Viridian Tears. Rachel Green
herself through her apprenticeship. When she worked alone with bodies it felt natural to talk to them and to imagine them talking back to her. David called it ‘puppeteering’ whenever he walked in on her holding both sides of a conversation. Now she was imagining Elizabeth speaking from inside her beech-veneered pine casket. “You should have taken me out first and put Eddie in the same drawer. It would have saved you a bit of money on the electricity bill.”
“Not to worry, love.” Eden kept the gloves on as she wheeled Elizabeth through the automatic doors to the next room. “I’ve got two council disposals scheduled for tomorrow. They’ll make the money up soon enough. This time next year I’ll be running at a profit, you wait and see.”
She stopped at the machine and slid Elizabeth’s casket into the chamber, then removed the heavy gloves to seal the cryomation chamber. She checked the liquid nitrogen tanks and switched the machine on. A readout showed Elizabeth’s weight including casket, the current temperature and current phase of the process. She patted the inspection panel. “Good night, Elizabeth. See you tomorrow.”
She pressed the process button and listened to the machine’s hiss as liquid nitrogen poured into the tank. She’d trained herself to gauge the state of the jets by the sound they made, since they were prone to becoming brittle from the sub-zero temperatures. At the far door she turned the lights out, leaving the cryomation chamber to automatically reduce Elizabeth to thirty pounds or so of sterile powder by morning.
Eden left her white lab coat in the lobby as she went upstairs to her private suite. That was the benefit of living above the shop. No commute to go home. On the first floor of the building, which was once the home of a wealthy Edwardian gentleman, was the suite of rooms she and David called home. She slipped on a pair of jeans and a blouse, mentally reprimanding herself for leaving the black dress in the scrubbing room. A quick detour to the bathroom while the kettle boiled, then a trip upstairs to the third floor.
This was Eden’s sanctum, her holy place if she’d been at all religious. Here she indulged herself in her passion for art and painting in particular. The air was heavy with the scent of oils from the two canvasses propped on easels at the far end of the attic. Each was a portrait of someone she’d never known, the decomposition of each figure rendered in exquisite detail. She was fond of watercolors, too, though her work in that medium tended to be much looser, almost abstract with only a hint of a gaping eye socket or exposed ribcage in the delicate tracery of viridian green, Prussian blue or alizarin crimson.
She set her coffee on a side table and sank into the deckchair furthest from the oils. Clouds plastered the sky like the world’s slate roof, leaving little illumination from the bank of north-facing skylights, but Eden was reluctant to switch on the overheads. They made everything look artificial.
The gloom deepened as she sat back in the deckchair, sipping her coffee.
As an early November twilight fell, the two canvasses sank further and further into the shadows. All Eden could make out was a crescent of ivory white where the skull of the left-hand painting showed through where rippled skin had slipped from the subject’s facial muscles. She put her cup down and stepped forward. The skull was too obvious. It turned the portrait into a memento mori, a reminder of the death that awaits the human condition. Not what she’d intended at all. It was supposed to represent the cycle of life, hence the daisy chain trailing from the corpse’s fingers and the housefly laying eggs in the corner of her mouth.
Eden switched on the overhead light, picked up her palette and brushes and began to paint.
The painting had changed completely by the time she heard David calling her name. She glanced at her watch to find it was almost seven and the skylights had become dark holes in the roof above her head. She dropped her brushes in the jar of white spirit and eased the palette from her left hand, massaging some life back into the thumb as she crossed to the stairs. “I’ll be right down.”
She went to the paint-stained sink to wash her hands and caught sight of herself in the mirrored cabinet doors. She had a streak of blue paint across one cheek, probably from scratching her nose while holding a loaded brush. She reached for the pot of hand cleanser and rubbed the streak away, hoping the pigment hadn’t stained.
She clattered downstairs and dropped her cup in the kitchen sink before threading a path through the boxes of files in the living room to the bedroom, where David was shedding the last of his clothes onto the floor. The sound of running water came from the en-suite bathroom.
“Darling! There you are.” He stepped forward to embrace her, his flaccid penis banging against her jeans. “What a bloody awful day I’ve had.”
Eden perched on the end of the bed. “Who did you get?”
“Fear Me Fearney.” David shook his head. “He must be down on his quota for this month. I thought I’d be in and out in ten minutes. I mean, it was only supposed to be a slap on the wrist for soliciting and my client was pleading guilty anyway. We should have been ‘Yes, your Honor. No, your Honor, fifty quid fine and away, but instead the old fool wants to make a stand against the declining moral standards of Laverstone and its environs and sends her down for six months. I mean, she’ll get four with good behavior and come out in two but it’s a hell of a difference to a slapped wrist. Now Social Services has to be involved because she’s got two little ones.”
“Oh dear. How old?”
“I don’t know. Under ten.” David frowned, scratching his left man-boob. “It’ll be in the case files. So anyway that’s why I’m late. Amy-blasted-Fitzroy from Social Services insisted on a dialogue.” This last was illustrated by his making quotation marks with his fingers.
“Your bath will overflow.”
“Yes. Thank you.” He hurried into the bathroom and shut off the taps. “So there you go. The poor little mites were held in the police station for three hours while she sorted out a temporary fostering. What sort of life for a kid is that, I ask you? Less than ten and they’ve already seen the inside of a cop shop.”
“So had I and I turned out alright.”
“In a manner of speaking.” David appeared at the doorway and laughed. “Anyway, it’s not the same for you. You were a copper’s daughter.” He disappeared from view again and Eden heard splashes as he lowered himself into the hot water. “Would you pass me my drink?”
“Sure.” Eden picked up a wine glass and carried it through. Water had splashed onto the tiled floor where David’s bulk had displaced it from the over-full bath. She put the drink on the corner, where there was an indented section for the soap he was currently running under his arms. “Had she no family then?”
“Amy Fitzroy? I’ve no idea. Obviously not, since she was in no hurry to go anywhere. I think she’d have kept me there all night if I hadn’t capitulated to her request for fostering.”
“I meant the girl you were representing. Didn’t she have someone who could look after the kids?”
“No. A mother, I think, but she’s in Bournemouth and wants nothing to do with her daughter. She’d have probably taken the kids, though, if I’d been willing to spend another three hours trying to convince Amy Fitzroy it was worth pursuing.” He sank back with a groan of pleasure and closed his eyes. “You wouldn’t scrub my back would you?”
“Okay.” Eden stood over him with the soap worked up a lather with her hands. He leaned forward again and she worked the lather over his shoulders and down his spine. “You’re going gray.” She leaned forward to plant a kiss on the little bald spot.
“I’ll blame that on Amy Fitzroy as well.” He reached for his drink. “You have the softest hands, you know.”
“A combination of linseed oil and rendered human fat.” Eden grinned. “Why do you think I wanted to work with the dead? Now you know my secret. It keeps me young.”
“I know what else is good for the complexion.” He reached up for her hand and pulled her forward, thrusting it to his groin.
Eden