Stephen Volk
We thought the best plan would be to remove it discreetly, quietly, causing the minimum of fuss or attention. The story was, as far as the press were concerned, that the family had requested it after the allegations had come to light ‘out of respect to the public’ – but in reality I was the one who had got the ball rolling. As soon as the Met announced there were over seventy-five separate lines of enquiry, and upwards of twenty more victims had spoken out, it became pretty clear, to me anyway, that something had to be done.
There was a creeping realisation, after decades of gossip and innuendo, that these accusations were not going to be swept under the carpet as they might have been in previous years. The perpetrator was no longer around to use his influence with those in power, or to threaten those he had sexually abused with legal action. That he had operated like that for so long was a cause of horror and mystification for many, while others, with twenty/twenty hindsight, basted themselves with the congratulatory knowledge he was always a ‘wrong ’un’ – yet what had they done to prevent anything? Precious little. It was a whole sorry mess for all concerned, and all concerned unfortunately included me.
Tragically – if one can use such a word; perhaps ironically would be better – the headstone had only been unveiled in January, a mere three weeks before I went to the council to get permission to have it removed. Eleven months after his death. During which time numerous reports had emerged which painted a horrendous picture of the former national treasure as an appalling and habitual molester of underage girls.
Simmy Noble.
As I explained to the council officers round the table, his name had already been taken off an inscription to the great and the good in Clayton Civic Hall. His name on a local footpath had been removed. His holiday cottage on the Isle of Wight had been sprayed with graffiti.
“Hell, a plaque outside his flat in Oxworth has had to be taken down after the words Rapist and Paedophile were written on it… It’s only a matter of time before the headstone gets the same treatment,” I said. “Pro or con.”
A pot-bellied man in a rugby club tie stiffened his back and asked me what I meant – “Pro?”
“Some tearaway who wants to outrage the public,” I said. “You hear about swastikas daubed on gravestones. Young men get up to all sorts of vile nonsense to get noticed.”
Someone I’d forgotten the name of from the Burial and Cemeteries Team was cleaning his glasses with a lint cloth.
“Is it our job, though?”
I fixed him with my eyes. “I think it’s mine. I buried the feller.”
He said, what he meant was, wasn’t it the responsibility of the police, and the family? The police if it was a criminal act, and the family, well…
“I’m happy to talk to the police and I’m happy to talk to the family,” I said. Having arranged Noble’s funeral, they weren’t strangers to me and it would be better coming from someone they knew rather than a council jobsworth. That could have the worst possible effect. I thought they’d have to agree with that, and they did. At that point coffee, tea and biscuits arrived on a rather quaint hostess trolley, which I thought incongruous given the discussion we were having.
“It’s not a question of that,” a Thatcheresque woman said when I implied they were procrastinating. “It’s a question of things going wrong. What if it attracts more publicity? We don’t want that for the city.”
I laughed. “Well, you’ve got it if you do nothing. Bad publicity.”
Someone concurred with me on that, thank goodness. Another person backed him up, and soon there were no naysayers, though the one with the Thatcher helmet of hair still sat on the fence somewhat.
“Look,” I told her straight. “We have got to do something. We can’t eradicate the grave, but we can stop advertising it.”
Luckily, that word hit home. Nobody argued the toss after that, and all we had to do was forge through the details in plodding, semi-disgruntled fashion. Like all politicians, they were primarily concerned with diverting the flak, keeping their heads down, and maintaining their jobs. At no point did I get any gratitude for coming to them and alerting them to a potential disaster – which was fine. All I was bothered about was the site becoming some kind of horrid tourist attraction for ghoulish visitors. The kind of rubberneckers who slow down at car crashes, or those who go out of their way to attach themselves to even the vilest examples of fame. I had little doubt there were some out there, even, who refused to believe he had done anything wicked – that it was all malicious lies by greedy young women – so dedicated were they to an image of Simmy Noble as some kind of secular stained-glass window saint. I said I did not want to give those people a point of pilgrimage.
“God help us,” said the man responsible for grounds maintenance, setting off shuffles of rumps and nods of agreement.
