The Tribute

by John Byron

  By the time he came out she was lying back, nicely relaxed and warmed up, her long coppery hair floating round her head like a halo as she looked up at the Southern Cross through the branches of the tall Sydney red gum in the yard behind. ‘Pretty handsome for an old fella,’ she said as he stepped down into the pool, giving him a sultry look.

  ‘Cheeky bitch,’ he said. He handed Sylvia her glass and angled his own towards it. ‘Cheers.’

  They each took a drink then put their glasses up on the poolside. Murphy reached for Sylvia’s feet, so she started the pool jets, leaned back on the edge and closed her eyes as he started massaging. ‘Christ, that feels good.’

  Murphy shot a glance towards the video camera, too small to see from the pool, as he worked both of her feet thoroughly, dissolving the knots that had accumulated over days on her feet at the hospital. He kneaded his way up her calves and past the backs of her knees, eliciting further groans, working his way up her thighs towards his true objective, tending inwards and upwards.

  But before he could get there, Sylvia glided away and reached for her glass. Murphy took his own and drained the whiskey in one throw. ‘Oh no you don’t, li’l darlin’,’ he growled, beckoning to her. ‘It’s time to repay your debt to society.’

  Sylvia put her wine down and floated back to him, her body straight out in front. Murphy’s left hand grasped a breast while his right moved down her flank, her hips tilting towards him. If access was on offer, Murphy was inclined to take it – it was just a matter of good policy – so he slipped a finger into her warmth as she stroked him. After a while Sylvia rolled over in the water and floated right up to his face.

  ‘I want you inside me,’ she breathed.

  There it was: the most exquisite sentence in the entire English language. A lyrical phrase on the lips of any woman, with Sylvia’s low, husky delivery it was fucken sublime.

  ‘Glad to oblige,’ he said, taking her hand and leading her out of the pool.

  Sunday 13 May – late morning

  Jo cycled up the lane behind her block of flats, her temper as foul as the weather, which had lashed her all the way home from Waverley Cemetery in gusty curtains full of leaves and grit. She’d hoped a hard physical ride in the steep streets behind the eastern beaches would calm her down, but the rainstorm and the bad behaviour of the car drivers had only made things worse. She locked her road bike then climbed the back stairs and let herself in, water streaming off her onto the carpet inside her back door. She headed straight to the bathroom, where she peeled off every sodden layer and stepped into the shower, washing away the muck from the torrent outside.

  That bloody brother of hers. Murphy had been like this her entire life: self-absorbed, instinctively belligerent, and scornful of emotion while oblivious to how driven by emotion he was himself – especially by anger.

  Not to mention his complete denial of the huge empty space in their lives where their mother used to be. All in service of his lifelong delusion that their mother had never been present to him in the first place.

  As her mum had told it, Murphy senior had never been close to David: an unsympathetic, old-school disciplinarian, he’d been a spectator in all other aspects of child-rearing, regarding it as women’s work. He’d called his son ‘boy’ and had been capable of not even acknowledging him for days on end. Yet the five-year-old had worshipped Diarmaid, and had been utterly devastated by his sudden absence. That pain had never left Murphy, and was only augmented once he joined the Force, gaining access to buried files and the guarded confidences of veteran cops.

  By the time Jo came along two years later, her brother was already in open rebellion against both their mother and the kind, generous, patient man she’d married: according to David, his mother was a traitor to a sacred memory, and the usurper was a feeble substitute for his fallen hero father. Jo presented further competition for his mother’s attention, so he’d launched a life-long project of antagonism against his baby sister. Older siblings are as demigods to an infant, and it took Jo a long time to realise that the sneaky cruelties and the withering contempt that her brother inflicted upon her were not simply the way of the world. School was a revelation, a place where people liked her and generally treated her well, and where lessons weren’t laced with outright falsehoods and booby-traps designed to wrong-foot her and get her in trouble. She thrived on this level playing field, and her self-sufficiency and competence soon neutralised her brother’s psychological warfare. By the time he’d hit his moody teens, they were ignoring one another completely.

