The Becketts’ was a good place to live, especially after some of the scum houses they’d been in when Lizzie was small. It was warm and clean and well lit, and they slept in a double bed beneath a huge pink eiderdown. Lizzie was by the wall, and Anne was next to the oversized wicker table so that she could reach for things in the night. The room had a high ceiling. It was extremely spacious, Lizzie told Jacob. A double room with sea views and a substantial bathroom. The room had been furnished with a bed, wooden table, wardrobe and two chairs. There had been a fireplace, but they didn’t use it, because the house had central heating. There was a cast-iron radiator that their feet could touch if they poked them out of the end of the bed. They could also hang their socks, tights, pants and thermal vests on the radiator, which meant they were warm when they went in the morning to put them on. The wardrobe was French, she told Jacob, and the tallest part was level with her mother’s ear. On the ledge above the fireplace they kept their hairbrushes and hair elastics. In the bathroom they kept their toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo and soap. They’d go and get books from the library, and cook downstairs in the Becketts’ kitchen. Anne made good bread.
Anne did her chores in the house, and in the Becketts’ shop, and Lizzie, as a small child, would watch her. On Fridays the whole house ate fish and chips on the promenade, and this was where Anne first met Ian. For a long time they kept one of the pictures he took with the camera. Late spring, and the photograph showed them soaking up the first rays of sun, squinting on the benches in front of the house. Mr. Beckett was in shorts and sandals, Mrs. B in her powder-blue dress, then Anne in a mustard-yellow roll-neck jumper. Then Lizzie, tall and frizzy, in a dress and cardigan, red tights, ankle boots.
Ian Harper was walking up the shingle beach towards them when he stopped to take their picture. He ended up taking a whole roll before Mr. Beckett went down there to ask what he was doing.
101. Think vegetarian thoughts. In case the meat is getting to you.
102. Nut rissoles remain popular. And goat’s cheese phyllo parcels.
103. All those things you can do with pomegranate seeds and pine nuts.
104. You have all this to look forward to.
105. Ratatouille?
106. You probably won’t feel like eating chicken ever again. No matter.
Jacob hadn’t really been listening to the story. But she’d wanted to tell him—especially since he’d said there were things missing in her, about her childhood—and prove to him and to herself that she could remember it all.
She’d said: “Ian Harper didn’t come that night. He didn’t come the next night either. He turned up three days later. He had a large brown suitcase and that camera hanging round his neck. Like I have,” she said, pointing to her own.
“He was wearing a crinkled light-colored suit, and a bowler hat. He was handsome, and he came in first to the shop on the ground floor. He said that he’d been to London. He apologized for not having let everyone know. He was polite and softly spoken. I liked him.
“He and Mum must have been the tallest pair on the south coast of England. We knew it wouldn’t last. It didn’t last. He was brokenhearted; she was impulsive.
“ ‘Disappointment is the main thing to get your head around, Lizzie,’ she told me, Jacob. ‘And really try not to drink,’ she said.”
“Nothing lasts,” Jacob had said.
Lizzie had smiled, and nodded, and looked around her kitchen. Then she said how, even though her mother got so maudlin about it, she’d known that Anne was more interested in Ian Harper than she’d said she was.
“You just can’t tell with love,” Lizzie had said to her new husband. “When he came down to our room, she stopped moving jaggedly, with her lips collapsed and her chin pushing up, which was how she looked when she was concentrating and tired. When Ian came down she spoke more softly and tried to walk sexily around the room, like she was in a bikini and wading into the sea. He took her out to the pub at the end of the road, and she wore her flares and her see-through top and put rose oil on her wrists and behind her ears.
“They’d wander up and down the beach like a pair of wading birds, up the shingle, over the pelican crossing and into the Becketts’ house. A few times we went out for fish and chips. Twice he took her out for dinner, which I picture as a somber and mournful affair, with both of them bending over a low pub table, her trying to help him with his sadness. Ian’s wife had left him and gone to America, Mr. Beckett told me. Broke the bugger’s heart in two, he said.
“Mum was pregnant when Ian Harper left, but she didn’t expect him to come back so she had the pregnancy terminated. She’d been through enough by then. She was forty-one. She wasn’t the kind of person who wanted to settle down, and we didn’t have things. She liked to be in a position from which she could spring and run at once; and in the meantime, she needed a bed for the two of us, and somewhere to store our clothes.
“Another thing you don’t know about my childhood, Jacob, is the fact that I had a job. I’d work for the Becketts in their shop at the weekends and sometimes in the afternoons. I liked doing the pricing, getting things ready for delivery, and weekend mornings were busy with locals coming in for staples. Then the holidaymakers buying nets and flags to take to the beach. It was cool in there, the best place to be, I thought.
