Funeral Rides

Chantal Schaul, 2003

My fellow inmate Albert was a dapper chap. Very into labour and extremely pragmatic. He had the right physique for harsh manual labour and he loved using raw muscle. Despite that, he was very amicable and what-have-you.

Governor James Caldwell took to Al in a big way. I got jealous sometimes. The two of them occasionally sat up late and chewed the fat in Al’s cell. But I’m not an unreasonable chap. I knew it never went beyond that.

One afternoon, Al refused to do sit-ups in the yard. He was caught breaking stones instead and put in a straitjacket for the day.

I popped into his cell for a visit. Frustrated and restricted as he was by his jacket, he poured out his past and told me what had got him into borstal.

‘My father was trampled to death by a mob of cobblers when I was two. My mother, glad to be rid of him, made her escape during the funeral march. I never saw her again.

Uncle Cuthbert took care of me. He was in his early thirties at the time, unmarried and an aspiring musician since his early teens. He played the piano in a restaurant quartet. His biggest dream was to make a musical breakthrough and become a world-famous pianist and composer.

Uncle Cuthbert rose early every morning. He sat in front of the kitchen table – we had no desk in our small dusty flat – and composed. He nervously nibbled his way though countless pencils and blackened the heels of his hands on the lead notes that he poured out in frenzy. By late afternoon, clusters of crumpled paper shuffled across the stained carpet.

I always picked up my uncle’s debris as soon as he had left for his soirée, smoothed the rumpled sheets out and collected them under my mattress. I believed in Uncle Cuthbert’s genius.

But as I grew older, doubts crept up. My mattress had risen several inches; I had to stash his papers away in cardboard boxes and store them in a corner of my bedroom. From there, they stared at me on moonlit nights.

When I was fifteen I started work for a cobbler, Mr Fibshod. I had no idea whether he had been among the mob that killed my father. Out of convenience I never asked. Mr Fibshod never talked.

As soon as I had started to earn my own money, Uncle Cuthbert considered cutting down on his work hours.

‘You understand, don’t you, Al? I am nearly forty and I have to create my masterpiece soon. Most great composers die young. I haven’t got much time left.’

‘Yes uncle,’ I nodded.

‘I shall let the restaurant manager know next week,’ he decided.

But it never came to that.

When Uncle Cuthbert returned from work that night, he wasn’t the same man. Without bothering to take his dinner jacket off, he sunk into a chair and gazed at the empty wall.

‘I found my muse,’ he whispered after a long silence.

He was still sitting in the same chair when I left for work in the morning.

When I returned in the evening, a neat pile of sheet music towered on the kitchen table. Uncle Cuthbert was humming a tune in the bathroom, still wearing his suit. A fresh flower now peeped out of his front pocket. A blazing white rose.

He smelt of various creams and ointments, which surprised me, for we never owned any toiletries apart from coarse Carbolic. His hair shone with brillantine, like the glistening black leather I moulded into shape every day at the cobbler’s. He had shaved and his nape fuzz had disappeared. His glasses were clean and shone like diamonds in their circular chrome frames.

‘I’m off,’ he said, and hopped out.

I’d never seen my uncle so ebullient. He eagerly swept down seven flights of stairs, his jacket tails billowing behind him.

I wanted to see this muse, who had prompted such a transformation in my uncle, but couldn’t afford to dine at the restaurant. Le Duc De Coquerelles was too classy and expensive for my cobbler’s wages. I ransacked my brain and came up with an alternative plan.

My best friend Nick’s father was a telegram deliveryman. He owned a uniform with an official logo. In fact, he owned two of the same outfits, which proved very useful indeed. Nick and I dressed up in them and prepared a love letter, to be read out in front of a random lady in the restaurant, preferably an innocent and naive one.

We were admitted into the posh Le Duc De Coquerelles and followed the snare of the music. I saw my uncle from a distance; his fingers were fluttering over the keys of the piano, while his gaze was fixed on a table nearby. Although a number of ladies were seated around it, sipping their champagne sorbets, I instantly knew which one of them he was hooked on.

She looked like the record fairy printed on the sleeve of Uncle Cuthbert’s first vinyl record, a collection of classics that included his favourite, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, which had first awoken his urge to become a composer.

The muse was young. She had long, thick, peroxide blond locks and vibrantly red rosebud lips. Her skin was as pale as her hair. She wore a shoulder free light blue dress made of shiny silk, which accentuated her opulent chest. Her lips kept dipping into a foaming sorbet, which she was spooning out of a fizzy flute in tiny globs.

