Stiff

by Shane Maloney

  Not a single tangible sign existed that anything untoward had happened here. Maybe, I thought, I’m dead. Maybe I’m over there under the water watching myself, the sole witness to my own demise. The dog whined, clamped its teeth gently around my fingers and tugged. If I’m dead, I thought, who are you? Cerberus, watchdog of the nether world? ‘Not enough heads,’ I said out loud. ‘You need more heads.’ I tried to remember how many, but it made my own ache even more.

  Across the road, behind mute front gardens, houses slept dumbly on, substantial and warm. I considered opening one of the front gates, knocking on the door. ‘Excuse me for waking you. Someone tried to kill me, but I went to sleep. Mind if I use your phone? You couldn’t spare a cup of coffee while I wait, could you?’ A crap-encrusted madman, mongrel dog in tow. Just the thought of it was enough to made my headache worse. I turned to the lake and vomited, beery dregs and diced carrots. Where did they come from? How come when you chuck there’s always diced carrots?

  A car approached down the hill. I stiffened and hobbled into the shadow of the trees. A little Japanese number puttered down to the roundabout, turned, and disappeared between the houses, reeling its exhaust rattle in as it went. Paranoia, I thought. Proof of the existence of life. And why shouldn’t I have been paranoid? Where were the fucking cops when you needed them? I paid my taxes, didn’t I? Wasn’t I as entitled as the next person to venture forth on the streets without fear for life and property? Hadn’t the Gaming Squad got my message?

  And what had become of the Good Samaritan, with his torch and his umbrella? What kind of person would see a car go hurtling into a lake, wander around in a storm searching for survivors, then pack up and go home without reporting it? Shit, maybe the police had already been. Come, found nothing and gone.

  I felt my scalp, probing for hairline fractures, distrusting my memory. How could a man think in this state, beaten insensible, his head throbbing and surging? Tender lumps bulged at the nape of my neck. I vomited again, retching bile. I puke therefore I am.

  Another car approached. It had a light on its roof. ‘Taxi,’ I croaked. The word hung in the air as if confirming my existence. I raised my hand and fumbled for the wad of notes and coins in my pants pocket. Five soggy dollars, ten, some change. Enough. I waved it above my head. The cab slowed. I saw myself reflected back in the driver’s stony glance. A wild-eyed derro, standing in a pool of chuck, waving crumpled bills, a dirty dog. The cab kept rolling, picking up speed. He might as well have got out and kicked me.

  ‘What’s the matter with this country?’ I asked the mutt. If the dog knew, she wasn’t saying. This bitch was turning into a liability. I sprayed a handful of gravel half-heartedly in her direction. ‘Garn, git.’ The dog skittered away, then cringed back, creeping forward on her belly. What have I done to deserve this? ‘True,’ I relented. ‘C’mon then.’

  C’mon where? When I’d started down the hill towards the lake I imagined myself wrapped in blankets. A steaming cup of tea would be thrust into my hands. A lady sergeant with a clipboard would sit beside me in the back of the ambulance. Well, it was pretty clear that no such thing was going to happen. I thought of Red and a spasm of anxiety gripped my stomach. I must call home. Call home then call the police.

  Past the roundabout and up the hill was a little strip of shops—chemist, a milk bar, an appliance repairer. And a phone booth. I began shambling along the footpath, the dog waddling alongside, forgiven and forgiving. The shivers were getting worse and my thighs were red raw. I was tempted to pee in my pants for thermal relief, like a surfer in his wetsuit. As we passed the neat front yards, their trees stripped of blossoms by the storm, I scanned the facades, wondering if I knew anyone hereabouts well enough to wake them up. The houses all but snored. No light showed, no television flickered behind the venetians. Were there no insomniacs left in suburbia? There had to be someone. This is my territory, after all. It wasn’t as though I was in a foreign country.

  Fight the headache, fight the nausea, this was my mantra. Not far now. Think it through. Must call home, check on Red. Tell Ayisha. God, maybe whoever did this to me had also done something to Red. Calm down. They wouldn’t harm a child. Why would they do that? But why do anything they’d done? None of it made sense. The Falcon in the rain, it was the same one, wasn’t it? Visibility had been close to zero. There must be hundreds of big blue sedans on the road. Maybe it had just been a perfectly innocent accident. Ahead, a man on a horse tipped his hat at me. Marlboro man riding the range on the billboard wall of the milk bar. I gripped the coins in my pocket and turned the corner. In front of the phone box, nose to the kerb in the six-slot parking area, sat Bayraktar’s Falcon.