I knew most of them by name, in fact. It had been a rigmarole to comply with cemetery regulations for what was a substantial funerary edifice. The monumental mason had to be signed up with the council’s registration scheme, which ours was, and the application had to include a design approved to proceed to the cemetery supervisor. You had to set a date for an initial stability test (not before thirty days after installation) and the stability had to be guaranteed in writing by the mason (with the exception of malicious damage, severe storm, or subsidence). Paperwork, paperwork – and all for what? Now we were going to pull it down and use its fragments as landfill.
The plan was to do it covertly and under the radar, for expediency’s sake and to avoid a media circus. Issue a press release telling them it would be done on the Wednesday, but – my suggestion – actually do it on the Tuesday night, before anybody noticed. Basically, get it done quickly and get out of there. No prior warning to anybody except those directly involved. In fairness, once this was decided, nobody questioned the logic of getting it done, sooner rather than later. Our conversation thereafter was a technical one.
I visited the family. Talked through the problem much the same way I had with the council and they were fine with it. Relieved, I think, at the thought of somebody else taking control. I think they trusted me. They were decent enough people, battered and bruised by the storm of events around them, through no fault of their own. They didn’t see me as the enemy. I hope not, anyway.
I conceived the wording of their statement with their solicitor and we released it to all branches of the media: ‘The family have made the decision to remove the gravestone because of the impact it would continue to have on the dignity and sanctity of the cemetery for those who tend graves of their loved ones and visit them.’
The white lie that we were doing it on the Wednesday was something I’d have to deal with when appropriate, and roll with the punches, if necessary.
On the Tuesday afternoon I closed the office at 4:30 and drove home to try to get a few hours’ sleep as it was going to be a long night. That turned out to be a vain hope. My wife always found it easy to have an afternoon snooze but I never could, and this proved to be the case. After tossing and turning in my bed I got up and watched afternoon TV, which was a rare joy I wasn’t used to. Quiz shows with smarmy comedians exhibiting the same kind of unctuous charm the deceased used in his prime. Consequently I found them hard to watch. My wife said I was so twitchy I was making her twitchy too.
“Sorry,” I said.
At 8:30 p.m. – still way too early – I changed out of my house pants and T-shirt and said I’d better make a move. She stood up and kissed me on the cheek, saying she hoped it would go well. I said I was sure it would.
Barney and Megan were glued to the television screen. My imminent departure made my son look up, startled. “Where are you going?”
Before I could answer, my wife said I had a meeting.
“What, now?”
“Boring,” I said, kissing each of them on the top of their heads. The boy had just got out of the shower and smelled of posh shampoo. Stealing his mother’s. He was that age, the devil.
Megan held out her hand and we fist-bumped. “Smash it, Dad.”
She had no idea that’s what I would be doing. Literally.
I drove my own car, not the business vehicle which was a grey personal ambulance, what we call a deceased removal vehicle. I decided to dress in the pleated, striped trousers, herringbone jacket and doeskin waistcoat I wore for funerals, rather than my first instinct, which was sweatshirt and jeans. If anyone were to spot me I didn’t want anyone badmouthing the firm based on lack of decorum or insensitivity. That would be bad for business. I didn’t want to look slovenly anyway, out of regard for my profession as much as anything.
I thought I’d drive around for a bit and clear my mind. I turned on the radio but the kids had tuned it to a station of their choice and it blared out Alvin Stardust singing ‘My Coo Ca Choo’ – which I could only stand for a few seconds before poking the OFF button. It was just the sort of pop song Noble would have played during his breakfast show in his heyday, interspersed with inane banter and moronic catch phrases. The background banality to all our lives.
With time to kill, I found myself aimlessly circling the district of town near where I was brought up. I always say, the feeling of being raised in a Christian household was like being given the antidote for a poison you didn’t know yet.
I found myself passing what used to be our local church. I envisaged sitting in a pew and having some quiet time with my thoughts. I should have known the door would be locked due to the ever-present possibility of vandalism. So, as it was, I sat in my car with the heating turned up, in all the comfort of Swedish engineering.
At about half past nine I pulled in and filled up with petrol, picking up a Crunchie at the counter, since I hadn’t been able to face the big dinner of lasagne the rest of the family were having earlier but now needed the energy boost of some sugar. I stopped to eat it in a side road beside a discount carpet warehouse and sat with my eyes closed, before realising it was daft putting off the inevitable and silly driving in circles.
Twenty minutes later I flipped my indicator and took the inside lane coming off the familiar roundabout, turning right past the old hotel. At the entrance to the cemetery a policeman standing next to his motorbike waved me on. They were in place and expecting us. Good.
