Marci’s eye sockets looked up at the ceiling. She’d been laid out with so much care, I couldn’t believe that Davey had had anything to do with it. I thought that Benny must be around somewhere, looking in, taking care.
I closed my eyes so that I wasn’t looking into the terrible, recriminating stare, and I leaned my head up against my mother, and I breathed until the stink got to me and then I pried myself upright and walked out of the cave. I stopped and stood in the mouth of the cave and listened as hard as I could, but my father wasn’t speaking. And the smell was getting to me.
She got him dressed and she fed him sips of water and she got him standing and walked him in circles around the little paddock he’d collapsed in.
“I need to get Georgie out of the car,” he said. “I’m going to leave him in the cave. It’s right.”
She bit her lip and nodded slowly. “I can help you with that,” she said.
“I don’t need help,” he said lamely.
“I didn’t say you did, but I can help anyway.”
They walked down slowly, him leaning on her arm like an old man, steps faltering in the scree on the slope. They came to the road and stood before the trunk as the cars whizzed past them. He opened the trunk and looked down.
The journey hadn’t been good to Gregg. He’d come undone from his winding sheet and lay face down, neck stiff, his nose mashed against the floor of the trunk. His skin had started to flake off, leaving a kind of scale or dandruff on the flat industrial upholstery inside the trunk.