Jigsaw puzzles

The overflow morgue smells clinical; the air is cold and tastes slightly of formaldehyde, but there’s a rancid note like off-butter underneath it all.  I kind of like it, but that might just be familiarisation, given how much I come here to think.  The trolleys are hard, cold steel, but that’s pleasant when your body’s as abused and damaged as mine: I don’t have to support anything, and the chill numbs the aches and pains of a life lived long.  I exhaled and let Death hug me just a little closer.

The sheep thing bugged me still.  Why had someone gone to the trouble of dragging one up all those flights of stairs to slaughter it?  And where was Boy Blue at the time?  Did he open his door and have a sheep bleat at him, probably angry and panicked by that point?  I knew Blue a little, and I expect he would have panicked too, probably backing up into the room while the sheep was goaded forwards.  There was so little in his room – even I have more in mine, though most of it belongs to my room-mate and probably wouldn’t fit me – that he’d reach the mattress before he knocked anything over.  Then he’d end up sitting down on the bed while the sheep bleated and pawed the ground, its eyes rolling madly in its triangular head, while behind it some shadowy figure made threats.

No, that just didn’t work.  How did Blue get out in that case, and why kill the sheep?

I adjusted my position on the trolley slightly and felt my shoulders go numb, which was a blessed relief.  Let’s try again.

Could Blue jump out of the window?  Not and stand up again, and certainly not run away.  Too many floors to fall.  Could there have been something below the window when he jumped that he could land on?  Seemed unlikely, but I hadn’t checked when I was there.  That would be lucky for him (I presumed), and stranger things did happen.  People thought that odd coincidences only happened in stories but that was because they didn’t do the numbers: with as many people in the world as there are, a one-in-a-million chance should be happening to a few hundred people on any given day.  Maybe yesterday had been Blue’s day?  He probably thought he was overdue one, most people did.

But was there an easier answer?  What if Blue wasn’t there when the sheep-killer arrived; could the murder of the sheep be a warning message?  Well, then the sheep had to be important and either Blue had been angering French farmers or… well, Belle Peep had already shown up in my investigation hadn’t she?  Her father, Bo Peep, had run a small inner-city farm before his death about ten years ago, and rumour had it that Belle kept the farm going but that the tours were for much more select groups with special interests.  Could Belle have a quarrel with Blue?  Or did Belle just supply the sheep for someone else who had a quarrel with Blue?

Something tickled at my foot, and I kicked out.  There was a soft outrushing of breath and a second, sharper, intake of breath so I opened my eyes.  Two medical students, easily identifiable by the looks of terror on their faces and the textbooks they were clutching were backing away from my trolley.  One was doubled over, as though he’d just been kicked in the pit of his stomach and the other was making the sign of the cross repeatedly across his chest.

“I’m not dead,” I said slowly.  It seems like that’s the one thing that should be easy to grasp about this situation, but in my experience it’s the bit people have most trouble with.  I blame all these zombie movies, and the occasional zombie outbreak.  “I’m having a think.”

“In the morgue?” said the self-crossing student lowering his arm.  His other hand, holding a heavy textbook, remained ready to swat at me in case I decided his brains were enough for a meal, which I rather doubted.

“It’s quiet, and I don’t often get disturbed,” I said.  “What are you doing here?”

“Homework,” wheezed the other student, slowly coming upright again.  “We’re a bit behind in class, so we got the keys–“

“Permission!” injected the second student quickly

“– and the keys to come down here and catch up a bit,” continued the first.  “We weren’t going to use your body, we were just wondering how badly advanced your state of decomposition was.”

“Still living,” I said with a snarl.  “You want the room next door; all the bodies in here are missing limbs that need to be put back with them before they can be autopsied.”

“Right,” said the first student starting to leave, but then stopped as the second looked at me quizzically.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“I’m supposed to be here,” I said.  “Night watchman.”

“Oh.”  He didn’t look convinced, but I didn’t care.  They wandered off, whispering to each other and looking nervous, and I slipped off the trolley.  I was going to go and check out Blue’s place again and see what I’d missed when Monkeybutt turned up, and then I was going to go and find out if Belle Peep really did still have her daddy’s farm.