The other ladies at her table giggled and clasped their heaving chests whenever the two men in their company spoke. Those men were overwhelmingly male. Curls of black chest hair fought for freedom underneath their collars. The coarse bristle on their knuckles trapped leftover crumbs and occasionally rasped against the tender flesh of the ladies. The two men struck me as sleazy. Why would those refined ladies dine with them, I wondered.

Nick nudged my arm and pointed out a mousy young thing sitting all alone at a table for two. We strode over.

‘Excuse us, Madam, we have a telegram for you,’ Nick announced.

The lady seemed startled. I whipped out the bit of paper that we had prepared and ceremoniously passed it to my accomplice. He was to do the talking while I would keep an eye on the uncle situation.

‘My sweetest soft-footed wondergirl – stop.’

The telegram was elaborated exclusively around foot metaphors, as we had had no way of anticipating which outstanding physical features our elected receptor would have. Feet were universal, hidden and non-committal.

‘When may I kiss your soft twirling toes again – stop. Stroke your immaculate cuticles – stop.’

I surveyed Uncle Cuthbert. His eyes followed the bleached lady of his heart while he passionately played his melodies. Occasionally he cast a despising look at the two hairy men. When one of them lit a cigarette and her golden locks became entangled in the wiry back of his hand, Uncle Cuthbert twitched and almost ran over to rescue her from the hirsute male. He held himself back just in time.

‘Fondle your flawless heels – stop,’ Nick continued.

‘I would rather die than see the marvellous foundations of your being restrained by coarse animal skins – stop.’

‘Let me be your carrier so your feet may rest unscathed until the end of days – stop.’

The mousy girl was highly disconcerted, but she endured the embarrassment without protest. We had made a lucky pick. As soon as the foot poem had been delivered, Nick stashed the telegram away and we swiftly left the posh place. I thanked him for his troubles and offered him life-long free shoe repairs in return, which he gratefully accepted.

Uncle Cuthbert came home late that night. He was afloat.

‘Albert,’ he said, ‘I spoke to her tonight.’

‘Who is she?’ I asked.

‘Her name is–’ he paused dramatically ‘Eulalie. She’s French. Parisian. She’s a model. She’s glamorous and sophisticated. But best of all, she’s my muse. I told her tonight.’

He closed his eyes to re-savour the event.

‘What did she say?’ I asked.

‘She was honoured. But I told her the honour was all mine.’

He closed his eyes again.

‘And then?’ I urged.

‘She was interested in my music. Asked what I composed. All sorts of things, I said, everything you could wish for. But then her horrible boss interrupted our conversation and took her away from me. She gave me one last smile.’

He almost melted away. I left him to it and went to bed in a pensive mood.

As the days went by, my uncle became increasingly infatuated. He feverishly composed love music and talked only of Eulalie. He praised her hair, her skin, her eyes, her chest. He scorned her two employers and would have liked to kill them. He wanted to become rich and famous and whisk her away.

One night, much to my surprise, she was with him. I heard the rustling of paper in the living room, as he showed her his music.

‘Sing it to me,’ she whispered.

Uncle Cuthbert sang in his sweetest voice.

‘One night at a Parisian Café,

My heart was attacked and touché.

Mon amour, it bleeds just for you,

I can hardly stand on my genoux moux.’

He took her to his room. I eavesdropped.

‘Would you write a piece of music for me?’ she asked in a seductive voice.

The floorboards creaked. Uncle Cuthbert must have kneeled down in front of her.

‘I would do anything for you and composing music is the most pleasurable of all.’

‘Even a funeral march?’ she muttered.

He gasped. ‘Funeral? Did someone die?’

After a moment of bated breath she softly said: ‘It’s me. I am going to die soon. I suffer from an incurable disease.’

Uncle Cuthbert’s finger joints clicked. He must have clasped her hand.

‘My dearest Eulalie. This can’t be true. You are a picture of youth and health. Who on earth told you that you were to die?’

‘The best doctors in Paris. One of the blood vessels in my brain is as thin as the wing of a butterfly. It’s only a matter of time when it will burst and give me a fatal brain haemorrhage.

Uncle Cuthbert broke into sobs.

‘You are in the blossom of your youth. You must not die,’ he said in a broken voice.

‘Will you write a funeral hymn for me?’ Eulalie sighed.

‘Of course, my lily bud, of course I will. My heart is so heavy that I won’t be able to produce anything but funeral hymns for the rest of my life.’

‘When can I have it?’ She dived into pragmatics.

‘I shall start tomorrow. Give me a few days.’

‘I shan’t see you before it’s done.’

‘I’ll do it as soon as humanly possible. I’ll start now,’ he promised.

