Season to Taste (5 page)

“What do you mean, what kind of thing?” he said, milking it, pouting a little, inwardly proud. “Black,” he said. “Leather
jacket. Little leather skirt.”

Lizzie said, “Leather skirt?”

“She says I should follow my heart.”

Ah well, Joanna would have to do without his little creations now. There was no way of contacting him. She'd probably try,
once or twice, and then tire of it soon enough. Joanna was a busy woman in London, and busy women let people slip away to
sea, Lizzie had found. Jacob Prain wasn't a priority. Him in his little woodland house, out in the dark somewhere, ruminating
on the life he might have made.

They'd both been ruminators, though. That was part of the problem. She went back to that Monday morning and saw herself in
her jeans, with her legs flying back under her nightie, and her hands on the wheelbarrow she was pushing across the lawn.
She saw herself reaching under his shoulders and swiveling the body around on the grass, falling back on her arse and then
over him once with the strain. She was able to tilt the body by lifting his shoulders and wedging her knee against the top
of his back, allowing the blood to flow from his leg stumps into the hole. She had tried to bring his leg stumps together
but they splayed back open, leaving his shriveled privates exposed. The hole soon filled to the brim with blood and she let
the body back down on the grass and then used the hose to wash the blood from his stumps and from her fingers.

She had used the axe then, to take his hands off at the wrists and wrap these, and then the arms, which left her with just
the torso to deal with. And the head, of course. Each of his organs, she decided, would need to be individually wrapped and
labeled so that she could quickly distinguish in the aftermath what was what.

She knew it was going to take a little more sherry to still the shaking hands, so she went back in for the bottle to keep
beside her, and she had a swig before bending down to bag and tie everything up. Every bag was pulled tight and neatly tied.
Then she pushed them all over to the freezer in the wheelbarrow.

She let the dog out. Rita sniffed and wagged and licked, then disappeared, leaping the fence behind the shed and going in
search of her own, smaller kill.

Lizzie felt her hair coming away from its clip and she knew she looked mad, with the pale frizz and the blood all over her
face. Her adrenaline was really pumping, and in its wake was a new strength, as if a human being had always known, deep down,
how to get on with the business of doing away with another.

Determination. That was what Jacob said was lacking in her when she came back from the interview at the shipbroker's.

“I can't help thinking you should have stuck it out at art school,” he said, and Lizzie wondered if he felt responsible for
her change of direction.

“I'm not going to make it as an artist, though. It's perfectly obvious, Jacob. I don't have the talent.”

“It's not that,” he said. “You're not as bad as you think. But you lack determination. It's as if you missed that piece,”
he said, with a smile. “Ego, and determination, to do things for yourself.”

Which was better than being a hard-arsed bollock-breaker, she replied. To which he suggested she relax.

And thinking about that out on the grass while chopping him up that Monday made Lizzie pause, and take the gloves off, and
spritz them with the hose. Then she sat back on her ankles with her hands splayed out flat on her knees.

She had to check herself then, to know that she was all right.

She gave up the gloves. They were in a terrible state and made her hands sweat. She went on with her bare skin and turned
what was left of him over onto its front and positioned it so that the head with its white neck was facedown on the inside
of a bin liner she'd pressed into the bloody hole. She knelt down beside the neck and splayed her fingers where she wanted
to make an incision with the saw. The axe might have been quicker, but she feared its abrupt violence now, and felt that the
head required specific care.

She placed the ridged blade against the skin, feeling in her own neck a stab of pain as the blade went in. Into her mind came
the blue-gray eyes she had known—they were staring into the hole now—so dark on some days they'd gone a scary slaty black,
and she got a sudden mysterious whiff of his aftershave and tobacco.

The only sound in the frosty garden was from the saw as her hand moved it back and forth minutely in his neck and eased through
the top of his spine. The marrow was something to bear in mind, and she'd not expected to see it quite like that, with all
the white threads coming out as the head tumbled into the bag. She tied a knot and went to the freezer and placed the bag
inside, with a label,
HEAD
, pressed on and smoothed.

She had tried to do every major chop over the hole he'd been digging, and in most cases she'd succeeded. Blood had gone right
into the soil and turned it the color of aubergines.

