Purged

by Peter Laws

  They sat in silence while the bath filled.

  Steam from the hot tap started to wisp around them like ghosts, fogging the mirrors. While she waited she leant forward on the toilet and started to draw something in the mirror over the sink. A perfectly formed tree, the start of a naked fat lady. She smirked when she saw him looking and rubbed it away with the back of her hand. ‘All gone,’ she said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Just so you know, this is the weirdest moment of my life. And believe me, I went to Art School so that’s saying something.’

  He twisted the taps closed. ‘Okay. I’m ready.’

  When he looked at her, the smirk was gone. She just stared at the water as it quaked against the sides of the bath.

  ‘Do you really think this will cure me?’

  ‘Trust me.’

  ‘Then look away for a second.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look away.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just do it. Please.’

  He frowned and didn’t like it, but then he realised he could turn and still catch her outline reflected in the curve of the taps.

  He shifted completely away from her but he was still watching.

  She sat upright on the toilet, her shape twisted in the chrome like a circus freak. Then she put her hands gently together. Bowed her head. He heard faint whispering from over his shoulder. She was praying. My God. Praying on her own! The sudden glimmer of her faith set him on fire.

  ‘It’s going to be okay, Tabby. I promise.’ He spun back round, excited. She stood up straight, stepped toward him. He moved to the side as she climbed in. ‘I’ve made it nice and warm. It’s cosy.’

  Her green argyle sock turned instantly black in the water. She winced a little.

  ‘Too hot?’

  ‘It’s fine. It’s fine. Let’s just get this over with. So you want me to sit?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She sunk her body into the water. Slowly. He could see her biting her lip as she did it, moving like it was obviously painful for her. She pushed a trembling hand to the headscarf and had to claw it off her head. A smooth bald scalp appeared as the headscarf slipped off. A few single hairs sprang out like wires. Yuk! The full reveal of her hairless head made her nose and top lip appear suddenly huge, as though they were jutting out with an overbite. Her eyes instantly looked more sunken.

  She’s a gargoyle, he thought, almost wanting to laugh.

  ‘Shouldn’t you take your gloves off?’ she said, throat suddenly rattling with phlegm. ‘Believe me, catching your skin infection’s the least of my worries.’

  ‘Shhhh.’ He pulled out his Bible. ‘Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you repent of your sin and trust in him for eternal life?’

  She waited for a moment before answering.

  ‘Tabby?’

  ‘Yes. I repent.’

  ‘Then Tabitha Tansy Clarke,’ he slipped his gloved hand over her head and put the other on her shoulder, ‘I baptise you in the name of the Father.’

  He immediately pushed her down and she slid quickly, squinting her eyes closed. She was fully under in about a second. Her knees came up out of the water. That wasn’t ideal because she should really be fully immersed but he figured God would understand. It felt irregular, but valid.

  She came back up with a gasp.

  ‘And the Son—’

  Down again before she’d even grabbed a breath. She came back up with a heaving, aching sound of pain. ‘Give me a second to breathe—’

  ‘And the Holy Spirit.’

  He pushed her down one more time.

  When she came up out of the water he couldn’t tell if she was smiling or just wheezing in agony.

  She winced then spluttered out the words, ‘Is that it?’

  He should have kept her under then, but he figured she needed a little reassurance before it happened. That felt like the gracious thing to do. So he leant in and spoke directly into her ear. ‘Tabitha. Trust me. Heaven is healing.’ Water from her hair touched the bridge of his nose. It made his spine shiver from top to bottom. She may have been pretty when she was younger, with hair. ‘Do you understand? Heaven is healing.’

  ‘But I don’t feel anything. Shouldn’t I be feeling—’

  ‘Heaven is healing,’ he whispered and pushed as hard as he could. She went under a fourth time, her words swamped in the water, her open mouth filled up. He felt her body jolt against him, hard and panicked. Because she knew. She knew that this time she wasn’t coming back up.

  Her chest, stomach and hips suddenly surged up out of the water and her legs started to kick out, but he kept the head down. One of her fists pounded into the side of the bath banging, banging, BANGING, while the other scrambled up like a mad spider, fingers scraping across his arms, tugging at his shirt.

