I got the kit I had been given at the morgue and I felt happy. I didn’t need to go to the hospital to do my job. Marta looked perfect. I just needed to clean off her make-up now. Her eyes were still open and I wanted to get the blue off her eyelids. It was nine o’clock and dark now, nearly time for bed. I gently touched her left eyelid, but it wouldn’t close. She was staring at me, looking at me with an accusing expression, and I tried again. Her eyes were locked open, she wouldn’t close them, and I wanted her to, a lot.
I tried again with the other eye, and then both together, but she was staring at me, coldly, like Mother when I did something wrong, and I tried to pull them closed. I had turned off the radio but then pressed button number two and put it on to the classical channel and Vivaldi was spilling from the speakers, thinking maybe that would relax her, but it didn’t make any difference. I left her face and tried to think what could be making her uncomfortable. I turned the radio off again, and came back to her. I bent down and undid her pigtails, and ran my fingers through her soft hair. I went and got my brush – it was soft because I hated having my hair pulled – and I brushed her hair out gently and it fanned round her head and looked like the halo of an angel.
Perhaps she wanted to be on her own for a bit. I went and stood under the scalding-hot water of the shower for twenty minutes, and my skin turned pink and clean and I came out of the bathroom. I dressed in my best pyjamas and I lay down next to Marta. I stroked her hair and then I tried to close her eyes again, gently, without looking at her, so that I wouldn’t make her angry. She wouldn’t let me close them, and I began to feel panicky.
‘Don’t worry,’ I whispered. ‘I’m here, it’s just us, we’re alone. You can relax now.’
I thought the best thing was to just go to sleep and I bent over to kiss her goodnight. Her mouth was slightly open, and I pressed my mouth on hers but her lips were stiff and her mouth didn’t move. I almost screamed. ‘No, stop it!’ I shouted.
I half crawled, half fell off the bed, and scuttled backwards towards the wall, where I sat, with my head banging against the base of the window. I imagined her, lying there, furious with me, her eyes angry and her jaw clenched, trying to move. I stood up, moving from foot to foot, and looked at her face, just for a moment. Her eyes were still open, and the expression had changed. She looked disgusted now, and her eyes seemed glazed over like the monster in a horror zombie film that Grandpa had once made me watch.
Why was this happening to me? I sat, too scared to move, back against the wall, in my clothes for the second time that week, and I didn’t close my eyes, not once all night. I hadn’t closed the curtains, and when the big harvest moon came up I got on my knees and peeped over the bottom of my bed. Her face was worse than before. Her eyes seemed to be smaller and deeper in her face. She looked grey, and I reached up into the blanket and felt her foot. It was icy. I put the heating on high; perhaps she was cold. It was autumn and the nights were getting chilly. I paced up and down my flat, trying to think of a plan. I didn’t eat, and the house was quiet. It was just her and me and nothing else. Slowly I began to understand that I had done a wrong thing here, and I was being punished, but I couldn’t think of a way to make it better.
It took a long, long time for the night to be over. The sun came up at quarter to seven and I didn’t feel good at all but I knew I needed to assess the situation and stop being so upset.
I pulled my chair from the desk and put it by the bed. I gently pulled her arm out from under the cover and held her hand. She was still cold. I threw a sheet over her then to make her warmer, and tried to go to sleep next to her to make up for my missed night’s rest. That didn’t work. I could remember Grandpa telling me to take control of my life, but Marta looked so angry that I just wanted her to be gone and things to go back to normal. I wished I could take her to the fridges in the morgue, or ask Pete for advice, but I couldn’t, and I got more and more panicky. I hadn’t eaten since before I went to work yesterday but my appetite was gone. I felt paralysed and I had nowhere to look that didn’t make me feel terrified. The litter tray was still outside one window and reminded me of the cat, and if I looked the other way I could see into the bedroom with Marta on the bed, her hair peeping out from under the sheet. I got up from my computer chair, crossed the living room, curled into a ball in the bathroom and kicked the door shut.
