Please imagine a house of brick and memories, of the psychic remnants of the long dead past. Of red brick and glass, symmetry, and the imprinted narratives of its generations. A house made organic by the centuries of blood from which its foundations were cut, in a street given consciousness by the weight of history, by the ancient tides of the forgotten Quaggy, the Ravensbourne – waters defaced by the flexing of the Thames wet muscle, abandoned, anonymous, (mere) tributary, never RIVER!
The swimming pool, filled in, became the grave they had imagined. A grave for six dead boys, marked with a circle of six grey stones. The freshly patted soil all scattered with grass seed, silently pecked at by the troupes of birds that line the streets in the dusk. It would grow patchy at first but thick with time, hair over a scar, the injury itself relegated to stories and anecdotes. The stones would soon wash away in the rain like a forgotten conversation. The truth is too frail to stand – fiction spreads through it like cancer, forming something truer still in its misremembered quotes, accidental embellishments, considered adaption’s, daydreamed happenings. Fiction makes new truth, thinks it into happening, a thousand different histories all authentic, all correct. And the six now amidst the layers of death that make a city, assimilated into London structure for the rest of time. They become it. It’s how cities are made. The concrete, steel and bricks are flourishes adorning a surface. The city as a concept grows of liquefying tissues, starved neuronal exchanges, voiceless apologies, unlived futures, unrecorded memories. Lucas and Tanya hold hands like lovers or children and watch the To Let sign hammered into the gravel in the front garden. As it was, as it always will be. Death always happens. It’s nothing, however much we might want it to be everything. Nothing changed. There are a thousand ways it could have happened but the end would always be the same. From the end comes the beginning. The To Let sign falters in the wind which blows the workman’s sparse fringe from his brow. And in that gentle movement, and in Lucas’s warm smile, and in the pools of Tanya’s eyes, it’s so perfectly clear. This is the end. The To Let sign, faltering in the wind which blows the workman’s sparse fringe from his brow.
Please imagine everything.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
the tenancy agreement: chapter 14
2005
November
Tanya was still in the armchair. The others all back in their seats. Semi-circular silence. She’d wiped some of the blood from her face onto a tea towel which she’d left on the floor next to her. The tea towel had a faint smell of week old lager. There was still a red sheen on her face like the remnants of artificial dyes from cheap face paints. She seemed to have calmed down. Breathing settled and staring straight ahead. She’d speak when she was ready. It was one hell of a trauma. They’d turned the overhead light on. The gravity of the situation seemed to demand it. Made the room feel like a waiting room on the platform of a train station, tiled floor and metal benches set behind thick painted wooden doors punctuated with reinforced glass windows. Tense. Hostile. Waiting for something to happen. Greg looked at his phone, then at the others. Pleading eyes. Couldn’t phone the police. Couldn’t have the police sniffing round. But then look at her. So ask her to leave or what? Get her to phone her family? What, like Lucas? Where was her dead brother? They had to get her out. It wasn’t their responsibility. She wasn’t. But fucking look at her.
“Do you think Joe’s okay?” said Greg. How long had it been? Half an hour? Twenty minutes? Less than that. What did he think he was going to do round there? “I thought he’d be back by now.”
Ezra looked at his phone. He looked worried. Craned his head back towards the window but the curtains were shut. Wouldn’t have seen anything.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” he said. Voice quiet with the weakness of disbelief. Looked at the phone again. “I’m sure he is.” Any semblance of certainty shafted by self-serving repetition.
“He’s probably forgotten what he went for,” said Tom. Sat forward in his seat. Hands on his knees. “You know Joe.”
“He’ll be back in a bit,” said Jonathan.
Speculation pierced by Tanya laughing loudly. Haw haw haw, a startling burst. They all four turned to look at her, Ezra’s mouth even slightly open. The damned social inappropriateness of it, the laughter. And in an anxious room. And fuck, the volume of it. She turned her head slightly to look at them, saw their expressions. Laughter stopped as quickly as it had started, and she sat calm once again.
“He’s dead.” She said it levelly, matter-of-fact. An observation of unquestionable, empirically verifiable certainty. A consensually accepted truism.
Ezra caught all of their eyes. This was getting wrong.
“What?” said Greg.
Tanya laughed again. Another machine gun burst, erratic, loud. Erupted uncontrolled from her swollen cut lips. Like the offset of psychosis or a terrible illness. She sounded insane. Ezra knelt down next to her again, returned his damp palm to her knee.
“Tanya?” he said. “What did you just say?”
“He’s dead. Joe’s dead.”
“What do you mean? Talk to me.”
“I am talking. He’s dead.”
Ezra stood up. Rubbed his hand over his moustache, his beard. It made a rough sound.
“You mean your husband... is Joe going to be okay over there?” He pointed to the window. “Is your husband...”
“He’s dead,” she said. Not looking at Ezra when she spoke. Like her eyes were closed, even with the lids up.
“Tanya?” Greg pushed Ezra to one side, towered over her. “Tanya? Listen to me. Who the fuck’s dead?”
“Joe. Joe’s dead.” Their raised voices made hers even slower, more measured. Spoke like something from a dream.
“How do you know that?” said Greg.
She was still looking straight ahead, straight through them, through history and life. The cut on her chest had stopped bleeding. Greg thought of Lucas and of Tanya. That horrible surprise on his face when the typewriter came down. The darkness of her imagined genitals. Scarred arms marking the unbearable passage like crosses on a calendar. A whole lifetime. What inconceivable horror. Ticking off the days. My body is a timepiece. Vividly recording the reliability of my decay. Until finally YES! Reborn! Out of life and into death! Born into death! Empty endless irresponsible death! The first and last consensual act of life is death. Thrust screaming uncertain into the world we leave it with the certainty of what we will face. Nothing.
“Did you think you’d get away with it?” she said. Eyes fixed.
Greg and Ezra looked at each other. Ezra’s face dropped. Paled behind the red-tinged beard. Mouth went slack.
“With what?” said Greg. “Tanya?”
“With what you’ve done.”
“We don’t know what...”
“He’s dead.”
“Shit,” said Tom. Something made him back up towards the wall. Spine pressed against the wooden edge of the mantelpiece.
“There’s evil through life,” she said. She rocked just gently. Her face made tiny twitches. Involuntary electrical impulses. Eyes bloodshot and teary. Blinked slowly. Isolated tears fell weighted down her blood smeared cheeks. “Everywhere you look. Even houses. In the bricks they’re made of. In the way they’re built. Just terrible doom.”
“Oh shit,” said Tom again.
“Shut her up,” said Jonathan.
“It spills into the people,” she said. Her lip was quivering as she spoke and there were many tears but she was composed like she hadn’t noticed.
“This isn’t good,” said Tom.
“Shut up,” said Greg.
And Tanya thought back. Her mother sitting immobile clutching the arms of the chair. Screaming a wretched deafening scream. Eyes and mouth stretched wide with the effort. Just screaming.
“Lucas and I,” said Tanya. “We lived here.”
And her mother was slapping herself across the face, scratching it, thin skin splitting, tearing chunks of hair loose from the scalp. From her screams came words, chanted over and over with a hoarse grotesque voice. Such blood from the scratches. Words formed like a gestating ancient language. A guttural response to stimuli and sculpted into meaning. Grunted out without breath. “DREAMLOVERDREAMLOVERDREAMLOVERDREAMLOVERDREAMLOVER”. The aching refrain of the dead Bobby Darin’s literally broken heart. The soundtrack of a collapsing mind. This yelped psychosis.
Ezra and Greg had edged away from Tanya and Tom was pacing on the other side of the room, hands clasped tight together. Jonathan had sat back down, too afraid to stand. No Joe. No Conor.
“What the hell is she doing?” said Tom.
“I’ll handle this,” said Ezra, holding his hand up. “Tanya? Everything’s going to be okay. You’ve had a terrible shock tonight.”
“Shock?” said Tom. “She knows. She fucking knows.”
“No, Tom, she’s had a shock. That’s all.” Look at that look. Fucking firm look. Her eyes still trained straight ahead. All of time in an instant.
“I know,” she said.
“Tanya,” said Greg softly. He leaned into her with delusions of comfort. Real fast she drew a knife up and dragged it hard across Greg’s forearm. He screamed when the blade pierced into the flesh. Watched it part like the smile of a sliced melon. Greg swung himself away from the knife, clutching his arm and pushing the flesh closed, and Ezra reared backwards with him. “Jesus,” said Greg.
“Shit stop it,” said Ezra. Stumbled on the edge of the blanket they’d laid over the bloodstain.
Tanya stood up from the chair, knife held out in front of her. Slashing it towards them. Grinning dumbly at their cowardice.
“Fucking bitch stabbed me,” said Greg.
“Not useful,” said Ezra. Hands held up. An empty nod to truce.
“Fuck you,” said Greg. Arm pissing blood straight through his clutched fingers.
“Fuck no one.” Ezra looked at Tom when said it.
“This is too much,” said Tom.
“Get her out of here,” said Jonathan.
“I know,” she said. Weirdly calm sounding given the circumstances.
“Shit,” said Tom.
She lunged at Greg and Ezra point first. Missed the stab and Greg impulsively punched her in the back of the head. Face glazed in sad surprise. Taut with confusion. She fell to her knees and he punched her again, in the face, fist arced wide in preparation. Tits hit the floor with the rest of her. Bloody spit in the corner of her lips. She was loosely conscious. Again Greg pushed the two halves of the wound together.
“That’ll do for Christ’s sake,” said Ezra. “We don’t want to kill her too.”
“Now what?” said Tom.
Jonathan jerked his eye across the accumulated shit left all over the room. There was a piece of rope Joe had found somewhere, too good to leave. He threw it to Ezra.
“What do you want me to do with this?” he said.
“Tie her up,” said Jonathan.
“Great, hostage taking. And murder.”
“We’re the fucking hostages,” said Greg, trying to tie a sports sock around his arm. A Daz-rinsed tourniquet. A primark medical aid. Pulling the toe end with his teeth. “And stop going on about murder.”
“She knows anyway. She said she knows.”
“Maybe she was bluffing.”
“She wasn’t fucking bluffing,” said Ezra.
“Just tie her up,” said Jonathan. “It’ll buy us some time if nothing else.”
Greg and Ezra heaved her onto a wooden dining chair and tied her wrists together behind her back, then to the chair and to her ankles. Tom picked the knife off the floor and threw it behind the TV. Tanya blinked herself to awareness. Felt the rope on her wrists.
“Ropes?” she said. “This what you’re into Ezra? Gent in conversation, animal in the bedroom?”
Ezra folded his arms. “No,” he said. So proudly. Moral paragon etched onto his future headstone.
“Pity,” she said. Turned to Greg. “How about you? You like to see a woman bound? In your control? Doing exactly what you say? Is that the way you like it?”
He tried not to look at the shape her body made between her legs. The gaps and the declivities. The imaginable feel of her cunt in his mouth. Not a good time.
“Fuck you,” he said. “Beats getting stabbed.”
“Stabbed? That was a scratch. Your friend Joe – he knows what a stabbing is.”
Greg slapped her once in the face. Split her lip anew. Caught it on his ring. She looked surprised, ran the tip of her tongue over the blood. Smiled as she did it. Ezra pushed Greg back, eyes narrowed with admonitory mirth.
“Hit me again Greg,” she said. “Be a man. What about you Tom? Jonathan? I bet you two want to touch me. If you could stop touching each other.”
“What the fuck have you done to Joe?” Greg shouted the question like a punk lyric.
“I haven’t done anything,” she said. “I’ve been here with you.”
“Tanya,” said Ezra. “I know you’re angry, and you may have a right to be, but just tell us where Joe is.”
“Angry? Why would I be angry? Because you killed my brother?”
“Where’s Joe?” He spat by mistake. He had started crying but he didn’t seem upset.
“I told you already.”
“Where?”
“He’s dead,” she said. Newsreader cool.
“You fucking...” Greg had balled his fist and drew it back but Ezra restrained him, both hands flat on his chest.
“Take it easy Greg,” he said.
“Take it easy? She said Joe’s dead.”
“How would she know if he was? She’s been sitting right here.”
“Oh he is dead,” she said. “Lucas did it.”
They all stopped in their tracks. Like the world just ended. Somehow it felt inevitable. No fresh starts. No clean breaks. Everything will always fuck you in the end.
“Lucas?” said Tom. Cleared his throat. Mocked by breathlessness. Buried alive inside these cheap painted walls. Upturned ashtrays his eternal pillow. Death shroud denim. He felt his lip moving of its own accord. Animated by the strain. Then both of them. Whipped his mouth up sharp into a grimace and pinched his face up. Did it when he cried too. Quivering bottom set against sneering top. Nerve damage smile.
“You remember Lucas?” she said. “Cripple? Landlord? My brother?”
“Of course. It’s just...”
“Yes?”
“Isn’t Lucas...” It was Greg. Both fists still clenched. Blue eyes soaked in urgent life.
“Is he?” said Tanya.
The dull light of the upright lamp flickered off then straight back on.
“This might be bad,” said Jonathan.
“You could say that, yeah,” said Ezra. Choking years of friendship with mouthfuls of disdain. “One house and two friends missing, presumed fucked. I’d say that’s pretty bad, yes. Shit, even.”
Tanya was giggling. With all the disembodied emptiness of canned laughter. Disconnected from actual.
“I just...” said Tom.
“What?” said Ezra. Snapped out, the cunt.
“I don’t understand why.”
Tanya giggling.
“Oh please. You know what’s happening here as well as she does. We all know. We were all there, weren’t we? We all did it, didn’t we?”
“Fuck, Ezra, he was dead,” said Greg. Blood curdling out of the sock’s fibrous parameters. A shapeless bargain cum spectator to the dying present. “It was a mistake, a terrible mistake, but the man was fucking dead.”
“We. Killed. Him. Do you get that? We killed him.”
The lamp flickered again and left shadows imprinted in instant memory like flash photography. Flickered like it was going to blow out. Tom was gulping in short breaths. He looked at the ceiling in a panic. Tanya was beaming, head angled up to the ceiling too. The other three looked up. Fucking cardboard pillar, a shitty totem.
“What was that,” said Tom. Hissed.
“What?” Greg and Jonathan said it in unison, like simultaneous prayer.
There was creaking from upstairs. The sound of floorboards being walked over. It moved across the whole length of Greg’s bedroom. Definitely footsteps. Even made the lightshade move. They followed the sound with their eyes. Something was up there. Took a few steps then stopped. Then it started again, louder, heavier, like it was fucking running about, just back and forth, one end of the room to the other. Running and stamping its feet.
“No one else is here right?” said Greg.
“Fuck, like who?” said Ezra. More aggressive the more frightened he got.
“Conor?” said Jonathan. Hopeful. Stupid.
Ezra was looking at the ceiling. “I don’t think Conor’s coming back tonight,” he said.
More creaking. Even louder. Fucking sounded like running, to the bedroom door. Heard the whine of hinges. Tom, Greg and Ezra all crept towards the hallway. Crushed by the silence they could hear their own sweat fall. So quiet. Except the creaking floorboards. The door opening. And thumping, getting faster.
“Shit what is that?” said Tom.
Ezra and Greg told him to shut up. Thumping. Things don’t just thump. Fucking hammering.
“Oh fuck,” he said.
“Oh god please be quiet,” said Greg, straining to hear, to find sense in the noise. No one sure who he was talking to.
They were peering out of the door, into the dark hall, bulb long smashed in the drunken revelry they tried never to regret. A light flicked on in one the bedrooms upstairs. They saw the glare grow out of the dark. Still creaking. Still thumping.
“Oh shit guys,” said Tom.
Greg looked back into the corner of the living room where Jonathan was standing. Saw Lucas behind him. Bloody and fucked up. Gnarled and bent in the wheelchair like a tree felled in thunder. Caught a glimpse of him out the corner of his eye. Flashed there like a camera bulb. Like a floater. A zombie speck dashed momentarily in reluctant visual parameters. Grin spread over Lucas’s shit face. A split second thing. Anomalous peripheral vision. Dead Lucas.
“Jesus!” said Greg. He fell backward onto Tom and Ezra. “Get the fuck out of there.”
Jonathan span around to look behind him. Lucas there, Lucas gone. Greg couldn’t take his eyes from the corner. He was panting, fingers clutched to the paint of the door frame. Knew he’d seen it but the corner left empty. Death hung in the room like weird incense. Jonathan too shit scared to move again. Greg mumbling: you see it? It was still dark in the hallway except for the faint light from the upstairs bedroom. Something was wrong. Something else. Jonathan’s eyes jerked to Tanya. Gave him the movement his body wouldn’t. Then to Ezra. Looked to his side.
“Where’s Tom?” he said. “Tom?”
He wasn’t there. Had been right at Ezra’s side but then – right then – he wasn’t there. The thumping from upstairs got faster. Louder. Frantic thumping it swelled under the weight of Tom’s absence.
“Come on,” said Greg, turning to the stairs. He flicked the light switch. Didn’t come on. The predictability would have felt like parody if he hadn’t been so terrified. Ezra was still in the doorway, framed by the viscous light of the living room.
“Keep an eye on her,” he said. To Jonathan.
“She’s not getting up.”
“Just keep an eye on her. Better to be sure.”
“You want me to stay here on my own?” said Jonathan. Red rimmed brown eyes built up to shameless tears. Something about blue jeans made him feel vulnerable.
“Yes. Just for a minute.”
“God.” Tanya was staring at him.
Greg was craning his neck, trying to look up the stairs without going up them. Still the thumping. Fucking neighbours didn’t complain about that.
“Didn’t I ask you to change this fucking light bulb?” he said.
“Where’s Tom?”
“Shut up. I don’t know.”
“Christ,” said Jonathan in the living room. “Where the fuck is he?”
“I want you to shut up,” said Greg. Had to almost shout it over the noise. Trying to peer up. Then a scream. Wretched, hollow, torn out. Terrible. A dying scream. Knew it was Tom before it had even finished. The thumping stopped. The bedroom light flicked off. Greg felt the darkness smother him like cold water.
“Come on,” said Greg. Started climbing the stairs.
“Greg I’m not sure how sensible this is,” said Ezra.
“Fuck sensible. None of this is sensible.”
He was climbing up slowly, one step at a time. Silent sweating. Ezra squirming in discomfort, lingering at the bottom.
“Greg. Come back down here. Maybe it’s better to think about this. Down here.”
“We’ve got to find Tom you bastard. Get up these stairs.”
“I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
“Shit.” Shouted.
“What? What is it?” Nothing. “Greg? Fuck. Greg?”
Upstairs it fell silent. Except creaking floorboards. They started again in the front bedroom. In Greg’s room. Couldn’t be Greg. Greg was still on the stairs. But it was creaking. Louder. It was fucking footsteps. It must have been. He could hear them.
“Greg?” said Ezra. Traces of panic, like echoes, memories. Still at the bottom, in the hallway. “What the fuck’s going on up there? Greg?” Cocked his ear up but couldn’t hear shit. Just that creaking. “Greg?”
Greg was awkwardly spread on the carpet at the top of the stairs. Tripped over a pile of socks. In his head he blamed Joe as he fell. He picked himself up. Four doors branched off of the landing, all then in darkness, four doors closed. Fuck, he said, to himself. He could hear Ezra calling him, but could hear the creaking floorboards over the top of that. The thumping started again. Quiet first but quickly louder. And a weird kind of slapping sound. Like slapping a wet thigh. Primed buttocks. Leather hand run down the length of dead livestock. Now he was up there it wasn’t clear where it was coming from. Sounded like everywhere. He reached for the handle of the door on the left. Back bedroom. Tom’s. Grown of dead foetus memory, incest, latterly the darkened blow jobs of tender faces, attentively done. And fucking. Thanking each other at the end of it. Greg pushed the door open, turned the light on, peered in. it was empty. He left the light on and walked across the landing to the other back bedroom, opened the door, turned the light on. Empty. Behind him music started abruptly, thrust into life like an alarm clock, blaring out of the room he had just left. It was The Birthday Party. Loud as fuck. Greg rushed back to the room, found the cheap paper lightshade swinging from side to side, as if it had been pushed. Dark rhythmically swallowed the corners of the room with the arc of the swinging light. Left changeable shadows. Made his brain work oddly, disorientated. He grabbed the bulb, screamed at his own burnt fingers. Screamed again at Ezra filling the door. Could see he was speaking but couldn’t hear him over the feedback, just fish lips impatiently chewing the words out. Greg turned the music off.
“What did you find?” said Ezra.
“Nothing.” Greg snapped it. “I was looking but you came up here and scared the shit out of me.”
Ezra’s eyes, pointed over Greg’s shoulder, widened. He instinctively took two steps backwards. Screeched it out: “Greg!”
Greg turned around and Lucas was behind him. Slowly, jerkily standing up from the wheelchair, like a rehabilitated veteran. The chair creaked like dead metal in the crushing silence. Greg’s voice lost to his own fear. Lucas was grinning. One of his eyes almost rotted away. The smile tore his bottom lip off and it hung loosely to his face. The skin sagged off of him like strangers clothes. Digesting itself. He straightened his weak legs. Something horrific about his unfamiliar movements. Ezra watched, paralysed. The irony. Paralysed by a cripples motion. Greg coughed out a scream. Lucas plunged his gloved hand into Greg’s open mouth, clutched onto his tongue, thick slimy muscle he clasped in the ruptured palm of his glove, and started to pull. Greg’s eyes stretched wide he watched it, felt the tongue pulled, saw Lucas’s yellow tinged skin dripping like wax around the cuff of his glove, heard the buckled bones of his legs and spine snapping back into life, tried to scream around the glove, felt his tongue splitting, tearing somewhere awful, felt the rush of blood, rich and meaty, felt it pouring down his throat. Ezra staggered backwards, staggered away. Lucas was silent. No, he was groaning. No, he was laughing. He placed his other hand on Greg’s forehead and gave a certain yank. Pulled the tongue free. A fountain of blood erupted from Greg’s mouth. Ezra could hear him choking on it. Odd how it sounded so full of life. Lucas held the muscle in his hand. It shone like a red trophy. Ezra backed further away. On desperate hands and knees Greg crawled, half sobbing, blood pouring from his mouth, spewing from the severed tongue stump, reached one hand out to Ezra, tried to speak, to plead. Ezra looked at him, at the blood, at Lucas, and he didn’t move. In a flash Lucas leapt onto Greg and pulled him back into the bedroom. He drove his fingers into Greg’s eyes sockets. The globes burst in aqueous humor and vitreous body, jelly liquid mixed with blood and dripping like aspic down Lucas’s probing thumbs. Greg was honking a kind of scream, mustered it from his vocal chords, and Lucas pulled him further into the room by the ankles, then sunk his teeth in Greg’s varying body parts. The fleshy underarm. The throat. Ezra’s face contorted, horrified, and he backed right away, felt the banister on his buttocks before he fell over the top of it, down onto the stairs below, down into the hallway. The bedroom door slammed shut.
Cut forehead but Ezra got straight to his feet. A scratch really. Nearly leapt into the living room.
“Jonathan,” he said oblivious. “We better get out.” Jonathan wasn’t there. Empty corner. Ezra turned in a panic to where Tanya had been sitting. Gone. Rope left in a coiled pile on the floor. chair upturned, her blood printed onto the cheap upholstery in thick neat lines. Ezra crept deeper in and saw Jonathan on the floor, edged behind the TV, like he’d tried to get away. His throat was slit and his stomach carved open, intestines tugged out and spread like display sausages across the window of his torso, onto the carpet around him. Yards of the shit. Ezra screamed and puked. Force of the regurgitation felt oddly relieving. He let it keep coming, retching and retching, gasping his empty gut back out and clutching onto the mantelpiece for support. The creaking and thumping was deafening. Felt like the ceiling’d cave in, the cornices crack like the opening earth to swallow him, blood pouring from the wounded house, the architecture humanised by generations of violence. The lamp flickered on and off. Jonathan dead on the floor. Ezra grabbed at his temples with both hands, trying to squeeze the noise away, then ran out of the house.