I drove up the narrow single-track road that followed the circumference of the graveyard, up a gentle slope to the East Gate where there were a few empty parking spaces, a line of three stopcocks for filling vases with water and a bin for the disposal of dead flowers. I was glad to see the media had gone and the police were as good as their word in keeping the location sealed off and sacrosanct. Two officers stood either side of the gates, yellow Hi-Viz tabards shining brightly in my headlights. One extended her right arm to direct me to the flat upper road overlooking the tiers of headstones that populated the various terraces zigzagging to the chapel below. I pointed the car towards the familiar obelisk where the paths met, the cenotaph where the dead of two world wars were recorded. Halfway along, framed in my windscreen and off to the left, I made out two arc lights on tall, extendable stalks, the kind you see casting their beams downwards when there are roadworks on the motorway at night. They illuminated a group of almost static silhouettes that took on more definition as I moved closer.
I recognised our work vehicle, the grey Renault Trafic. I’d asked three of my employees to be in attendance. The floodlights picked out Tod’s shaved head in an unforgiving way, like a white ball on a billiard table. Marta was wearing a green cagoule over her black suit. Ever practical.
I got out of my car and put on the black overcoat that was folded on the back seat. Immediately I could hear the hum of a generator, and saw a JCB lurking in anticipation, like an actor in the wings waiting for his cue. I also noticed grounds contractors with spades and picks, squarely built chaps in Hi-Viz smocks and wellies, guys used to getting their hands dirty. Though this was a dirty job in a way far beyond getting muck under your fingernails. We were all aware of that.
Nods were exchanged.
I shook hands with a uniformed senior police officer who gave me his name. I gave him mine. I wished I’d brought gloves, as he had, and instead sank my hands into my overcoat pockets.
The weather was cold – colder that you’d expect in February.
You could see your breath. It seemed to emphasise that we were the living.
Only the most cursory orders needed to be given. We all knew why we were there. It seemed slightly ironic that the dead man’s entire career was based on his gift of the gab, and here we were, hardly exchanging a syllable between us.
The headstone was a triptych, extended over three plots, its central rectangle having two wings either side, akin to the covers of an open book: something he never was. The grandeur of the thing was the kind you’d expect of captains of industry or tinpot dictators – a massive display of ego that now made me feel queasy. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in that. Normally I consider black granite offers a sense of dignified contemplation, but that night all I could think was: they say black sucks in the light.
The middle block was emblazoned with his full name in gold and that of his parents, long gone, mercifully saved the ignominy of their son’s abhorrent crimes. To right and left, etched portraits. The trademark ‘bandido’ moustache, the trademark glasses. All over, a list of his many glorious achievements. The benevolent causes, the charities he had supported or ennobled. Laurels conferred by royalty. A dubious record of his many visits to Buckingham Palace and Downing Street over half a century or more, hobnobbing and cosying up to the powerful who needed to bask in the sunlight of his radiance. Not knowing his ulterior motive for doing so. On the plinth below, that glib parting remark it was impossible to read now without disdain or anger:
“Make your last laugh a good ’un!”
It seemed grotesquely triumphant. Premeditatedly so. Rubbing in the fact that the star’s greatness was now irredeemably gone. The apogee of not only fame and success but also altruistic goodness now transformed into the lowest of the low.
Activity around me almost took on the aspect of a mime show. People moved to their positions and went about their appointed tasks. Since my team and I were attending in a supervisory capacity, we mostly stood back in the customary stance of undertakers, one hand over the other, feet apart. At ease, yet anything but.
I felt for the neighbouring residents as the pneumatic drill went to work, its operator’s eardrums protected. The surrounding householders hadn’t been informed. I felt bad, but this had to be hush-hush if it was to be carried out efficiently. We couldn’t afford someone to know in advance and ring the Daily Mail or The Sun.
Short, piercing bursts like machine gun fire emitted from the instrument, stone dust coughing up like smoke from gun barrels, or the decrepit mouth of an ancient celebrity with a penchant for cigars.
