The Collections

Until I was halfway home from work, the day had been pretty much like any other, a snatched breakfast of coffee and a bran muffin, a cursory press of my uniform, retrieved from the floor where I’d dropped it the evening before, and after that, the usual routine at the Depot. I remember it was a Wednesday and I’d been a widow for nine weeks and six days. I was lonely and facing my first Christmas alone in more than forty-one years. Maybe the yobbos sensed my despondency. It’s easy to kick someone when they’re down and I was as low-spirited as it’s possible to be.

There were three of them, loitering outside the Sunrise Dairy, dressed similarly in their own truculent livery of saggy pants and dark hoodies. As I passed, they ogled, and then one of them spat at me while the other two yelled out: Killer Millar, Killer Millar. They’d obviously seen my name, Claris Millar, embroidered in navy on the pocket of my work shirt, and been prompted by both, the shirt and the name, to mock me. The youth who’d spat followed me for a few menacing steps. I was intimidated by their belligerence, but not for a second would I let them see this so I purposefully didn’t walk any faster, maintaining instead my usual steady pace.

Killer. That’s the accusation they flung at me and days later I still felt debased by it, and besmirched.

This is where my story begins. Where the seeds of uncertainty that I’d so long shut my eyes to, began to take root.

They were cretins, those three youths, but what about others, normal well-behaved every-day people? Is that how they see me? As a killer? The imputation appalled me at the time, just as it sickened me to ask it of myself, and yet I couldn’t stop. The question clawed me from sleep, lunged at me when I woke, as if it had been prowling the room like a surly mongrel, waiting for me to wake. Were those louts correct? Am I a murderer? Scourge, slayer of fellow citizens, an executioner? And if I am, does that mean we have all of us become executioners?

After that day, I never again wore my Depot uniform to and from work. I had two sets, fawn slacks and shirts, and navy polar-fleece jackets, and I began storing them all in my locker at the Depot, taking them home only on the weekend, to wash and iron for the following week.

We never talked about it, but after that incident outside the Sunrise Dairy, I began to consider if any of my colleagues ever asked themselves the same question: are we killers? I found myself glancing at them from time to time, endeavouring to read their faces, but they were all as impassive as planks.

I worked at the Caledonia Depot and you couldn’t find a more caring workplace. Everyone there was very obliging and I’m sure they still are. The whole place is just so damn nice, not a scratch or dirty spot to be seen, not a raised voice to be heard. And no smell. That’s the weirdest thing. All the Depots are like this apparently. It’s in the manual: Maintain a subdued neutral ambience at all times.

How can there be no smell? Sometimes, I imagined my nostrils filled with the stench of Laurie’s flesh, his skin, his bones, his hair or what was left of it anyway.

I’d been working at Caledonia almost two and half years when it became futile to delude myself any more that the place wasn’t getting to me. It was if those yobbos prodded a sarcoma in me that I hadn’t known was there. I started having subversive thoughts. At one point I imagined putting on a hoodie myself and running amok, spray can in each hand, splashing scarlet slogans across the walls: those who witness this perishing will soon perish themselves or bellowing across the staff cafeteria that I have of late - but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth, or some such umpty declarations. I imagined taking a spade from the utilities store and shovelling so much mulch and shit into the entrance foyer that the doors were jammed shut and no one could get in or out.

Mulch and fertiliser, to put it euphemistically, is what we produced at the Depot, and exposing a few barrow-loads of the stuff would make the place smell all right. Make it normal.

Not that I have the slightest idea any more of what ‘normal’ is. So much has changed in the past few years that I don’t even try any more to keep up. I just do what I’m told. And yet, I struggled. During those low fretful hours in the night, troublesome words zigzagged back and forth across my consciousness – elimination, liquidation, parricide, sororicide – and by morning I was more drained and muddled than when I went to bed.

Clearly, I’d been at the job too long. That was no-one’s fault but mine. Depot workers are contracted for two years and no-one is ever asked to stay on after that and, as far as I knew, no one ever had, at least not until I put my hand up for a second stint. This was after Laurie died. They tried to discourage me but only half-heartedly. It’s not as if people are queueing up to work in the Depots – in the early days there had been talk of conscription but in the end, it hadn’t been necessary – and I could see quite clearly that they were thankful to have an experienced worker stay on, someone of sufficient maturity themselves to empathise with the clients. They meant a woman in her own declining years, of course, but were too polite to say so.

