The Bugger

by Julian Novitz

  A tense short story about a cop caught out while planting a listening device.

  Hiding behind a couch, Adam Gellworth (a police surveillance expert or ‘bugger’ of twenty years’ experience) is forced to contemplate the life he has led to get to this precarious point. But what of the men he was sent to spy on? Will they leave and give him the opportunity to escape, or will they discover him, lying face-down on the floor? Is the bugger buggered himself?

  The Bugger

  A SHORT STORY

  Julian Novitz

  Contents

  Title Page

  The Bugger

  About the author

  Copyright

  The Bugger

  Julian Novitz

  Adam Gellworth has been lying face down behind the couch for over an hour. The shearers or farmhands, whoever they are, don’t seem to be going anywhere. They opened a crate about half an hour ago and every now and then he hears a tinkle of glass as they pull out another bottle. How many bottles do they have left to drink? How many crates? There’s bugger all else to do out here besides drink; they could be at this all night. Adam hasn’t been out in the country for a while and the smell inside the shed reminds him of visits to his grandfather’s farm when he was a kid. Sheep dung, sweat and stale beer. Adam always hated the farm, hated the weekends with his grandfather. Mean-spirited old cunt. He’d be laughing now.

  There are about three of them in the shed, Adam thinks — three at least, but not more than four. Two of them are sitting on the couch; he can hear the springs creak above his head. There is a portable TV on the table; they’ve turned it on to watch the match. The door is open and Adam can feel a slight breeze. The others must be out drinking in the paddock — he can hear them wander in from time to time to check the score. Adam wonders what happened to McCarthy and Garret. They must have been surprised — no time to send him a warning. Adam has switched off his radio, anyway; he doesn’t want it crackling to life now. McCarthy and Garret must still be out there, he thinks, watching the shed from high up the hillside. There is bugger all they can do for him now.

  This isn’t the first time Adam ever got stuck. He is good at his job but you can’t plan for everything, and over the past twenty years he’s had to hide in wardrobes and under beds, leap out of windows at a moment’s notice and leg it across suburban lawns. Stuff-ups are always a possibility but this is a bad one, almost unforgivable. He has no idea what sort of men he is dealing with — how much they know, how smart they are, what routines they keep. He and Garret should have watched the place for longer but they’d been cocky. Now Adam was stuck down on his belly on the filthy shed floor.

  Hiding is not something they teach you. Bugger all is what they teach you — the rest you learn on the job, from experience. You stay still but try to flex your muscles every now and then so you don’t get a cramp when you have to run. You take deep, regular breaths — no one will hear you breathing unless they’re listening for you, and shallow breaths will just get you panicking. Adam’s bladder has swollen over the past hour. He is not above pissing himself when he has to, but here they might smell it. He regrets not sending McCarthy into the shed now. He could have been in and out faster; he is good enough. And even if he isn’t really good he is young, and he could manage lying still, face down on the floor for more than an hour. Adam isn’t sure how much longer he can last.

  You might be buggered, he thinks. The bugger is buggered. In the act of bugging he has buggered himself. If he makes a break for it they’d catch him. They are young men — younger than him, anyway — and Adam is out of shape. Too much time doing fiddly work with wires and electronics, too much time on the computer. His stomach gurgles beneath him. He wishes he could shift over onto his side, but he can’t risk it. He has been looking at the floor for more than an hour now, at its warped wooden surface, the dust and dirt and flecks of wool. He has been looking at his forearms for an hour, crossed in front of him — bare, beefy forearms covered with ginger hair. So many hairs, so many freckles, dimpled spongy flesh around his elbows.

  The wife took him to see a film the other month. Fucking Mission Impossible shit, fucking Tom Cruise. She thought it would be fun but it just pissed him off. Pretty-boy super-spies with their floppy hair, abseiling down skyscrapers, fucking explosions. Try lying on your gut in a woolshed and not being able to piss for over an hour, you alien-worshipping prick. We’re not spies, Adam thinks; we’re buggers. All we have is patience, all we’re good at is staying still and not making any noise. Adam is a savant when it comes to not moving. He is a master at not saying a bloody word.

