Grave Truths

by Anne Morgellyn

  Then the doors were opened to admit another mourner. My heart missed another beat as I recognised Samuel Veil. With the confidence I had come to expect from members of the medical profession, he strode right up to the front and sat by me. The vicar, too, had come early for Edith Woods, and he now began reading a shortened version of the Anglican funeral service. At the point where people were invited to say a few words, both Mrs Blank and the shaven-headed girl got up simultaneously. The vicar blinked at the girl but beckoned Mrs Blank forward.

  ‘No, I think Cressida should do it,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to say goodbye on behalf of The Tuesday Club. Edith was a valued member and a very good friend.’ There were sniffs and murmurs from the group of elders at this as Mrs Blank sat down.

  The shaven-headed beauty walked crisply up the aisle with a perfectly straight back. At the lectern, she paused and took a crumpled letter from the army surplus canteen slung round her waist. ‘Edith wrote this to me not long after I first met her,’ she said in a middle-class voice that she was trying to disguise in the fashionable dialect known as mockney. ‘I thought I’d read it now.

  Dear Cressida,

  It was good to meet you the other day. Thank you very much indeed for helping me carry my shopping. I always enjoy going out to the market, although it’s not as easy as it used to be with my legs. To think I played sport all my life before old age put a stop to all that. All sports I enjoyed, especially golf when I could get it, but my real favourite was tennis. Now I can’t get out so much, so I look through the window at the trees across the road and listen to the rooks up there. It’s better than talking to the gas fire, which my friend Mr Wick told me to do. This morning I saw some rooks building a nest. I’m afraid for them, really, with all this building work going on. Years ago, when we lived in our own house, I would spend hours watching the birds and flowers. I had a garden full of roses, beautiful flowers, and we had generations of blackbirds and robins, as well as some of the water birds. They used to fly up off the Mersey from the Irish Sea. We lived quite near New Brighton – you might have heard of it. It was quite a resort in its day, not like the real Brighton, of course, more of a resort for working people. Anyway, I have always had an affection for birds and roses, an affinity some might say. They bloom under the eye of loving kindness. It is very important to stand and stare, as the old rhyme says. One sees so much when one is observant. My grandfather used to say that rooks were harbingers of death.

  That’s all for now, dear. I do hope you will come and see me again.

  With very best wishes,

  Yours sincerely,

  Edith

  The girl folded the letter and replaced it in her bag. ‘That was what Edith did for me. She taught me to look at things close up, to see things as they really are.’ She gave a fierce stare around the chapel. ‘She taught me a lot of other things as well, but that was the best. Anyway, I just wanted to come today.’ She turned to the coffin. ‘I wanted to say goodbye. Goodbye, Edith, and thanks for wanting to know me.’

  At that, she marched back down the aisle and out through the double doors.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Blank, as though putting a full stop to this interlude. ‘Fancy her turning up. Edith collected all sorts of waifs and strays.’

  I caught Dr Veil’s eye. He was looking at me, a little too avidly, I thought, a little too much like Mr Wolf. As the vicar intoned the prayers of committal, my mind turned to New Brighton, carried by the revelation that Edith had come from up there. It was a dump already when I was a child, picked clean by the wind and the scallies. There had still been some sort of funfair though, toffee apples, candy floss, or maybe that was somewhere else. My grandma had taken me over on the ferry. Stepping onto the boat below the Liver Building had felt like setting off for new horizons, the promise of the other shore, another world. But New Brighton was as different to the old Brighton as Chas and I were different, as a rusted up old Norton was different from a Harley-D. I was choked by the thought that Edith’s son and I were not that far apart maybe. Had she lived, my grandma would have been around the same age as Edith Woods. Which school had Roy attended? Had that been in Liverpool or Birkenhead? How old was he? I glanced at Dr Veil, but dared not ask.

  Mr Byrne was overseeing the passage of the coffin through the purple curtains. Edith’s boat was casting off, slipping its moorings, being cast into the flames. But I had the feeling that it was over much too soon for Edith Woods. In spite of my rush to have her removed from my case, I wanted, perversely now, to know much more about her life. I wanted to know about the shaven-headed girl, about Edith’s old house with the garden full of blooming roses and the seabirds flying in. I wanted to know what had happened to the rooks that nested opposite the shabby apology for a flat where she had died, thinking of the clouds of dust arising from the skip, the shouts and whoops of construction work underway. Rooks were arbiters of death, her grandfather had said. Was he right all along? My own Liverpool grandma had said a bird in the house was unlucky, like the colour green and an overturned salt cellar.

