I took the newspapers out onto the balcony at the back of the apartment as I didn’t want to be overlooked. She had bought stacks of the Citizen. It was about tabloid size, printed on rough cheap paper.
I sat in the warm sunshine with my back to the wall of the apartment and gradually over the next half hour or so, the pile of papers on the right became a heap of paper tubes on my left as I took each copy, rolled it along its length and wrapped some tape around it to keep it in shape.
Then I put a blanket in the bottom of a bin bag and packed it with a stack of the rolled up papers. Repeating the process I managed to make four full bags.
I put most of the rest of the blankets to soak in a bucket full of cooking oil.
The day seemed to pass slowly. It seemed an age before darkness fell as it always did at around six. I had about another two hours to wait until the disco at the back started up.
But now I could finish my preparations. I picked up the jerry can. The awkward weight felt heavy but familiar in my hands as with a clank I opened it. As I tipped the sloshing can into the first open bin bag the oily reek of diesel perfumed the night air.
The can shuddered and rocked in my hands as the oil poured with a soft gulping sound, soaking into the papers and the blanket. Once each bag had been doused, another blanket went on top, again to be soused in fuel, and I knotted them closed.
Carefully I closed the can with a snap and left it out on the balcony as I went in to wash my hands. I didn’t want any accidents here, after all.
When I had first moved into the apartments, immediately outside the front of the block, but before the roadside shanty dukas and bars, there was a slowly spreading waste ground strewn with blackened piles of old bags, cans and bottles. This was the dump where all the apartments’ houseworkers simply piled the trash and where once the heap was big enough one or other of them would set fire to it. Until one day, a lorry full of workers and breezeblocks arrived and at the end of three days, there was the pen.
It was a simple construction about two metres square. Three of the walls were about two metres tall whilst the fourth, facing towards the apartments, was half that. Gaps had been left between the breezeblocks at the bottom to let air in so it made for a relatively efficient incinerator. Now, instead of just dumping garbage at random, the houseboys and maids from the apartments dumped it all in the pen, which at least contained it all in one place until it was full enough to burn.
Carrying the first two bags down, I heaved them over the low wall and onto the stinking heap of tied up plastic shopping bags full of papers, vegetable refuse, potato peelings, scraps and all sorts of trash that had been accumulating in the pen over the last few days, together with some brushwood that had been cut from around the entrance to the car park and dumped earlier in the week. I was pleased to see it was so full.
As I added the second pair of bags a few minutes later I looked around carefully. There didn’t seem to be anyone about.
I was quite casual about it. Undoubtedly many of the locals would know that I was going. The houseboys would all gossip together with the askaris every day. People around the apartments would be expecting to see rubbish being dumped as I cleared out, although they probably wouldn’t expect to see me doing it obviously.
I could hear a soft hubbub of voices from the bars outside at the front of the apartments, but they were another ten or so metres down the road from the pen.
In daylight the front of the structure was clearly visible from the apartments. In the dark and in the shadow of the pen itself, I doubted that anyone could see me, even if they were looking.
Then there were my friends the askaris, but they all dossed out on the concrete steps in front of the cars at the far end of the car park that led to the path around the back of the furthest block of apartments. I would be unlucky if there was anyone watching.
No, it looked safe enough, or as safe as I could hope for at least. Now it was a matter of waiting.
As I sat there, just after eight, I heard the girls’ voices coming from above, a little bubble of brightness and jollity disappearing down the stairwell; then the rusty creak as the ground floor grating opened, followed by the grinding complaining squeal as it was pulled to again and the jail-like clank of the moment the grating crashed shut with a reverberating clang that seemed to go on forever.
It was like the doors of hell closing.
Well, I thought. Time to go to work.
With the girls now out from the apartment above and the apartment below empty that only left the family on the ground floor, but they wouldn’t probably matter too much. The shower room’s window faced out to the back of the apartments so it was away from the blocks on either side which would be making their own noise anyway. At the back there was the short stretch of ground with the water tank which then gave over on to the road, on the other side of which was the big empty building plot and a large walled house which at the moment looked unoccupied. The disco seemed to be a couple of hundred metres further down on the right, it was shielded from view by trees but I would hear it clearly when it started to get going.
