strangulation Among a Small Sample of Unmarried Librarians in the Putney Area’ – Stephen, who had been staring at something on his sister’s chest, grabbed him by the arm and pointed towards a sheet of A4 paper, pinned to Frigga’s cardigan.

  ‘It’s her handwriting,’ he said. ‘Look!’

  And it was. George knew Frigga’s handwriting all too well. She was a woman who, in the English way, wrote thank-you notes and, sometimes, thank-you notes if you were unwise enough to send her a thank-you note. The gigantic As, the huge, swooping trails that slid away from her lower gs and upper Ws as well as the punctuation that looked as if it had been ground into the paper, like a blade point into an enemy’s heart: they were Frigga’s all right.

  Stephen read the note aloud: ‘I want to die. This is the way I want to do it. I am sorry. I know finding my body will not be easy. I cannot help that. I am sorry for what I have done. I have done wicked, wicked things. I am sorry. I have killed. I have murdered. I have taken the lives of the innocent. In England and on the Continent. I pushed those people under the train at the Gare du Nord. I have deprived my good, kind brother – the wisest, gentlest man I ever knew – of the precious gift of life. I have sent him down to the Dark Kingdom where the Trolls dance on the heads of the slain. Farewell!’

  Nat, who had joined George’s brother in front of Frigga’s body, said, ‘She hasn’t signed it, but that’s common with suicide notes.’

  It sounded, George thought, just like Frigga. It looked like her handwriting. It had all the marks of being written by someone whose head had been rotted by reading too much Tolkien. That ‘Farewell!’ at the end was the pure essence of his sister – flouncing off the stage of life in a manner that was dangerously close to the comic.

  He liked the bit about him being kind and wise and gentle – even if the stuff about Trolls dancing on his head was a bit from left field – but he was, he had to admit, puzzled by the confession relating to her having ‘taken away innocent lives in Britain and on the Continent’. Had his sister been a serial killer who had crossed the Channel in order to add spice to her repulsive habit? Pushing people under trains at the Gare du Nord! Had she picked them off one by one or driven some SNCF vehicle into a group of schoolchildren? What was going on here? She had, clearly, been no ordinary librarian.

  And nothing about her mother. It was, thought George, on the skimpy side as a suicide note. He could have done with more detail.

  He had lost many qualities since dying – taste, smell, touch, the ability to be heard by his fellow humans – but it had also done nothing for the compassionate side of his nature. Not that George had been renowned for that when alive. He had conspicuously failed to sob when Princess Diana had been driven into that wall in Paris. Esmeralda, who was more plentifully endowed with fellow feeling, was always bursting in on him with news of the latest atrocity or natural disaster. ‘Have you read about what’s happening in Botswana/the South China Sea/Zimbabwe/Iraq/Syria?’ she would say breathlessly, as she rounded the living room door.

  ‘They’re all dead, I suppose,’ George would reply, trying to look as if he was genuinely concerned about the plight of people of whose lives he had, until that moment, been entirely ignorant.

  But you would have thought he’d worry a bit more about his sister being strung up on an improvised gallows in his mum’s sitting room. That George was unable to give a stuff seemed to cast doubt on the whole of their relationship. The fact that – as far as he could tell – she had probably murdered him did not make any difference. He ought to feel something about the fact that Frigga was about to join him in the afterlife, apart from the hope that her ghost should be sent to a different area of the spirit world.

  ‘This,’ said Nat, with great authority, ‘is a crime scene. We mustn’t touch anything.’

  Veronica was looking at him wordlessly. Her face said it all. Why am I married to this idiot? Stephen, of course, was first to his phone. He addressed it in his usual clipped newsreader’s voice.

  ‘Inspector Hobday,’ he was saying.

  ‘What kind of hob would you like today?’ said his phone, in a pronounced American accent. ‘We have a huge range of gas hobs available at our mall in Wishaw, Arizona, many of them reduced by as much as three hundred per cent and all fully guaranteed! Parking is assured in our high-quality location only eighty-nine miles from the junction with the five-oh-nine! Bring the kids.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Stephen, in threatening tones, ‘I want Inspector Hobday. A Putney-based policeman. Now.’

  ‘Why wait?’ said his phone. ‘This offer ends on July fourteenth 2014.’

  Stephen thrust his face right up to the screen of his phone. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I will do you. I will fucking do you. I will disable you. I will do an app-ectomy on you. I will torch your memory. I will go out and get an ordinary phone. Would you like that, motherfucker?’

  ‘I am not an ordinary phone,’ said his phone. ‘I am an Excelsior 6
57B. Change your life and widen your horizons by staying in touch with friends across the globe. I have new apps for you, Stephen. How would you like to buy a swimming-pool? You stated a preference for watersports.’

  Stephen was trying desperately to shut his phone up – but it was clearly on a roll. He had, thought George, the look of a man who feared his most intimate secrets were about to be revealed by this obviously expensive and indiscreet piece of machinery. Meanwhile, as he groped with the buttons Esmeralda, who had a small, gadgetless mobile, had already got through to the police station and was talking to the inspector.

  ‘Alan,’ she was saying, ‘I’m at my mother-in-law’s flat. There has been what looks like a suicide. I am afraid it’s George’s sister. It looks as if she may have hanged herself.’

  Alan! Oho! And, while we were at it – an interesting use of the word ‘may’, thought George. He would have thought it was fairly obvious that that was exactly what his sister had done. Clearly Stephen found it odd as well. He was giving Esmeralda a very puzzled look. When she had disconnected her phone, he said, ‘You have doubts about whether she did?’

  Esmeralda screwed up her face. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There’s something odd about it.’

  Stephen did not answer this. He was punching the buttons on his phone again.

  ‘You have called the police,’ said his phone. ‘Have you been the victim of crime? I am sorry to hear that. Have you visited our website, victims of crime dot co dot org?’

  ‘You will be the victim of a crime,’ Stephen hissed, as he thrust his phone back into his pocket. ‘You will be the victim of common assault on a fucking phone.’

  Esmeralda was staring at Frigga’s body. ‘Maybe,’ she said slowly, ‘it’s the chair. Or maybe it’s the note. It is her writing. But…’ Her voice trailed away uneasily. ‘Is the chair in the wrong place?’ she said, but did not amplify this mysterious remark. She did not sound very convinced by her own question.

  Stephen, Veronica and Nat did not seem convinced by it either. George’s brother was knuckling his eyes – a gesture familiar to George from childhood. He looked, suddenly, like the younger brother he had never quite been able to be. Had George given him the kind of support he needed? Jessica’s will had been an attempt to get him to do just that. Perhaps he had not. Perhaps, as well as failing to get any of his poetry published, he had been a bad older brother.