You Should Know I Found a Dead Body

You Should Know I Found a Dead Body

Aea Varfis-van Warmelo

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An excerpt from Attention-Seeking Behavior by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo

You should know that when I found the body I did not scream.

On the phone, I feigned humanity. I performed the inflections of a person overwhelmed and confused, but the fact was ‘no, he is definitely not breathing and there is no pulse.’ I stood by him patiently as we waited for the police to arrive, hoping no dog walkers or joggers would amble near. I admit I drank my coffee, though I put my croissant in my bag for later.

The police asked their many questions and I was pragmatic in my answers. I felt like I was their colleague, my memory was so clear and my recounting so efficient. I felt like I answered in a way that suggested I was inured to horrors—humbled by them, perhaps, but no longer frightened. I said the precise time I had found the body (I’d checked), I indicated what footprints in the snow were mine and I described his original position, before I’d moved him to check for breath and pulse. They said I’d been very helpful, but I think they say that to everyone.

The man had frozen to death, this much was obvious to everyone.

I did not tell them that there was an immaculate beauty to the scene when I’d first found it, nor that I’d felt a weightless intimacy between me and this man as we’d waited for their arrival. I did not say that I felt like my life was supposed to be altered by this chance encounter, but it hadn’t in the slightest. If anything, I felt like this was meant to happen to me.

You should know that on the way home I ate my croissant.

I have never told this story before.

I think of the body most often at parties, when I miss a social cue or I am strange and sharp. In the second of silence and my rude, polite smile that follows, I think of how this happened to me. That one icy morning in December, likely hours after he had slipped away privately and quietly, I was the person who found the dead man, I was the person who penetrated the secrecy of his death and now I am the one who carries it. So in cold moments, when I have not been right as a person, I know it is because I have a death inside of me. This thought is very comforting to me.

I have never told anyone about this before. There is no way to prove that it happened, but why would I lie?

You should know that I was born a normal child and my parents loved me as best as they could, which is all you can ask of parents.

You should know that when I found the body I felt sick.

The helmet was cracked but his face was concealed. Blood had pooled around him already—glassy and still, catching my headlights like a perfect mirror. His limbs were wrong.

I put my hazard lights on then called the police.

The second time we slept together, Normal Ben lay in my bed, soft and supine. After his practiced gesture of tucking my hair behind my ear, he told me that, on some level, I remained a mystery to him. He asked me to tell him something private, maybe something I’d never told another soul. The question was obviously rehearsed, and its obviousness was endearing.

I told him about when I found the body. I told him what he needed to know about it, I told him I cried involuntarily while waiting for the police, I told him about the enormity of feeling grief for a stranger. He asked if I was telling the truth. I asked who would lie about something like that.

You should know that when I found the body it was bloated beyond recognition. I smelled it before I saw it.

He looked disquieted. Said, ‘That’s a lot.’ Then, ‘Did it fuck you up for a bit?’

I asked if I seemed fucked up.

The signs are all over your face, apparently. That’s where you can see it. But you can’t spot it without formal training.

You should know that the body was warm, once.

Allegedly the amygdala, that small almond structure in the limbic system, the seat of your brain, knows the truth and it reveals itself in microexpressions. You can try to lie—make your gestures and expressions match how you should be moving—but apparently the amygdala knows the truth and will always give you away in a split second. Anyone could read the signs, with training.

This is not true, but many people believe it, therefore it is as true as any other fact may be.

Normal Ben said I seemed to be managing okay.

You should know that the first time I found the body I was five years old. He was lying on my bed, silent as a stopped clock.

I felt about it as I should have done and the feeling lodged itself in my stomach.

His mouth tipped open when I adjusted his head and with that motion air slipped into him. When I placed him back down on the pillow he sighed. It sounded living. I repeated the gesture twice and each time there was the same release. The air was ignorant of its passage through this object.

The moment was changed, like many are, by a thought crossing my mind—a recognition. I couldn’t touch him anymore. I slid under the bed and felt his great weight hovering above me, then slept there for the three days it took the body to leave.

I liked Normal Ben because he made me laugh as much as I made him laugh. He cared about language as much as I do, but with a hobbyist’s ease and pleasure—he only really cared about language as the natural byproduct of being devoted to laughter and flirtation.

I also liked Normal Ben’s arms, which were firm and beautiful. He approached his body the same way he approached language. He didn’t have a love of sports, but he did love his friends and he wanted to play whatever sports they loved, so every weekend Normal Ben would either play football, go climbing, cycle to Richmond Park or play tennis, each one until he was satisfyingly drenched in sweat. Then he and his friends would drink enough to make a day feel complete, go their separate, meandering ways and then Normal Ben would reach his flat, have an efficient shower, and sleep face-down in a room with the windows open as wide as possible. The result of these athletic habits was that Normal Ben’s body was a relief map of the various ways he showed physical devotion to the people he cared about. That none of this beauty was contrived meant that when a gesture revealed a graceful muscle ridge or sinew I had an insurmountable urge to ravish him.