Head spinning in the street. There was a light on in the neighbour’s house. What was he supposed to say? He asked himself the question and hammered on their door. Still clutching his head with the other hand. Drown out even the memory. Blood was pooled on his eyebrows from the cut on his forehead. Clothes soaked in the juices of too many people. He was stepping from one foot to the other. Tony opened the door. Warmth, light and soft jazz hit Ezra like a backhand, muffled conversation somewhere in the house. Tony’s mouth dropped, split his face like an unmanned ventriloquist’s dummy.
“Ezra? What in God’s name?”
“Please,” said Ezra. Grabbing both his shoulders with bloody digits. “I need help.”
“What’s happened?” Looking at the blood on his face. His clothes. “Are you hurt?”
“Please. Please let me in.”
“Ezra, we’ve got company. It’s very late.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m in so much trouble.” Balls taut with panic. Blue eyes wide. “Please help me.”
“I can see that Ezra.” Soothing Tony. Man knew how to manage. Practised reassurance. “But this is no time to...”
“Please, I need to come in.”
Ezra pushed past Tony and into the house, straight into the living room. Helplessly drawn to the life of voices, toasting glasses. The mundane sounds of domestic normality. The smell of finished meals. The beating heart of a kind of existence. Barely looked up when he spoke.
“I’m sorry to barge in like this but...”
“Hello Ezra.”
That voice. Ezra stopped in his tracks like he had ceased to be. Dropped to his knees. Smirking legs betrayed him. Lifted his eyes to see it.
Lucas. Lucas in the wheelchair. Not bloody. Not beaten. Not rotting. Not fucked up. Not congealing, decaying, hideous Lucas. Just Lucas. Washed blonde hair spiked in the right gentle places. Tanned face handsome, white tooth smile. Eyes shone in candlelight, in halogen ceiling spotlights. Gloves meticulous. Clothes even more so. It was him alright. Untouched. Glowing with a life Ezra had never seen. Tanya sat next to him. Simple evening dress. No wounds, no blood, no genitals or screaming. She did look beautiful. Soft. They held hands, her index finger folded caressing into his palm. Ezra felt himself crying. Wondered how wet tears could burn his face. When he rolled his eyes upwards he saw a fringe of blood.
“Lucas,” he said. He spluttered. “You’re dead. We...”
They all laughed. Lucas. Tanya. Tony. His wife. Laughed until it was oppressive. Laughed even further. Ezra struggled to his feet, knocked into the coffee table. Red wine spilt. Bottle and two glasses soaking into thick beige shag. Where’s the salt when you need it? Laughter doubled, swelling all the more. Pulsed around him like a growing tumour. The sound given physical properties by its own recurrence. Became a thing itself. Swallowing him in the force of its own audibility. He staggered blindly out of the door, across the hall, into the dining room. Had to blink to get some focus back, and there they were. Five friends gone corpse, propped sitting up around the table like an uncomfortable dinner party. Conor: face lifted off like a manhole and raw muscle where it used to be, but unmistakably him, greying hairs even blood couldn’t hide. Joe: throat hacked open and bled like a pig. Tom: head bludgeoned in and left half the size, skull shattered to sharp thick fragments reminiscent of ancient pottery archaeologically unearthed, a complex jigsaw rich in brain, the whole thing sunk in like a popped balloon. Jonathan: guts left out like worms in the rain, like a carnivorous gastronomic delicacy left to prime, throat so slit the head only just stayed on. Greg: jaw broken two fists wide, mandible hung flapping, hell-red mouth an ancient blood pool, gooey pits where eyes once blinked, chunks of flesh torn toothily from the whole. Each had a glass of wine in front of them, white for Conor – such attention to detail! – and red the rest. Conical party hats in yellow, blue and green had been strapped with elastic to their heads. Tom’s sat uneven, slumping into the crushed remnants of his sagging parietal, the scalp like a loose sheet of turf scuffed up at the corners but draped temporarily over the jagged bone. Ezra screamed again, screamed until his nostrils stung. Backed out of the door and into Tony. He pulled him into the living room. What jolly expressions on their faces! Tony stripped Ezra’s dress off, tore it down the middle, and swept everything off of the coffee table with a stroke of his arm, glasses and Guardian newspapers and TV remotes. He slammed Ezra’s long weak body onto its surface – wood buckling under the impact, splinters in the flesh – and tied his hands up underneath it, table edges cutting into armpits, again into biceps. Lucas and Tanya both applauded. Rapt faces: the pride; the humour; the stimulation.
“Please,” said Ezra. “Please don’t. I’ll do anything.”
“It’s okay, Ezra,” said Lucas gently.
“Lucas?” said Tony. He was circling the table, his eyes fixed on Ezra. “May I?” Lucas nodded. Tony clapped his hands together, crooked smile drawn over his face. He walked heavily out of the room – there wasn’t the space to run past the antique furniture – but was almost straight back in, carrying a large toolbox and a couple of plastic sheets. Ezra was gasping, trying to catch his failed breath, sobbing. Tony laid the plastic around the edges of the table. The toolbox had a yellow handle.
“Oh God. Please don’t kill me.” Somehow Ezra got the words out. He thought he was going to be sick. He could barely turn his head. Lucas and Tanya were at the wrong end of the table for him to see. Tony’s wife had hitched her skirt up to her waist and had one leg over the arm of the sofa, and had her middle and index fingers in a V around her clitoris. She sunk them into her cunt every time Ezra begged, closed her eyes to really listen with every sob he honked out. “I beg you,” he said. He was still crying.
Tony lifted the catches of his toolbox and took out a thin hacksaw. The tools were meticulously organised. He ran his finger across the blade and nodded approvingly. It had cut into his finger a little. He hoisted up Ezra’s left leg and started to saw into the back of his knee in long even strokes. The ligaments snapped like wet tea towels. Ezra was screaming so loudly. Tony hacked on, arm trembling slightly with the effort, flecks of spatter and skin airbrushed over the tabletop and the sheets of plastic in a wealth of red tones. Lucas turned up anonymous saxophone music to drown out the noise. Tony stopped sawing and dabbed at his brow with the back of his hand, then put the hacksaw down carefully onto the plastic sheet. He knelt down by the toolbox and examined the contents. Settled on the claw hammer. It felt right in his hands, the weight, the arc, the angle, like it was made for him. He looked at Lucas and smiled cheerfully, even thankfully. Lucas was beaming too. A beautiful modern friendship. Tony gently tapped Ezra with the hammer as though he were testing his reflexes, five or six times, each in different places – kneecap, shoulder, fingers, forehead. Weighing up the resistance and the potential.
“Open your eyes please Ezra,” he said, softly drawing the claw end down the length of Ezra’s cheeks. Ezra’s chin was shuddering without control. “Open your eyes.”
“I’d do as he says Ezra,” said Lucas.
“Open your eyes,” said Tony again.
Ezra tried to pry them open. In instinct they had clasped tight shut like molluscs. He couldn’t see properly because his eyes were so teary, his vision drowned beneath their water. His whole body was shaking. Tony held the hammer just above Ezra’s mouth, tapped very gently on his teeth. Ezra could feel the metal on his lips. The weight of it on his teeth was nauseating. He puked a small amount, odd specks foamed out of his mouth and onto the hammer, the rest he swallowed back down. The hydrochloric acid burnt against his throat, fucked over by his own stupid body. Lucas was rubbing his gloved hand up and down Tanya’s leg, inside her thigh, left it lingering around the surface of her cunt.
“Please,” Ezra said. The speech erupted in fits and starts. It sounded involuntary, his body’s last ditch response to stimuli. Snot was pooling out of his flared nostrils. “Lucas. Please.”
“Don’t ask me, Ezra,” said Lucas. Fingers submerged in his sisters genitals. Tony’s wife working her own.
“We had a deal,” said Ezra. His sobs sounded ancient. The hammer was so close to Ezra’s mouth that it was distorting his words.
“No Ezra. No deal.”
Tony’s muscles were primed for death. The hammer caught the lamp light. The hammer came down.
November
Tanya was still in the armchair. The others all back in their seats. Semi-circular silence. She’d wiped some of the blood from her face onto a tea towel which she’d left on the floor next to her. The tea towel had a faint smell of week old lager. There was still a red sheen on her face like the remnants of artificial dyes from cheap face paints. She seemed to have calmed down. Breathing settled and staring straight ahead. She’d speak when she was ready. It was one hell of a trauma. They’d turned the overhead light on. The gravity of the situation seemed to demand it. Made the room feel like a waiting room on the platform of a train station, tiled floor and metal benches set behind thick painted wooden doors punctuated with reinforced glass windows. Tense. Hostile. Waiting for something to happen. Greg looked at his phone, then at the others. Pleading eyes. Couldn’t phone the police. Couldn’t have the police sniffing round. But then look at her. So ask her to leave or what? Get her to phone her family? What, like Lucas? Where was her dead brother? They had to get her out. It wasn’t their responsibility. She wasn’t. But fucking look at her.
“Do you think Joe’s okay?” said Greg. How long had it been? Half an hour? Twenty minutes? Less than that. What did he think he was going to do round there? “I thought he’d be back by now.”
Ezra looked at his phone. He looked worried. Craned his head back towards the window but the curtains were shut. Wouldn’t have seen anything.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” he said. Voice quiet with the weakness of disbelief. Looked at the phone again. “I’m sure he is.” Any semblance of certainty shafted by self-serving repetition.
“He’s probably forgotten what he went for,” said Tom. Sat forward in his seat. Hands on his knees. “You know Joe.”
“He’ll be back in a bit,” said Jonathan.
Speculation pierced by Tanya laughing loudly. Haw haw haw, a startling burst. They all four turned to look at her, Ezra’s mouth even slightly open. The damned social inappropriateness of it, the laughter. And in an anxious room. And fuck, the volume of it. She turned her head slightly to look at them, saw their expressions. Laughter stopped as quickly as it had started, and she sat calm once again.
“He’s dead.” She said it levelly, matter-of-fact. An observation of unquestionable, empirically verifiable certainty. A consensually accepted truism.
Ezra caught all of their eyes. This was getting wrong.
“What?” said Greg.
Tanya laughed again. Another machine gun burst, erratic, loud. Erupted uncontrolled from her swollen cut lips. Like the offset of psychosis or a terrible illness. She sounded insane. Ezra knelt down next to her again, returned his damp palm to her knee.
“Tanya?” he said. “What did you just say?”
“He’s dead. Joe’s dead.”
“What do you mean? Talk to me.”
“I am talking. He’s dead.”
Ezra stood up. Rubbed his hand over his moustache, his beard. It made a rough sound.
“You mean your husband... is Joe going to be okay over there?” He pointed to the window. “Is your husband...”
“He’s dead,” she said. Not looking at Ezra when she spoke. Like her eyes were closed, even with the lids up.
“Tanya?” Greg pushed Ezra to one side, towered over her. “Tanya? Listen to me. Who the fuck’s dead?”
“Joe. Joe’s dead.” Their raised voices made hers even slower, more measured. Spoke like something from a dream.
“How do you know that?” said Greg.
She was still looking straight ahead, straight through them, through history and life. The cut on her chest had stopped bleeding. Greg thought of Lucas and of Tanya. That horrible surprise on his face when the typewriter came down. The darkness of her imagined genitals. Scarred arms marking the unbearable passage like crosses on a calendar. A whole lifetime. What inconceivable horror. Ticking off the days. My body is a timepiece. Vividly recording the reliability of my decay. Until finally YES! Reborn! Out of life and into death! Born into death! Empty endless irresponsible death! The first and last consensual act of life is death. Thrust screaming uncertain into the world we leave it with the certainty of what we will face. Nothing.
“Did you think you’d get away with it?” she said. Eyes fixed.
Greg and Ezra looked at each other. Ezra’s face dropped. Paled behind the red-tinged beard. Mouth went slack.
“With what?” said Greg. “Tanya?”
“With what you’ve done.”
“We don’t know what...”
“He’s dead.”
“Shit,” said Tom. Something made him back up towards the wall. Spine pressed against the wooden edge of the mantelpiece.
“There’s evil through life,” she said. She rocked just gently. Her face made tiny twitches. Involuntary electrical impulses. Eyes bloodshot and teary. Blinked slowly. Isolated tears fell weighted down her blood smeared cheeks. “Everywhere you look. Even houses. In the bricks they’re made of. In the way they’re built. Just terrible doom.”
“Oh shit,” said Tom again.
“Shut her up,” said Jonathan.
“It spills into the people,” she said. Her lip was quivering as she spoke and there were many tears but she was composed like she hadn’t noticed.
“This isn’t good,” said Tom.
“Shut up,” said Greg.
And Tanya thought back. Her mother sitting immobile clutching the arms of the chair. Screaming a wretched deafening scream. Eyes and mouth stretched wide with the effort. Just screaming.
“Lucas and I,” said Tanya. “We lived here.”
And her mother was slapping herself across the face, scratching it, thin skin splitting, tearing chunks of hair loose from the scalp. From her screams came words, chanted over and over with a hoarse grotesque voice. Such blood from the scratches. Words formed like a gestating ancient language. A guttural response to stimuli and sculpted into meaning. Grunted out without breath. “DREAMLOVERDREAMLOVERDREAMLOVERDREAMLOVERDREAMLOVER”. The aching refrain of the dead Bobby Darin’s literally broken heart. The soundtrack of a collapsing mind. This yelped psychosis.
Ezra and Greg had edged away from Tanya and Tom was pacing on the other side of the room, hands clasped tight together. Jonathan had sat back down, too afraid to stand. No Joe. No Conor.
“What the hell is she doing?” said Tom.
“I’ll handle this,” said Ezra, holding his hand up. “Tanya? Everything’s going to be okay. You’ve had a terrible shock tonight.”
“Shock?” said Tom. “She knows. She fucking knows.”
“No, Tom, she’s had a shock. That’s all.” Look at that look. Fucking firm look. Her eyes still trained straight ahead. All of time in an instant.
“I know,” she said.
“Tanya,” said Greg softly. He leaned into her with delusions of comfort. Real fast she drew a knife up and dragged it hard across Greg’s forearm. He screamed when the blade pierced into the flesh. Watched it part like the smile of a sliced melon. Greg swung himself away from the knife, clutching his arm and pushing the flesh closed, and Ezra reared backwards with him. “Jesus,” said Greg.
“Shit stop it,” said Ezra. Stumbled on the edge of the blanket they’d laid over the bloodstain.
Tanya stood up from the chair, knife held out in front of her. Slashing it towards them. Grinning dumbly at their cowardice.
“Fucking bitch stabbed me,” said Greg.
“Not useful,” said Ezra. Hands held up. An empty nod to truce.
“Fuck you,” said Greg. Arm pissing blood straight through his clutched fingers.
“Fuck no one.” Ezra looked at Tom when said it.
“This is too much,” said Tom.
“Get her out of here,” said Jonathan.
“I know,” she said. Weirdly calm sounding given the circumstances.
“Shit,” said Tom.
She lunged at Greg and Ezra point first. Missed the stab and Greg impulsively punched her in the back of the head. Face glazed in sad surprise. Taut with confusion. She fell to her knees and he punched her again, in the face, fist arced wide in preparation. Tits hit the floor with the rest of her. Bloody spit in the corner of her lips. She was loosely conscious. Again Greg pushed the two halves of the wound together.
“That’ll do for Christ’s sake,” said Ezra. “We don’t want to kill her too.”
“Now what?” said Tom.
Jonathan jerked his eye across the accumulated shit left all over the room. There was a piece of rope Joe had found somewhere, too good to leave. He threw it to Ezra.
“What do you want me to do with this?” he said.
“Tie her up,” said Jonathan.
“Great, hostage taking. And murder.”
“We’re the fucking hostages,” said Greg, trying to tie a sports sock around his arm. A Daz-rinsed tourniquet. A primark medical aid. Pulling the toe end with his teeth. “And stop going on about murder.”
“She knows anyway. She said she knows.”
“Maybe she was bluffing.”
“She wasn’t fucking bluffing,” said Ezra.
“Just tie her up,” said Jonathan. “It’ll buy us some time if nothing else.”
Greg and Ezra heaved her onto a wooden dining chair and tied her wrists together behind her back, then to the chair and to her ankles. Tom picked the knife off the floor and threw it behind the TV. Tanya blinked herself to awareness. Felt the rope on her wrists.
“Ropes?” she said. “This what you’re into Ezra? Gent in conversation, animal in the bedroom?”
Ezra folded his arms. “No,” he said. So proudly. Moral paragon etched onto his future headstone.
“Pity,” she said. Turned to Greg. “How about you? You like to see a woman bound? In your control? Doing exactly what you say? Is that the way you like it?”
He tried not to look at the shape her body made between her legs. The gaps and the declivities. The imaginable feel of her cunt in his mouth. Not a good time.
“Fuck you,” he said. “Beats getting stabbed.”
“Stabbed? That was a scratch. Your friend Joe – he knows what a stabbing is.”
Greg slapped her once in the face. Split her lip anew. Caught it on his ring. She looked surprised, ran the tip of her tongue over the blood. Smiled as she did it. Ezra pushed Greg back, eyes narrowed with admonitory mirth.
“Hit me again Greg,” she said. “Be a man. What about you Tom? Jonathan? I bet you two want to touch me. If you could stop touching each other.”
“What the fuck have you done to Joe?” Greg shouted the question like a punk lyric.
“I haven’t done anything,” she said. “I’ve been here with you.”
“Tanya,” said Ezra. “I know you’re angry, and you may have a right to be, but just tell us where Joe is.”
“Angry? Why would I be angry? Because you killed my brother?”
“Where’s Joe?” He spat by mistake. He had started crying but he didn’t seem upset.
“I told you already.”
“Where?”
“He’s dead,” she said. Newsreader cool.
“You fucking...” Greg had balled his fist and drew it back but Ezra restrained him, both hands flat on his chest.
“Take it easy Greg,” he said.
“Take it easy? She said Joe’s dead.”
“How would she know if he was? She’s been sitting right here.”
“Oh he is dead,” she said. “Lucas did it.”
They all stopped in their tracks. Like the world just ended. Somehow it felt inevitable. No fresh starts. No clean breaks. Everything will always fuck you in the end.
“Lucas?” said Tom. Cleared his throat. Mocked by breathlessness. Buried alive inside these cheap painted walls. Upturned ashtrays his eternal pillow. Death shroud denim. He felt his lip moving of its own accord. Animated by the strain. Then both of them. Whipped his mouth up sharp into a grimace and pinched his face up. Did it when he cried too. Quivering bottom set against sneering top. Nerve damage smile.
“You remember Lucas?” she said. “Cripple? Landlord? My brother?”
“Of course. It’s just...”
“Yes?”
“Isn’t Lucas...” It was Greg. Both fists still clenched. Blue eyes soaked in urgent life.
“Is he?” said Tanya.
The dull light of the upright lamp flickered off then straight back on.
“This might be bad,” said Jonathan.
“You could say that, yeah,” said Ezra. Choking years of friendship with mouthfuls of disdain. “One house and two friends missing, presumed fucked. I’d say that’s pretty bad, yes. Shit, even.”
Tanya was giggling. With all the disembodied emptiness of canned laughter. Disconnected from actual.
“I just...” said Tom.
“What?” said Ezra. Snapped out, the cunt.
“I don’t understand why.”
Tanya giggling.
“Oh please. You know what’s happening here as well as she does. We all know. We were all there, weren’t we? We all did it, didn’t we?”
“Fuck, Ezra, he was dead,” said Greg. Blood curdling out of the sock’s fibrous parameters. A shapeless bargain cum spectator to the dying present. “It was a mistake, a terrible mistake, but the man was fucking dead.”
“We. Killed. Him. Do you get that? We killed him.”
The lamp flickered again and left shadows imprinted in instant memory like flash photography. Flickered like it was going to blow out. Tom was gulping in short breaths. He looked at the ceiling in a panic. Tanya was beaming, head angled up to the ceiling too. The other three looked up. Fucking cardboard pillar, a shitty totem.
“What was that,” said Tom. Hissed.
“What?” Greg and Jonathan said it in unison, like simultaneous prayer.
There was creaking from upstairs. The sound of floorboards being walked over. It moved across the whole length of Greg’s bedroom. Definitely footsteps. Even made the lightshade move. They followed the sound with their eyes. Something was up there. Took a few steps then stopped. Then it started again, louder, heavier, like it was fucking running about, just back and forth, one end of the room to the other. Running and stamping its feet.
“No one else is here right?” said Greg.
“Fuck, like who?” said Ezra. More aggressive the more frightened he got.
“Conor?” said Jonathan. Hopeful. Stupid.
Ezra was looking at the ceiling. “I don’t think Conor’s coming back tonight,” he said.
More creaking. Even louder. Fucking sounded like running, to the bedroom door. Heard the whine of hinges. Tom, Greg and Ezra all crept towards the hallway. Crushed by the silence they could hear their own sweat fall. So quiet. Except the creaking floorboards. The door opening. And thumping, getting faster.
“Shit what is that?” said Tom.
Ezra and Greg told him to shut up. Thumping. Things don’t just thump. Fucking hammering.
“Oh fuck,” he said.
“Oh god please be quiet,” said Greg, straining to hear, to find sense in the noise. No one sure who he was talking to.
They were peering out of the door, into the dark hall, bulb long smashed in the drunken revelry they tried never to regret. A light flicked on in one the bedrooms upstairs. They saw the glare grow out of the dark. Still creaking. Still thumping.
“Oh shit guys,” said Tom.
Greg looked back into the corner of the living room where Jonathan was standing. Saw Lucas behind him. Bloody and fucked up. Gnarled and bent in the wheelchair like a tree felled in thunder. Caught a glimpse of him out the corner of his eye. Flashed there like a camera bulb. Like a floater. A zombie speck dashed momentarily in reluctant visual parameters. Grin spread over Lucas’s shit face. A split second thing. Anomalous peripheral vision. Dead Lucas.
“Jesus!” said Greg. He fell backward onto Tom and Ezra. “Get the fuck out of there.”
Jonathan span around to look behind him. Lucas there, Lucas gone. Greg couldn’t take his eyes from the corner. He was panting, fingers clutched to the paint of the door frame. Knew he’d seen it but the corner left empty. Death hung in the room like weird incense. Jonathan too shit scared to move again. Greg mumbling: you see it? It was still dark in the hallway except for the faint light from the upstairs bedroom. Something was wrong. Something else. Jonathan’s eyes jerked to Tanya. Gave him the movement his body wouldn’t. Then to Ezra. Looked to his side.
“Where’s Tom?” he said. “Tom?”
He wasn’t there. Had been right at Ezra’s side but then – right then – he wasn’t there. The thumping from upstairs got faster. Louder. Frantic thumping it swelled under the weight of Tom’s absence.
“Come on,” said Greg, turning to the stairs. He flicked the light switch. Didn’t come on. The predictability would have felt like parody if he hadn’t been so terrified. Ezra was still in the doorway, framed by the viscous light of the living room.
“Keep an eye on her,” he said. To Jonathan.
“She’s not getting up.”
“Just keep an eye on her. Better to be sure.”
“You want me to stay here on my own?” said Jonathan. Red rimmed brown eyes built up to shameless tears. Something about blue jeans made him feel vulnerable.
