Dead in the Trunk: A Short Story Collection Read online

  I’m crying now. I don’t hate you. You understand that? I don’t hate you. I love you. I want you to be happy. That’s why I’m stepping aside. Letting you and mudman be together. So you can be happy.

  I love you.

  Peter sat back and looked over the last few lines. He wondered if he should add some kind of postscript or something, but then he guessed you had to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.

  He folded the letter and walked over to the hole he’d cut in the boards.

  'Daisy?'

  'Peter? Please...he’s...touching me...'

  Good. Good. He had to wonder, if they’d still get on, now mudman had gone all autistic.

  'Don’t worry about mudman. You like him, remember?'

  'God. What? Peter...God...'

  'Mudman! Back. Back!'

  Mudman scuttled away from the hole and the meagre light. Peter could just see Daisy’s upturned face. He smiled.

  'For you,' he said. He held up a candle so Daisy could see it. 'You’ll need the light. I’ve written a letter. Though I should explain...I don’t know. Mudman’s idea. I think. Mudman’s? Mine...'

  Peter shook his head, like he was shaking something loose. Mudman was muttering. Daisy, too. Something incomprehensible.

  'Fuck it. Doesn’t matter anymore. You got what you wanted. Here.'

  He held out the letter. Daisy shook her head, crying. Gibbering, really, if you wanted to be honest.

  'Take it!'

  She cried, but she took it.

  He knelt down on his left knee and pushed the candle through the hole and onto the spike, waiting precisely in the centre. Checked it was secure. He took a match and flicked it alight against the rough boards, touched it to the wick.

  Daisy was screaming then.

  'Just mudman,' he muttered. 'Just mudman.'

  She screamed for a while and mudman muttered and Peter sat, biting his lip, crunching tooth against tooth, waiting for the initial panic to subside.

  He didn’t want to look at her any more. Mudman was frightened. She was scaring him. Mudman was his friend. He didn’t want mudman to be afraid. But then, Daisy was his wife.

  He shrugged.

  'Read it,' he said.

  'You fucking psycho! Fucking cunt bastard fuck you fuck cock cunt fuck...'

  He tuned out for a while. Listened to mudman’s numbers, soothing, like background radio.

  Gave her a while. She ran out of steam.

  'Read it.'

  He could hear her panting. The adrenaline wearing off. Terror and anger gone. Just tired. A kind of resignation. The way he’d felt when he’d seen her with mudman and knew that was what she wanted and he’d never make her happy, never be good enough.

  'Read it.'

  He heard her fumbling around and the rustling of paper.

  He nodded. Mudman said something. He didn’t need to reply. Mudman knew what he was thinking.

  Peter laid his head on the boards he’d laid that afternoon, over mudman and Daisy.

  He took his pocketknife to his throat. After all this, it was still tough to do it. But you had to have a clean break. Break ups were messy.

  His blood ran across the boards and sprayed some, too, but enough of it ran toward the hole. He watched it run. Mudman had told him it would work. Even in the cold, the blood wouldn’t congeal quick enough to stop the flow, not a heavy flow. Not something arterial.

  Peter held on long enough to hear the sizzle of the candle going out as his blood hit the flame and a last scream.

  She didn’t seem all that grateful. Mudman sounded happy enough. Slurping. Kissing, maybe?

  Eating?

  Happy either way, maybe. But really, who knows what mudmen like?

  *

  So, maybe your appetite's whetted. Maybe you feel a little repulsed. I should put a proper horror...erm...I mean love story in the collection, right?

  Arseholes to that. Here's my kind of love story.

  Grass can be Weeds, too

  The water was scalding hot, but she kept her hands under, rubbing, rubbing, washing up liquid turning to suds and swirling into the sink, steam rising in a cloud around her face. Her hands turned pink as she scrubbed, first one hand, then the other. With a finely manicured nail she cleaned under her nails until there was no grime, just white crescents with pearls of boiling water lending further sheen to the immaculate polish.