  The wife says he doesn’t talk to her and Adam knows he needs to make an effort now; he can’t just piss off to the den and his computer every night, the way he used to when the kids were at home. He has to cook dinner once in a while, suggest a movie. And then the weekends, the trips to the market, sipping those lattes at an outdoor café, meeting friends in the evening, some other lonely-arsed couple with an empty nest. People have kids to stop themselves from getting bored, Adam thinks — sick of each other and themselves. There’s no other reason, really, when you get right down to it, not with all the grief they give. The best you can say is that they’re never boring.

  One of the shearers on the couch leans forward to shout abuse at the TV. Adam thinks that if just one of the bastards gets off his arse, if just one of them decides he wants to have a stretch, take a wander to the east window, or pick up that motorcycle magazine he can see on the table behind him, it will all be over. Who knows what they’ll do? Smartest thing to do would be to run him off the property quick as they can, then destroy any evidence. Keep their mouths shut and not do anything stupid. But the thing with this job, the thing that will always surprise you, is just how stupid your opposition can be. Adam still fondly remembers the time some idiots burned a DVD of themselves posing with all the loot they’d nicked, then forgot to take the thing out of a laptop drive when they tried to unload their haul at Cash Converters.

  But sometimes you get the other side of that stupidity, and it must happen in an instant, in a flash of complete idiocy. Adam wonders what they might be keeping around here. Some bright spark might have thought to hide a shotgun on an upper shelf, because they’re big-timers now, protecting their stash. But it doesn’t take a gun or even a knife — all you need is any blunt heavy object you might find around the home. Fists and feet will do at a pinch; no one is too stupid to improvise.

  Having dinner one night in a seafood restaurant, wearing paper napkins and eating mussels with the wife and some other couple he can barely remember, Adam had been asked a question about his job. His wife had smiled, because now there was a use for him after all — his job was interesting to the people she wanted to impress, the part-time interior decorator from her Pilates class and her real-estate agent husband. It was another world to those people, something off the tellie. They wanted to hear all about the case files of Detective Sergeant Gellworth — they couldn’t get enough. ‘The job?’ he had said, looking up from his plate, his fingers and lips greasy from the mussel shells. ‘When I’m on the job, mate, I’m untouchable.’ And then that idiot real-estate agent had laughed because he thought Adam had made a joke, because an overweight, moustached fifty-something with a mortgage and a bored wife could hardly claim to be untouchable, not on the job, not in any capacity.

  But untouchable he is, and that is why Detective Sergeant Adam Gellworth is still lying behind a couch on the floor of a woolshed, ready to piss his pants if he has to lie there a minute longer. The kids are gone, the wife is a lost cause — what else is there beside the bugs, the bugging, the bugger, the bugged and the buggered? There are other jobs for a man like him, of course: an older bugger in lousy shape with no leadership skills or management
potential. There are a whole range of small, uncomfortable places for him: archives, admin, training, retraining, any number of desks and cubicles and out-of-the-way basement offices. Bloody old Currie, the old bugger Adam had worked with for years — what happened to him after he tired of stuffing himself behind furniture and under tables, wiring bedrooms and garages and buggering all manner of people with his tools of buggeration, those devices the size of a ten-cent, no, a five-cent piece, inserting them into the rectums of their lives with aplomb? Where is Currie now, that bugger of fifteen years’ experience? At a computer in the corner of an office, click, click, click through his web browsers all day. Porn site after porn site, checking what they are showing and who is looking. Someone has to keep track of it all, and that someone is Currie, the poor bugger.

  Adam isn’t averse to pornography — there is still blood in his penis. But porn all day? Every day? Porn as your job, your life, for the five years you have to waste until retirement? No, Currie is buggered. But so is Adam, lying on his belly, looking at his fat forearms, his nose down close enough to smell his own skin. The fabric of his shirt and trousers have moulded themselves into the floor beneath his weight; he can’t move an inch now without hearing them pull and stick.

