He proceeds to the kitchen. Crossing the border between carpet and lino, he allows himself the briefest of glances in the dead cat’s direction: just enough to confirm that it is still there, that another night has passed without their doing the decent thing.
It is; they haven’t; more visual information than that he does not require.
He turns to get his cereal, and finds that padlocks have been fitted overnight to all his cupboards.
He accepts this development with equanimity. In a sense it is his own fault. He has known all along that something like it would happen, but has done absolutely nothing to prevent it. Strange, this ongoing complicity in his own decline, these daily refusals to alter his fate. Scouting the strewn benches for other means of nourishment, he finds a mug so rife with internal coffee stains that it just might yield him up a passable cup of that beverage, if boiling water is introduced to it and stirred with sufficient vigour. He puts on the kettle.
The stench isn’t so bad this morning. Now and again it does this. It abates; it withdraws a portion of its force. It lulls you into thinking it might be going away for good. But Fenton is no longer fooled by this. He knows by now that it’s not going anywhere. He knows that by tonight, when he comes back home, it will be back at full strength again, thick as gravy, waiting to hit him like a punch to the face when he walks in the front door.
He seeks a spoon, preferably one stained by the residue of further coffee.
It is no longer just about the disposal of the corpse, if indeed it ever has been. After all these days, the stakes have become very much higher than that. By now the thing has taken on wider implications; it has assumed a great symbolic weight. Whoever removes the cat now will be performing the ultimate domestic chore, the eternally binding piece of housework. Whoever does it will be defining himself for all time – or herself, or herself – as the party with the weakest will, the one who in the end will always crumble and do what needs to be done. The one who can therefore be safely relied on, from that day forward, to do everything, all the time.
Because he has started out from pretty much that position anyway, Fenton believes he has far less to lose out of this than they do. This belief keeps him going on nights when the funk of decay threatens to become too much for him. On nights when surrender begins to seem an altogether underrated thing, every bit as glorious in its own way as victory. Have they thought about it too? The bittersweet walk out to the back shed, the obtaining of the shovel, the grim march up the hall … and the grimmer march back down it, head averted like a hammer-thrower’s, the shovelblade full and wobbling? Maybe they have. Maybe they are as close to breaking as he is.
Or maybe they are as far away from it as they seem.
The first rule is to behave as if the corpse isn’t there. Perhaps indeed this is the only rule. It isn’t there and it never has been. You don’t look at it or speak of it or permit your face to register the slightest disapproval of its stink. You don’t in any way indicate that you find it disturbing, or even irregular, to have a decomposing cat on your TV room floor. Because if you do, that might imply you want it removed. And if you let yourself imply that, you’ll be halfway to conceding that you’ve thought about removing it yourself. And the moment you make that concession, the moment you display weakness of that order, the battle will be lost. At that moment, you might as well just roll up your sleeves and get shovelling.
So you feign indifference to it, and you hope your indifference looks real. Certainly theirs does. They do aerobics routines with the thing in between them, their star jumps ending within inches of its reeking flanks. They settle down on the carpet to play Monopoly there, with the stiff racked out behind Free Parking like a jaded spectator. Once or twice they’ve even spread out a blanket there, and had a picnic right next to it. There have been moments when they’ve had him wondering, genuinely wondering, if the corpse is really there at all. Wondering if the cat ever did exist, even when it was still alive. Wondering whether his troubled mind might not have manufactured the whole Streetwise phenomenon. This is how effectively they have erased the cat from the present, and from history.
Spoon found, he opens the fridge for milk. But the top shelf, his shelf, is empty. The milk is gone. Briefly he closes his eyes. He starts to take a deep breath – then thinks better of it. Deep breaths are a bad idea now, in this part of the house. Closing the fridge door, he mounts a pessimistic search of the surrounding benches for the missing carton.
In the smallish hours of this morning, he has woken in distress from the following nightmare. His parents have turned up on the front doorstep, suitcases in hand, to pay him an unannounced visit. That’s it. That’s the entire dream. But the image still haunts him, because it has forced him to consider how all this might look through the eyes of an outsider. And this is not a pleasant thought. Because it isn’t normal, is it? Not just the dead cat, but all of it, the entire house: the shameful trashscape of the kitchen, with its unwashed slums of leaning plate-towers, its Petri-dish remnants of ancient meals; the squalid pube convention of the bathtub; the unspeakable can; the sheaf of Neville Aggot’s prison letters that lurks malodorously under his bed; the sheets he hasn’t washed for well over a year. Looked at objectively, from the outside, none of this is right. The whole house is an affront to decent clean-living mainstream values. It’s like one of those households run by nappied six-year-olds while their mother is in jail. It’s the home of a serial killer, of a dirty old madman who subsists on dog food.
But as unsettling as these thoughts are, they’re still not enough to send Fenton shovelwards. For if he gives up now, all these days of silent struggle will have counted for nought. If he does it now, with nothing at all to show for it, then he might just as well have done it straight away, all those mornings ago, when the remains had been no more repellent than a stuffed toy. Then again, maybe there will come a time when its present condition will also start to seem, in retrospect, pretty wholesome. Maybe there will come a time – maybe that time will come soon – when he’ll look back and fervently wish he’d done it now.
