All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell

Author:Hayley Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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A month later, I’m waiting out the back of another south London funeral home, by the open roller-door of a garage filled with gleaming black hearses and limousines. A man in a dark suit sits on a fold-out chair, scrolling through his phone, a radio playing at his feet. A young woman with neatly pinned hair, a business skirt and thick beige tights, despite the heatwave, smokes a cigarette over a railing and stares at nothing. Kevin Sinclair emerges smiling from between the bins and smuggles me in through the back door rather than announcing my existence to the front desk. He’s in his early fifties, wearing a blue-and-red-check shirt tucked into blue jeans, with glasses and gelled hair. He’s been a qualified embalmer for nearly thirty years and a teacher with his own embalming school for half of that, though he seems more like someone you’d split a bag of scampi fries with in the local pub than someone who would show you how to embalm a body.

He leaves me for a moment by the wooden arched door to the Chapel of Rest, next to the staff toilets – one bearing the sign ‘DON’T SPRINKLE WHEN YOU TINKLE’ and a cartoon bear, winking. A large pine coffin is wheeled past me, disappearing through double doors to be slid back into the refrigerator, where it will stay until the hearse collects it. I can hear two of the funeral home employees arguing with each other in the driveway, something about a family unable to pay for a funeral, something about them being stuck in a hell of probate.

‘All he has to do is prove that the family can pay for it.’

‘Fuck’s sake.’

This is the business end, the unquiet voices you only hear out the back, during a break. Inside the office, in the part where the families go, you don’t even hear the sound of your own feet on the carpet.

Kevin waves me into the prep room and introduces me to his former student, Sophie, who will be working while we watch. Most of his students these days are women. She’s shy and a bit nervous to have me there. She smiles and waves briefly, small colourful tattoos flashing between the sleeve of her purple scrubs and the cuff of her nitrile gloves, before turning back to the body laid out between us: the pale, long remains of a man who died of lung cancer three weeks ago. Neat, dark pubic hair fans out across his belly that has, over the last few days, been slowly turning green.

Sophie has spent the morning going through the same process as we did at Poppy’s, removing all tubes and hospital ID bracelets. She’s also washed and blow-dried his hair, which now looks fluffy and soft. But there is more to do here before the man is dressed. She has already placed some eye caps under his eyelids, the small convex plastic shields that give the illusion that they have not sunk.

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