Culture Vultures
The bookshelves were stacked with cassette tapes. Earfuls of them.
The body must have been left lying there for ages, since the high stench had literally sprayed from the letter-box into a kid's prying face, one who was delivering a free newspaper, despite the sign on the garden gate expressly forbidding such delivery.
When I was finally alerted, as head of paupers' funerals in the local authority, the police work had been carried out. They had decided that the dead body had been left lying for some weeks, if a successful suicide could be blamed for such dilatoriness - which I doubted. Still, a dead body has got broad shoulders, in more senses than one - bones tending to spread out with the grain of decay. There was a desultory investigation by the autopsy man, where, on peering over his shoulder, I saw that there was very little differentiation between the congealed blood and the flesh proper.
There being no family to pick over the bones, as it were, I had my beady eye on the cassette tapes. From a cursory glance of the scrawled labels on the narrow side of each unpliable cuboid, the dead body had been a great lover of classical music. He and I had at least that in common. Even, the autopsy man, a philistine at the best of times, whistled with some bemused amazement, claiming that he didn't mind "a bit of that philharmonic stuff like that big fat geezer who sung the World Cup theme tune and, yes, of course, Mantovani".
"Mantovani?" I pretended I was not old enough to remember.
"Yes, Mantovani. Haven't you heard his 'Charmaine'? And, who else? Semprini. He played nice stuff on the piano. Geraldo. I reckon a lot of that dance music is even better than some philharmonic stuff."
The autopsy man did a mock jig round the dead body's living-room, as if reliving a romance of his youth when he danced the night away with his loved one to the sounds of some godawful Max Jaffa palm court rave or a Victor Sylvester jamming session!
With him thus preoccupied, I was further scrutinising the cassettes. A lot of classy sounds. Ranging from Monteverdi to Boulez. All the Bartok string quartets (my favourite). Tippett. Mahler. Schoenberg. And some composers even I had never encountered before. Hugh Wood. Ruders. Glass. Steve Reich. Havergal Brian. The Grateful Dead.
The Grateful Dead?
They weren't particularly classical. Weren't they a flower power pop group from the late sixties? I seemed to remember a friend of mine (in his forties, now) saying they were the best thing since sliced bread. And why sliced bread was such a good thing to be the best thing since ... well, I had never, till today, questioned.
Meanwhile, the autopsy man was acting turvy.
He had grabbed a cushion and was waltzing it around the room.
No, I was wrong, because I couldn't believe my eyes.
The cushion was not a cushion at all. It only looked like a cushion. In truth, it was a part of the dead body's body, lace-trimmed with a tripe-like fatty gristle, tinged pink. Goodness knows what he would have done if he had real music to jab his legs to. Most of it was in his head. Yet, I suddenly heard the imperceptible 'it is, it is, it is' sound that one often hears from others' personal hi-fi sets: an irritating habit of live bodies when they travel on trains these days. But, no, the autopsy man's ears did not wield such a spider-headclamp...
Unnoticed by both of us (and presumably likewise by the policemen), the dead body's head possessed a sprung device consisting of a shiny black half-hoop embedded in the white skull bone like a cinemascopic rodent ulcer trying, not to escape, but to enter a sinking ship - each extension of the hoop bearing a sanitary lug-pad stained with yellow wax. The interminable it-is emanated thence.
We then heard the sound of something coming through the letter box. No doubt this month's 'Good Music Guide', but we had scrammed through the back way, without bothering to investigate. Paupers' funeral arrangements are not always such avant garde affairs, I hasten to add. Yet, sometimes, paupers kindly end up burying themselves, as eventually turned out to be the case with today's stiff. Saves on council money. A lot to be said for it. Anyway, my friend the autopsy-turvy man - I've managed to get him into Stockhausen and Frank Zappa, but only after I promised to accompany him to a Richard Clayderman gig next week. He'll be doing our packed lunch.
Published 'Sivullinen' 1994
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