Prompt 2: Kill the Music

The glove leather pulls tight against the back of my hand, resisting my obligatory knuckle crack. I shift focus to the left hand – once on the right; twice on the left. Click… crack… crunch. It’s become a compulsion; a disabling ritual I have to observe before I can proceed.

Tension relieved, I turn the key in the ignition; the pistons press; the air compresses; the engine kicks to into life and an abrupt and discordant cacophony belches from the stereo. Recoiling from the sound, I stall and slam the immense weight of the vehicle into the verge in front. Eyes shut, I cock an ear in readiness for a complaint from the suspension, but the shrieks from the speakers fill the air around me and drown out any echo of damage – a single saving grace.

Our work is done in silence – that’s the drill – respectful silence. It’s the first rule we’re taught. I scan the week’s rota in my mind’s eye, trying to identify which ignorant pick last sat behind this wheel, but who can think amid such a riot of noise. I smack it into silence with a sharp slam of my hand, then breath deeply and and count slowly to ten.

It’s time to go. Time to arrive. Time to say goodbye. I glance over my shoulder at the highly-polished mahogany of my passenger’s temporary billet. I’ve been eighteen months in this job and still the hair on my neck stands in respect before the casket. I doff my hat in apology, re-crack my knuckles and restart the engine. This time there is silence, but for the sombre murmur of the engine. Better.

I use the mirrors to reverse to avoid my passenger’s absent gaze, and slowly pull the length of the hearse round and into the main flow of the traffic. Heads turn towards us, then snatch away. Eyes watch, then avert their stare. Such is the oscillating magnetism of my cargo – it draws and repels, creating voyeurs and shunners with each passing of the clock. I stare at the road ahead and part the sea of discomfort around me.

Off duty, I drive carefree with one hand at 12 and the other resting on the gear stick. Yet the pinch of my blazer and the weight of this vehicle commands my hands to 10-to-2 and I feed the wheel deliberately into and out of every corner en route. In my first few months I spent too much time and energy thinking about the gravity of the job. I’m responsible for taking people on their last journey – covering those last few miles that transfigure people from loved ones comforted in hospital beds to the closed-lidded subjects of funeral ceremonies. On my loading and unloading they turn from animate to the inanimate; from bodies of life and love to objects of loss. I’d make my way through a bottle of whiskey a night working through those ideas, conjuring with my role as the conveyor belt between last and final goodbyes. But the alcohol only served to darkened my thoughts and intensified my unease the following day.

Now I choose to focus on the road between my hands and the tail-lights of the car in front, to avoid the gaze of passer-by and to blank my mind. Yet thinking of nothing is a skill in itself – impossible except for the vacant, for meditators and for the wasters of the world. I need to count. As a child scared of the dark, I counted the obligatory promise of sheep. As a young man running from insomnia I moved to pure numbers – challenging myself to get to ten thousand and hoping desperately I’d fail. Now, I punctuate the deathly minutes in the hearse with a tally of passing cars, sometimes junctions. The intensity of counting is an enforced necessity – chosen to offset and dampen my inner chatter. Just enough to drown out; not enough to distract. Just enough to drown out; not enough to distract. Just enough to drown out; not enough to distract.

Today’s drive is thankfully short – 6 junctions (two rights, one roundabout and three lefts) then the crescent wall of Morton Hall Crematorium opens in welcome and we drive on in. Five hundred meters of managed garden and a wall of remembrance slide smoothly by. My companion’s family and loved ones stand up ahead, a murder of crows in black. Bodies dissipate as we approach, drifting inside on a sea of convention. By the time I bring the hearse to a halt only the sons and nephews who will bear the coffin remain.

I step out, exchange handshakes and condolences and help them raise their father and uncle aloft. I can never decide which I like less – the silence of the dead, or the suppressed cries of those left behind. From the uniform trace of red in their eyes, the man these boys carry was loved, loved deeply. Yet amid their grief, custom insists they thank me, and they do – profusely – before stepping away in unsteady unison towards the half hour of farewell where everything and nothing will be said in the hope of capturing just an essence of the truth.

I watch them move off and my hand drifts toward the Lucky Strikes in my breast pocket, but I shrug off the instinct to light up and take a step back from my own death. I might stand a while in the sunshine or walk, instead, through the gardens of remembrance – a memorial path is not so very different to a park track when all’s said and done.

Echoes of the first song escape from the service and sashay their way towards me across the late morning air. Something in their pitch reminds me of my journey start – the scream of the radio, the jolt of the stall and I glance over at the bonnet. It looks fine – normal. My gaze drifts down to the registration plate, searching out areas of possible damage, signs of our sudden encounter with the verge.  There are no dents, thankfully, but… I step forward… crouch down for a closer inspection… there’s what looks like… a streak… a… a bloody smudge on the registration plate – a fur-blackened streak of something, a note of remembrance from something that once used to be.