by Alex Marwood
He adopts his harmless smile and blinks at her, myopically. Chucks his new black spaniel friend behind the ear and lets it go. ‘Molly!’ she shouts. The dog, ignoring her, circles the bench on which Thomas sits a single time, sniffing the ground in the hope that he might have dropped a titbit, then comes back and sits at his feet, gazing up, expectantly.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Thomas. He puts his hands pointedly in his lap and says to the woman, ‘It’s just a bit of kidney. Nothing harmful.’
‘Molly!’ she shouts again. The dog ignores her. Its eyes plead until he sees the whites at their edges. ‘Yes, but she’s on an all-natural diet, you see,’ she informs him, staying ten feet away, as though she is nervous of getting closer.
The common is full of sunbathers and picnickers and joggers and drinkers, the way it has been all summer long. On a day like this, when a twenty-foot gap from your nearest neighbour feels like luxury, she stands no chance at all of coming to harm unless she eats a hotdog from the unlicensed wheelie-cart, but there’s a type of woman who revels in their sense of vulnerability, he’s noticed. Somehow the thought that someone could want to harm them makes them feel special.
‘Nothing more natural than a nice bit of kidney,’ he says, and smiles his most endearing smile.
The toddler starts to approach and she yanks on its harness reins and hauls it backwards, presses it, unwillingly, against her thighs.
‘It’s not preserved or anything,’ he says. ‘It’s just kidney. I’m clearing out the freezer. Didn’t want it to go to waste.’
The woman snorts. ‘Molly eats chicken breast and rice and vegetables,’ she says. ‘Not offal.’
‘No dairy?’ he teases, and she looks horrified. Then he sees her suspect that he might be taking the mick, and looks affronted.
‘Anyway, please don’t feed her,’ she says again, trying to wrest back the control. Hello, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, he thinks. Even your dog is special. ‘Would you like someone else feeding your dog?’
Thomas considers the question, thinks that he probably wouldn’t mind that much, then thinks that this might well be the wrong answer, so settles for apologising again. ‘She’s a lovely dog,’ he tells her. ‘Ever so friendly.’
She accepts the compliment without much grace. ‘Come on, Molly!’
Thomas shoos the dog away, and it sulks over until it is close enough for her to clip its lead to its collar. She jerks the lead a couple of times, irritably, then starts to walk off towards Station Road. The toddler stays for a moment, chewing Peppa Pig’s crusty ear and staring at him. He can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl, but doesn’t suppose it matters either way. It will quickly learn to be whatever Mama wants it to be, if it has any sense of self-preservation. He gives it a four-finger wave and it turns on its heels as its mother gives another tug on its reins.
Thomas sits back and extends his arms along the back of bench. Turns his face to the azure sky and enjoys the late afternoon. Never mind. There’ll be another one along in a moment. It’s Northbourne Common. All the dogs of Northbourne have come to love Thomas over the past few days. He’s the man with the treats. The special titbits, carefully selected from the choicest of cuts. He can’t believe he didn’t think of this before.
As he has predicted, he doesn’t have to wait long. The post-work passeggiata is in full swing and the park is a sea of dogs. He tosses a sliver of heart in the path of a Jack Russell, a choice slice of liver beneath the questing nose of a Weimeraner.
The Egyptians believed that the dead needed their internal organs with them, if they were to survive the afterlife. Once they were removed from the bodies, they were stored in canopic jars, preserved in herbs and honey and sealed with resin, and stored close at hand for when they were needed. Thomas is a man of the age of science. He knows that his girls are going nowhere. And the Ancient Egyptians didn’t have blenders, or refrigerators with freezer compartments.
At first, he thought that this new method of disposal might be a nuisance – the weekly defrost-and-blend ritual had seemed so convenient. But he’s discovered that it’s quite the opposite. He really enjoys his sojourns in the park. It gets him out of the house, into the fresh air, provides a seemingly endless opportunity for social moments. The flat has been feeling oppressively small for the past few days, especially now he’s started to fall out of love with Marianne. He doesn’t like the sense of reproach about her peeling skin. Feels like he’s being judged and found wanting. It’s not my fault, he thinks, resentfully. It’s this bloody weather. Drying everything out. Just look at the lawns in this park: it’s like the Gobi desert.
