Death Becomes her

Gillian Watt

The man at the morgue said, “Ladies I’m afraid the accident has left her ... well er ...in a bit of a state.”

I shot a look at my sister Jen. We said nothing to his face, but nodded grimly. “Why do people who deal with death always look like gargoyles?” I said quietly to Jen, as he walked ahead of us down the entrance hall. She glared at me. We went into the viewing room. It was a plain room painted beige. It felt clinical like a hospital. It looked like a room where people would watch executions, as there was a glass screen that divided it in half from floor to ceiling, as if we were going to scream and tear with angry fists into the thing lying there on a trolley. It looked bigger than she was; it seemed to take up the whole space. Its eyes were open. In a surprising grey they stared blankly up at the beige ceiling. Strands of her hair lay dead and dry across her face.

“They couldn’t even be bothered to brush it,” I said to Jen. We were whispering even though the glass was thick and Gargoyle no longer present, presumably discreetly leaving us to our private mourning moment. We were here against Uncle Pete’s Grief Control Instructions — delivered in a voice so thick it seemed like he was drunk.

“There’s no need for any of you to see my sister’s body, it would only upset you,” he had said, as we sat at the mahogany dinner table, the knives neatly laid out in the correct order.

“Don’t forget to take your tranquillisers. You know what the doctor advised,” he said, as if it were an afterthought.

We were all staying at Uncle Pete’s house. I had the audacity to start crying during the first course of the meal, butter chicken curry with naan bread from a plastic packet. But at least we had a small glass of wine.

“No crying now, you remember what we agreed,” he said, a forkful of meat midway between plate and mouth. I ran from the table to a bedroom upstairs. The birds outside couldn’t care less, and they sang and argued loudly beyond the window as if nothing had happened. It was May. None of my siblings followed me. “You know, I really don’t think we can bring the little ones,” Jen had said as we lay awake waiting for the tranks to kick in.

“Oh, Ok, whatever,” I said.

The next day we made some excuse to Uncle Pete that we had to take the car to get some more food. He was distracted; Auntie Anne had gone into a sulk about something, and he just waved us off with,

“Now, don’t you get cigarettes!”

Cigarettes for fuck’s sake. Anyway there we were.

“I wonder what it looks like under the sheet,” I said. Jen gave me a horrified and hurt look and I felt sorry. A caved-in chest probably, all the insides congealed and drying. Broken ribs, broken heart. All broken under the sheet. Well at least that was more honest. God knows she’d had enough to break any heart.

She didn’t look radiant or peaceful, but she was very, very, still. Her jaw was strong and handsome in life and seemed even stronger now that she had no power over us; lying there as if something had been sucked out of her.

“They didn’t even close her eyes,’ I said.

“How long can we stay here?” Jen said.

“I don’t know.”

We stayed until the image had pressed itself permanently on our minds. Hair unbrushed and angry. Eyes staring, grey, expressionless. The mysterious unseen broken body, that I’d lived inside of like an intergalactic creature in a shell, for nine months. The arms that had carried me until I was too heavy to be carried. The broken heart.

Gargoyle man hovered back into the room. Wanted us to leave. We did.

“At least we know she really is dead,” Jen said, as we got into the car. The words floated between us and filled the empty space.

“Just don’t tell Uncle Pete we saw her,” I said. Jen’s eyes were fixed on the road. I saw there was a tiny bit of grey in them. By now Gargoyle would have wheeled the thing back to the room where all the other things were kept in refrigerators. Stuck in drawers, like in the movies, or late-night police TV shows. Its staring eyes wouldn’t see anything then. It wouldn’t even have a beige ceiling not to see. I wondered if he thought of brushing the hair off her face, and I remembered a small piece of dried blood by her mouth. He could have washed that off.

“They didn’t even move the hair from her face,” I said again. Jen said nothing. There was nothing beautiful about it. We arrived back at the house with our secret, chocolate biscuits, and a pack of cigarettes.

That night I didn’t take a tranquilliser, and I lay awake on a mattress on the sitting room floor, listening to the drugged snoring of my brother and sisters. Her face. She took forever in the mornings to “put on her eyes,” arrange her hair, re- arrange her hair, make-up. I hated it. Jen would say, “you’re so hard on her”. I would simply shrug.

