Trumpet (12 page)

Of course there are always opposite personalities, even with the dead. There are those who have waited all their lives to be dead, who have spent their entire years on earth yearning to be on the other side. You can tell those ‘Can’t Waits’ a mile off. In life they were pessimists, sure to make a mountain out of a molehill. Martyrs. When they die, their spirit is out of Holding and Son’s so fast it leaves sparks on the parlour floor. The face left behind is empty, vacant, naive. Their corpses don’t stiffen in the same way. They are soft, pliable. They practically float. Easy as pie to dress and move; when he is powdering them, Holding often catches the tail end of a smile. The families of those who couldn’t wait to die will sit for ages as if they are just starting to get to know them properly, as if death suits them better than life. They relax into his parlour chairs like deckchairs on a beach. ‘Stay as long as you like,’ he tells them. He will offer a tall glass of cold water, ice clinking.

The friends Albert Holding used to have would never let him talk about his work. Too morbid, too depressing, they said. He thought his friends shallow, silly. Every one of you will die some day, he’d say, and you won’t have a clue what’s hit you. He has bodies come in here that didn’t, by the looks of them, realize there was such a thing as death. There are people that deny death to such an extent that their corpse tries to feign life. Those are the corpses that sit up and burp and suddenly open their eyes to stare at you. People who say that’s a reflex don’t know what they are talking about. Albert knows what he knows. Knows the many differences of the dead. Can tell more
about those distinguished, idiosyncratic personalities than he can about the cause of death. It is the character of the dead that fascinates Albert. Astounding, how much he can tell instantly. The death of some people, the exact manner that they have chosen to exit is often apt. Above Holding’s door on the inside of Holding and Son’s is a sign that he had specially made:

Written on a brass plate, it is the last thing anybody sees before they leave Holding and Son. If they were still in any need of confirmation, Holding thought the quote from
The Duchess of Malfi
would do the trick. He’d come across this quote when he was a student. It had always been his dream to put it up in his very own funeral parlour. There are as many different deaths as there are different people. Personality – people are born with one; people die with one. It might be the same one. Or it might change suddenly at the last minute in time for the next life. Most people die with the same personality that they were born with, only in extreme form – sometimes even a grotesque exaggeration of all their qualities. A naturally fussy person will become fussy beyond belief when they are ill, dying.

The undertaker had a girlfriend once who was a midwife. She told him she could tell the personalities of babies the minute they were born. He told her he could tell dead people’s. He confessed to her one night, over a
bottle of wine and a candle, that some people change personalities the moment they die. That’s why, he told her, getting all excited and knocking back his wine, that’s why you hear a lot of people say that the dead are unrecognizable. The reason the families can barely connect the dead person to the living person is because the dead person has changed! He clinked his glass down, triumphantly, and looked into his midwife girlfriend’s eyes. What he saw made him reach for the bottle and pour some more. Her eyes were shining. It was only when he was walking her home that he realized the look was one of complete terror.

For twenty-five years, Albert has run Holding and Son even though he has no son and his father was not an undertaker. (The name So and So and Son is reassuring no matter whether it is a butcher’s or a cobbler’s.) He welcomes his newcomer to her temporary abode. He prepares those who need it for the long, long journey ahead. He takes their hands, and he says, gently, ‘This is going to be the longest journey you have ever been on. Did you have a tendency towards travel sickness when you were living?’ If they nod, wink, or give him some other sign, he parts their lips and pours in a little Andrews Liver Salts. If he gets no reaction at all, he knows they are ready.

So many people seem to die nowadays. Holding is constantly up against it. They might be resting in peace, but he never gets a moment of it. If the terrible truth be known, most of the people are not at peace anyway. At least not when they first arrive. It takes quite a bit of
talent and ingenuity on the undertaker’s part to talk them into being dead. Some people are just not prepared to go through with it. Sometimes, he resents the time it takes up. He is not paid to be a counsellor! Like so many other people these days, his job involves more than what was on his job description. He has to be everything to everybody. It is not easy. The dead are rushing Albert Holding off his feet. The dead are so demanding. The dead are larger than life.

