- -
- 100%
- +
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk
HarperImpulse
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Copyright © David Atkinson 2019
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
David Atkinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008327880
Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008327873
Version: 2019-06-27
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About HarperImpulse
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
Getting killed hadn’t been part of Nathan Jones’s plans for Saturday afternoon. Instead, he’d mapped out a nice relaxing time for himself on the sofa catching up on The Walking Dead boxset he’d got for his birthday.
His wife Laura and their three children were in the kingdom of Fife, visiting her mother, and weren’t due back until the evening. He pottered from room to room, still in his pyjamas, revelling in the hush that had descended upon his normally noisy life.
Nathan polished off one of his favourite toasted cinnamon bagels, smothered with some of Tesco’s finest jam, whilst flicking from channel to channel making the most of having sole custody of the remote control. Had he known what was in store for him when he left his flat, he would have remained safely seated on the couch and phoned for a takeaway dinner.
Instead, he got dressed, zipped up his coat and headed out into the windy November afternoon munching a bag of pickled-onion-flavoured Monster Munch crisps. His planned destination had been the local Tesco but as he crossed the busy road adjacent to his flat he had an unfortunate run-in with a bus that subsequently changed everything.
When he pieced together the incident later, it appeared he had stepped off the pavement right into the path of the twelve-tonne vehicle. This was obviously a very silly thing to do and so unlike his normally cautious approach to life. He couldn’t remember the number of times he’d drummed into his children’s heads ‘STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN’.
The ambulance arrived in record time, but a paramedic pronounced him dead at the scene and an A & E doctor confirmed the decision a short time later at the local hospital.
He remembered very little about dying. If pushed, he would classify it as a complete non-event. Nothing flashed before his eyes and no dead relatives stood beckoning him into the light. Even if they had, his relationship with his family had been such that the likely outcome would have been him running in the opposite direction.
If Karen Gillan had been tasked with bringing him into the fold he might have considered it, but she hadn’t, probably because
1. She happened to be still very much alive and
2. He didn’t merit a heavenly Hollywood A-list reception committee.
His first impression of death? A vastly overrated experience and he had no idea why everyone made such a fuss over it.
He’d felt that way about several things in recent years: the various royal weddings and births, the Brexit fiasco and the launch of the latest incarnation of the iPhone.
His poor impression of death might be down to the fact that, like many things in life, Nathan didn’t do it very well. He was rubbish at lots of things. He couldn’t ski, skate or work out quadratic equations and had issues with authority figures. He could now add dying to the list.
Thinking back to his childhood, Nathan recalled that his mum’s main concern about death had been underwear.
‘Nathan, you must make sure that every day you leave the house in clean underpants, just in case you’re involved in any kind of accident. I don’t want you showing me up in hospital.’
For that reason, whenever she left the house her underwear would be clean and as new as possible. Even as a relatively young kid, Nathan realised that if she ever got injured so badly in an accident that she needed hospital admission her underwear would more than likely be soiled to the point that it would have to be binned.
He never mentioned this to her, however, and had she still been alive, she would not have been happy that on the day her son’s life ended, he’d been wearing very old and very threadbare boxer shorts.
Nathan first realised everything wasn’t quite right with the whole ‘after-death experience’ when he became aware of a bone-numbing cold and that his arms had been strapped down. His face had also annoyingly been covered with cloth. Overall it felt as if he’d been swaddled in a similar way to that which his wife used with the kids when they were babies.
Initially he thought it might be a straitjacket hugging him tightly. Perhaps the increasingly fractious relationship with his wife had finally reached a stage where his sanity had cracked, leading to an extreme psychosis demanding he be sectioned and confined in a small space?
He could still breathe easily enough, though he learned his breath smelt none too pleasant as he received instant feedback from the fabric pressed against his face. He tried to move his left arm, but this resulted in such searing pain that it made him gasp and brought tears to his eyes. He tentatively moved his right arm. He felt some gentle tingling but no pain. He pulled it free of whatever restricted it, reached up and removed the fabric membrane from his face.
Free of the first prison, he then faced a second containment. He’d been enclosed in something dark, hard and metallic. As far as he knew, even the most dangerous mental patients were not placed in metal boxes. At least, he didn’t think so, though he acknowledged he had limited knowledge of current UK mental health treatments.
