Human Remains (33 page)

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 whilst 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 which 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 to a body, human or animal, after death. Taphonomic processes are not limited to decomposition, of which there are four or five recognised 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 which 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 called me at work earlier today to postpone our
lunchtime
drink. He was ringing 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 realise 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 any more. 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 email 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 three hundred and seventeen) 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 centre. 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:

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:

Below that, some of her friends had commented.

I go back to the internet and find that there is a Luciano’s in Briarstone – an Italian restaurant right in the town centre. 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 labelled to suggest they are images from her summer holidays for the past few years.

I start with the oldest: ‘Kos Aug 2009’. I stand up before I go any further, take off my trousers and fold them over a hanger and put them back in my wardrobe. And after that, the rest of the evening is spent wanking 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.

Things were never the same for me after Vilette died. Vi, I called her. She was my sunshine and my light and my joy for fifty-nine years. Vi was the reason I was here, just as I was the reason she was here.

We met when I was twenty-two, quite by accident as it turned out. I was on shore leave, only two days, and then I was back to sea. It was February and the lake was frozen over. I was taking a short cut across the park back home, I’d been to the shop to get some cigarettes I think. Some errand for my old mum, anyway. I saw a group of girls by the lake, they were scuffling, laughing, you know, mucking about. I saw something fly up into the air and sail in the wind out on to the surface of the lake, something bright blue, like the wing of an exotic bird. It sailed up into the air and the breeze caught it.

Then the girls ran away, laughing, leaving one of their number behind at the edge of the lake.

The blue thing – a silk scarf, as it turned out, that had been given to her French mother when she had lived in Paris before the war, a scarf that young Vi was forbidden to look at, never mind take out of the house, never mind wear – was lying forlorn in a little blue puddle about ten yards from the edge.

Before I could get to her to help, she’d set one foot on the ice and then another, and was walking with a determined but cautious gait towards the middle of the lake, and the scarf. She was only a slip of a girl, just eighteen, light as a feather and tiny, but even so the ice was thinner than it had been when she’d skated on it the weekend before, thinning by the day thanks to the weak February sunshine.

When I was still a hundred yards away the ice cracked beneath her. I was close enough to see the shock on her face, hear her scream, before it cracked again and gave way. She only fell in up to her chest – thankfully the water wasn’t deeper than that – but still she clawed on the edge of the ice and could not get any purchase to pull herself out.

‘I’m coming,’ I yelled, ‘don’t worry!’ – as though that would make any difference to the terror and the pain of being stuck in an icy lake.

I took off my woollen coat and my jumper that mum knitted for me last Christmas and my shirt too, and tied all the sleeves together. That wasn’t long enough, so I ended up taking off my vest too and tying that on the end. All the while I could see her turning blue. After that it was just long enough for her to reach, and I told her to wind the end of it around her hands so that she didn’t need to grip, and then I hauled her out.

We were both shivering, her more than me of course. By this time a little crowd had gathered, including my brother Tom, who’d come to see where I’d got to. He gave me the coat off his back, and someone else took off their coat and put it round the young woman.

She was taken to hospital but she was alright after that. She even managed to get the scarf put away back in her mother’s closet before it was missed.

The next day I went round to see her before I had to go back to the ship and she told me that I’d saved her life. It didn’t feel like all that big a deal to me, after all what was I going to do, leave her in there? But by that time I’d seen her big beautiful grey eyes and how she got dimples in her cheeks when she smiled.

We got married in 1943, which was the next time I put in to port – just a quick wedding, me in my uniform, her in a coat she borrowed from a friend and wearing the beautiful blue scarf, lent by her mother.

Vi died the year before we would have had our diamond wedding. We were planning a big party, with our daughter Susan and all her family coming over from Australia, but by the spring both of us knew she wasn’t going to last that long. She fought so hard, but in the end it took her the way we knew it would. She died with me holding her hand on a rainy day in March.

I kissed her goodbye and went home.

You want to know about my story, don’t you? Well, my story ended on that day I left my Vi behind in the hospital. Things happened after that but they weren’t important. Nothing was important any more.

Susan came over from Australia for the funeral. She stayed two weeks and then went back again. I knew she wouldn’t come back to England again until it was my funeral, and maybe not even then – after all, I wasn’t to know about it either way, was I?

Mum’s funeral took place eleven days after I left hospital. Sam had helped with the arrangements. He’d asked for quotes from other funeral directors and then got on with the organising, once I was able to start making decisions again. He hadn’t wanted me to go back to the Co-operative Funeralcare on my own once I’d worked out that that was where it had happened… where I’d met him, the angel, whoever he was really.