Human Remains Read online

  It was easier to give in. I followed him, still clutching the shopping bag they’d given me with my mother’s possessions inside, and stood dumbly behind him while he moved a tray in a painfully slow progress toward the automatic drinks dispenser and thereafter the register.

  “Coffee?” he asked, when he finally got to the register. “Cappuccino OK?” All the other buttons on the machine were taped up with NOT WORKING written on the tape in a wavering handwriting.

  “Sure.”

  While he paid I went and sat down, and a few moments later a woman came and cleared up the two trays overladen with dirty dishes and half-eaten bits of food that were taking up most of the space on the table. “It’s a self-clear area,” she said to me, pointing at the sign. “You’d think people could read in this day and age, wouldn’t you?”

  I looked up at her and she didn’t speak to me again. Did I have some mark on my face, I wondered. Some sign that said RECENTLY BEREAVED, HANDLE WITH CARE? I even smiled at her, but still she left me to it, taking the dirty trays with her.

  Sam sat down in front of me and slid a mug of beige-colored foam across the table in my direction, followed by a handful of sugar packets and a Kit Kat.

  “I don’t really take sugar,” I said.

  “Have you eaten anything? When did you last have something to drink? I think you could do with some sugar.”

  “Are you my personal dietitian now or something?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Put sugar in it and I might leave you in peace for a while.”

  He made me smile, but I did as I was told. When I started eating the chocolate I realized I was hungry. My stomach growled and churned at the food. I sipped at the drink, expecting it to be boiling hot, but it was barely lukewarm.

  “I think their machine’s had it,” I said. The coffee tasted of Parmalat.

  “Yeah.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me about the case?”

  “Interesting as that conversation might be, that’s not what I’m here for.”

  “Oh? What are you here for?”

  He leaned forward slightly. “I called your office again. Then I called DI Frost. He told me you’d suffered an unexpected bereavement and that you wouldn’t be in for a while.”

  “So you came here . . . ?”

  “To find you.”

  “Why?”

  “To see if you were all right. Do you have anyone? Brothers, sisters? Other family?”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but no. Anyway, as I said to you before, I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me. I can take care of things; I always have. I just have to work my way through a list . . .”

  I gulped at the coffee, thinking that the sooner I drank it, the sooner I could get out of here and get home. Something was building up inside me, a feeling of unease, as if I was going to be sick or was coming down with something. I didn’t want to be here anymore. I wanted to be outside, in the fresh air, and then I wanted to go home and lock the door and not open it again.

  “Look,” he said. “I lost my mother a couple of years ago. I know a bit about what it’s like. I just thought I might be able to give you a bit of support.”

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Why did she die? Was she ill?”

  “She had cancer.”

  I nodded, although I had no frame of reference for this. My mother had suffered a stroke. Yes, she was housebound. Yes, she was elderly and frail. But aside from that, and the chest infection, she hadn’t been seriously ill at all. Only yesterday she’d been muttering some complaint about the prime minister while I cooked her dinner and put the shopping away.

  I tried to remember the last thing she’d said to me. Had she even said good-bye? When was the last time I’d said something nice to her? Asked her how she felt, if she was happy? When was the last time I’d told her I loved her?

  “I feel as if I should be crying, but I don’t feel like I can,” I said.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” he said. “And besides, it will take a long time for you to process all this.”

  “What does that mean?” I snapped. “I’m not a manufacturing plant; I’m a human being. I’m not going to ‘process’ anything at all. I’m not going to come to terms with it, get over it, or deal with it. I’m just going to go on with my life because that’s all I am able to do, the same as I’ve always done.”

  He made a noise like a sigh and was about to say something, but stopped himself and drank the rest of his coffee instead.

  “Sorry,” I said, a few minutes later.

  He shrugged. “No probs. Just trying to help.”

  “So I guess your office went a bit crazy after that phone call yesterday, right?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Is this the end of the Love Your Neighbor campaign?”

  He laughed. “I don’t think that was ever going to go anywhere. It was turning into more of a Spy On Your Neighbor or Moan About Your Neighbor campaign anyway.”

  “Well, that’s more the British way of doing things I suppose.”

  There was a short silence.

  “Are they going to check their computers?”

  I looked at him. He was crossing a line.

  “Oh, go on,” he said. “It’s a very general question. I thought maybe they’d all been accessing suicide chat rooms or something. Might be a link between them?”

  “I’d be surprised if they all had computers. Some of them were quite elderly, don’t forget.”

  “You’re including the elderly ones?”

  ‘Well, I am. It’s up to the senior investigating officer if he pays any attention to what I have to say.”

  He looked into his empty coffee mug. Mine was still half full, but I had no desire to finish it. It was like drinking dirty water.

  “I don’t think they killed themselves,” I said. “At least, not in the way we usually think of suicides. It wasn’t a deliberate act. It was more of a . . . as if they just gave up.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “It must be.”

