by Black Inc.
Ginger was so rattled by the tale she began to suspect her own mother might have suffered a similar fate, that she was not in fact a winged angel hovering above their home, but a living woman trapped in a wooden box two metres beneath the earth. Why, at her funeral, only weeks before, she’d lain in her open coffin, smiling serenely, her cheeks aglow, as if she were only asleep and having a pleasant dream. And could her father have accidentally buried other people alive, without anyone realising his fatal mistakes? If a priest – a man of God – could make such a serious error, surely so could the old man before her.
One night, sitting at his feet, she grew teary and breathless and pressed her face into his lap. He rested his hand on her head and stroked her hair, asking over and over what was wrong with his little girl. She trembled and hiccupped and wiped her eyes, trying to find the words to describe her despair.
Finally, she voiced her fears: the premature burials, her visions of babies being born in deep graves, the possibility that her mother might still be alive beneath the buffalo grass in Waverly Cemetery.
It was then that she heard him swallow hard. He took her face in his hands and lifted it from his lap, so they faced one another directly and she could smell the chemical whiff of alcohol on his breath.
‘Now,’ he whispered, ‘I’ve got something important to share with you. You must promise not to tell anyone. It will be our secret.’
*
The calls usually came at night, from hospitals, hostels and private homes. If the telephone didn’t wake her, the creak of her bedroom door would, and by the time her father had bundled her up in her flannel dressing gown, she’d be rubbing crust from the corners of her eyes. It generally took two adults to lift and transport a corpse, but since her mother had died, her father preferred to work alone or, rather, he preferred to work in the sole company of his daughter.
The inside of the hearse always smelled of leather and wilting flowers. On hot evenings, a faint stench would rise, like stagnant water left sitting too long in a vase. She found it strangely alluring to be out so late, without anyone else knowing – not even Mrs Kite, who always slept soundly each night until dawn.
She never accompanied her father into the mortuaries and hospitals, but remained in the front seat of the hearse, breathing on the windscreen and writing her name over and over with her index finger. Eventually, he would appear, pushing a gurney, with a corpse inside a canvas bag, which he loaded into the back. On the way home, she would listen for any signs of life from the body that lay behind her – a cough, a cry, a timid sigh – so that her father wouldn’t be like that man in the story who’d mistakenly buried a person alive.
The purpose of these trips, her father explained, was to help her to understand the difference between the living and the dead, between a human being and a corpse. Unlike the nineteenth century, he continued, today a body had to be examined by a raft of experts – a medical examiner, a coroner, a mortician like himself – before being declared officially dead.
The problem, Ginger soon realised, was that even a genuine corpse often refused to remain silent. Once, on their way home from a pick-up, she was startled to hear a sound, like a distant, faulty vacuum cleaner, whistling from the rear of the hearse. Another time, she heard a moan, as if the body was having a nightmare. Yet another time, she heard what sounded like a brief explosion, and her father explained to her that the dead are full of stale air and wind desperate to escape back into the atmosphere of the living.
One morning, when she admitted to him that she was still confused, that she still feared her mother had been buried alive, her father began chewing on the inside of his cheeks. He glanced around the room for what seemed like a long time, as if someone might appear to give him some advice on what to do.
Eventually, he cleared his throat, as if preparing to make a speech.
‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘Your mother has not been buried alive.’
She sniffed and looked away, shaking her head.
Her father tugged on his beard several times and sighed. She glanced up into his eyes and to her they seemed watery and unusually grey. And then he did something he’d never done before: he took her hand firmly and began leading her down four flights of stairs, to the basement. His hand around hers was warm and reassuring – as it had been when he’d walked her to her first day at school. And, with every step she took with him – she couldn’t tell why – she felt her anxiety diminishing.
*
The sandstone walls were lined with wooden cabinets, painted white, with glass doors through which she could see various bottles and jars of what looked like pale yellow powder. Surgical instruments were lined up beside a double sink: needles, scalpels, tubes and forceps.
In the centre of the room was a steel table with a narrow drainage gutter running around the sides. Lying on the table was a body – one she and her father had collected the night before from the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Until that moment, she hadn’t seen the corpse, a young woman with matted green hair whose collarbones and ribcage jutted through her skin. Her eyes were closed and her skin had a bluish sheen to it, like the early swelling of a bruise. Her father lit a candle and held it over the body. She flinched as she watched him lower it towards the woman’s arm and held the flame against her wrist. Ginger smelled a hint of singed hair but, as she watched the woman’s skin redden, she heard no cry of pain, not even a whimper.
Her father explained that, in the olden days, there were other ways of proving that a body was no longer alive: cutting off fingers, rigging bells to limbs, placing pennies on eyelids for three days before burial. Now, what with the advances in modern science, the chances of such an accident occurring were virtually impossible.
Ginger frowned. She grasped a hank of the woman’s green hair and pulled on it. The woman didn’t make a sound, nor did she move. ‘Can we dig up Mum?’ she asked. ‘Just to be sure?’
Her father pursed his lips and shook his head. When she asked why they couldn’t, he explained that exhuming bodies, without consent from the authorities, was against the law.
