I gave him the address and hung up.

  IX

  I waited. It was a huge effort to do anything. The man seemed to have grown in death, his body shrank the room. I thought of getting up and closing his eyes or something but in the end I just concentrated on not looking at the body. It was its utter stillness that was so intolerable, that gave the man this Olympian air of authority, as though he were in deep contemplation and ready to crush my tiny concerns at any moment. The silence was oppressive as well. I would have liked to have put the Mozart CD back on again but I didn’t have the energy for it. Then it occurred to me that in any case I’d destroyed that piece of music for ever. For the rest of my life, whenever I heard it I would no longer be reminded of Marianne’s young body, instead I would remember the one now stretched out before me. I would see not Marianne’s smile but her lover’s. The idea tore at me and I just sat there hypnotised with shock, not doing anything, not thinking anything.

  Suddenly the intercom buzzed. My head felt light and my legs heavy as though I’d been sitting down for hours. I looked around for the intercom, it was by the door. I had to step over the body to get to it. Christian’s voice crackled over the little speaker then I buzzed him in. I stood by the door. I could hear him climbing the stairs, two or three at a time. I wondered why he hadn’t taken the lift. Then I could feel him behind the door.

  I opened it slightly: ‘No, you can’t come in.’

  Christian was breathless from the stairs: ‘What the hell’s …’

  ‘You’d better go. I don’t know why I rang you.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Please, just go.’

  Christian forced his way past me. It took me by surprise and I made no attempt to stop him. It was as if I had no strength left in me at all. He stopped when he saw the body, though. He just stared down in horrified astonishment: ‘Oh my God … oh Jesus.’

  I stood there looking at Christian looking at the body. An overwhelming feeling of childlike guilt swept through me and all I could think was how badly I’d let him down: ‘I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.’ The memory came back to me of that day at the hospital and the nurse explaining to me how Christian’s wife had died and I’d suppressed the desire to say: ‘It wasn’t me who killed her.’

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick. I’m going to be sick.’

  Christian rushed to the window, almost tripping over the body, and hung his head outside for a minute or so. He wasn’t sick though. Eventually he sat down on the chair, the one I’d been sitting on, the one I’d got up from to grab the vase on the mantelpiece. He looked quite stunned. I said I was sorry again but he didn’t reply, not at first. He just sat there staring, his gangly body all folded up like an anglepoise lamp. Eventually he asked who the man was but I said nothing. There was another longish moment of silence.

  ‘Have you called the police?’

  ‘I haven’t called anyone except you.’

  ‘But who is he?’

  I still didn’t answer.

  ‘Do you want me to ring the police?’

  ‘Yes … no … I don’t know …’

  The dull warmth of the summer afternoon had invaded me and the muffled cries of kids playing cricket in the street seemed almost more interesting than my conversation with Christian. But that must have been when I told him I wanted to get the body out of there. I hadn’t even realised it was what I wanted to do until I’d put the desire into words. I must have said something like: I don’t want Marianne to find her lover like this. All dead and bloody. I owe her that at least. I begged him to help me and he told me to sit down. He didn’t speak for a long, long time after that. He sat down himself, but turned away from me, his arms and legs continually shifting about like an upturned beetle’s. A tap was dripping in the bathroom. The man couldn’t have turned it off properly. These vestiges of his last actions were peculiar, as though bits of him had yet to die.

  Finally Christian said: ‘You’re going to have to stay here, I’ll be back in twenty minutes.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.’

  ‘OK.’

  I let him go. I didn’t want to be left alone with the body again but it was a relief that Christian was doing something, taking the situation in hand. An absurd gratitude towards him swept through me. I didn’t really care too much about what exactly he was up to. Perhaps he was calling the police. I sat in a kind of trance smoking cigarette after cigarette. The sun had fallen a little lower in the sky and the body now cast a shadow over the opposite wall and the bed. It meant that practically wherever I looked I saw either the body or its shadow.

