And suddenly it was so easy, to see how the disposal was going to work. It was as if there was a divine dispensation, looking down benignly, knowing all along this was going to happen, having arranged for me in advance the perfect — the brilliant — solution. Its timeliness was breathtaking. How frequently during the course of my life, after all, would I need to dispose of a body? It was nothing short of phenomenal.
I was going to have to move him. I tugged at his ankle, experimentally. Nothing happened except that Borrow started whimpering again. I tugged again. Nothing.
He was a dead weight, of course.
‘Shut up,’ I said, fiercely, to the dog. He shot me a resentful leer and dropped his head between his paws again. I stood and pondered.
We had a trolley in the garage. We’d got it for moving furniture around when we were setting up in the house. Feeling gratitude for my forethought in providing direct access between house and garage, I padded into the garage with its chilly concrete floor and disentangled the trolley from the garden tools. I knocked a spade and it clanged against the Audi’s silver bonnet as it fell. No dent. Not that it mattered, of course: Max was past fretting over the duco. Carefully I steered the trolley into the lounge.
It was a good trolley, with triple wheels and strong webbing that you could use to stabilise large items such as refrigerators. We’d paid a bit extra for a reliable article: always thoughtful consumers, we had eschewed the cheaper varieties, which looked as if they’d buckle under anything with real bulk or weight. I laid the trolley on its back and, after a number of ham-handed attempts, rolled Max onto it.
I deduced from the chill inflexibility of his limbs that rigor mortis was setting in; but if anything this made the process easier. I buckled the webbing straps tightly and experimentally raised the trolley handles. It was surprisingly easy to manoeuvre. Borrow looked on, lifting his lip slightly as if to demonstrate his contempt for the proceedings. I didn’t blame him.
I went out to the switches by the back door and made sure that all the outside sensor lights were turned off. I was proud of my composure: I was thinking of everything. Softly I opened the door and wheeled Max out into the night. The neighbours’ lights were off. I stood a moment, to allow my eyes to accustom themselves to the silver-shot darkness of the moonlight. Borrow loped to one of the wattles and absent-mindedly urinated against its trunk.
I rolled Max over to the gaping mass of clay and broken tile where the glossy pale pool had sparkled in sunlight, its water transparent against the latte ceramic sheen of its tiles. I undid the webbing buckles and tipped him in. It was hard: he was very heavy and for a moment I thought I wasn’t going to be able to gain sufficient leverage. It was a relief when he toppled.
My eyes were more used to the moonlight now: I could see the dim outline of his body, sprawled where once he had dived with easy grace, his olive skin glistening in the water, his silver hair plastered to his skull.
I rolled the trolley back to the shed and brought out the spade. I noticed the wheelbarrow was full of weeds and grass clippings, so I also wheeled that out and tipped it into the great cavity. There were prunings, too, from the jasmine Max had trimmed back at the weekend. It all went in there. I slipped and slid down the edge of the slope, cutting my hand on a bit of tile.
Borrow lay in his sphinx position at the edge of the hole, concealing his confusion by asserting disengagement from my disreputable actions. I scrabbled and scraped, doglike, at the bottom of the hole, under the naked, callous moon, covering up the dreadful thing I had created. Please, God, I thought, don’t let the neighbours wake up and look out. Please, God, make the neighbours keep on sleeping.
It was hard work, and I had to try to be quiet, too, which made it harder. When I thought I had done enough, I climbed up. I cleaned the spade on the grass, replaced it, and went back inside. Blood dripped on the kitchen floor from the wound to my hand. I wiped it up very carefully and wrapped a tea towel around the gash. I would bandage it properly later, I thought.
I went back into the lounge and inspected it. So odd, I thought again, that there was no blood — or, rather, that the only blood was mine. The room was blank and peaceful, volunteering no information about the violence that had so recently ruptured it.
I examined the hearthstone, to see whether there were telltale hairs, whether some vestigial evidence clung to it. I could see nothing, but I wiped it down anyway, using the clean part of the tea towel. I took Max’s half-empty whisky glass and rinsed it in the kitchen.
