AN ACCIDENTAL KILLING
CHAPTER ONE
The man who stood on the
coastal path was unremarkable. He was
of average height and build, with thin mousy hair and a longish pointed
nose. People put him at forty, but he
was in fact thirty-four. He was
considered plain by those who knew him, quiet to the point of alienating, and
had never been in love. Now, he stared
out to sea but watched instead a scene from his past, when he had been a boy;
the kind of boy who stood alone in the school playground, who lacked friends
but attracted enemies. This present
memory came to him with a clarity that stirred a kind of nostalgia inside him
that troubled him. He was not
accustomed to pleasant reminiscing.
The body lay under a thin
white sheet. In the corner of a large,
sparsely furnished room Claude watched his father putting on clear plastic
gloves. It was cold and the bright
lights made it seem colder. He wished
he had put on an extra sweater. When his
father was ready, Claude stood back a little, waiting for the first
glimpse. He knew that it was a man, a
tourist from the south, killed in a traffic accident.
‘Are you ready?’ asked his
father, smiling.
‘Yes, father.’
‘Very well.’ He pulled back
the sheet.
The man’s hair was dark and
slicked back, apart from a strand that fell forward, partially adhering to a
sticky-looking wound above his left eye.
His complexion was already pale and bluish, lacking lustre. He was wearing casual but expensive clothes
and, where his skin was exposed, he would have been tanned with the honey glow
that you saw on television advertisements.
His shoes had leather soles. As
Claude helped his father to undress the corpse, he imagined the accident, the
look on the man’s face before the impact that had left him suddenly
lifeless. When he lay naked, his father
said what he always said: ‘In death we are all equal, rich or poor, old or
young!’ Claude liked the way he said
it, almost like a prayer.
‘Pass me the scalpel, will
you?’ his father asked. ‘Unless you would like to try?’
Claude smiled timidly and
shook his head.
‘No matter,’ his father
said, his eyes full of kindness.
‘Another time, another time.’ He
took the instrument and made an incision in the neck of the dead man, inserted
a tube and opened a large container of embalming fluid.
The boy did not ask
questions. He understood the
process. Once more, Claude shivered in
the cold, wishing again that he had dressed more warmly. He didn’t usually forget, but this time he
had been in the garden playing, and in the sunshine it had been pleasantly
warm.
‘You can run and fetch a
sweater,’ said his father. ‘I will do
the face when you get back. Tell mother
we will be ready for dinner at the usual time.’
Inside the house, there was
the warm moist smell of washing, vying with the meaty aroma of lasagne, and on
the sideboard, shone a fresh green salad with small ripe tomatoes and pale
flakes of parmesan cheese. Claude felt
the first stirrings of hunger. In his
room, he quickly found what he was looking for and ran back through the
kitchen, his soft shoes making hardly a sound.
‘Where are you going?’
He did not like to tell his
mother. ‘Outside! We will be in for dinner at the usual time!’
he called, realising that she would know from the ‘we’ that he was going to
watch his father, and swearing under his breath.
Back inside the one-storey
building which stood in the deep, cool shadows at the bottom of the garden of
his mother’s house, there was a buzz from the lights overhead as he entered,
and he saw his father from the back this time, bent over the body, his white
coat luminous.
‘Have you started yet,
father?’ said Claude, panting slightly.
‘I said that I would wait,
and I have,’ he replied, pleasantly.
‘Come to the other side and we can begin. Put on your gloves.’
Claude pulled on the smaller
gloves, bought specially for him, taking longer than he should because of his
haste, grinning and jumping up and down a little on the spot. At last they were on.
After his father had
supervised the washing of the man’s face, he allowed his son to lather and
shave it – delighting in the care and attention the lad took. The corpse’s lips were cracked and a little
dehydrated so, after the usual moisturising, Claude applied a little soft wax
to even out the surface. The lips were
firm and moved like rubber, displaying pale gums and a good set of teeth. When Claude had finished, his father helped
him insert the plastic discs, which kept the shape of the eyes, under the
eyelids, and then he mixed up glue to seal the eyes and mouth shut.
The body already looked
healthier, more lifelike and yet not alive.
Working from a photograph, it would be simple to render the man as
fresh-faced in death as he had been before the accident. With his index finger Claude took a little
foundation and began to dab it gently on the bruised area around the wound,
which soon began to take on a natural fleshy tone. His father had cleaned out the dirt and used tape to close
it. They worked closely together, their
arms brushing one against the other, making them smile momentarily. Claude listened to his father’s breathing
and caught the smell of garlic from his mouth.
By the time they had
finished, the man looked as though he had a small, almost invisible scar on an
otherwise flawless complexion.
‘He was a handsome man,’
said Signor Cousteau, holding up the photograph they had worked from. ‘More handsome in death than in life, don’t
you think?’
‘Yes, father,’ replied
Claude, sincerely.
‘Put a little rouge on the
cheeks,’ said his father. ‘That’s
right, and a little on the nose.
Yes. Now, on the forehead and
just a little on the chin. Perfect!’
‘Shall I put the lipstick on
now, father?’
‘Do you think he needs it?’
‘Maybe a little,’ said the boy,
more because he wanted to finish the job, not leaving anything out.
‘Very well. Just a little.’
The body was bruised where
the seatbelt had been, but the family and friends would not see the torso of
the deceased. The hands would need some
attention, though, when he had been dressed.
‘Is it time?’ asked his
father.
‘We have ten minutes more.’
‘We will finish after dinner
in that case. It is always better not
to rush. Do you have homework tonight?’
The boy hung his head a
little. ‘Yes, father.’
‘Then I will come
alone. Thank you for your assistance,
my son.’
Claude looked up quickly and
smiled at his father, who pretended to be busy with some clearing away.
After taking off their
gloves and washing their hands with a special antiseptic soap, they left the
building and went up towards the main house, in order to take a shower and be
ready for their meal. Claude put an arm
around his father’s waist and felt the weight and warmth of a large hand on his
shoulder. The garden was cooler now
that the sun had gone below the tops of the trees. It was different out in the fresh air, where people lived and
moved. More complicated thoughts
invaded Claude’s head and he wished he could go back and finish the work, so
that he could avoid the distractions that now assaulted his mind.
His mother was draining the
pasta when they entered, in the large traditional kitchen where she had
grown up. She was still a beauty, it
was said, and could have married into a grand Italian family. Instead, she had fallen in love with a
Frenchman, who had never quite managed to make the required transition from one
culture to another. He had come to Italy, for her, but his heart had never left
France. So the story went. Claude knew the fairytale had not quite come
true, but he was too young to understand why.
His mother’s house. That
was what his father called it, even after all the years he had lived in
it. Involuntarily, an idea came to Claude:
he wondered what it would be like to see her on the long, narrow table, covered
by a thin white sheet. Drawing it back,
he would do his best to take away the harshness in her face, to soften her
expression and make her look happy.
‘Be quick! The pasta will be ruined. Why can you never be on time!’ she said.
The men did not speak, but
hurried upstairs to wash.
On the coastal path, Claude
allowed a smile to spread across his face.
Exactly which memory was the author of such a pleasant reaction, was
impossible to surmise.
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