by Robert Gott
‘Who killed my fucking dogs?’ he repeated, with a snarl of which his fucking dogs would have been proud.
I turned my head and saw his trouser bottoms and filthy work boots. It was a struggle to get to my feet, having the use of only one arm. (How did Arthur get through life so permanently discommoded?) Arthur had lapsed back into unconsciousness, so I was left to confront Flint alone. When I faced him he was standing with his arms hanging by his sides with the pendulous muscularity of his obviously recent simian ancestors. He was breathing noisily through his mouth, his already ugly features contorted so severely that he was more gargoyle than man.
‘It wasn’t me,’ I said, but I knew I sounded defensive, frightened, cornered and, frankly, guilty. The tensing of his body and a further deterioration in his looks indicated that I had not won his confidence. I took a few steps backwards. He took a few steps forward. I thought he would simply stomp on Arthur’s body, but he lifted his feet and stepped over him without taking his eyes from my face. I had never been looked at before with such unalloyed hatred. Mal Flint was a man with whom negotiation would not be possible. He had the crude, inflexible psychology of a wild animal.
‘We didn’t kill your dogs.’ It was only at this point that I noticed the iron bar clutched in his right hand. He began to raise it slowly, and his features assumed the feverish concentration of a beast energised by the inevitable and unstoppable juggernaut that is instinct. I was frozen in fascination. I noticed tiny things: the spittle that had gathered in small, frothy mounds at the corners of his mouth; the fact that his left eye seemed to be set slightly lower in his face than his right eye; and the small and astonishing vanity of eyebrows that had been clipped to restrain their unruliness. He cocked his head slightly, worried that my failure to move might be a strategy rather than a physiological impossibility. When his arm reached the top of its arc, I think I may even have smiled.
What happened next remains a blur of movement and sound. I was watching Flint’s face, so Arthur’s initial action registered only peripherally. Using his legs with great force and dexterity, he seemed at once to collapse one of Flint’s legs at the knee joint while kicking the other sideways and off the ground. Flint had no time to arrest his fall, and he fell with the graceless, bovine drop of a toppled buffalo. His head struck the ground with the sickening thump of a plummeting watermelon, and he did not stir.
‘Help me get up,’ Arthur said.
I was staring at Flint’s prone form, and Arthur had to repeat the request.
‘I just saved your life. The least you could do is help me stand up.’
Brought back suddenly from the calm acceptance of my impending death, my body reacted in the unfortunate way it tends to when greatly stressed. I threw up. Arthur waited patiently for me to finish and then, sweating and weak, I assisted him to his feet.
‘I thought you were dead,’ I said.
‘I saw Flint when I came to. I thought it might be better to play possum.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘My head hurts like hell and so does my shoulder, but I’m not dead, so I’m ahead. You know, Will, we’re in the middle of a big, big mess.’
Flint moaned and his leg twitched.
‘At least I didn’t kill him,’ Arthur said. ‘He’s going to be pretty pissed off when he comes round.’
‘We have to talk to him,’ I said. ‘Find out what he knows. Convince him that we didn’t kill his dogs.’
Arthur gave me a look that was half pitying and half incredulous.
‘Do you seriously think that this creature, half man, half ape, is going to sit down with you and have a little chat?’
‘Short of shutting him up permanently, we have to try something.’
Arthur indicated Flint’s body dismissively and said, ‘All right, but we need to get him back to the house and tie him down. I’m not going to attempt any discussion unless he is immobilised.’
I nodded. I was uncertain about the legality of tying someone up, but this was no time to be restrained by such niceties. Flint uttered a small, helpless groan of semi-conscious protest as we each took a leg and began to haul him towards his house. The going was awkward. Because each of us had only his right arm with which to manoeuvre Flint’s body, one of us had to face him and the other have his back to him as we dragged him, stumbling as we went. There was nothing we could do to protect Flint’s head from the uneven ground over which we were pulling him. Occasionally it bounced with alarming vigour over a rock or a tree root.
‘Fortunately,’ Arthur said, ‘there’s not much brain to damage.’
I was incapable, at the time, of considering all the consequences of that morning’s occurrences. Thoughts and feelings flew through my mind with the disordered and numbing violence of a blizzard. It was as much as I could do to help Arthur truss Flint securely to the heavy stove in his kitchen. There were no chairs. His head lolled forward onto his chest, revealing that his pate was thinning at the crown. This small exposure lent him a kind of humanity which the rest of him resisted. We stood looking down at him, hideously conscious of the Babel of Beelzebub’s minions behind us.
‘We are now in shit right up to our eyeballs,’ Arthur said. ‘This arsehole is not going to want to cooperate. Christ, it will be like trying to reason with a wounded boar.’
‘Well, we can’t just let him go. Not now. And we can’t kill him.’
With stunning blandness, Arthur asked, ‘Why not?’
‘I believe it’s against the law,’ I said.
‘I hope you’re not expecting that same law to protect you from him.’
He gave Flint a vicious little nudge with his boot.
