Human Remains

  I walked past her, sitting on the park bench halfway up the hill, and immediately I was struck by her physique and the fact that she was sitting on the bench wearing jogging pants and sneakers, a shapeless hooded top that she seemed to be shrinking into.

  She did not pay me any attention and so I felt confident enough to turn back and sit down next to her on the bench.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She didn’t reply but she cast a glance in my direction, a nervous smile. She wasn’t used to being spoken to. She wasn’t used to attracting attention. She was used to hiding.

  “It’s a lovely day today,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess,” she said. Her voice sounded wheezy.

  “You’re out for a run?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can do this hill in thirty-five seconds,” I said. I had no idea if such a thing were even possible. It was a random guess at a number that completely did the trick: as if I’d flicked a switch, she engaged.

  “Really? Thirty-five? I can only manage sixty. That was last week.”

  “You’re fit,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I’m too . . .”

  She’d stopped herself from saying it.

  “You’re on a journey,” I said. “Every day is a step toward your goal.”

  She looked up at me with astonishment in her eyes, blue eyes that looked too big for her pale, gaunt face.

  I put a hand—tentative, but it felt like the right time—on her arm. She winced slightly but did not move away. I could feel the bones under my hand, as though the gray fleece fabric were the only thing between me and her skeleton.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Everything you think and feel is right. You’re choosing the right path.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You can make the decision,” I said. “You can choose what happens, how it happens.”

  “Can I?” She was wavering.

  “You know you’re right,” I said, keeping my voice even, keeping the eye contact with her. “You need to do the right thing at the right time.”

  “I need to know it will work,” she said.

  “It will work. You can make that choice. If you decide it, it will be. You need to know this.”

  A few minutes later she took me to her flat, which was a few streets away. We walked past a pub that was so full of people that some had spilled out onto the street, plastic pint glasses in hand, all focused on the big screens inside. The progress of the game—whatever it was—could be determined by the collective whoops and sighs. As we got to her front door I heard yells of delight from various properties and even, possibly, from the pub.

  We had not spoken since she had stood up slowly from the park bench and started walking, but still she stood aside to let me into her flat. She was utterly defeated by life. Complicit with me in every possible way. I helped her to find the path she had already unconsciously chosen. I helped her to bring her miserable existence to an end, simply by giving her the permission she felt she needed to do it. I helped her to transform.

  Annabel

  They discharged me, in the end. They hadn’t managed to get to the bottom of what had happened to me but since I was clearly recovering they said I could go, as long as I stayed with a friend to begin with. There was talk of a referral for therapy, regular outpatient appointments. I had a letter to give to my GP.

  Sam came to collect me and drove me to his house on Keats Road. I remembered looking up at the house from my car, the day my mum was in the hospital and I was giving him a lift home. It felt as if a lifetime had passed since then.

  I didn’t speak at all. He tried to ask me questions but when I didn’t answer I think he gave up. I was afraid of everything, scared of the medicated numbness in my head that meant I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t focus. The hospital was a bad place but in a way the outside world was worse. I shouldn’t be here, I kept thinking. I’m supposed to be dead. Am I a ghost now? Is this what it feels like?

  Sam lived with his dad, Brian, a former serviceman who spent most of his time at the Legion drinking with his friends, and Brian’s wife, Irene. She was everything my mother hadn’t been: bright, vivacious, full of life. She’d been Sam’s mother’s caregiver, once upon a time. They both welcomed me into their home without question, offering up their small spare room—Irene apologizing for it just as I expressed my profound gratitude that I’d been let out of the hospital thanks to them.

  Sam showed me the room upstairs, a single bed with a floral bedspread on it and a soft toy on the pillow.

  “I’ll leave you to settle in,” he said. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Maybe later,” I said. “I’d like to sleep.”

  He left the door open when he went downstairs. I pulled it to and lay down on the bed and closed my eyes.

  The next day Frosty phoned to ask if I was up to talking to someone. Sam had gone to work, leaving Irene with me. Without him I felt a bit lost, cut adrift.

  “I guess so,” I said. “I don’t know anything.”

  He stopped by with a female officer I hadn’t met before, whose name I forgot the minute she introduced herself. We sat in the living room. Irene made the tea and put a tray with homemade apple cake on the table in front of us, all the while talking about the weather and the roadworks in the town center and the lineup for this year’s Strictly Come Dancing. When she finally went and left us with just the ringing in our ears, it felt as if we’d all gone deaf.

  “You’re looking well, Annabel,” Frosty said then. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine,” I said automatically.

  “You don’t need to worry,” the young woman said. She was smiling at me. “Anything you can remember at this stage is useful.”

  “I don’t remember anything,” I said.

  “Sam told us you said there was a man. An angel. Do you remember that?”

  I thought about it, closed my eyes. I wanted to help them. I wanted to remember.

  “He was just ordinary. Just a normal man. But he said things that made me feel calm. He was kind.”

  “Did he go home with you?”

  “No,” I said. “I drove home. There was a rainbow.”

