The Killer Next Door(88)
The Landlord doesn’t look like that. Eight days has not been kind. His huge belly has swollen to the size of a Space Hopper and all his limbs have bloated. How it’s not split open, she has no idea. It can only be a matter of time. In the places where, when she last saw him, his skin was grey-white, it is greenish, now, and mottled like a marble floor, the occasional patch of livid crimson breaking through where his skin seems to have started to literally slide off the fat beneath. The parts that were purple are lustreless ebony black. His T-shirt, stretched so tight that the seams are beginning to split, seems to be undulating. For a moment she thinks it must be some kind of optical illusion, until she notices something small and white, the size of a couple of grains of rice, work its way over his swollen lower lip and drop to the floor.
‘Fucking ’ell,’ says Cher.
She stays and looks for a bit, fascinated. Her body still fights to act out its revulsion, hitting her with sudden, convulsive throat spasms so that she has to keep her hand clamped over her mouth, but her mind is clear, and curious. She’s always been inquisitive that way. If she’d learned to read really well and gone to a school where the staff had any ambitions for their students other than keeping them from rioting before playtime, she’d have been being encouraged into the sciences by now. So this is what happens when you get buried, she thinks. I’m bloody well getting cremated.
She spends a few minutes staring at the pullulating cloth, drinking in the detail – the wide-open, grey-misted eyes, like the zombies in The Walking Dead, the way that the fluid leakage seems concentrated around the head and, God help us, the flattened buttocks, the fact that the marble patterning – if it were a tattoo, say, or body paint rather than putrefaction – is almost pretty in its delicacy. I won’t forget this in a hurry, she thinks. Shame there’s no one I can tell about it, really. Probably not ever.
A car door slams in the street and snaps her from her reverie. She remembers the purpose of her visit, looks at her quarry. The big telly, the one she really lusts after, is situated directly over the corpse’s head, its cord trailing through a pool of brackish goo. Maybe not, she thinks, and goes round the coffee table to the small screen on the other side.
It’s a nice little apparatus, no more than a couple of years old. Silver casing and a Sony logo. Actually, this is better, she thinks. I’ll have to move on at some point, when they find him or whatever, and that big thing’s not exactly portable, is it? She bends down and unplugs it from the aerial socket, switches off the electricity and takes the plug from the extension adaptor on the floor. Stands on tiptoe to reach over the media cabinet below it and lift it from the wall-bracket on which it perches. It looks quite precarious, and she balances carefully to make sure not to drop it when it comes free.
It doesn’t come free. Taken by surprise, Cher wobbles on the balls of her feet and has to grab the telly by its frame to prevent herself overbalancing. She swears under her breath – doing anything lungfully is ill-advised in her current circumstances – and drops down on to her heels, her damaged ankle letting out a shriek that reminds her that she still needs to take care. She bends down to look for a hook, or a latch, or some other piece of Japanese ingenuity that’s lending the set stability. What she finds wrings another, louder word from her lips. A screw runs through a hole in the metal bracket, and is firmly embedded in the underside of the machine.
‘Fuck,’ mutters Cher. Might have known this wasn’t going to be that easy, she thinks. Like the universe was ever going to cut me a break.
‘You bastard,’ she says to the bloated body, and could swear that it releases another gust of swamp gas in response. ‘Bet you think you’re having the last laugh, don’t you?’
She stands up and glares round the room. Enough porn to power the Titanic, but nothing practical anywhere to be seen. The remains of a kebab on the table has gone green and sprouted fur. ‘Eugh,’ she says to the Landlord, ‘you really were a filthy fucker, weren’t you? If you’d put as much energy into walking as you did into wanking, you probably wouldn’t look like that now.’
The Landlord doesn’t answer. She tries the drawers of the media cabinet and finds little other than a bunch of unlabelled DVDs and those bunches of useless wires and plugs that seem to breed secretly in the dark places of every house.
‘Bugger,’ she mutters. She’s going to have to go further into the flat to see if she can find anything to undo the screw with. A knife would probably do it. If he owns a knife. It doesn’t look like he ate much that he couldn’t eat with his hands.