by Haydn Wilks
“The next station is: Chipping Sodbury. Chipping Sodbury.”
Why have you come here?
Walking quiet village streets, mere minutes until you’re faced with it; 50 Ross Close.
The same dorma bungalow you looked at on Google Maps. You potch about in the street for a bit, up and down, realise how maddeningly conspicuous you are, here in Chipping Sodbury, this serene satellite, this sleepy commuter town, veins kept fresh by Bristol or Bath, or somewhere else, away from here. Chipping Sodbury is not a place of work; it is a place of leisure. A refuge from the madness of the everyday. You are one with Chipping Sodbury. A village that no doubt sent a troop of brave men to face the uncertain horrors of trench warfare in Vurdun and the Somme. The only reason you’ve not seen a war monument is because it’s one of the 47 British towns considered “double-lucky”: all their war dead returned alive.
You stagger alongside the street outside 50 Ross Close, gazing over the brickwork, snatching a glimpse at the family through half-drawn blinds: hubby in the armchair, staring at the telly. Wife likely in the kitchen. Younger son on the sofa. Baby nowhere to be seen.
You walk the rest of the street, round it into some tree-lined back-passage, blocking the end of the estate off from a verdant field of grass adjacent. The sun beats through cloudless sky: the day’s a pleasant one. You could’ve been out here in the rain. Imagine that. You walk the narrow back-passage until you reach the unstained rear fencing of 50 Ross Close. You look through a gap in the fence planks, at a garden, a big red ball amongst the grass of it. There’s a shed, a fish pond, the works. You catch wifey through the window, washing dishes, cooking, or doing something else that’d have her staring down at a counter, shoulders jerking up and down. She disappears. You stay still. Time passes. A lot of it. You keep your mind largely absent of thought, save for a fleeting flash of Vietnam, of being a Yankee soldier in the jungle, listening to the frogs chirp through jungle night, awaiting the Viet Cong’s pounce. Some hours later, you hear the front door’s faint opening; you hear the muffled conversation of hubby and wifey: “Alright, see you later then,” is all you make out, at the end of it. A car door opens. An engine starts. A car drives away from 50 Ross Close. You stare at the kitchen window, trying to work out what’s happened. Maybe hubby’s taken son out to a football match. Maybe they’re Bristol City fans. Bristol Rovers. One of them must be playing at home today. That’s it; that’s the regular Saturday routine, when the seasons on. Hubby bought eldest son a shirt for his last birthday. The back door opens. Wife emerges bearing laundry. She hangs it on the line, you falling back from the fence plank, to the relative cover of trees. She works her way along the line and ends up close enough to the fence that you can smell her perfume, or the detergent, or some sweet fragrant thing on the breeze as you move not a muscle, measuring each breath’s duration and intensity, not wanting to give anything away. The laundry out, you hear her head back across grass. You’re back at the fence planks, gazing in, back door ajar.
Without thought, you’re scanning the ground for a snapped branch, something to jab between the fence planks, something to help you get yourself over it. You don’t find that, but you do find an oversized rock. You drag it over earth, stand on it, gaining all of 6cm in height, push down on the top of the fence, exert, get yourself up under such strain you’re sure the plank’ll give out beneath you. You shift over it, tumble onto grass, roll upright, quick, then pad across the back garden, catching glimpse of wifey in the window, back at the dishes again. You grasp a granite cherub perched on a low wall at the grass’s edge, separating it from a shuttered up blue BBQ unit. Through the back door, padding quietly toward wifey, though not enough to completely bury your footsteps beneath the sink’s water gush: she turns, or rather tilts, her head slightly to the left, sensing your approach. You bash her in the right of the head, that slightly tilted right, cherub making full-force contact with the back of her skull, you feeling the thing vibrate without breaking as she slumps forward, glimpsing the white of her left eye, getting the strange sense that whatever was once behind it, whatever made her who she was, the mother of two children, the wife who stays at home doing housework while her boys are at the footie, it’s left her, it simply isn’t her anymore, long before the body hits the tiled kitchen floor, before blood flows quick out the back of her and puddles over a floor she’d futilely spent twelve minutes of the morning washing with some fancy floor-soaping gadget. You stand in that weird silence that you guess you always knew followed a moment of absolute violence but hadn’t really expected consciously, leaving you to ponder if it’s not some genetically imprinted memory from when our people used to do this stuff openly on the regular. You drop the cherub and let it crack a floor tile as you hear a cry rise up in the living room. You move through, ignore the little thing wailing in the high chair, reach the sofa, pick a soft square cushion up with soft, light hands, then gently push the thing down over the little thing’s face for a few minutes, its wails rising up, some pushing and shifting and cute little outbursts of resistance doing nothing to stop the inevitable until the inevitable passes. Without really looking at it, you scoop the little thing up, shift your backpack off one shoulder and round in front of you, unzip, and stuff it inside.
