Angelmaker (13 page)

Billy Friend lights a cigarette and leans out of the window, next to the sign forbidding smoking and above the one which cautions against putting your hands or head outside the train while it’s in motion. He draws hard, sucking against the wind, and turns back to Joe. It’s surprisingly dark here, at the junction between their carriage and the next, and the gloomy overhead light makes him look ancient and craggy, with deep black pouches under his eyes and lines like scars running from the corners of his mouth. He waves his hand, up and down, to get himself started.

“There’s families, Joseph, right? In the Waiting game, I mean. There’s the Ascots, been doing it since King James, and the Godrics since the Norman conquest and before. My lot started out when Victoria was new. The Alleyns reckon they’ve been at it since Caesar, and most likely they have. And each of them has his own daft way of doing it, embalming and making up and laying out, right? Secrets of the trade, and that. And the thing you have to understand is the differences are mostly crap. It all comes to the same thing. But part of the service is giving a sense that maybe it’s not too late to show some kindness or some heart, right, even if you never did give a fig for the dead while they was still alive, or if they never gave a fig for you, because let’s face it, as great a proportion of the dead are arseholes as the living. It stands to reason, although you won’t find many funerals begin with ‘he was a total pain in the neck and only half as clever as he thought, so let’s put him in the ground and have a pint, and good riddance.’ I’ve always thought that would have a certain charm, myself.

“So then there’s the new sort, all Richard Branson shiny, right? They’re different from us. Someone like Vince Alleyn, you ask him
what he charges and he’ll tell you he charges what his client can afford. So Lady Farquar Froofroo Lah-Dee-Dah Fudge Follicle, right, putting her husband in the ground costs a sodding fortune. But her butler, when he buries his wife as used to turn down her ladyship’s sheets of an evening and sort out her ladyship’s wig collection, that’s dirt cheap. What you might like to think of as organic pricing, or
fairness
, if you’re a traditionalist like me. But then along comes some bugger in a white dinner jacket like Barry Manilow and he says he’s for transparent fees and it’s more democratic and all that. So, as my friend Daniel Levin would say—because your Jewish families have a whole different set of things they do for the dead, Joseph, and rather better in my view—so,
nu
. Now we do price lists and not everyone can afford the trimmings they want, and some pay in advance on the never-never, which is as macabre as you like, but here we are.

“Now the other thing about the new sort, they’re not families, right? They are companies, and they have logos and what all you like. They hire consultants. It’s bloody hilarious, I’ll tell you, watching a bunch of advertising berks try to find new ways to sell coffins. It’s just great.
Buy one, get one free!
and all that. These are the people who thought it would be better if the Post Office was called Consignia, so you can imagine what they do to the Waiting game. One of them tried to tell me we should rebrand as ‘AfterCare.’ I’m not making this up.

“Now, to join the Brotherhood, and set up shop in the Waiting trade, you need what we call an
acquaintanceship
. You want to have seen a bit of death, maybe as a nurse or a soldier or a doctor. It can be anything really, but you need to know. You can’t have your undertaker turn pale and chuck up when he sees the dearly departed, right? So Donovan Parry wants to set up shop and he’s a man in the old style. He gets onto Vince Alleyn and the others, my dad and their lot, and says he wants in. And there’s all hemming and hawing, because they don’t know him from Adam, but they call him over to the Bucket & Spade at Canonbury and they put to him the question. Why in all the world does he want to be a Waiting Man?

“ ‘It’s a living,’ says Donovan.

“ ‘There’s plenty of ways to make a living,’ says Vince, ‘and not many can do this one right.’

“ ‘Reckon I’d be one of them as can,’ Donovan tells him.

“ ‘Lot of fellows ain’t comfortable sitting up with the dead,’ Roy Godric says.

“ ‘Makes no never mind to me if a man’s living or he’s dead, so long as he don’t chatter on when I’m smoking a pipe or reading the Post,’ comes back Donovan Parry.

“And that’s how it goes on, and one by one they come to the conclusion that old Donovan might just have what it takes. He’s got what they call the Quiet on him, don’t fret much and don’t give out at all if he does. It’s a powerful thing on a Waiting Man, does half the job before the rabbit’s off the mark, like the Blacksmith’s Word for widows. But all the same it’s making them half mad, because he don’t talk like no doctor nor soldier, he’s more like a schoolmaster. Vince Alleyn asks him point blank if he’s a vicar lost his cassock, and if so what for, and Donovan Parry laughs and says no, he isn’t a religious sort and never has been. He believes in the laws of man, he says, and that should be enough for anybody—but the way he says it, it’s like a Bible verse, and steely cold.

