Summertime

by Elizabeth Rigbey

We look at each other.

  ‘I’m glad it’s going right back where it belongs,’ I say. There’s something pleasing about the idea of Daddy’s house, restored to order after the police presence, with his own car right outside. But Larry is already shaking his head at me.

  ‘This is a time of change, Lucy. Nothing’s going to be back the way it was, ever. You should understand that.’

  I look out across the beach’s bands of colour. Light brown where the sand is dry, a strip of dark sand at the water’s edge, then a band of light blue, dark blue and finally an impenetrable black as the bottomless water stretches on to infinity.

  11

  Bellamy is a pretty coastal town. Back behind the artists’ shops and the cafés and the fishing boats that the tourists see is the police precinct and a small courthouse. Jane and Larry and Scott tried to dissuade me from going to the mortuary there to see Daddy’s body. Finally, Scott insisted on accompanying me.

  I said: ‘It’ll only upset you.’ But he fixed his jaw in a way I don’t remember and told me he was coming anyway.

  We scan the address and the street but the building to which it leads us seems not to exist. We walk up and down looking for a sign which says Mortuary.

  ‘Let’s ask in the library,’ Scott suggests. We go into the nondescript rectangle of a building and as soon as the doors swing closed behind us we know that this must be the mortuary. We know it from the smell, which we recognize, at some animal level, as the smell of death.

  We ring a bell and a white-coated man slides back a glass panel in the wall.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’ he asks, looking us up and down.

  ‘Lucy Schaffer, three-thirty.’ Suddenly I want to giggle and the man seems to detect this. He looks at me petulantly. He says: ‘You’re late.’ He is wearing white boots and a badge with his picture in one corner which says: ‘David Davis, Morbid Anatomy Assistant.’

  ‘I mean, how did you expect the mortuary to look?’ he asks as if we’ve been arguing with him. We don’t reply.

  He leads us through a side door into a large, floodlit room. The smell is stronger now, it is very strong. Scott wrinkles his nose at me. It is the smell of burnt rubber. It is the smell of sadness. It is a smell which strips human beings of any hope or nobility. It is the smell of putrefaction.

  ‘Okay, now this is a bad air day,’ the assistant tells us. ‘I mean, we’ve had a few brought in from the streets this week so the smell is particularly strong right now. Usually I can’t pick it up at all because I’m so used to it but today even I can smell it, so I guess it must be choking you guys.’

  He is leading us through the airless, windowless room. It is lined by big metal drawers. The assistant leads us half-way down the room and checks his notes and checks the name on the drawer. It says: Professor Eric Schaffer. I stare.

  Scott turns to me suddenly. His face looks blue in these floodlights, as though bruised.

  ‘You can change your mind now, Luce. It’s not too late.’

  The assistant has his hand on the drawer. He raises his eyebrows at me. He is a young man and his features are even. Then he slides back the drawer. Inside is a sheet and beneath it is Daddy, just the way Stevie’s body lay beneath his blanket.

  ‘Luce…’ Scott hisses at me. ‘Luce, don’t do this. Don’t look.’ He is so close to me that I can feel his warm breath on my hair.

  But I nod at the mortuary assistant and he pulls back the sheet to reveal to me once more death’s strange mask. A mask modelled on Daddy’s face. White, thin, puckered, like a toy which someone has left out in the rain.

  At the base of the neck, where the doll has been stitched, roughly like a baseball mitt and with string, are purple pimples.

  ‘Oh!’ I say softly.

  Scott has turned away, his hand to his mouth.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘but he looks so cold!’

  David Davis laughs with unnatural vigour. He says heartily: ‘They’re all cold in here. For them, it’s Alaska.’

  Scott has started to heave. Great tremors pass through his muscles. He keeps a hand locked across his mouth. I say: ‘Could I be alone here with my father for a few minutes?’

  David Davis looks displeased. He works with the dead and they are undemanding. He is unpractised at helpfulness. ‘Our regulations don’t allow that.’

  I look anxiously at Scott and then back to the mortuary assistant.

  ‘Please. Just for a very short time.’

