Stiff

by Shane Maloney

  I turned the wipers up high and leaned forward, peering between their puny swipes. My knuckles were white as the wheel turned to mush in my hands. I was piloting a submarine up Niagara Falls. Slowing to a crawl, I inched forward. Up ahead was a roundabout, then the road dipped again, cutting across the bottom end of the lake where it overflowed across a weir and ran off into a creek so insignificant it had no name. This was where Mullane wanted his traffic lights.

  The downpour was flash-flooding across the asphalt as the stormwater drains overloaded and backed up. As I neared the roundabout, the engine shuddered and it seemed I might stall, hubcap-deep. I changed down, slammed my foot down hard and felt the Renault shudder as the wheels threw great pounding jets of water up against the floor like fire-hoses turned on a rioting mob.

  Just as I entered the curve, a powerful beam of light blazed suddenly on my right. Another car had come darting out of the cross street, its lights on high beam, apparently not seeing me. The idea flashed into my head that I was driving with no lights. I groped for the switch. Of course the lights were on, I realised simultaneously. How else would I be navigating? No, the other car must be able to see me. I was like a rabbit in a spotlight. What was the dickhead doing?

  The dickhead was almost on top of me now, an advancing wall of white light, waves sluicing up from its front wheels. Mullane had been right about one thing. There definitely were some maniac drivers around here. I swerved left, pumping at the brake pedal, feeling it suddenly useless under my foot. The Renault glided forward, rudderless. There was a flash of blue and I recognised the Falcon just at the instant the Renault ramped up the sloping pavers of the kerb and left the ground, surging forward into a gap between crash barriers.

  I rose with it, my backside lifting clear of the seat, snapping back into place at the strain of the seat belt. Then, as the Renault’s front wheels slewed into the soft earth of the roadside verge, I felt myself rise again. The front end of the car had dropped so abruptly that the back was still going, its momentum carrying it into an end-to-end roll, pitching me into an acrobat’s tumble, my hands locked around the steering wheel in a dead man’s grip.

  This is it, I thought, and screwed my face shut against the imminence of oblivion. The Renault flipped onto its roof, shuddered, and came to rest. The roar of the storm filled my head and luminous shapes bobbed on the edge of my consciousness. Something wet ran up my face, trickling into my nose and gathering in a pool at the nape of my neck. I sneezed, my eyes squirting open with the force of it. I was, I realised, suspended upside down by the straps of the seat belt, my head jammed sideways against the cold vinyl of the roof. Water was coming in from above, from the floor of the car. You can’t be this uncomfortable and dead at the same time, I told myself.

  My left hand groped for the catch of the seat belt and sprang it open, releasing me down upon myself, a foetal ball. My right hand searched for the door handle, and failed to find it. Gripping the bottom edge of the dashboard, I struggled to haul myself upright, my shoulders shucking themselves free of the seat belt. A scraping noise began. The car was moving, gathering momentum as it slid down the slippery incline of the bank. The steel shell of the roof screeched as it scraped across the concrete path that circled the lake. The Renault tilted abruptly, tottered for a moment, and slid into the water, rear end first.

  The lake was enormously wet, enormously dark. It wrapped itself around the shell of the car and sucked it downwards. The door came open and water gushed in, frigid beyond my powers of description, filling the interior. I never felt more alive in my life. As water forced itself into my mouth, blind terror guided my feet against the dashboard.

  Then somehow I was outside, breaking the surface, clawing at the air, my breath raspy and asthmatic, my testicles retreating beyond the icy onslaught. Sheets of torrential rain churned the surface around me. The bottom was somewhere in the darkness far below. My clothes were bonds, dragging me downwards. Breathing came in short hysterical gasps. Cold was crushing my chest. Looming above, dark on dark, was the embankment. Somewhere a light bobbed, moving closer. I kicked out towards the shore.

  Some slimy thing brushed my face, then another, and another, triggering yet more spasms, panic and cold in equal proportions. What horror was this? A tendril swept into my mouth, scaly and stiff. I spat it out, but there were more, dozens of them, trailing their tentacles over my lips and ears. My arms flailed the water, swatting, grabbing, my fingers closing around one of the ropy lengths, slippery and elastic.