“So finally Roy Godric says:

“ ‘All right, Mr. Parry, you’ve the Quiet on you right enough and the way about you to be a Waiting Man. So it’s just if you’ve got your acquaintanceship. If not, you work with me a year and then we’ll set you up.’

“And Donovan Parry laughs and says yes, he’s got an acquaintanceship all right.

“ ‘Well, what is it?’ Jack Ascot asks him.

“ ‘Well,’ says Donovan Parry, ‘back in the day, I sent a few the way of their final rest. More’n a few, I suppose. And spent the night before with each man, too.’ He grins at them, clear and pale and cold. ‘I was Crown’s hangman at Raftsey Jail, y’see.’

“ ‘How many was it?’ Jack Ascot says.

“ ‘I reckon nigh on fifty,’ says Donovan Parry, ‘but we don’t call it right to keep a tally. A good hangman does one at a time, and don’t dwell nor come prideful on the count. He meets his man the night before, and looks him in the eye and measures him for the drop, then on the day he hoods him if the man wants it—and tells ’em they should, there’s no shame in fear and no dignity in looking it in the eye for most, just a wet seat and the horrors—and gets him from the execution cell to the noose as fast as he can so there’s no time to think on what’s to come. Fastest we ever done was a minute twenty-two, and we were well pleased with that. The lad hardly knew it was happening, and he fell like a rock. Never once,’ says Donovan Parry, ‘did
we have one fall and not die right off. I never had to swing on a man’s legs nor take a second pass. And that’s something a hangman can be proud of, for it’s craft and wit and mercy, all in one. Still,’ he says, ‘the hanging’s done now, years back. There’ll be no more in England and I’ve no desire to get myself to Jamaica or one of those places. So it’s the Waiting trade for me, if you’ll have it.’

“And they surely would. Well, of course they would. It’s different now, because we don’t execute felons, and I’m sure that’s the right choice. But back then, Joseph, a Crown’s hangman was like David Beckham crossed with the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was death’s own coachman.

“Well, time went by and Donovan Parry himself passed on to his reward, and they say at the last he had a few qualms about the lads he might find on the other side, and what his ultimate destination might be. And his son Richard carried on the family trade, which he learned with his own dad, and in time he brought in young Vaughn, which was his son. And I’ll tell you something, Joseph, which many would consider indiscreet. I’d always had half a notion that the Honoured & Enduring Brotherhood was somewhat of a swizz. A closed shop, right? Seemed to me that any fool could do right by a corpse and pat the bereaved and say ‘He’s gone to a better place’ or ‘They look so peaceful, don’t they?’ and suchlike rubbish. I thought, it’s a Masonry, right, a dining club and a way of looking out for ourselves, and I’ve got no quarrel with that, but there’s no call for all this pendulous mystical crap about acquaintanceships and so on, that’s for the mugs, and one thing a Waiting Man doesn’t like to be considered, it’s a mug.

“Now, a fellow like Donovan Parry, they recognise his acquaintanceship and there’s an end to it, right? No test for him. But if you come up in the trade there’s a test, like a final exam, before they call you a Waiting Man proper. Lads who haven’t done it they call the
twices
, because they’re waiting to be Waiting. (Yes, I know, it’s weak, but doing what we do you find the laughs where you can.)

“Now each test is different, each one’s just for you. They don’t tell you it’s coming, they just do it, though of course once it starts you’ve a fair inkling this’ll be it. Richard Parry had to lay out a leper, which is actually no great horror. Mine, they locked me in a room with a whole load of corpses and told me to lay them out over one night, and of course the wicked buggers had got some lads from the building site and made them up, so I was halfway through the first one (he was
the only real dead ’un, right, sodding great hole in his gut from a car crash) when number two starts to twitch and moan and then up they all get and ghastly gashed they wander around going ‘Wooooo’ and so on. For about five seconds I near peed myself, and then I nearly called out for the others to tell them I’d seen through it, and finally I just got on with the dead fellow, because while they might want me to do something else, this lad still needed his laying-out, and buggered if I was going to mess that up, even if it meant another year as a
twice
. Took me two hours to get the thing done, and saying never a word nor looking around, even when these ghastly bastards all crowded about me and showed me their injuries and scabs and what have you. They’d done a good job with the make-up, of course, because it’s part of the trade, only this time rather in reverse. Now I was ninety-nine per cent sure they were fake, but damn me if that lingering one per cent weren’t a real possibility when midnight came along. No joke, Joseph, it was hard.