  Her fingers were tingling when she turned off the tap. She shook over the sink, took out a clean tea towel and dried meticulously, taking care with all the gaps. She hung the towel in its place on a rack beside the sink and pushed the kitchen door closed to keep Skater in the house. She didn’t know where he was…probably snoring and dreaming doggy dreams in the comfort of his leather basket. He was pampered, true, but at eleven years old he was entitled to a little pampering. A Jack Russell cross, he’d looked old from about a year on, and now he had cataracts in one eye and a lazy bladder. He’d been a wedding present from her husband, the first of many wedding presents over the last eleven years.

  A gust of wind rattled the French doors leading from the kitchen diner to the garden. It was building slowly, but the storm predicted was coming. The weatherman was seldom wrong on the local radio, SFM, but then he didn’t have the whole country to worry about. All he had to do was look out the window, perhaps ask some old country boy what the pine cones were doing, or consult the local haruspex. The garden needed her attention, though. Rain be damned. She’d never let the weather rule her life. She weeded every Friday, rain or shine.

  She pulled on her gardening shoes over her warm socks. She also had going-out socks, gym socks, boot socks and her totes, for sitting in front of the fire on a winter night. They didn’t have a real fire. Sam hated dirt and all the soot, he said, would drive him bug shit. His words, not hers. He hated dirt, she hated curse words. As with most things, he had gotten his way, and she had ended up with a pathetic electric fire when the old, original fireplace had been blocked up. On winter nights since she’d had to sit in front of a pale imitation of fire, a flickering display to pass the time in saccharin bliss. No crackle, no smoke, no soot.

  Her gardening shoes waited in the conservatory, their backs worn down. She always slipped them on, and the backs were broken. Snuggling her feet down to the end, feeling their coolness even through her warm socks, she stamped until they were settled.

  She opened the back door and stepped into the garden. Wind pulled at her hair and made her face tight in an instant. The temperature had plummeted, as predicted. On the horizon (what she could see of it…the Orsons had built a four-bedroom monstrosity behind their house, cutting down the poplars that had been there for four generations) clouds billowed darkly, piling into each other and building, coming in from the east, from the sea.

  A big blow, her daddy would have said. She recognised the psychology behind her calling her father daddy at 39 years of age, that she had never truly grown up, and when Sam had come along, ten years older than her, she had moved from one daddy to another. A strong man, one who could look after her and be a rock she could rely on. She was the concubine of a strong man, his toy, though, not a partner in any real sense of the word. She knew she was a weak-willed woman.

  Perhaps, she thought as she pulled on her worn gardening gloves, if she had been able to have children it would have been different. She might have had someone else to lean on, and in their dependence she might have grown stronger herself.

  Eleven years, daddy in the grave for the last two, her mother long before that, she was adrift and all she had left was Sam and his family. His family, she thought, with a sense of bitter irony, were all hale. There was no justice. Her daddy had loved her with all his heart, and she had been his angel. Now she was just a barren old wife, her looks fading. But Sam would never leave her. She might have been a trophy, once, but now she ran the household, cooked him his meals, and she recognised the dynamic here, too. She had become a mother to him, he a father to her. It was incestuous in a
safe way, Oedipus be damned, there was nothing there for anyone to sneer at. People just found their own feet in any marriage. Whatever worked. She was sure there were plenty of married couples out there with their own strange ways, their own darker natures…especially the childless ones. They knew a few couples with no children, older, like them, with no hope of the remittance that children brought. They had met them through the fertility clinic, and had been drawn together by their sadness and their grief. In some ways it was like a cancer victim’s support group, an all pervading depression evident in everything they did.

  Sam blamed her. She knew he did, even though he’d never said, never hinted at it. But she knew, in the way that women know when they’re unwanted, or being lied to, or when (she thought with bitterness) they were with child, their period later than usual, and so she had heard, a tingling, a surety, a subtle change in the circadian rhythms of their bodies. All her body was telling her was that she was winding down. At 39 she held out no hope of falling pregnant, even with all the advances science was making in the field of fertility. Damn it, women were becoming mothers at sixty!

