by Jon McGregor
The steam from the bath curls out into the hallway, easing the wallpaper away from the wall. Peppered spores of mould thicken and spread towards the ceiling. Rainwater seeps through the worn pointing on the front of the building and pushes through the plaster, the damp spreading outwards like an old bruise. The varnish on the doorframe cracks as the timber swells and softens and gradually rots away.
Later, when the water has cooled again, she stands up, awkwardly, the water streaming down her changed body and splashing into the bath. Her breasts are rounder now, heavier, and her stomach is swollen, her skin stretched taut. She grabs the edge of the sink as she climbs out, and presses a hand against the painful curve of her spine. He takes a towel from the hook on the door and wraps it round her body, holding out his arm to support her weight while she carefully pats herself dry.
Crayon scribbles appear, low on the wallpaper by the heaps of shoes and boxes of toys. Dated felt-tip stripes creep up the wall by the doorframe, tracking their daughter’s growth a thumb’s width at a time. Tiny shoes nudge in amongst the adult-sized ones, and bigger shoes take their place. Tea-stains the colour of old photographs splash across the wall, lingering long after the broken cups are cleared away. A dent the size of a fist or a forehead is hidden by a framed school portrait. The damp patches spread further, and the paper sags away from the wall, and the ceiling stains a darkening nicotine yellow. The door is kicked from its hinges, and rehung. More framed pictures are put up on the wall.
They scoop their daughter from the bath. This is Laura, we realise. They carry her from the room in the snug white wrap of a towel, chatting happily and playing with her mother’s hair. He leans down and kisses her damp forehead, breathing in the soapy smell of her, and he watches as his wife carries her into the small bedroom and puts her to bed, and he fetches a bottle of whisky from beneath the kitchen sink.
In the bathroom, dark lines of mould creep along the grouting between the tiles, and the tiles crack and fall away from the wall. The sink is pulled from its fixings and breaks in two, the cracked pipes spilling water across the floor until they’re capped and disconnected. The toilet stops flushing, blocks, and overflows, and the sludgy water pools in the corner of the room where the floor slopes down a little. The mirror above the sink is smashed into pieces.
In the kitchen, the man and woman in white overalls shine their torches around the room and push at the window. It swings open, creaking against the frame. They lean forward, seeing how large the gap is, looking out at the garage roof below. They look at the bloodstains in the sink, and take samples. They write things down in their notebooks, they take photographs, they shine their torches carefully across the surface of the worktop and the floor.
When they come back into the sitting room there are two more of them, wearing black suits and black shoes sheathed in plastic foot-covers. They tape plastic bags over Robert’s hands and head, wrap his whole body in a plastic sheet, and squeeze him into a thick white plastic bag. It takes four of them to get him into the bag, and one of them seems to make a joke about it. They seal the zip with a numbered lock. They lift him on to a stretcher, awkwardly, and it takes six of them to carry him out to the waiting van.
The photographer stays behind and takes pictures of the room without him in it. The empty space on the floor, which seems enormous now. The marks and stains around where he lay. His hat, which must have slipped from his head when he fell.
The two men who set up the lights stand in the hallway, talking quietly, waiting for the photographer to finish. He nods at them as he leaves, and they turn off the lights, the older policeman shining his torch while they pack the equipment away. The hot bulbs glow faintly for a few moments, and they carry everything else out to the van while they wait for the last ebb of light to cool.
We stand together in the hallway, uncertainly. We can hear the two policemen talking outside, the crackle and mutter of their radios. We can hear footsteps moving around upstairs, and somebody laughing. We can hear, faintly, Robert and Yvonne in the bath, splashing each other, asking for the soap. But when we look, there’s no one there, and the tiles are still cracked, fallen into the empty bath, and the sink has still been pulled from the wall. The hooks on the back of the door have been ripped out. The door to the small bedroom has been kicked from its hinges and propped against the wall. The framed pictures have been taken down, the glass smashed on the floor and the photographs torn into small fluttering pieces, each brighter square of wallpaper cratered by a fist-sized hole. Wine bottles have been broken against the doorframes, bleeding long red stains down the walls. The lino tiles have been studded with cigarette burns, and half of them peeled up off the floor. People have come and gone, and come and stayed, and left their rubbish piled up in the hall. We wait, not looking at one another, not sure what to do next. One or two of us leave, perhaps to go with him. Time seems to pass. We can hear them in the bathroom still, the tap dripping into the water, the low static murmur of their voices.
