This Book Is Full of Bodies Read online

  “And are you all right?”

  “I am fine.”

  “Okay. Glad to hear it. I guess I’ll have to drive myself.”

  She grabs her keys and puts her shoes on.

  Flora giggles at something on her phone and so I march up to Lisa and grab her and kiss her passionately with my eyes open and staring at Flora. Two can play at that game.

  Unfortunately, Flora is so engrossed in her menial screen she is unable to suffer the jealous effects I was intending.

  “Oh, well, I will look forward to seeing you later tonight,” Lisa says.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake. I didn’t mean to encourage her.

  She says goodbye and leaves and a minute later I hear the revving of a car engine growing faint in the distance.

  “So,” I say. “This Mark.”

  “Yeah?” she says, not looking up.

  “Put the phone down, Flora, there is a three-dimensional person talking to you.”

  “Uh huh. In a sec.”

  I stride up to her and grab her from behind and shove the phone out of her hand and enjoy her yelp as I grab her wrists with one hand and her tiny little breast in the other.

  “I said, I am talking to you.”

  She smiles like she is either enjoying upsetting me or gaining a sexual thrill from my actions, and I am yet to determine which one it is.

  “Get on your knees,” I tell her.

  She acquiesces my request and gets to her knees, looking up at me, purposefully opening her mouth but not approaching my crotch, knowing that this will drive me crazy. She laughs as she sees the outline of my penis unfurl beneath my corduroys.

  “So,” I repeat. “This Mark.”

  “What about him?”

  “Who is he?”

  “A friend.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “Could be.”

  “Does he–”

  She unzips me.

  She’s trying to distract me.

  “I said, does he–”

  She takes me in her mouth and I feel the warmth of her jaw surround me and there is nothing I could care about in this world right now, not even Mark, not even fucking Mark as she rubs her lips back and forth, flicking her tongue like I taught her. She goes faster and slower and harder and softer at all the right times, cupping my balls and delving the shaft down her outspread tongue and making me convulse and I am already close so close just about to cum as she is delivering me a bout of ecstasy that nothing could interrupt not even Lisa has driven her car to her book club with Carluccio in the back.

  My penis turns limp and my body stiffens.

  FUCK.

  I AM

  I am used.

  I am grateful.

  I am not a child.

  I am the wet dream of a pervert, the epitome of virtue, the dislike of those who know.

  I am not what you think I am.

  You think I want this?

  That I asked Gerald to fuck me?

  That I begged him to take away my innocence, that I pleaded with him to make me think this is all okay?

  Which it is, of course.

  All okay, I mean.

  Because I don’t know any better.

  I am too young.

  I was too young then; I am too young now, and I will forever be too young because of what he has done to me. I will never grow beyond sixteen years old, I will forever be left submissive in this state, always finding the world to be as it is now.

  I am not going to lie to you.

  And I am not going to stop him.

  But I am not going to pretend that it’s something I want, that it’s something I wish would continue.

  But what would you have me do?

  Perhaps you’d say something like I’d tell my mum, or I’d tell him to fuck off, or I would never let him treat me like that.

  You wouldn’t, you couldn’t dare, and you would let him do whatever.

  Because I am not you.

  But I could be. An ill stroke of fate, a dumb piece of luck, or just to be without the privilege you were so beautifully born into.

  I am going to say no.

  I am going to stop him.

  I am finally going to have the strength I have willed myself to have.

  Then again…

  I am wrong.

  I am never going to have the guts.

  I am never going to…

  To…

  To…

  You can picture me, can’t you? My head dropping as I write this, sinking, my eyes staring at a floor well-vacuumed, a house well built, a perfect home behind the white picket fence Gerald painted himself.

  Do you think I’m crying right now?

  Do you think I smile as I write this?

  Do you think my hand shakes?

  I am not going to be a victim of your sympathy.

  Do not pretend that you feel sorry for me. If I was a news item, you’d tut and move on. I’m another statistic you become immune to the more and more you hear about tragic cases such as mine.

  Go to hell with your pity.

  I don’t want your help.

  I am easily in control of this situation.

  I don’t need your intervention.

  I am going to do something about it, eventually.

  I am fierce. I am a warrior. I am a strong woman.

  But, most of all…

  I am lying.

  10

  I imagine that you may ask, should you ever have the chance to engage in conversation with me, why I chose to marry my wife.

  Although, if I am honest, it probably wouldn’t be the first question you’d ask me, considering I have experienced the delectable ordeal of taking a life. Having known what it is like to attain such a pleasure, I would hypothesise that you would want to know about that.

  That aside, it would be a pertinent question to ask me why I married Lisa.

  There was a spark when I met her, I suppose. I was briefly attracted to her in the way a child is briefly excited about a new puppy before they realise they have to walk it thrice a day and clean up its shite and watch it pee over the floor as they try to train it.

  In truth, I married her because it is what you are meant to do.

  It’s all part of the fancy dress, isn’t it?

  Society expects me to have a wife, so I acquired one.

