The Manner of the Mourning Read online

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  Elizabeth was buried at ten o’clock on a cold wet morning in January. She had chosen to be buried because she wanted her body to rot in the ground and to be fed upon by fat, white, blind grubs. Cremation, to her, somehow seemed too clean, if not even ethereal, her ashes purified by flame being scattered on the wind. Keeping them in an urn seemed simply too absurd.

  Crows swirled high against the grey sky and cawed as they returned to their black prickly nests dotted amongst the upper branches of the bare wintry trees. Rain fell in sharp sheets, cold, driven by blustery wind beneath the dark clouds. Soon it would turn to hail or sleet or snow.

  The people around the graveside seemed to huddle together, black clad and umbrellad, and to glance at each other for instants with moist eyes, or simply stand and stare emotionless, just cold. Soon it would be time to go, a duty done, thoughts of life and death darting to the surface of minds dulled by the greyness of it all.

  For some, the shock of death had long passed and they could not or chose not to envision the body now hidden in the earth beginning the long process of decay. For others the actual physicality of it all was too much, and the person loved or hated, slept with, eaten with, talked and listened to, who laughed and cried and all the rest of it, they now realised was in a wooden box underground. These, shuddered at the thought and felt a gnawingly empty sense of loss as the wind and the rain drove them from the graveside singly or in small groups, not many of them in truth, back to their cars, to carry on with their lives as it is put, probably, shortly to forget. In effect of course they had simply been mourning themselves.

  When they had gone, the gravediggers extinguished their cigarettes, smoked furtively behind a respectably distant tree, and began to shovel clods of black wet earth onto the coffin lid. It was a task so often performed that they had long become inured to it and it had become no more than painting a fence or pruning a privet. No thoughts were thought of wonder at the extinct life the body they were burying represented. They simply did not care who or what Elizabeth Anne Howard had been. Nor indeed, did they have any reason to.

  “I’ve been out with her three times now and I still haven’t got anywhere,” Nick, a tall greasy blonde with a squint in a hazel eye said to Morty his work-mate as he leant for a moment on his spade. “Maybe I should adopt the subtle approach and just go up to her and tell her to get her knickers off.”

  Morty, a short and gnarled sixty year-old in a flat cap looked at Nick for a moment, simply smiled and then shook his head.

  “Who is she anyway?” he then asked.

  “Remember? The girl I told you about?”

  “Oh, her, yes,” Morty said, wiping his nose on the back of his glove. He then looked up at the sky and ran his tongue around his lips, and his whole body began to shake. “Long ago, long ago, I was a seafarer,” he then said. “I’ve been to Mombasa and Maracaibo, to Valparaiso and Vladivostok. I’ve had a thousand women, all shapes and colours. I’ve seen sea the colour of wine and men bloated and blacked with disease. I’ve baked and froze and seen shrunken heads in Jayapura and gorilla’s hands in Douala. I’ve…”

  He stopped, suddenly and swallowed, pursing his lips, his eyes downcast, and he began to dig again. Nick just looked at him thinking that he might continue.

  “I had no idea, Morty,” he then said.

  They completed the task of burying Elizabeth and then returned to their hut where tea was brewed and sandwiches eaten and cigarettes smoked as they listened to the now heavier rain lashing against the wooden planks and grimy windows of their shelter. Nick offered Morty a piece of juicy-fruit rather like an explorer offering a string of coloured beads or a mirror to a savage native king, which, graciously, he accepted.

  “I’ve met a lot of people in this job,” Morty said thoughtfully as he chewed. “Funny that, don’t you think? Meeting people in graveyards, but it’s true. Some I’ve liked, some I haven’t, some I haven’t noticed. People I’ve worked with, people coming for the funerals, you know, watching them? One thing I’ve learnt though,” he then paused, looking into Nick’s squint with his surprisingly beautiful blue eyes. “No one, in the end, what they say, what they do, is worth a shit.”

  Darkness descended upon the cemetery, a bone-chilling deathly winter dark and already a little debris had blown over her grave which seemed to have aged and blended in with the hundreds of others. It was doubtful whether it ever again would be visited. It was one of those graves that seemed to embrace neglect, unremarkable, not of interest to an antiquarian in a century. And of those who had been in attendance on this day? What did it matter if they returned? Family or friends or ghouls. It was nothing more now than a patch of disturbed ground.

  That night, long after Nick and Morty had stored away their spades and muttered goodnights and had gone home, the little area of the graveyard where Elizabeth’s body lay, close to the main-gates entrance and to a sheltering building which had once been some kind of chapel but was now long shuttered and neglected, echoed eerily to the sound of laughter from some teenagers whose haunt this was to drink cans of beer and grope each other in seclusion.

  Somehow, their thoughtlessness and irreverence was apt, as though Elizabeth in life would have laughed with them as one of the boys relieved himself over her grave, his water piddling onto the already damp soil and steaming in the cold night air. But it was cold, and shortly they were gone. Summer nights were for copulation over graves like a thoughtless shout of defiance against death. In winter they were soon home, a few empty and crushed beer cans littered about and a damp quickly chilling patch of soil their only legacy.