  I wanted to add about the rainbow being a sign from my mum, a sign that I could trust him, that she’d sent him to take care of me, but I kept that part back. They wouldn’t have understood. They would have laughed.

  “What happened when you went home?”

  “Nothing. I went out again the next morning. I spoke to you on the phone,” I said to Frosty.

  “I remember,” he said. “Where were you, when we spoke on the phone?”

  “I was in the parking lot. I was going to the funeral director’s.”

  “Do you remember going in to see them?”

  “No,” I said. I closed my eyes again, struggling to picture it. “I remember walking toward the office and he was there waiting for me.”

  I looked across to Frosty. He was sitting forward, his hands gripped tightly between his knees. Seeing him like that reminded me of something Sam had told me, on one of his daily hospital visits. He said he’d been out the night before with Ryan Frost. Ryan had told Sam that his dad had been preoccupied, miserable, worrying that he’d missed the signs during the phone conversation he’d had with me that morning, when I’d been standing in the parking lot . Apparently I had sounded “odd.” He thought he should have done something, come to find me.

  “Can you tell us what he looked like?” The woman had taken over asking the questions. I felt embarrassed that I couldn’t remember her name.

  He was an angel, I thought. You can’t describe angels. And he would have looked different, to everyone else.

  I shook my head. “No. He was just—ordinary.”

  “Was he taller than you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Frosty was busy digging in to Irene’s apple cake, his mouth full of crumbs. I watched him.

  “What did you talk abou
t?” the woman asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did he ask you to go with him?”

  I felt tears starting, then, not at the frustration of not being able to remember, but at her insistent questions. I felt as if I was failing them: failing Frosty, failing Sam and Brian and Irene who had all been so kind to me.

  “Annabel?”

  “I don’t remember anything.”

  “It’s OK,” she said, the woman, whoever she was. I didn’t like her. She was giving me a headache with her sympathetic smile and her shiny hair and shiny white teeth.

  “I want to go back to sleep,” I said. “I’m really tired.”

  I stood up and left the room. Irene was in the kitchen, standing in the doorway looking awkward and fidgety. I thought she had probably been listening at the door and had jumped back when I’d come out, and hadn’t had time to arrange herself into an appropriately innocent activity. I looked at her and went upstairs. I didn’t mind if she had been listening; I had nothing to hide from her, except my own pathetic brain and its inability to remember what had happened to me.

  I lay on the bed, listening to them talking about me downstairs.

  “It’s very early days,” Frosty was saying. “I thought she was doing well, though.”

  “She is doing well,” Irene said. “She’s had a terrible ordeal. She just needs a bit of time.”

  “We have to ask,” the woman was saying. “We can come again, tomorrow maybe. See if anything’s come back to her.”

  “No,” Irene said. “We’ll call you if she remembers anything.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “This is a murder investigation, Mrs. Everett. We need to gather as much information as we can. We know what we’re doing.”

  “Not with that poor girl, you don’t,” Irene said. “I won’t have you pestering her.”

  “Look,” said Frosty then. “This isn’t helping. Thank you very much for your time, and for the cake. Will you give me a call, let me know how she is? She can take as much time as she needs.”

  Irene let them out of the front door after that and I heard it bang shut, with force. I wondered if she was angry with me.

  Colin

  I have been revisiting my biology notebooks in the evenings, comparing the notes I made with the images.

  Just occasionally, when I’m in the right frame of mind, I will select an album of images to peruse and put on a slide show in the background while engaged in some other activity, chores perhaps. It’s peaceful. No sounds.

  Shelley decayed quickest, perhaps because her house was warmer. I wonder too whether the medication she was taking had some effect on the chemical composition of the bodily fluids. In either case, the highlight was the loss of the forearm, the tendons that would usually hold the skeletal remains in place long after the flesh has disappeared letting her down, the way her body had let her down in life.

  I looked at my notes on taphonomy: the study of the processes that take place in a body, human or animal, after death. Taphonomic processes are not limited to decomposition, of which there are four or five recognized stages depending on which book you read (fresh, bloat, putrefaction—occasionally subdivided into active or “wet” decay and advanced decay—and putrid dry remains) but that may include processes involving external activity. Therefore scavenging, maggot feeding, burning, and cannibalism are also described as taphonomic processes.

  I’ve always been fascinated by the role of Nature in all this. Should human activity be separated from the taphonomic processes, since it is an intervention? I mean I can happily consider animal scavenging for inclusion as a process, since animals have a natural instinct to eat carrion, but what about cannibalism? It would be so much better to observe the process with no human intervention whatsoever, to see Nature at work without hindrance. But then, everything now is subjected to human intervention merely through the state of the world as it is. Even a corpse left undisturbed in a remote location would be subject to human intervention—greenhouse gases, the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain—acting to facilitate the decomposition process along with all the factors that Nature brings to the party. And utterly impossible, then, to separate the “real” from the artificial.