With declining hope he scans the benchtops for the milk. He keeps meaning to read up on the chemistry of what is going on over there, the hard science of the processes involved. For example: is mummification likely to occur soon, or at all? Alternatively: is the application of a cool morning breeze, such as the one that prevails right now, likely to do any good? If freezing has beneficial effects, shouldn’t crisp morning air produce at least a muted version of the same result? Or is mere chilliness neither here nor there? Still, it must be preferable to heat … mustn’t it?
But this is precisely why he needs to read up on such matters. One thing only he knows for sure. At some point in the future, the cat will be a skeleton, clean and white and inoffensive. This is an incontrovertible fact, and he clings to it. The only question is how long he’ll have to wait for that. Months? Years? Weeks is starting to look optimistic.
Here the milk carton is, standing next to the sink. This is an ominous place for it to be standing. He lifts it without much hope – and sure enough it comes up far too freely, unencumbered by any liquid content. He looks into the sink. He marks the telltale residue of dairy matter around the guilty lips of the plughole. And he reflects, not for the first time, on the sheer lunacy of what he has chosen to do. What was he thinking of, when he decided to start playing them at their own game? Them, the tag-team champions of domestic turpitude! In the field of ignoring household squalor, their credentials are second to none. Their track records are unblemished by any known show of moral or hygienic scruple. So why on earth has he taken them on? Why didn’t he get out before he got so far in? Why didn’t he back down before there was so much to back down from?
Here they are now, arriving behind him in their pornographic pyjamas.
“Good morning Fenty-bum,” they chirp, their smiles belying the foulness of the air.
“Morning ladies!” he returns with equal good cheer, his face betraying not a skerrick of the murderous hate that riots behind it.
Their arms open towards him for morning hugs. He puts down the empty milk carton and moves in. Each hug lasts a very long time. No party wants to be the one that breaks first. No party wants to display anything less than complete affection for the other. No party wants to appear in any way discontent with the domestic status quo. They are wearing the skimpiest of their nighties this morning. Are their skirts, he wonders, even meant to cover up their underpants? Shouldn’t they conceal at least part of them? Isn’t that what skirts are for?
Finally the hugs are over. This is all fairly standard stuff. So is their next move. They stroll over to the death site, to the couch that abuts the remains, and they flop themselves right down on it. This is done with balletic precision, with not a hint of a downward glance. Trixie – this too is standard – takes the more treacherous seat. Her left foot can’t be more than a few inches from the corpse.
“Sleep well?” he asks them.
“Why shouldn’t we?” Tara replies sharply, with customary lack of panache.
“No reason,” he says.
“So why ask?” she demands.
“I don’t know. Why ask why I ask?”
“Why don’t you come over and join us?” Trixie calmly intervenes, reclaiming the advantage. She slides across towards Tara. She pats the segment of yellow couch cushion that is thereby rendered vacant. It is the berth closest to the cadaver.
This part is not standard. This part represents a shift in tactics, an upping of the ante.
“Actually,” he says to them, “I’m just on my way out.”
“So why are you boiling the kettle?” Tara shrewdly rejoins.
“Perhaps I can join you for a moment,” he therefore has to say, and already he is halfway there, approaching them on a natural-seeming arc that skirts the cat by a good foot. Grimly he inserts himself between the couch’s arm and Trixie’s largely naked thigh. The stench over here is profound, mind-altering. It fully overpowers the sense of smell, invades the realms of the other senses. Its waves seem to shimmer visibly in the air. He even seems to feel them against his skin, slowing down his movements like a full bath. Trixie squirms tighter against him, in a seeming effort to propel him closer to the corpse. He holds his position. She keeps squirming towards him anyway. Now she is half on top of him. Her left thigh is draped over his right one. It dangles down between his legs like an uncommonly large and uncommonly smooth and uncommonly tapered tool.
He wonders how long he’ll have to stay here. It’s too soon to go just yet. He has to remain and exchange some pleasantries. He pats down his brain for a topic of small talk. But the smell is so potent here that it hampers thought. It envelops his head and face like a balaclava. Trixie is more or less sitting right in his lap now. Her legs and panties are quite irrefutably all the way out of her nightie. He finds himself looking closely at her upper thigh. He finds himself unable not to. It is mauve and sleek. The panties at the top of it are pale green and plump like a pillow of spearmint gum. Abominable as it is to concede, even to himself, hers is an extremely fetching upper thigh. At some deep level he has always known this. Yes, why not admit it? At some deep level he has always wanted to place his hand on her upper thigh and move the hand back and forth. Mainly forth. Her trim left buttock is now located squarely on top of what is fast becoming – quite unforgivably – a monstrous erection. And the orientation of this rogue boner with respect to his jeans couldn’t possibly be more problematic. The drum-tight material around his right thigh has got the entire hard-on trapped on a brutally unnatural downward slant, like a divining rod. The hard-on’s quest to be slanting diametrically the other way is checked, excruciatingly, by an impermeable firewall of denim. Nor is there any conceivable way of rectifying this problem without at least briefly removing the jeans altogether. And now the full weight of Trixie’s mint-green and frankly quite delectable arse is pressing down the wrong way on the business end of the hard-on like a marble fucking slab. Any moment now it is going to snap audibly at the root.