  Dr Veil interrupted my thoughts. ‘Very nice,’ he said blandly. ‘A wholly appropriate service.’

  ‘Her effects are still with my office,’ I said shortly. ‘I’ll arrange to have them couriered over to you if you wish. And then there’ll be the ashes.’ I looked round at the crematorium, but the smoke was not yet rising. ‘Mr Byrne can store those till her son comes back.’

  Veil was about to respond to this, but Mr Byrne himself was at my other shoulder.

  ‘You’ll have look lively if you want me to drop you back, Louise,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a viewing to see to at four thirty sharp. The traffic’s terrible.’

  On a sudden malevolent impulse, I turned to Dr Veil: ‘By the way, Professor Charles Androssoff asked to be remembered to you,’ I said. ‘He did the autopsy on Mrs Woods, you know.’

  ‘Ah yes.’ The psychiatrist closed his eyes. ‘He certainly knows his onions.’

  ‘Doesn’t he just?’ I returned, and walked away. Outside the building, the clutch of Tuesday Club members were fussily boarding their taxi. Mrs Blank nodded to me but obviously didn’t want to engage any further. That was it, I thought. All over. As we motored down the long straight road that led to the cemetery gates, we passed the shaven-headed girl, walking at a steady pace, though still with a few hundred yards left to cover. The hearse driver didn’t stop for her and I didn’t prompt him. She was a sturdy walker and those boots were sound. I looked back at her though, as though fixing her in my mind. It didn’t matter who she was, I thought. The last thing I needed were any more friends and well-wishers turning up to complicate the file of Edith Mary, the person at the centre of these proceedings, who had been cast into the fire. We would none of us ever see Edith again.

  So why did she still bother me? Why Edith and not John Getty, who had been of ending not afraid? Was it the fact she’d left traces, human remains, a son?

  ‘Looks like we’re in for a spell of rain tonight,’ said Mr Byrne. ‘Not before time, too. If they’d introduced that hosepipe ban like last year, it would have been curtains for my containers. You should come down to see the memorial garden, Louise. Lovely spot, knocks spots of Regent’s Park. Come on, rain,’ he roared. ‘Give us a break.’

  I sat well back in my seat and closed my eyes.

  ***

  Chapter 6

  At the traffic lights, I spotted a number 24 bus and asked the hearse driver to drop me off quickly so I could dodge through the stationary traffic and jump on board. It wasn’t far to walk home from there, but I was dog-tired. People jeered at me from the open windows of their vehicles as I got out of the corpse transport and sprinted towards the bus, the conductor skipping back indulgently to let me on. I remember landing on the platform, getting a grip on the pole, but then someone was blocking my way again, a straggle-haired woman in jeans. The only other detail I remember was a pair of red-rimmed eyes that fixed me with sour hatred and three spat-out words: fuck off, whore.
Then I woke up in The Royal Free Hospital with a bandage round my head.

  They told me I had fallen off the bus, had sprained my right wrist, and was suffering from concussion. My head would need further x-ray tests, possibly even a brain scan, and they refused to let me out until these tests were done. It seemed my handbag had disappeared, complete with purse, the keys to my flat, and all my credit cards. They could not contact anyone since I had no identification. The hearse must have pulled away, I thought, for Mr Byrne would never have left me in that state, nor his driver. ‘There is no one,’ I told the nurse. Cassie was away; the rest of the counselling sub-group were also dispersed for the summer. No one and nothing had been the portion of Edith Woods and John Frederick Getty. Nothing, thou elder brother, even to shade. I felt pity for them rise up and engulf me in a sudden useless pity for myself.

  The charge nurse had an earring and a mullet hairstyle, like someone else I had seen in hospital, someone pushing a different trolley, with similar lack of regard for the body that lay upon it. But I was not dead yet. I could still speak up for myself. I swallowed the lump in my throat and asked the nurse to go and call Chas.

