Blood Relative Read Free

make life simpler and quicker we’d bought most of the furniture from the Conran Shop, everything chosen in a single Saturday afternoon. Three Naviglio leather sofas formed a square whose fourth side was a massive fireplace. The dining table was walnut, as were the matching chairs.
    All but one of the walls were painted in Casablanca by John Oliver: a soft, dusty, soothing and completely inimitable white emulsion. The far wall, however, was almost entirely glass, with spectacular views across the North Yorkshire countryside. At night the glass became a shining black backdrop against which we played out our lives.
    Or a death, as it was in this case.
    Mariana turned right into the kitchen. ‘ Ich muss die Nudeln retten bevor sie überkochen ,’ she said.
    Apart from the odd dirty joke, we’d always spoken English. Mariana used to say she preferred it to German, which she only half-jokingly called ‘Hitler’s language’. But out of embarrassment at my own incompetence and just wanting to do something for her I’d spent a few months playing a Speak German course in the car. I’d picked up enough to get the gist of what she was saying. She was worried that the pasta was about to boil over.
    I didn’t reply. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the right words. I was simply incapable of speech.
    Andy was lying almost directly in front of where I stood, about halfway to the far wall. His face was frozen in an expression of fear and bafflement. His pale-blue, button-down shirt was punctured with stabs, though they were nothing compared to the terrible open wound that had cut his left thigh open almost to the bone.
    Andy had died at the centre of a spreading, swirling eruption of blood. It lay on the floor in puddles and smears whose patterns showed the thrashings and spasms of his dying limbs as clearly as angel wings in the snow.
    The blood was not confined to the floor. It had been flung across the canvas-white walls like the first scarlet spraying of a Jackson Pollock painting. It was dripping from the fancy leather sofas – one of them in particular was doused in it – and the wheeled bookcases that stood on either side of the fireplace. It soiled our creamy rugs. There was even a single scarlet handprint on the glass opposite me. The floor beneath it was a messy confusion of bloody footprints. Andrew must have reached out for support. Or perhaps it had been Mariana. Maybe she had gone to help him. Maybe that was why she was covered in blood. I mean she couldn’t have … no, that wasn’t possible. Not Mariana.
    Up to now I had been numb, as though my brain had been overwhelmed, unable to process the torrent of sensory and emotional information with which it had been flooded. I’d never in my life seen a dead body before. Our father died when I was twelve and Andy was five, but Mum wouldn’t let us see him. She said it would be too upsetting. So I had no idea until then how utterly changed the human form is by the absence of life, how absolute the difference between existence and its termination can be. A corpse bears no resemblance whatever to an actor lying still and trying not to breathe. A corpse that has bled out is doubly emptied: the stuff of life has left it as well as the spirit.
    Finally, the reality of Andy’s death seemed to register, like a website that takes an age to upload but then flashes all at once on the screen. I actually reeled back a couple of paces, as though I’d received a physical blow, and that was probably just as well because it took me away from the corpse and the blood. So when I threw up all over the floor in front of me none of the vomit corrupted the evidence.
    I straightened up, wiping the spit and puke from my mouth, and walked over to the kitchen sink. I turned on the tap, caught some water in my cupped hands and used it to rinse out my mouth. A second handful was splashed over my face.
    Mariana was almost close enough to touch, standing by the hob, ladling spaghetti out of a