Wrong Turn

The Dead Girl

Steven sat in the car, in the dark, a click, as the internal lights automatically shut off. Tick, tick, tick, went the engine as it slowly cooled off. His life now played out in beats, he counted every breath. He sat in the thick night silence, parked outside his house. He was paralysed, a lump of wood, unable to reach for the door handle and make his way inside. His wife Amy was in there waiting, he could see her busy shadows through the sheer linen curtains, as she primped and plumped the house. Eight whole minutes until she would start calling, panicked that the guest would start to arrive. He wished he still smoked. The way he use to before this life, out of a big dirty old mountain dew bottle, the rudimentary alfoil cone, sitting just above the dirty mark of the brown bong water below. A marker of a life before Amy, growing up in the grubby brown brick government house, where men spent days drinking on couches, left outside in the rain to rot.

He stared at his terrace, sat neatly in a row. Perfectly curated French style furniture, quaint table, two chairs so slim they were a struggle to sit on. Steven's phone beeped, another message from unknown. 'NEED 2 TALK NOW', it said. They wanted money, of that Steven was sure. He had invited his past into his present. He had needed them, after all these years of pretending he had not. Steven wanted it to be over, now he just wanted to go to the police. His eight minutes was up, he reached for the door and got out. A dead man walking.

"Don't chop the tomato like that Steven! That looks terrible" Amy was a frenetic person, tonight she was at her worst. Steven's phone buzzed again in his pocket, the calls coming in urgently, building in intensity like a rapidly sprawling grass fire. He ignored it. He knew who it would be. Steven glanced outside his kitchen window, at dancing dark shadowy shapes, which he hoped were just trees.

"Amy we need to talk" Steven gave up on the Caprese salad; his jagged cut tomatoes and the limp little bits of blanched bocconcini cheese.

"They'll be here any minute, SHIT!" Amy's wooden spoon hit the bubbling bright red sauce, a volcanic spurt landing on her silk shirt. She turned unbuttoning her blouse, bumping into Steven as she rushed towards the door.

"Wait" Steven grabbed her wrist; it was dainty, creamy white, edged with lace like ribbons of tender blue veins. They were attached to hands saved from the ragged reality of hard labour, including disposing of a body that Amy had herself killed, in a drunken hit and run, three weeks ago to the day.

"We need to go to the police Amy"

The doorbell rang.

"That'll be them," She grabbed her hand back. The dead girl had drawn a clear divide between them. A shared secret, rotten to the core. Her decaying body, festering in the middle of their martial bed. Twisting stubborn death weeds, through all of Steven's thoughts.

Steven hated Amy's friends. They all had strange baby like nick names, so popular with the middle class. They held tightly to any identify marker, to prove they had known each other from early days of private school. They bought bunches of pretentious flowers, which days later wilted with rot, smelling like weeds pissed on by a cat.

"Peonies!" Amy's favourite. Steven hated the way she kept tucking her hair behind her ears, they stuck out too much, like little fleshy open car doors.

Amy ushered them all in, Jamie, Jules, Bunny and Billie.

Dinner was served as the conversation lurched from one dreadful topic to the next; landing on the worst topic of all, politics. Steven sat silent, his views vastly different from the rest. He would normally relish his role of a left wing grenade but not tonight. He stared at his plate, hunks of meat and a shiny slick of fat, loosely hanging off the ox tailbone, the thick oily swirl of red sauce bleeding into his white mash. It made him sick; it made him think of the dead girl. Her grisly little knuckles as he dragged her from the road into the tarp covered boot of his car. He had almost done it without looking, but his eyes couldn't help but hit those innocent little hands as he closed the boot. He had driven her straight home, his original one. "Show us where she is, we'll take care of it"They said, his brothers, from his life, so long before.