EXCLUSIVE!
Blood & Grit is now officially out of print, but you can read a complete story from Simon's very first book right here:
Firstly, he'd telephoned the office and lied that he was unwell and that he'd be taking the day off work. "Must've been the Indian takeaway, Mr Westerman. I've been up all night. I feel terrible." He'd lied badly and he knew that Mr Westerman had seen through it. Damn him! Let him think what he wants! Secondly, he'd found the carrier bags full of index cards in his bedroom which he had to sort into numerical order. It was extra work, he didn't have to do it, but God knows, he and his mother needed the money now his father had gone. The cost of living? No, the cost of dying is higher.
Penny a card. There were nine thousand waiting to be sorted and bundled. And they had to be back by Friday or the shit would really hit the fan. For five minutes he stared at them anxiously in the hope they would somehow magically re-order themselves. It was as he lifted a bag to the window to look at the faintly printed cards more closely that he saw the accident.
A row of terrace houses faced his own, with a broad strip of rough grass in between. In one bedroom he saw a child, a boy of maybe four or five climbing up at the window. The window was open. Robert's heart beat faster. He could see into the living room of the house. The rest of the family were downstairs watching breakfast television obviously ignorant that their child even now was swinging one chubby leg out of the window.
He wondered if he should wave or shout. He saw the child look up. For a second their eyes met, the child smiled, then slipped.
Robert had covered his face with his hands, a sick feeling squeezed into his tightening throat. When he looked again, the child lay still at the bottom of the bay window, its eyes twinkling in the early morning light.
The family in the room had heard something. The father went to the window and looked out.
Robert held his breath. The father's reaction to seeing the dead child surely must be worse than seeing the accident itself.
The man's head bobbed from left to right as he looked. Then Robert saw him shrug, mouth something, then return to the television. Of course. The child had fallen at the base of the wall. No-one could see it from the living-room window.
Robert tried to imagine himself going across to the house, knocking on the door and saying, "Excuse me, you don't know me, but something awful's happened." No, he could not do it.
As it happened he did not have to. The postman saw the body as he delivered the letters.
Robert Horobin felt acutely for the family and grieved for the child as much as any man can do. What he witnessed seared him with real emotion and when, at last, the mother came to the door, her scream seemed to bore a hole through his head.
"I'VE COME TO COLLECT my father," said Robert hesitantly. "William Anthony Horobin." The mortuary attendant didn't look up from his crossword but merely pointed to twin rubber doors along the corridor.
"Through there, mate. See the day officer."
The day officer, a Vietnamese man, mid-thirties, concealing his clinical depression behind a desperate grin, pulled Robert by the arm through the stacks of processed corpses.
"You've done the sensible thing, sir," said the day officer. "What made you decide on packing?"
"Eh? Oh, the nurse at the hospital suggested it."
"Ah well, she would. A few years ago doctors received payment when they persuaded relatives to have their deceased cremated. Ash-cash the doctors called it. Now that's gone, and we have packaging and they get pack-pay. This way please, sir." A moment later he stopped to kick at a stack of the shrink-wrapped corpses in their multi-coloured vac-pacs.
"Trouble is, relatives are still reluctant to pick them up." He kicked at the stacks. Hard, as if he really hated them, that they were responsible for his black despair.
Where his foot struck some packs burst. One revealed a greenish arm. The weight of those stacked on top had pressed the bodies flat. A lop-sided face flopped from the tattered plastic. The pressure had pushed one eye back into the wizened face; as if to compensate the other eye squeezed out, proud from the head, like a fresh green olive.
"Serves them right," chuckled the day officer bitterly, "can't keep them here forever."
At last Robert reached the point where his father was stacked.
"There you go, sir."
Numbly, Robert took the package. It was lighter than he expected, something to do with the processing he supposed. Like those vacuum packed trout you buy, he could feel the shape of the body beneath the tight plastic – the head, the limbs, the lumps and the ridges – all rigid beneath its snug wrapper.
He could see nothing through the plastic. Printed on that were lilies and carnations and where the face should be was the photograph of a beautiful model, features relaxed, her lips pursed as if to deliver a moist kiss, eyes lightly closed.
"Sir. Don't forget your wreath." The man peeled the adhesive tabs and stuck the saucer size wreath onto the pack.
The man smiled grimly and nodded. Obviously it was time for Robert to go. But he stood awkwardly wondering how to frame the question he wanted to ask.
