The Evil Inside (18 page)

In a vain attempt to block out my fears, I got into the habit of hanging out at the Hell or High Water most nights till dawn.

I'd read in the
Post
that there'd been a murder at the club the night I'd been there with Jim and Nadine: the reason for the ambulance we'd heard as we were leaving, no doubt. But the crime didn't seem to have kept the revellers away.

I'd get there round midnight, do a quick lap of the sex cabins, then head down below to buy some of whatever the one-eyed albino had going.

Then I'd buy a couple of beers at the Medusa Bar, head upstairs to the ‘Jim and Nadine Memorial Hammock' and sway there till they turned the lights up.

One night after the club, I came home and rearranged the furniture to make more room for my growing stockpile of reading material. As well as Bill's father's occult titles, I was also steadily working my way through a fast-growing collection of Kennedy assassination books, essays and videos.

Like Oswald stacking textbooks at the Depository, I now had plenty of time to kill.

I pushed the main couch out – the end where Mia used to sit.

Underneath the couch on the floor, I found the old Madonna/Rupert Everett
Vanity Fair
magazine she used to flick through all the time, now coated in dust. One of the pages was folded back to mark her place. Funnily enough, the article was about Nadine's pleasure playground, Ibiza.

The apocryphal tale was about a promiscuous young American girl who was holidaying on the island back in 1970. While taking a heap of drugs and having sex with all and sundry, the young woman (not surprisingly) became pregnant. Upon hearing of her situation, she decided she wanted to have an abortion. However, when she saw a doctor, she was informed that her pregnancy was already four months advanced and that it was therefore too late for them to perform a termination.

The woman had no idea who the father was, yet was equally certain that she was going to name the baby either Alice (after
Alice in Wonderland
) or Peter, as in Peter Pan.

A party was organized on the highest house in the Old Town to celebrate the impending arrival. Local musicians piped flutes and strummed guitars while the expectant mother was festooned with veils and a turban like an Ottoman harem girl in an
Arabian Nights
-style tent.

But while the welcoming well-wishers were all stoned or tripping out of their heads, the baby boy was born with a head the size of a golf ball.

His tiny body was almost transparent – like a jellyfish's – apparently because his mother had ingested so much LSD.

Those present immediately took the baby to the doctor, who advised them to return him to his mother, because he wasn't going to live much longer anyway.

The doctor was right: poor little Peter Pan survived only three more days.

They dressed him in a soft, white cloth, laid him down on a piece of wood, lit a candle for him and pushed him out to sea.

After that, his mother was no longer popular on the island, and the people who had once been her friends soon made it clear that it might be best if she too sailed away.

I folded back the dog-ear and carefully placed the magazine on the top shelf.

*

‘So which room did he have?' Michael was twirling a striped straw in his Fluffy Duck. Enriquo was spit-polishing glasses.

‘I can't tell you that, Guy. That's classified hotel information. I could tell you …' Elmer Fudd took over, ‘…
but den I'd have to kill you – eh eh eh
.'

‘Well what floor did Mark David Chapman stay on, then? You can tell me that at least, can't you?'

Michael sucked his straw. ‘He stayed here for a few days in the November, lost his nerve and flew back to Hawaii. Then he came back to New York a few weeks later, checked into the Y on West 63rd, then the Sheraton, and then he shot Lennon.

‘What I
can
tell you is that he was as nutty as a fruitcake. He had this whole imaginary world going on where there were thousands of little people living in his living room with their own little government and ministers and committees and shit. And Chapman was their president!'

‘And did these little people tell him to murder Lennon?'

‘No. Apparently his little cabinet was actually horrified when he told them his plan. They advised him strongly
against
any violence.'

‘Well why did he do it then?'

‘Satan.' Michael said, twisting the straw. ‘Satan sent Chapman two personal demons called Lila and Dobar to give him the courage to kill John Lennon.'

Lila and Dobar? They sounded like exotic dancers who might appear down at the Hell or High Water.

Michael slurped the duck's entrails. ‘Apparently when Mark David Chapman was interviewed by psychiatrists, he spoke to them in the demons' voices, which were completely different from his own voice.'

I changed the assassin, if not the subject. ‘By the way, my friend Bill told me that when Lee Harvey Oswald was a teenager he washed dishes here at the Olcott after school. Before he went into the Marines. Have you ever heard that?'

Michael looked at his watch and shook his head. His break was over.

‘That was a kid called Oswald Lee, not Lee Oswald. That kid was Chinese. Got his own restaurant down in Chinatown now, I believe.'

*

‘But if I missed the last session, why do I still have to pay for it?'

Money was getting extremely tight. There wasn't going to be any cash coming in any more, apart from rent from the tenants back in Melbourne. And that was being paid directly into our monumental mortgage back home: money I couldn't access without getting Mia's signature, too. Plus, if it came to legal push and shove, I imagined Mia would end up with the house anyway.

Blakely gave me the standard psychobabble answer. ‘Because I set that time aside for you, Guy. I keep it free for you and nobody else.'