His hand brushes a hard edge of cold metal and he looks to see what it is. It’s a little plaque, brass, screwed firmly to the cross-strut. ‘In loving memory of John and Lizzie Brewer,’ it reads. ‘1922–96, 1924–2005. They loved this park.’
That’s sweet, he thinks, running his finger over the lettering, while at the same moment a suffocating feeling of melancholy washes through him. That was all I ever wanted, he thinks, a bit of love, a bit of lifelong companionship. It can’t be that hard. You just have to look at all the nonentities strolling hand-in-hand to see that. Why did it never happen to me? Every bench in this park has a plaque like that, put up by their children, mostly, or their widows or the friends who mourn them. Who’s going to do that for me?
He shakes his head like the dogs he’s been feeding, to shrug off the mood. Gets up and goes for a stroll past the bandstand, to leave it behind. There’s a coffee stand there, and its owners have erected a small collection of tin tables and chairs in among the benches. It’s where a lot of park regulars go, to meet and greet and pass the time of day. Thomas doesn’t count as a regular, yet; he’s only been coming here a few days. But he has hopes. One day, he’s sure, someone will smile in recognition and give him the friendly nod.
A pair of dog walkers chats at the coffee stand, adding sweetener to their drinks, while their charges – three Scotties, a Pom, two pugs and a Dalmatian – mill about at the extreme end of multi-leads and sniff about at the base of a waste-bin. A perfect opportunity, right there. He potters over and empties the remainder of his bag in among them, enjoys the pleasure with which they wolf down the unexpected goodies, the shining eyes that turn towards him in search of more.
He squats down and scratches behind the Pom’s neck ruff. It licks its lips and gives him a huge, foxy grin and he rewards it with a final piece of well-chopped tripe. It snarfs it up with a tail-wag so violent it almost loses it feet, and pants hopefully at him as he stands up once more. Thomas likes dogs. So trusting, so loyal. He sometimes thinks that, had he had another life – one where landlords allowed pets, for instance – he might not have had need of his girlfriends at all.
‘Sorry, poppet,’ he tells the friendly Pom. ‘That’s the lot for today. See you tomorrow, maybe?’
He walks back through the sunshine on the path to home. He feels no great need to dawdle. He’ll be taking a walk every day this week. The freezer compartment is full to bursting, and he suspects that he might soon need to free up some room.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
She thinks it through and decides to go in the daytime. A teenager carrying a television through the streets in the dark is asking for a stop-and-search, whereas you can walk around with pretty much anything while the shops are open. She once carted a bike, with its lock still on, all the way from Twickenham to Kingston, and nobody even batted an eyelid. For sure, a casual-looking girl with no obvious signs of drug abuse carting a flat-screen under her arm will be fine.
Cher’s thought and thought about that telly. She’s never had a television of her own, never even had control of a remote. And God knows she’s longed for one. A telly will make all the difference to her life, and the Landlord has three that he no longer needs. And besides, he owes her that much. That’s what she figures.
She passes a couple of people in the street and smiles boldly at them. The trick is to always look like you belong; like y
ou have a right to be wherever you are at the time. Look shifty, and people will assume that you are shifty. Fix them with a smile and cry out ‘good morning’, and nine times out of ten, in a city like this, they will shrug themselves into their imaginary coats and hurry by, mumbling an embarrassed greeting in return. The rest are either up to something shifty themselves, or they’re a bit mad, so they don’t really count.
She strides confidently to the Landlord’s basement stairs and skips down them, pulling on her gloves. Fishes from her pocket the bunch of keys she lifted off Thomas in the car when they were on the way home, and leafs through them. She identifies them in no time. Can’t believe it took Thomas so long, though she supposes it was dark when he was looking. They stand out from the Beulah keys because they’re new, and shiny, and have more than three levers to them. She undoes the mortise, then turns the Yale and steps cheerfully inside.
