Human Remains Read online

  “Well . . .” I said again.

  “Of course, it’s different if you’ve got family close by, like your mother had. Our two boys are both grown up and gorn away, long time ago now. When they have families of their own, you know, it’s hard because they get so busy and they know we’re all right, we’ve got each other, we can take care of ourselves, so we don’t really see them that much. Christmases, yes, and they came for her seventieth birthday last year, but that’s about it really. And it does make you wonder, don’t it, all this stuff in the paper about people being found dead and nobody taking care of them. It just makes you wonder about what might happen in the future.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Anyway, I mustn’t stand here gabbing all day; she’ll wonder what’s happened to me. I’ll be on my way. Do you want that stuff back?”

  This last bit was thrown casually over his shoulder, a parting question so innocuous, but he turned then and fixed me with a beady eye. Oh, so he hadn’t thrown it out, then? Effectively he’d come in here and stolen all my mom’s fresh food out of the fridge. I was surprised he’d left the eggs and butter behind.

  “No, of course not,” I said.

  “Righto, I’ll be off. You know where we are if you need anything. Give me a call if you need us, yes? I’ll check on her mail and stuff if you like. Righto, then. See you.”

  I heard the front door slam. It hadn’t slammed when he came in. He must have shut the door quietly, crept through the hallway treading carefully on the bare wooden boards. I didn’t want him to check her mail. I didn’t want him to have a key. I would go by and ask for it on the way out.

  I looked back at the silent kitchen, everything in its place. Everything waiting to be used again, looking back at me expectantly. I had a sudden thought and opened the cabinet where she kept her dry goods—tea bags, cereals. Right at the top was a commemorative tea caddy: the wedding of HRH Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer, 1981. In here she kept her housekeeping money, the money she kept from her pension to pay for groceries and other incidentals. I’d set up direct debits on her bank account to pay all the bills, and I checked them once every few months to make sure everything was covered and being paid. When I got her shopping, I would take the money from the tin and put the receipt behind in its place. I would round it up or down, never bothering with coins because it all evened itself out in the end anyway. When I’d been here last Sunday there had been eighty pounds in here in twenty-pound notes. I’d taken out a twenty and replaced it with a ten-pound note from my purse, because the shopping had come to a total of twelve pounds ninety-eight. When I came yesterday, though, I’d been so tired after working late that I’d forgotten to do it; the receipt was still at the bottom of my bag.

  In the jar was a grand total of twenty pounds. A single twenty-pound note. There was a fifty-pound difference since the last time I looked—a few days ago. For a moment I stood there looking at the single note, wondering if I was mistaken. Wondering what she might have spent it on.

  After that I went to the bureau in the dining room, the top drawer of which contained all the important stuff: her passport, bankbooks, birth certificate. I riffled through it briefly but even at a glance I could see that it was all still there. That was a relief; so maybe I had imagined it? Perhaps there had been less in there when I’d seen it, or I was getting confused with another day? Or maybe she’d had the window cleaner around, or put some money in a charity envelope?

  Fifty pounds, though?

  I looked around the rest of the house, not really sure what I was looking for. Her bedroom had that quiet silence about it that suggested nobody had been in here in some time. The clothes that hung in the wardrobe were old, no longer in regular use: a sparkly cocktail top, heavy with silver beading. A long black skirt. She’d worn this outfit to my twenty-first birthday meal. Why had she even kept it? There was no way she would have worn this again. And other clothes that I remembered her wearing—a blazer that she used to wear to work sometimes, before she retired. Shoes in the bottom of the wardrobe for the woman who never went out of her front door.

  The spare room was full of boxes that she’d never bothered to unpack when she moved here all those years ago. “One day,” she’d say, as though she were waiting for all the social engagements and frivolities to die down before she could properly settle in. It all looked undisturbed.

  Well. There was no delaying it. As much as I hated confrontations of any sort, this was one I could not put off any longer.

  He looked surprised to see me when he opened the door. “Everything all right?” He was chewing on something, and I wondered if it was a sandwich made with Mum’s bread.

  “Hello again. I just remembered I need to get the key back from you. After all, there’s no need for you to trouble with the house now that Mum’s gone, is there?”

  “D’you not want me to check the mail? Save you coming up here all the time?”

  “It’s fine, really. I’m not that far away.”

  “What if there’s an emergency?”

  “If there’s an emergency,” I said, firmly, wondering what on earth such an emergency could be now that Mum was dead, “you can call me, can’t you?”

  He looked suddenly crestfallen. “Oh. I see. Righto, then. Hold on.”

  He left the door ajar and went back into the hallway, leaving me on the step. A cooking smell, not a pleasant one, came through to me on a gust of warm air. The hallway was newly decorated, the wallpaper of that curious furry embossed type—what was it called? A weird name. Ana-something.

  “Here you go, then,” he said, coming back up the hallway. He was unthreading a Yale door key from a key ring containing several others. I wondered if it was his normal key ring, or whether he just collected the keys to other people’s houses.

  I held out my hand and he pressed the key into the palm, hard enough for it to hurt.

