Books of Blood: Volumes 1-6

  The occasional joy.

  That there was room for joy; ah! That was magic too.

  XXVII: THE LIFE OF DEATH

  The newspaper was the first edition of the day, and Elaine devoured it from cover to cover as she sat in the hospital waiting room. An animal thought to be a panther – which had terrorised the neighbourhood of Epping Forest for two months – had been shot and found to be a wild dog. Archaeologists in the Sudan had discovered bone fragments which they opined might lead to a complete reappraisal of Man's origins. A young woman who had once danced with minor royalty had been found murdered near Clapham; a solo round-the- world yachtsman was missing; recently excited hopes of a cure for the common cold had been dashed. She read the global bulletins and the trivia with equal fervor – anything to keep her mind off the examination ahead – but today's news seemed very like yesterday's; only the names had been changed. Doctor Sennett informed her that she was healing well, both inside and out, and was quite fit to return to her full responsibilities whenever she felt psychologically resilient enough. She should make another appointment for the first week of the new year, he told her, and come back for a final examination then. She left him washing his hands of her.

  The thought of getting straight onto the bus and heading back to her rooms was repugnant after so much time sitting and waiting. She would walk a stop or two along the route, she decided. The exercise would be good for her, and the December day, though far from warm, was bright.

  Her plans proved over-ambitious however. After only a few minutes of walking her lower abdomen began to ache, and she started to feel nauseous, so she turned off the main road to seek out a place where she could rest and drink some tea. She should eat too, she knew, though she had never had much appetite, and had less still since the operation. Her wanderings were rewarded. She found a small restaurant which, though it was twelve fifty-five, was not enjoying a roaring lunch-time trade. A small woman with unashamedly artificial red hair served her tea and a mushroom omelette. She did her best to eat, but didn't get very far. The waitress was plainly concerned. "Something wrong with the food?" she said, somewhat testily.

  "Oh no," Elaine reassured her. "It's just me."

  The waitress looked offended nevertheless.

  Td like some more tea though, if I may?" Elaine said.

  She pushed the plate away from her, hoping the waitress would claim it soon. The sight of the meal congealing on the patternless plate was doing nothing for her mood. She hated this unwelcome sensitivity in herself: it was absurd that a plate of uneaten eggs should bring these doldrums on, but she couldn't help herself. She found everywhere little echoes of her own loss. In the death, by a benign November and then the sudden frosts, of the bulbs in her window-sill box; in the thought of the wild dog she'd read of that morning, shot in Epping Forest. The waitress returned with fresh tea, but failed to take the plate. Elaine called her back, requesting that she do so. Grudgingly, she obliged.

  There were no customers left in the place now, other than Elaine, and the waitress busied herself with removing the lunchtime menus from the tables and replacing them with those for the evening. Elaine sat staring out of the window. Veils of blue-grey smoke had crept down the street in recent minutes, solidifying the sunlight. "They're burning again," the waitress said. "Damn smell gets everywhere."

  "What are they burning?"

  "Used to be the community centre. They're knocking it down, and building a new one. It's a waste of tax- payers' money."

  The smoke was indeed creeping into the restaurant. Elaine did not find it offensive; it was sweetly redolent of autumn, her favourite season. Intrigued, she finished her tea, paid for her meal, and then elected to wander along and find the source of the smoke. She didn't have far to walk. At the end of the street was a small square; the demolition site dominated it. There was one surprise however. The building that the waitress had described as a community centre was in fact a church; or had been. The lead and slates had already been stripped off the roof, leaving the joists bare to the sky; the windows had been denuded of glass; the turf had gone from the lawn at the side of the building, and two trees had been felled there. It was their pyre which provided the tantalising scent.