I returned to the lounge and gazed around. I noticed the meteor stone, where it had rolled away into the corner of the room. I picked it up and scrutinised it closely. Even on this, the murder weapon, I could see no incriminating evidence — no smear of congealing blood, no tuft of hair, no scrape or abrasion on its smooth surface to betray what it had done, what I had done. I dabbed at it with the tea towel, but it didn’t need cleaning. It was clean as a whistle already.
I replaced it on the table, where it belonged. But it vexed me there. Its character had changed: it now looked squat and evil, as if it harboured of its own volition an unpleasant secret that it might speak aloud bluntly to some stranger entering the room. Formerly it had symbolised the happiness and harmony of our union; now its presence mocked and corrupted that memory. Also, it was evidence.
I took it outside and chucked it, too, into the large cubic hole in the garden where our beautiful pool had nestled. I heard the crack and thud of its landing.
I showered. I bandaged my hand. I rinsed the blood-stained tea towel. I went to bed. I lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, at the walls, at the blankness all around me. After a while I started to shake uncontrollably. I remember I was relieved by this: it demonstrated to me that I had retained some shred of humanity, that I was not a monster.
And then the tears came. I wept for hours. Borrow crawled up from his mat onto the bed, which he was not allowed to do, and I grabbed him very tight and shook and sobbed until the morning.
Then I slept, for an hour or two. I had a mad painful dream in which Max was forcing me to think of a rhyme for the word corpse, and I woke up mumbling borps, morps, porps, dorps. Forceps. Forceps is the closest I can get, Max. And Max loomed impossibly high and dark above me, clenching his fists and threatening me, shouting at me (as he had never shouted in life) that forceps wasn’t good enough, that I had to think of a proper rhyme.
And then I got up and I showered again, for a long time, and I started to face up to a new kind of life.
I didn’t see anyone for a couple of days, except for the contractor who turned up to topple the slagheaps of filler earth into the fractured shell of the pool. This did not happen the day immediately after I killed Max, but the following morning. He came very early, when it was still half-dark, and buzzed around in the grey air in his bright little bobcat, trundling like a bulbous orange beetle across the garden.
I glanced out at him from time to time, my chest and throat tight, a hammering inside my head, wondering how he could possibly cross and recross the garden so frequently, so blithely unaware of what lay beneath him. The beetle’s throbbing rumble stopped at one point, and I peered out to see what was happening.
The contractor was standing by the void of the pool, looking meditatively across it. He was having a smoko. I could see the bluish trail of the cigarette fading into the morning air. Inhale, exhale; inhale, exhale. He looked down at the corner where Max lay, and my heart thudded harder. He threw in his stub. He sighed and stretched and flexed his arms, and ambled back into his machine. He continued to empty quantities of dirt into the space where the pool had been, and departed.
The next day Jack, of Jack’s Landscape Solutions, arrived to check out the site, twirling his beard and promising graders and rollers and ready-made turf and rose bushes and instant flowerbeds, all of which duly eventuated over the following couple of weeks without my doin
g anything to prompt it. Max had organised it all, of course, with his usual precision, his reliable attention to detail.
It looked terrific when it was all complete. Jack was disappointed that Max wasn’t around to see the finished product; I apologised and said he was on an unexpected business trip.
I rang work and said I had a stomach bug and wouldn’t be there for a few days. I didn’t answer the telephone: I didn’t even listen to the messages on the answering machine. I didn’t go out, except to empty the letterbox after dark. I didn’t bother to open the letters: I just didn’t want to leave the letterbox looking untended.
Borrow was cross, because he wanted a walk. It wasn’t until the fourth day that he got one. I slunk out in my sunglasses and ran immediately into one of the neighbours, out doing the edges of his lawn. He waved jauntily and I waved back.
I can’t remember much about those days. I was in shock, or denial, or limbo. Wherever. Certainly, I was somewhere I’d never been before. Max’s brutal quenching had engulfed me with such thoroughness, such rapidity, that I could do nothing but crouch and hide. I didn’t even cry very much, after that first night. The tears welled up sometimes, but as the days passed it was as if the reservoir within was drying up, its bed hard and eroded and cracked. A drought inside.
