The Roadside Floral Memorial Committee (PART ONE)

   Here was the mock joke doing the rounds of the council.  Nobody laughed, but they all knew what it referred to:

Rows of impacted faces, plasticene people, discoloured by bruising, in a hundred awful tinctures.  Black crusted with blood camouflage. They stare at you hungrily.  But these people are obviously beyond eating now.  Eyes wide, not one blinking. Like the gory banquet scene in Macbeth.  One or two turn towards you to try and talk, but no words come out.  A few dislodged teeth fall out of gaping, tongue-less mouths… A lot of beat up dead people and their simpering, harping, non-entity relations sitting uselessly around a table...

    – and that lot of living dead were just the committee members.

   Henry Gradely found it especially unfunny because he was transferred on to the working group that inspired the joke.   The sub-committee was set up to tackle a problem which had upset the delicate mechanism of Barrwater District Council.  Following an unusually high spate of fatal road accidents in the rural borough, some relatives had put elaborate floral tributes by the roadside in places where a loved one had died.  Some of the accident spots, on hairpin bends and narrow lanes, were so festooned with brightly coloured blooms that they caused a distraction to motorists and had been blamed as a contributory factor in several follow on accidents.  

   The council’s response was to form a committee,  a useful body that could readily redirect criticism to other people, or be blamed for inevitable future misfortune.   Nothing would get resolved by its actual existence or interminable processes, but the problem would get steamrollered so thinly by endless discussion that it would hopefully achieve a degree of invisibility that could be passed off as transparent democratic process.

    It was agreed that there should be rules about the size of memorial displays.  Impeding the transit of pedestrians and cyclists and the potential hazard to motor vehicles was the primary concern.  Also argued out was the question of whether new flowers could be laid on existing memorial sites and, if so, were the old wilted flowers to be disposed of  immediately, and by whom?  How long could a memorial floral display remain in situ at any particular location?  Which unfortunate council employee would have the task of telling a grieving family that it was time to take away their dead bouquets and start forgetting their beloved departed relative?   And should there actually be (whisper it) a statutory charge levied on grieving accident sites so that the authority could offset some of the fiscal nuisance involved.

    No-one craved direct responsibility for the problem.  So it was decided to lasso representatives of several departments’ hapless employees who seemed to fit the role.  The miserably conscripted included Adrian Bellew from Parks, despite his objection that no-one had actually died in a public park within living memory.  Also press-ganged was Nick Sanderson from Public Relations,  elected by mischievous colleagues who suffered his lack of tact.  It was Sanderson who said, ‘Bloody stupid idea anyway, leaving weepy posies on the verge for dead people.  Never happened thirty years ago.  Same as allergies; never used to hear about them.  People just got on with it.  This country’s going to the European bloody wall.’

    Several committee members came from Transport and Community and Learning.  The remainder were a floating cast of lost souls whose presence suggested certain managers were using conscription to this committee as a disciplinary tool.  Henry sat sometimes at meetings beside a downcast girl from Adult Care & Support, whose insipient sullenness suggested she herself was recently bereaved.  He tried desperately, and unfairly, to find her attractive, just so that he could pass the time fantasising about her.   But she escaped every reasonable mechanism of imaginary desire he could devise.

    Henry had been seconded from Leisure to provide admin support for the committee.  This mainly involved answering phones and writing facile letters.  He fielded complaints (many) and queries (annoying), and guarded a meaningless database which detailed roadside tributes flagged up by passing council employees and busybodies.  Some colleagues started calling him the ‘Road Kill Monitor’. 

    ‘You care more about stupid dead people than me,’ his wife Sarah accused him.

    He said he was fulfilling a necessary task in ameliorating the grief of council-tax payers by advising them on the practicalities of displaying tributes in public areas.  But she called him a dickhead and that put an end of him talking about his work.

    But he still found it difficult to be unaffected by some aspects of it.  Such was the case of the woman who asked if she could plant a small bush on the verge where her daughter was killed.  Henry consulted a grounds man about the likely growth rate and size of the plant, and went back to the heartbroken lady to say that the intended shrub was not viable.  The woman accepted the rejection, but said she could not afford a headstone and this would have been the only physical memorial to her daughter who crashed her car there.

