Last Orders

  I went through the opening and stood beside him. It smelt cold. I thought, He don’t know I’m here, he can’t ever know I’m here. Unless. I thought, He aint Jack Dodds, no more than I’m Vince Dodds. Because nobody aint nobody. Because nobody aint more than just a body, than just their own body, which aint nobody.

  Except you can’t see his body under that tablecloth.

  Then I just stood there looking at him and I felt myself going straight and tall, like I wasn’t just standing there, I was holding myself proud and stiff, like Amy. I was standing to attention. Like the only proper thing to do was to go stiff and straight and still and stony just like Jack was, out of sympathy. Except upright.

  And I thought, I should see him naked. Because we all are, aren’t we? He’s naked underneath, under the tablecloth. I should see his body. I should see his hands and his feet and his knees and his bleeding bollocks an’ all. I should see Jack Dodds’ body. Because this is Jack, Jack Dodds, but he don’t look like Jack, he looks like the bleeding Pope. Because naked we come and naked we. But they’ve kitted him out so he looks like the Pope.

  RAY

  I say, ‘It’s all right, Vince. You go ahead.’

  Because I’ve sat down suddenly in one of the wooden seats in the side-aisle, clutching the bag, like some old geezer on a shopping trip who’s run out of puff.

  He looks down at me, holding the guidebook, and I can see Lenny and Vic at the far end of the aisle. I reckon they moved off pretty smart, like they knew me and Vincey might have business to discuss.

  He says, ‘You okay, Lucky?’

  I say, ‘Yeh, give me a mo.’

  He flips shut the guidebook. ‘Gabbing on a bit, was I?’

  I say, ‘No, it wasn’t that.’

  He looks at me.

  There aint no hiding, if it’s true what they say, least of all in a church. Because He’s supposed to see everything, innermost thoughts. But I reckon if Vince can’t tell, if he can’t see my innermost, and if it was his thousand in the first place and he gave it to Jack in his dying days, on his death-bed, he’s not going to ask for it back, not now. Like asking for the money back you’ve put in the collection box. He aint going to tell no one.

  And Jack aint going to tell no one.

  He looks at me. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeh, give us a mo. You go on.’

  He looks at me. Then he looks round quickly at the pillars and the arches and the windows, then back at me as if he’s twigged the situation. Except he aint twigged it all. And I’m saying to myself, Miserable sinner. That’s what you’re supposed to tell yourself, miserable sinner. You’re supposed to sink down on your knees. But all I’d been thinking, suddenly, was that its a far cry, all this around me, from what I’m carrying in my hand, all this glory-hallelujah, from Jack and his drips. What’s a plastic jar up against this lot? What’s the lick and spit of a human life against fourteen centuries? And it was the same as I thought at that crematorium, though I never told no one, that none of it had to do with him, none of it. The velvet curtains, the flowers, the amens, the music. I stood there, looking at the curtains, trying to make it have to do with him, and Vic says, touching my arm, ‘You can go now, Ray.’ Because nothing aint got to do with Jack, not even his own ashes. Because Jack’s nothing.

  So I had to sit down, sink down, like I’d been hit. Like Vincey’d taken a swing at me an’ all.

  He says, ‘Okay, Raysy, fair enough. Take it easy.’

  I say, ‘Here,’ handing him the bag, looking at him, ‘I’ll catch you up,’ and he takes the bag, looking at me. He half moves to slip the guidebook into it but thinks again. Then he walks off, slowly, along the side-aisle, along the row of pillars, in his camel-hair coat, mud on his trousers. Lenny and Vic have reached a spot where some stone steps go up and they stop there for a bit like they’re wondering which way to go. Then Vince catches up with them. He taps Lenny on the shoulder and Lenny turns and Vince holds out the plastic bag and Lenny takes it.

  RAY’S RULES

  1. It’s not the wins, it’s the value.

  2. It’s not the betting, it’s the knowing when not to.

  3. It’s not the nags, it’s the other punters.

  4. Old horses don’t do new tricks.

  5. Always look at the ears, and keep your own twitched.

  6. Never bet shorter than three to one.

  7. Never bet more than five per cent of your kitty, except about five times in your life.

  8. You can blow all the rules if you’re Lucky.

  LENNY

  He gives me the bag. He don’t look at me, he looks at the guidebook. It’s like the only reason he’s given me the bag is so he can flick through the guidebook. But I can see it aint. He’s studying that guidebook like it’s got all the answers.

