Forever Shores by Peter McNamara

stinks without ever really looking at it. You take the familiar for granted. Two large windows, dark as night now, gave on to trimmed grass two full storeys below, and the fruit trees and organic vegetable plots of the back garden. Between them a pink wash-basin stood on a pedestal, set beneath a big antique wall-mounted mirror, at least a metre square, with a faint coppery patina, the silvering crazed at the edges. The claw-footed bath itself filled the left-hand corner, opposite a chain-flush toilet bowl of blue-patterned porcelain like a Wedgwood plate, next to the timber door with its ornate geometrical carvings. The toilet’s polished timber seat was down, naturally, and masked by a rather twee fluffy woollen cover that Tansy might well have knitted herself. A flower-patterned plastic screen hung on a steel rail around the bath, suspended from white plastic rings as large as bangles. Tansy did not approve of separate shower stalls; a bath was how she’d washed as a girl, and the wide old shower head was barely tolerated. I didn’t mind, I enjoyed a long soak as much as anyone three or four times my age.
    I pulled the screen back on its runner and studied the bath, which of course was empty, fighting an urge to throw off my sweaty clothes and jump in for a steaming soak. The possibility that six corpses had shared that bath caused me to change my mind, even as I shook my head in self-mockery.
    The place smelled wonderful, that’s what I was noticing most of all. Scalloped shells at bath and basin alike held a deep green translucent chunky oval of Pears soap, a green deeper than jade, and its aroma seemed to summon me back to childhood, when my mother washed me with the perfumed scents of cleanliness, then dried me briskly with a fluffy towel smelling of sunlight. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, caught myself sighing, opened them. Just an ordinary bathroom, really. Perhaps cleaner than most. Aunt Tansy was punctilious. The house was large and rambling but tidy; she ran a taut ship, with the help of a middle-aged ‘treasure’, Mrs Abbott, who came by twice a week and took over most of the vacuuming and dusting. But a ship insufficiently taut, apparently, to prevent a weekly visitation from the dead.
    I glanced at my watch. Little wonder I was tired, it was nearly eleven. Great-Aunt Tansy was a woman of regular habits. Her invariable practice was to watch television while baking until the end of the Saturday night movie, clean her teeth, and be in bed by 11.30. It seemed her Saturday corpse must have put in its appearance by the time she switched the TV off at 11.15 or so, and was always gone when she rose for church at 8.30 on Sunday morning.
    â€˜Madness,’ I muttered aloud, removed my heavy boots, and climbed into the bath, holding the bat in one hand. I got out again, lifted the woolly toilet seat, pissed for a while, flushed, left the seat up. This was my bathroom now, by default. I climbed back into the bath, cool on my feet through the socks. By leaving a gap between the plastic screen and the tiled wall, I was able to watch the closed and locked window through the small aperture. This meant sitting on the slippery rounded edge of the bath and stretching my neck into a ridiculous position, but I decided a few minutes discomfort for the cause was worth it. I thought of Tansy’s homely gesture in insisting on shared cocoa and wished for something equally mundane to calm my jitters. Half my friends in school would have lit up a cigarette, but the foul things made me sick, and besides, even if I smoked there’d be little gain in advertising my presence. I caught myself. To whom? This was a delusion, an old lady’s mad fancy.
    The silence took on an eerie aspect. In her room below, Tansy might be sleeping by now, or perhaps lying awake, eyes wide and fixed on her dim ceiling. In the bathroom, no sound but my own breathing, not even the movement of wind in the trees below. I