Decay Inevitable

The rope liked the feel of itself against his neck. It liked the taste of his sweat as it soaked into its fibres. Sean was sure he felt it constrict against him, like a boa sensing victory: a bitter peristalsis. For a second he thought he was back in the de Fleche building with Robbie Deakin and Nicky Preece, swapping insults and working up a sweat on the hammer. Plaster dust was in his hair, making an old man of him. It stuck in his throat. They’d take an hour after work and sink a few Stellas at the Ferry Inn. Home for a bath, phone Emma, go out for a steak, and take the car up to Walton Reservoir. Watch the sun go down, kiss her throat, see what happens next.

There was a lorry in the hallway. It had come at them across the field – Sean could see out of the grotesquely slanting window frame, through the settling plumes, a haphazard set of tyre prints slewing in great, lazy zig-zags as they homed in on the farmhouse – and ploughed through the face, lurching onto its side and taking out two of the walls completely. Gleave was trapped beneath one of them, screaming so violently that there was blood in his spittle. His leg was trapped under a pile of bricks and one of the ancient beams that had dropped from the ceiling. The shin was folded neatly back on itself. If Gleave could have waggled his toes he’d scratch his calf with them.

Vernon was nowhere to be seen. The lorry’s cab with its starred windscreen was empty, the door swinging on its hinges. Sean worked his wrists inside the loop that trapped them, trying to ease them free. Gleave’s screams were like cups of espresso for a drunk; they slapped him awake when it would have been easier to drift off and let things happen without his say so for a while.

But the knots were complex and keen. Already Sean could feel an oiliness on his skin that was not just sweat. Gleave was looking at him now with clownish wide eyes. His lips had been given a coat of purple greasepaint. He was going to black out soon. He focused on the appalling injury to Gleave’s leg, and the hands, outstretched as if Gleave was pretending to turn an invisible steering wheel. He worked against the knots more feverishly, shutting his mind to the heat they forced into his wrists. His blood helped to lubricate the configurations. He felt a swooning in the centre of his brain and blackness moved in on his vision, dark fire burning at the edges of paper. He stopped for a moment and breathed deeply. To faint now was to die. He imagined Naomi stroking his forehead and kissing his cheek with her cool lips. He smelled her: rosewater, chocolate, the faint vegetable whiff of henna in her cropped hair. The knots gave a little and the snake around his throat relaxed its grip. Oxygen flooded him and he revived, the miasmal chaos of the dining room resolving itself around him into its constituent parts: pebbles of glass, dunes of dust, splintered beams. Gleave was hunched over his ruined limb, shaking, his skin bleached by shock. The engine block of the lorry had ruptured: the room was filling with the stink of scorched oil.

Naomi’s smells lifted from him, but he felt her near. If he could turn around he felt he might see her. He fought with the rope at his wrists and got a thumb free; the knot’s grip lessened and he had a hand free in seconds. He lifted the noose from his throat and rubbed at the tender burn that encircled it like strange jewellery.

Naomi was nowhere to be seen, but his disappointment was brief: she had been here for him, in some form or other. She was still alive for him, if he wanted her. He just had to deal with their new level of involvement. She was still Naomi; she was different, that was all.

Sean got to his feet and kicked away the remaining coils of rope. As soon as it was off him, he felt strength beat a path through his limbs again. Something caught his eye on the floor in the midst of all the rubble: Vernon’s whistle on its chain. He gathered it up and slipped it over his head, relishing the feel of the cold metal against his chest.

Ignoring Gleave, but pocketing his revolver, he ducked out of the dining room and padded in darkness down a corridor that led to the kitchen. A track in the lino: the heel of Emma’s remaining shoe as she was dragged to the back door. Outside, the cold air scoured the inside of his throat as effectively as the rope had done for the exterior. It beat tears from his eyes as he stumbled over the cobbled yard. A mealy smell drifted to him from the barn, of ancient manure and stale hay cleansed by the wind and made palatable.