the tenancy agreement: chapter 9

2005

November

The only light in the stairwell came from the kitchen. The basement had one bare bulb hanging from a short flex, but it was behind the door at the bottom of the stairs. They hadn’t thought to prop it open. All six of them were sagging down the stairs like dumped laundry, dragging the body behind them, wrapped up on itself in the middle of the rug, a coarse woven shroud found dumped on the street. Ezra had pulled it back to the house, said he felt an affinity with it, and there it was wrapped around the lifeless body of a former cripple. They kept dropping their corners and it fell with dead thuds. Dead like pig hide, scrap parts, felled tree, demolished property. When a pig’s stunned with a captive bolt pistol it catastrophically damages the cerebrum but leaves the brain stem intact, then they slit its throat. Heart keeps on pumping the blood out. The obedience of meticulously domesticated biological processes! Aiding and abetting your own exsanguination! On the dark stairs the body-filled carpet roll fell with the kind of abandon only the deceased can muster. Their shoulders were crunching into the wood panelled walls that lined the stairwell. Then a knock at the front door. Rang through them all like bullets, three gunshots, a noise deafening in the void left by absent conversation. Thunderous knocking – the doorbell long broken – even louder than their breathing. It was hard heavy work. It was a knock alright.

“Fuck,” said Greg. He let the head end drop to his feet and listened. They all dropped it, the rolled rug almost as long as the stairs were tall, held it in place.

“Who’s that?” said Tom. The game’s up. Said as much in his eyeballs.

Greg put his finger over his lips. Three more gunshot knocks, six in total. One for each of them. Them murderers.

“Maybe they’ll go away,” said Tom, a sharp whisper.

“Shhh!” said Greg and Ezra together, craning their heads to listen.

The front door opened loudly. They were coming in. The living room. The blood. They could hear the door open. Rattling against its own frame.

“Hello?” It was a jovial male voice. “Anyone home?”

“Shit,” said Greg. “I think it’s the guy from next door.”

He ran up the rug and into the hallway. Couldn’t let the nosy bastard see the living room. He remembered to pull on a clean t-shirt on the way. The guy was standing just inside the front door, a friendly-looking fat face and balding, thickset in torso and grinning enthusiastically. He was wearing supermarket jeans and a loose grey t-shirt, a number cheaply screen-printed on its front, the name of an American state. Massachusetts or California or Michigan. All an allusion to the nameless sport he never played, never even thought about. The screen-print was cracking but it was a deliberate design method. Supposed to give it a sanitized retro trend-type. There was a caption too, printed in italics in big inverted commas. “Playing the hardest ball since ’72!” or something. It was the Americanization of his own memories channelled through supermarket fashion, his own nostalgia replaced by the recurring themes of Beach Boys records and cinematic cliché. It was an outfit of staggering blandness, steeped in reassurance. His grin doubled in width when he saw Greg coming towards him. He had sweat on his forehead.

“Can I help?” said Greg.

“Hello there,” said the neighbour, his voice like he worked in insurance sales and was talking on the telephone. “I’m Tony.” He extended his hand and Greg shook it limply. The blood on his hand was long dry. He had washed some of it off but he could still see bits, patches like a birthmark that he needed to scrub. He clasped his hands behind his back. “You boys okay around here?” Tony continued. “We thought we heard some... disturbances?” He rose it into a question. Neighbourhood diplomacy at its finest. South East London: a shining example to the world.

“Disturbances?” Greg looked about the hall, as if – even when looking, really looking, you could see him looking – he couldn’t for single second conceive of what these alleged disturbances might have been. This was a house without disturbance. That much was obvious from Greg, looking. Look at him looking for disturbances. Hasn’t found shit. Nothing. Not a peek. Or maybe... that’s it. He clicked his fingers. Greg did. A eureka moment. Was it overblown? Fuck it, he’d just killed a cripple. “Disturbances, right, of course,” he said, acting nonchalant. “We were decorating. Painting, actually. The mantelpiece.”

“Decorating? At” – he looked at his digital wristwatch – “three o’clock on a Sunday morning?”

“Strike while the iron’s hot,” said Greg through a vacuum-packed smile. “That’s kind of our house motto.” Bullshit. It said never regret revelry above the front door. Painted blue.

