A GUEST SERIES

11 – She Moves She – Four Tet (2003, Domino Records)

Released as a single in March 2003 (Reached Number 60)

“Go and get the bags then” this is Mrs SWC and we are not as you might expect in a hotel or even travelling to one. We are in our lounge. I’ll explain.

I’ve been decorating the hallway in our house, I’ve spent a fruitful morning stripping the old wallpaper off the walls and washing them all down to make them ready to be painted. Usually I stick the headphones in and just get on with it, otherwise it bores me to tears, and Mrs SWC and I fight about the right way to paint a wall. I have made myself a decent little compilation to listen to. The music is relaxing, Four Tet merges almost seamlessly into Caribou and then Death In Vegas and it is putting me in a very chilled mood. Mrs SWC lets me get on with the hard work, I whistle as I work.

Sun – Caribou (2010, City Slang, Did Not Chart)

Dirge – Death in Vegas (1999, Concrete Records, Number 135)

About an hour or so later I’ve done three-quarters of the hallway when I have to move the cabinet. The cabinet is an item of furniture that has been with us for a couple of decades, we picked up it in a charity shop in Exeter for about £30 and the plan was to sand it back, paint it and make it lovely. We’ve not touched it. We throw a table cloth over it and fill it with junk. It has become the place where we store, hats, keys, cycle helmets. We kind of just dumped it in the corner of the hallway and that is where it has sat ever since.

Mrs SWC gives me a hand in moving the cabinet, she compliments me on the job that I am doing and shows me the two types of paint that she has chosen for the walls. One is a white with a grey twinge to it, its proper colour according to the manufacturer is ‘Dimple’. Obviously. The other one is an eggshell blue which will go around the top of the hallway, above the coat rack and the mirror. My wife tells me she will do that bit.

She moves over to where the cabinet was and stands on the carpet and starts to idly peel some of the old wallpaper off. Then she stops and touches the carpet. “Its all bumpy here” she tells me, and then “there is something hard under the carpet”. Within seconds Mrs SWC is pulling back the carpet in the hallway. She lets out a little gasp about thirty seconds later. She calls me over, I had stopped for a sandwich, so I wander over, tomato and cucumbers still in my mouth and look at what she has done and there under our carpet, undisturbed since we moved in is a trapdoor. A bit of cucumber dramatically falls from my mouth as Mrs SWC pulls the trapdoor open.

She tells me to grab a torch.

I shine the torch down the hole in the floorboards. I’m not ashamed to say that my hand is shaking slightly as I do it. Its as if I’m expecting a zombie hoard to clamber out and eat our brains. We peer down the trapdoor, she tells me that she has seen this sort of thing before and that it will probably be a storage space under the floorboards, quite common in houses built slightly raised up in the late 50s and 60s. I nod my head in a slightly disappointed way.

The space under the floor is about ten-foot square and looks to be exactly what Mrs SWC says it is. It’s then we see the bags.

In the corner of the room are three bags. One is an old Adidas sports bag, the sort of one some of us would have had in the early 80s. I had a red one that had Arsenal Cup Winners 1979 on it. I’ve never been an Arsenal fan, my nan bought it for me. The second one is a green bag that obviously has something in it because you can see something sticking out the top. The third one is rubble sack style bag that again looks like it has something in it, probably rubble.

We sit back and I finish my sandwich. Mrs SWC looks at me and tells me with a smile “Well at least we know where they hid the chopped up bodies”. Which is when she tells me to go and get the bags. Or at least she says, “Look in them”.

And I love a cliffhanger. So, I’ll tell you what was in them next time.

SWC