Human Remains Read Free

the thudding of my heart.
    The room was furnished, but sparsely: a sofa, a low coffee table in front of it. On the table, a bunch of what must have once been carnations, stiff and brown in a waterless vase.
    The beam of the torch passed over an armchair. And even having felt a presence, half-expecting to find somebody in here, in this room, I gasped at the shock of seeing a person there, one horrifically distorted out of shape: black instead of white, the skin of the face stretched and split in places, the eyelids drawn back into a wide, black, hollow stare and the belly blown up like a balloon, stretching the fabric of what it was wearing – what
she
was wearing, for it was a skirt, and the hair that still clung to the skull was long, fine, lank, and maybe still fair in places, although it was coated in something – grease, some substance. And what made it worse was that there was movement in the abdomen, as though she was breathing – although surely this wasn’t possible? But when I looked closer I realised that her stomach was composed of a swarming, churning mass of maggots… And despite the horror, and my deep, heaving, choking breaths, I could not tear my eyes away. One hand was resting on the arm of the chair, and the other hand, the forearm from the elbow to the hand, was
on the floor
beside the chair, as though she’d dropped it, knocked it off the edge like a misplaced remote control.
    And then the purring began again – the bloody cat – and I looked down to see her rolling on the carpet beside the dark mess, as if the smell was catnip to her, and not the stench of the putrefying bodily fluids of a decomposing corpse.

Colin
     
     
    I was eating cornflakes and reading jokes aloud from the back of the 1982
Beano
annual when my father clutched his chest and dropped dead on the kitchen floor.
    Looking back it almost seems comical, but I believe that this was the moment when my life took a change in direction. My father was the sort of person you could read jokes to. He would spend Sundays fixing the car and I would help him, learning where all the pieces went and what they all did. He laughed a lot and together we both laughed at my mother, who was thin, and serious, and bitter.
    After he died, I couldn’t bring myself to read the
Beano
any more. I didn’t really laugh any more, either.
     
     
     It’s grim, feeling like this on a Monday morning. Other people have hangovers, people my age; or they’ve spent the weekend caravanning, or shagging their girlfriends. Or shagging someone else’s girlfriend. I’ve spent my weekend writing an essay, and staying up too late with whisky and porn. As a result I’m finding it impossible to concentrate on the budgets.
    The trouble is that I’m not sure I even want a girlfriend any more. I like my life the way it is, carefully ordered. I like my house the way it is. I’m not pathetically tidy – no visiting psychologist would have concerns for my sanity – but I think I would find it annoying to have to accommodate someone else’s things. Clothes finding their way into my wardrobe. Books on to my bookshelf. Food into my fridge. No, I don’t want that. I don’t have room in my house. And I don’t suppose I have room in my head, either.
    Still, sex would be nice.
    Garth has once again failed to bathe this weekend. He’s on the far side of the office yet I still catch a sniff of him every so often. As hard as I try to concentrate on happier things, I can’t help breathing in his direction, experimentally tasting the air again and again, incredulous that such a scent could possibly come from a normal, gainfully employed adult. He picks food out of his teeth, accompanying this with a sucking noise, and while this nauseates me I find myself glancing across at him, watching him rooting around the back of his molars with a probing finger and wondering what he’s eaten that could possibly become that stuck. He has ink on his fingers, too, like a schoolboy, and,