He didn’t understand the anxiety he felt, but it lingered and grew. After Dorothy he started to keep a record of any similar deaths he came across, writing their names, dates and whatever other details he could find in a notebook. Sometimes there might be two in six months and then nothing for another year. Most never made it onto the bulletin, only the few that happened to be discovered on sufficiently slow news days. For the majority, their solitary deaths created no more ripple than their solitary lives. Frank thought they should be remembered, though. Something in him would not accept that people could vanish without leaving some trace. He made a note of all of them, even attending their funerals when he could, or taking flowers to their doors.
Dorothy Ayling’s funeral took place four months after her death, after all attempts to trace a next of kin had failed. The service was short and simple. The vicar recited the twenty-third psalm. Frank would come to know those words by heart. He would learn the different versions, the cups that overflowed and the cups that runnethed over, he would notice the different lines emphasized by the different ministers. He had always thought the words were intended to reassure the flock left behind, but over time he came to believe that their purpose was to comfort the Shepherd himself. A reassurance to him that this sheep had not felt abandoned, had not been lost and scared, that he had not failed in his duty to care and guide. When Frank heard the psalm as he would many times in the years to come, he wondered if the Good Shepherd was consoled. Could he believe that the person lying now in the plain coffin with no one but a stranger to mourn them had truly felt ‘Thou art with me’?
There was one other mourner at Dorothy Ayling’s funeral. A plump woman with blonde hair and an open face. Frank spoke to her afterwards and learned that her name was Jo Manning, a technical support officer at the coroner’s office. She always tried to get to the funerals of such cases when her workload allowed. For her, attendance was a simple mark of respect. Frank found his attendance less easy to explain but Jo seemed to understand. In time they grew used to seeing each other on separate benches in cold rooms. Jo would tell him of small triumphs in the cases of those where a next of kin was located — sisters who had lost touch, brothers who had moved abroad, as well as the sadness of those where no one was found.
Andrea asked him once about the list of names and dates he had in his notebook and he told her.
‘Is it very weird?’
She hesitated before answering. ‘A little.’
‘I’m not sure why I do it.’
She smiled. ‘Because you have a melancholy disposition.’
‘You make me sound like my mother.’
She looked at him. ‘Perhaps this has more to do with your father.’
Frank put the notebook away and gave a little laugh. ‘I’m hoping I’ll grow out of it.’
Andrea touched his face. ‘You’d say, wouldn’t you, if you ever found the job was getting to you? If it was making you too sad or depressed.’
He told her he was fine.
6
It was a forty-five-minute drive from Frank and Andrea’s home to Evergreen Senior Living. Today an hour had passed already and they remained trapped in the Crufts gridlock around the NEC. Andrea and a Great Dane in the next car stared at each other morosely. The same advert for a carpet showroom had been playing on the radio for what seemed a very long time. Mo sat in the back engrossed in her comic and Frank hummed a tune as the engine idled.
In the advert a sales assistant showed a husband and wife around a showroom. The husband was a reluctant customer. The sales assistant extolled the virtues of different floor coverings to which the husband invariably replied in a dour, no-nonsense Northern accent: ‘Oh aye? And how much is that going to set me back?’
Hearing the amazing low price would cause him to faint and his oblivious wife to say: ‘Come on, Jim, this is no time for a lie down.’
The scenario was repeated over and over again. The final revelation of nought per cent finance was too much for Jim who fainted for the last time and was unable to be revived. It was left unclear whether he was in fact dead, but his wife seemed unconcerned as she told the sales assistant: ‘I think we’d better take the lot.’
The voice-over gave the location of all the stores and then a helium-voiced speeded-up garbling of credit terms and conditions.
Andrea tore her eyes away from the Great Dane and looked at Frank. ‘Do we have to listen to local radio?’
‘I just wanted to catch the news. I want to see if they’ve picked up on the school closure protest.’
‘I can’t take much more.’
‘They’ll play some music soon — it’s not all adverts. It’s golden-oldie hour.’
She sighed. ‘Great — fingers crossed for some Phil Collins.’ A song started and Andrea instantly recognized the pizzicato strings. ‘Oh God, it can’t be …’
Frank beamed and turned the radio up. ‘Amazing! T’Pau! Hey, Mo, this is our song!’
Mo shuffled forward in her seat. ‘What?’
‘Your mother and I — this is our special song.’
Andrea turned round. ‘It isn’t, Mo. Ignore him.’
Frank looked at Mo in the mirror and nodded conspiratorially.
‘Why is it your song, Mom?’
‘It isn’t our song. Your father’s just saying that to annoy me.’
Mo listened to the song for a few moments.
‘How can you have China in your hands?’
‘Who knows, Mo.’
Mo listened for a few more moments and then wrinkled her nose. ‘I don’t like it, Mom. It doesn’t make sense.’
Frank shook his head. ‘You two have got no soul.’
*
It was 1988 when Frank met Andrea, but behind the smoked-glass doors of Birmingham FM every day was 1983. The playlist favoured the current top forty, but would squeeze in a power ballad from Tina Turner or Bonnie Tyler every chance it got. The women who worked at the station favoured big hair, and a kind of leather-and-lace rock-chick-gone-to-seed look. The men had blotchy blond highlights, wore large red-framed glasses, sky-blue jeans and colourful knitwear. Andrea soon noticed the uneasy contrast between the dour off-air personalities of many of the DJs and the larger than life clothes they chose to wear.
Frank was a recent graduate in his first job as a reporter; Andrea was still a student doing a work placement at the station. They instantly picked each other out as misfits. Andrea’s clothes and hair had something of the 1950s about them and she seemed to Frank intimidatingly cool and collected. He was incredulous to later discover that Andrea thought exactly the same of him, though less incredulous to subsequently find that this had been based on a mistaken impression.
When he’d got the job at the station, Frank had assumed that he should wear a suit and tie every day. His budget being tight, he bought his two suits at the local branch of Oxfam. As far as he was concerned, a suit was a suit and aside from checking that they didn’t have holes and weren’t outright flares he didn’t notice the width of the trousers or the shape of the lapel. The team at Birmingham FM, merely five years out of date, smirked behind Frank’s back at his ten-years-out-of-date clothes. For Andrea, however, never suspecting that Frank could be as clueless about clothes as he turned out to be, he was cutting edge in his adoption of new-wave retro style.
Like all work placements, Andrea was taken advantage of. Many producers and presenters believed the best experience they could offer her was either to be left ignored and forgotten in the corner of a room ‘observing’ or fetching drinks and lunch for the team. Aware that they should be providing something more enriching for her, but unwilling to take the time to do so, most staff felt irked by her presence and passed her on to another party as soon as possible. She eventually turned up at Frank’s desk. On their first morning together he got her a tea and asked her how the placement had been going. Andrea was surprised by the question; in three weeks there no one else had asked her.