“So that’s one good reason why the dominant life form on this planet is Homo sapiens, not Loligo forbesii.”
You look at your watch. “It’s coming up to lunchtime, so if anyone has a question I suggest you come to the front. The rest can go.”
There’s an eruption of noise, the rattling of seats, and they crowd out of the exits, faces illuminated by smartphones, as they scan to see what texts and twitters they’ve missed while they’ve been sitting here.
This is the worst part. You have to stand here, pretending to fiddle with papers, while waiting to see if anyone approaches you with a question. It’s a bit like a writer sitting in a bookshop waiting to sign copies when no one knows who he is or wants to buy his book. You’ve scattered the seeds, and it seems they’ve fallen on barren ground.
A young man comes your way. You steel yourself. You’ve heard most of them.
“How much of this do we have to know for the exam?” And you’d like to answer, “All of it, none of it – it’s up to you. What did you come to university for?”
Or “Your lecture didn’t follow the handout.” And you wish you could say, “Of course it bloody didn’t. If I gave the same lecture every year I’d go insane with boredom.”
He approaches. “Excuse me, sir. I’m thinking about doing an Intercalated B.Sc. I was just wondering if I could, er, maybe do the research project in your lab.”
You blink, first with disbelief, then with relief.
“And your name is…?”
“Matthew. Matthew Craig.”
“All right, Matthew. I’m lecturing this afternoon, but if you pop up to my room at about five o’clock we could chat about it. Second floor, Room 2.01. Is that okay?”
“Yes, fine. Thank you very much.”
“No problem.”
You never know. You just never know.
With You in Spirit
What wakes me up is an electric screwdriver. It resonates through the small space, making a racket like a freight train. I open my eyes.
I’m lying on my back, contemplating a small panel of glass a couple of inches from my nose. Shadows move beyond the glass, and there’s music in the background, drowned intermittently by the deafening noise of screws being driven in. Light falls on a padded ledge of white satin. That clinches it. I’m in a coffin. It appears to be a very nice coffin but a coffin is not where I want to be. I try to open my mouth to shout, but that hasn’t worked for some time and it doesn’t work now. A couple more screws go in.
Now there are sounds, low murmurs and some world-class weeping. I open my eyes and find myself face-to-face across the glass with Millie. Millie, our receptionist before I married her. We were still in love right up to the so-called accident.
Tears are streaming down her cheeks and plopping onto the glass. Then she withdraws abruptly and I hear:
“He’s opened his eyes! Omigod! He’s alive!”
The voice of Karl, my partner in the private surgical practice. “Millie, Millie, it’s just rigor. Dave is dead.”
He is bloody not dead. He is alive.
There’s a vague swinging sensation, the window darkens, and I hear the thunder of clods of soil descending on the coffin.
*
Whoever decreed that people should be buried six feet down underestimated the power of the human spirit. It’s true I wasn’t quite what I’d been, but reflections in shop windows showed me to be a reasonable simulacrum. And there were advantages: I no longer had to shave, or bath, or sleep, or even eat.
Our house was empty, up for sale, so I went to the practice, scanned the car park, and spotted the little Mercedes SL350 roadster I’d bought her. She loved that car, and I knew she wouldn’t part with it. I was inside the boot when she drove away. At night, when everything was quiet, I flowed out of the boot. The car had been parked in the drive of a different house. I drifted through a wall and up to the bedroom.
She was in bed with someone. I took a chair and considered the situation. Then I coughed politely.
I knew Millie was a light sleeper. I also knew she would say “Omigod!” when she set eyes on me.
Her head lifted. “Karl? Are you awake? Karl? Wake up, I think there’s someone in the room.”
“Mmm? All right, all right, I’ll put the light on…”
“Not the ceiling light, please,” I said. “It’s too bright. The side light.”
There was dead silence. Then both of them rose up in their beds and Karl reached for the bedside light and switched it on.
Millie said, “Omigod!”
Something floundered around inside Karl’s mouth. His voice, when it finally emerged, was hoarse. “It can’t be!”
