BONE

 

 

 

I used her brand new kitchen set, except it was not new. More like unopened.

It was new forty years ago, a wedding present that Clare and I decided not to open until we moved out of our one-bed flat into a “proper” house, one with a “proper” kitchen. The knives were stainless steel, high gauge, powerful grips, shiny. They came with an electric sharpener and magnetic rack. You’d think for the work at hand the meat cleaver would be best. It was not.

There was only one bone left. It was twenty-two centimetres long, which, from my studies, was just below the average length for a right humerus. I had finished with the left humerus a hundred and fifty-three days prior. I kept track. I could now comfortably say that the murderer’s carcass took four hundred and two days to dispose of. I suppose if I were in a hurry and had accomplices it would be easier and faster, but I didn’t want easy and I didn’t want fast.

It was tiring, frustrating work when I started. At first I tried the meat cleaver, but it wrecked my shoulders and elbow joints, me not being young or a professional butcher. Then I tried one of those electric blades with two serrated edges and a vibration that rivals the highest setting on the spin drier. Good for soft tissue, but useless on bone.

We were Clare and Jake. I never remarried because who do you marry after Clare? She was light and darkness in equal measure, the embodiment of that Yin-yang symbol you see everywhere. I lived with her for three weeks, and that was…well, that was enough. Not long enough for jealousy, senseless arguments or those unsexy but comfortable large panties that women reveal. Not long enough for me to develop a beer gut or a roving eye.

I cut along the head of the humerus and opened the cavity where the bone marrow used to be. It was now home to the foulest of odours, swiftly yanked upwards by the extractor fan in my kitchen.

Somewhere in the ether this man’s soul wafted back and forth, or he was in hell or purgatory or wherever putrid lives went in his chosen religion. I often wished he would come back as a ghost so that I could torment him.

I had assurances about that; the living can torment the dead. I tormented him, then I tormented his body, and when his heart stopped I was surprised to find myself satisfied.

It took years to find him, to capture him, to build up the nerve to do what had to be done. In the end, remembering Clare was what powered me, even though those memories were broken into flashes of imagery.

We did many things, Clare and I. We enjoyed kissing, not as foreplay, but as an activity on its own, getting dizzy and lost in each others lips. We both liked slam poetry sessions and farmer’s markets. Her culinary skills extended to making coffee and boiling an egg, so she appreciated my love of cooking. What I missed the most was her nuzzling my neck from behind while I cooked a meal.

I imagined her doing that, watching me break her murderer into the final fragments with her knives in a proper kitchen in a proper house. I could feel her cold breath stroking the hairs on the back of my neck.

She said, ‘Thank you.’

Then she was gone.