Children probably get the most accurate depiction of their parents from the backseat of a car. That invisible separation between cockpit and commercial is like a two-way mirror, the child gets to look in, and the parents forget to look back. They probably assume you’re too engrossed in the streets flying by the window, the music blaring from the speakers, the rumble of the V8 engine sending you to sleep. They don’t know that you’ve seen your dad eye up your mum about ten different times, how he keeps slipping a hand over her thigh, how the more they bicker the more she smiles, or how she turns up the music and pushes down the pedal any time they get a sliver of space. They think you’re asleep, distracted, or hypnotised – but you are more awake than you’ve ever been before.
That was me. Ferried off to my doom in the back of a black Audi convertible by my two new parents, Mr. and Mrs. Roman – the crack team cleanup crew of the one and only Khalid, my new and indefinite employer. They were not what I was expecting.
Mr. Roman had the body of Ving Rhames, but the face of Ralph Feines. He was a soft spoken, straight forward, no nonsense kind of man; a what-do-we-need-and-how-do-we-need-it-done approach towards the whole thing. His “wife”, although I’m not sure if there’s any certification to back that up, was the complete opposite.
She hopped out the car first, leaving the door wide open, and strode down the gravel path in leather knee high boots, and a fresh face of makeup. Her thin, cruel mouth was stretched into a smile that could cut steel, and she wouldn’t even look back as her husband shut the car door calmly behind her. A high ponytail of jet-black hair swung from side to side as she strode towards me, placing each foot in front of the other like a runway model on a catwalk.
“Mrs. Roman.”
Her hand was cold and bony, as I’m sure most of her body and personality was too.
“My husband and I will assist you with your situation.”
Mr. Roman’s hands were surprisingly gentle. I tried to wipe the blood off mine before I shook it, but he just smiled and waggled his finger at me like a teacher amused with a failing student. He took both my hands in his generous paws and shook gracefully, smiling at me in a disarming, casual kind of way. I felt like I had just been invited to a swingers party and he was trying to put me at ease – relax me a little before his wife abused us both.
“Please, take us inside. We will be fast.” He spoke in heavily accented English. Somewhere between Polish and Persian. The vowels just rolled out his mouth like a lazy summer day, and every consonant was only enunciated enough to be heard. Nothing was ever harsh, nothing was ever sharp, everything was soothing to my ears. He was a human lullaby in a hired goon’s body.
Despite their dynamic, it was Mr. Roman that took charge of the cleanup. He was masterful. The first thing he asked Wentworth was, “Where did you keep the soul?”
I hadn’t even thought of that.
You see, a soul needs to be out with its proper environment for seven days before it expires (ie that big bloody boom-boom that got me in this mess). When I arrived at Wentworth Manor, poor Abbey was already possessed, rolling and fighting in a circle of her own blood; and I hadn’t even thought to ask how long the possession had been going on for. Serious amateur hour shit. If I had known that he brought the soul through six days ago, and Abbey had been rolling on that wooden flooring for around twenty three hours and forty minutes, I wouldn’t have wasted a breath on trying to calm her, I would have been right there in her psyche trying to find that soul and return it to where it belongs. I wouldn’t have had to call Khalid, he wouldn’t have called this creepy couple from the Coraline leftover sheet, and I wouldn’t be soaked from head to toe in blood about to enter my new life as an occult manservant to the dodgiest man this side of the Atlantic. If I had the energy, I would have kicked myself.
Wentworth muttered something I couldn’t catch and Mrs. Roman took him by the arm, marching him out the room with all the judicious pomp of a prison guard. I suppose at this point, we kind of were. Mr. Roman smiled banally at me as if we weren’t surrounded by pools of recently deceased sixteen-year-old, and calmly asked if I could locate a mop. The next six hours of my life were back breaking, sweaty, disgusting work.
We pooled the blood and soaked it in extra thick duvets somehow stuffed into the backseat of their convertible. We gently took every piece of furniture affected by the blast, every painting, every sculpture, every vase and fake plant, outside and covered them with white tarp. “I will send someone for them,” Mr. Roman reassured Wentworth after making an exact tally of quantity, type, age, and price. We dug a ditch in the back garden, six feet by six feet – I say ‘we’; it was Wentworth and I, and it felt more like we were digging our own graves than Abbey’s. There were still whole pieces of her scattered about the room. Most of her bones survived the blast, a few fingers, and unfortunately for me I found an entire eye underneath the curtain. Mrs. Roman took on the role of taskmaster during these proceedings, fingers winding and rewinding the music box Wentworth had used to store the soul, creating an ominous horror movie soundtrack as she pointed out patches of dried blood, missed guts, stray fingernails, and stained wood. Never joining in, and never dirtying her stylish black chemise, or designer torn jeans, she maintained an air of superiority in an outfit that would look more fitting in a Milanese Palazzo, rather than this mess. When I asked her if she’d roll up her sleeves and help, she said, “I prefer to look my best when dealing with the grotesque. You already look like shit.”
