Dr Siri Paiboun 06; The Merry Misogynist by Colin Cotterill

Author:Colin Cotterill [Cotterill, C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: [2010.07.01]
Publisher: [Côte d’Azur]
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

∨ The Merry Misogynist ∧

10

Dancing With Death

When Comrade Civilai arrived at the morgue that lunchtime he was surprised to find everyone busy in the cutting room. It was Saturday – a half day. They should have all been on their way home. But he didn’t want to disturb them. As a new retiree he found himself bothering a lot of people. He’d pop by his old office to say hello, and they’d be glad to see him, but busy. He’d offer his advice here and there – his seventy-three years of experience – surely somebody would want some of that? But all he seemed to do was get in the way. So he baked.

He sat at Siri’s desk with a dozen lemon meringue tarts on a tin tray. He felt a little foolish. He’d imagined walking into the morgue, everybody free, jumping for joy at the sight of his lemon meringues, Dtui running off to fetch coffee from the canteen. Then sitting around the office cracking egg jokes and eating tarts.

But they were busy.

He decided to give them five – no, ten – minutes, then leave. He’d attach a note to the tarts and go. Or he’d take them with him somewhere else. Somewhere he’d be appreciated. There was no shortage of people in need of lemon meringue. He stretched out his long legs and one foot kicked a large cardboard box on the floor.

♦

Siri removed his rubber gloves and went to the sink to wash his hands.

“Right,” he said. “If that wasn’t the silliest task we’ve performed here I’d say it ranks in the top three.”

“Come on, Doc,” Dtui said. “It was a public service.”

“It was a private service, and I feel like an accessory.”

The deputy minister of sport had arrived at the morgue before midday with his mother on a stretcher. The old lady had just passed away, but on her deathbed she’d asked to see the family diamonds for the last time. Reluctantly, the deputy had brought her the seven tiny cut stones that would pass down to him and his wife once his mother was gone.

“Let me touch them,” the old lady had said.

Who could refuse a dying wish? Her son had placed them on her withered palm and seen the expression change on her face. She’d smiled and, according to one of the gardeners who’d helped carry the litter, said something like, “You’ve been drooling over these all my life. Now you’re really going to have to work for them, you greedy ingrate.” With that she threw the diamonds into her mouth, reached beside the bed for a glass of water, and washed them down. That had been both her final act of defiance and her final act.

So how else would one remove one’s inheritance gracefully from a dead mother? The deputy had even written himself an official extraction order on ministry stationery. Siri knew this wasn’t the last he’d be seeing of the freshly mined lady, and he’d whispered an apology before releasing her body to her son.

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