Unfortunately, at this point some feeling started to return to the rest of his body and he ached. Not the kind of soul-ache that you got from being desperately in love with someone, which he could still recall (just), but the kind of all-over body ache that occasionally accompanied a bad bout of the flu when it felt as though a little man was running around your body stabbing your extremities with a hot needle. In fact, it felt very much as if he had been hit by a bus. Then he remembered with a start of realisation that that was exactly what had happened.
He started to shout. However, his croaky, weak voice only produced a pathetic whimper. He tried to bang the sides of the metal container with his good arm, but this only made the smallest of sounds given the lack of space at his disposal.
Nathan then discovered that if he banged his bare heels off the bottom of the metal prison it made much more noise. He did this for a few seconds then gave up, exhausted.
Then he suddenly felt himself moving forwards. It felt like the start of a roller-coaster ride but without any of the delicious anticipation, and suddenly he slid out of the darkness into a harsh white light.
As he squinted into the brightness a face emerged and peered curiously at him. An angel perhaps? If so, she was nothing like those depicted in Hollywood movies. Her hair was black, her eyes were black, her clothes were black, her earrings were black, her piercings were black, even her lips were black – although her teeth were pearly white. She smiled at him and said, ‘Hello there.’
Chapter 2
My full name is Klaudette Ainsworth-Thomas (yeah, I know). I woke up on my tenth birthday, decided enough was enough and made a monumental decision. The first person I had to tell? My mother.
‘Mum?’
Janice, my mum, could usually be found behind an ironing board. She ironed every day. Ironing was one of her many obsessions. If it got to 6 p.m. and there were no clothes left in the ironing basket she got all anxious and cranky and started to press things that had already been done, like my dad’s shirts or something random like the bedroom curtains. She had even been known to remove the cushion covers from the couch and press them on a low heat.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, Klaudie?’ Now, there was another thing that annoyed me; even though my thoughtless parents had lumbered me with the triple-barrelled name from hell, they couldn’t even be bothered to use it properly and invariably shortened it to Scotland’s prevailing type of weather.
‘I’ve made a decision.’
‘That’s nice, dear.’
‘Mum, I’m serious.’
My mum put the iron down and stared at me. ‘Klaudie, you’re always serious, that’s your problem, you—’
‘No, Mum, that’s not my problem, that’s your problem. I am the way I am. I’ve decided that I’m sick of being called Klaudette, Klaudie and Klaudia, and I’m sick of Ainsworth-Thomas as well. From now on I’m only going to answer to the name Kat, K-A-T.’
‘K-A-T?’
‘Yep, Kat is much cooler and most of my friends call me that anyway.’
Mum returned to ironing her slippers. ‘That’s nice, dear.’
Despite my mum’s apathy I stuck to my guns and from that day on I only answered to the name Kat. Eventually everyone, including my parents and most of the teachers, adopted my new alias, the only exception being the assistant head at my crumbling Glasgow high school, Mrs Brock, who insisted on calling me Klaudette. As a result, I ignored everything she said for the next five years.
The only issue with this impasse happened to be that Mrs Brock also taught me history for two of those five years. History, therefore, didn’t turn out to be one of my strong points, not helped by the number of Harolds/Haralds mooching about in 1066.
The fault all lay with my mum. She’d met and married a John Thomas (yes, really) and they decided to join forces and hyphenate their names after they got married. I’d always thought someone who had grown up being called John Thomas would have had more awareness and sympathy about kids’ names instead of lumbering his only daughter with such a mouthful. He’d even managed to become a professor of social anthropology to avoid using his first name. Even his bank cards only had ‘Professor J Thomas’ printed on them.
As a youngster, before I had the presence of mind to change my name, I had a plump, lumpy body, a squished face and little self-confidence. I used to come home from school, go into my bedroom and slip into a Cinderella or Snow-White costume from my dressing-up box and prance up and down in front of the mirror pretending I lived a different life, using clothes as an emotional crutch, an image to hide behind. I still did.
I’ve always felt that there was a certain cruelty involved, growing up as an only child, especially with parents like mine, who were too wrapped up in their own obsessions to notice my issues. All parents should be obliged to have two or more children or none. In my opinion, having only one kid could lead to them growing up lonely – well, kids like me who had real problems making friends would, anyway. If I’d had a sibling, they would have played with me and banished some of my loneliness.