  My mind flickered uncertainly from one half-formed idea to another. I recalled my grandmother once telling me about the death of her grandmother, how the family had sat up in vigil over the body the night she’d died, and how my grandmother hadn’t wanted to at all but her mother had made her. For the first time I imagined my grandmother as a young girl, a frightened, traumatised girl shut up in a stuffy Edwardian room with a dead relative. I suddenly felt a great flow of sympathy towards her and I could remember her face as she’d told me that story: it was so clear and I could read the pain in it. How was it that I hadn’t seen it before? And yet it was strange how my visual imagination seemed so much sharper, more real to me now. For instance, when I thought about Jarawa it was no longer as some kind of blank icon. It was as though the death of this other man had woken him up for me.

  Christian came back in as I was stubbing out the last of the man’s cigarettes. It seemed he’d been away only an instant, but judging from the number of cigarette butts in the ashtray, he must have been gone a good forty minutes. He had a whole lot of stuff with him that he’d brought up in the lift: cleaning products, rubbish bags, a bucket, a white sheet, a large tarpaulin-like cover … Where did you get all this from, I asked. He said from a DIY shop up in Shepherd’s Bush.

  After he’d got everything into the room and shut the door he unfolded the sheet and placed it beside the body: ‘Here, help me roll him onto it.’ I stepped onto the other end of the sheet, by the man’s feet. The body wasn’t easy to roll though. In the end we kind of dragged it to the middle of the sheet which Christian folded on top of it. But the sheet got caught on the man’s lower lip, pulling it down to expose his teeth, turning his smile into a sneer. Christian disentangled the sheet from the man’s lip and pulled it back from his face. A pool of blood – congealed and slightly lumpy, like poorly-made gravy – had formed where the man’s head had rested on the ground.

  Christian spread the tarpaulin over the floor and we lifted the now shrouded body onto it. The top end of the sheet had already started to stain red but the tarpaulin looked plastic and waterproof. Around the edges were reinforced holes through which was threaded a bright orange nylon rope. Immediately I grasped what Christian was trying to do. He was going to pull the rope tight to make a kind of bag out of the tarpaulin, with the body inside. I stood by and watched as he pushed the man’s knees into his chest so the body would fit properly on the tarpaulin. His knees kept springing back gently, but somehow Christian eventually manoeuvred the body so it was curled up and ball-like. I stared down. The body’s foetal position and the fact that it lay shrouded in white reminded me of the ultrasound images I’d seen of Jessica before she’d been born, when I’d gone to the prenatal clinic with Marianne.

  We lifted up the tarpaulin around the body and Christian pulled the nylon rope tight and knotted it. Then he got out some industrial sellotape he’d bought and started taping up the bag to secure it properly. When he’d finished, there was this huge thing sitting in the middle of the floor. It didn’t look like a body now. It didn’t look like anything at all.

  ‘My car’s right outside the building. He won’t fit in the boot but I’ve already put the back seat down.’

  We half pushed, half pulled the body along the floor, out through the door and into the lift then outside onto the pavement. A few kids – maybe the ones who I’d heard playing street cricket – looked on as we tried to haul the body into the car over the folded-down seat at the back. I could see the two lovers on the corner as well. They were still there, which seemed odd. There would be hundreds of witnesses of course. But I didn’t care.

  The trouble was our hands kept slipping on the plastic tarpaulin and it took a few minutes before we got the body in the car. It finally slid in and bounced about a little like a giant football. Christian slammed the car door: ‘Let’s get back and clean up.’ It was warm and the desire to be somewhere quite different – perhaps the swimming pool – was strong in me. I followed Christian back inside without saying a word.

