1. Helen and her best friend stole a whole packet of Mallowpuffs from the pantry. They ate them sitting on the road between two parked cars. The smell of asphalt and exhaust pipe seasoned the pillowy taste of the biscuits. A car screamed past them and down the street at top speed, then smashed into a pole at the bottom. It was their neighbour, Mr Milton. They could see the back of his blue coat and his white hair in the smashed-up car. They never told anyone what they’d seen. Helen didn’t understand until years later that he committed suicide.
2. Her pet mouse died of pneumonia. It was her fault. She didn’t clean the cage enough. She left the window open to get rid of the smell in her bedroom and the mouse got too cold.
3-6. A dog broke into her guinea pigs’ cage. The chicken wire was ripped away and Sally, Daisy, Carrot and Betty were eaten. Molly survived because she was the smallest and she squeezed behind the sleeping box. Later, Helen named her second child Molly. Her daughter doesn’t know she is named after a guinea pig.
7. Her cat was run over on Tinakori Road. She found him and buried him in the garden by herself after school. One side of him was perfect. The other side was crushed, with the eyeball popping out. Helen howled and howled, kneeling in the hall in her teal school uniform skirt and stroking his good side while he lay on a towel. Her bare knees were printed with the loop pile pattern of the carpet.
8. In the Aro Valley room where her sister died, there was a huge, red painting of a vulva with a battle axe in the centre. Her brother was not allowed inside the house. Helen went to see her dead sister in the early hours of the morning. The women at the flat had tied the mouth shut with a scarf under the chin. Helen noticed that her sister still had pimples. The ghost followed her home to Thorndon at 4 am. She screwed her eyes shut and begged it to go away. She did not believe in ghosts. Seeing ghosts as you fall asleep is called a hypnogogic hallucination.
9. Helen dissected a cadaver at medical school in Dunedin. Her assigned dead woman had died with a ruptured intestine. She scooped out endless poo with a special long-handled spoon. It was the same formalin smell as the dogfish she dissected the year before.
10. She spent her student elective outside New Zealand with her friend, Janet. They worked together trying to save a premature baby that would have survived at home. They wondered why the local doctor sat so still in the corner, just watching them. He knew. There was no CPAP machine, no surfactant. The baby died the next day.
11. Another young boy lived in that hospital. His family brought in his food and took his bedding home to wash. He was chatty and cheeky and confident. He sang the local pop songs to Helen and Janet when they came in the room. “Everybody’s somebody’s baby, everybody’s somebody’s foooool.” He died one night. Helen hadn’t known then that the kids who are at ease in hospitals are often the ones who die.
12-16. In the Wellington Hospital Emergency Department, the charge nurse generally sent the most junior doctor downstairs to certify the Dead On Arrival. The police might suggest that Helen didn’t really need to unzip the bag but she always did. She thought she had better make sure what was in there before she signed anything. The ambulance guys joked that she should check the pulse of the maggots.
17-31. After a child died, it felt best to keep talking to them. Helen said inane things like “Here we go” while she lifted up the Spiderman pyjama top to listen for a heartbeat. The grief of parents radiated. She could feel it corrupting her bone marrow.
32. Her nephew Zac stopped taking his lithium. She thought he might catch an STD or start gambling online. Instead, he sped his blue Subaru Impreza down Moorhouse Ave at 2 am and crashed into a concrete wall. Helen sat with her brother in an underground room of the hospital, looking through the viewing window. He said, “Zac’s friends should see what a real dead body looks like, so they can do their zombie make-up better.”
The concrete wall is near the petrol station and Helen drives past it when she is in Christchurch. The graffiti changes every few months. Right now, there are big puffy letters like blue marshmallows.
33. Her uncle was home alone. Her aunt had gone out to pick up a shower chair and incontinence pads from the nurses. The police investigated, to make sure her aunt hadn’t murdered her husband then set the house on fire. Uncle Pete had died of a heart attack, a lit cigarette in his left hand. The policeman seemed so relieved when he delivered the post-mortem result. He gave Helen’s aunt a Ziplock bag with the charred wedding ring inside.
Her aunt sold the house in Palmerston North just as it was and the new owners didn’t knock it down for ages. Local kids dared each other to go into the haunted ruins.
34. Helen asked the vet to kill her dog because it kept on biting people. Her children were fifteen and eleven. They all wept, kneeling on the lino floor of the surgery. The vet was crying too. He used paper towels to mop up the puddle of urine the dog released after the injection.
35-36. Her mother died and then her father followed, six weeks later. They had been divorced for forty-one years.
A few weeks before her mother died, she was kicked out of her book club because she was leaving the chairs wet. Helen found seven big boxes of incontinence supplies when she cleaned out the flat. Her mother had avoided changing the wet pads, trying to save them up for the future.
Her father made it to her mother’s funeral. “Bloody Hell. They made her sound like an angel,” said her father.
Her father had threatened to die many times in the last few years but kept breaking the promise. Helen had felt disappointed each time but she couldn’t tell anybody. It’s not acceptable to be angry because your father keeps living. Helen had expected to feel lighter when his death finally arrived, but instead it is as though she has a terrible flu. She forces herself to keep dealing with the administration for the estate but sometimes she allows herself to fall apart. Only last Wednesday, she lay face down on the carpet and keened because she had to print and email a form for the bank.
The longer you manage to stay alive, the more corpses pile up around you.
Helen’s five-year-old grandson came up to Wellington for the funeral last month. He wanted to see a dead body. That was his number one. His family cat got run over yesterday.