I didn’t let on to anyone exactly why I felt the need to stay, that it allowed me to return each day to the place where Laurie had last been. To hold on to him. If they knew, they’d probably mumble some platitude in my ear, then pat me on the back, metaphorically anyway, physical contact being discouraged, and tell me to get a life. Oh, the irony.

It’s also possible, and more than likely, that when I asked to renew my contract, I was fostering some nebulous and no doubt half-baked notion that it would make things easier for me when my turn came, that at the end of a normal working day I’d hang up my uniform, my hangman’s hood if you will, one last time and, after leaving the women’s locker room, turn left instead of right.

What would that make me? A model citizen I hear you say.

Sometimes I was tempted to ask my colleagues, Chloe and Ben, whether they had these thoughts too and if they did, whether or not they’d come up with any answers. And sometimes I came dangerously close to broaching the subject, but I shut my mouth before the words could spill. Because that’s in the manual too: Depot activities are not to be discussed anytime, anywhere. It’s in the contract. We all signed a confidentiality agreement and that’s that.

Rules aside, I think what really stopped us talking about all this, not to mention questioning what we were doing, was unease about what the answers might be.

Not that I’d want to talk with Ben about it. Chloe possibly, but Ben? There was something a little off-putting about that young man. He had a chip on his shoulder and I know I’m being unfair, but the way he wore his hair, in a severe side-part, always put me in mind of despots. I was never a fan of goatees either. That tuft of hair on the chin suggests vanity to me, as if the wearer needs to trumpet his masculinity but lacks the testosterone to grow a full beard. No, Ben was a dickhead and the last person with whom I’d consider sharing anything let alone my thoughts.

I was on my own with this new and unsought for misgiving about the rightness or wrongness of the Government’s Collections policy.

Perhaps I was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Maybe I still am. My mind does frequently go into overdrive, filled with prickly unwelcome thoughts, and my sleep, if you could call it that, could certainly be improved. Aren’t these symptoms of stress?

Any day now I might start cutting myself.

Of course, I don’t mean that. Self-harm is not my style.

Most of our clients at the Depot were reconciled to what we were doing for them and ready for Collection because after all it’s necessary, urgently unassailably necessary, and everyone knows and accepts this, but now and then someone would turn up who didn’t accept it, and who wasn’t ready. To give you an example, there was an incident once, during my first year at the Depot, a retired electrician if I recall, Robson his name was, shouting at us that we’d got the paperwork wrong, that he shouldn’t be there, that he was booked into a golf tournament the following weekend. We ignored him. Kept our emotions in check. That was hard. But the paperwork is never wrong and as Mickey said at the time, would it really matter if it was? A year or so at the end of one’s life is neither here nor there; it’s all for the common good. Due process must be followed at all times. And yes, that’s another injunction in the manual.

We live in a gothic world.

And I fear for the future. Humans are so adaptable, and so credulous. How easily and swiftly we get used to terrible things and now we’ve allowed ourselves to become accustomed to the reality of Collections, so much so that the system is almost banal. Yet Collections haven’t been underway for long enough to understand what the long-term cost will be; they may make the planet more habitable again, reduce the pressure on resources, but the magnitude of what we’re doing – killing off the old folk to make way for the young – is yet to hit home.

What if everyone – everyone in their sixties, say, and even their children and their grand-children – started cutting themselves in a pandemic of self-harm to assuage the trauma of the age? Is anyone out there watching? Is there a concerned eye, anywhere among us, watching out for our collective psychological health?

It was cold, that day I was slagged off outside the Sunrise Dairy, and windy, and scraps of paper, the tatters of old concert posters by the look of them, were blowing about on the pavement. There was no one else around. As soon as I was out of view of those yobbos, I walked faster, the faster to arrive back in the village where I would reach the consolations of home.

There is no eye, kindly or otherwise. No-one is looking. We are all of us lonesome as orphans.

You can see why I began to question the manual. I couldn’t stop myself. Something in me changed, although I was yet to define what exactly. Our clients may have been reconciled to their fate, but I was no longer sure I was. One of the things that particularly worried me about that Depot hand-book was its instruction not to talk about our work. It meant Chloe, Ben and I, and Mickey too, couldn’t support each other as well as we might have. We had no rituals, no therapy groups or psycho-education sessions with which to prop each other up. We were each of us alone in obedient denial.

As I say, sometimes I itched to run riot, just to disrupt everything, fling the whole frigging lot – the manual, my job description, those vile tubs – up in the claggy air and hope they never came down again.

