An Untidy Death

by Simon Brett

  ‘She was telling me about an influencer she’d met,’ Fleur went on. ‘Do you know what an “influencer” is, Ellen?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said wearily. ‘Influencers are people who have a large social media presence and are paid to endorse various products.’

  ‘Yes.’ Fleur’s tone was a little miffed. She had looked forward to enlightening my ignorance on the subject of influencers. ‘I think it’s only a matter of time before your Jools becomes an influencer herself, you know. She seems to have so many contacts in the fashion world.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s something she would love to be,’ I said, trying not to sound snide. It was true. There was nothing Jools would like more than having a worshipping following of young women, following her fashion tips on social media.

  ‘Hm.’ Fleur looked at me beadily over the edge of her wine glass as she changed the subject. ‘And how’s Ben?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I said, ready for the usual insinuating criticism of my son.

  ‘You hear from him more often than you hear from Jools, don’t you?’

  I shrugged. ‘He keeps in touch. Texts mostly. Then the occasional long phone call. As I say, he’s fine.’

  ‘Good.’ But, of course, Fleur wasn’t going to leave it at that, was she? ‘Still got the girlfriend, has he?’

  ‘So far as I know, yes. Tracey. Seems to be working very well.’

  ‘Good,’ she said again, before moving into carping mode. ‘And you still haven’t met her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Seems strange, doesn’t it? Not introducing his girlfriend to his mother?’

  ‘I think that’s up to Ben, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe. Still seems strange to me.’

  In spite of myself, I was getting riled. The temptation to remind Fleur how few of her lovers she’d introduced to her daughter welled up in me. I was in my teens before she introduced my father (not an encounter that prompted any bonding instinct – or even interest – in me). But I resisted the urge to strike back at her.

  Perhaps it got to me because there was an element of truth in the insinuation. I was disappointed by the fact that Ben hadn’t suggested introducing Tracey to me. But stronger than that feeling was relief that my son was in a relationship that seemed to be working. He’d had a fairly chequered history with women. Never had any difficulty in attracting them. When he was on form, Ben was charismatic, he could charm the birds from the trees. But he wasn’t good at sustaining relationships. They always started well, but ended in break-up, pain, and anguish.

  In contrast to the distance between me and Jools, I had always been effortlessly close to Ben. He was easy to love. Just like his father. Sadly, he had inherited other, less benign, characteristics from his father. I know I’m sometimes overprotective of Ben, but I have my reasons for that.

  ‘Seems strange to me,’ Fleur repeated, ‘that Ben doesn’t want to introduce his girlfriend to his mother. Or his grandmother. This Tracey …’ she mused, preparing to slide the knife in once again, ‘… do you think he’s ashamed of her?’

  I managed to finish the lunch without losing my temper. Fleur paid. She always paid. She was very generous with Kenneth’s money.

  My mobile had blipped while we were at the table, but I didn’t check for messages until I was back in the Yeti in the car park. Only one. Voicemail.

  A rather precise, slightly nervous voice.

  ‘Hello. I hope I’ve got through to the right person. My name is Edward Finch and I have a problem of far too much clutter in my house. I’d be grateful if you could get back to me. My number is …’

  The message suggested that Edward Finch was elderly, of the generation that still didn’t quite believe mobile phones recorded the numbers of incoming calls. Not unusual. A lot of my clients are elderly. The urge to hoard grows with age.

  I’d get back to him on the Monday. I try – not always successfully – not to do SpaceWoman work at weekends. I love what I do, but the effort of encouraging people and always sounding positive for them takes a lot out of me. The physical lugging around of boxes and furniture can also be draining. When Friday evening comes round, I’m exhausted, and I need time to recharge my batteries.

  I thought that Edward Finch’s was just another routine enquiry.

  But I didn’t know how wrong I could be.

  TWO

  ‘There is nothing new under the sun,’ he announced. ‘Everything comes from somewhere else. Even plastic started off as crude oil or natural gas or coal.’