    Another problem was at the other end of the scale.  After a young man died in a traffic accident the adjacent woods started to be covered with day-glow decorations and flashing, trashy party ornaments.  The baubles were so conspicuous that they attracted sightseers and there was congestion caused by too many cars parking by the roadside. The gaudy nature of the incident caught the attention of the local press and they were soon hotly raking up the speculation. Whose sick idea was it to decorate the forest where poor Sam Wellsbye died?  Someone’s sick concept of a joke?

    It turned out that the culprit was Sam’s dad, who had become disturbed after his boy’s fatal accident.  Henry had to go to his house with another council official and ask him to desist.  The man said that he had to illuminate the forest because he did not want his son’s spirit to become lost wandering about in the darkness.

    Henry kept these incidents quiet and became, by default, a repository for lost grief.  He buried away echoes of death and tried to help people as much as he was able to. When he was not co-ordinating the removal of withered wayside tributes or dealing with distraught relatives, he floated around various departments, filling in where necessary with other administrative emergencies.  He performed so unobtrusively that  management disregarded him and he was able to function unmolested beneath their radar.

    In July he looked forward to the peaceful task of sorting out a clerical mess at one of the far flung outposts of the council. The Eastridge Cemetery, on the edge of the district, was mostly forgotten as it had reached its capacity many years ago.  The only visitors were an occasional ageing relative and the odd rambler who enjoyed picturesque country graveyards.  But it was usually untroubled by present day human interference.  Or it would have been if the vandals hadn’t gone on a rampage.

    One night they had invaded the site, breaking  headstones and ransacking the site office.  The grounds man who looked after the cemetery several days a week discovered the chaos the next day and had a heart attack on site.  They didn’t find him until the next day, thankfully still alive.  But the place was left in a significant mess.

   Henry tackled the chaos full on. The book containing the names of who was in each grave plot had been town into pieces and it was a hard job putting it in the correct order and repairing it.  He brought a scanner and copied all the pages and sent the information to the council archives.  After supervising the repair of desecrated tombstones and the removal of displaced stonework his duties tailed off.  By the third day good order was nearly complete and he had less to do. He started to find the place oppressive. There was a smell in the office, source unknown, which would not leave him alone.  For a while he thought that the vandals had left him a present of ordure skilfully hidden somewhere on the premises. But an extensive search revealed no hidden deposits. It dawned on him eventually that the smell was something from the deep earth that had been disturbed and turned over.

    Disturbed was a good word for his realisation. Possibly the place was haunted by the smell of an empty, freshly dug grave.  There was still a good two day’s work to be done on the site, so he ignored the stench and persevered, though he had to make frequent excursions into the  cemetery to refresh his airways.  Here, despite the careful study he had made of the layout of the stones and the plots, he was quickly swallowed by the overgrown verdure. 

  In the graveyard, beside the usual yews and a few lachrymose willows, there was also a profusion of rhododendron and other invasive shrubs which spilled onto the paths and obscured the graves.  Worryingly the more strolls he took in the grounds, the more difficulty he found in getting back to the site office.  It hurt Henry’s pride that he could manage to get lost in a graveyard; it was hardly an impenetrable tropical rainforest.

   On his last day there he had an outlandish shock.  He had become more stupidly lost than usual in the undergrowth and stumbled across a root and fell over.  His trip made a commotion in the bushes which he mistook for a mocking, suppressed snigger.  When he swivelled around he saw no-one, bar a startled song thrush.  He was in a cleared space, in the middle of which was an oblong indentation, nine inches deep, as if someone had neatly sliced off the topsoil.

    The incident was forgotten the following week when Henry was thrown again into the grim cauldron of the sub-committee. He began to imagine, while these proceedings dragged on, whole florist shop’s worth of memorial flowers wilting on the local waysides.  The current hot topic for debate by the committee was whether there should be regulations concerning the flammability of memorial objects, such as cuddly toys.  

    Sanderson predictably went up like a firework at this suggestion.  He ranted about using health and safety laws to persecute poor bloody teddy bears. The other members shrank in their seats, except an observer from the fire brigade, who laughed loudly. The matter was put to one side and the discussion sunk into a numbing dissection of statistics correlating black spot accident sites and numbers of remembrance deposits.  Henry drifted off into a state of nodding semi awareness and did not break out of it until someone handed him a note.

