Memoriam

Jacob’s worked at the crematorium more years than he can remember. When he started, he had to lug the coffins about himself, with a trolley and his own brute strength. It’s all automated now. Just as well. He’s not as young as he used to be.

He watches the coffin slide along the little conveyor belt, hears the curtains in the chapel swoosh shut behind it and the shuffle as people stand up and leave the pews. He can imagine them straggling out into the rain, sniffling into tissues, poor buggers. A day they’ll never forget, he thinks. For him, it’s just another Saturday.

The coffin comes to a gentle stop before the door of the incinerator.  He waits a few more minutes until he’s sure the room next door’s empty. No reason for it, only it seems more polite, somehow. The little lever’s smooth in his hand as he lifts it, opens the door, and watches the coffin slide inside. Gazing at it a moment with his cap off, over his heart, out of respect like always, he wonders who this one is. Someone’s mum, or dad, or grandpa. Doesn’t do to think too much about them lying there under the wooden lid, their eyelids shut against the finality of it. All in their best clothes, like they’re going somewhere fancy. He hopes the vicar’s right, and they are. The door slides shut with a heavy clunk.

He pushes the button and the flames roar up. Just like every time, he hears a scream.

He knows it’s not real. They’re dead when they come here. Certified. Cut open and diagnosed and stitched back up again. No way they’re still alive. Doesn’t stop ‘em screaming though. He’s read books on it, how it’s the gases escaping in the heat, or something. Knowing the reason doesn’t make it any easier to hear. Or believe.

A few years ago, he’d told Clara about it. Had to. He’d woken her up in the middle of the night yelling, so she reckoned.

“Who’s screaming Jakey?” She’d shaken him awake, insistent.

“What? Nobody. Go back to sleep.”

But she wasn’t having it. She’d flicked the bedside light on and told him neither of them were getting any peace until he told her. So he did. She listened while he laid it all out, or some of it, the bits he could bear to tell. The bits he could bear for her to hear. How he knew it was all in his head, but he couldn’t stop hearing it. By the time he’d finished, he was shaking and there were tears in both their eyes. Horrible, she’d said, horrible to think of. They’d both had friends and family who’d ended up at the crem. It was a small town.

A few days later she bought him some ear pods. New-fangled things that played music from his phone.

“There you go love, that’ll sort it out,” she’d beamed as she handed them to him, shiny and perfect in their posh packaging. He didn’t ask where she’d got the money. The emergency tin she kept in her wardrobe was a good bit lighter than it had been, he guessed.

He’d read the instruction booklet carefully as she watched, all eager. Got it working and they both sat and listened to an Elgar concert on one of those podcast things, an earphone each.

“That should do the trick, eh?” She’d smiled as the last notes of Serenade for Strings died away, and he’d patted her hand.

He’d worn the earplugs every day since. They didn’t make a blind bit of difference. He’d never really thought they would.

He peeps in through the little window at the top of the door to check everything’s in order. In an hour or two there’ll be nothing left but a heap of ashes. He nods to himself and ambles off to the kettle in the corner to make himself a cuppa before the next service. He’s got the urns for today all ready, nice and polished, sitting next to their little packing cases on the side table. Jacob likes to have everything just so. It’s the least he can do. A bit of dignity in death; don’t we all deserve that?

He passes a hand over his eyes to wipe away the memory that won’t be buried, no matter how many times he does things perfectly.

It was his first month alone on the job. Macky Thomas, the old bloke who’d been training him up, had put his back out and retired. Said it was about time he passed on the responsibility, anyhow. It was the middle of winter and things were busy. Flu season. Services lined up one after the other, like buses on a Saturday in the high street. Jacob could barely keep up. His muscles, young as he was, ached from pushing the loaded trolley, shoving and sliding the coffins down the counter to the incinerator. His head was thick with the fumes that belched out every time he opened the door to scrape out the ashes.

No wonder he made a mistake in the end. Shoved too hard hefting one of ‘em up onto the counter. It slid away from him, pitching over the edge to land on the stone-slabbed floor with a heavy thud and a sickening splintering of wood.

He’d stood there for a moment, frozen with the horror of it. Watched, helpless, as the timber planking on the coffin’s sides teetered then fell open. Inside was a woman, an old lady, her make-up a bit overdone by whoever had got her ready—it wasn’t always the funeral parlour back in them days. Whoever it was had made a loving job of it, her hair curled just so, her best frock ironed neat.

He’d tried not to look, but he couldn’t help noticing the details, as he shoved the coffin hurriedly into the furnace, and the body after it, as delicately as his aching muscles would let him. When the door slammed shut, it was only the heat of it stopped him slumping down against it in relief. Nobody had seen the accident. He’d got away with it.

Except that the she wasn’t dead.

The jolt must’ve knocked something loose. Like Snow White coughing up bits of apple, the old lady sat up and stared through the little glass window at him as she screamed and lit up in flames.

Jacob’s done the research, read the books. He knows the best explanation is simply sinews contracting in the heat. Of course she was dead. Those staring eyes and the scream burned into his nightmares were just a trick of biology; not true, not true.

He knows all that but it doesn’t matter. The eyes that had fixed on his were fully conscious. And horrified.

She didn’t have time to understand, he’s told himself, couldn’t have suffered for long, but in his mind her eyes go on boring into him, staring and staring while she screams until her vocal cords burn up, and she pitches over in silence.

He hadn’t been able to tear his own gaze away from the little glass window, all the while she crumbled and burned.

Forty years ago, if it’s a day, and he can still hear her screaming. He’s never told Clara that part, of course. Can’t tell a person that sort of thing. Especially when it’s their auntie.

He hadn’t known that, back then. Hadn’t known Clara. Met her a couple of weeks later, bringing chrysanthemums to lay under the shiny plaque on the crem wall. Fell for her at once, with her sad, gentle smile and her pretty face.

It was a slow realization, and a nasty shock when he put the pieces together. He managed to convince himself it was a blessing, meeting her; a sign he’d been forgiven. They married the next spring, with her family around her, the apple blossoms raining down on them heavier than confetti. Her uncle had patted him on the shoulder. “Look after her,” he’d said, and wiped away a tear, and it had felt to Jacob like a second chance. Absolution.

He’d never told Clara any of it.

Just like he can’t tell her, as the years roll by, how every day she comes to look more and more like the old lady, her aunt.

Not forgiveness, he knows now. Retribution.

So Jakey wakes up yelling, night after night, with his wife’s dead face next to him on the pillow, and her aunt’s screams burning his ears, and there’s no headphones in the world can block it out.