It’s not a big patch of land. Too small to be built on or, property being what it is in London, someone would have slapped in a block of flats at some point and called it Northbourne View or Park Vista, despite the fact that its outlook would be of the railway at the bottom of the embankment, and the line of scrubby sycamores that mark the edge of the common on the other side. There are fifteen feet between the bottom of the garden and the bindweed-twined chain link that demarcates railway property, and this patch of lost land runs the length of Beulah Grove, home to brambles and buddleia and ragwort and a family of urban foxes. It’s his own secret garden, his private domain.
He likes to come here as dawn is breaking and the blackbirds are starting up their greeting to the day. At this time of year, daylight begins in earnest by five o’clock, when his neighbours are still safely tucked up in their beds and he can be fairly certain that he will not be overlooked. So he risks carrying a load that in normal circumstances would be foolhardy: Alice, jointed and stuffed into two tote bags, the longest pieces her femurs, the bulkiest her skull. She chinks as he walks: her bones, stripped bare, ringing out like china in the cool, damp air.
Someone will hear me, he thinks; someone has to hear me. They’ve all got their windows open in this heat, and God knows I’ve not been sleeping deeply myself. He puts the bags down to give himself two hands to lift the gate into the side-return. Raises it on its hinges to stop the scraping sound that will give his presence away, and is surprised to find that it has been freshly oiled and opens with the merest whisper. Funny, he thinks. Of all the bits of maintenance that need doing around here, you wouldn’t have thought he would have started with that. He picks up the bags again and sets off, on tiptoe, across the grass.
There’s been a heavy dew, and the lawn is wet. It soaks his shoes, weighs down the bottoms of his trousers. Beyond Vesta Collins’s little patch, the grass is long and unkempt and trips him up a couple of times with grasping tentacles. The shed, with its blank windows, overlooks his approach. He wonders occasionally what lives in there, whether even the Landlord knows. From the look of the notice, and the rust on the padlock that holds the painted steel door shut, it’s been closed for decades. There could be anything in there. Junk furniture, a workshop – dead bodies?
His sledgehammer is still there, leaning against the rear wall of the shed, its head shiny with newness. He tucks it awkwardly under his arm, and ducks through the gap in the fence then breathes deep and releases his tension. No one can see him, now. The garden fences are eight feet high, the bindweed so thick that barely a gap shows through. At one end, the blank back wall of the post office, at the other, a small office block that hasn’t been tenanted since the recession hit. For now, he is safe.
There’s a path, of sorts, worn by animals through the middle of the maze of weeds. He turns to his right and walks thirty feet up, to the bottom of the garden of number twenty-seven. The house is empty at the moment, covered in scaffolding and plastic sheeting as the new owners – well, their team of Slovak builders – gut and renovate. Four months ago, the builders, like many before them, used the strip as a dump rather than pay for a skip, flinging joists and broken bricks and bits of crazy paving over the fence. It’s perfect for a demolition of his own.
He opens and upends the bags. Alice rattles out, rustles and clatters into a pile on the rubble. The Lover looks down at the bones, and marvels at the way he no longer associates these jigsaw pieces, these bleached lumps of calcium and carbon, with the girl who stirred his passion. She’s just rubbish, now, is Alice. But still identifiable, in her current state, as what once she was – once-human. Foxes and dogs and insects make short work of the soft stuff – the age-old recycling of Mother Nature – but bones are bones are bones, all the marrow boiled out of them.
The skull grins up at him, sightlessly. A few scraps of leather still cling to the cheeks, a lock or two of hair to the fontanelles. Though it’s unlikely that anyone will be along here before the brambles have piled high over the top of them, it’s best, he thinks, to make sure that, if they do, all they’ll see is chunks of something else hard among the scraps of concrete, the brown-and-orange tiles, the avocado bathroom suite.
He raises the sledgehammer above his head and brings it down.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I can fly, Cher thinks, as she turns into the alley and speeds through the night, as she hears his panting imprecations drop further into the darkness. I’m so fast, it’s like I’ve got wings on my feet. I swear, if I went any faster, I could actually take off and soar through the air like a bird.