Something Special, Something Rare Read Online Free Page A

coffin. At the time, she sensed that the service would be for a local criminal. This was confirmed when, before the ceremony began, she walked down a side aisle, tripped on an outstretched foot, and bumped into a man wearing a dark suit. At once, she glimpsed the inside of his open jacket and the gun in a holster strapped to his chest. When she looked up she noticed he had a hooked nose and smelled strongly of a minty aftershave. He seemed like a man who would hunt down criminals, she thought, one of those policemen you can’t recognise because they try to dress like everyone else.
    She eyed the gun, frowning. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, before she could stop herself.
    He buttoned his jacket, concealing the gun. ‘Just wanna make sure the bastard’s really dead.’
    When she thought about it, she understood that she could easily learn more about the background of a corpse than she could about her own. The deceased always came with a death certificate, stating its date and place of birth, its parents and grandparents, and of course the cause and date of death. A corpse usually attracted a big family of close and distant relatives, best friends and casual acquaintances, those who were inconsolable and others who feigned grief by bowing their heads and clutching tissues and handkerchiefs. Death gave a person a complete identity of a kind that it probably hadn’t achieved in life. The dead knew who they were.
    She now flitted between the embalming room and the funeral parlour, between mourners and flower arrangers, with a detached, almost world-weary air. She thought she’d seen everything: bullet wounds the size of saucers, gangrenous legs, and once – on Christmas Day – a complete decapitation, with the woman’s head in a separate plastic bag from the one in which her body was stored.
    Then, late one night, in the first month of winter, her father received a summons from the morgue at St Vincent’s Hospital. Even though it was only a hundred metres up the road, her father insisted that Ginger accompany him. The last time he’d left the hearse unattended outside the hospital, in order to sign paperwork, a man had jumped into the driver’s seat and driven off on a joyride, with the corpse still in the back.
    Wearing her flannelette pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers, she waited in the front passenger seat, watching a patient wearing only a thin green hospital gown standing in the icy wind, hooked up to an IV, smoking a cigarette. She looked at his sunken face, his rounded, almost collapsed shoulders, and knew the next time she’d see this man would probably be in the basement of her home. She was surprised to realise these thoughts no longer disturbed her.
    She was further surprised when her father walked through the automatic sliding doors without pushing the usual gurney or stretcher. At first, she thought there’d been some mistake, that the body they were to collect had been stored at another hospital. As her father drew closer, however, and as he moved briefly through a pool of yellow light from a passing car, she noticed he was carrying a tiny package in his arm – no bigger than a loaf of bread. He was lurching slightly and seemed to be finding it hard to breathe.
    *
    The organist played ‘Amazing Grace’, slower than usual, as downcast people – some dressed casually in jeans, others in dark wool and pearls – filed into the candlelit parlour. Mrs Kite was arranging some flowers beside the front dais and Ginger was passing out the Order of Service cards. Earlier, her father had handed her a pair of old-fashioned dressmaking scissors, which had once belonged to his mother. He’d whispered instructions about what she was to do with them following the ceremony, and she’d nodded and slipped them into the pocket of her dress.
    In the back row sat a group of men whom Ginger recognised immediately from the beer garden across