“Indeed,” said Tony, warmed against his better judgement to his own sizeable innards by enterprising, can-do attitudes. He rubbed his chin, eyes locked on Greg’s, smiling with an awkward constancy. He peered over Greg’s shoulder, as if he was trying to get past him, to confirm or deny the decorating story, to see for himself the masterwork of the newly painted mantelpiece. He didn’t buy it. Don’t be fooled by the smile. Knows what he heard and it wasn’t painting. What was it? Assault? Rape? Violence? Greg blocked his path as politely as possible. There was a loud thud from the basement. Tony looked right into Greg’s face, eyebrows cocked like hairy pistols. “What was that?” he said.

“What was what?” said Greg. He swallowed drily after the sentence. Thirsty work this unplanned murder.

“That thud. Sounded like it was coming from the basement.” He knew the layout of the house, of course he did. All the houses in the terrace were the same, or at least mirror images of the one next door.

“The basement? Oh right. That was just Joe. He’s doing some work down there.”

“I see. Just Joe. Doing a bit of work.”

“Exactly,” said Greg, same tight smile.

“Well, as long as it’s not another swimming pool.”

“Not this time.” Greg’s knees felt weak. His heart hurt with relief.

“Okay son.” They shook hands again, for what felt like too long. “You students seem to keep pretty strange hours.”

“Yeah. We’re really sorry if we disturbed you. Just lost track of time again, I guess.”

“That’s okay. Just try to keep it down in future, okay? Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” said Greg. He waved. Did that look normal? Waving to someone standing right next to you at three in the morning? He couldn’t tell. Tony walked to the front door but turned back to look at Greg, who was standing rooted to the same spot, grinning wearily, like he couldn’t hold his cheeks up. Tony walked back to him, shuffling with distraction.

“You know it sounds a bit odd but the wife swears blind that she heard screaming, of all the mad things. Coming from here.” He tapped his hand on the cold wall. “That’s why I came over, really. The wife. Real screaming, she said. Horrible screaming.” They looked at each other. Greg could feel a drop of sweat in his eyebrow. He waited for it to fall, to hit his eye, waited for the sting. He was fucked. He felt fucked. There wasn’t a thing he could say. “There wasn’t any screaming, was there?” Again he was trying to peer behind Greg, over his shoulder, into the house. The living room. Greg shook his head, paragon of arch sincerity.

“No, no I don’t... wait a minute,” he said, just then remembering. Of course! How obvious! “You said screaming?” Tony’s turn to nod. “Of course. That’ll be Joe again. He tends to scream while he decorates.” As an aside: “It’s just his thing.” Like he’s talking about a medical condition, a recognisable and diagnosed mania. “We’ve tried telling him but...”

“Right, right,” said Tony. “Old habits and all that. Just try to” – he tapped an index finger on the face of his wristwatch.

“Of course. We’ll keep a better eye on the time. And like I say, we’re really sorry to have disturbed you. Again.”

“No problem.”

He walked back to the front door, his back turned to Greg, who stayed right where he was. He deliberated for a second. His fingers were on the door handle, Greg was willing him out, away, but he strolled the same few paces back into the house, hands in his jeans pockets.

“You know Lucas is a good friend of ours,” he said. Greg felt pale, felt the blood drain out of his face.

“He’s a good man,” said Greg quietly, clutching onto the present tense.

“He is. One of the best. And he likes us to keep a bit of an eye on the place. When we can.”

“It’s the smart thing to do.”

Tony inspected Greg, looked him up and down like produce at a market, like a whore in a window. He nodded, apparently satisfied.

“Good stuff,” he said. “Goodnight then.”

Greg waved again. Didn’t have the energy to speak. Tony fucked off, closed the door firmly behind him with a kind of half wave. Shit. Shithead. Fuckbrain. Fountaincock. Greg gasped like he’d been underwater and rushed back to the basement.

They were all hunched in stasis on the stairway, clutching loosely at odd bits of the rug-rolled corpse, which had slipped further down the stairs so the head pressed into the door at the bottom with all the indignity of discarded soft furnishings. They belched out sighs of collective relief at Greg’s silhouette, blocking what little light there was from their eyes and hands.

“He’s gone,” said Greg.

“What did he want?” said Jonathan.

“Wanted to know what the noise was.” Greg squinted at the rug. “What was that fucking banging. Sounded like a dead body being dropped.”

“It was,” said Conor. His eyes were huge and blue and simple and his lips deep red against his pale Irish heritage, like beetroot sliced onto a white dinner plate, like thick crayon lines on a blank page. You couldn’t tell in the dark. “I lost my grip.”

