the tenancy agreement: chapter 8

2005

November

They were sat on chairs around the body, flecks and spatters of blood like ink on their hands and arms and clothes, all over the carpet, already drying in, their own sweat evaporating on their skin. The cool of it felt intrusive in the heat of the room, left them racked with all the emptiness of a one night stand, eyes turned upwards to the secular ceiling, their silent drunk prayers screamed unheard to no one. Someone had pulled a rug over the body and left a human shaped mound piled in the centre of the room. Like last days prophesy there were pools of blood fingers deep in the creases of the rug. Tom shook his head, his movements quick and spasmodic.

“Fuck, we need to get that thing out of here,” he said. He inhaled hard through his nostrils. “I can smell it.”

“It doesn’t smell yet,” said Greg, cold behind the eyes. “It hasn’t been dead long enough.”

“It does, and I can smell it.” Voice pitched with hysteria. “And then the neighbours will smell it. Fuck. I can smell it. We need to get it out of here now.”

“Will you calm down?” said Jonathan.

“He’s right,” said Greg. “We need to do this properly.”

They had been friends for what seemed like forever.

Tom looked at the blood on his hands and rubbed it onto the thighs of his jeans. It left red stained smears on his fingers like he had been chopping beetroot or pomegranate. An indelible reminder, a verbose witness, a scarlet letter.

“Properly?” said Conor. “What do any of us know about properly? I mean properly dealing with a dead body?”

Tom stood up, scratching the side of his head.

“We need to get the fucking thing out of here, that’s what we need to do,” he said.

“Well perhaps if you hadn’t killed him he wouldn’t be in here in the first place,” said Ezra, his only white shirt ruined. They used to drive parents’ cars all night and scream on the streets. Once Joe got over the counter ether from a French pharmacy and they took it all night and woke up on the floor smelling of hospitals. They must have been different people. Committing the pubic hair of every girl they ever fucked to memory as though it were the exact information that would save them.

“Me?” said Tom. “It was Joe that killed him.” Joe’s eyes were red rimmed but the tears – instinctive tears – were gone, his shirt unbuttoned to halfway down his abdomen. He still felt the coke in his heartbeat, his dry mouth, and he spurned culpability. He felt himself majestic. Far outside the wrongs of the world he happened without it. There was a lifetime between them. “Why the fuck did you kill him Joe?”

“I seem to remember you kicking him in the face,” said Joe.

“But you finished him.” All good narratives need an antagonist. “He was still alive.”

“Someone had to finish him” – Joe’s mouth moved as though behind strobe lights – “the way you fucked it up.”

“Please shut up and get it out of here.” Tom was shouting. Guilt hits everybody different. So does the need for self-preservation.

“Both of you need to shut up,” said Jonathan. “We all did this, we did it together. You too Ezra. It’s a mess we all need to take responsibility for.”

Ezra sneered as he smoked. The room was quiet. They could hear the blood.

“I can smell it,” said Tom eventually.

“Shut up,” said Ezra.

“We’ve got to get him out.”

“Where to exactly?” said Greg. He had stood up too, all the better to point. “The shops? The park? Where? Where the fuck are we supposed to take it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then shut up until you’ve got a useful suggestion. Jonathan. What do you think?”

“Honestly? I don’t know.”

“Oh God,” said Ezra, groaning with impatience.

“Oh God nothing,” said Greg. “We’re not just dumping a piece of rubbish. None of us know what to do here.”

“Maybe we should call the police?” said Conor.

The terrible stillness of the body was the worst thing. Nothing was ever that still. It was oppressive like a supercell. It left the room taut with unspoken expectation. Tom thought back to the party. Remembered the sand dry cunt of the friend he couldn’t get hard enough to fuck. Remembered the squat block of dark hair that sang with promise and pointed like an arrow like a command, pointed down to large fleshy labia like strips of meat. His teeth had chattered from pills and he dropped cigarette ash into his chest hair. He got her to jerk off while he watched. The sun coming up through the curtains that didn’t fit across the windows lit her discomfort like a beacon. They lay down next to each other but inches apart. Sexual failure on flannel sheets. Now there was blood on the floor. Now there was a body under the rug. Why was it so still? Death the logistical nightmare.

“And say what?” said Greg. “’Sorry officer – got a bit carried away at a house party and smashed our landlords head in. No harm done.’ That’s bullshit. This” – he pointed at the rug, at the typewriter – “is way past the police.”

“The police’ll have us,” said Tom. He spoke it in a whisper, in visions of pubis, acutely aware of the inappropriateness of his own reminiscences.

“This has got to stay between us,” said Jonathan.

“You know I can’t condone lies. Morally speaking.” Ezra had studied ethics at school, and was doing it again at university. Thought it gave him a real kind of moral superiority, despite having had at least one adulterous tryst that he didn’t like to talk about. He fixated on honesty because he thought his girlfriend was cheating on him. They all looked at him, disbelief wrung on their faces like smallpox. “Unless they benefit me, of course,” he said, smirking.

“Right,” said Greg. “So now what?”

“Could just stick it in the basement,” said Joe, matter-of-factly. He was picking at his long fingernails.

“Ha,” said Ezra, pronouncing it as a word and not a sound. He was that kind of a person. “That is the most stupid, absurd thing I have ever heard you say. Even out of the countless stupid and absurd things you’ve said in the past.”

But it was an idea. It had that much going for it.