The Life of Death Read online

  I look over at the pile of firewood, the men milling around for the first sniff of new blood, to the white shards of my mother’s bones scattered over soft ashes. Why not? It doesn’t sound that bad – eternal life and a chance to help people die with someone they love at their side, right to the very end. I think of the chance my mother just had – to spend her very final moments with her daughter, wrapped in a love to protect her from the pain of reality. Why couldn’t I give everyone that chance? If I can do this in any way I choose, why not do that for everyone? Allow them to spend their last moments with their mother, daughter, sister, wife. Offer what comfort I can until they too, like my mother, fade to black.

  ‘You must bear this in mind, Lizzy. If you take me up on this, if you accept this work and the eternity that lies before you, if you sell me your soul, I will own you. If you change your mind, have second thoughts, if the thought of eternal life weighs too heavy to bear and you find the task of death too burdensome, you can’t just run, Lizzy. For every action, remember, there must be a reaction. And you must, must remember this: I. Will. Own. You.’

  He gets up, pulling me by the hand and leads me back to my cell. As we approach the door and prepare to step back into the darkness, He turns to me. ‘Well?’

  I can hear the men down the stone passageway heading my way. ‘Elizabeth Murray’, ‘Ha ha ha – burn her, the Witch Bitch!’, ‘Jem! Bet you can’t wait to see this one go up!’, ‘Fix that with your potions!’ Jeers and shouts echoing towards me, bouncing off granite walls, ringing with contempt.

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Good girl. My Little Death. My Little D. Now, let’s get you back to where you belong.’

  Back in the cell, the iron bridle hanging from the wall, Lucifer takes my hand. Kisses the back of it as if I’m a lady stepping into a carriage. Fixes the straps over my head and slips the cold metal bit into my mouth. But there’s no pain now. No discomfort. I feel nothing. He lifts first one hand, then the other to fix them into the shackles against the wall. Steps back to leave me hanging, to await my fate, as the men burst forth into the room.

  I’m led back to the market square by a chain attached to my iron head-dress. Paraded for the townspeople to see. Sly kicks at my legs from the people leading me. The dull thud of vegetables thrown from the crowd and hitting my shoulders, my back, the side of my head. Hands push me forward, jerking me back when I stumble, over-balanced by the weight of the iron frame around my head.

  Whenever I look up He is there, an island of calm in a surging sea of hatred and vitriol. A sea of looming, angry red faces, mouths wide open in a communal death chant. The sun is setting and my path is lit by flaming torches carried overhead.

  They lead me over to the stake, tie each hand behind my back. Stack the firewood around my feet. Make their final pronouncements of my status as witch and set light to the kindling with one of the procession of torches. The flames curl and dance, licking up my legs and catching my sacking dress while the waiting crowd cover their mouths and noses as the smell of burning human flesh billows out across their eager mass. They laugh and point as tendrils of smoke entwine with my hair. Cheer as sparks catch and flare, as fabric falls away and skin is exposed to melt like wax. I feel nothing. He is leaning against the stone cross, arms folded across his chest, eyes boring into mine, a twisted smile on his lips as He stands head and shoulders above the seething swell. As the flames grow, enveloping my head in a gossamer cloak of smoke, as the scene before me warps and distorts through the heat haze, as my mortal bones crack and groan in the blaze, I don’t take my eyes from His. And as my body dies in that Scottish market square, I am born as Death.

  3

  IT WAS OVER FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO, THAT cold day in that exposed market square. Four hundred years since I took that offer, since I sealed my fate. Four hundred years of this, my new life. This life of Death. Day after day. Year upon year. Each second lived a mirror flash of the reflected life of the women I embody. Each second lived as someone else. Me and not me. Them and not them. For four hundred years.

  In the early days, I flew with pride from one death to the next. Held my head high as death followed life and souls swept by me to their final conclusion. But in these latter years, I have found it cold, this life without life. While I move from one to the next, basking in reflected love and a shared history, my core remains cold. My fingertips have no feeling for the skin beneath them; there is no need for sustenance, so in all of these years I haven’t tasted a morsel to make the mouth water, to make the stomach rumble.

