Death Is Not Meeting Expectations

The man had been comparing two packets of picture hooks for so long that Death had begun to suspect he was waiting for an expert opinion. One packet held twelve hooks and promised to support up to three kilograms. The other contained eight, cost forty pence more and featured a reassuring photograph of a smiling couple admiring a framed print. The man had read both sets of instructions, examined the backs and was now checking the price labels on the shelf below, which were not arranged in any particularly helpful order. Death stood beside the display of curtain poles in the home-improvement shop and watched the second hand of the man's wristwatch reach the twelve. At that precise instant, the electrical rhythm of his heart broke into a chaos from which it would never recover. His expression changed, very slightly. The packet with the smiling couple slipped from his fingers and struck the floor. A moment later he followed it, taking a stand of discounted screwdrivers with him. A woman at the next shelf cried out. Someone shouted for an ambulance. Death waited for the familiar separation, the brief, peculiar sensation in which a person discovered that the world could carry on making a perfectly dreadful noise without any further assistance from him. The man sat up beside his body, discovered that he was sitting in the middle of the aisle without any particular discomfort, and surveyed the scattered screwdrivers with much greater alarm than the people gathering around him. "Oh, for heaven's sake," he said. "I've knocked the whole thing over." "Mr Wilkes?" Death consulted the small black book he kept inside his robe. There was no practical need to do so. He knew exactly who the man was, but in his experience people were less likely to object if the encounter began with a proper identification. "Graham Wilkes?" "Yes. Who are you?" Graham looked at the hand Death offered, then at the long, curved scythe resting against a stack of boxed lamps. "Is this some kind of promotion?" "No." "You shouldn't leave that there. Someone will trip over it." "Nobody living can see it." Graham considered this, looked back at the floor, and found himself looking at his own face. A store employee was kneeling beside the body, taking instructions from a voice on a telephone. He had left the screwdrivers where they fell. "Good God. That's me." "Yes." "Am I...?" "I'm afraid so." Death thought this a tactful formulation. He had once tried answering the question with a brisk affirmative, but a succession of complaints had led him to adopt the conventional expression of regret. It cost nothing, and even on occasions when the customer understood that Death himself had very little to be sorry about, it tended to speed things along. Graham got to his feet with surprising ease. He had been a broad man in life, with troublesome knees, and he looked down at them in faint appreciation before remembering the person lying on the floor. The store employee had begun pressing hard against his chest. Graham winced. Graham watched the store employee working on his chest. "Is that going to work? He seems to know what he's doing." "He does know what he's doing. He simply can't alter the result," Death said. "If you'd come with me, please." "You're sure?" "Quite." Death had found that certainty was generally more reassuring than a detailed explanation of irreversible cardiac failure, although the living medical profession seemed determined to disagree. Graham did not move. "My wife is expecting me back." "I imagine someone will tell her." "You imagine?" Death took his book out again, although there was still no need. "Family notification is not within my remit. There are perfectly adequate arrangements for that sort of thing on your side. Police officers, hospitals, telephones. They manage remarkably well." "But I left her a note saying I'd only be ten minutes," Graham said. "I was supposed to be buying hooks." "And that is precisely what you were doing. At least she'll know approximately where you went." Graham looked from his empty hands to the packet on the floor. He seemed to be trying to decide whether Death was being deliberately difficult. Death could see an objection taking shape and had no interest in hearing it. There had been a period, during the early days of telephony, when nearly every newly deceased person insisted on making a call. At least modern customers generally understood why a phone might be unavailable; centuries ago they had expected him to deliver messages in person, sometimes across oceans, with the most extraordinary lack of concern for his other appointments. "Look," Graham said, "I've got the spare house key in the shed, behind a tin of paint. She's been telling me to move it for years. She won't know it's there." "A tin of paint. Yes." "The blue one. Well, it's white paint, but the tin's blue." "Mr Wilkes, I am not making a list." "I just thought you could—" "No." A paramedic arrived, carrying a bag and looking around for space to kneel. The store employee moved back to let him take over the compressions. The woman who had raised the alarm was crying into her mobile phone, although from Death's perspective she appeared to know Graham no better than anybody else in the shop. He had never understood this habit of taking another person's death as a personal affront. It was sympathetic, certainly, but extraordinarily time-consuming. Graham watched the activity for a little longer. Then he asked, more quietly, "Will she be all right?" Death had been asked variations of this question several billion times, and the answer had not become any less straightforward through repetition. "Not immediately, one would think. You have been married forty-one years." "Forty-two next March." "Well, not now, obviously." Graham gave him a look of such concentrated dislike that Death was momentarily puzzled. He checked the date of the marriage in his book. His arithmetic had been correct. "Come along," he said. "There's no benefit in delaying." "Can I at least stay until they've told somebody?" "You're already dead. They can take as long as they require without inconveniencing you." "It would be nice to know." "Then it is unfortunate that knowing is no longer one of the services available to you." There was, Death conceded privately, a regrettable sharpness to that last sentence. He had grown tired of the discussion, and Graham was beginning to look unpleasantly like a man who might ask for a supervisor. Death revised his tone. "I'm sure the appropriate parties will be informed," he said. "Shall we?" Graham stared at his body, at the young paramedic continuing