Last Offices

On Bonfire Night, Jas Coombe carries a ninety-seven-year-old woman out of her cottage in the steep lane above St Mary's Church. At the top of the lane, by an empty gateway, a woman's voice asks her: "Are you come for them?"

When Jas turns round, there's nobody there. Only a smell of vinegar and woodsmoke.

In the summer of 1646, plague came to Bideford. Houses were shut up, food and water were left at the windows, and the dead went into the ground at night without the old words. In one lane, a woman shut in with two small children waited for someone who never came.

Jas knows about not coming. In the spring of 2020 she was a care assistant, and on Easter Sunday a man she had shaved every week for six years asked for her. She was at home with the blinds down. She has never told anyone why.

Now she has a brown stoneware jug, a letter that says to put clean water on the step every eighteenth of January, and a hard frost coming.

A ghost story about the care of the dead, the people who stayed, and the last things we do for each other, from the author of Night Shift, Request Stop, Line Clear, Persons Reported, Proving and Waiting Time.