death

The leaves burn amber from the forest. Crisping, curling in wait for a breath of wind willing their curtailment. A thousand tiny curtains ready to fall. I ride shotgun down this familiar, smooth tarmac, slicing through the trees, the forest around us asleep or scared or, at least, silenced by the swelling rage of pressed rubber. I shift in my new polyester suit. My boxers tug around my upper thigh, strangling articulation. I usually make this journey in a Ford Mondeo. My mum or brother in the front, my dad behind the wheel. I know these trees. We go from Oxford to London often enough. Once to see a play, to watch football, once to see Buckingham Palace.
"The cut," says Michael, my driver. We already passed the white-cliffed scar at the top of the hill signifying the historic limit of Oxfordshire where the road is etched into the countryside, like a ruler's edge dragged back and forth into a school table.
"Ye know Linda." Michael speaks in infrequent statements with a soft Irish lilt.
"The boss?"
"Yer boss Linda, ye. Her grampa was a shepherd up round here. Round the Chilterns."
"Huh."
"His flock roamed on that bit of land round the cut, long ago, long before they built this road. He was there when they dug the cut." Michael had moved from Galway to Oxford ten years ago, he told me yesterday. Found God after doing time. Used to be into drinking and fighting – "all that silly nonsense" as he now refers to it. "I was the kind of fella'd knock you out if ye looked at me funny." I shifted in my seat that Wednesday as I am shifting this Thursday.
"Anyway, I met him once, her pa. Told me they hit bones when they were doing the dig."
"Hit bones? How?"
"Bones and all sorts."

I was five or six when I was introduced to death. It was the morning and I was walking to school. Mike and Robert told me about the concept of infinity so we were trying to count to it. I asked my dad how long it would take and he said that it was impossible. I asked what if I just kept on counting and he said that I would die before I reached it. No one had told me that I would die. He told me that everything dies and I shouldn't worry about it. He was right that I shouldn't, but I soon found out that a lot of people actually spend a lot of time being preoccupied by it.

For years I cried in bed at night as I pondered death. I still do sometimes. Nothingness has made a habit of haunting me. I would wake up screaming after dreams that my parents had died. It terrified me. I didn't understand how people could just go along with their lives knowing that this would happen. It seemed unconscionable. How had someone not done something about this?

At sixteen, our school required us to do week-long work experience placements. I listed my only interests as 19th-century literature and tapestry. I thought that all of my classmates would list mock interests as well but they all ended up doing things that were relatively useful for gaining an insight into a potential workplace. Arthur got placed in a recording studio for jingles, Claire was a florist, Ali worked as a real estate agent for a week and Sam was posted at a mechanics¹. They didn't have anything for me so gave me a list to choose from. In a parallel life I spent a week wiping tables at McDonalds. In another, I was a groundskeeper at the very posh Headington Girls' School (I still find it rather astounding that they offered what was essentially a placement as a janitor to students from my state school). But in this life, I decided to take up a placement at S & R Childs Funeral Directors. At first I thought that it might be a funeral home specializing in children but it was just a misfortunate name. "It will be interesting to see another side of life... the other side of life", my advisor told me.

My mum bought me a suit from Tesco's. All black, plastic and ill fitting. On a Monday morning in October, I cycled through town, down High Street and up Headington Hill on a battered racer. Locking up my bike, I fanned my shirt to get some air running through, praying the sweat would dry and fisted a passable knot in my tie in the service station opposite my new workplace.

I rang the bell. Linda greeted me at the door. She was the owner. A blonde bob atop a beige skirt suit. Fifty and some. Friendly within the boundaries of professionalism. She led introduced me to Bob and Gina in the office, they helped out with the general admin. The office wore the shades of beige skipped by Linda's skirt suit. Heavy-set desktop computers filled most of the space in the small upstairs. I have since realized that office work is a small death in and of itself and that there is little difference between the weight of nothingness and spending half of one's life cooped up behind a screen. I heard a toilet flush, a door open. "Theo", said Linda, "This is my son, Rob". I shook a wet right hand.
"Looks like Tom Hanks", said Rob. "I'll call him Tom Hanks".

Linda led me downstairs, fished a key from her pocket to open a door leading to another part of the building. A small corridor. She opened another door. Nonchalantly she walked through the next room and through to the garage. I followed, but could not ignore a woman, around sixty years old, laying in a coffin on a table in the middle of the room. A white frilled sheet came up to her neck. The air was impossibly still around her and time stopped for me in that moment. Once you have seen a body there is no going back, in much the same way that once you have

^1. When we came back to school afterwards we discussed our experiences in Citizenship class. The teacher asked Sam what he was doing at the mechanics and he said that he was "leaning against a pole" for most of his time there.↩