  A sheet of heavy-duty transparent plastic had been stuck over the missing rear window with blue electrical tape. It was billowing softly in and out like a lung. I went rigid and pressed myself against the cowboy’s horse. Nothing else moved. Deep in the milk bar a row of bottles stood sentinel, back-lit in a refrigerated display. The Falcon was empty.

  I grabbed the handle and threw the driver’s door open, not caring any more. Nothing. No perfidious Turk waiting to spring. Not even any litter. Just the key in the ignition and the ozone smell of freshly wiped vinyl. The dog fixed that, bounding past me onto the passenger seat.

  The dog was doing my thinking for me. Take the car and I could be home in ten minutes. I would know if Red was safe. If I called the police from the phone box, a prowl car might be twenty minutes arriving. Then would come the explanations, the questions, and more explanations. I would have to take them down the hill, show them the vanishing skid marks, convince them I wasn’t deranged. Fuck them. This was all their fault anyway. I’d call from home.

  I walked around the car. I crouched, joints stiff, and peered underneath. I sprung the hood and peered into the oily pit of the motor. What was I looking for? A bundle of gelignite, a coil of wires, a ticking clock? The engine block was cold to the touch. I got in. The seat was too far forward, squeezing me against the steering wheel. The last person in this seat had been shorter. I bent forward and found the adjustment lever. A smear of drying mud covered the floor. The seat slid back and I turned the key. The big six cylinder purred into action. Fingerprints, I thought, shrugged and gripped the wheel. Let the cops figure it out.

  Streetlights flashed past overhead, a stroboscope that woke the epileptic octopus in my skull, made it real mad. A nauseating sickly-sweet detergent smell came at me off the upholstery. Keeping to the main roads I made it home in fifteen minutes. I parked halfway along the street and left the key in the ignition. ‘Stay,’ I told the dog. Dognapping. What would it be next?

  The only other cars parked in the street were familiar. No BMW’s. Ayisha’s Laser was parked out the front where she had left it. Down the side of the house a light showed dimly in the kitchen window. I was standing on the verandah, patting myself down and asking the toxic octopus where I had left my keys when the front door opened. Out of some swamp deep inside me came the croak of a frog. ‘Red,’ it said.

  Ayisha appeared, immersed in a pool of light. She swam towards me out of her halo. Our Lady of the Muddle Headed. ‘Fuck,’ she said.

  Then nothing. Nothing at all.

  She had me on the bedroom floor and was pulling my trousers off. I felt a stirring in my underpants. Not now, I prayed, not now. Then I was under the covers, warm and dry. The octopus prised one eyelid open and Ayisha’s face came into focus. ‘Accountancy?’ I said, concentrating on getting my tongue to work.

  ‘Takes skills to get things done.’ She was humouring me. She felt my forehead, all the while gnawing away at her bottom lip. ‘Program budgeting skills, mainly.’ She dispensed the reassuring grimace that passes for a smile among the caring professions. I’d have preferred a cuddle. ‘Lie still while I phone a doctor.’

  The wet clothes had been replaced by track pants and windcheater. No undies, I noticed. I levered myself upright and swung my legs over the side of the bed. My mouth still wasn’t working properly.
‘Pee,’ I made it say. Wee wees. Getting this much of me functioning made my head spin. Ayisha slipped a hand under my armpit. I shook her off, wanting to know how far gone I was. I was pretty far gone. At the door I turned not towards the bathroom but into Red’s bedroom. An angular jumble of knees and elbows was breathing rhythmically under a familiar blanket. ‘I let him watch telly until he flaked out,’ said Ayisha defensively. ‘That okay?’

  She stood outside the toilet door the whole time. I sounded like a brewery horse pissing in a tin bucket. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick.’ You’d think we had been married for years. I must have slept through the honeymoon. ‘You’re covered in bruises. It’s nearly 3 a.m. Your clothes are wet, torn to pieces. What happened, Murray? Tell me, for God’s sake.’

