An Unremarkable Body Read online

  In memory of Margaret Hegarty, née Farrelly

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Part One: External Examination

  Part Two: Internal Examination

  Part Three: Cause of Death

  Part Four: Conclusions

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  More on W&N

  Copyright

  Part One

  External Examination

  On Tuesday 14 February 2012 I carried out a post-mortem examination on the body of Katharine Rowan of 121 Crane View Road, Surbiton, at the instance of Dr Brian Steadings, Coroner. The body was that of a 51-year-old female, 5ft 7in in height and of moderate obese build. There was a small scar on the right side of the neck. Both earlobes had been pierced, the left torn.

  I remember how my mother got that scar. She was attacked in the school playground. It happened as we waited for the bell to signal the beginning of the school day. I was about six years old, in Ms Graham’s class – 2B. My baby brother Christopher was snotty and cold in his pushchair, the front wheels positioned on the 2 and 3 of the hopscotch grid. I remember this because my mother was standing on the 7, making it an impossibly long leap from where I was, at number 1.

  Her hair was pulled back, quickly and quietly, by Sue Warren. Sue lived a few doors down from us with her daughter Jenny and son Sam. I had sat in her car and at her table before, but whatever instinct led her to grab my mother’s hair – and entangled earring – back in this strangely intimate way, and stare down into my mother’s pained face, made her strange and ugly to me.

  Remembering that morning, as an adult, I find myself wondering at my failure to cry. Christopher also failed in this basic requirement of the young and immobile whose lot it is to watch their mother plucked from them. But Christopher didn’t cry because his pushchair was positioned away from the shuffling feet, from what looked like a rather undignified fight for square number 10. I didn’t cry because it simply wasn’t an anatomical possibility. I was too astonished by what the woman who looked like Sue was doing to my mother.

  And I wasn’t the only one frozen by events. The mothers of my friends and classmates also looked on, stupefied. The incongruous hush of a playground before the bell was broken only by my mother’s croaky grunts, uncertain but persevering.

  Sue spoke first. ‘I need to talk to you. About Jenny.’ She said it almost calmly, as though my mother needn’t rush. As if she’d tapped my mother gently on the arm instead of grabbing her hair up in an angry fist. My mother tried to nod. It made her strained face look even more stretched as she tried to bring her chin down in assent.

  The other women approached cautiously when Sue had let go of my mother’s hair, their resolve to intervene stiffened by the absence of any requirement to do so.

  ‘How could you let it happen?’ Sue’s voice was hoarse and dry – I could tell she needed to swallow. ‘Allow Richard to put his filthy hands on my Jenny? She’s a child. Just a child.’

  I saw the looks of concern turn to confusion. They were wondering if my mother had it coming. Finally, one of them broke ranks and stepped forward. ‘Are you all right, Kath?’ Careful not to look at Sue with anything that might be construed as reproach. At that moment, Ms Graham came out of her classroom and rang the bell vigorously, joyful in her oblivion. Sue stepped away from my mother, her palms out and open in the universal gesture of it wasn’t me or, even if it was, the preamble to a pretty robust explanation.

  My mother put her hand up to her left ear, stroked the earlobe gently and then smelt her fingers. As she looked at me in horror, I began to cry. She was smelling the blood that was running down her neck.

  My mother’s torn earlobe was just one scar on her corpse among many. The others were more difficult to discern, buried so deep they would only show themselves to the pathologist’s scalpel. It was, of course, the most obvious physical assault on her body in the wake of my father’s affair, but seeing it recorded so clinically reminds me how public her humiliation was. Not just that day in the playground or even the years afterwards, but now, in her death. Her earlobe, like so much other tissue weighed and fingered, dispassionately reported in those pages, bears witness to all her body suffered. Did the earlobe give the pathologist pause? Did he crouch down and peer closely at the injury and wonder who might have pulled that earring down and away from her body?

