Head Case

by Ross Armstrong

  Rabbit’s hand tenses and the blade breaks the skin around my throat just a touch. He doesn’t need any chemical assistance to stay jumpy, it was what first drew my eyes towards him, but unfortunately he’s pumped full of assistance now. The door flings open.

  Two hands. Turan’s. Open palmed and in submission.

  He walks in slowly, his eyes castigating me and attempting in vain to calm Rabbit, as behind him appears Bartu, pressing a gun firmly to his neck. I didn’t want to take a gun in with me. I wasn’t braced for a shoot-out and they’d only take it off me. That’s why this morning I taped it inside the bin, just inside the playground, for Emre Bartu. Just in case he felt that what he heard justified a need for it.

  Admittance. Guilt. Violence. For my part, I’d planned to elicit this by wandering moth-like into the flame, knocking on the door, maybe asking some dumb questions and seeing how much trouble I could get into.

  I hadn’t bargained on Turan picking me up before I got here. But then, he hadn’t bargained on Bartu.

  ‘Put the blade down!’ Bartu says to Rabbit.

  Rabbit holds his gaze behind his glasses in the dim room. Bartu’s eyes saccade to the blood on the plastic sheeting below. Then to my leg. I’d like to say ‘The jig is up, they just don’t know it yet.’ That’s what flashes into my head as my eyelids droop.

  But in reality, I’m not so sure.

  Rabbit removes the blade and steps back, keeping his arms low. Turan glances at Rabbit out of the corner of his eye, conveying wordless thoughts we need to cut off. It’s their subtle coercion that helped them evade me and everyone else for some time. Their only misstep was Rabbit appearing unsure how to play it when he accidentally walked in on us and Turan at the chicken shop. He got jumpy and Turan had to think on his feet every time I mentioned or got close to Rabbit from then on.

  Bartu, unsure quite how to play this, thinks about turning the gun on Rabbit but wisely keeps the theoretical advantage of the easy kill shot to Turan’s head.

  We have the added bonus that a bullet or two in the house would surely be like a distress flair around the neighbourhood and blow their cover. Maybe things have stacked up pretty well for us.

  ‘Now untie him,’ Bartu says.

  After a few seconds stand-off, Rabbit complies. He is, as you might imagine, a deeply unsettling and unsettled man. At one glance the beaten skin around his face could make him look sixty years old, but he’s also got a youth about him that could make you mistake him for sixteen at a distance. I wince as the last knot comes loose and drags across the brutal rope burn on my wrist.

  Bartu takes a step towards me. Then a noise from below. A whimper, a cry and another slap of skin on skin. Bartu turns his head to look at the door where the sound appears to come from.

  I’d tell him not to if I had enough energy left. But I don’t. And he can’t help himself. And seeing the tiny window of opportunity, Turan acts: he elbows Bartu in the stomach, but as he goes to grab a gun of his own, stuffed down the back of his trousers, he only gets his hand on it before Bartu hits him firmly between the nose and the cheekbone with the butt of his weapon.

  Turan’s legs give out from underneath him and he hits the ground, out cold.

  In the melee, Rabbit rushes at Bartu and when Turan’s gun goes loose he makes a dive for it.

  I sensed Rabbit was ready to go before he made his first move, yet weak as I am all I can do is stick out a leg that sends him into a fall. But it doesn’t stop him from reaching the ground below Bartu.

  Compounding this, the force Bartu used to put Turan down caused his own gun to slip from his hand and fall, allowing Rabbit to drop his blade and grab that one too.

  We’re two nil down on the gun front. Rabbit lies on his back below us, both barrels pointed up at Emre.

  Now it’s Bartu’s turn to show his palms in submission.

  But mine stay by my sides. I’m not sure I have the energy to do anything else with them. But I keep thinking.

  38

  ‘The girl next door, well, well, well,

  the girl next door’s living in a little hell.’

  Rabbit gets up carefully and leans his back into the door that must lead down to the basement. He points one gun at each of us. I’m not sure if he’s handled one before. My guess is he has, but more as a frightener; he’s never fired. That’s a duck it’s good to break before you enter the big time, I’d imagine.