It’s crazy but when I arrived home each evening, I’d find myself, like a leprous person checking her extremities were still intact, assessing my character for signs of moral decay.

2

This change to my frame of mind began around three months after Laurie was collected and no doubt it was his Collection, as much as my being rudely insulted by those youths, that brought it on.

Each hour of that egregious day is etched on my memory like a fresh, still suppurating tattoo. We’d talked about it until both of us were heartily fed up, so tired of the subject in fact that Laurie’s Collection might almost have come as a relief, except that unquestionably it didn’t. I wasn’t ready for it. I was never going to be ready and feigning a poise I didn’t feel was wearing thin as a communal wafer.

I remember the weather was unseasonable. Well, when is it ever seasonable? I could tell you that the day of Laurie’s Collection was sultry or that a southerly wind was blowing or even that it was snowing, but the subject of weather has been so thrashed and picked over in recent years that there really is no point even mentioning it any more. It’s either too hot or too cold, too dry or too wet. And utterly random. We all just wait for the next meteorological bashing and hope the blows land on someone else.

My husband was composed, which made me overwrought, even though I recognised that illness and dying can be easier for the person who is ill or dying because for them there is no mystery in it. They are on the inside as it were, so nothing for them is left to the imagination, there is no room for agitation and this makes it easier for them to accept what is happening.

Laurie was all phlegmatic acceptance of his Collection. He was ready to go and I knew that was as it should be, but still railed against it. I struggled mightily to reconcile the global exigency with my own enormous need to have my husband remain with me.

‘I wish we were going together,’ I said, not for the first time.

He placed his hands on my shoulders and rubbed his nose against mine. This was one of Laurie’s habitual gestures of affection for me. His breath smelled of mint. ‘We’ve been through all this, Clarry,’ he said. ‘You have to let me go now, and be strong.’

‘Can’t I at least drive you over there? I promise not to come in, I’ll drop you off outside.’ The thought of actually doing this made me feel quite bilious. Laurie stepping through the door at Caledonia’s was the very last thing I had ever wanted to see or ever have happen. ‘I’ve got to be there myself soon anyway.’

‘You’re not going into work today. And you know the drill. We say goodbye here, in our home where my dear, dear Claris, you’ve given me the best, most contented years of my life.’

A car pulled up silently outside. I looked out our living room window to the street and saw one of the Depot’s navy sedans. The windows were tinted impenetrably black but I knew that inside the seats were fawn leather and that behind the driver’s seat there was a shelf with small decanters, one brandy, the other whiskey, and in glass box, a small metal canister and face mask for clients who requested, or whose behaviour warranted a more powerful relaxant. It was the same sort of laughing gas that dentists use; ether you can inhale to make you sleepy, and brave.

‘He’s ten minutes early. Work must be slow today, but all the same, how could he? It isn’t right to be early.’

At the Caledonia, we seldom processed more than three or four clients a day but now and then there were more, which made for a hellishly busy shift and left all of us at the Depot uncomfortably frazzled at the end of it. We didn’t like to rush our clients, or be rushed ourselves. The process is kinder for everyone when we can all take our time.

Laurie put on his jacket. It was charcoal tweed with a faint maroon check and I’d bought it in Ballantynes department store three years before, for his birthday. He took it off again and draped it over the back of a chair. We both stared at it. It really didn’t matter whether he wore it or didn’t wear it. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t but started crying. Then pulled myself together. A woman in late middle age blubbering is a pathetic sight at the best of times and I didn’t want that to be Laurie’s last view of me.

I rummaged in the pockets of his jacket and found a mint. I unwrapped the sweet and put it under my tongue. The strong flavour revived me a little, enough to feign courage. ‘Couldn’t we, you know … take off somewhere, clear out? C’mon Laurie, why don’t we?’

‘Clarry, love.’ He pulled me into his arms and hugged me tight. ‘I wouldn’t change a thing, you know that.’

Of course, I knew. My husband was an ardent environmentalist and if he’d been asked, he’d willingly have gone to the Depot when he was sixty. All right, sixty-five maybe. I’m exaggerating but you get my drift. Laurie understood the urgency. Who doesn’t?

When he went, Laurie left the front door open, as if he was just popping out to check the letter box. Or as if he was leaving it open for me to follow. Some atavistic urge in me caused me to grab the family Bible out of drawer and sprint down the path after Laurie and hand it to him.