  ‘Oh, Christ. You’re bleeding. Your earring.’ And then, as if we were looking for a set of keys, everybody’s eyes slid to the grey surface of the playground and the blue lines of the hopscotch grid. I continued crying until Christopher, jutting his jaw forward for more snot, opened his mouth and joined me in my howl.

  It was then I felt Ms Graham’s fingers on my shoulders as she gently turned me in the direction of her classroom. ‘Come on, Laura. Come with me.’ But instead of going through the door to 2B’s room, we went down the dark red corridor that led to the school office. She kept her hand on my shoulder the whole time, reassuring me, ‘Your mother and brother are coming. They’re with Mr Lewis,’ when, in truth, I was relieved to be walking away from them with their too-much blood and snot. And sure enough, when I turned round, my chin brushing Ms Graham’s calloused fingers, I saw my mother was walking alongside the deputy head with a clump of bloodstained tissue held to her ear. Mr Lewis was pushing Christopher – the too-low pushchair handles forcing him to a stoop.

  Ms Graham steered me towards one of the burgundy chairs, their colour deepening the red of the walls and giving the overriding impression of being stuck inside a hideous body passage. The chairs were lined up against the wall outside the school office, reserved for naughty pupils or anxious parents. Except I was the anxious pupil, swinging my legs, waiting for the naughty parent who had been taken into the school office for fighting. Mr Lewis pushed Christopher into the space at the end of the row of chairs and – rather expertly – applied the brake. He turned and knelt down in front of me, his breath heavy and wet with the smell of coffee: ‘You sit here, Laura. Mum will be out in a bit. We’re just going to have a little chat and see if we can’t find a plaster for her ear, OK?’ I nodded and looked up to see Ms Graham coming out of the office, shaking her head with disapproval, wearing the kind of obvious disappointment usually reserved for serious misdemeanours: spitting, biting, swearing, punching. Sue’s action in the playground and my mother’s consequent injury had served as a bloody demonstration of why dangly earrings should not be worn to school.

  Mr Lewis stood up and steered Ms Graham away down the corridor. He kept his back to me as he tried to whisper, but I was able to make out the word fuck, which I knew to be a very serious swear word. But instead of looking at him with disappointment, Ms Graham just mouthed the words no idea and shook her head again. She looked up at me and noticed how closely I was watching them. Placing her hand gently on Mr Lewis’s elbow, she moved him aside, walked towards me and sat down in the chair next to mine. Taking my hand in hers, she began patting the back of it with her free hand. I stared down at our conjoined hands for a long time, noting she had blue chalk on her thumb and index finger. She must have changed the date on the blackboard before coming outside to ring the bell.

  ‘Your mummy’s going to be fine, Laura. It’s just a scratch.’

  I nodded my agreement that her bleeding ear, violently torn by Sue, was probably just a scratch.

  ‘Laura, do you know why Mrs Warren was so angry this morning?’ Mr Lewis moved a little closer to us but did not sit down. Ms Graham continued: ‘Have your mummy and Mrs Warren had a falling-out?’

  Even my six-year-old self knew this was an occasion ripe for sarcasm. A perfect opportunity to raise my eyebrows, tilt my head condescendingly and a
gree: ‘Yes, I think so. I think they might not be the best of friends at the moment.’ But Ms Graham was a nice person; she was stroking my hand, if not gently, then at least with the good intention of reassuring me while extracting pertinent information. I looked down at our intertwined fingers, wondered who was taking 2B’s register and started to cry again.

  Many years have passed since that day in 1987. I tried to forget about it. My simple strategy was to pretend that it never happened, and my mother was happy to help me succeed in forgetting. She never tried to coax any fragment of it from me. Neither of us foresaw this, her post-mortem report, politely typed up with her torn earlobe as a matter of reported fact. An invitation to explain. As we both set about pretending Sue’s assault on her had never happened, neither of us thought about the possibility that an account would one day be required, or that the day in question would come after her death and removal. When I was alone. A motherless daughter, with no hope of ever seeing her emerge – whole – again.