“So I finished him off, and then I gets my saw out and turns to the nearest moaning ghost and I says ‘All right, my poor dead matey, I’ve to cut you open now, and I mean to do it, so you may as well hop up on this table and spare your grieving relatives an ugly mess!’ Hah!
He
near peed himself then, and of course the Waiting Men come in and gave me the nod. Said I’d shown the Quiet, you see, which of course I had, and I never knew.

“Well, that was all good fun and actually I was a fair bit proud, after, of how I carried it off, and Jack Ascot said—he was nearly a hundred by then—he said when they had Vince Alleyn’s test back in the day, they done a thing much the same called the Bloody Bride, and a woman from the local butcher’s shop wore a set of cow’s intestines around her neck and a slashed-open wedding dress. Vince damn near fainted, and then after, blow me if he didn’t walk right over and kiss her on the mouth. He passed right away, and married the girl, to boot. Anyway, Jack said he hadn’t seen much better since.

“So come the day, we had young Vaughn’s test, and Richard said we’d best find something particularly dark, because his son had a steady nerve.

“Now, in the book—there’s an actual book, can you believe, and I imagine it’s worth a ton of money now, there’s likely only the one—there’s about a dozen really awful things they used to do. About the worst is to get the corpse of a condemned blasphemer and sew it
up with cats inside, then tell the lad doing the test it’s your dear old mum or someone close. As ghoulish as it comes. Modern times, of course, there’s no way you’d get away with something like that, even if you were of a mind. But they found a way for Vaughn Parry, and this is what it was: they got a dead ape, and they shaved it all over and drew on a sailor’s tattoo, and then they put it in a suit and smashed the head up some so you couldn’t immediately say it wasn’t a man, just a really ugly one. And then—well, they couldn’t use a cat, that wouldn’t be right—so they caught a fox from the rubbish tip, knocked him out with a bit of doped luncheon meat, and stitched the poor dead ape up around him. And then they put Vaughn Parry up to bat.

“So they did it in the Alleyn place, because there’s a two-way mirror so old Vince could keep an eye on his lads while they were working and be sure the thing was done respectful. And we all crowded in to see what would happen. There’s Vaughn, working away, and the belly of the ape wriggles and heaves, and Vaughn glances over at it, but it’s stopped, so he goes back to work. And then a moment later it happens again, and then there’s this appalling noise, I swear you never heard such a thing, a scream fit to make you think someone’s being crucified, right there beside you, and the nails going in through bone and gristle. I swear, Joseph, I never heard such a noise. And we all thought it must be Vaughn, seeing what was happening, but it wasn’t. It was the fox, screaming for his life. Vaughn … he reaches over like he’s passing the gravy on a Sunday, and cuts the ape open, then goes inside for the fox and lifts it out, and without barely looking he snaps its neck and goes on with the job. And my dad, who never speaks in these things, never says a word, because he’s a shy old bugger, he says ‘Ah, well,’ like that’s decided something. And everyone leaves. They don’t bother to go and get Vaughn and tell him the gag. They up and leave. And the next day, when he comes looking, they won’t none of them talk to him, or even look him in the eye, and finally he goes to Roy Godric and asks what’s the matter.

“ ‘Sorry, Vaughn,’ Roy says quietly, ‘but you’re out. You failed your
acquaintanceship
. You’re done.’

“Now, I’ve never heard of no one
failing
before. Not passing, yes, but you just try again. But
failing
, so the Brotherhood won’t ever take you, I didn’t even know that was possible.

“ ‘What? What do you mean?’ Vaughn wants to know.

“ ‘Just what I say, Vaughn, boy,’ Roy says. ‘You won’t be one of us. Not ever.’

“ ‘But I passed! Look what you did, and I passed. I showed
Quiet
. I know I did!’

“ ‘No, boy. You ain’t got the Quiet. And you ain’t now, nor never will be, a Waiting Man. Now, off you go.’ And he points at the door, and Vaughn Parry just goes, because he doesn’t know what else to do.