  ‘He’s a doctor,’ I said, dictating the number, which showed my memory was still working in some respects, although I had no recollection of the accident. ‘Well, not exactly a clinician,’ I garbled. ‘He’s actually professor of pathology down at Charity’s.’

  ‘Oh my,’ said the nurse. ‘We’d better watch our p’s and q’s then.’

  Half an hour went by, but no one came to me. I tried to get out of bed but a bolt of pain shot through my arm and the world turned upside down. The nurse came, tutting, to pick me up, broken and humiliated, the bandage around my head making me into a figure from a nursery rhyme. Poor Jack with his vinegar and brown paper, Humpty Dumpty, whom all the king’s men could not put back together again. ‘Here,’ said the charge nurse, shoving a box of tissues on top of my sheet. ‘You try that one more time and I’ll have to tie you to the bedpost. Your friend is on his way.’

  At last I saw a Chas come onto the ward in his rider’s jacket and biker boots. He said something to the group that manned the nursing station and followed their fingers to where I lay.

  ‘Christ, that looks nasty.’ He sat on the edge of the bed and touched my grazed hand. ‘I’m sorry, I forgot your flowers.’

  ‘I hate cut flowers,’ I said. ‘They remind me too much of my job.’

  He took the chart out of its holder at the foot of the bed and scanned the notes.

  ‘I’ll be all right, won’t I?’ I asked. Chas was silent for once. Maybe I had given him a shock.

  ‘The scan will show what’s what,’ he said. ‘Your head’s going to hurt for a while. What happened, Louise?’

  ‘I fell off a bus and lost my bag,’ I told him. ‘My purse was in it, and my keys.’

  ‘The landlord will have a spare set.’

  ‘Yes, but I can’t remember his number. It’s somewhere in the flat.’

  ‘I’ll go round later and check it out.’

  ‘He’ll be pissed off about the keys. He’s a stickler for security.’

  ‘Tough. You’ll have to cancel your cards and phone the bank.’

  ‘But there’s nothing in the bank,’ I said. Then I remembered my salary was due to go in at the end of the month. The Bank Holiday weekend was almost on top of us, always a busy time for the Coroner. But I would not be going into work tomorrow.

  ‘There was this hostile woman,’ I said, remembering her scowling face. ‘I was trying to get on a bus. She told me to fuck off. Oh, and she called me a whore. It wasn’t exactly fitting, was it?’ I said bravely. ‘I mean, I’d just come from a funeral.’

  ‘What’s fitting got to do with it? Maybe it was bus rage.’

  ‘You’ll check the house out? I don’t want her coming back …’

  ‘Of course. If that couple upstairs are showing a light, I’ll tell them what’s happened.’

  ‘They won’t be visiting me.’

  ‘You never know, Louise.’ He touched my hand again. ‘You never know who’s ready to reach out, until you ask.’

  ‘Nobody reached out to Edith Woods. I was coming back from her funeral when it happened. They cremated her today.’

  ‘Oh, your DOA with the stroke.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe somebody did and she pushed them away.’

  ‘It doesn’t always do to rely on people, especially when you’re on your own.’

  ‘Surely that would be the logical reason to call on all the help you can get.’ He looked round. The charge nurse was stationing a drugs trolley at the foot of my bed. Chas moved out of his way.

  ‘What are you giving me?’ I asked the nurse.

  ‘Just something to keep you comfortable.’ He handed over a plastic cup, containing two blue pills.

  ‘I’ll check back with you in the morning,’ Chas said. ‘Try not to worry.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing worth pinching.’ I winced at the sudden pain inside my head. ‘I forgot to ask how your reunion went. I seem to do nothing but mess up your schedule these days. Too many favours, Chas, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Just take the pills, Louise. They’ll help you sleep.’

  ‘What are they? Not testosterone, I hope.’

  ‘Not that, for sure.’ The nurse winked at me. ‘Good to see you’ve got your spirits up.’

  ‘She’s going to be scanned in the morning?’ Chas asked.

  ‘She’s down for it. We’re a radiographer down. It’s not like Charity’s here.’

  ‘We all have our crosses to bear,’ Chas murmured. ‘You’ll live, Louise.’ He bent impulsively and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I felt immensely cheered by this, in spite of the pain in my head.

  ‘Odd branch of medicine, pathology,’ I giggled to the charge nurse as Chas walked from the ward. ‘Hardly the front line.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ the nurse shrugged. ‘Seems a good guy to me. You do as he says and get some sleep.’