  I wish there were someone I could discuss this with. My father, had he survived, would have been interested. He was endlessly fascinated by Nature and I believe I got my interest in the subject from him. On the long walks that my mother insisted we go on every Sunday while she “rested,” he would entertain and educate me about synchronicity, the beautiful, poetic, creative structures and systems of life and death. Everything has a purpose; everything has a place, a right to exist, a function. Birth, life, death, an endless, echoing cycle, a dance to which all the steps are natural and innate. No confusion, nothing wasted, nothing out of place. Change happens at the right time and for the right reasons.

  Vaughn phoned me at work earlier today to postpone our lunchtime drink. He was calling from home, having not made it in to work. It seems Audrey has made their separation permanent, and Vaughn is too upset to contemplate anything but the loss of her.

  “I just don’t understand it,” he moaned over the phone. “We were getting on so well.”

  I was tempted to suggest that the beginning of the end was likely to be the moment he considered Weston-super-Mare as a romantic weekend getaway, but I held my tongue.

  I have no particular scruples about the notion of “stealing” Audrey away from Vaughn, although perhaps the idea of her body and where it has been might be a little distracting if I think about it too much. But the fact that she is now single, and presumably in need of some comfort, or at the very least entertainment, consumes my every waking thought.

  I have been here before, remember. There was a time before Justine when I wanted a girlfriend. Is that what I want now? Bored with the dance of death, do I now want to return to the unpredictability and despair of life? Part of me wants to fuck her, yes. Part of me does want that. But there is something else.

  In all my dealings with the depressed and the lame and the unhinged, I learned quickly that there was no point trying any of my techniques with those who had not already considered the path and taken some steps along it. It simply didn’t work, and no amount of tweaks to my procedure made any difference. That was when I learned how to pick the right people. But now I realize that the reason it has all become so stale is not just that if you’ve seen one human being decompose you’ve seen them all, but rather that I have such limited choice in the matter. If I could select people at random, it would all be so much more fun.

  So perhaps it isn’t about helping people who know what path they have chosen anymore. Perhaps it is about giving people a gentle shove in that particular direction.

  After I finish the chores, I log on to Facebook for the first time in many months. I’ve opened accounts under various identities, for various reasons, but today I go straight to my own details. I have not bothered to find or add friends, other than Vaughn, who insisted. He remains my only contact. His page proclaims proudly that he is “in a relationship with” Audrey Madison. I click on Audrey’s profile, which states just as proudly that her relationship status is “complicated.”

  To my surprise and pleasure, Audrey’s profile is instantly accessible: under “info” I discover her e-mail address, a whole list of films that she likes (horror and thrillers, in the main), that her musical tastes can best be described as eclectic (Simon and Garfunkel, Metallica, the Beatles), and that she went to school in Northampton followed by the University of Leicester. Her current interests are listed as cooking and going to the gym. Unfortunately she has chosen not to complete the employment part of the profile. I move on to her friends list (total 317) and scan down the list of names.

  Ten of the friends show their workplace as Arnold and Partners, Briarstone. I click on the link to the Arnold’s page. It’s an accountancy firm in the town center. I go back to Audrey’s list of friends and commit the Arnold’s employees?
?? names to memory, and then go to Audrey’s wall. And there it is, a wall post from last Friday:

  Cheryl Dann: Hope u have a good weekend hunni. See you Monday at work xxx

  An Internet search of Arnold and Partners takes me to their home page, which helpfully includes a How to Find Us map and their opening hours.

  I go back to Audrey’s wall and read down the various status updates, likes, and comments. Yesterday Audrey had written:

  Audrey Madison: Can’t wait for Adele’s bday bash Friday night. Been a long while and am in serious need of a night out.

  Below that, some of her friends had commented.

  Lara Smith: Will be so good to see you. What time r we getting to Lucianos?

  Claire McLeod: Table is booked for 8 Lara.

  Lara Smith: Thanks. See you there!

  Cheryl Dann: Woop woop.

  Adele Babycakes Strachan: V excited. Bring it.

  I go back to the Internet and find that there is a Luciano’s in Briarstone—an Italian restaurant right in the town center. It’s in the Market Square, which also contains three bars and one of the biggest nightclubs.

  After that, I finally allow myself to click back to Audrey’s photos. There are twelve albums, of which three are helpfully labeled to suggest they are images from her summer vacations for the past few years.

  I start with the oldest: “Kos Aug 2009.” I stand up before I go any further, take off my pants and fold them over a hanger and put them back in my wardrobe. And after that, the rest of the evening is spent jerking off over the many delicious images of Audrey in a bikini. And she is no longer Vaughn’s. For her, it’s “complicated,” but for me it is wonderfully simple.

  She is mine.

  BRIARSTONE CHRONICLE OCTOBER

  Body of Former Councilman Leader Found

  Police called to a house in Newton Lane last Saturday evening discovered the decomposed remains of yet another person, an elderly male, believed to be former Briarstone Borough councilman George Armstrong, 92. A police spokesperson said that neighbors had reported a strong smell coming from the property.