  Putting on the rubber gloves he’d brought with him, Christian went to the bathroom, filled up the bucket then started working on the pool of blood. I looked out the window. There was a tree on the street corner not too far from the window and while Christian cleaned I watched it rustling in the breeze, not thinking of anything, except perhaps of the melancholy beauty of the tree. Eventually I turned back to the room. The soap suds in the bucket were pink now but all trace of blood on the floor had gone. Christian was sitting back, rolling himself a cigarette: ‘Of course, it won’t escape any real investigation. If the cops come round and examine the place I mean.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  The trouble was, the floor-tiles Christian had cleaned the blood from were now a slightly different colour to the rest. They were shiny and stood out. I said this to Christian and he squinted down at the floor: ‘I could clean all the tiles. Then they’d all be the same.’

  ‘No. Marianne would notice.’

  In the end what Christian did was stamp around the place where the blood had been, trying to rub in some of the dirt from his shoes. That took some of the shine off it – if you weren’t actually looking for anything you probably wouldn’t have noticed the difference. After that Christian started sweeping up the glass and flowers while I tidied, washing out the bucket, chucking stuff into the bin-liners he’d bought. I put the whisky bottle back in its proper place, washed up the whisky glasses and wiped down everything I could remember touching. It was a futile exercise of course. As Christian had already pointed out, if the police actually came round here they’d obviously find evidence of one sort or another. They’d find a hair, a footprint, or maybe the blood between the cracks in the tiles … All that was a question of time and a matter of complete indifference to me.

  As all the cleaning was going on I’d slipped into a kind of reverie. I’d almost forgotten what had happened until the phone rang. It was incredibly loud. I froze and so did Christian. The phone rang and rang, six times, ten times. When eventually it stopped I said, OK, we’ve got to get out of here. I started to panic and gabble, losing control. Christian said hang on, there’s no point in hurrying this, messing it up, whoever rang is not going to come round right now. I’m not so sure, I replied. My left hand had started shaking again and I was stuttering and rushing over my words. Christian said no, slow down, just sit down, we’ve got to do this properly. I sat down, relieved once more to have him tell me what to do. Christian began gathering up all the cleaning things and putting them into one of the binliners. Then he piled everything by the door. After that he went into the bathroom for a moment. When he came out again he said: ‘Is everything in place here? I mean, is this the way you want to leave the room?’

  I looked around for the last time. The room seemed curiously empty without the body. I looked over to the partially-made bed. I picked up the lighter, my lighter, and put it in my pocket. ‘Yes,’ I said. But as soon as we’d left the room and Christian had shut the door behind us I remembered something. I’d forgotten Marianne’s skirt. It had been hanging on the back of the chair and the man had put it away so that I could sit down. I should have got the skirt out again. It didn’t matter really. It’s hard to explain but somehow it made me feel incredibly sad that I’d forgotten to put the skirt back on the chair.

  It was hot in the car. I could smell blood – or perhaps it was just my imagination – and I wound down the window. We didn’t talk. I didn’t ask Christian where we were going but then we were on the Hammersmith flyover. For quite a while I couldn’t rid myself of that feeling of panic which had been triggered by the phone ringing. I wished I’d picked up the phone and found out who’d been calling. I was certain it had been Marianne. Perhaps she was heading over there right now. She would be surprised to find that the man wasn’t at the bedsit. Would she notice anything different? Would she notice the shiny patch on the chequered tiles? Perhaps not. There would be the missing vase of course. I’d forgotten about that. Its disappearance would seem mysterious, very mysterious. I couldn’t imagine how Marianne would explain it to herself.

  I watched Christian as he drove – he hardly moved at all. I’d always looked down on men who were happy to cede control to another man, perhaps it was one of the reasons why Christian had rubbed me up the wrong way at times. Now it seemed I’d become the very thing I despised. We passed a field of cows, then another, speeding past them so fast that they appeared to be the merest blur of biology. There was something curiously comforting about being in a car accelerating through the countryside: it was to do with the fact that the motorway was a kind of non-place. In the world but not of it.

  Christian cut through my reflections: ‘It was a shock. Seeing the body. I mean I’ve never seen a dead body before.’

  ‘I have.’