You walk back through Chipping Sodbury, not passing a single soul on the street, though there’s one guy vacantly hosing his front lawn down, but you don’t look up, and don’t think he notices you, even if Chipping Sodbury is the sort of place where moving to another place outside a motor vehicle isn’t done often, save for during the daily run. You decide against heading back from Chipping Sodbury, a little paranoia queering the mellow of your post-kill high, but walk on to the next town, to Yate, thinking much of nothing. You wait at a simple platform station for a bit, board the train to Cardiff Central, sit and stare at English ploughed fields, The Animals – It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue playing in earphones. A sudden smell wafts up from the backpack on the seat beside you; the unmistakable stench of human excrement. Bowels must’ve been released some point en route. A consequence of all that banging about, walking up down the slight inclines of Chipping Sodbury. You consider going to the bathroom and sorting it out, but then the consider the mess an inexperienced nappy changer like yourself is likely to leave behind. DNA everywhere. Under fingernails. And there’ll be evidence smeared all over the toilet cubicle. And you’ll have been seeing going in there. And you’ve not even got a baby with you.
Laughter kicks up in your throat, and you turn toward the window, suppressing it as best you can, chuckle still cracking through. You’ve fucking done it, you mad bastard. No turning back now.
You get off at Cardiff Central and pound hard through the station, hoping to breeze past all before it hits them the smell’s yours. You slide your ticket through the slot at the barriers, thinking ahead to the plush bogs in St. David’s 2, the shopping centre, and realise they’ve probably got Mother & Baby Changing Rooms as well. Parent & Baby, these days.
Heading out the station, out along the wide stone openness before the city gets penned in by tall old office blocks clad round the Millennium Stadium, a voice calls out: “Rhys!”
You look up from the stone floor and feel the blood drain from your face: Branston.
“Alright, butt?” you ask.
“Yeah,” he says, face souring. “Do you smell something?”
“Yeah, I do, aye,” you say. “Anyway, it’s been good seeing you—”
“What you up to tonight?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. You?”
“What do you reckon we meet up with them girls again? They were a wicked laugh,” Branston laughs.
“Yeah. I dunno. Maybe. I’ll give ‘em a text.”
“Nice one. Well let me know if you do, yeah?”
“Yeah, definitely.”
You walk off abruptly, ignoring whatever words of departure he calls out after you.
The mind propels the body forward without conscious thought having any input.
Within a long tense minute, that moment passes, and your walking with pace towards the restaurant area at the back of the upper floor, to the toilets nestled beside them, to the Parent & Baby room. You grasp at the thick blue handle to slide the door open; it doesn’t move. Someone’s inside. You step back immediately, feeling, but not quite being sure that, a thoroughly normal-looking bloke’s given you a bit of an odd look on his way into the gent’s.
You place yourself into the corner outside the toilets which is farthest from the toilets and their attendant foot traffic, tapping your hands upon the surface of your jeans rhythmically, trying to will thought out from within the blank canvas your brain’s become.
