Cooee (24 page)

I can see now, of course, that I was in shock. But at the time it seemed to me I was functioning with commendable lucidity, that the cogs were all spinning and connecting to each other with at least usual efficiency, that indeed I had somehow achieved a singular purity of vision.

I breathed silently while death and guilt and anger and fear and other great nameless things swirled around me, while possible new, murky futures unfolded like dark, narrow paths on all sides, while Borrow uneasily snuffled and my lover gradually cooled and stiffened.

After a while — it could have been twenty minutes; it could have been hours — I set down my glass of brandy, which under the circumstances I had managed to stretch out pretty well. I walked over to Max's corpse. I squatted beside him and I stroked his hair.

His head was very cold.

I didn't know what to do. I felt in his jacket pocket and took out his wallet. It was an old wallet, but good quality: it was a soft, dark leather, with claret-coloured silk lining. I'd never looked at it closely before: Max didn't appreciate people messing with his belongings; and I wouldn't normally have dreamt of examining his wallet or his desk or his papers or anything else belonging to him.

I opened it and found my picture inside. It was a nasty shock, considering everything. There I was, grinning insouciantly up at me. There were a number of credit cards and what appeared to be a huge amount of cash. I counted it, quietly and methodically, pleased in a way to have something to do. There were thirty-five crisp, neat hundred-dollar notes, and a medley of smaller denominations as well. It was a very orderly wallet.

Steve used to stuff everything in his wallet: bits of paper, addresses, cards, advertising blurb, receipts. Max had been so meticulous about everything. I was amazed that he carried so much cash around. He was never short of cash, of course, but three thousand dollars plus seemed excessive. I was cross, in fact: it wasn't only excessive but careless. Anything might have happened to him, carrying as much as that around with him.

But I had no time or energy to think about it: I replaced the notes carefully and took the wallet upstairs, and put it on the table beside our bed, on Max's side, next to the novel he had been reading, a murder mystery by P.D. James.

Only a night or two ago he had asked lazily, as he closed the book and turned the bedside lamp off, why women wrote the best murder mysteries. I'd told him it was because we had the most devious minds, and he'd laughed and pulled me towards him and … Well, there was no point in thinking about that.

I went back downstairs, stepping heavily on the carpeted treads. Max's body was still there, exactly where I had left it. It seemed odd, somehow: I had so competently extinguished his spirit, it seemed as if his body should also have evaporated, vanishing into the air with a wreath of white smoke. Yet here it lay, stubbornly corporeal, dead but otherwise fit and svelte, as Max always was, requiring disposal.

And suddenly it was so easy, to see how the disposal was going to work. It was as if there was a divine dispensation, looking down benignly, knowing all along this was going to happen, having arranged for me in advance the perfect — the brilliant — solution. Its timeliness was breathtaking. How frequently during the course of my life, after all, would I need to dispose of a body? It was nothing short of phenomenal.

I was going to have to move him. I tugged at his ankle, experimentally. Nothing happened except that Borrow started whimpering again. I tugged again. Nothing.

He was a dead weight, of course.

‘Shut up,' I said, fiercely, to the dog. He shot me a resentful leer and dropped his head between his paws again. I stood and pondered.

We had a trolley in the garage. We'd got it for moving furniture around when we were setting up in the house. Feeling gratitude for my forethought in providing direct access between house and garage, I padded into the garage with its chilly concrete floor and disentangled the trolley from the garden tools. I knocked a spade and it clanged against the Audi's silver bonnet as it fell. No dent. Not that it mattered, of course: Max was past fretting over the duco. Carefully I steered the trolley into the lounge.

It was a good trolley, with triple wheels and strong webbing that you could use to stabilise large items such as refrigerators. We'd paid a bit extra for a reliable article: always thoughtful consumers, we had eschewed the cheaper varieties, which looked as if they'd buckle under anything with real bulk or weight. I laid the trolley on its back and, after a number of ham-handed attempts, rolled Max onto it.