“Yes. Just for a minute.”
“God.” Tanya was staring at him.
Greg was craning his neck, trying to look up the stairs without going up them. Still the thumping. Fucking neighbours didn’t complain about that.
“Didn’t I ask you to change this fucking light bulb?” he said.
“Where’s Tom?”
“Shut up. I don’t know.”
“Christ,” said Jonathan in the living room. “Where the fuck is he?”
“I want you to shut up,” said Greg. Had to almost shout it over the noise. Trying to peer up. Then a scream. Wretched, hollow, torn out. Terrible. A dying scream. Knew it was Tom before it had even finished. The thumping stopped. The bedroom light flicked off. Greg felt the darkness smother him like cold water.
“Come on,” said Greg. Started climbing the stairs.
“Greg I’m not sure how sensible this is,” said Ezra.
“Fuck sensible. None of this is sensible.”
He was climbing up slowly, one step at a time. Silent sweating. Ezra squirming in discomfort, lingering at the bottom.
“Greg. Come back down here. Maybe it’s better to think about this. Down here.”
“We’ve got to find Tom you bastard. Get up these stairs.”
“I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
“Shit.” Shouted.
“What? What is it?” Nothing. “Greg? Fuck. Greg?”
Upstairs it fell silent. Except creaking floorboards. They started again in the front bedroom. In Greg’s room. Couldn’t be Greg. Greg was still on the stairs. But it was creaking. Louder. It was fucking footsteps. It must have been. He could hear them.
“Greg?” said Ezra. Traces of panic, like echoes, memories. Still at the bottom, in the hallway. “What the fuck’s going on up there? Greg?” Cocked his ear up but couldn’t hear shit. Just that creaking. “Greg?”
Greg was awkwardly spread on the carpet at the top of the stairs. Tripped over a pile of socks. In his head he blamed Joe as he fell. He picked himself up. Four doors branched off of the landing, all then in darkness, four doors closed. Fuck, he said, to himself. He could hear Ezra calling him, but could hear the creaking floorboards over the top of that. The thumping started again. Quiet first but quickly louder. And a weird kind of slapping sound. Like slapping a wet thigh. Primed buttocks. Leather hand run down the length of dead livestock. Now he was up there it wasn’t clear where it was coming from. Sounded like everywhere. He reached for the handle of the door on the left. Back bedroom. Tom’s. Grown of dead foetus memory, incest, latterly the darkened blow jobs of tender faces, attentively done. And fucking. Thanking each other at the end of it. Greg pushed the door open, turned the light on, peered in. it was empty. He left the light on and walked across the landing to the other back bedroom, opened the door, turned the light on. Empty. Behind him music started abruptly, thrust into life like an alarm clock, blaring out of the room he had just left. It was The Birthday Party. Loud as fuck. Greg rushed back to the room, found the cheap paper lightshade swinging from side to side, as if it had been pushed. Dark rhythmically swallowed the corners of the room with the arc of the swinging light. Left changeable shadows. Made his brain work oddly, disorientated. He grabbed the bulb, screamed at his own burnt fingers. Screamed again at Ezra filling the door. Could see he was speaking but couldn’t hear him over the feedback, just fish lips impatiently chewing the words out. Greg turned the music off.
“What did you find?” said Ezra.
“Nothing.” Greg snapped it. “I was looking but you came up here and scared the shit out of me.”
Ezra’s eyes, pointed over Greg’s shoulder, widened. He instinctively took two steps backwards. Screeched it out: “Greg!”
Greg turned around and Lucas was behind him. Slowly, jerkily standing up from the wheelchair, like a rehabilitated veteran. The chair creaked like dead metal in the crushing silence. Greg’s voice lost to his own fear. Lucas was grinning. One of his eyes almost rotted away. The smile tore his bottom lip off and it hung loosely to his face. The skin sagged off of him like strangers clothes. Digesting itself. He straightened his weak legs. Something horrific about his unfamiliar movements. Ezra watched, paralysed. The irony. Paralysed by a cripples motion. Greg coughed out a scream. Lucas plunged his gloved hand into Greg’s open mouth, clutched onto his tongue, thick slimy muscle he clasped in the ruptured palm of his glove, and started to pull. Greg’s eyes stretched wide he watched it, felt the tongue pulled, saw Lucas’s yellow tinged skin dripping like wax around the cuff of his glove, heard the buckled bones of his legs and spine snapping back into life, tried to scream around the glove, felt his tongue splitting, tearing somewhere awful, felt the rush of blood, rich and meaty, felt it pouring down his throat. Ezra staggered backwards, staggered away. Lucas was silent. No, he was groaning. No, he was laughing. He placed his other hand on Greg’s forehead and gave a certain yank. Pulled the tongue free. A fountain of blood erupted from Greg’s mouth. Ezra could hear him choking on it. Odd how it sounded so full of life. Lucas held the muscle in his hand. It shone like a red trophy. Ezra backed further away. On desperate hands and knees Greg crawled, half sobbing, blood pouring from his mouth, spewing from the severed tongue stump, reached one hand out to Ezra, tried to speak, to plead. Ezra looked at him, at the blood, at Lucas, and he didn’t move. In a flash Lucas leapt onto Greg and pulled him back into the bedroom. He drove his fingers into Greg’s eyes sockets. The globes burst in aqueous humor and vitreous body, jelly liquid mixed with blood and dripping like aspic down Lucas’s probing thumbs. Greg was honking a kind of scream, mustered it from his vocal chords, and Lucas pulled him further into the room by the ankles, then sunk his teeth in Greg’s varying body parts. The fleshy underarm. The throat. Ezra’s face contorted, horrified, and he backed right away, felt the banister on his buttocks before he fell over the top of it, down onto the stairs below, down into the hallway. The bedroom door slammed shut.
Cut forehead but Ezra got straight to his feet. A scratch really. Nearly leapt into the living room.
“Jonathan,” he said oblivious. “We better get out.” Jonathan wasn’t there. Empty corner. Ezra turned in a panic to where Tanya had been sitting. Gone. Rope left in a coiled pile on the floor. chair upturned, her blood printed onto the cheap upholstery in thick neat lines. Ezra crept deeper in and saw Jonathan on the floor, edged behind the TV, like he’d tried to get away. His throat was slit and his stomach carved open, intestines tugged out and spread like display sausages across the window of his torso, onto the carpet around him. Yards of the shit. Ezra screamed and puked. Force of the regurgitation felt oddly relieving. He let it keep coming, retching and retching, gasping his empty gut back out and clutching onto the mantelpiece for support. The creaking and thumping was deafening. Felt like the ceiling’d cave in, the cornices crack like the opening earth to swallow him, blood pouring from the wounded house, the architecture humanised by generations of violence. The lamp flickered on and off. Jonathan dead on the floor. Ezra grabbed at his temples with both hands, trying to squeeze the noise away, then ran out of the house.
Head spinning in the street. There was a light on in the neighbour’s house. What was he supposed to say? He asked himself the question and hammered on their door. Still clutching his head with the other hand. Drown out even the memory. Blood was pooled on his eyebrows from the cut on his forehead. Clothes soaked in the juices of too many people. He was stepping from one foot to the other. Tony opened the door. Warmth, light and soft jazz hit Ezra like a backhand, muffled conversation somewhere in the house. Tony’s mouth dropped, split his face like an unmanned ventriloquist’s dummy.
“Ezra? What in God’s name?”
“Please,” said Ezra. Grabbing both his shoulders with bloody digits. “I need help.”
“What’s happened?” Looking at the blood on his face. His clothes. “Are you hurt?”
“Please. Please let me in.”
“Ezra, we’ve got company. It’s very late.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m in so much trouble.” Balls taut with panic. Blue eyes wide. “Please help me.”
“I can see that Ezra.” Soothing Tony. Man knew how to manage. Practised reassurance. “But this is no time to...”
“Please, I need to come in.”
Ezra pushed past Tony and into the house, straight into the living room. Helplessly drawn to the life of voices, toasting glasses. The mundane sounds of domestic normality. The smell of finished meals. The beating heart of a kind of existence. Barely looked up when he spoke.
“I’m sorry to barge in like this but...”
“Hello Ezra.”
That voice. Ezra stopped in his tracks like he had ceased to be. Dropped to his knees. Smirking legs betrayed him. Lifted his eyes to see it.
Lucas. Lucas in the wheelchair. Not bloody. Not beaten. Not rotting. Not fucked up. Not congealing, decaying, hideous Lucas. Just Lucas. Washed blonde hair spiked in the right gentle places. Tanned face handsome, white tooth smile. Eyes shone in candlelight, in halogen ceiling spotlights. Gloves meticulous. Clothes even more so. It was him alright. Untouched. Glowing with a life Ezra had never seen. Tanya sat next to him. Simple evening dress. No wounds, no blood, no genitals or screaming. She did look beautiful. Soft. They held hands, her index finger folded caressing into his palm. Ezra felt himself crying. Wondered how wet tears could burn his face. When he rolled his eyes upwards he saw a fringe of blood.
“Lucas,” he said. He spluttered. “You’re dead. We...”
They all laughed. Lucas. Tanya. Tony. His wife. Laughed until it was oppressive. Laughed even further. Ezra struggled to his feet, knocked into the coffee table. Red wine spilt. Bottle and two glasses soaking into thick beige shag. Where’s the salt when you need it? Laughter doubled, swelling all the more. Pulsed around him like a growing tumour. The sound given physical properties by its own recurrence. Became a thing itself. Swallowing him in the force of its own audibility. He staggered blindly out of the door, across the hall, into the dining room. Had to blink to get some focus back, and there they were. Five friends gone corpse, propped sitting up around the table like an uncomfortable dinner party. Conor: face lifted off like a manhole and raw muscle where it used to be, but unmistakably him, greying hairs even blood couldn’t hide. Joe: throat hacked open and bled like a pig. Tom: head bludgeoned in and left half the size, skull shattered to sharp thick fragments reminiscent of ancient pottery archaeologically unearthed, a complex jigsaw rich in brain, the whole thing sunk in like a popped balloon. Jonathan: guts left out like worms in the rain, like a carnivorous gastronomic delicacy left to prime, throat so slit the head only just stayed on. Greg: jaw broken two fists wide, mandible hung flapping, hell-red mouth an ancient blood pool, gooey pits where eyes once blinked, chunks of flesh torn toothily from the whole. Each had a glass of wine in front of them, white for Conor – such attention to detail! – and red the rest. Conical party hats in yellow, blue and green had been strapped with elastic to their heads. Tom’s sat uneven, slumping into the crushed remnants of his sagging parietal, the scalp like a loose sheet of turf scuffed up at the corners but draped temporarily over the jagged bone. Ezra screamed again, screamed until his nostrils stung. Backed out of the door and into Tony. He pulled him into the living room. What jolly expressions on their faces! Tony stripped Ezra’s dress off, tore it down the middle, and swept everything off of the coffee table with a stroke of his arm, glasses and Guardian newspapers and TV remotes. He slammed Ezra’s long weak body onto its surface – wood buckling under the impact, splinters in the flesh – and tied his hands up underneath it, table edges cutting into armpits, again into biceps. Lucas and Tanya both applauded. Rapt faces: the pride; the humour; the stimulation.
“Please,” said Ezra. “Please don’t. I’ll do anything.”
“It’s okay, Ezra,” said Lucas gently.
“Lucas?” said Tony. He was circling the table, his eyes fixed on Ezra. “May I?” Lucas nodded. Tony clapped his hands together, crooked smile drawn over his face. He walked heavily out of the room – there wasn’t the space to run past the antique furniture – but was almost straight back in, carrying a large toolbox and a couple of plastic sheets. Ezra was gasping, trying to catch his failed breath, sobbing. Tony laid the plastic around the edges of the table. The toolbox had a yellow handle.
“Oh God. Please don’t kill me.” Somehow Ezra got the words out. He thought he was going to be sick. He could barely turn his head. Lucas and Tanya were at the wrong end of the table for him to see. Tony’s wife had hitched her skirt up to her waist and had one leg over the arm of the sofa, and had her middle and index fingers in a V around her clitoris. She sunk them into her cunt every time Ezra begged, closed her eyes to really listen with every sob he honked out. “I beg you,” he said. He was still crying.
Tony lifted the catches of his toolbox and took out a thin hacksaw. The tools were meticulously organised. He ran his finger across the blade and nodded approvingly. It had cut into his finger a little. He hoisted up Ezra’s left leg and started to saw into the back of his knee in long even strokes. The ligaments snapped like wet tea towels. Ezra was screaming so loudly. Tony hacked on, arm trembling slightly with the effort, flecks of spatter and skin airbrushed over the tabletop and the sheets of plastic in a wealth of red tones. Lucas turned up anonymous saxophone music to drown out the noise. Tony stopped sawing and dabbed at his brow with the back of his hand, then put the hacksaw down carefully onto the plastic sheet. He knelt down by the toolbox and examined the contents. Settled on the claw hammer. It felt right in his hands, the weight, the arc, the angle, like it was made for him. He looked at Lucas and smiled cheerfully, even thankfully. Lucas was beaming too. A beautiful modern friendship. Tony gently tapped Ezra with the hammer as though he were testing his reflexes, five or six times, each in different places – kneecap, shoulder, fingers, forehead. Weighing up the resistance and the potential.
“Open your eyes please Ezra,” he said, softly drawing the claw end down the length of Ezra’s cheeks. Ezra’s chin was shuddering without control. “Open your eyes.”
“I’d do as he says Ezra,” said Lucas.
“Open your eyes,” said Tony again.
Ezra tried to pry them open. In instinct they had clasped tight shut like molluscs. He couldn’t see properly because his eyes were so teary, his vision drowned beneath their water. His whole body was shaking. Tony held the hammer just above Ezra’s mouth, tapped very gently on his teeth. Ezra could feel the metal on his lips. The weight of it on his teeth was nauseating. He puked a small amount, odd specks foamed out of his mouth and onto the hammer, the rest he swallowed back down. The hydrochloric acid burnt against his throat, fucked over by his own stupid body. Lucas was rubbing his gloved hand up and down Tanya’s leg, inside her thigh, left it lingering around the surface of her cunt.
“Please,” Ezra said. The speech erupted in fits and starts. It sounded involuntary, his body’s last ditch response to stimuli. Snot was pooling out of his flared nostrils. “Lucas. Please.”
“Don’t ask me, Ezra,” said Lucas. Fingers submerged in his sisters genitals. Tony’s wife working her own.
“We had a deal,” said Ezra. His sobs sounded ancient. The hammer was so close to Ezra’s mouth that it was distorting his words.
“No Ezra. No deal.”
Tony’s muscles were primed for death. The hammer caught the lamp light. The hammer came down.
Monday, September 13, 2010
the tenancy agreement: chapter 13
2005
November
Back in their seats Greg and Jonathan both lit cigarettes. Comforting routine of slow death unaccelerated by violence or accident. Tom had his head hung, probing nicotine fingers into his eyes. Rich yellow penetrating fingers. Called them his Shane McGowan’s. Scrubbed them raw with wire wool and washing up liquid every couple of months over the kitchen sink to etch the yellow off. Like varnish off a sideboard. Restoring his own antique – twenty four year vintage! – appendages. Left the skin feeling thin and tender but alive. Not deadened by the weight of casual addiction. Ezra strode the room. His long legs made it feel tiny, structurally vulnerable to his every move.
“So let’s think about this smartly,” he said. “Where could the body be?” He pointed, gestured when he spoke. Product of his notably amateur dramatic training. His nightmare of inexpressive self.
“I guess...” said Jonathan through smoke.
“Yes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Right.”
Ezra looked to Greg, hoping for reason.
“I honestly don’t know Ezra,” he said. “If he was dead...”
“He was dead.” Ezra leaned in about twelve inches from Greg’s face when he said it. Slapped the back of his right hand hard down into the palm of his left. There were these faint strands of spittle stuck between his lips when he opened his mouth wide to speak, which he often had when he was excited.
“Well if he was dead he should still be there,” said Greg.
“Exactly, and he’s not. So let’s think about the evidence. If he wasn’t dead, hypothetically” –
“I thought you said he was dead,” said Joe. Running his finger around the saucy bottom rim of an eaten Pot Noodle. Chunklets of freeze dried soya texture congealed in cooled stock powder still granular from poor mixing. He fingered one out of the plastic and into his mouth.
“He was. Is. Hypothetically I said. If he wasn’t dead, which he was, but if he wasn’t, hypothetically, if he had by some fucking miracle regained consciousness, despite the smashed head and slit throat, where would he be?” They all just looked at him. Stood there in the middle of the room with eyes kind of manic like he’d been awake too long. Rosy wet pools shot through with fine veins. He shrugged. “In the basement,” he said, like he’d told them their own birthdays. “Even if we hadn’t killed the bastard, if he was still alive, and it’s a fucking big if, he would still be in that basement. He was wrapped in a rug; he couldn’t have just walked out of there. And if he had there’d be a trail of blood from there to fucking there. Can we agree on that?”
“I suppose so,” said Tom, tired with it. What terrible moments in life ruin everything in an instant. He had to go to lectures.
“Good,” Ezra went on. “So if he was alive, which is completely impossible, he would have been too weak and too confined to get out of here without us noticing. So he’d still be in the basement, right?”
“Okay,” said Greg.
“Okay. So then the second possibility is that he is dead. We killed him.” He looked at their four faces. Killing already sounded so tasteless. Lucas’s death was an occurrence already assimilated into their lives, divorced from the visceral emotion and morality that the word implied. A passive unfolding, a routine happenstance. He sounded impatient when he spoke again. “Fuck, he is dead, we did kill him. And so I’m not a fucking scientist but can a dead body move itself, with or without the presence of a rug?”
“Well, no,” said Tom, shifting in his seat to get his phone out of his pocket. Thought he felt his thigh vibrate.
“Yes, no,” said Ezra, “and there are no buts. A dead body cannot move. Lucas is dead, we left him in the basement and no one’s been in here except the six people who live here. Now could that body have upped and moved?”
“No but...”
“But the fuck what?”
“But it did.” Tom held onto his phone in the quiet. Greg flung a leg over the arm of the chair. Knocked an ashtray over. The grey stain embedded in the carpet from previous spills invited you to keep on doing it. They’d sweep up the butts but the stain never shifted. Along with the bloodstain it was like a birthmark, integral to the personality of the carpet.
“Look, that’s just it, no it didn’t. Bodies don’t move. There are six people living in this house and only five of them are here. Did any of you move it?” Everyone shook their head no. “Okay, and I didn’t move it.”
“Which leaves Conor,” said Jonathan.
“Progress,” said Ezra. “Where is Conor?”
“He’s not here,” said Greg. Not sharing Ezra’s certainty. Doesn’t add up. No one would have moved it on their own. They all had to deal with it. Responsibility.
Ezra snatched the phone out of Tom’s hands and started jabbing at the buttons with uncoordinated thrusts.
“Then let’s call him and sort this out,” he said, holding the phone up to his ear. “That’s the logical approach. Deduction. If something can’t move itself then it can only be moved. Acted upon. By something else. We didn’t touch it so that leaves Conor.” He had a smug look on his face. Certain and comfortable. “You know what Conor’s like. Gets things done. He’ll probably be coming through that door any minute, wondering what all the panic was about.”
A phone started ringing. Sounded like it was coming from the next room. Conor’s room. Ezra stormed out saying fuck.
“I don’t think Conor has anything to do with this,” said Tom, standing up and wringing his hands, looking at the floor. Interior monologue externalised. Happens in close-knit groups.
“Cunt’s right though,” said Greg. “A body doesn’t just disappear. Someone must have moved it.”
“That’s what worries me,” said Tom.
“Exactly. Was it one of us?” said Jonathan.
“There’s no other reasonable explanation,” said Greg.
“Shit this isn’t a very reasonable situation,” said Tom. “There’s nothing fucking reasonable going on here.”
Ezra stormed back into the room. The breeze from his body made the carrier bag of beer rustle. His cheeks were flushed red and he waved Conor’s phone in the air in front of him, threw Tom’s phone onto the table.
“Typical fucking Conor,” he said.
There was a knock on the door. Shit that fucking door. Greg lurched out of his seat instinctively. How easily door knocks had become the sound of the end. The ominous sound of failure. The rapping force of authority. Fucking raven. Fucking Poe. Gently rapping at my glass fronted door. Ringing through skulls like unanaesthetised dental work.
“Ha,” said Ezra, a proud snort, still clutching Conor’s phone. “Expect that’s him now. Probably forgot his fucking keys as well.”
Ezra walked out into the hall and pulled open the inside door and took a step into the porch. Cold tiled floor. He spoke as he opened the front door up.
“Where have you been Conor you bastard?” he said, door swinging inwards towards him. Eyeing the sight before him his smirk dropped like a cold cock. “Oh Jesus.”
It was Tanya.
Her nose was bleeding from both nostrils. Her face beaten up, cheeks and chin. Shallow cuts over her chest just above the weight of the tits. Half her clothes were torn off. And hung limp like history. There were patches of bruised flesh through the gaps in her clothing. He couldn’t help looking. Saw a line of blood in a path to her navel. Curve of her hips red-bruised in finger shapes. Old arm scars cut back open straight through the shitty tissue. Her bottom lip was shaking and she was sobbing drily on the doorstep. Ezra noticed how thirsty he was. Swallowed and reached towards her. Took her arm softly.
“Tanya. My god. What happened to you?” She didn’t respond. Just cried out nothing. Oh sweet nothing. Easier than even something. “Tanya? Who did this?”
She clutched onto him. Fucked face buried in his fibrous dress.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. Piercing, hysterical, ecstatic pain. Voiced so racked it felt distant like another world. Inconceivably shattering. “I’m so sorry I’m so sorry.”
“Jesus,” said Ezra, holding her head into him. “You’re okay now.”
“I’m sorry I’m so sorry.” Must have been the shock. Made her repetitive.
“What’s happened to you, to your face?” he said. “Come in, please. Come in.”
He led her through the door, wrapped his arm around her stripped bare carved shoulders. Her blood smeared down the front of his dress like mascara on a heavy night. He looked out into the street over his shoulder, kicked the door shut with his foot.
Tom and Joe were standing up when they went in the living room. Greg had had the foresight to throw a blanket over the bloodstained carpet. They had already dumped the wheelchair in the back garden, thrown it over the white-painted iron banisters, left the leather seat to rot. Ezra sat Tanya down in an armchair and knelt on the floor next to her, one hand laid on top of her own.
“Shit,” said Greg.
“Shut up,” said Ezra.
“What happened?” said Tom. “Oh god.”
“Is she okay?” said Greg.
“Why don’t you ask her?”
Greg walked over to Tanya. Rested his hand on her shoulder, squatted in front of her, next to Ezra.
“Tanya,” he said. Spoke softly. As if in a romance. As if a love had passed between them. The softness he couldn’t find for anyone else. Manufactured beautiful broken romance from fantasy and skewed cleansed memory. “Who did this?”
“I’m so sorry,” she said again. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands. Painted blood over her features. Thick on the philtrum it dripped onto her lips.
“Who did this Tanya?” said Joe. Sounded angry. He stepped from one foot to the other. Face pinched into action. Nostrils flared.
“Please,” she said.
“It’s okay,” said Ezra. He could sound assuring. “We’re here for you. We’re going to help you but you have to tell us what happened.”
“It’s Jack,” she said. Hyperventilating, hysterical, blood snorting, still poured out of her nose, real steady. And into her mouth. “My husband. Jack.”
Ezra looked to Joe, whose eyes had narrowed like an animal.
“Did he do this?” said Ezra.
