He never likes this part. She is lying on her left side, so he has to roll her over to access the entrance to her abdomen, to get at the packing that both dehydrates her torso and prevents it from losing shape as it does so. Then he goes in with a serving spoon, scooping out the natron like stuffing from a Christmas-day turkey.
This packing is more solid than that on the outside; interiors are more permeable than skin designed to keep out the rain. And it’s dark brown in colour, where that which surrounds the body is a blend of khaki and yellow. And it stinks. The stench that rises from the depths of Nikki makes him gag repeatedly as he buries his arm to the shoulder and scrapes out its filling. This won’t wash down the sink so easily, either. It’s one for the toilet. Once again, he makes a mental note to keep a bucket of clean powder back to chase it down the drains.
It’s worth the effort, though, he tells himself. Two more weeks of this, and she’ll be perfect.
Chapter Fourteen
He thinks you’re still in Spain. Don’t sweat it. He’s not looking for you here; he still thinks you’re in Spain.
It’s only two or three miles to Collier’s Wood, but the trip involves two trains and a tube. Five stops to Clapham Junction, two stops to Balham, then three on the Northern Line. London’s transport system almost invariably involves going round an unnecessary corner, the neighbouring boroughs often the most laborious to get to; she’d forgotten that factor, when she picked Northbourne on the map. It will be almost two hours to get there and back each time, and because of the change of transport and the enforced trip into Zone 2, would cost the best part of a tenner without an Oyster card. Suddenly, the thought of taking one of those minicabs from the kiosk at Northbourne Junction seems less of an extravagance.
She makes sure to travel well out of rush hour, but still, by the time the tube doors open, she is bathed in sweat and nursing a dry, crackly throat. The air as she comes up the escalator, usually a moment’s pleasure, provides little relief. The day is still, hanging over the streets like punishment.
She buys a bottle of water at the little shop by the station, and searches the phone menu for the satnav. She’s not bothered to buy a new handset this time, just replaced the SIM. She’s getting better with each move at slowing down her spending, finding new ways to move to a new city on the cheap. If she wants to keep ahead of Tony Stott, she needs to string the cash out for as long as she can.
The thought of Tony makes her check, instinctively, over her shoulder. Fuck’s sake, Collette. He doesn’t know where you are. He doesn’t know where your mother is. It’s not like we’ve shared a surname since I was eight. And it’s not like anyone at Nefertiti’s spent their nights having cosy chats about their families. He thinks you’re still in Spain. But still, the years in hiding have taken their toll on her, made her fear each passing shadow.
Sunnyvale is a ten-minute walk away, in a cul-de-sac off Christchurch Close. They’re always a way away from public transport, these places, though there’s a bus stop at the end of the road for the people who’ve really mastered this city’s labyrinthine routes. It makes sense, really: it’s not as though the residents are going to be going anywhere, and a lot of them don’t get a visitor from one month’s end to the next. God preserve me from dementia, she shudders. She sets off up the main road past the bookies and the Royal Mail sorting office, weaves her way between mid-morning knots of uniformed smokers. The bottle of water vanishes down her throat as though it were just a thimbleful. It’s the sort of weather that makes you wonder if you’re diabetic, she thinks. Christ, I’m getting middle-aged.
All these suburbs, blending into one. Collier’s Wood is slightly newer than Northbourne and lacks, from what she can see, the networks of Victorian artisan terraces and solicitors’ villas that have made Tooting, and now her own area, so appealing to the fixer-uppers with an eye on the Cotswolds thirty years down the line. She passes a sad little arcade, a pretty church marooned in a field of 1930s semis. Edwardiana is right back in with Londoners, now, so how long until these stuccoed porches and low-silled windows begin to look attractive to generations who no longer remember them as nasty-modern? It’s the way of the British, she muses. We like old things. And when we can’t afford the old things, we start seeing newer things as old, stake a claim of our own, and drive the renters and the drifters and the immigrants on to somewhere newer.
She turns off the main road into Christchurch Close, and the tarmac gives way to cement block paving; a high, wire-topped wall along one side and blocky 1950s brick housing on the other. When her mother was young, she thinks, these were the sorts of places people dreamed of being located to: the bombsites filled in with affordable housing. There’s a symmetry to Janine coming to somewhere like this on her downward slide.