  She doubted if the building had ever been beautiful, but there was enough of its structure remaining for her to suppose it might have had charm. Its weathered stone was now completely at variance with the brick and concrete that surrounded it, but its besieged situation (the workmen labouring to undo it; the bulldozer on hand, hungry for rubble) gave it a certain glamour. One or two of the workmen noticed her standing watching them, but none made any move to stop her as she walked across the square to the front porch of the church and peered inside. The interior, stripped of its decorative stonework, of pulpit, pews, font and the rest, was simply a stone room, completely lacking in atmosphere or authority. Somebody, however, had found a source of interest here. At the far end of the church a man stood with his back to Elaine, staring intently at the ground. Hearing footsteps behind him he looked round guiltily.

  "Oh," he said. "I won't be a moment."

  "It's all right -” Elaine said. "I think we're probably both trespassing."

  The man nodded. He was dressed soberly – even drearily – but for his green bow-tie. His features, despite the garb and the grey hairs of a man in middle-age, were curiously unlined, as though neither smile nor frown much ruffled their perfect indifference.

  "Sad, isn't it?" he said. "Seeing a place like this."

  "Did you know the church as it used to be?"

  "I came in on occasion," he said, “but it was never very popular."

  "What's it called?"

  "All Saints. It was built in the late seventeenth century, I believe. Are you fond of churches?"

  "Not particularly. It was just that I saw the smoke, and…"

  "Everybody likes a demolition scene," he said.

  "Yes," she replied, "I suppose that's true."

  "It's like watching a funeral. Better them than us, eh?"

  She murmured something in agreement, her mind flitting elsewhere. Back to the hospital. To her pain and her present healing. To her life saved only by losing the capacity for further life. Better them than us. "My name's Kavanagh," he said, covering the short distance between them, his hand extended. "How do you do?" she said. I'm Elaine Rider."

  "Elaine," he said. "Charming."

  "Are you just taking a final look at the place before it comes down?"

  "That's right. I've been looking at the inscriptions on the floor stones. Some of them are most eloquent." He brushed a fragment of timber off one of the tablets with his foot. "It seems such a loss. I'm sure they'll just smash the stones to smithereens when they start to pull the floor up -”

  She looked down at the patchwork of tablets beneath her feet. Not all were marked, and of those that were many simply carried names and dates. There were some inscriptions however. One, to the left of where Kavanagh was standing, carried an all but eroded relief of crossed shin-bones, like drum-sticks, and the abrupt motto: Redeem the time.

  "I think there must have been a crypt under here at some time," Kavanagh said.

  "Oh. I see. And these are the people who were buried there."

  "Well, I can't think of any other reason for the inscriptions, can you? I was thinking of asking the work men…" he paused in mid-sentence,"… you'll probably think this positively morbid of me…"

  "What?"

  "Well, just to preserve one or two of the finer stones from being destroyed."

  "I don't think that's morbid," she said. They're very beautiful."

  He was evidently encouraged by her response. "Maybe I should speak with them now," he said. "Would you excuse me for a moment?"

  He left her standing in the nave like a forsaken bride, while he went out to quiz one of the workmen. She wandered down to where the altar had been, reading the names as she went. Who knew or cared about these people's resting places now? Dead two hundred years
and more, and gone away not into loving posterity but into oblivion. And suddenly the unarticulated hopes for an after-life she had nursed through her thirty-four years slipped away; she was no longer weighed down by some vague ambition for heaven. One day, perhaps this day, she would die, just as these people had died, and it wouldn't matter a jot. There was nothing to come, nothing to aspire to, nothing to dream of. She stood in a patch of smoke-thickened sun, thinking of this, and was almost happy.

  Kavanagh returned from his exchanges with the foreman.

  "There is indeed a crypt," he said, “but it hasn't been emptied yet."

  "Oh."

  They were still underfoot, she thought. Dust and bones.

  "Apparently they're having some difficulty getting into it. All the entrances have been sealed up. That's why they're digging around the foundations. To find another way in."

  "Are crypts normally sealed up?"

  "Not as thoroughly as this one."

  "Maybe there was no more room," she said.