  It was only when Jo’s father was diagnosed with cancer that Murphy softened a little, becoming closer to him and their mum in the final year of his life. But after Jo’s dad died, Murphy withdrew again from their mother, retreating before her grief at being widowed for a second time. He’d affected indifference ever since, even through their mother’s declining health. After her final episode, all he’d had to offer Jo was the observation that a heart attack in your sleep wasn’t a bad way to go.

  It was vintage Murphy. He refused to be tactful or sensitive. Or to just shut the fuck up.

  The water started to cool slightly, and Jo realised she’d been standing under the spray for ages. She stepped out of the shower into the billowing steam and dried herself off, then dashed to her bedroom for a bathrobe and slippers. In the living room, she poured a good dose of Baileys over ice and sat on her sofa, watching the storm thrash the upper branches of the Norfolk pines across the way. She closed her eyes and focused on her breathing. She could use a restorative afternoon of painting, but she needed to get her brother out of her head first.

  Thursday 7 June – evening

  Arriving home from his twelve-hour day shift, Porter locked the door, drew the curtains and started his stereo, playing Birgit Nilsson’s peerless 1966 performance of Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth, opposite Wolfgang Windgassen and conducted by Karl Böhm.

  He donned a pair of custom-fitted unpowdered polyisoprene disposable surgical gloves and went to the hall cupboard. He pulled out a vintage Gladstone bag that he’d purchased on the Portobello Road several years ago. Of British manufacture, circa 1925, it was genuine crocodile skin tanned to a deep mahogany, with the initials ELM in gold lettering on one flank. He then opened the vacuum cleaner and removed an orange pouch from behind the dust bag. Handmade by Louis Cardini of soft ostrich leather, it held a Browning Hi-Power Mark III automatic pistol, the standard-issue sidearm of the Australian Defence Force. Porter had procured the weapon from an entrepreneur of the enlisted ranks inside the Holsworthy Barracks. He slid the pouch into a sturdy pocket inside the Gladstone bag’s front wall and took the whole lot out to the living room.

  Next into the bag went a photocopy of Volume II of the New Fabrica, a gorgeous new translation recently published by Karger of Basel to celebrate the quincentenary of Vesalius’s birth. With freshly rendered illustrations, luminous page presentation and text in English, it was perfect for his project, although both too bulky and far too precious to take on site. He had made separate high-resolution wire-bound photocopies of each of the seven Volumes, in preparation for his Tribute.

  He crossed to an antique red-lacquered Chinese cabinet and transferred to the bag an assortment of surgical instruments and supplies: lancets, scissors, forceps, clamps, hooks, chisels, rib spreaders, syringes, probes, retractors, sponges. A basic first-aid kit, an entire box of his custom-fitted disposable gloves, nail-polish remover, tissues, a dozen large plastic bin-liners, two-dozen energy-gel packs, a collapsed plastic expansion bladder, a hooded protective coverall suit, a pair of matching overboots, a hairnet and two N95 masks. He covered it all with a small navy-blue hand-towel.

  He took a black syringe case from the Chinese cabinet into the kitchen. He removed an unmarked bottle of freeze-dried sodium thiopental powder from his pantry, stirred a teaspoon into a shot glass half-filled with hot water and drew the solution into a blue-capped syringe. He removed two vials of pancuronium bromide from the dairy sectio
n of his refrigerator, transferring the contents of one into another syringe, this one red-capped. He placed both syringes and the spare vial into the case.

  The combination of these two drugs was the preferred formula for Dutch euthanasia. The thiopental sedative acted on the brain to induce coma, then the curare-mimetic muscle relaxant stilled the diaphragm and halted the breath. While the pancuronium would be administered intravenously, it had the handy characteristic of being effective via intramuscular delivery. Porter found comfort in the insurance of bringing an extra dose along, just in case.

