Page 59 of We Live Here Now

58

Freddie

The smell hits me like a wave as soon as the alarm wakes me. A vague rotten stench hanging like mist in the room, so strong that it almost makes me gag. I go out to the bathroom, closing the bedroom door quietly on sleeping Emily. The smell is worse here, thicker, like food rotting in a bin in the height of summer. The landing window is closed, and I think this is one time she could have bloody opened it in the night and I wouldn’t have minded. God, the stink is foul.

I should wake Emily up, but I don’t want to face that I told you so expression that she does so well. And anyway, this smell might be something completely different from what she claimed to have experienced before. Iso was so drunk at the party she might well have vomited somewhere upstairs, forgotten by morning, and not cleaned it up.

My jaw’s tight with irritation as I try to keep my breathing shallow and head up to the third floor barefoot. Iso has never been good at cleaning up after herself. I don’t know how Mark puts up with her, banging body or not, because there’s no way I could live with someone that high-maintenance. After those few months living alone when Emily was in the hospital, even she feels high-maintenance. I find it hard to remember how much I missed her now. Did I really want her to come home? Sometimes I’m so tired that I can’t remember our lives before this house at all.

The stench of awful decaying wetness is even worse on the top landing, and I cover my face in the hope that will help. It can’t just be vomit, surely? There’s nothing up here that I can see though, not even any tiny droppings, evidence that maybe rats or mice have died under the floorboards, although it would have to be a whole nest that had died to come close to this smell.

As I head toward the primary suite, which seems to be the source of the odor, I hate to admit it, but maybe Emily really did smell something up here. And if so, what’s causing it? I push open the door to the bedroom and fight back a gag and cough as a wall of stink hits. Something is very wrong in here and it panics me. I avoided telling Emily but I bought this house without a survey. What if this is going to cost a fortune to repair before we can sell?

I stumble over to the window, holding my breath, and quickly tug at the lock and push the window wide, hooking the lever to hold it open. It’s still dark outside even though it’s after six and icy air immediately tumbles into the room, embracing me, but I don’t care. It’s deliciously clean and sweet and I momentarily drink it in.

I wedge the bedroom door open and hurry back down the stairs, happy that the smell is already diminishing behind me even as the temperature drops. Still, I think, as I go back to the bedroom to get dressed, happy to see Emily is still fast asleep, she always goes on about the house being too hot. See how she likes it cold.

I don’t bother with coffee and sneak quietly out to the car. Whatever’s going on with the house is going to have to wait. We can’t afford to fix anything anyway.

From somewhere on the roof of the house I hear a bird cawing into the dawn and another answering from somewhere on the moor. Emily will be up soon , I think, as I head down the icy lane and pause at the postbox at the edge of the village to slide the signed life insurance renewal form in. A headache starts thumping behind my eyes as I watch the envelope disappear. Why couldn’t she just have died? All my problems would have been solved. I’d have been free.

She could still die , a tiny voice inside whispers, and the headache blooms into a migraine. The vicar thinks she’s obsessed with the suicide victims on the crossroads and all the strange things in the house.

There’s a lot of medication in the house too. It would be easy for her to make a mistake. Take too many.