Lances of winter rain and freezing wind framed the morning she was discovered, the elements incentivizing the police, ambulance services and social services to get the death bureaucracy dealt with quickly.
The police cars and ambulances parked outside the dilapidated 1960s apartment block, a hideous concrete relic of perfunctory urban planning, barely attracted attention. For an East London neighborhood accustomed to weekly murders, drug gang battles fought with machetes and addicts expiring in the nearby playground on a regular basis, the sight of the agencies of bad news turning up was as normal as the jingling arrival of ice-cream vans on the estate had once been. Diverse people passed on the pathway adjacent to the blocks, some clasping umbrellas and others phones while shivering. None even bothered glancing over. Who cared? Somebody else’s very bad day, just a micro-tragedy in the vast cosmos of misfortune.
Inside one of the block’s social housing flats, Roy and Grace are still shaking but palming away the ‘specially trained officers’ with anger, indignant that workers from the institutions that prevented them finding and helping their sister now want to comfort them with approved cliches from training workshops. Police Sergeant Ali senses the tension and notices the growing rage in Roy’s quivering bottom lip. He turns the support officers away with a subtle nod. Give them space. They hate us right now—and why shouldn’t they? After all, I can’t imagine how I’d feel if my sister was found in this state, he reasons.
Thirty minutes earlier they had been confronted by the eerie, accusatory stare of a twenty-first century mummy when they had battered down the door and entered the lounge. Lola’s final expression, her absolute last trace of mortal emotion, was an anguished cry to a world that had forgotten her. Her mouth was a black cave. An opening through which her last breath had passed, as unsightly as her distended cheeks and mottled, leathery skin. Mummified body of woman lies undiscovered in flat for five years the headlines of the Yahoo news clicks with one minute lifespans would read, before being dumped into the search-engine’s vast landfill of digital misery, joining celebrity sex confessions, recycled death tolls from disasters and horrifying crime narratives of every genre.
Roy and Grace froze when their sister’s gnarled corpse, covered by a duvet coated in sepia coloured grime, was discovered in the lounge. The police had had to force the door. The Community Mental Health workers had gasped while the social workers’ faces turned white, perhaps as much from guilt as the macabre, sickening reality of the scene. The fact that it was possible to die like this in a country whose government promoted the nation to the world as the tip-top model of civilization and democracy. A land of milk and honey the migrants were flocking to, such as the Afghan family in the next-door flat Sergeant Ali had interviewed with much linguistic difficulty. They knew, saw or heard nothing. Had no idea of the accidental, high-rise tomb next to them or its forgotten cadaver that had decayed as prime ministers changed, pandemics raged, and monarchs died. Neither the traumas of lockdowns nor the non sequiturs of daytime talk-show guests opining mindlessly about Covid across channels concerned her, for her television was now nothing but a redundant prop. Her utilities had been shut off a full year after her death, the cause of which the coroner would never determine. For Lola, no pharaoh’s burial. No grand sarcophagus, jewels or golden mask laced in lapis lazuli. Just an infirmary corpse sheet to cover her remains as they were carried by two orderlies to the ambulance. There would be no conference with Anubis or judgement by the gods, only the glimmering, impersonal steel of the autopsy table.
“She wasted away, shriveled like a fucking prune and you did nothing to help her! You left her to die and kept us, her family, away. Damn your privacy laws! Your inhuman and criminal rules. You bastards!”
Grace’s eruption is inevitable. A molten hot explosion of fury from the strata of her grief that demands release. The rage is so intense it threatens spontaneous combustion without vent and this notion occurs to her as she screams at the vacant faces of those she will later testify played leading roles in her sister’s tragedy. I wish I would burst into ball of flames and take these bastards, this shithole, the entire country with me. My nuclear revenge. The targets of her vitriol don’t respond. They just absorb the words and think of their training, all willing the end of this excruciating moment and praying for the time that they can exit, unnoticed, from this squalid shrine to the failure of authorities.