Normal Ben had been born as he was and he had never doubted that. His parents had loved him as best as they could, and I always suspected that his parents were better at loving than mine.

We had a hundred running jokes, but my favourite was the one where we’d start a statement with ‘you should know this about me’ and follow it with something either innocuous, absurd, or universal. ‘You should know this about me, I have to sleep a certain number of hours to survive’, ‘You should know this about me, there was a brief period when I was a baby where I couldn’t walk or talk’, ‘You should know this about me, I was the guy who shot JFK and I’m worried I will kill again.’

I started it on our first date, but he made it last. As I slid out of the pub booth to head to the bathroom I announced, very seriously, ‘I’m leaving my bag here, but you should know this about me: I really hate it when people I’ve just met steal my wallet and commit identity fraud.’ I made this stupid joke on every date and it always got a stupid laugh. That Normal Ben did not even smile helped persuade me to like him. He said, ‘Okay, but you should know this about me: those are my two favourite things to do.’

At the end of our first date we stood at his bus stop as he said things about work and waking up early and I said that was fine, of course. Then in the heavy, silent beat that is the cusp of indulgence, I took his hand and ran my nail from his wrist down to the centre of his palm where I pressed just hard enough to hear him take a shallow breath, which meant I’d won.

In my bedroom I did not feel like his body would be a unique and new discovery, nor that what it would do to me was unique to him alone. I thought that, at last, he was on my level, no one could be a better person than I was here. So I stroked his neck and chest the way I did everyone else’s, and he tugged at my jumpsuit the way everyone did and said the customary ‘how the fuck do you take this thing off’ it had been subjected to so many times before, and when I reached down and he wasn’t hard yet I said ‘are you Catholic or something?’ between coating him in kisses and before he could answer I said ‘because I give you permission to sin. In fact I insist on it, you can go to confession later’ and as he started speaking I said ‘I can sense your remorse! I can sense your hesitation! But it’s allowed, you’re allowed to get hard! You’re allowed to fuck my brains out!’ and his laugh was so sexy it made me grateful God made me funny and especially grateful that Normal Ben found this arousing because now successful I kissed him deeply, placed my hand around his throat and pressed against his cock which was reliably hard, pressed his jugular and asked what the worst thing about him was and before he could answer I said ‘I think it’s probably that you’re so good looking you don’t have to try very hard at all do you, people just give you things don’t they’ and batted away his hand as it tried to resolve my jumpsuit, ‘I think it’s probably that you’re too secure’ and he groaned and grabbed my waist, pulling me hard against him, said he fucking hated me and then I said ‘what’s your mother’s name?’ to which he flipped me over, in his swift and athletic way, so he lay on top of me and finally clamped his hand over my mouth and told me to shut the fuck up but faltered again at the jumpsuit and I wriggled smugly under him as he struggled to undress me until he rolled off, defeated, and I kissed his neck in that soft way you’re supposed to and stroked his unrewarded penis and said ‘tell me her name’ and he sighed deeply, eyes shut and defeated, and whispered ‘Maggie’, and I peeled my jumpsuit off in an instant, went down on him and let him grip my hair like everyone does and then when he’d grabbed and moved me and was inside of me, eyes shut and rough, I gasped and grabbed and said ‘call me Maggie’ and with the briefest pause in his thrusting he said ‘I have literally never met someone I wanted to fuck more and less simultaneously’ and muted my laughter with his hand again and then there was hardly any talking and later when he came it was very good, it was like a punchline, it was like being understood.

Then in the pause, the space of clean up, heads on shoulders and eyes shut with deep contented breathing, a laugh rumbled through him slowly until he indulged in it fully, and after it had infected me and we were both laughing and I asked him why three times he took a deep breath and admitted, serenely, ‘Her name is Sally. And yes, I am Catholic, but lapsed. And you should know this about me—I will never say my mother’s name when I’m hard.’

Normal Ben never thought about language, but he knew how to play its game with me. This is why he was allowed in my bed, why I held his hand in public and why I fully surrendered to his kiss.

It didn’t seem to worry him that the more a conversation is filled with laughter the less is truly said, nor that every story about my life was narratively smooth and ended with a neat conclusion. I suspected only a subconscious awareness, the slightest suspicion, of the fact that every time he laughed at my jokes he validated the character I’d invented for him and encouraged me to continue performing her.

This slight suspicion must have been what led to him asking, the second time he’d met me, for something real.

To stop that suspicion growing I had to tell him about finding the body.

That he believed me is not his fault; everyone does.

This notion that the amygdala secretes truth in the flickers of eyelids and the twitching of lips is almost comforting—it suggests that no matter what I say and no matter what people believe, there will always be this impenetrable lump of truth inside of me. When I’m overwrought and sick with self-hatred, I’ve felt it throb, hot inside my skull. I picture it as a gold and glowing gland, inhibited by some kind of blockage from secreting its truth throughout my body. I used to feel there must be a simple cure and it was my fault for not wanting it hard enough.