  Even when the flush drowned out her voice, she didn’t shut up, bless her. As I opened the door she put her palm back on my forehead and rolled back first one eyelid, then the other. Confidently, like she knew what she was doing. ‘You should be looked at by a doctor,’ she diagnosed.

  ‘Look in the cupboard,’ I said, my mouth reluctantly responding to orders. ‘See if you can find some aspirin.’

  She put two tablets on my tongue and lifted a glass of water to my lips. I felt like I’d just played three consecutive Grand Finals at centre half-forward and we’d lost them all. On the kitchen table the washing had been neatly folded in a laundry basket. The dishes had been done. I sensed the prospects of romance receding.

  Ayisha fiddled with the kettle, poured tea. ‘I rang the hotel at eleven. They said you’d left. Can you remember what happened after that?’

  The tentacles began mooching about irritably again, squeezing any stray brain cells they could find.

  ‘I thought maybe it had something to do with the storm, an accident or something. Jeeze, it was bad. All this water started coming through the roof.’ Through the lounge room I could see a row of saucepans lined up across the floor. ‘Anyhow, I rang around the hospitals, but nobody fitting your description had been admitted. I was beginning to think I’d better ring the police. Then I heard something out the front. It was you, collapsing on the doorstep. I thought you were dying, fair dinkum. Freaked me right out, you did.’

  Is it me, I thought, or does this woman take the cake? Softly enough not to upset the octopus, I laughed. Ayisha’s tale had filled me with enough strength to totter across to the cupboard and screw the top off the Jamesons bottle. I thought of the wine, nicely chilled at the bottom of the lake. Ayisha gave a cautionary shake of her head. Bloody Moslems, no appreciation of the tonic properties of the sacred waters. I added a tot to both our cups of tea and moulded a wad of her tobacco into a lumpy cylinder. All this physical therapy was doing me good. My thought processes were beginning to fight their way free. I did the attention-grabbing trick with the match again. This is why people smoke. So many clichés, so readily at hand.

  ‘The aqua Falcon,’ I said. ‘Bayraktar’s car. Ran me off the road. Right into Edwardes Lake. I ended up floating down some creek. Then spent half the night trying to get a cab to pick me up.’ I slumped back, exhausted from the effort of talking. I tried to get my thoughts into some sort of order.

  ‘Jesus,’ she exclaimed. ‘This is getting right out of hand. You’re gunna hafta call the cops.’

  I shook my head. It hurt. ‘No point,’ I winced. ‘Unless I tell them about Memo. And that’s not going to do your, or the League’s, credibility any good, is it? It was you who convinced him he could trust me, remember.’ Frankly, I couldn’t give a shit about Gezen at this stage.

  She looked at me like I was a gibbering idiot. ‘My credibility? Jeeze, Murray. Somebody’s trying to kill you and you’re worried about my credibility?’

  Isn’t she fantastic, I thought. The warm tea and whiskey were beginning to work their cure in the pit of my stomach. I started to unscrew the whiskey cap again. Ayisha wrested the bottle out of my unresisting grasp. ‘Call the police!’ she ordered. What was it about me, I wondered, that brought out the bossy boots in women?

  ‘I would,’ I said, ‘if I thought it’d do any good. But it’s like your bloody petition. The cops won’t act without evidence. And when they do move, it’ll be too slow. Or too late.’ She didn’t know about my earlier conversations with the constabulary, of course. ‘Shit, I don’t even know why this is happening. You got any ideas?’

  That shut her up. And thank Christ, too, said the octopus. On the table a saucer was piled with butts, hers and mine. If I survived, I’d have to invest in an ashtray. ‘In fact I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t Gezen driving the Falcon. Maybe he changed his mind about confessing and decided he’d eliminate the only other people who knew what had happened.’

  She thought I was serious. ‘Gimme a break.’ She leaped up a lit herself a cigarette on the gas jet. ‘Memo’s a little flaky, I’ll admit that, but you can’t seriously think he’s a killer.’

  I felt old eight legs shift, spread his grey gelatinous membranes and puff a slow balloon of darkness through the water towards me. A cool black cloud of ink, blotting out the light and noise and the jabber of voices in my head. The world was out there somewhere, moving distantly, glimpsed through a red-tinged slit. I made it go away.

