The Body

by Dean Clayton Edwards

  The room was sparse now.

  An hour had passed and all that remained was an anonymous bedside table, a coat stand, a couple of beautiful Indian rugs, Sylvia and Imelda.

  "Don't worry," the eldest man said. "We've got plenty of room."

  "Thank you," said Matilda.

  "Don't let him touch me," Sylvia begged. "Matilda, please, don't let anyone touch me."

  He pulled the mattress from the bed, sheets and all and leant them up against the wall where Petra had been. She was naked now, except for the drapes attached to the four posts.

  "Beautiful piece," he said.

  "Yes," Matilda agreed.

  "You do it, Matilda," Sylvia demanded.

  The man undid the ties with strong, patient fingers, folded them and placed them on the bedside table.

  "They'll go separately," Matilda said. "Or maybe I'll leave them here."

  "Right you are."

  The other two men arrived then and helped him to unfasten the four posts.

  "You do it, Matilda," Sylvia kept saying. "You do it. Please."

  "You got the electric?" one of the guys said and the apprentice went down to the lorry to fetch it. It whirred and the screws plopped out one by one into the foreman's hand. Sylvia sobbed all the while.

  Her posts leaned for the first time in twelve years. Sylvia had attached them herself with great care and it had been Matilda who had tightened everything up then, making sure she was straight. Now Matilda stood by the open window, taking in the combination of cool breeze and warm, rising sun on her face and arms while Sylvia snivelled.

  "Goodbye," she said as the men tipped Sylvia up onto one side and then carried her out of the room. They spent a couple of minutes angling her just right so that they could manoeuvre her out of the bedroom and into the hallway. It was a sharp turn and there were scraping sounds. Sylvia gasped and hissed with each noise, even though she was covered with packing material. It would be over soon.

  Matilda listened to them thumping down the stairs.

  "Coffee, boys?" Roger said. "Tea?"

  "No, thank you, sir, you're a gentleman. We're almost all finished."

  It was just her and Imelda now.

  "I'm disappointed by you," Matilda said. "I stood by the window for five minutes and you didn't try to push me out. Are you so easily broken? It's humiliating for me. It's humiliating to think that I was made captive by someone so weak."

  Matilda stood in the middle of the room. It was almost bare, but it felt right like this, as if the room was coming back to its own again now that the stifling presence of her sisters was diminished. If she decided to rent, someone could live here in peace in a bed from Ikea and with furnishings from charity shops in town.

  "Fine," Matilda said. "Don't speak. You'll have plenty of time for that. I've paid for storage until the end of next year, and I've set up a direct debit. You'll be there until the company goes out of business. I paid for the smallest storage unit possible to save the family fortune that you were so worried about, so don't worry about the cost."

  Heavy footsteps on the stairs.

  "Okay," the grey-haired man said, puffing. He clapped his big, gloved hands. "Last one."

  He removed her top drawer and handed it to his assistant to take downstairs. Then he passed the bottom drawer to the apprentice to do the same.

  "We'll need to detach the mirror," he said and pulled a screwdriver from his back pocket.

  "Fine," Matilda said.

  The apprentice took the mirror from the room while the other two took a side each, prepared for the object to be heavy because of its size and the marble top.

  The older man stopped dead in mid-lift.

  "Hmm," he said. He blinked hard.

  Matilda pushed with her mind.

  "That's funny," the man said. "I came over all weird. Dizzy."

  "Age," said the other.

  "Funny," said the first.

  Matilda concentrated, suppressing Imelda from taking either of the two men, but it was easily done. Imelda was either weak or powerless.

  "Your great strength was manipulation," Matilda thought as the men carried Imelda down the stairs. "Any last words."

  "I forgive you, Lara," Imelda thought, breaking her silence at last. "But it's all down to you now. It's up to you to do the right thing."

  "I will," Lara thought. "I am doing the right thing."

  "We're all you have," Imelda thought. "Don't forget."

  Matilda paid the removal men in cash.

  "Don't put anything back together," she told them, thinking in particular of Imelda, significantly weakened simply by having her mirror removed. "And if there's no room, don't be afraid to shove. You can dismantle them some more if you need to. Maybe put some stuff inside the wardrobe."

  "No!" roared Olga.

  "Don't worry, we've done this a hundred times," the supervisor said, flicking through the notes and pocketing them. He looked at her in surprise. "You've given me too much, love."

  "There's one more item I want you to take. It's in the shed. It might not look like much, but I want you to take special care of it. It's not going in storage with the others. I want you to arrange its delivery to France. I'd like you to do it personally."

  "Okay," he said. "Lead the way."

  She'd cleaned her chest of drawers throughout so that there was no longer any trace of mould or spiderwebs or egg sacs. The surfaces gleamed and now it looked as though it might survive another hundred years without any problem. It would outlive the body and then some.

  The men lifted it and squeezed it through the narrow doorway and into the garden where it was drizzling slightly.

  "A little rain's not going to hurt it," Matilda told them. "Just get it done."