My neighbours came back. I couldn’t remember a time when they had both been out all night, but that might have been because I didn’t usually notice where they were or what they were doing. This week had changed everything. At seven o’clock I heard Dr Karen on the stairs. I knew the sound of her walk. She stopped outside my door, I could hear that too, but after a minute she carried on. I didn’t want to see her, not at all. At eight o’clock, I heard the door again, and the door to the downstairs flat and the outside door both shut. Now everyone was home, and I didn’t know what to do.
I opened the door of the bathroom and looked out. Marta was still on the bed, and the flat was very hot. I had put the heating on constant and maximum and I hoped it had made her warmer. It took me a long time to get across the room, but I managed it, and her hand was still outside the blanket, and it looked warmer and a bit purple. I picked it up. It was warmer, but I didn’t feel better. Thursday was supposed to be another work day, but now it wasn’t. It would have to be a day of trying to think what to do. I didn’t know where to start.
I sat thinking while people came and went. Karen stopped outside my door again and said my name quietly but I didn’t say anything back. I heard banging again at ten o’clock, and wondered if it was the police. I didn’t go, and I opened my door to hear but it wasn’t them, it was Marta’s brother, looking for her. I almost shouted out to tell him she was in my flat, he could have taken her with him, but I was too scared.
The day was long, and I picked up the phone lots of times to call the police, then stopped. Where would they put me? I knew they wouldn’t understand why I had done any of the things I had done, and I didn’t want to be in a prison with dirt and people all around me. I thought of getting on a train to the seaside or on to an aeroplane, but Mother had my passport and I couldn’t just leave Marta here in my bed. I took off my jumper, and felt cross that she needed the flat this warm.
I decided that I couldn’t sleep in the bedroom ever again, so I put on my yellow Marigold gloves that I used to clean and picked up the broom that Marta had touched the day before. I was on tiptoes again, and had to have four tries, but I got the window next to the litter tray open, and pushed it off out into the space down the side of the house with the broom. I didn’t look at it, but even then I was a little bit sick in my mouth, and decided to throw the broom down too. I hoped the policeman downstairs didn’t see, but I really didn’t care any more.
I put the cushions from the sofa in a pile and took off the covers one by one. I threw the one I had used to make Marta quiet across the room, and put the others under my head under the window which was now closed tight, and the germs from the tray were gone so I could breathe without getting sick. I still had the same clothes on, but I didn’t want to take them off with her in the flat and it was so hot I didn’t need a blanket. I closed my eyes, back against the wall, and I went to sleep.
When I woke up it was Friday. I still had no plan but I was determined to make one. I went to the bathroom without looking at the bed at all. I had decided that I would ignore Marta and google how to dispose of bodies. When I opened the door to come out of the bathroom, I sat straight down at the computer. It took me most of the day to do my research. None of the ways they suggested seemed as if they would work now that Marta was in my flat. I couldn’t cremate her without anyone noticing, or bury her, or cut her up. If I had a bath I could have dissolved her in acid, but I didn’t have a bath, or acid, and I didn’t know where to get any. I would have to leave if she couldn’t, there was no other way. I could go to a hotel, a clean one. Before I left I would go into the bedroom and check she was still there. I thought she
would be but I had remembered how often Grandpa said, It’s all in your mind, you retard. You’re imagining the whole thing.