‘What if we don’t get caught?’ she persisted. ‘We could do it in the middle of the night, when everyone’s asleep.’
And that was when he sat her down on the wooden bench and told her he had something else very important to share with her. He had wanted to wait until she was older, he explained, at least until she was a teenager, but now seemed as good a time as any. Ginger crossed her ankles, unsure if she wanted him to continue or not. He put his hands behind his back and began pacing around the steel table, the lifeless body, staring at the concrete floor, as if following the path of a cockroach.
Finally, he paused, looked up, and announced that if she wanted to see her mother again she should not look among the dead, but the living.
*
As the years passed, Ginger slowly became inured to her own sense of loss, and to the grief of the funeral mourners who filed through her home. She continued to accompany her father on his pick-ups, helped him fill out paperwork, and watched with practised nonchalance as he drained blood from bodies, powdered the faces of corpses, and stitched their lips together. Sometimes she helped with the rouge and eyeliner, though she never failed to be surprised by how cold the face of a cadaver could become.
What had begun as an introduction to the cycles of life and death gradually became a part of her daily routine, as normal and regular as brushing her teeth or watering the front garden. She gradually stopped fearing that her father would preside over a premature burial. Now that she knew that her mother and father weren’t her real parents – that she’d been adopted at the age of eight weeks old – she no longer pined so much for the dead woman who’d raised her, but for the woman who’d given birth to her, the one who was still alive.
She looked for this woman in the faces of shop assistants, bus drivers and stallholders at the local market. She searched the glazed eyes of young mothers pushing strollers, the smiles of barmaids who worked in th
e pub across the road from where she lived. She listened to the soft voices of librarians and the banter of gossiping women at outdoor cafés, wondering if any one of them could be the one, the mysterious woman who’d made her.
Her father – for that is how she still referred to him – did not know many details about the identities of her birth parents, only that they had both been very young and that her mother had lived locally, having given birth at St Vincent’s Hospital only two blocks away. For Ginger, the mixture of anonymity and close proximity was both tantalising and exasperating. Why, she could have walked past her own mother every day for many years, without even recognising her. She had learnt from her father that the name ‘Ginger’ had been chosen specifically by the woman who’d given birth to her.
When Ginger asked why, her father merely smiled, and touched her long ponytail of reddish-blonde hair. She smiled back, and the thought that her mother’s hair might be the same colour as her own made her shiver. Her father had showed her a copy of her own birth certificate: Mother: Sonia Darling. Father: Unknown.
By the time she was nine she realised that it was possible that she was no longer an only child. It occurred to her that she could have younger brothers and sisters who lived in the area, who maybe even went to her own school – children that her mother had decided to keep instead of giving away to strangers.
This possibility caused her to study local families even closer. Each afternoon, she scrutinised every fair-haired mother who picked up her kids from school. There was a cheery woman in her early thirties who wore sequined gypsy skirts and red boots, who collected her five-year-old son on a bicycle that had a second seat on the back. One day, Ginger found herself running towards her, stopping just short of the bike’s front wheel. ‘What’s your name?’ she blurted out, dropping her school case. Her son suddenly appeared and the woman put one arm around him and kissed him on the head. ‘Caroline,’ she replied. ‘What’s yours?’
*
There was also a very young, thin woman whose twin boy and girl never wore a uniform to school; every afternoon, she would stand at the gate, smiling, and holding two cones of strawberry ice-cream. Ginger didn’t bother to ask what her name was: she wore a silver necklace with letters hanging from it that spelled out ‘KAREN.’ And then there was a glamorous woman – quite a bit older – who wore her blonde hair pinned up into a lacquered beehive, and who picked up her first-grade daughter in a dark-blue convertible that she always double-parked. One afternoon, Ginger summoned the courage to ask the woman her name. But the woman merely looked away and pushed a button on the dashboard. The roof of the car began to rise, enclosing the woman, and she began to wind her window up. Her daughter climbed into the car and they drove away.
After a few months, this imaginary life – this pretend mother – no longer preoccupied her, and she began to resent the conventional families she witnessed each day, with their ice-creams, bicycles and easy laughter. She dreaded the usual questions from the kids at school: What does your dad do? How many brothers and sisters have you got? What’s your mum baking for the annual fete? Often her reply was silence, or she disappeared into the toilet block.
She decided that not one of the mothers she saw at the school gate would have given her baby away. The love and tenderness they exuded was too obvious.
*
By her tenth birthday she’d realised that the dead were much easier to get to know than those who were still alive. In calloused hands she recognised a hard life spent labouring; in dark, leathery faces, permanently suntanned, she sensed years whiled away on a fishing boat; caesarean scars revealed the births of offspring; a thin and hairless body told stories of incurable cancer.
Ginger also grew to understand that you could learn a lot about a corpse from the kinds of mourners it attracted. For example, a few scruffy men with beards and oversized shoes usually meant that the deceased had been homeless and had probably died in a nearby lane. It was on these occasions that her father usually performed the ceremony alone, delivering a short, general eulogy, in lieu of the usual family members and friends.
