Your narrator, recorder priest of the GNFR, having safely stored the above on disc, returned home after work to his dear wife Honor, who had prepared for him, as was her custom, an excellent low fat, high fibre meal, the details of which escape him.
‘But you have no appetite, my dear,’ Honor exclaimed. ‘If you aren’t careful you will fall right out of your optimum weight band!’ The government now heavily taxes not only the too fat but – after considerable lobbying by the obese – the too thin. ‘Is something the matter?’
And she showed such wifely kindness and concern that your narrator confided in her worries which he should more properly have kept to himself. Honor is a good woman, but not in the hierarchy of the GNFR – few women are – and we recorder priests are expected to preserve whatever aura of mystefaction (as it’s called) we can, around our dealings with the dead. I speak brutally, I know. The word ‘dead’ which in my youth could be spoken openly, now has the ring of obscenity: Honor hates to hear it. Well, it is understandable. There are so many in that state, passed out of this drama and into the next, especially amongst the young, and ‘dead’ is so dreary and final a word. The elderly and the less sexually active amongst us survive only too well. Our family has been fortunate. All my and Honor’s children have remained healthy, although our eldest grand-daughter has just been declared HIV-positive of the variety most likely to develop the Full Blown Flower of AIDS and must now up sticks and be off to Scotland to live. Press Play and Record! Let the tragic Muse descend! Praise Be the GSWITS!
‘Well might they inscribe RIP over Miss Sumpter’s grave!’ I said to Honor, with some force. ‘How can anyone rest in peace now that the pinner priests lurk by night in every graveyard in the land?’
‘My dear,’ said Honor, ‘you are tired, or you would not talk like this.’
‘You think so?’ I asked, darkly. It is true that the faithful are weakminded and the new Sony sensors provide much needed evidence that this life is but a runthrough and there are many tales to come: nevertheless this evidence is provided not so much by what the pinner priests (blessed be their names) record, but by the interpretations that we, the pulp priests, make as we grasp for meaning and significance in the patterns which flicker upon our screens during the Playback process. Sometimes in the past I have even thought, to my distress, that we have before us nothing more than the nightdreams of grasshoppers and ants, and on occasion the more vigorous scurrying of voles through the night grass, and not the voices of the departed at all. But the re-wind of Gabriella Sumpter had put an end to such supposition, and I found I was not grateful as I ought to be, but upset.
‘She should have asked for cremation!’ I found myself saying to Honor. ‘So many do, these days. Why not Miss Sumpter? Surely we have a human right to quiet, and finality?’
‘Not even burning the body destroys the recall voices,’ said Honor, who I sometimes think can read my thoughts. Well, we have been married for forty years. ‘They can pick up traces from an urn of ashes, they say.’
‘Ah, but burning scrambles them to the point of indecipherability,’ I replied. ‘They don’t publicise that, or the graveyards would empty, and then where would the drama be?’
‘The dramatic is always good,’ said Honor. ‘But now you must relax. In your agitation you are burning unnecessary calories.’
I lay down upon the water couch and she massaged my shoulders with essential oils. I apologised for the unaesthetic sharpness and angularity of my shoulder-blades, but she said she was accustomed to them and worked on with her strong, no-nonsense fingers. These days the living deal with each other kindly – more kindly than I remember in my youth. But for all her efforts I could not leave the subject of Miss Sumpter.
‘Do we not have enough trouble with the living?’ I demanded. ‘Do we have to add the dead to our burdens?’
‘Please don’t use that word,’ Honor said. ‘You know I dislike it. It’s unlucky.’
I apologised, but the truth of the matter remains: the human quest for knowledge is as unrootupable as couch grass in a field, and as disastrous. But there is no stopping our pinner priests. I wondered what Miss Sumpter’s hands had been like, in her life-time. Small and delicate, I imagined, and red tipped. Honor never paints her nails; she is scornful of the habit as wasteful, and vain.
The next day I returned, more calm, thanks to Honor’s borage tea, to the Museum. By good fortune, Playback Temple No 3 was available, which has the newest and most refined Audio Interpretation system to be found anywhere in the world (they say) and there I laced up the Sumpter tapes. The voice came over clear, and free from the occasional overtones of self-righteousness which had threaded through the previous days’ Playback and Print-out and Hear-thru. So much good equipment can do for a re-wind.