The pub was perfectly placed just near to a
conference centre guaranteeing a regular crowd of new faces most nights, people
away from home and looking for a good time. In addition it was dark and the
CCTV covered just the till and the bar focused on preventing staff pilfering
rather than customer safety.
He carried the two drinks back to the high
table in the corner and put her prosecco onto the stained bar mat in front of
her. He placed his own red wine on the table before seating himself.
She wasn’t stupid, she could see that feint
lighter band of skin where his wedding ring should have been. She listened,
apparently attentively, whilst letting her mind drift around the words he was
saying. They laughed a few times and she revealed very little about herself.
Finally he made the suggestion of ‘another drink here or shall we move on?’
‘I can read you like a book,’ she said
‘I doubt that,’ he smiled knowing the
thoughts of what he would like to do to her were running through his head.
‘Why not come back to my place, it’s just
round the corner?’
Gathering their belongings they pushed
through the crowd that was growing more exuberant by the moment a nd made their
way to the door and out into the cooler, quieter air of the street.
After a short walk they were stepping up a driveway
to what must have been one of the oldest houses in the town. He found it hard
to contain a ‘wow’ as she opened the door onto an impressive classic hallway.
She threw her coat and bag onto a central
table and turned. ‘Wine?’
‘That would be great,’ he stumbled slightly
thrown by the scale of the house.
‘Go through and make yourself at home,’ she
pointed to a doorway and he tried to look casual as he walked over and
stepped into the room. It was like being in a film set. He hadn’t realised he
was staring open mouthed at one of the paintings until she had reappeared with drinks
and asked ‘like it?’
‘It’s beautiful,’ he replied trying to
regain some calmness and authority, ‘is the house yours?’ He turned to look at
her taking his red wine from her outstretched arm.
‘It belonged to my Mum and Dad but now it’s
mine.’ She loved calling them Mum and Dad knowing how much they hated the
shortened form of the more formal and respectful ‘Mother and Father’ she had to
call them when they were alive.
They sat on one of the sofas, raised glasses
for a slightly awkward cheers. His mind was racing ahead to what he wanted to
do to her. She had opened the painful memories of her life in this mausoleum.
Her Father spent every day in his library, her mother in the garden or kitchen.
Never together except for meals where words were frowned upon. Theirs was not
the love she read about in the fairytale books she devoured. Long, painful,
resentful, hateful silences not the joy that the heroes and heroines deserved.
They both thought she was fanciful, a dreamer and spent their days trying to
undermine her hope.
She heard him speaking and snapped back to
the present. She could see he was beginning to get woozy. The drugs in his wine
were taking affect. In a few moments she would propose that they move. ‘I can
read you like a book’ she said again. His slurred reply told her it was time.
With the help of her arm he was able to
stand and stumble out of the room back into hallway. He wasn’t so far gone that
the fact they didn’t make to go up the stairs but rather to another room off
the hallway surprised him.
Through droopy eyes he could see it was a large library. His eyes could just
about focus on what seemed like a hospital gurney in the centre of the room.
She was helping to take his clothes off and folding them neatly on a plastic
sheet. She led him naked towards the trolley and helped him lie down. A part of
his brain was letting him know that she was a ‘kinky one’.
His last memory was of a white hankie
covering his mouth and nose before everything became dark.
Later, changed into her special clothes and
with the instruments next to her she lifted a scalpel and quietly spoke, ‘I can
read you like a book’.
Starting at the chest she peeled back
leaves of skin, faced with the ribs she cut through the sternum and pushed back
the covers, making sure not to damage the spine, to reveal the heart. Once
again she was disappointed with the ending. His heart was not black, despite
his clear wrongdoing, his infidelity his heart was not as the fairy tales had
told her.
Slowly and carefully she gathered the
plastic sheeting around the body and placed his folded clothes at his feet. She
shuffled a clear body bag around him and zipped it up, pushed the trolley over
to the bookshelves where she had fitted hooks and hung him up.
She pulled the trolley away from under him
and let the body find its natural position alongside the others. On a new
library card she wrote the initial of his first name ‘k’ neatly before placing
it into one of the catalogue drawers.
A new clear plastic sheet was placed on the
carpet and the trolley rolled back. As she wiped it down in case anything had
leaked she looked at the row of bodies hanging in various stages of
decomposition. There were now sixteen, all first editions and she wondered whether
she should rearrange them in alphabetical order. After a moment she decided not
to. It was somehow fitting that the shelf started ‘M’ and ‘D’ and that they
were close together in death having avoided it in life.
