The Dead Beat

by Doug Johnstone

  Didn’t.

  She got up and stood over Gordon’s body. His chest was rising and falling softly, in time with the wheeze of the life-support machine. She caught a faint whiff of the lilies from the bedside table, just a tiny trace.

  Samantha was sniffling into a tissue.

  Martha touched Samantha’s shoulder as she walked away. It felt like the most useless gesture imaginable.

  23

  Martha stopped outside the hospital and sucked in air. Something about the sterilised atmosphere inside felt like it had petrified her lungs. She gulped in freshness, springtime. Her work skirt felt tight, the elastic digging into her flesh. She fiddled with it, running her fingers around the inside of the waistband. She kneaded away at her forehead, scrunching her eyes closed then blinking them open a few times.

  She looked around. She was getting stared at by two old men in pyjamas, slippers and dressing gowns at the other side of the entrance. They were both smoking, cigarettes cupped into their palms against the breeze. One of them had a drip on wheels and was using the pole to keep himself upright. He had yellow fingers and a sickly tinge to the grey beard around his mouth. The other one was in a wheelchair and looked like death warmed up.

  Martha stared back and they both turned away. She imagined what their bodies looked like under their clothes – cancerous cells eating away the healthy ones, hefty scars on chests or stomachs, pouches of skin, wrinkles, decay. We’re all dying in our own tedious ways.

  She was about to head for the bus stop when she saw Rose walking towards the entrance carrying a small bouquet of carnations. She had a self-absorbed look on her face, which lifted when she spotted Martha.

  ‘Rose,’ Martha said.

  ‘Martha.’

  Martha nodded at the flowers. ‘Visiting someone?’

  ‘Gordon, obviously.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t know him that well.’

  ‘We knew each other back in the day.’

  Martha raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh yeah?’

  Rose shook her head. ‘Nothing like that.’

  ‘So how come you’re visiting him?’

  Rose shrugged. ‘I thought someone from the office should. And I didn’t think there would be many offers to traipse out here, they’re a hard-hearted lot down there.’

  ‘Whereas you’re full of the milk of human kindness?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Rose said. ‘Why are you here to see him?’

  ‘What makes you think I’m here to see him?’

  Rose gave her a sceptical look.

  Martha said, ‘Why do you think he tried to kill himself?’

  ‘Why does anyone?’ Rose said. ‘Gordon has had a lot of problems with depression. And maybe he felt guilty.’

  ‘About what?’ Martha said.

  ‘We all carry guilt around with us, don’t we?’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Martha said.

  Rose laughed. ‘I used to be just like you.’

  Martha scrunched up her nose. ‘What changed?’

  ‘I grew up.’

  ‘Is that why you’re shacked up with a boy half your age?’

  ‘Billy is just crashing in my spare room while he gets back on his feet.’

  ‘Do you think it’s wise having a criminal stay in your spare room?’

  ‘Billy’s never been convicted of any crime,’ Rose said. ‘And I know you like him, and he likes you.’

  Martha looked down, spotted a smudge on her heel, the remains of rat brains from the graveyard. She cleared her throat. ‘This isn’t the playground, I couldn’t care less if he likes me.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  Martha sighed. ‘Oh my God, you’re so annoying.’

  Rose smiled. ‘You are just like I was at your age.’

  ‘If you say that one more time I’ll take those flowers and beat you round the head with them.’

  ‘That’s the kind of thing I would’ve said.’

  Martha shook her head and looked at her watch. ‘I can’t stand around here blethering all day, I need to get to the office.’

  ‘The dead wait for no one, eh?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Martha made to walk away but Rose touched her arm. ‘Just be gentle with Billy, OK? He’s been through a lot.’

  ‘There’s nothing between Billy and me.’

  ‘Women like us, Martha, it’s easy to hurt the people we care about, that’s all.’

  She let go of Martha’s sleeve and headed into the hospital, the automatic doors swishing and shushing.

  Martha saw the two smokers staring at her again, faces scowling and closed.

  She turned and headed to work.

  24

  Martha sat at Gordon’s desk and stared at the screen.

  The obit in front of her had her welling up. She didn’t know the guy, but he’d lived a long and satisfying life, and she could tell by reading it that there was so much love in his life, from family, friends, those he worked with.

  The picture was the usual old white man, thinning grey hair, open-necked shirt – could’ve been anyone’s grandad. Could’ve been Martha’s grandad, if she had any left alive. Why did everyone in her family die so young? There was never a Fluke family obituary like this – eight hundred words of understated praise, heartwarming details like his job surveying the remote Canadian wilderness, or his time building schools in Kenya, or his national service in Saudi Arabia or his rumoured involvement in the disappearance of the Stone of Scone.

  This was a life. This was grabbing life for all it was worth.

  What did Martha have to compare? Several years of medication and treatment for mental illness. A placement as a trainee journalist. Still living at home with her brother and her mum.

  Then what?

