Human Remains (9 page)

I cooked myself an omelette for tea, watched a programme about Africa on the telly and then went and had a bath. I sat there in the hot foamy water and listened to the silence in the house, the echoing silence.

I tried to imagine what could have happened in the months since the time I’d seen Shelley Burton. Maybe she’d been so unhappy after her partner had moved out that she’d given up on gardening, given up on life. Maybe he’d had an affair with someone, and she’d been devastated by it.

All of these things could have been happening next door and I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t seen her for a long time. Maybe because of this I’d assumed that she’d gone, that the house was being sold or put up for letting, and it had turned out she was still living there, all along.

I wasn’t feeling unhappy but the tears started before I even really expected them. Tears for the silence, the being alone. Tears for the people who died in their houses and stayed there, their bodies rotting away to fluid and bone and slime, nothing left in the end but a black stain on the mattress or the chair. Buried with nobody there but some woman from the council who’d tried and failed to find someone who’d loved them.

If I died, here, now, would I be missed? Surely work would notice? Surely Mum would phone the police, if she couldn’t get hold of me? Someone might call round. What if I didn’t answer the door? How long would it be before someone kicked the door in? Days? Weeks? What state would I be in, by then?

Outside the bathroom door I heard a scratching sound. The cat, my support, my rock.

At work today I noticed Martha talking to Katrine, the new temp. I hardly registered her presence for the first couple of weeks, and then she smiled at me in the lift and ever since then I find myself acutely aware of her every time she’s in the room.

She’s Danish, apparently, although she doesn’t appear to have an accent. They all talk about her when she’s not there, the same way they undoubtedly talk about me the moment I leave. I hate their pettiness, their bitchiness, the way they pretend to be friends all the time and then verbally tear their prey to shreds in their absence.

They tried to get me to join in, asked me what I thought, but then realised that I didn’t want to play their juvenile games. I’m there to work, not to socialise.

Actually, I’m there because it suits me. I earn the same amount of money every month and I can do the job without expending any intellectual effort. In fact, most days I can get my work done by half-past ten in the morning and after that I use my workstation to complete study assignments or research. There is no point in looking for additional work to do, after all, because that would just be setting myself up for bigger challenges in the future. No: I do what I have to do, I do it well, I do it slightly better than anyone else, and they leave me alone.

I’ve stopped masturbating, for now. I was disgusting myself. I’m saving it for the weekend, when I can waste time with it if I feel like it. I am, as always, in control.

Vaughn Bradstock has asked me if I would like to have dinner with him and the delightful Audrey on Saturday.

My first thought was that it would interrupt my evening of wanking and porn; then I reconsidered. It would be intriguing to meet Audrey, after having heard about every intimate detail of her life, her physique and her personality over the last few months. He has decided against Weston-super-Mare, by the way. I told him it was wise. If you were going to go somewhere with the woman of your dreams, then surely you would find somewhere more exotic than Weston-super-Mare?

‘About six-thirty alright?’ he’d asked.

Typical, I thought. ‘Can we make it a bit later? I have a phone call to make at that time.’

There was a momentary pause. ‘Oh, well, I suppose so. Can’t you ring whoever it is earlier? It’s just that Audrey doesn’t like to eat too late. Something about the diet she’s on.’

‘I can be there for seven,’ I said firmly. ‘If that’s no good, I’m afraid I shall have to decline.’

In the end he agreed to seven o’clock, and then he asked me if I had any special dietary requirements, at which I laughed.

‘It’s a serious question,’ he asked. ‘I’d hate to accidentally kill you with something you have an allergy to.’

‘I’m not too keen on aubergine,’ I said, in the end.

‘We’ll bear that in mind,’ he said. ‘Audrey’s cooking.’

‘Is she any good?’ I asked, thinking that actually he must surely have told me about Audrey’s culinary expertise at some point; after all, he’d told me about everything else.

‘Oh, yes,’ Vaughn said with enthusiasm.

But, given Vaughn’s taste in women, beer and music, this was not enlightening. I will have to wait until Saturday and see for myself.

I dropped in to see my friend Maggie on the way home. She wasn’t looking too bright, poor thing. Still, I sat with her for a while and chatted to her. I’m intrigued by her house, which is beautiful, along with everything in it – there must be about six bedrooms upstairs; no idea why she needs that many since she’s been on her own for a good couple of years. I don’t think I disturbed her too much, although she was looking very tired. I told her I’d go back and see how she was doing at the weekend, and left her to it.

I got home and cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, put on a load of laundry and ironed my work shirts whilst watching the news.

I’ll have to plan my weekend carefully, with so much to fit in. Vaughn’s dinner party, diverting as it sounds, is the least of my priorities at the moment.

My wife left me, and that was the beginning of the end of my life.

I remember I was at home with the kids on a Sunday afternoon, washing up, when the doorbell rang. It was Elaine, my wife’s best friend. She had tears in her eyes. I invited her in and faffed about making a cup of tea while she sat in the living room and sobbed unselfconsciously, making a hideous racket. Fortunately the kids were upstairs also making a hideous racket so they were none the wiser.

‘Where’s Beverley?’ Elaine said to me when at last she could speak. I assumed she just wanted her best friend’s shoulder to cry on, not mine.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘She went out.’ We weren’t the sort of couple who spent every minute together. We had our own lives, our own hobbies, our own friends. It made the time we did spend together more exciting, more precious. Or so I thought.

The doorbell went again just then, and I remember feeling terrible, as if the world had suddenly shifted on its axis and I hadn’t realised, as if something was wrong in the most fundamental way possible and I was the last one to know. On the doorstep was Beverley, with Mike, Elaine’s husband.

