‘Korea?’
‘That’s why they’re paper-thin.’
It was unforgivable: the trudging stupidity of these people. That they should live and act and be: while he buzzed on and on, boiling with frustration. Was that fair?
‘Neat-shot, eh Lenny?’
‘What?’
‘The stiff. Old what’s his name the Sex-King. Bang in the middle of the forehead. See that? Pop goes the weasel.’
Lenny’s companion, it seemed, was still preoccupied with his paper-thin sole. He didn’t reply. Lenny inquisitively inched back the shroud from Ronnie’s forehead. The lines of sawn and scalped flesh were inelegantly sewn, but the bullet hole itself was neat.
‘Look at it.’
The other glanced round at the dead face. The head-wound had been cleaned after the probing pincers had worked at it. The edges were white and puckered.
‘I thought they usually went for the heart,’ said the sole-searcher.
‘This wasn’t any street-fight. It was an execution; formal like,’ said Lenny, poking his little finger into the wound. ‘It’s a perfect shot. Bang in the middle of the forehead. Like he had three eyes.’ •Yeah . . .’
The shroud was tossed back over Ronnie’s face. The bee buzzed on; round and round. ‘You hear about third eyes, don’t you?’
‘Do you?’
‘Stella read me something about it being the centre of the body.’
That’s your navel. How can your forehead be the centre of your body?’
‘Well. . .’
That’s your navel.’
‘No, it’s more your spiritual centre.’
The other didn’t deign to respond.
‘Just about where this bullet-hole is,’ said Lenny, still lost in admiration for Ronnie’s killer.
The bee listened. The bullet-hole was just one of many holes in his Life. Holes where his wife and children should have been. Holes winking up at him like sightless eyes from the pages of the magazines, pink and brown and hair-lipped. Holes to the right of him, holes to the left –
Could it be, at last, that he had found here a hole that he could profit by? Why not leave by the wound?
His spirit braced itself, and made for his brow, creeping through his cortex with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. Ahead, he could sense the exit door like the light at the end of a long tunnel. Beyond the hole, the warp and weft of his shroud glittered like a promised land. His sense of direction was good; the light grew as he crept, the voices became louder. Without fanfare Ronnie’s spirit spat itself into the -outside world: a tiny seepage of soul. The motes of fluid that carried his will and his consciousness were soaked up by his shroud like tears by tissues.
His flesh and blood body was utterly deserted now; an icy bulk fit for nothing but the flames.
Ronnie Glass existed in a new world: a white linen world like no state he had lived or dreamed before.
Ronnie Glass was his shroud.
Had Ronnie’s pathologist not been forgetful he wouldn’t have come back into the mortuary at that moment, trying to locate the diary he’d written the Widow Glass’ number in; and, had he not come in, he would have lived. As it was –
‘Haven’t you started on this one yet?’ he snapped at the technicians.
They murmured some apology or other. He was always testy at this time of night; they were used to his tantrums.
‘Get on with it,’ he said, stripping the shroud off the body and flinging it to the floor in irritation, ‘before the fucker walks out of
here in disgust. Don’t want to get our little hotel a bad reputation, do we?’ ‘Yes, sir. I mean, no sir.’
‘Well don’t stand there: parcel it up. There’s a widow wants him dispatched as soon as possible. I’ve seen all I need to see of him.’
Ronnie lay on the floor in a crumpled heap, slowly spreading his influence through this new-found land. It felt good to have a body, even if it was sterile and rectangular. Bringing a power of will to bear he hadn’t known he possessed, Ronnie took full control of the shroud.
At first it refused life. It had always been passive: that was its condition. It wasn’t use to occupation by spirits. But Ronnie wasn’t to be beaten now. His will was an imperative. Against all rules of natural behaviour it stretched and knotted the sullen linen into a semblance of life.