When Julie left school, she started her career as an
apprentice at the local funeral parlour. Within six months she had killed the
son of James Hogg & Sons (the eldest son surviving) and achieved some
degree of local celebrity for her heinous act.
Fortunately for Julie, at the end of the trial, the judge
was minded (considering her barristers plea of mitigation), to reduce her time
in jail, but it will still be years before she is free. Perhaps she always knew
that, before she took her revenge.
Throughout her young life Julie had worked hard to perfect
an androgynous look. It was not because she thought her gender a mistake - she
was happy to be a woman -, but ambiguoity was an over-riding compulsion. It
also meant, in all things social and cultural, that Julie considered her
orientation and paradigm as gothic.
This had amused James Hogg Junior, who had first noticed the
flat chested teenager in college and was even more surprised when she turned up
at his father’s business as the apprentice.
Julie excelled in her work placement. The best part of her
job, she told her friend, was the crematorium, where she provided aftercare
service. Dressed all in black, wearing a slightly oversized top-hat, she would
support either of the Hogg brothers presenting the ashes to grieving relatives.
It was also how she achieved a little notoriety as the strange man/woman, who
was just like a member of the Adams
Family.
For Julie, there was an aura which pervaded the crematorium,
an oblique peacefulness which was not obtainable anywhere else. She would love
to wander around the grass expanses and patches of rose bushes, wondering how
often she trod on the dust of people. It was also how she came to mention to
James Hogg junior that it was a long-held ambition to personally experience the
ceremony of death without dying. On hearing this, he was more than happy to
oblige, although a foul trick was not what Julie could have anticipated.
Back at his father’s funeral parlour he persuaded Julie to
lie in a coffin and then placed the lid over her. Once he had done this he left
the shop with Julie on her own until the morning.
It was cruel and thoughtless prank which was repaid in kind
a hundred times over.
What was never clarified at the trial was how James Hogg
Junior had remained silent for so long in the coffin of his own incarceration.
Julie herself admitted she had failed to anticipate the last-minute change in
the order of services.
And another thing which was speculated on, but avoided
by both legal teams at the trial, was if James Hogg Junior was alive or dead by
the time he was incinerated.