  Do you know how monotonous endless life can become? Incessantly shifting, never-ending, never-pausing? A constant whirl from bedside to battlefield, from a lonely kitchen table to the plastic incubator on the hospital ward. The death itself becomes inconsequential, meaningless as seconds pass in hours and I whirl, morphing from one woman to the next, to the next. And the brief moments between these deaths, when I pause to catch my breath and float unbidden in the darkness before being tugged to attention and summoned to the next bedside, roadside, homicide … Well, those brief moments serve as the most painful reminder. That while I tend to a death I am everything to the person with whom I sit, with whom I reminisce, but in the intervening moments when I float alone in this world, I have no one. No one, and nothing. I keep my previous life at arm’s length – a haze, a blur. A mirage in my memory that shimmers and shines, that lures me in only to disappear when I get too close. And so on I whirl, from one death to the next, never stopping to think of the pain of my missed life, so consumed am I with death.

  Until one day, everything I know, everything I hold dear, it changes. Changes overnight. I’m caught unawares, knocked off my feet and spun around until up is down and right is wrong. More than four hundred years on from that cold market square, the constant whirl slows abruptly in a ubiquitous hospital room. I am pulled up short, brought to a halt as time sweeps around me in lazy arcs. And in the centre of this storm, calm, oblivious … Tom. The eye at the centre of my storm. Tom. Four hundred years on from that cold market square I fall in love.

  Four hundred years pass and I find myself, as I often do these days, in a hospital ward. Hunched shoulders shelter the bed. A cold, dead hand clasped in huge paw and crushed against creased brow. It’s her I’ve come to see. Tubes masking a pale face. It’s her I’m here for, but it’s him I can’t tear my eyes from.

  Although he can’t see me, it feels as though he’s watching my every move. As I clamber onto the bed, raised high on its haunches to facilitate access, as I whisper into her ear and press my lips against a clammy forehead to murmur and soothe, as I plump the cushions behind her head, he watches.

  Around us nurses bustle and fuss, hooking up saline drips, smoothing down sheets. There are no windows in this room, no way of knowing the time of day, the state of the world outside. Only the rolled-up sleeves of the consultant when he arrives, the damp patch of cotton clinging wetly to the small of his back and the fine mist of sweat on his brow betray the heat of an unseasonably warm late October day somewhere outside.

  She fades in and out. The whitened knuckles of a clutching hand betray the innate fear she’s hiding from the man sitting by her bedside as the clinical beep of the respirator jabs into her skull with every mechanised breath. The rush of a forced inhalation chased by the hush of an outward sigh.

  Ever since her diagnosis as a teeny tot, Kate has known this day would come. That the daily physiotherapy and dietary supplements would only keep the cystic fibrosis under control for so long. She knew it when she met Tom that first day in the Student Union, when he chased her down the length of the corridor at the Freshers’ Fayre to get her to agree to come and watch his rugby team’s first game. It’s why she resisted him for so long. Didn’t want him to get attached to a broken girl who was going to have to leave him one day through no choice of her own. Didn’t want to have to explain to a complete stranger about the strange bruises on her chest and back and the gritty powders in her food. But he persev
ered, young Tom. Walking her home from lectures and turning up after training for a cup of tea and a biscuit in her tiny room in halls. He persevered until the two of them had fused together and there was never one without the other. Until she realised that although she might not live long, she couldn’t live what life she had without him.

  And he too has known, since she explained her illness, way back when. He too has known this day would come. As he has pummelled her chest daily to loosen the phlegm and mucus that churns in her lungs and clogs her airways. He has known that the complications would crop up more and more frequently. That their time together could be all too short.

  Knowing doesn’t make it any easier though, does it?

  We’ve been lying side by side for half an hour before she speaks.

  ‘He was so bloody persistent – remember?’ She nods her head towards Tom, lips moving in silent prayer to a God he’s never previously believed in. A last-ditch attempt to reverse the inevitable.

