The Body

  The Body

  A novel

  Copyright 2016 Dean Clayton Edwards

  Published by Armoured Car Books

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  SARAH

  The air was musty, and thick with the smell of teak oil and bees wax, evidence of the love that Lara had poured into this place. Still, the familiar smells made her anxious, as if she were a young girl returning from a first term away from home, exhausted, exhilarated and heavy with secrets.

  She normally kept the house immaculate for the others. This time she hadn't been home for three weeks, not even to open the windows.

  Her white trainers were near soundless on the dusty maroon tiles of the hall as she crossed to the mirror. It was circular and larger than the largest dinner plate in the house, even back in the years when there had been dinner parties here. The Victorian mirror was surrounded by a dark, oak frame, heavily-ornamented with carved vines with no discernible beginning nor end. She stood for a moment examining a spot on the wall before forcing herself to look into the mirror's surface.

  Taking a breath, she was surprised to find that she was no longer pretty, but beautiful, despite her frown and an unsure, slightly lopsided smile. Her eyes were green-blue, like the sea, and they glinted back at her, full of promises of adventure. Her hair was the colour of sand and full of life. No-one would have thought that she'd styled that herself using only a mirror and a brush, but she had. She enjoyed playing with it. Today it seemed to be her best feature.

  This mirror held nothing back. It was not unkind. It was perhaps the best object in the entire house. Everybody loved it. It had a simplicity to it and an honest way of going about its business of reflecting the world as it was, without sugar, as people feared but sometimes dared to see the world and themselves within it.

  Lara held her own gaze and laughed, admiring the woman that she had become over the last three weeks.

  “It's going to be okay,” she said to the mirror, not to her reflection. “Trust me.”

  Then she started up the stairs to face the others.

  The master bedroom was not the grandest of the twelve rooms, but it was the only one that was inhabited even when it was empty. The master bedroom was literally full of life no matter the time of day or the season. It was early evening now. Lara could only face this place in the light of day. And it was Autumn. A time of change; the shedding of old ways in preparation for cleansing and a fresh start. It would be getting dark soon, so she would have to hurry.

  The dining room was like a showroom in the fake heart of a museum with its unlit red candles without a single drop of wax on the oak table, untarnished silver candelabras and a swept and blocked fireplace. The kitchen at the rear of the house was relatively small, but a huge relic nonetheless, a dinosaur crushed under its own weight. The reception room to the left of the entrance hall was one of the least welcoming spaces Lara had ever occupied.

  In comparison to the rest of the house, the master bedroom always felt lived in and had real character.

  It was the only room that remained fully-furnished.

  It was, in fact, over-furnished, but Lara would never say so out loud. She didn't dare even think it for more than a second at a time, after which she would direct her thoughts elsewhere, to some shiny object of distraction, internal or external.

  The master bedroom was home to a four-poster bed, impeccably made with a red satin bedspread and white cotton sheets and an impressive oak dining table, which had once comfortably sat four adults along either side and a matriarch at each end while downstairs in the dining room but had been moved upstairs in order to keep certain items of furniture together in one room. A vase of rose stems sat in the centre of the table. Around the vase, it appeared as if a petal had fallen for every day that Lara had been away. On another occasion, she would have liked to have used the fallen petals to prepare a pot pourri, because the scent of roses was always magical, alive or dead, but she was in a great hurry. For once in her life she had somewhere to be and someone to be with.

  In the corner of the room was a rocking chair, an item of which she was envious, because it was not only attractively-designed, but also perfectly balanced. It looked as if someone had been sitting in it moments ago and it had just come to rest. Though she discerned no movement, there was something about this entire room that suggested things had been in flux moments ago, only to be tamed by her eye. The furniture reverberated in a silence that was too complete and too sudden.

  She passed through a shaft of light as she circled the room and enjoyed the sensation of her bare legs against her cotton dress, careful not to flaunt her sensuality. She could enjoy it now if she were subtle. She could flaunt it later and being subtle wouldn't even be a consideration.

  An antique wardrobe dominated the corner of the room that received the least light from the two large windows. Its double doors held fast, one to the other, like folded arms. The key had gone missing some years ago and so the doors remained unlocked. She didn't remember if there was even a single dress inside. She never looked. She suspected that prising open those doors would reveal a dozen wooden hangers, empty in the cavernous dark like skeletons rattling for flesh.

  A towering, ancient grandfather clock with a brass pendulum stood perfectly between the room's two windows. Like the wardrobe, it also shied away from the light. Lara opened up the glass door, reached in and wound the hands, then the chime, before setting the pendulum swinging again with a brush of her index finger; an unnecessary act of love, performed because she was in love and wanted to share the feeling and the news.

  The clock face glared at her and then, when Lara was gone across the room again, it glared at the dressing table opposite.

  Attached to the dressing table was a large, rectangular mirror, which, being south-facing, reflected the sun around the room. During this part of the early evening it reflected enough sunlight to be as effective as an electric bulb, splitting the light and throwing it at odd angles against the walls and other furniture in an act of defiance against shadows and shade.