  “But surely your body would override that decision, wouldn’t it? Surely hunger—thirst—aren’t they primal forces? You would have to have a completely iron will to just sit down and starve yourself to death.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Because of the phone call we can be reasonably sure now that someone or something is behind all this. I’m thinking that all these people had something done to them to force them to do this, something that has overridden their human instincts in some way.”

  He sat forward in his chair. “Now that,” he said, “is very interesting.”

  “Is it?”

  “What could do that? What could override the basic human instinct?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Scary, though, isn’t it?” he said.

  I nodded, not entirely sure what he meant.

  “Scary that someone out there could do this,” he went on. “I mean we could all be victims, couldn’t we?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, although there wasn’t anything obvious linking them, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have things in common. They all lived on their own, for a start. None of them had jobs, for one reason or another.”

  “You’re still talking about a very considerable slice of the population,” said Sam.

  “You want to go out and warn everyone who lives on their own and doesn’t have a job?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’d send them all into a panic.”

  We were both picturing a hysterical mass of single people, and it raised a smile.

  “The demographics are interesting,” he said, changing the subject neatly back to the bodies.

  “Because they’re so varied?”

  “Exactly. I mean if someone’s getting some sort of kick out of this? I don’t know. It’s just so weird. What does he have to ga
in from it? Did they leave wills, or anything like that?”

  “I don’t have access to that sort of data,” I said. “Maybe the investigation will get to that quite quickly.”

  “I can’t imagine it’s something that simple.”

  “No. I think—” I stopped myself.

  “What?”

  I looked away for a minute, then down at the table. “I think I should go. I have so much that I need to do.”

  “That wasn’t what you were going to say,” he said.

  My cheeks were flushing and to cover up my discomfort I stood up. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “It was awful, wasn’t it? I’ll buy you a decent cup next time.”

  I wasn’t going to agree to another meeting, no matter what excuse he came up with.

  “I’ll walk back to the parking lot with you,” he said, not giving me any sort of opportunity to refuse.

  I walked as quickly as I could, hoping to leave him behind. But my fast walk was similar to a normal person’s stroll and he kept up with me easily. “My car’s over here,” I said at last, breathless. “See you another time.”

  “Annabel,” he said, “you know I’d like to help if I can. I remember what it was like when I lost my mother. There’s so much to do; you miss things. Let me know if I can help—all right?”

  “You’re very kind.”

  “Have you still got my number?”

  “Yes,” I said, but I’d hesitated for a fraction of a second before saying it and he’d whipped a business card out of his pocket and handed it over to me. “I’ll see you soon, then,” he said. “Call me. Yes?”

  He was walking backward through the parking lot, which was a stupid idea—someone hooted at him and he jumped out of the way of a four by four on the desperate hunt for a parking space.

  Despite the misery of the last few hours, seeing him had done the unthinkable: it had cheered me up. But, in those moments after he left, I felt more alone than I ever had before. There were people all around me, cars driving past, but I was completely and utterly alone. I felt fear, and then a wave of sorrow followed it. I have no one, I thought. No purpose, nobody to take care of or strive to protect. I have nothing left.

  Colin

  After the orgasm last night, I didn’t sleep well.

  Waking in the early hours in a state of agitation, I ran a warm bath and found myself wondering whether Mr. Thomas Stearns Eliot caused, or contributed to, my fascination with the subject of death and transformation, or whether my interest goes back to my father’s death. Or maybe further back still.

  Sitting back in the bath, eyes closed, attempting to relax, I recited the first two verses of “Whispers of Immortality,” lingering over the words, tasting them. I am still thinking of them now, hours later.

  Sex and death, I think, so inextricably bound together. Dead limbs, lusts, and luxuries. Sex, desire, decomposition. And such erotic words, so smooth on the tongue: “tightening its lusts,” “clings,” “breastless,” “lipless.” So perfect, so obvious, so beautiful. I think of Janice, who also inspired me to travel down this path, think of her buried (even though she was cremated, I imagine her interred), lovelier in her time of decay than she ever was breathing.

  Annabel

  On the way home I went to Mum’s house. Force of habit almost diverted me to the supermarket on the way but there was no need for any of that anymore, was there? I sat in the car outside for a little while. The house already looked empty. I wondered who had turned all the lights off after the ambulance had left with my mother.

  Well, this wasn’t achieving anything, and I had so much to do. The front yard looked neglected—when did that happen?—the weeds growing through the cracks in the cement path, the grass of the tiny front lawn high enough to be growing in unsightly tufts. I would have to bring the lawnmower over and cut it back before the winter really set in, especially if I was going to have to sell the house.

  I mentally added it to the rapidly growing to-do list.

  The house was warm, which I hadn’t been expecting. But of course, the heat was still set to come on at the usual time. I should turn it off. But then maybe the pipes would freeze if it got unexpectedly cold. That reminded me about the freezer. I should empty it and turn it off, defrost it. And the fridge. I should turn off all the electrical appliances, in fact, because they were all just wasting money now. Maybe I should turn the electricity off at the mains? And the gas—but then the heat wouldn’t come on, and maybe the pipes would freeze.

