Something inside of Alex blew on his stomach lining to form a current of fuzzy trepidation when Bentley’s barking only intensified.
Suzanne broke from a brisk walk into a gentle jog. Alex did the same and was doing fine before the heel of his right foot freed from its housing, and when it came back down the boot buckled, twisting his ankle and tripping him into the damp, uncut grass.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said, rubbing his ankle, moving it back and forth.
He watched Suzanne advance toward the hyperactive dog, moving toward the septic tank.
“Fuck ya, Bentley,” he said. “You’re gonna screw me!” He got his boot back on, pulled the laces tight and tucked them in before getting to his feet. Then he went after Suzanne as fast as his limp would carry him.
Bentley stayed put behind the dense shrubbery.
Suzanne was almost there now, along the bushes, another couple of meters and she would find all the fuss. He watched her cover her nose and mouth with the sleeve of her jumper as if she might have seen something horrible but without the scream. He knew the horror would come when she found out what he had done. Then she might well scream.
He could smell it, too. The same smell had crept into the cottage on a number of occasions. Little whiffs at first. It could be smelt on the veranda in the evenings, lingering like a stagnant fog. Not every night but enough for Suzanne to question its source. Bentley barked at it from the back door and they had to let him outside where he barked some more, but he always came back, never stressed. Alex pleaded pure ignorance about its whereabouts and wished the wind direction would hurry up and change.
Suzanne came up with every conceivable cause for the stench, from a blocked drain to a dead rodent trapped underneath the floorboards or stuck up the chimney. She once joked that it smelt like a decomposing corpse, that the cottage was built over an ancient burial site but the very thought scared her and she stopped. She said she had smelt something like it before when removing a homemade dressing on a wound that was poisonous and forgotten. The removal of each layer unveiled a cumulative mess of dampness and puss. And the smell—“Well, you have to try it at least once,” same as tasting a smelly cheese for the first time, you do it knowing it’s going to hurt. It gets stuck at the back of the throat, thousands of tiny hands with tiny fingers snatching, grappling, and pulling at the surrounding tissue walls to get out, you can’t help but gag and apologise to the patient afterward.
“Something must have died. It has to be coming from somewhere. We need to find it. I can’t put up with it another second. . . . Jesus, what the hell is it?”
The pest controller came out the next day but by the time he arrived, the stink had all but gone and he found nothing. Now she was about to find out the truth and when she did, it would likely take as long as the rest of the week to forgive him (no more Morning Sex, great while it lasted).
He was not entirely sure how she would react. Of course, she would be pissed at his lying-ignorance about the stink (that was bad), and for not telling her what he was up to in the first place (a lot more hibernating lies sleeping right there). However, in his defence, had she known, she would never have allowed him go through with it, “No fucking way, man,” and then where would they be? No more business, that’s where. She would say it was immoral, perhaps, or just downright disgusting, probably both . . . and dangerous because such a horrific smell must bring with it the threat of disease. And to be fair, she might have a point.
Nothing could smell so bad and not be a health risk. The devil himself would struggle to produce a smellier fart, but as far as Alex was concerned, he’d had no choice. She wouldn’t leave him over something like this, would she? Surely not. The more he considered his wife’s reaction, the less he believed his own justification and the more nervous he became. “Stupid, stupid, stupid idiot!”
“. . . ruff, ruff, ruff . . . arrggghhh . . . ruff, ruff, ruff . . . arrggghhh . . . ruff. . . .”
“Bentley, Bentley. Stop it. What is up with you?” she said, concerned, only feet from the Fuss.
Suzanne scanned beyond the leaves and branches and caught glimpses of her dog. Bentley appeared physically fine, not hurt in any way she could see, but aggressive, very aggressive, not like Bentley at all. He was attacking something, gnawing into it, pausing to sound his bark and then charging in for the kill once more. “Must be dead, whatever it is. Not a sound or a peep from it, so what’s he attacking? The tank! He’s attacking the tank.”
She hadn’t been down this end of the garden for some time and had almost forgot about the tank, tucked in behind the bushes and shrubs, never used, just sitting there in camouflaged comfort.
Apprehension then mixed with intrigue. She lowered her gaze to the ground before turning into the opening to confront Bentley and saw the tyre tracks. Two flattened valleys squashed between eight inches of grass that ran the ground and stopped here, by her feet.