  Ayisha was shaking my shoulder. ‘You okay?’ I jerked upright. I must have dozed off. This was fucked. How could I think in this condition? A sob story like Gezen’s would have aroused every conceivable sympathy in someone like Ayisha. It was cruel to taunt her. ‘You okay?’ she repeated.

  I was okay. Red was okay. My constant companion the octopus was so fucking okay it was dancing a hornpipe with my frontal lobes. I had some thinking to do. The only tangible evidence of what had happened was the Falcon parked outside in the street. And in itself the car proved nothing. No doubt the only fingerprints it carried were mine, smeared all over the wheel, the doors, the hood. And I could guess why it had been abandoned with the key in the ignition. What better way to dispose of a car than to leave it where it was certain to be nicked by joy-riding kids who would dump it miles away?

  No. It would take more than a dead man’s car, a hair-raising tale and a half-baked story about extortion and revenge to get the cops fired up. I could be dead by the time they extracted their collective digit. The only thing I had going for me was that whoever ran me off the road probably thought I was already. ‘The Anatolia Club,’ I said. ‘I think I should pay it a visit. Let them know I’m on to them. See what I can find out.’ But not alone. ‘You reckon Sivan will come with me?’

  ‘I’d like to see you try to stop him,’ Ayisha said, grinning. She was close, her presence overwhelming my senses. I could smell her, taste her. She yawned, no longer able to hide her tiredness. I made my play.

  ‘You go home,’ I urged. ‘Thanks for minding Red. For everything. I’ll talk to Sivan in the morning, speak with Memo again, sort something out.’ I cocked my finger like a gun. ‘No single fascist act must go unchallenged.’ I quoted from somewhere, unable to remember where.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but she nodded approval. She was tired, resigned. The clock on the stove clicked over. 3:35 a.m. Then she was shaking her head. ‘But first you gotta see a doctor. What if you’ve got concussion? You could slip into a coma or something.’

  ‘First thing in the morning,’ I promised. The furry muck on my tongue mingled with the taste of tea and whiskey. I held down a retch. My timing was terrible, I told myself. I wasn’t in a fit state for anything,

  ‘It’s nearly morning now. Got any blankets? I’ll stay on the couch. Keep an eye on you.’

  ‘No,’ I insisted, wanting nothing more. Her hand moved, erasing the air between us, brushing my objection aside. Luckily I’d changed the linen. I led her up the hall to the bedroom, trying not to collapse on the way.

  She stood with her back to the bed while I went through the motions of reaching up to where the spare bedding was stowed, stacked tight on the top shelf of the wardrobe. I tugged at the scratchy wool, high on tip
toes, dizzy from the altitude. The blankets broke free and I teetered before her, a man leaning into a strong wind. Then the wind dropped and I was pitching forward. Ayisha’s arms extended effortlessly, receiving me, enfolding me. Her neck and my forehead, I observed as if from a distance, yielded a perfect fit. Motionless, cradling my eggshell head, she was a bottomless well into which I tumbled headlong into a free fall.

  ‘Oh, boy,’ exclaimed key sectional interests of my metabolism, sensing an advantage. ‘You can’t keep a good man down.’ Actually you can, I’m grateful to say. I felt her warmth reach out and enclose me in its embrace. Warmth, yes. Heat, no. There never would be any heat, I comprehended. But even in the finality of that knowledge I could not bring myself to move, but stood there letting myself be cradled in her arms. What energy I had was devoted entirely to not weeping with gratitude.

  Then Red walked into the room and I jumped about ten feet into the air. For a long moment he stood there, regarding me with heavy-lidded, vacant eyes. Then he gripped his pyjama pants by the elastic, gave them an upward tug, turned, and somnambulated towards the bathroom.

  Nurse Ayisha, herself at the far extremity of wakefulness, scooped up the blankets and draped them over her arm. ‘That reminds me,’ she yawned. ‘Your wife rang just after you left. Said she’d be on the early flight. Said you’d know what that meant. She sounded very nice.’

  I’ll bet she did.

  ‘And someone called Angelo Annoletti or something. Said to call him urgently when you got home. Bit late now, I suppose.’