This is the eleventh part of A Story in Several Parts, by Matthew de Kersaint Giradeau, the previous parts can be further down the page. (The painting is by George Shaw and is taken from here;http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/online_shop/ikon_catalogues/artists_monographs/… )
The body doesn't smell yet, but it will. Give it a few days in this damp environment and it will smell. Give it three weeks and it will start to smell like cheese. Butyric acid. Not really cheese. That attracts a whole new suite of corpse fauna. That is the worst bit. After that, most of the soft tissue is gone and the maggots ease off. The beetles stay for a while, but the maggots ease off. They clamber down, back into the soil to wait for what comes next.
Alex gets up and feels a sudden, sharp pain in his head. The adrenaline of being beaten by Lloyd has worn off and the acid is stiffening his joints. He is cold and bruised and his face is sticky with drying blood and Lloyd's spit. He turns his face up to the sky, stretching his neck. There is a plane. Like the plane he was watching before the body.
Alex looks at the plane for a while. It buzzes, getting louder and fainter even though it is high enough to look like it is moving slowly. Alex looks at the plane and then he looks at the tent peg. Lloyd is gone, but the tent peg is still on the ground. Alex looks around but Lloyd is gone. He picks up the tent peg and moves towards the body. He wipes his face in his sleeve and he feels the pain in his nose and his head. He crouches where Lloyd crouched before and looks at where Lloyd has scratched the body's arm. He takes the tent peg and pushes it against the small cut. It is hard and pliable. Like your own skin, but different because you can't feel it. He pushes harder against the cut and tries to push the tent peg in, but it won't go in. He makes the cut bigger on the surface, but the skin feels close to the flesh and not like skin on a chicken breast which is loose and baggy. He takes the tent peg and looks around again. No one is there and the plane is still buzzing up in the sky. He grips the tent peg in a different way, more like you would hold a dagger in a film. He raises his arm, holds it there for one second, and brings the tent peg down hard into the arm. The tent peg sticks in the arm. Like a compass in an apple. Alex pulls it out and watches the blood start to move to the skin and flow over the ragged, white entry wound. It moves so slowly. Like a thermometer when you hold it hard in between your fingers.
This was not much effort. And it was good and satisfying to see that slow blood. But now they will know. If he tells them about the body then they will know that he has made the body bleed. And then he will have to tell them about Lloyd and there will be a time when Alex is walking home and it is dark and Lloyd will come and get him and then there will be real violence. This was bad, but that will be worse.
So Alex throws the tent peg down on the floor and looks at it suspiciously. Maybe he should take it and throw it in the river. He picks it back up and puts it in his pocket. But he knows that this is not enough. He has to make a deal with the body. Maybe the body doesn't want to be found, so if Alex makes a deal with it then neither of them will have to be discovered. The body can rot and Alex can just leave the woods and not come back and forget about going back to the woods.
His friends don't come here anyway. They weren't so excited about making the den in the summer, and by September it was just Alex coming down anyway. So no one will make Alex come down next summer, and it is getting wetter and will soon be cold. And then it is too dark to even play out for long after school. And then it is Christmas. So if he makes the deal with the body, then leaves and doesn't say anything to anyone, then no one will know.
Alex pulls the body's shirt up and struggles against the weight of it. He tries to pull the body's trousers down, but he has to undo the body's belt first. Close as he is now, Alex can smell the sweat and piss of before the body was dead, and the digestive fluids that are beginning to leak out of the body's intestines are producing the gases that will eventually bloat the body; make it purple and fat like a dead sniper in a tree. Alex has to half lift the body to get his hands underneath it. Then he undoes the body's belt and unzips his flies. This is all hard work. the body is heavy and Alex is small. To pull the body's trousers down is also hard work. Gravity means that Alex has to pull the trousers down on the back of the body's legs, and then pull the trousers down on the front of the legs. Each time Alex pulls, the trousers only move by a few inches, and then by pulling the other side, he undoes most of the progress gained on the previous pull.