With a rush of moral rectitude I suggested that just at the moment it was Flint who needed protection from us, not the other way around. I didn’t underestimate the danger he represented, but I had become slightly discombobulated by the topsy-turvy nature of the moral universe I seemed to have been dragged into. Charlotte and Arthur were two people whose characters I thought I understood, and both of them, within twenty-four hours of each other, had advocated the worst of crimes as a solution to an inconvenient problem. And they had both done so with unsettling ease. I couldn’t blame the war for this. Whatever individual and collective suspensions of civilised behaviour were taking place in the Solomon Islands or at Stalingrad, they surely didn’t apply here in Maryborough, where war was felt most profoundly in the unavailability of ice-cream and butter.
Flint began to come round. He gurgled, and lifted his head and shook it from side to side. He could not, initially, understand why he was unable to move his arms or legs. He flailed pointlessly because he couldn’t budge the heavy stove, or loosen the knots Arthur had expertly, if monodextrously, tied. His breath was pushed noisily out through clenched, discoloured teeth, and sounded like air escaping from a small, punctured bellows. When he had gained sufficient consciousness to utter the word, ‘Cunts!’, Arthur took a handful of his greasy hair, yanked his head back, and told him calmly that, as he had only a few more minutes to live, he might want his last words to be a little more substantial. I was mesmerised by a quality in Arthur’s voice that I had never heard before. There was no hint of deference or sympathy. It was calm and steely, and the words slid from his palate with the unctuous certainty of the practised sadist. He was playing the role of his life. Flint, however, did not betray any fear. He looked furious and ill. I don’t see how he could have been anything other than severely concussed given the number of heavy knocks his head had sustained. Flint’s eyes followed Arthur groggily as he picked up a brutal-looking knife from a filthy sill.
‘Is this what you use to butcher the pigs?’
Without waiting for a reply, Arthur moved to the carcass suspended over the bath. With a deft and sure stroke he opened its belly with the knife. The viscera tumbled forth, slick, obscene, and somehow animated in the
ir coiling, glistening release.
‘It’s sharp,’ Arthur said.
Flint looked from Arthur to me, and I didn’t miss the inchoate presence now of fear in his eyes. Arthur came across to where Flint sat propped and restrained. He brought the knife, foul with pig’s blood, up to Flint’s throat.
‘This is what it feel likes to die,’ he said, and drew the knife savagely across Flint’s throat. I let out a cry of disbelief, and Arthur stepped back to admire the effect. For a moment that seemed an eternity, both Flint and I thought that his throat had been cut — but Arthur had used the blunt, back of the knife, not its edge. Arthur laughed.
‘Whoops,’ he said. ‘Wrong side. I’ll have to try that again.’
Flint uttered an involuntary whimper, and the spreading patch at his groin indicated that he had lost control of his bladder. I began to feel sorry for him. Arthur was merciless in his harrying. He leaned down again, but this time he slashed the buttons from Flint’s shirt and gingerly pushed the sides apart to expose his unexpectedly white, hairless chest and belly. He pushed the point of the knife into the soft V of the throat, and drew blood. He then drew the knife down over the sternum, and didn’t stop until he reached the belt of Flint’s trousers. He produced a thin line of blood as he went. At the belt he scratched a line from hip bone to hip bone so that an inverted, red T formed on Flint’s torso.
‘I could open you up like that pig,’ he said, ‘and your guts would fall into your lap and you wouldn’t be dead. You’d see your own intestines. Would you like that?’
Arthur’s voice was caressing. Flint shook his head, his lips quivering and tears, and snot running down his face.
‘I’ll start here,’ Arthur said and dug the point of the knife into Flint’s skin just below the navel. Flint began yowling in a way that was both pathetic and terrifying.
‘What? What? What?’ he said. ‘What do you want?’
Arthur withdrew the knife and straightened up.
‘Who paid you to kill Polly Drummond and her mother?’
It took a moment for the question to sink in. Flint was still shaking and blubbering, but I saw the bewilderment in his eyes when he finally understood Arthur’s words. It was a reaction impossible to fake. Arthur saw it, too. His features sagged for the briefest of moments with the appalled realisation that he had wounded and humiliated an innocent man. Whatever unpleasant things Flint had done in his miserable life, killing Polly and her mother were not among them.
‘I didn’t kill anybody. I swear I didn’t.’
Flint had not detected any change in Arthur’s face and still believed that he was only a few seconds away from being disembowelled.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please. I didn’t kill anybody.’
‘Where’s Joe Drummond,’ Arthur snapped.
‘Joe?’ he sniffled. He was thrown by the question. ‘Joe left Maryborough years ago. I don’t know where he went. Honest.’
The way he said ‘honest’ was almost heartbreaking in its transparent attempt to indicate that, although he did not grasp any of what was happening to him, he was prepared to answer any question, even if it made no sense to him, and he was prepared to answer it truthfully, because a truthful answer to an absurd question was all he had left. Arthur knew, and I knew, that he not seen Joe, let alone disposed of him. As I took in the scene before me, its ghastliness made my knees tremble. We had entered a world that was almost apocalyptic in its awfulness: the flies buzzed with renewed frenzy over the malodorous gralloch of the pig; Flint sat, bleeding and broken, and beginning to be plagued by flies as well; and Arthur stood, knife in hand, agog, I thought, at what he had wrought, and wondering what to do next.