“That’s great,” said Greg. “We need to be a lot more fucking careful.”

“Look can we just get him down here?” said Joe. He was drained by narcotics.

Greg walked down a few steps and picked up the foot end of the heavy roll. The others tried to get their arms around it, like it was a blanket they were carrying under their arms to picnic.

“We have to pull it up first to get the door open,” said Greg.

They pulled at it. Ezra dropped his section.

“Fuck,” he said, shouting. “This is absurd.”

“Have you got a better idea?” said Tom.

Ezra sneered and grabbed the rug again. He supported it on his knee while he got a better hold on it and they pulled it up a couple of steps. Joe’s hand got crushed against the wall and he punched the rug with his free hand, its lifelessness making for effective stress relief. Ezra pulled the door open and turned on the light, and they all squinted troglodyte eyes at the illuminated honesty of the exposed sixty watts. It picked out blood stains in electric truth. Ruined Levis. That’ll never wash out. It made a confessional of the stuffy basement. No hiding from that light. Oh watered down red on once white vests now tobacco yellow! The streaks may be pink but their organic – or rather to say, HUMAN – origin remained obvious, more so in the bulb glare. Oh sweat rivulets pooled in chest hair! Squelch beneath thumbs and make your brine ponds in fluffy umbilici! Oh scuffed knuckles, skin torn through like a threadbare trouser set! Oh beards, dashed in chaotic action with all the bloody remnants of surprise murder! In the light of the basement the clarity of the twenty-first century was amplifying the grotesque to obscene definition. It smelt like dust burning on the bulb. Microscopic particles incinerated by the unbearable heat of revelation. Their veins looked an incredible blue. Their imperfections grew exponentially.

“Bastard,” said Greg, dropping his end of the rug and rubbing his hands down the front of his jeans. He was talking about the body.

“Heavy for a cripple,” said Joe.

“It’s all the sitting down,” said Tom. “Everything he eats just congregates in his guts like lead shit, poor bastard.”

“Let’s get him in there,” said Greg, pointing to the doorway, the tunnel behind it. It was only about five and a half feet from floor to ceiling but went back about twenty, its walls of bare red brick, the ancient plaster just pouring out from between them like dry sand, and it was stuffed with bits of broken furniture and weird clothes and suitcases. They dragged the body into the tunnel and walked over the top of it to get back out. Cunt was dead anyway.

“It’s still going to smell,” said Jonathan.

“We’ll have to get a tarp or something,” said Greg. He was nodding. Like he was reassuring himself. His tendency toward practical solutions depended on the right tools for the job. “I need some wood glue anyway. This’ll take care of it in the short-term.”

“We’ll have to bury it,” said Tom.

“We can use the swimming pool,” said Joe. Irony swamped by his own misplaced pride. For Joe the square dirt hole was a swimming pool. A swimming pool more than the sum of its shit parts. The swimming pool was a grave. He had dug it weeks ago. Was it cocaine prophecy, self-fulfilled, body and all? Muddy grave leads to body, wrapped in a rug and dumped in a basement. Needs it like a gun needs to shoot. To be purposeful. To be itself. It couldn’t be different to how it was. Nothing could. Balls in fate’s mouth. It’s fucking Joe again. Big Joe.

“This is a big mistake,” said Ezra.

“Killing him was the mistake,” said Conor. “Sorting the mess out is the only thing we can do.”

They each lit cigarettes. The nicotine made their legs feel weak. The air felt thin, like the dead body had pulled all the life out of it, leaving a vacuum where it used to be. They waited for their eyes to bulge out of their sockets. For their hearts to burst like meat balloons. For their heads to explode from the weight of their own existence. Nothing happened.

“Let’s get upstairs,” said Tom. “I hate this fucking basement.”

Greg turned the light out and closed the door leaving the body behind it and they filed up the stairs one by one. The coolness of the house felt soothing on their skin like human hands. Greg put the kettle on. They stood in the kitchen, didn’t speak, stared out into the dark garden, the dead streets beyond. Even the traffic was quiet. Over the cheap plastic kettle that struggled to boil they heard another knock. Two uncertain raps. Pause. Three more. Must have seen the lights still on. Jesus, wake up the whole fucking –

“Christ, what now?” Ezra switched the kettle off, as if it were only the rushing sound of its working element that alerted anyone to their house-wide wakefulness. It took seconds to shut up. Wearily assured of its own failure. More knocking. Not the fucking neighbour again.

