Human Remains (6 page)

I opened the front door with my key, which I kept on a separate key ring as a kind of message to myself that this wasn’t a permanent arrangement. ‘Only me, Mum!’ I called. From the back room I could hear the sound of her television, loud – one of the soaps, as it always was at this time of the evening.

‘Hello, dear,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Can you turn the thermostat up a little bit? Getting a bit chilly.’

I reached over her head and twisted the dial until I heard the ‘whoomph’ of the gas boiler in the kitchen firing up again.

‘I got you one of those carton soups,’ I said. ‘Broccoli and stilton.’

She pulled a face but said, ‘Alright, dear. If it needs eating up.’

It was my favourite, this one. I opened the spout and put it in the microwave, even though she always made a fuss if I didn’t do it in a saucepan. The small pan was in the sink, crusted hard with what looked like scrambled egg that she’d made for her breakfast. While I was waiting for the soup I ran the hot tap into the pan and squeezed a jet of washing up liquid into it. I stopped the microwave before the telltale ping and stirred the soup into a bowl, added it to a tray with a buttered wholemeal roll on a plate, and took it through to her.

‘No white rolls?’ she said plaintively.

‘The Co-op didn’t have any,’ I fibbed. ‘Anyway, wholemeal’s better for you. You need more fibre, Mum, especially if you’re having scrambled eggs every day.’

She’d gone back to the television.

I washed up, scrubbing the pan clean and wishing she would at least leave it in to soak, and then I cleaned the kitchen surfaces. After that, I went back into the living room. She’d eaten all the soup, despite claiming not to like it.

‘While you’re here,’ she said, ‘can you have a look for my bank book?’

There was usually a ‘while you’re here’ moment, invariably just as I had my coat on and was about to leave.

‘Which one?’

‘The savings one.’

I went through to the other room and opened the top drawer of the dresser, where she kept her expired passport, driving licence, guarantee certificates and instruction manuals for every electrical item she’d purchased in the last thirty years – all the documents of life she was never going to need again, and buried underneath them the ones that she would: building society passbooks, her disabled badge, family photographs.

‘Mum, it’s right here.’

I looked at the open drawer, at the passbook right on the top where it never was – and noticed how everything in there was neat and tidy, as though someone had had a good old
clear-out
. She must have done it herself, put some order into the chaos for once, and forgotten all about it.

She was getting old and forgetful, I found myself thinking as I took the book through to her. Until now she’d always been sharp as a pin even though physically she was frail. How much longer would she be able to cope in her own house, even with me coming in to check on her?

They all said in the newspapers that they didn’t know why I went, or where I’d gone. They said that it was completely out of character. They said I had friends and a loving home. They said I must have been taken by somebody because I would never have left. My mother said I was doing well at college and I had a good career ahead of me. That I had my whole life to look forward to. She said I was a beautiful girl, and that I was loved by my whole family.

All of that was lies.

She appeared on the telly, I saw her, tears in her eyes, appealing for me to get in touch. And then appealing to whoever had taken me – ‘Someone, somewhere must know where my Rachelle is, where my baby is…’ asking them to get in touch with the police, ‘put a mother’s mind at rest, she’s going out of her mind with worry, we can only imagine what she’s going through.’

My baby
. I actually heard her say those words. I was sitting on the sofa in my new flat in a state of complete shock at seeing my own mother on the television appealing for me to get in touch. I was wrapped in three jumpers, cold, too worried about money to put the heating on. I was always cold, even in summer.

Still it meant I couldn’t go out, for a while, after that. I’d already seen the neighbours once and I was hoping that they wouldn’t have recognised me. I’d dyed my hair black, given it a rough choppy cut – hard to see the back but better than nothing; at least my hair was thick enough for the uneven bits not to really show. With a bit of make-up smudged around the eyes I looked a proper emo. I doubt my own mother would have recognised me, in truth, but then she had a hard time looking at me even before the makeover.

I ran out of medication after two months here but I couldn’t go and find a doctor. So I did without, and it was OK. I was sick of the medicated numbness anyway. At least with the black cloud you knew where you were. It was always there anyway, it was just like with the pills it was hidden out of sight. I liked to know it was there. Even if it was bad, at least it was real.

After I saw my mother on the news, I couldn’t go out for a few days. If I didn’t go out, then I couldn’t buy food. I would just have to stay in and go without. And by the time I really needed to go out and get things, maybe I would have lost – what? Four pounds? Maybe even half a stone? It had been a long time since I’d had a good weight loss like that. I would lose a pound here, half a pound there – every so often if I had a really bad day I’d put on, but usually I made sure that I lost it again, quickly. I would say to myself, by the time I go back (if I ever want to go back, that is) I’ll be thin and beautiful and maybe then they’ll all start listening to me and treating me better.

I like this flat. It’s tiny, of course, but it’s furnished and they let me have it for six months. I used the money Gran gave me. They didn’t know about that. She gave me seven thousand pounds before she died, told me to put it in a bank account and not tell them. She left me some other money in her will, but she knew that they would take that away.

Gran was the only one who loved me no matter what, the only person who understood my drive towards perfection. She never once told me I was wasting away, or too thin, or needing to put a few pounds on. She never once told me I was ugly looking like this, nor did she ever tell me I was beautiful. To her, I was just Rachelle. I was the same little girl who’d played in her back garden when I was small, who’d dressed up in her cocktail gowns and high heels.