“Grace, Grace. Nothing I can say, nothing I can do can make this any easier,” says Sergeant Ali, daring to speak. As soon as he dispenses his trite, cold comfort syllables, his hackneyed script from the hundreds of domestic tragedies his work obliged him to observe, he feels guilty. Poorly timed. Inappropriate. Insensitive. Clumsy to say the least. The damning adjectives flow through his mind as he flounders in his swamp of verbal damage limitation and searches for language to correct things.
“Sorry. What I mean is—”
“Save it!” Shouts Roy closing him down. “We don’t want your cheap sympathy, your platitudes or you patronizing us!” Ali nods sheepishly, a concession to Roy’s prerogative to lambast them all. The fetid air combines with the stench of long-rotted food haunting the dormant refrigerator. A stale, punishing miasma pervades the space and all except the next-of-kin are close to gagging. Somebody open a window is the shared sentiment. Around them, the poignant debris of Lola’s life is all that remains to confirm her existence. A mound of unopened, trodden-on mail by the front door lingers, most of it bearing local authority postmarks. A box of unopened medication lies on the coffee table next to a mildewed local newspaper half a decade old opened at a feature article concerning a funding crisis with the local council’s social care budget. The curtains and blinds are covered with derelict cobwebs, the gossamer threads ancient and frail. Roy stares at the large 2017 flip calendar sitting on the third tier of some shelves opposite the sofa in front of which his sister’s remains were found. He is transfixed by a discovery, something shocking and revelatory that had been hiding in plain sight during the thirty horrific minutes that they had occupied this appalling space. The others have no choice but to follow Roy’s line of sight, which directs their gaze with psychic intensity towards the glaring red epiphany scrawled across the calendar’s February 2017 page.
I need help!
Grace gasps and the color drains out of her face so instantaneously it is as if she has become a ghost. Her right arm springs up from her side and her hand clasps her mouth, as though reflexively trying to stifle a scream but the scream doesn’t come, only a muffled whimper that presages copious tears that stream down her cheeks. As she sobs, Roy’s jaw and fists clench.
***
“In the opinion of this inquiry it is undeniable that the council failed catastrophically in its duty of care towards Lola Martin. It not only failed to check on her welfare, to make visits when she had not kept appointments with her psychiatry team. Its lead care team didn’t even bother to contact her landlord at her social housing flat to simply knock on her door and confirm she was well and coping.”
Roy and Grace watch the remote po faces on the peculiar digital person grid that still astonishes them years after being introduced to Zoom. Born in the early seventies, they both grew up under the hypnotic glow of the analog surrogate parent screen that entertained, that babysat. That held their gaze with cartoons, with myriad narrative fantasies and with game shows such as Celebrity Squares where c-list entertainers once appeared on the screen just like this, made lame one-liner remarks which elicited bursts of canned laughter and did goofy things for applause. Roy still cannot accept the extremes of Silicon Valley sorcery he has witnessed in his lifetime that once saw people calling human operators through cumbersome exchanges just to phone somebody in another country, to an era where virtual meeting rooms instantly materialize like teleports in a Star Trek episode. Where people have synchronous talk from different parts of the world with pixelated proxies of others enclosed in graphical borders. Pure science fiction fantasy. None of it is real. The dismissive idea speaks in Roy’s mind as he listens to the Queen’s Counsel lawyer leading the inquiry into his sister’s death and discovery making his summation. Both he and Grace had objected to the proceedings for the inquiry to deliver its findings being held remotely. They were denied the chance to eyeball the chief executives and the managers who had tried to hide, who had tried to bury their negligence in bowls of word-salad, dishing out nebulous phrases of crisis control such as ‘complex circumstances of the case’ and ‘deterioration in protocol fulfillment’ when questioned by the cross examiners. Grace, finally seeing the people who had for months been the nameless, faceless objects of her loathing seethes in front of her computer screen. She watches the two women and one man with malevolent intentions. Her animus towards them is so intense, and her senses so