I thought a lot — but to no great purpose — about death. I found it hard to credit that Max was really dead; I found it even harder to believe I was responsible. I dreamt the Lost Dream again and again at night, waking in sweat, trembling, turning to the embrace that no longer held me, the arms that were no longer there.
I thought about murder. Surely it hadn’t really been murder? I hadn’t meant it, after all. Let’s call it manslaughter, I said to myself. It sounded so much better. And I thought about punishments. The state no longer sanctioned capital punishment. If I was discovered, exposed, I wouldn’t actually die. I wouldn’t be hanged. This was quite a consoling thought. But what would happen? Would I be jailed? And for how long?
What did you wear in jail? I wondered. Some sort of uniform, I supposed. I hoped it wouldn’t be yellow. Or pink.
Then again, perhaps it was murder. Perhaps I was a murderer. A murderess. Perhaps intention didn’t have anything to do with it. In any case, who could say what I had intended? It was only my word to say I hadn’t meant it. People might not believe me. People probably wouldn’t.
I went around in circles, dreary and lonely and frightened.
On perhaps the fourth evening the doorbell rang. Dominic stood there.
‘Honey! Dominic!’ I said, brightly.
He stared at me. I opened the security door to let him in. His gait was curious, not his usual light, elastic tread, rather shambling, rather as if he were sleepwalking.
‘What is it?’
I was alarmed. I thought perhaps something had happened to Steve. Had Steve died? Was Dominic coming to tell me that Steve had died? Had both my husbands died together? At a level that I can’t possibly explain I thought this sublimely amusing, if it were the case. I prepared myself to restrain laughter.
‘Dominic,’ I repeated. ‘What is it? How did you get here?’ And then I saw the bicycle, leaning against the wall behind him. ‘You rode here?’ I asked, stupidly. ‘It’s miles, Dominic. It’s miles from Dad’s place to here. How long did it take you?’
I noticed then that he didn’t look well. His skin had a chalky colour and his eyes seemed huge charcoal blobs, Boyd eyes. He reminded me of the black-crayon stick people he used to draw as a child: dangly, puppetlike, white triangular faces with vast eyes like lumps of coal. A different Dominic from the suave young man at Kate’s party for Sophie, from the prizewinner at speech night.
‘You cow,’ he said. ‘You bitch.’
I was dumbfounded. How did he know? How could he possibly know what I had done? He didn’t even like Max, I thought. Why is he so angry, when he didn’t even like Max? I couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘You just don’t care, do you? You couldn’t give a fuck about me.’
Him? Care about him? What the hell did he have to do with it?
He laughed. ‘You don’t even know, do you? You don’t even remember.’
I did remember, then. It trickled back into my consciousness. I’d been supposed to meet him at an appointment and take him home. I’d forgotten. Could that possibly be what this was about? Dominic, I felt like saying, Dominic, get your priorities straight. A man has died here, and you’re fussing about a dental appointment?
‘You’re so fucking self-absorbed.’
‘Dominic,’ I said. Dominic, apple of my eye, light of my life, stay and support of my feeble old age. At least, I didn’t say all of that, but I thought it, and I hoped it was strongly implied in my gaze.
‘You were supposed to be there. You were supposed to take me home. I waited for an hour after, and you didn’t show up. How could you forget me like that?’
‘I’m sorry. I know, I know, you had a dentist’s appointment, didn’t you?’
‘I had a wisdom tooth pulled out,’ screamed Dominic. ‘It hurt like hell. It went wrong. He couldn’t get at it. You were supposed to be there. There was no one to take me home. It was bloody dark by the time I realised you weren’t ever coming. I was bleeding. I was bleeding and it was dark and you didn’t come.’
‘I’m sorry. I haven’t been well, honey. I’m sorry. Things haven’t been good.’
‘I’m supposed to feel sorry for you? Things haven’t been good? Things haven’t been fucking good for me, either, but you haven’t bothered to enquire, have you?’