  A huge bubble of air peeled her lips back and shot out of her mouth, popping on the surface.

  She was kicking at the taps with her feet but her sock slipped off the chrome. It sent her heel smashing into one of the white tiles. Three sudden cracks shot across it. He thought she was going to kick both taps clean off until he realised what she was doing.

  She was trying to hook her foot behind the chain of the plug.

  The end of her toes suddenly swooped under the chain. His mouth dropped open.

  She’s pulling it.

  He gasped out in panic, and craned his head over his shoulder. ‘Help!’ he shouted.

  Her knee rose up, the chain became taut.

  ‘Help!’

  Then the gurgling sound. That hideous, terrifying gurgling sound of the bath emptying. She lifted her foot and the plug came springing out of the water, dripping and dangling.

  ‘Stephen, for God’s sake! Help me!’

  He kept pushing her down and could tell she was getting weaker. But if he reached for the plug to stick it back in he’d need to take his hands off her shoulders and head. She might rise up and sink her queer teeth into his throat. He didn’t know what else to do.

  He moved both of his gloved hands from her head and shoulder and quickly slipped them round her neck. He pressed both thumbs into her throat, keeping her under as the water went down slowly.

  ‘Stephen! Please!’

  She made a hideous muffled roar from under the water, and tiny bubbles filled with her screams, popped on the surface. Her gargoyle eyes glared at him from beneath the surface.

  The water was going down … down … down …

  Any minute and the tip of her nose would be out. He pressed his thumbs in much harder and suddenly felt something in her throat click and collapse under the pressure. The feeling sent a jolt of nausea through his body.

  ‘Stephen!’

  The bathroom door finally slammed open and Stephen raced into the room. ‘The plug’s out, you dick.’

  ‘Put it back in. Please.’

  ‘You do it.’

  ‘I can’t, she’ll get up.’

  ‘She’s half dead. Put the bloody plug back in and I’ll keep an eye out.’

  He took a deep breath and pulled his hands from her throat. The skin seemed to grow dark purple by the second so he must have burst something. There was one other detail that disturbed him no end – her left eye had almost swollen out of its socket and he could barely look away from it. He grabbed the plug and pushed it back into its hole. It took a few attempts because of the chunky gloves. When it finally sunk into place he span the hot and cold taps on full pelt.

  Then he screamed.

  Her hand shot suddenly out from the water, flinging drops everywhere. She grabbed the side of the bath.

  ‘Push her down!’ Stephen said. ‘Sit on the bitch, if you have to.’

  He slammed his hands back on her shoulders, but this time it wasn’t hard to keep her under.

  The glugging of the emptying bath stopped as the taps hammered in. Finally the water began to rise.

  He just kept h
er there. The kicking, the grabbing, grew laboured and spasmodic. Still holding her, he leant against the bathtub; after what seemed like a long time bubbles stopped coming from Tabitha’s mouth, and she was still. Peaceful. That single evil eye, misting into a glass marble as her soul shook off its skin.

  He went to pull his aching hands away, thumbs hot with pain. But Stephen shook his head. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Just wait.’

  He did as he was told and waited, trying hard not to cry but he couldn’t stop it. He wept, willing her to be completely dead this time. Arms stinging with the effort of it all. He tried not to look at Stephen but he could feel those eyes digging into his back, monitoring his weakness.

  He went to vomit.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ Stephen said. ‘Now come on. Let’s get her in the car.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It was a pretty quirky way to start a holiday, searching through the woods for the body of a dead anorexic girl. They’d given him a tool, too. Or more specifically a broom shank to slap the branches and tall grass back. At times he felt like Indiana Jones only in a much more grim, depressing instalment of the franchise.

  He’d seen dead bodies before. Lots of them in fact. But he still found that his heart froze in his chest when the stick whacked against something soft in the brush. It was usually a moist mound of earth or in one case an abandoned black bin bag full of porn mags, sticky with sperm and insects. Seems like he’d discovered Hobbs Hill’s under-the-radar sex scene, hidden near the hollow of a tree.