  “There’s one other thing, Len,” I said, dreading this bit but knowing I had to ask. “Do you know if the window cleaner stopped by this week? Or anyone else Mum might have given money to?”

  “No. Ted comes around first week of the month usually. Why?”

  Well, he did ask, I thought. “Mum had some money in a tin, and most of it’s gone. It was there when I visited her last. Any ideas?”

  I said it casually and, as much as he was trying to pull off the “kindly old gent next door” thing, he was eyeing me with bright, suspicious eyes.

  “We did some shopping for her Monday,” he said. “We told her we were going into town and she said she wanted some bits and pieces. She gave me cash and I gave her the receipt. Did you not find it?”

  “What things?”

  “Hmm. Well, let me think. She wanted a steak from the butcher. And batteries for the radio . . . oh, and three books of first-class stamps. There was some other stuff . . . I can’t remember it all.”

  I looked at the key in my hand and wondered if this was an argument I really needed to be having. It was only fifty quid, after all. “Thanks, Len,” I said. “I know she really appreciated everything you did for her.”

  “S’all right,” he said. “You know we were always happy to help. Any time, love. You sure you don’t want us to keep an eye on things next door?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m going to get the mail forwarded anyway.” I wasn’t sure if such a thing was possible when a person was deceased, but I didn’t want him looking for an excuse to get back inside the house.

  “You sure you want to do that? I mean we can always . . .”

  “No, Len. Honestly, you’ve done enough. Thanks.”

  I turned and started to head down the path, back to the car. It was dark, and cold, and I wanted to get home now, shut the door, and be on my own where nobody could see me.

  Colin

  Work today was distracting, and monumentally dull. I feel as though I am beyond all this now, as though I have a more entrancing destiny before me than dealing with city finances.

  Patienc
e is one of my strongest virtues I’ve always thought. In the year following my father’s death, I found it difficult to engage at school. It all felt so hideously pointless. I got into trouble regularly, although I was never disruptive. If the subject failed to interest me, I sat in the class and stared straight ahead, relentlessly patient and tirelessly disconsolate, regardless of what the rest of the class was tasked with doing.

  “Friedland,” the master would say, “are you not going to make an attempt?”

  “No,” I’d say, if I replied at all.

  “No, sir.”

  I would stare back with what they must have thought of as insolence. To me it was indifference.

  “That’s it. I’ve had enough. You shall go to the headmaster’s office.”

  This happened on an almost daily basis. I was caned. These were the days when caning was not only allowed but, in the British public school system, a tradition. I didn’t even feel the pain, not in any way that mattered. I didn’t feel the humiliation. The punishments had no effect on me at all. The headmaster knew I wasn’t stupid. At first, he was even sympathetic—having lost his own father at a young age—but his patience only lasted for a short while.

  Stiff upper lip, that was the ticket. Putting the needs of your compadres ahead of yourself. Playing the game.

  And I wasn’t playing.

  In the end he almost expected me; if I wasn’t in his office before lunch he started to wonder where I was. My mother was called in. It was suggested that I might like to transfer to a different school, that I might be better suited elsewhere. A fresh start. My mother stared vacantly ahead, numbed by whichever benzodiazepine they were trying her on this month, while I stood behind her in the headmaster’s office, hands sullenly in my pockets even though I’d been caned for just such insouciance the day before.

  “She doesn’t care,” I said.

  “Friedland,” the headmaster said, “you are present only at your mother’s request. You are expected to hold your silence here.”

  “I do care,” she said, though the tone of her voice suggested otherwise. “I just don’t know what to do about it.”

  The money to send me to the school had been my father’s. She had his pension, and a payout, but she was not used to having to deal with matters such as this. She had never worked, never had to pay a bill, never had to speak to anybody about anything more taxing than what to have for dinner and where to go on vacation.

  The headmaster dismissed us both shortly afterward, recognizing another brick wall behind all the others I’d constructed in the past few weeks.

  In the end, I made everything much easier for him. Two days after the meeting with Mother, a boy made some comment about my father and my behavior as our paths crossed in the hall. Later in the evening I found him alone, took him into one of the empty classrooms, and punched him until he was unconscious and bleeding.

  The effort of finding another school willing to take me was beyond my mother. Additionally, as she told me on more than one occasion, since she had no intention of getting a job, she needed to save what was left of Father’s life insurance for her living expenses.

  And so I was enrolled into the nearest state school for the remainder of my school years.

  At lunchtime Vaughn called to invite me to the Red Lion. It was the first time we’ve been in contact since the dinner party, although I did send him a text thanking him for a super evening. Maybe he interpreted it as sarcastic.

  We sat with our pints in front of us. The television bolted precariously over the corner of the bar was showing Sky Sports News, an endless jumble of primary colors and a man in a suit mouthing no doubt vital pieces of information about teams I have no interest in.

  “How’s Audrey?” I asked at last.

  “All right, I think,” he said.

  I drank some bitter, grimacing and thinking it would taste a whole lot better with a cheese baguette to soak it up. I looked hopefully toward the bar, but the barmaid, an appropriately barrel-shaped woman who was wearing red tights and calf-length black boots that looked alarming on one so short, was nowhere to be seen.