  The side gate was banging in the rising wind, left off the latch. She took her basket from shed and went through into the sideway, making sure to close the gate firmly behind her until she heard the click of the latch falling. She swung the basket as she walked, the tools of the gardener’s trade clinking softly where they were nestled in the wicker. The house needed painting. The white was now grey, but she didn’t suppose that would get done anytime soon. Sam was a devil for repairs on the house.

  The driveway was full, Sam’s Jaguar and her new Mercedes, a present from him. Her jewellery box had overflowed a long time ago…she had a second, now. She’d been to on a Mediterranean cruise, travelled the Nordic fjords, seen the Valley of Kings and sunned herself on Caribbean beaches with a tall drink in one hand and a paperback in the other…Sam wasn’t shy of spending his money on her. There was barely a week gone by when he hadn’t bought her something from a shop, or had something delivered to her during the day while he was out at work. He wasn’t a bad man, not really.

  But then, when you have everything you want but one thing, that’s what you want…that one thing. Nothing else can assuage that longing. Nothing can fill the hole.

  She looked around the front lawn. The grass needed cutting, but that was Sam’s job. The front lawn was bracketed on both sides by their neighbour’s front lawns. Theirs put hers to shame, their grass was as neatly trimmed as Sam insisted she be…down there. She didn’t like it, but he said it made her look younger in bed. She didn’t know about that. She’d suffered some of the ravages of time, but she knew she was still a fine looking 39. She’d read in a woman’s magazine that men liked their women to be trimmed because it made them look younger…a dirty old man in every man, a way to keep a woman down, to make her shamed by her own natural beauty, a way for a man to convince himself he was balling a twenty-year old glamour model? She didn’t know, and she found herself blushing at the thought. Perhaps she would let her hair down, so to speak. See what happened.

  She shook her head and knelt smoothly beside the first border as the first plink of rain hit her trowel. Her hair fell across her face, but she didn’t notice. The dark clouds were overhead now, the outriders of the storm, bringing with it a hint. The buddleia was swaying in the breeze, the grass rippling at each gust that came. She took out her fork, a small hand fork, and set to work, her hair in her face and her thoughts skipping across the surface of her mind as a stone skips across the water.

  Too many weeds, even though it was early autumn and the leaves on the trees in the Avenue were beginning to turn. The weeds never quit, never gave up and just died. Every week, without fail, she turned the earth between the flowers, picking out the smallest to the largest, turning the earth and picking out the weeds with her filthy old gloves, dumping them in her basket to take to the compost heap at the back of the house. The rear garden had to be done, too, but this was where she spent most of her time. The neighbours might turn their nose up, smell her barren womb, talk behind their hands about the ageing trophy wife and when her high-flying husband would finally trade her in for a younger model, a good breeder, as they have a way of saying out in the country. Here in the suburbs people gossip, sometimes it’s snide and sometimes sweet, but she knew. She knew, because she’d done it herself. Maggie from No. 54’s been stepping out with her colleague at work, Harold’s grandson was banned for drink driving but I’ve seen him on the Avenue in his dad’s car just last night, Terry from the paper shop’s had a testicle removed, and oh how sad it is, him with a young wife, said with darkling glee.

  She wouldn’t let them talk about her. She might not be a young, supple breeder, but she’d be damned if she’d let her garden slide.

  A fat droplet of rain washed away some of her more bitter thoughts, and she glanced up at the sky. It was darker, now, a purpling grey with a hint of sun behind it, but the cloud was thick and murky with a belly full of rain. The wind whipped her hair and she watched the slowly falling rain in a kind of trance, listening to it beat out a steady, easy tempo on the pampas grass in the corner of the garden. She felt it on her face, her cheeks wet with it, blinking only when it hit her eye, water running down the crinkles they called crow’s feet…sometimes laughter lines, if people were being kind…but she knew what hers were.

