Read by Susan Moisan
I recently spent an agonising weekend completing my first ever tax return. It was the sort of long, grey slog that made me wish repeatedly for death. Once you’ve spent two hours trying to locate your 10-digit Unique Taxpayer Reference online you really do begin to question whether you’re living at all any more. Imagine then the pleasing sense of irony (and less pleasing sense of dread) I had when HMRC called me in my lunch break to tell me I’d been dead all along.
‘According to our system,’ said a girl who sounded only minutes from the grave herself, ‘according to our system, you were marked legally deceased on the 28th of August last year…’
I cast my mind back.
‘No …’ I said ‘I don’t think so. Was that the bank holiday?’
I felt fairly alive but I glanced down at myself just in case. Everything seemed to be in order.
‘Hang on,’ she said ‘could you wait a moment? I’m just going to pop you on hold.’
A tinny version of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No.2 played down the phone at me.
‘I don’t think I can work the rest of the day’ I said to the office.
‘Feeling peaky?’
‘I – I think it’s more serious than that.’
When I got back to the flat I found my tax documents had been returned to me. They were waiting on the doormat, sealed in a polythene bag stamped ‘deceased and void’ with a leaflet about inheritance tax.
‘Kate,’ I said to my flatmate when I got upstairs ‘Am I dead? Be honest.’
She looked hard at me.
‘No,’ she said finally. ‘Is this like when you were worried you were living in a simulation?’
‘No this is much worse.’ I slid the sealed documents to her across the kitchen table like a shady undead gangster. She turned them over and laughed.
‘So there’s a glitch in their system!’
‘Do you think?’
‘What do you mean do I think! Look at y– Of course you’re– I can’t believe we’re having this conversation!’
I wanted to tell her it must be nice to be so certain about things.
‘Just write off the day.’ she advised. ‘Call HMRC. Someone in the vaults will get to the bottom of it. They’ll mark you as alive, you can send these back,’ she brandished the polythene envelope, ‘and then this evening we’ll go out for drinks to celebrate the fact that you’re not dead yet.’
‘But the hold music,’ I said ‘It’s so… unnerving.’
‘So don’t let them put you on hold. You might have to get a bit shouty. That’s the best way to cut through bureaucracy. Just sound very sure of yourself as soon as you speak to a human.’
‘Kate, five minutes ago I wasn't even sure if I was alive! How am I meant to muster that kind of–’ but she’d already handed me the phone.
After my third hour of Sonata No. 2 I decided it would be easier to cycle up to Westminster and stand in line. When they saw me, I reasoned, they couldn’t possibly argue I was six months deceased, though I did brush a little extra blusher on, just in case.
Standing in line at HMRC is very much the physical equivalent of being on hold, but at least when you’re on hold in your own home you can wandering around naked, or pee, or prepare food with one hand. All of which are frowned upon in governmental buildings. Instead I joined a long human crocodile of boredom that shuffled forward at intervals.
An hour later I got to a desk at the front of the queue. I explained to the woman behind it that, in spite of what I’d just been through, I wasn’t dead yet and I wanted this to be officially recognised. She frowned at me so I held up my ‘void and deceased’ tax bundle and gestured expansively down at my still living self.
She nodded and pointed me mutely to a side room just off of the queuing atrium. There was a brass plaque on the door that read ‘R27’. I pushed it open, it was a waiting room. White. There was a low buzz from the fluorescent tube lighting and around the edge of the room, as if spun out by centrifugal force, were 20 people sat passively in black chairs. They all had their rejected ‘deceased and void’ tax returns laid in their laps.
I sat down in an empty chair.
‘Welcome to the R27s,’ said the old woman beside me.
After a while an HMCR employee popped his head out a door opposite the one I’d come through and called ‘James Pierce?’ A man leapt up and followed him into an adjoining room.
‘It’s limbo you know,’ he hissed at me as he passed.
‘It’s not.’ said the old woman ‘It is actually a waiting room in HMRC. Don’t pay any attention to him.’ but a young man next to her shook his head. She seemed to have a handle on the situation so I thought I might as well ask.
‘I’m dead aren’t I?’ I said.
‘I couldn’t possibly tell you, dear.’ She directed her attention back to her large print Mills and Boon. ‘They’ll decide. Try not to worry about it.’
‘I’m dead,’ I said in tones swimming with my own worry. ‘I mean that’s the obvious twist isn’t it. I’m dead, we’re all dead. We have to wait here forever.’
‘That would certainly be obvious,’ she said mildly.
‘That or an ironic flip and everyone else is dead. All of HMRC.’
‘Don’t be cruel dear, they just seem that way. This isn’t The Others.’
The boy on her right leant round.
‘It’s the uncertainty that gets to you, isn’t it? Why‘ve we been singled out? I’ve been here two years now.’