“He went mad. He just... oh my god I’m so sorry.”
“Right,” said Joe. Yanked the door open so hard it hit the armchair. They heard the front door open. Didn’t close it. Could be forgiven in the circumstances.
“I couldn’t stop it,” she said. I tried but I couldn’t. He went mad. I tried to stop it. I was so scared.”
She clutched her fingers down into Ezra’s and started screaming. Like it had just sunk in. Like it kept sinking in.
“Oh Jesus no he’s got my baby. Oh god please help me he’s got my baby. I tried to stop it. Oh god please. My husband. It’s my husband. Oh please god help me.”
Ezra got up and put his arms around her.
“Everything’s going to be okay now. Joe’ll get your baby. It’s going to be okay.”
Tom and Jonathan were stood back. The look in their eyes more verbose than a thousand books. Explicit uncertainty in every imperceptible dilation. Greg squatted next to her. Ezra on his feet, arms around her. Comforting himself with the warmth of fear. Something wasn’t right here. Tom felt it in him. Nothing was.
*
Joe was running around the corner to where he knew Tanya’s building was. She lived on the top floor of a four-storey Victorian terrace. Not sure which one exactly. Coins hummed in his pockets. Hasty clipping of his running Cuban heels was weirdly archaic. There was no one about but it wasn’t that late. The slow grumble of bus engines drifted up from the main road. The constancy of transport kept the organs of the city alive. A black BMW had knocked one of their friends over a few weeks ago when he’d been fucking about at a bus stop. It just drove off and left him but he was okay. Cuts and bruises. Made his face more sheer. Joe stopped in front of the house he thought was hers. Tried to remember how he knew where she lived but couldn’t. The next house along had an open front door. Heavy wood painted bright red. Stained glass window at eye level. Supposed to be an orchid or something. Ornate knocker. That must be it. She left in such a state. Door would be open. He ran through the front door and straight up the stairs. Two at a time. Smelt like incense. Fabric softener. Boiled rice. Past the other flats. There was an electric stair lift running along the banisters of the three flights. Paid no attention to it. Tanya’s flat was at the top. Her door open as well. Streak of blood on the white gloss. He pushed it right open with his fingertips and edged into the hallway. Heart beating like fuck. Trying not to pant too loudly. Have to sneak up on the fucker.
There were family photographs framed and hanging on the walls all the way down the hall. Tanya smiling in all of them. Her husband too. Some had Lucas in, in the wheelchair. Big fucking smile. What a happy life. Left a bad taste in Joe’s mouth. He wanted to turn the pictures around. He peered into the first couple of doors off the corridor. Cursory inspection but there was nothing in them. Guy’s probably long gone. Wouldn’t hang around after what he did. Joe pulled the knife he used to slit Lucas’s throat out of his inside jacket pocket all the same. Extracted the blade.
“Jack?” he said.
Course it’s silent. Cunt wouldn’t answer. Stupid. At the end of the hallway Joe went through the door into the living room. Nicely decorated. Felt yellow. It was a good feeling. Shame about the domestic abuse. As he went further in he saw the mess. Ruined the ambience. Smashed glass, broken furniture. Looked like their house. A shit load of blood. Joe knelt down by a thick pool of it. The warm light made it a strange colour. Black pudding. There was something in the blood; he prodded it with the tip of the knife blade. Teeth. Whole fucking teeth. Root to crown. Bits of bloody periodontal ligament still fresh and attached. Joe recoiled, even with the knife. There were other blood patches around the carpet and on the sofas. Spatters up some of the walls.
“Fuck,” he said.
He stood up and looked back around the room. No one there either. Only one more room in the flat. Nothing to be scared of. He wasn’t going to be there anyway. Like he said: long gone. The door led off the living room. He could see the light was on in there from the crack at the bottom of the door but it didn’t mean anything. Probably just left it on like the dirty fucker left the front door open on his way out. Joe turned the handle slowly. Went in. Surveyed the scene at head height. There was no one in there. He let out a breath of relief. Gaze fell with it to the bed. He jumped back, screamed out “Jesus”. Ah fuck. Spread eagled naked on the bed. It was Jack from photographs, Tanya’s Jack. But this face was bare exposed flesh. Raw muscle. No smile. Skin peeled off like a blanched tomato. His lips had been removed. It made the gums look tall, tightly drawn back around half smashed out teeth. Scalp hacked, it had been cut and torn back in a thick wedge. The white of the skull bone flashed beneath the blood. Eyelids cut off left his eyes hauntingly open. Perpetually awake. Looked fucking massive. Golf balls. Face a mess of blood. Fucking flayed him. Huge wound running all the way down his chest from collar bone to cock. Countless stab marks cut into the flesh. Legs decorated with burns and incisions. Cock was gone though. Left a kind of bloody hole. The baby was laid next to him on the bed. Throat slit, soft head smashed in. Would have given out easily, like pushed meringue, like a damaged basket. Fingers cut off of its tiny hands. Father and child laid out together. Drenched in the blood of the other. Joe felt tears streaming down his cheeks. The sheets were sodden scarlet. The lamp cast a red light on the room from the blood splashed over its once white shade. Joe’s eyes blurred from crying but darted between them, the bodies, trying to take it in, or not take it in, to process something out of it. He squeezed his eyes closed but it was all still there when he opened them. Tanya. What the fuck had she done? He looked again at the baby. Tiny little baby. The sharp edges of its shattered skull torn through its skin. He threw up mercifully. Staggered backwards towards the door, tripping over fallen furniture. Couldn’t tear his eyes from the death. Or too afraid to. He felt the cool wood of the door pressed into his back. Managed to turn to it and pull it open. Get the fuck out. He knew it. Acid from the puke made his nose run. Rubbed his eyes dry with the sleeve of his jacket. Fucking hell the baby just a baby. And the face stripped like the ribs from a hog roast. Oh god the baby. He puked again. Looked up and saw the wheels. Gloved hands. It’s not. Face pale, loose flesh cut and hanging. Flaccid eyes loose in their sockets. Knife wound around the throat. Blonde hair blood-matted. Oh fuck. Flesh on the arms rotting off, from the wrist of the gloves upwards. Teeth yellowed stumps he was smiling head cocked, smiling at Joe.
It was Lucas.
Joe screamed. Lucas plunged a kitchen knife forwards and clean through his throat before he could take a step backwards. Scraped through the larynx. The tip jutted out the other side. Knife piercing the neck Joe twitched his life out, straight and vertical before the wheelchair, held upright by the wide metal of the blade. Fluttered convulsive. Dancing dead. Blood bubbled from the throat, from the mouth, right down his shirt front. The jerking feet made a terrible noise on the wooden floorboards. Cuban heels. Lucas was still, watching, one hand holding the knife. The twitching went on. Persistently trying to grip at life. The body couldn’t help it. It would stop eventually.
November
Back in their seats Greg and Jonathan both lit cigarettes. Comforting routine of slow death unaccelerated by violence or accident. Tom had his head hung, probing nicotine fingers into his eyes. Rich yellow penetrating fingers. Called them his Shane McGowan’s. Scrubbed them raw with wire wool and washing up liquid every couple of months over the kitchen sink to etch the yellow off. Like varnish off a sideboard. Restoring his own antique – twenty four year vintage! – appendages. Left the skin feeling thin and tender but alive. Not deadened by the weight of casual addiction. Ezra strode the room. His long legs made it feel tiny, structurally vulnerable to his every move.
“So let’s think about this smartly,” he said. “Where could the body be?” He pointed, gestured when he spoke. Product of his notably amateur dramatic training. His nightmare of inexpressive self.
“I guess...” said Jonathan through smoke.
“Yes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Right.”
Ezra looked to Greg, hoping for reason.
“I honestly don’t know Ezra,” he said. “If he was dead...”
“He was dead.” Ezra leaned in about twelve inches from Greg’s face when he said it. Slapped the back of his right hand hard down into the palm of his left. There were these faint strands of spittle stuck between his lips when he opened his mouth wide to speak, which he often had when he was excited.
“Well if he was dead he should still be there,” said Greg.
“Exactly, and he’s not. So let’s think about the evidence. If he wasn’t dead, hypothetically” –
“I thought you said he was dead,” said Joe. Running his finger around the saucy bottom rim of an eaten Pot Noodle. Chunklets of freeze dried soya texture congealed in cooled stock powder still granular from poor mixing. He fingered one out of the plastic and into his mouth.
“He was. Is. Hypothetically I said. If he wasn’t dead, which he was, but if he wasn’t, hypothetically, if he had by some fucking miracle regained consciousness, despite the smashed head and slit throat, where would he be?” They all just looked at him. Stood there in the middle of the room with eyes kind of manic like he’d been awake too long. Rosy wet pools shot through with fine veins. He shrugged. “In the basement,” he said, like he’d told them their own birthdays. “Even if we hadn’t killed the bastard, if he was still alive, and it’s a fucking big if, he would still be in that basement. He was wrapped in a rug; he couldn’t have just walked out of there. And if he had there’d be a trail of blood from there to fucking there. Can we agree on that?”
“I suppose so,” said Tom, tired with it. What terrible moments in life ruin everything in an instant. He had to go to lectures.
“Good,” Ezra went on. “So if he was alive, which is completely impossible, he would have been too weak and too confined to get out of here without us noticing. So he’d still be in the basement, right?”
“Okay,” said Greg.
“Okay. So then the second possibility is that he is dead. We killed him.” He looked at their four faces. Killing already sounded so tasteless. Lucas’s death was an occurrence already assimilated into their lives, divorced from the visceral emotion and morality that the word implied. A passive unfolding, a routine happenstance. He sounded impatient when he spoke again. “Fuck, he is dead, we did kill him. And so I’m not a fucking scientist but can a dead body move itself, with or without the presence of a rug?”
“Well, no,” said Tom, shifting in his seat to get his phone out of his pocket. Thought he felt his thigh vibrate.
“Yes, no,” said Ezra, “and there are no buts. A dead body cannot move. Lucas is dead, we left him in the basement and no one’s been in here except the six people who live here. Now could that body have upped and moved?”
“No but...”
“But the fuck what?”
“But it did.” Tom held onto his phone in the quiet. Greg flung a leg over the arm of the chair. Knocked an ashtray over. The grey stain embedded in the carpet from previous spills invited you to keep on doing it. They’d sweep up the butts but the stain never shifted. Along with the bloodstain it was like a birthmark, integral to the personality of the carpet.
“Look, that’s just it, no it didn’t. Bodies don’t move. There are six people living in this house and only five of them are here. Did any of you move it?” Everyone shook their head no. “Okay, and I didn’t move it.”
“Which leaves Conor,” said Jonathan.
“Progress,” said Ezra. “Where is Conor?”
“He’s not here,” said Greg. Not sharing Ezra’s certainty. Doesn’t add up. No one would have moved it on their own. They all had to deal with it. Responsibility.
Ezra snatched the phone out of Tom’s hands and started jabbing at the buttons with uncoordinated thrusts.
“Then let’s call him and sort this out,” he said, holding the phone up to his ear. “That’s the logical approach. Deduction. If something can’t move itself then it can only be moved. Acted upon. By something else. We didn’t touch it so that leaves Conor.” He had a smug look on his face. Certain and comfortable. “You know what Conor’s like. Gets things done. He’ll probably be coming through that door any minute, wondering what all the panic was about.”
A phone started ringing. Sounded like it was coming from the next room. Conor’s room. Ezra stormed out saying fuck.
“I don’t think Conor has anything to do with this,” said Tom, standing up and wringing his hands, looking at the floor. Interior monologue externalised. Happens in close-knit groups.
“Cunt’s right though,” said Greg. “A body doesn’t just disappear. Someone must have moved it.”
“That’s what worries me,” said Tom.
“Exactly. Was it one of us?” said Jonathan.
“There’s no other reasonable explanation,” said Greg.
“Shit this isn’t a very reasonable situation,” said Tom. “There’s nothing fucking reasonable going on here.”
Ezra stormed back into the room. The breeze from his body made the carrier bag of beer rustle. His cheeks were flushed red and he waved Conor’s phone in the air in front of him, threw Tom’s phone onto the table.
“Typical fucking Conor,” he said.
There was a knock on the door. Shit that fucking door. Greg lurched out of his seat instinctively. How easily door knocks had become the sound of the end. The ominous sound of failure. The rapping force of authority. Fucking raven. Fucking Poe. Gently rapping at my glass fronted door. Ringing through skulls like unanaesthetised dental work.
“Ha,” said Ezra, a proud snort, still clutching Conor’s phone. “Expect that’s him now. Probably forgot his fucking keys as well.”
Ezra walked out into the hall and pulled open the inside door and took a step into the porch. Cold tiled floor. He spoke as he opened the front door up.
“Where have you been Conor you bastard?” he said, door swinging inwards towards him. Eyeing the sight before him his smirk dropped like a cold cock. “Oh Jesus.”
It was Tanya.
Her nose was bleeding from both nostrils. Her face beaten up, cheeks and chin. Shallow cuts over her chest just above the weight of the tits. Half her clothes were torn off. And hung limp like history. There were patches of bruised flesh through the gaps in her clothing. He couldn’t help looking. Saw a line of blood in a path to her navel. Curve of her hips red-bruised in finger shapes. Old arm scars cut back open straight through the shitty tissue. Her bottom lip was shaking and she was sobbing drily on the doorstep. Ezra noticed how thirsty he was. Swallowed and reached towards her. Took her arm softly.
“Tanya. My god. What happened to you?” She didn’t respond. Just cried out nothing. Oh sweet nothing. Easier than even something. “Tanya? Who did this?”
She clutched onto him. Fucked face buried in his fibrous dress.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. Piercing, hysterical, ecstatic pain. Voiced so racked it felt distant like another world. Inconceivably shattering. “I’m so sorry I’m so sorry.”
“Jesus,” said Ezra, holding her head into him. “You’re okay now.”
“I’m sorry I’m so sorry.” Must have been the shock. Made her repetitive.
“What’s happened to you, to your face?” he said. “Come in, please. Come in.”
He led her through the door, wrapped his arm around her stripped bare carved shoulders. Her blood smeared down the front of his dress like mascara on a heavy night. He looked out into the street over his shoulder, kicked the door shut with his foot.
Tom and Joe were standing up when they went in the living room. Greg had had the foresight to throw a blanket over the bloodstained carpet. They had already dumped the wheelchair in the back garden, thrown it over the white-painted iron banisters, left the leather seat to rot. Ezra sat Tanya down in an armchair and knelt on the floor next to her, one hand laid on top of her own.
“Shit,” said Greg.
“Shut up,” said Ezra.
“What happened?” said Tom. “Oh god.”
“Is she okay?” said Greg.
“Why don’t you ask her?”
Greg walked over to Tanya. Rested his hand on her shoulder, squatted in front of her, next to Ezra.
“Tanya,” he said. Spoke softly. As if in a romance. As if a love had passed between them. The softness he couldn’t find for anyone else. Manufactured beautiful broken romance from fantasy and skewed cleansed memory. “Who did this?”
“I’m so sorry,” she said again. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands. Painted blood over her features. Thick on the philtrum it dripped onto her lips.
“Who did this Tanya?” said Joe. Sounded angry. He stepped from one foot to the other. Face pinched into action. Nostrils flared.
“Please,” she said.
“It’s okay,” said Ezra. He could sound assuring. “We’re here for you. We’re going to help you but you have to tell us what happened.”
“It’s Jack,” she said. Hyperventilating, hysterical, blood snorting, still poured out of her nose, real steady. And into her mouth. “My husband. Jack.”
Ezra looked to Joe, whose eyes had narrowed like an animal.
“Did he do this?” said Ezra.
“He went mad. He just... oh my god I’m so sorry.”
“Right,” said Joe. Yanked the door open so hard it hit the armchair. They heard the front door open. Didn’t close it. Could be forgiven in the circumstances.
“I couldn’t stop it,” she said. I tried but I couldn’t. He went mad. I tried to stop it. I was so scared.”
She clutched her fingers down into Ezra’s and started screaming. Like it had just sunk in. Like it kept sinking in.
“Oh Jesus no he’s got my baby. Oh god please help me he’s got my baby. I tried to stop it. Oh god please. My husband. It’s my husband. Oh please god help me.”
Ezra got up and put his arms around her.
“Everything’s going to be okay now. Joe’ll get your baby. It’s going to be okay.”
Tom and Jonathan were stood back. The look in their eyes more verbose than a thousand books. Explicit uncertainty in every imperceptible dilation. Greg squatted next to her. Ezra on his feet, arms around her. Comforting himself with the warmth of fear. Something wasn’t right here. Tom felt it in him. Nothing was.
*
Joe was running around the corner to where he knew Tanya’s building was. She lived on the top floor of a four-storey Victorian terrace. Not sure which one exactly. Coins hummed in his pockets. Hasty clipping of his running Cuban heels was weirdly archaic. There was no one about but it wasn’t that late. The slow grumble of bus engines drifted up from the main road. The constancy of transport kept the organs of the city alive. A black BMW had knocked one of their friends over a few weeks ago when he’d been fucking about at a bus stop. It just drove off and left him but he was okay. Cuts and bruises. Made his face more sheer. Joe stopped in front of the house he thought was hers. Tried to remember how he knew where she lived but couldn’t. The next house along had an open front door. Heavy wood painted bright red. Stained glass window at eye level. Supposed to be an orchid or something. Ornate knocker. That must be it. She left in such a state. Door would be open. He ran through the front door and straight up the stairs. Two at a time. Smelt like incense. Fabric softener. Boiled rice. Past the other flats. There was an electric stair lift running along the banisters of the three flights. Paid no attention to it. Tanya’s flat was at the top. Her door open as well. Streak of blood on the white gloss. He pushed it right open with his fingertips and edged into the hallway. Heart beating like fuck. Trying not to pant too loudly. Have to sneak up on the fucker.
There were family photographs framed and hanging on the walls all the way down the hall. Tanya smiling in all of them. Her husband too. Some had Lucas in, in the wheelchair. Big fucking smile. What a happy life. Left a bad taste in Joe’s mouth. He wanted to turn the pictures around. He peered into the first couple of doors off the corridor. Cursory inspection but there was nothing in them. Guy’s probably long gone. Wouldn’t hang around after what he did. Joe pulled the knife he used to slit Lucas’s throat out of his inside jacket pocket all the same. Extracted the blade.
“Jack?” he said.
Course it’s silent. Cunt wouldn’t answer. Stupid. At the end of the hallway Joe went through the door into the living room. Nicely decorated. Felt yellow. It was a good feeling. Shame about the domestic abuse. As he went further in he saw the mess. Ruined the ambience. Smashed glass, broken furniture. Looked like their house. A shit load of blood. Joe knelt down by a thick pool of it. The warm light made it a strange colour. Black pudding. There was something in the blood; he prodded it with the tip of the knife blade. Teeth. Whole fucking teeth. Root to crown. Bits of bloody periodontal ligament still fresh and attached. Joe recoiled, even with the knife. There were other blood patches around the carpet and on the sofas. Spatters up some of the walls.
“Fuck,” he said.
He stood up and looked back around the room. No one there either. Only one more room in the flat. Nothing to be scared of. He wasn’t going to be there anyway. Like he said: long gone. The door led off the living room. He could see the light was on in there from the crack at the bottom of the door but it didn’t mean anything. Probably just left it on like the dirty fucker left the front door open on his way out. Joe turned the handle slowly. Went in. Surveyed the scene at head height. There was no one in there. He let out a breath of relief. Gaze fell with it to the bed. He jumped back, screamed out “Jesus”. Ah fuck. Spread eagled naked on the bed. It was Jack from photographs, Tanya’s Jack. But this face was bare exposed flesh. Raw muscle. No smile. Skin peeled off like a blanched tomato. His lips had been removed. It made the gums look tall, tightly drawn back around half smashed out teeth. Scalp hacked, it had been cut and torn back in a thick wedge. The white of the skull bone flashed beneath the blood. Eyelids cut off left his eyes hauntingly open. Perpetually awake. Looked fucking massive. Golf balls. Face a mess of blood. Fucking flayed him. Huge wound running all the way down his chest from collar bone to cock. Countless stab marks cut into the flesh. Legs decorated with burns and incisions. Cock was gone though. Left a kind of bloody hole. The baby was laid next to him on the bed. Throat slit, soft head smashed in. Would have given out easily, like pushed meringue, like a damaged basket. Fingers cut off of its tiny hands. Father and child laid out together. Drenched in the blood of the other. Joe felt tears streaming down his cheeks. The sheets were sodden scarlet. The lamp cast a red light on the room from the blood splashed over its once white shade. Joe’s eyes blurred from crying but darted between them, the bodies, trying to take it in, or not take it in, to process something out of it. He squeezed his eyes closed but it was all still there when he opened them. Tanya. What the fuck had she done? He looked again at the baby. Tiny little baby. The sharp edges of its shattered skull torn through its skin. He threw up mercifully. Staggered backwards towards the door, tripping over fallen furniture. Couldn’t tear his eyes from the death. Or too afraid to. He felt the cool wood of the door pressed into his back. Managed to turn to it and pull it open. Get the fuck out. He knew it. Acid from the puke made his nose run. Rubbed his eyes dry with the sleeve of his jacket. Fucking hell the baby just a baby. And the face stripped like the ribs from a hog roast. Oh god the baby. He puked again. Looked up and saw the wheels. Gloved hands. It’s not. Face pale, loose flesh cut and hanging. Flaccid eyes loose in their sockets. Knife wound around the throat. Blonde hair blood-matted. Oh fuck. Flesh on the arms rotting off, from the wrist of the gloves upwards. Teeth yellowed stumps he was smiling head cocked, smiling at Joe.
It was Lucas.
Joe screamed. Lucas plunged a kitchen knife forwards and clean through his throat before he could take a step backwards. Scraped through the larynx. The tip jutted out the other side. Knife piercing the neck Joe twitched his life out, straight and vertical before the wheelchair, held upright by the wide metal of the blade. Fluttered convulsive. Dancing dead. Blood bubbled from the throat, from the mouth, right down his shirt front. The jerking feet made a terrible noise on the wooden floorboards. Cuban heels. Lucas was still, watching, one hand holding the knife. The twitching went on. Persistently trying to grip at life. The body couldn’t help it. It would stop eventually.
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
the tenancy agreement: chapter 12
2005
November
Tom was vacuuming the sodden salt from the carpet. It was so wet and thick that it didn’t suck up easily, crystalline clumps breaking apart and darting across the carpet. It smelt like day-old raw meat shaken into washing up liquid. When he finally got the salt up the stain underneath was still there. It had faded from red down to a deep brown like a birthmark, as prominent as it had been the day before. Somehow more so with its dull tones. Greg, Joe and Jonathan were sitting on chairs around him with a plastic bag full of cans of lager at their feet. Despondent, they looked at the stain. A black eye on the face of the carpet. It said murder like a newspaper headline. Tom pushed the vacuum cleaner to one side and opened a can.
“That looks much better,” said Joe. They had to smile. It really did look shit.
“Yeah,” said Tom. He had spent most of the afternoon with an Irish girl he had met a couple of years earlier at a house party, kissing on the floor of her bedroom. Just half-hearted. To pass the time. Easier than conversation. They had always sort of wanted to fuck but it had never got around to happening. They tried it once drunk but it hurt. Her legs were a bit bowed and her feet pointed inwards. Her face was composed of sharp angles. She had invited him up to her room after a concert but they’d only talked about air travel. White walls and fairy lights. By that point too nervous or indifferent to do anything else. He imagined her cunt but it wasn’t with desire. And the white Gaelic skin that led to it. “I would say we’re going to lose our deposit but we killed our landlord yesterday.”