  ‘I found your pictures,’ I say, still sitting. ‘For the girls. They’re good.’

  ‘Shut up,’ he says, tightening his grip, focusing his eyes on me. ‘They’re not for you.’

  Bartu adjusts and Rabbit turns his attentions back to him, keeping the other gun pointed in my direction poised. Sooner or later, Rabbit has a choice to make.

  ‘I know. It just makes me wonder why you keep coming back to a scene like that. And I’ve been reading a lot about acquired savantism lately.’

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ he says, flinching as we hear more noise from beneath. I see his jittery outline quaking in shadow, and I realise I saw Rabbit the day I was shot. His car stopped right in front of me. As I held traffic. They’d started watching straight away.

  ‘It’s kind of what we have. You and me, Rabbit. I got a hole in the head. You? You need to get your car fixed more often. I suppose it’s difficult to find time for that sort of thing, with all you’ve got on, I get it. You’ve been gassing yourself. It’s what makes colours difficult for you to see. It’s what made you crash your car –’

  ‘Who the fuck are you!?’ he rasps.

  ‘I’ll bet it was hard taking her the rest of the way on foot. And a risk. It put a stop to the fireworks night you had planned. You’re such a sweetheart, planning these little date nights.’

  ‘This is it. I’m the last face you’ll see, so… ’

  Bartu steps in a touch. Rabbit’s eyes saccade with nerves. I start talking a mile a minute.

  ‘You know, Rabbit, I’ve been wondering why you chose to draw the playground so often. And why it’s different in each picture. And I realised that if you’re anything like me, and I know you’re at least a bit like me, you’re obsessed. That’s what people like us often are. Some paint, I write songs, you draw. And your brain is telling you to draw something you couldn’t work out. Your brain is trying to resolve things, you know? Like therapy!’

  ‘I’m gonna fucking tear you apart!’ he shouts. And now that trigger finger could go at any time.

  ‘You’re drawing the playground you saw out of your old bedroom window, not this one. You have an obsession with that moment! Just after they’d done what they did to you. In that room. You’re still trying to work it out! If you deserved it. We’re so nostalgic, not just you and me, all of us. Cycles of abuse. In a way, none of this is your fault. It’s always patterns. In a way, you’re the victim. Bartu, you remember that Taser?’

  ‘I couldn’t get a Taser,’ Bartu says.

  ‘Shit,’ I say.

  ‘Fuck you!’ Rabbit screams and as he fires I dive from my chair and keep moving. He has the other gun trained on Bartu who doesn’t flinch.

  Rabbit shouts for me to ‘Stay still!’ He can’t seem to find me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Bartu shouts.

  ‘Stay fucking still. Both of you!’ Rabbit screams.

  I keep moving. Shadow moves, big and small.

  ‘The sort of disorder he’s got. He can’t see movement that well. Shades help him judge depth better, breaking things down into clearer blocks, but not movement. I noticed it, Rabbit, when you took that punch from Turan. Didn’t see it coming, did you?’ I shout.

  ‘Stay still!’ he screams.

  And this time I move towards him and when he fires he misses by a long way. And when I slam him hard against the door, Bartu picks up the gun he came in with and slams it into Rabbit’s head. Two or three times. Until he stops moving.

  ‘Careful, he can’t take many blows to the head. And if those girls aren’t down there we need him al
ive,’ I say.

  As his glasses fall from his face, one feature of him is distinct enough even for me. He has one dark green eye and one brown. They may have been that way since birth, but it’s also possible the pigment in his one eye was degraded by the carbon monoxide poisoning.

  Rabbit must’ve constructed a different version of himself for whenever he was working at the school. It helped that without glasses the world scared him, introverted him, which changed the way he held himself and interacted. Then add a different voice, and the whole act gave him a decent chance that, if anyone did see him with any of the girls, they wouldn’t recognise him as one of the school cleaners.

  I guess those industrial iodine-based fluids he worked with meant he often felt pretty light headed, which he thought was the cause of those headaches he had whenever he drove his car. But, luckily for him, they also masked his aftershave on the day we met at the school, otherwise I would’ve matched him to that blue smell at the Fraser house right then and there.