Outside, it gets lighter, and darker, and as the sky begins to lighten again behind the curtains in Laura’s room her mother creeps in and sits on her bed. We watch as she brushes the hair from her sleeping daughter’s eyes. Laura wakes up, and frowns. Her mother puts a finger to her lips, reaching under the bed to pull out a bag she packed with clothes and money the night before, and while Laura gets dressed she gathers a few of her books and toys and stuffs those in as well. Laura crouches on the floor to pull on her shoes, and then the two of them slip from the room and out of the flat, closing the front door with an almost inaudible squeeze and click, and then the two of them are gone. The morning’s light begins to filter through the thin orange curtains, and the shallow impression of Laura’s body on her mattress slowly fades. The scent of her lingers in the hollow fibres of the rumpled pillow, and in the turned-back duvet, and in the vests and pants and t-shirts which spill in bitter fistfuls from her drawers. The book she was being read is left unfinished, broken-backed on the floor. Dust settles. And then the two of them are gone.
He wakes up. Robert, this is. He wakes up, and every day it seems as though they’ve only just left. He wakes with a jolt, as if at the sound of the softly closing door, and remembers that the two of them are gone.
The room is suddenly much darker. We sink to the floor. The view from the window is clouded by an unfamiliar condensation on the glass. The heat from the lights and the voices and the bodies of the men and women who have been in the room takes a few hours to fade. As it does so, and as the whole flat begins to cool, the condensation hardens into thin tracings of ice, and splinters of light from the dawn outside crack slowly into the room.
We get up, and we leave the flat. We’re not sure what else we can do. In the street, the men slide Robert’s body into a van with darkened windows, and we all climb in beside him. There isn’t enough room, but it seems like the right place to be. In the circumstances. They slam the doors closed. The air inside is hushed and still, the steel floor shining with cold. Two of the men stand outside, talking to the younger policeman and the photographer, and the man with the dark tangled hair. At the top of the steps, the woman with the checked dressing gown is standing with her arms folded, watching, the older policeman beside her. People have appeared on the walkway, and at windows on the upper floors. A group of children are standing on the pavement, pushing each other, shouting questions. The two men, and the younger policeman, climb into the front of the van, and there’s a rush of cold damp air before they close the doors. They start the engine, and the tyres slip and squeak as we drive away down the hill. We look back, and we see the garage roof behind the flat, where Danny jumped and slipped and ran off looking for someone to tell. And we see Danny
two
They carry his body through the city at dusk and take him away to the morgue.
And we see Danny, stumbling away from the garages at the back of the flats, tumbling down the hill like he’s about to fall, rubbing at his cheeks with the backs of his hands in great angr
y gestures which look almost like punches, wiping at the tears which haven’t yet fallen from a face still twisted with fear. Einstein beside him, snapping and whining and trying to keep up, held back as always by the weight of her broken
Had to find someone and tell them was all he could think. Had to find Laura and let her know, had to find Mike. But tell her what, him lying on the floor like that, one leg bent wrong under the other and one hand over his mouth like he could smell himself beginning to rot. Tell her what, he died peacefully, they took him in and did everything they could but in the end there weren’t nothing to be done. He didn’t suffer. Couldn’t tell her that. Didn’t know much about it but knew it weren’t nothing like that. He had all his friends around him when fuck
Through the darkened windows of the van we watch him, slipping and hurrying down the hill to the main road and the underpass and through the darkened windows we see the city passing us by, whole streets abandoned to the cold, faint shadows moving behind curtains backlit by a flickering pale blue. Christmas decorations dip and swing between telegraph poles and skeletal trees, hang from garage doors, trail from the lids of bins spilling over with crumpled paper and packaging foam. Coloured lights snap on and off in front-room windows, and around shop-front displays, and we follow him down to the bottom of the
Danny, were you the last one to see him?