Women in black suits and pearls, with matching handbags and shoes, usually mourned a corpse that had acquired some wealth, one who had lived in Double Bay or Vaucluse – probably a former socialite or the mistress of a CEO who’d died of leaking breast implants or too many sessions at a tanning salon.
One day, the parlour was packed with over 200 people – some with dreadlocks, others with shaved heads, teenagers with tattooed arms and hands. The air, she remembered, had been thick with the smell of incense. She’d even noticed a handcuffed female prisoner wearing an orange jumpsuit, flanked by two male guards, sitting in the back row, and a huge grey dog the size of a Shetland pony panting away beside the coffin. At the time, she sensed that the service would be for a local criminal. This was confirmed when, before the ceremony began, she walked down a side aisle, tripped on an outstretched foot, and bumped into a man wearing a dark suit. At once, she glimpsed the inside of his open jacket and the gun in a holster strapped to his chest. When she looked up she noticed he had a hooked nose and smelled strongly of a minty aftershave. He seemed like a man who would hunt down criminals, she thought, one of those policemen you can’t recognise because they try to dress like everyone else.
She eyed the gun, frowning. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, before she could stop herself.
He buttoned his jacket, concealing the gun. ‘Just wanna make sure the bastard’s really dead.’
When she thought about it, she understood that she could easily learn more about the background of a corpse than she could about her own. The deceased always came with a death certificate, stating its date and place of birth, its parents and grandparents, and of course the cause and date of death. A corpse usually attracted a big family of close and distant relatives, best friends and casual acquaintances, those who were inconsolable and others who feigned grief by bowing their heads and clutching tissues and handkerchiefs. Death gave a person a complete identity of a kind that it probably hadn’t achieved in life. The dead knew who they were.
She now flitted between the embalming room and the funeral parlour, between mourners and flower arrangers, with a detached, almost world-weary air. She thought she’d seen everything: bullet wounds the size of saucers, gangrenous legs, and once – on Christmas Day – a complete decapitation, with the woman’s head in a separate plastic bag from the one in which her body was stored.
Then, late one night, in the first month of winter, her father received a summons from the morgue at St Vincent’s Hospital. Even though it was only a hundred metres up the road, her father insisted that Ginger accompany him. The last time he’d left the hearse unattended outside the hospital, in order to sign paperwork, a man had jumped into the driver’s seat and driven off on a joyride, with the corpse still in the back.
Wearing her flannelette pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers, she waited in the front passenger seat, watching a patient wearing only a thin green hospital gown standing in the icy wind, hooked up to an IV, smoking a cigarette. She looked at his sunken face, his rounded, almost collapsed shoulders, and knew the next time she’d see this man would probably be in the basement of her home. She was surprised to realise these thoughts no longer disturbed her.
She was further surprised when her father walked through the automatic sliding doors without pushing the usual gurney or stretcher. At first, she thought there’d been some mistake, that the body they were to collect had been stored at another hospital. As her father drew closer, however, and as he moved briefly through a pool of yellow light from a passing car, she noticed he was carrying a tiny package in his arm – no bigger than a loaf of bread. He was lurching slightly and seemed to be finding it hard to breathe.
*
The organist played ‘Amazing Grace’, slower than usual, as downcast people – some dressed casually in jeans, others in dark wool and pearls – filed into the candlelit parlour. Mrs Kite was arranging some flowers
beside the front dais and Ginger was passing out the Order of Service cards. Earlier, her father had handed her a pair of old-fashioned dressmaking scissors, which had once belonged to his mother. He’d whispered instructions about what she was to do with them following the ceremony, and she’d nodded and slipped them into the pocket of her dress.
In the back row sat a group of men whom Ginger recognised immediately from the beer garden across the road, clutching caps in their fists, wearing overalls and work boots covered in dried concrete. The local shopkeeper, who was always dressed in black, sat alone in the corner – an Italian woman who sometimes had to have her teenage son translate for customers. There were a few pale-faced women in a middle row cradling gurgling babies and softly berating their restless toddlers. Then the Lord Mayor swept through the door with a photographer and two suited men – Ginger had seen her picture in the paper many times. She was wearing a grey pinstripe suit and her neck was ringed with her usual leather choker dotted with silver studs. By now, it was standing-room only and some fold-out chairs had to be wedged against the wall.
Standing an arm’s length away from Ginger was a tall man in a blue suit, studying the crowd. It was only when she caught a whiff of mint aftershave, and glimpsed the hook nose, that she recognised him. She could just make out the impression that his gun made through his jacket.
She frowned and glanced about, wondering why he was attending the service. After a minute or so, she recognised another man, similarly suited and groomed, standing closer to the front, his eyes roving like spotlights across the crowd of teary mourners. Ginger glanced back at the hooked-nosed one, at the slight lump protruding from the left side of his jacket, and wondered if he planned to shoot one of the mourners. It seemed strange to have detectives attend such a ceremony, as if her father were about to commit an act of terrorism rather than conduct a short funeral.