  Dodge is prone to saying things that sound like quotations. Sometimes they are. More often they’re his own thoughts. I’d a feeling that, though his last remarks started with a biblical quotation, the rest was pure Dodge. Not too much about plastic in the Bible.

  His real name’s Gervaise, though I’ve never heard anyone call him that. In fact, I’ve rarely heard anyone call him anything. Dodge has a somewhat reclusive personality and I’ve only seen him with other people in a work context. I think he likes me, though he’s never put it into words. Eight years – more than eight years now – we’ve been working together, and he’s never once looked me in the face.

  My nickname for him, Dodge, came from Diogenes, the Athenian philosopher whose rejection of consumerism was so strong that it’s unfair the way his name has been misapplied in the literature of hoarding. ‘Diogenes Syndrome’ is used to describe a condition also known as ‘senile squalor syndrome’, where the elderly surround themselves with rubbish. Most unjust to Diogenes of Sinope, who lived in a large ceramic jar and, very responsibly, kept his possessions to the absolute minimum.

  Dodge, though, conforms more accurately to the philosopher’s model. Following a private education and a highly lucrative job in the City (from which he retains upper-crust vowels), he suffered some kind of breakdown, the full details of which I have never been told. All I do know is that he emerged from the experience as an enemy of consumerism and a champion of recycling. He has a whole house near the village of Walberton which is full of items he is going to repurpose. And if that sounds like the definition of a hoarder, let me tell you everything there is neatly stacked and catalogued. And, what’s more, Dodge does eventually find a way to transform every bit of it into something useful.

  He runs a company – of which he is the sole staff member – called ‘Treasures Upon Earth’. Its byline is: ‘All of your rubbish has a value to someone.’

  I was lucky enough to make contact with him, just randomly through an ad in a local free newspaper, soon after I’d started SpaceWoman. It had quickly become clear that I was going to need a reliable ‘man with a van’ to transport a lot of the clutter I was clearing out of my clients’ homes, and Dodge could not have been a more perfect fit for me. Back then, I had assumed most of the household debris would go straight to the dump, but I hadn’t reckoned with Dodge’s ingenuity and transformational skills.

  Which is why I was driving with him that Monday morning in his 1951 Morris Commercial CV9/40 Tipper, a vehicle he maintains with a devotion that almost amounts to worship. And our mission was supplying furniture which Dodge had lovingly constructed from old wooden pallets.

  A lot of the work I take on doesn’t end with the completion of what was in the job description. Some of my clients, particularly the elderly ones, need a lot of aftercare, and I have to watch it that I don’t spend too much unpaid time looking after them.

  Mary Griffin was a good example of what I mean. Not elderly in her case, early thirties with a three-year-old daughter called Amy. I’m often employed through social services and charities. I was put on to Mary by a Worthing-based organization that helps in cases of domestic violence.

  As a young woman, she had been well placed, owning a two-bedroom house in Ferring, which she had inherited from her parents. She had a job she enjoyed, working as a waitress in Shoreham-on-Sea, and her life appeared to be set fair. Until she met and married the wrong man. Craig Griffin.

  The pattern was achingly familiar. Though charmin
g and considerate during the wooing, once married, Craig turned out to be the standard-issue coercive husband, whose manic jealousy had cut Mary off from friends, family, and any form of independent social life. He started to get paranoid about her relationships with the other staff at work and the customers. He took to spending his evenings parked opposite the restaurant where she worked, watching his wife through the glass frontage. If he thought her to have been over-friendly with any of the diners, she would pay for it when she got home. Eventually, Craig’s presence became so irksome to her employers that she had to give up the job.

  Like many women in such circumstances, sheer terror had prevented Mary from doing anything about his behaviour. She had endured bullying and beatings, even through her pregnancy, and had kept quiet about the situation because she saw no one she dared tell about it. And also, as is so often the case in such situations, she genuinely loved her husband.