Greg smirked over his ring pull.
“Could be worse,” he said.
“Much worse,” said Jonathan.
“It’s fine,” said Joe.
“Completely,” said Tom.
They all four took a pull on their beers. It looked like a synchronized act. Measured and precise. A modern callisthenic ritual.
“Where’re Ezra and Conor?” said Jonathan.
“Ezra’s in there,” said Tom, gesturing towards his bedroom. “Haven’t seen Conor all day.”
“Probably went out,” said Greg.
Jonathan stood up and went and knocked on Ezra’s door.
“You want a beer?” he said.
They came back in together, Ezra opening a can. He looked at the stain and shook his head.
“Who put that salt down there?” he said after three, four mouthfuls. He drank beer from the corner of his mouth. You could see it pouring out of the can between his parted lips. Dissipating specks of foam in his beard.
“Me,” said Tom.
“It looks bloody awful.”
“I know. I thought salt was supposed to help with red stains.”
“It does,” said Joe.
“Yeah, it does,” said Ezra. “But only if you put it down straight away, and only if you haven’t made a soaking mess of fairy liquid and shit beforehand.”
“We had to do something,” said Tom.
“And now we still have to do something,” said Ezra.
“That’s enough,” said Greg. Bored of it.
“It does look terrible,” said Jonathan.
“And we’re out of salt,” said Tom.
Ezra drained his beer and opened another. Looked at the four of them as he took the first swallow.
“To be honest it’s not the carpet we should be worrying about,” he said eventually.
“What do you mean?” said Joe.
“It’s probably the body in the basement we need to deal with.”
“We’ve discussed this,” said Greg. “We don’t know what to do with it.”
“We need to do something. Tom’s right: it will smell. Very soon. And if anyone else comes knocking looking for a missing man, I don’t want to be the one trying to explain what the stench is.”
He had read about a research centre in the USA where they have corpses laid outside on a patch of grass behind security fences so they can assess the stages of decay and decomposition. And an immortal jellyfish, turritopsis nutricula. When a corpse is embalmed they place a modesty cloth over the genitalia. Dead on a table and they have to hide the sex organs. Sanitize my dead parts for the good of yourselves, your vision! Perhaps a limp penis makes it too personal. The horror of an exposed, coarsely hirsute declivity. Too dirty. Insufficiently presentable.
“Okay. What do we do?” said Greg.
“We tidy up,” said Ezra. He rested one hand on his knee. “Simple.”
“But what are we going to actually do?” Aggression felt bloated under the surface of Greg’s patronising emphasis.
“I say we get the body back up here, wait until later and then take it somewhere and bury it,” said Jonathan.
“Where do we take it and bury it?” said Greg. Sharp-voiced. “We haven’t got a car and I don’t think they’ll let us take him on the night bus.”
“What about the park?”
“It’s a public park,” said Ezra. “How are we going to have time to dig a grave in a public park, much less not get noticed doing it. It’s not going to happen.”
“What about the river?” said Joe. Pillaging his brain for the city’s natural resources. It had hidden death for centuries. Swallowed it in its concrete and its topography. A city built around death. “Walk him down to Greenwich and just dump him in the water.”
“Do-able but not ideal,” said Greg. “Fucker’ll end up floating up somewhere and they’ll have him identified and be knocking that fucking door down.”
“And then how will we explain the stain?” said Tom. He lit a cigarette. “That’d be a lot of red wine.”
“Look, carrying him anywhere has got to be a bad idea. This may be London but you can’t just carry a dead body around, even here. People notice that kind of thing. Notice it and don’t like it.” Ezra was massaging one temple as he spoke. His fingers crackled over his hair.
“Then what do you have in mind?” said Joe. “The garden?”
Ezra raised an eyebrow. His mouth formed a smile from its sneer. An involuntary motion.
“You’re serious,” said Greg. “You want to bury our landlord in his own back garden?”
“Why not? It makes perfect sense. As Joe said himself, half of the hole’s already dug, and it’s near enough six feet. We just need to bang him in there” – he clapped as he said it, emphasizing the simplicity – “and fill it in.”
“It’s private, I suppose,” said Jonathan.
“Entirely. And the neighbour’s will be glad to see the back of that fucking hole.”
“I’m not sure,” said Tom.
“I’m telling you, it’s the safest option,” said Ezra. “The police don’t just dig up a garden because a grown man goes missing. They need suspicion, and why the hell would they assume a few university kids would wind up doing some massive murder burial cover-up thing? They wouldn’t, is the answer.”
He took a cigarette from Tom’s packet and lit it. Satisfied suck. His lips clicked around the butt. He looked at Joe. For consensus.
“Beats carrying him around London,” said Joe.
He looked at Greg.
“I haven’t got a better idea,” said Greg.
He looked at Jonathan.
“We need to get him out of that basement,” said Jonathan.
He looked at Tom.
“Okay, I’m in,” said Tom. “But there’s something else I think we should take care of.”
“What?” said Ezra.
“Hands. And teeth.”
“Jesus that’s fucking sick,” said Greg.
“What do we have to do?” said Joe. Sounded interested. He was big into fishing and slaughtering animals for meat, acts tinged with the seed of psychopathy. It sat uncomfortably with his vocational urbanity. He justified it by eating them, but anyone could see it was about more than food. When he had been on holiday in Africa he had reverted to a primal state. The rumour was that he smoked street heroin in his hotel room and then tried to hunt birds bare-chested with a bow and arrow. Climbed trees in torn bootcut jeans and tattered suede boots. Scared off the birds with the glare of his sunglasses.
“Cut them off and knock them out. Makes it a bit harder to identify.”
“He’ll be buried,” said Ezra. “There’ll be no identification.”
“Just in case. We’re not going to live here forever, and I don’t want this coming back and fucking me in ten years. It’s a shit job but we get it done now and that’s it, it’s dealt with.”
Greg gave a measured snort. He wanted clean hands but there was blood in his veins. His fingernails were tainted.
“Well I’m not doing it,” he said. He put a few fingers into his pocket.
“We’re all fucking doing it,” said Tom.
“I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“We’ll do it Greg,” said Jonathan. “We can do it.”
“It seems unnecessary,” said Ezra.
“Just humour me. I think it’s the best idea. It severs something.” Tom blinked when he spoke. His life felt small before him. “Weirdly makes it faceless. An end to personality. A lot of people see the soul in the hands, like they’re the most personal thing we have.”
“Agreed,” said Joe.
It was dark out. Ezra stood up, put his empty can down on the table.
“Now?” he said.
They all stood up.
“Shit, let’s get this done quickly,” said Greg.
They walked in single file down the hallway to the basement. It hadn’t taken long for everything to become normal, the shock of the murder engulfed in the movements of their still occurring lives. Moral concerns soon become practical. There was resignation not remorse in their complaints. It was like they had broken a window or left the tap running. Life itself a disposable commodity of occasional convenience. Start of a century. Defend our awful selves.
“So what’s the plan?” said Jonathan at the door.
“We get down there, get him up here, cut his hands off and smash his teeth out and then bury the bastard in the swimming pool.” Greg spoke like he was reading from an instruction manual. Following line diagrams for a flat-packed wardrobe. Key actions circled and magnified.
“What shall we do with the... trimmings?” said Ezra.
“We can burn the hands next time we have a fire,” said Tom. “And just hide the teeth.”
“Hide?” said Ezra. Tom nodded. “Okay.”
“You seem to know a lot about this,” said Joe, to Tom.
“I watch films.”
“Well let’s go,” said Jonathan.
“Right,” said Greg.
“Here we go,” said Ezra.
“To the basement,” said Tom.
“Down the hatch,” said Joe.
Nobody moved. They nodded like they were party to a critically decisive action but their eyes hugged the floor that their focus stayed flat down upon.
“Fuck it,” said Greg. He pulled the basement door open. It reeked of piss but none of them noticed. Didn’t notice Conor’s dressing gown, soaked and screwed in a ball amongst all the other clothes on the stairs. He moved his foot towards the top step. Tom grabbed his arm. Hissed loud whispers into his ear.
“Wait, wait,” he said. Greg jumped. Playing for time. Not the fucking basement. Just the thought of the smell was like something solid stuck in the throat. Choke on the possible, the prospective. Choke on an uncertain olfactory outcome of a future event. Please give me the Heimlich manoeuvre.
“What?” he said.
“I think we better get him into the bath. To cut him up I mean. We don’t want to fuck up the carpet any more than we have already.”
“That’s it?” said Greg. Frown spread over his face like make up.
“Yes.”
“Well for fuck’s sake, don’t make me jump like that. We’ll get him out of the fucking basement first, then we’ll worry about getting him up the stairs.”
“Okay,” said Tom. “Sorry. Let’s go.”
Greg went down a few steps. Why wasn’t there a light on the stairs? Someone must have moved the torch. Carpet felt damp under the soles of his trainers but he paid no attention. Looked back at the other four, still stood like exhibits peering through glass at his stuttered descent.
“Look you’re coming down here too,” he said. “I’m not doing this on my own.”
They do. Looked at each other and then Joe started to follow Greg, and the others fell into line with the measured slow progress of a silent carnival parade. An Alejandro funeral. Smelt less than they thought it would. Maybe the door kept it in. Maybe the decay was slower than they’d imagined. It’d hit them when they pulled the door. Dead atoms breathed into the lungs – they’d feel the end inside them. Taste death on their flat tongues with the clarity of a prophet’s vision. Death waited in carpets rolled in basement tunnels. Until then it just smelt vaguely like piss, a passing waft. Was that how it smelt, a whole life reduced to the odour of a common excretion, a crucial body function? They crept down the steps as though they might wake him up.
Lucas Manckiewicz
Son, brother and man
Who fell asleep
A night or so ago.
The unmade headstone. The unmarked memorial. It would only exist in the knowledge of their actions. They stopped at the bottom. Their breaths were loud and heavy with nerves. The electricity meter clicked through quantifiable units.
“So,” said Greg, “we’ll pull him out of here and get him up the stairs. Agreed?”
Mumbled assent. Hard to motivate for this kind of thing. Not a lot to say.
“Typical fucking Conor,” said Ezra. “Missing the difficult bit.”
“Where is Conor?” said Joe. A night off coke had made his voice sound younger.
“I don’t know. I saw him this morning.”
“He’s probably off with his other friends,” said Jonathan.
“He’s got the right idea,” said Tom.
“Yeah, well fuck Conor,” said Greg, trying to clap them into action. Anxiety made him organised. Fear made him managerial. Both odd traits for a man of Greg’s insubstantial work ethic. He spoke like a marshal at a team building conference. Dulled and nasal. “We’ve still got to get this done. He can clean the carpet. I’m going to open the door.”
They all instinctively moved backwards. Greg flicked on the light switch on the right of the door and then started to open it crack by crack. It would have creaked in a horror film but it was silent. They squinted into the light that swamped the darkness. Blinked their eyes in adjustment. Their presence there felt shameful.
“Oh shit,” said Greg.
Peering into the tunnel. The fuck was he talking about? Followed his eyes and then they saw it. Rug unrolled and thick with blood and flanked by busted furniture and brick dust piles but empty. No body. Unrolled and no body. Wasn’t in the tunnel wasn’t in the basement. No body.
“What the cunt?” said Tom. Unconcealed alarm. The beginning of an asthma episode.
“This is a problem,” said Ezra.
“Where is he?” said Jonathan.
“He’s not here,” said Joe. He stepped onto the rug and walked knees bent down the tunnel. Lifted some bits of wood like a languid search party.
“He must be here,” said Greg. “We killed him and dumped him down here. He couldn’t just get up and wander off.”
“Maybe he wasn’t dead?” said Tom. “You read about it all the time. Bells in coffins. Shredded fingernails. Ah fuck.” Hands gripped on the sides of his head. Felt like he was going to puke. Rich smell of blood. Earthy they say now.
“Wasn’t dead?” said Greg. “You saw him. We kicked his face apart and he slit his throat. He was dead.”
“Then where is he?” said Ezra.
“I don’t know so stop fucking asking me.”
“Maybe he wasn’t dead,” said Tom again. Peering down the tunnel to Joe. Looking for a body. Willing it back. “Maybe we just knocked him out or something. And he got out and...”
“Tom, Tom, he was dead,” said Ezra. “And even if he wasn’t we rolled him up in a rug. How the fuck would you roll your gravely injured body back out of a rug heavy with your own fucking blood?”
“Shit. Oh shit,” said Tom.
“We’re fucked,” said Greg. “This is fucked.”
“A body doesn’t just disappear,” said Joe. His eyes looked tear swollen.
“And no one’s been in here but us,” said Jonathan.
Ezra clicked his fingers, his face stretched into a smile.
“Conor,” he said.
“What about him?” said Greg. “You think he took him with him?”
“Maybe he dealt with it.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I have a bad feeling,” said Tom. Jumper soaked with sweat but his skin felt cold. Anomalous body.
“That’s because you killed your landlord and the body’s gone walkabout,” said Ezra. “I imagine a bad feeling’s a pretty natural response to something like that.”
“What are we supposed to do?” said Joe.
“Get the hell upstairs for one thing.”
“A dead body doesn’t disappear,” said Jonathan.
“He was dead, wasn’t he?” said Tom.
“HE WAS DEAD. WE FUCKING KILLED HIM.” Greg was shouting. Confusion made him spiteful. Doom made him violent.
“Then where the fuck is he?”
“I DON’T KNOW.”
“Let’s continue this riveting conversation upstairs,” said Ezra. “There must be an explanation. Bodies don’t just vanish. Let’s phone Conor and get rational. Get philosophical. There’s no need to panic yet. The police aren’t hammering on the door, are they, so I think it’s fair to assume that Lucas hasn’t been staggering around the city and telling anyone who’ll listen exactly what happened to him. All we need to do is think. There’s always a rational explanation.”
“Rational explanation fucking nothing,” said Tom. “A disappearing corpse goes against rational, don’t you think?”
“You’re a shit atheist, Tom,” said Ezra. Gut swollen with the poorly digested memories of his own degree topics. “Let’s just get upstairs before we start jumping to any generic conclusions, shall we?”
He pushed past the others and went up the stairs. He wore cheap white trainers tightly laced on his feet beneath the dress. They made him look like a doctored photograph.
“Come on,” he said from the top step. Greg turned the light out and closed the door to the tunnel. They followed him out and walked their damp piss footprints through the house, the smell of blood still behind them like a shadow.
November
Tom was vacuuming the sodden salt from the carpet. It was so wet and thick that it didn’t suck up easily, crystalline clumps breaking apart and darting across the carpet. It smelt like day-old raw meat shaken into washing up liquid. When he finally got the salt up the stain underneath was still there. It had faded from red down to a deep brown like a birthmark, as prominent as it had been the day before. Somehow more so with its dull tones. Greg, Joe and Jonathan were sitting on chairs around him with a plastic bag full of cans of lager at their feet. Despondent, they looked at the stain. A black eye on the face of the carpet. It said murder like a newspaper headline. Tom pushed the vacuum cleaner to one side and opened a can.
“That looks much better,” said Joe. They had to smile. It really did look shit.
“Yeah,” said Tom. He had spent most of the afternoon with an Irish girl he had met a couple of years earlier at a house party, kissing on the floor of her bedroom. Just half-hearted. To pass the time. Easier than conversation. They had always sort of wanted to fuck but it had never got around to happening. They tried it once drunk but it hurt. Her legs were a bit bowed and her feet pointed inwards. Her face was composed of sharp angles. She had invited him up to her room after a concert but they’d only talked about air travel. White walls and fairy lights. By that point too nervous or indifferent to do anything else. He imagined her cunt but it wasn’t with desire. And the white Gaelic skin that led to it. “I would say we’re going to lose our deposit but we killed our landlord yesterday.”
Greg smirked over his ring pull.
“Could be worse,” he said.
“Much worse,” said Jonathan.
“It’s fine,” said Joe.
“Completely,” said Tom.
They all four took a pull on their beers. It looked like a synchronized act. Measured and precise. A modern callisthenic ritual.
“Where’re Ezra and Conor?” said Jonathan.
“Ezra’s in there,” said Tom, gesturing towards his bedroom. “Haven’t seen Conor all day.”
“Probably went out,” said Greg.
Jonathan stood up and went and knocked on Ezra’s door.
“You want a beer?” he said.
They came back in together, Ezra opening a can. He looked at the stain and shook his head.
“Who put that salt down there?” he said after three, four mouthfuls. He drank beer from the corner of his mouth. You could see it pouring out of the can between his parted lips. Dissipating specks of foam in his beard.
“Me,” said Tom.
“It looks bloody awful.”
“I know. I thought salt was supposed to help with red stains.”
“It does,” said Joe.
“Yeah, it does,” said Ezra. “But only if you put it down straight away, and only if you haven’t made a soaking mess of fairy liquid and shit beforehand.”
“We had to do something,” said Tom.
“And now we still have to do something,” said Ezra.
“That’s enough,” said Greg. Bored of it.
“It does look terrible,” said Jonathan.
“And we’re out of salt,” said Tom.
Ezra drained his beer and opened another. Looked at the four of them as he took the first swallow.
“To be honest it’s not the carpet we should be worrying about,” he said eventually.
“What do you mean?” said Joe.
“It’s probably the body in the basement we need to deal with.”
“We’ve discussed this,” said Greg. “We don’t know what to do with it.”
“We need to do something. Tom’s right: it will smell. Very soon. And if anyone else comes knocking looking for a missing man, I don’t want to be the one trying to explain what the stench is.”
He had read about a research centre in the USA where they have corpses laid outside on a patch of grass behind security fences so they can assess the stages of decay and decomposition. And an immortal jellyfish, turritopsis nutricula. When a corpse is embalmed they place a modesty cloth over the genitalia. Dead on a table and they have to hide the sex organs. Sanitize my dead parts for the good of yourselves, your vision! Perhaps a limp penis makes it too personal. The horror of an exposed, coarsely hirsute declivity. Too dirty. Insufficiently presentable.
“Okay. What do we do?” said Greg.
“We tidy up,” said Ezra. He rested one hand on his knee. “Simple.”
“But what are we going to actually do?” Aggression felt bloated under the surface of Greg’s patronising emphasis.
“I say we get the body back up here, wait until later and then take it somewhere and bury it,” said Jonathan.
“Where do we take it and bury it?” said Greg. Sharp-voiced. “We haven’t got a car and I don’t think they’ll let us take him on the night bus.”
“What about the park?”
“It’s a public park,” said Ezra. “How are we going to have time to dig a grave in a public park, much less not get noticed doing it. It’s not going to happen.”
“What about the river?” said Joe. Pillaging his brain for the city’s natural resources. It had hidden death for centuries. Swallowed it in its concrete and its topography. A city built around death. “Walk him down to Greenwich and just dump him in the water.”
“Do-able but not ideal,” said Greg. “Fucker’ll end up floating up somewhere and they’ll have him identified and be knocking that fucking door down.”
“And then how will we explain the stain?” said Tom. He lit a cigarette. “That’d be a lot of red wine.”
“Look, carrying him anywhere has got to be a bad idea. This may be London but you can’t just carry a dead body around, even here. People notice that kind of thing. Notice it and don’t like it.” Ezra was massaging one temple as he spoke. His fingers crackled over his hair.
“Then what do you have in mind?” said Joe. “The garden?”
Ezra raised an eyebrow. His mouth formed a smile from its sneer. An involuntary motion.
“You’re serious,” said Greg. “You want to bury our landlord in his own back garden?”
“Why not? It makes perfect sense. As Joe said himself, half of the hole’s already dug, and it’s near enough six feet. We just need to bang him in there” – he clapped as he said it, emphasizing the simplicity – “and fill it in.”
“It’s private, I suppose,” said Jonathan.
“Entirely. And the neighbour’s will be glad to see the back of that fucking hole.”
“I’m not sure,” said Tom.
“I’m telling you, it’s the safest option,” said Ezra. “The police don’t just dig up a garden because a grown man goes missing. They need suspicion, and why the hell would they assume a few university kids would wind up doing some massive murder burial cover-up thing? They wouldn’t, is the answer.”
He took a cigarette from Tom’s packet and lit it. Satisfied suck. His lips clicked around the butt. He looked at Joe. For consensus.
“Beats carrying him around London,” said Joe.
He looked at Greg.
“I haven’t got a better idea,” said Greg.
He looked at Jonathan.
“We need to get him out of that basement,” said Jonathan.
He looked at Tom.
“Okay, I’m in,” said Tom. “But there’s something else I think we should take care of.”
“What?” said Ezra.
“Hands. And teeth.”
“Jesus that’s fucking sick,” said Greg.
“What do we have to do?” said Joe. Sounded interested. He was big into fishing and slaughtering animals for meat, acts tinged with the seed of psychopathy. It sat uncomfortably with his vocational urbanity. He justified it by eating them, but anyone could see it was about more than food. When he had been on holiday in Africa he had reverted to a primal state. The rumour was that he smoked street heroin in his hotel room and then tried to hunt birds bare-chested with a bow and arrow. Climbed trees in torn bootcut jeans and tattered suede boots. Scared off the birds with the glare of his sunglasses.
“Cut them off and knock them out. Makes it a bit harder to identify.”
“He’ll be buried,” said Ezra. “There’ll be no identification.”
“Just in case. We’re not going to live here forever, and I don’t want this coming back and fucking me in ten years. It’s a shit job but we get it done now and that’s it, it’s dealt with.”
Greg gave a measured snort. He wanted clean hands but there was blood in his veins. His fingernails were tainted.
“Well I’m not doing it,” he said. He put a few fingers into his pocket.
“We’re all fucking doing it,” said Tom.
“I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“We’ll do it Greg,” said Jonathan. “We can do it.”
“It seems unnecessary,” said Ezra.
“Just humour me. I think it’s the best idea. It severs something.” Tom blinked when he spoke. His life felt small before him. “Weirdly makes it faceless. An end to personality. A lot of people see the soul in the hands, like they’re the most personal thing we have.”
“Agreed,” said Joe.
It was dark out. Ezra stood up, put his empty can down on the table.
“Now?” he said.
They all stood up.
“Shit, let’s get this done quickly,” said Greg.
They walked in single file down the hallway to the basement. It hadn’t taken long for everything to become normal, the shock of the murder engulfed in the movements of their still occurring lives. Moral concerns soon become practical. There was resignation not remorse in their complaints. It was like they had broken a window or left the tap running. Life itself a disposable commodity of occasional convenience. Start of a century. Defend our awful selves.
“So what’s the plan?” said Jonathan at the door.
“We get down there, get him up here, cut his hands off and smash his teeth out and then bury the bastard in the swimming pool.” Greg spoke like he was reading from an instruction manual. Following line diagrams for a flat-packed wardrobe. Key actions circled and magnified.
“What shall we do with the... trimmings?” said Ezra.
“We can burn the hands next time we have a fire,” said Tom. “And just hide the teeth.”
“Hide?” said Ezra. Tom nodded. “Okay.”
“You seem to know a lot about this,” said Joe, to Tom.
“I watch films.”
“Well let’s go,” said Jonathan.
“Right,” said Greg.
“Here we go,” said Ezra.
“To the basement,” said Tom.
“Down the hatch,” said Joe.
Nobody moved. They nodded like they were party to a critically decisive action but their eyes hugged the floor that their focus stayed flat down upon.
“Fuck it,” said Greg. He pulled the basement door open. It reeked of piss but none of them noticed. Didn’t notice Conor’s dressing gown, soaked and screwed in a ball amongst all the other clothes on the stairs. He moved his foot towards the top step. Tom grabbed his arm. Hissed loud whispers into his ear.