  Elizabeth’s body lay still in its coffin, stiffened and juices drying. She had even thought that she might be buried alive. An ultimate horror she supposed. A long lost relative or lover returns from abroad and remembers on hearing of her death the family curse of cataleptic seizure. When the coffin is opened they find her eyes wild and staring and her fingers torn and bloody from clawing at the coffin lid as her lungs burst seeking air. All was quiet though. No burrowing creature passed close to a sound from her. She had started to decay.

  The next morning brought no respite from the rain. Nick and Morty dug another grave in a plot close to Elizabeth in preparation for an afternoon burial.

  “I used to eat worms when I was a lad,” Morty said as they dug their spades into the earth. “It was to join the gang. Little savages we were. Ignorant and poor. The world has changed. It’s electricity that’s done it.”

  Nick noticed that he had severed a long pink fat worm in two with his spade. He watched as it writhed in the dirt.

  “They’re hermaphrodites you know,” Morty added. “You’ve just created another worm.”

  “Surely it’ll die?” Nick asked.

  “No. It won’t die,” said Morty, smiling.

  The afternoon funeral was a very well attended affair. The graveside was banked with flowers and wreaths in the shape of crosses and blood-red hearts. Some formed the letters DAD and GRANDAD. They had cards attached to them with words such as, “Go to sleep now, Dad” or, “Have a good rest, Dad.” On a black marble headstone to be e
rected later, they had chosen, in gold lettering, the inscription, “Ernest McGonigle, beloved husband and devoted father. Taken unto the bosom of the Lord.”

  There were literally dozens of mourners, brought in convoy by black limousines and private cars, the family alone exceeding in number the average attendance for such an event. They wept copiously in a sort of collective desperation and held each other in little sobbing groups. The women seemed to wear considerable amounts of make-up.

  A shaft of sunlight suddenly broke through the cloud cover and the rain stopped as though in divine approval of the proceedings and gradually the crowd of mourners dispersed. The local British Legion club had been booked for the reception as Dad would have expected everyone to enjoy themselves as he had had a good life and wouldn’t want anyone to be miserable on his account. Soon Nick and Morty were at work again, covering Dad forever.

  The sunshine brought no warmth with it however, and the cold January wind cut across the cemetery, blowing twigs and bits of paper about, and they were glad when the work was done and they could take shelter and fortify themselves with hot tea and sandwiches and bars of chocolate.

  The hut smelled of damp and rotting wood and paint and turpentine and creosote from ancient tins long left open, testimony to a time when the cemetery was at least superficially maintained. These days a sense of near dereliction had descended over the place as nobody really cared any more. Once the bodies were buried, that was more or less it. Fences were not repaired and grass was rarely cut. The times when death was a thriving industry were over. Ancestor worship was now simply a distant race-memory.

  “You seeing that girl of yours tonight then?” Morty asked Nick, his hands warming around an enamel mug of steaming tea.

  “No, ’fraid not,” Nick replied. “She didn’t take too kindly to my suggestion. I don’t think we’re quite suited.”

  “Never mind. You’ll just have to look elsewhere won’t you,” said Morty, taking off his cap and scratching his bald head.

  “Suppose so,” said Nick.

  They then lost themselves in their thoughts and soon it was time to go home again

  “Goodnight, Nick.”

  “Goodnight, Morty.”

  The night was dry but bitterly cold. The wind had increased in strength throughout the evening and now was a vicious icy gale that swept the streets around the cemetery clear of people, and tore at plastic bags caught in the railings, sometimes whistling strange eerie tunes.

  Elizabeth’s body, now no longer the freshest in the graveyard could not be affronted by its company. Whatever had made her different or apart in life was now long gone and all that was left was a cold and rotting cadaver the equal of all the others about her. The fact that she did not have a personal mausoleum or was not buried in a stone sarcophagus in the family crypt would not have been a concern for her in life and so the municipal cemetery was as good a resting place for her mortal remains as any other.

  As to the people she had “left behind,” the people she had known throughout her life, some of whom had even come to watch as she was returned to the earth, what she would have thought or felt about them now is something that simply cannot be known. Those who knew her might have opinions or not. She could not have.

  Whatever the case, day broke to little birdsong save that of the crows and the sky darkened unnaturally with the dawn as heavy black clouds lumbered in overhead and began to beat the earth with fat cold rain. A little later a man appeared at the graveside wearing a black raincoat and carrying a black umbrella. He had not been present at the funeral.

  He stared down at the grave without expression for a time and then left suddenly. In a moment, it was as though he had never been there. And Elizabeth rotted a little more into the earth.

  CHAPTER TWO

  At school, on a wet Monday afternoon in July, Elizabeth sat at the back of the class, bored and staring out of the window. It was a geography lesson with Old Wiggy.

  Old Wiggy was Mr Sanderson who wore a ludicrously obvious red toupee. The fact that his natural hair at the sides and back of his head was grey did not seem to have occurred to him. Mr Sanderson hated Elizabeth.

