Pincushion by Anne Morgellyn

Gingerly, I turned the pages. They were mostly tableaux of people having unspeakable things done to them, with plenty of studs, pins, spikes and bungs shoved into bare white flesh. The tattooing shots seemed mild in comparison. August was there, of course, wearing one of those little surgeon's lamps to guide him as he scored a needle over Cressida's sternum. The photographs were lit in the same unforgiving but necessary light as surgical illustrations. I had seen many such photographs and illustrations in Chas's medical books. But there was a point to those, an educational outcome predicated on a wish to cure, or if not to cure, then at least to understand. I wondered what point there was to all these mutilations. It was the fact that she had willed this atrocity to be done to her that caused me such resentment. Boob jobs, I could understand, even people having the fat sucked out of their thighs and injected into their faces to make them look more youthful. There was a materialist aesthetic there, a yen to conform to some plastic notion of beauty, however elusive the elixir, however superficial the strokes. But what warped aesthetic drove Cressida's performance?
     The camera had caught her hanging from a wicked-looking steel contraption, a bit like a joiner's trestle. Half a dozen or more hooks had been inserted into the skin of her back then attached to a central cable which fed into a pulley. August was there again, standing close to the mechanism: August the winchman, the puppet-master, pulling the strings. Had he willed this - had he made her do it? She looked like a consenting adult, but you never could tell.
     'It looks like a rack,' I said at last.
     'No, the racks are in the front somewhere.' She tapped the picture. 'You do something like this,' she said, 'and you feel on top of the world. You are never the same person, I promise you that.'
     'Did you feel better for it then?' I asked, timidly, but what I wanted to know was why. What had happened in her life that this could make her feel better?
     'I feel myself,' she breathed. 'Truly myself. I can't explain it. Most people haven't got the nerve to be themselves. But you've been around a bit, haven't you? August said. It takes guts to be a morgue technician.'
     'I'm a counsellor now,' I said quickly. 'I work with the bereaved.'
     'But you've worked with bodies. You're not squeamish, I take it?'
     'It wasn't like this.' I glanced at the book of grotesques. 'The dead can't feel.'
     'No, I guess not. You have to feel it,' she said. 'That's crucial. You have to face the pain to overcome it.'
     'There are other ways maybe to deal with pain …'
     'There's a performance tonight if you want to come. But I'll just be assisting.' She patted her stomach. 'Assisting from now on, till this is born.'
     'It isn't really my scene.'
     'How do you know until you've been and seen it? That's the trouble. People think they've got the right to criticise us, but they just don't know what they're talking about. It would open your eyes.'
     I blinked: 'I've got a friend coming round.'
     'So bring him with you. It's not Doctor Androssoff, is it?' Her eyes gleamed. 'I'm fascinated by pathology. He's top of the tree, so I believe.'
     'He's a professor now. He specialises in neuropathology now. You know, brains.'
     'I know that. I saw him at August's inquest. August's dad was bankrolling that research, wasn't he?'
     'As far as I know, he still is.'
     'I expect there's a lot you can tell from brains. Like Edgar Allen Poe.'
     'That was probably a calcified tumour,' I said authoritatively, for Chas had filled me in about the discovery in the skull of the exhumed horror author, confirming Poe's Fortean credentials for the credulous. 'Brain tissue is actually one of the first things to deteriorate post mortem. If you want to examine a brain, you have to fix it pretty quickly in preserving fluid. But tumours can calcify. That's probably what they found in Poe's skull, a shrivelled up brain tumour.'
     'Yeah? I think that's fascinating.' She put her hand on my arm. 'I'm so glad you're next door to me, Louise. But that would tell you a lot about Poe anyway, wouldn't it? I mean, if he had a brain tumour, that might have caused his weird writing. That might have been the inspiration behind The Fall of the House of Usher. I love those gothic-horrors, even if they aren't particularly scary.'
     'That's not the sort of thing that Chas would speculate about. He doesn't do shades of grey.'
     'Bit anal, is he? Yeah, August said he was. He doesn't look it to me though. He looks quite cool, although the Harley-Davidson's cheesy. August had a picture of him on his bike, cut out of the paper. Hell's Angel of the NHS. Your man's no Hell's Angel, I can tell he isn't. He's a weekend ride-out man, you can tell that a mile.'
     'It wasn't fair on Chas, any of those reports. The press really hounded him. But he had nothing to do with the retention of those organs. He was only doing his job.'