Fuck should I know.
Was anyone there when you found the body?
Don’t know I didn’t hang around.
What did you do? Where did you go?
Fucking ran what do you think. What would you
He’d been away was what he’d tell the police. He decided. If they came looking for him, if they had a reason to come looking for him, which if he kept his mouth shut why would they. Unless some cunt. He’d been out of town. He’d gone to his brother’s house, for Christmas, he’d got the idea into his head that they could have a like a family thing for once. Danny and his brother Tony and Tony’s new wife and them two kids which weren’t even Tony’s. Weren’t much of a family. Weren’t much of an idea anyhow because Tony kicked him out on Boxing Day, like gave him a cold turkey sandwich and told him to fuck off but that was where he’d been and that was what he’d tell the police. If they showed up, if they took him in and asked him questions like
We’ve all known people dead but aint many ever seen it. Thought he’d look asleep or something but weren’t nothing like that at all. Was more like, what. Flies and maggots and stuff leaking over the floor. And the smell of it. Churns in your guts and comes pouring out your mouth like
Two days to get back from his brother’s, two days of walking and hiding in train toilets and jumping over barriers and sleeping in carparks and walking some more and carrying Einstein when her leg got too bad. Big fucking dog to carry but what else could he do. When it was his fault about the leg anyway. And this was the welcome he got, no cunt anywhere and Robert laid out dead and no clue what’s going on at all. Had to find Mike was the thing, Mike would sort it, Mike would know what was going on and what to do. But had to find Laura as well, had to tell Laura before some other cunt got there first. Like Ben or some cunt like that. Had to find somewhere to score. And his own brother had shut the door on him, had said
The driver talks to the policeman in the front, and for the first time we can hear what they say. Is this your first one, he’s asking, and the policeman says Yes, just about, first proper one like this, and the two men laugh and say You’ll soon get used to it, chap, it’s a busy time of year. We follow Danny down to the bottom of the hill, trailing his blankets, tripping over the sodden ragged hems of his jeans, turning to call and hurry Einstein along. The van sweeps up the sliproad at the interchange, and we lose sight of him for a moment as he stumbles down into the underpass, the weight of Robert’s body shifting in the bag between us as we turn on to the exit road and see Danny climbing the steps back up to the street. We see him shaking his head, taking off his glasses and wiping them clean across his coat, looking around for anyone he knows. But there’s no one. Only Einstein, sitting at his feet and panting hard, standing and following as Danny strides away again, the way he always walks, swinging his arms too hard like he’s struggling up a steep hill or something, off towards Barford Street and the markets, turning to look at us for a moment as we drive past and leave him behind, as we weave smoothly through empty one-way streets past loading bays and bus shelters and somewhere out beyond, accelerating away up the steep ramp of the flyover towards the bruise-dark clouds of the blackened
He saw Sammy, down on the corner of Barford Street and Exchange Street. Saw him from the top of the road but he knew it was him, weren’t no one else it could be. That great long beard and the screwed-up eyes and the way he shuffled around like his feet were chained together or something. Called out as soon as he saw him. Sammy, Sammy mate, Sammy, near enough running down towards him in his usual spot on the corner with the benches and bins and flowerpots and that sculpture of fuck knows what. Sammy mate. Sammy. His voice ragged and breathless with the pace he’d kept up since climbing out of the window at the flat. Sammy pissing into a bin, waving fuck off over his shoulder. Sammy, mate, I’m looking for Laura, have you seen her, do you know where she is? Sammy turning and putting his knob away, wiping his hands on his filthy trousers. Staggering with the effort of focusing on Danny, his mouth opening and closing like he’d already forgotten the question. Danny kept moving, kept walking, couldn’t stop, looked away up Barford Street and back the way he’d come, headed off up Exchange Street and away towards the Abbey Day Centre. Not seen no cunt for days, Sammy called out, and Danny turned back to listen, walking backwards for a moment to see if there was anything more. Not seen no cunt for days, Sammy said again, almost to himself, sitting down heavily and reaching around on the floor for his bottle while a pigeon circled in from a rooftop, settled on the edge of the bin, and pecked at a sodden kebab. You can fuck off an all, Sammy said when he heard it, spitting in its general direction, the phlegm trickling through his beard as the pigeon flew up over the marketplace, the station, the multi-storey carpark and the office block and the long dwarfed spire of the