  My upper body rose from the water and solid ground formed itself under my feet. I stood, amazed to find myself in less than a metre of water. The thing in my hand resolved itself into the dangling branch of a weeping willow. Over my shoulder, the Renault disappeared entirely. My feet mired in unseen mud, sheets of torrential rain lashing my face, freezing water up to my thighs, I emitted an involuntary groan of relief.

  The bobbing light approached, above on the embankment. A stocky figure, half umbrella, was braving the storm, sweeping the lake with the beam of a powerful torch. I opened my mouth to shout and nearly bit off the end of my tongue, my teeth and jaws shivering into spasm. A thin, animal moan escaped from deep in my chest. It was all I could manage. The wind threw it back into the darkness behind me. Grasping the dangling ropes of the willow branches for support, I sucked my shoes out of the mud and began shuffling ashore. The man with the torch, God bless him, would see me soon. Christ, I was cold.

  The bank was a shoulder-high redoubt of slippery mud, cascading with rain water. I tried to cry out again, but still all that came was the same wounded animal noise, lost in the roar of the rain, and the castanet clatter of my teeth. One thing I knew for sure was that if I didn’t get out of there soon I’d freeze to death where I stood.

  The light was less than twenty metres away by then, almost close enough to touch. The figure holding it crouched low under the dome of an umbrella, and peered intently along the beam, methodically playing it back and forth across the roiling water. But it was pointed in the wrong direction, flashing uselessly across the place where the car had gone down. Whoever it was would pass without noticing me, half-drowned, virtually underfoot. I gathered a fistful of willow frond and hauled, dragging myself hand over hand upwards, into his line of sight.

  My fingers were stiff with cold, my sodden clothes a dead weight. The branch bent low and snapped. I was back in the water, my feet kicking for the bottom, not finding it. My suit was a sheet of lead swathing my limbs, dragging me under. The light was going now, retreating up the embankment towards the road. I opened my mouth and pushed a yell up from deep inside my body cavity, but water filled my mouth and all that came out was a wheezing cough. Then the current took me.

  Rain, flooding into the lake from every direction, had raised the water above the level of the containment weir. A foaming sheet was pouring over the lip of the spillway only yards away. I felt myself being swept along, the pull increasing. The smooth concrete lip of the rim reared out of the dark and struck my shoulder. Suddenly I was toppling over the wall, ricocheting down the open funnel of the overflow chute. White water buffeted me from all sides. Up ahead, at the apex of the funnel, the dark mouth of the stormwater drain yawned. There wasn’t even enough time to scream before I was sucked into its swirling vortex.

  Turbid with crap of every variety, the torrent surged through the culvert, hurtling me irresistibly, feet-forward into the void. My jaw was clamped shut against the water, but nothing could lessen the elemental roar that filled my ears as I barrelled the length of the stormwater drain, my head bang, bang banging against the smooth concrete walls.

  Just at the moment my lungs seemed about to burst, I was spat out like an orange pip and deposited, flailing, into the bed of the creek with no name. My feet hit the rocky bottom with a bone-jarring impact and I immediately pitched face-down into the stream. Again I was swept helplessly forward, along with all the other crummy debris the storm was flushing away—a toxic minestrone of wormy fur-balls, slim
y old Wagon Wheel wrappers, dog turds, all the dross of a thousand households. As I tumbled by, the blackberry bushes crowding the banks slashed at my clothes but failed utterly to slow my progress.

  Several times I managed to struggle upright, but the creek bed was an uneven tangle of slippery rocks and lumps of masonry, and the pressure of the current was so immense that I was immediately sent flailing onwards, scrabbling to keep my head above the vile wash.

  Then a glowing shape loomed ahead of me. An old white bathtub, upside down, its bottom perforated with rust like a colander, jutted into the stream. I threw my arms over its slippery enamel curve and felt the ground solidify under my knees as the tide fought to drag me back under. Staggering upright, I threw myself headlong up the bank and pitched into a thicket of blackberries. One, two, three steps and I hit a sagging chain-mesh fence. I scrabbled upwards, my fingers through the links, putting distance between myself and the eddying swirl behind me, until the dead weight of my body flipped over the top and toppled into a mound of green plastic garbage bags, soft and yielding.

  As suddenly as it had begun, the storm was abating. Rain was still falling, but in an ethereal, almost benign, mist. I rolled over and lay face down, listening to my heart race. The slick plastic was smooth against my cheek. The cushioning softness yielded to my shape. My entire existence seemed to have been reduced to a dull pulsating throb that wobbled back and forth behind my closed eyes like a malignant octopus.

