‘A party?’
‘Not a huge party. Just us. Well, it’s silly, isn’t it? All of us living on top of each other, and we’ve never all been in the same place at the same time. And it would be nice. A thank you because you’ve all been so nice, about the burglary. You and Hossein. Even Thomas. And it would be a good way to kill two birds with one stone. Welcome her to the house; thank everyone. And get him in Flat One to leave his lair. He’s been here ages and we’ve barely said a word. And besides. It’s been ages since I had a party.’
‘How long?’
‘God, it must be…’ Her mind flashes back to Erroll Grey and the Khans, sitting on her mother’s old settee. Really? She’s not had a party since that went on a skip? ‘Good Lord. Seven years, at least. I can’t believe it. I used to have people down all the time. And I’ve still got Mum’s old teaset. I spend my life washing the damn thing up, and it never gets used. Might as well celebrate the fact that at least he didn’t smash that, eh?’
‘Tea,’ says Cher.
Vesta laughs. ‘Oh, sorry. Were you expecting cocktails?’
Cher pouts, just a little bit. Of course she was. She’s a teenager. She wants to be out carousing, not eating finger sandwiches with a crew of middle-aged strangers. We must all seem ancient to her, Vesta thinks. Practically mummified. Same way she looks like a baby to me.
‘We could have some cider, at least,’ says Cher.
‘No,’ says Vesta, firmly.
Chapter Thirteen
The Lover is a great reader. He loves to read. He lives in a world where not many people do, where his learning is an anomaly and treated, often, with suspicion, but without reading he wouldn’t be the man he is. He wouldn’t know about the forty days, or about ritual and how its basis often lies in accidental coincidence and pragmatic use of the surroundings in which it developed. And besides: reading helps stave off the loneliness, in more ways than one.
The things he has read about Ancient Egypt, for instance, and its burial traditions. While venerating the corpses of the great is common all over the world, the means of disposing of them often reflects the circumstances of their lives. Thus the Vikings, facing solid, deep-frozen soil for much of the year, would, unsurprisingly, dispose of their heroes in fire and water. And a country in which the combination of climate and shallow topsoil would frequently turn up desiccated corpses from shallow burials might well eventually ritualise the natural order. Egypt’s arid plains, dotted with salty lakes that threw up great heaps of sodium, was ideal for experimentation. With skilled evisceration, and the right combinations of salts and herbs, forty days would be the perfect time to turn wet and putrefying dead bodies into leathery facsimiles that, at least passingly, resembled the original owner as they were in life.
But in a south London suburb – even a suburb that is going through the longest heatwave in living memory – the process needs a little help.
He’s learned as he’s gone along. Practice, after all, makes perfect, and besides, he’s had to learn two sets of skills where his teachers only had to master one. In Egypt, two sets of priests were responsible for rendering their royalty fit for the afterlife: the parichistes and the taricheutes, the cutters and the salters. Necessity has forced the Lover to master both roles, and there were bound to be errors along the way.
He doesn’t like to think about his first two attempts at making himself a girlfriend; is just grateful that he didn’t live in this crowded house when the first experiment failed, at least. A body is easier to move before the rot has set in. Jecca left the house in a series of carrier bags, flesh falling from bone like a five-hour pot roast; but at least, coming from a garden flat, she didn’t have to go through any communal areas. Katrina, her body cavities cleared more studiously, was a steep learning curve. His incision, down the front of the abdomen the way a pathologist would do it, left the trunk loose and floppy, and her nose was ruined by his clumsy attempts to remove the brain with the crochet hook. The parichistic entry, via a slit in the left-hand side, though it means having to plunge himself arm-deep in viscera, produces a neater, more human-shaped final product. He discovered the barrel drill in Homebase soon after that. He figures that the Egyptians would have used one too, had they had access to electricity and geared motors. He thinks of them sometimes, his two lost loves: Katrina sacrificed to fire and Jecca to water. He wonders if they are lonely, now, as he no longer is.
But he’s not happy with Alice. She’s an improvement on the two who came before, but it was only once her forty days were up and he had to break her from her crust like a salt-baked chicken that he understood that he needed to change the desiccation salts as the process progressed. The Egyptians had the help of the blazing sun to preserve their kings. For his princesses, he has dehumidifiers, and the close quarters of their confinement means that the juices have nowhere to go.