  Kavanagh took the comment quite seriously. "Maybe," he said.

  "Will they give you one of the stones?"

  He shook his head. "It's not up to them to say. These are just council lackeys. Apparently they have a firm of professional excavators to come in and shift the bodies to new burial sites. It all has to be done with due decorum." "Much they care," Elaine said, looking down at the stones again.

  "I must agree," Kavanagh replied. "It all seems in excess of the facts. But then perhaps we're not God- fearing enough."

  "Probably."

  "Anyhow, they told me to come back in a day or two's time, and ask the removal men."

  She laughed at the thought of the dead moving house; packing up their goods and chattels. Kavanagh was pleased to have made a joke, even if it had been unintentional. Riding on the crest of this success, he said: "I wonder, may I take you for a drink?"

  "I wouldn't be very good company, I'm afraid," she said. "I'm really very tired."

  "We could perhaps meet later," he said.

  She looked away from his eager face. He was pleasant enough, in his uneventful way. She liked his green bow-tie surely a joke at the expense of his own drabness. She liked his seriousness too. But she couldn't face the idea of drinking with him; at least not tonight. She made her apologies, and explained that she'd been ill recently and hadn't recovered her stamina.

  "Another night perhaps?" he enquired gently. The lack of aggression in his courtship was persuasive, and she said: That would be nice. Thank you."

  Before they parted they exchanged telephone numbers. He seemed charmingly excited by the thought of their meeting again; it made her feel, despite all that had been taken from her, that she still had her sex. She returned to the flat to find both a parcel from Mitch and a hungry cat on the doorstep. She fed the demanding animal, then made herself some coffee and opened the parcel. In it, cocooned in several layers of tissue paper, she found a silk scarf, chosen with Mitch's uncanny eye for her taste. The note along with it simply said: It's your colour. I love you. Mitch.

  She wanted to pick up the telephone on the spot and talk to him, but somehow the thought of hearing his voice seemed dangerous. Too close to the hurt, perhaps. He would ask her how she felt, and she would reply that she was well, and he would insist: yes, but really? And she would say: I'm empty; they took out half my innards, damn you, and I'll never have your children or anybody else's, so that's the end of that, isn't it? Even thinking about their talking she felt tears threaten, and in a fit of inexplicable rage she wrapped the scarf up in the desiccated paper and buried it at the back of her deepest drawer. Damn him for trying to make things better now, when at the time she'd most needed him all he'd talked of was fatherhood, and how her tumours would deny it him.

  It was a clear evening – the sky's cold skin stretched to breaking point. She did not want to draw the curtains in the front room, even though passers-by would stare in, because the deepening blue was too fine to miss. So she sat at the window and watched the dark come. Only when the last change had been wrought did she close off the chill. She had no appetite, but she made herself some food nevertheless, and sat down to watch television as she ate. The food unfinished, she laid down her tray, and dozed, the programmes filtering through to her intermittently. Some witless comedian whose merest cough sent his audience into paroxysms; a natural history programme on life in the Serengeti; the news. She had read all that she needed to know that morning: the headlines hadn't changed. One item, however, did pique her curiosity: an interview with the solo yachtsman, Michael Maybury, who had been picked up that day after two weeks adrift in the Pacific. The interview was being beamed from Australia, and the contact was bad; the image of Maybury's bearded and sun-scorched face was constantly threatened with being snowed out. The picture mattered little: the account he gave of his failed voyage was riveting in sound alone, and in particular an event that seemed to distress him afresh even as he told it. He had been becalmed, and as his vessel lacked a motor had been obliged to wait for wind. It had not come. A week had gone by with his hardly moving a kilometer from the same spot of listless ocean; no bird or passing ship broke the monotony. With every hour that passed, his claustrophobia grew, and on the eighth day it reached panic proportions, so he let himself over the side of the yacht and swam away from the vessel, a life-line tied about his middle, in order to escape the same few yards of deck. But once away from the yacht, and treading the still, warm water, he had no desire to go back. Why not untie the knot, he'd thought to himself, and float away.

