It was a mistake, coming here. Paula hadn’t been to this park since childhood, when it had been a limitless realm; but now she saw that it was small, only about the size of a rugby field, and exposed. There were worn patches in the grass, a brandy bottle in the dry pond that had once held carp. She had hoped the place would feel safe, but instead it was desolate.
The lawn sloped up gently between patches of shrubbery. At the top end, a bank of pine trees separated the park from the reservoir beyond. The sky was pale, full of clear sunlight that reflected off the few white-painted benches. Down near the entrance, a nanny sat with a toddler on a blanket, but otherwise the lawns were empty. A weekday afternoon. Paula wanted to get under the trees, somewhere private and away from the road; but Mariette was dawdling behind, a dark figure afloat against the green.
A mistake. This was not the right place to bring her cousin. The nanny was folding up the blanket now. Soon, Paula realised, she and Mariette would be the only people there.
A guinea-fowl darted between the flowerbeds – a speckled mother followed by a row of droplet chicks. Mariette came up the slope behind the birds and then stopped, arms crossed, waiting.
‘Let’s go in the shade.’ Paula pointed with her free hand. In the other she held the handles of a plastic shopping bag containing four beers. She’d been unsure about the beers. Mariette was only sixteen, four years younger than herself; she didn’t want to get her little cousin drunk. Or maybe just slightly. So she’d torn open the six-pack and left two bottles at home. Two each should be fine.
Mariette shrugged. Her shoulders were made for shrugging, angular and mobile beneath the black polo-neck. There was little family resemblance between the cousins, except that both were tall and dark-haired. Mariette had a small square face, neat features, a wiry prettiness that Paula, softer fleshed, had always envied. The younger girl’s wavy hair, worn loose down her back, seemed freshly washed. But she was gaunt; the shine of her hair was at odds with the dead surfaces of skin and eyes. She wore a long brown skirt of some silky material, dark stockings and black suede boots with a heel. Clothes to conceal, but tight, their bandaging material exposing the sharpness of knee and elbow. A black satin ribbon was tied like a choker around her neck.
Last time Paula had seen her, a year ago, Mariette had been emphatically made up – Egyptian eyeliner, dark lipstick, hair streaked with red. Then it had seemed childish to Paula, melodramatic; but now she missed the colours. Mariette’s naked face was powdery and dry, not the way a young girl’s skin was supposed to look. And she had grown so thin that when her arms were tightened across her chest, as now, it looked as if she were binding dark cords around herself. A paperback book was caught in the awkward clinch, pushed into one armpit. She’d squeezed an index finger between the pages to keep her place. It looked painful; Paula could see that the top joint of the finger was white.
Mariette had irritated her in the car, reading all through the silent journey to the park.
Paula headed for the shade of an old rubber tree, Mariette trailing. The grass had worn away to earth around the humped roots.
‘How about here?’ She dropped the bag of beers on the ground, where the sand was pocked with ant-lion holes like miniature volcanoes. Just beyond the rubber tree, the lawn ended and the wooded bank rose. A narrow path, edged with worn brick, led up into the pines.
Mariette shrugged again, then bent from the waist to help herself to beer. An elegant movement that combined worldliness with years of ballet lessons. When she saw her cousin pop the bottle open with a practised snap of the wrist, Paula knew she should have brought the six-pack after all.
Moving just beyond the tree’s shade, Mariette set the bottle down carefully on the uneven grass. That ballerina trick of going from standing to sitting in a single fold. Then she stretched out on her stomach, ankles precisely crossed, as if she’d decided beforehand how to compose her body. Shifting her elbows together, she held the fat paperback open in both hands. It had a red-and-black cover, featuring, as far as Paula could see between Mariette’s fingers, a dead hand floating in blood-coloured light.
Paula moved unwillingly out of the shade and sat down cross-legged next to her cousin. ‘Detective book?’
‘It’s about forensic pathology,’ Mariette answered in a faint voice.
Paula had read one or two books like that – maggots and blood-spatters and knife-cuts. She could feel her cousin slipping away; she was losing the moment. She must try to say something, now, before Mariette turned another page.
‘It’s interesting,’ Mariette offered unexpectedly. ‘I might be a pathologist when I leave school.’
Mariette hadn’t been to school since July, Paula’s mother had said. Paula shifted her legs, pulling her knees up. Sitting cross-legged made her thighs look fat, and the grass was prickling. She’d considered bringing a blanket, but had decided against it: the crocheted patchwork had seemed old-womanly, fussy. ‘Isn’t it a bit gross?’ she asked. ‘Dead bodies, and all that.’
Her cousin gave a cool half-smile, not looking up.
Paula ploughed on. ‘I wouldn’t want read that kind of stuff. i If I were you.’
Mariette went still. Her eyes did not leave the page, but they no longer scanned the lines. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Ah, nothing,’ Paula flushed, but she was already pink from the sun and perhaps it didn’t show. She clenched her toes inside her running shoes. ‘You know, violence.’
