Dead Like You

Her shivering was getting worse, the cold seeping deep inside her bones. It was all right, though, she thought, so long as she was shivering. Four years ago, when she had left school, she’d worked for a season as a washer-upper in a ski resort in France. A Japanese skier had taken the last chairlift up one afternoon in a snowstorm. There was a mistake by the lift attendants, who thought the last person had already gone up and been counted at the top, so they turned the lift off. In the morning, when they switched it back on, he arrived at the top, covered in ice, dead, stark naked, with a big smile on his face.

No one could understand why he was naked or smiling. Then a local ski instructor she’d had a brief fling with explained to her that during the last stages of hypothermia people hallucinated that they were too hot and would start removing their clothes.

She knew that somehow she had to keep warm, had to ward off hypothermia. So she did the only movements she could, rolling, left and then right on the hessian matting. Rolling. Rolling. Totally disoriented by the darkness, there were moments when she lay on her side and toppled on to her face and others when she fell on to her back.

She had to get out. Somehow. Had to. How? Oh, God, how?

She couldn’t move her hands or her feet. She couldn’t shout. Her naked body was covered in goose pimples so sharp they felt like millions of needle points piercing her flesh.

Oh, please God, help me.

She rolled again and crashed into the side of the van. Something fell over with a loud, echoing clangggggg.

Then she heard a gurgling noise.

Smelt something foul, rancid. Diesel oil, she realized. Gurgling. Glug… glug… glug.

She rolled again. And again. Then her face pressed into it, the sticky, stinking stuff, stinging her eyes, making her cry even more.

But, she figured, it must be coming from a can!

If it was pouring out, then the top had come off. The neck of the can would be round and thin! She rolled again and something moved through the stinking wet slimy stuff, clattering, scraping.

Clatter… clatter… clangggg.

She trapped it against the side of the van. Wriggled around it, felt it move, made it turn, forced it to turn until it was square on, spout outwards. Then she pressed against the sharpness of the neck. Felt its rough edge cutting into her. She wormed her body against it, jigging, slowly, forcefully, then felt it spin away from her.

Don’t do this to me!

She wriggled and twisted until the can moved again, until she felt the rough neck of the spout again, then she pressed against it, gently at first, then applying more pressure, until she had it wedged firmly. Now she moved slowly, rubbing right, left, right, left, for an eternity at whatever was binding her wrists. Suddenly, the grip around them slackened, just a fraction.

But enough to give her hope.

She kept on rubbing, twisting, rubbing. Breathing in and out through her nose. Breathing in the noxious, dizzying stink of the diesel oil. Her face, her hair, her whole body soaked in the stuff.

The grip on her wrists slackened a tiny bit further.

Then she heard a sudden loud metallic clang and she froze. No, please no. It sounded like the garage door opening. She rolled on to her back and held her breath. Moments later she heard the rear doors of the van opening. A flashlight beam suddenly blinded her. She blinked into it. Felt his stare. Lay in frozen terror wondering what he was going to do.

He just seemed to be standing in silence. She heard heavy breathing. Not her own. She tried to cry out, but no sound came.

Then the light went out.

She heard the van doors clang shut. Another loud clang, like the garage door closing.

Then silence.

She listened, unsure whether he was still in here. She listened for a long time before she began to rub against the neck once more. She could feel it cutting into her flesh, but she didn’t care. Each time she rubbed now, she was certain the bonds holding her wrists were slackening more and more.

18

Saturday 3 January

Garry Starling and his wife, Denise, had gone to the China Garden restaurant most Saturday nights for the past twelve years. They favoured the table just up the steps, to the right of the main part of the restaurant, the table where Garry had proposed to Denise almost twelve years ago.

Separated from the rest of the room by a railing, it had a degree of privacy, and with Denise’s increasingly heavy drinking, they could sit here without the rest of the diners being privy to her frequent tirades – mostly against him.

She was usually drunk before they had even left home, particularly since the smoking ban, when she would quaff the best part of a bottle of white wine and smoke several cigarettes, despite his nagging her for years to quit, before tottering out to the waiting taxi. Then, at the restaurant, Denise would polish off one and often two Cosmopolitans in the bar area before they got to their table.

At which point she usually kicked off and began complaining about defects she perceived in her husband. Sometimes the same old ones, sometimes new ones. It was water off a duck’s back to Garry, who remained placid and unemotional, which usually wound her up even more. He was a control freak, she told her girlfriends. As well as being a sodding fitness freak.

The couple they normally came here with, Maurice and Ulla Stein, were heavy drinkers too and, long used to Denise’s tirades, they tended to humour her. Besides, there were plenty of undercurrents in their own relationship.

Tonight, the first Saturday of the New Year, Denise, Maurice and Ulla were in particularly heavy drinking mode. Their hangovers from New Year’s Eve, which they had celebrated together at the Metropole Hotel, were now distant memories. But they were also a little tired and Denise was in an uncharacteristically subdued mood. She was even drinking a little water – which, normally, she rarely touched.

The third bottle of Sauvignon Blanc had just been poured. As she picked her glass up, Denise watched Garry, who had stepped out to take a phone call, walking back towards them and slipping his phone into his top pocket.

He had a slight frame and a sly, studious face topped with short, tidy black hair that was thi

In contrast to her husband, Denise, who had been a slender blonde with an hourglass figure when they had first met, had ballooned recently. She was still blonde, thanks to her colourist, but years of heavy drinking had taken their toll. With her clothes off, in Garry’s opinion – which he had never actually voiced to her because he was too reserved – she had the body of a flabby pig.

‘Lizzie – my sister,’ Garry a

‘Lizzie? Stupid woman, what’s she gone and done that for?’ said Denise.

‘Oh, sure,’ Garry said. ‘She did it deliberately, right? Give her a break, for God’s sake! She’s been through the marriage from hell and now she’s going through the divorce from hell from that bastard.’

‘Poor thing,’ said Ulla.

‘She’s still way over the limit. They won’t let her drive home. I wonder if I should go and-’