“Mum found it deathly in the shop. She preferred working with Mrs. Beckett in the guest rooms, dragging rugs out into the air and beating them, flipping beds, driving the vacuum back and forth. So I sat at the counter when I was home from school, and I was quiet there, and diligent. I didn’t read, or allow my thoughts to wander. I sat on the stool and waited for my customers. I liked being in the window, close to the sea. I sat and listened and watched. Which was how I got to hear about Ian and how he hadn’t gone to work on an oil rig and he’d never had a wife. He was all anyone talked about for a little while. Who the hell was he? they said. Wasn’t who he said he was. And it gave people the creeps now to think about his long, skinny body shambling round the town. So sweet, they said. Unassuming. Always are, they said, when they’re on the run. Could be Irish, they said. Come here to keep hush. They talked about it right by the counter, and it didn’t matter to me in the end because I learned that the story about Ian Harper and my mother gave the local people something to take their minds off things.”
107. All sorts of interesting recipes can be found on the Internet.
108. A sweet pineapple marinade can be used on any cut of meat to give it a fresh, light, fruity lift. The one I’d like to suggest has a great Hawaiian teriyaki flavor and will work beautifully with strips of meat laid over rice.
109. It takes all of six minutes to make and will give you about two cups of sauce.
110. Ingredients: 1 cup crushed pineapple. Absolutely fine to use the tins you’ve got in the cupboard.
1/3 cup soy sauce
1/3 cup honey
1/4 cup cider vinegar
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ginger powder
1/4 teaspoon powdered cloves
Preparation: mix all the ingredients together and use immediately or store in an airtight container for up to seven days.
Lizzie’s mother had come to the wedding and hung back, looking awkward in pastels. Once or twice she’d glanced at her daughter’s stomach, just to check, Lizzie thought, for any accident that might have prompted the decision to wed this rather odd woodland-dwelling antiques man. Who had been charming on his wedding day. Open-armed and steering everyone about. As if, like Lizzie with the axe and saw that desperate Monday morning, he’d always known what to do.
At seven it was dark. She drove up to the pub in the car with the cake on the front seat. Mike was waiting for her, standing in the porch smoking a roll-up. He was wearing a red bow tie, and his dreadlocks were slicked back away from his face.
Lizzie stood in the porch and peeled back the tin foil. The shoes had come out really well. They were black and white striped.
“Man!�
� he said. Then he showed her how his hand was shaking. He blew on his hands and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
Lizzie was quiet. It was dark in the porch, and cold. She looked at the shoes.
“I think they’ll be fine,” she said, feeling the heat coming off his body.
“They’re really beautiful,” he said.
Lizzie swallowed while she tried to find a response.
“It’s time, you know?” he said, straightening his back and standing up tall in the porch. “It’s just about bloody time. Me. And Nic. I love her. I’m nervous. It’s OK. I’m not good enough, that’s what I feel.”
“I think the fact that you can say what you feel will be good enough for her. And good enough for anybody,” Lizzie said, quietly.
He took the cake from her hands and took a deep, clearing breath.
“Are you going to do it in front of everyone, Mike?”
“Yup.”
“Gosh.”
“Nah, man. I’m ready. Ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Me too,” she said. “I’m leaving here, I’m putting the house on the market.”
“You’re kidding! I love that little house. See it every time I go cycling past and think how much I love that place. A sweet little home. You know? Wish I could have one of my own. For me and Nic.”
Lizzie tucked the foil back under the plate. Then she looked up at him and her eyes settled longingly on his soft young cheek.
“Perhaps you can,” she said.
111. Temptations will be everywhere. You will be drawn to young people. Young, happy people, especially those in love, will seem very attractive to you. You will be extremely sensitive to the smells coming off them. They will seem warm and musky and heaven to be around. You will find yourself leaning in with what feels like an innocent kind of love, a sense of wanting to be friends with them, but watch the old throbbing sensations, and the dreams you will be making. Summer afternoons with jugs of lemonade and strong brown arms folding around you and drawing you close are the stuff of dreams only; in all probability not visions of a future for you.
112. This doesn’t mean you won’t be happy.
“I’ll come tomorrow with the money,” he said. She looked down at the heel on his cowboy boots. She’d taken her hair out of its clip. Now she tried to flick it back with a jerk of her head.
“Good luck,” she said, “and let’s speak again.”
She took the steps two at a time, and quickly belted her swollen body into the car. Her stomach was gurgling and her insides felt very heavy now, as when she’d had too much dairy over a number of days. There was also a thick, oily feeling in her mouth, which made it hard to swallow. She sipped water, then put the bottle back into her coat pocket. She was getting sick. She would need to go home and have a cup of tea beside the fire.
She put her headlights on as she drove back up the lane, then flicked them down when she saw the car coming the other way. She knew it was her neighbors from up at the farm and she looked into the back of the car as it passed by to see if the old man was there.
By now she was trembling at the wheel. She made an effort to park the car very neatly, very precisely, half in, half out of the ditch, as it had always been.
She got out of the car and stood in the dark with her hands the same lengths at the sides. She looked up through the trees and saw not a single star in the sky.
It was remarkable how people managed in life, how they got on without worrying too much about it, she thought.
“Get up and put your lipstick on,” Anne had said, standing tall with her daughter, almost to the ceiling of the rented room in Hove. “Get up and brush your hair and wash and cream your face as if your life were not as it is but better.”
