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All the coffins were line by line the same. The grain of the wood matched exactly on every one. Hardly surprising; it wasn’t real wood...only a plastic veneer glued over a hardboard shell. He ought to know. He’d made dozens of the damned things, before the idea came to him that he could lie in one himself, and that by choice.
This one he’d kept back, always stacking it on the highest shelves, where it would only be seen from below. Seen from above, there was something wrong with it. The lid seemed to be screwed down already. In fact the points of the screws had been sawn off, and only a close fit held the lid in place. Inside were special clips that really would hold the lid down, but they could only be operated from within.
Ventilation was by means of holes bored through the twelve anchor points of the six carrying handles. The handles could be seen to be hollow. They were designed that way, lengths of bronze tubing, with columnar supports butted to the sides of the coffin. It was not apparent that the supports were also hollow, and that the opening went clean through into the body of the coffin - to the body in the coffin, come to that.
The screws, the ones in uniform that is, got confused on that day. There had been a riot over in C Block at breakfast time, and one of the trusties, suspected of grassing, had been doused in hot fat, and set afire. The poor beggar’s badly burned body was supposed to be in the coffin awaiting collection. Before the undertaker’s van came, there had been another riot in B Block, no doubt spurred on by the earlier one. The warders on the shift involved decided that he was no problem, all by himself in the joinery shop, and left him there. Those on the next shift assumed that he’d been rounded up with all the other prisoners after the riot, and returned to his cell.
Realizing the situation, he had pulled down the doctored coffin, and hoisted up the full one to leave in its place. They’d find the charred corpse pretty smartly when the undertaker found himself with an empty coffin of an unusual construction. They might even find it earlier, if the boss decided on a proper head count before the end of the shift, and somebody twigged what had happened. He was depending on the screws being too busy, and on the undertaker having come and gone before they got straightened out.
His luck held.
He had lain quietly in the padded darkness, the lid dogged down, for no more than half-an-hour, when he heard the van driver’s voice.
"This the one, is it?"
"Must be. It’s been screwed down, eh."
A warder spoke from further away, "Nobody here wants to look at what’s in there. You fellers can have that to yourselves!"
"We’re used to it," the driver claimed. "You want to see some of the things we have to make look pretty
for the relatives."
"No fear of that for this poor bugger," the warder said. "He ain’t got none. No mates either."
"Just as well. The prison authorities never pay for embalming anyway."
He heard the undertaker’s men signing for the body, felt the coffin being trundled through the corridors on the chromed steel trolley, and heard doors banging and clanging all the way to the yard. A lurch, and men grunting, followed by the rattling of rollers told him that he’d been loaded into the van.
Somebody clambered in after him, rattled the fittings, and climbed out again - a warder checking that no prisoners had smuggled themselves aboard while the van was unattended. Another would be checking underneath with an angled mirror on a pole.
"Clear to go."
The motor rumbled into life, and the coffin jerked back against the chocks. More voices marked their passage out of the yard gates, and on to the long drive down to the main gates at the public road.
Voices again, and they’d passed them too.
Some time later, after much lurching and swaying, a shorter version of the process, without all the checks, was repeated in reverse. It ended with more rollers, and a clang, a little clang, a tiny echo of all the clangs he had lived with for so many years.
It was cold. He could do with a leak. He hung on to it for hours and hours. Well, twenty four minutes by his luminous wristwatch, but it felt like hours.
He was hungry too. The morning riot had meant no lunch, and he wouldn’t be there for dinner, if they had any. That’s when they’d miss him. How long did he have before they found that the coffins had been switched?
It wasn’t half bloody dark, eh.
"Good night. See you in the morning."
"Yeah, right-oh."
The undertaker’s staff were leaving, closing up for the night. Doors thumped. Locks clicked.
He hung on, bursting, for another half hour.
When he released the catches, and pushed up the lid, it rose about ten centimetres, before being stopped by something above it - the roof to the storage locker. For a moment he felt panic wash through him. He couldn’t get out. There wasn’t room.
Determinedly, he breathed in deeply, forced himself to calm down, to think. Ten centimetres gave him room to push an arm up past his face, to grip the padded end of the lid, and slide the whole thing back toward his feet. He kept pushing until he felt the far end of the lid fetch up against the back wall of the locker.
Wriggling up to the head of the coffin, he felt over the end. There was just room for his hand to feel down the inside of the locker door, and locate the catch housing, a flimsy thing, but nonetheless one that offered no purchase for his exploring fingers. Morgue lockers were not meant to be opened from within.
"Brute force ‘n iggerance," he said aloud, and startled himself as the words resounded in the enclosed space.
He twisted about until he could wedge his other hand against the head of the coffin, and braced it there. Then with a fresh grip on the lid, he wrenched it hard back against the far end of the locker, and forced the coffin to run forward on the rollers, and slam into the locker door.