Somehow I'd lost a whole day and missed a scheduled dose of shrinkage.

I think I slept through most of it.

I probably did some reading.

Went for a run.

Something.

‘Well, what did you do in my regrettable absence? Did you make notes? Is there a dossier on me that you updated? Can I see it?'

She smiled that infuriating smile. ‘We have a contract, you and I. For some reason, you chose to break our contract and not attend the last session.'

What contract? I hadn't signed anything for her apart from Visa bills.

‘Do you want to
talk
about your anger? Do you feel that I somehow wasn't here for you, even though you made it impossible for me to talk to you by not even turning up?

‘Not to mention what we've already discussed many times before, Guy. About you being not willing or prepared to open up to me even when we're sitting down here and facing each other.'

I looked out the window. Like I always did.

‘And just so you're prepared, I'll be away from the 27
^th
for two weeks. You might wish to discuss your feelings about that as well?'

*

It was the last week of June, I think.

‘What?' I couldn't hear what he was saying. The music was pounding in my temples.

‘Uh, Guy, you're dripping onto my counter.' Michael shouted, giving his desk a wipe with a little Olcott hand towel.

I was collecting my mail. Another letter in a Brave Face envelope – my final meagre payout, no doubt. An eviction warning notice from the Olcott. And a letter from
Reader's Digest
addressed to a Mr M. Balsam.

I pulled the sweaty little plugs out of my ears. ‘Riders on the Storm' made me feel incredible. ‘Sweet Child o' Mine' made me invincible. ‘Heroes' immortal.

‘You've been running a lot lately,' Michael noted. ‘Looks like you've lost a few pounds.'

I wiped my brow on my forearm and checked my watch: the reservoir and back in less than thirty-five minutes. Not bad, considering I'd been up all night again.

Twenty minutes later, I climbed into Callum's bed for my afternoon nap.

The running helped me to sleep. My foot hit something hard: Callum's Etch-a-Sketch was hiding under the blanket. I looked at the glowing screen.

There was a series of uneven ovoid shapes or circles.

And a single word that looked like BuB.

I kicked the toy onto the floor and pulled the pillow tight round my ears.

I'm in the belltower, looking out.

First Mia falls past me screaming.

Then Callum.

Then Bubby falls but stops right in front of me.

Hovering in the air like a bat and giggling.

And then a man in a grey flannel suit slams down right on top of her and they scream obscenities at me as they hurtle out of sight.

I'd given Dr Blakely one of my stories to read while she was away.

She'd been pestering me for a writing sample for some time. No doubt part of her ongoing strategy to get me to ‘open up more'; to help her ‘break down my wall' as she so annoyingly put it. So I printed one off the floppy disk I kept all my stories on in the vain hope that I might resurrect my stillborn writing career one day. Yeah right.

I made sure I chose a story that had nothing to do with me personally. Something so far removed from me and my real life that she'd never be able to draw any of her cutesy, sophomoric conclusions from it.

I thought of it as a sort of ‘Cold man's Hemingway'.

 

 

Pound of Flesh

By Guy Russell

It was about five to five when The Kid locked me in the Big Fridge.

Every second Friday we move most of what's left in the Big Fridge into the cool room. Sides of beef, legs of lamb, sausages, pigs' trotters, the odd chook – whatever's left. Then, Monday afternoon, the boys from the abattoir arrive and restock the fridge for the following fortnight.

We call it the Big Fridge, but it's really a freezer.

About twelve by twelve with an eight-foot ceiling.

Inside there's two huge stainless steel racks with three shelves on each. The aisle between them is about five foot wide.

There's a footstool at the far end of the aisle.

I should have sussed The Kid.

He's been acting funny all afternoon.

At first I thought he was just sooking on account of what happened at lunchtime.

He was sitting behind the counter out the front reading one of those motorbike magazines that he always reads and scoffing those disgusting cheese and banana sandwiches that his Mum makes for him.

O'Malley our boss was at the bank.

I was sweeping up.

The Kid's got a real bad case of pimples and today he's got a bump the size of a pinball right in the middle of his forehead.

‘Hey, Pus Head,' I says. ‘Looks like ya brain's trying to escape again.'

‘Piss off, Clefty,' he says, pullin' up his top lip to pay me back.

Now if there's one thing that sets me off, it's when someone takes the mickey out of me scar. So I swings around with the broom so hard I damn near knock his head off. He falls to the ground, pretending he's hurt. I give him a good kick up the arse to go on with and waddya know? He spits out a bloody tooth!

‘Musta been a rotten one, Pus Head,' I laughs. ‘It'll save ya a trip to the dentist, anyhow!'

Like I said, he had his funny ones on all afternoon after that. He goes all quiet but still has that mad dog look in his eye that he sometimes gets. He didn't dob me in to O'Malley of course. He knows better than that.

Anyways, O'Malley pisses off just after 4.30 to go fishin' for the weekend.

