Read Online Cherry Bites by Alison Preston - Free Book Online Page A

me.
    It was there that I ran into Myrna again, the undertaker’s daughter. She was a Norwood girl, but two years older than me, so we hadn’t had much to do with each other till then. By this time I was fascinated by her situation. Her huge house on the other side of St. Mary’s Road was attached to a funeral parlour. The place where she ate, slept and bathed was home to dead people, with their blank eyes and their various stages of decay. Stiffs, as she still called them, got worked on there, laid out by her father and his helpers. For all I knew Myrna was one of those helpers.
    “Myrna, dear, hand me that tube, would ya,” her father might say. “Stick it in this corpse’s neck, please, and we’ll drain all his blood out before embalming him.”
    “Sure thing, Pop,” she would answer.
    I was afraid to ask her questions about the business even though I longed to hear her talk about it. Sometimes I could have sworn the stink of formaldehyde was on her. It might have been my imagination but at the time I didn’t think so.
    Myrna attended university and worked only weekends, the same as I did. She worked in the girls’ clothes department, which seemed a much better deal. Both of us got a ten per cent discount on all of our purchases. She helped me pick out clothes that suited me. I was grateful for this because I didn’t have a clue. For instance, I loved pink. Myrna convinced me that I looked like an idiot in pink, a deranged bunny rabbit was how she put it, and that greens and rusty colours suited me better.
    I had been a little nervous about approaching her in the lounge because she was older and all, but she soon came up to me and it didn’t take long before we were making fun of people together and laughing a lot. Once we started talking she told me that she was going into the family business but that her parents insisted on a university education first. They also insisted on the job at The Bay in the hope that it would improve her people skills.
    “Do you want to go into the family business,” I asked, “or are your parents making you?”
    “I want to,” she said. “My sister doesn’t. She wants to get as far away from it as she can. But I like it. Especially when no one else is around, when my dad’s not there talking too loud. It can be so quiet and…I don’t know…awe-inspiring? I feel at home with the dead.”
    She smiled and I liked her very much at that moment.
    Myrna could be nasty, even back then. I found it a relief to have a nasty friend, someone worse than me. I could picture her biting a baby.
    She actually played tricks on people. There was a woman in her department named Muriel whom she played tricks on all the time. Poor Muriel was in her forties, skinny and lonesome. The Bay was her life, according to Myrna.
    “Hey Muriel, what’s shakin’?” Myrna would call across the lounge as Muriel walked in.
    Muriel grimaced into her shoulder and took a seat as far away from us as possible.
    “Last Friday night I really got her going,” Myrna said.
    “What did you do?”
    “I phoned her at home and disguised my voice and asked her if Moses was there.”
    “Moses?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What did she say?”
    “Nothing much. Just that there was no Moses there, that I should double-check the number. She didn’t seem to think it was weird that someone these days would be named Moses.”
    “There are Moseses,” I said.
    Myrna squinted at me with a look that said I didn’t have any more of a clue than Muriel. She lit up another cigarette from the one she had just finished. If we smoked fast we could squeeze two into our break.
    “Okay, so then what?” I asked.
    “I called her back and said, ‘May I please speak to Lucifer?’ Muriel said ‘Who?’ Then I said, ‘Lucifer. You know, Satan? I need to speak to him.’”
    I laughed.
    “She asked if it was me. ‘Is that you, Myrna?’” Myrna said, in imitation of Muriel who sat across the room from us staring straight ahead. “I