  They carried it into the house, through the kitchen, through the hall and out to the removal van, with Matilda following every step of the way. She watched them carry it up the ramp and put it down next to the others. One of the men was speaking to her, but she didn't hear them. She stared at her mummified sisters, mute and terrified and indignant, lost, broken and doomed.

  Part of her wished that she'd sent them to the tip instead of storage. They beamed their hatred at her, not realising or not caring for the mercy she had shown them.

  "There," they said when it was done.

  Matilda gave the supervisor the address on a piece of card.

  "You have my contact details," she said. "If you need more money, let me know."

  "We always need more money," he laughed. "It'll be fine. It's in safe hands. It's all in safe hands."

  "I only care about the chest of drawers," she told them. "I need it as soon as possible."

  He nodded and descended the ramp.

  "What about this?" the youngest man said from the house. He was holding Isla, the mirror that he'd removed from the wall to ease their passage up and down. He held it up to illustrate that it had been tagged like the others and it slipped from his fingers.

  "Shit!" he said.

  The sound of breaking glass seemed to continue for a long time, reverberating through the house.

  Matilda found herself standing in front of the kid. He averted his eyes from hers. They were piercing. Terrifying. Not like a woman's eyes should be.

  "I'm sorry, miss," he said and looked at his boots, at the shards of glass. He set about picking them up.

  "Get up," she snapped. "I'll do it. Just go."

  "It's one of those things," the supervisor said behind her. "He didn't mean it. You clutz. Just do what I tell you."

  "It's okay," Matilda said, unable to take her eyes away from the broken face on the floor. "Take better care of the chest of drawers."

  "Done. Have a good time in France."

  They left the house and Roger hovered over her while she picked the sharp pieces up with her bare hands.

  "You'll hurt yourself," Roger said.

  "Isla was the best of us," she said out loud. They had all been damaged in some way, even Isla, but she would have had
the best chance of a successful life.

  Roger just frowned at Matilda's grief and bent down to help.

  "No," Matilda snapped.

  "Let me help you!" Roger insisted.

  They put the pieces in a pile.

  "I'll get a bag," Roger said.

  "Not a black bag," Matilda said. "Anything else."

  He came back with a sturdy supermarket carrier bag and Matilda began dropping the pieces inside, bracing herself against the further shattering sounds.

  "There are two types of mirror," Roger said. "Those that show you who you are and those that show you who you want to be."

  Those were kind words, Matilda thought. Good words for a funeral.

  "There's a third kind," Matilda said, thinking of Imelda, and then carried the bag of broken pieces into the kitchen.

  Lara was sobbing, heartbroken.

  "It was an accident," Matilda said while Roger was still in the hallway.

  Lara sniffed.

  "I don't think it was," she said. "I think she did it on purpose."

  "Well, we'll never know now," Matilda said.

  Lara attempted to control herself.

  "Now we're eleven," she whined.

  "No," Matilda said. "Now we're two."

  "Were you going to bring her with us?"

  "I hadn't decided yet. Perhaps you're right. She decided for us."

  "I think she did."

  Lara wept uncontrollably.

  Matilda understood her upset, but she found it repulsive. What was done was done. They had to keep moving.

  "Did you pack all your things?" Matilda asked Roger.

  "There wasn't much to pack," Roger replied. "But the car's almost full."

  She asked Roger to fetch her bag from the bedroom and then took it from him at the bottom of the stairs.

  "It will have to go on the backseat," Roger said. "Unless we rearrange everything."

  "That's fine," Matilda said. "I'm ready to go. Grab the stool."

  "We're taking that old thing with us?"

  On seeing the look on her face, he went into the kitchen and carried Lara out to the car.

  "I don't know where it's going to go," Roger said, standing in front of the tiny boot that was already filled with just one bag and a case.

  "I don't need my clothes," Matilda said, starting back to the house.

  "Don't be daft," Roger said. "Maybe we can cut the legs off the stool and glue them back on when we get there," he quipped.

  "If anything happens to this stool, I'll cut your legs off and reglue them too."

  "Alright, alright ..."

  He began uselessly rummaging in the boot, trying to make a few inches of space, but it was no good. Any fool could see that.

  Matilda removed the suitcase, opened the passenger door.

  "This car wasn't designed for luggage," he said. "It was designed for speed."

  "Then let's get there fast."

  She re-arranged everything so that most of the bags went on the back seat and the stool fit snugly into the boot, squashing one of the shoulder bags. She'd have to take one of the bags on her lap, but rather that than Lara.

  "I won't be able to see out of the back," Roger complained, but he may as well have been talking to himself. "Do you need a minute to say goodbye to the old place? Who knows when we'll be back."

  Matilda slammed the boot and climbed into the passenger seat.

  "... Okay then."

  *

  At first, Lara was annoyed that Matilda had shut her in the boot like another piece of luggage, but over the course of the following hours, she had time to rationalise. Of course, she had to seem like another piece of luggage as far as Roger was concerned. If she and Matilda were to effectively share the body, Roger must never know about the stool. It was bizarre enough for him that the stool was going with them at all.

  The sound of the engine, became like white noise, a welcome diversion from the voices of her sisters that had plagued her for the last few days in particular. Their madness was infectious, but it was over now. She laughed to herself and yelped with joy. They were off to a new life; a new home; a new country.