There was an almighty crash. The coffin rebounded, to slide back to the far end. The door was still shut.
Again he slammed the coffin at the door, harder. Another crash, louder yet.
Fresh cold air blew into his face, as the door burst open, and the coffin ran half out of the locker, tilted, and jammed - leaving him lying on his back at a slope, head down.
Dim lighting, street lights spilling their fluorescent glow through high windows of obscured glass, showed him a rank of locker doors, a bare room, tiles, and a free-standing stainless steel bench. On the floor, stainless steel buckets; along the far wall, stainless steel tubs. A door to the outside world was in one end wall, and an interior door in the other. Everything looked black, and silver-grey, tinged with a blueness.
He drew his legs up, jack-knifed over the edge of the coffin, and came to his feet. He felt thankful, and cold, and dizzy, and ready to wet himself, if he didn’t have that bloody leak soon. The tubs...the blessed tubs, one of them anyway. Oh God, the relief!
Zipping up, quelling the butterflies in his stomach, he moved over to the interior door. There was no sense in rushing out into the streets in his prison garb. Somewhere in the building there would be a cloakroom. Perhaps one of the staff had left a coat hanging there.
He wondered where they got the clothes the stiffs got buried in. Probably the families supplied them, but what if things got left over, not used? There might be some useful clobber tucked away somewhere, petty cash even...food? How would a supper of communion wafers and wine go, eh?
As expected, beyond the door was the chapel, rows of pews, and a dim night light on a table at the front. Double doors, glass, lay at the far end of the central aisle. There was a view through a vestibule into the street. A passing car splashed racing yellow beams around the walls, and was gone.
Another door was set in the side wall near to the foremost pew; through there then, and mind that he wasn’t seen by some passer-by happening to glance in.
Keeping low, he sidled across the clear space in front of the pews - and stopped dead!
A chuckle, a low feminine chuckle sounded from somewhere among the pews.
Hair lifted on the back of his neck. He’d read about it. It really happened like that. It was happening to him. He had the bit with the cold water trickling down his spine too. A flipping ghost! Just the place for one, eh?
"What do you want?" he growled, wondering if there was a crucifix somewhere handy. There ought to be. A Star of David? Hammer and sickle? One of those moon and star things? Hell, a place like this ought to have them all.
A head was peering out at him from around the end of one of the rows, long shiny hair, a glitter of eyes
reflecting the light on the table. "I came here looking for something," she answered. "I thought I might
find what I was looking for here."
"Come out of there," he ordered hoarsely, backing up to the wall, avoiding the line of sight from the
street. His throat had gone so dry, he could hardly speak.
"You don’t want to be seen either?" She rose up from the shadows, and glided toward him, stopping a
couple of metres or so short. Nothing was wrong with her voice. It was surprising that she should seem
to show so little fear of him.
She looked substantial enough, calf-length boots, a tweed skirt and jacket. Not a bad looker either, rather the kind he liked actually; a cleaned-up version of the sheila he’d lived with for so long, only about twenty years younger.
"What are you doing here?" he rasped.
"I said I came looking for something. What are you hoping for?"
"Food...a change of clothing."
"You won’t get far in prison rig," she observed. "There’s odds and ends of clothing through the back
there. Maybe you’ll find something to fit."
She moved toward the nearby door, standing to one side of it, and automatically, prompted by the almost forgotten reactions of an over-strict childhood, he held it open for her.
"How do you know?" he asked.
"I’ve been here before. There’s a staffroom where there’s usually biscuits in a tin."
She slipped through the door, and moved easily in the dark hallway beyond. At another door she waited again, and when he opened it, he saw by reflected street lighting a dining table and chairs, and a bench with an electric water heater above it. On the bench was a bottle half full of milk, and several tins of various shapes and sizes. The room smelt of old coffee and cigarette smoke.
"Clothes first," he said. "I might want to leave in a hurry."
"Put the zip on first," she suggested. "It can boil while you’re changing."
She showed him where to find the clothing in a storeroom across the hallway, and went back to the staffroom. When he rejoined her, wearing a slightly baggy suit, and highly polished black shoes, she was seated at the near side of the dining table.
"Loosen the tie," she said. "It looks wrong with your face so whiskery."
"Is there a razor somewhere?"
"In the mortuary."
"I think I’ll leave it for now. I’ll get a shave another time."
"You don’t fancy going back in there?"
"I don’t want to waste too much time here. How’s that water?"
He felt the glass tube at the side of the cylinder. It was hot enough. He didn’t want the damned whistle waking up the whole neighbourhood when she boiled.
"How do you take your coffee?"
"I won’t bother just now," she said a shade too quickly.
"Now who’s chicken?" he asked. "Don’t fancy it in this place, eh?"
"It’s not stopping you."
"No. I’ve had to learn not to be too choosey."