  Only when he started turning his anger against their daughter did Mary find the courage to speak up and contact the charity. They had acted with commendable speed, informing the police about her husband’s violence, and removing Mary and Amy to the safety of a women’s refuge. They then embarked on the difficult process of starting legal proceedings against Craig Griffin.

  As it turned out, he made things easy for them. In a fury of frustration at his inability to trace his wife, he had refocused his violence on the house. Literally taken a sledgehammer to it. The furniture had been reduced to matchwood and the electrical equipment smashed to pieces. Anything featuring glass – the television, the doors of cupboards, the microwave and the washing machine – had been shattered. When questioned by the police, Craig Griffin did not deny that he was responsible for the destruction. So, he had been arrested for that and was on remand, while the charity’s lawyers tried to assemble a case against him for the more serious crime of domestic abuse. As usual, the problem was lack of witnesses. Mary had not been hospitalized after any of her husband’s attacks, so there was no paper trail in the medical records. It came down to her word against his. But the lawyers had been in that situation many times before and were hopeful of charging him.

  So, Mary had gone from the refuge back to Ferring, fortunately without Amy the first time, and seen with horror what had happened to their home. That was when I got involved. I’d done other stuff for the charity over the years, but never before had my decluttering skills been required because of criminal damage.

  It took a good few trips with Dodge’s van to clear it all. And it was a challenge for his considerable powers of recycling. Little had been left in a state where he could repurpose it into something else. Except for some of the large bits of wood. Dodge could always find a use for bits of wood.

  Mary was there while I organized the removal of the debris and she did open up to me about her situation. Maybe the time she’d spent in the sympathetic environment of the refuge made her more ready to talk. Maybe it was the knowledge that, at least for a while, Craig couldn’t get at her.

  The destruction in the house was almost too obvious a symbol for the breakdown of a marriage. Mary felt sufficiently at ease with me to cry as we removed yet another shattered piece of her domestic dreams, though she did try to hold back the tears while Dodge was in the house.

  The moment that got to her most was when we started to tidy up Amy’s room. The girl’s father had shown no mercy with his daughter’s possessions. Like most little girls her age, she had been obsessed by the Frozen movies, and the floor was littered with the detritus of smashed merchandise – figurines, mugs and hanging ornaments. Craig Griffin had even taken a Stanley knife to Amy’s favourite Elsa costume.

  But the destruction that hurt Mary most was what had been done to her daughter’s bed. The tears poured down unchecked from her brown eyes as she said, ‘She was so proud of it. She had just moved into it. No longer a baby’s bed. A grown-up little girl’s bed. One she could get in and out of at will. She was so proud.’

  The tears took over for a moment before she managed to say again, ‘So proud. And moving to the grown-up bed coincided with her not needing a nappy at nighttime. She was dry. So proud of being dry. Mind you, that didn’t last long, with all the upheaval of going to the refuge. She started bed-wetting there. Back in nappies now.’

  Mary sniffed fiercely, hoping to sniff away the tears, as she went on, ‘I just hate to think what long-term damage all this has done to Amy. What it’s made her think about the things that go on between men and women, whether she’ll ever trust a man again. Whether she’ll be able to form a decent grown-up relationship herself.’

  I didn’t give her a reassuring, ‘Of course she will.’ I knew too much about the effects of childhood trauma to do that. I just said, ‘If she needs it later in life, she’ll be able to get help.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I hope so. It took me long enough to ask for help. I just hate the thought of her life being ruined and it being my fault.’

  ‘It won’t be your fault. Parents blame themselves too much for what happens to their children. There are lots of other factors in play. Heredity, the education they get, the people they meet, career choices. You haven’t any problem loving Amy, have you?’

  ‘No, that’s one thing I’ve never had to worry about.’

  ‘Then she’ll come through,’ I said.