Most of the relevant bits of shopping were on the table.
Standing in the darkened living room I pushed the play button on the dusty black ghetto blaster before turning back into the room and reaching out for the clothes. As if in a dream I pulled the boiler suit on over my boxers and stuffed its legs into the tops of the Wellington boots. As the staccato guitar gave way to the crashing beat of the drums and the strangely echoing melody I felt that at home I’d have been afraid of it drawing attention, of having some neighbour come round to complain about the noise. But here it was normal. Mind you, at home I wouldn’t be in this situation. I felt strangely distanced, disassociated from the present almost as though I was watching myself from afar.
I felt nauseous, and then a violent hot churning need to run back towards the choo. You’re stalling, I thought to myself, slipping the elastic straps of the protective facemask over my head. You’re finding all sorts of excuses the voice in my head went on. You’ve just got to get on and do it.
With an unbearable effort I took a first reluctant step towards the hallway. And then a second.
All of a sudden there I was, dusk mask and goggles in place outside the door as the familiar haunting voice growled its instruction.
I reached across to the unit on the shelf to turn up the volume.
I fitted the bar into the latch on the shower room door and opened it as the song crescendoed.
The shower room was dark, I hadn’t bothered to turn on the light.
There was a sort of grunt and movement as I pushed the door open. He must have heard me come in.
For reasons I could never really explain I said, ‘I’m sorry about this.’
With the tape over his eyes he wouldn’t even have seen me as some massive shape, haloed by the light of the living room.
And then I fired.
There was what a colossal crack and the room was lit with a momentary flash as I felt the kick of the recoil.
Above the scream of the record there was a horrible hideous gurgling sound.
I quickly worked the pump and then in the darkness, I fired again, low.
I was coughing.
There was an acrid stench of cordite in the air. In the small room it seemed to bite and sting my eyes and then there was the smell of blood.
I stepped backwards out of the shower room and shut the door, shuddering and breathing deeply.
My whole body seemed to be going through hot and cold flushes. I don’t know how long I stood like that, maybe ten, twenty seconds.
I felt as though I was going to shit myself. It seemed a lifetime.
And then… Well, I felt suddenly calm. I had done it. I breathed deeply. There was no going back now.
And that was it. That’s how I committed murder as the song turned into a denial.
With a click I turned off the tape. My ears rang with the silence.
There was no going ba
ck now.
It was done.
I just had to get on with it. I picked up the shotgun again and taking a deep breath, opened the shower door and switched on the light.
He was lying huddled in the corner. Dead of course. No surprise about that. One of my shots, the first I guessed, had taken him just at the shoulder, at that range it had just about amputated the arm and smashed in the left-hand side of his chest. It was probably enough to have killed him instantly. The second had hit him full on, slap bang in the centre of the belly and had almost blown him in two. The sky blue mattress was now a sodden, purple black with thick oozing pools of blood.
I took a deep breath. My throat felt tight. I could feel my gorge rising, my hands gripped the gun, my knuckles were white. But I felt oddly calm, collected, controlled, I was on top of the situation. I knew what I had to do.
The problem with killing him had always been what to do with the body. I was living on a peninsula so my first thought was could I just dump him in the water? I had quickly discounted the idea as impractical. There were estuaries on either side and the sea was shallow and quite tidal, while other than the little headland at the end of Mnazi Moja, the coastline was largely beaches or mudflats so there weren’t any cliffs off which I could reliably tip him into deep enough water. To use the sea properly, I would need access to a boat which I didn’t have. The last thing I wanted was to have him found lying in the mud at low tide or washed ashore.
If I took him inland and could find the right place and wanted to take the risk, I could always dump him and trust the animals do the work. But it was a long way to drive with a body in the back of the Suzuki to turn him into hyena or croc meat. And I would have to get far enough away that circling vultures wouldn’t be a giveaway.
Trying to bury him in a patch of wasteland somewhere on the headland would be a complete disaster. There were people everywhere, herding goats, living in little huts, scrabbling over discarded rubbish and litter to see what they could find of value. Either I would be caught in the act or he would swiftly be found.
