Ghost Virus

David was woken by the doorbell chiming. He opened his eyes and stared at the bedroom wallpaper with its florid red roses. At first he couldn’t think where he was.

Where am I? Whose bedroom is this? How did I get here?

He sat up. The doorbell chimed again, and then a woman’s voice called out, ‘Evie? Evie, are you there?’

Somebody wants to see Evie, but you know what you’ve done to her. Punished her – taken your revenge, and about time too.

He climbed off the bed, crossed the landing and went downstairs, although he lost his footing near the bottom. He banged loudly down the last three or four stairs and had to grab at the newel post to stop himself from falling over.

The doorbell chimed yet again, and the woman knocked and called out, ‘Evie? It’s Bella! You’re not still in bed, are you?’

He opened the front door. A freckle-faced woman in a white raincoat and a headscarf was standing in the porch, holding a large tapestry bag.

She took one look at David and said, ‘Oh! David! Sorry!’

It was then that he realised that he was wearing only the black sweater that he had found at his mother’s house. He pulled it down at the front to cover himself.

‘Is Evie there?’ asked Bella, keeping her head turned away so that she wouldn’t have to look at him.

‘Evie? No. Evie’s, er… Evie’s gone to see her sister.’

‘Gone to see her sister? She didn’t say anything to me. We were supposed to go out shopping early today. They’ve got a sale on at Morley’s.’

‘Her sister’s not too well. I don’t know what’s wrong with her. But she asked Evie to go up to Watford and take care of the kids.’

‘Why didn’t she ring and tell me?’

‘I have no idea. I don’t know when she’ll be back, either.’

Bella reached into her raincoat pocket and took out her mobile phone. ‘I’ll give her a call. I can’t believe that she didn’t tell me that she couldn’t come shopping this morning.’

She prodded at her phone but David said, ‘It’s no good ringing her. She left her phone behind.’

Bella turned her head now and stared at him. ‘She left her phone behind? Evie? I don’t believe it!’

‘She was in a hurry, and she was very upset about her sister.’

‘Well, have you got her sister’s number? You must have her sister’s number.’

‘Sorry, I don’t. Evie keeps all her numbers on her phone and I don’t know her password.’

‘What’s her sister’s surname? You must have her address. I could find her number from directory enquiry.’

‘Atkins, I think. Or maybe it’s Watkins. I’m not entirely sure. And I don’t know her address. She only moved to Watford in March and I’ve never been there.’

Bella stayed in the porch for a few moments, looking exasperated. Then she said, ‘What about her sister’s husband? Do you know where he works?’

‘I haven’t a clue. I think he’s a solicitor, something like that. Listen – why don’t you wait until Evie rings you? She’s bound to, sooner or later.’

‘I’ll have to, won’t I? I don’t see that I’ve any alternative.’

With that, Bella walked away. She clanged the wrought-iron gate behind her to show her disapproval and crossed over to her bright yellow Fiat 500. There was another woman sitting in the back seat and David vaguely recognised her as one of Evie’s friends. He couldn’t remember her name but he remembered that she never stopped talking.

He closed the front door and went through to the kitchen. Evie was lying on her side staring at the grey-tiled floor, the back of her dress looking like a map of North and South America in dried brown blood. Her eyes were open but they had turned milky. Maggie the tortoiseshell cat was prowling around, clearly unable to understand why Evie didn’t stand up and feed her, as she usually did. She looked up at David and mewled.

You can starve for all I care, you perishing nuisance. Evie knew that you were allergic to cats, didn’t she? but she insisted on having one. ‘Who will I have for company when you’re at work?’ And that had been a double-edged question, hadn’t it, because you hadn’t been able to have children. And whose fault had that been? His – because of having such a low sperm count.

David felt a tinge of sadness that Evie was dead. After all, they had enjoyed nearly seven years together, and for most of the time they had been happy, although she had always desperately wanted children. That had caused endless low-level friction between them, because she had often had dreams that she was pregnant, or that she had actually given birth. She had once claimed that she had heard their child laughing in another room – the child they would never be able to have. But David had been dead set against a sperm donor. That would have been like allowing his wife to have sex with another man, and the child would never have been his.

He looked at the slices of onion on the chopping-board. They had all dried up now, but there were plenty more onions in the vegetable rack. Carrots, too, and half a swede, and he knew that there were beans in the fridge. He could carry on where Evie had left off, and make a stew himself.

He crouched down beside her, and gently laid his hand on her shoulder. If he cooked a stew, that could not only provide him with three or four decent meals, it could solve the problem of what to do with her body. He could cut her up neatly, and package her, and freeze her remains, and over the coming months he could keep the promise that he had made to her on the day that he had proposed to her. ‘You and me, the two of us, let’s become one.’