They were holding hands.

I stood aside to let them in and they went through to the living room where Elaine was sitting, presumably already somehow aware of the bombshell they were about to drop into all of our lives. They were surprisingly calm, rational and emotionless as they delivered the news. They had been carrying on the affair for the past five months, and they were no longer prepared to continue to lie to everyone. Beverley told me she didn’t love me any more, she loved Mike, and she wanted us to get a divorce so that they could get married.

At the time I took it all so well. I think if it had just been Bev and me having the discussion I might have ranted, thrown something, certainly raised my voice a little. But here we were, the four of us, having this civil discussion downstairs while upstairs our children played some game that involved a lot of banging and crashing and pounding of feet on the landing between the bedrooms.

They got their way, of course. There was nothing I could do to stop it, and, besides, after the initial hysteria Elaine seemed to get used to the idea and then she was fine with it. How could I kick up a fuss when she was being so reasonable?

In the days and weeks that followed, though, I found myself at the start of a downward spiral. I moved out into a rented flat, leaving Bev and the kids in the house while it was sold. But it was the wrong time to try and sell a four-bedroomed house, and it stayed on the market for month after month, while I paid the mortgage and the rent on the flat and money to Bev for child support.

Alone in my miserable little one-bedroomed flat, trying to make sense of what I’d done wrong, why it was me being punished when I wasn’t the one who’d had the affair, who’d demanded a divorce, I started drinking every night and then eventually in the morning when I woke up, too.

I lost my job the following November, on the day when I came into work still partly drunk from the day before and even drunker because I’d had to have a bottle of strong cider before I could face the day.

Bev helped me out a bit. She was a good girl really, kind, one of the reasons why I married her in the first place. I think she felt guilty over the way things had ended. She told me I didn’t have to pay for the kids for a while, until I got things sorted out, and as it turned out I didn’t have to pay for the big mortgage any more since Mike and Elaine had sold their house, and he’d moved in with Bev and the kids.

I got a bit of money from the social, and that went on the rent for the flat. The little bit that I kept back from that, I tried to spend on food, and bills, and presents for the kids at Christmas and birthdays. But more often than not I’d go to the corner shop and buy a couple of bottles, just to keep me warm.

This was where I ended up, two years after the moment it all started, with me in blissful ignorance doing the washing-up on a Sunday afternoon while my kids played upstairs and my wife was who knew where doing who knew what.

You never realise what loneliness is until it creeps up on you – like a disease, it is, something that happens to you gradually. And of course the alcohol doesn’t help: you drink it to forget about how shit it is living like that, and then when you stop drinking everything looks a hell of a lot worse. So you keep drinking to try and blot it all out.

I always thought if there was someone I could have talked to, someone who’d really listen… Not the doctor, who was always in a hurry to get me out of the surgery because I smelt of booze and worse; not the people at the day centre who heard stories like this all the time, every day. Besides, there are a lot worse tales to tell than mine.

There was nobody like that, of course. And if there had been, if some random person had come up to me in the street and said ‘How are you?’ and meant it, what would I even have said to them? Where would I have begun?

Sometimes I used to play a little game when I was outside, just to see if I could catch someone’s eye, to see if I could get them to look at me, even just for a minute. And you know what? Nobody looks you in the eye. And I realised, it had been years and years since anyone made eye contact with me, and the last person was probably Bev. So what did that mean? What does it even mean? If people stop looking at you, do you cease to exist? Does it mean you’re not a person any more? Does it mean you’re already dead?

I knew it was unusual to believe in angels.

I didn’t talk about it at work because of course it would become some huge office joke. My colleagues dealt with horrific crime every day of the week, and the only way they coped was to have a laugh wherever and whenever they possibly could. They laughed about each other and they all took it, quite happily. Often they took the piss out of us, the analysts. Kate didn’t mind it at all, of course, but then she had so much confidence in her own skin that you could tell her she was a butt-ugly nobody and she’d give you a grin and a wink and reply with something like, ‘Sure thing, gorgeous.’

I knew I was too sensitive. I tried not to be. I tried to put on this brave, jolly face and deflect the worst of the jokes about my weight, or my lack of a social life, by getting in there first. I think they sensed that there was a line there that couldn’t be crossed.

That was why I didn’t tell them about the angels. How they were real, holy, beautiful and around us all the time. I would feel them when I was sad – a rainbow, a feather, a breath of a breeze against my skin. I talked to them and listened out for whatever they might say to me. I tried to act in a way that made them happy.

But at the moment I wasn’t happy. I thought constantly about Shelley Burton and all the other ones, those people, those poor people, alone in their houses at the moment of death, waiting to be welcomed home by the angels and yet on earth, knowing that they would lie there and rot, unloved, untended, unrespected. The thought of it made me feel ill and ashamed. I wondered if they had really known what they were doing, or if life had treated them so badly that the need to die had become a greater force than the horrible prospect of what might happen to them afterwards.

Today three members of the Tac Team were in for a meeting with Intel, and they were all having a good old laugh about my sudden fascination with rotting corpses. Oh, ha ha, very funny, Annabel the fat old frump has a fetish for foetid meat, who’d have thought it… Kate was joining in and having a laugh. Well, to be fair, even I was laughing, but what else could I do – burst into tears? They didn’t really mean it disrespectfully, even though any outsider would have been horrified at some of the things they were saying. It was just their way of coping with the things they had to see and deal with. Meanwhile I had my hand in my pocket, my fingers feeling the solid shape of the crystal angel I carried all the time, trusting, hoping for some peace from it all. Hoping that I could do my job properly and persuade someone to look into it, this alarming pattern of unloved and unwanted people.