They might have been pronounced dead by a doctor but, as far as he is concerned, it’s a slow business. It is a process. People don’t suddenly die. Death is not an event. Not even when they have suffered a heart attack or been in an accident, do people suddenly die. There is life long after the heart has stopped beating. Of this he is certain. Years ago people knew this. They would sit around the corpse for nine days before burying it, just in case. Years ago, people feared being buried alive. Death is not the finite moment that we are told it is. Death is the infinite moment. People want to believe that death is quick because they are scared of dying to the rigid core of their being. But the truth is that death messes about, prevaricating, putting things off, being unreliable, carrying out several tiny displacement activities. Out with the dustpan and brush. The polish. The big yellow duster.

Several minutes after the heart has stopped beating a mini electrocardiogram can be recorded. Three hours after the heart has stopped beating, the pupils can still contract. Twenty-four hours after the heart has stopped beating, it is possible to do a decent skin graft. Forty-eight hours
after the heart has stopped beating, it is possible to do a bone graft. It is small wonder the atmosphere in Holding and Son’s is crackling. It can take days for things to quieten down. A new arrival will have the others agitated and attention seeking, like a new baby on a baby ward. It used to be even worse in the days when burials were more popular. Death, like everything else in our society, has speeded up.

Holding is not one given to much gasping himself. He rarely gasps. Nothing ever shocks. When he is walking home in the early evening, a big man shouting at a small woman will shock him; or a boy battering another boy; or a glaring tabloid headline. But death, once you are used to the teasing, the prevaricating, the loitering, death is certainly not shocking. When his own mother died, he wasn’t shocked. He tended to her personally. Gave her the full treatment. Didn’t want her to go in the furnace. Buried her and wrote her stone. Still spends a small portion of every day at her grave. She is at peace, he knows. Lucky to have a son in the profession, to get a little special treatment, to land on her feet.

Holding is rarely shocked. Never gasps. But at one stage in his life, he seemed to have collected a bunch of gasping friends who were forever putting their hands over their mouths, or rushing for the toilet whenever he spoke about his work. It seemed a little unfair. Even his pathologist friend, Dr Norman Snell, found his conversation unseemly. Norman Snell is the one who says, ‘I have a wonderful collection of livers,’ as a chat-up line. The mystery is that it always works. The man has had a
succession of good-looking men. One after the other. Holding has seen them, stroking his hair and laughing. Yet his conversation rarely veers from livers. He never goes anywhere without a jar of them to show people what a liver looks like that has suffered the devastating effects of alcohol abuse. It is Snell’s crusade, like the dead are Holding’s. He cuts livers up in front of appalled, hysterical friends. ‘Look how the fat rises to the top, like fat on mince,’ he says to uproarious laughter. ‘The liver soaked in whisky is very, very fatty.’ Then he brings from his jar of horrors his second sample from an even worse alcoholic than the first. ‘The tough liver is worse than the fatty one. To cut it you have to stab through the thick skin as if it were a haggis.’ His friends’ tears pour down their faces. ‘The skin becomes tough like this when alcohol abuse has reached its heights.’ The heavy drinkers knock back their bitters, looking, frankly, terrified. ‘And then the smell is worse than a brewery.’ There have been times after Dr Norman Snell’s talks of livers when Holding has not been able to touch a drop for weeks.

Holding’s friends do not laugh like the friends of Dr Norman Snell. Holding is always told to shut up or get out. Or worst of all, he is disbelieved. The old friends, who went to university with him, and once thought he was a good guy who had been driven barking mad by the company he kept, have mostly crossed him out of their address books. They used to joke that he couldn’t stand up to the stiff pressure at work. Only when they are dying themselves will they believe him; and then it will be too late.

But today something did shock Albert Holding. Today, Albert Holding did gasp.

