The Other Side of the Door

one arm over her face and the other on Lola’s bunched-up body. Her chestnut hair needed washing; there were stains on her dress, purple smudges under her eyes. I put the remains of our picnic into the bag and stood up to drop it into the rubbish bin.
After
Sonia knelt by his body. She hesitated for a moment, then straightened him out with her pink-gloved hands. She took his arms, one after the other, and laid them so they were lying straight by his sides. Her face had become expressionless again. I could only tell that she was distressed by the slight tightening of her mouth and the way, every so often, she gave a small blink as if to clear her vision.
‘You have to help me, Bonnie,’ she said.
‘What shall I do?’ To show I was co-operating I took off my thin jacket and hung it over the back of the chair. My knees were trembling and I almost tripped as I turned back to her. My body seemed to have a mind of its own—twitching hands, wobbling legs and a faint buzzing in my ears.
‘We’ll roll him up in the rug.’
I wanted to say I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t kneel down and touch him, manipulate his cooling limbs, bundle him up like a piece of garbage. I couldn’t. I had lain by this body, held it, kissed it, and I couldn’t.
‘We have to pull it to one end of the rug and then roll,’ Sonia was saying. ‘Bonnie? Look, if we’re going to do this . . . this . . .’ Her voice cracked. ‘We have to do it now or not at all.’
‘You’re right.’
‘Take the shoulders.’
I made myself kneel by the body. A few inches from my knee, the pooled blood was dark, almost black.
‘When I say, try to shift it up.’
‘Yes.’
A dead body is heavy. It won’t be shifted. His soft hair. I used to run my fingers through it. I could hear his murmur of pleasure, the way he said my name, like a groan. But it was matted with blood now.
‘We’re going to have to roll it over,’ said Sonia. ‘Move it that way.’
I will see his face, his beautiful face. Will his eyes be open, will they stare up at me?
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes.’
‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’
THERE HE WAS. His eyes were open and they looked up past me to the ceiling. His face was pale, almost grey, like putty. I couldn’t help myself. I peeled off one glove and put out a hand to touch him for a last time, to close those unseeing eyes.
‘No.’ Sonia’s voice stopped me. ‘Don’t do it, Bonnie. He’s dead. It’s all over. Now it’s a corpse, and we’re getting rid of it. If you start letting yourself feel everything, we won’t be able to go through with this. Remember later—feel whatever it is you have to feel later. Not now.’
I lifted my eyes to her face, which was stern and handsome. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘What do we do now?’
‘When we’re ready we have to get it out of here and into his car. Where are the keys? You have got them, haven’t you?’
‘In my pocket, with the one for the flat.’
We squatted at either end of the body and lifted the end flap of the rug over it. Now I couldn’t see his face any more. Straining with the effort, we rolled the body over in the rug. It rose and fell with a muffled thump. My ribs ached, and sharp stabs of pain shot through me. I had a sudden memory of rolling up a tent when I was a teenager, trying to make it tight and even. But bodies are unwieldy things. Through the rug I could feel his shape. The bulk of his shoulders. Don’t feel. Don’t remember. Don’t even think. Just act.
Before
The phone rang just as a friend who had popped by was telling me he thought I could simply knock down the wall between the small kitchen and sitting room, making one not-so-small room. It was Joakim, still awkward with my transition from teacher to human being. He asked me if I’d found a drummer. I told him we might have to make do without. He gave an awkward cough. ‘There’s someone I know.’
‘Yes?’
‘My dad. He’s keen.’ There was a pause. ‘Not good, but very keen.’
After
The body was hidden from sight but, if anything, that made it worse. Before it had been a horrible mess, perhaps even a tragedy of some sort. Now it looked like what it was, which was a crime.
‘What next?’ I said.
‘We carry it out to the car.’
‘Won’t he be very heavy?’
‘We have to.’
‘Couldn’t we just leave him in the street somewhere? It might look as if he was mugged.’
Sonia sighed, as if I were failing to live up to her expectations. ‘We’ve got to do what we said we’d do,’ she said. ‘The best chance is for it to seem as if he’s gone away. If he’s found dead tonight, there’ll be a huge inquiry straight away. It’ll all fall apart.’
At that moment there was a sound so unexpected that for a few seconds I couldn’t make out what it was. It was as if my brain was refusing to accept it. I had to think hard and then I realized. It was a doorbell. The doorbell of the flat. It rang again. We looked at each other. I was certain that the same questions must have been in both of our minds. Who was it? Had they heard anything? And, most important of all, more important than anything else in the world: did they have a key? My brain was working slowly. I couldn’t make sense of it. First I thought: No, they can’t have a key or why would they be ringing the bell? But then I thought: Some people leave a key somewhere, under a flowerpot. I’d done it myself sometimes. Was it possible Liza had done that and not told me?
There was another question I tried