In an instant she is gagging. She had remembered the smell from the boot, and had expected to have to make an adjustment, but eight days has magnified it so much that it takes her breath away completely. Her throat closes up and she feels her gorge rise. She’s never smelled anything like this. The smell of ripe shit in Vesta’s bathroom is like flowers in comparison. Her lungs don’t seem to want to take this fetid air into themselves. They rebel each time she tries to breathe, let only tiny sips of it through before her epiglottis clamps down and everything stops.
How can the neighbours not smell this, she thinks. It’s not possible. Maybe it’s… God, I’ve never smelled anything like this. Nothing close to it. Maybe they just don’t know what it is?
She switches the light on. Lets out a huge bronchial cough, the sort that can turn too easily into the gag reflex. But once it’s out, she finds that she is able to breathe. Not normally, not by a long chalk, and she has to keep her lips clamped firmly closed, but enough that she doesn’t have to flee the room.
The Landlord has been leaking. The floor is sticky with fluids. They have spread outwards across the beech-look laminate by several feet, have stained the wall against which his right arm presses. Now the first wave of nausea has passed, she’s interested. He’s not her first corpse. But her mum and her nanna were freshly dead when she saw them, and she didn’t have a lot of time to study them before they were swept up by forensics and taken away for autopsy, then given the old cosmetic beautification by an undertaker. By the time they were buried, they looked like waxworks. Overpainted, their features sewn up with clever threadwork into Mona Lisa smiles.
The Landlord doesn’t look like that. Eight days has not been kind. His huge belly has swollen to the size of a Space Hopper and all his limbs have bloated. How it’s not split open, she has no idea. It can only be a matter of time. In the places where, when she last saw him, his skin was grey-white, it is greenish, now, and mottled like a marble floor, the occasional patch of livid crimson breaking through where his skin seems to have started to literally slide off the fat beneath. The parts that were purple are lustreless ebony black. His T-shirt, stretched so tight that the seams are beginning to split, seems to be undulating. For a moment she thinks it must be some kind of optical illusion, until she notices something small and white, the size of a couple of grains of rice, work its way over his swollen lower lip and drop to the floor.
‘Fucking ’ell,’ says Cher.
She stays and looks for a bit, fascinated. Her body still fights to act out its revulsion, hitting her with sudden, convulsive throat spasms so that she has to keep her hand clamped over her mouth, but her mind is clear, and curious. She’s always been inquisitive that way. If she’d learned to read really well and gone to a school where the staff had any ambitions for their students other than keeping them from rioting before playtime, she’d have been being encouraged into the sciences by now. So this is what happens when you get buried, she thinks. I’m bloody well getting cremated.
She spends a few minutes staring at the pullulating cloth, drinking in the detail – the wide-open, grey-misted eyes, like the zombies in The Walking Dead, the way that the fluid leakage seems concentrated around the head and, God help us, the flattened buttocks, the fact that the marble patterning – if it were a tattoo, say, or body paint rather than putrefaction – is almost pretty in its delicacy. I won’t forget this in a hurry, she thinks. Shame there’s no one I can tell about it, really. Probably not ever.
A car door slams in the street and snaps her from her reverie. She remembers the purpose of her visit, looks at her quarry. The big telly, the one she really lusts after, is situated directly over the corpse’s head, its cord trailing through a pool of brackish goo. Maybe not, she thinks, and goes round the coffee table to the small screen on the other side.
It’s a nice little apparatus, no more than a couple of years old. Silver casing and a Sony logo. Actually, this is better, she thinks. I’ll have to move on at some point, when they find him or whatever, and that big thing’s not exactly portable, is it? She bends down and unplugs it from the aerial socket, switches off the electricity and takes the plug from the extension adaptor on the floor. Stands on tiptoe to reach over the media cabinet below it and lift it from the wall-bracket on which it perches. It looks quite precarious, and she balances carefully to make sure not to drop it when it comes free.
