the worktop and the floor.
When they come back into the sitting room there are two more of them, wearing black suits and black shoes sheathed in plastic foot-covers. They tape plastic bags over Robert’s hands and head, wrap his whole body in a plastic sheet, and squeeze him into a thick white plastic bag. It takes four of them to get him into the bag, and one of them seems to make a joke about it. They seal the zip with a numbered lock. They lift him on to a stretcher, awkwardly, and it takes six of them to carry him out to the waiting van.
The photographer stays behind and takes pictures of the room without him in it. The empty space on the floor, which seems enormous now. The marks and stains around where he lay. His hat, which must have slipped from his head when he fell.
The two men who set up the lights stand in the hallway, talking quietly, waiting for the photographer to finish. He nods at them as he leaves, and they turn off the lights, the older policeman shining his torch while they pack the equipment away. The hot bulbs glow faintly for a few moments, and they carry everything else out to the van while they wait for the last ebb of light to cool.
We stand together in the hallway, uncertainly. We can hear the two policemen talking outside, the crackle and mutter of their radios. We can hear footsteps moving around upstairs, and somebody laughing. We can hear, faintly, Robert and Yvonne in the bath, splashing each other, asking for the soap. But when we look, there’s no one there, and the tiles are still cracked, fallen into the empty bath, and the sink has still been pulled from the wall. The hooks on the back of the door have been ripped out. The door to the small bedroom has been kicked from its hinges and propped against the wall. The framed pictures have been taken down, the glass smashed on the floor and the photographs torn into small fluttering pieces, each brighter square of wallpaper cratered by a fist-sized hole. Wine bottles have been broken against the doorframes, bleeding long red stains down the walls. The lino tiles have been studded with cigarette burns, and half of them peeled up off the floor. People have come and gone, and come and stayed, and left their rubbish piled up in the hall. We wait, not looking at one another, not sure what to do next. One or two of us leave, perhaps to go with him. Time seems to pass. We can hear them in the bathroom still, the tap dripping into the water, the low static murmur of their voices.
Outside, it gets lighter, and darker, and as the sky begins to lighten again behind the curtains in Laura’s room her mother creeps in and sits on her bed. We watch as she brushes the hair from her sleeping daughter’s eyes. Laura wakes up, and frowns. Her mother puts a finger to her lips, reaching under the bed to pull out a bag she packed with clothes and money the night before, and while Laura gets dressed she gathers a few of her books and toys and stuffs those in as well. Laura crouches on the floor to pull on her shoes, and then the two of them slip from the room and out of the flat, closing the front door with an almost inaudible squeeze and click, and then the two of them are gone. The morning’s light begins to filter through the thin orange curtains, and the shallow impression of Laura’s body on her mattress slowly fades. The scent of her lingers in the hollow fibres of the rumpled pillow, and in the turned-back duvet, and in the vests and pants and t-shirts which spill in bitter fistfuls from her drawers. The book she was being read is left unfinished, broken-backed on the floor. Dust settles. And then the two of them are gone.
He wakes up. Robert, this is. He wakes up, and every day it seems as though they’ve only just left. He wakes with a jolt, as if at the sound of the softly closing door, and remembers that the two of them are gone.
The room is suddenly much darker. We sink to the floor. The view from the window is clouded by an unfamiliar condensation on the glass. The heat from the lights and the voices and the bodies of the men and women who have been in the room takes a few hours to fade. As it does so, and as the whole flat begins to cool, the condensation hardens into thin tracings of ice, and splinters of light from the dawn outside crack slowly into the room.
We get up, and we leave the flat. We’re not sure what else we can do. In the street, the men slide Robert’s body into a van with darkened windows, and we all climb in beside him. There isn’t enough room, but it seems like the right place to be. In the circumstances. They slam the doors closed. The air inside is hushed and still, the steel floor shining with cold. Two of the men stand outside, talking to the younger policeman and the photographer, and the man with the dark tangled hair. At the top of the steps, the woman with the checked dressing gown is standing with her arms folded, watching, the older policeman beside her. People have appeared on the walkway, and at windows on the upper floors. A group of children are standing on the pavement, pushing each other, shouting questions. The two men, and the younger policeman, climb into the front of the van, and there’s a rush of cold damp air before they close the doors. They start the engine, and the tyres slip and squeak as we drive away down the hill. We look back, and we see the garage roof behind the flat, where Danny jumped and slipped and ran off looking for someone to tell. And we see Danny
They carry his body through the city at dusk and take him away to the morgue.
And we see Danny, stumbling away from the garages at the back of the flats, tumbling down the hill like he’s about to fall, rubbing at his cheeks with the backs of his hands in great angry gestures which look almost like punches, wiping at the tears which haven’t yet fallen from a face still twisted with fear. Einstein beside him, snapping and whining and trying to keep up, held back as always by the weight of her broken
Had to find someone and tell them was all he could think. Had to find Laura and let her know, had to find Mike. But tell her what, him lying on the floor like that, one leg bent wrong under the other and one hand over his mouth like he could smell himself beginning to rot. Tell her what, he died peacefully, they took him in and did everything they could but in the end there weren’t nothing to be done. He didn’t suffer. Couldn’t tell her that. Didn’t know much about it but knew it weren’t nothing like that. He had all his friends around him when fuck
Through the darkened windows of the van we watch him, slipping and hurrying down the hill to the main road and the underpass and through the darkened windows we see the city passing us by, whole streets abandoned to the cold, faint shadows moving behind curtains backlit by a flickering pale blue. Christmas decorations dip and swing between telegraph poles and skeletal trees, hang from garage doors, trail from the lids of bins spilling over with crumpled paper and packaging foam. Coloured lights snap on and off in front-room windows, and around shop-front displays, and we follow him down to the bottom of the
Danny, were you the last one to see him?
Fuck should I know.
Was anyone there when you found the body?
Don’t know I didn’t hang around.
What did you do? Where did you go?
Fucking ran what do you think. What would you
He’d been away was what he’d tell the police. He decided. If they came looking for him, if they had a reason to come looking for him, which if he kept his mouth shut why would they. Unless some cunt. He’d been out of town. He’d gone to his brother’s house, for Christmas, he’d got the idea into his head that they could have a like a family thing for once. Danny and his brother Tony and Tony’s new wife and them two kids which weren’t even Tony’s. Weren’t much of a family. Weren’t much of an idea anyhow because Tony kicked him out on Boxing Day, like gave him a cold turkey sandwich and told him to fuck off but that was where he’d been and that was what he’d tell the police. If they showed up, if they took him in and asked him questions like
