Galloway could do nothing with the realization but stare down like a damn fool while this corpse gave him head.
Then it seemed she sensed his horror. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. How could he ever have mistaken that dead stare for life? Gently, she withdrew his shrunken manhood from between her lips.
‘What is it?’ she asked, her fluting voice still affecting life.
‘You. . . you’re not. . . breathing.’
Her face fell. She let him go.
‘Oh darling,’ she said, letting all pretence to life disappear, ‘I’m not so good at playing the part, am I?’
Her voice was a ghost’s voice: thin, forlorn. Her skin, which he had thought so flatteringly pale was, on second view, a waxen white.
‘You are dead?’ he said.
‘I’m afraid so. Two hours ago: in my sleep. But I had to come, Terry; so much unfinished business. I made my choice. You should be flattered. You are flattered, aren’t you?’
She stood up and reached into her handbag, which she’d
left beside the mirror. Galloway looked at the door, trying to make his limbs work, but they were inert. Besides, he had his trousers round his ankles. Two steps and he’d fall flat on his face.
She turned back on him, with something silver and sharp in her hand. Try as he might, he couldn’t get a focus on it. But whatever it was, she meant it for him.
Since the building of the new Crematorium in 1934, one humiliation had come after another for the cemetery. The tombs had been raided for lead coffin-linings, the stones overturned and smashed; it was fouled by dogs and graffiti. Very few mourners now came to tend the graves. The generations had dwindled, and the small number of people who might still have had a loved one buried there were too infirm to risk the throttled walkways, or too tender to bear looking at such vandalism.
It had not always been so. There were illustrious and influential families interred behind the marble façades of the Victorian mausoleums. Founder fathers, local industrialists and dignitaries, any and all who had done the town proud by their efforts. The body of the actress Constantia Lichfield had been buried here (‘Until the Day Break and the Shadows Flee Away’), though her grave was almost unique in the attention some secret admirer still paid to it.
Nobody was watching that night, it was too bitter for lovers. Nobody saw Charlotte Hancock open the door of her sepulchre, with the beating wings of pigeons applauding her vigour as she shambled out to meet the moon. Her husband Gerard was with her, he less fresh than she, having been dead thirteen years longer. Joseph Jardine, en famille, was not far behind the Hancocks, as was Marriott Fletcher, and Anne Snell, and the Peacock
Brothers; the list went on and on. In one corner, Alfred Crawshaw (Captain in the 17th Lancers), was helping his lovely wife Emma from the rot of their bed. Everywhere faces pressed at the cracks of the tomb lids — was that not Kezia Reynolds with her child, who’d lived just a day, in her arms? and Martin van de Linde (the Memory of the Just is Blessed) whose wife had never been found; Rosa and Selina Goldfinch: upstanding women both; and Thomas Jerrey, and —Too many names to mention. Too many states of decay to describe. Sufficient to say they rose: their burial finery fly born, their faces stripped of all but the foundation of beauty. Still they came, swinging open the back gate of the cemetery and threading their way across the wasteland towards the Elysium. In the distance, the sound of traffic. Above, a jet roared in to land. One of the Peacock brothers, staring up at the winking giant as it passed over, missed his footing and fell on his face, shattering his jaw. They picked him up fondly, and escorted him on his way. There was no harm done; and what would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?
So the show went on.
‘If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die —‘