Dead Men's s Boots

Four huge inlaid panels dominated the space, two to each side of the door: a lion and an eagle to the left, an ox and a robed angel to the right. The symbols of the four evangelists. The carpet was royal blue, scuffed pale in places by the passage of many feet.

Ahead of us was another door. Black-suited men, pres citen pumably also hired by Todd, stood to either side of it and nodded respectfully to us as we passed. They looked like bouncers at a nightclub.

We walked though into a large high-ceilinged room that looked like any church hall anywhere, except for the dumbwaiter-like doors at the far end and the slightly sinister platform placed in front of them: a platform whose surface was a plain of slick, frictionless plastic rollers.

I abreact to furnaces, probably because of having had to take my dad his lunch a couple of times when he worked behind the ovens in a bread factory. Places like this one always put me in mind of Satan’s locker room.

The bearers placed the coffin on the platform and stepped back, and at the same time a very short man in a black ecclesiastical robe came out through a curtained doorway off to one side.

Todd went forward and had a brief murmured conversation with him, presumably along the lines of ‘This is the action replay, but let’s dispense with the slow motion and get it over with.’ The man nodded briskly. He had a slender face with a very long, sharp nose that made me think of a fox or a wolf. I’d seen a Japanese ivory once – a tiny figure, barely bigger than the top joint of my thumb – of a fox dressed as a priest, with a long robe and a staff and a pious expression: maybe it was unfair, because the nose must have been enough of a burden to bear in itself, but this young cleric brought the statuette vividly into my mind.

Todd had presumably told him that Carla didn’t want any prayers said, but he clearly wasn’t happy to let the occasion go by without ruminating on mortality just a little: force of habit, I figured, although technically he was wearing a surplice.

‘In the midst of life,’ he said, ‘we are in death.’ Two cheers and a thump on the tub for the Book of Common Prayer. Sitting in the front row, with Carla to my left and Todd to my right, I let my attention wander. Unfortunately it wandered to the furnace doors, where it found no comfort and shied away again pretty fast.

I was still feeling tired and rough: worse than I had when I woke up, if anything.