A small, stern face turned towards Paula. ‘Did my mother ask you to talk to me?’
‘No – well,’ Paula hesitated, ‘Actually my mother.’
Mariette was impassive. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Would she prefer her little cousin to cry? Tears would make this easier, Paula thought.
‘Well, if you ever do, you know – ’
‘Ja.’ Mariette closed the book, first carefully folding down a corner of the page to mark her place, and put it to one side on the grass. Then she pulled her legs under her and stood, ankles together, beer in hand.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said, and headed off up the path into the trees, reaching out to strip a leaf off a bush as she went. She walked quickly now, not looking back.
Paula sank back on the grass, cross-legged, reminding herself: patience. Mariette was the damaged one, the one who must be cared for. Paula must be patient, gentle. As if I am ever not, she thought.
She picked up the thick wad of the book and leafed through it – thin, cheap paper. It opened on the page Mariette had marked: ... retracting skin from the cranial ... Her gaze flicked away from the words. Paula had never had the stomach for this kind of writing; the formalin-soaked relish of it. She always imagined herself the body on the slab, not the steely forensic pathologist with the implements in her gloved hands. She flipped to another page. Now the pathologist was cooking a romantic dinner for two. Paula pushed it away.
The grass was starting to feel like tiny blades, even through Paula’s shorts, and she could also feel movement – ants under her legs. Worms. But when she checked she saw nothing, just pink leaf impressions on the soft flesh of her thighs. She moved back into the shade of the tree, idly looking for ants to feed to the ant-lions. But there were none. She sat down and opened another beer.
Mariette stayed away for ten minutes; twenty. The light grew soft, shadows lengthened. It was dim in the trees beyond the lawn.
Look after her Paulie, you know what a bad time she’s had. Just take her out for the day, just one day. Talk to her.
We were never that close, Mom.
Mariette had been different, apparently, since July. That’s when Aunt Denise had come home to find the house burgled, Mariette unconscious in her room. There’d been terrible bruises on the girl’s neck, and perhaps worse, Paula’s mother had hinted; Denise had not told all of it. That was four months ago. Mariette herself had said nothing about the incident, not in the hospital nor at any time since. For the first week, she hadn’t spoken at all.
What do you mean, close? She’s your cousin, Paulie. You used to play together.
Long ago, on the beach. She’d been given her cousin’s hand to hold. Mariette was an outgoing, pretty five-year-old, hair in pigtails, wearing pink panties and nothing else. Her small hand was mobile in Paula’s. It was an easy accident to happen: the energetic little girl had squirmed from her grip and run towards the shallows, and Paula had felt incapable of stopping the child, of preventing her disappearing into the waves like a mechanical toy wound up and released. Paula had not taken a single step towards the water.
The undertow had grabbed Mariette by the ankles and tipped her so her head went under, stayed under for thirty seconds or more. Only then did Paula shout. Aunt Denise had rushed forward to grab the little girl by an arm and an leg and lift her clear, turning in the next moment to stare with terrible accusation at the lumplike nine-year-old standing on the shore.
They’d pressed at Mariette’s white chest with their hands and she’d puked up water and thin bile and then started coughing, staring not at her mother between coughs but fiercely up at the sky. Afterwards, wrapped in a towel on the back seat next to Paula, Mariette had seemed tired but pleased. What a brave girl, Paula’s mother had said. Not looking at Paula.
Eleven years later, Paula could still feel the shame, but also the odd disappointment she’d experienced. There had been, for a few short moments, a simple curiosity; a desire to watch what happened when the child’s clockwork legs carried her into the sea. As if Mariette were a little machine that Paula had devised in order to test something she was afraid to try for herself.
‘Hey!’ The shout was piercing, so buoyant that Paula didn’t immediately recognise the voice. Then Mariette came running down the path, laughing like a child, and Paula started to laugh too, feeling that some kind of breakthrough had most unexpectedly occurred. She almost opened her arms to embrace her cousin – it felt that natural.
As Mariette got closer, Paula saw the flush in her cheeks. She was shouting. ‘It’s a man! I found a man!’
Mariette came up to her, closer than they’d been all day. Her whole posture had changed – now not primly upright, but leaning forward, eagerly taking hold of Paula’s arm with both hands. Her grip was strong.
‘What?’
‘There’s a man in the bushes. A dead man.’
The sunlight was cold. A guinea-fowl gave its rusty-swing call somewhere lower down the sloping lawn and Paula was startled, almost as if the creak of dismay had come from her own throat.
‘Come see, come see.’ Mariette was turning, pulling at her arm. Long strands of dark hair were twisted around her neck.
The path tilted up through the trees, away from the sunny lawns and into shadow. Paula resisted the tug. ‘Mariette ... are you sure?’
Mariette’s face snapped shut again. She snatched her hand away, then turned and stalked up the slope, grace lost, with the stiff determined gait of a child heading for the waves.
