It’s pretty messy work taping up a bloody dead man. A little bit of blood makes a lot of fucking mess. I can’t tell you how many times I scrubbed myself clean when I got back home, but however many times it was, it wasn’t enough to get rid of the tiny speck they found under my nails when they arrested me more than a month later. And when I say I scrubbed, I mean I scrubbed until my own skin was beginning to bleed and then I couldn’t tell whether it was his blood on me or my own. I basically soaked myself in bleach that night but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get the feeling or the smell of the dead boy off my skin.
Once I had taped him up and wiped him down with bleach, I went into the main room and scooped up a handful of baking soda that’d been laid out everywhere and covered all the wet bits on him with it. I more or less covered him in powder until he was dry. The smell of it helped to cover the smell of the blood too. Anyway, I finally zipped up Jamil in his coat and to my mind, I thought, if you didn’t get up too close, he didn’t look too bad. For a dead boy. I pulled his hat over his eyes and called Curt over.
‘Good,’ says Curt. ‘Now you better get that shit off you.’
I take off my top, which is bloody and covered in powder at the same time and throw it in a bin liner. Just as I am wondering what I am going to wear, Curt hands me his hoodie. It was his hoodie, you get me. An XXL black hoodie with Chinese-style writing on the back of it. You remember. The number three evidence the prosecution has been going on about.
‘Gloves man,’ says Curt and hands me a pair of them yellow washing-up gloves. He also puts on a pair and together we stand there for a second looking at each other, wearing these ridiculous gloves. Then without saying anything we take him by an arm each and stumble down the two flights to the ground floor main entrance.
Just before we open the front door, I look at Curt. He is breathing heavy but other than that he seems like he’s okay. Calm in a ways.
‘What about those two upstairs?’ I go.
‘They ain’t going nowhere. That tape’s not coming off any time soon,’ he says and heaves the body out into the cold air.
It was the hardest thing man. It was like dragging a bag of cement and trying to keep it upright at the same time. We dropped him a couple of times on the way down it was that bad. Every time we did I kept expecting him to scream out. But he never did. Like for once he was taking his licks like a man.
Once we were at the bottom Curt held him up while I stuck my hands in his coat pocket and waded through used tissues until I found his car keys. Then we stepped out into the cold air, and looked for his wheels.
‘Where the fuck are his wheels at?’ I say looking around.
‘Just press the button, maybe it’s got one of them bleeper things.’
I did and suddenly two amber lights wink at us from the other side of the street. There it was, his gleaming M3 right under a tree. Don’t know how we missed it.
Now what I really should have checked if I had been thinking straight was his phones. I really should have got rid of them. But I ain’t got a murdering kind of a mind, you get me. This wasn’t planned or nothing. This was just supposed to be taxing, end of story. Get Ki safe. That’s all it was about. Anyway that was my bad luck really. Doesn’t matter now though does it? You know the whole story now innit? Oh shit and the hair. My hair in his car. I just never even thought about it. Who would think of hair when you practically ain’t even got none on your head? Maybe I should have put plastic on the seats before I sat down, or fucking hoovered the car up afterwards but I just didn’t think of them things with all the other things that were crowding my mind. That’s how they find you though. What’s that thing people say. You can think of some things. You can think of nearly all the things. But nobody can think of all the things all the time. Whatever. You know what I mean.
Anyways we parked up round the back of one of the estates we knew and dragged him out of his car and round the back to like a shed thing where they keep all the bins. We had no clue what to do with him so we just proper dumped him. Like he was just another bag of rubbish. And when he landed on the ground, the thing I remember most is how he made a muffled kind of a sound like he wasn’t even really there, like he was far away from his body already. That’s the only thing that kept me able to even do it. That I knew it weren’t even him there any more. It was just his past.