“Wait, wait,” he said. Greg jumped. Playing for time. Not the fucking basement. Just the thought of the smell was like something solid stuck in the throat. Choke on the possible, the prospective. Choke on an uncertain olfactory outcome of a future event. Please give me the Heimlich manoeuvre.
“What?” he said.
“I think we better get him into the bath. To cut him up I mean. We don’t want to fuck up the carpet any more than we have already.”
“That’s it?” said Greg. Frown spread over his face like make up.
“Yes.”
“Well for fuck’s sake, don’t make me jump like that. We’ll get him out of the fucking basement first, then we’ll worry about getting him up the stairs.”
“Okay,” said Tom. “Sorry. Let’s go.”
Greg went down a few steps. Why wasn’t there a light on the stairs? Someone must have moved the torch. Carpet felt damp under the soles of his trainers but he paid no attention. Looked back at the other four, still stood like exhibits peering through glass at his stuttered descent.
“Look you’re coming down here too,” he said. “I’m not doing this on my own.”
They do. Looked at each other and then Joe started to follow Greg, and the others fell into line with the measured slow progress of a silent carnival parade. An Alejandro funeral. Smelt less than they thought it would. Maybe the door kept it in. Maybe the decay was slower than they’d imagined. It’d hit them when they pulled the door. Dead atoms breathed into the lungs – they’d feel the end inside them. Taste death on their flat tongues with the clarity of a prophet’s vision. Death waited in carpets rolled in basement tunnels. Until then it just smelt vaguely like piss, a passing waft. Was that how it smelt, a whole life reduced to the odour of a common excretion, a crucial body function? They crept down the steps as though they might wake him up.
Lucas Manckiewicz
Son, brother and man
Who fell asleep
A night or so ago.
The unmade headstone. The unmarked memorial. It would only exist in the knowledge of their actions. They stopped at the bottom. Their breaths were loud and heavy with nerves. The electricity meter clicked through quantifiable units.
“So,” said Greg, “we’ll pull him out of here and get him up the stairs. Agreed?”
Mumbled assent. Hard to motivate for this kind of thing. Not a lot to say.
“Typical fucking Conor,” said Ezra. “Missing the difficult bit.”
“Where is Conor?” said Joe. A night off coke had made his voice sound younger.
“I don’t know. I saw him this morning.”
“He’s probably off with his other friends,” said Jonathan.
“He’s got the right idea,” said Tom.
“Yeah, well fuck Conor,” said Greg, trying to clap them into action. Anxiety made him organised. Fear made him managerial. Both odd traits for a man of Greg’s insubstantial work ethic. He spoke like a marshal at a team building conference. Dulled and nasal. “We’ve still got to get this done. He can clean the carpet. I’m going to open the door.”
They all instinctively moved backwards. Greg flicked on the light switch on the right of the door and then started to open it crack by crack. It would have creaked in a horror film but it was silent. They squinted into the light that swamped the darkness. Blinked their eyes in adjustment. Their presence there felt shameful.
“Oh shit,” said Greg.
Peering into the tunnel. The fuck was he talking about? Followed his eyes and then they saw it. Rug unrolled and thick with blood and flanked by busted furniture and brick dust piles but empty. No body. Unrolled and no body. Wasn’t in the tunnel wasn’t in the basement. No body.
“What the cunt?” said Tom. Unconcealed alarm. The beginning of an asthma episode.
“This is a problem,” said Ezra.
“Where is he?” said Jonathan.
“He’s not here,” said Joe. He stepped onto the rug and walked knees bent down the tunnel. Lifted some bits of wood like a languid search party.
“He must be here,” said Greg. “We killed him and dumped him down here. He couldn’t just get up and wander off.”
“Maybe he wasn’t dead?” said Tom. “You read about it all the time. Bells in coffins. Shredded fingernails. Ah fuck.” Hands gripped on the sides of his head. Felt like he was going to puke. Rich smell of blood. Earthy they say now.
“Wasn’t dead?” said Greg. “You saw him. We kicked his face apart and he slit his throat. He was dead.”
“Then where is he?” said Ezra.
“I don’t know so stop fucking asking me.”
“Maybe he wasn’t dead,” said Tom again. Peering down the tunnel to Joe. Looking for a body. Willing it back. “Maybe we just knocked him out or something. And he got out and...”
“Tom, Tom, he was dead,” said Ezra. “And even if he wasn’t we rolled him up in a rug. How the fuck would you roll your gravely injured body back out of a rug heavy with your own fucking blood?”
“Shit. Oh shit,” said Tom.
“We’re fucked,” said Greg. “This is fucked.”
“A body doesn’t just disappear,” said Joe. His eyes looked tear swollen.
“And no one’s been in here but us,” said Jonathan.
Ezra clicked his fingers, his face stretched into a smile.
“Conor,” he said.
“What about him?” said Greg. “You think he took him with him?”
“Maybe he dealt with it.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I have a bad feeling,” said Tom. Jumper soaked with sweat but his skin felt cold. Anomalous body.
“That’s because you killed your landlord and the body’s gone walkabout,” said Ezra. “I imagine a bad feeling’s a pretty natural response to something like that.”
“What are we supposed to do?” said Joe.
“Get the hell upstairs for one thing.”
“A dead body doesn’t disappear,” said Jonathan.
“He was dead, wasn’t he?” said Tom.
“HE WAS DEAD. WE FUCKING KILLED HIM.” Greg was shouting. Confusion made him spiteful. Doom made him violent.
“Then where the fuck is he?”
“I DON’T KNOW.”
“Let’s continue this riveting conversation upstairs,” said Ezra. “There must be an explanation. Bodies don’t just vanish. Let’s phone Conor and get rational. Get philosophical. There’s no need to panic yet. The police aren’t hammering on the door, are they, so I think it’s fair to assume that Lucas hasn’t been staggering around the city and telling anyone who’ll listen exactly what happened to him. All we need to do is think. There’s always a rational explanation.”
“Rational explanation fucking nothing,” said Tom. “A disappearing corpse goes against rational, don’t you think?”
“You’re a shit atheist, Tom,” said Ezra. Gut swollen with the poorly digested memories of his own degree topics. “Let’s just get upstairs before we start jumping to any generic conclusions, shall we?”
He pushed past the others and went up the stairs. He wore cheap white trainers tightly laced on his feet beneath the dress. They made him look like a doctored photograph.
“Come on,” he said from the top step. Greg turned the light out and closed the door to the tunnel. They followed him out and walked their damp piss footprints through the house, the smell of blood still behind them like a shadow.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
the tenancy agreement: chapter 11
2005
November
Conor strolled out of his bedroom in light steeped in early afternoon. Stretching loudly. He walked past the basement door, the kitchen and to the living room. He peered in but the room was empty, salt piled on the bloodstain.
“Guys?” he said loudly. There was no reply. Must have been gone lunchtime. “Anyone home?” No reply again. He shrugged and went back to the kitchen and picked up the kettle. Screamed awfully and hopped onto one foot. Stepped in glass. There was blood seeping out of his thick soles. It ran in a single careful line from the wound, down to the base of his toes. Because of the elevation. He put the kettle down and picked the glass out, a piece about two inches long and broken into a perfect point. It made a sound like kissing on the way out. He threw it in the bin and wiped the blood off with a tea towel. Screwed in a ball and sodden on the surface. The colour of tea. Kettle filled and on it started to boil. He turned on the radio loud and put a slice of bread in the toaster. It was the crust end. An act of desperate finality. It was too thick for the toaster compartment and he had to coax it down. About thirty seconds later the kettle stopped mid boil. Toaster popped up. Radio flicked off. He pulled open the fridge and the light was off. Darkness among the milk carton and the mayonnaise jar.
“Fucking electricity,” he said.
They had a prepayment meter with a plastic key and only ever bought the minimum amount. It ran out almost constantly. The meter was in the basement, just at the bottom of the stairs. Next to the tunnel. He opened the basement door and looked down the stairwell. It was the same as always but he knew there was a body. He had helped carry it down. Don’t be fooled by the tennis racquet covers. There was no light on the stairs. The carpet was loose. It hung red from the contours of the steps like it had been left there by mistake. The door was closed at the bottom. How they left it.
“Hello?” he said. Shouted. Not taking his eyes from the stairway. He held a torch in his hand. They left it by the basement for just this reason. “Guys? We’re out of electricity. Guys? Shit.”
The house was even quieter without the humming of the fridge. He didn’t want to go down there alone but it was either that or sit in darkness until someone else got back. It was dark early in November. He stepped down onto the first step. It creaked loudly. Conor shone the torch into the stairway, craning his neck to see. There was nothing there, just piles of clothes. He licked the corner of his lips. They were so claret they looked sore.
“Guys?” he said again. “Is anyone in the house?” It was empty. Of course. Perfect. To himself: “Fuck. I’ll have to do it.”
He shone the torch again and started down the stairs. Must have only been, what, ten degrees? Twelve at most. It felt hotter. His face was damp with sweat. Was that flies buzzing? Already? He didn’t know how quickly a body decomposed. He remembered reading that it was quicker than you’d think. Or maybe that it was slower than you’d think. It sounded rich with the life of insects. They feasted themselves to birth. Swallowed the mess of death to make life of their own. Under slipping skin and liquefied cells. It’s the way the world works. Life makes death and death makes life. Amplified by the basement walls the buzzing was claustrophobic. His heart oscillated with it. He got to the bottom, slumped in the piles, felt snapped wood scrape his calf. It was so hot. Bowels of the earth. Flies like a wall of noise behind the door. Must have been thousands. Drunk on the product of the autolysing cells. He pointed the torch at the electricity meter. It said Credit £4.50. He pulled the key out and shone the torch on it, then plugged it back in. The radio came back on upstairs. It was Bobby Darin. “Dream Lover”. Conor shrugged and started back up the stairs. He turned the torch off because of the light from the back door. He was walking into the light. The kettle restarted the boiling process, sounded like an aeroplane flying overhead. About halfway up he tripped and fell down onto his hands. He looked down at his ankle, tried yanking it away from whatever it was caught in.
“I hate this fucking mess,” he said, and meant it.
He pulled at his leg a few more times, bent down and tried to free it. His ankle was caught between two planks of wood, he saw it when he angled the torch down. Joe must have left them there. He sighed with a bit of relief and pushed the wood to one side. Continued up the stairs. There was a loud crash from the bottom of the basement. From behind the door. From the tunnel. Like smashing furniture. Like something was moving. Only loud. It drowned out the radio and the kettle and the flies. Only for a second but a second can be long. A slow second. Then the flies again. They weren’t there for him.
“Hello?” he said. The tone of his voice said more than a sentence. It faltered like a cold car engine. He felt vulnerable in his dressing gown. The dark-striped towelling was abrasive. Don’t let him piss in a dressing gown.
No reply just appliances. Conor swallowed and stood up, started creeping towards the top. Another crash from the bottom. He froze up. Couldn’t move his legs. It was louder than the first, sounded like something had hit the door. He heard the cheap wood crack some from the impact. Like it had been hit from the inside. He felt his bladder want to quit. Gave him something to focus on. There was a scraping sound on the door. He could hear it. It was like fingernails. Knew it couldn’t be but that’s how it sounded. Fingernails. Scraping to get out. It was getting louder. Don’t piss yourself. You know it’s not. Fuck, but listen. It was definitely scraping. He could hear it.
“Shit, hello?”
The scraping went on. It was faster. Uncontrolled. Scraping. Frantic.
“Hello? Oh God. Hello?”
He was leaning his head down, peering down the stairway, trying to see the door, see what the fuck was going on. The torch light was too dull to make it out. The scraping just got louder. And so fucking fast. He turned and ran up the last few stairs but the door slammed shut in his face. Knocked him back a step. He felt the warmth of piss on his legs. It pooled out from the bottom of his dressing gown, soaked the stairs carpet, hit it with the sound of an overflow pipe. The scraping. It became a thumping at the door at the bottom of the stairs. Four thumps a second. He was soaked in piss in the darkness. The only light was the failing torch beam. He hammered on the door, turned the handle, shouted out, screamed. It didn’t give. The scraping and the thumping was deafening. He had to shout to hear himself over it.
“Guys! The door’s stuck! Shit. Get me out!”
He had his back to the bottom of the stairs, pounding his fists into the door. The noise from the bottom sounded closer. It was moving. It was right on top of him. He had set the torch on the floor. Its little light seemed red from the carpet. The door wouldn’t move. He heard a creak on the step behind him. Heard the piss wet carpet slurp.
“Oh fuck,” he said, like a prayer.
He started to turn around. He had to see it. The scraping. The thumping. So loud. It was right there. It was. He screamed. A real scream. It spoke of pain. He clasped at his guts. He felt them go. He dropped to the floor. The dark basement darker still. His blood smelt metallic. He couldn’t speak. The scraping. The thumping. So loud. Couldn’t think over it. He felt his body pulled down the stairs. He saw the rectangle of light that shone around the edges of the closed basement door. He saw the electricity meter. He saw the torch falling down the stairs behind him. He heard the scraping stop. He heard Bobby Darin.
November
Conor strolled out of his bedroom in light steeped in early afternoon. Stretching loudly. He walked past the basement door, the kitchen and to the living room. He peered in but the room was empty, salt piled on the bloodstain.
“Guys?” he said loudly. There was no reply. Must have been gone lunchtime. “Anyone home?” No reply again. He shrugged and went back to the kitchen and picked up the kettle. Screamed awfully and hopped onto one foot. Stepped in glass. There was blood seeping out of his thick soles. It ran in a single careful line from the wound, down to the base of his toes. Because of the elevation. He put the kettle down and picked the glass out, a piece about two inches long and broken into a perfect point. It made a sound like kissing on the way out. He threw it in the bin and wiped the blood off with a tea towel. Screwed in a ball and sodden on the surface. The colour of tea. Kettle filled and on it started to boil. He turned on the radio loud and put a slice of bread in the toaster. It was the crust end. An act of desperate finality. It was too thick for the toaster compartment and he had to coax it down. About thirty seconds later the kettle stopped mid boil. Toaster popped up. Radio flicked off. He pulled open the fridge and the light was off. Darkness among the milk carton and the mayonnaise jar.
“Fucking electricity,” he said.
They had a prepayment meter with a plastic key and only ever bought the minimum amount. It ran out almost constantly. The meter was in the basement, just at the bottom of the stairs. Next to the tunnel. He opened the basement door and looked down the stairwell. It was the same as always but he knew there was a body. He had helped carry it down. Don’t be fooled by the tennis racquet covers. There was no light on the stairs. The carpet was loose. It hung red from the contours of the steps like it had been left there by mistake. The door was closed at the bottom. How they left it.
“Hello?” he said. Shouted. Not taking his eyes from the stairway. He held a torch in his hand. They left it by the basement for just this reason. “Guys? We’re out of electricity. Guys? Shit.”
The house was even quieter without the humming of the fridge. He didn’t want to go down there alone but it was either that or sit in darkness until someone else got back. It was dark early in November. He stepped down onto the first step. It creaked loudly. Conor shone the torch into the stairway, craning his neck to see. There was nothing there, just piles of clothes. He licked the corner of his lips. They were so claret they looked sore.
“Guys?” he said again. “Is anyone in the house?” It was empty. Of course. Perfect. To himself: “Fuck. I’ll have to do it.”
He shone the torch again and started down the stairs. Must have only been, what, ten degrees? Twelve at most. It felt hotter. His face was damp with sweat. Was that flies buzzing? Already? He didn’t know how quickly a body decomposed. He remembered reading that it was quicker than you’d think. Or maybe that it was slower than you’d think. It sounded rich with the life of insects. They feasted themselves to birth. Swallowed the mess of death to make life of their own. Under slipping skin and liquefied cells. It’s the way the world works. Life makes death and death makes life. Amplified by the basement walls the buzzing was claustrophobic. His heart oscillated with it. He got to the bottom, slumped in the piles, felt snapped wood scrape his calf. It was so hot. Bowels of the earth. Flies like a wall of noise behind the door. Must have been thousands. Drunk on the product of the autolysing cells. He pointed the torch at the electricity meter. It said Credit £4.50. He pulled the key out and shone the torch on it, then plugged it back in. The radio came back on upstairs. It was Bobby Darin. “Dream Lover”. Conor shrugged and started back up the stairs. He turned the torch off because of the light from the back door. He was walking into the light. The kettle restarted the boiling process, sounded like an aeroplane flying overhead. About halfway up he tripped and fell down onto his hands. He looked down at his ankle, tried yanking it away from whatever it was caught in.
“I hate this fucking mess,” he said, and meant it.
He pulled at his leg a few more times, bent down and tried to free it. His ankle was caught between two planks of wood, he saw it when he angled the torch down. Joe must have left them there. He sighed with a bit of relief and pushed the wood to one side. Continued up the stairs. There was a loud crash from the bottom of the basement. From behind the door. From the tunnel. Like smashing furniture. Like something was moving. Only loud. It drowned out the radio and the kettle and the flies. Only for a second but a second can be long. A slow second. Then the flies again. They weren’t there for him.
“Hello?” he said. The tone of his voice said more than a sentence. It faltered like a cold car engine. He felt vulnerable in his dressing gown. The dark-striped towelling was abrasive. Don’t let him piss in a dressing gown.
No reply just appliances. Conor swallowed and stood up, started creeping towards the top. Another crash from the bottom. He froze up. Couldn’t move his legs. It was louder than the first, sounded like something had hit the door. He heard the cheap wood crack some from the impact. Like it had been hit from the inside. He felt his bladder want to quit. Gave him something to focus on. There was a scraping sound on the door. He could hear it. It was like fingernails. Knew it couldn’t be but that’s how it sounded. Fingernails. Scraping to get out. It was getting louder. Don’t piss yourself. You know it’s not. Fuck, but listen. It was definitely scraping. He could hear it.
“Shit, hello?”
The scraping went on. It was faster. Uncontrolled. Scraping. Frantic.
“Hello? Oh God. Hello?”
He was leaning his head down, peering down the stairway, trying to see the door, see what the fuck was going on. The torch light was too dull to make it out. The scraping just got louder. And so fucking fast. He turned and ran up the last few stairs but the door slammed shut in his face. Knocked him back a step. He felt the warmth of piss on his legs. It pooled out from the bottom of his dressing gown, soaked the stairs carpet, hit it with the sound of an overflow pipe. The scraping. It became a thumping at the door at the bottom of the stairs. Four thumps a second. He was soaked in piss in the darkness. The only light was the failing torch beam. He hammered on the door, turned the handle, shouted out, screamed. It didn’t give. The scraping and the thumping was deafening. He had to shout to hear himself over it.
“Guys! The door’s stuck! Shit. Get me out!”
He had his back to the bottom of the stairs, pounding his fists into the door. The noise from the bottom sounded closer. It was moving. It was right on top of him. He had set the torch on the floor. Its little light seemed red from the carpet. The door wouldn’t move. He heard a creak on the step behind him. Heard the piss wet carpet slurp.
“Oh fuck,” he said, like a prayer.
He started to turn around. He had to see it. The scraping. The thumping. So loud. It was right there. It was. He screamed. A real scream. It spoke of pain. He clasped at his guts. He felt them go. He dropped to the floor. The dark basement darker still. His blood smelt metallic. He couldn’t speak. The scraping. The thumping. So loud. Couldn’t think over it. He felt his body pulled down the stairs. He saw the rectangle of light that shone around the edges of the closed basement door. He saw the electricity meter. He saw the torch falling down the stairs behind him. He heard the scraping stop. He heard Bobby Darin.
Monday, August 30, 2010
the tenancy agreement: chapter 10
2005
November
Greg was running a bath in the clinical light. He heard the others go off to their rooms. The white tub had layered black rims like centuries of sediment, ancient dirt imprinting its memory on the physical world. Water fell so slowly from the taps, tepid at best. It felt like a bad lifetime just to get an inch. No bubbles. It looked murky in the discoloured tub. He felt sick when he pulled his clothes off. Piled them on the floor as far away as he could. The jeans, the shoes, the socks, the pants. Witnesses. Saw it all. His skinny body was grey in the bathroom. He climbed into the bath and the water only came up to his ankles. He sat down, clutched his knees up tight to his chest. There was blood under some of his fingernails. Dark like dirt but it washed out red. He scrubbed at his hands so hard that water showered out of the bath and onto the floor. The taps were still running slowly. He started screaming, screaming fuck fuck fuck, and his voice was hoarse. The words became sobs, heaves, tears. He cried and held his knees to his chest. His thin legs. His long feet. Why had she licked his cheek? Felt like her fucking tongue print was branded into his flesh. Her tits, dark blue veins like tattoos by the bumps of her areola. Her neck, her jeans running up to her amenable cunt. Her tongue flicking over his cheek, smooth like a teenager. Saw it in his eyelids. Why had it been him? His crying was muffled by the sound of the water falling.
*
The living room had an upright lamp switched on. The sky was half-light in the cracks, where the curtains hung down from the tops of the windows. Tom was hunched over the bloodstain, scrubbing it with a wet kitchen cloth. There was a part-drunk mug of instant coffee on the table next to him. He was in a vest with his jeans. The bucket he rinsed the cloth in was full of pinkish water. Blood-coloured bubbles foaming on the stain. Scrubbed up, rung out then scrubbed again. His arms were shaking with the effort. The bubbles reappeared with every scrub, oozed out of the stain. It got pinker, not any better. It was deep into the fibres. Irreversible, like the act itself. Fingerprint of an evening. Of an entire narrative.
“Fuck it,” said Tom. Pointless effort.
He stood up and threw the cloth back into the bucket. His vest was soaked in sweat in a circle on the chest and smeared with blood. He took a sip from the coffee, grimaced as it went down. He rubbed the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. It left blood on his face from the cleaning. He walked out of the room but was back within seconds carrying a big pot of table salt. He poured it all over the stain and sat down in an armchair. Lit another cigarette. Then got up and opened the curtains. It looked even worse in the light.
*
The morning sun streamed rich sickly yellow through the tinted honey glass of the back door. Ezra walked into it from his bedroom. The yellow felt holy. He was wearing a thick grey dress that hung shapeless to his knees. Something Indian. It had become a part of his character, a token of life’s own absurdity, the remnant of a relationship. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened for movement. Nothing. They were asleep.
He crossed the hall and went into the living room. There was a layer of wet salt over the blood stain. It had turned grey not red. Looked like a skin condition. Fucking idiot must have tried to clean it first. He took a cigarette from a packet on the table and lit it with a match. Stepped over the salt and opened up the curtains. November sun only burns in silence. He turned back to the room and saw Lucas in the armchair –
“Jesus!” said Ezra. His body jumped.
It was him alright. Face tanned and asleep. He looked okay. Just there, resting – like he always had been. An esoteric twist to the magnolia decor. No cuts, no smashed features. Ezra remembered kicking his face and feeling bone give way. The way the windpipe whistled. The way the mouth gurgled like a sink or an alien life form. Remembered carrying the body down to the basement wrapped up in a rug, stripped of personality by their own thorough violence. He crept towards the armchair. He had smoke in his eyes. He reached out one hand to touch Lucas’s face, to feel the mass of reality, his fingertips on the warm flesh. It was there. It gave a little with his touch. He was in the armchair. Ezra smelt his shampoo. He was there.
“Ezra?” said Conor. He was in boxer shorts, stood in the doorway. Ezra pulled away. “What are you doing?”
“I was just...” He looked back at the armchair. Conor looked too. He knew it would be empty. “Nothing.”
“Okay. I’m going to try and get some more sleep. It’s early.”
