He slept deeply all night, which you might think was because he had a clear conscience but obviously you would be wrong on account not only of Morris very rarely having a clear conscience but such a thing at this time being especially unlikely. He had only one dream, a ridiculous one about a dead body in his bedroom, and he woke up to find it wasn’t ridiculous at all. Shit, he thought, why is it only the bad dreams that come true? Why couldn’t that one he had last week come true? Still, this was no time to be thinking about threesomes.

He lay there, as usual, trying to pretend it wasn’t time to get up, although in fairness since he never had much reason to get up except on signing-on days that wasn’t far from the truth. Still, the sun was shining and the world doesn’t stop just because there’s a dead woman on the floor. No, today was the day to do something about it, something better than yesterday, which he had to admit wasn’t a great solution to the problem. Today he would have a brilliant idea and the problem was going to go away. Yep, he was feeling better already.

Until the mouse came out and climbed up the blanket he had so carefully draped over the body last night. OK, it was a mouse, but really, did it have no respect? It sat there apparently nibbling at the blanket, which Morris thought was strange because even he knew the nutritional value of a 100% nylon blanket from Argos was likely to be pretty small but then there’s no accounting for taste. On the other hand, at least if it was breakfasting on the bedding it was going to be leaving his Frosties alone. On the other hand, now he thought about it, only yesterday he had successfully killed the mouse with the broom and dumped it in the bin under the sink. He remembered that now because in doing so he had smashed the table lamp and that was still where it had fallen in bits, so either this was another mouse, a possibility that Morris had never considered before on account of all mice looking pretty much the same to him, and to most people probably, or it was a ghost.

In his present state he was prepared to consider the latter as a very real possibility, and he found himself rummaging in the bin under the sink, past the fish finger packet, several milk bottle tops and a used condom (when the hell had that been from?) and there it was, still dead, and come to that dead still, which meant he hadn’t imagined it and whatever was nibbling the blanket it wasn’t this mouse.

God, if only disposing of bodies was as easy as this, just throwing them in the bin. That’s when it came to him. OK, not the bin, but the council tip. He put his coat on.

‘Morris, is that you?’

‘Yes, Marty, it’s your old friend Morris Figg, back again.’

‘Well I must say this is a pleasure, twice in three days.’

Morris thought about that. ‘Two days. I was here yesterday, remember?’

‘Was it yesterday, was it? Well well, doesn’t time fly?’

Morris wondered about that too, and found he was unable to come up with an answer so he stopped trying.

‘Anyway, boy, if it’s work you’re after I’m afraid there isn’t any. Things is a bit quiet just now.’

‘Yes, I know, you told me that yesterday.’ Or was it the day before? Marty was confusing him. ‘Actually, Marty, I was wondering if you could do me a favour.’

‘A flavour is it you’re wanting? And what flavour would that be then?’

Morris couldn’t resist it. ‘Chocolate’.

‘What? Chocolate? Morris, what the hell are you talking about? You know, sometimes I wonder about you. Have you been on the stuff this morning?’

That was when Morris realised flavour wasn’t a joke, it was Marty for favour. ‘Look Marty, I need to borrow your van for a while.’

‘Oh, the van. Well, I suppose that would be alright, seeing as it’s you. I suppose you’ve got a driving licence?’

‘Yep.’

‘And insurance?’

‘Yep.’

‘Well that will be fine then. Here’s the keys.’

As he drove off in a cloud of blue smoke, Morris thanked the god of halfwits for Marty.

He got the body as far as the door of the flat before the thought occurred to him that taking a corpse out of a van at the council tip might arouse some suspicion, and he put it down and rested on his haunches against the door frame while he tried to figure that one out. He went back downstairs and out to the back yard. Yes, there it was still, an old carpet Mrs Diggle had thrown out in the summer. It was sodden with the rain but it would have to do. He considered whether it was better to take a wet carpet up the stairs and wrap the body up in it there, or drag the body down the stairs and do the job in the hall, and decided that neither of them was ideal. Still, it would have to be one or the other, and something told him that dragging a corpse down three flights of stairs, even in this house where no-one cared what went on in the normal run of things, might attract the wrong sort of attention.

Upstairs again, he rolled Tinkerbelle up in the carpet without much difficulty but as he started to drag the whole thing down the stairs the carpet came with him and the body slid out and came to rest on the landing. No, he would have to tie it up.