  He says, ‘They got the Black Prince in here somewhere.’

  I say, ‘Who’s he when he’s in?’ Maybe they got Snow White an’ all.

  He says, ‘I reckon we should find the Black Prince.’

  I say, ‘Whatever you say, Big Boy.’

  So we shuffle on, down some steps and up some steps, past all these geezers made of stone, lying face up, flat out, out for the count.

  I reckon he’s sorry, that’s what he is. I reckon he’s trying to make amends. We’ve all got a bit of that to do if you look back over the years. Excluding Vic maybe. Clean hands, as always.

  Seeing as there’s three of us here involved, counting Raysy. And Sally’s paid her price, if you can say she ever deserved to in the first place, being the innocent party, or at least the least guilty. Since I don’t suppose it happened while she was looking the other way. It was Vincey’s doing in the first place, but it was me who said, when she came right out with it and said she wanted to have the baby, ‘No you don’t, my girl.’ My first fully weighed-up response as a father, words just shot from my gob. She said he’d come back and do right by her. I said, ‘Don’t talk bollocks, girl. What book’ve you been reading?’ And she aint ever forgiven me since.

  I reckon that’s when it really happened, that’s when we really parted company, though it wasn’t till later, till she teamed up with that Tyson toe-rag, then started taking on all-comers, that I washed my hands altogether, did a Vic. Daughters, eh Raysy?

  It was me who found the doc to do the job. O’Brien. And it was me who found the money to pay him. I need a winner, Raysy, I need some readies double quick. So Raysy was a party.

  You just leave it all to me, girl, you just make yourself ready. Well, you should’ve thought of that. You just make yourself nice and ready.

  And the fact is I never even spared a thought at the time for that poor little unborn perisher. Except it went through my head, like some sort of excuse, like some sort of cock-eyed warning, that it might turn out like June, it might turn out to have been better not born. Settling up for your sins. So, either way, you end up short.

  And the fact is that when you can remember, just a few years before, loading and firing, loading and firing, whacking it home and knowing that that’s a few more of ’em blown to bits, and not thinking twice about it, even being glad, because it’s them not you, less of them to do it to you and it’s only what’s asked of you, any case, what you’re trained for, then what’s one little unborn sod who aint ever going to see the light of day?

  Gunner Tate.

  And what they call a sin and a crime and against the law at one time aint at another, is it? Like if it’d been five years later, we could’ve solved that little problem, no fuss, all above board and legal. Different time, different rules. Like one moment we’re fighting over a whole heap of desert, next we’re pulling out of Aden snappy.

  It’s only now that I think what it might’ve been. It. He. She. A whole life. All these stony geezers. It might’ve been the next Archbishop of Canterbury. It might’ve been Kath, Kathy Dodds. Different mother, same result: Vincey’s brat. Same old game now, it seems, for Kathy as for Sally anyhow. Just better luck at it. Turns up at the funeral
dressed to kill.

  I’m carrying the bag, but like it aint got nothing to do with me. Rochester Food Fayre. Vic’s walking ahead. I tap him on the shoulder. I say, ‘Here, Vic.’ Like it’s a relay, a relay round Canterbury Cathedral, and it’s his lap.

  VIC

  He says, reading, ‘ “Edward Plant— Edward Plant—Edward Plantagenet. The Black Prince. Son of Edward the Third. English commander in the Hundred Years War. Fought at Cressy and Pottiers …” ’

  Sounds like a proper soldier-boy. Looks like one too, with his helmet and his chain-mail and his coat of arms. All level in death.

  ‘ “… Married Joan, the ‘Fair Maid of Kent’.” There you are, Lenny, he got spliced to a Joan an’ all.’

  Lenny touches my arm while Vince reads. He holds out the bag for me to take. Vince lifts his eyes, noticing, as if he’s the teacher and we ought to listen. Pay attention at the back.

  I take the bag.

  ‘ “… Died in 1376.” ’

  Well Jack, if it’s any consolation, if it means anything to you, we had you rubbing shoulders, so to speak, with the Black Prince.