  They had said that she would miss them, but when she thought of them now she felt was elation that they were trundling away in one direction while she, Matilda and Roger powered in the other, like a rocket hurtling through space.

  Isla should have been with them, of course. She was haunted by the sound of breaking glass from the hallway. She hadn't believed Isla was dead at first, but her presence had disintegrated with the crash; like a tiny, corner light you might not notice until it's gone, but that throws the space out of balance.

  "Can't we fix it?" Lara had asked, but her question had been met with a knowing silence. To be dismantled and put back together took months of recovery time, but most of them had been through that at some time or another. But you couldn't successfully repair what was broken. The Isla they had known was already gone by the time the shards stopped moving. Any attempt to fix the glass would have resulted in the arrival of something else. The cracks would show in the mind of that creature, just as they would on the mirror itself. To be put back together was considered a fate worse than death. It wouldn't have been fair to Isla - beautiful, pure, patient Isla - nor to anyone living.

  She thought of her remaining sisters and imagined their frenzy; their broken minds clamouring as the removal men shoved them into lifts that rattled like circus cages and then shoved and tipped and shunted them into their storage containers, with more gusto now that they were not observed by Matilda.

  Matilda's chest of drawers was destined for France. She suspected it would arrive some after they did, because they seemed to be hurtling along, but she had no frame of reference. There was not even a crack through which to see a strip of daylight.

  (Oh, how much longer until we get there?)

  Matilda said nothing. They were connected, but since being in the shed she'd learnt to tune the others out. Lara forgave her. It was a new talent that had helped her stay sane over the last couple of days and she envied her, though she thought that was she was using it unfairly. Lara and Matilda were really sisters, setting off on a great adventure together. She thought that they ought to behave accordingly.

  The felt the car stop moving every so often, and then it would roar again and swerve one way and then the other. Roundabouts, Lara realised. The engine would roar, powering through the gears and then easing down again, swerving, powering up, powering down.

  She felt herself rocked as if she were a baby and was just beginning to enjoy the sensation when the car slowed so dramatically that she wasn't sure they were moving at all, and then it went over several bumps. Somehow, the atmosphere was different. The air was different, even in the car.

  (Are we here? Are we here already?)

  The engine idled and then stopped.

  "We're early," Matilda said.

  "You want to get a drink?" Lara heard Roger ask.

  (Yes. A cold drink. A cold drink to quench my thirst and to feel it flowing along my throat in slow, long swallows. I could drink an iced tea, or a soda, or just water, from a tap. I could drink a gallon of water).

  "More something to eat," Matilda mused.

  "Well, good luck," said Roger. "Dover services is not exactly gourmet. Even the pictures don't tell you what the food is. And they charge a premium because they know that we're trapped here until our ferry."

  Lara strained to hear their conversation from the boot. It would have been easier if they had spoken up, but they were talking companionably, easy now in each other's company.

  "Why didn't you pack a lunch?" Roger asked, teasing Matilda. "You thought of everything else."

  "Because I'm not your mother," Matilda said.

  "No, you are not. Shall we?"

  Lara heard both front doors open and close. She waited for the sound of footsteps and for Matilda to open the boot. She endured an agonising minute of expectation before realising that they had already lef
t.

  Perhaps some ploy to open the boot would have been nice. Perhaps Matilda could have pretended to need something from the case, just to give her something to see and some air and to pass a kind word. It was what she would have done.

  She thought that her sister should have known better, having been prisoner in the shed for so long. She more than any of them should be able to appreciate the discomfort of being alone and of having things go on all around you but to not be privy to any of it.

  But Matilda was smart, patient and exhibited superior self-control. She was doing what was necessary to avoid suspicion.

  Roger was right. She had thought of everything. She just had to trust her a little longer. Of all the people in the world, it was she and Roger she trusted the most.

  And so Lara stayed in the boot, wrapped up inside herself with the warmth of her mind.

  She made an effort to think positive thoughts. She wondered whether the car was in a restaurant parking space or in lane ready to drive onto the ferry. She wondered if there were other cars nearby. There must be, she thought. She wondered how many of them were going on holiday, how many were going home, how many were escaping, perhaps never to return. All three of those things applied to her and she was glad. She hadn't heard what time the crossing was, but she estimated that it would be only a matter of hours before they arrived on French soil.

  Other cars came and went. They pulled right alongside. The occupants got out and bought food or went to the toilet or bought sweet things in the gift shop, and then they returned to their cars and drove away.

  Still, Matilda and Roger had not returned.

  Waiting was always worse when she was alone, but that couldn't be helped. The trick to waiting, Isla had said, was not to wait at all.

  The two of them had sometimes played some games, until Isla had grown bored of them. I spy and I went to market primarily. Lara tried for a few minutes, but even before she could get bored, she crumbled at the prospect of playing without Isla.

  Panic seeped in.

  Was this it? Had they left her for good? What if something happened to them? Perhaps they were hit by a car or maybe they weren't at the ferry terminal at all but at the airport.