by Alex Marwood
They hurry past number twenty-five and into their own alleyway. Once they get behind the gate, they let go of the plastic and take a moment to breathe. ‘So how long were you in care?’ asks Cher.
‘Oh, on and off, you know. Just a few weeks at a time. The longest was maybe a couple of months. My mum wasn’t a great coper, you know? Sometimes it just all got too much and she’d check me in,’
‘Yeah, I know,’ says Cher, but she feels disappointed. She’s never known a living adult who’s had her experiences. Had hoped that she’d finally found one.
‘It’s shit, though, isn’t it? I was scared stupid all the time. How about you?’
‘Since I was twelve.’
‘Wow,’ says Collette. ‘How about your family?’
‘My mum’s dead,’ says Cher. ‘When I was nine. I lived with my nanna and that was okay. She was nice.’
‘And your dad?’
The sort of question Vesta asks. Cher doesn’t mind it from her. She comes from a world where people know their dads. She reminds Cher of Nanna, all kindness and cake and the confusion of the honest. Collette has seemed like she’s from a wider world. Maybe not. Cher shrugs. ‘Who knows?’
Collette gives her a sympathetic look. She had so many dads and uncles growing up that she forgets that some people have none at all. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, lamely. ‘It’s tough.’
Cher feels a surprising surge of rage. Great, she thinks. Fucking sympathy. That’s all I need. She picks up her end of the sheeting. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘We haven’t got all night.’
In the area outside Vesta’s kitchen, Hossein has done what he can with a broom to clear away the worst of the slurry. He and Thomas stand in the doorway, looking out for their arrival, and wait as they manhandle their burden down the steps and dump it on the concrete. ‘Oh, that’s good,’ says Thomas. ‘Very good.’
‘Damp proofing,’ says Collette.
So it won’t be permeable, then.
They unfold it and lay it out. Even doubled over, it covers most of the flagstones. Collette checks her watch. It’s taken less than an hour for them all to turn from victims and rescuers into conspirators. ‘I’ve got the shed open,’ says Hossein. ‘That lock didn’t take more than a couple of bashes with a brick. It must’ve been there for decades.’
‘It has,’ says Thomas. ‘Vesta says she doesn’t remember it ever being open.’
‘What’s in there?’
‘Nothing much. A rusted up old lawnmower and some plant pots. And an armchair that looks like it’s been mouse metropolis for many generations. With an ashtray.’
‘Where is Vesta?’ asks Collette.
‘Sitting down.’
‘I’ll go and check on her.’
The men stand around the plastic sheeting, hands on hips. ‘Right,’ says Thomas, ‘we’d better get on with it, then.’
While the women have been on their foraging mission, they have levered the Landlord into the bath and washed him down with the shower hose. The operation has only been a partial success, as the bath is draining so slowly that he wallows in four inches of filthy water, but his face and torso, stripped of its covering, are relatively clean. He gapes at the ceiling, his arm flopping down the side as though it’s been stripped of its bones. He’s pale, like a mushroom grown in a cellar, the skin below his collar line near-white and spongy. A bluebottle, awoken from its slumbers, buzzes lazily over his head, looking for an orifice to enter. Hossein bats it away.
From the front room, Cher can hear the murmur of voices. She follows the sound. Some part of her feels that moving the body is somehow man’s work. She’s surprised by how sanguine everyone seems to be now the decision is made. The Landlord is no longer the Landlord: already he’s a bulky object that needs moving, a problem that needs to be got under control before the dawn brings out the neighbours, what passed for his soul long passed from his body. But she no more wants to lay hands on that mozzarella flesh in death than she did in life, and the sight of it makes her skin crawl.
In her front room, surrounded by the piled-up mementos of her life, Vesta sits on the edge of her settee, stiff and pale. One hand holds a glass of brandy, the other sits loosely in Collette’s as she stares at the air. Collette is speaking, and Cher pauses in the doorway, unsure if she should interrupt.
‘… look after you, Vesta. It wasn’t your fault. You’ll be okay, I swear. We’re going to clear this up and nobody will be any the wiser.’
‘You’re very kind,’ says Vesta, distantly, like the Queen receiving her thirtieth bunch of daffs of the day. ‘You’re all very kind.’