"That's all there is, sir. Can you find your way back to the car park?"
"Yes, uh, thank you." Reluctantly Robert started to walk away. As he did so the words came in a rush. "What do I do with it now?" He turned but the man had gone, whistling away, away, away through the stacks of shrink-wrapped dead.
ROBERT DROVE BACK through the rain to find his mother waiting. She stood behind the table snipping the air with scissors.
"Come on, come on," she said impatiently. "Let's open him up and see what we've got."
"No!" Robert was shocked. They could never remove the wrapper. He'd seen enough of the compressed carcasses at the mortuary to know what his father looked like now. The idea repulsed him. He took a deep breath. "No, mother. We have to leave the bag intact."
She sighed. "Suit yourself, lad."
He carefully laid the pack on the settee. Something was wrong apart from the lack of weight. When his father was alive he used to lay on the settee after his lunchtime beer sessions, resting his head on the cushioned arm with his slippered feet hanging over the other end. Now he barely took up two cushions. A sick disappointment soaked through Robert. "You know what they've done, mother?"
"What?" She squinted at it through her glasses.
"Well, just look!" He snatched up the telephone and began looking for the mortuary number. "They've gone and tricked us, that's what." His voice cracked. "Look, the head's the right size, but – but his body's too small. It's a dwarf or a – or a doll."
His mother prised the handset from his fingers and replaced it. "Robert," she said softly. "Remember. In this place they do things differently."
He sat down heavily beside the pack. She was right. He nodded miserably. "But five hundred pounds for that. What are we going to do with him?"
His mother squeezed his hand. "This has been a very trying time for us all. But life must go on. In a minute I'll go and make us a nice dinner." She picked up the scissors and looked at them thoughtfully. "Robert, we could just snip a hole in the corner." A glint came into her eye as she snipped at the air once more. "Just a tiny one and take a little peek."
"No, no. No!"
Grumbling, his mother disappeared into the kitchen.
THAT NIGHT ROBERT dreamt he stood on the bank of the river watching the pack float by. Boys were pelting it with stones – they were laughing. The plastic burst open to expose something wrapped in strips of grey tissue which the water slowly unravelled to reveal part of his father's deeply lined forehead. Another strip peeled away and Robert looked down into a single naked eye. Wide open. Bloodshot. Staring.
A stone splashed near the pack making it bob lightly. Robert looked up at the boys. "Stop that!" The heavy weight of the authority in his voice surprised him. And the boys did stop. "Go on," he ordered firmly. "Clear off." Without answering back they ran away.
Robert awoke. Three am. And it was as if he had really woken from a bad dream that had lasted nearly all his life. He twisted himself out of bed and looked round at the dismal room. God, how had he lived in such a dump? Window frames rotted, giving off a mushroom smell, wallpaper hung down like scorched skin. He tested his balance on his toes and breathed deeply, feeling his blood hammer.
First things first. The cards. For the next four hours he worked. They seemed to dance into order beneath his suddenly dexterous fingers. As he snapped a rubber band around the last bundle the sunlight came slicing through the curtains. Jumping up, he ripped them aside, then wrenched up the sash window. It groaned, creaked, juddered but up it came and he thrust out his head to a chorus of singing birds that had to sing, for if they did not sing then they would burst with joy. And they sang because the sun annihilated a cold, and a dark, and a pitiless night. His elation expanded like a bubble and rose within him. His flesh could not contain it and it rose upward and outward to join with the birds that soared toward the heavenly blue sky.
The man from the house opposite, the same one from which the child had fallen, was walking across the grass, no doubt on his way to work, his snap bag over his shoulder, thermos in his donkey jacket pocket. He was whistling.
Insight blasted through Robert's head, bringing with it apostle-strength conviction.
"How's the boy?" called Robert cheerfully.
The man stopped and smiled up. "Not too bad now. But he's got hissen a bump on 'is head like an egg."
"He's home then?"
"Aye, they X-rayed 'im and that was it. Right as rain he is. Anyroad, it's learned 'im not to go and bloody well do it again. Sithee."
With his bare elbows resting on the window sill Robert Horobin stood there for a while until the sun had burnt the accumulated damp from his bones. After that, he went to his bedside table and took the blade from his razor. It was sharp enough. And he knew exactly what to do:
He would go
down
and find out what
his father
was really like.