THE TURNING IN THE GRAVE

First written and unfinished by me almost a decade ago, now completed (sort of) and presented here

It wasn’t until Jeremiah Bickerstaff swore that black was blue on a copy of an Old Testament once apparently owned by a certain now deceased Mrs Teapot that the latter started turning in her grave.

It happened like this.

Jeremiah Bickerstaff was a shambling old man with drooping shoulders and an even more drooping moustache. He walked around from here to there and back again more for the sake of having something to do than needing somewhere to go, and that was his life. Backwards and forwards he went, don’t you know, like a mindless automaton, never pausing for more than a few moments yet simultaneously in need of a rest in order to cure his weariness. He didn’t particularly enjoy it, of course, but the Good Lord had provided him with twenty four hours to each day and by hook or by crook he was going to use them up. It was like a crusade to him. Wasted time was wasted life and although he wasted just about every moment of his life he didn’t enjoy the idea of doing it. So he walked " or rather, he shambled, in an effort to reduce wastage.

Whatever you think of it, it all made sense to him. Just about.

On one of his various perambulations he passed the residence of the late and very much lamented Mrs Teapot just as it was being cleared out by Abraham and Sons, House Clearers to the Gentry And Others, and he found himself pausing to stare at the proceedings. House clearing was, to him, both happy and sad: happy because things might be seen that would otherwise remain hidden and sad because it invariable meant that someone had died.

And this time it was Mrs Teapot who was dead and buried, the Lord bless her soul.

So he concentrated, uncharacteristically and for quite a few moments, on something more interesting than just walking. All manner of things were being dragged from the house and some were placed carefully into a geriatric lorry with loads of sacking and old curtains to prevent damage whilst others were slung unceremoniously into a skip. He was amazed at the quantity of stuff. There were pieces of furniture of an indeterminate function, some slightly polished whilst others disgracefully dusty, some mahogany whilst others were contrastingly beech, and even others made from woven raffia or split cane. Then there were baskets of crockery that rattled in the sort of way that indicated that most of them were cracked and other dishes that shone pristinely under a weakening sun.

It wasn’t what he considered to be the good stuff that had been carefully placed in the lorry that interested him, but rather the rubbish that was slung into the skip. The good stuff would have a monetary value and he never had more money than he needed to scrape along. No, he was fascinated by stuff that the rest of the world might perceive had no value at all, the huge deposits in the skip. He loved rubbish, and it’s probably true that his shambling loony gait was the product of many years of poking and prodding in lost corners of creation looking for long forgotten treasures. He did that sometimes, visiting various rubbish dumps and salivating over the prospect of finding something more than dross amongst the ashes and the detritus that time was slowly moulding into clay. And sometimes he did " sometimes, but sadly rarely.

And it was whilst he stood on the street staring that he saw one of the men drop a battered old book that could only have been some kind of religious text. He watched it as it fell from a pile of odds and ends that the man was carrying to the skip, and he watched it as that same man idly kicked it towards the edge of the path where, no doubt, he hoped it would remain unseen and unwanted until the weather disposed of it as the weather does.

After a while the men finished their task. The skip was loaded to overflowing and the furniture lorry was still barely half full. But the nature of the possessions of the late lamented Mrs Teapot was such that a great deal of them constituted rubbish and very few had any worth at all.

When the house clearance men had gone away Jeremiah Bickerstaff sneaked to where they’d been working and picked up the dropped book. He glanced at it, curiously. Books, he reasoned, might be valuable if they were old and first editions. He’d read that somewhere.

On the cover, in an ancient golden script, he read “Ye Olde Testament” and when he opened it he read the words “This book is the property of the late Jeremiah Bickerstaff, RIP.”

“Well bugger me!” he exclaimed to himself quite under his breath, and somehow, I can’t explain how, the profanity found its way to where the dear and dead Mrs Teapot lay in her grave, and despite the fact that she was as dead as every dodo ever conceived, she contrived to hear his words almost loud and clear. “Well bugger me” seeped somehow from the air to the ground and wriggled, unsilenced by distance, into the very depths of the earth, passing worms and centipedes and other creepy crawlies on the way.

And when the decaying ears of dear Mrs Teapot detected the naughty word spoken with the hand of the speaker resting unbelievingly on her very own Olde Testament, she slowly and almost painfully started turning in her grave.

It didn’t take very long for the ground itself to start protesting. After all, soil doesn’t really like being disturbed by something big enough to know better: ask any mole if you’re uncertain about that! And particularly it doesn’t like its recently compacted layers being slowly forced upwards by a decomposing body rising, like decomposing bodies don’t, to the very surface where the evening sun still shone weakly.

The whole affair gave Jeremiah Bickerstaff the sort of funny turn that ancient hearts don’t like and unbeknown to Mrs Teapot (who was in no position to know anything much) he sank to the old pavement outside her deserted house, clutching Ye Olde Testament in a grip so vice-like that the undertaker had to work particularly hard prizing the fingers apart.

© Peter Rogerson 2008, revised 14.01.17

Reviews

[Vicky Hand]

I was hooked by the title. I like darker stories so this appealed to me. Thanks for sharing

[Peter Rogerson]

Thanks for your support. The truth is I rescued this from a ten year old memory stick where it had lain since 2008, forgotten and unloved! I polished it and posted it here.

[Vicky Hand]

My pleasure. I'd love to do a novel one day, maybe when my life is less hectic. I think short stories will do for now.

[Peter Rogerson]

I've written several novels and to start with I found the hardest part was pacing them. But it comes. You build up a kind of inner-rhythm and paciung the plot seems to fall into place.

[Vicky Hand]

Yes I should go on a creative writing course really, I'm sure I'd learn an awful lot.