  He took a bottle of liquid midazolam from the fridge, used it to thoroughly soak a pad of soft, absorbent fabric then sealed the fabric in a sandwich bag, ready to deploy. The powerful, short-acting benzodiazepine had a soporific effect nearly as rapid and deep as that inaccurately ascribed by Hollywood to chloroform, allowing him to inject the other drugs. It also had the happy side effect of anterograde amnesia, useful in the unlikely event his meticulous planning somehow failed and he had to abort.

  Each of these formulations was regulated in Australia as a Schedule 4 drug: a simple prescription medicine. Considering what Porter was using them for, they had been indecently easy to procure: a few borrowed medical identities, a little homework on sympotomatology, several careless doctors and a dozen suburban pharmacies, and he possessed enough pharmaceuticals to despatch the entire population of Blues Point Tower. It was a scandal, really.

  He placed the drugs in the Gladstone bag on top of the navy towel, along with a final pair of disposable gloves ready for immediate access, finishing with a Masonite clipboard on top. He closed the bag and set it by the front door, then took a bottle of clear nail polish from the bathroom cabinet and left it on the kitchen counter, ready for application to his fingertips before the following day’s excursion.

  Finally, he packed a small overnight bag with clothes and toiletries for his two nights in a bland Manly motel. During his detailed research he had learned that most perpetrators of lethal crimes were identified and taken into custody within forty-eight hours of the act. His rigorous protocol therefore entailed sleeping elsewhere, listening to a police scanner, watching the news broadcasts and surveilling his home and workplace for a couple of days afterwards.

  He degloved, satisfied with his evening’s work. He ate a light supper then poured a glass of Armagnac, collected the new issue of Quadrant that had arrived in the day’s mail and took himself off for an early night.

  Thursday 7 June – evening

  Sylvia came in late from an exhausting twelve-hour day shift to find Murphy on the couch with an empty wine glass, watching some car show on the television while their expensive kitchen steadfastly refused to cook them dinner on its own initiative.

  ‘Hey, Sylv,’ he said distractedly.

  She bent over to kiss him. ‘How was your day?’

  ‘Same old,’ he replied. ‘Bad guys still doing bad guy shit and the idiots still in charge.’ He was always this cheerful when he’d been watching the news. ‘What’s for tea, anyway? I’m starved.’

  She took a deep breath and held it while crossing to the fridge to consider their options. ‘How about pan-fried salmon and steamed vegies?’ she asked, once she trusted herself to speak.

  ‘Sounds good, darlin’.’ An ad came on and Murphy took his empty glass to the sideboard. ‘Want a drink?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ replied Sylvia, heading for the hall. ‘I’ll just get changed.’

  ‘Grenache all right?’ he called after her. He cocked his ear to listen but there was nothing. He poured her a glass of the red anyway and topped up his own.

  She came back into the living room to find Murphy muttering darkly, having embarked on some technical challenge with the home cinema. It looked like he was trying to set the system to record something, but the software had updated and he couldn’t work the new menu.

  ‘Oh, before I forget, Dave,’ said Sylvia as she gathered ingredients, ‘Claire at work asked if she could stay over tomorrow night.’

  ‘Claire?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s going to Ireland on Saturday morning. Six o’clock flight.’

  ‘Ireland?’

  ‘Yeah. So I said it was okay for her to stay here,’ she ventured cautiously as she started washing vegetables.

  ‘Why? She lives next door.’ He was utterly distracted, lost in an obscure sub-menu.

  Sylvia struggled not to laugh. ‘Not Clare next door, Dave. Claire from work.’

  ‘Oh. But why does she need to stay with us?’ He cursed, bailed out to the main menu and started again.

  ‘She lives out west, in Wenty I think. With all the security she has to be there by four. Starting from here will be a lot easier for her.’

  ‘Why can’t she stay next door?’

  Sylvia silently lost it, but eventually regained her composure. ‘They don’t know one another, Dave. They just have the same name.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ Murphy gave up on the TV and threw down the remote. ‘You know I don’t like randoms in my house, Sylvia. Definitely not overnight.’

  ‘She’s not a random, we work together.’

