Decay Inevitable

Vernon lays his hand on the old girl’s shoulder. Myra, her name was. Her old man, Clive, he behaves like a good boy and buzzes off to the kitchen to make us all a cup of tea. There’s the three of us standing in the room. I blink. And there’s four of us. I didn’t hear the door open or close. No footsteps. He’s just there. And it takes me a moment or two for it to sink in because he’s so still. This tall doctor bloke with a paper mask. His eyes are crawling all over Myra. Insect eyes, he had. They didn’t stop bloody moving.

Vernon goes, This is Dr. Chater. His voice is cracking all over the place like a wafer, like a bloody choir boy at bollockdrop. I realise, despite the smile on Vernon’s face, that he is shitting himself.

Dr. Chater moved like nobody I had ever seen before. If you think of a film of someone moving, and then take away all the frames that contain the getting from one position to the next, it was like that. Like looking at photographs. One second he was looking at Myra, the next second his hand was full of knives and she was forced back over the arm of the settee, antimacassars all over the shop. Another second, her blouse is up around her ears and Dr. Chater’s hunched over her. I watched him cut her. I watched him take a lung. No blood. He moved too fast for her body to even realise it was open. Clive came in with tears in his eyes asking who took sugar. One look at her and he shut the kitchen door. A good boy, Clive. She was stitched up and in her armchair within seconds. She was dead. She’d had a heart attack.