Mixed grill

 “Is our graveyard halal?”

Marvin stared at Jill while his brain processed what his ears had just heard, trying it a couple of different ways and still rejecting it as nonsense.

“What?” he said finally, frowning so hard it hurt.

“That’s what she asked,” said Jill.  “I did ask her what she meant by that, twice, and she said something about it being in all the papers.”

“Do people… do people actually try eating graveyards?” said Marvin, feeling rhetorical.  “I mean, don’t answer that, obviously, but how can something that you don’t eat be halal?”

“I’m not sure it’s just about eating,” said Jill slowly.  “Isn’t it halal from the way it’s done?  I mean, all the preparation, and where it’s done and who it’s done by?”

They looked at one another, united in their ignorance of other cultures.

“We could maybe ask around and see if we can find a halal gravedigger,” said Marvin at last.  “Maybe a halal priest, but… I mean, would a vegetarian do, in that case?  That might be easier to find, I know that Sebastian has a thing about not eating meat.  At least on Thursdays.  Is there a fixed number of days in a row you have to not eat meat to be a vegetarian?”

“I think vegetarian is a philosophy, right?”

Marvin shrugged.  “And kosher is religion, but what’s the actual difference?”

“One has a god… or many gods?”

“Meh, they claim to have gods but they never provide evidence.  I’d call that a philosophy.  But then maybe veganism is a religion since they seem to think that meat is the very devil.”

“Is the devil a god?”

“Can you have the Devil without having God?”

There was a crash from the outer office and Jill jumped.  “I’d better go back out,” she said.  “The woman who wanted the lay-away cremation made a bit of a mess and it sounds like this new one’s having a go too.  Can you get me an answer though?”

Marvin wanted to say “No,” both the Jill and the question, but he forced a smile on his face and nodded.  Jill darted through the door, closing it firmly behind her, and Marvin eyed the pile of invoices.  He still wasn’t half-way through.

“Halal,” he murmured, opening up a browser on his laptop.  He didn’t even consider phoning Kev, his boss, again to ask; Kev would be no more use than a chocolate teapot.  “In the papers?”

He pulled up the websites of all the local newspapers through a search engine,  though the first one he tried, the one that had ties to ChatGPT,  claimed the existence of two newspapers that he’d never heard of, and that Isvestiya was also a local production.  He found another search engine and a more reliable list of papers and scanned their front pages.  When that proved fruitless he scanned the obituaries pages, and there, in the Modern Times, found what he was looking for.

“This can’t be for real,” he murmured.  Talking to himself was almost a hobby.  The article claimed that the prevalence of non-human organ donation now meant that you could be buried in a graveyard where only 30% or less of the contents were actually human.

“This is as bad as the council charging us for littering,” he said, more loudly than he’d intended.  He looked around guiltily but Jill was still in the outer office, probably dealing with the idiot who’d read this article.  He looked once again at his pile of invoices and decided that the right thing to do was to go and help her.

The outer office looked like a whirlwind had been through.  Normally there was IKEA furniture set about the small room, a water cooler in one corner and some tastefully places swiss-cheese plants.  This was all largely Jill’s doing as Kev’s idea had been a chair for him to sit in, an ashtray that he never let anyone use, and a wood-chipper that had belonged to his great-grandmother.  Now the plants were rolling on their side across the floor, the water-cooler had a slow leak that was spraying an arc of water across the beige tiles on the walls and the IKEA furniture looked as though someone had tried to disassemble it.  A woman was sitting on one of the chairs and Jill, her arms folded defensively across her chest, was using the reception desk like a shield.

“Were you enquiring about our graveyard?” asked Marvin.  Jill looked suddenly relieved.

“Is it halal?  Only wifey here doesn’t seem to know!”

Marvin’s smile wavered.  He didn’t know whether ‘wifey’ was an insult or not.  Then he remembered why he’d come out.

“Very halal,” he said.  “We only allow human remains in the graveyard.  We don’t even allow plastic in there.”  As of today, he added mentally, but it seemed unnecessary to let the customer know that.

“See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”  The customer glared at Jill as though she’d been refusing to divulge state secrets.  “I want to have a barbecue there afterwards, too,” she continued.  “My Leonard loved that graveyard and he’d like to know we were all still there, eating and singing and making merry.”

“No,” said Marvin automatically.  He turned on his heel, but Jill darted through the door ahead of him and he paused, unwilling to leave the outer office empty.

The customer’s shriek would have been audible from the other side of the door anyway.