The only solution was the obvious one. I would have to put him out with the rubbish. I would need to dismember him to fit him into the bin bags we had bought. I also needed to prevent him being identified if his remains were ever found. Ideally I wanted to prevent him being identified as human at all by anyone who came across any remains.
I had to make sure I did three things, well, four, if you include avoiding cuts and breathing in any blood that might be carrying HIV.
I had to cut him up small enough to be able to get his remains into the bin bags for disposal. Draining out anything that could be washed down the shower grate so as to lose weight would help.
Secondly, I had to ensure that any body parts that might by any chance escape the destruction process would be unrecognisable for what they were.
And thirdly, I had to combine the bits as I wrapped them in the oil-sodden blankets and put them into the bin bags, so as to best help the destruction process.
I plugged the extension lead into the socket in the corridor and turned the music back on but at a lower volume. I was going to need to use the chainsaw.
The legs were first, as the great ripping blade tore into cloth and flesh in a spray of blood, the whining tone deepening as it bit into the bone. Working quickly, I looped rope around each ankle and passed them up through the iron security bars cemented across the window, and back down into the room. Heaving on the ropes I hoisted each leg up the wall so that they hung like lambs in an abattoir to drain. They were surprisingly heavy things, huge lumps of muscle and bone. I was going to need to section them in any case, I thought, they were still too big.
I worked steadily and methodically with the axe and saw. The arms came off and I cut them down into smaller chunks and lumps, the flesh jagged and shredded at the edges. I took the fingers off to make the hands less recognisable.
I set his head down carefully on its side on a portion of the mattress in the middle of the floor. I wanted to deaden the sound as, standing over it, I pounded at it with the sledgehammer, smashing the skull, the face, the jaw bone. Without the flesh I wanted unrecognisable fragments of bone, if any survived at all.
I was careful to crush the jaw with direct blows. I needed to ensure I broke all the teeth. I had to do a solid workmanlike job. If there was one thing in my life that I had to do right, this was it. No cock-ups, no mistakes, because there was no second chance, no excuses in this situation.
The guts felt squelchy and hot through my rubber gloves as I scooped and ladled them into some of the bin bags. I was hacking the innards loose with a knife – the liver, the heart, the lungs. I was trying not to look, trying not to think about what I was doing. I was just reaching into the body cavity, pulling out handfuls of organs, hacking the sinews and connecting tissue to free the contents for disposal.
The rib cage would be distinctive. Luckily it was mostly gone on the left-hand side. I cut it into four strips, up the breastbone, up either side to each of the armpits, up either side of the backbone, chopping up and under the shoulder blades with the axe until I could wrestle sections free.
The backbone I cut into manageable sections, the pelvis was a huge lump that I thought would be very recognisable. It was too big for the sledgehammer so I used the chainsaw to cut it into two before pounding it as best I could.
I had finished the noisy bit now and ran the tap in the basin to rinse my gloved hands. There was a mist of blood in the room’s air. I didn’t want to leave bloody footprints so I slipped my feet out of my boots to step into the main room and turn the tape off again.
I listened hard but the only noises I could hear were those of any normal evening drifting across from the dukas out on the road.
I used the blankets soaked in cooking oil to wrap his mortal remains in as small chunks as possible, before putting them into the bin bags. Once each bag was sufficiently full, but not so full it was impossible to carry, I dragged it out through the living room and kitchen to the balcony. As each shot had shredded the body it had also shredded the mattress beneath and so a mess of blood-soaked foam and pellets went into each bag as well. What bits of mattress were still big enough I used the saw to rip so that I could also stuff them into the bags. The shower room was a mess.
It’s called the wick effect. I’d come across it drunk and alone late one night as I vegetated on my couch watching some crappy documentary investigating explanations for so called spontaneous combustion cases. It’s been found to happen occasionally when someone’s clothes catch fire. In principle, it’s a bit like the way a candle burns, but where the wick rather than being trapped in the middle of the fuel, is a sheet of material wrapped around the outside of it.