“Fuck,” said Greg.

He left the kitchen and walked to the front door. Closed the living room door shut on his way. No more fuck ups. He yanked it open. Tanya. Lucas and Tanya. Sister. Shitlivers. He recoiled slightly away from her. Momentary loss of composure. Took a look at her tits. Imagined his cock between them. It was happening quickly in imperceptible perversion. Harmless enough. Though perhaps imagining doing it – intercourse – with your victim’s big sister edges towards classic psychopathy or psychosexual crises or characteristic paraphilic depravity. They looked big under her shirt. She wasn’t that old. He knew it wasn’t the time but the stress made his loins move. In ripples like a dying fish left on a riverbank. Don’t think about that now. Think about this now. Dead landlord. Dead brother. Dead fucked. Her thighs were thick but her calves were tiny, like arms. Older women were the more receptive. Who told him that? His dad? Can’t have been. She would beg him to do it and he would and Lucas would be dead downstairs. They would feel the secrecy in their congress and her clitoris would swell unconsciously with her dead brother’s memory. He wanted it to feel like he shouldn’t be doing it. It did feel like that. It wasn’t the time. He thought of the basement.

“Tanya,” he said, loud enough for them to hear in the kitchen. Ezra’s cigarette dropped out of his mouth. They all felt grateful for the kettle’s silence. “Hi.” He was leaning on the open front door like a bad actor playing nonchalant. His body stopped Tanya from coming inside.

“Hi Greg.” She spoke enthusiastically. “I’m sorry to come round so late.”

“That’s okay, anytime is fine. Although it is pretty late and...”

“I just wondered if you guys had seen Lucas.”

Greg’s tight face dropped, hung slack like a slipper, like shabby old house clothes. He couldn’t hold onto the smile. He swallowed, painfully aware of the concrete scraping of his own laryngeal prominence.

“Lucas?” he said. Voice like a child beaten up.

“Lucas.”

“No,” he said. “I mean. No. Why would we have seen Lucas? It’s late.”

“It’s just he mentioned that he had to come over here to see you guys,” she said. She put her hands, more just her fingers, in her jean pockets. Kind of rocked on her heels. “He was supposed to be coming to ours afterwards. That was about seven hours ago. He isn’t answering his phone and we haven’t heard a thing from him and to be honest Greg I’m a bit concerned. Worried.” She tried to peer over Greg’s shoulder. It was a very subtle motion. He adjusted his position a fraction, like it was something natural and not a defensive response to stimuli. “So have you seen him?”

“Have I?” said Greg slowly. Contemplative. Excessively so. Makes him look guilty.

“It’s straightforward Greg. Has he been here?”

“Right. No. Definitely no.”

“No?”

“No. Final answer.” Tried to smile as he said it but his fragile joke imploded hard, swallowing its own cheap pop culture reference like a mouthful of dogshit, left pointlessly hollow in Tanya’s partly raised eyebrows.

“Okay,” she said. They looked at each other for seconds. Ten, fifteen. He kept his eyes off her chest. She leant quickly into him, so quick it was like violence out of the stillness, and she pulled him towards her by the t-shirt. Her eyes were manic, darted about like a blackbird’s. Her face was centimetres from his. She could smell the spoilt milk twang of his sweaty neck. He kept his eyes straight ahead but out of the corner of one he saw her tongue come out, extended past her teeth and lips. Thick wet muscle of tongue, flexible and strong. It came out – as if sentient – and licked the length of his cheek. An animal ritual. A papillae declaration of devastating significance. There was a promise in that tongued exchange. There was cognisance, comprehension. It was a statement. She knew. He felt hot breath from her nostrils blow against his spittle cheek. She licked him again, the flat width of her giant tongue pressed down against him. It hadn’t felt like this in fantasy, where she begged him to fuck her. This felt bad wrong, something he actually shouldn’t be doing and not just something that felt like he shouldn’t be doing it. He felt like food weighed up under the convincing musculature of her masticatory organ. He was too surprised to move. She had a hand on each of his shoulders and moved her mouth to his ear. “You’re dead.” She said it quietly. Spoke it like an elegy. Short and painful. An observation rather than a threat. Greg pushed her away from him but gently.

“What?” he said. He sounded afraid, his face lopsided with confusion.

