The Book of the Dead

Chapter One — The Person Who Wasn’t There

The first difficulty with being Death was the parking.

I wasn’t Death, obviously. I had never claimed to be. I’d said something about keeping names safe, once, when tired, to a man who sold me a rather apologetic sausage roll. He’d said, ‘Fair enough, mate,’ which is the entirety of the theological scrutiny available at a motorway service station.

Even so, a woman had telephoned me at twenty past eight on a Monday morning to say that a man who had died eleven days earlier wanted to see me.

‘You’ll understand I can’t promise an appointment,’ I said.‘He’s already got one.’

Her name was Mrs Bell. She worked in an office attached to a crematorium north of London, in a district built largely out of houses that looked shocked to find themselves so close together. Behind her voice I could hear a printer having an argument with paper.

‘With whom?’ I asked.‘With you.’

I had not told her my name. That was the first thing I noticed and the second thing I allowed myself not to notice.

‘Did he make it before he died?’‘That’s the problem, Mr O’Crowley. The booking was made this morning.’

I looked at the kettle. It was behaving in an exemplary manner, which seemed pointed.

There had been strange things in James’s book. A pencilled surname no one could explain. A man in a care home who had said the wrong James with the certainty of someone remembering a tablecloth. People had been frightened or kind, and I had often mistaken the one for evidence of the other. I had promised myself I would not do that again.

From a working edition. The final published text may differ.