“Sure,” said Ezra. He was still looking at the chair. He rubbed his fingertips together gently. He could feel the skin, the resistance he had felt pushing up against life. Conor left him alone. Ezra leant his hand out towards the armchair, groping at the emptiness, trying to reconstruct a person from the spaces they used to occupy. To sculpt them back into existence. To feel them back into life.
The room was so empty he couldn’t be sure that even he was in it.
November
Greg was running a bath in the clinical light. He heard the others go off to their rooms. The white tub had layered black rims like centuries of sediment, ancient dirt imprinting its memory on the physical world. Water fell so slowly from the taps, tepid at best. It felt like a bad lifetime just to get an inch. No bubbles. It looked murky in the discoloured tub. He felt sick when he pulled his clothes off. Piled them on the floor as far away as he could. The jeans, the shoes, the socks, the pants. Witnesses. Saw it all. His skinny body was grey in the bathroom. He climbed into the bath and the water only came up to his ankles. He sat down, clutched his knees up tight to his chest. There was blood under some of his fingernails. Dark like dirt but it washed out red. He scrubbed at his hands so hard that water showered out of the bath and onto the floor. The taps were still running slowly. He started screaming, screaming fuck fuck fuck, and his voice was hoarse. The words became sobs, heaves, tears. He cried and held his knees to his chest. His thin legs. His long feet. Why had she licked his cheek? Felt like her fucking tongue print was branded into his flesh. Her tits, dark blue veins like tattoos by the bumps of her areola. Her neck, her jeans running up to her amenable cunt. Her tongue flicking over his cheek, smooth like a teenager. Saw it in his eyelids. Why had it been him? His crying was muffled by the sound of the water falling.
*
The living room had an upright lamp switched on. The sky was half-light in the cracks, where the curtains hung down from the tops of the windows. Tom was hunched over the bloodstain, scrubbing it with a wet kitchen cloth. There was a part-drunk mug of instant coffee on the table next to him. He was in a vest with his jeans. The bucket he rinsed the cloth in was full of pinkish water. Blood-coloured bubbles foaming on the stain. Scrubbed up, rung out then scrubbed again. His arms were shaking with the effort. The bubbles reappeared with every scrub, oozed out of the stain. It got pinker, not any better. It was deep into the fibres. Irreversible, like the act itself. Fingerprint of an evening. Of an entire narrative.
“Fuck it,” said Tom. Pointless effort.
He stood up and threw the cloth back into the bucket. His vest was soaked in sweat in a circle on the chest and smeared with blood. He took a sip from the coffee, grimaced as it went down. He rubbed the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. It left blood on his face from the cleaning. He walked out of the room but was back within seconds carrying a big pot of table salt. He poured it all over the stain and sat down in an armchair. Lit another cigarette. Then got up and opened the curtains. It looked even worse in the light.
*
The morning sun streamed rich sickly yellow through the tinted honey glass of the back door. Ezra walked into it from his bedroom. The yellow felt holy. He was wearing a thick grey dress that hung shapeless to his knees. Something Indian. It had become a part of his character, a token of life’s own absurdity, the remnant of a relationship. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened for movement. Nothing. They were asleep.
He crossed the hall and went into the living room. There was a layer of wet salt over the blood stain. It had turned grey not red. Looked like a skin condition. Fucking idiot must have tried to clean it first. He took a cigarette from a packet on the table and lit it with a match. Stepped over the salt and opened up the curtains. November sun only burns in silence. He turned back to the room and saw Lucas in the armchair –
“Jesus!” said Ezra. His body jumped.
It was him alright. Face tanned and asleep. He looked okay. Just there, resting – like he always had been. An esoteric twist to the magnolia decor. No cuts, no smashed features. Ezra remembered kicking his face and feeling bone give way. The way the windpipe whistled. The way the mouth gurgled like a sink or an alien life form. Remembered carrying the body down to the basement wrapped up in a rug, stripped of personality by their own thorough violence. He crept towards the armchair. He had smoke in his eyes. He reached out one hand to touch Lucas’s face, to feel the mass of reality, his fingertips on the warm flesh. It was there. It gave a little with his touch. He was in the armchair. Ezra smelt his shampoo. He was there.
“Ezra?” said Conor. He was in boxer shorts, stood in the doorway. Ezra pulled away. “What are you doing?”
“I was just...” He looked back at the armchair. Conor looked too. He knew it would be empty. “Nothing.”
“Okay. I’m going to try and get some more sleep. It’s early.”
“Sure,” said Ezra. He was still looking at the chair. He rubbed his fingertips together gently. He could feel the skin, the resistance he had felt pushing up against life. Conor left him alone. Ezra leant his hand out towards the armchair, groping at the emptiness, trying to reconstruct a person from the spaces they used to occupy. To sculpt them back into existence. To feel them back into life.
The room was so empty he couldn’t be sure that even he was in it.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
the tenancy agreement: chapter 9
2005
November
The only light in the stairwell came from the kitchen. The basement had one bare bulb hanging from a short flex, but it was behind the door at the bottom of the stairs. They hadn’t thought to prop it open. All six of them were sagging down the stairs like dumped laundry, dragging the body behind them, wrapped up on itself in the middle of the rug, a coarse woven shroud found dumped on the street. Ezra had pulled it back to the house, said he felt an affinity with it, and there it was wrapped around the lifeless body of a former cripple. They kept dropping their corners and it fell with dead thuds. Dead like pig hide, scrap parts, felled tree, demolished property. When a pig’s stunned with a captive bolt pistol it catastrophically damages the cerebrum but leaves the brain stem intact, then they slit its throat. Heart keeps on pumping the blood out. The obedience of meticulously domesticated biological processes! Aiding and abetting your own exsanguination! On the dark stairs the body-filled carpet roll fell with the kind of abandon only the deceased can muster. Their shoulders were crunching into the wood panelled walls that lined the stairwell. Then a knock at the front door. Rang through them all like bullets, three gunshots, a noise deafening in the void left by absent conversation. Thunderous knocking – the doorbell long broken – even louder than their breathing. It was hard heavy work. It was a knock alright.
“Fuck,” said Greg. He let the head end drop to his feet and listened. They all dropped it, the rolled rug almost as long as the stairs were tall, held it in place.
“Who’s that?” said Tom. The game’s up. Said as much in his eyeballs.
Greg put his finger over his lips. Three more gunshot knocks, six in total. One for each of them. Them murderers.
“Maybe they’ll go away,” said Tom, a sharp whisper.
“Shhh!” said Greg and Ezra together, craning their heads to listen.
The front door opened loudly. They were coming in. The living room. The blood. They could hear the door open. Rattling against its own frame.
“Hello?” It was a jovial male voice. “Anyone home?”
“Shit,” said Greg. “I think it’s the guy from next door.”
He ran up the rug and into the hallway. Couldn’t let the nosy bastard see the living room. He remembered to pull on a clean t-shirt on the way. The guy was standing just inside the front door, a friendly-looking fat face and balding, thickset in torso and grinning enthusiastically. He was wearing supermarket jeans and a loose grey t-shirt, a number cheaply screen-printed on its front, the name of an American state. Massachusetts or California or Michigan. All an allusion to the nameless sport he never played, never even thought about. The screen-print was cracking but it was a deliberate design method. Supposed to give it a sanitized retro trend-type. There was a caption too, printed in italics in big inverted commas. “Playing the hardest ball since ’72!” or something. It was the Americanization of his own memories channelled through supermarket fashion, his own nostalgia replaced by the recurring themes of Beach Boys records and cinematic cliché. It was an outfit of staggering blandness, steeped in reassurance. His grin doubled in width when he saw Greg coming towards him. He had sweat on his forehead.
“Can I help?” said Greg.
“Hello there,” said the neighbour, his voice like he worked in insurance sales and was talking on the telephone. “I’m Tony.” He extended his hand and Greg shook it limply. The blood on his hand was long dry. He had washed some of it off but he could still see bits, patches like a birthmark that he needed to scrub. He clasped his hands behind his back. “You boys okay around here?” Tony continued. “We thought we heard some... disturbances?” He rose it into a question. Neighbourhood diplomacy at its finest. South East London: a shining example to the world.
“Disturbances?” Greg looked about the hall, as if – even when looking, really looking, you could see him looking – he couldn’t for single second conceive of what these alleged disturbances might have been. This was a house without disturbance. That much was obvious from Greg, looking. Look at him looking for disturbances. Hasn’t found shit. Nothing. Not a peek. Or maybe... that’s it. He clicked his fingers. Greg did. A eureka moment. Was it overblown? Fuck it, he’d just killed a cripple. “Disturbances, right, of course,” he said, acting nonchalant. “We were decorating. Painting, actually. The mantelpiece.”
“Decorating? At” – he looked at his digital wristwatch – “three o’clock on a Sunday morning?”
“Strike while the iron’s hot,” said Greg through a vacuum-packed smile. “That’s kind of our house motto.” Bullshit. It said never regret revelry above the front door. Painted blue.
“Indeed,” said Tony, warmed against his better judgement to his own sizeable innards by enterprising, can-do attitudes. He rubbed his chin, eyes locked on Greg’s, smiling with an awkward constancy. He peered over Greg’s shoulder, as if he was trying to get past him, to confirm or deny the decorating story, to see for himself the masterwork of the newly painted mantelpiece. He didn’t buy it. Don’t be fooled by the smile. Knows what he heard and it wasn’t painting. What was it? Assault? Rape? Violence? Greg blocked his path as politely as possible. There was a loud thud from the basement. Tony looked right into Greg’s face, eyebrows cocked like hairy pistols. “What was that?” he said.
“What was what?” said Greg. He swallowed drily after the sentence. Thirsty work this unplanned murder.
“That thud. Sounded like it was coming from the basement.” He knew the layout of the house, of course he did. All the houses in the terrace were the same, or at least mirror images of the one next door.
“The basement? Oh right. That was just Joe. He’s doing some work down there.”
“I see. Just Joe. Doing a bit of work.”
“Exactly,” said Greg, same tight smile.
“Well, as long as it’s not another swimming pool.”
“Not this time.” Greg’s knees felt weak. His heart hurt with relief.
“Okay son.” They shook hands again, for what felt like too long. “You students seem to keep pretty strange hours.”
“Yeah. We’re really sorry if we disturbed you. Just lost track of time again, I guess.”
“That’s okay. Just try to keep it down in future, okay? Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” said Greg. He waved. Did that look normal? Waving to someone standing right next to you at three in the morning? He couldn’t tell. Tony walked to the front door but turned back to look at Greg, who was standing rooted to the same spot, grinning wearily, like he couldn’t hold his cheeks up. Tony walked back to him, shuffling with distraction.
“You know it sounds a bit odd but the wife swears blind that she heard screaming, of all the mad things. Coming from here.” He tapped his hand on the cold wall. “That’s why I came over, really. The wife. Real screaming, she said. Horrible screaming.” They looked at each other. Greg could feel a drop of sweat in his eyebrow. He waited for it to fall, to hit his eye, waited for the sting. He was fucked. He felt fucked. There wasn’t a thing he could say. “There wasn’t any screaming, was there?” Again he was trying to peer behind Greg, over his shoulder, into the house. The living room. Greg shook his head, paragon of arch sincerity.
“No, no I don’t... wait a minute,” he said, just then remembering. Of course! How obvious! “You said screaming?” Tony’s turn to nod. “Of course. That’ll be Joe again. He tends to scream while he decorates.” As an aside: “It’s just his thing.” Like he’s talking about a medical condition, a recognisable and diagnosed mania. “We’ve tried telling him but...”
“Right, right,” said Tony. “Old habits and all that. Just try to” – he tapped an index finger on the face of his wristwatch.
“Of course. We’ll keep a better eye on the time. And like I say, we’re really sorry to have disturbed you. Again.”
“No problem.”
He walked back to the front door, his back turned to Greg, who stayed right where he was. He deliberated for a second. His fingers were on the door handle, Greg was willing him out, away, but he strolled the same few paces back into the house, hands in his jeans pockets.
“You know Lucas is a good friend of ours,” he said. Greg felt pale, felt the blood drain out of his face.
“He’s a good man,” said Greg quietly, clutching onto the present tense.
“He is. One of the best. And he likes us to keep a bit of an eye on the place. When we can.”
“It’s the smart thing to do.”
Tony inspected Greg, looked him up and down like produce at a market, like a whore in a window. He nodded, apparently satisfied.
“Good stuff,” he said. “Goodnight then.”
Greg waved again. Didn’t have the energy to speak. Tony fucked off, closed the door firmly behind him with a kind of half wave. Shit. Shithead. Fuckbrain. Fountaincock. Greg gasped like he’d been underwater and rushed back to the basement.
They were all hunched in stasis on the stairway, clutching loosely at odd bits of the rug-rolled corpse, which had slipped further down the stairs so the head pressed into the door at the bottom with all the indignity of discarded soft furnishings. They belched out sighs of collective relief at Greg’s silhouette, blocking what little light there was from their eyes and hands.
“He’s gone,” said Greg.
“What did he want?” said Jonathan.
“Wanted to know what the noise was.” Greg squinted at the rug. “What was that fucking banging. Sounded like a dead body being dropped.”
“It was,” said Conor. His eyes were huge and blue and simple and his lips deep red against his pale Irish heritage, like beetroot sliced onto a white dinner plate, like thick crayon lines on a blank page. You couldn’t tell in the dark. “I lost my grip.”
“That’s great,” said Greg. “We need to be a lot more fucking careful.”
“Look can we just get him down here?” said Joe. He was drained by narcotics.
Greg walked down a few steps and picked up the foot end of the heavy roll. The others tried to get their arms around it, like it was a blanket they were carrying under their arms to picnic.
“We have to pull it up first to get the door open,” said Greg.
They pulled at it. Ezra dropped his section.
“Fuck,” he said, shouting. “This is absurd.”
“Have you got a better idea?” said Tom.
Ezra sneered and grabbed the rug again. He supported it on his knee while he got a better hold on it and they pulled it up a couple of steps. Joe’s hand got crushed against the wall and he punched the rug with his free hand, its lifelessness making for effective stress relief. Ezra pulled the door open and turned on the light, and they all squinted troglodyte eyes at the illuminated honesty of the exposed sixty watts. It picked out blood stains in electric truth. Ruined Levis. That’ll never wash out. It made a confessional of the stuffy basement. No hiding from that light. Oh watered down red on once white vests now tobacco yellow! The streaks may be pink but their organic – or rather to say, HUMAN – origin remained obvious, more so in the bulb glare. Oh sweat rivulets pooled in chest hair! Squelch beneath thumbs and make your brine ponds in fluffy umbilici! Oh scuffed knuckles, skin torn through like a threadbare trouser set! Oh beards, dashed in chaotic action with all the bloody remnants of surprise murder! In the light of the basement the clarity of the twenty-first century was amplifying the grotesque to obscene definition. It smelt like dust burning on the bulb. Microscopic particles incinerated by the unbearable heat of revelation. Their veins looked an incredible blue. Their imperfections grew exponentially.
“Bastard,” said Greg, dropping his end of the rug and rubbing his hands down the front of his jeans. He was talking about the body.
“Heavy for a cripple,” said Joe.
“It’s all the sitting down,” said Tom. “Everything he eats just congregates in his guts like lead shit, poor bastard.”
“Let’s get him in there,” said Greg, pointing to the doorway, the tunnel behind it. It was only about five and a half feet from floor to ceiling but went back about twenty, its walls of bare red brick, the ancient plaster just pouring out from between them like dry sand, and it was stuffed with bits of broken furniture and weird clothes and suitcases. They dragged the body into the tunnel and walked over the top of it to get back out. Cunt was dead anyway.
“It’s still going to smell,” said Jonathan.
“We’ll have to get a tarp or something,” said Greg. He was nodding. Like he was reassuring himself. His tendency toward practical solutions depended on the right tools for the job. “I need some wood glue anyway. This’ll take care of it in the short-term.”
“We’ll have to bury it,” said Tom.
“We can use the swimming pool,” said Joe. Irony swamped by his own misplaced pride. For Joe the square dirt hole was a swimming pool. A swimming pool more than the sum of its shit parts. The swimming pool was a grave. He had dug it weeks ago. Was it cocaine prophecy, self-fulfilled, body and all? Muddy grave leads to body, wrapped in a rug and dumped in a basement. Needs it like a gun needs to shoot. To be purposeful. To be itself. It couldn’t be different to how it was. Nothing could. Balls in fate’s mouth. It’s fucking Joe again. Big Joe.
“This is a big mistake,” said Ezra.
“Killing him was the mistake,” said Conor. “Sorting the mess out is the only thing we can do.”
They each lit cigarettes. The nicotine made their legs feel weak. The air felt thin, like the dead body had pulled all the life out of it, leaving a vacuum where it used to be. They waited for their eyes to bulge out of their sockets. For their hearts to burst like meat balloons. For their heads to explode from the weight of their own existence. Nothing happened.
“Let’s get upstairs,” said Tom. “I hate this fucking basement.”
Greg turned the light out and closed the door leaving the body behind it and they filed up the stairs one by one. The coolness of the house felt soothing on their skin like human hands. Greg put the kettle on. They stood in the kitchen, didn’t speak, stared out into the dark garden, the dead streets beyond. Even the traffic was quiet. Over the cheap plastic kettle that struggled to boil they heard another knock. Two uncertain raps. Pause. Three more. Must have seen the lights still on. Jesus, wake up the whole fucking –
“Christ, what now?” Ezra switched the kettle off, as if it were only the rushing sound of its working element that alerted anyone to their house-wide wakefulness. It took seconds to shut up. Wearily assured of its own failure. More knocking. Not the fucking neighbour again.
“Fuck,” said Greg.
He left the kitchen and walked to the front door. Closed the living room door shut on his way. No more fuck ups. He yanked it open. Tanya. Lucas and Tanya. Sister. Shitlivers. He recoiled slightly away from her. Momentary loss of composure. Took a look at her tits. Imagined his cock between them. It was happening quickly in imperceptible perversion. Harmless enough. Though perhaps imagining doing it – intercourse – with your victim’s big sister edges towards classic psychopathy or psychosexual crises or characteristic paraphilic depravity. They looked big under her shirt. She wasn’t that old. He knew it wasn’t the time but the stress made his loins move. In ripples like a dying fish left on a riverbank. Don’t think about that now. Think about this now. Dead landlord. Dead brother. Dead fucked. Her thighs were thick but her calves were tiny, like arms. Older women were the more receptive. Who told him that? His dad? Can’t have been. She would beg him to do it and he would and Lucas would be dead downstairs. They would feel the secrecy in their congress and her clitoris would swell unconsciously with her dead brother’s memory. He wanted it to feel like he shouldn’t be doing it. It did feel like that. It wasn’t the time. He thought of the basement.
“Tanya,” he said, loud enough for them to hear in the kitchen. Ezra’s cigarette dropped out of his mouth. They all felt grateful for the kettle’s silence. “Hi.” He was leaning on the open front door like a bad actor playing nonchalant. His body stopped Tanya from coming inside.
“Hi Greg.” She spoke enthusiastically. “I’m sorry to come round so late.”
“That’s okay, anytime is fine. Although it is pretty late and...”
“I just wondered if you guys had seen Lucas.”
Greg’s tight face dropped, hung slack like a slipper, like shabby old house clothes. He couldn’t hold onto the smile. He swallowed, painfully aware of the concrete scraping of his own laryngeal prominence.
“Lucas?” he said. Voice like a child beaten up.
“Lucas.”
“No,” he said. “I mean. No. Why would we have seen Lucas? It’s late.”
“It’s just he mentioned that he had to come over here to see you guys,” she said. She put her hands, more just her fingers, in her jean pockets. Kind of rocked on her heels. “He was supposed to be coming to ours afterwards. That was about seven hours ago. He isn’t answering his phone and we haven’t heard a thing from him and to be honest Greg I’m a bit concerned. Worried.” She tried to peer over Greg’s shoulder. It was a very subtle motion. He adjusted his position a fraction, like it was something natural and not a defensive response to stimuli. “So have you seen him?”
“Have I?” said Greg slowly. Contemplative. Excessively so. Makes him look guilty.
“It’s straightforward Greg. Has he been here?”
“Right. No. Definitely no.”
“No?”
“No. Final answer.” Tried to smile as he said it but his fragile joke imploded hard, swallowing its own cheap pop culture reference like a mouthful of dogshit, left pointlessly hollow in Tanya’s partly raised eyebrows.
“Okay,” she said. They looked at each other for seconds. Ten, fifteen. He kept his eyes off her chest. She leant quickly into him, so quick it was like violence out of the stillness, and she pulled him towards her by the t-shirt. Her eyes were manic, darted about like a blackbird’s. Her face was centimetres from his. She could smell the spoilt milk twang of his sweaty neck. He kept his eyes straight ahead but out of the corner of one he saw her tongue come out, extended past her teeth and lips. Thick wet muscle of tongue, flexible and strong. It came out – as if sentient – and licked the length of his cheek. An animal ritual. A papillae declaration of devastating significance. There was a promise in that tongued exchange. There was cognisance, comprehension. It was a statement. She knew. He felt hot breath from her nostrils blow against his spittle cheek. She licked him again, the flat width of her giant tongue pressed down against him. It hadn’t felt like this in fantasy, where she begged him to fuck her. This felt bad wrong, something he actually shouldn’t be doing and not just something that felt like he shouldn’t be doing it. He felt like food weighed up under the convincing musculature of her masticatory organ. He was too surprised to move. She had a hand on each of his shoulders and moved her mouth to his ear. “You’re dead.” She said it quietly. Spoke it like an elegy. Short and painful. An observation rather than a threat. Greg pushed her away from him but gently.
“What?” he said. He sounded afraid, his face lopsided with confusion.
“I said okay,” she said. All warm smile and sincere blinking. Her eyelids moved very slowly. Greg thought of Morse code. “It’s fine. I’m sure he’ll turn up. You know what Lucas is like.” She rolled her eyes like they were sharing an intimate joke. The life of Lucas. Lucas and his ways. A real fucking character. If eyes talk then hers said they shared it, her and Greg. Her eyes screamed the conversation, barked it from rooftops: they both had their Lucas secrets. He felt it on her tongue over his bald left cheek, over its average contours. Felt the knowledge. Poured out of him like taste. She could taste it on him. “Thanks Greg, I mean that.” Smile. Smile. “Have a good night.” She looked at her wristwatch. “Or a good day I suppose. I’ll see you around.”
She left. Greg put a hand to his cheek, still damp. He rubbed it dry. He felt insane. He felt like Dustin Hoffman, only this wasn’t a seduction. He went back to the kitchen. They were standing in a circle around a broken pint glass in the middle of the laminate floor. Greg looked at the pint glass and sighed.
“Shit,” he said.
“What was that?” said Ezra, hissed like a pantomime.
“It was nothing.”
“Was that Tanya?” said Jonathan.
“Yeah, but it was nothing,” said Greg.
“Nothing?” said Ezra. “How can that be nothing?”
“What did she want?” said Tom.
“She wondered if we’d seen Lucas.”
They all looked at each other. Colour-drained haggard faces aged decades in five hours. Joe was rubbing his veined eyes with the palms of both hands. They slurped like wet mud. He rubbed until he saw flashing lights.
“She knows,” said Conor.
“She doesn’t know. How could she know?” Ezra’s sentences had all become scathing accusations.
“You heard her. She knew he was supposed to be coming here.”
“But why would she suspect murder?”
“Maybe he’s that kind of man,” said Joe. Eyes closed.
“Shut up,” said Ezra.
“How did she look?” said Jonathan.
“What does that mean?” said Greg.