I said, “It can, and it is.”
Millie said, “It’s his ghost, come to haunt us!”
“Oh,” I said. “Did I forget something? White sheet? Woo-woo noises? Clanking chains?”
Karl got up, put a dressing gown on and sat carefully on the edge of the bed, watching me the whole time. His face was the colour of papier maché.
Millie’s jaw was quivering. “Omigod!”
Karl’s eyes narrowed. “You died. We buried you.”
“You buried me, all right, but I wasn’t dead.”
“You were dead. You’d been in a persistent vegetative state for a year and when there was no hope we switched off the life support.”
“You switched off the life support, Karl. And you were responsible for the vegetative state.”
“It was an accident! The technician forgot to check there was a full cylinder of oxygen in theatre. It ran out during the operation.”
“But no one noticed, of course. No alarms went off. No one saw my sats plunging on the display or my ECG going crazy. You bastard! It wasn’t medical negligence: it was murder.”
His tone became surer, more aggressive. “It was a tragic accident. What do you want, an apology?”
“Seems kind of inadequate, Karl.” I pursed my lips. “Self-immolation would be a grander gesture: you know, human torch, something along those lines?”
“Very funny. I’ll ask you again: what do you want?”
“Number one, I’d feel a lot happier if you weren’t screwing my wife every night.”
Millie had recovered control of her jaw. “It isn’t every night, Dave –”
“Millie…” Karl turned back to me. “All right, Dave, what’s it to you?”
“What’s it to me? She’s my wife, Karl. You’re in bed with my wife!”
“Your widow, Dave. She’s my wife now. I married your widow.”
“I should have known. You lusted after her so you rid yourself of me. You got control of the practice. And Millie here collected my life insurance. Nice.”
“No, Dave,” Millie said. “I wanted you, not your insurance. But you went somewhere I couldn’t reach you. And Karl’s been kind to me, even through the worst of it, when you had to be fed through tubes and there was no response to anything or anyone. He was a wonderful support.”
I smiled. “Of course he was. All part of the grand plan, wasn’t it? You made just one mistake. Burying me alive wasn’t smart, Karl. There’s something a little different about the mechanics, you see. So actually you haven’t got rid of me at all.”
There was a wild look in Karl’s eyes. He ran the tip of his tongue round his lips, then plunged a hand into the drawer of the bedside table and came out with a revolver.
Millie looked at him in alarm. “Karl! No!”
I laughed, and that must have pushed him over the edge because he fired, twice.
“You see?” I said to Millie, as I got up from the chair and examined the holes in the plaster wall behind me. “You married a killer.”
The look Millie skewered him with told me all I needed to know.
*
Millie and I had always had a good understanding. It took just one more visit, while Karl wasn’t around, and the stage was set.
The patient was head of a big law firm, in for a coronary bypass, the
perfect candidate. It was just a matter of swapping the labels on some bottles. The patient got morphine for pain relief, only it was a rather larger dose than Karl had anticipated. The man’s colleagues went to town. Karl was struck off, then prosecuted for culpable homicide. I liked the symmetry of it: undetected for a crime he committed, but convicted of one he didn’t. Millie divorced him while he was in prison, and with her share of the house she bought a nice apartment.
I visit her there often – for companionship, of course, because physicality is not on the agenda these days.
You could say ours is more of a spiritual relationship.
When the Party’s Over
She floats around the room, the perfect hostess – a part played so often she can do it at a level below conscious awareness.
They are enjoying it, these people: the warmth, the opulent surroundings, the expensive food and drink, the fact of being in the boss’s home at all.
The young men congregate in a corner. They’re ill at ease because they don’t know each other; they tell jokes and erupt from time to time in gales of forced laughter. The girls chat in smaller groups. They strike poses, a drink held high in one hand, a pendant swinging and lodging in an overexposed cleavage, a pelvis thrust forward, the shine on a silky dress moving over slim haunches and a flat stomach. One of the waitresses pauses and a slender thing twists around, reaches impossibly long nails into the tray, pops a canapé. Watching that pliant young body makes her conscious of the solidity of her own waist, the bulge of her hips that stubbornly resists her endless diets and visits to the gym, the crèping between her breasts, concealed now behind higher necklines.