Whenever I thought of Gran, of being at Gran’s house, it would make me smile. It was the only thing that made me smile.

I wanted to start running. I thought about going early in the morning before anyone was awake. When I was at school I loved running, I loved the feeling it gave me, and I got on with the gym teacher better than any of the other stupid teachers who were always banging on about coursework and deadlines and vocational qualifications. Miss Jackson didn’t give a shit about any of that. She liked me because I never cried off sick, always helped her clear the equipment away. In years gone by the school had funding specifically for athletics, for taking students away for track events with other schools, but they didn’t do that any more. I was the only one bothered, in any case. In the end I got so bad that I had to leave school, even though I needed to run still and who knows, I might have got better if I’d been able to run properly and do weights and spinning classes and things other schools got to do.

But the running was a mistake. I put the effort in but my legs didn’t really work the way they used to. It was like my body had already died and was just waiting for my mind to catch up. And maybe that’s what the black cloud is, after all. Maybe the black cloud is death and I just didn’t recognise it for what it was. And so many of us are still walking around the world but we are all just dead because of the cloud inside us and outside and all around us.

I was under the cloud and there was no way out of it, no escape from it. It was like being in a maze where every path you choose is the wrong one, every path leads to a dead end. Except for one. There’s one path, which is the way out. I just needed to find it.

Another mind-numbing day at work, although at least it’s Tuesday again, which means it’s gym night, which means I shall manage to sleep. Last week’s effort is dutifully recorded on my fitness app, ready and waiting to be beaten.

I’m finding it quite disturbing the amount I’m masturbating. So far this week it’s been hours every night. I think it must be a combination of boredom and too much porn, this obsession.

So I find comfort – of a sort – in my routines. Monday is study night. Tuesday I go to the gym. Wednesday is laundry and housekeeping. Thursday is college. Friday is takeaway and film night. Saturday and Sunday… well. I like to keep my weekends flexible, shall we say? And of course there are the visits I make to my friends. I like to keep up with them.

The main focus for my attention, however, is always the study. Although the last degree course I did was very interesting, I didn’t find it a particular challenge. All my essays were on time, some of them were even early, and I got a First without even trying.

When that course came to an end last year I looked at the options for part-time study and there were very few left which appealed. I even considered doing biology again, as that had been the most enjoyable. But then I saw ‘NLP and behavioural analysis techniques for business and social interaction’. The business bit is neither here nor there, I have no interest in furthering my career with the council – but I was intrigued by the idea that a course might grant me some insight into the thoughts and intentions of others. And it has been fascinating, if undemanding. Very few of the courses I have undertaken at the college have been taxing, and this was no exception. No, the intriguing thing for me has been the additional avenues I’ve been able to explore as a result: thought transference, hypnotism (as distinct from hypnotherapy, another matter entirely), neurolinguistic programming – a misnomer if ever there was one – and brainwashing. I rarely do a course without undertaking some additional study, especially if the subject captivates me, and this one in particular has opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Although it’s unusual for me to continue with a subject beyond a year’s study, unless it’s a degree course, I have found this one particularly absorbing, and so I have moved on to the higher-level course. Quite surprising that some of the other participants have done the same; they have never struck me as being especially intelligent.

And why all this behavioural analysis results in me wanking every night, I have no idea.

When this course first started I remember lying in the darkness pondering, as I’m sure countless single men have before me, whether there might be a way, in all of this human contact bullshit, of getting a woman to sleep with me.

It’s not as though I’m hideous, after all, am I? I’m over six feet tall, well built without being overweight, well-dressed, impeccably clean – what more could any self-respecting woman ask? The only thing I seem to lack is the ability to comprehend what any of them actually want me to say. So what is it that women really want? You don’t have to answer that. I don’t think I can even begin to guess – and I suspect your answer would be different from that of the person next to you.

It has crossed my mind that I could find a prostitute, but in all honesty I object to paying for something that countless filthy, vapid idiots up and down the country are managing to get for free. Not to mention the possibility of contracting some dreadful disease. But, despite my reluctance, going to a prostitute remains my fantasy of choice. I imagine going along the London Road, driving slowly into the darkness between the orange pools of light, seeing the shapes moving, women standing back, a woman leaning against a wall, maybe, or strolling along the pavement, impossibly high heels making her hips swing. I pull over behind a figure – I can’t see her clearly, not at all in fact, but somehow I’ve chosen her. She comes into the light and leans through the open window of the car.

Some nights she’s old, in her fifties if she’s a day, with curly black hair that must surely be a wig. She smiles at me and gets into the car, and we go back to a filthy flat she thinks is tastefully decorated with pink nylon and polyester, a carpet with the same psychedelic pattern as the one my parents’ living room had in the Seventies; I lie back on the bed that smells of damp and sex, and watch her undressing, laying all of that PVC and stretch nylon lace out on a frayed chintz settee. Her body is old and used, her skin slack against bone, her hair under the wig grey and coarse. I try to fuck her but I can’t even feel the sides of her vast hole against me, so she ends up taking out her teeth and gumming me vigorously until I can finally orgasm. Of course the fantasy can’t end until I’ve paid out some nauseatingly overinflated sum of money and been let out into the street, hot and smelling of her, filthy with her various bodily fluids all over my face, my hands, my body and my clothes.