   It was folded into such an ornate shape that he had to wake up slightly in order to open it.  The message inside said:  ‘Tell them to leave Ramley’s Corner alone.’  It meant nothing to him, so he used the reverse to doodle on during the remainder of the meeting, then he discarded it.  Nothing useful was agreed at the meeting.   The members shuffled off into their mutually resentful entrenched corners and Henry went home in his usual deflated temper.

   Every night that week he had bad dreams about the committee.  On the first night the table was empty and in darkness.  There was a muffled sound of sobbing in the background.  On the second night there was an array of identically shaped modules of darkness seated around the committee table, with himself  served as a roasted main course in the centre.  Henry in the dream did not dare to turn and look at his dark companions, but he knew that each figure was halfway between human and abstract.  They were shaped like monstrous light bulbs filled with various densities of mist and darkness.  By the third night he was no longer part of a meal but alongside the others and he was aware that these beings wanted something from him, but he was loth to look at them, let alone discover what they wanted.  The rest of the week’s dreams were too indefinite to recall, except that he had the impression of helpless encroachment.

    Henry had the happy news next week that the committee had been indefinitely suspended.  Someone from the parks department who had temporarily sat on the committee, and who he could not recall, had been caught gathering up wayside memorial flowers and selling them on for profit.  The board of the council started a witch hunt and interviewed everyone, including Henry, who could tell them nothing.  The headless chickens became even more deranged when the accused employee was found with his throat cut in his flat one day.  It was rumoured that he had been killed either by a co-worker in his department or a bereaved relative.  Henry believed that the committee members would be considered too invertebrate to be able to perpetrate a murder.

    For some reason, he found himself unwanted in his previous department, though it could hardly have been because he was considered guilty by association.  He became slightly paranoid as he moved through the main council offices and was sure that people were looking at him sideways and dropping the volume of their voices when he approached.  At first the sensation was mildly exciting, then it grew to be upsetting.  It was a relief when he was transferred to an outlying office where no-one much bothered him, like the old days.  His main area of activity was the public relations department.  Most of his immediate duties comprised of fielding salacious calls from the press who wanted information about the unfortunate and unlamented member of staff.

    Mr Bryant was a welcome relief when his query came in.  His letter explained that he was writing a paper for a folklore journal on wayside floral tributes and had heard something about the controversy in Barrwater Council.  Not that his paper would be contentious or political in any way, he assured.  He merely wanted to conduct a survey into the area’s tributes, with a view to ascertaining if there was a regional trend in roadside tributes.  Even Henry, who was non judgmental in these matters, thought the project may have been a frivolous waste of academic energy which would benefit no-one apart from Mr Bryant. Googling Bryant did not enhance Henry’s opinion of his credentials.  The subject of Bryant’s M. A. dissertation had been a study of early 20^th century house names in south-west England. The summarised conclusions revealed that there was a preponderance of houses named after perceived idyllic rural locations at the opposite end of the country.  It hardly seemed ground breaking, let alone interesting.

   In person, Bryant was no more prepossessing than the sum of his interests.  He had the likeness of a grey squirrel in human form; a similarity enhanced by a tweed jacket that looked like it had been woven from nesting material.  For all his casualness, Henry thought there was unformed anger or something worse at the root of the man, which he covered up with his nonsensical interests.  There was no doubt he was a clever man, but he displayed a sort of annoying, gnawing intelligence that any observer would soon somehow find unclean.  He quickly gobbled up all the data that Henry could provide about the roadside sites and transferred it cryptically into a grey leather notebook.  His frustration when the information provided dried up was obvious.

   In the end he actually said to Henry, ‘Look here, all this stuff is all very well and worthy and useful and so on, but I’d rather see what’s on the ground.’

   ‘There’s nothing on the ground,’ Henry said.  ‘What I mean is, to my knowledge, there have been no fatal road accidents recently and therefore no roadside memorials in situ.’

   The academic tutted, disappointed at the lack of carnage.

   ‘It can’t be helped, I suppose,’ he said petulantly.  ‘Never mind.  We can still take a dander around the historic hot spots and imbibe their ambience, as it were.’