Lizzie had asked her mother how you creamed your face as if your life were not as it was but better, and Anne had shown her how to do it slowly, and tenderly, with a look of pride, like someone would if they had all day to go and watch water voles swimming or play tennis with a friend.
“The thing to remember is: only you know how bad it is. Only we know what we know. Therefore only we see it like that. We have the power then to pretend it isn’t, to smile as if we believe.”
“Pretend until it’s better” had been one of Anne’s favorite sayings, and Lizzie, born in the dead of winter, 8 a.m. with a sea view, had learned early on that one had to be practical to get through.
Now she secured the head torch. Kneeling in the dark, she cut the bin liner and peeled it open. She spread the plastic out on the lawn, and looked. She had used the carving knife to slice under the rib cage and cut above the diaphragm. His chest had shoulders, but no arms attached: no head. She’d axed the upper arms, leaving the shoulders on, so that he looked like a Greek bust, with a splendid, prominent cage of ribs.
In the beam of the torch the torso looked very white. She’d been able to get down on the grass and look up through the cage to the heart and lungs. She’d had to bleed the chest with a clothes peg on her nose, by tilting it into the flower bed by the shed, and she’d worried, briefly, that the heart and lungs might slip out onto the grass. That hadn’t happened, though. She bent forward on her knees and peered up into his ribs. All the red and purple bits were still in there.
113. As you work, various thoughts and feelings may come to the surface. These could be things as silly or trivial as, thank goodness he wasn’t the kind of man to wear jewelry around his neck; or they could be thoughts that trigger feelings of resentment in you, such as, he wasn’t there for this or that, and I was left to fend for myself.
114. It could be: he was busy. I was drowning.
115. It could also be: I was trying to help. That was silly of me.
116. Or that he never took exercise.
117. He didn’t make an effort for me.
118. He didn’t want me.
119. Try not to resist, avoid or turn away. Simply let the thoughts and feelings come to the surface while you are working. See yourself bent over on a cushion in the garden with a sponge in your hand. See that you are busy, absorbed in what you are doing by the light of the torch, and that your thoughts and feelings are bobbing to the surface now and then. Notice them for what they are.
120. Don’t judge!
No question the chest would have to be axed open and butterflied. She would be some time at the barbecue. That was fine. There was enough fuel, and she’d had some wine: she would stand through the night with a bonfire blazing with what was left of the furniture. She tapped the head torch to bring the bulb back to life, and then crouched down beside the torso, using her fingers this time to test the skin. She moved her hands all over it, squatting down to get them around the ribs.
His heart was still in there; that would have to be cut out, and eaten separately, if she could manage it, in a recipe of its own.
She rocked the torso about on the plastic and saw how bits of soil and turf from the dug-up lawn leaped on. The dog was barking in the kitchen, and Lizzie switched her head torch off and sat very still in the garden for a moment while the sound died down.
The agent would say: “We’re not entirely sure why they decided to dig up the garden. Something to do with wanting to plant a meadow, we think.”
121. Try to understand that your mind will offer up all sorts of excuses and diversions.
122. Burying bits of him in the garden, or out in the woods, even that thought of a sky burial, are just the sorts of diversions I’m referring to.
123. Let the ideas come, but stay resolute. Disposing of a body in this way has already passed your own various tests. It’s practical, economical, and in many ways a moral choice. See below.
124. It doesn’t matter, either, if you haven’t given thought to any test whatsoever. Don’t be sitting there thinking, what test? I never ran it past anything in me.
125. Remember, some people think and worry about things more than others. If you’re the sort of person who wouldn’t have any kind of test, that doesn’t matter in the l
east.
126. One could argue that disposing of him in a lake would be good for the water life. Similarly, burying a body in the garden would fertilize the soil and add all sorts of welcome nutrients to the feeders in there. But eating him is nourishing a human who was, let’s face it, undernourished. And not just physically so. The process will be strengthening the psyche and readying you for your journey onward in life.
127. On that last point, do not think, if you are a little overweight, or heavier than you’d like to be, “Oh, I am fat, and therefore shouldn’t be doing this.” It doesn’t matter what size you are. You can still eat your husband.
128. Also worth bearing in mind that while a burial might be good for the ground or water, it would cause merry hell out in the world if found. Which, of course, it is much more likely to be.
129. In the first instance, you wouldn’t want anyone else to come across a bit of him unawares. Imagine a child walking in the woods and finding his hand!
130. Thank goodness, then, that his hand has been absorbed into you, and not left out in the woods to traumatize an innocent child.
131. Consider also the people who will be spared images of body parts found in the garden or woods. This includes those working for the police, forensic experts and random people, in the Dog and Duck, for example, who might see the images on the television and then not sleep for a week.
132. Obviously, it’s not likely that a random person having a drink in the Dog and Duck and seeing a human hand on the television is going to lose sleep for a whole week, even one night, but it might be something to consider as you go along.
133. Mike and Nic? Young love, and full of cake. Your cake! Consider them. How would they feel?
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