  I was cold, I knew that from the chattering of my teeth— now a finer, more regular grinding movement than the out-of-control juddering of before. This was like a special machine, something for polishing stones. I could live with this sensation, as long as the ache in my head went away. Yes, I was cold, but first I had to rest, allow the terror to drain away. Every muscle felt bruised, every nerve teased raw.

  Distantly, up the hill, I could hear the faint hum of traffic. I knew that if I looked up I would see a littered incline and the back of a row of small workshops and factories that ran along the ridge above the creek. But to do that I would have to raise my head. The view wasn’t worth it.

  I knew this place. On paper, it had long ago been slated for development as community recreation space, pending funding. I had seen the plans pinned to a board in the town hall foyer—thematic shrubbery, stick citizens at picnic tables. Submissions had been invited from the public. So far the only development had been the erection of a fence along the ridge behind the industrial estate and some signs prohibiting the dumping of rubbish. Ingenuity thrives on such obstacles. Uncivil garbage, rich in diversity, had insinuated its way over the chain-link border and down the slope. Paint tins, twisted bike wheels, warped and splintered plywood, garden waste, trash and junk of all kinds littered the slope where I lay.

  But at least it was dry land, drier than the creek anyway. And if not quite land then a squelching mattress, soft and warm against my body. I reached over and stroked the pliant, yielding cushion on which I lay, feeling the warmth beneath my fingers as though the core of the earth had risen to comfort me.

  Not just my face and fingers felt the soft heat, but my chest and thighs too, even through the sodden fabric of my suit. I snuggled deeper, drawing a filthy sheet of old linoleum over me as a blanket. Pain surged red behind my eyes with the effort of movement. Lie still, my brain commanded.

  Smell, as well as warmth, enveloped me, the rich pong of rotting vegetation. Lawn clippings, I recognised. I poked a hole in the bag and it gave a fragrant sigh, a gaseous rush of breath. It was full of half-rotten grass, cut wet and packed down hard, dumped by some weekend gardener too lazy or too lousy to drive to the tip and pay his three dollars. Trapped in the airless plastic, the grass had begun to ferment and smoulder with the same febrile heat that caused haystacks to combust spontaneously.

  Ignoring the shrill irritability of the poisonous octopus in my skull, I cradled the pillow closer and snuggled deeper into the bloated softness. Its embrace fused with the dissipating heat of my body and soothed the ache at the centre of my being. Shuddering, I groaned softly and drank in the steaming aroma of a hose-drenched summer lawn. Mother earth held me fast. ‘Mummy,’ I murmured.

  The beer garden of the Pier Hotel had been my first proper lawn. Before that, living upstairs at the Carter’s Arms, I had envied the other kids their backyards, the space for balls and cubbies. As soon as I saw the lawn at the Pier I had claimed it, a mat of couch-grass just long enough for a run-up and a full toss. I hammered in the stumps as a claim of ownership and set the bails on top.

  Fine, my father had said. You want it, you mow it. And he’d pointed into the shed, past the empty kegs and spare pluto hoses, to the rotary mower. At eight it had been all I could do to push the thing, its cylinder blades and tractor-treaded iron wheels stiff with age and rust. Then, shaking off months of disuse, it had darted forward, springing into life, tumbler whirring, and thrown an arc of green confetti behind, first rough and itchy on bare shins then soft and spongy under bare soles. A green rainbow in the summer sun, flecked with transient light like tail lights disappearing in the rain, like the sweep of a torch beam across freshly chopped water.

  The police would be here soon. The helicopter would be thumping overhead, wompa wompa, sweeping its bloody great searchlight across the dark waters, following the line of the creek. Floodlights and generators. Frogmen, groping the mud, would attach chains to a tow-truck winch and haul the gushing Renault ashore. Orange tape stretched across the embankment, the traffic branch in their white raincoats going door to door. Did you see anything, madam? The Accident Appreciation Squad.

