No Rest For The Soon Departed

For the final stage of my Art History degree studies, having already exhausted every Art History module available, I chose to undertake a module in Creative Writing. As my degree was already all but assured, I thought this would be a nice way to afford me the opportunity to conclude my studies while also forcing me to actually write. The following short story was written and submitted as my year-end assessment piece. While it's far from a professional job in my own eyes, it did well enough to earn me an A-grade pass for the module and to secure a First-Class Honours Degree overall.
As I have absolutely no intention of seeking publication for this piece, I thought I might as well post it here, rather than leave it lingering in my Dropbox account. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.



No Rest For The Soon Departed

Mother’s eyes glared at me from the mouth of the coffee cup, bobbing like bloated pearls in a bucket of watery silt as I tried to drown them beneath the surface. They were a reminder of the one thing I’d missed. I’d often wondered in the months since her passing what her expression must have been at the end. Fear? Relief? Or perhaps the look of someone discovering something truly wonderful, the final countenance of a life redefined by revelation at its end.
The coffee-cup eyes held no trace of such an expression. Instead, they looked at me like a lost puppy looking at a stranger; a vague hope of rescue mingled with an immeasurable fear of the unknown. I clenched my own eyes shut in response. I’ve always been able to snap myself out of a dream that way, as though I can flip-flop between realms, my eyelids like portals. When I opened them again, mother’s eyes were gone and I was faced with nothing more than my own reflection rippling darkly across the surface.
‘Hey, Maggie! You gonna drink that or just look at it?’ Shiver’s smile, wreathed in dreadlocks the colour of moonlight, completed my transition back to reality, to the familiar surroundings of The Spirit Box, her little Goth shop on the high street; or as she had once described it to me, ‘more of a lifestyle shop, really, hun’.
Grey sky and grey stone shone dully through the black-laced window. Next door was the betting shop; as stark a contrast in businesses as you could hope for, all misery and adrenalin and the leaden musk of body odour. Next door to that, one of the many empty store fronts which made the high street look like a series of faded photographs, vessels now devoid of memory.
I managed a weary smile in Shiver’s direction, unable to mask the exhaustion I was feeling. ‘You sound like the voice in my head after the night shift.’
‘The what?’
I tried to keep my voice from cracking. ‘Oh...nothing! Just that after a few hours of telling people to move on from park benches or store fronts you start to sound like a broken record.’ I felt almost nakedly aware of the fact that I was still wearing my uniform. The florescent Special Constable’s jacket was an incongruous sight amongst all the black velvet and leather, like a shot of blanched sunlight streaking across oil. A row of PVC outfits arrayed on the far wall made me think of wetsuits, rekindling the memory of the face of the man I’d seen pulled from the river and the sodden clothes which had clung to his body like a second skin, fleshless and anaemic. The stench of sodden decay still lingered in my nostrils, even a week later, reinforcing the image of a once white t-shirt which had taken on the sallow hue of an ancient candle, and of jeans which had gained a greasy sheen like a day-old fever. Mud had spattered the man’s face like a blackly pigmented birthmark. The entire scene had felt dreamlike in its intensity, all the more real for its surreality.
The scent of coffee replaced the remembered stench of a drowned addict, grounding me back within the present moment. My concentration had been all over the place for some time. Overwork probably. Underpaid, definitely. Voluntary shifts as a Special Constable did little to keep the job-centre off my back. Even in the digital age, the fear of the brown envelope on the doormat is a prodigious one.
‘One too many night shifts, if you ask me,’ Shiver said, her face turned towards the coffee machine located behind the cluttered expanse of the counter. The coffee machine dominated the far corner of the shop, a ludicrously everyday item amongst the pseudo-mystical paraphernalia, as out of place as a birthday cake at a funeral. It’s sleek body shone dark and metallic, like a sculpted carapace. It’s colour matched its environment, if nothing else. ‘Surprised you’re not home already. You could do with sleep more than coffee, hun.’ I could sense the disapproval in her words. Shiver had never fully reconciled herself with my becoming a Special Constable. In high school we had forged a bond built upon a mutual love of the music of Joy Division and (to a lesser extent) New Order and the novels of Anne Rice. When my father had deserted us, the melancholic miasma of that world of heightened emotions had been a refuge, somewhere I could make sense of my feelings, of the injustices of the world. Anger, despair, bitterness, had all been accepted as elements of my life story, as indelibly a part of me as a tattoo, something I could carry forward as proof of having lived, emotional states transformed into fault lines.
But times had changed. Sometimes I felt I’d changed more than Shiver, who still clung to her high-school nickname and her increasingly age-inappropriate dreadlocks. The Spirit Box was still a form of refuge, and Shiver still an integral part of that refuge, but it felt less secure, more prone to incursions from a reality I would rather deny.
