“When it came time to write it, I started to think about journeys—about the prices we pay for them sometimes and the debts incurred—and this story is the end result of those thoughts. It’s short but, I think, one I can be proud of.
“The paramedic’s line about the brain looking like a snail, by the way? That’s genuine, and is written here pretty much verbatim from how it was told to me.”
ELISE DROVE A private ambulance. Unlike most ambulances, this one was dressed in a monotone, sombre grey, had no sirens or flashing lights, and the patients it carried were beyond treatment or help or hope of recovery. There was no need for rush, no pressure on Elise to arrive at her destination quickly, there was simply smooth movement of the world rolling past the windows and the knowledge that in the vehicle’s chill rear, her passengers rode in silence. She never turned the radio on when she drove, despite the fact that the ambulance’s cab was separate from the back section, feeling somehow that it would be disrespectful during these final journeys. Elise gave the dead serenity and grace wherever she could, quietness after life’s noise.
These night-time rides were the ones that she enjoyed the most; there was little traffic, especially out here where the buildings had given way to farmland and the ground rose to hills, and she could drive without effort or concentration, letting her mind reach out into the sky and land around her and find shapes and scents and sounds that, she thought, few other people ever felt or smelled or heard.
Old man Tunstall’s funeral parlour was out in one of the villages, serving the isolated communities scattered throughout the farmlands. Actually, they maybe weren’t isolated communities, Elise thought, but one huge community stretched thin and laid across the hills and valleys and fields like a net, hundreds of individual strands twisting around each other in links that stretched from farmhouse to terraced street to barn and back to farmhouse. Few people escaped the area, once arrived, not for any length of time. Tunstall had once told her that most of his business was what he called “in-house”, people from the area dying at home and being buried in the land that had sustained them. It was only occasionally that Elise was called on to take a body from the hospital in the city to Tunstall’s, and the runs were always at night.
Outside, the ground was dusted with frost and occasional banks of snow. It had been bitterly cold these last few weeks, the earth hardening, becoming frigid, and Elise drove slowly, letting the vehicle’s weight give it grip on the iced surface. The roads glistened in the dying moonlight and, around her, the fields drowsed under a caul of ice and the journey was all that mattered, this last journey between the places of life and the places of death.
Elise carried only one traveller that night. “He killed himself,” the morgue attendant had told her in a voice somewhere between glee and horrified awe, “and we don’t know who he is!” The man had apparently walked to the banks of the river that wound down from the hills, passing through the town on its way to the sea, stripped, knelt down on the ridged and furled mud at the bitter water’s edge and frozen to death. His clothes were in a bag next to Elise now, neatly folded, the top of the bag rolled and held down with tape.
“He was frozen solid,” the morgue attendant had said, “and we had to defrost him like a piece of chicken!” Elise had met people like the attendant before, people for whom the mechanics of death were the most fascinating part of the journey, for whom the biology of things was the most important. There had been the paramedic who had told her, voice rich with undisguised fascination, about the suicide who had jumped from a tall building and landed on the ground at an odd angle. Their head, said the paramedic, had connected hard with a kerbstone and cracked open and their brain had burst free and slithered, almost intact, across the road “like a big pink snail”.
He had asked her out for a drink after telling her this. She had refused, politely, and taken the suicide’s body into her private ambulance to begin its next stage of the procession into the ground. For Elise, death wasn’t a moment; rather, it was a string of moments, a set of markers that led from life to burial or cremation, to earth or fire, and she saw herself as a companion and guide to these, the most significant of journeys.
The rear of the ambulance shifted slightly as she went around a corner, the wheels slipping over ice, and she slowed.
The dead man was being delivered to Tunstall’s Funeral Home simply because Tunstall had a council contract to deal with the unidentified dead; there were spaces in the graveyards out here. In the cities, space for the departed was rapidly being filled and the real estate of passing on carried heavy costs that councils couldn’t pay, so people like Elise’s passenger were sent out, to where populations were lower and the grounds cheaper.
The rear of the vehicle shifted again. There was a noise as it shifted, a gentle knocking.
Elise slowed again, dropping smoothly through the gears, letting the engine quieten. There was another thud from behind her, and a slight shiver ran through the vehicle. Had she run over something in the road? A rock or branch, maybe an animal? She glanced in her wing mirror but the road behind her, painted in fragile moonlight, was clear. She let her speed creep back up, happy that all was well. Elise took the dead man on.
Another thud, another slight shiver. Movement. In the rear of the vehicle.
Elise’s first thought was that something had come loose back there, one of the straps holding the man’s coffin possibly, that it was flapping, but no—the thud had been too loud and the shiver too heavy to be caused by a simple loose strap. Perhaps the coffin itself was moving, slipping on its base and banging against the vehicle’s wall when she went around corners?
Another corner, slower now, but no accompanying shift or thud, the road straightening, letting the ambulance speed up and then a definite bang from the rear. Elise started, the tyres shimmying across the surface of the frozen road before she grasped the wheel and brought the vehicle back into line. The bag of belongings next to her fell from the seat into the footwell with a rustle of plastic that sounded almost organic, like an owl opening its wings and stretching. Making sure the road was straight ahead for a while, Elise turned and tried to peer through the small observation window between the cab and the refrigerated rear section.
The glass was dark, throwing back a reflection of her face, eyes inked pools below her pale forehead.
She turned back to the road, lifting her foot from the accelerator and taking the vehicle gently left, in towards the roadside. When it came to a halt, she put the ambulance in neutral and unclipped her seatbelt, turning properly to the observation slit. Cupping her hands around her eyes, she peered into the blackness that travelled at her back. It was almost absolute, a gloom that was broken only vaguely by pale edges and shapes.
Something moved loosely in the dark and then the engine of the ambulance abruptly cut out.
Elise jerked back from the glass. What had that been? She twisted back around and turned the key, starting the vehicle again. The engine sputtered for a moment, caught and slipped, caught again and grumbled to full life. She opened the driver’s side door and stepped out, leaving it open so that the cab lights fell across the road. There were no other lights out here, no street lamps, no cars or trucks barrelling along the road, just the stars above her and the moon dipping low as the night came to its end.