The Execution. Hugo Wilcken
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We went down a lift and got out somewhere below ground level. We were in a harshly-lit corridor with no natural light at all. As we walked, I wondered whether morgues were always underground. If so, perhaps it was because it had been a means of keeping bodies cold, before the invention of refrigeration I mean. Or perhaps it was for a more metaphorical reason. In any case, it was a stupid thing to waste time thinking about, since I didn’t even know if morgues were always underground. The woman led me through more corridors. There seemed to be a maze of them and I quickly lost my sense of direction. Electrical wiring and water pipes hung down from the low, dusty ceiling. At one point, I said: ‘But really, I only knew her very slightly. Perhaps I won’t even recognise her.’ I really thought I might not. ‘That’s no problem,’ answered the woman, ‘all you say then is that you don’t recognise her, and that’s the end of it.’ I said: ‘Then what’s the point?’ – but we’d already arrived at the room.
She was lying on a trolley, with two white sheets draped over her. There was a morgue assistant there, a young guy with tied-back hair and a goatee beard, perhaps a student. We’d interrupted a game of solitaire he’d been playing at a desk on the far side of the room. He wheeled the body over to us, then removed the sheets from her face with great delicacy, as if he were a beautician about to give someone a facial. I stared. I’d never actually seen a dead body before. Alex once told me he’d been so anxious the first time he was confronted with a corpse in anatomy class that he’d gone to the toilet afterwards and thrown up. Staring at the face, I didn’t feel anything in particular. A long, faint scratch mark crossed her high forehead diagonally from left to right, like a line drawn across a page to strike it out.
It was her all right. It was Susan Tedeschi. Or perhaps she called herself Susan Smith. I hadn’t even remembered that her first name was Susan until the doctor reminded me. And I’d thought I might not recognise her face, but I did. It transfixed me momentarily. I probably only looked for a few seconds, but it seemed much longer. They must have hosed down the body or something because her hair was all wet and combed back. It made her look more lifelike, as if she’d only just this minute stepped out of the shower. In other ways too she appeared much as she’d been in life, but there were subtle differences. Her skin was grey rather than pink, although that might also have been the effect of the fluorescent lights, which seemed to drain the colour out of everything else in the morgue. Another difference was the expression on her face. On the two or three occasions I’d seen her previously, she’d seemed quite meek. About the only thing Christian had ever told me about his wife was that once he’d arranged to meet her at a party, but she’d never turned up. Then on leaving, he’d spotted their car in the street opposite the house where the party was being held, with his wife sitting inside. Apparently she’d had some kind of panic attack.
In death, though, she looked anything but meek. Her face wore a stern, implacable expression and she seemed almost powerful.
I turned to the doctor: ‘Yes, that’s her.’ She seemed visibly relieved. The morgue assistant flicked the two sheets perfectly back into place in one smooth action, which reminded me of Christian’s skill in rolling cigarettes. Then he wheeled the body away.
‘Wait here a moment please,’ the doctor said, ‘I’ll be back in a second.’ She disappeared and I was left alone with the morgue assistant. He stood around uneasily, obviously not wanting to go back to his game of solitaire while I was still in the room. It was difficult to know what kind of small talk to make to a morgue assistant, though.
‘So what happens now? To the body I mean.’
‘Umm, they’ll probably do an autopsy.’
‘Really? How do they decide that? I mean, how do they decide which bodies they’re going to do an autopsy on?’
‘Well there’s all these categories. I can’t remember offhand. Accidents, suicides, deaths in custody …’
‘That’s interesting. I mean I never thought about what happens to the bodies. It’s strange.’
I waved my hand vaguely to encompass the morgue, the morgue assistant and the enormous fridges with metal doors like prison cells.
‘Well it’s pretty weird at first, yeah. But then you get used to it.’
I thought he’d stopped and I was about to say something else when he abruptly continued: ‘It’s the babies that are the hardest. They haven’t been given a chance. You’re holding it in your arms, you know it’s dead but you can’t resist the impulse to support its head, not to let it drop back.’
I stared at him, momentarily lost for words. Just then the doctor appeared at the door. Sorry to leave you waiting like that, she said, without explaining where she’d been or what she’d been up to. She hustled me out of the morgue and we made our way back through the maze of corridors to the lift. Upstairs, I had to sign a declaration and then I was free to go. What with Christian under sedation, there didn’t seem to be any point in hanging around any longer.
I made it back to London in fifty minutes. At first I thought I’d go straight home, then I changed my mind and went into the West End and parked the car in the underground car park at work. I thought I might find Jo and get going on the Jarawa campaign, we could at least rough out an initial press release for the London papers. But as I waited for the lift, it occurred to me that if I went into the office I’d have to talk about Christian and I didn’t want to do that. So I left the car park on foot by the car exit and started to walk aimlessly towards Covent Garden. I wasn’t really thinking about Christian. But his wife’s face was still in front of me, in a way, with its single scratch on the forehead. Eventually I decided to go for a swim. The private swimming pool where I’m a member was five minutes’ walk away, just off Shaftesbury Avenue.
It was an odd pleasure to open my locker and see my swimming and shower gear there, just as I’d left it last time. I changed quickly: I wanted to get into the pool as fast as possible. It was still only five fifteen, which meant that there was hardly anyone around yet – the pool doesn’t usually fill up until six or six thirty, when people start knocking off work. There was one old man who was swimming extremely slowly, doing one lap to my three or four. He was very hairy, his body and prominent breasts were covered in fine silver hair like some aquatic animal, and it seemed a big struggle for him to keep his head above water. Finally he got out – taking ages to climb up the little ladder – and collapsed breathlessly onto a poolside bench. The afternoon light splashed in through the skylights overhead.
I felt much better after my swim. I felt cleansed. I looked at myself in the mirror and felt reassured by the healthy young man that stared back at me. In the changing room I bumped into Phil. He was looking for someone to play a few games of squash with, but I told him I’d just swum fifteen hundred metres and was feeling pretty whacked.
I walked back to the car park and picked up the car. As I drove, I noticed for the first time since the morning what a beautiful day it was, or had been. Soft blue sky, Dutch wisps of cloud, a hazy warmth. It felt more like July than May. I opened up the sunroof, partly to let the sun stream in, partly to rid the car of the smell from Christian’s cigarette. An old Golf convertible stood beside me at the lights, pumping out music. The three young guys inside were wearing sunglasses and had taken their shirts off. The driver looked my way and smiled at me. I slammed my foot down on the accelerator when the lights changed but the Golf was too quick. As the car sped off, the driver honked his horn at me and I honked back.
I passed by an art gallery in Mayfair and suddenly remembered Marianne’s opening at Joseph Kimberly. She’d been nervous about it all week. But I’d completely forgotten – this whole business with Christian’s wife had driven it from my mind. Now it occurred to me that there was no point in going back to Camberwell if I had to be at Primrose Hill by half past seven. As I passed Hyde Park I noticed a parking spot and pulled up without thinking about it too much. I just wanted to make the most of the vestiges of the warm afternoon. So I got out and wandered around on the south side of the park for a while near Rotten Row then sat down under a tree. Despite the hot weather, the grass still had that Astroturf sheen the spring rain had given it. It looked unripe, is what Marianne might have said.