‘Suppose I believe you,’ he said. ‘Suppose I let you go. What’s in it for me?’
I could see where Arthur was heading. Flint was too dazed and too naturally stupid to comprehend the fact that a deal was being offered, but it was a deal designed to protect us from him, not him from us. It was critical that Flint thought the latter. Arthur went on.
‘Let’s get one thing straight. We didn’t kill your dogs. They were already dead when we got here.’
Flint looked blank. His terror was receding, and he was beginning to experience the mortifying awareness of the extent of his abasement.
‘Do you understand that? We did not kill your dogs.’
Flint nodded.
‘All right. Now, maybe you can help us. Do you want to help us?’
Flint nodded again.
‘Because if you’re not willing to help us, you’re no use to us. And if you’re no use to us, you’re no use to anybody. And if you’re no use to anybody, you might as well be dead.’
Flint flinched.
‘I’ll help,’ he croaked. ‘How? What do you want me to do?’
‘We want you to help us find the lunatic who killed Polly and her mother, and now Joe.’
‘I don’t know anything,’ he said, his voice tremulous.
‘We want you to help us when we need it, that’s all. You do a couple of small things for us, you get to keep your guts on the inside. Fair enough? And what happened here goes no further. The fact that Mal Flint pissed his pants can be our little secret.’
My knees were still trembling, and I did not trust myself to speak. My voice would reveal that Flint had nothing to fear from me. It was apparent, though, in the relaxation of his body, that he had accepted Arthur as a kind of pack leader. I didn’t think that he would attempt to exact revenge when he was untied. He was in no physical condition to do so anyway. Arthur cut through Flint’s restraints with the bloodied knife, threw it into a corner, and offered him a hand up. Flint barely moved, then slowly drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around his legs. It was a curious thing to do. I suspected that he didn’t want to stand up and expose the shame of his micturition.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked, and looked first at Arthur and then at me. There was no defiance in his eyes; all that they revealed was total submission. Incredible as it seemed, Mal Flint had become our creature.
‘Nothing for the moment. Absolutely nothing. We’ll contact you when we need something done. In the meantime, just do whatever it is you normally do.’
He indicated the pig with his thumb.
‘Enjoy your pork.’
I thought he was going to give Flint one final kick, but he turned and walked down the corridor and out of the house. I was left for a moment with Flint. When he looked at me this time, I thought that unless I moved quickly he would leap at me and wring my neck.
Once outside, I hurried to catch up with Arthur, who was already at Walkers Point Road.
‘Jesus Christ!’ I said. ‘What happened in there? What got into you? You scared the shit out of me.’
‘The idea was to scare the shit out of Flint.’
‘Yeah, well, mission accomplished, I’d say. I’ve never seen you like that. What would you have done if Flint hadn’t broken?’
‘He’s a bully, and bullies always break. But if he hadn’t broken, I would have killed him.’
We were now in Odessa Street, heading back towards the Granville Bridge. I let Arthur’s words sink in.
‘Could you really do that? Could you kill someone?’
Arthur stopped and placed his hand on my chest.
‘Could I kill someone? Yes, yes. I could do that. I wasn’t acting in there, Will. You should know I’m not that good an actor.’
He gave my chest the slightest of shoves as he removed his hand. It was a small, telling gesture.
‘Did you enjoy doing that to Flint?’ I asked quietly.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed it very much.’
I must have looked nonplussed. He went on. ‘Listen, Will. You think you know me because you know that I’ve only got one ball, but what else do yo
u know about me? Nothing.’
I shrugged.
‘I respect your privacy. I’m not the kind of person to pry.’
He released a rather mean little laugh.
‘No, Will. It’s got nothing to do with respecting privacy. It’s because you’re simply not interested.’
He was becoming agitated — probably, I thought, as a consequence of the fierce encounter he had just had with Flint. I decided not to press him further. I had caught a glimpse of an Arthur Rank who was a stranger to me. A rather frightening stranger.
‘Don’t worry, Will,’ he said. ‘When we get back to the George I’ll be the damaged, compliant Arthur you think you know.’ He laughed again, and this time I could hardly fail to miss the hint of nastiness in it.
We didn’t speak after that. The bridge was down, so we were spared the awkwardness of waiting. I wanted to speak, but felt constrained by Arthur’s distance. I wanted my mind put at ease. How could we be sure that Flint wouldn’t come after us? What were we going to say about Joe? The police were bound to think that I had had something to do with his disappearance. The closer we came to the hotel, the more urgent was my need to talk. There was something closed about Arthur now, and talking was out of the question. So when we entered the George and found Topaz waiting there for us, I experienced something close to internal hysteria. I may even have done a double-take the comic equal of Oliver Hardy. It did not go unnoticed.
‘Surprise!’ he said.
‘I think we can match your surprise and raise you,’ Arthur said.
My eyes must have widened significantly, and I think I may even have uttered a little gasp of shock, reminiscent of the first contact of testicles with cold water. This also did not go unnoticed.