Although I knew that Grandpa was just saying that to confuse me, I hoped that just this time I had imagined it, and it had been a dream. I put my hand on the bedroom door handle, and turned it slowly. The bedroom was even hotter than the living room, because they had the same size radiator, but the bedroom was smaller and the air hit me. I could almost taste it, a sweet smell which was like the rotten carrots that Mother had once left in the cupboard and forgotten about and which had turned into liquid before Grandpa made me throw them away. I put my hand over my mouth and ran to the bathroom. I was sick but I hadn’t eaten anything so nothing came out. I splashed some water on my face. I needed to go back in there and get clothes to take with me if I was leaving. I could shower when I arrived at the Holiday Inn I had found on the internet. I covered my mouth with my flannel and sprayed aftershave in front of me as I went in. Even though I knew the smell must mean she was in there, I looked towards her now, hands waving, standing on the balls of my feet. The bed looked different. Marta’s shape looked bigger and you could see the outline of her face through the sheet as if someone had been in there with yellowish brown paint. It looked as if her mouth was sticking to the sheet and the outline was darker like lipstick even though I had washed her. I couldn’t look any more, so I took three sets of clean clothes, and one pair of fresh trainers, and shut the bedroom door. Then I backed away from Marta, and the memory of the cat, and the smell, and tiptoed towards the door, trying not to make any noise. I opened it behind me, latch then handle. I was standing on the landing, with the door finally closed behind me, when I heard footsteps coming towards me and I screamed.
12 | Karen
‘Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.’
— Oscar Wilde
Thursday morning
Back to square one, that was the depressing reality that greeted Karen as she opened her eyes. Nick was gone from the morgue, and was doing his utmost not to interact with her at all now, not taking her calls or, as far as she could tell, coming out of his flat at all. She had stopped outside his door on her way to work this morning, but the flat was silent. She knew he was in there: the lights were on, and the heating was on so high you could feel it on the landing. Karen had reverted immediately to her usual pattern of overwork now that her dream case study was no longer available at the hospital or at home, and after the general humiliation of the past week, which had culminated in both her sex life and her work life crumbling to nothing. It had been enough to make her resort to a two a.m. finish and a quick sleep in the on-call room at the hospital on Wednesday night. She couldn’t face Nick and she was doing her best to avoid Tam. She had only gone home to change her clothes and shower and even then hadn’t been able to avoid him, coming home as she was getting ready for another pointless day at work. He had looked like a tramp, and, as he was in the same clothes he had been wearing when she had seen him on Tuesday evening, presumably he smelt like one too. She had ignored him – well, just looked at him for a minute, which was long enough to notice that he had a huge love bite on his neck that was nothing to do with her. She had dodged a bullet there. It had taken him less than twenty-four hours to soothe his wounds by finding a new sexual partner.
She had collated all the information she had gathered on Nick and it amounted to a pitiful ten pages. Even after spending the morning padding it out with observations over the last three years at Staverton Road, she had given up in the end. There was no way she had enough to present as a study.
Karen sat down and poured herself a coffee. Could she find another job for Nick? Perhaps she could employ him herself. Her life had spun full circle in the space of a few days, from a new relationship with her neighbour which had fizzled out completely, to the seeming culmination of her life’s work and a fresh start with her children, to having gone not one step further forward. She wasn’t prone to feeling depressed, but she certainly felt as close to futile as she ever had.
She picked up her phone: three missed calls from her ex-husband. Her finger hesitated over the call button, then she put the phone down. She couldn’t take his sarcastic tone this morning. He had been almost pleasant the other evening when he had picked the kids up from her flat and would no doubt have something to say about yet another relationship coming to nothing. His words rang in her ears.
‘No one could live with you; you’re a work-obsessed frigid bitch with no warmth or mothering instinct in your whole body.’
For the first time, Karen thought he might have a point.
She spent the next hour googling different criteria for scientific paper submissions and tried to find something that demanded less data. Karen knew in her heart that there was no point in submitting to a less prestigious body; her ideas and research would be discredited before they were even published. All she really had left now were some nebulous ideas and a non-existent case study. She closed her computer and rubbed her eyes. Her phone flashed green again. ‘Yes, Karen speaking.’
‘Karen, I’m at the kids’ school. Didn’t you get my message about Jamie? I asked you to come.’
‘I’m at work – you know, the cupboard I go to every day to earn a living, while you make scones and daisy chains.’
