experimentation. With skilled evisceration, and the right combinations of salts and herbs, forty days would be the perfect time to turn wet and putrefying dead bodies into leathery facsimiles that, at least passingly, resembled the original owner as they were in life.
But in a south London suburb – even a suburb that is going through the longest heatwave in living memory – the process needs a little help.
He’s learned as he’s gone along. Practice, after all, makes perfect, and besides, he’s had to learn two sets of skills where his teachers only had to master one. In Egypt, two sets of priests were responsible for rendering their royalty fit for the afterlife: the
parichistes
and the
taricheutes
, the cutters and the salters. Necessity has forced the Lover to master both roles, and there were bound to be errors along the way.
He doesn’t like to think about his first two attempts at making himself a girlfriend; is just grateful that he didn’t live in this crowded house when the first experiment failed, at least. A body is easier to move before the rot has set in. Jecca left the house in a series of carrier bags, flesh falling from bone like a five-hour pot roast; but at least, coming from a garden flat, she didn’t have to go through any communal areas. Katrina, her body cavities cleared more studiously, was a steep learning curve. His incision, down the front of the abdomen the way a pathologist would do it, left the trunk loose and floppy, and her nose was ruined by his clumsy attempts to remove the brain with the crochet hook. The parichistic entry, via a slit in the left-hand side, though it means having to plunge himself arm-deep in viscera, produces a neater, more human-shaped final product. He discovered the barrel drill in Homebase soon after that. He figures that the Egyptians would have used one too, had they had access to electricity and geared motors. He thinks of them sometimes, his two lost loves: Katrina sacrificed to fire and Jecca to water. He wonders if they are lonely, now, as he no longer is.
But he’s not happy with Alice. She’s an improvement on the two who came before, but it was only once her forty days were up and he had to break her from her crust like a salt-baked chicken that he understood that he needed to change the desiccation salts as the process progressed. The Egyptians had the help of the blazing sun to preserve their kings. For his princesses, he has dehumidifiers, and the close quarters of their confinement means that the juices have nowhere to go.
He moves Alice and Marianne to the sofa to watch the TV while he attends to Nikki. Some tender part of him wants to spare her the indignity of exposing her half-cooked nakedness to the gaze of his more finished beauties. As he carries Alice, he sees that her smile has spread again, as her skin is contracting back towards her hairline. He can almost see her wisdom teeth and is painfully aware of the bones beneath the surface. I haven’t done you justice, my dear, he thinks. I should have read more. If only I’d known before it was too late that a girl like you deserves her share of moisture once the natural wet is gone. He puts her gently down in the armchair, unwinds her arm from round his neck. She settles with a rustling whisper. Her hair is thin and brittle, her eyes sunken and hollow beneath their drooping lids. I wonder, he thinks. Soon you’ll be nothing but skin and bone, flaking and shedding over my carpet. Perhaps it’s time that we started to think about parting company.
He goes back to the bed, to his Princess Nikki.
The base of the bed is covered with a thick plastic sheet, liberated from a building site. Sleeping above his girls has never been a problem for him – indeed, it gives him a feeling of warm companionship – but the process of transformation, even with the alkaline, deadening effect of his home-made natron, tends to produce sudden bursts of smell that wake him, gagging, in the night. He props
But in a south London suburb – even a suburb that is going through the longest heatwave in living memory – the process needs a little help.
He’s learned as he’s gone along. Practice, after all, makes perfect, and besides, he’s had to learn two sets of skills where his teachers only had to master one. In Egypt, two sets of priests were responsible for rendering their royalty fit for the afterlife: the
parichistes
and the
taricheutes
, the cutters and the salters. Necessity has forced the Lover to master both roles, and there were bound to be errors along the way.
He doesn’t like to think about his first two attempts at making himself a girlfriend; is just grateful that he didn’t live in this crowded house when the first experiment failed, at least. A body is easier to move before the rot has set in. Jecca left the house in a series of carrier bags, flesh falling from bone like a five-hour pot roast; but at least, coming from a garden flat, she didn’t have to go through any communal areas. Katrina, her body cavities cleared more studiously, was a steep learning curve. His incision, down the front of the abdomen the way a pathologist would do it, left the trunk loose and floppy, and her nose was ruined by his clumsy attempts to remove the brain with the crochet hook. The parichistic entry, via a slit in the left-hand side, though it means having to plunge himself arm-deep in viscera, produces a neater, more human-shaped final product. He discovered the barrel drill in Homebase soon after that. He figures that the Egyptians would have used one too, had they had access to electricity and geared motors. He thinks of them sometimes, his two lost loves: Katrina sacrificed to fire and Jecca to water. He wonders if they are lonely, now, as he no longer is.
But he’s not happy with Alice. She’s an improvement on the two who came before, but it was only once her forty days were up and he had to break her from her crust like a salt-baked chicken that he understood that he needed to change the desiccation salts as the process progressed. The Egyptians had the help of the blazing sun to preserve their kings. For his princesses, he has dehumidifiers, and the close quarters of their confinement means that the juices have nowhere to go.
He moves Alice and Marianne to the sofa to watch the TV while he attends to Nikki. Some tender part of him wants to spare her the indignity of exposing her half-cooked nakedness to the gaze of his more finished beauties. As he carries Alice, he sees that her smile has spread again, as her skin is contracting back towards her hairline. He can almost see her wisdom teeth and is painfully aware of the bones beneath the surface. I haven’t done you justice, my dear, he thinks. I should have read more. If only I’d known before it was too late that a girl like you deserves her share of moisture once the natural wet is gone. He puts her gently down in the armchair, unwinds her arm from round his neck. She settles with a rustling whisper. Her hair is thin and brittle, her eyes sunken and hollow beneath their drooping lids. I wonder, he thinks. Soon you’ll be nothing but skin and bone, flaking and shedding over my carpet. Perhaps it’s time that we started to think about parting company.
He goes back to the bed, to his Princess Nikki.
The base of the bed is covered with a thick plastic sheet, liberated from a building site. Sleeping above his girls has never been a problem for him – indeed, it gives him a feeling of warm companionship – but the process of transformation, even with the alkaline, deadening effect of his home-made natron, tends to produce sudden bursts of smell that wake him, gagging, in the night. He props
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