SHE MADE HIM STAND UP SO SHE COULD WASH HIS GENITALS
HE HAD WAITED UNTIL HIS MOTHER HAD GONE TO WORK, she worked on the fish counter at the West Garside Cooperative Society and he knew she would not be back until tea time.
He took out the blood-stained white coat from its hiding place behind the mackintosh in his wardrobe and carried it downstairs. The house was quiet, as he knew it would be, but the quiet was somehow uncomfortably disturbing, every tick of the clock on the mantelshelf in the kitchen seemed extra loud, accusingly loud, and for the thousandth time, he wished he could turn back time, not all the way of course, but back to just before those last frenzied seconds when the screaming started.
He put the coat into the big porcelain Belfast sink in the scullery, found a bar of yellow coal soap, a scrubbing brush, and then turned on the taps. The gas boiler in the corner of the room ignited with a popping roar and the hot water flowed into the sink and he jerked his hand away in sudden pain as the steaming water hit him. He sucked at the angry red patch on the back of his hand while running in the cold water. When the water was sufficiently cooled, he scrubbed away at the blood stain, working the soap into the fabric before scrubbing as hard as he could with the brush. The water turned pink as he scrubbed at the stains but try as he might, he could not totally erase the ingrained blood.
He swore under his breath, “Bugger it,” he thought, he could do no more, so he pulled out the plug and squeezed the water from the coat, twisting it into as tight a knot as he could, twisting and twisting until his wrists ached with the strain and he could squeeze no more water out. The coat was still wet and finding an enamel bowl under the sink, he carried it upstairs and into the bathroom. He hung it on a wire hanger over the bath, next to a pair of his mother’s stockings, some knickers, and a large white brassiere that she had washed the last night and hung to dry.
Drips of water fell from the hem of the white coat, dropping into the enamel bath with a watery plink, plink, plink, plink, just by the rust patch where the enamel had chipped away and which always scraped against the skin of his buttocks when he took his weekly bath during which his mother washed his hair for him as if he were still a little boy. He hated that, he hated it when she made him stand up so she could wash his genitals, sometimes scrubbing him especially hard with a coarse flannel if she suspected that he had been ‘abusing’ himself. He squeezed some more of the water that had drained down from the top of the coat. He would have to come by every few minutes to squeeze out more water, but it was not as if he had anything else to do the rest of the day.
There was also the dirt ingrained into the knees of his brown corduroy trousers, he had to brush that out as well and went downstairs again to find a clothes brush. He thought there was one in the cupboard under the stairs where they hung their winter coats, but he could not find one and so used the scrubbing brush from the scullery instead.
When he had scrubbed away as much dirt as he could from the knees of his trousers (although enough would remain for microscopic examination should ever his trousers be so analysed and compared with control samples of dirt taken from the murder scene, but the killer was by now certain that he had eliminated all incriminating traces) he went back upstairs to squeeze out some more water from the white coat.
He then went back down again to make himself a cup of tea and a strawberry jam sandwich for his breakfast.