  She tried to imagine herself in old age, dying at eighty-nine, like this guy on the page in front of her, Derek Simpson. Some random guy she’d never met but whose life had reduced her to sniffing into a tissue and wiping her eyes. She tried to picture herself as an old maid, hair wispy and thin, knuckles swollen by arthritis, papery skin, bifocals on a piece of string round her neck. They could run a picture of her surrounded by frayed rugs and cats. She tried to imagine dying after a brave battle with bowel cancer, surrounded in her last moments by doting friends and family.

  Nope.

  Couldn’t see it. Just couldn’t see it.

  She worked out that if she lived to be eighty-nine, she would die in 2082.

  Jesus Christ, that was never going to happen.

  There won’t even be newspapers then. We will either have transcended to a higher plane of existence, or be living on Mars. Or more likely we’ll have reverted to warring cannibalistic savages, shivering in caves against a harsh new ice age of our own making.

  Martha took a deep breath and held it. Not the relaxation technique she’d been taught, but it sometimes worked. She wiped away the smudges from her eyes. She was supposed to be working, she had to get her shit together.

  She checked through the obit again, trying to disengage from the subject matter and look at it objectively. Searching for typos, clumsy language, anything that might be dubious or get the paper into trouble. She triple-checked the dates of birth and death, the picture caption and intro, tidied up the edges of the columns, got rid of a couple of hyphens, made sure the text flowed through the page as smoothly as possible.

  Done.

  One dead man down, the rest of the page to go.

  She looked at the clock on screen.

  2.13 p.m.

  Six more minutes and it would be exactly twenty-four hours since that call. She was surprised she remembered. She’d looked at the same clock on the same screen yesterday when the phone rang. Hadn’t registered at the time. What else could she remember if she put her mind to it?

  So it hadn’t even been a full day since Gordon had done it.

  Felt like years.

  The phone rang.

  She jumped.

  Stared at it.


  ‘You’re shitting me,’ she said.

  Let it ring.

  ‘Seriously. If this is . . .’

  Deep breath. Picked up the phone.

  ‘Hello, the Standard obituary desk, this is Martha Fluke.’

  The sound of someone crying and sniffling.

  Martha rubbed her fingers on the bridge of her nose.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’

  ‘Take your time.’

  ‘It’s about my husband.’

  Martha had her pen and pad at the ready. ‘Go on.’

  In amongst the sound of snuffles and gasps, she heard ‘Wallace’.

  She put on her softest voice. ‘Is Wallace his first or last name?’

  ‘Surname.’

  For the next ten minutes she provided a shoulder to cry on. Mrs Wallace’s husband had finally succumbed to some form of dementia. He’d spent the last two years unaware of where or who he was, unable to recognise his wife and children, angry and aggressive to all visitors until the last two weeks, when he became serene and childlike.

  Martha couldn’t use a single word of this stuff – the manner of death was usually skirted over, especially something harrowing like this. No one wanted to read about Mr Wallace’s years lost in the wilderness of his own frazzled brain. They wanted to remember the man who’d been instrumental in setting up a cookery school for underprivileged kids in Perth long before the modern-day obsession with cuisine as porn. They wanted to hear about his antics on his gap year, where he travelled to Australia and was almost bitten by a shark off the Great Barrier Reef.

  Martha kept Mrs Wallace talking, thinking of what V had said about getting the bereaved to write the thing themselves. She made a few tentative steps towards suggesting it, but her heart wasn’t in it. Wallace had died this morning, for Christ’s sake, his widow wasn’t in any mood to hit a deadline. Martha took down a few more details, then told Mrs Wallace that one of the paper’s regular freelancers would be in touch to interview her properly. Truth was, Wallace wouldn’t make more than a sidebar, if that. Depended who else shuffled off their mortal coil in the next few days.

  Eventually Mrs Wallace hung up the phone, still sniffling.

  ‘Didn’t get the appreciation, huh?’

  It was V next to her.

  Martha shook her head.

  ‘You need to try harder than that,’ V said. ‘You’ll understand after a month, when they review the budgets and haul you into the office. Roast your ass.’

  Martha shrugged.

  The phone rang again.

  ‘Busy time for dead people,’ V said, not taking her eyes off her screen.

  Martha picked up. ‘Hello, Martha Fluke on the obituary desk. Can I help?’

  Silence.

  Breathing.

  Martha felt a shiver. ‘Hello?’

  She heard a man clear his throat.

  ‘Hello, sir, can I help you?’

  V was rolling her eyes at the next desk.

  Martha tried one last time. ‘Hello? Is there someone there?’

  The clearing of a throat again. Then a voice.

  ‘Did you say Fluke?’

  ‘Yes, Martha. I’m the obituaries editor here at the Standard.’

  A beat. Another. This was like pulling teeth.

  ‘You sound so young,’ the man said.

  There was something about his voice. Edinburgh accent. Something familiar, but somehow different.

  ‘I’ve not been in the job long.’

  ‘I’ll bet.’

  What did that mean? ‘But I’m perfectly capable.’

  ‘Martha Fluke.’

  Martha rolled her eyes at V, who laughed and shook her head. ‘Can I ask what you’re calling about?’

  Click.

  Dial tone.

  Martha held the handset up to V.

  ‘Prick hung up.’

  ‘Happens a lot. The bereaved are an emotional bunch.’

  ‘He didn’t sound very emotional.’