They live for the present, these girls. They smoke incessantly, unworried by the prospect that nicotine will ravage their looks, turn peach-smooth skin into a white, powder-dry hide that shrivels in the sun.
Like hers? Yes, like hers.
Her bloom has faded, she knows that; neither the attentions of the cosmetic surgeon nor the numerous jars on her dressing table can bring it back. She picks up a glass of champagne and moves on, bestows a smile on a newly arrived nymph and her escort, feeling the tautness as it stretches the skin of her jaw and neck, aware that the girl, too, has registered it. She raises her glass a little, ostensibly to drink but actually to let the large square-cut diamond on her finger scintillate in the candlelight. The blue doll’s-eyes widen. It restores her confidence.
Her husband stands near the door, greeting the guests as they arrive. She watches him, eyes narrowed. The touch of grey at the temples and the cragginess creeping into his jaw lend him an air of spurious integrity. He’s a charming host, isn’t he? For each young man a firm handshake, a warm welcome, an invitation to help themselves from trays loaded with drinks and canapés. But for each woman something intimate, something personal, whispered into a small, faux-diamond-studded ear, eliciting a giggle of delight here, a peck on the cheek there. As the couples pass into the room she can read their lips.
“What did he say?”
“Oh, nothing.”
He takes a girl’s shawl, rests a hand a little too long on a pale, naked shoulder blade and she shoots him a quick smile. Wealth, power, mature good looks – for these girls it’s an irresistible combination. He employs young women almost exclusively and he hires the prettiest ones. There’s nothing about it in Equal Opportunities legislation – is there? – nothing that prevents you from discriminating against ugly, overweight women. He has his pick, and in the run-up to Christmas he brings them here, parades them in front of her. Does he really think she’s that naïve?
She continues to circulate, nodding, being appropriate. The room is noisy but the noise is distant; she is operating on a different plane. She has nothing in common with these people: the party is not for her entertainment; it is for theirs.
A girl arrives on her own, thanks her for the invitation, says she is looking well. There has to be at least one gauche remark on these occasions. She inclines her head graciously. She is looking well, is she? Not beautiful, not even elegant; just well. Well preserved, perhaps? She stops a waitress.
“You simply must try one of these mushroom vol-au-vents,” she coos.
They are death, the mushroom vol-au-vents; culinary fragmentation grenades. She waits for the tasty morsel to disintegrate into a mess of pastry flakes and grey slime down the front of the dress, but the girl passes it expertly between carmine lips and murmurs her approval. She is disappointed that the minor disaster did not happen; she is disappointed that she wanted it to happen.
The girl has lovely hair; a shimmering curtain of gold that cascades to her shoulders. It swings as she turns to join her friends. Most of them are blond, natural or otherwise. That’s no accident; he likes blondes. Self-consciously she touches her own expensive coiffure. Her hair no longer shines like that; years of bleaching and rinsing have drained the life out of it. At least it disguises the strands of grey.
She glances again in her husband’s direction. How many of these young women has he taken to bed? Why be so delicate about it? How many has he fucked? The obscenity seldom enters her mind and never crosses her lips so its very unfamiliarity gives the word a savage potency. Is there a better way to describe carnal lust in the absence of love or affection? No. So how many has he fucked? She feels their eyes on her, senses their surreptitious glances. They’re wondering if it was better with them. They know it was better with them. She fingers her ring nervously but it offers no defence; she feels inadequate, diminished.
The food comes and goes. People begin to slip away. She looks at her dainty watch. My, is that the time? With a little encouragement the last guests collect their coats, the last effusion of thanks hangs in the frosty night air, the last cars cough into life and crunch out over the forecourt. She closes the door. The house is suddenly quiet.