I deduced from the chill inflexibility of his limbs that rigor mortis was setting in; but if anything this made the process easier. I buckled the webbing straps tightly and experimentally raised the trolley handles. It was surprisingly easy to manoeuvre. Borrow looked on, lifting his lip slightly as if to demonstrate his contempt for the proceedings. I didn't blame him.

I went out to the switches by the back door and made sure that all the outside sensor lights were turned off. I was proud of my composure: I was thinking of everything. Softly I opened the door and wheeled Max out into the night. The neighbours' lights were off. I stood a moment, to allow my eyes to accustom themselves to the silver-shot darkness of the moonlight. Borrow loped to one of the wattles and absent-mindedly urinated against its trunk.

I rolled Max over to the gaping mass of clay and broken tile where the glossy pale pool had sparkled in sunlight, its water transparent against the latte ceramic sheen of its tiles. I undid the webbing buckles and tipped him in. It was hard: he was very heavy and for a moment I thought I wasn't going to be able to gain sufficient leverage. It was a relief when he toppled.

My eyes were more used to the moonlight now: I could see the dim outline of his body, sprawled where once he had dived with easy grace, his olive skin glistening in the water, his silver hair plastered to his skull.

I rolled the trolley back to the shed and brought out the spade. I noticed the wheelbarrow was full of weeds and grass clippings, so I also wheeled that out and tipped it into the great cavity. There were prunings, too, from the jasmine Max had trimmed back at the weekend. It all went in there. I slipped and slid down the edge of the slope, cutting my hand on a bit of tile.

Borrow lay in his sphinx position at the edge of the hole, concealing his confusion by asserting disengagement from my disreputable actions. I scrabbled and scraped, doglike, at the bottom of the hole, under the naked, callous moon, covering up the dreadful thing I had created. Please, God, I thought, don't let the neighbours wake up and look out. Please, God, make the neighbours keep on sleeping.

It was hard work, and I had to try to be quiet, too, which made it harder. When I thought I had done enough, I climbed up. I cleaned the spade on the grass, replaced it, and went back inside. Blood dripped on the kitchen floor from the wound to my hand. I wiped it up very carefully and wrapped a tea towel around the gash. I would bandage it properly later, I thought.

I went back into the lounge and inspected it. So odd, I thought again, that there was no blood — or, rather, that the only blood was mine. The room was blank and peaceful, volunteering no information about the violence that had so recently ruptured it.

I examined the hearthstone, to see whether there were telltale hairs, whether some vestigial evidence clung to it. I could see nothing, but I wiped it down anyway, using the clean part of the tea towel. I took Max's half-empty whisky glass and rinsed it in the kitchen.

I returned to the lounge and gazed around. I noticed the meteor stone, where it had rolled away into the corner of the room. I picked it up and scrutinised it closely. Even on this, the murder weapon, I could see no incriminating evidence — no smear of congealing blood, no tuft of hair, no scrape or abrasion on its smooth surface to betray what it had done, what I had done. I dabbed at it with the tea towel, but it didn't need cleaning. It was clean as a whistle already.

I replaced it on the table, where it belonged. But it vexed me there. Its character had changed: it now looked squat and evil, as if it harboured of its own volition an unpleasant secret that it might speak aloud bluntly to some stranger entering the room. Formerly it had symbolised the happiness and harmony of our union; now its presence mocked and corrupted that memory. Also, it was evidence.

I took it outside and chucked it, too, into the large cubic hole in the garden where our beautiful pool had nestled. I heard the crack and thud of its landing.

I showered. I bandaged my hand. I rinsed the blood-stained tea towel. I went to bed. I lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, at the walls, at the blankness all around me. After a while I started to shake uncontrollably. I remember I was relieved by this: it demonstrated to me that I had retained some shred of humanity, that I was not a monster.

