It Could Have Been Her(35)
chapter twenty-eight
STUART, NINE YEARS EARLIER
Annie hates me. She hates everything about me. She behaves as though I smell, simply because of the way I dress, the way I present myself, but if there’s one thing you learn when you’re sleeping in a different place every few months, every few days, when you’re sofa-surfing, squatting, short-term renting, a night on the streets, whatever it is, you learn how to stay clean. You learn where to get your clothes washed, or you learn how to hand-wash. You learn how to shampoo over the side of a bath with a jug of cold water and a bar of soap if necessary. You learn to keep your shoes fresh, your breath fresh, all the shortcuts to hygiene. So I may look rough from a distance, but close up I smell like a summer meadow, I can assure you.
However, Annie will never know that because she will never get that close. She is like a magnetic particle, repelled across whichever space we find ourselves sharing. Boing. I don’t care. I can’t say I’m that fond of Annie either.
“I’m only here for another week,” I tell her reassuringly that weekend. “Don’t you worry. And in the meantime, I will do all that I can to help around the place. I’m pretty handy. I can build things, fix things, move things. Whatever you need doing, Annie, just ask.”
“There’s a dead cat in the shed. It’s been there for over a year. Maybe you could get rid of it for us.”
“A dead…” I sigh. Jesus. I bloody love cats. I don’t want to see a dead one. But I need to earn my keep, to earn my place here. “Sure,” I say. I ask for rubber gloves, a garbage bag, and a point in the right direction. I set off through the back door and head up the scruffy, overgrown path that leads through the scruffy, overgrown garden. I can imagine it was beautiful once, a proper English cottage garden: flower beds, apple trees, cherry trees, nooks and crannies, a greenhouse at one end, and there, just ahead of me, the shed. I pull the neck of my sweater up over my mouth and nose and yank the door open. All the accoutrements of a keen gardener are here to see: bags of compost, neatly arranged gardening implements, an apron hanging from a peg, little plastic seedling boxes on a tall wooden table. And there, just as Annie promised, a desiccated cat, curled into a corner, its gray hair matted into knots, its eyes wide open, mouth hanging ajar, the tip of a dead gray tongue protruding.
“Jesus.” I snap on the gloves and crouch down. “Oh, buddy,” I say to the cat. “Buddy, buddy, buddy.” Poor bastard, I think, what a way to go.
I collect him carefully and realize that he is a she and I say, “Ah, sweetheart,” and slide her into the bag. Then I take her out into the garden with a spade in my other hand and I head toward a quiet corner to bury her with dignity.
“What are you doing?” Annie calls out to me from the back door.
“I’m going to bury her,” I say. “Somewhere up the back there.”
“No!” she snaps. “Do not do that! Throw it into the bushes. Let the foxes deal with it.”
I frown. “It’s a she,” I say, “not an it. And I want to bury her.”
“Well then, take it on to the Heath. Bury it there. But do not dig up my garden, absolutely not.”
I shake my head and tut gently under my breath. “Whatever you want, Your Majesty,” I say, and then I take the cat and the spade into a quiet corner of the Heath, far from prying eyes and CCTV. I call her Tina, I don’t know why. I mark the spot with a cross made out of dry sticks and then I head back to the house.
Annie eyes me curiously when I return.
“All done,” I say. “But I guess there’s probably a family somewhere round here wondering where their beloved pet ended up. Would be good to let them know. Could put posters up, maybe?”
She looks at me aghast. “Absolutely not. The cat’s dead. If they loved it so much they should have kept it indoors.”
“How do you think it got in? To the shed?”
“No idea. Must have followed one of us in there without us noticing.”
“So you’re the gardener?”
“Gosh. No. My husband was the gardener.”
“So what were you doing in the shed?”
She narrows her eyes at me, purses her lips. “Looking for pruning shears. For the rosebush by the front gate. And talking of which, the frontage is a mess. Brambles. Chaos. Could I trouble you to tidy it up a bit?”
“Absolutely, Your Majesty,” I say. “Pass me the pruning shears and I am all yours.”
I see her shudder slightly at the idea of me being all hers, but she turns and pulls open a drawer in the sideboard behind her, and hands me a pair of pruning shears. As she passes them to me my eye is caught by other items in the drawer: the glint of a pair of handcuffs, a pair of white leather gloves, and there, smiling up at me chillingly, a plastic clown mask.
* * *
The January sun has disappeared beneath the January horizon and I am alone for now, cooking dinner for the family. It turns out that left to their own devices this family eats shit. Nobody cooks; they make meals out of toast and frozen chicken pieces, out of powdered potatoes and packet sauces. There are no vegetables in the fridge, no fruit in the bowl. They eat cereal for dinner and toast for lunch and if there’s one thing I can do to help around here it’s to get some proper nutrition into them. Hampstead is wall-to-wall food emporiums, and I have filled their fridge with organic veg and fresh meat. Tonight I am making a chicken stir-fry with noodles, but first I really want to check inside that drawer in the sideboard because, frankly, this house has given me the creeps since the moment I arrived, and what with the dead cat and now the clown mask, I’m this close to booking into a hotel for the night.