Dead Romantic (11 page)

Louis didn't seem too thrilled at the prospect of going back to his family, but I nodded again, and tried to smile and look like it didn't matter. ‘What are you going to eat if you don't eat fish?' I asked.

‘Chips,' he shrugged. ‘I guess five minutes would be okay, if you really wanted to see him.' I nodded again. ‘Okay.' He took a bunch of keys out of his trouser pocket and found the one to unlock the door.

I'd never been in a funeral parlour before. I'd expected it to be all dark and cobwebby and for a big, meaty, dead-people stink to hit me. But the reception was warm and biscuit-coloured and smelled of tea and sweet flowers. There was a small tropical fish tank in the corner and a painting of a field full of lambs.

‘How's your nose?' he asked, bringing the potatoes in for me and closing the door behind us.

I touched my face, then immediately wished I hadn't cos my nose started throbbing again. ‘Hurts,' I said. He looked really guilty, and at that moment I would have said anything to make his face not go like that, even though he had caused both my nose to hurt
and
his face to go like that. ‘Only when I touch it though. Otherwise, it's fine, really. So, what do you do here?' I asked him, looking around.

He looked at me. ‘Well, we deal with dead people and stuff.'

‘No,' I laughed, ‘I mean you. What's your job?'

‘Uh, a bit of everything really.' He tapped the side of the little fish tank in the wall. ‘Preparing the coffins. Getting the suits ready. Dressing the clients. I'm allowed to drive the cars now sometimes but my dad still won't let me direct the funerals. He's kind of fussy about stuff and I'm not really. He doesn't quite trust me not to mess things up.'

‘They're nice fish,' I said, nodding to the fish tank. I was just making conversation really.

‘They're mine,' he said, wiping a sheen of rain from his forehead. ‘I'm not allowed pets at home so Dad and Uncle Pete let me keep these instead. They're for the mourners really but I feed them and clean them out and stuff.'

‘They're pretty,' I said. ‘I'm not allowed pets either. But I . . . kind of found this Jack Russell puppy and he's mine now. My mum and dad don't know about him yet. I've been hiding him. It's hard though, running straight upstairs every time I come home. Running straight out
first thing. I'm sure they're beginning to smell a rat. Or a dog.'

Louis laughed.

‘I'm going to keep him though. They can't stop me.'

‘Good for you,' he said. ‘I wouldn't dare with my dad. Talking of which, we'd better . . . um, I'll just go and . . .' Louis chucked his keys down on the coffee table and disappeared into an office next door, mumbling about his phone.

Zoe popped up from behind a sofa. I clasped my hand over my mouth to stop from screaming.

‘What are you doing?' she whispered. ‘Why the hell's he here?'

‘He came back for his phone. I didn't know what to do so I pretended I was all upset over Luke the Lifeguard. He's let me in so I can see the body. A last time before the funeral, kind of thing.'

Zoe sniffed. ‘Well, boys'll do anything if you cry hard enough, I suppose.'

‘Or maybe he's just being nice?' I snipped.

‘Just hurry up and get rid of him,' she said, getting up. Behind her back, she was holding a large, scary-looking meat cleaver. She ducked down again.

Louis came back into the reception area, waving his phone to show he'd found it. ‘We can go in,' he said. ‘I've switched it all on. You can leave the potatoes here if you like.'

He led me along a small corridor to an unmarked door, opened it for me and I went in. The room was small and red and dimly lit by large candles. It smelled sweet, like
summer pudding, and in the corner was a little CD player softly playing the theme tune to
Baywatch
. A large object painted orange and shaped to look like a dinghy stood on a stand right in the middle. I guessed it was a type of coffin. Inside it lay a man with his hands clasped over his chest. He was dressed in a wet suit and over his legs was draped a blue Chelsea flag.

‘I'm going to back to the restaurant for a bit, okay? Otherwise Dad'll wonder where I've got to.' Louis whispered. I nodded. ‘I reckon I could give you about ten minutes. Then I'll make some excuse and come back and let you out.' I thought he was going to clasp my shoulder in sympathy, but at the last minute he itched his nose instead.

‘Thank you.'

He closed the door behind him. I heard his footsteps down the hallway and the front door closing. Then nothing.

Zoe appeared from behind a red curtain. ‘About time.'

I stepped closer to the body in the coffin. It was weird how it still looked like Luke the Lifeguard, but not quite. Like Mrs Cleak had, except not old and wrinkly. His skin wasn't pink any more, it was sort of bleached. There was no expression on his face at all. Like a doll. Tucked into the sides of the dinghy coffin were some car magazines, a bottle of super-strength lager and a photograph of a group of sunburnt men with their tops off and pints in their hands.

‘People always say they look peaceful, like they're asleep, but he doesn't look peaceful. He just looks dead.'

‘Just as well,' said Zoe, pulling the meat cleaver from her waistband. ‘He won't feel this then.'

And before I even had time to look away, she swung the cleaver high into the air and down again, hard onto his thick, pulse-less neck.

Kerrrrrrrr-chunnnnnnnk!

 

 

 

 

A
head on its own was pretty disgusting – so disgusting, it was almost funny. It was a bit like something you would see in the window of a butcher's shop, all bright red and cleanly cut and stinking of meat, until you remembered that it was not just some pig or some cow's head – it was a human head. A human head I'd been flirting with all last summer. A head that had laughed and cried and fallen in love and blown out candles on birthday cakes.

‘I don't know how you can be so . . . fine about it, Zoe,' I told her. ‘So cold. You've just cut a man's head off.'

‘No, I've just cut a
corpse's
head off. It's dead meat, Camille. It has no nerve endings. No feelings anymore. Once you accept that, it's mind over matter. It's easy.'