  RAY

  It smells of stone and space and oldness. The pillars go up and up, then they fan out like they’re not pillars any more, they’ve let go of their own weight and it’s not stone any more, it’s not material. It’s like wings up there, arching and reaching, and I know you’re supposed to gaze up and think it’s amazing and feel yourself being raised up too, and I’m gazing, I’m staring, I’m peering hard, but I can’t see it, I can’t make it out. The next world.

  But I reckon I could fly to Australia. Cross this world. Money I’ve got. Save Sue the trouble of doing it, other way. When. If.

  Though I reckon she would, I’d lay odds she would. Though you’d think it’d serve no purpose, you’d think it’d be immaterial, and there’s a hundred things you could better put the fare towards. New car, swimming pool.

  It’s a far sight further, Sydney to London, than London to Margate, a far cry further. And when she got here she’d only wonder why she ever came, it wouldn’t be like the place she left years ago, roots, there wouldn’t be no country churchyard with birds tweeting, God knows where I’ll get shoved. But someone’s got to do it, you’ve got to have someone, and I bet she would.

  But I could save her the trouble.

  LENNY

  I found that doc to do the job. O’Brien. I’d like to know what register he was on or had been struck off of, I’d like to know how he washed his hands.

  Doctor. Butcher more like. Family butcher.

  Which strikes me as funny now. You shouldn’t joke in church. Because when Jack in that bag there was still up and breathing, or not up but still breathing, flat on his back like one of these holy Joes but not yet turned to stone, he went and said to me that he always wanted to be a doctor.

  I stared at him, a bit lost for a comment. He said, ‘You know, a doctor, a quack, a sawbones. Cure the sick, chase after nurses, that sort of thing. I’d say live meat’s better than dead meat any day, wouldn’t you?’

  I looked around at the other bed-cases and I looked back at him, because I thought he must be having me on, and he said, ‘What are you sniggering at, Gunner?’

  I said, ‘Well it’s a turn-up, Jack.’

  This Black Prince feller don’t look like he ever smiled.

  Vince says, studying that guidebook, ‘I say we should take a gander at the cloisters, then make tracks.’

  I say, ‘Okay, Big Boy, you lead on.’ Vic and I have a quick smirk at each other and we traipse on, following Vince, like we can’t leave till we’ve done the lot, it’s obligatory.

  You shouldn’t joke in church, or in hospital, it seems. But it’s either a crying shame or it’s the biggest joke out to end up wishing we was something we aint. And I’d rather laugh than cry. And, thinking it all over and sizing it all up, I’d say Big Boy there’s got the last laugh, since he knows he aint Vince Dodds, he knows he never was, though it’s looking like he’d like to change his tune over that. But there aint none of the rest of us know who we really are. Boxer. Doctor. Jockey.

  Except Vic.

  We’re slipping through the doorway that leads to the cloisters. It looks like we’ve lost Raysy.

  Live meat’s better than dead meat, that’s what he said, though we’ll never know June Dodds’ honest and considered opinion on that. And Sally’ll always have wanted to have had that baby, that pillock’s dead baby, though she could’ve done without some of the live meat she’s lived off since. It’s a thin line sometimes between the one and the other. But flesh is flesh. It can’t be denied.

  Maybe the first thing I ought to do after we’ve done our duty by Jack here is go and pay Sally a visit. It’s me, girl. It’s your old dad, remember? It aint just another passing prick.

  It can’t be denied. It shouldn’t be encouraged either, sometimes, but it shouldn’t be denied. It’s like I shouldn’t be thinking right now, when I’m taking a turn in the cloisters, of Amy, forty years ago, when Sally was a nipper, fresh back from the seaside. But I am all of a sudden, I am. It don’t do when you’re escorting her dead husband’s remains for their final disposing to think of the way her tits used to point and the way her frock used to hang on her. But I am.

  You shouldn’t ever have wicked thoughts in church, but you do, you want to have ’em, like it’s an encouragement. You shouldn’t think such things when you’re an old man of sixty-nine with no breath in your lungs and nothing but a penny whistle between your legs, but I do, I am, like I’m free to, seeing as Jack’s in the bag. I’m thinking of how she’d kiss and pet Sally and I’d be jealous of my own daughter, and how I used to think Jack was the luckiest bastard alive.