     'I know, I know all about it, Louise. August told me. He filled me in about your time at the mortuary with Dr Death - he admired you for it. Still, those shiny bikes are for old men, really, aren't they, old men pretending to be cool, the kind of guys who still call one another cats,' she laughed. 'Your man's not like that, I hope. How old is he, anyway?'
     'Thirty-nine.'
     'He's younger than August then.'
     'Yes.' This surprised me, too, not that Chas looked any older than his age. His hair was still jet black, as black as Cressida's, although without the benefit of any bottle, and not quite as long. He didn't have a paunch. He didn't stoop - a professional hazard with microscope researchers. But August had seemed much younger. Maybe it was his curls, his elfin face that gave him the ageless aspect of a sprite or faun. That was it, I thought. Chas looked like a man of thirty-nine. Chas, in spite of his long hair, looked like a man full stop. August had always looked like a youth, an eternal teenager, a trickster.
     'Chas doesn't take any prisoners,' I sighed. 'He's coming round tonight to toast my move with a bottle of sour grapes.'
     'He didn't want you to move in here?'
     'Not really, no.'
     'Oh, what a shame. Well, I'm glad to have you here, anyway. Men.' She rolled her eyes. 'You think there's some engagement there, you think you've got a future with them, then, crash …' She snapped her fingers. 'They weird out on you. You're better off solo. I mean, in sole control. I'm a great believer in self-control, Louise. I'll explain to you what I mean by that some time.'
         'August was beyond weird,' I said tiredly. 'I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but he was, well - beyond weird. I suppose you know we didn't get on that well. I couldn't believe it when he gave me this place.'
     'That's not what he told me. He said he had a lot of respect for you, Louise. You helped him out with the Assisis, didn't you?'
     'Not really. I wasn't active in any of their campaigns. I gave him some information about the man I was working for. He went to the press.'
     'The Britfeed scandal with that crooked MP, and those farmers feeding shit to their pigs? Yes, I know. That was really brave - you did time, didn't you?'
     'Just probation. I lost my job, of course. Eddie, the crooked MP, got me busted for possession of dope; by way of revenge, I suppose. That's how I ended up at the mortuary as Chas's technician. Nobody wants that job, those survival wages.'
     'I wouldn't mind it. I'd be fascinated. I'd be good at it, I think. I'm not squeamish. I'd have stuck it out. Anyway, you met your other half. Seems like you fell on your feet with him, Louise, although I knew that August didn't like him. I think he might have been a bit jealous. I know you and Gutsy were getting it together once, a long time before he met me, so I'm completely cool about it. I want you to know that, just so there's no awkwardness between us. You can talk to me anytime about August, you know.'
     'There was never anything between us, not like that,' I said, horrified. 'He tried it on once, and we were just friends after that, not even friends, really.' Not anything really, I thought. Nearly enemies. Once. 'He was heavily into heroin then. He couldn't …' I checked myself, ashamed about disrespecting my benefactor. I didn't care if Cressida gave me permission to talk to her about August. I didn't need her permission, but that failed attempt on the chaise longue was between August and me alone.
     'You must miss him,' I said. 'If you want to talk to me about it, you can, you know. Anytime. I'm a bereavement counsellor now, and since I don't know you yet, as a friend - not enough to muddy the waters, I mean. I'm not emotionally involved.' Not really, I thought. I wasn't grieving for August either. 'So if I could be of help to you in that way, I'd be …'
     'Oh, I'm cool about it. I don't dwell on things. I've never been a brooder.' She collected my tea mug and went to the kitchen. I judged it a signal for me to take my leave.
     'I never thought August would be the sort of person to kill himself,' I persisted. It still puzzled me how anyone could commit an act of procreation - an act of love, for God's sake - then coolly hang themselves, as planned, a couple of hours later in a rented room, wearing nothing but that PVC belt. I had to hand it to August - that was some finale.
     'I know it doesn't make sense to you, but it will one day, perhaps,' she said, walking me to the front door to see me out. 'When we've hung our washing out together a bit maybe. We'll be just like old biddies gossiping over the fence, won't we? You've got an airer out the back, I see. I've got to get one too. I've got to get one of those. It's so Coronation Street. I've always wanted to gossip over the fence. I could never have done that with August here.'
     'I'll see you there then,' I smiled. And let it go.