"They give you a hard time in prison?"
"Not too bad. Stay respectful, do your time, the screws treat
you fair enough. You do it to yourself really. There’s too much time to think."
"Thinking being something you weren’t used to?"
"I wasn’t paid to think. I wasn’t paid to feel either, but I guess most of my life I was too busy to notice.
Twelve hours a day, jammed in your cell with blokes you’re sick of talking to, doesn’t leave you much
else to do but think."
"No reading?"
"Yeah. Reading, eh? A feller taught me that first year. I sort of never did get the hang of it properly at
school. I guess I was never there often enough. I read pretty good now. The trouble with reading is that
that makes you think too."
He heaped sugar over the coffee powder in the cup. Water gurgled.
"I suppose thinking about what you were in for must have been painful?"
"You can say that again. Bad mistake there."
"How so?"
"I did in the bloke I thought was duffing my bird; her too. Then I found I’d got it wrong."
"Wrong?"
"Yeah, D and A, or something. They’ve got these tests see, and they can tell from the blood and stuff
who the real father has to be, and it was me all the time."
"She wasn’t having it off with this other fellow?"
"Perhaps not. I dunno. It doesn’t matter now. Whether she was or not isn’t important, and never was."
"That’s a change of heart."
"Yeah, isn’t it. Funny that. It’s what comes of all that thinking, I guess."
"You’d do it differently now, if you had it to do all over again?"
He slumped over the steaming coffee cup across the table from her. "You can’t go back. You can’t change the past."
"Well, reincarnation then. Do you believe you could be born to another life one day? What if you met
her again in your next life?"
"If I could meet her again, knowing what I know now? Yeah, eh, that would be something."
"What would you do, if you thought she was being unfaithful?"
"I’d talk to her - try to find out why. There’s this thing, you see, women start to feel when they’re
getting older. You’ll maybe feel it one day. You wonder if it’s all gone past, if you haven’t got it any
more? You feel desperate to find out if you can get another man to look at you. If it was just that, if I
knew she’d come back, that I wasn’t going to lose her, then I’d get out of her way for a bit, give her her
head, eh."
"And if you were going to lose her?"
I’d do that hard. She was all I’d got, the only good thing that had ever happened to me, but if she
wanted to go, I’d have to let her go. I mean, if she wanted to go, I’d have lost her already, wouldn’t I?
She wouldn’t have been mine any more, would she, even if she did stay?"
"Letting her go would have been a measure of your love for her."
"Yeah, that’s right, innit? That’s the way it would be, though."
"What are you planning to do now?"
"Go looking for somebody else, eh. That’s something else I’ve been thinking. If you can find one,
there’s got to be another one out there somewhere. Just because you find a new one to love, doesn’t
have to mean that you love the first one any less."
"You think you’ll find one who’ll have you?"
"There’s always one, if you keep looking. There’ll be one who’ll be willing to put up with my troubles, if
I’m willing to help her with hers."
"A jailbreaker on the run won’t be much of a bargain."
"You don’t fancy me chances?"
"A woman would have to be in deep to take that on. Are you really planning to saddle her with it,
without telling her?"
"I hadn’t thought of it that way."
"A fellow out on probation, a fellow who’s done his time is one thing. The way you are now...well..."
"You wouldn’t touch me with a barge pole?"
"Another life, another time, us both of an age," she said thoughtfully, "I wouldn’t mind meeting you
again. With your present way of thinking, you’d train up real good."
In a brown study, he sipped at his coffee, his hunger and the biscuits forgotten. Her seeds sown, she sat quietly, companionably, letting him work it out for himself.
"Ah, shit," he said after a time. "I’ve been a fool again, haven’t I? I’ve got to go back. There’s nothing
for me out here."
"Not yet," she replied. "One day, but not yet."
"They won’t half sock it into me," he commented ruefully.
"Perhaps not too bad. Phone the governor. There’s a phone in the office here. Tell him where you are,
and that you’ll wait here for them to pick you up. They’re not going to say much about a broken locker
door and a cup of coffee."
"I’d better put these clothes back then."
He changed first, and then phoned as she’d suggested.
"The boss himself," he said, as he put the phone down. "He reckons he hasn’t time to be bothered with me at the moment. He’s sending a taxi for me."
Apart from the damaged locker, they left the undertaker’s place as they’d found it. The front door, on a Yale lock, clicked shut behind them, and they stood together, hunched up, in the recessed doorway.
"I used to have somebody like you once," he said. "I hope I can again."
"Who knows?" she replied. "Another time, another place."
A taxi appeared down the street, braked opposite them, and U-turned across the street to face them. The headlights stagelit him standing there, a scruffy, whiskery, old man all alone in the doorway, talking to himself.
"You didn’t get what you came for," he said to her.
"No," she shook her head, hair glistening in the light. "I changed my mind. I didn’t want it after all."