Human Remains

of me, but I kept that bit back. They wouldn’t have understood. They would have laughed.
    ‘What happened when you went home?’
    ‘Nothing. I went out again the next morning. I spoke to you on the phone,’ I said to Frosty.
    ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘Where were you, when we spoke on the phone?’
    ‘I was in the car park. I was going to the funeral directors.’
    ‘Do you remember going in to see them?’
    ‘No,’ I said. I closed my eyes again, struggling to picture it. ‘I remember walking towards the office and he was there waiting for me.’
    I looked across to Frosty. He was sitting forward, his hands gripped tightly between his knees. Seeing him like that reminded me of something Sam had told me, on one of his daily hospital visits. He said he’d been out the night before with Ryan Frost. Ryan had told Sam that his dad had been preoccupied, miserable, worrying that he’d missed the signs during the phone conversation he’d had with me that morning, when I’d been standing in the car park at the shopping precinct. Apparently I had sounded ‘odd’. He thought he should have done something, come to find me.
    ‘Can you tell us what he looked like?’ The woman had taken over asking the questions. I felt embarrassed that I couldn’t remember her name.
    He was an angel,
I thought.
You can’t describe angels. And he would have looked different, to everyone else
.
    I shook my head. ‘No. He was just – ordinary.’
    ‘Was he taller than you?’
    ‘I don’t remember.’
    Frosty was busy tucking into Irene’s apple cake, his mouth full of crumbs. I watched him.
    ‘What did you talk about?’ the woman asked.
    ‘I don’t remember.’
    ‘Did he ask you to go with him?’
    I felt tears starting, then, not at the frustration of not being able to remember, but at her insistent questions. I felt as if I was failing them: failing Frosty, failing Sam and Brian and Irene who had all been so kind to me.
    ‘Annabel?’
    ‘I don’t remember anything.’
    ‘It’s OK,’ she said, the woman, whoever she was. I didn’t like her. She was giving me a headache with her sympathetic smile and her shiny hair and shiny white teeth.
    ‘I want to go back to sleep,’ I said. ‘I’m really tired.’
    I stood up and left the room. Irene was in the kitchen, standing in the doorway looking awkward and fidgety. I thought she had probably been listening at the door and had jumped back when I’d come out, and hadn’t had time to arrange herself into an appropriately innocent activity. I looked at her and went upstairs. I didn’t mind if she had been listening; I had nothing to hide from her, except my own pathetic brain and its inability to remember what had happened to me.
    I lay on the bed, listening to them talking about me downstairs.
    ‘It’s very early days,’ Frosty was saying. ‘I thought she was doing well, though.’
    ‘She
is
doing well,’ Irene said. ‘She’s had a terrible ordeal. She just needs a bit of time.’
    ‘We have to ask,’ the woman was saying. ‘We can come again, tomorrow maybe. See if anything’s come back to her.’
    ‘No,’ Irene said. ‘We’ll call you if she remembers anything.’
    ‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘This is a murder investigation, Mrs Everett. We need to gather as much information as we can. We know what we’re doing.’
    ‘Not with that poor girl, you don’t,’ Irene said. ‘I won’t have you pestering her.’
    ‘Look,’ said Frosty then, ‘this isn’t helping. Thank you very much for your time, and for the cake. Will you give me a call, let me know how she is? She can take as much time as she needs.’
    Irene let them out of the front door after that and I heard it bang shut, with force. I wondered if she was angry with me.

Colin
     
     
    I have been revisiting my biology notebooks in the evenings, comparing the notes I made with the images.
    Just occasionally, when I’m in the right frame of mind, I will select an album of images to peruse and put on a slide show in the background whilst engaged in some other activity, chores perhaps. It’s peaceful. No sounds.
    Shelley decayed quickest, perhaps because her house was warmer. I wonder too whether the medication she was taking had some effect on the chemical composition of the bodily fluids. In either case, the highlight was the loss of the forearm, the tendons which would usually hold the skeletal remains in place long after the flesh has disappeared letting her down, the way