Are we, though, thinks Cher. Is it really because we care about Vesta, or because we don’t want people up in our own business? The only person here I can think of who doesn’t have a reason to cover this up is Thomas, and God knows what he’s hiding while he plays good neighbour. I love Vesta. She’s been like a nan to me, but if I thought she was going to get me taken back into care I’d drop her and run in a heartbeat. And that one, there: the fact that she’s on the run from someone, somewhere, that she’s hiding – it couldn’t be more obvious, now I see it, than if she was wearing an orange jumpsuit. And Hossein’s still months off getting his asylum application waved through, and God knows the Daily Mail’s on the hunt for foreign troublemakers. We’re all out to protect ourselves, in the end. None of it’s really about Vesta.
Vesta buries her nose in her drink and swallows an inch down in a single go. Behind her, Cher can hear grunts of exertion. ‘Go left,’ says Hossein. ‘No, my left. It’s caught on the cooker. No, no, go back, then lift it.’ She steps into the room.
Vesta and Collette look up like kids caught stealing sweets. Their faces relax when they see that it’s her. ‘How are you doing, Vesta?’ she asks.
Vesta pulls a face that’s somewhere between tears and laughter. ‘Oh, you know, dear, I’ve been better.’
‘They’re moving him now,’ she says. ‘He’ll be out of here in no time.’
‘You’re so kind,’ says Vesta, automatically. ‘You’re all so kind. I should be helping, really. I shouldn’t leave other people to clean up my mess.’
‘It’s okay, Vesta,’ says Collette. ‘They’re big strong boys.’
‘But really,’ says Vesta, and makes a move as if to stand up. ‘I’ve never asked anyone to do my dirty work in my life. I’m not starting now.’
Collette puts a strong arm on her shoulder, and holds her down. This is so weird, thinks Cher. Tomorrow – later today – I’ll wake up and I’ll think it’s all been a dream. Roy Preece dead on the bathroom floor. It feels like a dream already.
‘Maybe you should come up and stay in mine, tonight,’ says Collette.
‘Oh, no, I couldn’t,’ says Vesta, still talking on autopilot, clinging to an independence that has vanished. ‘I wouldn’t want to intrude.’
Collette looks sharply up at Cher and gestures her away with her free hand. Leave me to it, the look says. You’re not helping. It’s all I can do to keep her under control.
‘It’s not an intrusion, Vesta,’ she says as Cher goes back to the men.
They’ve got him out on to the plastic. He lies on his side, blubber spreading across the ground like melted candlewax. Sweat drips from their faces and their shirts cling to their chests. Somewhere out in the dark, over near the railway, a fox barks. Out on the road, the sound of a car engine. There are people, thinks Cher. In London there are people all the time, even in the dead of night. Maybe that man in Flat One is lying there, listening to his heartbeat, wondering what we were doing breaking down Vesta’s door. Maybe he isn’t out at all, maybe he’s just too scared to admit that he’s in. She glances at the old sunburst clock on the kitchen wall, a spidery hand ticking off the seconds. Nearly half past three. An hour, maybe less, until daylight. At this time of year people get up to get in a morning’s fishing at the pond on Northbourne Common before they start their day’s work. Children, overheated in their stuffy bedrooms, will catch sight of
the dawn and want attention.
Beyond the stink of the sewage, the hot scent of masculine sweat, she can smell the familiar honk of Landlord. That mix of fungus and must and three-day-old curry, the cheesy tang of desultory washing that has filled her room, and her worries, for months on end. I thought that was the worst smell in the world, she thinks, but he’ll soon smell a whole lot worse than that, and has to bite back a bark of hysterical laughter. My God, I’m fifteen, she thinks. I’m meant to be rowing with my mam and saving up for One Direction tickets. I’m meant to be choosing my GCSEs.
Thomas looks up at the sky. He looks curiously vital in his tinted specs, as though he’s on the adventure of a lifetime. But thank God for him, thinks Cher. He’s the only person who seems prepared to take charge around here. ‘Come on,’ he says, like a general urging his troops over the top. ‘One last push, and we’re done. Cher, do you think you can manage a corner?’