his work, and at the packet of hooks lying underneath a display unit. Death allowed him another few moments before gesturing towards the doorway that had appeared beside the aisle's fire exit. It was a plain door, painted a respectable shade of cream, with a brass plate bearing the word DEPARTURES. The plate had replaced a more elaborate archway after a review of presentation standards some years earlier. Death had opposed the change. He considered a proper archway dignified, and the new door bore an unfortunate resemblance to the entrance of a small-town dentist's surgery. "Through here, please." Graham stopped short of the door. "Where does it go?" "Reception," Death said. He had answered this particular question so frequently that he could usually anticipate the next three. "And before you ask, there's only one Reception. I shouldn't think anyone will have trouble directing you." Death held the door open. Graham hesitated, then went through, passing from the noise and urgency of the shop into a corridor with a fitted carpet and lighting that was neither pleasant nor sufficiently unpleasant to justify complaint. Along one wall stood a row of framed prints depicting landscapes of no identifiable country. At the far end, a large sign read WELCOME. PLEASE TAKE A SEAT. Death had objected to the sign on the grounds that the customers were already present and could hardly be made welcome by being told so. He had been informed that it was part of a consistent arrival experience. The reception desk stood in front of a waiting room furnished with upholstered chairs, a water dispenser and a magazine rack containing editions of magazines nobody could remember ordering. A narrow counter at the side held pencils and a stack of feedback cards. On one wall, a digital display announced NOW SERVING without ever displaying a number. Graham looked around at the chairs and the water dispenser. "Is this heaven?" "Good Lord, no." "Purgatory?" Graham asked. When Death indicated that theological questions would have to wait until he had gone farther along, Graham examined the room again, less impressed than before. "Then what is it?" "Reception, Mr Wilkes. I've been quite clear about that." Graham inspected the chairs. A woman in a raincoat sat beneath the landscape prints, studying the information printed on the reverse of a feedback card. Beyond her, two men were arguing in low voices over whether a ticket was required. One held a crumpled ticket; the other maintained that it had come out of a dispenser before the dispenser was removed and was therefore invalid. "I thought there'd be more to it," Graham said. "There used to be." Death couldn't help himself. Once, the journey had offered magnificent variety. Elysian meadows, great halls, rivers with ferrymen who knew their business, entire reception arrangements carried out with an attention to ceremony that modern management found exhausting. Now everybody came through a waiting room in which the water tasted faintly of plastic. It was more efficient, apparently. Everything was more efficient, provided nobody asked whether the result was any good. "Are you all right to wait here?" Death asked. "I don't think I have much choice." "There you are, then. The cards are optional, though management does encourage feedback. Someone will call you when they're ready." Graham picked up a card and read the heading aloud. "Rate your overall experience. One to five." He turned it over, presumably hoping to discover he'd misunderstood. "Is this a joke?" "I sincerely wish it were. The cards were introduced against my advice. They're voluntary, of course." "I'm dead, and you want to know how much I enjoyed the experience?" "I personally want nothing of the sort," Death said. "But management is keen on feedback, and it is a remarkably persistent organisation." Graham found a pencil. He pressed it into the paper with the concentrated force of a man who had spent forty-two years learning the value of putting dissatisfaction into writing. Death took the empty clipboard from the counter and replaced it in its holder, aligning the edges out of habit. "Well, I hope things become less upsetting for you," he said. Graham looked up, perhaps expecting some additional expression of concern, but Death was already moving towards the corridor. There was work to be done. There always was. He returned the scythe to his shoulder, made certain that his robe wasn't caught under the door, and stepped back into the home-improvement shop. The paramedics were still working on Graham Wilkes. From their point of view almost no time had passed. Death did not linger. He was due at a fishing boat off the coast of Iceland, a hospital in Mumbai, a farm in Nebraska and several other places that would have required a frankly unreasonable amount of travel had he been subject to the ordinary limitations of geography. He completed his appointments without incident. One gentleman was cross about being collected during the second half of a football match. A ninety-three-year-old woman in a hospital bed asked whether she was permitted to keep her spectacles, though she had ceased needing them, and insisted on bringing them anyway. A young man asked so many questions about the scythe that Death was tempted to give him a short lecture on occupational symbolism. He thought better of it when the young man became visibly distressed. By the time Death returned to the corridor beside Reception, he had encountered another twenty-seven people who considered his arrival poorly timed. He was accustomed to the criticism. Nobody ever complained that he had come a day late, though that, he felt, would have been a much more serious matter. A square envelope lay on the narrow shelf beside the door to his office. The paper was cream, the typeface disappointingly modern, and his name had been printed in a smaller font than that used for the departmental reference number. He opened it with one long finger, noticing that even the envelope had a small box in one corner for a document tracking code. PLEASE ATTEND A PERFORMANCE DISCUSSION WITH JEFF AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE. Death read the sentence twice. He had served the organisation faithfully since humanity was young enough to mistake the moon for an interested observer. He had never missed an appointment, lost a client or requested leave. A performance discussion, if one was necessary at all, could only concern the formal recognition of those achievements. He inspected the back of the envelope for a note about refreshments, found none, and set off for Jeff's office, wondering whether there would be a certificate.