Human Remains

We often seemed to be in the kitchen at the same time making tea. She was never chatty, but polite and formal, and – I can’t believe I’m saying this – I enjoyed her company. When she went off sick I almost missed her. But then she was gone so long we forgot she existed, until the day when that incompetent numpty from personnel took us into the meeting room and told us that Janice’s body had been found at her house. I imagined she’d had a heart attack, and was waiting to be told when we could recruit someone else, but then he went on to tell us that she’d been lying in her house rotting for some four months.
    And it was just before lunch.
    Janice’s sad demise was the chief topic of conversation for the next few days, to the extent that I got sick of hearing about it and was on the verge of standing up and shouting some obscenity if I so much as heard her name. What was more alarming, though, was that moment when my name was suddenly brought into the conversation.
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    It was Martha, of course.
    ‘I just said, Colin, if you’d been listening, that you were friends with her, weren’t you?’
    ‘With whom? Janice? I was not.’
    ‘You talked to her more than any of us did.’
    ‘I spoke to her – that doesn’t mean we were friends.’
    ‘Nevertheless, don’t you think it’s just awful that she was dead for all that time and none of us checked up on her?’
    ‘Yes, awful,’ I said, through my teeth. I carried on working in the hope that they would all get the hint, and fortunately they moved on to talk about something else.
    I did find myself thinking about her, though. Why had she spoken to me on that day, after so long without a word? Could it be that she’d found me attractive? I thought more about it: the way she’d smiled, the way her face had changed. I tried to imagine her in my bedroom at home, tried to imagine taking off her cardigan and that dreadful shapeless blouse she always seemed to be wearing, finding a brassiere underneath that could be generously described as sturdy. But underneath the clothes, when what I needed was something real, something solid, with hair and creases and moles, curves and the scent of sweat, all I found was the body of my angel, firm and lithe and golden and glowing, flawless and serene and untouchable, and with it my ardour faded, as it always does when faced with perfection.
     
     
    The gym is emptying and I head to the changing rooms, a quick shower to rinse the sweat away and then thirty laps of the pool, a nice easy rhythm to cool down. Even so I’ve got one eye on the clock. Last week I did this in nineteen minutes. It’s possible I can get it down to fifteen, which seems much more appropriate, but I will need to work up to it. Push myself.
    When I moved to this gym from the one in town I was self-conscious about my workout. At the old place there had been a group of young women who always seemed to be there when I was, giggling and whispering behind their hands. And it was always packed – another reason to leave. There’s nothing worse than watching someone’s sweaty arse swivelling on a bike seat, waiting for them to finish.
    This gym is more expensive, but to my mind it’s worth the difference. It’s much bigger, which means more equipment, and the cost of it means one can expect a certain standard of clientele. The women with nothing better to do with their time come during the day; the mothers come with their children after school. But later in the evening the gym is populated by other single professionals who are here to do their business and then get off home, or to the pub, or whatever else it is people do who are both like me and utterly unlike me at the same time.
    It’s a year ago this week that we were told that Janice had died. Perhaps that’s why she has been on my mind so much recently. Something about the weather, the turning of the leaves, reminds me of decay and of her rotting corpse, slipping into liquid with nobody there to notice. I wish I’d paid more attention to her. There was so much beauty there that I could have observed, and I missed out on it.
    But then again it would have just been more bother, more distraction, like that infernal woman from the nursing home. She called again this evening before I set off for the gym, and, expecting it to be Vaughn, I answered it without looking at the caller display.
    ‘Mr Friedland?’
    I knew it was her. She has a way of pronouncing my name with