Crime Scene
The single word that best described her room was ‘gudgeon’. A monolithic wardrobe, a clot-coloured eiderdown, duvet and pillow filled with something fibrous, asbestos perhaps, it was the kind of place you might stay the night before a relative’s funeral. She boiled the miniature kettle and looked out at the lake in the last of the light. This at least was beautiful, the miles of black water, the rocky shore and the misted valley beyond, tomorrow’s adventure. She felt a shudder of anticipation then corrected herself. Pack it in, Frodo.
Tonight she intended to bring the silvery tinkle of cocktail-bar laughter to this humble country inn. She knew that Conrad owned an electric Audi but was not yet sure if he had a sense of humour, so tonight she would be witty, effervescent, a guest on a seventies chat show, walking into the saloon bar as if she was walking on to a yacht. Such natural vivacity would require effort, a state of intense but tension-free concentration, the kind of focus a swimmer finds on the starting block. Timing was key, verbal and mental dexterity, clear diction, a little alcohol but not too much. In company, her best jokes often went unnoticed or were spoken over, white doves released into the air while everyone was looking the other way, but not tonight. Isn’t she great? he’d whisper. Almost too vivacious. Where has she been hiding?
Taking care not to slide down the bedspread, she hauled herself to the bathroom and peeled off her damp clothes. A mirror confirmed her fears: black smudges around her eyes, a German Expressionist painting. Cleo had lured her with the promise of rural luxury, roll-top baths and rough-hewn oak floors, but here was a rickety shower cubicle built by children from sticks, the heater thunking like a fairground generator, the water alternately freezing and scalding. Toiletries came not in small bottles but in sachets, which she had to tear with her teeth, like pub mayonnaise. ‘Hair and Body Wash’, it said, when surely it should be one or the other. Inside, washing-up liquid.
Back in the bedroom, she was presented with another problem: a distilled essence of farmyard silage as potent and concentrated as a nerve agent. She pulled on her best underwear and her third-best dress, but even with the window open, the smell was so acrid that it threatened to make her retch in her sleep. The source was easily traced to her boots, and she wondered if the pub might have a boot room but wasn’t sure if such a thing existed or whether she’d just picked it up from Downton Abbey. She imagined the landlord glaring over his spectacles and decided to rinse the soles in the bathroom sink, cramming them under the tap, gouging at the ridges with twists of toilet paper. This stuff was as sticky as tar, the paper disintegrating at first touch so that in moments the basin was blocked and filled with a stew of fibrous, rotten matter the colour of turmeric. A cotton bud fared no better, buckling as if recoiling, and so she had to resort to the handle of her toothbrush before reaching into the filth, swirling with her finger telling herself, Don’t touch your eyes, don’t ever touch your face.
From Stickleback next door she heard Conrad’s party music, and with renewed urgency, she hurled the boots into the shower cubicle and closed the door on them, scrubbed her hands and scoured the handle of her toothbrush but noticed that the filth was now spattered on the pale blue walls, like arterial blood (she felt like she knew which cow had done this, could identify the cow in a line-up) and if it was on the walls then it was on her clothes too. ‘Let’s goooo!’ shouted Conrad, as she rubbed at her dress with the floor mat, but still the stench remained, was, if anything, worse now that it had been atomised and spritzed into the air, the bathroom the scene of a terrible crime.
This was the razzle-dazzle she brought down to dinner. The bar was suddenly busy with what’s called ‘an older crowd’, hunched male backs in olive green, and she felt absurdly over-dressed in her small black dress, Audrey Hepburn addressing the National Farmers Union. She ordered a gin and tonic, a double, the glass as large as an astronaut’s helmet, taking such a deep gulp that she almost sucked it on to her face. Time to summon up that metropolitan air. She wiped lipstick from the rim with her thumb. The rest of the group was already seated and as she approached, too far from the table, she shouted, ‘I think I smell of cow shit,’ effervescent, fascinating, an enigma to all.