augmented, that she can smell their self-regard emanating from the monitor. Their sense of dismissive condescension stinks. She recalls the patronizing, unsigned e-mails from their department that told them they had no legal right to contact their sister, and the refused Freedom of Information requests. The police were as useless then as when they attended Lora’s discovery. We can’t intervene. The law is the law, they parroted back to them. Even their solicitor, decent and determined, could not penetrate the local authority’s formidable walls, insulated with legalese. Their psychiatrists had recorded their paranoid schizophrenic sibling, after an acute episode while pumped full of antipsychotics, say she feared everyone, including her family. This had been the basis of their non-challengeable ruling to use privacy laws to deny them all contact with Lola. Question marks about whether Lola was eating, drinking and breathing had tormented Roy and Grace for half a decade, while they had had to navigate the brutal rapids of their own life rivers. One of Roy’s sons had been paralyzed in a traffic accident while Grace had been diagnosed with breast cancer. There were times when they had wondered if Lola was even still in England, whether she had become addicted to drugs or was existing in a squat or surviving under a bridge somewhere. The friends of hers that were contactable simply didn’t know. They had described, with great discomfort, their friend’s mental collapse. Her withdrawal from the world and disquieting disappearance. This was the first they’d learned of their sister’s slide into a non-functioning state. They’d noticed small signs years earlier of course. The clues only the trained could read.
“Furthermore, we conclude that the absolute minimum that the keyworkers assigned to Lola had an obligation to do was make greater efforts to find out from neighbors and her landlord where she was. It was two years before you saw fit to even try to reach her by phone for goodness sakes!” The shift in the QC’s voice to a more hostile tone unsettles the guilty officials, who oafishly maintain their masks of aloofness but mentally squirm in their little pixelated pens. “No checks were followed up. No enquiries were made with the Department of Work and Pensions to find out if she was still claiming and spending her benefits. Neither did you—and I refer to all three of you as sharing collective responsibility in this disgraceful case—make any attempt to coordinate with stakeholders in Lola’s care. And the fact that her parents, brother and sister were actually denied contact with her and kept ignorant of her suffering, isolation and eventual lonely death is absolutely unforgivable. You can be certain that I will be expressing my views to both the Health Secretary, the Ministry of Justice and other relevant departments in due course.”
Grace sends a chat message to her brother.
Will we get justice for Lola?
The sentence in the chat window, in its minute font, stimulates a montage of melancholy nostalgia for Roy. In one image, a grainy Polaroid from another century materializes in his mind. It is of all three of them, smiling and carefree on a Skegness beach in the nineteen eighties. Lola’s long, distinctive, thoughtful face is contemplating something. Inexplicably, the same long-forgotten photograph imposes itself on Grace’s thoughts at that very same moment. Nothing can explain this synchronicity of recall, this mutual retrieval of their shared visual history which they experience hundreds of miles apart, in their separate homes, as they watch the meeting coming to a close. However, closure is some way off for them, with their case against the local authorities pending in the courts.
Lola, we tried to find you they think, in sync, as they both sense the same avalanche of guilt about to flatten them. They look at themselves in their tiny mirror images magicked out of binary code, with their muted microphone icons, and jointly curse modernity. What did these gadgets ever do for us, they both ask the world silently. The e-mails. The messaging apps. The social media pages and infinite registrations doing nothing to unite people. 4G networks couldn’t help find our sister. Just the allies of this unlawful bureaucracy that wrecked our lives. The despair overwhelms them, and they are just about to break down in tears when a new black cubicle appears on the screen to indicate somebody joining the meeting. Before they can be baffled, they are amazed when Lola materializes, youthful, healthy and happy. She smiles and waves to them just as the meeting is brought to an end.
[Image Credit : Photo by Heidi Bruce on Unsplash ]
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