Deal Me Out (21 page)

English suddenly seemed like a foreign language to me. ‘To see Bill Mountain,’ I said thickly.

The name jolted her although she tried to hide the reaction. A sort of tremor ran the full, long length of her, and she drew her knees up and closed her eyes in a spasm.

‘Who did you say?’

The lassitude dropped away. Now I felt bright and chatty, communicative and in control. ‘William Mountain. He’s an amazing man. He’s writing a novel—and you’re in it, Mrs Kelly, in a starring role.’

She threw back her head and laughed in a sharp cackle. ‘Mrs Kelly! God, it’s been years since anyone called me that. What else d’you know about me?’

‘I don’t know anything about you and I don’t want to know anything. But I think you’ll lead me to Mountain.’

‘What’s your business with him?’

The music was louder still, and the party noise was mounting to a roar. I had to lean close to her to be heard, and that rank smell got stronger. ‘That’s between him and me. My feeling is he’s going to be here tonight and I’m sticking close to you just in case you’ve got some idea of warning him off. You could call your watchdog in from the door, but the noise we’d make between us’d finish off your party.’

‘I’m among friends here.’

I looked around the room: everyone I could see was
drunk or stoned or both. A couple of the men looked big enough to be useful but one of them was just starting to slide down the wall and another man was staring into his own eyes in the wall mirror. I felt I could move very fast if I had to; I didn’t want to, but … if I had to.

‘I can’t see anyone here who’d give me too much trouble,’ I said, ‘and there doesn’t have to be any trouble in this for you. I just want to talk to Mountain when he comes. I hope I can make him see reason; if I can’t, some things might get broken but I’ll try to watch out for your mirrors.’

‘I’ve never heard such crap. Get the hell out of here!’

She started to get up and I got a grip on her biceps around the bracelet and pulled here down. She flexed the muscle and resisted, but I put on more pressure. ‘Listen, lady. I don’t give a fuck what drugs you peddle to who. I don’t care if you turn on the whole North Shore. I just want to see Mountain.’

She sneered at me, and the frustration and anger that had been bottled up in me for days came out; I needed to hurt someone and she was closest. I gripped her arm tighter. ‘I don’t care if you imagine people raping you and report it to the police. You can imagine me raping you if you like.’

She smiled suddenly and almost sweetly. It was as if I’d said the magic word. She tapped my hand with one long finger and I let her go. ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘I’ve decided that you’re an interesting man after all. Let me get you a drink.’

‘You’re not going anywhere.’ I spoke in what I thought was a firm voice, but I felt less dominant, and anchored to the spot.

‘No, no, of course.’ She waved in the direction of the bar and made a gesture with her hands to indicate a drink. It was okay by me; my throat was dry from the heat and the smoke, and Deirdre Kelly’s bad smell and sudden switch in mood had strung me out and made me nervous. The
topless barmaid came over with a bottle of champagne and a glass on a tray. The party seethed around her, and she had to lift the tray to get it clear of grasping hands. Kelly cleared a hand aside with a swift chop and stroked a fish-netted thigh as she took the tray in her other hand.

‘Not bad, eh? What d’you think of her?’

‘She’s well-built,’ I said. ‘When’s Mountain due?’

‘He’ll be along.’ She dismissed the barmaid with a light slap and poured me out a glass of champagne. ‘I won’t do anything to stop you seeing Bill, on one condition.’

I didn’t answer; I didn’t fancy bargaining with her. I drank some champagne and looked at the angry red mark I’d made on her arm. I felt a burning in my stomach—champagne’s not what it was.

‘On condition that you let me listen to your conversation.’ She took the glass from me and sipped; her lipstick purpled the edge.

‘That’d be up to him.’

‘Oh,
he’d
let me. He lets me do anything I like.’

A man fell into the pit, and Kelly eased herself away from him and closer to me. There seemed to be just as many people in the room as before, but fewer of them were standing up.

‘When did you see him last?’

‘Today. This morning.’ She leaned closer and her odour was gamy, feral. ‘We made love all night.’

‘That so? When does he find time to write?’

She laughed, not the cackle this time but a fluid, oily sound. ‘Not when he’s with me, I can promise you that. His writing’s brilliant, like his fucking.’

‘Have you read it?’

