Jess starts. It is the first time she has heard her client say her name.

Tears break and run down her client’s ancient, anguished face. ‘Did you want to sit in my chair?’

Jess drops her face to the frail sticks of her client’s thighs. She sobs hard, her entire body wracked with shudders. Coming down. Coming down hard from being electrified. Coming down fast from the terrible impact of what she has just done and been consumed by. Her whole body tries to shake itself apart. And yet she extends her arms around her client like a child reaching for its mother.

Flo gently places one hand upon the back of her carer’s head and looks at the window, seeking and finding happy frolicking Izzy upon the lawn, the sunlight out there so bright. Flo strokes Jess’s hair and whispers. ‘They’re everything. Always.’

SCRICK! comes the sound of a key thrust into the front door.

34

Damp, bedraggled, her clothing stained and hair hanging about her face, her mouth bleeding and her ex-husband dead upon the floor with a catastrophic head injury, Jess stands beside Flo’s chair, resigned, if she can even feel that much.

Scowling, put-upon, loaded down with carrier bags, Morag ambles and slouches into the living room. She eyes Tony’s corpse and ponders the crushed skull and terrible glistening stain. And shrugs nonchalantly. ‘About bleedin’ time, you ask me.’

Jess stares at the night worker as if at a traffic accident. An eyelid twitches before she blinks rapidly, attempting to comprehend her colleague’s reaction.

Morag drops her bags. Wasting no time, she seizes Tony’s lifeless ankles and drags his inert form out of the living room, pulling the corpse in a series of jerks, grunting as she moves. Above his lifeless body, her teeth are set in a grimace from exertion, or even satisfaction. It’s hard to tell.

Morag’s retreating form incrementally dissolves to a black silhouette. The sun strikes and illumines the spoked wheel of the stained glass above the front door. A colourful eye.

Tony’s corpse is tugged onwards and to the tunnel in the dining room where Jess discovered the first shrine, the first stick-wheel. His crimson, misshapen head leaks horribly. His arms are cast out upon the old, threadbare carpet but away he goes to the dusty articles of furniture, boxes, bags, books.

Morag ducks down, crawls backwards into the dark aperture of the tomb within this room, until her body disappears entirely. Her two fleshy arms then thrust out and seize Tony’s ankles.

His body, in a final series of jerks, is yanked completely into the darkness. Once his remains are entirely ensconced inside the tunnel, Morag chuckles to herself.

* * *

Hands planted on either side of the kitchen sink, Jess barks the meagre contents of her stomach into the empty basin, then gasps for air.