I couldn’t fault her with that one.
We worked well into the early morning, and as the sunrise peeked over the horizon, we had successfully cleared, cleaned, and blanched the room; collected up the pieces of Abbey, and placed them unceremoniously in the ditch along with every bloody rag, mop, towel, curtain, and duvet. For the final touch, Mr. Roman went to the car and returned with two bags of fertilizer and seven bottles of industrial level bleach. Again, I don’t know what feat of engineering stuffed these into that compact convertible.
First, the fertilizer went into the ditch. Then he poured on the bleach. White noxious clouds rose up from the bed of mulch and toilet cleaner; and a terrible, eye watering smell filled our nostrils. It was something like what I imagine chlorine gas must have smelt like to the soldiers in the trenches. “You should step away,” is all he said through bloodshot eyes as he brought out the last part of this chemical cauldron concoction. In his arms he carried a canister, a cracker, and a jug of water, the type you see actors leaning on in a movie about a terrible boss. Turning his face away he cracked the canister and let the even fouler smelling gas mix with the water in the jug. As soon as the two started bubbling, the jugs bottom gave way, and he dumped the whole corrosive mess into the pile with the rest. “Ok,” he said. “Mrs. Roman, please.” His wife handed him a hazmat level, oh fuck we have a contagion on our hands here, mask (while we are standing there with just our hands and eyelids for protection, I might add), and the lunatic starts to shovel the dirt back into the ditch like some cartoon gravedigger on crack. I mean when I said those arms could move, They. Could. Move. His muscles bulged out to twice their size, his shoulders flexed like a Greco-Roman wrestler, I thought his shirt was going to rip in half every time he added another level of dirt. I saw every vein so clearly, every pathway from his forehead to his wrist was bulging. He got through what took me and Wentworth the best part of an hour in fifteen relentless, solid minutes. Mrs. Roman looked very proud, and more than a little turned on.
So, these were the sick fucks driving me off to see my new boss Khalid in the flesh. I expected to meet Dr. Khalid in a momentous, movie worthy moment. I imagined him sitting on a throne atop a flight of red velvet stairs, bannisters adorned with carved snakes and marble gargoyles; a harem of vampiric, pale, witch-like women hanging off his shoulders as they fed him grapes bursting with blood. He’d be holding a skull in one hand and an hourglass in the other, maybe an animal fur around his shoulders, and his laugh would echo through his mansion as I slowly climbed to my demise. I did not look ready for any of that. I hadn’t slept. I hadn’t changed my clothes. I was sitting on bin bags in a dirty, bloody, ruined suit. There was still brain in my hair, corrosive gas in my lungs, I was out of cigarettes; and did I forget to mention, they were flirting relentlessly in the front seat. Like I said, apparently being in the back means you don’t exist.
As we exited the bypass, Nicki Minaj’s verse from Monster came blaring over the system and Mr. Roman turned up the volume. “Ok, first things first I’ll eat your brains.” He sang along in a comically soft voice.
“Honey, why don’t you ever let me mix the Hydrofluoric acid? Do you think I can’t handle it?” Mrs. Roman sped through a red light, eyes not on the road.
“No sweetie. You know I think you can handle anything. Do you remember the judge? You marched right into his office and handled it. The case got dropped. You made that happen. He’s flashing his lights at us.”
“I’ll let him overtake.” Mrs. Roman switched lanes and a white BMW sped past. She immediately switched again, much to the horn blaring dismay of the cars behind her and edged the nose so close to the BMW I could see his alarmed eyes in the rearview mirror. Not liking the heat, the BMW left the kitchen, and she raced by him, flashing her lights the whole time. “I did handle him, didn’t I?” She said with a dreamy lilt to her voice.
“You did, baby. And you know, I was going to let you do the acid this time, but remember what we were talking about last night…”
“Yes, I remember.”
“You remember the dress code?”
“How could I forget….”
“Now imagine you got acid on those pretty hands right before something like that.”
“Or my pretty toes?”
“Yes, yes, or your pretty toes.”
“You’re right, you’re right. Next time though, I dissolve the bodies.”
“Anything, my love.”
“Look at what you just saw, this is what you live for, ah I’m a motherfucking monster!” Finishes Nicki Minaj as the chorus kicks in.
What a fucking day.