  The match is over; the boys sitting on the couch greet the final whistle with a groan and reach for more beer. Adam wonders who’s been playing. He’s never been much into sport, to tell the truth. His son had been good at soccer for a while, between the ages of ten and fifteen, and Adam had taken some pride in watching his matches. When people asked him about his son he could say he was good at soccer and that never failed to content the questioner. It was a fact uncomplicated by any qualification — good at soccer, good at kicking a ball past other kickers on some muddy field.

  But the soccer fell away as the boy progressed deeper into adolescence, growing into a lurking, slouching creature. Adam wasn’t an angry father — he lacked that kind of energy — and continued to say that his boy was good at soccer even after the ball had deflated in the garage and the boots had submerged themselves in the back of a wardrobe. Bad grades, late nights, sullen dinner conversations, cut classes, minor traffic accidents. The boy became more and more of an abstraction as he got older, just a wearisome thought in the back of Adam’s mind. A lot of sneering, a lot of posturing, but not really anything to do with Adam, now that the soccer days were past. The girls had been easier. They just grew up.

  Adam remembers a time when the boy had been seen at a party that got out of control; some cunt of a PC was joking about it in the cafeteria. Adam had gone home that night and not talked to anyone; sat in the den at his computer without really focusing on the images flickering on his screen. The next morning, a Saturday, he had gone into the boy’s room and sat down on the bed. Adam wasn’t sure how long he had sat there, watching the boy sleep, his face burrowed deep into the pillow. Outside the sun was up; he could hear a neighbour mowing his lawn, could almost smell the grass cuttings on the hot flat air. After a while Adam had leaned forward, grabbed a handful of the boy’s long, dyed black hair and tugged him upright. His son had been shocked, his face screwed up with pain, and Adam was almost touched for a moment — he had forgotten how the boy looked when he was afraid and vulnerable.

  ‘Don’t you embarrass me, son,’ he had said, pulling harder. ‘Don’t you fucking embarrass me.’ And they had looked at each other and understood each other then, and Adam had wished that the moment could have lasted forever, but eventually he had to let go and walk away, with a few long black hairs still looped around his fingers. The boy was up and about in an hour, all his rudeness and insolence flooding back, but he was a bit more careful around Adam after that, at least until after he moved out. Buggered off to university in some other city to collect his bloody Bachelor of Arts, his degree in Bugger All.

  Shadows move across the floor of the woolshed; twilight is passing. Outside Adam can hear loud talk and laughter. If the boys on the couch would only get up and join their mates then he might be able to slip out through the other door, creep away around the hillside, moving unseen through the dark. One of them tears open a pack of potato chips and swears as they scatter over the couch. Adam’s bladder has grown until he thinks of it as an entity quite apart from him, a swollen island beneath his skin, round and hard like a rock. His weight presses down on it and it presses back into him and Adam starts to believe that he is not controlling it but that two equally intractable forces are simply keeping each other in check. Despite his attempts to stretch and flex, his joints have stiffened, his knees feel sore and swollen. If he has to run he’ll never make it, not in this state.

  After another minute one of the shearers stands up from the couch. Adam hears him brush potato chips out of his lap, hears the springs creak. The man shuffles around, looking over to the window on the other side of the room. All he’d have to do is lean forward a little, let his eyes fall lower, but the moment soon passes and the man turns away. Adam hears him walk across the room and out into the paddock. He releases his breath in a long steady stream through pursed lips. Adam Gellworth is untouchable. For a while yet, anyway. For a little while longer, perhaps.