As the wick burns it melts the body fat, which then soaks into the wick material around the body to burn, giving a very low and localised flame, but one that burns at a very high temperature for ages. They demonstrated it with a pig’s carcass. It lasted for something like six hours, smoldering away, but eventually turning even bone to ash. At least he had plenty of fat on him, I thought, as I sloshed the last of the cooking oil into the bags for luck.
I had been careful with the diesel soaked papers that I had dumped out earlier. Just enough to get it going I judged, but not so much that my wick was burnt away before the process could start to work.
The clothes I was wearing would need to go in the bags as well so I had no real choice but to start to clean up now. I ran the shower for about half an hour while I hosed down the walls and floor and used bleach on the scrubbing brush to get the worst of the mess sluiced away. Caustic soda down the drains would help to chemically remove the evidence. I would need to have another go tomorrow. The cement walls were pitted and scarred with shot. The cement and paint would sort that and the damage in the bedroom out later on over the weekend.
I pulled off my sodden boiler suit and quickly ran my head, arms and feet under the shower, scrubbing vigorously to get rid of any obvious signs. I was su
rprised to find my hair sticky with blood and rubbed it furiously, trying to get it clean.
By now it was nearly ten o’clock. Out on the balcony I threw the clothes I had been wearing into one of the bags. Finally in went the bits and pieces, the scrubbing brush, the extension lead, the mask and the gloves.
I toweled myself down, dressed and looked out the front of the apartments. It all seemed fine. There weren’t too many cars in the car park and as normal the askaris seemed to be asleep on the step down from the hard standing. The little row of dukas were shutting up for the night and as ever there were groups of two and three people picking their way around the puddles as they wandered away.
I decided I would leave it for half an hour or so to let the duka owners go home.
I made myself a cup of coffee and thought about it as I drank. I wanted the trip to the pen to be over as quickly as possible and I now had a lot of fairly heavy bin bags sitting out on the balcony. Getting them down the stairs would take a while, as would coming in and out of the building.
I tied the top of each one shut and looked out over the balcony. If I carried them down I could put them behind the water tank, between it and the fence. They would be out of sight there while I fetched and carried from the apartment or from there to the pen.
I just brought the last of the bags downstairs when I realised I had been a complete idiot. I had forgotten the matches. So it was back upstairs, to open the grille, open the door, collect the box, close the door, close the grille and head back downstairs. I was just about to go out through the back grille when I heard a clanking behind me. It was Mr Chavda, coming out for his evening stroll.
He was a pleasant enough old stick. I liked him. He did like a bit of a chat though. Especially with wazungu because then he could indulge in a bit of a moan about the wananchi.
‘Bloody Africans, no civilisation, no culture, they are just always so noisy. I hear from Dinesh that you have been over to complain to the apartments next door. I’ve been over to complain as well before. No consideration.’
We stood there in the hallway for a few minutes. I winced inwardly but nodded when he said he had been going to go across to complain about the banging earlier on but he hadn’t been able to work out where it was coming from. It was only a couple of minutes talking to him but it felt like an hour, just one of those times when you want to get on and do things and you feel time ticking away. At last he said goodnight and walked off around the corner.
The moon was out, a pair of crescent horns sticking up over the top of the trees, and as I stepped away from the pool of yellow light and its dancing moths at the exit from the stairwell, there was a delicious blue silvery sheen which belied the velvet warmth of the night. I started to transfer the bags across to the pen. I kept my head down and walked, did not run.
The askaris were lying on the steps, asleep on their long coats. The last thing I wanted just at the moment was for one of them to wake up and volunteer to help. As I carried the second set across Daisy came snuffling up.
‘Go on, shoo,’ I hissed. She stopped, looking up at me, hesitant. Normally I was friendly. ‘Go on, off with you.’ I swung the bag at her. It was so big and heavy and slow it was never going to connect, it was more an indication and she backed off, almost shrugged her shoulders, and trotted on by me towards the back of the apartments.
I walked across the car park and out of the gate towards the pen, thinking, It’s absolutely normal, nothing to worry about, nothing to notice, just a mzungu putting out rubbish. I lifted the first bag up and dumped it on the pile, then the second to join the other black bin bags sitting there. Just a few more to go, I thought, as I wandered back.