You could take the baby to the adjacent car park, get the shit cleared off it there, perhaps even forget this whole stupid venture and toss it off the roof. But the car park would surely be plastered in CCTV. You forget that option as quickly as you thought of it.
You could go home – and, really, there would be ways and means of avoiding any problems arising from the shit stench you’re bringing home with you. “I stepped in dog shit,” is all you’d need to say. How much questioning would you really endure? Just get upstairs, into the bathroom, and start cleaning the mess up. It’s not like the stink of human excrement is a known hallmark of child killers. You’ve seen lots of sick depraved fucks appear on the news for crimes much worse than your own, and as much as the media love to stir up the fear and the horror and get the gut reaction to heinous crimes really festering, you’ve never once heard a news anchor tell the audience to be on the lookout for shifty-eyed men with a shit stench.
Your minds lost on this tangent as the door opens, and a father exits the room, pushing a pram. You move quickly in behind him, sliding the door shut, without a soul noticing. The bag’s then flung off your shoulder, onto the bed-like changing unit. You unzip, flop the little thing out, it hitting the unit with an awkward flailing of limbs, then you stare at it, the stench rising up, overpowering you, sending waves of nausea rippling out from your stomach.
You turn to the sink behind you and vomit, blasting it hard with orange-hued reminders of the previous night’s dinner, and as you stand clutching the sides of the basin, heaving, and then recovering, the last of the sick out, it strikes you that you had no breakfast before departing Cardiff for Chipping Sodbury, and you haven’t actually eaten anything all day.
You consider getting a Gregg’s once this is all done, as you hold your hand beneath the tap in the orange-splattered sink. The automated taps shoot out water in meek ejaculatory bursts, and it quickly proves impossible to keep your hand positioned correctly beneath it to draw water out whilst simultaneously manoeuvring the water so that the puke is washed down the drain.
“Fuck’s sake,” you mumble, after continual failure.
You look at the baby, face-down upon the changing unit, and wonder what other options there are. Nothing comes to mind. Nothing. You stare at it, vexation growing, some dread coming in with it. You’d brought the last baby home in a state of drunken numbness, and had the luxury of residual alcohol in your system to get through the disposing of the evidence. Now, brutally sober and all the stupider for it, you stare at that baby, basin full of puke behind you, thick stench of baby shit choking the air, and all the certainty of purpose with which you’d stalked out your prey in Chipping Sodbury ebbs away from you, so that you are nothing more than the sum of your lived experiences and the situation into which you’ve placed yourself; you’re a piece-of-shit salesman with a penchant for murdering infants.
As the horror of what you are courses through your body’s nervous system, bubbling through in the form of pure anxiety, a high-pitched squeal fills the room, and for a moment the waves of anxiety are forgotten as you consider the source of the sound must be the baby. A moment later, more sense returns to you, and you realise it was your phone.
You take it from your pocket. Whatsapp. Emilia. Hey, are you and the guys doing anything 2nite? xXx
You and the guys. The guys. Fuck’s sake. It’s now become ‘you and the guys’. Not ‘you’. ‘You and the guys’. You and Dave and fucking Branston are now packaged as a set. Fries, Coke, & Hamburger. Coffee, Milk, & Sugar. Except you drink your coffee with neither milk nor sugar. Tea would’ve perhaps been a better example. But you don’t put sugar in your tea, either. People who add sugar to stuff unnecessarily are fucking morons.