‘This is better,’ I replied, at length. ‘Home hasn’t felt the same since...you know! Especially at night. That’s why I volunteer for the night shift. No-one else wants to do it anyway.’ I took a deep gulp of coffee, trying not to think of my mother’s eyes, before intoning, ‘The Graveyard shift!’.
‘Sleep through the day and stalk the streets at night. So you turned into a vampire after all.’ Shiver winked in my direction, any trace of reproach now gone, replaced by the remembrance of the many hours we’d spent as teenagers discussing Lestat and his velvet-drenched cohorts.
It was another reminder of the gulf which had widened between us.
Time flows like a river unaware of its course. I am certain of this. For all the change I’ve undergone since my teenage years, I still can’t divorce myself from the feeling that I’ve achieved little more than to pass the time. The years spent caring for my mother sit like a meteorite within the internal geography of my life, a solid mass obliterating everything around it. No new relationships forged, no new passions developed, just an expanse of existence flattened into a tedious stretch toward a grey horizon.
Still, like a meteorite, a certain brilliance has resulted from its impact.
As I drank my coffee I noticed a trio of skeletal porcelain figures perched beside the till. Identical bare-toothed grins leered ghoulishly from their cartoonish skulls, painted like comic-book representations of Mexican Day of the Dead masks. Clearly they were meant to approximate the three wise monkeys, though all three figures held bony hands over their empty eye sockets, each a representative of the maxim of ‘see no evil’.
I lifted one of the figures from the counter, turning it between my fingers, its glazed pate reflecting the rainbow of fairy lights adorning the counter wall. ‘Why are these all the same? Shouldn’t they be different?’
‘Hmm! Oh, they’re sold individually, not as a set. S’pose that’s all that’s left. People mustn’t like to admit to seeing evil around here.’ She winked at me again, though this time I could sense the contempt creeping back in.
As I drained the final dregs from the cup, a teenage girl elbowed her way past me. Either she didn’t recognise my uniform or she recognised it all too well as a symbol of my tenuous position of authority. Her hair was the colour of a moonless night, a perfect contrast with the figure the other side of the counter, and she was dressed in fishnet tights which seemed to descend like a perverse dream-catcher from her painfully thin frame. A black hoodie bulked out her torso so that she looked as though she were wrapped in a blanket. Once she’d paid for her purchase – a velvet skirt considerably more modest than the one she was wearing – she brushed past me and left the store without so much as a glance in my direction.
She couldn’t have been much more than seventeen, but already she seemed to be hastening her transition into adulthood. We’re less aware of time’s passage at that age. Sometimes it feels like everyone has somewhere to hurry to, somewhere personal to them. Other times, I’m convinced we’re all rushing toward the same destination, failing to acknowledge one another as we go.

The high street felt unseasonably warm as I walked home, the atmosphere heavy like a dream in which the whole world has come to a stand still. There was a taste in the air, like ash. The place felt like a prison, empty windows taking the place of bars, endlessly reflecting the image of the street back upon itself. All the passers-by looked like zombies in the reflections. Doubtless a few really were zombies, zoned out on Spice as though they were opting out of time itself, skipping towards oblivion. They, at least, had an awareness of reality, even if it was only during their more lucid periods. Like the figures in the Spirit Box, they had chosen not to see the evil which surrounded them. I empathised with them even while it was my responsibility when on duty to remove them from the streets.
The drowned man had been amongst their number. After we’d fished him out of the water, PC Unwin had chimed in with his usual unsavoury remarks. ‘A fiver says he got ripped off his tits then threw himself into the river. Probably tried to walk on the water. Not that it matters. Stupid bastard’s dead, all the same.’ Everyone who wasn’t exactly like Unwin was a bastard. Or a weirdo. Unwin had a face which looked as though it had moved directly from teenage misfortune into middle-age neglect, without ever losing the greasy complexion. Doubtless his mental state had matured little in the intervening years, either.
The only other officer present had been an older DC whom I’d never met before. She hadn’t reacted to Unwin’s juvenile badinage. She had the look of a woman who had seen too many bodies; too many young bodies, at that! They didn’t affect her in the same way any more. She’d grown numb to the sight of untimely death; numb to a lot of things, no doubt. Sometime in the past she must have built a wall around her emotions, a wall which time had weathered into a facade of stony indifference, bearded with resignation.
The differing reactions of the two officers had felt to me as though they’d tainted the purity of the occasion. I was only there because I’d been first on the scene, tracked down by a member of the public who had seen the body floating in the river, where his waxy-face had been seen peeking Orpheus-like from out of the brackish water. There’d been something sacred to me about the situation, as though I had trespassed across the borderline of some secret place not meant to be witnessed by the living. When I’d scrunched my eyes closed then, I had remained within that dream-space.