Cher gulps. Yes, with my sprained ankle and my bruised ribs and my face that’ll split open if I strain, sure. Any time. She bends, obediently, and takes hold of the plastic. Got to find a way. Get through tonight, take some pills, get some sleep. How can it get worse, anyway?
Thomas bends, and rolls the Landlord on to his back. A long, dank strand of comb-over has come loose and wraps itself around the puffy neck. Thomas picks it up between his fingers and strokes it back into place, the gesture almost tender, the first moment of care anyone has shown for Roy Preece’s dignity. No funeral-parlour niceties for him. No embalming fluid or lilies, no church candles discreetly burning to cover the smell of formaldehyde.
Cher remembers her nanna, in her coffin with its polyester-satin lining, her best shirt dress buttoned up to the neck and her mouth turned up at the corners, the marks on her face miraculously disguised by the skill of the cosmetician. And Cher standing there, flanked by two social workers as though she might make a break for it, and all the old people popping in and telling her how her nanna used to talk about her all the time at the pensioners’ club, sucking their Werther’s Originals and treating it like a day trip. Suddenly, she wants to cry, to howl at the moon, My nanna’s dead and there’s nobody left to love me. She bites fiercely at her lower lip and forces her face to imitate the frozen impassivity she sees around her. Only kids cry, she thinks. Only stupid little kids. You’re with the grown-ups, now.
Thomas takes hold of a corner of the sheet and pulls it across the Landlord’s body to hide the slack, staring face. The action seems to spur them all into life. They leap forward and pull it fully across, tuck it in like a sleeping bag. Thomas and Hossein take the other side and pull it back towards her, and suddenly he’s not the Landlord any more. He’s no longer leering Roy Preece with his roguish lip twitches and his way of hitching his trousers up that seemed at once both pathetic and obscene. Now he’s just a hulking bundle of dirty blue plastic, a nuisance in the garden, a problem to be solved.
‘He’s still filthy,’ says Hossein, tiredness making his accent stronger so the word comes out as feelthy. ‘We can’t put him back like that.’
Thomas rubs his hands together, almost gleefully. ‘I’ll get up to the tool hire place tomorrow,’ he says, ‘and hire a power jet. Once we’ve got these drains unblocked, we can get it all cleared up. We can just turn the hose on the lot of it, give him a change of clothes and no one will be any the wiser. Come on. Time’s wasting.’
Hossein looks doubtful, but takes his corner. ‘Remember to bend at the knees,’ says Thomas. ‘The last thing we need is someone putting their back out.’
They shuffle around the corpse, trying to work out the best way to carry it. Settle, in the end, for Thomas taking the feet and Hossein and Cher sharing the top end. Thomas counts down: three… two… one… and they straighten up together. Cher gasps at the sheer weight of him, at the pain shooting up through her foot. He’s a forklift truck, a reinforced ambulance, a supersized operating table. He’s not a man, she thinks, and feels her junk-fed muscles strain under her share, the sweat spring to her scalp like someone’s turned on a tap. There’s something else in there, there’s got to be. A whale. A load of cement. But she sees a jellyfish hand creep out from the fold in the plastic, and knows it isn’t true.
It seems to take an hour to get up the steps to the garden. Though they strain at the plastic, they can’t stop the heavy middle section from drooping, and it catches on each edge as they pass it. Her teeth grind against each other as she struggles to control the pain, and a protest from her cracked tooth at least distracts her from the howls of rage coming from her leg. They stop three times and rest their package on the bricks while they pant and flex their backs. She understands now what they mean by the phrase dead weight. Even Roy Preece can’t have been this heavy when he was breathing. She greys out a couple of times, aware of nothing but the deep crimson agony in the central core of her being, but eventually, though she has long since lost track of her surroundings, she realises that her flip-flops are on soft cool grass, and they are out in the open.
‘Keep going,’ Thomas urges, his whisper urgent. There’s no chance of secrecy now, of pretending they’re not there. A casual insomniac glancing out through their curtains will know exactly what they’re doing. ‘Hurry. Not much further. Come on.’