“I said okay,” she said. All warm smile and sincere blinking. Her eyelids moved very slowly. Greg thought of Morse code. “It’s fine. I’m sure he’ll turn up. You know what Lucas is like.” She rolled her eyes like they were sharing an intimate joke. The life of Lucas. Lucas and his ways. A real fucking character. If eyes talk then hers said they shared it, her and Greg. Her eyes screamed the conversation, barked it from rooftops: they both had their Lucas secrets. He felt it on her tongue over his bald left cheek, over its average contours. Felt the knowledge. Poured out of him like taste. She could taste it on him. “Thanks Greg, I mean that.” Smile. Smile. “Have a good night.” She looked at her wristwatch. “Or a good day I suppose. I’ll see you around.”

She left. Greg put a hand to his cheek, still damp. He rubbed it dry. He felt insane. He felt like Dustin Hoffman, only this wasn’t a seduction. He went back to the kitchen. They were standing in a circle around a broken pint glass in the middle of the laminate floor. Greg looked at the pint glass and sighed.

“Shit,” he said.

“What was that?” said Ezra, hissed like a pantomime.

“It was nothing.”

“Was that Tanya?” said Jonathan.

“Yeah, but it was nothing,” said Greg.

“Nothing?” said Ezra. “How can that be nothing?”

“What did she want?” said Tom.

“She wondered if we’d seen Lucas.”

They all looked at each other. Colour-drained haggard faces aged decades in five hours. Joe was rubbing his veined eyes with the palms of both hands. They slurped like wet mud. He rubbed until he saw flashing lights.

“She knows,” said Conor.

“She doesn’t know. How could she know?” Ezra’s sentences had all become scathing accusations.

“You heard her. She knew he was supposed to be coming here.”

“But why would she suspect murder?”

“Maybe he’s that kind of man,” said Joe. Eyes closed.

“Shut up,” said Ezra.

“How did she look?” said Jonathan.

“What does that mean?” said Greg.

“Suspicious? Angry?”

“She looked fine. As far as she’s concerned it’s fine.”

Greg felt limp in their gaze. He could still feel her tongue run up his cheek. Felt it on his buccal nerve like an orgasm. Imagined his thumb in her anus. He could still hear her say it: you’re dead.

“It doesn’t look fine,” said Tom.

“It’s fine.”

“Then why’s she coming here?”

“To see if her fucking brother was here,” said Greg. He moved his arms like inconveniences. “He wasn’t. Isn’t. I told her he wasn’t and she has no reason to think otherwise. Let’s keep it that way.”

“This is the beginning of the end,” said Tom. “First the neighbour, then Tanya, then the police. People are going to be looking for him and this is one of the first places they’re going to look. He was supposed to be coming here, for fuck’s sake. He told his sister he was coming here. His fucking body’s in the basement. His blood’s all over the carpet. The neighbour heard screaming. How the fuck do we think we’re going to get away with this? It’s murder.”

“People get away with worse things than murder and we’ll get away with this,” said Ezra. “We just need to be smart about it. And I admit, we can’t have this happening every day. We need to get it out of here.”

“We will,” said Jonathan. “We just need a couple of days to sort things out.”

“A couple of days might be just what we don’t have.”

“This is a big thing,” said Conor. Monotone assertions were his trademark. “Getting away with it’s not our only worry. We need to live with it. For our whole lives.” He tapped his temple with his index finger. “It’ll get us in here.”

“Please,” said Greg, picking up a glass from the worktop and smelling it. He filled it with water from the tap. “Let’s not do this now. I need to sleep. We all need to sleep. And can somebody please clear this fucking glass up.”

The words felt futile passing his lips. He left the kitchen, Joe followed him.

“Goodnight,” said Jonathan. He went.

Ezra filled a mug with water. It was ringed at the bottom with thick tea stains and chipped around the lip. He swallowed a gulp. Didn’t take his eyes off of Tom and Conor.

“We’ve fucked up,” he said. Tom nodded a reluctant agreement. “Night.” He went.

Tom turned the kettle on and lit a cigarette.

“How the hell are we supposed to sleep?” he said, “We need to get cleaned up in here. We need to...”

“Goodnight man,” said Conor. He put his hand on Tom’s shoulder. Just for a second. Then went into the back bedroom and closed the door.

Tom poured some instant coffee into a cup, poured water over that. The smoke from the cigarette looked like you could hold onto it. The sun was coming up.