Salt and smoke

When I schlepped out of the Corner Pie House my stomach was full with… well, let’s leave it at something meaty, and my mind was overflowing with thoughts.  The evening had started off with a simple visit to Little Boy Blue and had gone wildly off the rails since then.  Natasha Monkeybutt showing up had been bad enough, but another sighting of the deliciously prestidigitational Miss Sapphire and the mention of Mad Frankie had done nothing but boost my dyspepsia.  Then Jackie, Belle Peep, the Corner Pie House, and now a suggestion that Jack Crown might be watching me.  I needed somewhere where I could lie down, listen to my bones creak and my tendons snap, and think about what was going on.  The trouble was, it was the wrong time of day, or rather, it was night-time.  I share a room with a hard-working young man with the deal being that I have the room during the day and he has it at night.  It maximises the utility of the room, which should make any amateur economist happy, and by happy coincidence we maximise the use of the bed too.  In my case by sleeping in it, and in his case by the sheer volume of clients he… takes care of.  We’re a boon to the economy also as the sheets have to be replaced roughly weekly, though we argue over who puts the most wear and tear to them.  So going home wasn’t an option for at least another five hours.

I trudged up the street, avoiding the piles of rubbish and walking through the puddles of liquid.  They might have been water when they fell from the sky, but they’d have been added to since, and now only needed a lightning strike to start the evolution of life all over again.  My shoes have seen worse though, and my trouser cuffs are permanently soggy; the doctors occasionally marvel that I haven’t got trench-foot, trench-ankle, and trench-shin.  That is, until they discover the athlete’s foot and exactly how pernicious it is, and then a look of understanding comes over their faces as they recoil, holding tongue depressors before them in whatever religious symbol they prefer, and attempt to exorcise me from their offices.  I’ve heard it said that there are no atheists in foxholes, and while I’ve been in a few foxholes, taking my shoes off and showing the ends of my legs to people seems a more sure-fire way of finding what God there is in a person.

Left at the top of the street, turning a corner housing a greengrocer on one side and some residential houses on the other.  They were tenement buildings, once town houses but now taken over by several families and divided up amongst them.  The windows housed cracked glass, darkened by smoke and years without cleaning and tattered curtains fluttered at only a couple of them.  A pale face like an anaemic ghost peered out of one briefly, not seeing anyone in particular on the streets below, and then was cuffed away by a fist like a shovel.  I stepped heavily on a soft turnip that squished, and remembered that I should look where I’m going.

The street at the top, Cuttermonger street where the knife-sellers used to sell out at three and then hide behind their shutters until the fighting died down and the participants had died off still had knife-sellers on it, joined now by the wok-istas who cooked street food in huge, hot, cast-iron bowls over charcoal fires.  Smells of smoky spices filled the air, some from the food and others from the sticks of lemon-grass and cinnamon that the vendors threw on the coals deliberately.  Meats, neat little cubes coated in marinades that made it impossible to guess what they were, sizzled in pans as people stated their orders and proffered their money; ginger, garlic, chili peppers, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, and river-shrimp were added, and sauces, usually sticky and sweet, redolent of memories of other people’s childhoods, were poured over.  Then a handful of salt, large flat crystals that seemed inclined to rest on the surface like dandruff, was thrown on at the last minute before it was all scooped out with a little wire net and dumped unceremoniously into a cardboard box whose bottom would give out in five minutes, so you had to eat fast.

Normally I avoided Cuttermonger street because it made me hungry and smell like a three-day-old barbecue pit, but having just eaten a decent meal for the week I was feeling like I could handle it, and I breathed deep as I walked along.  Salt and smoke, two of my favourite smells in all the world.

At the end of the street I turned left again, and started down Nobs Hill.  The houses here were smaller but better kept; the people here still had pride, and one or two, during daylight hours at least, would run out and chase the likes of me away with brooms, tea-towels, and occasionally secateurs.  There was no real money here, just a determination not to be seen to not have any.  Now, with evening behind me and the night beckoning invitingly, the householders were all inside, tucked up in their beds with threadbare blankets, kept warm more by their dogs than their pride, and the street was mine to walk down.

And of course, the real indicator of wealth for a neighbourhood is what else is there other than the houses.  At the bottom of Nobs Hill was the overflow morgue, outside whose doors I stopped.