I was conscious that, underneath the monument, he lay in his golden coffin like some Egyptian Pharaoh of light entertainment. That was why he was encased in concrete, so I was told – to stop grave robbers digging him up. I could vouch for the fact he was buried resplendent in bling – the gold neck chains and jewellery that had become his daily attire. When I had talked to the council, we had given consideration to moving the body, but the cost involved would have been £20,000 and that would have had to have been covered by the family, and they were unwilling to do so, as they believed (rightly, in my view) the money was supposed to go to good causes.
Marta got mud on her shoes and wiped the sides of them in the long grass. She caught me looking at her but didn’t smile. It wasn’t a smiling night.
Platinum blonde and tiny, though anything but fragile, she had responded to my call out for an apprentice, and I count my lucky stars she walked through my door. She soon proved to have a rare openness and empathy perfect for the job. Perhaps it was her Polish upbringing that gave her a no-nonsense work ethic combined with dedication. I don’t know. She could run the business when I was gone, I had absolutely no doubt of that, and it pleased me.
As the night wore on it became clear there wasn’t an awful lot for us to do on a practical level. So it was a case of, as Mark Twain said: “I like hard work. I could watch it all day.”
Soon my nose really did feel like ice. Occasionally, I’d pace up and down, just to exercise my legs and give my arms a ridiculous-looking swing or two, or blow into my cupped hands. From that high vantage point I could look out over the community of Clayton, seeing the lights in the windows, the rooftops as people slept.
I’d stare off into the shadows. If there was wildlife hereabouts – foxes, owls – they were keeping a low profile, perhaps intimidated by the presence of the arch-predator in the ground.
At around midnight the council workers took a short break. I wondered what the union rules were regarding the dismantling of a prolific sex offender’s memorial. One of them sidled closer, shook his cigarette packet in my direction, offering me one.
“No, thanks.”
He lit up. “Ever smoked?”
“Tried it when I was about sixteen. Could never get on with the things. Just gave me a sore throat. Could never understand what pleasure you’d get.”
He semi-chuckled as he took a substantial drag. “Tried it once, didn’t like it. Like girls, eh?” The only thing said that night that even remotely passed for humour.
“Hardly,” I said. “Got a wife and two kids back home.”
He asked what age.
I told him.
He said his three had flown the nest.
When he finished the cigarette he tossed the stub away. I watched the glow of it go out.
He made me think of my wife tucked up under the duvet in our double bed. I could see her head against the pillow patterned with roses. I wanted to be there lying next to her, not out in a cemetery freezing my so-and-sos off.
The drilling continued. Fissures appeared and black chunks fell away like calving glaciers.
Turning my back briefly, I saw a Thermos flask sitting in the foot well of the graveyard workers’ vehicle. I wished I’d brought a Thermos too, and started to fantasise about the taste of really strong coffee. Then I thought not. In some deep sense I felt I deserved the punishment of the cold. I’d put him in the ground, after all. I was an associate of sorts, in some people’s eyes. I was complicit in the charade.
It was well-known locally that I was the funeral director who had taken on his burial, but I had not asked for it. The family had come to me. Noble’s father had been buried by us and he must have thought we’d done a good job, as John Absalom & Son was specified in his will. I admit – pre-revelations – we were flattered.
Not that his dad’s service wasn’t a bizarre affair. I’d observed at a distance his keening and tears, how Simeon Jr. had knelt in silent contemplation and prayer for hours. Was it possible for such a man to be pious and a devoted Christian considering what we later found out he had done over decades? I had no idea, and still don’t. It’s not my judgement to call. It’s for Him upstairs to do that.
At the time, my own father had dealt with the TV star directly and I hadn’t. I remember asking him after their first meeting what he made of the celebrity. Never given to passing judgement on anybody, my father summed him up in one telling word: “Grubby.”
It was the literal filth of the creature that had struck him most forcibly. Rather than anything of actual worth, up close his personal accessories seemed more like costume jewellery. His Rolex, thick in dirt, had flakes of dry, discarded skin trapped between the links, festering with a greenish mould, he said. The bottle-bottom glasses were chipped and repaired with dabs of paint. Everything about him reeked of the unclean. Crumbs and detritus had gathered in the hairs of his moustache, the whole effigy of him soiled and matted, diametrically opposed to the gold-lamé apparition captured by the TV cameras.
Perhaps, like many people before and since, Dad had perceived him as projecting a strong-willed and upbeat persona that masked a fiercely narcissistic inner core. An individual used to getting his own way, by hook or by crook. Or maybe I’m just needlessly floundering around the word evil.