  When she came out of the school office, her earlobe inexpertly taped up with plasters, she walked purposefully towards Christopher’s pushchair, released the brake, took the handle with one hand and extended the other to me. I was relieved to emerge from all that red into the bright light of the playground and the promise of a day at home. We crossed the playground, walked over the hopscotch grid without so much as a downward glance and went out of the school gates.

  I lay on the sofa for most of the afternoon, my mother happy for me to self-soothe with television. Christopher’s cold and traumatic morning extended his usual forty-five-minute nap to just over two hours. The hours of quiet afforded my mother the opportunity to bathe and ice her ear and re-dress the wound. By the time my father came home that evening, she had changed out of her blood-soaked top, and the only evidence of Sue’s assault was a subtle flesh-coloured plaster over her earlobe.

  My father worked in a bank. In the years after my birth he had been slowly promoted to branch manager, an elevation in duties that kept him away from home for many hours and early evenings. But this was an evening at the end of the strangest of days.

  Christopher and I were in bed by the time he came home but I was still awake, trying to piece together what had happened in the playground and wondering how my mother would ever wear an earring in her left ear again. I knew all about clip-on clasps, but couldn’t work out what skin it could possibly pinch now that hers was so irreparably torn. The insoluble nature of my mother’s injury led me back to her attacker: Sue was Jenny’s mother, and Jenny was our babysitter. She came over to help my mother around the house on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

  The sleepy escapism of the sofa had given way to a racing mind in bed; I was still wired and awake when my father came home and asked my mother what was wrong.

  ‘Kath, come on. You’re obviously not fine.’

  ‘Of course I’m not fine. Look what she did to my ear!’

  ‘The woman’s a lunatic.’

  ‘Laura saw it all,’ she moaned.

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘This is your fault.’

  ‘I think Sue’s the one at fault, don’t you?’

  ‘Don’t give me that.’ Her voice had hardened. ‘It was because of you and Jenny. She came to accuse you – but decided to send her message through me, in front of our children!’ I heard my mother sniff and walk down the hallway into the kitchen. This was followed by the spink-spink of the gas lighter used to ignite the stove. I waited for my father to follow her into the kitchen, but the silence testified to his inaction.

  And then, from the living room, his voice loud: ‘Give me a reason to stop and I’ll stop.’

  I moved to the landing and heard my mother exhale loudly. I could see the top of my father’s head; he was standing on the threshold of the hallway, hovering uncertainly between the two rooms.

  The answer came from the kitchen. It was spoken in a quiet and firm voice: ‘Never in the house.’

  He put his hands in his trouser pockets and hung his head. As if something amused him. And then he turned on his heel and walked back into the living room.

  I needed to wee and decided I’d use the downstairs toilet. I wanted in on this argument and – though I didn’t understand the significance of what she’d just said to my father – I felt an urgency, deep down in my body, to show my mother I was still alive to the morning’s events. My father might be sipping a gin and tonic in front of the fire, but I was still awake and straining to hear every movement and sound. I wanted to show her she wasn’t alone but I didn’t have the emotional vocabulary to explain any of this. All I could do was present myself, at the bottom of the stairs, in my pyjamas and peer through the open doorway of the kitchen. What I saw has stayed with me as an abiding and curious vision: my mother leaning on the work surface with a lit cigarette in her right hand. I had never, in my life, seen her smoke. Until that day. The day Sue ripped her ear apart.

  On 12 February 2012 I drove the short distance to Surbiton to have lunch with my mother who, like me, lived alone. When she failed to answer the door, I let myself in. And there at the bottom of the stairs lay her body.

  Her death changed everything. But not the spoken or written fact of it, the many euphemisms used to convey a difficult truth. She passed away. She’s gone. She’s no longer with us. It was her physical absence that I couldn’t settle on. There had been a body. A body I knew well. It looked like her and it felt like her, but when I touched it, the warmth had gone. And because she was so cold and so dead, someone had driven her away and opened her up. And then into this appalling nothing came a typed report from someone who’d weighed and categorised all of her constituent parts and, in the process, come to a conclusion about how her absence came to be.

