The Sorting Office

I could not help but feel that she would have approved of the manner of her death. It was faintly absurd, such that on hearing the news one was unsure whether to laugh or cry, and wound up doing neither. The funeral its self has been a quiet affair at a crematorium in Southend, it had been a simple enough service. The right people said the right things at the right times. Nobody burst into inappropriate laughter or unseemly sobbing fits. Nobody forgot their words or their manners. Everybody told her husband how terribly, terribly sorry they were for his loss and he politely thanked them. I cannot have helped but feel she would have appreciated something more. She was after all never conventional - at least not when I had known her although I admit that it had been some years ago. Still there was a fire in her then that I cannot believe can ever have died entirely.
Still, however she may have changed in the years since last I saw her, now she is dust and ashes and flowers. There are flower, of course. There are always flowers. The family had issued the usual notice to the effect that mourners should, rather than buying flowers, make a donation to some suitable charity in her name. As usual this suggestion had been either ignored, or people had just done both. There had to be flowers, after all. Perhaps somebody should set up a charity-flower business, and catch both ends of the market. It was to these floral tributes that I returned after the service. Lacking a gravestone they were the closest I had to a physical place to be alone with her memory. It's not like I could have just said to her husband - her widower I suppose now - "Hey Andrew, could I borrow your dead wife's ashes, I want to take a moment". It would have been unseemly.
So there I stood, looking at the rings of yellow petals that were - in a sense - all that was left of a once quite remarkable woman. Then I decided that it did not do to laugh, and there, in a crematorium in Southend, I wept as I have never done before or since.
It was perhaps as a result of my loss to self pity that I did not notice the man who came upon me in that moment in front of that yellow- brick building. I had been, to the best of my knowledge, entirely alone in my doldrums, but then there came the voice.
"Are these your tears sir?"
The voice belonged to a middle aged man with the uniform and manner of the Thames Valley police officer. I was so surprised at his apparition that I paid no mind to the nonsensical nature of his question.
"Are these your tears sir?" he repeated, in a manner as blasé and businesslike as if he had pulled me up for speeding.
"Pardon?" was my feeble reply. I could think of nothing better at the time, and I still cannot today.
"We've had a report of a state of mourning stolen in the area. It matches this description."
"Oh." I could, I suppose, have asked him if he was winding me up, but he seemed so serious and so confident that I can honestly say that the thought never occurred to me.
"Relationship to the deceased?"
"Friend." with hindsight, my response may have been a little too rapid, a little too rehearsed. "An old, personal friend."
"Licence and registration."
At this point I was genuinely flummoxed, I pulled out my wallet and fumbled through it. I produced a driver's licence and presented it.
"Not that licence. The other licence"
I poured through the contents of my wallet. A bank card, two expired library cards and a train ticket I'd kept for sentimental reasons. I could see nothing that approximated to a licence. "Please" I faltered, "please, I don't understand."
"You need to have a licence. Got to have a licence for the crying."
"What?" this time I was sure I could not have heard him correctly.
"Thousands of people die every day." offered the policeman by way of explanation. "On roads, in wars, from sickness and sorrow. Think where we would be if people just went around crying for anybody they felt like. All the tears would run dry, or build up in one place and start to drown folk." he continued, and then added, in a slightly less formal tone "I've seen it happen, that's why you've got to have the licenses."
"I don't have a licence. Nobody told me you had to have a licence."
"Wasn't it in the newspaper?"
"What newspaper?"
"Births and deaths are in the newspapers. If you were meant to have a license they should have given you one. If they didn't I'm sorry but you have to take it up with them. It's their department not mine."
"Can I." and please understand me that I was as surprised to find myself uttering this phrase as you would be, but I was still understandably shaken by the events of the day, "can I get a licence?"
"If you don't have one? It's tricky. You need to go to the sorting office and fill in a Claim for Lost Paperwork if you think you should have had one, elsewise you need to fill in an Application for Rarer Feeling, and those are hard to come by. You'd need five forms of ID including a valid coroners report, and the sworn word of your true love."
"What if I can't find those things?"
"We will, at a pinch, accept a valid birth certificate in another man's name, and a letter from your mother. The authorities are trying to be more flexible about such matters."
"I don't have those things either. I have a ticket to Rayleigh from six years ago."
"Is it clipped?"
"Pardon?" by this stage I had all but given up attempting to make sense of the exchange, and was hoping to ride it out to some conclusion or other.
"It must be clipped by a conductor, or it does not serve."
I looked at the ticket. It had indeed been clipped.
"That will do." said the policeman, as he took the ticket from me. "Go about your business. I am sorry for taking up your valuable time. We have to check these things you understand. We have to check these things or there'll be anarchy, and the authorities despise anarchy."
I returned to the flowers, and I could not help but think that I saw them then in a new light. But perhaps that was simply my imagination.