The Killer Next Door(29)
He moves Alice and Marianne to the sofa to watch the TV while he attends to Nikki. Some tender part of him wants to spare her the indignity of exposing her half-cooked nakedness to the gaze of his more finished beauties. As he carries Alice, he sees that her smile has spread again, as her skin is contracting back towards her hairline. He can almost see her wisdom teeth and is painfully aware of the bones beneath the surface. I haven’t done you justice, my dear, he thinks. I should have read more. If only I’d known before it was too late that a girl like you deserves her share of moisture once the natural wet is gone. He puts her gently down in the armchair, unwinds her arm from round his neck. She settles with a rustling whisper. Her hair is thin and brittle, her eyes sunken and hollow beneath their drooping lids. I wonder, he thinks. Soon you’ll be nothing but skin and bone, flaking and shedding over my carpet. Perhaps it’s time that we started to think about parting company.
He goes back to the bed, to his Princess Nikki.
The base of the bed is covered with a thick plastic sheet, liberated from a building site. Sleeping above his girls has never been a problem for him – indeed, it gives him a feeling of warm companionship – but the process of transformation, even with the alkaline, deadening effect of his home-made natron, tends to produce sudden bursts of smell that wake him, gagging, in the night. He props the mattress – lovely soft, lightweight memory-foam mattress – against the wall and peels the plastic off. Waits, breathing through his mouth, until his stomach settles, then tugs on the cloth ties and allows the lids to lift on the two compartments below. He spent a long time making his choice on the internet once he’d seen the possibility of such a bed, clicking through faux leather after faux leather, until he finally settled on this workmanlike black hessian covering. Cloth tends to soak up smells, but it’s breathable; and when the bed is empty and the plastic cover off, the memory of its former contents dissipates over time. He has drilled air holes where the walls meet, to allow the bank of dehumidifiers in the head section to do their work. The collection tank of each one – and there are six altogether – is nearing full. This was where he went wrong with Jecca and Katrina. You can never believe, until you experience it first-hand, how much moisture there is in a human body. It comes and comes, for the first few weeks. In week two, once the natron really starts to work its magic, he has to empty the chambers on a daily basis.
Two by two, he unclips the chambers and carries them to the kitchenette sink. The water is strangely greasy, as though it has been used to wash up with after a full Sunday roast. He doesn’t bother to flush around the sink. He’ll be chasing it down soon enough, after all. He grabs the bucket and the trowel from the cupboard under the sink, and returns to his darling.
The natron has settled, as it often does, and one shoulder peeks out from above the surface. This is one of the reasons that he’s opted for the weekly fuel change. He left Alice alone for the full forty days, and chipping and scraping her out from her hard-set casing was the full work of an afternoon, a chore that made him admire the stoical patience of archaeologists in a way he never had before. And he has been forced to dress her in sleeves since he got her out, to hide the deterioration of her exposed left arm. No little sundresses for Alice; no pretty evening gowns. Every time he looks at her, he feels sour and sad. So close, and yet so far.
‘Never mind,’ he says to Nikki. ‘I’ve got you, now.’
He digs from the walls inwards. The powder is still dryish in the corners away from the flesh. It pours like sand into the bucket, almost good enough to use again. But the Lover no longer believes in shortcuts. Precision, he knows, means the difference between failure and something to treasure for ever. He fills the bucket and takes it to the sink. His natron, made by mixing simple washing soda with equal parts of bicarb, has the added advantage of acting like a drain cleaner. Everything that goes down his sink – tea leaves, bacon fat, scraps of visceral matter scrubbed from his parichistic hands – is periodically dissolved and flushed away from the pipes as he changes his preservatives. He upends the bucket, turns on the cold tap and watches, pleased, as the natron fizzes, smokes and vanishes down the plughole.
He works with the windows thrown wide, but the heat is heavy on his shoulders and, as the digging becomes harder, his breath is damp and stuffy behind the surgical mask he wears to protect his lungs. Three weeks in, and Nikki has given up the greater part of her moisture, but still the natron has solidified around her and needs prising out in lumps. He sweats as he works, sees drops of it run over his goggles, feels it drip from the end of his nose to mingle with Nikki’s body fluids. It takes a full half hour of digging and flushing before he has her uncovered, and can brush the final sticky coating off with the help of a stiff paintbrush in preparation for the final cleaning.