  I have climbed onto Kate’s hospital bed as her mother. Ash-blonde hair perfectly bobbed and tucked around tiny gold earrings. A cashmere sweater paired with tailored flannel trousers. The papery skin on the back of my hands is dusted with the tell-tale signs of summers in the sun. I curl myself next to her, stroke her hair as she rests her head against my shoulder.

  As we lie there, I do remember. That persistence of first love. I remember the eager twenty-year-old being brought home for the first time, nervously shaking hands with Kate’s dad and chucking a ball around the back garden with little brothers and a yapping Jack Russell, the only breed whose hair didn’t induce bubbling coughs. I can see him turning to check she’s there, check she’s OK. And she was at her happiest – the final piece of a jigsaw had slotted into place to complete the picture of the people she loves.

  ‘I’m glad he was, though. Glad he was so bloody stubborn. Do you think I’ve been selfish? If I’d left him years ago he’d be happily married now, wouldn’t he? Two point four children and a black lab.’

  ‘Not the tiniest bit.’ How could she even think that? ‘He wouldn’t have let you go for a start. And you’ve had seventeen wonderful years together. No one and nothing can ever take that away from either of you.’

  ‘But no one wants to be a widower by the age of thirty-seven do they? That’s what I’ve given him – pitying looks on the street and a label that belongs to an eighty-year-old. That’s my legacy.’

  ‘Oh Kate … Katie K … Don’t you ever, ever think that. He wouldn’t have changed it for a second. Not one second.’

  ‘I want him to be happy. I want you to let him know that it’s OK. That I know he loved me. That it’s OK for him to meet someone else. To fall in love. I want you to tell him that. I don’t want him to ever forget me, what we had. But I want him to live his life. Find a nice girl. Have the kids and the dog and the wife who will take him through to the end of his days, not leave him floundering alone like I have at the end of mine.’ Her voice breaks through the tears. ‘You will tell him, won’t you?’

  I look over the top of her head at the man crumpled by her side. At lightly freckled forearms and a curly mop-top of hair standing up at angles from being raked through by desperate fingers. And I fight an urge to calm those fingers, to twist my own into soft, dark curls. To lean over and kiss eyelids screwed tight shut in silent prayer.

  ‘I’ll tell him.’

  ‘Thank you.’ A whisper.

  She closes her eyes, squeezes Tom’s hand gently in her own one last time, and to the unbroken monotone trill of the heart-rate monitor, Kate Olivia Sanderson fades to black.

  As the alarm sounds, the room is submerged in a flurry of activity. Nurses run in to surround the bed, lifting lids to shine bright lights into dead eyes. Tom shoves his chair away from the bed, backs himself into the corner, never taking his eyes from the body lying in front of him. Gulps. Gags. Sags to the floor. He can’t hear the voices that implore him to ‘Get up please, Tom. Come with me, Tom.’ Can’t feel the hands that take him by the elbow to lead him out of the room. Steering his shoulders as his body corkscrews to turn to her. To call her name.

  They lead him out into the corridor. Press a plastic cup of hot, sweet tea into his hand and settle him into the hard-backed chair where he slumps, eyes closed against the beep-thud of the defibrillator. He’s shaking. Shivering despite the warmth of the corridor. He takes a sip of the tea, but he can’t force it past the ball of tension in his throat and he gags, spluttering hot liquid against the back of his hand, pressed hard against his lips.

  I slip out of the room. Leave the nurses to their fruitless task. She’s gone now. I should leave.

  But I don’t. I can’t.

  In the corridor, he looks straight at me, grief and disbelief in his navy-blue eyes fringed with lashes saturated with tears. And reflected in his eyes I can see it. See everything that I want. See everything that he thinks he has lost. It hits me full in the stomach, like a punch. There is no gradual dawning, no gentle awakening to the thought. It’s as though a floodlight has swept across my vision, and where there was darkness, now all is clear.

  I want to live. I need to live. I want a love so overwhelming that life is meaningless without it. I am desperate to feel the love of a family, the woozy headiness of a day spent drinking red wine in front of a fire, hot breath against my neck in a semi-dark room. The giddiness of laughing till I lose my breath, the great racking sobs that exhaust even the strongest. I want to smell freshly baked bread and cram it into my mouth, oozing with melted butter. I want to roll in freshly mown grass. I want to live, and I want all that life brings with it. I see it all, exposed in stark relief. Everything that I crave. Everything I’ve missed.