Her bones? Well, he could smash up her bones with a hammer and then flush them a little at a time down the toilet.

He stood up. He felt pleased with that plan, especially since it would have secretly delighted his mother so much.

Evie was never right for him. Never had his class. Now she’s going to end up what she was always destined to be. Human waste.

He opened the cutlery drawer and took out a sharp thin-bladed boning knife. While Maggie watched him, he knelt down on the floor and lifted Evie’s dress up over her right hip. He cut the elasticated waistband of her tights and pulled them down as far as her knees. When he gripped her thigh between finger and thumb her flesh felt soft and yielding. With the point of his knife he marked a rectangle into her skin, about fifteen centimetres by eight, and he used this as guidelines to slice deep into her flesh, until the tip of the blade jarred against her femur.

Carefully, he cut out a large lump of flesh. It was paler and fattier than he thought it was going to be, and there was very little blood, but of course her heart had stopped beating and she had no circulation. Once he had worried the lump away from her thighbone he lifted it up in the palm of his hand and smelled it, and when Maggie saw him doing that she licked her lips. He had read that cannibals claimed that human flesh tasted like pork – that’s why they called it ‘long pig’ – but this didn’t smell like pork at all, or any other meat that he had ever eaten. The closest he could think of was veal.

He scraped the dried-up onion slices off the chopping-board and laid the lump of flesh onto it. Before he started preparing his stew, though, he knelt down beside Evie’s body and finished undressing her. He grunted with effort taking off her dress because she was so floppy, and she seemed to be so much heavier than when she was alive. At last, though, he managed to bundle up her dress and her tights and her apron and toss them over to the far corner of the kitchen. When he rolled her over onto her stomach to unfasten her bra, he saw the tiny angel’s wings that had been tattooed between her shoulder-blades the day after he had proposed to her.

‘I’ve done that because I feel I’m in Heaven,’ she had told him. If only she had realised how soon she really would be.

He opened the door to the utility room and dragged Evie’s body inside. Next to the washing-machine stood a large chest freezer, and he unlocked it and opened up the lid. He had to take out at least a dozen bags of frozen roast potatoes and broad beans and chicken drumsticks before there was enough room for Evie. He dropped them all on the floor. He could either throw them in the dustbin or scatter them over the lawn at the back of the house. The pigeons and the squirrels would soon eat them.

Grunting again with effort, he lifted up Evie’s body and lowered her into the freezer. He tried to do it with some reverence, as if he were setting her down to rest in a coffin. She lay there naked, her skin dead white, her lips slightly parted, staring up at him with those milky unfocused eyes. He was reminded of that pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia, drowning in the river, except that Ophelia was surrounded by flowers and weeds, and Evie was lying amongst packets of frozen prawns and Bird’s Eye peas.

He closed the lid of the freezer, locked it, and went back into the kitchen. He took out the largest of their frying-pans, put it on the hob, and poured a tablespoonful of olive oil into it. While the oil was heating up, he sliced the lump of Evie’s flesh into cubes. It was quite stringy, and made a crunching sound when he cut it.

As soon as the oil was smoking, he dropped the cubes of flesh into it, and stirred them around. They were quickly sizzled to a golden-brown, and when they had all been seared, he tipped them out onto a piece of kitchen towel. The smell was meaty but light, and again he was reminded of veal. It made him feel seriously hungry, and of course he hadn’t eaten since lunchtime yesterday, and that was only a pig cheek sandwich in the Trafalgar Arms.

Why bother making a stew? You could try this right now.

He picked up a cube of flesh. It was crisp on the outside and it did smell good. He hesitated for a moment, and then he bit into it, and chewed it. It was still a little tough, and it squeaked at first between his teeth, but the flavour was savoury and delicious.

I’m eating my wife. I’m eating Evie. She was a human being and I loved her and now I’m eating her. I’m actually eating her.

Aren’t you proud of yourself? There’s not many husbands who would have the nerve to do what you did, no matter how often they may have felt like it.

And I’ll bet there’s hardly any husbands who would deny their wives a Christian burial by passing them through their digestive tract instead.

Still chewing, David walked out of the kitchen, with Maggie following him and tangling herself between his ankles, mewling for something to eat. He stared at himself in the mirror by the front door. He had dark circles under his eyes and he was still wearing nothing but the black sweater that his mother had knitted. The sweater felt itchy across his back and around his elbows, but he had no inclination to take it off.

He watched himself chewing, moving the piece of flesh from one side of his mouth to the other. I’m eating my wife. This lump of meat that I have in my mouth, this is Evie.

He chewed more slowly. He closed his eyes and wondered if he ought to spit the meat out. But then, after a long pause, he swallowed it.