  My mind started to spin in exhausted circles, so I forced myself to put those thoughts to one side. I turned the light on, put my bag down in the hallway, and hung my coat up on the coat stand as I did every time I came into this house.

  She’d moved here fifteen years ago when her sister, my aunt, moved to Scotland. They’d shared a house after I went away to university but once Aunty Bet left, Mum had wanted to live nearer to me. Back then she was still active, still going out to bingo with her friends, still visiting the supermarket herself three times a week, going on the odd weekend bus trip with the Social Club. I don’t think I had a real awareness of her getting older but, looking back, the signs were there. She fell out with someone at the Social Club so she stopped going there. Aunty Bet died five years ago and the death of her only sister started Mum on a downward spiral. She started worrying about money, even though she had a good pension and had never worried about it before. Not long after that she stopped going to bingo, too. And then it was just me. I was the only person left for her, except for the neighbors who popped in to check on her every so often, and even then she used to complain about them to me when I stopped by.

  “They’re always bothering me,” she would hiss, as though they might be listening with glasses pressed to their ears on the other side of the wall. “They just show up. I mean it’s not exactly convenient.”

  “Why?” I said. “What might you be doing?” I refused to lower my voice in these circumstances. We never heard them talking; why should they be able to hear what we were saying?

  As it turned out, Len next door had almost saved her life, and had certainly given me the chance to say a kind of good-bye even if she couldn’t hear me. I would have come to see her the next evening, but by then she would have been dead. If she’d been a bit more welcoming toward him, he might even have discovered her a bit sooner than he did, and then maybe she would have survived.

  I went into the living room, turning the light on, and almost expecting to see her sitting in her chair. The impact of the empty chair hit me like a physical force and I took a step back from it. Every time I visited her—three or four times a week—she would be sitting there. Occasionally she would get up while I was there to go to the bathroom or do something in the kitchen, using her walker or her cane to get about, using my helpful hand to heave her out of the chair, but most of the time she would sit and wait for me to fetch things for her.

  And the chair was empty. There was a dip in the seat cushion and the covers were both faded and grubby from years of use. The arms of the chair were gray from the constant touch of her hands. She was not there anymore.

  I was breathing quite fast and I felt panicky, strange. I wondered what it was that had suddenly set me off like this. The house was so silent, so still. Had I ever been in this room without the television being on? Even the air felt different without her in here.

  I took a deep breath and got myself back under control. This was no good. I had things to do.

  I turned my back on her chair and went to the kitchen. It was really dark there, the window facing only the empty yard and the unlit windows of the neighboring house. I turned on the light.

  It was suspiciously neat. Mum was not fond of doing the dishes, and when I came to bring her dinner I would usually start by washing the dishes from the previous few meals. But the sink was clear, the gray dishcloth draped over the faucet, a steady drip-drip splashing into the sink. I opened the fridge. Inside it looked bare—a couple of jars of jam,
a bottle of salad dressing, a cardboard egg box, the butter dish, an unopened package of cheese, an unopened bottle of white wine. Had I even bought those things? I couldn’t remember. Where were the vegetables I’d put in here—when was it? Sunday? She couldn’t have eaten them all before she fell. What about the milk? I’d bought her a new two-pint bottle yesterday.

  “Annabel, is that you?”

  The sound from behind me made me jump out of my skin. Len was standing close by. I had no idea how he had managed to get in without me hearing him, given the silence of the house.

  “Hello, Len,” I said. “You made me jump.”

  “Sorry, my dear. How are you?”

  “My mother died this morning,” I said. I would have to start thinking of a better way of sharing the news with people.

  “Yes, I know,” he said. “I’m so sorry. You poor girl.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I called the ’ospickle this morning to see how she was.”

  I found myself stifling another entirely inappropriate giggle. He had actually said “ ’ospickle.”

  “How are you doing?” he asked. “Me and the wife were worried about you when we heard.”

  “I’m all right. I just have so many things that I need to do.”

  “I know. It’s a bind. You know if there’s anything we can do to help . . .”

  “Thank you,” I said. I stood awkwardly with one hand on the fridge, wondering what it was he wanted. Wondering why he was still coming in here when it was now clear that my mother wasn’t coming back. “Did you clear out the fridge?”

  I think I said it a bit brusquely, because he flushed a little and shifted uncomfortably on the spot. “Yes, well, we didn’t want the food to be going bad. I thought it would be a lickle while before you stopped by—you know, with the grief . . . and everything.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s very kind of you. But really—I can manage.”

  “Difficult times,” he said, appeased. “Very difficult. Me and the wife, you know, we did our best to keep an eye on her, but she was getting very frail. Very difficult to get about, and then it’s just a matter of time really, isn’t it? Comes to us all, don’t it? In the end?”