The waitresses busy themselves clearing the debris. She drifts into the kitchen, tells them what to do with the food that’s over, lets them take most of it. They come in from the sitting room in relays, a procession bearing plastic bags full of cocktail sticks retrieved from plant pots, cigarette butts and olive stones tipped from ashtrays, boxes stripped of their serried ranks of liqueur chocolates, broken glasses and chipped plates, screwed up paper napkins, grease-stained doilies, champagne corks and empty bottles, a caravan of detritus that files through the kitchen and out to the dustbins. The crockery is stacked. The glasses are washed and polished and returned to the cabinets. The girls look to her with tired eyes. She smiles, they can leave the rest; her cleaning lady will see to it in the morning. Gratefully, they take off their frilly white aprons. She settles up. They leave.
She wanders back. Her husband is sprawled on a sofa, his tie loosened, his shirt collar open. He is drunk, drunk on champagne and adulation.
Once again she has done what was required of her, once again the slight, the indignity of it all, has been lost on him. Right now he is riding high. What of the future? What happens when he gets his heart attack or his stroke or when he is diagnosed with cancer of the prostate or the lung or the colon, what then? Then, of course, she will be a prized possession once more, the dutiful wife who nurses him, wipes the drool from gibbering lips, feeds him with a spoon, supervises the nurses who will conduct his limp, uncoordinated body to the bathroom to wash off the spilt food, the fluids, the excrement…
She remembers how she attended her own father in his last illness, recalls now the ripe, repulsive, tobacco-leaf odour of that room with its lone, sickly patient. She has no regrets: he was a good parent, she owed him that duty. But what about this, this thing collapsed on the sofa: what duty does she owe this? Her stomach lurches.
She takes a deep breath, expels it slowly and wrinkles her nose, suddenly oppressed by the residual smell of the room, the stale cigarette smoke, the odours of the food, the multiple fragrances of the women. She takes a snuffer and extinguishes a candle, watches the ribbon of blue smoke spiral to the ceiling, inhales its waxy pungence, savours it. And now she visits
every candle in the room, lowering the snuffer carefully, watching as each flame ends its life, suffocated under the tiny inverted bell; no spilt wax, no sign of violence.
A thin smile tightens her lips.
He gets up with abrupt untidiness, catches his balance.
“I’m all in,” he slurs. “Coming to bed?”
“Yes, dear,” she says, lifting a plump cushion from the sofa. “You go on. I’ll be right behind you.”
The Tomb
I’m not an Egyptologist – I’m not even an archaeologist – so what, you may ask, was I doing standing under a burning sun in a wadi in Egypt, watching people shovel sand out of the desert?
It started with a dinner party given by a colleague and his wife. Deryk enjoys the company of lively, contrary sort of people, and I wasn’t surprised to find I’d already met one of the other guests, Ronnie Flynn. Ronnie has the sort of mind that will seize upon an accepted explanation and immediately turn it upside-down. I think he often does this just to see what reaction he can provoke, but as the meal progressed we moved to a topic that he seemed to feel more strongly about. He was talking about the so-called Curse of the Pharoahs: the deaths of people who’d been involved in the excavation of Egyptian tombs.
“It’s just a popular myth, isn’t it?” Deryk said. “I mean, some of the people they said died from ‘The Curse’ only visited the tombs ages after they’d been opened.”
“True enough,” Ronnie said, “But some of the others are harder to account for. Look at the team who worked with Howard Carter. Many of them were dead not long afterwards. Carter himself died aged sixty-four from lymphoma. Was it pure chance or were they exposed to something?”
“The Curse?” ventured one of the other guests, in a vain attempt to keep the tone light.
Ronnie shook his head. “I think there’s a perfectly rational explanation.” He sat forward and tapped a finger on the tablecloth. “Radon.”
Radon, Ronnie explained, is a highly radioactive gas produced by radioactive decay in rocks under the ground. The amount in the air varies from place to place but in some locations it exposes people to more radiation than any other source. Indeed there are parts of Britain where houses are no longer built because the radon concentration is so high.
The Tomb and Other Stories Page 20