After I told him about the body, Normal Ben reclined and gazed at my ceiling for a few silent seconds. In his eyes I saw the visible outline of a corpse, my footprints in the snow, my broken breathing as I phoned the police. He pulled me into an embrace and pressed his chin to the crown of my skull. It was too intimate a gesture too soon into knowing each other. His embrace tightened. I liked it.

Everything I had told him until then led to this moment. An act of kindness I didn’t deserve. I liked it so much.

He fell asleep shortly after, still holding me. I slipped out of his grasp to get a glass of water. On the way out of the room I was struck by how little his face was changed by sleep. Apart from a minor loosening between his brows, it seemed to me that Normal Ben’s unconscious might be indistinct from his conscious.

I stood in the dark kitchen watching the shadows and light play across the brick of the opposite building, watching a neighbour pacing in his bedroom. My skin prickled where Normal Ben’s arms had been wrapped around me. As I swayed in the dark my amygdala throbbed in protest. The neighbour opened his window and climbed onto the ledge. I looked away before he jumped. You should know I heard the impact.

This is what happened when I told Normal Ben about finding the body.

He kissed the back of my hand, our fingers interlocked, sat up and asked me to tell him something I’d never told another soul. It thrilled me. I rested on my elbow, so I could look him in the eyes, and asked ‘Why do you want to know something like that?’

I wanted to offer symbols of resistance, so when I gave my confession he felt like he’d earned it.

‘Well, you’ve interrogated me about my relationship with my mum enough, so I think it would be fair for you to tell me something too. And, I don’t know, you’re doing this whole mysterious and aloof thing, and it’s working, obviously, I’m here. But you are actually still a bit of a mystery, and,’ he shrugged, ‘I guess I just want to find out what else I should know about you.’

‘Isn’t premarital sex enough? What more could you possibly want from me?’

‘I could get that anywhere, you’re not special.’

I could have felt pity for the fact that he wanted me to trust him—it could have been pathetic, but I also sensed that if I rejected him he wouldn’t try again, and the integrity of that was very appealing. And a surprisingly large part of me wanted to receive his trust. I knew it would feel good, maybe better than anyone else’s.

It didn’t even occur to me to tell him something true.

I told him that I was walking through Battersea Park two months ago, in December, and that when I found the body I didn’t scream, though I’m not sure why. I told him I’d never called 999 before and felt surprisingly nervous about it so I practiced what I had to say before dialling and then when I did I was surprised by how quickly they answered, and surprised they asked me what service I needed. I hadn’t realised I would have any choice in the matter. I said police and told them where I was, what I’d found. They said they were on their way. And then I waited. I avoided Normal Ben’s eye contact when I admitted to crying, very briefly, while I waited. That I’d cried because a thought had crossed my mind: I’d wondered what the body’s name had been. That it seemed silly to cry over that. Then I said it was an irrelevant detail, I wasn’t sure why I mentioned it. I paused. I inhaled deeply. I looked back at him when I said the police were very nice and sensible and it was reassuring actually. That after they’d asked me all their questions I walked out of the park in a daze, feeling incredibly aware of myself and my surroundings. That I came home and had to join a work call, so I did. That I felt like I was being weird on the call, but slowly remembered how to be normal. That by the time the call ended I felt like myself again. That I decided I shouldn’t really talk about what had happened that morning, because I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. That I still wasn’t sure how I felt about it. But I was relieved to talk about it now, actually.

As he listened to me I saw him learn what he needed to know about me: that I was someone who had encountered enough pain in my life that when I experienced a new grief it touched me to the quick, joined the rest of my history, rattled me, but did not compromise my humanity. Perhaps it even deepened it. He learned that I was someone who could look after herself. He saw an opportunity to look after me too.

I said I was sorry and laughed and said ‘oh god, I’m so embarrassed, that was way too heavy.’ I said he probably wanted a different kind of confession, like how often I stole chewing gum from Sainsbury’s. Which was ‘every day, by the way. Every single day.’

He didn’t laugh. He looked at me with a fold of concentration then let out a deep breath. ‘That is intense, yeah,’ he said, still frowning. ‘That really happened?’

I laughed. ‘What, like, did I make it up? Who would lie about something like that?’

‘No, I don’t mean . . . It’s just. Yeah, it’s a lot. Did it fuck you up for a bit?’

I gave an exaggerated shrug. ‘Do I seem fucked up?’

He still refused to smile. ‘Well. I mean, every day is too often to be stealing chewing gum, if we’re being honest. There’s something pathological about that.’

He reclined into my pillow. I was excited to watch every beat of my story replay across his face, chased by the thought of my dead mother. He looked like he was about to speak but instead pulled me into an embrace, pressed his chin into the crown of my head and said, ‘No, you don’t seem fucked up.’

As I fell asleep I thought of Normal Ben’s arms. I thought of my neighbour’s body. I wondered when it would be found.

You should know I’ve never told anyone I am a liar before. You should know I know the consequences of making this confession.

In the morning Normal Ben paused as he was putting on his shoes. He asked me why I’d said I needed the police instead of an ambulance. I tugged and undid his shoelaces with my toes and said I didn’t know why, but as soon as I’d arrived it felt like a crime scene.