The next morning I decided to go back. I phoned the morgue when everyone was out on a ‘nice long walk’.

“The fresh air will do you good,” said Uncle Pete. I smoked a couple of cigs out the back and then found the number.

Gargoyle was very efficient on the phone and remembered who I was. I arranged to go there in a half hour. I looked at myself in the mirror as I put on some lipstick; decided to wear my heels. I grabbed the car keys from one of the neatly labelled hooks by the front door. I could always say I needed to get something from the chemist suddenly. Uncle Pete would never ask me what.

Gargoyle seemed nervous when I arrived. He was grimacing. Or smiling. “Oh yes Miss Wood, oh yes, I completely understand, it’s no problem at all,” he said, like a waiter in an otherwise empty restaurant.

“Thank you Mr Cokely, very kind of you.” I had brought a tissue to dab at my eyes and I held it obviously even though I had no intention of crying now.

“Mr Cokely,” I smiled sweetly, “There was one thing, one special request, I wanted to ask you, I was wondering if I might just see my mother up close, you know, you see,” and here I paused for effect, “ I would like to hold my dear mother’s hand just one more time”

“Er well, Er Miss Wood, I’m not sure. I mean well.. .you know we haven’t,” he coughed nervously, “well, we haven’t embalmed the body, I mean the person, I mean the body...that is your mother... and, well it’s not really protocol...” He was getting flustered. “You know, Miss Wood, it’s just not really protocol without a special request for open coffin viewing, you see... it’s very irregular.”

I leaned forward and pressed my hand on his arm. It was bony and chill. I smiled sweetly,

“Oh Mr Cokely, I know what a difficult job it must be for you at times... would you just allow me this one last farewell to my only mother?” After the shock of being touched, his eyes brightened a little, and there was another grimace. He agreed, of course.

Later, I said to Jen’s disapproving looks,

“I mean, how many morgue attendants get flirted with, for fuck’s sake? They spend day-in and day-out with corpses and grieving people. It makes them strange, and besides, I probably made his day.”

Anyway, I was let behind the glass, and he left me alone with her. There was no way I was going to lift the sheet. I shivered standing there.

I reached over. The skin was icy cold. It still felt like skin but there was nothing there. I took a deep breath and leaned forward. I moved the hair off her face, trying not to look at her eyes. The hair fell by her neck as it always did. There was nothing I could do about the small bit of dried blood by her mouth. I wasn’t going to spit on my tissue and rub it off. Holding my breath, I moved my hand across her face to close the eyes. In the movies the characters just gently pass their hand down across the lids, so, naturally, I did this. I felt the tickle of her eyelashes. Nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing happened. They wouldn’t move. I had to look then, and they were like two dead fish eyes. They were beginning to sink into the skull. They were drying out. A wave of nausea nearly floored me. The lids were stiff. Rigor mortis for fuck’s sake.

So I did it again but this time I pushed down with one finger firmly on each one. The left one moved. It didn’t close completely, but it was, more or less, shut. The right one didn’t move. Oh fucking great, now she’s winking at us. I had to cough loudly to cover an involuntary, and nearly uncontrollable, fit of weird laughter. Finally, I pushed the other eyelid down. Enough to cover most of the fish eye, although, when I stepped back, it looked a bit more sunken than the other. It was the best I could do. Then I thought that I’d better actually hold her hand, as I’d said I would. That way she would know that I hadn’t told a lie.

At that point, Gargoyle knocked softly at the door. I let go of her hand as if I’d been caught stealing something precious, and turned quickly to join him in the entrance hall. I forced, what I hoped was, another winning smile. “Oh thank you so much, Mr Cokely. That’s made all the difference to me”. He smiled again and shook my hand intensely.

I got back to the house just before the others returned from their walk. Jen looked harried.

“Well, that was a fucking waste of time,” she said, “The little ones just fought the whole way, and Uncle Pete and Auntie Anne bickered about house insurance.”

“Nice,” I said, “Better take more tranquillisers.”

I lay awake again that night, on my back, staring straight ahead. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t feel anything. Car headlights from the window moved light over the room as they passed. Each time the lights crossed the room, they lit up a beige ceiling.