No New Way to Die

Louis lay on his back in the park and watched the clouds pass over his head. Heidi, who had been dead this morning but who was not dead anymore, lay next to him, playing with the folds of his shirt in a half-distracted way. As a cloud passed across the sun, Heidi undid one of the buttons of Louis’s shirt and slid a hand through the hole created, to trace unseen patterns on his chest.

She stopped when her fingers found the two wedding bands that Louis wore on a string around his neck. Louis felt the string tighten as she grasped it and anticipating her curiosity he pulled the rings out and over his collar. Heidi looked at them quizzically; she did not speak English.

He showed her the larger ring first, “Mein vater,” he said. Then the smaller ring, “Mein… madre.” He did not speak German.

Heidi rolled the larger ring round her fingers, then pointed at the plastic bag that lay flapping next to the picnic hamper at their feet, “Dein vater?” Louis could see the track marks on Heidi’s arm as she pointed; self consciously he rubbed his, tight and sore underneath his shirt.

He nodded, “Dein vater.”

As Heidi studied the rings, Louis remembered the night six months ago when he had nearly pawned the smaller ring for drugs. He had no particular drug in mind as he stood and watched his step-father Andrew writhe in pain in his hospital bed. The intravenous drugs weren’t cutting it anymore and Andrew needed something stronger.

To his credit, Andrew prevented his step-son from pawning the ring. Not so much with words but with his actions; one decisive action, as final as closing the lid of a coffin. A week after that Louis wore two rings on the string around his neck, and Andrew’s body passed through the crematorium.

Voices reached Louis where he lay: Josh and Ginny returning with ice creams. Ice creams brought with part of the twenty-thousand Andrew had squirrelled away over the course of a decade and a half, and had, to everyone’s surprise, left Louis in his will. Louis, not knowing what to do with that large an amount of cash, had developed, what was in his mind, a revolutionary philosophy about how to spend it. He had a fuzzy memory of attempting to spread that philosophy to Heidi the night before, although he knew that the language barrier had rather spoiled his lesson in fiscal irresponsibility.

Louis’s mind dragged him back to earlier this morning, with Heidi dead in the hotel room. He remembered Joshua and Ginny barging in, whispering when they saw Louis had company.

“No need to whisper,” Louis had said, nodding to the figure in the bed with the covers pulled up to her chin. Dried vomit encrusted her mouth, and her hair lay lank across her forehead. “I think she’s dead.”

In the hotel room of the past, Ginny had stared wide-eyed at her friend, while in the park of the present, Ginny’s shadow passed over Louis as she passed him his ice cream - in a tub as requested. Joshua gave Heidi her cone, and she smiled as way of thanks.

Had Louis really wanted to leave Heidi dead in that hotel room? Just another dead girl, that was what he called Heidi; that was when Ginny slapped him.

“It happens all the time,” he said, gesturing at the girl in the bed, “Another dead girl, dead on drugs. People die like this all the time. It’s boring in its unoriginality, really.”

Louis began digging into his ice cream with the little plastic spoon. He caught Ginny’s eye and she didn’t look away. That was good enough, they must have made up.

“Are you feeling okay about doing this?” Josh asked, nodding at the plastic bag. It was Josh who had checked Heidi’s pulse while Louis and Ginny argued about the politics of leaving a dead girl in a hotel room.

Louis nodded, “It’ll be fine. It’s not really goodbye, it’s just symbolic, isn’t it?”

In the hotel room, when Josh whimpered his discovery that Heidi did have a pulse after all, Ginny had rushed to her aid. Louis had continued packing his suitcase. He wanted to leave, he didn’t want to deal with a half-dead junkie. He was happy on the coke, she was the one who had pulled the little black notebook out of her handbag and flipped through it until she found the name of the man who could provide her with a little bag of heroin. An address book, in this day and age? It was comical really.

It was while they waited for their door-to-door heroin delivery that Louis began to philosophise.

“It’s like when you’re a kid,” he explained to Heidi, as she idly chewed on the corner of her address book. “When you’re a kid and you want something, but you can’t have it. Like, you’re at the zoo, and you want the stuffed tiger, but your mum says no, because the zoo was the treat today and the stuffed tiger is just an extra expense on top of a million other expenses. Well, what I’m doing with the money is spending it like a kid. I want the stuffed tiger? Fuck it, buy it! I want currywurst from the sketchy looking roadside van? Goddamnit, I’m gonna have the currywurst. I wanna fucking - I don’t know - take my two best friends on holiday and go to Germany because there’s nothing for us back home? Then I’m gonna do it! And I’m gonna have a fucking good time while I’m there. Because that’s what it’s about, you know?”

That was when Louis had really gotten excited, and it was in this excited state that the dealer found him and Heidi an indefinite amount of time later.

Louis’s crisis of conscience did not occur until the morning after, when he bent to pick up his pants off the floor, and his parent’s rings slipped over his shirt and hovered in front of him in that dimly lit hotel room.

“Okay then,” he had said, leaning against the dressing table with his arms crossed, the light filtering through the half-closed blinds casting bars on his face.

With one arm, he manouvered Josh and Ginny away from the bed, and pulled Heidi free. She was heavier than he thought she would be. He dropped her quickly in an undignified heap on the floor, then began the work of straightening her limbs. Ginny caught on immediately and rushed over to push Heidi onto her side. Louis manouvered Heidi’s arms under her head and pushed her knee up into a right angle. Then he staggered away from her roughly breathing body and swallowed down the vomit that threatened to escape from his throat.

In another life, in the English Garden in Munich, Louis pulled the cardboard box containing his step-father’s ashes out of the plastic bag. With Ginny, Josh, and Heidi watching, he opened the lid and stared at the pale powder inside.

The sun was warm on Louis’s face as he took handful after handful of ashes and gave them to the wind.