  He called PC Taylor over to check it out. When Taylor saw what was in the bag he audibly gulped then shook his head in disgust. But he still gazed at the covers, adjusting his glasses. They were bagged as evidence and the search resumed.

  They were sweeping the fields and woods in a single line, edging across with almost synchronised steps. Every now and again Sergeant Miller would wander over to see what Matt was up to. Matt certainly felt … surveilled, if that was even a word. Maybe Miller thought that the strange and eager professor from London might come across a body and hide it up his jumper. Replace it with a stupid picture of a rainbow.

  They finished the search at two in the afternoon and, like the others, Matt was shattered. He sat against a tree and held a cold bottle of coke to his forehead as Miller announced that the team at the lake hadn’t come up with anything either. Though, Miller admitted, it wasn’t a full drag through the water. That’d come later if, ‘God forbid’, they still needed it.

  A few people looked positively disappointed that they hadn’t come up with a corpse, as though they’d gone on a specialist safari and hadn’t got to photograph the rarest animal. But the trudge in most of their feet wasn’t disappointment. It was depression. A sense of collective foreboding that could freeze facial muscles on a hot day. Because these were friends and family. Their kids went to the same school as Nicola. At one point a few of them swooped around a large lady who was bent over the bonnet of a car. He guessed it was Nicola’s mother. He could hear her sobbing as he slipped back into his car and heard that wailing on repeat in his short-term memory long after he’d driven away and headed up the leafy roads to the cottage.

  He was halfway down their dirt track when he saw Chris’s son Ben Kelly rumbling along the road on a white mountain bike, away from the cottage. No helmet. Matt slowed the car so he wouldn’t wipe the lad out and he gave a gentle toot of the horn. Ben looked over and nodded with a smile. Both hands locked on the handlebars. He slowed the car to talk, but Ben was already bombing through the gravel.

  When Matt got back he asked what Ben had wanted. He’d just dropped off an SD card for Lucy, packed with Christian albums that he was recommending. The surprising part? She was so keen to hear them. She slipped awkwardly past Matt with the card clutched to her chest, hiding it from him. Like it was some sort of contraband propaganda that he would stamp on if he saw it.

  They were all going out for the afternoon but there was still an hour before they headed off. So he took his laptop into the garden and flipped it open. He clicked to the desktop and spotted the Word file for his book, batting its sad little eyes like a neglected toddler. ‘In Our Image: The Gods We Tend To Invent’.

  He opened it up. Stared at the flashing cursor, ticking on and off like the countdown on a thermonuclear bomb. He clicked it off and decided it was a cue for more coffee.

  In Our Image was turning out to be the proverbial ‘difficult second album’. The most annoying part was that it actually was his first.

  How eagerly he’d pitched his grand vision on the ‘psychology of religious invention’ and the ‘nature of reality denial inherent in all religious belief’. The proposal had slid out of him easily, like butter across plastic. On a warm day. And so had writing the actual book. At least at first. Until it suddenly felt like passing gravel. It scared him that he might be one of those chumps that gets a publishing deal and suddenly finds he can’t work out ‘how to say stuff’.

  He came back with his coffee and jabbed at the cursor, and spoke in a low Vader tone. ‘Right, you little twerp. I have you now.’ But he needn’t have bothered.

  Every time the keys clicked, unpleasant little mind-shots flashed into his head. Of him whacking down his stick and hitting Nicola Knox on the head. And when he tried to ignore it the clicks became Wren, Amelia or Lucy in the grass, with blue skin and dry, chapped lips.

  Ten minutes of this and he’d had enough. He called Amelia over and they had one of their YouTube sessions. She sat on his knee as they watched clips of people falling over, cats chasing laser beams. You’ve Been Framed stuff. Anything to shake the grim things away.

