Fiddler's Green

There's a dead body upstairs. He's in the front room, Room 9, the one that opens onto the rickety old verandah with the broken palings. We keep the doors closed and the air conditioner rattling to reduce his stench to a bare minimum, but even the bare minimum is an assault. He's been dead far too long to avoid it. Perhaps we should have left the air conditioner off and tried to mummify him early on - the
January heatwave was searing enough that it might have done it, especially up there in those Victorian-era heat trap bedrooms. They face full west and catch the summer sun for most of the day. By sunset the light is brassy and all you can hear is the stop-start buzzing of dying flies.