It was a living thing once. A living, breathing thing. Now it’s just a torso. A bloated, blueing corpse with no arms or legs, a hole in its chest where its heart should be. No head to talk of. Caught up like decaying flotsam in the branches of a petrified tree overhanging the outpouring of a rusted old mill. From its outward appearance, its positioning, bobbling about in the floods, it’s hard to imagine this was once a middle-aged man with a paunch.
I spot the body first, standing silently up on the boulder bridge. The sight of it, swirling around, yet held firm within the tree’s cruel embrace made me retch then recoil. The torso boasts a birthmark, a milk chocolate mole, growing on its belly near its navel – similar to mine. Shaken to the core, I twist my sickly head towards Sian, her rosy cheeks still flushed from her exertions on the ramble, ‘What is it?’
She’s speaking in her morbid, fascinated, shrill, excitable voice, the voice that shocks me rigid with its lack of fear. Sian is unafraid. Her inability to comprehend disgust, distress, dismay, disdain, her sweet, loving, innocent attitude to life’s horrors, render her fearless of torsos floating like obscene tree trunks in the flooded millstream.
I swallow. I cough to clear my throat. I tell her what she must already know. The corpse bobbing about the swollen stream downstream of the mill’s sill is far beyond our reach impossible for us to reach without specialist equipment: a crane with a winch and a hook.
Her reaction is predictably chilled, ‘What should we do about it?’ Not shall, but should.
*****
We walk three miles in treacherous mud, teeming rain, over fields, through wet woods, to reach the mill. Pause by a pony field with electrified fencing to eat a ripe black banana. Share a can of ginger beer, then find it. Our first torso in how many years of walking? Seven? I estimate the hole in its chest to be five inches wide, the size of a human fist. I wonder where its heart, head, limbs and bits are. Downstream, caught in the sluice? Hanging off one of many barbed wire fences that criss-cross the river? Who to tell?
‘Stake thru its heart,’ Sian moans dreamily, darkly as she ever did.
She scares the living hell out of me when she dreams and moans all dark like that, ‘Sorry?’
‘The hole in his chest bears all the hallmarks of a stake driven through a vampire’s heart.’
I caress my bristled chin. I never shave or shower before rambles. I don’t need to. Sian fancies me coarse, rugged, unclean, with flossed, brushed teeth. My mind enquires as to the dental state of the torso’s head, deliberating on how many teeth it held prior to death. He, it, is beginning to penetrate my inner conscience, to call on my sense of duty.
‘I think we should track back to village, find a phone that works, call the Police.’
Sian shrugs her cute little shoulders anxiously, ‘Why would we want to do that? Think of all the trouble we could cause. Someone will find it soon enough: a woman out walking her dog, a man cross-country running. Not sure I can cope with telling anyone my secret.’
Her secret: she possesses a flared anxiety syndrome which threatens to explode if teased or taunted by telling tales of torsos. I agree to leave it hanging in the branches. Relieved, Sian leads me a mile to our car, salmon sandwiches, health bar, warmth, steamy windows.
While I mourn the deaths of my two identical triplets.