  The man looks at Scott’s white face and heaving body and sighs. ‘Come with me,’ he tells Scott, leading him back up the room, and for a moment I watch them go, walking past the shiny steel drawers of the dead as though they’re making their way through some enormous kitchen.

  I turn back to Daddy but suddenly the room goes dark. Daddy’s body, the whole world, disappears into some black hole where the darkness is of an unnatural, enveloping density. My heart bangs violently, its protests fill my ears, tiny nerves in my fingers and toes sting me. Everything I fear most, everything I don’t think about, ever, but which sometimes roars at me in my dreams, suddenly it is all here, surrounding me. I open my mouth to scream but I have no breath. My own formless fears, the smell and the darkness all suffocate me. And then the lights blink back on.

  ‘Whoops, sorry!’ calls David Davis from the door. ‘I just switch off automatically when I leave the mortuary. I hope I didn’t frighten you!’ The door bangs behind him.

  Daddy lies on his metal bed, impervious to my beating heart and shaking fingers. Impervious to everything. I lean closer to him and am quieted by his stillness. I want to say something I never could have said while he was alive because we aren’t that kind of family.

  ‘I love you, Daddy.’

  But Daddy isn’t here, behind this cold mask. He can’t hear me.

  He’s still big. Death can’t take that away from him. And he still has that strength in his face which drew people to him. His bones jut inside his cheeks, his chin is strong, his forehead high. Even when he rots, and now that he is dead his body will rot, it will be clear from his skeleton that he was big and strong and special.

  ‘I mean, I don’t love you less because you’re dead.’

  Along the left side of his face there are swellings, an unnatural blue, sometimes with cuts at their nucleus. I lean across him to examine them. I don’t like them. I try to see Daddy’s face without looking at them and I learn that he had aged since I last saw him. Lines have been etched not by time but by worry. There is no worry in his face now but this is its patina. I touch his hair, whiter and thinner than three years ago but still leonine in its magnificence. I study the network of lines running down his cheeks, the small scars, the mole, the freckles, the little blister below one ear. Marks accumulated over more than seventy years. Life’s hieroglyphics telling Daddy’s story to anyone who can decipher them in death.

  I whisper: ‘Daddy, what worried you so much? Was it me? I hope it wasn’t me.’

  Carefully, I pull the sheet at his side up a little until one hand is revealed. It retains something of the ocean in the faint blueness of its veins. Neat fingernails, bulging knuckles. Big, square, practical. I loved to watch Daddy work with these hands. Making things. Fixing things. Chipping at rocks with sharp, precise movements until they yielded with a powdery shudder.

  Very gently I touch one finger. It is not a human finger but a cold, cunning model of a finger. I examine the lines on his palm, his wrist. His left wrist. I see that it is circled by a bracelet of white flesh, thin as a needle. I touch this but it is barely perceptible to the pads of my fingers.

  Footsteps. Not the soft prowl of David Davis but the clicking of high heels walking purposefully. I replace Daddy’s hand as though it were made of glass and when I look up a woman is standing before me in a blue silk suit, exquisite and understated jewellery and expensive hair. There is a curious clash of scents, perfume and death. Does she wear all this for the dead?

  ‘Do you have permission to be here?’ she dem
ands.

  ‘Yes. My husband…’ The strangeness of these words, after all this time, jolts me. ‘… My husband felt nauseous and David Davis just took him outside.’

  She looks mollified.

  ‘I’ll have to stay with you or you should leave until he gets back. We can’t allow unsupervised visits.’

  ‘Are you a medical examiner?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you examine my father’s body?’

  She sighs. I wonder how old she is. Her clothes and hair and make-up are like a disguise. Have I also been wearing a disguise for the last three years?

  ‘Actually yes. But I can’t discuss his case with you in detail.’

  ‘Can you tell me what this is?’

  I point to the thin, white line around Daddy’s wrist. She glances at it but moves no closer to me or Daddy. She doesn’t need to. She’s familiar with the scar. She hesitates.

  ‘Please tell me,’ I say.

  At length she says: ‘It’s an attempted suicide.’

