Melvin Burgess Stuff

The snow is melting in my garden. Each day a few more things, plants or steps or stones emerge.

Humps and bumps reveal themselves as benign secrets – flowerbeds, a log, a bag of compost not yet emptied.

Today, though something special.

A little girl.

She's aged about four years old, with long browny yellow hair, a blob of a nose, slightly upturned and a pretty smile.

As soon as I see her I run out to say hello. She’s pleased to see me. I'm pleased to see her.

I bend down in the mud to kiss her.

“You look beautiful,” I tell her.

“You look old,” she says, and laughs.

We sit and talk a while until she gets bored and wants to run around and play. But of course shecan’t.

Only her head and shoulders are clear of thedrift.

"Perhaps tomorrow," I say, and she looks at me reprochfully.

Instead, I build a snowman for her right next to her, so she can help smooth down his sides. As a finishing touch, she fluffs up his woolly hat before I place it on his head

"He's got a big head," she says.

"Yes, but he's still stupid," I repl;y, and we both laugh like anything.

Now her hands are too cold. I take them in mine and rub them and blow on them untill they sting.

She cries a little bit.

I run inside and make her cocoa, anxious in case she too melts away But she's til there when I get back.

She wipes her eyes and sips.

Soon the cocoa is gone and she is tired. She rubs her eyes. But it can’t be bedtime already.

“Try and stay awake,” I tell her.

“Silly Melvin,” she says.

She wants me to tell her a story. What sort?

“Mr and Mrs Bottom smacker,” she says.

So I do. As I talk, her head begins to droop.

"Do you suppose,” I say, “That if snow carries on melting, you’ll be able to come into the house?”

“That would be nice,” she says. “What would we do?”

“Oh, we’ll bake a cake,. Or find some more stories, or playgames.”

“Will Oliver be there?”

“He’s grown up now. But we could get the little boy from next door to play.”

She grows quiet and thoughtful. Then she says this:

“When I die, can we hold hands?”

That’s the last thing I want.

“When you die,” I say. “I won’t be there. I’ll have died myself a long time before that.”

She wails and holds out her arms. “Want to hold hands!” she wails.

I bend and hug her and promise. Yes,. We’ll hold hands. I promise.

After that I have to sing her a song. Then she leans her head against me and goes to sleep.

It’s dark now. I’m cold, I’m stiff and I’m wet, from sitting in that icy garden for so long. I go inside, where my wife clearly thinks I’m mad.

I hope that all the snow will melt and that I’ll be able to go out in the morning and bring her in. Or perhaps she’ll come into the bedroom to wake me up …

And yes, the snow melts. But in the morning she’s not there any more.

It’s always the same.

Whenever the earth seems about to give up it’s dead, it takes them back before they can walk free.

As if death wants to trick me into thinking he has a sense of humour.

I have a sad day. I spend most of it in bed.

Tomorrow, though, something happy. My daughter's comes to stay for a few days.

Her air is darker now. Her nose is still a bit of a blob,but she still has her pretty smile and that slight upturn.

She can stay a week. Loads of time.

But – I can’t ever have the years I missed with a little girl aged four, and five and six and seven and eight

That little girl is gone forever. Children don’t grow up. They don’t die. They simply disappear.

Ends

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

A murder was committed in the park in front of Owen Davies’ house one Friday night.

A young woman aged twenty four,wearing a short black coat and knee boots, was assaulted and strangled on the muddy grass shortly after midnight,while Owen slept.

He found out about it on Saturday morning when a neighbour paused and told him the news.

“Just over there.” The neighbour nodded to an array of police tape and uniforms. It was official; a unofficial death.

Owen stood and looked across the grass. A life cut short, so near. It was the closest he had ever come to murder.

He left for his workout at the gym. All day, the fact of the murder rose up and down in his mind. Like a drowned body, he thought, rising and falling in the innocent water.

Over the weekend, more pieces ofinformation emerged. The girl’s name was Rose. She was short, mixed race, pretty.

She had been assaulted, but not raped – whatever that meant. Then she had been strangled with her own tights. There was no sign of any struggle.

Owen wondered – “How do they know it was assault, then?”

Perhaps she had known her assailant.

That night Owen looked from his bedroom window over the park, and marvelled at the magic of an ended life.

Death. Past, present and future, all gone. Memories vanished as if they had never been. Feelings never felt, thoughts never known.