  He didn’t say anything further. He looked like he was thinking, or maybe he was just concentrating on driving. I glanced at my watch: it was two thirty. An instant later I looked at it again and it was three. Suddenly Christian slowed down. It was the Oxford turnoff, which crossed back over the motorway via a little bridge. As he swung the car around I could feel the body rolling about a little in the back.

  We were now on a suburban road on the outskirts of town and after the otherworldliness of the bedsit and the motorway it was odd to see people going about their normal business. I noticed a young woman with a shopping bag walking down the street with her daughter, aged five or six. The girl was skipping along behind, one foot in the gutter, the other on the footpath, talking or singing to herself.

  We stopped outside a semi-detached house in Headington with a ‘For Sale’ sign out front. Christian got out of the car: ‘Wait here a minute.’ He hadn’t told me what his plans were and I hadn’t asked. There was almost this feeling that somehow I was already out of the picture. In some respects I had yet to even leave the bedsit and I saw myself kneeling over the man, desperately trying to catch his final words.

  I could hear Christian putting things in the boot. Then he got back into the driving seat. He’d changed his shirt. He’d washed his face too, wetting his hair and slicking it back. It had been cut, I hadn’t noticed that before. He had new glasses as well. He’d lost his hippie look and it changed him, in some way making him look older and more purposeful.

  Christian was driving again. We passed through suburbs into a kind of transitional zone, not town, not country. There were abandoned buildings, warehouses or old factories maybe, and tarmac areas with great cracks and grass and weeds pushing up through them. It was empty with the strange exception of a few girls hanging about. They were of an indeterminate age. Then finally we emerged into the countryside.

  We didn’t drive for long though. We turned off into a country lane then into a dirt track darkened with overhanging trees. It was a small forest or something. We bumped along for a while then at one point Christian stopped abruptly, pulled over to one side: ‘It’s here, I think.’ He got out, went round to my side and opened my door. At first I didn’t move and Christian didn’t say anything. He turned away and got some tools and this camp bed thing out of the boot and unfolded it, then just stood there and rolled a cigarette. He seemed deep in thought. Eventually I got out. Christian said: ‘OK. We’ve got to get him out of the back. It’ll soon be over.’ I noticed how Christian said ‘him’ and not ‘it’ when he talked about the body. I said: ‘OK.’

  It was very hot. I grabbed hold of the nylon rope around the tarpaulin and pulled the body to the edge of the seat, then Christian eased it onto the ground: ‘I’m going to take all this sellotape crap off then take him out and lay him on the stretcher. He’ll be easier to carry like that.’ He got some secateurs from the boot and started hacking through the sellotape, then he undid the rope. The tarpaulin fell away. The body was on its side, still curled up in foetal position. Even like that, even shrouded in a sheet he was somehow recognisable. It was the shape of his body. The top half of the sheet was stained red with blood now, stiff with it as though that part was another piece of material altogether. It looked like a hood for a condemned man.

  Christian grappled with the body but it wouldn’t uncurl: maybe rigor mortis had set in. In the end we hauled it onto the camp bed just as it was. Lying there on its side it looked like a solitary child coiled up against the cold. As long as his body was there, as long as his distinctive shape was still recognisable it seemed there was still a breath of life about the man.

  We positioned ourselves on either end of the camp bed and picked it up. Right at that moment though I heard the sound of a car from up the road. Christian stayed calm: ‘We’ll carry him behind the car then throw the tarpaulin over him.’ I could hardly hold my end of the bed I was shaking so much but Christian stared at me ferociously: ‘It’ll be all right. Just do what I say.’ We got the body and camp bed behind the car and then stood about while the car passed. It was a man driving, tweed cap, Barbour, a caricature of a country type. The man slowed down slightly and peered at us with hostile curiosity, but Christian waved and he drove on and disappeared round the bend.

  I grabbed Christian by the shoulder: ‘God … we look so bloody suspicious. What’s he going to think? We’ve got to get out of here. What’s he going to think?’