  My breath catches and I am motionless.

  ‘Many years ago. When Professor Schaffer was a young man.’

  I shake my head. ‘No. No. He never would have done that.’

  ‘He was right-handed and he tried to cut the artery on his left wrist.’

  ‘But I’ve never noticed this scar before.’

  ‘It shows the classic signs of a self-inflicted wound: it’s noticeably deeper on the left side than the right. He managed quite a deep cut before he gave up. He would have bent back his hand so that the vessels withdraw behind the cartilage and bone and the pain would have gotten too much before he could do an effective job.’

  ‘When? When did he do this?’

  ‘All I can tell you is that it happened a very long time ago.’

  I stare at Daddy’s wrist.

  She says: ‘You didn’t see it because you didn’t expect it to be there. Plus he probably wore his wristwatch low.’

  ‘These blue marks down the left side of his face… what are they?’

  ‘Bruises.’

  I am quick with anxiety. ‘Bruises? There was a fight?’

  I am determined not to cry. If I do, this woman won’t answer my questions. She’ll call for someone to come and she’ll click back through the mortuary on her stilettos.

  ‘I can’t ascertain whether there was a fight but the bruising is certainly non-fatal. It may have occurred immediately prior to death or soon afterwards but it wasn’t so extensive as it looks now because bruising continues to spread across the body after death for some days. By the time you bury Professor Schaffer, he’ll be a lot darker.’

  My voice is too strained to emulate the detached, clinical tone with which the ME would be comfortable.

  ‘What about the cuts?’

  ‘Also non-fatal. The puncture marks are not deep and there’s no major artery or vein involved. They’re caused by impact with some hard, sharp object, probably rock, it’s hard to tell. Unfortunately, bruising does not reproduce the shape of the injuring object.’

  I forget to be clinical. ‘You think he hit Daddy’s face? With rocks?’

  The ME sighs and her jewellery rattles crossly.

  ‘A few of the injuries are consistent with attack by a right-handed assailant but I’d say it’s more likely that the Pacific Ocean inflicted these wounds shortly after death.’

  ‘But… isn’t Big Brim a sandy beach?’

  She shrugs. ‘You’ve crossed the line now, between my work and Detective MacFarlane’s.’

  ‘Can you tell… do you know if he suffered when he died?’

  She pauses. I have risked a brisk reply and now I wait for it. But she says: ‘I believe he didn’t suffer. When the decedent has fought death or been in great distress there are a number of indicators. Not only is distress very clearly visible on the face but other muscles can be so contracted that the body is almost curled. It’s not unusual to find the fingernails are damaged or have become embedded in the palms during the struggle for life.’

  I turn my head away. I am thinking not of Daddy but of Stevie. He looked peaceful, as though sleeping, but the way he lay in his crib, one arm raised a little, suggested some instinctive, ineffectual struggle against death.

  Her tone doesn’t soften but there is a new, distant note in it, kindness or some poorer relative. ‘None of these indicators was present in the case of Professor Schaffer.’

  I look right at her. ‘Are you sure my father was a homicide victim? Are you certain? Nobody who really knew him can believe that he was killed.’

  The discreet laughter of gold jewellery. The ME doesn’t like her judgement to be questioned.

  ‘Then,’ she says sharply, ‘maybe nobody really knew him.’

  Silence in the mortuary. She relents a little. ‘In cases of drowning,’ she explains, ‘we find diatoms, which are the microscopic algae present in water, all around the body. The heart pumps them there during immersion. If the body is dead prior to immersion then the diatoms don’t reach any organ beyond the lungs. In the case of your father I did not find them anywhere else but the lungs.’

  ‘But how did he die?’

  There is a small, involuntary reaction from behind the make-up. ‘I’m not completely sure yet. We’re going to take another look. But we’ll be through by Friday and can release the body to you any time next week for the funeral.’

  A door opens. David Davis, Morbid Anatomy Assistant, alone now. The ME take the opportunity to leave but after a step or two she pauses and turns.

  ‘Miss Schaffer?’

  I nod.