  Not that I wish to do what society expects me to; rather, I do this to conform to what society has made you expect me to do, therefore allowing my sick mind—though it is only sick as you would refer to it when in company of others who determine anything they can’t quite understand as sick, therefore removing all the many, many layers there are to human nature in order to keep believing the image you wish to believe—where was I? Ah, yes; therefore allowing my brilliant mind to feel I was well hidden.

  Marriage is to me what changing colour is to a chameleon. They blend in, unnoticed.

  If you were to walk past me in the street, apart from to marvel at the superior quality of my suit compared to yours, you would not look twice. You would see me just as you do everyone else. Which is why, as you may or may not have noticed, I have failed to describe my own appearance in this fruitful memoir. Because you will attach whatever image you think a killer has to these words, whether or not I describe how immensely dull I look. Either way, I look like your friend, or your uncle, or your boss, or, probably, you yourself.

  (Though in saying yourself I am assuming your gender, something most liberals seem to find as abominable an action as Nazism. If you are a woman, then disregard that you yourself bit. Not because a woman can’t be a killer. Quite the contrary, you will find many a prison stocked up with murderesses. I simply point this out as I am a man, as you will have most likely assumed.)

  So, I sit here, awaiting the return of Lisa. I do not know where the book club is and it would not be a good idea for me to go out searching. I do need to go and acquire a new car, but this will now have to be done this afternoon. I simply have to know whether or not Li
sa happened to open her boot to place her bag into it or to see what the umphing noise is every time she drives over a hump. Would she confront me or just go straight to the police station or panic and have some unhelpful witness go do such things for her?

  Flora tries to felade me once again, insisting that she should finish what she started. After telling her I am otherwise preoccupied, this being one of the rare times my arousal toward her does not take, she threatens to go suck off Mark what’s-his-face instead.

  This makes me angry and I consider what I could do to Flora in response, but then I hear a car pull up on the driveway and my entire body tenses.

  “Oh, and by the way,” Flora says, the front door half open as she readies her quick escape that would not allow me the final word, “Mark has a much juicier cock than yours,” and she disappears into the street.

  I want to find this Mark and churn him into sausages and force Flora to eat it whilst making her beg me for forgiveness and tell me that he does not taste as nice as me and that his cock is not so great and Lisa has stepped through the door.

  She stands there. Frozen. Her arms folded. Looking dumbfounded at me.

  “I can’t believe you,” she says, stone faced and poised, unmoved.

  Shit.

  I immediately start my plan on what to do with Lisa. I will have to kill her immediately. Could I get that knife from the kitchen draw or maybe I could use something heavy from in here like the television; no that would be rubbish – damn flat-screens – maybe the vinyl player in the corner Lisa insists on having, as if something old fashioned makes her seem more hip, as if worse technology is a fashionable gimmick, and I realise I am distracted and I stand, ready to just do it with my hands, when a smile spreads across her face.

  “The air freshener,” she says.

  Huh?

  I feel my head tilt. I am ever so confused. Does she recognise what I am about to do? Is this to throw me off, some clever game she is playing?

  “The one you put in my car,” she prompts me.

  The one I put in–

  Ah, yes!

  The one I retrieved from the wreckage of my Mercedes before it was towed, the one I put in to disguise the smell of death, that one!

  “It just…” She looks like she’s about to cry, and Jesus Christ it’s a fucking air freshener and she scared the shit out of me. “I know it’s small, I know it isn’t really much, but such a small gesture, like just getting one and putting it in my car so I get in the next morning to find a lovely smell, it… It’s a small gesture that means a lot. It shows you really want to work on this marriage. Doesn’t it?”

  She’s in front of me before I can respond and her arms are wrapped around my neck like she’s strangling me, but it’s supposed to be affection. She is too small to hug me around my neck, and I wonder why she doesn’t just hug my chest instead, and her face turns to within inches of mine and her lips are on mine and that is why. That is why she has insisted on putting her arms around my neck. It’s so she can slide her sickly tongue into my mouth and flash it around like a dying eel. It revolts me. She’s attractive enough, I guess, she’s just not Flora, and she’s not a whore.

  She goes to take my jacket off and I step out of her embrace.

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” I say.

  “Why not?” she says, moving toward me, smiling like I am teasing her.

  “I have to go out and get a new car.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you can spare ten minutes…”

  “I really, honestly, cannot.”

  She freezes. Her face drops. She’s angry again, I can tell.

  “Are you serious?” she says.

  Why would I not be serious? I can’t find the punchline if this was a joke.

  “Unbelievable,” she says, and throws her hands in the air, turns as if to storm out but doesn’t. “I think you do something for me out of the goodness of your heart, Flora is out for the afternoon, and we have some time together, and you’d rather shop for a damn car than have sex with me. Do you even know how long it’s been?”

  FYI, dear reader, I assume she meant how long since we last had sex, even though she did not clearly stipulate this.

  “Three and a half months. Three and a half months, Gerald! I mean, couples don’t go that long even when they are seventy years old.”

  I sigh. I’d really like to get to that car shop.

  I edge toward her.