You forget that thought as a fresh wave of shit stench hits your nostrils, and your suddenly thrown into action. Without conscious thought, you snatch the baby from the unit, yank its pants off, throw them into a bin, dropping a few splattering clumps of yellow-brown mush upon the tiled floor inadvertently. You wash and soap your hands vigorously, then return to the baby, being careful to avoid the shit-smeared arse as you pull its red jumper off. You take the jumper to the sink, soak it beneath the automated tap with ease, then use it to wipe the puke off the sides of the basin and into the drain. You give the mini-jumper a swill, swipe the clumps of splattered poop up off the floor with it, swill again, return to the naked shit-smeared baby’s arse, give it a good dab over, returning twice to the sink for further soaking, until the skin is as pure and milky as God intended it. You shove the jumper in the bin, shove the baby in the bag, and get the fuck out of the Parent & Baby changing room, two girls chatting, heading in your direction, as you move away from the toilets, fortunately too engrossed in conversation to notice you leave the Parent & Baby room without the requisite youngling.
You smile as you move through the strip-lit upper level of the shopping mall. There’s a faint odour of crap hanging over you, no doubt caused by the length of time the corpse spent in the bag strapped to your back before you sorted the mess out, but the scent is no longer stronger enough to raise any suspicion. You figure you should maybe find a Poundworld, pick up some Febreeze. As you walk, John Lewis appears at the end of the mall, like a shining light at the end of the tunnel. You think of how recent payday was, and how much dough you’ve got left, and decide to be completely frivolous and treat yourself to a bottle of stupidly expensive aftershave. You carry on walking towards the department store with your grin growing ever wider, feeling twenty feet tall, a giant amongst men. Someone with the wildest and craziest of impulses, beyond that of these fucking idiots, these capitalist cattle, bumbling along around you, talking loudly to each other, carting heaving bags of overpriced clobber and tat, slurping frappucinos and milk shakes, gorging themselves idiotically on the swill served to them by those above them in the food chain, fattening them up for harvest. As you near John Lewis, you think of all these fuckwits’ sheer indignation, the horror they’ll express, when the media drip-feeds them the details of your crimes. The thought fills your heart with gladness, so much so, that you quite forget all about the plan of buying some aftershave, and instead quickly find yourself downstairs, in the kitchen section, looking at sleek silver free-standing range cookers, thinking how much easier everything would be to have one installed in your room, free from the prying eyes of your housemates. You move along, eyeing each cooker with envy, thinking of the necessary hassle of getting it home, into the house, up the stairs, and then connected to the gas mains, and how impossible that all would be to pull off without detection, and how thoroughly mental it would seem to be caught installing a fucking oven range in your bedroom, so you move along, frowning unhappily, until more possibilities appear before you: mini ovens, toaster ovens, pizza ovens, a gourmet hot dog maker, with s
lots for the buns inside and the sausages on top, and then you reach the solution: shelves laden with deep steel buckets, dials affixed to the front of them; slow cookers. You stare at the gadgets, thinking of what the word means – slow cooker. A baby all in one go is too much for anyone, but with a slow cooker, you could presumably keep it stewing over time, brewing its own juices, and perhaps enjoy its flesh over the course of a week or more. You stare with real intent at each metal bucket slow cooker, not knowing how in any meaningful way to differentiate between them, other than size and price. You amble slowly along the row, until reaching its end, the most expensive item perched in front of you: a Heston Blumenthal-branded Fast-Slow Cooker. The contradiction in the name, the price tag of £199.95, making it almost double the cost of all the adjacent products, and the branding of a chef with a television show, all of it compels you to take the box from the shelf, turn it over, nodding with satisfaction at promises of perfectly sautéed or seared meat, a variable steam release function, and the easy cleaning features of a wipe-clean moat and removable drip cup. You’re soon at the counter, typing in your PIN, then you’re out the street, walking through an unseasonably mild winter’s day, wondering at the other shoppers’ intentions, at the compulsion behind their purposes, at the extent to which a human in shopping mind has essentially been reduced to a robot programmed to execute the function of item retrieval, and how the calm muzak and bright lighting of all the stores are designed to engender and support this suppression of autonomy, to keep the cattle grazing, feeding, gorging, on products that offer them all access to the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, branding and belief systems offering the buyer spiritual satisfaction and confirmation they belong within society.
