Cher’s thought and thought about that telly. She’s never had a television of her own, never even had control of a remote. And God knows she’s longed for one. A telly will make all the difference to her life, and the Landlord has three that he no longer needs. And besides, he owes her that much. That’s what she figures.
She passes a couple of people in the street and smiles boldly at them. The trick is to always look like you belong; like you have a right to be wherever you are at the time. Look shifty, and people will assume that you are shifty. Fix them with a smile and cry out ‘good morning’, and nine times out of ten, in a city like this, they will shrug themselves into their imaginary coats and hurry by, mumbling an embarrassed greeting in return. The rest are either up to something shifty themselves, or they’re a bit mad, so they don’t really count.
She strides confidently to the Landlord’s basement stairs and skips down them, pulling on her gloves. Fishes from her pocket the bunch of keys she lifted off Thomas in the car when they were on the way home, and leafs through them. She identifies them in no time. Can’t believe it took Thomas so long, though she supposes it was dark when he was looking. They stand out from the Beulah keys because they’re new, and shiny, and have more than three levers to them. She undoes the mortise, then turns the Yale and steps cheerfully inside.
In an instant she is gagging. She had remembered the smell from the boot, and had expected to have to make an adjustment, but eight days has magnified it so much that it takes her breath away completely. Her throat closes up and she feels her gorge rise. She’s never smelled anything like this. The smell of ripe shit in Vesta’s bathroom is like flowers in comparison. Her lungs don’t seem to want to take this fetid air into themselves. They rebel each time she tries to breathe, let only tiny sips of it through before her epiglottis clamps down and everything stops.
How can the neighbours not smell this, she thinks. It’s not possible. Maybe it’s… God, I’ve never smelled anything like this. Nothing close to it. Maybe they just don’t know what it is?
She switches the light on. Lets out a huge bronchial cough, the sort that can turn too easily into the gag reflex. But once it’s out, she finds that she is able to breathe. Not normally, not by a long chalk, and she has to keep her lips clamped firmly closed, but enough that she doesn’t have to flee the room.
The Landlord has been leaking. The floor is sticky with fluids. They have spread outwards across the beech-look laminate by several feet, have stained the wall against which his right arm presses. Now the first wave of nausea has passed, she’s interested. He’s not her first corpse. But her mum and her nanna were freshly dead when she saw them, and she didn’t have a lot of time to study them before they were swept up by forensics and taken away for autopsy, then given the old cosmetic beautification by an undertaker. By the time they were buried, they looked like waxworks. Overpainted, their features sewn up with clever threadwork into Mona Lisa smiles.
The Landlord doesn’t look like that. Eight days has not been kind. His huge belly has swollen to the size of a Space Hopper and all his limbs have bloated. How it’s not split open, she has no idea. It can only be a matter of time. In the places where, when she last saw him, his skin was grey-white, it is greenish, now, and mottled like a marble floor, the occasional patch of livid crimson breaking through where his skin seems to have started to literally slide off the fat beneath. The parts that were purple are lustreless ebony black. His T-shirt, stretched so tight that the seams are beginning to split, seems to be undulating. For a moment she thinks it must be some kind of optical illusion, until she notices something small and white, the size of a couple of grains of rice, work its way over his swollen lower lip and drop to the floor.
‘Fucking ’ell,’ says Cher.
She stays and looks for a bit, fascinated. Her body still fights to act out its revulsion, hitting her with sudden, convulsive throat spasms so that she has to keep her hand clamped over her mouth, but her mind is clear, and curious. She’s always been inquisitive that way. If she’d learned to read really well and gone to a school where the staff had any ambitions for their students other than keeping them from rioting before playtime, she’d have been being encouraged into the sciences by now. So this is what happens when you get buried, she thinks. I’m bloody well getting cremated.
She spends a few minutes staring at the pullulating cloth, drinking in the detail – the wide-open, grey-misted eyes, like the zombies in The Walking Dead, the way that the fluid leakage seems concentrated around the head and, God help us, the flattened buttocks, the fact that the marble patterning – if it were a tattoo, say, or body paint rather than putrefaction – is almost pretty in its delicacy. I won’t forget this in a hurry, she thinks. Shame there’s no one I can tell about it, really. Probably not ever.
A car door slams in the street and snaps her from her reverie. She remembers the purpose of her visit, looks at her quarry. The big telly, the one she really lusts after, is situated directly over the corpse’s head, its cord trailing through a pool of brackish goo. Maybe not, she thinks, and goes round the coffee table to the small screen on the other side.
It’s a nice little apparatus, no more than a couple of years old. Silver casing and a Sony logo. Actually, this is better, she thinks. I’ll have to move on at some point, when they find him or whatever, and that big thing’s not exactly portable, is it? She bends down and unplugs it from the aerial socket, switches off the electricity and takes the plug from the extension adaptor on the floor. Stands on tiptoe to reach over the media cabinet below it and lift it from the wall-bracket on which it perches. It looks quite precarious, and she balances carefully to make sure not to drop it when it comes free.
It doesn’t come free. Taken by surprise, Cher wobbles on the balls of her feet and has to grab the telly by its frame to prevent herself overbalancing. She swears under her breath – doing anything lungfully is ill-advised in her current circumstances – and drops down on to her heels, her damaged ankle letting out a shriek that reminds her that she still needs to take care. She bends down to look for a hook, or a latch, or some other piece of Japanese ingenuity that’s lending the set stability. What she finds wrings another, louder word from her lips. A screw runs through a hole in the metal bracket, and is firmly embedded in the underside of the machine.
‘Fuck,’ mutters Cher. Might have known this wasn’t going to be that easy, she thinks. Like the universe was ever going to cut me a break.
‘You bastard,’ she says to the bloated body, and could swear that it releases another gust of swamp gas in response. ‘Bet you think you’re having the last laugh, don’t you?’
She stands up and glares round the room. Enough porn to power the Titanic, but nothing practical anywhere to be seen. The remains of a kebab on the table has gone green and sprouted fur. ‘Eugh,’ she says to the Landlord, ‘you really were a filthy fucker, weren’t you? If you’d put as much energy into walking as you did into wanking, you probably wouldn’t look like that now.’
The Landlord doesn’t answer. She tries the drawers of the media cabinet and finds little other than a bunch of unlabelled DVDs and those bunches of useless wires and plugs that seem to breed secretly in the dark places of every house.
‘Bugger,’ she mutters. She’s going to have to go further into the flat to see if she can find anything to undo the screw with. A knife would probably do it. If he owns a knife. It doesn’t look like he ate much that he couldn’t eat with his hands.