So The Kid and me start to empty out the Big Fridge.

We'd been goin' about twenty minutes.

‘Any more?' I calls out.

I don't expect him to answer on account of his mood.

But he yells back from the cool room: ‘Just bring the cutlets!'

So I goes back into the Big Fridge and waddya know?

The door slams shut behind me, the light goes out and I hear the lock click.

The little bastard's locked me in.

I had ta laugh. I'd fallen for it.

Hook, line and sinker.

‘Good one, Kid!' I shout.

‘Now let me out and I'll give ya a lift home!'

There's no answer. He can't hear me.

The door to the Big Fridge is four inches thick.

I sits down on the little stool.

I wait.

He's smarter than I give ‘im credit for, The Kid. I spose he thinks I give ‘im a hard time. But he don't know what a hard time is. When I was ‘is age I got picked on much worse.

‘
Oi, Clefty – what's wrong with your mouth
?' they'd all laugh, pulling up their lips. The Kid don't know he's alive. His skin's gonna clear up one of these days, but I'll always look like this. I give ‘im the occasional hiding. So what?

It's gettin' cold now.

Come on, Kid – a joke's a bloody joke.

The Big Fridge is set at twelve below. It's black as the grave.

I press the light button on me watch: 5.17 and the glass is starting to frost over.

I'm shivering like a bastard.

The footstool feels like a block of ice.

So I get up and start jogging on the spot and hugging meself.

All I've got on are a pair of slacks, a T-shirt and me apron.

Me gloves are out in the cool room. I know that there's no extra clothes kept in the Big Fridge. But there's always a big pile of plastic sheets, some rubber bands and a pricing gun down the far end. We use these for wrapping and pricing the offal and pet mince.

I slowly feel me way down between the big metal racks.

The Kid was telling the truth about the cutlets anyway. About halfway down the aisle, me left hand lands on a tray of them on the second shelf.

I pick one up and snap it in half.

It takes a good three or four hours to freeze meat properly.

About the same time it takes to defrost it.

But that's dead meat.

I wonder how long it would take to freeze a live animal in the Big Fridge.

I find the plastic sheets at the end of the rack.

I take out me filleting knife and cut the plastic into different shapes and sizes.

Two long rectangles for me arms and hands and a big square one for me head.

It's harder to get the head one right. I end up having to put a whole sheet over me head and then cut a hole out for me mouth.

I know the plastic won't keep the cold out. But it might help protect me skin from frostbite. I'll just have to be very careful when I peel it off that I don't peel half me face off with it.

Doing it in a warm bath would probably be the best bet.

I wrap some lacka bands round my neck and wrists to hold the plastic in place.

I scrape the ice off me watch: 6.01 now. Because me hands are shaking so much, it's taken me an hour to do what would normally take five minutes.

I mean, The Kid and me once cut, bagged and priced 100 bags of lambs' livers in less than an hour. Easy.

I make me way back to the stool like one of them Arctic explorers in the olden days. I'm shivering so hard now I nearly fall over.

I don't feel cold any more. More sort of high than anything.

Like when I used to sniff them aerosol cans when I was a kid.

But I feel me legs are gonna break if I keep trying to run on the spot. And there's sort of an ache growing in me chest.

And there's an awful cold stinging feeling on the tops of me legs where I've pissed meself.

I remember seeing a TV show one time about hypothermia.

They reckoned your blood pressure drops and your breathing slows right down. Till you eventually pass out.

I check me breathing again: about one breath every eight seconds now.

Tick … tick … tick …

My life is freezing away, second by second.

The TV show also showed these smartarse surgeons who'd deliberately frozen people so they could operate on them. They said it was quite safe as long as ice crystals didn't form in the tissues.

What else did the bastards say? Oh yeah, the only other thing I can remember is that when you're cold, shivering is the body's way of getting your body temperature back up.

In fact, when you're shivering to the max, the body can produce five times more heat than it can normally.

It's when you stop shivering that you're in trouble.

I sit meself back down on the stool. I'm feeling very lazy now.

When I was The Kid's age, I often thought about bumping meself off. Jumping from a building, shooting it out with the coppers, playing chicken with a train – somethin' schmick. But this was something much better than I could ever have thought up.

You had to give the bloody Kid credit! An ‘
accident
'?

It was perfect.

That's what he thinks! I pulls out me filleting knife and start to scratch a message into the wall. I can't see what I'm doing in the dark so I use big, long strokes. It seems to take even longer than it took to put the bloody plastic strips on. But I'm much tireder now so it's hard to compare.

I finish.

I check me work with me watch light:

O'Malley walked in on the Monday morning with an Esky full of flathead and found him on the floor.

Stiff as a board.

There was a $3.99kg price sticker stuck to the back of his head.

They charged The Kid with Murder One. But the jury let him off.

Because the coroner placed the time of death at approximately 11.00 p.m. on the Friday night.

And that was at least five hours after The Kid had snuck back to the Big Fridge and turned it off.

 

THE END