It doesn’t come free. Taken by surprise, Cher wobbles on the balls of her feet and has to grab the telly by its frame to prevent herself overbalancing. She swears under her breath – doing anything lungfully is ill-advised in her current circumstances – and drops down on to her heels, her damaged ankle letting out a shriek that reminds her that she still needs to take care. She bends down to look for a hook, or a latch, or some other piece of Japanese ingenuity that’s lending the set stability. What she finds wrings another, louder word from her lips. A screw runs through a hole in the metal bracket, and is firmly embedded in the underside of the machine.
‘Fuck,’ mutters Cher. Might have known this wasn’t going to be that easy, she thinks. Like the universe was ever going to cut me a break.
‘You bastard,’ she says to the bloated body, and could swear that it releases another gust of swamp gas in response. ‘Bet you think you’re having the last laugh, don’t you?’
She stands up and glares round the room. Enough porn to power the Titanic, but nothing practical anywhere to be seen. The remains of a kebab on the table has gone green and sprouted fur. ‘Eugh,’ she says to the Landlord, ‘you really were a filthy fucker, weren’t you? If you’d put as much energy into walking as you did into wanking, you probably wouldn’t look like that now.’
The Landlord doesn’t answer. She tries the drawers of the media cabinet and finds little other than a bunch of unlabelled DVDs and those bunches of useless wires and plugs that seem to breed secretly in the dark places of every house.
‘Bugger,’ she mutters. She’s going to have to go further into the flat to see if she can find anything to undo the screw with. A knife would probably do it. If he owns a knife. It doesn’t look like he ate much that he couldn’t eat with his hands.
Even with the bare light bulb on, the hall is dark, and stuffy. The two doors to her left and the one at the end of the hall – hollow, unpanelled doors, seen-better-days white gloss paint, those old-people half-moon pull handles – are closed, and neither light nor air seep through. More of the same boring laminate, no embellishments other than a row of half full recycling boxes and a couple of grubby coats on hooks. A joyless sort of place, she thinks, as she walks up it to what she assumes will be the kitchen. Not exactly living for pleasure, was he? Apart from eating kebabs and fingering his privates.
She has all sorts of plans for the things she’ll do with her home, when she gets on her feet at last, based on things she’s seen through windows, or in the pages of magazines. If your life is made up of necessities, your head is filled with all the pretty shiny things that would make it complete. Pink paper lampshades. A collection of paper fans, opened out and pinned to the wall. Sari fabric draped round curtain
poles. Floor cushions. A Tiffany lamp. One of those make-up chests that looks like a steamer trunk. A collection of slogan mugs hanging from hooks under a shelf full of tea caddies. A wall motto, spelled out in big gold letters. She’s not sure what it will read, but she likes the look of them. A fake fur bedspread. Nothing slaggy, like animal print. Classy. Wolfskin. Or mink, maybe.
She finds it hard to imagine how someone with the sort of money the Landlord has – had – could live in a place that looks like a storage unit. Even with Vesta paying practically squat, he must have been taking in over a grand a week, and a lot of it – hers and Collette’s, anyway – cash-in-hand, as well, so no tax. Cher can totally see why someone blessed with what she regards as footballer levels of wealth would fill their house with high-spec electronics, so she’s not surprised by the televisions, but the rest of the flat, its sparse furnishings, its piles of redundant stuff that suggest that he was simply too lazy to take them to the dump, is a disappointment. She’d sort of imagined him sitting on a gold sofa, wearing a gold lamé tracksuit and fingering his gold pendant chains as he watched Dallas on a gold TV and sent texts from a mobile encrusted with Swarovski crystals. Instead it’s chocolate milk bottles in plastic recycling boxes and a small collection of offcuts of timber stored along the hall wainscot.
The kitchen is a galley, lined on both sides with cabinets in the nineties Spaceship Interior style. Scratched stainless steel surfaces, chrome door handles, lino that’s done up to look like those steel plates you find on walkways. I’d never have that, thinks Cher. Why would you have that? You’d never keep it clean, all those bobbles. Nobody would have a kitchen that looked like this if they meant to cook here. It’s the kitchen of someone who lives on takeout.