Karen almost bit her lip, it had been a long week, but it never worked to go on the attack with Charlie; he just hit back harder.
‘Sorry, Charlie, having a stressful day at the computer. What’s the problem?’
‘That makes a change. They’ve called me in to see the Special Educational Needs person; apparently Jamie is very withdrawn in class and not socialising. I thought that this might get you down here for a change. I know you think the rest of their education is beneath you.’
The barbed remark missed its mark; Karen was still concentrating on the first part of what Charlie had said.
‘There’s nothing wrong with Jamie. Where are you now?’ ‘I’m still waiting to go in, the appointment’s in twenty minutes, which you would know if you ever listened to your voice messages.’
Karen grabbed her keys and was in her car within two minutes. She parked on the zigzag white lines outside the school and raced across the playground. She had never been inside before; parents’ evenings were Charlie’s territory, and she had more than enough to do already. This was something else, though, and she was furious.
The headmaster was sitting opposite her children’s father when she arrived.
‘Hello, I’m Jamie’s mum, what have I missed?’
She had in fact completely missed Jamie, sitting on his own on the chair behind his father, hugging his knees and staring down at the floor. She had already launched into the explanation of how she knew that there was nothing wrong with her son, citing her long experience of working with children with a variety of learning difficulties from ADHD to Asperger’s and every other variety of autism.
The room was quiet, and after she had finished she realised that the headmaster hadn’t spoken at all since she’d come in, and Charlie was quietly shaking his head, hand on their son’s shoulder.
‘Hello, Jamie, shouldn’t you be in a lesson?’
Jamie put his thumb in his mouth, didn’t look at her, but hugged his knees tighter to him and clenched his fists. Something rang a bell deep in Karen’s head, and she looked at her youngest with fresh eyes. She had left Charlie and the kids when Jamie was still a baby, and she had to admit their relationship was distant. She had been waiting for him to grow up a bit for them to grow closer – she enjoyed the company of older children, well, teenagers really, and had always thought that was when she would come into her own as a mother.
The headmaster looked at Karen.
‘Thank you very much for attending today. We are all here to offer some much-needed support to Jamie, who is finding socialising and his lessons a bit of a struggle at the moment, aren’t you, Jamie? I appreciate that you feel there’s not a problem. Would you
say that when Jamie is with you he is verbal and engaged? Sorry for being so direct, but you seem to have already come to a firm conclusion and I would appreciate your input. As you know, Jamie is by any standards gifted, despite his young age. It’s been noticed by the staff who run the after-school computer club, where he is streets ahead of children several years older than him, but even his skill with computers and programming doesn’t compensate Jamie for the isolation and bullying he’s suffering, and we all need to decide whether this is the most appropriate place for him to further his education and maximise his potential. That’s why I’ve asked you to come in today. Happiness is everything when you’re a kid, and you aren’t very happy at the moment, are you, J?’
Karen was irritated already, but the hippyish use of ‘J’ and the nodding from Charlie combined to bring her to the edge of losing her temper.
‘I think I may have missed a few pages here. What’s happened and what are you suggesting? Gifted? If Jamie is excelling in programming then this is the first I’m hearing about it. Do you understand that this is what I do for a living? Don’t you think I would have recognised the signs if one of my children were in trouble? I spend my days dealing with exactly this type of presentation.’
To her left, Charlie sighed deeply then spoke.
‘Karen, when I picked him up from you the other night, Sarah said he hadn’t spoken all evening, and you hadn’t spoken to him either. Who do you think you are, trying to tell me, or his teacher, or anyone, what he does or doesn’t do in a day? Ask his sister, ask his brother, ask me – just don’t pretend you have any fucking clue.’
The headmaster nodded towards Jamie, who was now rocking backwards and forwards on his chair, something Karen realised she’d seen him do before. She looked at him, then put on her professional mantle.
The Man on the Middle Floor Page 16