Not that I saw him as evil growing up, when I was a fan of his TV shows like every other child my age, though I never particularly found him a lovable presence. I found him creepy in a way that few of us could really explain. And, yes, there were rumours flying around throughout my journey to adulthood, yet nobody had any concrete proof of sexual abuse at the time he died, so his funeral was simply seen by us as a feather in our cap. Like anyone in my trade, my prime concern was that I wanted the family to be happy the service went smoothly and appropriately.
Then the allegations began to emerge, and I found myself being looked at with sideways glances, heard muttering comments behind my back. The association with fame had been tarnished, then poisoned, as the stories of the victims became more and more awful and heartrending. The image of the cheery, anarchic clown in his coat of many colours grew ever more monstrous and sickening.
It’s my belief that every human being deserves dignity in death, but thinking back to his funeral, as I did that cold February night, I couldn’t help but feel guilty that I had been a part of it. I asked myself, if I could go back, would I have taken on the job, knowing what I knew now? I’d have to answer: Yes, I would. Because even the worst of us is entitled to a communal ritual at their passing and the possibility of grace. I know many would say that some individuals deserve no respect or dignity at all, when their debased and selfish actions so denied the respect and dignity of others. And it’s hard to argue that they’re wrong. But if you don’t believe in the possibility of grace in the next life as a Christian, what do you believe?
I stared up at the night sky.
Low cloud cover, no stars. The only star was in the ground.
The red dot of another cigarette end was flicked into the shadows.
Around me, things were winding down.
I looked at my watch. A cheap, unostentatious one. Christmas present from my son the year before. Bought with his own money, bless him.
We had started at 11:00 p.m. and were finished by 1:30. No mistakes. No surprises. No gawkers. A sense of completion was palpable. Everyone moved around more easily. Limbs looser.
The council team piled the pieces of black granite into a truck. Wheelbarrows of soil did some filling in surprisingly quickly, then sections of turf were laid over in the bare earth that was left. Rolled out like carpet runners.
Shortly after I’d arrived I’d moved aside half a dozen small bouquets that had lain beside the headstone. The cheap plastic wrapping seemed appropriately shoddy. Now I put them back in place upon the freshly embedded segments of lawn. I let them lie there not due to any respect for the dead man but rather to those who had left them, his grieving family and friends. Grief is universal, and so is pain. I equally knew that when those last, paltry floral tributes were gone, the grave would remain unmarked.
I quietly told Marta and the others to go home. Marta was typically thoughtful. “Are you sure, boss?”
I nodded that I was.
“Thank you. Thank you everybody.”
Under normal circumstances I might have asked them to stand at the graveside and bow their heads in respect. But these were not normal circumstances.
Watching them drive off towards the East Gate, I caught my dim reflection in the side window of my car and saw the silvery glisten of morning dew on the shoulders of my overcoat. I ran my fingers through my hair and found it wet.
I followed the council van to our monumental mason’s yard, not far from our sister office, a drive of an hour and a half away. His instructions were to grind off the inscriptions – name, dates, litany of achievements; most of all the odious, chirpy innuendo on the plinth. I wasn’t obliged to accompany them, but I was adamant I wanted to see it done, first hand. I wanted no possibility that any fraction of the memorial would remain. That anything would be missed, done wrongly, or put to one side to inadvertently end up as some sort of trophy on eBay, or in some warped mind’s private museum.
The stonemason, whom I trusted implicitly, switched on the grinder and got to work without hesitation. The room filled with a thick, toxic cloud. The workshop became opaque, like a New York street after 9/11. Eddie was an old friend of my dad. Chain smoker. Never wore a mask. I dreaded to think what the stone dust was doing to his lungs. I had a feeling I’d find out one day.
“Thank you for coming in,” I said, hours later, when he’d finished, and the material had been, ostensibly, pulverised. “Go home and get your beauty sleep.”
The object had been reduced to the smallest possible fragments, bagged up and dumped in a skip. In the early hours of Wednesday, it gave me pleasure to watch it being hoisted up on rattling chains, taken off to its final destination.
The encrusted hands shook mine.
“Good riddance,” the old man with stone dust in his beard said, turning away.