Crispy

 The shrieking recommenced almost as soon as Jill closed the door behind her again and Marvin shivered, glad that he wasn’t having to face potential customers.  He picked up the invoice that he’d pushed back before Jill came in and a puzzled expression came over his face.  He wasn’t especially handsome, and even his wife sometimes referred to him as having a face fit for radio, and his expression of puzzlement twisted up his puffy lips and flexed pock-marked skin in a way that sometimes put diners off their food for a couple of days.  He read the invoice again, and then turned it over and inspected the fine print on the back in case this was some kind of obscure joke.  Finding everything he expected there, even down to the phone number looking mostly correct he turned it back over and read it again, just in case it had changed while he wasn’t looking.  Then he set it down on the desk in front of him, stared at it as though it might change while he watched, and finally, reluctantly, picked up the phone.

“Kev!” yelled a voice on the other end.  Describing Marvin’s boss as excitable missed the opportunity to compare him with a hyperactive toddler who’d been gorging on forbidden E-numbers all morning and sugar all afternoon.  Marvin pulled the phone away from his face slightly to avoid feeling like he was being deafened.

“Kev, it’s Marvin here,” he said.  Most people would have checked to see who was calling when they answered the phone but Marvin knew his boss would simply have grabbed the phone without looking and answered it.  There was no-one in the world that Kev wouldn’t talk to, but there were a lot of telemarketing firms that had him on their no-call list.

“Marvin!” Kev sounded elated.  “I was just going to think about you!  You’re awesome, you know that right?  I love the job you do!  What do you for me again?”  There was the sound of a car horn blaring and Marvin guessed that Kev was probably driving.  He waited, and sure enough he heard Kev shouting, probably out of his window.

“Yeah, and I’d do that to your mother too, you—“ and another cacophony of horns drowned him out.  When approximate silence resumed Marvin risked talking.

“Kev, we’ve got an invoice here from the council,” he said.

“Lovely people,” said Kev.  “You’re one of my corpse-robbers, right?”

“Right,” said Marvin.  Arguing with Kev was pointless as he rarely listened to anything anyone told him unless it was related to money.  “The council are billing us for littering.”

“What?”  There was a screech that might have been Kev braking hard, or someone close by to him braking hard.  Marvin wouldn’t have liked to have to guess.

“Yeah, apparently we’re in breach of new guidelines on the disposal of long-chain hydrocarbons with persistent features.”  That was, word for word, what the invoice said.

“What the bloody hell does that mean?  Can’t these guys speak English?  And look where you’re putting that thing, mate, or I’ll find somewhere to put it that’ll have you walking funny for a week!”

“I think they’re talking about plastic surgery,” said Marvin, who was certain that this was the case but still had trouble believing it.

“You what?  That wasn’t a bleeding pig, mate!”

“I think,” said Marvin, wondering what was going on where Kev was, “that the council are saying that if we bury people who’ve had plastic surgery without removing the plastic bits first, they’re going to bill us for littering.”

“Then remove the plastic bits, bro!”

Marvin stared off into the distance while listening to the wail of a police siren approach and then fade away again while Kev trash-talked someone who sounded like they might be a pensioner.  When he felt that Kev might be listening he spoke up.

“First, people are going to get upset if they think only bits of their relatives are getting buried,” he said and Kev cut him off.

“Tell them it’s a legal requirement,” he said.  “Put it in the fine print and point them at the council when they moan.  Their rules, they can sort it out.”

“The other problem,” said Marvin doggedly, feeling like he was ordering the tide to turn back.  He’d been rather hoping Kev would be upset by all this and would go and shout at the councillors.  “The other problem is that rummaging through a body to remove the plastic bits will take ages.  It’ll end up costing us a fortune in wages, and maybe overtime for the first couple of weeks.”

“Sorting machine!” said Kev.  “Same to you, love, only with spikes on!”

“What?”

“Sorting machine,” said Kev.  “Like what they use in the post office.  Push the body in one end, get a filleted body out the other and a nice bag of plastic giblets.  Easy.  Talk to Alfred, he’ll fix you up with one.  Right mate, gotta go, I’m still trying to get these organs delivered and the traffic’s atrocious up here!”

Marvin set the phone down on the desk and gently rested his head in his hands while he tried to find a way that Kev’s idea didn’t make sense.  Outside he heard a slam and hoped that Jill had managed to get rid of the troublesome customer.

“Sorting machine,” he whispered to himself.

Charred

 “I want a discount!”

Marvin sighed.  He was in the back office of Kev’s Crematorium trying to deal with the week’s invoices but the person who had come in five minutes ago had a piercing voice and it was getting louder.  He looked at the stack of papers in the blue plastic in-tray and decided that he wasn’t going to go out and see what the commotion was about until he’d got at least half-way through them.  He pulled the top of the pile towards him and frowned at the number on it, which seemed too large.  He checked the name at the top of the invoice: Kev’s Caskets.

“Jesus, Kev,” he muttered.  Kev was his boss and the owner of many of the funeral-related businesses in the town — something of a one-horse town, only the horse had died a few years back and Kev delighted in telling the tale of how he’d buried it — and ought to know better than to mix the ‘invoices’ between the businesses up with the actual invoices that needed paying.  “You’ll give me a heart attack one of these days,” he finished, wondering if his wife would get a discount from Kev if he did.  He filed Kev’s invoice in a lever-arch file on a shelf behind him and pulled the next invoice from the pile.