I still thought of the flat as ‘our’ flat, rather than my own. I could avoid thinking of it as a mausoleum that way. I hadn’t let any of her things go. At first I’d thought of her possessions as a means of keeping her alive, as though every piece of her clothing, every one of her books, every knick-knack and trinket were imbued with some aspect of her soul, like a psychic imprint capable of gaining sentience, anchoring its owner to the material world. A kind of absolute materialism.
That relationship had changed with the passage of time. After a few months it had become easier to view her things as a physical manifestation of those lost years, a fetish which I could turn my back on at the start of every night patrol, a means of exorcising the disdain I’d never been able to show her during the days of her long decline. Now it was like living with the utensils one relied upon in prison; the singular items of cutlery which had been ever present during one’s incarceration. Retaining them emphasised my new found freedom. I may have dreaded coming home each day, but release was always just around the corner.
The most potent of these objects was a replica Countdown teapot, which nestled between the TV and the wall. She’d been obsessed with the show as long as I could remember, never missing an episode, even a repeat. As a teenager it had been a useful cover under which me and Shiver could find some privacy. As long as we could hear the ticking of the giant clock on the TV, then we were free to talk about the usual teenage concerns; sex, music and the looming spectre of adulthood. For one hour we were free from her disapproving looks and sidelong glances.
She’d never really approved of Shiver. Once we started to dress alike – cheap corsets, billowing skirts and the palest of foundation, always the palest – the notion of her being a bad influence on me was crystallised in my mother’s mind. Shiver had called round once with a packet of cigarettes. She’d been smoking for some time, but I’d never had the nerve to try for myself. When Shiver proffered a cigarette to me, I refused, accepting the gentle mockery she aimed in my direction as the price of maturity. Unbeknownst to me, she left half a dozen of the cigarettes on my bed-side table, presumably under the assumption that I would later change my mind. My mother discovered their presence before I did, coming across them while she tidied my room during school hours. When I got home she forced me to smoke every one of them while she watched. I threw up after the final cigarette and no more word was said on the matter, though my mother’s treatment of Shiver became even more standoffish from that moment on.
Shiver still smokes today. The same brand, even! Sometimes I wonder if she’s ever really grown up. I lost time, but Shiver seems never to have noticed its presence to begin with.
My mother often talked about applying to be a contestant on Countdown, though that day never came. Instead of forming letters into words her bones formed their own anagrams, twisting their own cells into cancer. I bought her the teapot the first Mother’s Day after her diagnosis. She laughed when I gave it to her, even while her lip quivered. Yet she never stopped thinking that she’d be on the show one day, going so far as as to record an entire VHS tapes worth of episodes to help her practice beyond the show’s regular broadcast. That tape still stands next to the teapot, propped upright like a hardback book turned brittle. When I last checked its contents I found the tape had lost quality as it had aged, turning pale and weak. My mother did the same. I think perhaps the whole flat did.
A pile of brown envelopes, summons and demands from the almighty job centre, are stacked like bills beneath the teapot now. The whole scene makes me wonder if I have less substance than the remembered ghost of my mother, who still seems to live here more fervently than I do. Her physical absence seems increasingly unimportant, replaced by a certain dust-laced intimacy, cloying in its intensity.
While my mother’s final months passed in a seemingly endless repetition of TV and sleep, I wafted about the house like a restless spirit, condemned to servitude. The thought of passing the hours in the same way as my mother, passively mesmerized by the ghostly glow of the TV, filled me with dread. I could only think of such a thing as akin to waiting to die, as though it were possible to switch off one’s brain in anticipation, like uprooting a forest in the face of an advancing desert. Books required too much by way of dedication to someone tasked with the duties of a caregiver and music did nothing more than intensify my heart-rate. Eventually, I settled on a number of podcasts as my preferred media, predominantly those of a true crime bent. Listening to those stories made me realise something; that in every case the ordinary world was utterly subverted by the presence of untimely death. Even the most mundane and inauspicious of locales seemed to gain a certain spectral resonance in the face of so fundamental a sundering of the established order.
When she finally passed away, my mother gave me a gift greater than any she could possibly have given me in life; even if she had been so inclined. Though her face had been hidden from my view as she struggled out of this life, I knew the moment she passed as a feeling deeper than any I had ever known. It was as if, for a moment, the waking world dropped its facade and, rather than some Oz-like wizard shambling through the lame performance of everyday routine, a far greater existence was revealed to me. Behind this metaphysical curtain I glimpsed the deepest of depths, an eternally expanding oneness in which death was like a quantum-leap of evolution. Like an electric shock, time suddenly jump-started, no longer something to be feared but to be accepted as the very traction which propels us towards our greater end. A river that does not know its course it may be, but it flows with the determination of purpose nonetheless; we may, for a time, become trapped in its whirlpools – like the Spice addicts who dull themselves to its passing - but even they are moving ever further downstream.
