“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.