Yeah, but knowing you they would have hated you so that would’ve made things worse.
‘Things couldn’t have been much worse.’
Wanna bet?
When I get stressed I often argue with my inner self, usually out loud, which can bring me some weird glances from strangers. Well, weirder than normal. Reminiscing about my childhood usually raises my stress levels so I try not to.
Despite the problems in high school I left with some decent grades, much to the surprise of many of my teachers, especially Mrs Brock, and won a place at Napier University in Edinburgh to study nursing.
I couldn’t stand the thought of working in an office. I was a practical sort of person and initially believed that nursing would be a good option. I anticipated that it would provide a stimulating and fast-changing environment that would stop me getting bored. It didn’t.
My first placement in an adult surgical ward saw me dealing with patients who were either waiting for or recovering from an operation. The ward was chronically under-resourced (like so many others), which meant I felt used and abused by everyone, staff and patients alike. On my first eight-hour shift my mentor said, ‘Kat, the patient in room three needs some toast and tea. Can you get that for them?’
I rushed back to the nurses’ station after I’d finished. My mentor said, ‘Quick work, that. Can you change the two beds in room eleven, they’re covered in blood and vomit, and after that could you be a dear and nip down to the shops for some sandwiches for me and Elaine, the staff nurse, as we both forgot to bring anything in for lunch?’
By the end of the day I felt more like a waitress and a chambermaid than a nurse. I also wondered why patients were called ‘patients’ as they were anything but, constantly pressing buzzers and shouting for anything and everything.
I could have probably put up with all that and carried on but for me the final straw came on the last week of my first placement. Whilst I was escorting an elderly male patient to the toilet, he suddenly turned and grabbed both my breasts in his bony (but surprisingly strong) little hands, thrust his head into my cleavage, sighed and expired on the floor.
Enough was enough, so I dropped out and began a medical internship at the local mortuary. Dead patients didn’t grope me, or demand things, or speak to me, or stare at me, or assault me. In fact, they rarely did anything at all – except lie still. They occasionally stink a little, but you soon get used to that.
I applied myself and with the help of day release and evening courses I qualified as an anatomical pathologist practitioner, better known as a mortuary technician. I suppose given my view of the world and my relatively serious and introverted nature, the work suited me. I’d been working in Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary for nearly six years now and there wasn’t much I hadn’t seen, or, more pertinently perhaps, smelled.
Initially, my mum reacted in horror at my relatively unusual career choice and couldn’t understand my motivation. Over time, however, she came to recognise that I enjoyed my job – as weird as that sounds – and never complained about it, the way many people did.
Monday, 23 November started out like most other early shifts. My alarm woke me at 5.45 a.m., I showered, ate cornflakes whilst drying my hair and staring at BBC News with the subtitles on, so I could understand what the presenters were jabbering about over the noise of the hairdryer. My thick hair always takes ages to dry.
After that I applied my Manic Panic foundation. If I was honest I liked the name more than anything as pretty much any pale slap worked for me. However, for the last ten years I’d only ever worn three shades of Rimmel lipstick: black, purple and, for special occasions, RockChick Scarlet but today being a work day meant boring Black Diva.
I then applied my black liner and smudged some light pink blusher on to contour my cheeks and make me look slightly less like one of my charges. In truth, as I’d got older I’d toned down the Goth persona. I supposed I’d got nobody and nothing to rebel against these days, but still liked the fact it made people wary of me.
I then pulled on my clothes, left my tiny rented flat in the Duddingston area of Edinburgh and drove to work. My workload scheduled for that morning should have been light as we had no post-mortems booked until the afternoon, so my plan had been to sort out a load of paperwork I hadn’t bothered finishing on Friday. Another plus would be that I’d be working with Sid.
Sid’s actual title was Dr David Ingles but his idol growing up had been Sid Vicious, so he’d taken the nickname. My only issue with this was that, in my opinion, Taylor Swift bore more resemblance to Sid Vicious than David did with his soft round face, big lips and gentle grey eyes. There was also the slight problem that as David, being only thirty-six, wouldn’t have been born when the Sex Pistols were at their zenith but then who am I to criticise? Sid was my favourite forensic pathologist, which was a bit like saying he was my favourite teddy bear, given his nature. He started at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary around the same time as me and although much more senior he didn’t have the ‘lording over’ attitude some of the other doctors have and we got on brilliantly.