  Tired of the window view over the muddy playing-fields as the heavy summer rain beat against the pane she began to scribble in her notebook, the drone of Old Wiggy’s voice in the background a distant irritant.

  “Elizabeth.”

  The sound of her name caught her attention and she looked up to see him staring at her.

  “I do hope we’re not boring you, Elizabeth,” he said.

  “Not at all, Mr Sanderson,” she said. “Do please carry on.”

  The rest of the class giggled and the teacher’s face flushed.

  “Don’t get smart with me my girl.”

  “Really, Mr Sanderson, I don’t think you should make it public knowledge that I’m your girl,” she said, smiling.

  The class erupted.

  “Quiet!” Wiggy screamed, the colour of his face now matching that of his wig. “Perhaps, Elizabeth, if you applied your wit to the lesson instead of making facetious remarks we might all benefit.”

  “Yes, you’re quite right. I do apologize. As I said, please do carry on.”

  She crossed her legs and stared eagerly to the front of the class in breathless anticipation.

  “Perhaps you’d like to tell us what the consequences of the continued destruction of the rainforest would be, Elizabeth.”

  “Oh no, I don’t think so. You see. I don’t really believe that such places exist.”

  “What?” Wiggy asked, incredulous.

  “Well, I’ve never seen one, and people pointing vaguely at maps and telling me that they exist is hardly poof is it? I mean, people say they’re in the Amazon basin and central America and central and west Africa, and south east Asia, even on the Atlantic coast of South America and in the Cape York Peninsula and Arnhem Land in Australia, but well, I mean, how do they know? And if we’ve been hacking away at it for five hundred years, how can it still be there? People keep saying that in so many more years there’ll be none of it left and then those so many more years have passed and they say it again. I simply don’t believe it.”

  The bell rang for the end of the lesson and Elizabeth walked past Wiggy, who had still not said another word.

  She met Richard in the corridor. They were both in the same form, but Richard didn’t do geography. He did something scientific instead. Elizabeth wasn’t exactly sure what.

  “Hi, Rich.”

  “Hi, Liz.”

  “I’ve just had a frightful flogging from Old Wiggy,” she said, lapsing into comic public-schoolboyese, which they occasionally did.

  “Yes, he can be beastly to a fellow,” Richard said, thoughtfully. “I say, I’ve just had a parcel of tuck from home. Come to the dorm and we’ll have a feast.”

  “We’ll have to be careful Old Flashbugger doesn’t see us. We won’t half cop it if he does. It’ll be a roasting at the very least.”

  “Come on then. What larks!”

  After school they walked together to Elizabeth’s house.

  Elizabeth’s father was a moderately successful actor and her mother was a producer for the BBC. Their house was set back about a hundred yards from the road and was large, square and ivy clad. Built in the eighteen eighties of solid red and cream brick, it had sixteen rooms and a sunny disposition, facing south. Though it retained a touch of Victorian grimness in some aspect, it was a happy place.

  Daniel Howard, Elizabeth’s father was at home when she and Richard arrived.

  “Dad, can I have some money, please?” Elizabeth asked when she saw him sitting in an armchair in the drawing room.

  “Certainly not,” he replied, looking up. “What a greeting.”

  “Really Father, such cruelty,” she said before bending down to kiss him. “I’ll just have to go on the game if you don’t give me some.”

  “I’m always giving you money,” he said.

  “God, you’re so embarrass
ing. Richard, put your fingers in your ears. Look at it this way Father dear. You’ve never bought me a pony and instead of sending me to Roedean or Benenden you sent me to the local poxy comp. No wonder I’m a nervous wreck.

  I know, that’s it isn’t it? You want me to be a shrivelled-up old spinster and you want to keep me here with you forever, don’t you? Well I shan’t, I tell you, not while I have breath in my body. I shall be free!”

  With this, Elizabeth motioned a swoon and fell into a chair sobbing with her head resting on her forearm.

  “And how are you, Richard?”

  “Fine, thanks, Mr Howard.”

  “Good, good. Take Elizabeth up to her room would you? She makes the place look untidy.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I shall tell Mama how you have used me, sir,” Elizabeth said dramatically as she was leaving the room with Richard, clinging to him.

  “Oh, yes. Your mother won’t be home ’til Friday. She’s working in town.”

  “Ha! Another man. There’s no doubt of it!”

  “Do take her away, Richard.”

  “Yes. Come on, Liz.”

  In Elizabeth’s room they lay on their backs on her bed staring at the ceiling. Outside, the rain had stopped and it had turned into a beautifully sunny afternoon. The sunlight streamed in through the blinds and the sound of the birds tweeting out in the garden floated over them on the soft warm breeze.

  “Why do they twitter so?” she asked thoughtfully. “Feathery reptiles aren’t they?”

  “Who knows,” he said. “Why is there such a thing as a sloth? Perhaps that we might wonder at it?”

  “Light us a fag, Rich?”

  He reached into his blazer pocket and took out cigarettes and matches.

  “Take your blazer off, you must be boiling,” she said.