“Wow, okay,” Peggy said. “And what’s the going rate for a funeral these days?”
“It depends,” Andrew said. “Average cost is about four thousand. But if the deceased hasn’t got any sort of estate, and no relatives or anyone else willing to pay for it, then the council are legally obliged to bury them. Without frills—no headstone, flowers, private plot and the like—that’s about a grand.”
“Jeez,” Peggy said, snapping a glove on. “Does that happen a lot—the council doing that?”
“Increasingly,” Andrew said. “In the last five years or so there’s been about a twelve percent increase in public health funerals. More and more people are passing away on their own, so we’re always busy.”
Peggy shivered.
“Sorry, I know it’s a bit bleak,” Andrew said.
“No, it’s that expression—‘pass away.’ I know it’s meant to soften the blow, but it just seems so, I dunno, flimsy.”
“I agree, actually,” Andrew said. “I don’t usually say it myself. But sometimes people prefer it described that way.”
Peggy cracked her knuckles. “Ah, you’re all right, Andrew. I’m quite hard to shock. Ha—cut to me in five minutes’ time legging it out of here.” From the couple of wafts Andrew had already smelled coming through the door, he wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was what happened. What was the protocol then? Would he have to chase after her?
“So what else did the coroner have to say about this poor chap?” Peggy asked.
“Well, the neighbors realized they hadn’t seen him for a while and called the police, who forced entry and found his body. He was in the living room and he’d been there for a while so was in a fairly bad state of decomposition.”
Peggy reached up and twiddled one of her earrings.
“Does that mean it might be a bit . . .” She tapped her nose.
“Afraid so,” Andrew said. “It will have had time to air out a bit, but you can’t . . . it’s hard to explain, but . . . it’s a very specific sort of smell.”
Peggy was starting to look a little pale.
“But that’s where this comes in,” Andrew said quickly, holding up the aftershave, sounding unintentionally like he was in an advert. He shook the bottle and sprayed it liberally inside his mask, then did the same for Peggy, who strapped her mask over her nose and mouth.
“I’m not entirely sure this is what Paco Rabanne had in mind,” came her muffled voice. This time Andrew smiled for real, and though Peggy’s mouth was obscured he could tell from her eyes that she was smiling back.
“I’ve tried all sorts of different things over the years—but it’s only ever the expensive stuff that seems to work.”
He took the keys from an envelope in his bag.
“I’ll go and have a quick look first, if that’s okay?”
“Be my guest,” Peggy said.
With the key in the lock, this was usually the point where Andrew took a moment to remind himself why he was there: that he was to treat the place with as much respect as possible, no matter how bad the conditions. He was by no means a spiritual person, but he tried to make sure he carried out his work as if the deceased were watching on. On this occasion, not wanting to make Peggy any more uncomfortable than she already was, he only went through this little ritual—putting his phone on silent, too—after he’d stepped inside and shut the door gently behind him.
When Peggy had asked him about the smell, he was glad he’d managed to censor himself. Truthfully, what she was about to experience would change her forever. Because, as Andrew had discovered, once you’ve smelled death it never leaves you. Once, not long after his first-ever house inspection, he’d been walking through an underpass and had caught the same smell of decomposition as he’d experienced at the house. Glancing to one side, he saw among the leaves and rubbish on the floor a small stretch of police tape. It still made him shudder whenever he thought about it, to feel so highly tuned to death.
It was hard to tell from the little hallway what condition the flat was going to be in. In Andrew’s experience, the places fell into two categories: either they were immaculately clean—no dust, no cobwebs, not a thing out of place—or they were overpoweringly squalid. It was the former that Andrew found the most upsetting by far, because to him it never felt as simple as the deceased’s just being house-proud. Instead, it seemed more likely that they knew that when they died they were going to be found by a stranger and couldn’t bear the thought of leaving a mess. It was like a more extreme version of people who spent the morning feverishly tidying in preparation for the cleaner. Of course there was a certain dignity to it, but it made Andrew’s heart break to think that, for some people, the moments immediately following their death were more of a pressing concern than whatever time they had left to live. Chaos, on the other hand—clutter and filth and decay—never felt quite as upsetting. Maybe the deceased had just been unable to look after themselves properly in their last days, but Andrew liked to think that they were actually giving the finger to convention. Nobody had bothered to hang around to look after them, so why should they carry on giving a shit? You can’t go gently into the good night when you’re laughing uproariously imagining some mug from the council slipping on some shit on the bathroom floor.
The fact that he was forced to shoulder open the door to the little living room suggested this was going to be the latter of the two scenarios, and, sure enough, the smell hit him with an overwhelming intensity, greedily seeking out his nostrils. He usually refrained if possible from spraying air freshener, but to really be able to spend time there he would have to. He fired off a generous burst in each corner, picking his way through the mess, and reserved the most prolonged spray for the center of the room. He would have opened the grimy window but the key was presumably lost somewhere in all the clutter. The floor was covered by an ocean of blue corner-shop bags stuffed with empty crisp packets and cans of soft drinks. In one corner, a mound of clothes. In another, newspapers and mail, mostly unopened. In the middle of the room there was a green camping chair, a can of cherry Coke in each cup holder, opposite a television that was propped up on an uneven pile of telephone directories, so that it sloped to one side. Andrew wondered if Eric had suffered from a crick in his neck from having to angle his head at the listing screen. On the floor in front of the chair was an upturned microwave meal, yellow rice spilled all around it. That was probably where it happened. That chair. Andrew was about to make a start on the pile of mail when he remembered Peggy.
“How is it?” she said when he stepped outside.
“It’s pretty messy, and the smell isn’t . . . ideal. You can always wait outside if you’d prefer.”
“No,” Peggy said, clenching and unclenching her hands at her sides. “If I don’t do it the first time then I never will.”
She followed him into the living room, and apart from the fact she was holding her mask to her face so firmly her knuckles were faintly white, she didn’t seem too distressed. They surveyed the living room together.
“Wow,” Peggy eventually mumbled through her mask. “There’s something so, I dunno, static about all this. It’s like the place died with him.”
Andrew had never really thought about it that way. But there was something eerily still about it all. They reflected in silence for a moment. If Andrew had known any profound quotes about death this would have been the perfect time for one. It was then that an ice-cream van went past outside, cheerily blasting out “Popeye the Sailor Man.”
—
Under Andrew’s instruction, they began to sort through all the paper.