Ten minutes later he came to the conclusion that there was no string in the flat, unless he counted the length of garden twine that was holding together one of the legs on the bed which had broken during an overenthusiastic shag he had had with a fourteen stone Polish woman he had picked up over the frozen food section of the Plentiful Goodness Food Store, but he decided that ought to stay where it was.

He knocked gently on Mrs Diggle’s door and when there was no reply he figured out that could be on account of her being deaf, so he banged a lot harder and when there was no reply to that either he decided that deaf, in Mrs Diggle’s case, meant completely deaf, and no amount of banging was going to do the job. Upon which he instinctively tried the handle and lo and behold the door opened. Mrs Diggle was fast asleep and snoring to waken the dead in an armchair in front of the TV. The volume was turned right off and Morris stood in front of it for a moment sharing the old lady’s deaf world, and then he pulled himself together and crept into the kitchen. He wondered why he was creeping when she was not only fast asleep but wouldn’t be able to hear him if she were wide awake and he rode through her flat on a motorbike with a broken exhaust, but creeping came naturally to Morris.

He rummaged, quietly, in the drawer under the kitchen sink and there he found, among the detritus of years of widowed life, a roll of string, still with an ancient label on from Woolworth, price 9d. Morris wondered momentarily what 9d meant, and then he crept out again and up the stairs.

When he finished the tying and stood up to admire his handiwork, he had to admit, if it looked like anything it looked like a body tied up in a blanket. But on the other hand that was what it looked like to him because he knew it was a body tied up in a blanket. No-one at the tip would know that.

Ten minutes later he had the whole package stashed in the back of the van and he used some more of Mrs Diggle’s string to tie up the door which didn’t close normally which didn’t bother Marty but bothered Morris today, on account of losing Tinkerbelle’s body on the ring road might cause problems. It was only another twenty minutes later when Morris pulled up in front of the gates of the council tip. They were closed. A council youth with a fluorescent yellow jacket lounged against them in a kind of triumphant way.

‘Sorry mate, we’re closed.’

‘Closed? What do you mean, closed?’

The youth managed to look down his nose at Morris even though he had to look up at the cab of the van.

‘Look mate, which bit of closed don’t you understand?’

‘But you’re supposed to be open till four o’clock.’

‘Yeh, right. And what’s the time now?’

Morris looked at the clock in the van. Ten to four. Then he remembered the clock in Marty’s van always said ten to four.

‘Shit.’

‘My thoughts exactly Sir.’

‘But couldn’t you just open up for a minute? I’ve come a long way.’

‘Yes, sir, I suppose you could say we’ve all come a long way.’

It was just Morris’s luck to get some kid on day release from a philosophy course at the polytechnic.

‘Look, I’ll make it worth your while.’

The youth’s palms were itching, Morris could tell from the glint in his eyes, but whatever it was they were teaching him at the Poly must have got the better of him.

‘OK, sir, now look we really are closed, so if you wouldn’t mind.’

Yes, Morris really would mind. He briefly considered ramming the gates with Marty’s van and dragging the kid’s mangled remains with him while he went on to dump Tinkerbelle, but the thought lasted only a fleeting moment, and in any case it was disturbed by a horn sounding impatiently behind him. He looked round, ready to shout some sarcastic remark about the tip being closed, when he saw it was a council dustcart. What’s more, it was a council dustcart obstructing his way out.

He shouted over the combined engine nose of the dustcart and the van.

‘Excuse me, I don’t suppose you could just pull back while I turn this round?’ This was Morris at his most polite.

‘No mate.’

What? No? Why the sodding hell not? The driver looked at him blankly. The youth on the gate managed to look sorry for him while making it quite clear that he was really rather pleased at this turn of events.

Morris seriously considered getting out and smacking the kid in the mouth, and the kid sensed this and stopped gloating, at least as long as it took him to slip behind the gate and lock it again, when he carried on gloating as before. The van’s gearbox screamed in agony as Morris tried to get it in reverse, and it was after about a fifteen-point turn that he finally got it facing the other way and, as his parting gift to the obnoxious kid, the van spewed a great cloud of filthy diesel exhaust over him as it pulled away past the dustcart.

For want of any other ideas he drove back to the flat. He could just return the van to Marty and feign ignorance of the body in the back but he somehow knew this wasn’t going to work, not even with Marty, so there was no choice but to drag it up three flights of stairs and put it back where it was this morning.

As he relaxed on the toilet later with a joint he began to mellow, and it came to him that he was living, for the first time in his life, with a woman. OK, a dead woman, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Copyright R S Brynin 2022