Ex chapter 21 - The story of the Mountains of Milton Keynes - part 1

Chasney Mint had worked as an embalmer in Milton Keynes for more than 40 years. It was not so much a calling - more a self fulfilling prophecy.

Born in 1930 in Paris, his parents had found themselves in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time when their neighbours decided to come for an extended holiday bringing a thousand or so tanks with them. Once his family had been singled out from many others and given the opportunity to spend some time in Poland - a country they had never previously visited, he had only survived by dent of his mother’s lineage and his body’s apparent inability to die. His father, uncles and aunts, everyone he knew and loved or would ever properly know and love had been considerably less fortunate. The cross in their lounge, the star on his father and uncle’s jackets had been talisman, shapes and colours no more significant to him than the jagged lines in a broken mirror but to others, it seemed, determinative of whether you stayed in your home, in your current life or you all fell down.

Chas wondered at night, whilst others who had not endured his waking nightmare sunk into the cotton wool in their mind’s eye, whether he should have been a man, a mensch, and insisted upon the star and not the cross, taken his father’s hand and not let go when his mother told him to say goodbye in a way he had never done before. Should he have joined his friends at school when the stones flew, friends who had laughed but had forgotten laughter, whose cries stained walls that were now and would forever be monuments to unimaginable excess. Was this life his body had chosen without consultation worth it, what was this survival?

Yet he endured, he had children who were born from this terrible game of chance and they were Mints and not Mintovski’s as his father had been, they had strong bones and thick hair and unwavering smiles. He had given them a strength that was not his to bestow - it was the strength of those who he had lost, whose faces and voices he could no longer remember. It was their legacy and he was no more than a cipher.

Whilst Chas had spent more than four decades as an embalmer that is not to to say that he was good at his work - he was not, he was certainly not. He had established three “looks” regardless of gender, age or ethnicity and he stubbornly bestowed these without demur.

Look 1 - Gloria Swanson - the aging Hollywood harlot;
Look 2 - Bella Lugosi - the zombie vampire;
Look 3 - (and by far the most objectionable) Guiseppi the clown.

It would seem, even looking beyond the superficial that Chasney Mint was set to self destruct and yet within the community, his community, there had arisen a sense of appreciation, that these were no longer just the faces of their beloved but the faces of others, that death was not the issue here. These were the screams of the defiled, in whose queue he should have stood, in whose arms he should have died, they were a love letter which had taken more than 60 years to write and to which his patrons were proud to add their signature.

Reaching over for some more rouge, Chas realized that he was not alone in the mortuary. There were two children and something that looked as though it might have been a child, had it not been over 6 ft tall with the body of a guerrilla. It was now speaking.

“We were hoping you might be able to help, we came out of Milton Keynes station, turned left at the organic greengrocers.”

“I would have said that it was more of a holistic retailer with produce of a variety of.....”

One of the smaller children - this one had two pairs of glasses and Holbienesque acne had begun to speak but had been interrupted by the guerrilla throwing him to the floor and standing on his face.

“But when we asked people where we could find the screams of the damned and the veil of tears they directed us to you.”

Silence passed between them like the reaction to an envelope containing a wedding invitation which had been sent to the wrong address. Chas looked from face to face, these were children but it was as if their innocence had not simply been lost but replaced by betrayal. Is this what people really thought of him, of his work?

“What are you doing to that man’s face?” It was the other child, with eyes that looked 100 years old. He had seen eyes like this before, it was not a happy memory.

“I am preparing him for his loved ones.”

“He looks like an evil clown - are you sure that his family will like it.”

Chas looked, really looked at the face he was besmirching. He had never had any complaints but he did gain the sense, in whispered glances, in the shuffle footed dance of the recently bereaved that there was much they were not saying.

“I don’t really know. Perhaps it isn’t about them and what they feel. What are you three doing here, what can I possibly do for you that other’s can’t?”

“We are looking for a mountain. The mountain my grandmother lives on.”

“Here - in Milton Keynes, a mountain?”

The small boy seemed to tense, he must have known that the answer to this question was inevitable. Chas sensed that there was no room left in this child, in any of these children for any more rejection. He could not unwind the fates of the children he had left behind but perhaps, here was a chance, possibly his last chance to justify his solitary survival.

“You know there might be a mountain here - its just that I have never looked at in that way.”