The stone hands locked around
his windpipe. His eyeballs bulged.
And his eyes opened.
Lids flicking up with a butterfly motion. Effortless.
The room was quiet and the air was
still. He could see the wardrobe in the corner by the door. The moon through
the uncurtained window. The luminous green hands of the travel alarm clock,
although he couldn't make out how they were arranged.
Inside his chest he felt
nothing at all. The bed was silent now, no creaks. He expected to find the
bedclothes in knots, but the sheets were still stiffly tucked in around him.
Hospital corners. He lay calmly motionless and listened to his breathing,
steady now. Nor could he feel his heart pounding any more.
So peaceful.
The relief was so great that he
didn't try to move, just let his head sink into the pillow and his gaze drift
up to the ceiling, where the little light hung in a frosty miasma about six
inches above his left temple. He went on watching the light, fully resigned
now, as it turned from blue to pink . . . to blood red.
He tried to scream then, his
face twisting, but it came out as a parched rattle.
Chapter IV
This was the thing about Wales. Some places seemed cursed—filthy
weather, soil you could hardly grow dandelions in—and some places, like this
village, had it all. The change, when you came out of the forestry, the other
side of the Nearly Mountains, was dramatic and yet subtle too . . . the landscape
greener, the weather milder, the whole atmosphere all-round mellower.
It embraced you, he thought,
like a good woman,
The better to appreciate it, Dai
Death, the undertaker in Pontmeurig, stopped his hearse in the middle of the
road, where it left the forestry, and looked down on the village in its little
cwm. Sunday afternoon. No hurry. It had looked like rain in Pontmeurig- but the
sky over Y Groes was as deep a blue as you could ever expect to see in Wales.
The cottages were a clutch of eggs in
a nest; the church a benevolent old bird.
A clutch of eggs, yes. Nice
metaphor. Dai liked to write a bit of poetry and aspired to the crown of the
Glanmeurig Eisteddfod. Sitting at the wheel of his hearse, window wound down
and the sunlight warm on his bald head, he lit a cigarette, feeling happy because
he liked doing business in Y Groes and it wasn't often he got the chance—not
because nobody died here, but because they had little use for undertakers. He
wondered, not for the first time, how anyone could look out at such a place
from his deathbed and hold on to any hopes of going to a greater paradise,
By all accounts, though, today's
customer had been in no position to dwell upon the relative merits of a
hypothetical heaven and the village of Y Groes. He'd gone in the night when,
Dai supposed, Y Groes looked much the same as any other village.
An engine grumbled at him from
behind. In his wing mirror he saw a tractor that couldn't get past, it being a narrow
road and the farmer not wanting to sound his horn because he could see a coffin
in the back of Dai's hearse - how was he to know it was empty?
"All right, man. I'm off."
Dai tossed his cigarette out of
the window, raised an apologetic hand and put the hearse in gear. Normally he might
have let out the clutch sharpish like, and shot off in a spurt—bouncing the pale
utility coffin into the air, giving the bugger on the tractor one hell of a shock.
But he didn't like to do that now.
Not here.
For Dai's greatest aspiration,
even closer to his heart than the thought of wearing the plastic crown at the
Glanmeurig Eisteddfod, was to get himself a cottage in this village and retire
one day to paradise.
He was on his own today, his
brother Harri still in Bronglais Hospital with his back. So he had to ask the
landlord to give him a hand with the customer.
"Police sent you. is
it?" said Aled Gruffydd.
Dai nodded. "Said could
they have him stored until they find his relatives down in England." He
lifted up the tailgate of the hearse and pulled out the lightweight fibreglass coffin
with one hand. "Well, see. I don't mind jobs like this, even on a Sunday.
Sooner or later some bugger pays the bill." He smiled slyly. "English
prices, isn't it?"
The bedroom was almost directly
over the bar. It had a very low ceiling and wasn't really big enough for three
men even if one would be forever still.
"Above and beyond, this
is, Dai." Aled grunted as they laid the body on a plastic sheet next to the
coffin. It was going to be a tight fit. "Not what I'd call a small man,
the Professor. Also, seemed to smell a good deal better, I remember, when he
was alive."
"Obviously went off in a
bit of a sweat." Dai observed.
The customer was somewhere between late middle-age and elderly. There
was a touch of froth, which nobody had bothered to wipe away, at the side of
his mouth.
"Professor, you say?"
Dai said conversationally, trying not to react to the expression on the face of
the customer. He was reminded of the time he'd removed a body from a dentist's
chair, a man, who - mortally afraid of dentists all his life - had expired at
the very moment of extraction.
"Well, of sorts."
Aled was small, but wiry and strong enough to take the corpse's weight at the
shoulders. "Big Morgan, it was, first started calling him that. Retired
teacher, I suppose, or a college lecturer. Some sort of historian. Always
walking around making notes, looking at things, never at people, you know the
kind. Oh. Christ, I forgot they did that. Pass me that cloth, will you,
Dai."
"Sorry, Aled. Should have
thought." In this part of the world most people still knew the basics of
it. They had not grown up with funeral parlours; laying out their relatives was
something most of them had had to learn, like changing a wheel. Not only was it
uneconomical to pay somebody like Dai to prepare a corpse, it was also still
considered in many homes—and particularly, he'd found, in Y Groes—to be less
than polite to the deceased.
"Can you do anything about
that?" Aled asked, nodding at the face. "Or does he have to go to his
maker looking as though somebody was amputating his leg without the anaesthetic?"
