First published by
TIDE in 2004.
Waiting for Afternoon TeaSandra had heard the shot from outside, so she was prepared for a bit of a sight when she went in. What she wasn't prepared for was stumbling in on the cleaning process - the efficient gestures, the smell of cleaning fluids, their pale bustling movements through the room, the patch of white foam on the head of the old florid armchair. There was a hole in the panelling behind, and a drying unformed web of mince beetling its way down the wall.
She wasn't prepared for the way his stippled thumb folded in on itself when one of them took his hand to move him, or the non-reaction of his eyelids, and their eyes, when they went to move him and a finger slipped, into an eye-ball that would liquefy (or. . . congeal?) soon enough. It was like a shock to the system, like being struck unexpectedly. Someone was trying to save her the vision of his truth. His unclean magenta.
She had expected them to do it and leave, but really they should have had more time. She had, after all, promised to stay out for the full working day, and only came home with the vague, diminished feeling that perhaps she could do something to stop it, though the finances were settled and over.
She had paused to check the door was closed and kept the key on her when she went inside. She didn't like the way it seemed to grow onto the walls it was supposed to crack open, adding a little metal to the line under the hook each time it swung. She had started to acquire his slur in the end.
Now she put down her shopping bags (one of everything, not two), in the usual place that she put them, under the hallway table, and was glad that they hadn't done it in the kitchen. She had always gone in to greet him before putting the groceries way. No matter how close the Wildberry Sorbet was to turning to mush. One must always check. Becoming suddenly unexpectedly alone was best not delayed until after the tomatoes were in the fridge. Not if it meant that it might be dropped in your initial shock, on the way to the kitchen, might roll red into hidden corners.
So she had always kissed him with free hands; he liked her moment of being glad to see him, and they hadn't minded re-frozen desserts. There was one patch worn under the little mahogany table, the rest fairly new and untrodden.
This time, she walked into the lounge-room, brisk as usual, and, as usual, following the door-framed vision. She hadn't forgotten that it was happening, but all those other times, going past the two doors of the bedrooms, dining-room on the right, all those other brisk trots down the carpet had dealt with death as much as this one. Until you were in the room you never knew.
This time, when she got there, she wasn't sure what to do. Realising that her ritual was broken, that she wouldn't kiss that cadaver, touch the corpse, she stood unacknowledged and unchallenged, in a room silent with trite respect, or numb efficiency, and watched as one added foam to the trail left by the motion of rolling him onto the stretcher.
Next door switched on a radio, and more foam was added to an old stain (they clearly loved their job, as he had), as the stretcher was folded to fit into one of the two industrial vacuum cleaners in the room.
They had said that they would dispose of it properly, but she liked to think that they wanted the corpse for soap. He would have liked it that way. Towards the end the humiliation of dried shit on his cheeks (turn the other one) had been too much for him. He had spent most of his time in the specially-fitted shower, a pink shape through the glass, while she read in the steaming room. Her crisp books slackening with the damp, until he called. To end transubstantiated, transformed, into something clean, something that would leave other things clean, rather than smearing them with another bodily fluid, that would have made him happy. She suspected that that was why he had chosen them, rather than another organisation. But they had reassured her that things would be done "properly", and now, when their job was almost done, they asked no questions, and neither did she.
Rising to her toes to avoid all the little islets, and the one who was dabbing at the carpet, slowly wiping the stuff away, she went and counted the lipsticks in the bathroom. She arranged them into different rows. Oldest to newest. Most to least. Lightest to deepest. She hadn't worn them for some time because they made him nervous. Lipstick meant sex, which meant that she was leaving him, that she regretted the new creases between her eyebrows, and the time-drift of the moles on the back of her hand. In the end he decided to go before she could. The vacuum started up and she realised that she had been listening to the muffled sounds of music through the wall.
There was the usual smell now, from the final sagging of his muscles. The concluding huzzah. She wondered whether he enjoyed having control over the moment. For once. At last. Whether he felt reckless at that moment, or terrified. She would bet on terrified, but one could never tell.
She turned on the shower and opened the medicine cabinet.
There was an old copy of Women's Weekly on the shelf, so she took it down and resented the closed doors of the last few days, and the closed expression of his last few weeks. Sandra tried to imagine what the Reader to Reader Panel would say, so that by the time they were loading one of the vacuum cleaners into the van she wasn't sure whether it was his vacuum or not. Perhaps they wouldn't use him to clean up his own remnants. He would have enjoyed the irony of it, among other things, but they seemed too cold to notice. She wondered whether they would move on into the hall and the bedrooms, or just do the lounge. That part of the contract hadn't been explained. Not to her.
When she realised that her fingernail was digging into the whites of Kurt Cobain's eyes she put it down and went outside, to check the mail, half of it now defunct, and paused a moment beside their van ("MarC's Carpet Cleaning, Special Services Inclusive"), to look at her house, before moving to take the shopping from the hall, and put the tomatoes away.
© Laura Smith 2004