“No, ‘cos the job’s half-done, right?” came the shrill voice from the outer office.  Marvin couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation: Jill would be on duty at the moment and she was quietly spoken even when she was angry.  He tried not to think about the implications of that statement and looked at the invoice.  This one was from a local florist and was easy to approve.  He tapped at the keyboard bringing up the online banking application and paying the bill.  He still remembered the days when every invoice needed a ledger entry and a cheque written out — by hand! — and felt that modern technology had made huge improvements in his quality of life.  The invoice, now handled, was filed in a different lever arch folder on a different shelf.

“Well, I want partial credit then!”

Marvin picked up the next invoice and then hesitated.  That could be interpreted in two ways and neither sounded like the kind of thing that you’d expect to hear in a crematorium.  Jill must have answered fairly quickly, and probably with no, as the next thing he heard was,

“You can’t go taking all the credit for this!  Either I get a discount or you put my name on it.”

Marvin forced himself to read the invoice but it was hard work.  He was becoming curious as to what the conversation was really all about.  The next invoice wasn’t actually an invoice but a letter from someone who’d had their husband cremated.  He was about to drop it into the bin, as sentiments didn’t pay for a business, until he noticed that the last paragraph was actually a demand for a partial refund.

“20% isn’t a lot!”

“It might be,” murmured Marvin.  The letter was asking for a 20% refund as well because the corpse’s height had been under 160cm in life and the letter-writer seemed to think that cremation was like certain kinds of pizza and charged by the metre.  He dropped it into the bin; if they could find a lawyer to submit the claim he’d have their lawyer refute it, but there was no point entertaining these people.

“Is there an instalment plan?”

Marvin’s fingers let the next invoice fall from them.  Jill would have to come and interrupt him about this; they generally didn’t offer credit, preferring payment up front, but sometimes they extended the payment period a little when there were good reasons for it.  Like publicity.  He waited, and sure enough, there was a tap on the door.

“Come,” he said, and the door swung open just enough for Jill to squeeze through the gap and close it behind her.  She leant on it, and Marvin saw the door handle depress as though someone outside was trying to follow her.

“Trouble?” he said, as though he’d not heard anything.

“Sort of,” said Jill.  She was middle-aged and plump and had the look of a woman who didn’t want to be a grandmother but wasn’t being given much choice.  She rubbed her left temple as though trying to stave off a headache.  “There’s a woman outside who wants a discount.”

“No,’ said Marvin.

“I know, I told her that already.  But she’s saying that the body is already partially cremated and she shouldn’t have to pay for the bit that’s already done.”

“Already done…?”  Marvin mentally added this to the list of things he felt no-one working in a crematorium should have to hear.

“Quite.  I told her that it’s a fixed fee, not based on height, weight, or shape but she keeps arguing.  She wants to have the cremation done in instalments now.”

“No,” said Marvin automatically, but then his brain caught up.  “Wait, you mean she wants to pay for it in instalments, right?”

“No,” said Jill.  “She wants to have bits cremated as she can find the money for them.  She suggested doing the head last as she’d like to be able to keep talking to the… the deceased, I suppose.”

Marvin’s mouth moved but no sound came out.  Jill nodded, looking sympathetic.  “I had the same reaction,” she said.  “I mean, where would we even keep the body?”

“We wouldn’t,” said Marvin.  He hated being labelled autistic, but his automatic response to questions, even rhetorical ones, was to try and answer them and his teachers had been fond of labelling him.  “We’d cremate the whole thing and just release portions of the ashes as she pays for them.”

Jill’s eyes widened.  “Can I tell her that?” she asked, sounding relieved.

“No,” said Marvin, back in his comfort zone.  “And we’re not doing it, but you just asked a —“

“Question,” they said together.  Jill nodded.  “Right,” she said.  “Never mind, but it’s not a bad idea, mind you.”

“It’s a terrible idea,” said Marvin.  “People will come in and get 15g of mummy or daddy and decide that since it’s only ash the rest doesn’t matter.  We’ll lose a fortune.”

“What if we did keep the heads though, and only did them last?”

Marvin’s mouth worked before his brain could tell it this was a bad idea.  “Then we’d probably get into trouble with the police,” he said.  “Damn it, you know not to ask me questions like that!”

Jill grinned.  “Yes,” she said, “but I’ve got to go out there and try and get this woman to see sense.  I deserve a little entertainment too, you know.”

Marvin forced a smile.  “Just keep telling her no,” he said.  “Sooner or later it’ll sink in.  And no sketching up a design for a cabinet for the heads of the lay-away-cremation customers!”