  The plan was for him and Wren to work in the mornings, and then go out in the afternoons. So over the next few days, from one in the afternoon, they ended up devouring everything fun, relaxing or touristy they could find. It was with a certain delicious irony that Hobbs Hill turned out to be named after Hobbs, the old English word for devil. He’d suspected as much, but it was fun to find out he was right. And he wasn’t surprised, either, to find that the church had started a campaign to change the village name to something more heavenly. Their first choice … ye Gads! … High Hopes. Sounded like a 90s American sitcom. He preferred Hobbs Hill. It sounded folksy and English and odd.

  They visited the so-called Devil’s Den (reason number two for the name change campaign) which was a decent-sized cave behind the waterfall itself. They had built a little viewing platform in there. Just some stone steps and a metal rail overlooking a large hole in the rock. But with the waterfall gushing down at the mouth of it all, it was actually pretty decent. A guy sat in a wooden booth at the top of the stone staircase, selling tickets. He said the cave was where old Hobbs himself washed his toes when the moon was right. But, Matt noticed, that wasn’t mentioned in the floppy yellow pamphlet. It was all about the wonders of the natural world, and he spotted the word ‘creation’ twice.

  Then they had a barbecue up on the top of the ridge, where you could follow the river as it toppled over the edge and became Cooper’s Force Waterfall. Keeping with family tradition they bought a magnet to add to their fridge collection. This one said, ‘I Fell for the Falls’ on it.

  All in all, the days were good here. And he got a bunch of time to laze in the bath, reading H. G. Wells. That was always welcome. But there were a few odd things too.

  For a start, the cottage didn’t have any curtains whatsoever. No blinds either. Nobody had realised this when they first arrived, until the night started falling. The owners, the Shores, must have figured the place was too deep in the woods to warrant them. Or perhaps they were so perfect-looking they were more than happy to swing their dicks for the woodland sprites. But Matt wasn’t so keen. In their bedroom, he had to drape a bed sheet across two unlit floor lamps to give them at least some privacy. Maybe he’d lived in the city too long but he didn’t fancy some pervy local jogger climbing a tree and salivating while he and his wife were making love on that massive, fairy-tale bed. Matt was old-fas
hioned that way.

  The other slightly weird thing was Nicola Knox’s face. It started to stare out from shop windows and telegraph poles on ‘Missing’ posters, yet no matter how much he clicked the email link on his phone or computer screen he got nothing but a rainbow. It made him wonder if who he’d seen there might have been someone else, after all. The searches went on and he joined them a few more times, though he could tell by the way people were whacking their sticks that hope was fading.

  All things considered, it had been a surprisingly good holiday up till then. But the next day was a Saturday. And that’s when things began to change.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Seven-thirty in the morning and Matt was brushing his teeth over the sink. The bathroom window was wide open in front of him. His chest was bared to the trees. He felt earthy. Tarzan’s monkey, Cheetah, might suddenly swing in, slink a hairy arm around his shoulder and kiss him on the cheek. The thought made him look down, stop brushing and suck his gut in.

  When it didn’t contract as much as he expected he knew it was time for a run.

  He was hurrying up the scrubbing while he listened to the birds when he spotted Chris Kelly’s silver Audi creeping through the tree trunks and up the dirt road. Matt swilled some water, spat it out and quickly stepped into his running shorts. By the time he’d pulled his last sock on, there was a rattling knock at the door.

  Chris stood on the doorstep clutching a paper bag splitting at the seams with croissants. ‘Well aren’t you looking aerobic.’

  ‘Morning, Chris.’ Matt yawned and stepped back to let him in. The smell from the bag wafted under his nose.

  He lifted it and theatrically licked his lips. ‘Kids up? Is Wren?’

  ‘Not yet. Just me. I thought I might go for an early run. You want to come?’

  ‘Pah! Forget that. You’re on holiday. Besides … you need some carbs first and then you can burn them off.’

  Matt took another sniff, deep and long. ‘Okay, I’m convinced. I’ll call the others down.’

  ‘No.’ Chris quickly shook his head. ‘Don’t do that. How about we talk? Just you and me. Seems like we haven’t had a decent chance for a catch up yet. In fact, anyone’d think you were avoiding me.’