  “It was a good meal,” I said. “And nice to see your house.”

  People say things like this. Compliment each other, comment on the decor in their respective houses, even when they think it’s hideous. As I do.

  “Actually,” he said, “she’s not really all right. She’s acting a bit funny.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “She’s a bit—well, distant. After the other night.”

  “Oh,” I said, because I couldn’t think of any more appropriate response.

  “I’ve telephoned her a couple of times. She answered once, and she was terribly vague. When I went over to her apartment she wasn’t there.”

  “Maybe she was just out,” I said helpfully. “Or busy doing something else.”

  Vaughn snorted. “I can’t imagine what.”

  “Do you still think she’s having an affair?”

  He looked up from his pint, startled. “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, you were asking me about it just the other day. You were talking about taking her to Weston-super-Mare. Do you remember?”

  “Oh. Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Really, Vaughn,” I said. “Your memory is going.”

  “I’ve been a bit distracted,” he said, and to my surprise he put his head in his hands on the table and his shoulders started shaking. I stared at him with curiosity. In the Red Lion, of all places.

  “Vaughn,” I said. “What on earth’s the matter?”

  He sniffed and retrieved a handkerchief from his pants pocket, dabbed viciously at his eyes and expectorated loudly into it. I shuddered at this display but it seemed to do the trick and he composed himself once again.

  “I’m really very fond of Audrey,” he said at last.

  “I know that,” I said, although what goes on between Vaughn’s ears is as much a mystery to me as the thoughts of any other person. “She’s a lovely lady.”

  “I think we’re growing apart. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Maybe you should take things to the next level,” I said, borrowing unfamiliar vocabulary from one of the appalling television shows I happen to find myself watching on occasion. “Maybe you should ask her to marry you, or something?”

  “Really? You think so?”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  I’ve always thought of Vaughn’s relationship as, in many ways, idyllic—someone living in another house, who would occasionally show up for companionship, intelligent conversation, and—far more importantly—sex. And who would then clean up after themselves and go back home again. But it doesn’t appear to be fulfilling after all, at least not to Vaughn, who no doubt needs more emotional sustenance from a woman than I do. I have no need of it at all.

  I was hoping Vaughn wouldn’t put forward a series of reasoned counterproposals because I am very poorly equipped to deal with them, but in the event I need not have concerned myself. He was beaming, the wide Cheshire Cat grin of the suddenly enlightened.

  “That’s what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll propose. Of course! How could I have been such an idiot?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. Idiocy is not something I usually miss, but in Vaughn’s case I prefer to think of him as merely confused.

  “She’s been hinting,” he said eagerly. “Her sister got married last year and ever since then she’s been making jokes about being on the shelf, being too old to worry about it, but it must be what she’s wanted all along!”

  He drank the last of his pint with unseemly haste, considering I had paid for it, stood up, and wrapped his scarf around his neck.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get a ring, dear chap!” Only Vaughn could use the phrase “dear chap” and not sound like a pompous oaf. “I’ve half an hour left before I need to be back at work. I need to go and find a jeweler!”

  Gaviston Public School, Grove
Road. I went there when I was thirteen, seven months away from my fourteenth birthday. Recovered by then from the initial shock of bereavement, I had settled into a phase that could best be described as sullen. I had no wish to meet anyone, talk to anyone, or engage in activity of any kind—educational or social—so in that environment, of course, I fit in very well.

  On my third day, two boys from another class cornered me in the cloakrooms.

  “You’re new,” one of them said. He was a pale kid, with one of those stupid haircuts they had back then, shaved at the sides, mouse-colored and spiky on top, a ridiculous rat’s tail plaited down his back. Next to him his companion was less muscular than corpulent, but still at least a foot taller than I was. It would be another two years until the growth spurt that took me up to six foot and a bit beyond.

  “Yes,” I said, already wary of speaking too much and giving away an accent that didn’t match theirs.

  “Where you come from,” the other one offered. Was it supposed to be a question? It hadn’t sounded like one and therefore I didn’t feel the need to answer.

  I went to leave but they were blocking my way. The smaller of the two said, “You a bit weird, or summink? Bit funny in the ’ead?” The fat one snorted and moved closer, close enough to grant me the scent of his armpits.

  I don’t even suppose they were being particularly threatening; I certainly wasn’t afraid of them. But they were in my way and I had no desire to hang around in this stinking, graffitied hole any longer.

  I think the primary advantage I have over people is surprise. I move quickly, I don’t hesitate, and I don’t give anything away.

  I kicked the fat one in the groin and he doubled over and fell to the floor, shrieking with a noise that sounded far too girlish and shrill for one so large. The smaller one looked at me, his eyes widening. He was about the same size as I was, and my guess was that he’d never been challenged, never had to get physical with anyone without the assistance of his chum.

  He took a step backward and went to let me pass. I thought about it, really I did, but the fat shit was still rolling around on the floor crying, and for the first time in months I felt something stirring inside me, something unfamiliar. It felt good. I was having fun.