He was on my wavelength with so many things, and as we had absolutely no interest in each other physically it was easy to talk to him. I suspect he might be gay – in fact I’d stake money on it – but whenever I broached the subject (usually on a night out after a few drinks) he changed the subject of conversation immediately. He was firmly in the closet as far as I was concerned, so far in that he’d locked the damn thing and thrown away the key.
On this Monday, I managed to arrive before anyone else and opened the door to the large basement room where all the recently deceased were stored. Then, something made me stop in my tracks. I’d heard something. I didn’t move for a moment, hardly breathing, then decided I must have been mistaken. I’d been alone down here hundreds of times before, both during the day and at night, and it didn’t bother me any more. It had been a little creepy at first, but I’d soon come to realise that the dead couldn’t hurt me (barring any kind of zombie uprising, of course), and life had taught me well that it was the living I needed to be wary of.
I quickly scanned the log, noting only one new entry, and as I turned to go and get changed I heard something coming from one of the drawers. How strange.
I cautiously approached the section where the banging emanated from and thought for a second that one of the medical staff might be playing a trick, but that sort of stuff was usually only reserved for ‘newbies’. I slowly pulled out the offending drawer and peered down at the pale and bruised but incredibly cute face staring up at me. It blinked its bright blue eyes and I was immediately smitten. It had finally happened – I’d fallen for a corpse.
Chapter 3
Once I’d made sure my rather attractive ‘corpse’ was alive and not a figment of my too often fertile imagination, I called upstairs and got them to send down some of the intensive care staff. My ‘patient’ (I thought that sounded better than ‘corpse’ on the phone) hadn’t been dead for long, if indeed he’d been dead at all. The doctors were understandably confused and fired loads of questions at me, most of which I couldn’t answer.
Fifteen minutes after I’d discovered the patient – Mr Jones, according to his label – had been moved to an intensive care bed, wired up to the moon and subjected to all manner of poking and prodding. After they finished their tests, they loaded him up with painkillers and left him to sleep. The IT consultant told me that, ‘Nathan Jones is a medical curiosity, a walking miracle – well, he will be. Currently, he’s a lying-down moaning miracle.’
At the end of my shift I pottered upstairs to see how my first ‘living corpse’ had fared. He intrigued me but, more than that, he’d unsettled me. I’d never developed feelings instantly for anyone before, alive or dead or maybe somewhere in between, as Mr Jones appeared to be.
I knew I’d stepped onto dodgy ground but couldn’t help the way I felt.
I stopped by the nurses’ station on the way and got an update from Jan, the staff nurse on duty. We’d known each other for years. She’d ‘taken me under her wing’ (her description not mine) when I’d first started in the hospital, and even confessed to me one night when we were both a bit drunk that she suspected she had bisexual tendencies but didn’t want her husband or teenage son to find out. Given that new information, I hadn’t been sure at the time whether her ‘taking me under her wing’ might be a sign that she liked me or a sign that she liked me, but – to my relief – nothing more than her drunken confession had happened.
She filled me in on what she knew and that he remained asleep. I slipped into his room and sat staring at him for a while, wondering how on earth he’d managed to get pronounced dead and yet still be alive.
I’d just decided to get up and head for home when his eyes flickered open. ‘Hello there,’ I said brightly.
‘Can you say anything else?’ he mumbled with an English accent, running his tongue around dry lips. I poured him some water and handed it to him. His left arm had been encased in plaster but his right one seemed fine and he took the beaker from me.
‘Are you right-handed? That’s lucky.’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, I don’t feel that lucky just now. I think I need to thank you … you know, for finding me.’
‘You were being very noisy. The morgue is usually quiet, like, well … a morgue, I suppose.’
‘Not too noisy, I hope – not enough to wake the dead.’
‘I didn’t check but I think you were the only live one there.’
‘Has that ever happened to you before?’
I shook my head. ‘Nope, you’re my first zombie. You were definitely dead when they shut you in the drawer again yesterday.’
‘Again?’
‘Yeah, I wasn’t in over the weekend, but it seems after your wife identified you on Saturday night, they moved you around a fair bit because they were servicing the fridge mechanisms, so you haven’t been in the drawers much. Thing is, you’d think all that moving about would have woken you up.’