  ‘They don’t sometimes. Especially the blokes. Keep it bottled up, that’s the macho Scottish way, right?’

  ‘He kept asking about my surname.’

  V turned away from her letters page. ‘Yeah, I meant to mention that, you probably don’t want to be giving your name out.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Get a lot of nutjobs attracted to death. Makes sense to keep that information to yourself until you know the person on the phone is legit. That goes double for men. Perverts.’

  Martha did 1471. Number withheld. She felt a tremor through her body but shrugged it off. People withhold numbers all the time, networks don’t provide them, blah blah. But still.

  It was something in the guy’s voice. Familiar yet different. She couldn’t put her finger on it.

  V gave off an exasperated grunt. ‘Fucking wind farms,’ she said. She held up a letter she’d just opened. Covered in a red scrawl. ‘Can’t these assholes come up with anything else to moan about other than wind farms? I’d like to stick all their faces in the blades of a turbine.’ She ripped the letter into confetti and threw it in the bin.

  Martha checked her email. Two new messages about dead people. She began to read, but kept thinking about that man’s voice, trying to work out what was so familiar about it.

  25

  Billy came by her desk at six and put on his squint smile.

  ‘Fancy grabbing a sandwich?’

  Martha realised she hadn’t eaten all day, that was one way of losing weight. Maybe by the end of her stint here she’d be svelte and willowy.

  She looked at her screen then at V.

  V waved at her. ‘You know the ropes already, girlfriend. Pages are nearly set, we’re ahead of schedule. Go break some bread with Loverboy.’

  Billy stuck his middle finger up at V, his smile getting more lopsided.

  ‘Don’t tempt me,’ V said. ‘I will sit on that and break it off.’

  Billy made a show of shuddering and Martha smiled.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, getting up.

  As they headed downstairs to the canteen, Martha stole glances at the scar on the back of Billy’s head. She had read about it. An emergency decompressive craniotomy, one of the newspaper reports had said. Otherwise known as a hole in the head to let the pressure out. She felt the pressure inside her own skull. Took a deep breath and thought about her ECT appointment first thing tomorrow. She still hadn’t checked that Cal was going to come with her. Wasn’t ideal that she had to come to work after, but it was doable. She had a few hours to recover at home. She wondered about trying to explain it all to Billy, but he would be just like everyone else – imagining Jack Nicholson in Cuckoo’s Nest, thrashing around and biting down on a gum shield like a madman.

  She had footage of herself from her first visit. They weren’t supposed to, but Cal filmed it on his phone. She asked him to, so she would know exactly what they were doing. She’d been reassured by all the doctors but needed to see for herself.

  She looked serene in the footage. Under anaesthetic, controlled voltage applied, end of story. No jerking spasms, no furrowed brow, no manic staring in wild-eyed panic. Just resetting the mind. That old IT joke about switching it off and on again. Worked nine times out of ten. Reboot your personality.

  And the feeling afterwards, as if that heavy, wet blanket had been lifted from her mind. Like her body was a landmass after the glacier had melted and the water run off. All her senses were buoyed. She could smell things again. Only then did she realise her senses had been dulled by illness, by medication. She could smell the earthy stink of her armpits when she hadn’t washed. She could smell when she was on her period. She felt alive again, back in the world.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’ Billy said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  They got sandwiches and coffee and grabbed a table next to the window, the Crags looming over them.

  ‘I met Rose today at the hospital,’ Martha said.

  Billy chewed tho
ughtfully. ‘There to see Gordon?’

  Martha nodded. ‘She had flowers. I thought she didn’t know him that well.’

  ‘That’s what I thought too.’

  ‘And you are best friends.’

  ‘Don’t say it like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like we’re fucking. We’re not.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Billy lowered his sandwich. ‘What were you doing there?’

  Martha shrugged. ‘Just wanted to check on him. I feel connected, you know? I was the last person to speak to him.’

  ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘Not good. His wife was there.’

  Billy was chewing again. ‘You speak to her?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Anything?’

  Martha shook her head. ‘Not really. She doesn’t think he’s going to live.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She have any idea that he was going to do something like this?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘What about the gun? Does she know anything about that?’

  Martha shook her head again. ‘Did you hear anything from the police?’

  Billy pulled a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. ‘Yeah, but nothing exciting.’ He unfolded the sheet. ‘It was an Olympic BBM nine-millimetre revolver. It’s a starting pistol, converted to fire live ammunition. It’s easy, a two-hour job. About half the firearms the cops see are converted starting pistols. Means it was definitely bought in a pub or down a back street, no licence or anything. Only his prints on it, obviously.’

  Martha took a swig of coffee. ‘I think that’s what Samantha finds hardest.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The premeditation of it. He went out and bought a gun, that’s a lot of hassle. That’s not just a spur-of-the-moment thing like pills or hanging. He had that gun in the house for a reason. And he kept it a secret for a reason. That’s pretty fucked up. Imagine if someone you loved did that behind your back.’

  ‘Brutal.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They’d both finished eating by now. Billy took a last gulp of his coffee.

  ‘So, it doesn’t look as if we have a news story,’ he said.

  ‘Doesn’t look like it.’