Written on 18 January 2019
Carl was a proud employee of Smithfield Logistics, Enfield’s number one house clearance service.
But even for Carl this particular house seemed like a tall order.
They'd been hired by the family of a now deceased hoarder. It was brutal. The hall was stacked from floor to ceiling with newspapers, old bikes, ravaged washing machines, crates and crates of empty beer bottles from the 80’s and giant tacky totem poles.
It only got worse from there. He found 8 boxes of monster munch (best before 9/92) a rotting wooden chicken coup, 193 versions of monopoly and a dustbin full to the brim of dry pasta. It took them four days to clear just the ground floor.
He was into the second week when he found the body. Clearing away old children's sand pits, countless boxes of “books for dummies'' and three full sized mannequins, he saw a green, rotting corpse with tufts of hair missing, maggots in its eyes, a rotting Cardiff City shirt now fused to the body. Carl was about to shout for help when the corpse began talking to him.
“Can't you just let me rest?”
“You can't stay here. It's a house. You need to be buried or burnt or something. Who are you?”
“His wife. Everyone assumed I left him a couple of years ago because he was so disgusting, but really I was crushed by all the stuff you've just removed from me.”
“Jesus Christ, did your husband know?”
“Nah, I'd threatened to leave him so many times he thought I was gone. Nice of him to look for me, though.”
“I'm really sorry, I'm going to have to call the police.”
The body sighed.
“If you must, but I'm telling you it's nothing suspicious.”
Carl left the room, wondering whether what he’d just seen may be something to do with the open ethanol cans everywhere, his fatigue, the mannequins, or whether he really had just found a rotting corpse. He went to grab his boss for a second opinion.