It was the wife was the problem. Tony’s wife. She had a long memory was the problem. Tony had been all right before. He’d let Danny stop round there sometimes. He’d sorted him out. They went back a long way and they had a what, they had a way of dealing with things. Like an understanding. But then he’d met that woman. Nicola. Nicolah-di-dah. Danny had turned up one time, hadn’t been there for months on account of some previous misunderstanding which would have been forgotten by then if it was down to Tony, but now it was different because she was there, Nicola, his new wife, and it was obvious she thought she knew all about him. Grabbed hold of her kids and took them upstairs, didn’t even say hello or nothing, left him standing there in the lounge thinking what the fuck have I done this time. Tony said Sorry but she’s just kind of nervous and that, with the kids and everything, you know how it is. Nervous was right. The way she swept them off upstairs like that she must have thought he was like what, infectious or something. Like he could pass on all the troubles he had as easy as sneezing. Aint that simple, Nicolah. Aint that simple at all. Takes years of
Had to find someone and tell them. Jesus, what was it, what had happened. Leave town for a week and you come back and he’s dead and everyone else vanished like a fuck like a puff of what like a giro cheque. Passed a phonebox on Exchange Street and thought about calling the police from there and telling them about Robert. Found some fag-ends on the floor outside and put them in his tin. Got as far as opening the door before he changed his mind because what was he going to say, what was
Where did you go when you left the scene?
Ran down the hill, went under the underpass, went into town.
Why did you run?
I didn’t run but I was like scared and that.
Scared of what?
Don’t know, I was just scared.
Where did you go?
Was looking for someone.
Where did you
Through the market, down past the Lion and the newsagent’s and the bookie’s. Straight over the main road and across the roundabout and round the side of the old boarded-up warehouse to the hostel where he’d seen Laura that last time. Buzzed at the door but no one answered. Looked up at the windows but couldn’t see no one there. Pints of milk keeping cold on the windowsills, trainers and boots hanging out to air, but the curtains all shut and no sign of anyone awake. Looked in through the office window and saw that what’s her name Ruth on the other side of the bars, clicking away on the computer with her face all lit up by the screen. Banged on the window but when she looked up she only pointed back at the door. Fucksake. Buzzed at the door again and some other bloke’s voice came out the speaker going Sorry, mate, we’re not open yet, usually you’d have to come back at five but we’re full tonight, is there anything we can help you with? I’m looking for someone, Danny said, I’m looking for a friend, she’s staying here, I need to come in and talk to her. Bloke goes What’s her name and when Danny said Laura he didn’t say nothing for a minute then he said She’s not here. She was here a few days ago, Danny said, where’s she gone. Bloke said I can’t tell you that I can’t help you, mate. Danny said It’s fucking cold out here will you let me in so we can have a proper conversation or what, like she must be here, she was going to stay another couple of weeks at least. I need to talk to her. Bloke said I can’t help you, mate, sorry, and if that’s your dog we don’t let dogs in either, and then he didn’t say nothing else even though Danny kept buzzing and buzzing and shouting into the speaking grille. Banging on the office window didn’t help neither, the glass was all toughened and anyway the bars were there and Ruth didn’t even look she just kept clicking away on that fucking computer and what the fuck was she looking at that was so interesting anyway and why wouldn’t they tell him where the fuck Laura had