Then Trixie begins to swing her leg mischievously back and forth at the knee. The effect of this is unbelievably painful, and yet on the whole he doesn’t want it to cease. The proximity of the dead cat seems to be blurring his judgment, smearing his perceptions like some psychedelic substance. Yes, on the whole he wants her to keep keep keep doing that. Maybe his cock will break like a green stick in the process, but this is very much way it would have wanted to go. Grotesquely aroused, mesmerized by shimmering catfunk, he has a peaceful sense that he is finally losing his mind. The stench of death is smothering his reason, flooding through the machinery of his brain like treacle, bearing him slowly and sweetly away from the tedious world of implications and guilt.
The leg swings on. His conscience, of course, informs him that this is all wrong, that it is gratuitous filth, that it must stop at once. But its protests are muffled, dim, distant, abstract. His hand, he now finds, is resting on her upper thigh. The flesh there feels cool. Down at the lower fringe of his vision the corpse of Streetwise sings its siren song, daring him to dip his gaze for a closer look. He resists. Instead he turns towards Trixie. He looks dumbly into her eyes, hoping his face displays nothing more than a mild sort of half-interest, as if his thoughts are largely elsewhere, wrestling with some abstruse and rather important problem. Her facial features – or is he imagining this? – are not without a certain rodent-like beauty. He looks beyond her, to Tara, who appears to be looking down with open horror at his hand on Trixie’s thigh. Christ: she isn’t so bad-looking either, in a sneering sort of way. Like a young Mick Jagger, but with a thinner neck and only slightly larger breasts …
The movements of Trixie’s leg are gaining in violence now, and in yield of pain. He thinks vaguely of the voodoo doll with its mangled manhood, and wonders if she isn’t trying to deliver on that threat here and now. But he is stiffer than Streetwise now, and doesn’t care. He thinks too of his nightmare last night, the one involving the visit of his parents, and it freshly occurs to him that all is not right with his life. How has he let it all drift so far beyond the pale? He’s a decent guy, he really is. How has he let his life come to this? He vows to make some serious changes, as soon as the present episode has attained, and it won’t be long now, completion.
The leg swings on. A sound starts to mount in his inner ear, a mournful wail that is swiftly rising to a shriek. Tara is punching his shoulder and saying with unconcealed hate: “Don’t you think you’d better get that?” Shit! It’s the kettle. With a vague look he stalls the bitch, as if he’s taken her point on board and is currently at work on framing a suitable reply, his face twitching a little, perhaps, under the strain of the required cogitation. But suddenly Tara loses patience. She grabs Trixie’s leg with both jealous hands and yanks it reprehensibly off him – and as abruptly as it has arrived there the limb is gone, having understayed its welcome by about ten seconds. In speechless grief he watches it return to the surface of the couch and settle back into its own dent. He devotes strong consideration to seizing it and putting it back on top of his cock. But now Trixie is demurely resmoothing her nightie over the leg’s top few inches. And, watching her, he knows with infinite desolation that the moment is over. It’s gone. It is no more coming back than Streetwise is.
The scream of the kettle is getting intolerable. It can no longer be denied. He hobbles to his feet, leaning into the angle of his hard-on like an uphill cyclist, swerving back to the kitchen on the same wide arc he left it by, saying “Can I offer either of you ladies a coffee?” in as jolly a tone as he can muster.
Another morning then, chez Bland.
It had crossed Fenton’s mind that this grubby exercise, besides making Pamela Scratch so grateful to him that she would maybe never refer to the sandpit incident again, might also have a salutary effect on Gus. Perhaps (Fenton speculated) the big man’s mania for covert political action might get fully slaked by the stooge work. Perhaps manipulating the affairs of a rival leftist organisation would be enough for him. Perhaps after doing it he would be moved to defer, or even cancel, the blowing up of Ivan Lego…
Pamela won by a single vote.
Through howls of denunciation from the floor, she delivered her victory speech. She declared herself humbled by the ballot’s outcome. Her administration, she pledged, would work tirelessly to vindicate the membership’s gratifying show of faith in it. She urged all SNARBY personnel, especially everyone in the other faction, to put factional interests aside and unite behind the Aggot cause. And she closed, cryptically, by suggesting that all the “true believers” would soon be getting a nice surprise on prime-time TV.
As for the murder of Ivan Lego, Fenton’s hopes concerning Gus’s deferral of it proved to be woefully ill-founded. The Maoists’ decisive participation in the vote-stack, far from quenching Gus’s hunger for clandestine left-wing activity, served only to sharpen it. In his excitement, he issued Warren with a new and tighter deadline for the completion of the bomb.
Fenton had eighteen days.