‘No, but he’s told me about it.’

I knew she was lying, and she knew I knew. She took the glass, drank some wine and spilled some more on her dress. The stain showed black on the dark silk.

‘Consume myself, starting with my own brain.’ I sounded like Orson Welles. I smiled and said it again.

‘What?’ she gasped.

‘What?’

‘You said something.’ She shoved aside the man who had fallen into the pit and had rolled over. An arm flopped down from floor level and hung in space between us.

‘No, I didn’t say anything.’ I looked around the room for the nearest door, just in case of trouble, but there was no door. The mirror ran from the ceiling and down all four walls. I blinked and the mirror shattered into a kaleidoscope of colours that blinked back at me. The people changed into dwarfs and giants; I tried to focus on the nearest faces and the features went rubbery and all shapes went angular like in a Picasso painting. A huge nose grew out of a man’s rubbery face and pressed towards a woman’s swollen breasts. Then the breasts shrank and the woman’s chest went concave and the nose pressed in and in.

I tried to stand up but Deirdre Kelly pushed me down like a mother cat tumbling one of her kittens. The music shrilled and screamed; I put my hands over my ears to shut it out, and my ears felt huge, wet and terrifying. Kelly’s rank breath flooded over me.

‘You’re passing out, Mr Somebody. You’re going to be sorry you hurt me.’

I was sorry already, and wanted to say so. My stomach lurched and my head fell towards my knees and I didn’t care where it landed. It passed my knees and went on falling.

W
HEN
I came out of it, I felt as if I was lying around in four or five separate pieces. Reconstituting myself was agony but I made the effort. I wriggled and twitched and made mental contact with the furthest off bits. When I was back in one piece I found that the piece was tied at the wrists and ankles. I was naked and in a room I had never seen before. That made for a very uncomfortable feeling, the familiarity of my body and the utter strangeness of the room.

If I was still in Apartment Seven, this had to be the locked room off the hallway. It wasn’t hard to see why Dee Kelly kept it locked: the room was painted black from floor to ceiling; there was enough concealed lighting for me to make out objects in the room from the propped-against-a-wall position I’d wriggled into. A big low bed dominated one corner; a couple of upholstered chairs were over by one wall and there was a six foot high padded post jutting up out of the black carpet in the centre of the room. I squirmed to get my head around for a look along the wall. There seemed to be irregularities in it, protuberances that broke up the smooth, black surface. They were irregularies all right—chains and manacles in a dull, non-reflective metal like night-fighting weapons. I looked with alarm-sharpened vision at the bed; it had ropes and chains attached to its headboard; along another wall was a rack containing whips and canes and other objects I couldn’t identify and didn’t want to.

My arms were drawn together under my thighs and my wrists were tied; I was sitting with my knees drawn up and the knots of the ropes around my ankles were
underneath, below my calves. When I could move my hands without wanting to scream, I tried to get my fingers to work on the knots, but it was impossible. No give in the rope—expert job. I had a raging thirst and could still hear, through the throbbing inside my head, the sounds I’d heard before I’d passed out, although I was pretty sure that the room was actually dead quiet. At least things were restored to their normal shapes and sizes, if you could say that bondage beds and chains and manacles had normal shapes and sizes.

I was registering these comforting, orientating thoughts when a section of black wall swung in and William Mountain entered the room. I recognised him, although he was incredibly changed. He was clean-shaven with short hair. Drastic weight loss had left the skin of his face loose and plastic-looking. His body was strong and well-conditioned; there could be no doubt about that, because all he was wearing was a pair of skin-tight leather pants.

He came across and looked down at me; his eyes were wide open, red-veined and mad. Those eyes were the most frightening thing so far in ten minutes or so of rising fear. He squatted down easily in front of me, and the fat lines around his waist were minimal. The light leather creaked.

‘Cliff Hardy, how nice to see you.’ His smile was simple, unaffected, genuine. I’d never seen him smile out of an un-hirsute face before, and the effect was obscene.

‘Mountain,’ I croaked. ‘Great joke, Bill.’

He shook his head slowly. ‘No joke, Hardy.’

‘We’ve got a lot of talking to do,’ I babbled. ‘I’ve been looking for you for …’

‘Days, weeks, I know.’