She limps forward. Her foot seems to have given up, decided that complaining is pointless, died down to a deep pulsating ache that she knows promises trouble for tomorrow. They’re able to let out a bit of slack in their screaming arms now they’re on the flat. They shuffle awkwardly between Vesta’s pots, then hobble crabwise across the uncut grass, feet catching, balance uncertain. What must we look like, she wonders, out here in the dark. But she knows the answer, and doesn’t ask the question again.
The shed approaches. Twenty feet… ten… five… She can hear her pulse in her ears, feels sure that the veins are sticking out of her skin like tree roots. Tendons stand out like hawsers in Hossein’s neck. Thomas looks like he’s going to burst. They reach the open door, and relief floods through her. Thomas backs in to the darkness. We’re nearly there. We’re nearly —
He sticks. The door’s too narrow. Roy’s life of chocolate and sausage rolls and late-night pizza has rendered him too wide to fit.
‘Shit,’ hisses Cher, and drops her corner. There’s a noise inside the shed – a tumbling, thumping noise – and she realises that Thomas, caught unawares by the sudden halt, has lost his grip and fallen over.
‘No,’ says Cher. ‘Not now, fuck’s sake.’
She hears him grunt and pull himself up, then the pulling starts from the other side again. Cher and Hossein brace themselves, and push. Their burden just bunches up against the frame, gets thicker, lodges the wood more deeply into itself.
‘Stop.’ Thomas’s voice sounds horribly loud on the night air. They suck their breath in and halt. Wait for the sound of sirens. Someone must have heard them by now. Come to their bedroom window to see what the neighbours are up to. She stares around, looks up at the Poshes’ hundred-pound roller blinds, but nothing stirs in the gardens, no faces appear at the windows.
He speaks again, sotto voce. ‘Turn him on his side.’
Don’t see how that will help, thinks Cher, but they obey. The body still sticks, like a cork in a bottle. But it’s soft tissue, without the underlying hardness of hip bones.
‘Tuck him in,’ comes the voice.
‘What?’
‘Tuck him in. Go on.’
Oh, God. She looks at Hossein and he looks back. He’s on the far side from the pendulous stomach. He can reach across and pull, but it’s going to be her job to tuck. She gulps. I’m fifteen, she thinks again. It’s all downhill from here.
He’s over halfway in, his stomach forced up towards his nipples by the pressure of the door frame. Cher balls her hands into fists, closes her eyes and presses. She’s never kneaded bread, but she thinks it might be a similar sensation.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Poshes next door are throwing a party. At two o’c
lock in the afternoon, while Hossein is flushing out the drains with the power jet that Thomas, true to his word, hired from HSS, the sound of plummy merriment begins to float over the fence, and the air fills with a tantalising scent of a Saturday barbecue. The street fills up with SUVs, and Thomas’s rusty old Honda stands out like a bungalow in an executive development.
Hossein can’t believe that anyone would want to eat among the stench his labours are producing. But the English, he finds, are an odd race, prepared to put up with just about anything rather than engage with a stranger. It was one of many things about this grim grey city that depressed and confused him when he first came here. It took him a long time to learn not to take it personally. But he’s used to it now, and he can see its advantages. Certainly, it gives him some confidence that their plans for Roy Preece’s remains could see success, at least for a while. The Landlord’s neighbours will probably tut and spray Febreze around for months to avoid ringing on his doorbell and potentially having to deal with rudeness.
He bends back to his work. Everything they plan to do depends, ultimately, on getting these drains to work. They need to clean Roy up, get him pristine for his clean clothes, make sure he doesn’t contaminate his final destination. And the only way they can do that is by making sure that the place where they wash him is itself clean. And after that, if they are to carry on living here, business as usual but no rent to pay while, one by one they gradually melt away among the teeming masses…
Hossein is an economist by training, a troublemaker by reputation. He’s always prided himself on his competence. But sitting at a computer and marching with the Green Movement have done little to prepare him for the competencies he’s had to learn since he came to London. With a landlord like Roy, whose combination of meanness and inertia have meant that no repairs would get done unless one did them oneself, he’s had to become a carpenter-plumber-locksmith-glazier just to survive. And now, it seems, he is a drain clearance specialist.
