Like Bernie Skinner always says - like any landlord -after the third time of calling time, 'Aint none of you got homes to go to?' With that sudden fierceness, as if he's insulting his own customers, as if he really hates all boozers and loiterers and it's the worst disgrace you can throw at a person, to have no home to go to.
And they're always sad anyway, these pick-ups from long-term institutions. Taking them out of one box just to put them in another. As if there was never any choice in the first place, and if you'd listened carefully you could've heard the sound of a coffin being nailed, long before I showed up. I picked up a prisoner once. Wormwood Scrubs. Heart attack, fifty-one years. I said to the warder, 'What was he in for?' and he said, 'Murder. Murdered his missis three years ago. Turned out to be a life sentence after all.' Or a merciful release.
But the outcast and the outlawed have to die too, the shunned and forgotten, and somewhere there's a reluctant relative who has to step uneasily forward. And you never ask, it's not your place, what exactly this death means to them. Though you can see sometimes it's not the simple, neat thing they'd hoped for, a merciful release. Your job is to provide a decent funeral, decency and respect with regard to the final disposal, everyone deserves that. It's not your job to pry.
What you learn in this business is how to keep your mouth shut.
There were brick walls and a gateway and a drive and gardens and trees, so that though it was the edge of London you might have been arriving at someone's country mansion. Except the mansion had got mixed up with what looked like an old-style barracks block, with grilles on the windows, and, once through the main entrance, there was the usual sour-milk smell of Institution, the usual squeaky corridors leading off, the usual rattle of things being shifted by trolley.
The receptionist looked at my ID and the forms, and I thought, Some day someone will do this for June, someone will come with the papers. Release of the body. It'll be the next main event. The receptionist picked up her phone and tapped out a number, then looked at me, the way people do when they're on a phone as if they're not looking at you at all but at the same time they're staring. She had hair permed stiff as wire and glasses hanging from her neck on a chain, and I thought, She's been here long enough to view everyone as inferior, everyone as suspicious. Long enough to know that if you put her in charge she'd run it a whole lot better. Beaky face, twisty mouth. She held the receiver clamped to her ear, starting to look cross at being kept waiting and starting to look cross at me for seeing her being kept waiting, and I thought, as I do sometimes, it helps to calm things down, And you too, sweetheart, one day, you too. Release of the body.
Then she said crisply into the phone, 'I see. I'll tell him,'
then to me, with a sort of relish, 'You'll have to wait. The superintendent's on a late lunch, he won't be back till three.'
I said, 'I can wait,' thinking, I'm damn glad I didn't send Trev.
She scanned the forms again, as if they might have changed, then handed them back, looking at the next thing on her desk, like I was being dismissed. Then just at the point when she knew I was going to ask, she said with a little huff, as if I should know, 'Round the back of the main building and across the service yard.'
But I wouldVe known anyway. There's always an incinerator chimney. There's always a blank double door like the back exit of a cinema. If there's no one about and there's no other sign, you bang with your fist on the double door. Someone comes to a window and sees the Maria reversed up.
She said, 'Three o'clock.'
It's a sort of distaste. Stigma, that's the word. Like you don't want to know the man who takes away your rubbish. I'm used to it, it's natural. The old man used to say an undertaker's half lord, half leper. You shouldn't hold it against.
I thought of asking: Is there somewhere I could get a bite? Then reckoned better of it. Then I thought, for a mad moment: Twenty minutes - I could see June. Just see her. Out of plain curiosity, out of I don't know what. See what Jack never sees. I could find out and just go, a black jacket will take you most places. But then I thought, No, seeing June might not be so hard, might not be so bad, but first you had to get past this charmer.
I said, 'Three o'clock,' folding the forms back into my pocket.
But I looked towards where the corridors led off, thinking, So this is where. And this is where Amy comes twice a week, year in year out. I wonder if she says hello to this cow, I wonder if she gets a smile.
And it wasn't till then that I realized that today was Thursday. Thursday afternoons: it was one of Amy's afternoons. And I felt myself sort of bracing up, lifting my shoulders and tugging my lapel, the way you do when you might meet someone unplanned, the way an undertaker has to do most of the time. You never know who you might bump into, you never know whose toes you might tread on. It's not just a job, it's a place in the community. That's what the old man said. There's some who say I'm the next best thing to a vicar, and I say, "That's all right. Call me Vie.'
So I stopped being the humble pick-up man. I became the full-scale, knock-'em-dead funeral director, and she must've seen, because I made her eyes flick away from me.
I said, 'Nice out, I'll take a stroll.'
It was an airy, breezy day, the sunshine coming in quick splashes. I walked out on to the forecourt, checked the Maria was parked okay, then took one of the paths that fanned out across the lawns, feeling like a truant, feeling that I was enjoying this, the boss doing the hired man's job, this slipping in and out of a part like the sun dodging the clouds. Feeling that for twenty minutes I had a special angle on the world.
There were rose beds and trees. Patients were out exercising, taking the air too. What do you call them? Patients? Inmates? Residents? Some of them moving oddly or standing oddly still. A thin man came towards me, his lips and his fingers clenched round the stub of a cigarette as if he was trying to pull a long piece of string from his mouth, but it was pulling back. Others looked quite normal, only the old clothes gave them away. But even then. So if you weren't careful. And how would you explain'? So you think you're an undertaker, do you? You better come along with us.
I sat on one of the benches while the sun came out and went in, came out and went in again. The man with the cigarette turned and came back, as if I'd taken his bench, and as he passed me he snarled like a dog, dribbling, his teeth showing. I wasn't afraid. Have no fear. I wondered if Amy was afraid, whether she'd been afraid when she first came. But women aren't afraid, or not of the same things. I thought, You see all the dead, all the bent and broken or plain stretched-out dead, and you think, These people are strangers now, total strangers. But it's the living who are strangers, it's the living whose shapes you can't ever guess.
And that's when I saw them. There must be something that makes you look. Sitting on a bench, on a bench on another path, in front and to the left. I saw Amy's head of brown hair, the breeze stirring it, the sun putting colour into it, and that way she had of sitting, plain and straight and simple, as if she was waiting her turn. But not before I saw Ray> looking small beside her, almost like her kid. His little coconut-shy head, and that way of scratching his neck, I'd recognize that gesture anywhere, the fingers reaching right into his collar as if a whole mouse had dived in there. I thought, I wonder if he knows, he's definitely thinning on top, bit of pink showing through.