I still couldn't quite accept that but, as it turned out, cutting Luke's head off
had
been the easy part of the process. Getting the body out of the coffin was major diffs, and getting it out quietly was even more diffs. Because the coffin was on a stand, we had to get it on the floor before we could lift him out of it. And I never realised just how heavy a coffin was.

‘Come on, heave!' Zoe whispered. ‘Bend your knees, one, two, three, LIFT!'

‘I am. I'm trying as hard as I . . . can. It's not going to . . . budge!' We both let go and stood back. The dinghy coffin had shifted on the stand, but only slightly.

‘Dead weight,' said Zoe. ‘Blast.'

‘Well, it moves
on
the stand, so it must be able to move
off
the stand as well,' I whispered. I rounded on it, standing at the head end, opposite where Zoe had spread a black curtain out on the floor.

‘What are you doing?' said Zoe.

‘Tipping him out. We're not going to get him out of it otherwise, are we? If we can't lift it, we'll have to tip it.'

‘No! The force will bruise him!' she said. ‘Help me slide it back.'

We both took the foot end of the coffin, pulled it backwards with all our might. With an almighty
THUD
the stand collapsed.

Kerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrumph!

We both stood absolutely still and silent, listening out for signs of Louis or a nosey neighbour or the police, but there came nothing.
Baywatch
still tinkled along on the speaker.

‘Well, that's one way of doing it I suppose,' I said when the dust had settled.

‘Okay, quickly, help me pull him upright,' said Zoe and we grabbed hold of the body by its arms and pulled it into a sitting position. As we did, the head rolled back off the shoulders and plonked into the coffin.

We dragged the body out and lay it on the curtain, where we wrapped it up and tied both ends with curtain cord. Then we put the coffin back on the stand and filled it with the two heavy potato sacks, plus a spare water-cooler bottle we found in the corridor to weigh it down more. Once we'd wrapped the potatoes and the bottle in the Chelsea flag, it kind of looked like it had been before, except a bit more lumpy, with just his head on show.

‘There. That wasn't too taxing, was it?' she said, then stopped. She sighed and banged her eyes shut like she'd just remembered the answer to the million-dollar question when it was a second too late.

‘What? Zoe, what is it?'

She turned to me, coming back to life and posting the cleaver back into her waistband. ‘Right, when Louis comes back, I need you to get him to do something.'

‘What?' I frowned, dreading what she was going to get me to do next.

‘Nail the lid down.'

‘What?'

‘Louis must nail the coffin lid down, otherwise when they nail it down tomorrow morning for the funeral, they are going to know someone has tampered with the
contents. It looks all right in this dimmed lighting, but in broad daylight it is not going to look like a body.'

‘Well how am I going to get him to do that?' I cried. ‘I'm only supposed to be saying goodbye.'

‘Use your feminine charms on him. Cry again if you have to. You can do it.'

So I did it. When Louis came back, Zoe waited behind the altar with the headless body and I turned on the water-works. I got myself in a state, producing real tears, saying I was afraid Luke's ex was going to visit the funeral parlour the next day and put a lock of her hair in with Luke (I'd seen that on a film once) and that was why I needed him to nail the lid down tonight. And even though he knew he might get in trouble with his dad who didn't trust him with watering the flowers, let alone nailing down the lids, he did as I asked him. I hugged him in relief. He hugged me back. And even though we weren't hugging for a real reason, it was the nicest thing that had happened all night long.

Louis walked me out of the funeral parlour and we said one of those awkward goodbyes where we didn't quite know whether to do a handshake or another hug.

‘I can't thank you enough for, well, you know, letting me in and everything.'

He shrugged. ‘It was no sweat, really.' He smiled and looked at his shoes.

‘Will you get in trouble for nailing the lid down?'

‘Probably. So, will you be okay now?'

I nodded, pretending to wipe my eyes with a tissue. ‘I'll see you tomorrow.'

‘Yeah. Triple History, isn't it?' I said, rolling my eyes like I really hated it, even though I didn't actually mind it too much.

He frowned. ‘There's no point going in for it though. You won't be able to concentrate and you'd have to leave at ten anyway for the funeral.'

‘Oh yeah, yeah of course, of course. No, I don't suppose I'll bother.' I mentally stapled it to my brain:
don't forget to show up at the funeral tomorrow morning.
Wherever it was.
Sniff.

‘Mr Atwill won't mind, under the circumstances,' he said.

‘I guess not,' I said as he put his hand up to wave and then walked across the road and into Fat Pang's, which was buzzing with people and colour and light. On the doorstep, he turned to look at me and I made out I was starting to walk in the opposite direction. But once his back was turned, I stopped and watched him go inside. He walked over to a long table beside the wall with the huge fish tank in it. He sat down next to Damian, who looked especially Yumsville in his black suit with his shirt wide open. He was leaning back in his chair chatting to some blonde girl with black roots. Louis sipped his Coke and seemed more interested in the fish tank and I couldn't help myself smiling.

‘So, that's Part One,' said Zoe, climbing into the driver's seat and carefully closing the door behind her.

‘What's Part Two?' I said. ‘The head?'

‘Yes, but we should get some serum into him first to retard decomposition.'

‘What's decomposition?'

‘Rotting. He will have been taken out of the freezer at the funeral parlour around four for family viewing. That means he's been thawing ever since. If I get the serum into him tonight, that will give us at least a few more days' grace, provided he is kept at low temperature.' She started up the engine.

‘I thought you only inserted the serum before you electrocuted?' I asked her as the van rolled out of the street and waited at the traffic lights to the seafront. ‘We're not going to electrocute him without a head, are we?'

‘No, of course not,' said Zoe. ‘We need to do things a little differently with this one. The serum can be injected at any time before electrocution takes, but I want to give it longer to work in this specimen, so that it has less chance of going wrong. Like with the hamsters and your dog.'