  But the sedatives stuck in my throat. The pain was kicking in now, putting me on red alert, and activating all my demons. I had blacked out on the pavement in Camden Town, with God knows how many people manhandling me onto a trolley. My clothes had been removed. My head was bandaged up. I couldn’t move my arm. I had lain unconscious and exposed like Edith Woods. I shut my eyes, but that did not block out the image of myself ending up on Chas’s table. I could not get away from the quintessential morbidity of the job, even when I was sleeping, especially not then.

  I thought of Chas riding over to my flat, going through my knicker drawer and my bank statements: thoughts that made me hot all over. I spent my life assessing and quantifying other people’s belongings, helpless, solitary people, who had no choice but to trust the City, as though we were some anonymous, faceless entity that passed no judgment. But of course we passed judgment. We thought they were a bunch of losers, who hadn’t been able to summon a friend in the world to wave them goodbye. Curiosity about others was no bad thing: it showed you were interested; it showed you cared. Investigation was my job. I just didn’t want people investigating me.

  There was a small switch on the console behind my head. I thought of reaching up and pressing it, to call him back and tell him not to bother about the flat, but I hadn’t any energy. I just sank back against the pillow, and waited for the drugs to take effect. Several times, I caught myself drifting off, and then the stab came right behind my eyes, and she was there again, that woman who had pushed me. (Had she pushed me?) Fuck off I could understand, if I had got in her way, but why whore? I could take it to counselling practice, I thought. At least the incident had been real, for never in my worst imaginings about myself would I have imagined that. Why whore? Did I look like a tart, or was she just a little limited in her vocabulary? What would I do if I saw her again? How would I act? What would I do if she turned up as one of my clients, or if some client turned up who happened to look like her, who triggered some memory of her in me and made me cry, screa
m, wince again with rage and pain? I had to deal with such thoughts if I was going to do that job. It was no good dismissing them. Maybe, I thought, the woman had done me a favour in giving me a slap on the head, in making me shape up? At any rate, I swore that she would not defeat me. I had fielded the Bubba’s verbal googlies and stayed upon my feet, but I had internalised them too, I thought. I had taken them to heart. I would not take this to heart. I would just have to pull myself together.

  ***

  Chapter 7

  The brain scan showed extensive bruising, obliging me to sign myself off sick for a couple of weeks to rest and recover, not that I could have done much investigation anyway with a head like a pumpkin and a sprained left wrist. But at least I didn’t need to stay more than a couple of days in hospital, wedged in between the get-well card from my colleagues, signing under the Bubba’s flourish like a flock of frightened sheep, and the basket of red and white roses that Chas brought in, in spite of what I’d said about cut flowers. ‘Those colours are bad luck,’ the charge nurse grumbled camply, neutralising the red and white with a faded marigold, filched from another patient, and scowling at me as though I was a harbinger of doom. All in all, I was glad when they let me go home. My basement had remained inviolate, till Chas got there, and the landlord had installed a new Chubb lock, following the loss (or theft) of my keys.

  We were now just into September, with the weather continuing hot and sunny, although I could scarcely feel the warmth in my subterranean hole. I had a permanent headache that the neurologist told me could take some weeks to go away, but I forced myself to walk to the corner shop in the morning for milk and a newspaper, just so that I wouldn’t lose my nerve. I had resolved not to become some sort of paranoid agoraphobic because a stranger on a bus had called me names and possibly assaulted me, although the people who’d waited till the police arrived didn’t seem to have noticed any pushing beyond the usual crush to get on and off the bus, and the police weren’t following it up. But since that day, I felt shaky and tearful, crying over little things, like not being able to steady a can with my sore hand while I opened it with the good one, and brooding unhealthily on some of the nasty jibes the Bubba had so often aimed in my direction, leaving me hapless and silent, shoring up resentment and fantasies of revenge against these fat (or tatty) women who had it in for me for reasons known only to themselves. I watched a lot of television, unable to concentrate on reading or other purposeful activities. I didn’t enjoy this feeling of forced passivity, far from it. Chas tried his best to snap me out of it by popping in every evening on his way home from work and encouraging me to think of the fall as an accident. But accidents made victims too.