All night and all next day my uncle feverishly worked on Eulalie’s hymn. He didn’t eat, he didn’t drink, he didn’t speak. He wrote frantically. His eyes caved in and gleamed madly from inside their dark sockets. His skin turned ashen pale. He was burnt out.

The hymn was finished just before Uncle Cuthbert left for work that night. Coughing and wheezing, he rolled it up and tied it up with a red ribbon. Beads of cold sweat trickled from his forehead.

The following morning, Uncle Cuthbert’s fever had got worse. He could hardly breathe, his face was flushed and hot, his sheets were drenched in sweat. I called a doctor. But even the doctor was at a loss.

‘I need to see Eulalie,’ Uncle Cuthbert pleaded. ‘Only she will give me peace. Find her for me, Al, please find her.’

I swung on my bike and darted to Le Duc De Coquerelles. I waited outside for a long time. When Eulalie came out, she was with her entire entourage. I approached her, but the two hirsute male beasts immediately rebuked me. They brandished their hairy fists before I could even open my mouth to speak.

I revised my plan and followed the glamorous group from a safe distance, quietly pushing my bike along. A blue van, parked in a squalid alleyway between windowless buildings, swallowed up the ladies and their two beastly leaders.

The van’s logo read: ‘Corner Bros. – Postmortem Pleasure Pictures.’

It struck me as odd.

The van slowly pulled out of the alley and drove off. I followed it to the outskirts of town, through a gateway that led to a large cemetery. It stopped halfway down the graveyard. I hid behind a bulky gravestone and observed how the bristly brothers carried film equipment towards a cluster of three decaying graves. They set up a camera and some dingy lights. The ladies, meanwhile, flocked together and chuckled. They spoke French.

One of the beastly brothers finally commanded: ‘Allons-y. On se débarrasse.’

They all took their clothes off, apart from one of the bristly bastards. He stood behind the camera and barked instructions at the ladies. Eulalie lay down on the soil at the foot of the gravestone and played dead.

I was aghast when I realised what they were up to. My legs were heavy as lead. My tongue was dry.

It took me a while to regain my physical capacities. When I did, I lurched towards the open van and sat on its brink. A loose flyer caught my attention. It confirmed my worst fears.

Postmortem Pleasure Pictures presents:

The Gravedigger Series

Bouncing Bones

Coy Coffins

Bloodless Babes

Waxen Vixens

Ash Blondes

With an all Canadian cast

Starring:

Claude & Camille Corrupthommes

Eulalie Isireyde

Vanessa Wantonne

Isabelle Infernalle

Bernadette Bestialle

Juliette Joviale

Sabrine Sousentendu

My blood froze when I read those words. Not only had Eulalie lied about her occupation; she had also pretended to be a Parisian, whereas, in reality, she was a mere Canadian. Suddenly I realised that she had lied about much much more.

I found my uncle’s funeral hymn lying tattered among flyers and film equipment. The red ribbon, limp and dirty, was stuck underneath a pile of reels. An unfamiliar hand had scribbled on it: ‘Theme tune for Funeral Rides.’

The whole truth dawned on me. Eulalie had used Uncle Cuthbert’s creative talents for lewd and immoral purposes. His divine tunes were to fuel this diabolic necrophiliac pornography!

I was outraged. Never, even in my most inappropriate dreams, had I expected anything of this kind. My mind was numb with fury as I stumbled out of the van. While, in the distance, the grave mass-copulation unfolded, I pledged that Eulalie would rot in hell.

When I got home, Uncle Cuthbert was dead. He lay flat on his back, facing the grey ceiling, a smile on his sunken face. I banged my head against the wall to numb the pain.

Eulalie had killed my uncle and I had quietly looked on. My stranded anger coiled up in a whirlwind of revenge. I raided the kitchen for weapons, but a blunt knife and a rolling pin were all I could conjure up. My uncle had never been very well equipped with culinary accessories.

I lost the knife on my wild chase back to the graveyard.

The monsters were still filming. Eulalie lay draped over a Victorian angel. One of the debauched brothers was taking her from behind. The other brother gave obscene instructions in French from behind the camera.

I hurled myself at the Canadian bitch, swinging the rolling pin through the night air to crack open her despicable skull. But she heard me coming and jumped off the statue. The brothers suddenly vanished.

I dived into the dark bushes and found Eulalie unconscious and covered in thorns and scratches. I dragged her out and slapped her cheeks to revive her, but a forceful hand gripped my arm and held me back. It was a rozzer. The brutal brothers had been prepared for all eventualities.

‘You’re under arrest for molestation and rape,’ the rozzer roared.

I was taken away. They would not hear me out. The sperm they found inside Eulalie was proof enough for them. And that was how I ended up in borstal.’