Clean

"It isn't you," he said. "It's me. I don't want you to ever think it was you."

Now isn't really the time for this conversation. We're working flat out as it is. He's short of breath with the effort he has to put in to cut the pieces up small enough to get them into the bags. He has to do that first, before I can start to clean. I'm holding things down so that his job is easier.

He's wrong, of course. It is me. Or rather, it's about me. All of it. It always has been.

"I don't think it's me," I tell him. "Of course not. Now shut up and concentrate, will you?"

We need to be out within the next half hour. We have to have it cleaned before the morning shift starts.

He's struggling with one piece, struggling to get the saw through the density. It's a big piece. Thick and knotted like a lump of wood. My dad could teach him a thing or two about sawing. So could I, in all fairness. I don't know why I pander to his male ego. Letting him make a mess of the sawing; letting him assume it's not me, it's him.

He likes to think he's in control. He isn't. None of us is in control.

He seems to think he's ready to move on. He's ready because I've been withdrawing for the past few weeks. It's easy to do. You follow the routine. You make the right noises. But you do it in a way that feels dead. You hollow it out. Playing along; wearing the mufti. It's self-protection and it's an indirect attack. Rejection is an attack, you see.

He's making a mess of this one piece. It should have been the first piece. I think the saw might be blunted now. I hold it down with one hand and take a starlight mint from my pocket. Souvenir of a recent trip, peppermint cool and swirled with red, it looks like raspberry ripple ice-cream.

I want to tell him to finish off the smaller pieces, get them out of the way at least, then we can make one big effort, together, to get this last one done. Put it in the bag as it is, if we need to. I'm just conscious of the time.

"You see," he says, pausing to wipe the sweat from his eyes. His eyebrows aren't doing their job properly, he's perspiring so much. "I've started to wonder if I even know what I want any more. Not this." He motions around the room, the separate black sacks. "This is fine. Us, maybe. Do I want us?"

He's looking at me as if I'll give him some sort of answer.

I'm not going to commit to this conversation. Not here. Not while there's work to be done.

I pick up the saw from the floor, where he's left it, and I finish sawing through this piece he's been struggling with. I'm strong. I don't know what his problem has been, other than that he wasn't holding the saw right.

I put the two pieces into two bags, and then set to work on what's left. He kneels on the floor. He looks knackered. I try to remember how much older than me he is. Is it four years, or is it five? One of the two. I crunch into the mint. I instantly hate myself for doing it, then decide to relish destroying its circular form with the pressure from my teeth. If it's four or five years, he's starting now to be too old to stay ahead of the game. Maybe it's time he got out.

I'm done. It's all bagged up, and we start the process of taking the bags out to the van. He does the lifting and the carrying out of the building, I help by moving the bags closer to the door. While he's taking them out, I set to on the floor, cleaning up the blood and fragments of bone. It has to be spotless, or as spotless as can be. Forensics means it will never be spotless. But if I can leave it so it doesn't seem like anything has happened, then it buys some time, and leaves the trail free to go cold. Until these bags of body parts pop up unexpectedly somewhere.

I snap off the latex gloves when I'm done, and replace them with a clean pair, so I won't leave any fingerprints anywhere. The discarded pair I put into a bag to be incinerated later. The clothes we are wearing will be incinerated too.

"It really isn't you, you know."

He's standing in the doorway, pulling off his own gloves. I open the bag and hold it out towards him. He drops them in. He's so busy trying to reassure me that he doesn't even ask for a replacement pair. I don't prompt him.

I leave the room before him, and he closes the door behind us, making sure that the lock is engaged first. He grips the door handle and pushes firmly against the door with the flat of his other hand.

I walk down to the van and get in on the passenger side. The plastic sheeting covering the seats, which will also get incinerated later, crackles as I sit down. It crackles more when he sits in the driver's seat.

He starts the engine and we move off. I look out of the window and smile to myself.

I feel clean already.

© J R Hargreaves 2006