On her weekend off, in lieu of a laugh, since she’s over forty and more than seventeen stone, Audrey chooses a numbing. These are strange times, she considered that Saturday morning, on her way to The Fat Ox in Icklesfield. It was muggy and fly-ridden in the winter and in the summer there was hail. It was a time of turmoil. Maybe it did portend some greater crisis coming: first the recession, next the pandemic.
Since she gave the business a marketing overhaul and made it more sympathetic to modern ‘tastes’, they’d become the funeral directors of choice in the area. She and Roger were full time, round the clock, and they had on the books another eight working in shifts.
She consulted with them all when it came to the new slogan.
‘The dead – it’s a living.’ This was Roger’s suggestion. The others agreed it was fair. No one could think of anything else.
So, she decided to go with her own idea: ‘When the worst thing happens, we will be there.’ It was on all the stationery and on the front window in appealing soft italics.
‘All right,’ Roger had said warily. ‘If you think so.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No, go on, what?’
‘It’s a bit soft.’
‘Soft?’
‘American.’
‘In a good way, though?’
‘No.’
‘What – you think it’s dodging the subject?’
‘There could be plenty of other worse things and we won’t be there.’ Roger was reliably cautious.
‘I think the clue is in the subtitle: funeral directors. I don’t think we’ll be getting called out when the teenage daughter’s up the duff or the cellar’s flooded.’
‘Sounds like we’ll clean up the mess, or get rid of the evidence.’
‘When the worst thing happens we will be there,’ she said, trying it with a new emphasis, like a woman in a changing room giving a skirt a bit of flounce.
‘It’s like being the Grim Reaper.’
‘Oh no!’
‘Sort of like being Keith Chegwin.’
‘No. Not at all.’ She’d laughed, but she’d felt a bit annoyed with him. ‘Bugger me, Roger, you’re like the Reaper yourself sometimes. It’s like pushing water uphill, getting you to show a bit of enthusiasm.’
He took it badly. He stood there for a moment with his mouth open – just as if the worst thing had happened – and then he dashed off. She’d never seen Roger dash.
He kept himself busy in the coffin room and they didn’t exchange more than a few words for several days. He was quiet, even for Roger, and there was no eye contact whatsoever. If she came up, he was sitting there doing the crossword; the question was a particularly complicated one that required him to press his forehead upon the newspaper.
So, they stuck to business. She gave directions, and he went. There was no chat, nothing in the way of their usual laughs. The body appeared in the mortuary, she attended to it, he gave her a hand to get it in the fridge, to put the waste bins into the street, and then he went off to plane coffins or polish the hearse. And he left on time. It was then she realized that his normal routine was to hang about with her, having a coffee, having a chat and, on the odd occasion they went to the pub, she’d have a glass of wine, and he’d have a juice.
He went to AA meetings. She’d seen him waiting outside, grinning shyly while the big boys and girls smoked, waiting to go in. He only grinned when he was terribly afraid, she knew.
He was heavy and lonely. So what? Who wasn’t?
She was on the board for the National Association of Funeral Directors and went occasionally to speak at conventions. When she did, she left Roger in charge. She kept it to a minimum. He was so pithy when it came to phone conversation that the caller was treated to something only just short of silence.
‘Hello, hello?’ the long pauses caused the caller to say. Eventually they’d get this much: ‘Name? . . . No, of the deceased . . . Thank you.’
It seemed to put him too much on the spot, the phone ringing. He went red. He dithered and let it ring too many times, hoping she’d take it if she were there. Interpersonal skills were not among his talents. Lugging bodies, lugging coffins, lugging spare wheels; these were his talents. And turning up. Not to mention the placid demeanour that supplied his response to even the good things in life – such as when he won a tenner on the lottery, or she treated them to a fish and chip lunch – as much as the worst things, such as his wife leaving him.
The customers liked him. He was a shoulder to cry on – and they did, and he just stood there, immobile, but with a touch of spare pride in his cheeks. There was something consoling in his stoic presence.
Before this little upset between them, she’d gone away to Birmingham for a few days to speak at a convention on pandemics, and his pleasure at having her back seemed to be more than was warranted by being relieved of phone duties. He went to meet her at the station and joked and larked about as he took her case from her, swinging it about as if it were light as a feather. He was like something out of a musical, she’d thought, gay as a lad.
‘Pandemics are becoming your special subject,’ he’d ventured.
‘So it seems!’
‘There’s one coming then, is there?’ he’d chuckled.
She’d done a double take. Roger had become an extrovert in her absence.
‘Sure as eggs is eggs, Roger. We’ve got a contingency plan that will be the gold standard of the south-east.’
‘It’s me, isn’t it?’ he’d laughed. She’d confirmed it.
‘Righto,’ was all he said, but he whistled all the way up the steps from Warrior Square.
When the hospital called day and night, as they had last year with the MRSA crisis, it was Roger who unfailingly went. There were so many of them in there from the funeral companies, he said, that they were obliged to tip the stretcher up and hold it vertical in order to pass each other in the corridors.
‘When this here pandemonium comes,’ he’d quipped as they turned into Norman Road, ‘I’ll be nose to nose with the corpses in corridors.’
If any town succumbed to a pandemic, it would be this one. It was an already weakened population on the brink of collapse. Nearly everyone in Hastings was a full-time alcoholic. She wondered what it was in him that kept Roger off the bottle now. It wasn’t the pay, it wasn’t responsibility to a family, it wasn’t a sense of Christian duty, but he just showed up – every time he was needed – without much to say but with ready hands.
They talked about how things were going: people dying fatter, younger, done in with drugs and booze, suicides, old people neglected, with no families to call on, funerals unattended. How it was unusual to pick someone up from their home. It wore you down; you had to speak about it, but you couldn’t go bandying it about. Drink helped in her case. She’d have a few glasses back home, on her own more often than not. Unlike Roger.
And unlike Roger she had been brought up to it, the job. She was fourteen years old when she first went with her mum and dad to pick up a body. An old girl, it was, and her nightdress kept coming up as they put her on the stretcher. Her old dad kept shouting out, ‘That’s your job, Audrey, to keep her bleeding nightie down!’ To give her some respect.
She couldn’t go much more than five miles away on her days off, so here she was at The Fat Ox, under a set of dirty great pylons in a little village where no one knew her and she could sit and get properly drunk, far too drunk to drive, and have a room for the night for thirty quid. She’d sit outside from lunchtime onwards with the pylons buzzing and humming and doing God knows what to her head, and sometimes she’d pass out at a picnic table after ham, egg and chips. Sometimes she’d go inside and have a big dinner, and she’d sit there straight-backed like a bloke, fists on the table, looking like a long-distance lorry driver, assuming masculinity to avoid interest. She’d drink to the end of the bottle and then she’d go up the backstairs to the bed where the pillows smelt of head sweat – and that was good, because that was how a man smelt – and she’d sleep until breakfast time.
The only thing she wanted, really wanted, was to be kissed and loved and told ‘You’re a good person’ by someone she could believe.
In the morning light she lay on that bed with an arm out, palm open. She couldn’t imagine how Roger did it – what kept him at the job, and sober too. It was heroic. It didn’t make sense. There was no logic to it.