She'd used the saw to get through his waist, lining up with his belly button. She went in through the downy hair and punctured
his stomach. The juices sprang into the air and squirted her face and made her vomit. She had not known a smell like that—she
was really shaking then—and knew she was on the verge of passing out, so she stuck her jaw forward as she wheeled him over
the grass and into the garage for the final labeling and freeze.

Lizzie had watched a lot of television in her life—probably more than most women of her age, he'd told her—even so,
real
life, the one she'd suddenly jumped into the picture for, wasn't so spectacular. The body was softer and less bloody than
on the TV, and leaping up behind the axe to get through his femur, for example, wasn't necessary. There were clots flung out
on the ground that she scraped with a trowel, but everything was hosed down by four in the afternoon, and the hose was coiled
back on the wall, the freezer shut.

Saturday morning. Lizzie opened the lid of the freezer and took two chunky bags out.

“What the hell,” she whispered to herself. She'd had such a good start. A fortnight was surely more than enough to do this
in.

She put the pink gloves in the bin. They made her hands hot and itchy and she would need to get some better ones. From the
cupboard beside the fridge she took down the ring binder and found the number of the telephone company. A man had come and
installed the router so that they had been able to make better use of the Internet. He'd improved their speed, just before
she lost her job.

It was still her voice. Of course it was. It was just a regular Saturday morning and she was speaking on the telephone.

Lizzie dialed the number and waited. They could cut the phone line whenever she was ready. The man was cheery. He said that
was absolutely fine.

“Nothing lasts,” Jacob had said about the cold she'd got from standing outside the house waiting for him on a damp, freezing
Sunday afternoon. He had said to get to the house at two o'clock. The bus had dropped her off in Puttenham and then she'd
walked, out past the pub with the hanging baskets and the field with the horse.

She'd waited on the porch all afternoon. In the rain, he struggled out of the taxi, and held out the door key. He limped forward
with a crutch. She got up from her huddle and went towards him, stretching out an arm. She introduced herself.

“I'm really sorry,” he said, gently. Then he put his head down, and winced.

Which was the moment, she now thought, if there had to be a precise one, that she'd got sucked in. That warmth in “sorry,”
the head down, the wince. Softness and sorrow and pity. She'd wanted to help him. In helping, she was able to go somewhere,
to slide right into the warmth she would make.

“Thanks,” he said. They walked together up to the door. “I'm really sorry for keeping you.”

They sat in the kitchen.

She watched him moving around. He lit a fire in the living room, and made a pot of tea that they drank with his tin of digestive
biscuits between them. He was charming.

He didn't say why he'd been held up. It didn't seem to matter by then. She felt the cold coming on. Something inside her had
surrendered already. She had given up wanting to be at art school, where everyone seemed set on making a point. Here she could
take some photographs and look after him. She could be away from the world.

He was young, yet talking softly, and stooping, as if he were sixty.

“I wanted to be a sculptor,” he'd said. “It's what I would have done.”

He hadn't said: “It's what I would have done if things had been different.” He hadn't tried to lay the blame on anyone else.
And she had turned her face to that and smiled. No resentment clogging up the air here then. A little bit of kindness. Rolled-up
soft trousers, even in winter. And fresh air. It hadn't occurred to her that he might know how angry he was, or who he was
angry with.

Nothing lasts, she said to herself, standing out in the garden now in a woolen hat and coat and scarf. She switched the torch
on and aimed it at the trees.

The thigh was vast. She had it in a bin liner on the garden table, and she stood for a long time looking at it as if she were
planning to take a photograph. She drank a glass of white wine, and she looked at the thigh from every angle; she stood back
and admired it, as he had done, occasionally, with hers.

Like the first time they'd gone to bed.

“Can you just sit on the bed, like that, on your knees, so that I can look at the shape?”

She'd done as he asked.

In the beginning, she always did what he asked her to do. He had a house; and she didn't. Partly, though, she'd done it because
it turned her on. Being his object was a way out of feeling—at the moment when she might have begun to feel the intimacy,
he did something like this, he made her an object, which gave her an excuse to distance herself. What a relief, to sit on
his bed, to kneel like that without any clothes on. What a relief to run her hands down her front with her head down. She
wouldn't have to hug him then, not while he was over there slumped in the armchair. She wouldn't have to wrap her arms around
him and tell him how she really felt, which was close to love, certainly.