  Grief rose like a haze of heat, distant and distorted by absolute bewilderment that she was dead. And the unrelenting truth of it, the fact that day after day she was always nowhere, altered the landscape of my life; it drained the colour from what I could see had been a pretty pallid canvas. My small, two-bedroom flat in Balham, once a triumphantly independent purchase, immediately revealed itself as a small, cramped and tatty dwelling. And as I slowed and sank under what was now a certainty, life piled up around me. Dishes soaked in the sink for days, the bin overflowed, the phone rang and still I sat there, on the cold, thin carpet with only her post-mortem report for company. The closest thing I had to her body, I found myself searching for her in the lines that claimed to account for everything she was. They were all there – her lungs, brain, heart – the organs of function, and yet I couldn’t be satisfied. My own lungs heaved to the pain of her inexistence, my brain crawled over an absence that would never end: days that would never contain her again. And my heart. My heart was not broken. It was defiant and beating; pumping blood to meet the rising rhythm of my sobs.

  I am a freelance writer and journalist, used to working alone and intensely on something, but I exhausted myself looking for meaning. I had never known such loneliness. I closed my eyes and tried to remember her face, the soft white fuzz that skirted her jawbone, but the image skipped away before I could reach out for it. When I opened my eyes again, to the crumbs on the work surface and the damaged sealant around the splashback tiles, I saw what a disappointing life mine was. And would be without her.

  One evening towards the end of February, as the flat began to darken with the waning day, I felt a sudden urge to seize some of the light I’d ignored all day. I put down my cup of tea and grabbed my keys, my shoes and my coat and almost ran to the front door. I didn’t want to talk myself out of it. The air outside was clean and unaffected by my mother’s death. There was no time or consideration for her on Balham High Road; no one cared that she’d died with her tongue caught between her teeth. They were just getting on with their Thursday evening and, for a brief moment, I was happy to join them in their act of forgetting. With my head down and my hands in my pockets.

  I passed an off-licence and, on a whim, went inside. I felt unexpectedl
y inspired by the bottles of alcohol, of uncorking oblivion. The carpet beneath my feet was red and garish, the shopkeeper too friendly. I bought a bottle of cheap red and walked home.

  Despite the fresh air and change of scenery, I exhaled with deep relief when I got back to the shared hallway of my Victorian conversion. I made my way past the bicycles and pushchairs left there by tenants who had shrugged at the lack of storage space in their flats. My own flat is on the first floor and, once inside, I went straight to the kitchen and, without taking my coat off, poured myself a glass of wine. I gulped it down quickly and then poured another. I felt relieved and relaxed enough to take off my coat and shoes, switch on the lamps in the living room and light the fire. With glass in hand I sat down at the table and began reading the report again, carefully. As the wine spread its warmth through my stomach, I read of the coldness of hers. And then I grabbed for my work bag, thrown down in the hallway on the last Friday of my old life. I pulled at the Velcro strap that held my laptop secure in its sleeve and, with a sudden and urgent need to bear witness, I began reaching within myself for the story of her torn earlobe.

  My editor, Andy, called one Friday afternoon around the middle of March. I was absorbed in my writing, the laptop screen providing the only light in the dimming living room. My phone was on the table beside me, on silent so that I would not be disturbed. But the unexpected vibration was enough to jolt my attention and force me to notice that it was almost time to go and buy another bottle of wine. And answer the phone. I accepted the call with a renewed and short-lived interest. One that waned after hello.

  ‘Laura? How’re you doing?’

  ‘Hi Andy. I’m OK, thanks. How are you?’

  ‘All good here. Listen, say if you think it’s too soon, but I wondered if you fancied having lunch one day next week? It’s been a while since we spoke and, you know, we’re all missing you here.’

  ‘Thank you. And yes, I’d like that.’