Last Rights Read Online Free Page B

to the marshes it grew out of
     all those centuries ago. I’ve conducted funerals for people made flat by falling buildings. I’ve done funerals for a leg,
     an arm and what’s left of a head thrown into a coffin and given a name – Alf, Edie, Ruth, Sammy. Some poor old dear crying
     over what’s left of probably three different people. But for her it is Ruth or Sammy, and that person is dead as sure as eggs
     is eggs. Some people, see, they vaporise: there isn’t anything left, not a thing.
    I lay listening to and watching that hell for I don’t know how long. But some time I must have gone to sleep because the next
     thing I really remember is the daylight shining on to all the glass shards that were covering mybody. As I sat up, I heard someone laugh and I looked down into the street where I could see Alfie Rosen, Doris’s husband.
     With his cap stuck casual like on the back of his head and his ever-present fag on the go, the only way you’d ever think he
     was a bus conductor and not a wide-boy was because of the ticket machine hung round his neck.
    ‘She down your Anderson, Mr H?’ he said, anxious through his laughter about his big, buxom Doris.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Stay there, Alfie, I’ll come and let you in.’
    As I walked back down through the flat and into the shop, I wondered as I always did at how we’d survived another night. Mum
     and Nan, I knew, would put it all down to the grace of God and the Blessed Virgin. Like Aggie, I just felt we’d been lucky,
     got away with it again.
    I unlocked the front door and looked into Alfie’s smiling, grimy face. Like his father, Herschel, Alfie Rosen is one of those
     red-haired Jews with very pale, almost colourless, skin. But then as I moved aside to let him in, another person turned up
     – big Fred Bryant, constable at the local nick. ‘Hello, Mr Hancock,’ he said, as he respectfully removed his helmet. ‘Can
     I come in for a mo?’
    I said yes, let him in and my life changed.
    The police brought the body round about an hour later in a mortuary van. Fred said the morgue couldn’t take any more – not
     that the morgue was the morgue any more. That couldn’t cope so other places had had to be pressed into service for the reception
     of the dead. Poplarswimming-baths was now used as the morgue, a nice big area with tiles you could wash down easily.
    But, that day, it was full too.
    ‘I don’t know who he is,’ Fred said, as two of his blokes and the mortuary-van man placed the body in one of my coffins, ‘but
     he’s all in one piece and Dr Cockburn’s done him a certificate, so I thought that if he could rest here for a bit someone
     might come along and claim him.’
    ‘I can’t keep him long, Fred,’ I said. ‘At least, not open. I can’t risk maggots everywhere.’
    Maggots breed quickly in a corpse that isn’t preserved in any way. Unpreserved and open in the coffin this happens even more
     rapidly so you have to be careful to make sure you close up as soon as you can. Maggots underneath the lino is not a pleasant
     experience, especially if people, like my family and me, have to live in the property.
    ‘Nah.’ Fred’s heavily jowled face broke into a smile. ‘If no one claims him you can make arrangements in a bit. But he’s quite
     a good-looking fella – hard, you know – and I can’t believe no one’ll miss him. Take a gander.’
    Fred pulled away the cloth they’d used to cover his face and there he was, no more at rest in death than he had been when
     I’d seen him that night after the bare-knuckle fight. His eyes still stared at me with the same hatred I’d seen then. Like
     with the poor buggers who’d tried to desert from the trenches, nobody had taken the care to close the eyes after death. But
     that’s what you get if you’re nameless, like this bloke, and shamed like the poor bastards my comrades and I were terrified
     into executing.Made me jump at first, and the rest if Fred Bryant was any