As I came round to the water tank for the last time I could see something moving. So that was where she was off to.
‘Shoo Daisy, shoo. Go on get out of it.’ I was waving my arms as I came up to the tank. She darted off the other way before I got close. I picked up the last two bags and tramped back towards the pen.
The pile of rubbish was quite high now and stank to high heaven of rotting food and veg. I put one of the bags down in order to use both hands to lift the other one on to the top of the pile. I brought my hand underneath it, lifted it to chest height and then up and on to the pile.
I turned and stooped to pick up the last bag and grabbing the neck with my right hand, as I lifted it up from the ground I straightened and swung my left-hand underneath to repeat the operation. The underside was wet and slimy.
I looked down, this was odd. I had done this with all the other bags. Had I put it in a puddle or something? I lifted the bag to chest height and there, staring me in the face, was a huge tear in the bag. The wet sliminess was blood. For a moment I was frozen with panic. All I could think was, Christ, Christ, Daisy, it had to be Daisy. She had been round by the tank.
I could dump this in the pen but if I had dropped anything on the way from the water tank, had I just left a trail of blood between here and there? It was dark. I couldn’t tell. I forced myself to think calmly as I shoved the bag on to the top of the pile.
Between the tank and the corner of the block I had come across the grass. I had walked on the paved path just along the side of the block and then had cut straight across the grass in the middle as the most direct route to the gate. So the only places I could have dripped blood where it might be seen would be on the path and across the car park. But the car park was sufficiently dusty and dirty with tyre tracks and oil stains that nobody would notice anything, so that was OK. I lifted the torn edge of the bag and peered quickly inside. Daisy had obviously been after something, had she got anything? If she had pulled something out could other things have fallen? I knew she had a den in amongst some old water tanks dumped in the back corner of the site. I would never find her there now in the darkness, but as I walked back I would just have to check the ground to see if there was anything obvious, check the back of the apartments around the water tank and just trust to luck.
The first thing to do was just to get this away before anybody caught me. I chose a likely looking selection in the corner nearest to me and another on the far side. I glanced around but there didn’t seem to be anyone in sight. I fumbled with the matchbox. The first two sticks broke and I muttered, bloody shitty matches, to myself, they were Kharatasi of course. The next one struck and I had to duck to avoid being burnt as the paper in the bin bags took with a whoosh of flame.
I stepped sideways around the corner of the pen to be out of the direct light from the fire as it roared into life and then walked smartly, but carefully, back through the gate. I tried to trace the route I had taken with the bags, my eyes on the ground. I crossed the car park. I couldn’t see anything; down the steps on to the grass, it was hopeless here. Behind me flames were just starting to dance over the top of the wall of the pen, the flickering light casting shadows from the parked cars across the field. The moonlight was bright but the light of the flames and the dancing shadows made it difficult to see. I had been carrying that last bag in my left hand so as I had come around the side of the building it would have been the one nearest the wall and would have been directly over the paved surface whereas the other would have been over the grass. I stopped at the corner of the building and looked. It was far enough away here that moonlight ruled again. I couldn’t see anything. There was nothing which looked obvious. I would just have to wait for daylight.
The girls arrived back about twenty minutes later.
“Hope you’re feeling better,” Clare said, as I opened the door to Sam. “You missed a good night.”
“Yes, we went to Rooftops, did the barbecue,” said Sam looking pained.
“Looks like somebody is putting on a show here,” said Clare, nodding at the raging fire which could now be seen blazing in the pen as we turned and looked through the sitting room and out of the balcony windows. “They don’t usually burn it at night, it’s a bit spectacular though, isn’t it?”
I turned and we all looked out at
it for a moment. It really had caught, it was roaring now, all furnace oranges, reds and bright yellows, as flames licked up into the sky while puffs of exploding sparks crackled and snapped as a stream of hot red embers and sparks rushed up in to the night air with the hot billowing smoke.
“Yes,” I said, “it is spectacular. I’ve been standing here watching it.”
“Oh well,” she said, “Time to call it a night. Lala Salaama.”
“Yeah, good night to you too,” I said, and shut the door.
THE END
CUFFED
by James J. Murray
https://www.jamesjmurray.com/