  Dodge, as I said, always finds a use for bits of wood and he’s highly creative in what he does with them. When he makes furniture, his basic raw materials are wooden pallets, but other scraps of timber are also pressed into service. He is a wonderfully inventive recycler and, though he sometimes has to buy new screws and nails, he regards paying for anything else as a failure on his part.

  Though Dodge didn’t look me in the eye when I told him about Mary Griffin’s predicament, I could tell he was immediately enthused by the construction project. Everything in the house needed replacing. She hadn’t been insured and, though she might eventually get some compensation for the chaos her husband had wreaked, it was going to be a slow process. And she had no income, only a small amount of savings salted away in an account she’d managed to keep secret from Craig. In time, poverty might force her to sell the house and move somewhere smaller, but the charity was determined to prevent that from happening.

  So, they helped her replace her shattered possessions, finding a cast-off sofa and some shelves, rugs, mattresses, and bedding. An old electric cooker was sourced, a just-about-working washing machine and a far-from-smart television. For the kitchen, pans, a toaster, and a kettle were unearthed from somewhere.

  My first visit after removing the debris, I found that Mary Griffin had hardly started on making the house habitable again. Amy was still being looked after at the refuge, as she had been for some weeks. Mary didn’t want the little girl to see the destruction her father had wrought. But she herself didn’t seem to be capable of making the effort required to recreate her home. All the stuff delivered by the charity still lay where they had put it down. For Mary, the effort of moving it seemed too great.

  I recognized how traumatized she was. And knew that I would have to hold her hand through every step of the reorganization process. That morning I arranged for a plumber and electrician to do the necessary work on the kitchen appliances and guided Mary in moving the piled-up furniture into the relevant rooms.

  On top of the charity’s donations of furniture, Dodge had contributed stuff he’d already made, tables and chairs, whose finely sanded and oiled finish would never have betrayed their humble origin as pallets.

  But his new project, on which he spent God knows how many hours, was a bed for Amy. Not quite full-size but big enough for her to think of it as grown-up.

  That was what we were driving to deliver at Mary Griffin’s house the Monday morning he quoted Ecclesiastes at me. The bed lay in flat-pack form, covered with a blanket in the back of his van, ready to be assembled when we got there.

  He took the makings of the bed upstairs whil
e Mary and I lingered over coffee in the kitchen. With my help and encouragement, she had managed to get all the furniture into the right rooms. The plumber and electrician I’d organized had fixed her a working kitchen. There was still plenty left to do – pegged-up sheets substituted for curtains and so on – but the place was beginning to look like a home again.

  So much so that Mary had taken the decision to bring Amy back that afternoon and was clearly worried about the likely response. The little girl had witnessed many traumatic scenes in the house and its new improvised furnishings would be unfamiliar to her.

  I was about to reassure Mary when we heard a cough and turned to see the tall figure of Dodge in the doorway. Needless to say, he didn’t look at either of us as he mumbled that, if we wanted to come upstairs, the bed was ready for inspection.

  It was his masterwork. Solid, very definitely grown-up, and painted pink. A little girl’s dream – and with a refinement to warm Amy’s heart.

  I must have mentioned the movie Frozen to Dodge because I’m sure he’d never heard of it before. His spartan living quarters did not contain a television and he never mentioned going out to the cinema. Nor do I think he ever bought newspapers or magazines.

  But somehow, he’d known what was needed. On the bed’s headboard was a row of Frozen stickers.

  ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Mary, tears glinting in her tired eyes. ‘That is so fabulous! Oh, I must give you a hug!’

  But, intuitively recognizing Dodge’s uneasiness about human contact, she didn’t carry out her intention.

  ‘No worries,’ he mumbled in his awkward, privately schooled accent. ‘I’ll make some more stuff for her, dressing table and what-have-you.’

  Turning to me, Mary said, ‘Amy will be over the moon about the bed. I can’t thank you – I can’t thank both of you enough!’