Dai made a professional appraisal
of the customer's blue and twisted features, working out how they might be rearranged.
"Easy," he said loftily. "Piece of piss. What was it anyway?"
"Well, heart. Angina, something
of that order. Dr. Wyn said he was not surprised at all. Been coming here for months,
see. Had his pills through Dr. Wyn regular."
"Why was that?"
"Well, convenient, I
suppose."
"No, no. I mean why did he
come here? The fishing?"
"No, I was telling you. Historian
or something. Into old churches."
"Not old houses?" In
Dai's experience, most of the English people who persistently returned to this
area were looking to buy a piece of it, some little stone cottage with an
inglenook and a view of the mountains. "Buggers go crazy over places like
this."
"Do they now?" Aled
said. "Well, well."
"Name your price, man,
place like this. Name your bloody price."
Aled made no reply. Dai looked
for an expression in the landlord's compact face, but none was apparent. All
the same, he decided this was as good an opening as any, and he said carefully,
"You know ... I was only thinking myself, well, I wouldn't mind retiring
to Y Groes, me and the wife. Nowhere quite like it, see, for the peace and
quiet. Casual like. In passing. Not sounding as serious as he really was.
"But hell, man, I don't suppose I could afford it any more, even with
selling the business, the way things are going, the prices."
"Where do you want him?"
Aled asked, as if he hadn't heard any of this. "In that thing, is
it?"
"In the shell."
"The what?"
"Shell. What we call it.
Utility job, see. Just to get him to the warehouse, and then the relatives
choose something more tasteful." Dai tapped the side of the light-coloured
coffin to show how cheap and flimsy it was, then returned hopefully, to his
theme. "What's the answer, though? What is the answer? Local boy wants a
home of his own, priced out of the market before he starts. Got to go, isn't
it? No option. Winds up in bloody Birmingham or somewhere and all the rich
buggers who couldn't tell a Welsh mountain ewe from a Beulah speckle-faced if
you drew 'em a diagram are moving in and building bloody squash courts. Well,
of course, I have nothing against the English, as a race . . . Right, now, you
get the other side and we'll . . . Ah, lovely job."
Both men stood back. Dai Death
mopped his bald head with a handkerchief. "So, tell me, purely out of
interest, like . . . How much are they fetching?"
"Beulah
speckle-faced?"
"Houses, man! What would
it cost for me to get a place here? How much did the last one go for?"
"I can't remember. It was
a long time ago."
"Oh, come on now!"
Dai was getting a bit exasperated. What Aled was supposed to say was, well,
Dai, funny you should bring that up because there's this very interesting little
place I know of, not on the market yet, but if they thought you were keen—you
being a local boy, a Welsh- speaker and a respected professional man — I'm sure
a nice quick deal could be arranged, no fuss, no estate agents.
"That it?" Aled
demanded. "Finished, have we?"
"I can't credit that at
all," Dai said. "Bloody hell, in Pont, I'm not kidding, the estate agents'
signs have been going up faster than the TV aerials when we got the first
transmitter."
"So they tell me."
said Aled.
"But not here."
"No." A note of
finality. "Not here."
Dai was baffled and felt slighted.
What, he wondered, had happened to Tegwyn Jones's place now his wife was also
dead? Every village always had a couple of houses ready for the market,
especially now, when the English would pay a small fortune for something you
wouldn't keep chickens in. And what about—now here was a point — what about the
judge's house?
"Having the lid on, are
we. Dai?"
"I'll deal with that.
Tricky, this sort. Professional use only." Dai straightened up, gathering
what was left of his dignity. They only ever called him out here for the
foreigners, like that chap Martin, the curate. And poor Bethan's man.
He sniffed. For Judge Rhys
there'd been a coffin custom-made by Dewi Fon, the carpenter, gravestone by
Myrddin Jones, the sculptor. He went out to the landing and returned with a
rectangular strip of fibreglass. which he slotted into place, concealing the
dreadful face of the Professor. Wondering gloomily who would be doing this job
in ten years' time when he and Harri had retired. Harri being a bachelor and
Dai's son away at university to study engineering. No doubt the business would
get taken over by one of these national chains with colour brochures of coffins
and off-the-peg shrouds. Well, bollocks to that.
"So what happened,"
he asked bluntly, "to the judge's house?"
"Well done, Dai,"
said Aled. ignoring the question.
"Look, come and have a drink
before we take him down."
He towed the coffin away from the bedroom door so they could get out.
"There, see . . . getting soft, I am, helping you with your bloody corpse
then offering you a drink." He
smiled. "Stiff one, is it?"
"Very funny." said
Dai Death. "I'll have a pint and I'll pay you for it."
"Good God. Epidemic of
something fatal, is there, in Pontmeurig, that you're so wealthy?"
"The judge's house."
Dai reminded him, annoyed now and showing it. "Just tell me what happened
to the fucking judge's house?"
Driving away, customer in the back. Dai took careful note. And, yes, it
was true enough. Not a For Sale sign anywhere in the village He shook his head
in disbelief, afflicted by the usual aching longing as he took in the mellow
stone and timber-framed dwellings, the crooked stone steps and walled gardens,
the soft fields and the stately oaks, the wooded amphitheatre of hills sloping
to the Nearly Mountains. Even the bloody Nearly Mountains, wind-blasted and conifer-choked
. . . even they looked impressive when viewed from Y Groes.