  ‘Well I don’t know her, do I?’

  Because we never socialise with my colleagues, Sylvia almost said. Instead, she went with, ‘It’s only one night.’

  ‘When’s this?’

  ‘Tomorrow night.’

  ‘We’re going sailing on Saturday. Have to be up at sparrow’s.’

  ‘I know. She’ll be gone by three-thirty.’

  Murphy grunted, having run out of objections. ‘Who even is she?’

  ‘You met her at Deb’s wedding. Strawberry blonde, amber eyes.’ That rang no bells. ‘Plum watered silk dress, off the shoulder.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I remember.’ Claire had scrubbed up very well that day. ‘All right, but I’m not getting up to let her out.’

  ‘You won’t know a thing about it,’ Sylvia assured him. She laid the fish in the hot pan and the sizzle prevented any further conversation.

  VOLUME II

  THE LIGAMENTS AND MUSCLES

  endered in exquisite and merciless detail, the depiction of the dissected musculature of the second Volume produces the Fabrica’s highest pitch of visual horror. Presaged by a single introductory page of close text, fourteen full-body figures blur into a medieval pageant of violation and misery. The gruesome opening of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is a lullaby by comparison.

  The first figure, flayed and abject, stands on high ground overlooking Padua, gazing heavenward in an attitude of supplication. Or perhaps we are merely observing the postural effect of the rope that has anchored the model, omitted from the illustration.

  A second figure in an athletic stance and a third in a frank, conversational aspect do not trouble us overmuch, but disquiet is initiated with the awkward posture of the fourth figure (wrongly titled the first – the printer would institute more rigorous quality controls after the production of the Fabrica), visibly shamed by the loss of the outer layers of muscle. Many of the long muscles have been severed from their superior attachments and hang, ruined and tawdry, from their still intact lower attachments.

  This gruesome procedure of stripping and severing escalates as we advance. The sixth figure’s visage is truly terrifying, a kind of anti-mask from an alien horror film, the facial muscles torn asunder. Whole strips of abdominal muscle dangle limp and useless between the legs, almost unnoticed beneath the ghastly head.

  The seventh figure is the most harrowing of all, strung up by rope next to a blank wall. Gutted and stripped of musculature, it is all cavity and barely shrouded bone. Robbed of its jaw, violated by a rope threaded through spaces in the skull, the head screams like a Munch, the resonating chamber inside the ribs echoing and amplifying the existential anguish of the damned. Strips of meat hang from wrists, from fingers, even from toes. Its diaphragm has been completely excised and, horrifyingly, affixed to the wall by its own organic adhesive. No humiliation has been spared th
is corpse; none spared our common bleak humanity.

  The eighth figure is almost too dishabille to truly disturb, slumping in a posture of abjection before its inevitable fate. The arms are nearly detached from the torso, while the resected sternum, decorated with twin gruesome flights of severed ribs, leans carelessly against the wall.

  The ninth figure offers us reprieve as we return to an almost complete musculature in posterior view. We begin again, but this time, when the muscles are stripped away and left dangling in the illustrations that follow, it is a nearly cheerful business. The inclusion of an extra leg in the thirteenth plate hardly disturbs the gaiety, although it does portend the sole but powerful discordance in the posterior set: the fourteenth figure, caught awkwardly between standing and kneeling, propped on a low plinth, literally disarmed and contemplating a supernumerary cranium before it. Remember that dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.

  Friday 8 June – morning

  Porter had taken particular care in selecting his second candidate, in search of physiological and aesthetic perfection.

  He was utterly committed to a comprehensive anatomical enquiry: every structure and every system of the body was vital to him, without exception. But not without distinction. The human muscular system was what had first united for him science and art, the two halves of his identity.

  Although in school he had excelled at art, in which the body played a prominent role, he’d achieved entry to medical school on the strength of his mastery of the beautiful abstractions and intellectual rigours of mathematics and the physical sciences. Biology had little interested him before, so he’d been surprised in anatomy class to find himself overawed by the grace, power and economy of the musculature.