for a guy ten years my junior, and I would have been interested in reading him, but he just stepped back and indicated the doors with a gesture that was almost a bow.
‘I presume everything is ready inside,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been able to check – I’ve got a lot to do elsewhere, and I’m running late already. And I wouldn’t presume to join you for the actual ceremony. But my very best wishes to you all – and especially to you, Mrs Gittings. If there’s anything I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to call.’
He took a card from his pocket and gave it to her with a decorous flourish. Carla took it without even looking at it. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured throatily.
The personable young man swept us all with a frank blue-eyed gaze, and then with a final murmur of farewell to Todd he headed off towards a small sleek black sports car parked at the other end of the drive. Todd watched him go, his attention taken up to the exclusion of everything else around him.
‘The owner?’ I said, as the bearers slid John’s coffin noisily onto the runners and drew the lawyer out of his reverie
Todd looked surprised for a moment, then he laughed with a slightly odd inflection. ‘No, Mister Castor. The owner is a man named Lionel Palance. He lives a long way from here, in Chingford Hatch, and he hardly ever leaves his house at all now. No, that was Peter Covington, a man who Mister Palance employs as a sort of – personal assistant.’ He rattled off these facts with a lawyer’s precision, as though it mattered that I should get the details straight in my head. Then he seemed to recollect himself, and his tone became more formal and solemn. ‘Mrs Gittings, shall we go in?’
We crossed the drive, following behind the bearers. Carla was still holding Covington’s card, because she’d left her handbag inside the car. ‘Fix,’ she said. ‘Would you . . . ?’ I took the card and secreted it away in the well- worn leather wallet where I keep my mostly useless credit cards.
The front doors of the crematorium opened onto a narrow entrance hall, almost long enough to count as a corridor, whose dark woods and vaulted ceiling confirmed the impression of age I’d got outside. Four huge inlaid panels dominated the space, two to each side of the door: a lion and an eagle to the left, an ox and a robed angel to the right. The symbols of the four evangelists. The carpet was royal blue, scuffed pale in places by the passage of many feet.
Ahead of us was another door. Black-suited men, presumably also hired by Todd, stood to either side of it and nodded respectfully to us as we passed. They looked like bouncers at a nightclub.
We walked though into a large high-ceilinged room that looked like any church hall anywhere, except for the dumbwaiter-like doors at the far end and the slightly sinister platform placed in front of them: a platform whose surface was a plain of slick, frictionless plastic rollers. I abreact to furnaces, probably because of having had to take my dad his lunch a couple of times when he worked behind the ovens in a bread factory. Places like this one always put me in mind of Satan’s locker room.
The bearers placed the coffin on the platform and stepped back, and at the same time a very short man in a black ecclesiastical robe came out through a curtained doorway off to one side. Todd went forward and had a brief murmured conversation with him, presumably along the lines of ‘This is the action replay, but let’s dispense with the slow motion and get it over with.’ The man nodded briskly. He had a slender face with a very long, sharp nose that made me think of a fox or a wolf. I’d seen a Japanese ivory once – a tiny figure, barely bigger than the top joint of my thumb – of a fox dressed as a priest, with a long robe and a staff and a pious expression: maybe it was unfair, because the nose must have been enough of a burden to bear in itself, but this young cleric brought the statuette vividly into my mind.
Todd had presumably told him that Carla didn’t want any prayers said, but he clearly wasn’t happy to let the occasion go by without ruminating on mortality just a little: force of habit, I figured, although technically he was wearing a surplice.
‘In the midst of life,’ he said, ‘we are in death.’ Two cheers and a thump on the tub for the Book of Common Prayer. Sitting in the front row, with Carla to my left and Todd to my right, I let my attention wander. Unfortunately it wandered to the furnace doors, where it found no comfort and shied away again pretty fast.
I was still feeling tired and rough: worse than I had when I woke up, if anything. The chill in the room was creeping into me, and the half-floral, half-chemical smell was turning my stomach. It didn’t help that beyond the walls the dead souls were massed thickly, sounding to my overdeveloped senses like a swarm of desert locusts.
There was another soul here, too: stronger, or at any rate closer. It hovered around our heads like an invisible cloud, making the lights in the room suddenly seem a fraction dimmer. But a cloud suggests something dispersed and diffuse, and this presence was localised: as my gaze panned across the room, it reached the coffin and stopped as if the coffin was a black hole, pulling light and matter and everything else in towards it.
The priest’s voice had taken on a hollow echo. There was an arrhythmical vibration rising behind it like a pulse, and the vibration danced against the surface of my skin, wave after wave, as though it was looking for a way in.
Neither Carla nor Todd seemed to be aware of any of this: they were both watching the priest, whose lips were still moving although I was damned if I could hear a word he was saying now. For a moment I wondered if I was just imagining the whole thing – if the nightmare and the lack of sleep were all just taking their toll – but then the feeling of general, overall pressure narrowed in on the front of my head and intensified into one of actual pain.
Todd slipped something into my hand, and I found myself staring down dully into a hip flask a little like my own, except that this one was slimmer and cased in black leather. Reflexively I raised it to my lips and took a hit. The liquor was very potent and very bitter, and it took a real effort not to gag. I passed the flask back to Todd and he slid it away into some recess of his suit where it didn’t spoil the hang.
The priest pressed a switch on the catafalque, and the coffin moved forward on its rollers. The waves of pressure in my skull built to a new crescendo as John Gittings’s body trundled towards the double doors like a very short wagon train rolling over black plastic prairie. The doors slid open on either side to receive him into the furnace beyond.
The pain was so intense now that I actually gasped. It was as if John had thrown out an invisible grapnel, trying to keep a purchase in this world, and one of the flukes had embedded itself in my skull.
Carla looked around at me in surprise. She put a hand on my arm but I waved it away: I had to get out of there. As casually as I could I lurched to my feet and stepped out into the aisle. I was heading for the door but suddenly I wasn’t even sure which way the door was. Instinctively, I walked away from the force that was pulling on me so hard: away from the coffin, half-convinced that I must be dragging it along behind me like a sheet anchor because the sensation of weight, of resistance, was so palpable.
The doors loomed into my field of vision and I took another step towards them. Carla was on her feet at my side, and Todd too. Hot air which must have been entirely imaginary billowed across my back. The hook bit deeper and I couldn’t move, couldn’t move at all now; couldn’t make myself walk forward, because a force as unanswerable as gravity was pulling me back towards that hot mouth behind me – pulling me back and down into the dark.
Someone shouted a name – a single syllable. My name? Possibly. I wouldn’t have wanted to be categorical on that subject right then, because I didn’t seem to have a name of my own: only a vague sense of a space that was me and a space that was everything else. And the oven’s searing heat was making the space that was me shrink away like the film of breath you leave on a window-pane.
Then suddenly the doors ahead of me were thrown open, and something miraculously beautiful filled my sight. It was Juliet. Vivid, ineffable, irreducible Juliet, a bookmark in the stodgy, samey script of the world that always lets you find your place. I fell into her arms like a drowning man, aware even through the sweltering ruck inside my head of her strength, the incredible ease with which she took my weight. The last thing I saw as the red of the furnace rose before my eyes was her face staring down into mine, a little surprised.
She said something too long and complicated for me to catch, but I was pretty sure that my name was in there somewhere.
Castor. Yeah, of course: I knew that.
Voices came towards me across a fractal landscape of synaesthetically throbbing shadow. They were raised in argument.
Todd telling Juliet that this was a private ceremony and she couldn’t just walk in off the street and interrupt it.