I was grateful when the sun started to peek out as I drove home, gradually lightening the world as it lightened me. Little paintbrush strokes began to delineate buildings, outlining the cityscape as dawn prodded it awake. Something I didn’t remember experiencing before, except for all-nighters during my mis-spent youth: the day stirring. Morning seemed to belong to rubbish collectors in green overalls trundling wheelie bins. Frowning runners urgently consulting their watches. Girls in swishing ponytails pausing to lean against lamp-posts to stretch their hamstrings.
Needing a soundtrack, I didn’t want the radio on but instead reached into the glove compartment, took out a CD and slid it into the slot in the dashboard. I let John Dunstable’s incredible Veni Sancte Spiritus envelop me with its magical counterpoint and sweetness, asking the Holy Spirit to come and save us from Purgatory. It elevated me immediately as it always did. My wife was bored of hearing me say this was the music I wanted at my funeral.
I parked in the driveway, careful not to slam the car door. The bedroom curtains were still drawn, as I knew they would be. The idea of my russet-haired Rhinemaiden lying rested and toasty against her pillow was so absorbing that cuddling into her was an intoxicating prospect which excited me for a second, but what time was it? 5:30 a.m. – far too early to wake her. Let her sleep. Let everybody sleep.
I took off my overcoat and hung it in the hall. I noticed the sleeves were covered in a layer of powder. The stone dust. I tried to brush it off with the flat of my hand but it just smeared. It would have to go to the dry cleaner’s.
I dropped my car keys on one of the kitchen surfaces. Took off my jacket and put it on the back of a chair, the grey waistcoat over it. I filled and switched on the kettle, loosened my tie and undid the top button of my shirt. It was still pretty dark outside the kitchen window, that ailing conifer a ghost of green and brown.
The silence suddenly struck me. This was usually the noisiest room in the house and it didn’t seem right for it to be calm and peaceful, devoid of domestic turbulence. I actually wanted some of that turbulence – craved it, actually. The babble of voices arguing over the inconsequential. Where’s this? Where’s that? Under your nose, where it usually is. The hum of the hair dryer in the hall. Mum? Dad? What? Do it yourself!
Before I forgot, I took out my phone and emailed the family, as I promised I would. Nothing flowery, just informing them it had been done. Somehow, that small action of pressing SEND did for me. The sudden relief was overwhelming. Exhaustion hit me and I sat at the kitchen table, immobile, with my face in my hands. The weight of all the tension I’d carried lifted from my shoulders like a massive boulder. A millstone of responsibility.
It was over.
After a good five minutes I stood up, my legs like jelly from tiredness, poured myself a glass of Jameson’s and knocked it back in one. Most unlike me. I didn’t even like spirits most of the time, but it did its job. I needed to drive to the press conference at midday – for that I needed a clear head and a few hours’ kip, and the whiskey would help, I hoped.
As the sharpness anaesthetised the back of my throat a voice inside me told me I should pray. Not for him, not for me. I don’t know who for.
Clasping my hands together, for some reason I thought of the words from Luke 17 in the King James version: And if he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him. But it was a passage in Ephesians I had used in many a service for the dead that came to my lips:
“Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice. And be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”
I sat in silence, watching the shade lift from the colourless garden.
I waited until 6:15 a.m. before making a cup of tea to take up to my wife. She’d be rousing then, or thereabouts; she always did, wide awake while I snored for Britain, as she never ceased telling me. Larks and owls, we were. Yin and yang.
I whirlpooled the tea bag with a spoon. Splash of milk. No sugar. She liked it strong, borderline stewed. Soon it would be time to rouse Megan and get her ready for school, which her dad would do for once. I took out boxes of cereal and placed them on the kitchen table. The bowl she insisted on, ready for madam. Sunlight tentatively filled the room. It would be a day like any other day. The darkness had been dispelled.
Mug in my hand, I placed one foot on the first step of the staircase when a groggy, muffled voice came from above.
“Daaad?”
The voice of my ten-year-old daughter, just breaking the surface of deep sleep. I conjured the image of her little arms stretching up in her pyjama sleeves before she opened her eyes. It was what she said next that turned my blood to ice and froze me to the staircase like an enchanted statue in a fairy tale. And I want to disbelieve it now, just as I tried to deny I’d heard it then, even though the earth opened beneath me.
“Daa-aa-aaad? Why did you kiss me on the back of my neck just now?”