Melvin Burgess Stuff

The snow has been melting in my garden

Things that were there before are reappearing.

Each day something new.

Grass, of course. The shoots of snowdrops. The spade where I was digging in the new fruit trees.

My footprints have emerged, some in mud, some frozen in the ice of the last snowfall, like fossils of not long ago.

But today, as the snow shrank low, other fossils have appeared that ought not to be there.

Things that were not there before the snow are there today, showing themselves through the thaw.

They are emerging as if they have been carelessly left behind.

But by who? Who has been playing in my garden, underneath the snow?

These are the items I have found so far.

A deck chair, collapsed.

A bottle dark red wine, unfinished.

A tangle of sodden Christmas wrapping paper, metallic ribbon and wilted cellotape.

Two winter coats, a man's and a woman's.

A dead girl. Aged mid twenties, I’d say.

The girl is lying on the ground on the grass where I’d started digging a bed for the raspberries.

I’d say she was very beautiful before the mud, the frost and the foxes saw to her.

She has four neat puncture holes below her breasts and a dark bloom on her front. Once, it was as red as roses.

By the fence, where the snow drifted deep and melts more slowly in the shadows, she has companion

There, just showing through thismorning, the top of a man’s head is showing through. So far, we have not seen his facce. Perhaps tomorrow.

***

There was a scattering of snow last night. The girl's face was covered with a a frosting this morning. She looked beautiful again, as if she slept.

But that was earlier. The thaw goes on. Now she is ugly again.

Her hair, which used to hang in swinging tresses, is thick clammy hanks of mud and mess.

Her lips, I remember, used to pout in a sulky, sullen scowl very often. But her smile when it came was wonderful – like sunshine.

The fox has eaten her lips now. All she can do is grimace.

My wife finds the whole thing disturbing. She doesn't understand. “Call the police,” she keeps saying. “You know you have to. Just do it!”

But I find it sad having these bodies in my garden. Sadness, I think, is one of the more comforting feelings in the human range.

I’m not ready yet to call thepolice. Give it another day.

The man, meanwhile, sitting under thef ence watching, has revealled more of his head as the snow continues to retreat.

He must have sat tehre and just watched her die. No doubt it is his fingerprints they will find on the garden fork. It stands close by to him.

What on earth went on in his mind as he watched? A mind like that - what sort of a man must he be!

He deserved to die.

I’ve expected the prongs on the garden fork closely – it is clearly the murderweapon – but I think the garden mud has wiped it clean.

I have to plant blackcurretns next month. My book says they need a rich soil. It suggests burying them over a feather mattress or duvet.

I wonder if I buried the girl there, if the fruit would be good.

Out of decay came forth sweetness, as the bible says.

That's when Samson killed the lion and the bees nested in the corpse.

No such luck with my dead.

I would have to chop the body into pieces to fit it into that particular bed.

I take out the small ax and try to sharpen it on a whetstone, but it takes so long, I become dispirited.

The bodies remain on the lawn, stinking now. Sometimes I think they'll never leave me. What’s the saying?

“Unwanted guests soon stink the house out.”

Something like that.
The man's head is now exposed almost totally. It looks as if he's looking at the girl.

At least, he would if he had any eyes. The foxes, the cats and the crows have seen to quite a few of features.

Still, at a distance, at the right angle, it looks as if he's watching the girl.

It's indecent, to stare at the dead like that.

I bet he watched her the whole time she was suffering I bet he was greedy for every grimace and gasp, every last drop of blood.

It was like pornography for him, I bet.

He didn't dare shut his eyes fo ra moment

Or maybe he was thinking of himself as he life seeped away and he just sat there.

I bet he was so greedy for her even in death, that he refused to move as the cold slolwy stole his own life away.

I bet he sat there and froze to death and died, rather than miss a single second of it.
"He deserved to die," I shout up to my wife.She looks down from the bedroom window and shakes her head.

My wife wants to go down to he town for shoppinig. We’re running out of food.

“What shall we eat?” she says.

“Go then. Go. I’m not stopping you,” I tell her. But she won’t. It’s all air. She stays in her room as she has down for nearly a week now.

Another morning passes. The snow has retreated almost to the ground, even in the lea of the fence where the murderer sat and watched.

But it is now revealled that the man has his hands tied behind hisback. Thatrules him out as No1 suspect, I guess.

Odd to think a murderer is loose. Odd to think that. Iwonder if he's watching?

I wonder if aprooves of the way I'm handling this.

Maybe he thinks he's victims deserve more than crowsd and foxes. But I guess he likes the way I watch the events he has caused unfold.

I wonder who he is. If he is a he, of course.

The black currents were a present, but I haven’t been able to get them in the ground yet, with so much snow.

My daughter gave them to me. She came for Christmas and then left.

She brought her boyfriend along. He seemed like a nice boy, althoughof course, no one can ever be good enough.

The black currents were from them both.

They stayed, they ate their dinner, they slept in the same bed, then they left - fortunately before they had a chance to see what the foxes and crows can do to a person,

Even a quite pretty person can be turned into something hideous.

A witch.

A thing with no face, no family, no words.

No meaning any more.

That’s all death does, don’t you think? Remove all meaning.

Like an operation. Who cares? It's not much more than that

Today the snow is all gone. Today my neighbour came into his garden to do some work.

Haven’t seen him for nearly two weeks.

He pokes his head around the fence betore I had a chance to stop him, but I ran up towards him anyway in case he hadn’t seen.

It was just at that moment that my wife thrw a tin can at the window.

We both heard the bang. We both looked up. we were bnoth surprised. I had no idea anythign heavy was left in there.

She seemed agitated. She gestured and shouted, but the double glazing did it's work.

“Christmas got to her,” I say. Terry smiles anxiously.

She bangs again on the window and shouts. I try to stare her into silence - I can do that sometimes - but when I look back, Terry has glacned past me to the lawn.

He looks at me, questioningly.

Above us, my wife throws the can at the window again, adn this time it shatters.

“Terry, ring the police,” she begs. “Ring the police."

Terry and I stand still, watching her, until the stink of her room comes down to us. Terry makes off as fast as his little old legs will carry him.

My wife and I stand looing at each other.

“My poor love,” she says. “My poor, poor love. How did this happen to you?”

And she begins to cry for the first time in a week

ENDS