“Suspicious? Angry?”
“She looked fine. As far as she’s concerned it’s fine.”
Greg felt limp in their gaze. He could still feel her tongue run up his cheek. Felt it on his buccal nerve like an orgasm. Imagined his thumb in her anus. He could still hear her say it: you’re dead.
“It doesn’t look fine,” said Tom.
“It’s fine.”
“Then why’s she coming here?”
“To see if her fucking brother was here,” said Greg. He moved his arms like inconveniences. “He wasn’t. Isn’t. I told her he wasn’t and she has no reason to think otherwise. Let’s keep it that way.”
“This is the beginning of the end,” said Tom. “First the neighbour, then Tanya, then the police. People are going to be looking for him and this is one of the first places they’re going to look. He was supposed to be coming here, for fuck’s sake. He told his sister he was coming here. His fucking body’s in the basement. His blood’s all over the carpet. The neighbour heard screaming. How the fuck do we think we’re going to get away with this? It’s murder.”
“People get away with worse things than murder and we’ll get away with this,” said Ezra. “We just need to be smart about it. And I admit, we can’t have this happening every day. We need to get it out of here.”
“We will,” said Jonathan. “We just need a couple of days to sort things out.”
“A couple of days might be just what we don’t have.”
“This is a big thing,” said Conor. Monotone assertions were his trademark. “Getting away with it’s not our only worry. We need to live with it. For our whole lives.” He tapped his temple with his index finger. “It’ll get us in here.”
“Please,” said Greg, picking up a glass from the worktop and smelling it. He filled it with water from the tap. “Let’s not do this now. I need to sleep. We all need to sleep. And can somebody please clear this fucking glass up.”
The words felt futile passing his lips. He left the kitchen, Joe followed him.
“Goodnight,” said Jonathan. He went.
Ezra filled a mug with water. It was ringed at the bottom with thick tea stains and chipped around the lip. He swallowed a gulp. Didn’t take his eyes off of Tom and Conor.
“We’ve fucked up,” he said. Tom nodded a reluctant agreement. “Night.” He went.
Tom turned the kettle on and lit a cigarette.
“How the hell are we supposed to sleep?” he said, “We need to get cleaned up in here. We need to...”
“Goodnight man,” said Conor. He put his hand on Tom’s shoulder. Just for a second. Then went into the back bedroom and closed the door.
Tom poured some instant coffee into a cup, poured water over that. The smoke from the cigarette looked like you could hold onto it. The sun was coming up.
November
The only light in the stairwell came from the kitchen. The basement had one bare bulb hanging from a short flex, but it was behind the door at the bottom of the stairs. They hadn’t thought to prop it open. All six of them were sagging down the stairs like dumped laundry, dragging the body behind them, wrapped up on itself in the middle of the rug, a coarse woven shroud found dumped on the street. Ezra had pulled it back to the house, said he felt an affinity with it, and there it was wrapped around the lifeless body of a former cripple. They kept dropping their corners and it fell with dead thuds. Dead like pig hide, scrap parts, felled tree, demolished property. When a pig’s stunned with a captive bolt pistol it catastrophically damages the cerebrum but leaves the brain stem intact, then they slit its throat. Heart keeps on pumping the blood out. The obedience of meticulously domesticated biological processes! Aiding and abetting your own exsanguination! On the dark stairs the body-filled carpet roll fell with the kind of abandon only the deceased can muster. Their shoulders were crunching into the wood panelled walls that lined the stairwell. Then a knock at the front door. Rang through them all like bullets, three gunshots, a noise deafening in the void left by absent conversation. Thunderous knocking – the doorbell long broken – even louder than their breathing. It was hard heavy work. It was a knock alright.
“Fuck,” said Greg. He let the head end drop to his feet and listened. They all dropped it, the rolled rug almost as long as the stairs were tall, held it in place.
“Who’s that?” said Tom. The game’s up. Said as much in his eyeballs.
Greg put his finger over his lips. Three more gunshot knocks, six in total. One for each of them. Them murderers.
“Maybe they’ll go away,” said Tom, a sharp whisper.
“Shhh!” said Greg and Ezra together, craning their heads to listen.
The front door opened loudly. They were coming in. The living room. The blood. They could hear the door open. Rattling against its own frame.
“Hello?” It was a jovial male voice. “Anyone home?”
“Shit,” said Greg. “I think it’s the guy from next door.”
He ran up the rug and into the hallway. Couldn’t let the nosy bastard see the living room. He remembered to pull on a clean t-shirt on the way. The guy was standing just inside the front door, a friendly-looking fat face and balding, thickset in torso and grinning enthusiastically. He was wearing supermarket jeans and a loose grey t-shirt, a number cheaply screen-printed on its front, the name of an American state. Massachusetts or California or Michigan. All an allusion to the nameless sport he never played, never even thought about. The screen-print was cracking but it was a deliberate design method. Supposed to give it a sanitized retro trend-type. There was a caption too, printed in italics in big inverted commas. “Playing the hardest ball since ’72!” or something. It was the Americanization of his own memories channelled through supermarket fashion, his own nostalgia replaced by the recurring themes of Beach Boys records and cinematic cliché. It was an outfit of staggering blandness, steeped in reassurance. His grin doubled in width when he saw Greg coming towards him. He had sweat on his forehead.
“Can I help?” said Greg.
“Hello there,” said the neighbour, his voice like he worked in insurance sales and was talking on the telephone. “I’m Tony.” He extended his hand and Greg shook it limply. The blood on his hand was long dry. He had washed some of it off but he could still see bits, patches like a birthmark that he needed to scrub. He clasped his hands behind his back. “You boys okay around here?” Tony continued. “We thought we heard some... disturbances?” He rose it into a question. Neighbourhood diplomacy at its finest. South East London: a shining example to the world.
“Disturbances?” Greg looked about the hall, as if – even when looking, really looking, you could see him looking – he couldn’t for single second conceive of what these alleged disturbances might have been. This was a house without disturbance. That much was obvious from Greg, looking. Look at him looking for disturbances. Hasn’t found shit. Nothing. Not a peek. Or maybe... that’s it. He clicked his fingers. Greg did. A eureka moment. Was it overblown? Fuck it, he’d just killed a cripple. “Disturbances, right, of course,” he said, acting nonchalant. “We were decorating. Painting, actually. The mantelpiece.”
“Decorating? At” – he looked at his digital wristwatch – “three o’clock on a Sunday morning?”
“Strike while the iron’s hot,” said Greg through a vacuum-packed smile. “That’s kind of our house motto.” Bullshit. It said never regret revelry above the front door. Painted blue.
“Indeed,” said Tony, warmed against his better judgement to his own sizeable innards by enterprising, can-do attitudes. He rubbed his chin, eyes locked on Greg’s, smiling with an awkward constancy. He peered over Greg’s shoulder, as if he was trying to get past him, to confirm or deny the decorating story, to see for himself the masterwork of the newly painted mantelpiece. He didn’t buy it. Don’t be fooled by the smile. Knows what he heard and it wasn’t painting. What was it? Assault? Rape? Violence? Greg blocked his path as politely as possible. There was a loud thud from the basement. Tony looked right into Greg’s face, eyebrows cocked like hairy pistols. “What was that?” he said.
“What was what?” said Greg. He swallowed drily after the sentence. Thirsty work this unplanned murder.
“That thud. Sounded like it was coming from the basement.” He knew the layout of the house, of course he did. All the houses in the terrace were the same, or at least mirror images of the one next door.
“The basement? Oh right. That was just Joe. He’s doing some work down there.”
“I see. Just Joe. Doing a bit of work.”
“Exactly,” said Greg, same tight smile.
“Well, as long as it’s not another swimming pool.”
“Not this time.” Greg’s knees felt weak. His heart hurt with relief.
“Okay son.” They shook hands again, for what felt like too long. “You students seem to keep pretty strange hours.”
“Yeah. We’re really sorry if we disturbed you. Just lost track of time again, I guess.”
“That’s okay. Just try to keep it down in future, okay? Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” said Greg. He waved. Did that look normal? Waving to someone standing right next to you at three in the morning? He couldn’t tell. Tony walked to the front door but turned back to look at Greg, who was standing rooted to the same spot, grinning wearily, like he couldn’t hold his cheeks up. Tony walked back to him, shuffling with distraction.
“You know it sounds a bit odd but the wife swears blind that she heard screaming, of all the mad things. Coming from here.” He tapped his hand on the cold wall. “That’s why I came over, really. The wife. Real screaming, she said. Horrible screaming.” They looked at each other. Greg could feel a drop of sweat in his eyebrow. He waited for it to fall, to hit his eye, waited for the sting. He was fucked. He felt fucked. There wasn’t a thing he could say. “There wasn’t any screaming, was there?” Again he was trying to peer behind Greg, over his shoulder, into the house. The living room. Greg shook his head, paragon of arch sincerity.
“No, no I don’t... wait a minute,” he said, just then remembering. Of course! How obvious! “You said screaming?” Tony’s turn to nod. “Of course. That’ll be Joe again. He tends to scream while he decorates.” As an aside: “It’s just his thing.” Like he’s talking about a medical condition, a recognisable and diagnosed mania. “We’ve tried telling him but...”
“Right, right,” said Tony. “Old habits and all that. Just try to” – he tapped an index finger on the face of his wristwatch.
“Of course. We’ll keep a better eye on the time. And like I say, we’re really sorry to have disturbed you. Again.”
“No problem.”
He walked back to the front door, his back turned to Greg, who stayed right where he was. He deliberated for a second. His fingers were on the door handle, Greg was willing him out, away, but he strolled the same few paces back into the house, hands in his jeans pockets.
“You know Lucas is a good friend of ours,” he said. Greg felt pale, felt the blood drain out of his face.
“He’s a good man,” said Greg quietly, clutching onto the present tense.
“He is. One of the best. And he likes us to keep a bit of an eye on the place. When we can.”
“It’s the smart thing to do.”
Tony inspected Greg, looked him up and down like produce at a market, like a whore in a window. He nodded, apparently satisfied.
“Good stuff,” he said. “Goodnight then.”
Greg waved again. Didn’t have the energy to speak. Tony fucked off, closed the door firmly behind him with a kind of half wave. Shit. Shithead. Fuckbrain. Fountaincock. Greg gasped like he’d been underwater and rushed back to the basement.
They were all hunched in stasis on the stairway, clutching loosely at odd bits of the rug-rolled corpse, which had slipped further down the stairs so the head pressed into the door at the bottom with all the indignity of discarded soft furnishings. They belched out sighs of collective relief at Greg’s silhouette, blocking what little light there was from their eyes and hands.
“He’s gone,” said Greg.
“What did he want?” said Jonathan.
“Wanted to know what the noise was.” Greg squinted at the rug. “What was that fucking banging. Sounded like a dead body being dropped.”
“It was,” said Conor. His eyes were huge and blue and simple and his lips deep red against his pale Irish heritage, like beetroot sliced onto a white dinner plate, like thick crayon lines on a blank page. You couldn’t tell in the dark. “I lost my grip.”
“That’s great,” said Greg. “We need to be a lot more fucking careful.”
“Look can we just get him down here?” said Joe. He was drained by narcotics.
Greg walked down a few steps and picked up the foot end of the heavy roll. The others tried to get their arms around it, like it was a blanket they were carrying under their arms to picnic.
“We have to pull it up first to get the door open,” said Greg.
They pulled at it. Ezra dropped his section.
“Fuck,” he said, shouting. “This is absurd.”
“Have you got a better idea?” said Tom.
Ezra sneered and grabbed the rug again. He supported it on his knee while he got a better hold on it and they pulled it up a couple of steps. Joe’s hand got crushed against the wall and he punched the rug with his free hand, its lifelessness making for effective stress relief. Ezra pulled the door open and turned on the light, and they all squinted troglodyte eyes at the illuminated honesty of the exposed sixty watts. It picked out blood stains in electric truth. Ruined Levis. That’ll never wash out. It made a confessional of the stuffy basement. No hiding from that light. Oh watered down red on once white vests now tobacco yellow! The streaks may be pink but their organic – or rather to say, HUMAN – origin remained obvious, more so in the bulb glare. Oh sweat rivulets pooled in chest hair! Squelch beneath thumbs and make your brine ponds in fluffy umbilici! Oh scuffed knuckles, skin torn through like a threadbare trouser set! Oh beards, dashed in chaotic action with all the bloody remnants of surprise murder! In the light of the basement the clarity of the twenty-first century was amplifying the grotesque to obscene definition. It smelt like dust burning on the bulb. Microscopic particles incinerated by the unbearable heat of revelation. Their veins looked an incredible blue. Their imperfections grew exponentially.
“Bastard,” said Greg, dropping his end of the rug and rubbing his hands down the front of his jeans. He was talking about the body.
“Heavy for a cripple,” said Joe.
“It’s all the sitting down,” said Tom. “Everything he eats just congregates in his guts like lead shit, poor bastard.”
“Let’s get him in there,” said Greg, pointing to the doorway, the tunnel behind it. It was only about five and a half feet from floor to ceiling but went back about twenty, its walls of bare red brick, the ancient plaster just pouring out from between them like dry sand, and it was stuffed with bits of broken furniture and weird clothes and suitcases. They dragged the body into the tunnel and walked over the top of it to get back out. Cunt was dead anyway.
“It’s still going to smell,” said Jonathan.
“We’ll have to get a tarp or something,” said Greg. He was nodding. Like he was reassuring himself. His tendency toward practical solutions depended on the right tools for the job. “I need some wood glue anyway. This’ll take care of it in the short-term.”
“We’ll have to bury it,” said Tom.
“We can use the swimming pool,” said Joe. Irony swamped by his own misplaced pride. For Joe the square dirt hole was a swimming pool. A swimming pool more than the sum of its shit parts. The swimming pool was a grave. He had dug it weeks ago. Was it cocaine prophecy, self-fulfilled, body and all? Muddy grave leads to body, wrapped in a rug and dumped in a basement. Needs it like a gun needs to shoot. To be purposeful. To be itself. It couldn’t be different to how it was. Nothing could. Balls in fate’s mouth. It’s fucking Joe again. Big Joe.
“This is a big mistake,” said Ezra.
“Killing him was the mistake,” said Conor. “Sorting the mess out is the only thing we can do.”
They each lit cigarettes. The nicotine made their legs feel weak. The air felt thin, like the dead body had pulled all the life out of it, leaving a vacuum where it used to be. They waited for their eyes to bulge out of their sockets. For their hearts to burst like meat balloons. For their heads to explode from the weight of their own existence. Nothing happened.
“Let’s get upstairs,” said Tom. “I hate this fucking basement.”
Greg turned the light out and closed the door leaving the body behind it and they filed up the stairs one by one. The coolness of the house felt soothing on their skin like human hands. Greg put the kettle on. They stood in the kitchen, didn’t speak, stared out into the dark garden, the dead streets beyond. Even the traffic was quiet. Over the cheap plastic kettle that struggled to boil they heard another knock. Two uncertain raps. Pause. Three more. Must have seen the lights still on. Jesus, wake up the whole fucking –
“Christ, what now?” Ezra switched the kettle off, as if it were only the rushing sound of its working element that alerted anyone to their house-wide wakefulness. It took seconds to shut up. Wearily assured of its own failure. More knocking. Not the fucking neighbour again.
“Fuck,” said Greg.
He left the kitchen and walked to the front door. Closed the living room door shut on his way. No more fuck ups. He yanked it open. Tanya. Lucas and Tanya. Sister. Shitlivers. He recoiled slightly away from her. Momentary loss of composure. Took a look at her tits. Imagined his cock between them. It was happening quickly in imperceptible perversion. Harmless enough. Though perhaps imagining doing it – intercourse – with your victim’s big sister edges towards classic psychopathy or psychosexual crises or characteristic paraphilic depravity. They looked big under her shirt. She wasn’t that old. He knew it wasn’t the time but the stress made his loins move. In ripples like a dying fish left on a riverbank. Don’t think about that now. Think about this now. Dead landlord. Dead brother. Dead fucked. Her thighs were thick but her calves were tiny, like arms. Older women were the more receptive. Who told him that? His dad? Can’t have been. She would beg him to do it and he would and Lucas would be dead downstairs. They would feel the secrecy in their congress and her clitoris would swell unconsciously with her dead brother’s memory. He wanted it to feel like he shouldn’t be doing it. It did feel like that. It wasn’t the time. He thought of the basement.
“Tanya,” he said, loud enough for them to hear in the kitchen. Ezra’s cigarette dropped out of his mouth. They all felt grateful for the kettle’s silence. “Hi.” He was leaning on the open front door like a bad actor playing nonchalant. His body stopped Tanya from coming inside.
“Hi Greg.” She spoke enthusiastically. “I’m sorry to come round so late.”
“That’s okay, anytime is fine. Although it is pretty late and...”
“I just wondered if you guys had seen Lucas.”
Greg’s tight face dropped, hung slack like a slipper, like shabby old house clothes. He couldn’t hold onto the smile. He swallowed, painfully aware of the concrete scraping of his own laryngeal prominence.
“Lucas?” he said. Voice like a child beaten up.
“Lucas.”
“No,” he said. “I mean. No. Why would we have seen Lucas? It’s late.”
“It’s just he mentioned that he had to come over here to see you guys,” she said. She put her hands, more just her fingers, in her jean pockets. Kind of rocked on her heels. “He was supposed to be coming to ours afterwards. That was about seven hours ago. He isn’t answering his phone and we haven’t heard a thing from him and to be honest Greg I’m a bit concerned. Worried.” She tried to peer over Greg’s shoulder. It was a very subtle motion. He adjusted his position a fraction, like it was something natural and not a defensive response to stimuli. “So have you seen him?”
“Have I?” said Greg slowly. Contemplative. Excessively so. Makes him look guilty.
“It’s straightforward Greg. Has he been here?”
“Right. No. Definitely no.”
“No?”
“No. Final answer.” Tried to smile as he said it but his fragile joke imploded hard, swallowing its own cheap pop culture reference like a mouthful of dogshit, left pointlessly hollow in Tanya’s partly raised eyebrows.
“Okay,” she said. They looked at each other for seconds. Ten, fifteen. He kept his eyes off her chest. She leant quickly into him, so quick it was like violence out of the stillness, and she pulled him towards her by the t-shirt. Her eyes were manic, darted about like a blackbird’s. Her face was centimetres from his. She could smell the spoilt milk twang of his sweaty neck. He kept his eyes straight ahead but out of the corner of one he saw her tongue come out, extended past her teeth and lips. Thick wet muscle of tongue, flexible and strong. It came out – as if sentient – and licked the length of his cheek. An animal ritual. A papillae declaration of devastating significance. There was a promise in that tongued exchange. There was cognisance, comprehension. It was a statement. She knew. He felt hot breath from her nostrils blow against his spittle cheek. She licked him again, the flat width of her giant tongue pressed down against him. It hadn’t felt like this in fantasy, where she begged him to fuck her. This felt bad wrong, something he actually shouldn’t be doing and not just something that felt like he shouldn’t be doing it. He felt like food weighed up under the convincing musculature of her masticatory organ. He was too surprised to move. She had a hand on each of his shoulders and moved her mouth to his ear. “You’re dead.” She said it quietly. Spoke it like an elegy. Short and painful. An observation rather than a threat. Greg pushed her away from him but gently.
“What?” he said. He sounded afraid, his face lopsided with confusion.
“I said okay,” she said. All warm smile and sincere blinking. Her eyelids moved very slowly. Greg thought of Morse code. “It’s fine. I’m sure he’ll turn up. You know what Lucas is like.” She rolled her eyes like they were sharing an intimate joke. The life of Lucas. Lucas and his ways. A real fucking character. If eyes talk then hers said they shared it, her and Greg. Her eyes screamed the conversation, barked it from rooftops: they both had their Lucas secrets. He felt it on her tongue over his bald left cheek, over its average contours. Felt the knowledge. Poured out of him like taste. She could taste it on him. “Thanks Greg, I mean that.” Smile. Smile. “Have a good night.” She looked at her wristwatch. “Or a good day I suppose. I’ll see you around.”
She left. Greg put a hand to his cheek, still damp. He rubbed it dry. He felt insane. He felt like Dustin Hoffman, only this wasn’t a seduction. He went back to the kitchen. They were standing in a circle around a broken pint glass in the middle of the laminate floor. Greg looked at the pint glass and sighed.
“Shit,” he said.
“What was that?” said Ezra, hissed like a pantomime.
“It was nothing.”
“Was that Tanya?” said Jonathan.
“Yeah, but it was nothing,” said Greg.
“Nothing?” said Ezra. “How can that be nothing?”
“What did she want?” said Tom.
“She wondered if we’d seen Lucas.”
They all looked at each other. Colour-drained haggard faces aged decades in five hours. Joe was rubbing his veined eyes with the palms of both hands. They slurped like wet mud. He rubbed until he saw flashing lights.
“She knows,” said Conor.
“She doesn’t know. How could she know?” Ezra’s sentences had all become scathing accusations.
“You heard her. She knew he was supposed to be coming here.”
“But why would she suspect murder?”
“Maybe he’s that kind of man,” said Joe. Eyes closed.
“Shut up,” said Ezra.
“How did she look?” said Jonathan.
“What does that mean?” said Greg.
“Suspicious? Angry?”
“She looked fine. As far as she’s concerned it’s fine.”
Greg felt limp in their gaze. He could still feel her tongue run up his cheek. Felt it on his buccal nerve like an orgasm. Imagined his thumb in her anus. He could still hear her say it: you’re dead.
“It doesn’t look fine,” said Tom.
“It’s fine.”
“Then why’s she coming here?”
“To see if her fucking brother was here,” said Greg. He moved his arms like inconveniences. “He wasn’t. Isn’t. I told her he wasn’t and she has no reason to think otherwise. Let’s keep it that way.”
“This is the beginning of the end,” said Tom. “First the neighbour, then Tanya, then the police. People are going to be looking for him and this is one of the first places they’re going to look. He was supposed to be coming here, for fuck’s sake. He told his sister he was coming here. His fucking body’s in the basement. His blood’s all over the carpet. The neighbour heard screaming. How the fuck do we think we’re going to get away with this? It’s murder.”
“People get away with worse things than murder and we’ll get away with this,” said Ezra. “We just need to be smart about it. And I admit, we can’t have this happening every day. We need to get it out of here.”
“We will,” said Jonathan. “We just need a couple of days to sort things out.”
“A couple of days might be just what we don’t have.”
“This is a big thing,” said Conor. Monotone assertions were his trademark. “Getting away with it’s not our only worry. We need to live with it. For our whole lives.” He tapped his temple with his index finger. “It’ll get us in here.”
“Please,” said Greg, picking up a glass from the worktop and smelling it. He filled it with water from the tap. “Let’s not do this now. I need to sleep. We all need to sleep. And can somebody please clear this fucking glass up.”
The words felt futile passing his lips. He left the kitchen, Joe followed him.
“Goodnight,” said Jonathan. He went.
Ezra filled a mug with water. It was ringed at the bottom with thick tea stains and chipped around the lip. He swallowed a gulp. Didn’t take his eyes off of Tom and Conor.
“We’ve fucked up,” he said. Tom nodded a reluctant agreement. “Night.” He went.
Tom turned the kettle on and lit a cigarette.
“How the hell are we supposed to sleep?” he said, “We need to get cleaned up in here. We need to...”
“Goodnight man,” said Conor. He put his hand on Tom’s shoulder. Just for a second. Then went into the back bedroom and closed the door.
Tom poured some instant coffee into a cup, poured water over that. The smoke from the cigarette looked like you could hold onto it. The sun was coming up.
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