Even the memory of memory had been extinguished.

On Monday morning he began to collect more information about the murder.

The girl was single. She had recently split up from her boyfriend. She was popular, middle class, well educated.

Not your usual victim, he thought, but then, what did he know about murder victims?

She had studied forensic science at university. She wanted to be a police woman, but had been unable to find a job so far.

The papers found that oddly exciting.

She had worked part time in a bakery quite near the park.

Owen found that oddly exciting. he used that bakery from time to time.

Perhaps he had seen her, spoken to her. He might even have bought something from her.

Perhaps.

That lunch time, he went to buy his lunch at the bakery where Rose had worked. It was important to him that he have some contact with the dead girl.

The management had put a photo of her on the counter, with a box for contributions for flowers for her funeral.

Owen bought a pasty and left five pounds.

That night, he wept for her. Even as his tears fell, he knew that the thought of her in death was far, far more beautiful than she had ever been in life.

That evening, he continued finding out about Rose, telling himself thhat it was in her memory - a form of substitute life for the dead girl.

He learned the name of her family, her friends. He joined the Facebook group in her remberence.

He scanned a newspaper photograph of herself into his computor and sat, sipping wine, watching her face for signs of movement.

Of course there were none.

On a website that evening, he had a bit of coup. he discovered her address froma careless remark on website.

Late at night, eh went to visit Rose at her home.he waited outside, peered in through the windows. He didn not call her name, though - he wasn't that stupid.

He left when someone came out of the house and called to him.

The day he bought his lunch at Rose's bakery again. When he got home int eh evneing, the police announced that they were looking for a man

Rose, it seemed, had been stalked.

A man had been hanigng around outside her house and place of work int eh days leading up to the murder.

There were several wittnesses. The police had a detailed description.

He had been wearing a dark green walking jacket, a black wolly hat with Thinsulate written on a white label on the front.

He had worn jeans and trainers. A wisp of blonde hair straggled out from under his hat.

Owen went to bed that night in a stateof great excitment.

The next day, a Wednesday, he took the mornign off work and went into town, shopping.

He bought himself the murderer's outfit - The black hat, the jeans, the trainers. It was all easy to find.

Only his hair was incorrect - his was too dark.

He solved this by buying himself a wig.

He spent the night sitting at home in full attire, talking to Rose on the PC.

It felt so good.

The next morning, he again took time of work, only staling out to buy a local paper at midday.

The photokit looked so like him, his heart sang.

To be turning into someone else - to be turning into a man who stopped lives - his own, the girl's. It just felt so good.

But when he awoke the morning after that, it was a Friday.

He couldn't belive it. He had missed a day? But where?

He had no memory of the missing day. Time seemd to have jumped forward.

He spent the day at home, sweating, biting his nails, overcome with the feeling that his pleasent dream was about to turn into a nightmare.

He had so convinced himself that the police were after him, that he did not dare leave the house all day.

He spent the time searching for stories about himself in the local and national newspapers.

had this happened before? His sense of identity was slipping along with time.

He was not himself.

It was almost midnight when finally got he courage to take some air in the park.

He stayed off the grass to play it safe.

A mistake.

It was not until he saw the girl come towards him, smiling, holding out her tights in her hand, that he realised.

He had not jumped forward a day at all.

He had jumped back a week.

They set apon him in a field, and bound him, kicked him, and rubbed his face in the dung.

"Your mother is a sow," the sneered. "Gypsy. Hedge-dweller. She searches in dustbins foryour tea. Your dad fucks his own kids."

"You're a family of pigs. Go wehre you belong."

And they flun ghim in the field with the pigs, great beasts with jaws like machines, full of tusks and gobble.

When they saw him land, the pigs came running.

The bullies yelled in excitment at first, then in fright.

A pig can eat a man.

It can take his leg off with one bite.

A pig can eat chew up your sweet fingers like bread sticks.

He can chaw your face.

A pig can eat you.

So they yelled as the pigs came, but they were too scared to get over the fence.

Instead they backed off and shriked like girls as the great long beasts, heads as big as a coal scuttle, came running to see what goodies god had sent them.

And he, lieing in the field, felt their wet snouts poking in his belly.

Felt their wet pig lips kiss his his face.

Felt their tusks scrape his wrists

Felt the fear of the beasts in the woods - the fear of being eaten alive.