  Two left on the couch. Three, maybe four out in the paddock. Six years ago he would have risked it, would have wriggled across the room, got the window open and rolled out over its ledge without anyone hearing a thing. Now he’s not sure if he can stand up on his own. Adam thinks about Garret and McCarthy, up on the hillside with their binoculars, trying to guess what might be going on. He almost feels sorry for the poor buggers, then decides to feel sorry for himself instead. McCarthy made it out okay, scampered up to the tree-line without being seen. But the door was already opening by the time Adam realised what was going on and he was down on his knees, busy with his buggering behind the couch. In another minute he would have been out of there, but all he could do then was fall flat on his belly and wait for a chance to slip away, or wait to be buggered himself. Now his world has shrunk to the bare wooden floor beneath him, his forearms crossed in front of his face, the dirt, dust and curls of wool. This is his world and he is learning to live with it. Better to be here than anywhere else, he thinks. This is his job, after all, the only job. It is the one thing in the world that is indisputably his, and no floppy-haired Tom Cruise fuckwit can dispute his ownership. Fucking super-spies: there’s no such thing. Just buggers like him.

  Above the shed, on the hillside, Garret and McCarthy must be listening in, listening through his bug to the drone of the television and the mumbled commentary of the shearers on the couch. Maybe they can hear his slow regular breaths as well, and reassure themselves that he has not vanished entirely, that he will return from behind the couch at some point. This is the job, Adam tells himself. This is what I do.

  It is dark outside. They have passed from twilight to night, and the voices in the paddock seem closer, as if they are moving back towards the door, drawn to the pallid light of the shed. How long can he remain undetected with four or five people milling around inside? He has been waiting for things to get better and now they are getting worse. He has been waiting for a chance, but perhaps he’s missed it. What will the wife be doing now? Watching television probably, the pre-dinner hour. Dinner will be eaten with the news, then after-dinner TV, then bedtime, forty-five minutes with her library book before lights out. God, she must have been embarrassed when he talked about the job, when he claimed to be untouchable. A fat old man making out like some faster-than-fast super-spy. God.

  They’re not moving out but coming back in. All of them are inside now; the door to the paddock has been swung shut and the television turned off. More bottles of beer are produced — the last bottles; there is talk of opening another crate. Adam looks around and sees a couple of crates on the other side of the room, on his side of the room, over by one of the shearing stalls. I-spy-with-my-little-fucking-eye. Of course they may just be empties, from some earlier drinking session, but he can’t quite bring himself to believe that, no
t tonight, not with the way his luck has been going. When he is on the job he is untouchable. Stupid. Fucking unbelievable.

  Adam can’t understand how he has not seen those crates before now. He doesn’t understand much, really — not the wife as she declines daily, tottering bravely through a life of vague dissatisfaction; not the kids with their useless degrees and useless ideas, their smugness, their support for that lesbian bitch in the Beehive, their patronising glances at his solid, silent form. He doesn’t understand any of that or any of them. But the job — he thought he understood the job, he thought it all made sense. Bug, bugger, being a bugger, we’ve bugged them and they’re buggered now. Stuff-ups happen, but if you do the job, if you know the job, then you’ll get through it. A bugger doesn’t let himself get buggered.

  Footsteps creaking on the wooden floorboards, someone moving around the side of the couch — he can see them looming up from out of the corner of his eye. Adam puts his head down, as if that will help. Stupid. Oh God. Stupid old man. Stupid fucking God. He doesn’t understand a thing now, can’t for the life of him understand how he came to be here. Everything is a mystery.

  Above him, Adam hears a drawn-in breath. He lifts his head from his forearms but it seems to take ages for him to raise his eyes, up past muddy steel-capped boots and yellow pulled-up socks, past hairy bare legs and faded shorts, past the beginnings of a beer-gut and the turned-up collar of a dirty chequered shirt, to the face of the surprised young man. A rush of warmth overcomes him then, and Adam realises that the long battle with his bladder is over and in the end it hasn’t mattered — nothing has. The man above has not shouted, not alerted his friends. His mouth is still wide with surprise; he doesn’t know why Adam is here or what to do, not for the life of him, not yet.