  There was a tea trolley laden with fine blue and white china, including a large, round teapot. It had been parked beside the bed, not far from a long oak chest in which, somewhat mundanely, blankets were kept, though again she didn't entertain such thoughts for very long. Although the chest was closed, she could smell mothballs. Even when the sheets came wet out of the washing machine or the wool blankets came back from the dry cleaners, she could still smell mothballs.

  Today, however, she was also attended by an uncommon perfume, not one of the cheap scents from the shared bathroom cupboard, but something expensive, like one of the many fragrances that covered the dressing table like pieces on a chessboard and which she was forbidden to touch. The fragrance was French and Roger had chosen it for her. According to Roger, it matched her perfectly, because it was subtle.

  She nodded to the ink-stained bedside table and continued her circle around the room, glancing for only an instant at the leather-covered foot stool before averting her eyes in the direction of the bookcase, which harboured more than a hundred books that she fleetingly thought nobody would have cared to read even if they had lived in the house for a hundred years. She bowed her head slightly to the case and then let her eyes glide over the paper spines, attempting to find something for holiday reading among this collection, unlikely as that was. She saw collected essays and works of literature for which she didn't really have the mind nor inclination. The names Freud, Jung, and Nietzche were the only names she recognised on that entire shelf and although she had not been forbidden to touch the books in this room, she saw nothing that tempted her eye.<
br />
  There was not a single romance novel.

  Perhaps that was for the best. Her time had become increasingly precious and she couldn't afford to spend it daydreaming. There were preparations to make and plans to announce.

  On completing her brief journey around the room, she saw her sad smile in the dressing table mirror. It could almost have been a different woman to the one she had seen reflected in the downstairs hallway. This face had sharper edges and a single, fine hair jutting from her chin that nobody had had the presence of mind or the decency to tell her about.

  Why on earth not? I'm not scary. Or did they think I was going to break?

  And crows' feet. She had crows' feet in this mirror too.

  Why do you do this? she thought and let it linger this time. It's somewhat childish. Really, it is. It's beneath us.

  She forced a smile in defiance. She was careful, however, to keep her mouth shut, because she was unwilling to give the mirror any more material to use against her. Disengaging from her perverted reflection, she strode into the middle of the room, affecting the gait of a much taller woman, before she addressed the room as a whole, keeping far enough away from everything that it was impossible to tell that she was trembling.

  “I'd like the passport,” she said out loud, her voice sounding fragile, even brittle, in the near-silent room.

  That wasn't how she'd practiced it. "I want the passport," she'd said in her head. "I want the passport." It had sounded strong and certain and then it had seemed undeniable that she should have it. Only an idiot would have refused her, the way she'd said it in her head.

  Not a bird. Not a breeze. Not a breath but her own.

  “Now, don't panic," she went on, "but I have to go away. But I'll be back, very soon. Long before the end of the month.”

  She'd practised this speech silently in the car and had decided to keep it brief. She had not developed much skill with oration, but she had at least always been true to her word; for that reason, she had decided to let the facts speak for her rather than overstate her case.

  She had always been trustworthy and had asked for very little. Surely they would see that and grant her some flexibility for her exceptional circumstances.

  She noted that motes of dust were hovering about the room, like they were afraid to settle.

  “I should like to know where the passport is kept,” she said firmly, addressing this last to Imelda, she of the fragrant pawns.

  "Lara?" the dressing table replied, sounding like a negotiator talking someone down from a ledge. It went on slowly. "I don't think that's going to work.”

  Lara regarded the room to see if anyone else had anything to say.

  “I've never asked any of you for anything before,” she said.

  “So why now?” Imelda countered. “And what on Earth, makes you think we'd let you leave with the body?"

  "The fact that we all know that I'm nothing without you all," Lara admitted, head bowed.

  The room erupted with snorts and brays of laughter from all around.

  They all started muttering at once; a horrible, nightmarish sound.

  "Because I'm in love!" Lara snapped, her words failing to cut through the noise.

  Well, she hadn't been planning to say that at all.

  There were groans and sighs of derision until the room soon fell back into baleful silence.

  Imelda had kept her cool during the entire uproar. She was a good leader. She knew when to push and when to hold back. Lara hoped that she had learnt enough to use the same skills in her own favour.

  “In love?” muttered Sylvia, ruffling the sheets.

  “Of course you're in love, darling,” said Tanya bluntly, her voice as old and careless as the wind, stirring the leaves of her books. “You've had the body for three weeks: you're in love with everything.”

  Amid murmurs of agreement, Lara shook her head, knowing that she had to say something very clever now to stop their momentum building against her.

  “You've only been out for three weeks,” Katja said, interrupting Lara's thoughts, her pendulum swinging back and forth like an axe sharpening itself on Time. “How can you possibly know if you're in love in three weeks?”