Eventually the body's trousers are round it's knees and Alex falls back exhausted. He sits for a while. The fear has mostly gone from him know, but he looks around none the less, suddenly conscious that someone could be listening out. They aren't listening out and Alex allows his breath to become louder and deeper. Alex stands up and pulls his trousers down. He feels the damp patch on his underpants and feels ashamed. He will have to roll them up and stuff them in the washing basket with his other clothes. Piss makes your clothes stiff and if they dry then they go crinkly.
He turns around with his pants and trousers around his ankles, shuffling as he turns. Then he crouches down, and holding on to the body's shoes for support, he tries to take a shit. He looks through his legs to get the angle right. At first he feels blocked up, constipated by how exposed he feels. Then he farts and feels his bowels loosen their grip on whatever comes next. The fear and pain he felt earlier have done something strange to his stomach. He feels liquid coming out, rather than solid, and then a succession of farts and diarrhoea sprays undigested food and bowel tinged fluid all over the body's arse and back. It hurts Alex to shit, but it feels like his intestines are vomiting and he can't stop it. It goes on and on, and Alex can hear bits of it hitting the floor around the body. Alex grimaces and doesn't look between his legs, just hopes that this will be the last of it.
After he is sure that there is no more to come out, Alex realises that he has no toilet paper. He looks about him on the floor and tries to use some leaves to get the worst of it off. He can get most of the solid bits, but he just smears the liquid around on his skin. He breathes deeply and tries not to cry. It isn't far to get home. He thinks he can probably use the washing machine. He could put everything in the washing machine, have a shower and then dry his clothes in his room. They will be dry by tomorrow and no one will know. Alex pulls his trousers back up from the floor, holding them with his fingertips. He gingerly eases them around his thighs and feels the wet shit on his skin and clothes. He gets them up to his waist and decides not to do up the buttons. Alex looks at the body, covered in shit, with its trousers at its knees and feels bad. That wasn't meant to happen. That wasn't the deal he had hoped to make.
Alex limps back through the woods. His face hurts from Lloyd hitting him. And his chest hurts from Lloyd sitting on him. He can smell himself. He smells like shit and dried blood and death. When Alex gets home he locks the door, takes all his clothes off and puts them straight in the washing machine. He puts far too much washing powder into the wrong compartment and doesn't know what temperature to use.
Alex goes up stairs to have a shower. In the shower he stands still while the hot water beats him on the back of his head. He watches his blood and poo mix as they are carried along his skin and then down the plug hole. They shouldn't mix. They should be separate. He should have separate showers, one for getting rid of the shit and one for getting rid of the blood. He probably has urine on him, but that is fine. Urine can mix with blood or shit. It doesn't matter. One of Alex's teachers once told the class that urine is sterile and if you get a bad cut you can wee on it and it will clean the wound. Alex doesn't think that this is true, but he believes it in a way. No one would ever say that about shit. Shit makes you go blind. Blood is hot and tastes like gravy for the first second. Things like that shouldn't mix.
Alex gets out of the shower and sits, like he always does, on the bath mat with his towel wrapped all around him, steaming and warm. He is tired and does not want to think about the body any more. But the body keeps being there. Alex really messed the deal up. The poo should have been solid and soft. It should have lain on the body like the poo on the trees. But it is all over the body and all over the floor and the body won't let him have the deal now. He is sure of this. The body would have let him go, stayed quiet about things as long as Alex stayed quiet. Now the body will get louder and louder until no one can hear anything else.
Alex wakes up and it is dark. He is shivering in his towel on the floor of the bathroom. He takes a few moments to remember, but when he does he jumps up, worried that his mum might be home. The house is dark, she is not home. He puts some different clothes on, runs downstairs and bundles up his washing from the machine. He takes it up stairs and hangs it in odd arrangements about his room. He shuts his door and goes downstairs to watch TV, leaving all the lights on as he goes.
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