DIY or DIE?

by Vahini Naidoo

It started off fairly normally. I was just doing another DIY project with my husband. Things started to get out of hand pretty fast, though. It turns out that doing a DIY bathroom is far more stressful than it seems when the TV couples do it. Tension had been rising between Tim and me for weeks now, and honestly, at the moment, I hated his guts.

With a savage grace, I tore through a line of the backing board of some ceramic tiles, cutting a bunch of them off the board, ready to go into the bathroom. The craft knife I was using to do the job was sharp enough to slice a hair and was doing its job well. I razored through another few sheets of cardboard before Tim came out into the garden, where I was sitting, running a hand through his brown hair.

“Hi, Sarah, honey.” My eyes narrowed immediately. He never calls me honey – never uses that tone – unless something is drastically wrong.

“What's happened?” I sigh.

“Nothing...Much. You see, the pipes in the bathroom? Well, I didn't know that they were there, and it turns out that I, er, sliced through one of them with the saw.” He winced and braced himself, preparing for my anger. “I'm really, really, sorry. I thought it was a piece of wood.”

I stood there, in shock. How could anyone be that stupid? “How much is it going to cost to fix it?”

“Not much. Only a few hundred dollars. It's not the cost that's the problem. It's the time. Sarah, it could take months to fix this.”

Months? My brain practically exploded with red hot anger. “WHAT?” I yelled at him.

“Sarah –“

I cut him off before he could even begin to excuse himself, “Timothy Alex Parker! I'm not going to be able to shower for months? I'm not going to have any toilet to use except for the outside one? Every time I need to use the loo, I'm going to have to beg the neighbours?”

And then, before I knew what I was doing I raised my hand with the craft-knife still in it and struck out at Tim. I swear I'd forgotten that the cold, steel blade was there. I swear I didn't know that I'd stab him that hard. In the heart. You have to believe me; I didn't know that my husband would die in my arms, in my backyard.

Panic took over my body, the moment grief left it. The moment Tim took his last, shuddering breath and was still. Dead. “Shit!” I swore at the daisies that grew wildly about our garden.

Then, panic and grief still overwhelming me, I hauled Tim into the house, to the bathroom. I knew that I needed to hide the body. There was no way in hell that I was going to jail and I knew that there was no way anyone would believe that I'd ‘accidentally' stabbed my husband.

There didn't seem to be anywhere for me to temporarily hide the body, though. Timothy was dead, lying on the floor of our unfinished bathroom and there was nothing for me to do with him. Eventually, the gaping hole in the floor where he'd sawed open the pipe caught my eye. I couldn't, shouldn't....

My instinct of self-preservation won out in the end. I grabbed Tim by his feet and dragged his limp body along the floor, leaving a trail of congealed blood behind him. My nose wrinkled as I shoved him face first into the hole and tears trickled down my face. I didn't want to do this to Tim, but what choice did I have? If I didn't, then both our lives would be over.

Once Tim was in the hole, I tossed a sail-cloth covering over the top, locked up the house and drove to the shops. I stopped off at the local library and went to the DIY section checking out a book on pipes. I sat in my Nissan for an hour, trying to decipher the complex, mechanical terms. Eventually, I worked out what sort of pipe I needed and the key turned in the ignition. Time to hit the hardware store.

When I returned home, with my hardware supplies shoved into a Go-Green shopping bag, I headed straight for the bathroom. The smell inside there was already quite bad, even though the temperature was quite cool. Tim needed a burial, now, before he decomposed.

So, with my trusty library book, I climbed into the hole beside my dead husband and began to jam the piping that I'd bought into the pipe that Tim broken. It was a dodgy fix job and normally I would have called in a plumber to do it for me. Unfortunately, my circumstances were anything but normal, and so, to maintain my innocence I had to do this job myself.

“It's okay, Tim,” I told him, as I worked, my hands twisting the pipe to and fro. Sometimes I sang lullabies, to keep me and him calm.

Once the pipe was in, I clambered out of the hole in the floor, ran to the garden and grabbed Tim's bag of concrete, shoving it into a wheelbarrow. I then wheeled my materials back inside. In a frenzy I mixed together a lumpy solution of concrete, sand and water in our wheelbarrow. It was not good enough, but it would have to do. With a few tears and an immense sense of wrong doing, I tipped my wheelbarrow sideways and poured the concrete into the hole, sealing it. Sealing Tim's grave.

I cleaned up after myself thoroughly. No-one would ever have been able to say the mess I'd created existed when I was done with my clean-up. I called the police and told them that Tim was missing. They opened a case file on him, but there was never one spotting. Murder, death, wasn't suspected. They just thought that Tim had run off, leaving me, his poor wife behind.

Years passed and my life moved on. I remained in the same house in which Tim was buried, but even when in the bathroom my memories of him were weak. Eventually, I even moved on from the feelings I'd had for Tim. I remarried.

Winston moved into the house and for a while everything was great. But lately, the pipes had been wheezing and he was thinking of calling in a plumber. I, of course, was very opposed to this plan. One morning though, Winston burst from the shower, stark naked and screaming. He was covered in dry flakes of red blood. Tim must have gotten into the pipe somehow. It was then I knew I'd been discovered, or at least would be in a matter of moments. I had seconds to change things, buy myself more time.

I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a knife. Ran back to where Winston stood, staring at the shower, aghast. His back was turned to me and it was all too easy to do it a second time, to take life. He fell to the ground with a crash, but I kept calm. I cast about me, searching for a hole. Somewhere to hide him.