‘You’ve been here for 45 minutes, Damian.’ said a Scottish man on the opposite side of the waiting room.
I looked at him. ‘Do you know if we’re dead?’ I asked.
‘Legally we’re all dead,’ he said with the air of someone who had declared themselves an expert. ‘In actuality, who knows, I suspect only a few of us are dead.’
‘How many?’
‘1 in 10,’ he said certainly.
‘1 in 10?’
‘A good solid ratio,’ he said. ‘So the question is do you feel alive?’
I thought about it. ‘I’m not sure any more,’ I said honestly.
‘Me either,’ said Damian.
‘Pearl?’ asked the Scottish man.
She laid down her Mills and Boon, so that she could really consider it.
‘I’m very sure I don't feel dead. I don't feel alive, mind you. Not alive alive. I’ve not just done a bungee jump or broken the law. I don’t feel alive, but I still feel – extant.’ She smiled at us.
‘Right, extant,’ I said. ‘Me too, I don’t feel dead.’
‘Do you feel undead?’
‘No.’
‘Shame’ said the Scottish man gesturing to James Pierce who was coming back in, pulling on his coat ‘Jim there felt undead. Cotard’s syndrome – triggered we think by him being marked ‘dead’ on the HMRC system. But now they know, look, he can leave the R27s and go home. And the upside is his wife will have power of attorney, he’ll never have to fill in another tax return.’
An HMRC employee was signing the last of Jim’s forms as he went; it had all been very quick. They ushered him out with a smile. I was just about to ask the room whether they all thought we were living in a big computer simulation when the same employee called my name.
Damian gave me a subtle fingers crossed and Pearl rubbed my arm.
‘Good luck not being dead, dear.’
The room beyond R27 had none of its strange otherworldliness. It was full of filing cabinets for a start. A man sat down at the desk, gestured for me to sit opposite, and tapped away at his computer wordlessly for while. I felt like I was applying for a loan.
‘Ah, I see,’ he said at last, ’28th of August. This one’s an easy one Janet, go and get a head start on one of the others.’ A woman stood at the back of the room nodded, and walked out briskly.
‘I really should apologise,’ he said looking up at me for the first time ‘You probably worked this out anyway – it’s just a glitch in our system. Wrong column ticked or a double of your name somewhere. I’m not positive but I’m very sorry you had to come all the way down here.’
‘How does this happen so often?’ I said ‘There’s a whole waiting room of people out there.’
‘Well, there are different reasons, mostly mistakes in the numbers though. You’d be surprised how often these things occur. The other way round as well, lots of dead people are accidentally declared living every year.’
‘What waiting room do you keep them in?’ I asked.
His eyes glazed a little. ‘Oh God, you don’t want to see what it’s like in there… kidding’ he added and tucked my newly viable tax return into one of the filing cabinets. ‘You’re free to go. Sorry again, have a great day – ha! and life
I was keen to share my news with the rest of the R27s, and tell them to perk up or get a grip. A day of queuing and waiting had obviously made us hysterical and the sooner we accepted we were all alive the better. As I entered the white room though, I saw two HMRC officials bent over Pearl.
She was being sealed bodily in a huge polythene bag stamped ‘deceased and void’ from which she shrugged at us in a resigned, slightly disappointed way before waddling out of the room. There was a third door I hadn’t noticed before. She disappeared through it in her bag, flanked on either side by HMRC officials.
The Scottish man wouldn’t meet my eye, but I could tell he was counting up the number of people in the room, and doing some mental arithmetic.
’At least she knows now,’ said Damian to me.
‘Good luck’ I said and walked through the queuing atrium, up the stairs and directly out in to the Whitehall sunshine.
Life went on (for some of us). Kate, true to her word and thrilled that I was legally alive, took me for a drink at The Vale that night. I didn’t tell her about the R27s. Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 was still on a loop in my head, and no matter how much I tried to focus on the taste of the drink, or the music over the speakers, the image of Pearl and that third door was there too; projected on to my eyelids when I closed them like a camera flash. It’s hard to repress fully. It’s been surfacing almost daily over the last few weeks, usually just before I fall asleep.
‘Here’s to life!’ said Kate, raising her glass.
(c) Anna Savory, 2017
Anna Savory was born in Medway (the only bit of Kent which isn’t lovely) and now lives in Brixton. She’s a comedy writer and sometime a proper comedian on stages. She inherited a cursed library from Dennis Wheatley once but she almost never mentions it. Follow her on twitter at @AnnaSavory
Susan Moisan is a graduate of Drama Studio London. Credits: Lady Agatha Proudcock in Oswald's Return at the OSO Arts Centre; We Are Gods (White Bear Theatre); Hatchepsut in Zipporah (George Wood Theatre, Goldsmiths), Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing; and Central Film School's short film The Factory. She has also played a number of roles in new writing for radio.
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