  She shuffled along the border and turned the earth, the wind buffeted her and she heard as if from a long way away the side gate banging again, where it had come loose. She should shut it tight, or the thin slats would snap off. But she was weeding. The grass had grown over the borders in some places. She used the small trowel to cut it off, cut it back to straight. Her hair hung in wet strands on her face, and dimly she was aware her shoulders were damp, now, the chill rain working its way through her thick sweater to her skin. She didn’t mind. It was cleansing, washing away her sadness.

  She weeded, the rain fell. Heavier, the borders were muddying and her basket filling. Rain soaked her heels, too, where they poked out of her gardening shoes. The basket was filling up nicely, a bumper crop. The sky lit up briefly, a sudden flash, and a deafening crack overhead.

  She almost didn’t notice the car pull into the driveway, its lights washing the garden as it turned. She squinted in the gloom when it did, trying to see the driver, but it wasn’t until the door opened, pulled in a random gust of wind, that she saw Mike from Sam’s office. He wore a slightly worried frown and a dark suit. She smiled at him as he walked over, him pulling a battered umbrella over his head to protect him from the rain. She didn’t get up, but waved him over.

  'What are you doing out in this? It’s bucketing down!'

  'I’m weeding. I always weed on Fridays.' She was aware that there was a hint of pride in her voice…and that perhaps it was folly. But she’d started, and she’d finish, and besides, she thought stubbornly, Friday was weeding day. Always had been, always would be.

  Mike shook his head, but seeing something in her eyes, let the matter drop.

  'Where’s Sam? Is he sick? I’ve been phoning…'

  'I can’t hear the phone out here. He’s not going in today. He’s upstairs if you want to see him.' She indicated over her shoulder with one hand, holding a weed between her thumb and forefinger.' The front door’s open. Mind Skater doesn’t get out, though.'

  He shook his head, probably thinking the old girl’s gone crazy, as he walked up the path to the front door. She didn’t care what he thought.

  Nearly done. One last border to go. Then she could move onto the back garden. Her hair, normally thick and full, hung now in damp tatters around her face. She didn’t want to get dirt in it, so she left it where it was. A prickly weed caught her on the wrist, where her sweater and glove left a gap. She drew her hand back with a small wince, then attacked the weed with the fork. It came out whole, and she dumped it with no small pleasure into the basket with the rest of her day’s bounty.

  For a while, she was los
t in her own world, rain drummed out a beat on her head, her back and face dripped, soaked. She heard, as if from a distance, footsteps on the path, and as the thunder rumbled overhead a hand fell on her shoulder. She jumped and turned, forgetting Mike was there. He stepped back, and she knew what he was thinking. Crazy old barren lady, weeding in the rain. Well, fuck him, she thought. She’d never raise children, but she wouldn’t have Mike looking down on her, especially as she knew he’d been having an affair behind Sarah’s back with a girl from reception at the office. She could imagine his sordid hands on the young girl, pawing at her push-up bra and pulling down her knickers. No doubt her garden was finely trimmed, thank you very much ma’am for keeping your borders tidy.

  He was looking at her, saying something, but she couldn’t hear him over the crack and roar of the thunder and the wind and the rain. She just waved him away with the fork, and turned back to her weeding. She heard his footsteps vaguely disappearing, back toward the house, but she ignored him. He could do what he liked, she was sure. She had a border to finish, and she’d never liked him anyway, always looking at her with a boyish glint in his eye, probably thinking she’d relish the chance to get her claws into him, probably thinking she’d be a safe fuck, no chance of any embarrassing mishaps that Sarah would find out about, no chance of a baby to mess things up for him when his wife left him with his own ironing to do.

  Sam probably thought much the same thing when he was fucking his mistress. She wondered if all the presents were laced with guilt. Sometimes she imagined him pawing at her and thinking of her. Sometimes, driving her Mercedes to the shops to pick up something for dinner to make him when he eventually got home, usually late, she imagined she could smell her ripe young odour, fertile and lush, stinking up the car. When he came in her, did he think ‘I wish, I wish’ and wish upon a star, wish he was somewhere else, with a young girl on his arm, sharing his bed instead of the back seat of his car? Did he wish she was somewhere else?