Human Remains Read Free Page A

whilst I loathe the man, whilst every second in his presence is a form of torture to my senses, I have this dreadful fascination with him – an unquenchable curiosity about how someone so repellent can subsist in the modern world.
    Martha saunters in late. New shoes, I notice – the third pair this month by my reckoning.
    ‘Morning, Colin – good weekend?’
    She doesn’t really want to know, of course. It took me a while to work out that the question is rhetorical, a ritual for a Monday morning. The first few times she asked, I told her at great length what I’d done over the weekend, carefully editing the details that even I knew were not appropriate to share with a colleague. She looked vacant after a few minutes. She stopped asking, after that, and only recently – I believe when someone else asked me the same thing within earshot and got a brief response – did she recommence with the Monday ritual.
    ‘Fine, thank you. And you?’ It had certainly been eventful, especially Friday evening, but of course I wasn’t about to supply her with the details.
    On occasion I heard her telling one of the others all about her weekend – kite-flying or baking or hiking or going to a fête or watching football or visiting her cousin or landscaping the garden – but her reply to me was invariably the same.
    ‘It was good, thanks.’
    Vaughn sends me an email asking if I want to go to the Red Lion at lunchtime. I’m tempted to ask if he wants to go now; I doubt things are going to suddenly get more exciting here in the next three hours. It’s sad that the thought of half an hour in a dark, mouldy pub next to the gasworks with Vaughn Bradstock is so cheering.
     
     
    When I get to the Red Lion, twenty minutes early, not even noon, Vaughn is already there at our usual corner table, with a pint of John Smith’s waiting for me. Vaughn and I worked together, many years ago. He used to be a contractor in the IT department at the council, and for some reason we developed a friendship that endured even when he moved on to other projects. He gave up contracting in favour of the security of something more permanent, and now he works for a software development company in the town centre. Handy for the Red Lion.
    ‘Colin,’ he says tonelessly in acknowledgment of my arrival.
    ‘Vaughn,’ I reply.
    He wants to talk about his girlfriend again. It’s usually that, or philately.
    I brace myself with a couple of good swallows of the bitter, wondering whether it’s too early to be thinking about a whisky chaser. Meanwhile Vaughn chunters on about whether his girlfriend is having an affair. I want to point out that she can hardly be in the first flush of youth – surely it’s unlikely? But he’s convinced that she is lying to him about something. He sits with his head bent low over his pint, pondering whether taking her to Weston-super-Mare in the caravan is a good idea.
    My mother took me to Weston-super-Mare on holiday the summer after my father died. We stayed in a guest house three streets back from the seafront; close enough to hear the gulls, not close enough to hear the sea. I was almost thirteen years old and already I didn’t fit into my own skull. I read Eliot and Kafka and watched documentaries on BBC2. Stayed up late and got up early to watch the Open University programmes, back when it was all beards and flared trousers. My mother wanted me to build sandcastles and run in the sea, laughing. I don’t think I laughed once the whole time I was there. I sat in the shade and read until she took my books away. After that I sat in the shade and tried not to look at the girls on the beach.
    ‘Weston-super-Mare’s probably a bad idea,’ I say.
    In the end I take pity on poor old Vaughn and tell him about cortico-limbic responses and non-verbal cues, poor bugger.
    ‘What the hell’s a limbic response?’ he asks me. And then, before I can respond, ‘Oh, don’t tell me. It’s that bloody course you’ve been doing,