Mice

17

And that’s what we did. We buried him in the garden.

‘Surreal’ is the only word to describe the hour that followed. It was as though Mum and I had stepped into a bizarre hall-of-mirrors world where familiar reality was warped into absurd and grotesque shapes. I knew that it was all really happening, but at the same time I couldn’t believe that it was all really happening.

Mum and I pulling on our wellington boots so that we wouldn’t have to wade into that sticky pool in our bare feet when we seized the burglar’s legs and pulled him out from under the table.

The two of us debating whether to bury him in the vegetable patch or the oval rose bed as rationally, as calmly, as if we’d been discussing which wallpaper to pick for my bedroom (we finally chose the oval rose bed, as the veggie patch was too far to drag him and too close to the road).

The way the burglar’s body resisted our first tug, as though he’d become stuck in that congealing gravy.

Mum and I dragging a corpse (a corpse! A dead human being!) through the dew-wet grass while the birds twittered hysterically in the trees around us, and the day, a beautiful warm spring day, dawned.

The burglar’s head bumping down the concrete steps that led to the front garden and the oval rose bed (I winced at each bump and then told myself: he can’t feel anything — he’s dead — and I realized that death was still too enormous for me to grasp, that I still couldn’t rid myself of the idea that he must feel something).

Mum lurching backwards when his trainer came off in her hand and taking a pratfall straight out of a homevideo bloopers show.

The two of us, staggering around the garden, helpless with laughter, while the corpse lay face-down on the grass, its right arm outstretched before it like a resolute swimmer.

Mum and I walking to the shed to get the shovels — not to plant vegetables this time, but to plant a corpse, to plant a skinny, pallid twenty-year-old man in the chalky soil of our front garden.

Returning with our tools to find a large ginger cat we’d never seen before and have never seen since, licking the blood from the tips of the corpse’s fingers (it slunk away reluctantly at our approach and disappeared through an impossibly small hole in the hedge).

Looking up from our digging to see a farmer, perched high atop a ludicrous Heath Robinson piece of farm machinery, come roaring down the narrow lane and right past the house not more than a hundred and fifty metres from where we stood; watching him glance quickly in our direction and salute us with a stiff straight arm which he kept aloft until he’d passed out of sight.

We waved dazedly back at him, two women in bloodstained nightclothes burying a body in our front garden at half-past six in the morning.

There was just enough room to fit the corpse in the rose bed without having to uproot any of the rose bushes. The top layer of soil was wet after the night’s rain and our sharp spades cut through it easily. It was sticky and clung to the blades and we had to use our boots time and again to scrape them clean. The deeper we dug, however, the more difficult it became. Two feet down, the soil seemed unaffected by the rain and as hard as rock.

I started to sweat profusely. I felt dizzy and lightheaded and had to take off my heavy dressing gown before I could carry on. We were both too weak, too exhausted from lack of sleep, to make much of an impression against this stubborn stratum, and as we hacked away fruitlessly at the soil, the day was growing lighter every second. I began to feel horribly exposed and visible, even though there was no one around to see us — the farmer had long gone, the lane was deserted, and the surrounding fields were as still and silent as a photograph. I found myself remembering one of my religious education teacher’s favourite sayings: The eye of God sees all.

At three feet deep, Mum stopped, red-faced and breathing heavily from the exertion.

‘It’s not deep enough, Mum,’ I said. ‘Animals might be able to dig him up.’

‘It’ll have to do, Shelley. We’ve just got to hide him. We’ve got the house to clean up yet.’

We dragged the body to the very lip of the narrow trench, and then pushed him in using our feet and our spades, not wanting to touch something so disgusting with our hands. To my horror, he came to rest on his back, and I found myself staring at that weaselly face yet again. The same face, yet different, subtly changed by death.

The eyes were half-open, but they were glassy, unfocused. His eyebrows, completely relaxed now, had dropped low on his forehead, forming a dark Neanderthal ridge. His jaw must have been dislocated by Mum’s blow, because the bottom half of his face was twisted sharply away from the rest. The fracture had forced his mouth open and his lower teeth now protruded slightly above his top lip, giving him a fierce, animal look like a boxer dog. His left arm lay straight by his side, the hand on his thigh as if strumming a guitar, while his right arm, stiffened into the position in which he’d died, was extended high above his head like a keen student who knows the answer to a difficult question.

And maybe he does know the answer to a difficult question, I thought, the most difficult question of all — what happens to us when we die?

The shallow pit we’d dug wasn’t long enough to fit the burglar’s straightened right arm. The forearm and hand remained protruding out of the mud, a grotesque new five-petalled flower in the garden. Rather than dig any more, Mum stepped gingerly down into the hole and seized the corpse’s arm and tried to bend it down towards the top of his head. Rigor mortis had already started to set in, and the arm kept slipping from her grip and straightening itself as though the burglar was deliberately resisting her — even in death.

Mum was horribly pale when she stepped up out of the hole.

We shovelled the soil back on top of him. I buried his feet (one foot in its trainer, the other in a ragged green sock), his legs, his left hand, his waist, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw any dirt over his head. When I saw Mum dump a shovelful of soil onto his face, I winced (mud was going in his eyes — mud was going in his mouth!) and then kicked myself for being such a baby.

He can’t feel anything — he’s dead!

When we’d finished, the youth had completely disappeared from the face of the earth. There was Honeysuckle Cottage, there was the neat front garden, there was the oval rose bed, there were the rose bushes already showing here and there a precocious pink bud. But the corpse had vanished without trace.

We leaned on our spades, drunk with fatigue, taking a moment before we started on the next horrendous task — cleaning up the blood in the kitchen.

It was then that I heard the noise. Soft, muffled, a series of musical notes like a bird or maybe even an insect. It stopped and then a few seconds later it started again, the same set of musical notes. Mum and I looked at each other, confused. The noise stopped. It started again. I looked around at the bushes and flowerbeds to see what it could be, and then it dawned on me. I knew that tune. I’d heard it many times before, in the street, in cafes, in restaurants, on trains. .

It was the ringing of a mobile phone. And it was coming from the oval rose bed.