I was aghast but fascinated. I’d never seen Dominic like this. I’d seen him sarcastic and scornful and bitter and wry, but I’d never seen him flamingly angry, like this. To my astonishment I saw that he was weeping. Tears seeped from his large, black eyes and made sparkling snail-tracks down his cheeks. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Dominic weep before — at any rate, not since he was a toddler.
He was fifteen. He was behaving like Kate, who sobbed over trivia and came out in awful pink stains and blotches. I’d forgotten about picking him up from the dentist, for Christ’s sake, and he was crying. I couldn’t understand it. Pull yourself together, I felt like saying. Dominic, if you want something to cry about, contemplate the fact that your mother’s a murderer. You want to weep, boy? I’ll give you something to weep about.
‘Honey, I’m really sorry, truly I am, but I don’t see why it’s so important. I overlooked it. I’m sorry if it was uncomfortable for you. I’m sorry, but I didn’t mean to do it. Next time I’ll be there.’
‘Next time isn’t the point,’ he said, suddenly sounding immensely tired, even bored. ‘Whether you meant to do it isn’t the point. Being sorry isn’t the point. The point is that you didn’t come when you were supposed to. The point is that you forgot.’
‘It’s not my fault. It’s truly not my fault, Dominic. I couldn’t help it.’
‘That’s what you always say,’ he threw at me, belligerence returning.
‘You’ve got no idea how much I’ve had on my mind. I’ve been having a really bad time, Dominic.’ I heard my voice waver. I wasn’t putting it on to impress him: it was genuinely wavering, all on its own. ‘Max has left me, Dominic.’
And as I said it, I nearly believed it. It was what I’d decided on. Just to say, well, we quarrelled. He left. I’d tried to think my way through what happened after that, but it was hard. I couldn’t quite work it out. But it would be enough, as a first step. And here I was, taking the first step. The lie slipped from my lips smoothly and easily.
For a moment he didn’t say anything. He just looked at me, his eyes wet and burning. And then he made a funny, small sound, something like a cough, half sob, half laugh. ‘You know what it feels like, then, don’t you?’
I found I couldn’t say anything. The manifest unfairne
ss, the sheer cruelty of it, kicked me too sharply. And then he turned and left, wheeling the bike down the front steps, mounting it in a swift, fluid movement, riding off with decision and crispness.
Absalom, Absalom.
Oh, my son, Dominic. My son, my son, Dominic.
But it forced me back into the land of the living, Dominic’s visit. I started to pick up pieces. I had to. I listened to the answering machine. I opened the letters, and paid the bills. I turned up to work again. I cleaned the house, top to bottom, scrubbing obsessively; I hired a gardener; I took Borrow to the vet to get his shots. I took him for a few extra walks, too. I thought about going to see Kate, who had left two messages on the answering machine, the second one gratifyingly desperate. I thought about Sophie. I thought a lot about Sophie.
I gathered a number of Max’s clothes, laying them out carefully on the bed and working out what he would need if he were to go away for an extended holiday. I packed his elegant, charcoal suitcase with changes of underwear and hankies and socks, and spare shoes and an umbrella and a jacket in case it rained.
I checked his overnight bag and cast an eye over his deodorant and toothpaste and shampoo. Max was fussy about his shampoo: he didn’t like using the sort hotels give you. His gleaming black wetpack was kept fully packed: it was his habit to keep it always ready for use, so everything was in pretty good order. I replaced the toothpaste with a fresh tube, just to be sure; and I included his blood-pressure medication and his vitamin tablets.
I put the cases in the boot of my car and drove into Spencer Street Station one Friday afternoon. It was busy; there were people streaming everywhere. I felt extraordinarily conspicuous, but calm common sense (which I could dimly perceive somewhere in the distance near the horizon) told me nobody was paying me any attention. I hired a luggage locker and left the cases in it. The ticket they gave me said that if I didn’t claim my property within two weeks it would be confiscated and eventually disposed of. I tore up the ticket and the printout of the lock combination and threw them out in a street bin. Then I drove home.
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