And so Paula followed, in under the pines, into the damp shadows where the light failed. She watched Mariette’s white hands swinging at the ends of her black sleeves, disconnected from her body in the gloom. The path looped back down, but Mariette plunged off it, straight up the steep trackless slope. Thick undergrowth grew here, and Paula felt the branches scratching blood from her hands as she pressed her way through. She moaned softly to herself. Then the slope flattened out and she came up with relief against a fence; Mariette was waiting, gripping the wire. Paula stopped, breathing through her nose to conceal her panting. She gave a little laugh, to show that she didn’t blame Mariette for teasing.
But then Mariette hitched up her skirt – a line of pale, sinewy leg – grabbed the wooden fencepost and climbed over, nimble in her heeled boots.
Paula didn’t bother to protest. With difficulty, she followed; she was not agile, and the toes of her running shoes were too snub to fit the diamond gaps in the wire. She teetered on top, the fence rocking under her, thinking for an awful moment that she would fall with a leg on each side. But she made it over.
Mariette had broken through the bushes into a small clearing where the sunlight fell onto rubble – bricks, rusty cans and broken glass, knit together with grass. On the other side, the bushes pressed thickly against another fence, then more trees; beyond, a glint of water from the reservoir.
Mariette was pointing at a tangle of old rubbish. Her empty beer bottle stood to one side. ‘There!’
‘I can’t see anything, Mariette,’ Paula said in a calming tone, still trying to control her breathing.
‘Look.’
Paula stared. Then slowly, transmuted by Mariette’s pointing finger, the pile of rags took form. A blue anorak. A pair of shoes. A bundle of yellow-grey sticks, loosely threaded through the bright, imperishable synthetics, grass pushing up between them. Then Paula made out a yellow skull, staring straight up, the jaw still attached by leathery shreds; hands twisting out of the blue sleeves, skin peeling back from the delicate bones of the hands like dry leaves curling ...
How lonely, was Paula’s first thought. She felt no revulsion. There was no smell. It was dry and unfrightening. She noted the cheap fabric of the clothes, the worn soles of the shoes. Poor man’s clothes. The body had been there a long time – months, years. How could it have passed through all the garish stages of death, unwitnessed? To reach this state of quietude. Paula moved towards the body, feeling some need to cover it: shut up the eye sockets, fold the arms and legs, zip the sad anorak; something.
‘Don’t go too close,’ Mariette said sharply. ‘It’s evidence.’ She was talking swiftly, intently. Her hands were on her hips, not tucked up into her armpits now. ‘They need to bring the forensics team in here as soon as possible, cordon off the scene.’ Mariette’s eyes were bright as she lifted her hair away from her neck and twisted it up with both hands, giving her flushed neck some air. ‘It’s a man, don’t you think? Must be a man,’ she said, shaking her hair loose again. ‘I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to find a body.’
Paula didn’t watch them gather up the remains. When she saw them carrying the narrow bundle on a stretcher down to the road where the mortuary van was parked, she thought they treated it roughly and without care.
But the policeman was gentle. The large man sat next to Mariette on a white bench next to the park entrance and took her statement, pressing on his knees. The ballpoint pen kept pushing holes in the paper, and Paula worried about him getting ink on his trousers. His uniform was immaculate. An enamel nametag said MAJOLA.
Mariette, next to him, was straight-backed again, her hands on her own sharp knees, staring ahead and talking with quick animation.
‘It was a man, I could see at once it was a man. And of course I knew it wasn’t a natural death,’ she was saying. ‘From the position of the body. There’d been a struggle. Abrasions, bruising on the neck. And cuts, knife-cuts – all over.’ Her voice was trembling now, tissue paper floating above a fire, on the edge of combustion. ‘The blood had ... pooled around the body.’
The policeman raised soft, puzzled eyes. ‘Blood? Where’s the blood?’
Paula started shaking her head, but he wasn’t looking at her.
‘A blade with a thin cross-section,’ Mariette continued. ‘But cause of death was strangulation. Fractured hyoid bone. Classic.’
Sergeant Majola had stopped writing now and was staring blankly at Mariette.
‘Excuse me,’ said Paula. She motioned the policeman away, and he stood and walked with her a little way up the lawn. Mariette stayed on the bench, staring bright-faced into the setting sun.
‘My cousin is upset,’ said Paula. ‘We didn’t go that close. There was no blood or anything. Just what you saw. That’s all.’
In the car on the way home, Mariette’s long hands came up to the ribbon at her neck, fingertips together and palms facing out, an inside-out prayer. ‘A horrible way to die,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘Yes.’
‘I wouldn’t want to go that way.’
‘No.’ Paula shifted her eyes sideways, and saw that her cousin had undone the ribbon, was rubbing the silky stuff between her fingers. Her neck was unmarked.
‘Your book, we left your book behind,’ Paula remembered.
Mariette gave a secret smile. ‘That’s okay,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t such a good one anyway.’
She rolled down the window a crack and trailed the ribbon out of the car. It fluttered for a moment, a strand of seaweed in the flow, then whipped away behind them as she let it loose.