And then the tears came. I wept for hours. Borrow crawled up from his mat onto the bed, which he was not allowed to do, and I grabbed him very tight and shook and sobbed until the morning.

Then I slept, for an hour or two. I had a mad painful dream in which Max was forcing me to think of a rhyme for the word
corpse
, and I woke up mumbling
borps, morps, porps, dorps. Forceps. Forceps is the closest I can get, Max.
And Max loomed impossibly high and dark above me, clenching his fists and threatening me, shouting at me (as he had never shouted in life) that
forceps
wasn't good enough, that I had to think of a proper rhyme.

And then I got up and I showered again, for a long time, and I started to face up to a new kind of life.

I didn't see anyone for a couple of days, except for the contractor who turned up to topple the slagheaps of filler earth into the fractured shell of the pool. This did not happen the day immediately after I killed Max, but the following morning. He came very early, when it was still half-dark, and buzzed around in the grey air in his bright little bobcat, trundling like a bulbous orange beetle across the garden.

I glanced out at him from time to time, my chest and throat tight, a hammering inside my head, wondering how he could possibly cross and recross the garden so frequently, so blithely unaware of what lay beneath him. The beetle's throbbing rumble stopped at one point, and I peered out to see what was happening.

The contractor was standing by the void of the pool, looking meditatively across it. He was having a smoko. I could see the bluish trail of the cigarette fading into the morning air. Inhale, exhale; inhale, exhale. He looked down at the corner where Max lay, and my heart thudded harder. He threw in his stub. He sighed and stretched and flexed his arms, and ambled back into his machine. He continued to empty quantities of dirt into the space where the pool had been, and departed.

The next day Jack, of Jack's Landscape Solutions, arrived to check out the site, twirling his beard and promising graders and rollers and ready-made turf and rose bushes and instant flowerbeds, all of which duly eventuated over the following couple of weeks without my doing anything to prompt it. Max had organised it all, of course, with his usual precision, his reliable attention to detail.

It looked terrific when it was all complete. Jack was disappointed that Max wasn't around to see the finished product; I apologised and said he was on an unexpected business trip.

I rang work and said I had a stomach bug and wouldn't be there for a few days. I didn't answer the telephone: I didn't even listen to the messages on the answering machine. I didn't go out, except to empty the letterbox after dark. I didn't bother to open the letters: I just didn't want to leave the letterbox looking untended.

Borrow was cross, because he wanted a walk. It wasn't until the fourth day that he got one. I slunk out in my sunglasses and ran immediately into one of the neighbours, out doing the edges of his lawn. He waved jauntily and I waved back.

I can't remember much about those days. I was in shock, or denial, or limbo. Wherever. Certainly, I was somewhere I'd never been before. Max's brutal quenching had engulfed me with such thoroughness, such rapidity, that I could do nothing but crouch and hide. I didn't even cry very much, after that first night. The tears welled up sometimes, but as the days passed it was as if the reservoir within was drying up, its bed hard and eroded and cracked. A drought inside.

I thought a lot — but to no great purpose — about death. I found it hard to credit that Max was really dead; I found it even harder to believe I was responsible. I dreamt the Lost Dream again and again at night, waking in sweat, trembling, turning to the embrace that no longer held me, the arms that were no longer there.

I thought about murder. Surely it hadn't really been murder? I hadn't meant it, after all.
Let's call it manslaughter
, I said to myself. It sounded so much better. And I thought about punishments. The state no longer sanctioned capital punishment. If I was discovered, exposed, I wouldn't actually die. I wouldn't be hanged. This was quite a consoling thought. But what would happen? Would I be jailed? And for how long?

What did you wear in jail? I wondered. Some sort of uniform, I supposed. I hoped it wouldn't be yellow. Or pink.

Then again, perhaps it was murder. Perhaps I was a murderer. A murderess. Perhaps intention didn't have anything to do with it. In any case, who could say what I had intended? It was only my word to say I hadn't meant it. People might not believe me. People probably wouldn't.