A novel by Barry Hotson - Extract - Suffering the Fire

ONE The coffin glides towards the blue curtains – heavenly blue, you might say. My only feeling is that I’m almost free.

The holy muzak can’t hide the noise of the roller conveyor any more than turning up the volume masks the hum of an amplifier. Or maybe it’s my ears, always tuned for warnings: noises at the wrong time, in the wrong place, with the wrong tone.

I look sideways to Lou and down to Emily and Hannah sitting between us. They’re still intent on their final sight of Mum’s polished oak shell. It’s a blurred view for them. I had my one-off paroxysm when the hospice rang.

Mum’s been declining to an early death ever since Boroughcliff – thirty-one years of wasting away. Now she’s got what she was waiting for: her release from bereavement’s grief. Why didn’t she ever recover?

The disaster stole Dad from me too; and yet the way it turned out, I lost them both: a dad crushed and burnt to death, and a loving mum replaced by an irritable and depressed recluse. I struggled to please her the whole time – but not any more. Now I’m released too; I can focus on the new job, prove my talent, make my name – and show Lou she’s wrong.

The curtains are parted and then the coffin’s out of sight. People don’t know what goes on back there, later – the technology: fuel-air ratio, furnace temperature, stack gas analysis, emission control. It’s the black hole at the crematorium: the invisible part between the corpse in the coffin and the grit in the casket. Maybe they don’t think, because of the Holocaust link: ‘cremation’ and ‘extermination’.

“Michael!”

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