  And I know. I know in that longest of seconds. There is only one way for me to grasp life and all that living brings. My time has come to end this monotony – this never-ending task of ending. To bring about the death, you might say, of Death.

  And there is one man alone who can help me – one man with the power to give me what I can only dream of. He is my nemesis and my colleague.

  I must go and see the Devil.

  4

  THE POPPIES AND BALSA WOOD CROSSES OF THE Westminster Abbey Field of Remembrance stand out blood red and bone white against the grass. It’s dank, drizzly, a typical November afternoon in London – fog hanging in the air and dusk peeking his head around the corner no matter what the time of day.

  I enter through the West Door – brought up short by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Carpeted in poppies, the gold lettering of melted ammunition plain against the polished black marble. I knew him of course, the Unknown Soldier. I knew them all. Gathered together on those cold, wet, claggy trenches in those most final of moments – sharing smokes, singing – always singing – about packing up your troubles in an old kit bag while smiling all the time.

  Those were busy days, I can tell you. I’d sit with them for hours, those men. Battered and bruised, tattered and torn. To each of them I was someone different – sweethearts from back home, mothers and sisters. I sat with them in those French fields, wiped the caked mud from their faces, laid my head against the death rattle of mustard gas clogging their lungs. They cried on me, they laughed. Ruffled my hair and showed me their letters from home. And then one by one, with their hands in mine, they would fade to black. Some in a matter of moments, some lasting hours, days. The Unknown Soldier was one of the last.

  Now, on to the task in hand. As ever, I have to search for Him – I have requested an audience and it has been granted – but He’s never one to make things easy. I keep going, down the central aisle, through the Quire Screen with its gilt-adorned carvings and golden stars picked out against a cerulean blue sky. Past the heavy oak choir stalls and down towards the altar. Round the back of the Shrine of Edward the Confessor, whipping round the Chapel of Henry VII and into Poets’ Corner. This is not a sight-seeing visit. I am not a tourist – this is a means to an end.

  Up ahead and tucked off to the side
, a heavy wooden door. Chances are if He’s not perched in the rafters or lounging in the Coronation Chair, taunting the vergers with His invisible presence, He’ll be tucked away, hidden, waiting for me to find Him, His own little game of cat and mouse. I slip through the door into the darkened corridors of the Cloisters.

  I see Him immediately. Sleek and feline in an impeccably cut suit, His hair slicked back from His angular face. He’s lounging against the wall on a stone bench running the length of the corridor. One slim ankle hooked over its opposite knee. Above Him, a simple plaque in the rough stone walls – Jane Lister, dear childe, 1688. (Tuberculosis. Feverish embraces in a room on Cheapside. Poor little thing. She clung to me as if she’d never let go.) He stands, stretches to His full height.

  The winter light struggles through the columns of the arcade, fighting through the stained glass at the apex of each arch. The individually lit vaults do nothing to warm or welcome.

  When He speaks, it is with a sneer of indifference. His voice is cold, clinical, clipped. Ringing off flagstones worn smooth by centuries of feet.

  ‘You wanted to see me?’

  I know no one can hear Him but me, I know that no one is even aware of our being there, but I wince. I try to encourage Him into an alcove. Somewhere less open. Who do I think I am? He’s the Devil. We’re staying right where He wants us. Years of experience have told me exactly who holds the reins in this relationship.

  ‘I …’

  A pause. Silence in that cold, stone corridor.

  ‘I …’

  Try. Again. Fail. Again.

  ‘Get on with it,’ He snaps. ‘You wanted to see me.’ He can’t abide having His time wasted. ‘After all this time – you don’t write, you don’t call. And now you demand a meeting and all you can do is stand there and splutter.’

  ‘I’ve had enough.’ I’ve said it, it’s out there. I wait for the explosion – for the 800-year-old walls around us to crumble and fall. For the shriek of His disapproval. But, nothing. He’s nothing if not unpredictable.