Human Remains by Elizabeth Haynes Page B

work about her body being found.
    I wonder if she would ever have let me fuck her.
     
     
    I’m still thinking about Janice when I get to the gym at seven. Thirty minutes on the bike, thirty minutes rowing, thirty minutes on the treadmill. Feels like hard work this evening, but for most of the ninety minutes the thought of her keeps me occupied.
    I remember when Janice first spoke to me. She must have been working at the council for years upon years, a figure who was as much a part of the scenery as the photocopier or the pile of ten-year-old telephone directories, and I’d never heard her speak.
    That day she brought the mail up from the post room, and instead of just leaving it in a pile in the tray by the door she brought an envelope over to my desk, cleared her throat and said, ‘This one’s for you.’
    I looked up in astonishment.
    She would have been in her late thirties by then, the same age I am now, but she looked nearer fifty, hair scraped back into a lanky ponytail, dull brown and greying at the temples, pale eyes hooded in a lined face. She had the sort of face that would have benefited from make-up, and that’s not the sort of thing I would say often. In fact I could have imagined her on one of those ghastly makeover shows, going in as a frumpy old maid and coming out as a beautiful, poised mature woman.
    As if she could read my mind she smiled, and her whole face changed. She was almost beautiful – the old hag to the angel.
    After that I spoke to her quite a few times. 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