  ‘He picked those girls from ones that were around after school. Then some days he got changed quickly, so quickly that when he arrived outside school he was slightly breathless, like he was late for something, just as the caretaker said. Then he took photos for Turan, so they could choose which ones they wanted,’ I say.

  Bartu nods through heavy breaths as he drags Rabbit away from the door and kicks it in. It comes open with one big blow and we see concrete steps leading into the darkness. But there’s no noise. Not a sound.

  He passes me the other gun and I fiddle with it discreetly as we head down. Doing something with it that I know I have to.

  It’s so dark down here but we see a shaft of light at the bottom of the stairs. We hear breathing. Bartu grips his gun tighter and so do I. For me it’s a threat more than anything. A chess move. My leg bleeds heavily. I can hardly hold myself up. It’s an effort to keep my eyes open. I hear the breathing. Bartu finds a cord above his head and pulls it.

  In the blinking light I see them arrive in my field of vision one by one. Tied tightly with various ropes and telephone wires. It’s damp down here but there are beds forged from mattresses, old blankets and plastic sheeting. It smells grey. Sweat and dust that hangs in the air above our heads like cobwebs and dances in the yellow light.

  There is a bucket to catch the drips from the damp in the ceiling. And a couple of tables with leather straps that allow you to hold someone down firmly if you need to. And there are our girls. Their mouths stuffed with rags. And now I see their tears and hear them cry through the material.

  Tanya Fraser

  Jade Bridges

  Nina Da Silva

  And Sarah Walker.

  The girl next door. My first crush.

  Bartu names them for me in a whisper one by one. But he doesn’t need to name check Sarah. Hers is the only face I can see. The one blown up and shot onto the canvas in the back of my mind. Bartu moves towards them and then pauses for a second. He looks back to me and smiles. He can’t believe this is it. That everything we’ve done has come through. I agree, it doesn’t quite seem real.

  I wonder how Sarah stayed alive all this time when the others are nowhere to be seen. I wonder what she had to do. To survive. What her story is.

  Bartu lingers over Sarah. She looks at Bartu, pleading with him with her eyes. Her hands seem to be tied to a metal pipe with cord.

  ‘You got the blade?’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. I picked up the Sai on the way down while messing with my gun.

  ‘Then let’s get them out of here.’

  But I waver for some reason. Now the other girls are crying. I look into their eyes, they’re different to Sarah’s. They wail through the rags.

  ‘Come on, man. Let’s go,’ Bartu says, grabbing the blade and starting to cut away at Sarah’s shackles. The girls scream. And I put out a hand, but I’m too late to stop him.

  As her left hand comes free her face changes, and I see her right was already loose. She holds a Sai that matches the one Bartu holds, which she plunges into his stomach.

  The girls scream and try to dive for Bartu’s blade as it drops from his hand. But they are still trussed up and Sarah Walker now has her weapon and Bartu’s gun too.

  She kicks the other Sai away to the corner of the room and points the gun at me, as I lift mine wearily to her.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ she says. ‘Been waiting for you.’

  ‘Here I am,’ I say. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  Bartu writhes and bleeds onto a mattress between us.

  ‘Yes, you found me,’ she mutters, blinking wildly. She holds my gaze and I see right into her. That face I know so well. That girl I hardly know at all.

  ‘I was wondering how you survived so long. When the others didn’t,’ I say. It’s hard work to hold myself up, let alone push words from mind to mouth.

  ‘Tom…’ she says, in a feral growl. ‘I didn’t survive. It’s just that they didn’t survive me.’

  Bartu breathes deep, desperate breaths.

  ‘You cut their thighs to let enough blood to leave at a scene. Then when everyone thinks they’re dead you can do exactly what you want with them,’ I say.

  ‘Your friend is going to die even faster than you. Those little bitches got what was coming to them. Every one. Give me the gun and I’ll tell you about it,’ she says.

  ‘Why would I do that?’ I say.

  The girls writhe and scream. Sarah kicks out at one of them and they whimper and fall back to their places against the damp wall.

  ‘Because you need to know, and because you’re both hurt and time is not on your side, and because you want me to put you out of your misery,’ she says, my dream girl.