  Told you so, I’d tell them. None of this would have happened if you’d pulled your fingers out earlier. A driver deliberately run off the road, a car on its roof in ten metres of water. Hardly a bit of harmless hooning around. Attempted murder, that’s what. Questions in the House, there’d be. Charges laid. Red faces all round. Serves them right. Attempted murder. One for downtown, Russell Street. Well out of the local league, this one. Let’s hear what Bayraktar’s mates would have to say for themselves when the Homicide squad came knocking on the door at the Anatolia Club.

  Three days ago I’d never heard of Bayraktar, now someone in the guy’s car was trying to kill me. What for? Crossing the street with intent to ask questions? What sort of fascistic bloody-mindedness was that? Shaking a fist in the street, hardly a killing offence. Talk about over-excitable wogs.

  Gezen was the key. All this shit had started the moment Gezen had decided to make a clean breast of it. Double life Gezen. Timid little mop jockey Gezen, eyes that sucked you dry. What was it he had said? ‘I see everything.’ Maybe that was it. Maybe he had seen something he shouldn’t have. Maybe somebody thought he had dobbed them in. Maybe they thought he told me something he shouldn’t have.

  Bayraktar could not have been working alone. The man could hardly even sign his own name, let along fabricate the contents of a tax declaration form. Was he just doing what he was told, someone else doing the thinking? Maybe it was all bullshit, Gezen’s confession, the whole standover story. Gezen had Ayisha convinced, that much was sure. Or was she in on it, too? That rushed and hushed burble of Turkish before Gezen had told his story, what had that been all about? No, Ayisha wouldn’t dud her pal Murray, would she? She liked me. Even though my head ached and I felt like shit, she liked me.

  Why else would she be curled up beside me now, here on this rubbish tip, her rump tucked into the curve of my belly, her hair tickling my neck, the rhythm of her breathing rising and falling with mine? She wouldn’t lie, she whose mouth was finding mine, the rubbery flesh of her lips nuzzling mine, the wet rasp of her tongue mashing my cheek, a whine of desire rising from her throat.

  I opened my eyes. A black dog with yellow teeth—a foul breathed, wet-mouthed, bow-legged roly-poly lump of an animal with an accordion button row of nipples down its belly—was slobbering over my face. I stumbled upright, throwing off the lino. My shoes squelched. My head felt as though it had been cast in so
me experimental material that would soon be recalled by the manufacturer. The sky was clear and bright and very high up. At the far horizon a few last cauliflowers of cloud raced ahead of the slight breeze. Through the broken glass of my watch I deciphered that it was just about to go one-thirty. Or had been when the watch stopped. I shook my head in disbelief, igniting fireworks behind my eyes. The searing jolt slowly subsided into mere pain.

  Unbelievable. Run off the road, car wrecked, nearly drowned, swept away in a flood, and what do I do? I pass out like a baby, face down in a pile of compost for more than three hours. From somewhere up the hill came the fading sound of a car engine. The dog licked my hand and stuck its muzzle in my crotch. It wasn’t much, but I was grateful for the thought.

  ‘C’mon,’ I said. The vibration of my voice triggered another chain reaction in my skull. I began picking my way through the broken glass and builder’s rubble. Bile and old beer rose in my gullet. My trouser legs were rubbing the insides of my thighs raw. I shivered, that old spasm back again.

  The double cyclone-gate at the top of the rise was locked, but there was enough slack on the chain to slip through the gate. The low row of brick workshops—a panel beater’s, a printery, a tiler’s yard—showed no light. Daytime places. In one direction the road curved away towards houses, in the other it ran back down towards the lake. I was a blinking neon of unpleasant sensation, sweating cold. The dog frolicked beside me, an imbecile.

  ‘Easy, lover girl,’ I urged, needing to hear my own voice. It was high-pitched, all edge. I wondered where the energy was coming from. The lake came into view, a ruffled nap of black velour. I kept on down the empty road, past the bolted roller door of the Lakeview Hotel’s drive-in bottle shop. The only sound now was the faint swish of the treetops.

  No rescue squad. No nothing. Maybe, I thought, I’m still asleep. At the weir wall, a thin glaze of water curved gently over the culvert, no more turbulent than a blanket tucked in tight at the end of a well-made bed. Down the embankment, the weeds flattened by the upturned Renault’s progress were already springing upright. The gashes torn in the earth by the impact were no more than a random string of muddy ruts. From the path at the lake’s edge I peered into the water, willing the sunken car to reveal itself. Two grand worth of comprehensively uninsured frogmobile, vanished.