  ‘I offer you my sympathy on the loss of your father.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I should have said that before. In my job it’s too easy to forget the complex, interesting individual the decedent used to be.’

  She resumes her departure. The mortuary assistant calls to her: ‘I’m sorry, Dr Ball.’ His voice carries effortlessly in the still room. His tone is respectful. I bet he never turns the lights out on her. ‘I had to be absent for a short time, her husband started barfing.’

  Dr Ball excuses him with a wave and disappears.

  I take a last look at the shape in the drawer, the shape which Daddy used to inhabit.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I say.

  David Davis covers Daddy’s hand and pulls the sheet back over his face. The drawer runners rumble as they transport Daddy’s body back into its metal box.

  Scott is sitting, white-faced, in the lobby where the smell is fainter. He stands up when I come in. Wordlessly we head for the doors. When we walk through them we will be completely free of that smell.

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ we say. David Davis smiles.

  ‘Oh, my pleasure,’ he assures us. ‘It’s always nice to see some living tissue in here.’ He grins broadly. He has enjoyed his power over us.

  As we leave the mortuary, the sunshine of late afternoon warms us. We walk across the asphalt and the air bulges with a youthful energy. A group of uniformed police officers leaves the courthouse, walking a slow, sinewy walk as though it feels good. Out on the street, people wear colourful clothes. They mostly move in the same direction like participants in a bright dance. This is life and we return to the car enjoying its embrace.

  ‘That weirdo turned the lights out on you deliberately,’ Scott tells me on the way back up to Needle Bay.

  ‘He sure seemed to enjoy it.’

  ‘I’ll bet he’s done it before. When we got outside he said that most women scream.’

  ‘If you’re really frightened you don’t scream.’

  ‘Were you really frightened?’

  ‘Yes. It was like a weekend break in the underworld.’

  Driving back to Needle Bay, Scott sighs. ‘Jeez, Luce, it’s hard to believe anyone could have killed Eric, especially not anyone who knew him. I’ve been racking my brains all night…’ Scott, wrapped in a sweater, maybe two, sitting out on the wooden porch, the tide crashing in the dark. He is thinking,
remembering every friend Daddy ever mentioned, looking for names, explanations. ‘I mean, he didn’t have any enemies. Sure, he could be irritating, it was impossible to budge him in argument, he kept his emotions so much in check that sometimes I felt mad at him. But no one would have killed him. Unless there was someone way back, from his childhood.’

  ‘He left all that behind him, Scott. He had no contact with his family and they had no way of finding him.’

  ‘Later, then. When he was a young man.’

  When Daddy was a young man, he tried to saw through the artery on his left wrist.

  I sigh. ‘Do people really settle old scores fifty years too late?’

  We drive in silence. We pull up to some traffic lights and a man, his hair bushy and shoulder-length, stands at the intersection holding a sign scrawled on cardboard: ‘I am a Vietnam Vet. I fought for my country but now I have no home and no job. I feel betrayed. Please help me.’

  Scott reaches for his wallet and waves a bill out of the window and the guy walks over and takes it from him.

  ‘Thank you sir. And thank God you have so much goddamn money you can afford to throw a little at me like I’m some common beggar.’

  The lights change and we drive on rapidly.

  ‘Shit,’ Scott says. ‘That’s the last time I hand anything to those guys.’

  I glance at him. He looks crushed by the man’s aggression. His face is still white and his limbs are hunched as though his shirt is too small. I say: ‘That’s what Daddy would have done. Daddy was always giving people on the street money. And if they spoke to him that way he would have shrugged and understood how hard it was for the guy to take it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ agrees Scott morosely.

  When we get back to Needle Bay the beach is almost empty and the sun has started its descent. We sit on the porch and gradually Scott’s face and body resume their normal roundness and his cheeks start to reflect the pink of the late afternoon sun.

  He asks: ‘Could you tell how much Eric had changed since you last saw him?’

  ‘Well, he did look a little older. Mostly he looked sort of worried.’

  Scott nods. ‘Yeah.’

  I feel my voice crack as though I just threw it up against some rocky wall. ‘What was he worrying about?’