  ‘You started this off the cuff. You decided to take a few girls on a trip. Girls you didn’t know well, who you’d selected. Then, almost on a whim, having got hopped up together on illicit ideas and other substances, you ambushed them with your boyfriend. Cut them. Did what you wanted to them. You laid low and thought for a while. Then you played dead and got a new life,’ I say.

  ‘Give me the gun, Tom,’ she says.

  Bartu is bleeding out between us. I notice the scars around her lips.

  I place the gun on the ground. Slowly. I slide it to her as the girl’s wails rise. She places the blade down carefully and now she has two guns. Just like Rabbit did.

  ‘Your friend is in some real pain. I should put him out of his misery.’ She points at Bartu and her trigger fingers twitches.

  ‘Okay, I’ll bite. Why keep re-enacting it? For the thrill?’

  ‘Enough questions. You’re bleeding hard, too. I don’t mind the sight of blood but you’re making the place look ugly.’ She raises both guns, one at each of us. Bartu rouses himself into a kneeling position. He holds up his hands, palms in submission.

  ‘Do you just love the repetitions too? The patterns?’ I say.

  ‘Goodbye, Tom. This is where the bullet does its job.’

  She points at my head.

  ‘I didn’t recognise you. The time I saw you outside the house. Not really. Maybe if you hadn’t come after me, I never would’ve ended up here,’ I say.

  ‘It don’t fucking matter, Tom. I like you here,’ she spits, as she holds the gun nice and still. Then pulls the trigger.

  Click. I never did like guns. That’s why I emptied that one on the stairs as soon as I got a chance. I reach into my pocket and show her the bullets.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say.

  She grimaces only for a second. Then her eyes run to Bartu and the other gun she holds. And this time she looks into my eyes as she pulls the trigger of the barrel aimed at him with relish.

  Click.

  ‘Now, that one, Sarah. That’s not even a real gun. It’s from something called a Live Action Role Play Society. I was worried you might know the difference actually. It’s tough to get hold of a real gun these days.’

  Her face becomes a dark cloud.

  ‘You didn’t give me a real f
ucking gun,’ Bartu shouts.

  ‘And it saved your life,’ I shout.

  And Sarah screams, digging her nails into her palms, rousing herself.

  ‘Do something then!’ Bartu shouts.

  ‘I can’t. I could never hit a woman. Certainly not while I’m on duty… ’

  Nina twitches. Tanya keeps her eyes on Sarah. Jade points to the Sai at their feet.

  ‘You really are fucking strange, you know that? You always were,’ Sarah says, as her eyes flick to the blade below.

  ‘… But Emre…’ I say. ‘… Emre? You’re currently off duty. Aren’t you?’

  She crouches for the weapon. Bartu lifts himself into a punch, the force of which sends Sarah’s head smacking into the wall behind her. Her body slackening before she hits the ground.

  As my blinks get longer and the light flickers above me, I look up at Bartu and I give him the thumbs up. His face has questions that I’m in no state to answer. I’m not sure if he thinks either of us are going to make it. We’ve lost a lot of blood.

  Then the footsteps come. Four sets, five sets, six. Shouts of ‘Police!’ and gasps at the scene from above us.

  Then my eyes close. And as they do I hear my name called and the voice is Jarwar. And her call comes out for an ambulance. The last thing I see is feet, and ankles. Girls untied and rags falling from mouths.

  The rest really is like a dream. But for once, Sarah doesn’t feature.

  Or threatening faceless figures.

  Or lipstick shapes.

  Or lullabies.

  I think of shots being fired. And the neighbours on the phone that saved our lives. The men in uniform above us who do the rest.

  ‘Thank heavens for neighbours. Thank heavens for…’ I think. As I drift away.

  Thank heavens.

  Whether you believe in heaven.

  Or hell.

  Afters

  ‘Can’t forget. Can’t forget yet.

  About that night. Never will, I’ll bet.’

  I set off early as it’s a long walk to Holloway Prison and I’m doing it on my own. Bartu declined an invitation, he’s still a bit sore with her about a couple of things, and it was really only me she asked for.