‘You know? How? Look, these bloody ropes’re …’

‘I didn’t exactly know it’d be
you!
I’m a bit surprised, actually. I thought you only did clean work, or cleanish. This is a dirty job—working for
them.’

‘I’m working for the guy you stole the cars from.’

His tongue flicked out and worked at the corner of his
mouth; I realised that he was trying to perform the old nervous trick of trapping a beard hair in his teeth and pulling it out with a movement of his head. The tongue moved uselessly. ‘That’s what the other one said.’

‘You mean the guy at Blackheath?’

‘You
have
been on the trail, Cliff. Congratulations on reaching the end.’

I summoned up some breath and saliva to enable me to speak clearly and keep the fear down. ‘Let’s not piss around, Mountain. You’re in big, big trouble, but it’s probably not too late to pull something out of this mess.’

He laughed then; the basso I’d heard in pubs and in his house; it was a warm, rich, totally good-humoured sound, and so inappropriate in that chamber of horrors that it had the effect of making me shiver. ‘I’ve been on a journey,’ he said easily. ‘An incredible journey, the like of which no man has ever been on before.’

‘Bullshit! You’re talking half-baked mysticism, and you’ve been acting out fantasies half the men in Sydney share. Quit before you go too far.’

‘You wouldn’t understand. After all those years of seeing life through the bottom of a bottle, I’ve finally acted, I’ve finally freed myself. I’ve broken the block; I can write again.’

My full-frontal approach hadn’t produced much of a result. Time for the soft-soap? ‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘I know you’ve been writing. Your agent thinks it’s wonderful.’

‘So he should, it
is
wonderful. I slaved over that, it’s Art!’ Something happened to his eyes, which had been fixed directly on me, as he spoke. They seemed to wander away to focus on the remote distance. He put his hand up to stroke his face; his skin had lost its elasticity, and the flesh moved under his hand and moved back to its original shape only slowly. He unsquatted with the suggestion of an effort; he was still a heavy, bulky man, and walked out of the room. I shouted as he went but he didn’t seem to
hear me.

After a few minutes, he came back with Deirdre Kelly. She was wearing spike heeled, thigh-high boots, a G-string and a velvet jerkin that propped up her breasts and left them exposed. The sounds in my head had stopped, and in the few seconds that the door was open I registered that the party was over.

Mountain’s eyes were back to red, wide and crazed again, and he was smiling.

‘I promised Dee I’d let her hear this.’

‘I’m glad you keep your promises,’ I said. ‘It makes me feel more at home.’

That didn’t get a smile from either of them, much less a laugh. ‘This is Cliff Hardy, darling,’ Mountain said. ‘He’s a private detective who does things like finding missing teenagers and throwing drunks out of rich people’s parties.’

Kelly didn’t seem to be listening; she played with her right nipple, poking and teasing at it until it stood out an inch from her breast. She moved rhythmically, as if she was listening to music being played inside her head.

‘Do you know how dangerous this woman is?’ I said. ‘She’s crazy, she has rape fantasies. She’s the worst kind of trouble on legs.’ I realised how silly it sounded as I said it, but I was desperately trying to touch bases, to stand up for normality in the bizarre surroundings. ‘Come on, Bill, this isn’t you. You’re a writer, you need a keyboard and paper and something to drink.’

‘I don’t drink any more.’ His voice was childlike with pleasure at forming the words. It was useless to try reaching him by referring to his earlier life. He pulled at the inelastic, slack skin on his face and twitched his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. A nerve jumped under his right eye: he was well away, responding to chemical and emotional stimuli all new and all his own.

Kelly knew how to get through to him; she massaged his upper arm with her long, strong fingers and carried his
hand up to her breast. He gripped the nipple between thumb and forefinger and squeezed hard. I saw the pain wave hit her and give way to something else; a dreamy look came over her face and her purple tongue licked her lips as if they were sugar-coated. ‘I want to hear all about it,’ she said.

‘All about what?’ I said.

The tongue flicked out. ‘How did he look, the man at the Blackheath house? The one Bill killed. How did he look?’

‘He looked dead. And Bill’ll look the same way if certain people catch up with him.’

Mountain grinned as if he’d caught me out in a lie. ‘I thought you said you weren’t working for them?’