  And this was my idea, to come here. Dose of holiness. It wasn’t for him. Who’s he going to tell, who’s he going to brag about it to over a slow beer at the end of the day? My mates did me proud, they carried me round Canterbury Cathedral.

  It was for us, to put us back on our best behaviour, to clean up our acts. Seeing as how Amy aint here.

  I’m undressing her in my heart.

  It’s just as well your thoughts don’t show in your face, though that aint such a let-out with my mush. Face like a fire alarm. But you can’t help your face, even less than your thoughts. You can’t help flesh being flesh.

  It’s like Jack used to say, I can see him holding forth now in the Coach, that there was more than one meat market at Smithfield once, bad old good old days. That night he was extra merry and Raysy wasn’t, bad run with the nags I suppose. It was Vincey’s birthday, Vincey’s so-called birthday. And that new barmaid. You shouldn’t think of a barmaid’s bum. Raysy trying to make some joke about the Coach never going nowhere. Everyone tanked. And Jack saying, ‘Cock Lane, Smithfield, famous for it once. You wonder how they think up the names. Cock Lane off Giltspur Street. We’ve all been there, aint we, Raysy? Cock lane, cock alley, cock passage, we’ve all driven the coach up there.’

  VIC

  So I said, ‘I’ll just have to go myself.’

  Trev looked up.

  I said, ‘That was Tony. Won’t be in. Looks like he’s down with the same bug as Dick. They’re dropping like flies.’

  Trev said, ‘There’s Roy. There’s me.’

  I said, ‘It’s out beyond Sutton. You’ve both got to be at the crem at three thirty. It’s pushing it. I’ll have to go. Can you deal with the Harrises?’

  Trev nodded. ‘And if you’re not back before I go to the crem?’

  ‘You better put the Closed sign up. Late lunch. We can’t ask Maggie here to hold the fort.’ I was standing by the window, and I smiled. ‘Unless you want to ask Jack Dodds to swap trades for half an hour. He’s often said.’

  And it was only then that I realized: the Fairfax Park Hospital and Home, Cheam. That was where June was. Where Amy went, where Jack didn’t.

  ‘It’s all right, I’ll go. Make a change for me.’

  So a little after half past one
I took the forms and the keys and went round to the lock-up and drove off in the black van with the blacked-out rear windows, what we called the Black Maria. The hearses were more friendly: Doris and Mavis. A ship is always she.

  It wasn’t as though I expected to see her. It wasn’t as though it would look any different, because June was there, from all the other homes and hospitals that are an undertaker’s regular port of call. Homes, Hospitals and Hospices, where people hexpire. And the worst are the Homes, since you know they aren’t homes at all, it’s just a sweet-sounding name for a clearing-station for the handicapped or the old, or a stand-in for that word you mustn’t use any more: asylum. And you know that for lots of them it wasn’t such a short stay, that this was where the deceased lived maybe most, maybe all of their life, and that life, in this case, meant a kind of death, a kind of not having a home to go to.

  Like Bernie Skinner always says – like any landlord – after the third time of calling time, ‘Aint none of you got homes to go to?’ With that sudden fierceness, as if he’s insulting his own customers, as if he really hates all boozers and loiterers and it’s the worst disgrace you can throw at a person, to have no home to go to.

  And they’re always sad anyway, these pick-ups from long-term institutions. Taking them out of one box just to put them in another. As if there was never any choice in the first place, and if you’d listened carefully you could’ve heard the sound of a coffin being nailed, long before I showed up. I picked up a prisoner once. Wormwood Scrubs. Heart attack, fifty-one years. I said to the warder, ‘What was he in for?’ and he said, ‘Murder. Murdered his missis three years ago. Turned out to be a life sentence after all.’ Or a merciful release.

  But the outcast and the outlawed have to die too, the shunned and forgotten, and somewhere there’s a reluctant relative who has to step uneasily forward. And you never ask, it’s not your place, what exactly this death means to them. Though you can see sometimes it’s not the simple, neat thing they’d hoped for, a merciful release. Your job is to provide a decent funeral, decency and respect with regard to the final disposal, everyone deserves that. It’s not your job to pry.