  "What made you change your mind?" the interviewer asked.

  Here Maybury frowned. He had clearly reached the crux of his story, but didn't want to finish it. The interviewer repeated the question.

  At last, hesitantly, the sailor responded. "I looked back at the yacht," he said, “and I saw somebody on the deck." The interviewer, not certain that he'd heard correctly, said: "Somebody on the deck?"

  "That's right," Maybury replied. "Somebody was there. I saw a figure quite clearly; moving around." "Did you… did you recognise this stowaway?" the question came.

  Maybury's face closed down, sensing that his story was being treated with mild sarcasm.

  "Who was it?" the interviewer pressed.

  "I don't know," Maybury said. "Death, I suppose."

  The questioner was momentarily lost for words.

  "But of course you returned to the boat, eventually."

  "Of course."

  "And there was no sign of anybody?"

  Maybury glanced up at the interviewer, and a look of contempt crossed his face.

  "I've survived, haven't I?" he said.

  The interviewer mumbled something about not understanding his point.

  "I didn't drown," Maybury said. "I could have died then, if I'd wanted to. Slipped off the rope and drowned." "But you didn't. And the next day -”

  The next day the wind picked up."

  "It's an extraordinary story," the interviewer said, con- tent that the stickiest part of the exchange was now safely bypassed. "You must be looking forward to seeing your family again for Christmas…"

  Elaine didn't hear the final exchange of pleasantries. Her imagination was tied by a fine rope to the room she was sitting in; her fingers toyed with the knot. If Death could find a boat in the wastes of the Pacific, how much easier it must be to find her. To sit with her, perhaps, as she slept. To watch her as she went about her mourning. She stood up and turned the television off. The flat was suddenly silent. She questioned the hush impatiently, but it held no sign of guests, welcome or unwelcome.

  As she listened, she could taste salt-water. Ocean, no doubt.

  She had been offered several refuges in which to convalesce when she came out of hospital. Her father had invited her up to Aberdeen; her sister Rachel had made several appeals for her to spend a few weeks in Buckinghamshire; there had even been a pitiful telephone call from Mitch, in which he had talked of their holidaying together. She had re
jected them all, telling them that she wanted to re-establish the rhythm of her previous life as soon as possible: to return to her job, to her working colleagues and friends. In fact, her reasons had gone deeper than that. She had feared their sympathies, feared that she would be held too close in their affections and quickly come to rely upon them. Her streak of independence, which had first brought her to this unfriendly city, was in studied defiance of her smothering appetite for security. If she gave in to those loving appeals she knew she would take root in domestic soil and not look up and out again for another year. In which time, what adventures might have passed her by? Instead she had returned to work as soon as she felt able, hoping that although she had not taken on all her former responsibilities the familiar routines would help her to re-establish a normal life. But the sleight-of-hand was not entirely successful. Every few days something would happen – she would overhear some remark, or catch a look that she was not intended to see – that made her realise she was being treated with a rehearsed caution; that her colleagues viewed her as being fundamentally changed by her illness. It had made her angry. She'd wanted to spit her suspicions in their faces; tell them that she and her uterus were not synonymous, and that the removal of one did not imply the eclipse of the other.

  But today, returning to the office, she was not so certain they weren't correct. She felt as though she hadn't slept in weeks, though in fact she was sleeping long and deeply every night. Her eyesight was blurred, and there was a curious remoteness about her experiences that day that she associated with extreme fatigue, as if she were drifting further and further from the work on her desk; from her sensations, from her very thoughts. Twice that morning she caught herself speaking and then wondered who it was who was conceiving of these words. It certainly wasn't her; she was too busy listening.

  And then, an hour after lunch, things had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. She had been called into her supervisor's office and asked to sit down.

  "Are you all right, Elaine?" Mr. Chimes had asked.