I volunteered to become a special constable for this very reason; that I might experience this sensation again. In the case of the drowned man pulled from the river, I experienced this feeling only second-hand, having not been physically present at the precise moment of his passing. But a police officer’s lot is one almost guaranteed to confront death. In lieu of payment I have accepted that as a far greater reward for the indignities of the world.

My relationship with this town has changed since mother’s death. Even that word, death, has taken on a far greater significance. The streets seem so much less depressing when looked upon not as the decaying arcades of a town gone to seed, but as sprawling anterooms for another existence entirely.
I prefer to work the night shift alone. Usually, I’ll peel myself away from the duty officer assigned to chaperone me. That way I can both clear my head and follow my nose. He prefers to avoid his duties, in any case.
The strictures of the day fall away after dark, lose their lustre like a dying sunflower hiding its damaged face. Time becomes a slow march. I’m beyond the reach of the job centre during these hours. The few businesses still active on the high street become every bit as dark as their empty brethren. Even Shiver’s Spirit Box begins to take on something of the aspect of its name. Night is a liminal space in which the presence of that other world can be sensed more clearly. The sun blinds us to this reality, blanching our days like the giant clock which so fascinated my mother. When the darkness descends, the fragility of our connections to other people becomes manifest. We seal ourselves away for the most part, sheltering within our homes, while those who brave the night-shrouded world are compelled to come together, out of desperation, if nothing else, as though seeking a hand to hold before the naked terror of existence.
The Spice addicts huddle together in doorways, their bodies curled into foetal positions. So far, every one I’ve encountered has been alive, if unresponsive. I’ve always felt a pang of disappointment upon discovering them still breathing. A death on the high street would be the ultimate incursion of deep-reality into the facade of normality. For now, I leave them to their chemical slumber, like ghosts in waiting. They remind me too much of my mother.
The night after I encountered the girl in Shiver’s shop, I ran into her twice more. The first time she was heading into a public toilet with a boy I took to be of a similar age. Reluctant to be exposed to the sight of black jeans pulled down around a pair of skinny ankles, I knocked on the piss-stained door and demanded they leave. When the girl stared daggers at me, I felt a faint glow of satisfaction for having forced her to notice me this time.
Our second meeting came down by the river.
Ever since the discovery of the body in the river, I’ve made a point of extending my beat to include its banks. Beyond the brooding hulks of the industrial district, the river winds its foetid way like a last stretch of wilderness spitefully holding on to existence. Stagnant and overgrown. The water is blacker than the night sky, absorbing the weak starlight like a black hole.
The girl was alone by the time I found her wandering along the river bank. It was obvious from her demeanour that she’d been ditched by her partner of the evening; her shoulders sagging, her hands wrapped around her arms – exposed by the flimsy material of her cami top (black, of course). She was wearing the long skirt she had bought from the Spirit Box earlier that day, which I could now see was far less demure I’d first thought, being split all the way up to her thighs, swinging around her legs like a pair of scissors. Her back was turned toward me so that she remained unaware of my presence. Had it not been for her exposed arms and legs, she would have been entirely one with the surrounding night.
She seemed to weave to and fro as she continued to make her way along the riverbank, a motion I initially mistook for distress but which was more likely the result of something she had taken. I chose not to make my presence known, preferring to stick to my usual route and the rhythm of my own thoughts.
A sudden burst of light, like a flare erupting only to gutter away within moments, signified the lighting of a cigarette, which pulsed with a ring of amber phosphorescence as she drew on its length. I thought for a moment of the cigarettes Shiver had hidden in my room and my mother’s anger, which had simmered like the cigarette the girl was now smoking.
As I drew nearer, I could see her arms were in tatters from self-harm. She seemed so utterly alone in that moment that it felt as though I were committing an act of mercy as I pushed her into the water. She fell like a stone, like a fragment of a meteorite, impacting the black water as a solid mass of darkness and light. Her pale arms, tyre-tracked with red scars, sank into the murk almost instantly. She offered no resistance, as though she’d been fully expecting this moment to occur. She’d always been swimming within this river, as, indeed, we all are. She’d merely traversed its length a little quicker than others.
As the ripples of her impact died down I could see, through my own undulating reflection, my mother’s eyes looking back up at me again. There was something almost blissful about the look in those eyes, as though she’d accepted her new reality with all the graceful serenity of a bird taking flight for the very first time, leaving the filth of the earth behind to explore a new and boundless horizon, not grey but crystal-shot with colours. Beneath the surface of the water lay the collective dreaming to which we belong, ever growing and ever deeper. One day we shall all be a part of it. Until that day, we are all of us alone.