Chapter 14 #2
Or maybe I should be thinking about more practical items. There’s a letterbox basket, just along a bit, and I definitely need one of them.
I open the flip top and take out handfuls of junk mail—Land’s End catalogues, seed-and-bulb catalogues, Innovations catalogues, flyers galore, a couple of envelopes that look like real mail, but they’re so clever at faking it these days.
I stuff it all into a drying pile of old magazines inside a cracked plastic washing-up basin, and tuck the basket under my arm.
What next? There’s a hall stand near where the letter basket was and of course there is, if this is a house hastily cleared and dumped in a pile.
Which is still bothering me more than it should.
I know it’s because of Kai, really, but Peggy has completely taken over.
It’s the way she was scraped out of her house so efficiently, even if it was me who got the benefit.
And then to have all her precious things—
But these aren’t Peggy’s things, I remind myself. John didn’t clear Peggy’s house. He just swore on his children’s lives he didn’t. That only makes it worse somehow: that she’s not the only old lady this has happened to.
Helplessly, there in the mess and loss, I feel all the grief of the last year surge up to submerge the outside of my body, bubble up to drown the inside like it used to all the time at the start. It’s as if I’m back at Andy Murray’s golden pillar box again, and so I let myself cry.
It’s when I finally sniff hard to help the tears stop that I smell it. There’s something rotten back here. I breathe in again—a proper big whiff this time—and it’s even stronger.
It’s not the first time. Once when we were kids a rat died in a drawer and wasn’t found for a week.
It was summertime and the customer who came to tell us was waxy looking, the colour of cake mix before you bake it.
John and I took off on our bikes as my dad headed back into the sheds with a bin bag.
This, I think, sniffing again and feeling my early-morning coffee shift in my stomach, is bigger than a rat.
I hope it’s not a stray cat or a lost dog.
I keep following my nose but the stench is growing with every step, and I don’t think I can stand it.
I turn away and, blundering for an escape route, I find myself on John’s new path he’s made right up one side of the yard.
I trot along it all the way to the front, only letting my breath go when I’m back at the big sheds again.
“Bad news,” I say, letting myself into the cabin. “Something’s died back past where that merry-go-round horse is. And it’s not a mouse, I can tell you that much.”
“It’s probably slurry,” says John. “On the fields.” He glances at the letter basket still in my hand and lifts his eyebrows. “Help yourself, Lindsay. As ever.”
I shake my head. “Nothing else smells like death, John. Cow shit smells absolutely nothing like it. Go and see for yourself, if you don’t believe me. And I’ll leave a fiver for this, of course. Only you need to refund me if it doesn’t fit.”
John frowns deeper than either a dead cat or a lippy sister should make him do and hauls himself out of his chair.
“Sorry about earlier,” I say, taking a guess at what’s wrong.
He doesn’t answer, just takes a mask from an open packet on the counter and hooks it over his ears.
“They’re handy, those last masks we never used, aren’t they?” I say. I’m surprised, if I’m honest. I never thought of John as the squeamish type and I certainly didn’t think of him as the mask type. He was first back in the pub after they lifted the lockdown.
“Take the bypass,” I say, following him out. “You’ll smell it up at the end.”
“Bypass,” he repeats, giving me a hard look from over the nose piece that he’s pinched in hard.
“Your shortcut,” I say. Then, to lighten the mood, I add, “Have you got a wee man cave back there or something?”
“I’m not that sort of man,” he says, turning away.
“Catch me being hounded out of my own house to live in a hut in the garden. Catch me marrying a woman who would try that on me.” As if he doesn’t spend three quarters of his life in a Portakabin.
Mind you, I realise, he did have that poker game right in the dining room, cigar smoke and all.
I feel uneasy remembering it, probably because of the state I was in that first night.
I’m glad when Shelley comes out onto the step.
“I thought that was your car,” she says. “Everything okay?”
“Rough night,” I tell her. “Weird morning.” Then I scrub my face hard, like you’re not supposed to.
“Are you looking for John?” she says. She takes hold of the club hanging by a piece of string next to her makeshift gong and bangs it three times.
I hear pounding footsteps and John comes clattering round the appliance shed. “What?” he says. He looks wildly about the yard.
“Lindsay’s here,” Shelley tells him.
John pulls his mask down, spits on the ground and puts his hand on the side of the cabin to steady himself. “Jesus Christ, Shel. I nearly jumped out of—” He clears his throat. “Aye, I know Lindsay’s here.”
“Where were you?” says Shelley.
“I was right back in the Barrens,” says John. “Christ almighty. So there’s nothing actually wrong?”
“Is that where it was coming from?” I ask him. I was nowhere near that far back when the smell got too much for me. “What the hell is it? It can’t be a rodent, as bad as all that.”
“What’s this?” says Shelley.
“Something’s died,” I say.
Shelley screws her face up and turns to John. “It might be the comfrey tea I made for my garden,” she says.
“It’s a fox,” John says. “I’ll bury it.”
“You’ll puke up your guts,” says Shelley.
“Can’t you just phone the council?” I ask.
“Don’t you dare,” says John, far too fierce. Then he rubs under his nose with the side of his finger and attempts a laugh. “Too many of my pals are on the council pick-up,” he says. “I’d never live it down, calling them out.”
“I could try,” I say.
“You’d puke up your toenails,” says John, which is true. “Leave it to me, Lindsay. You’ve done enough.”
“Me?” I say, looking between the two of them. “What have I done except smell it?”
Shelley is shaking her head at him.
John stares at me for a moment or two before he speaks. “You came home,” he says at last. “You’re taking things off our hands, letting us clear out. The boys like having you near.”
Shelley snorts. “You’re bloody hopeless,” she says. “Lindsay, he wants to stage some of our nice stuff in that big front room of yours and sell it online. Only he hasn’t got the bottle up to ask you yet. Only he forgot he hasn’t and just blabbed anyway.”
John gives me a sheepish look and shrugs.
“Of course,” I say. “What a good idea. It’s the future, isn’t it? Selling online. And speaking of my house, I better get back there. I’ve abandoned Chloe and David. Good luck with the fox.” Shelley snorts again.
As I’m driving away, I can see them huddled together talking furiously at each other, neither one listening.
It looks like an argument, but that doesn’t make any sense.
Whoever said no one knows what goes on inside a marriage might have based their conclusions on John and Shelley.
I can’t imagine what they’ve found to argue about in the two seconds since I left them.