Pig lips tenderly brush his eyes. The soft warm tongue against his wrist givesway to the hard furrowed edge of tusk.

The rope falls away, severed.

It was not greed, but love. Not a tasting;a kiss.

Free, he stands. The bullies archtheir backs and screw up their faces,

while the pigs kneel before him, their snouts in the mud.

What can this be?

As he opens the gate and points at the bullies begin to run. Not far enough,not fast enough.

They stumble on the lane as the pigs give chase.

Men are no match for these beasts.

They deal with the bullies behind the hill, least they offend his eye.

They gobble up the evidence.

They even devour the bloodstained earth.

Then they return to the field.

He announces he is hungry.

The sows confer.

They choose a willing child.

Willingly they sever his throat.

Willingly they disembowel him.

They wash him in the stream before presenting his body to the chosen one,happy to be of service

It is the least they can do for him.

He stands a while, holding the sacrifice, then speaks.

“It wasn’t a vision – it was never that,” he says.

“But I had dreams, the same as everyone.

“I could have been so much.

“King of Lions, King of wolves!

“King of Dogs, even. But I had to beKing of Pigs.

“King of the fucking Pigs.

“King of the swill trough and farrowing.

“King of mud and rolling in mud.

“King of eating shit. That’s me.”

Sadly, shaking his head, he leads his people out of the field

To search for fire.

THE END

Walking down Moss Lane, quiet in his trainers, and his wife Marlene, clop, clop, clip clop a few steps behind.

In mid clop her steps stop. He looks behind in surprise and there she isn’t.

Unebelieveable. He laughs.

“How did you do that?”

No answer.

He steps back and peers over his shoulder, to this side then to that.

No Marlene.

He stands on tip toe. He peers around behind a parked car.

No Marlene.

Impossible. There’s no where to hide.

Spooked now, he calls her name. "Mary!" Then laughs. Is he forgetting her already?

He retraces his steps, back to the last time they spoke. Maybe he imagined just her clopping along behind him.

“It’s gone cool,” she’d said.

“Yes,” he replied.

That’s it. And now she’s gone.

He goes back further to a ginnel running up behind Shoal Street. He peers along the narrow ally.

Empty.

She must have gone up there. Stopped to talk. Found cat. Got left behind. Gone home in a strop.

That must be it. Anxious, but still believing in her, he hurries home and no one’s there.

He goes to bed unhappy and wakes up scared. He rings the police, but the reply is predictable.

“Give it another day or two sir. These things usually resolve themselves.”

They think she’s left him. Perhaps she has.

Miserably, he goes to the wardrobe to see what clothes are missing.

Quite a few. The police were right.

Like this? He’d believed they were so close – in love? And now she’s gone without a word, in mid step.

He rages around the house. But her jewellery, so much of it presents from him? What has she taken of that?

He returns to the bedroom. The jewellery box is gone. Yet he is certain it was there only a short time ago.

He saw it on the dressing table next to her perfume and scattered bits of make up.

He turns to the wardrobe again. But the wardrobe is gone.

Dumbfounded, he goes back to bed and stays there for aday, but when he gets up Marlene’s dressing table has gone.

He goes to bookcase for their wedding album. Only his frist wife appears to have ever existed.

He goes to the PC to call up photos taken over the past five years. It appears he has never re-married.

Distraught and anxious about his sanity, he goes through the house searching, searching for some reminder of his vanished wife only to realise he no longer knows her name.

He is on the verge of suicide when he turns up a card from his mother-on-law at the bottom of an empty cupboard.

It is dated 2006 – two years after he married for the second time.

He pulls on his coat and rushes round to confront her.

A fit, well-dressed woman in her seventies opens the door and smiles to see him.

“It’s about your daughter,” he says, as he steps in.

She looks curiously at him and leads the way through to the sitting room.

“Sit, sit,” she says. She takes a chair opposite a large picture window and gestures to another by her side.

They sit in silence for a while. He wriggles uncomfortably while she gazes out of the window across the valley, as if entranced by the view.

He has no idea how to begin.

“I think, I think” he says at last, “that I may be having some kind of breakdown.”

“A breakdown?” she exclaims in disgust.

“The universe is disappearing piece by piece, and he thinks he’s having a breakdown.”

She gestures to the window. He looks out over the hill.

For the first time he sees how whole chunks of the landscape have vanished, leaving smooth, neat holes behind, like an enormous swiss cheese.