  The rocking chair rolled back slightly, almost imperceptibly, as if an invisible man had sat in it. This was Anna. “You know how it is,” she said flirtatiously. “We've all had boyfriends.”

  “Slu-ut!” boomed Olga, her voice reverberating in her cavernous belly, rattling the wooden hangers within.

  “Well, maybe not you,” Anna added coolly but spitefully.

  "She's been planning it," said Sylvia.

  "No, I haven't," said Lara. "If I'd planned it, I'd have ..."

  "You'd have what?" said Olga.

  “You can't leave,” Katja said. Swish. Slice. Slash. "Nobody leaves. You can't just try to up and leave us."

  “But I didn't leave, did I?” argued Lara.

  “You need to consult us first,” pressed Katja.

  “But I did consult you, didn't I? That's what I'm doing now.”

  “Only because you need the passport. Otherwise, we'd never have seen you or the body again.”

  “That's not true. I could have ordered one myself, but I didn't want to go behind your backs. I thought I'd ask for it instead and we could talk about it and decide.”

  “If you had the passport, how would we know you'd come back?”

  “Don't start that again,” warned Hilda, speaking for the first time from her place at the foot of the bed, full of bedsheets and the odour of mothballs. "Let's end this now. It's a ridiculous subject."

  “We used the passport before,” Lara reminded them weakly.

  "Yes! And look what happened," said Hilda.

  There were grumbles of disapproval as they all thought about 'Her' - she who would not be tamed.

  "So she tried to run away," Lara said. "That happened once. Once in nearly ten years. And we've all taken steps to ensure that something like that won't happen again."

  "By locking up the passport," Katja said, as if Lara had proven her point for her.

  "No!" Lara said. "By reaffirming that we're a family and that we wouldn't abandon each other."

  They scoffed at that, which upset her deeply. They didn't believe they were a family.

  Please don't tell me we're tied to each other by fear, she thought. I'm already so afraid. Don't let that be the truth of it.

  "We had a problem and we fixed it," Lara said.

  "We fixed her," Olga chuckled bloodily.

  "It's time we went back to how things were before ... before what happened. We're wiser now. Right? We are a family. Aren't we?"

  She could feel their silent impatience with her. They didn't want things back the way they were before the incident. They wanted things back the way they were before Lara had entered the room. They wanted to go back to flicking dust off their shoulders, and bathing in the sun, and watching the shadows lengthen as they crept around the room.

  “We always came back," she said, aware that her voice was becoming increasingly desperate, smaller and smaller, like a candle going out not because of a breeze but because the room was so cold. "It's what we did," she whispered. She'd wanted to say: "It's what we do."

  “Anyone who needs the passport is planning to go too far,” said Olga.

  "We belong here. Together. As you said."

  "That's not what I said!"

  As she planned her next move, Lara looked hopefully from object to object. Tanya and her books, best able to put herself in the position of others; Hilda at the foot of the bed, always slow to come to conclusions because she really thought things through; Anna, rocking, who lived more in four weeks than the others lived in four years and who, though she hadn't said anything to this effect yet, would certainly enjoy the reintroduction of the passport to their lives.

  Katja started up again though.

  “I don't like it,” she said.

  Imelda's interruption of the slowly turning tide was m
ore deliberate and more subtle. It was masterful. She held great power as a speaker and as their leader. All she did was use a specific tone of voice to recite their names in the best order for sewing doubt and solidarity through fear.

  “Jocanta?” she said.

  The table replied “No” as certain as if she'd been asked if she were a staircase.

  “Sylvia?”

  “If you need a passport, you're going too far,” Sylvia said, agreeing with Olga, which was disheartening but not at all surprising.

  "Olga?"

  It was obvious that Imelda would go there next. She knew the path of least resistance and where her support lay along it.

  “We agreed to stay inland,” Olga said, "and for good reason. There's no need to change something that's already working."

  "It's not working!" Lara complained, speaking without thinking. "It's not working for me. And we didn't agree on anything. Ever."

  “Oh, Lara,” said Imelda gently, glinting. “We all agreed.”

  “I didn't agree!” Lara said. She hated the sound of her voice cracking.

  Somebody laughed.

  “Of course we did,” said Imelda as though talking to a child. “This is a democracy. Right, Olga?”

  “We did agree,” said Olga.

  “No,” said Lara and she stamped her foot. She imagined it going through the floorboards and the sight of blood and splintered wood shocking them into taking her seriously, but in the end it was just a foot, her foot, Sarah's foot, and there was nothing to be done. Hilda was right. This conversation should never have started, at least not with her.

  “Imelda," Lara said, changing tactics. There was no point trying to sway public opinion when the others would agree with whatever Imelda thought best. "You remember what happened. The passport went missing." She was being deliberately diplomatic. "Nobody really thought about it much, because no-one wanted to go anywhere after what happened to ... her ... the passport going away was a relief. Nobody ever discussed what happened to it or whether we should get a new one. You remember? There really was no discussion.”

  She glanced at Anna for support, but Anna didn't respond. She may as well have been just a chair.