The Service Of Clouds Read Online Free PDF Page B

balm to him.
    He pushed open the inner door.

Seven
     
    The mortuary was lit only at the far end, where the attendant sat beside the trolley. They had brought her down already. She lay like the skeleton of a bird, scarcely heaped up, lightly and softly beneath the sheet. Annie Hare.
    The man glanced up. Nodded to him. He was used to Molloy coming here, to sit for minutes, or for an hour, recognised that the place seemed to serve as church or chapel to him. Sometimes they spoke a word or two.
    Molloy went to stand beside her but did not lift the sheet to look beneath, did not disturb her. Then he turned, pulling out a stool to sit on.
    ‘Quiet,’ he said.
    ‘Just this one, and two from yesterday.’
    The man went on writing in the file of Annie Hare, and the desk lamp shone on to his hands, huge and thick, with tufts of black hair over the backs, like the pelts of a small animal. He was younger than Molloy, but he would be leaving at the same time. He was not going to the new hospital. He was moving away, north to where his sons were. ‘Time for a bit of new life.’ He did the job because it was a job, and thought little of it, a cheerful man, easy with the living, untroubled by the dead.
    ‘“The Gateway,”’ someone had said to Molloy, the first time he had gone there, as a student. ‘We call it “The Gateway”.’ Thoughthe mortuary was called other things too; they had to make light of it to be able to deal with it, as with the horrors they saw. They had to get used to things quickly, and never brood. Molloy brooded. It would be his failing, his tutors said, it would break him. A doctor could not brood. A brooding temperament would not see him through.
    They were right to believe it, but not right about Molloy. Only by taking things deep down into himself and brooding upon them there in silence, until he somehow transmuted them and was able to feel easy, could he do his work, and retain a sense of balance and sanity. He could not make crude jokes, as his fellows did, and never ducked nor swerved away from the worst there was to know. And the worst was not death. For him, death was often the best of it, a right and fitting conclusion. Death led here, to this cool, white place, into this quietness and stillness and solitude. ‘The Gateway’.
    He did not believe any of the customary creeds that he had recited at school. She had not. ‘No one knows,’ she had said. ‘They’ll pretend to you. They will all claim the truth. None of them knows it, and we do not either, and you will not. Only never close your mind. That’s all. Never.’
    She had always spoken to him, as to an adult, in this way. There had never been baby talk between them. In the conversations he remembered still, word for word, so that he could hear them over in his head, there had never been any sense that he was too young to hear about this or that, not ready to understand. What she had wanted him to know, she had told him, what she had wondered about and needed to discuss openly, she had talked to him about.
    As, death.
    ‘We do not know. No one does. Nor ever has.’
    He would not have doubted her, in this as in anything else. No one knew. Yet she was all-knowing to him, he was certain of it, as well as all-powerful and all-providing. He needed no one else.
    ‘The Gateway.’ He thought the word now, looking towards the outline beneath the heavy sheet. In all the years since his mother’sown dying, he had come to it time after time. This far. If there was a farther, he could not follow. It was the best he could ever do. It had to satisfy.
    The first time he had entered a mortuary, in the teaching hospital, he had been sick with dread. They had had to give him leave, for two days after. He had been sweating and grey in his terror. He would have to leave then, he had been sure. Blood was nothing to him, incised flesh or protruding bone, the stench in the open gut, pus in a wound. But his imagination had shied away from the place where