and I flung it open, umbrella at the ready. This particular April shower had turned into a full-blown downpour and the raindrops were bouncing off the pavement so hard I could actually hear them.
It must have been the thought of my lunchtime cupcake that made me fail to look where I was going. I stepped onto the street and literally fell over a woman for whom the phrase ‘drowned rat’ could have been invented.
She was sitting – slumped was probably more accurate – in the doorway.
Before I could apologise and ask if she was okay, I realised she was anything but.
And before I could speak the woman grabbed my leg and looked up into my face. She was about my age, dressed in a jacket and skirt that looked as though they’d been left out to drip-dry. Her pretty face was framed by two bedraggled blonde tendrils and her mascara was in ruins.
The pressure on my leg increased. ‘Please,’ the woman sobbed. ‘You have to help me.’
‘So two years we are here. My husband Grigor and me. We are sad to leave home but things are better in England …’
Whenever I think about the drowned rat – her name is Anna – which is often, I am grateful I took an early lunchbreak that day. It’s as if fate decided our two paths needed to collide.
Sitting in the deli with her, I had remembered her story right away. ‘Grigor Kovaks,’ I said. ‘I read about it—’ I stopped myself from reciting the details of the horrific accident that had left Anna’s husband in hospital with life-threatening injuries.
‘Yes, Grigor. My lovely Grigor.’ Her smile was so full of love it pierced my heart. ‘We find a flat in Camberwell and Grigor works nights for a bank in Canary Wharf. Security guard. And I am a cleaner. Then three weeks ago, on the Tuesday, Grigor is offered an extra shift, and of course we say yes.’
I listened carefully. It’s so important not to interrupt. Being there for someone at the worst time in their life, letting them tell their own story in their own way, can make it just a tiny bit better.
‘He is so proud of his bicycle,’ Anna continued. ‘Cleans and polishes it like it is a sports car. He needs his bike. The fares on your underground, they are so expensive. Not like in Budapest … After the accident I am living more or less at the hospital. Grigor stays in the coma. He looks asleep and I keep waiting for him to wake up. But nothing. And … last night I agree with the doctors that the machines are turned off. Then later the nurses were so kind but I could not speak to them. I need a little time on my own. So I go to the hospital chapel to pray for my man and when I come back to the ward, Grigor is not there.’ Anna started to cry. Fortunately, the deli was filling up fast, and nobody took any notice of us.
She took a sip of her now cold espresso, composed herself, and continued. ‘And that is when they tell me he has been taken already to the funeral place. Your funeral place.’
Oh God.
Please.
No.
I think I know what’s coming next. It shouldn’t happen, but it does.
A phone call to a ‘friendly’ undertaker during the night.
Money changing hands.
And someone like Anna Kovaks, a woman who’s just lost someone she loves and who has not slept for thirty-six hours, delivered like a lamb to the slaughter into the grubby paws of a business that sees every new client as a cash machine.
If this were BC – Before Chung – it would have been unthinkable. Our standards were always so much higher.
Gently, I encouraged Anna to continue.
‘When I arrive, the man seems very nice. Very full of sympathy.’
Full of something else if you ask me, but I keep my professional face in place.
‘He takes me into his office, and asks me many questions about my Grigor.’ For a moment, Anna’s voice faltered, but then – as is so often the case – she summoned her inner strength. ‘I tell this man, this Mr Chung of yours, how Grigor and I meet when we are both twelve years old. That we grow up together. That we have so many big dreams. And how our life begins when we come to London. And now Grigor has been accepted to do teacher training in September. He is so good at mathematics. They put him on the fast track and he will work at a big school in Beckenham.’
Anna drained her coffee cup, then fumbled in her bag and produced a soggy linen handkerchief. I recognised it at once. Jason orders them by the dozen. ‘Quality handkerchiefs make a statement about our business,’ he informed us at a staff meeting. I happened to agree, but in this case Jason’s largesse meant we were putting up our prices. Again.
Anna continued, ‘Then Mr Chung tells me it is an honour and a privilege that your firm has been chosen to make the arrangements. That is how it works in England. The hospital decides on the funeral place, right?’
A million times wrong.
‘So first of all, he invites me to choose the … the coffin. I pick the one that costs the least. But Mr Chung tells me that as Grigor is going to be a professional man, a teacher, it is a bad choice. He wants me to pick the one made of ma … ma—’
‘Mahogany,’ I supplied.
Anna nodded. ‘And then he tells me about embalming. It needs to be done, right?’
Absolutely not.
‘Mr Chung says I will want Grigor to look his best when relatives come to visit him before the funeral. I tell him that everyone is in Hungary, and he seems very glad. Before I say anything, he picks up the phone and talks about re … re—’
‘Repatriating the body.’
‘Yes. But I can tell from the conversation that this will be much too expensive. I explain we have started saving for the deposit on a flat, but only recently. And that I must do what Grigor wanted for us most. Stay here in London and raise our child to have the best chance in life.’ Anna noticed my startled face and softly added, ‘Fourteen weeks. The two weeks before … before the accident … they were the happiest time we ever spent. Now I truly believe that the peanut – that was our name for the baby – is a gift from God. I have to think that. Or …’ Anna was unable to continue.
‘So what did Mr Chung suggest?’ I prompted.
‘He said he would find Grigor a nice home at a cemetery in a part of London called Kilburn. He says it is a very nice district, right?’
Anna has obviously never been there.
‘And there will be many flowers. And car for me to ride in alone. And a stone to remember Grigor that will come all the way from China. I want to ask questions, but your Mr Chung, he talks very fast. He tells me we shall need a double plot so we can be together always. And that it will be a good idea for me to take out a funeral plan for myself at the same time. He makes me very nervous, Mr Chung, because I can tell all this will be very expensive.’
I’m surprised only that Jason didn’t insist on a horse-drawn hearse accompanied by the skirl of bagpipes and a juvenile chimney sweep.
Anna resumed, ‘In the end I tell Mr Chung that I shall spend all our savings for the flat deposit. Every penny. We have eleven hundred pounds in the Santander account. And you know what?’
Sadly, yes.
Having snatched Grigor’s body from the hospital in order to hold it to ransom in the corporate fridge, Jason Chung had been deeply unimpressed with the size of Anna’s life savings.
‘I knew it was expensive to live in London. But I never imagined it will cost so much to die.’ Anna’s bottom lip wobbled. ‘But Mr Chung says he wants to help me give Grigor the ceremony he deserves, and that he has a solution. I am not to worry because there is a nice organisation