  Her face seems to change.

  She gets excited. She thinks I’m changing my mind. She lifts her arms as she goes to caress me.

  I take the keys from her hand.

  Her face turns to fury.

  I leave before the shouting starts.

  11

  I acquire myself a new Mercedes. The same model as my old one, except newer, and better. This one has enhanced Bluetooth capabilities, an inbuilt SatNav and cruise control. It makes me wonder why I kept my old one for so long, why I was so hesitant to replace it – maybe it was from some place of sentimentality or fondness, similar to how your supposedly regular members of society might feel toward a sibling or a child or a pet. That car was my pet, and I had to let it go, and now I have a new pet, one that can do so much more.

  I spend the rest of Saturday just driving it, pulling up at traffic lights and revving past whatever unfortunate individual is in the inside lane. They can never keep up. Occasionally I roll alongside a BMW, German trash for people who can’t drive if you ask me. I’ve always wondered what BMW stands for, only to conclude from most of the driving I see that it must be an acronym for Bellend Mong Wanker.

  Before you point it out, I am fully aware that Mercedes is also a German model, but Mercedes at least spent the time developing their automobiles in its Godforsaken country, whilst BMW spent most of their time developing aircraft – or so their Wikipedia pages would assert.

  Anyway, it’s not so much the car but the people who drive it. Mercedes is for a classy individual. BMWs are for those who suddenly have a little money to buy a car so they buy the shittest expensive car they can afford. They buy with their eyes, not their feel – and a Mercedes feels better; it purrs for its owner, unlike a BMW that just swerves and cuts others up.

  I proceed to spend most of my Sunday driving around in this car. When it comes time to refill the gas tank, I do so with a sense of pride, looking around at the other owners to ensure they have at least afforded themselves a wayward glance to admire or envy the car I pour gasoline into.

  One young man with a flat cap and tattoos poking out from beneath his vest steps out of a Nissan Almera – a Nissan Almera! I didn’t even know they still made those. Or, perhaps they don’t, and his car is just exceptionally old. Either way I allow myself a silent chuckle at the irony displayed by this stereotype. Society, of course, would expect a heavily tattooed, rough-looking youngster to be driving a car with a loud engine and an invisible sign that says I have a tiny penis – the perfect example of a BMW driver, for example.

  He looks at me as he returns to his vehicle and I must be staring because he glares at me and mutters something barely decipherable that I just make out as, “What you looking at?”

  I chuckle at his impunity, thinking about the image he so poorly feigns. He tries to look tough with his vest and cap and tattoos and attempts at intimidating threats. I feel like showing him what’s in my wife’s car boot and seeing how he feels then.

  The thought suddenly reminds me – shit! Lisa’s car boot! Carluccio is still in there, and he’s bound to start smelling soon.

  Just as the thought arrives and I return to my car I see my phone screen light up with Lisa’s name. I needn’t break any laws by talking with my phone to my ear as my car has Bluetooth, allowing me to patch her through to the speaker of the car, and her voice echoes all around me in some kind of high-technological torture.

  “Gerald, are you there?” she snaps, and I think she’s annoyed. I have come to recognise this tone, and it normally comes with folded arms, weight on one leg, and a tappin
g foot. I read a book about body language by a man who claimed to be an FBI profiler, and these were all symptoms he claimed pointed to annoyance.

  “I am here,” I confirm, enjoying how much this response will wind her up more.

  “Gerald, I have barely seen you this weekend, where are you?”

  “I am at the petrol station. And now I am leaving. You are talking to me on Bluetooth, how marvellous is that?”

  “Great.” She doesn’t mean it. “Are you planning on coming home at any point?”

  Urgh. Home. With that repugnant wife and daughter that is so out of fashion now I have my new car.

  “Eventually.”

  “Eventually? What the hell does that mean, eventually?”

  “Eventually. It is an adverb, one that means at some point.”

  “I know what the fucking word means, Gerald, I want to know what you mean by it?”

  I am temporarily flummoxed as I try to understand what exactly she is inquiring. I meant exactly what the word meant, and I don’t quite comprehend how I would mean anything else.

  “Well,” she says, interrupting the silent contemplation. “Just tell me if you are actually coming home today.”

  I sigh. I suppose I should come home at some point, if only to keep up the pretence of this sham marriage.

  Oh, and I do need to sort out that car boot.

  “I will be home this evening,” I say.

  “Right, well I am popping out at six to get petrol for tomorrow, as I have–”

  “Wait!” I interrupt, immediately halting her.

  A genius idea reaches me that this is, as one may put it, a way to kill two birds with one stone (although why you would deny yourself the joy of bashing each bird in separately with its own unique stone I do not know.) I can offer to get the petrol for her, which would also allow me to dispose of the body whilst making it seem like I am doing her a favour, therefore erasing this evident stupor she has worked herself into.

  “I will come home now,” I announce. “And I will get your petrol for you.”

  “I need milk as well.”

  “I will acquire you some milk.” Maybe I should get something she hasn’t asked for – that’s supposed to make people like you. “And some wine.”