What happened has made him think new things and it’s been some years since Holding has had a new thought in his head. He has been thinking about men and women. Ever since the young man got so distressed and pulled him back and forth, shaking him, he has been thinking about men and women. The differences between them. It never occurred to him to think of those differences before, except of course those obvious ones that he is confronted with every working day of his life.

The body came in at nine-thirty this morning. One of Holding’s men went to the house and collected it. There was nothing particularly unusual about the death. The man had had a fear of hospitals and had died at home, being cared for more than adequately by his devoted wife. Holding sat down for his morning cup of tea. He finished that, rinsed the cup in the sink, washed his hands with surgical wash and set about his new arrival, the famous trumpeter Joss Moody – though Holding had never heard of him until today. His funeral wouldn’t be until Friday because it would take some organization. Anything over three days is a definite case for embalming. He had booked the embalmer and she would be coming in some time today.

He started to get the body ready for the embalmer. He took off his pyjamas, a rather expensive pair of pyjamas in a cream linen, very trendy for a man of his years. He took the bottoms off first. The first thing he noticed was that the man’s legs were not hairy. Then Holding noticed
that he had rather a lot of pubic hair. A bush. The absence of the penis did not strike him straight away. Perhaps because he was expecting it, he imagined it for a while. When he did notice after a few moments that there was no visible penis, he actually found himself rummaging in the pubic hair just to check that there wasn’t a very, very small one hiding somewhere. The whole absence made Albert Holding feel terribly anxious, as if he had done something wrong. As if he was not doing his job properly.

He began to take the pyjama shirt off. He noticed his hand was shaking slightly. (Under normal circumstances, he prided himself in having a steady hand with his dead.) The top button came away in his hand. It was an imitation bone button, quite lovely. Albert didn’t know what to do with it. He stared at it in his hand. A few bits of cream thread were still attached to it. He pulled them out so that the two tiny eyes were clear. An image of himself as a young boy scrambling under the table to discover a much missed button of his mother’s rushed towards him. His mother ruffling his hair, telling him she’d never been able to find another one like it. Albert put the bone button in his back trouser pocket to keep it safe, in case it was asked for. He took a deep breath and continued undoing the rest of the buttons. Underneath the pyjama shirt were several bandages wrapped firmly round the chest. He undid the large white safety pin. It was exactly the sort of pin you’d find on an old-fashioned nappy. And so he began to unravel the whole length of bandage. It was quite a difficult business, because of course Holding couldn’t sit the body up. He had to keep turning the
body on its side. Holding pulled a bit of bandage, turned it on the side, rolled the body over to the other side to pull some more. This went on for some time. Holding was sweating by the time he had finished. He could feel the heat of his own breath. He laid him on his back again. Even though Holding was expecting them, he still gave out a gasp when he saw them. There they were, staring up at him in all innocence – the breasts. In terribly good condition for someone of his years. Pert, alert. Small enough to have remained hidden beneath those bandages. The nipples were dark plum colour. Holding had a strange feeling staring at those breasts that was difficult for him to articulate to himself. It was as if they knew they had hardly been seen by anybody. As if they knew they were secrets. There was something in his surprise that made him feel the breasts were some sort of archaeological find, as if he himself had dug them up. Albert Holding looked at the pile of bandages on his parlour floor. They were like the bandages of an Egyptian mummy.

He didn’t mean to but he happened to glance quickly at the face. It gave him quite a turn. The face had transformed. It looked more round, more womanly. It was without question a woman’s face. How anybody could have ever thought that face male was beyond Albert Holding. How he himself could have thought it male! There she was, broad-boned face, black hair, with spatterings of grey, full lips, smooth skin. Quite an extraordinary looking woman. Her body was in good shape. Her stomach lean, muscles taut. Albert wouldn’t have said she
had a particularly womanly shape, but the fact that she was a woman was now beyond question.

It had never happened to him before. He had never had a man turn into a woman before his very eyes. He felt it to be one of those defining moments in his life that he would be compelled to return to again and again.