Free Facing the Tank by Patrick Gale Page A

The skin was still warm. ‘Mother!’ he shouted. He took her firmly by the shoulders and swung her into a more dignified vertical, pulling the pillows around her to hold her in place. Even with her shoulders upright, her head continued to loll drunkenly. He pressed his ear to where he thought her heart should be. Nothing. He moved his head. Nothing. He didn’t bother with a pulse. He could never find those anyway. ‘Oh Ma,’ he said quietly and sat on the side of the bed.
    He wondered what he should do now. Dr Morton had been in the Patron’s chapel so it was pointless to call him out yet. There was no hurry now. What did one do with a dead mother? What did one do with a dead anybody? He had been so firm about politely refusing offers of help from Mrs Moore, Lydia Hart and co. that he could hardly call them in now, at the grisly last. It was difficult to picture Lydia having anything to do with a corpse.
    Oh Mother. You’ve become a corpse.
    Fergus’s eye turned across the room he had prepared for her before he met her flight from Lagos in November. Her photographs, some on the table, some on the mantelshelf. Her Bible, of course, sun-baked from the new widow’s proselytizing trips into the African bush. The wardrobe full of long-outdated winter clothes he had had sent down from Inverness for her. He had unpacked them so carefully and she had never been well enough to get up and wear them again. The mirror and the bed, placed so that she could see the Cathedral, in reflection, from her pillows. In her brief hours of sanity she had lain there identifying the silhouettes of birds flying around its twin towers. Her Guide to British Birds , signed by her friend the author, lay on the carpet beside her brown corduroy slippers and the WI Book.
    Brightening, Fergus bent down and took up the latter. Ever since she married his father at eighteen and left her native Dundee for his family’s farm near Inverness, she had made a collection of recipes, advice pages, natural remedies and nursing hints and glued them into this great black volume. She called it the W I Book because the original idea, and many of the pamphlets, came from the Women’s Institute to which the young and inexperienced Mrs Gibson was introduced by dour Mrs Gibson senior. Over the years, for son as much as mother, the black tome had come to represent security in crisis. When he had a toothache or had cut his knee or was simply feeling low, he had only to reach for the W I Book. It had helped when Granny Gibson was bitten by an adder, it would help now.
    Fergus opened the book on his lap and turned to the back pages where, in her flawless antiquated copperplate, his mother had kept an index of everything she pasted in. He turned to D for death and O for old, without success. Then his eye landed on L and found an entry under Last Offices – page 75. Seventy-five was early on in the collection. The black-bordered pamphlet must have been given to her when her father-in-law died of a heart attack. Fergus read.
    ‘The first action should be to remove any hot-water bottles from the bed and all pillows bar one.’ He pulled her hot-water bottle out and emptied the tepid water into her bedroom basin. Then, holding her shrunken shoulders out of the way, he removed all pillows bar one and laid her gently back on that. Her mouth fell open and he tried in vain to close it. Clicking his tongue he returned to the book and read on, hoping for advice about mouths. ‘Close the eyelids with wet cotton wool if possible and straighten the limbs. Clean and replace any dentures, tucking a pillow firmly under the lower jaw until mouth can remain closed of its own accord.’ So. Her false teeth were still soaking by the sink. He had had plenty of practice at taking those in and out for her over the last months, and was no longer squeamish. Fergus took a pillow from the floor, after dealing with the teeth, and tucked it firmly under the jaw. The corpse was less alarming with a