They’re from the van. Why? What’s he been up to? And that god awful smell—it’s coming from here! I’m going to fucking kill you, Alex.
The cuff of her sleeve scrunched in the palm of her hand made for less than adequate protection against the smell. She’d stopped breathing through her nose some time back when she got the first familiar whiff but even so, the smell was all around, clinging to her skin. It was everywhere, no getting away from it, hanging around like a wet vapour of the Bad Stuff. Whatever was going on, Alex had something to do with it, she was sure of that. No question, he was responsible.
She looked back at him, then turned beyond the hedge.
Alex’s gaze sharpened and his pace quickened. Her glance was brief, but he saw her eyes were as sharp as an eagle’s and the way her lips thinned down and pressed together before she turned the bend told him all he didn’t want to know. The thought of turning around and running back to the cottage crossed his mind.
“Bentley!” Suzanne screamed.
Alex ran as fast he dared without losing his boots and rounded the hedge in time to see Suzanne cautiously approach Bentley.
“. . . ruff, ruff, ruff . . . arrggghhh. . . .”
“Bentley, be quiet!”
“. . . arrggghhh . . . .”
“Come here this instant!” Suzanne said, taking hesitant steps while trying to sound like the alpha male. Bentley’s behaviour both shocked and frightened her. She’d never seen anything like it. His contorted, mindless face scraping up against the hard green plastic of the tank, bloodied teeth from torn gums battering and bashing against the slippery surface, and nails exposed, scratching, vexed to penetrate a losing battle.
“Bentley, that’s quite enough now.” She took a cautious breath and snapped the lead on the ring of his collar.
Alex’s hand came across hers, taut in the brown leather strap, and grabbed the chain. Together they pulled the unwilling brute several feet from the tank. Then the barking stopped and Bentley sat without command, job done, panting a hundred pants a second, blood rolling off his flaccid tongue like stringy pasta dangling from a fork. His head looked up as if expecting praise, the aggression gone. The combination of excessive panting and the drool spilling between the black fingers of his bottom lip made Bentley appear to smile. He had done his duty and alerted his masters to the inexplicable threat of the septic tank. His battle was over.
Theirs had just begun.
They both noticed Bentley’s uncanny smile, which gave them reason to look at each other, but only for a second. Suzanne looked away without expression and cautiously knelt down in front of her dog. The image of him grinding and clawing against the tank was still raw in her mind and for a split second she envisaged him doing that to her, jumping in to meet her neck, pulling her down into the dirt and pawing through her. But he was placid now.
“Bentley and hide,” she said, and she felt safe when she gently took his ears in her hands to inspect
the wounds. Bentley winced and pulled his head back when Suzanne thumbed the flap of his cut ear but he did not snap or bite.
“Easy, Bentley, that’s a good boy, my poor baby,” she said, now considering his mouth.
Satisfied Bentley would live, Suzanne stood up to capture her surroundings. The trampled ground, the burnt-out drum, the trail of dark-stained grass cutting a line between the burnt-out drum and the septic tank, the spade on the ground and a mound of soil. The stepladder folded, lying on the ground, gouged marks on the tank. Bentley’s bloody face. Suzanne noticed everything and an electric bolt of association swept over her consciousness and she thought she might pass out, fall down on herself like a closing xylophone. The dried stains running down the side from the lid of the tank matched the blood Bentley had left behind and it all clicked into place.
Suzanne knew what Alex had been doing down here.
The signs were obvious now, dreadful to think about, dried stains all over the septic tank and around the lip of the lid, handprints, too. The dark dribble ran down and underneath its big green belly. Suzanne moved a little closer, looking beneath the tank and inspected the end trail of the spill—a coagulated mess. It reminded her of the stalagmites and stalactites she had seen on a school outing when the class was brought deep down into a well-lit cave, but she was not looking at calcium build-up over hundreds of thousands of years, this was something else entirely.
A name popped into her head that made her feel sick to her stomach: Anatomic mites: The birth of two rosewood-coagulated mounds of God knows what, germinating between the breezeblocks that held the tank off the ground—a fucking mess of hellish proportion. She would not in a million years dare touch it, but she imagined being a mischievous kid looking for a nearby stick to prudently prod one, stand back, and watch it wobble like a jellyfish and squeal out like a pig.
Suzanne walked around the septic tank in a tizzy. Her eyes darted from one scene to the next and when she thought she had seen the worst, her gaze fixed on the valves and the black tubing that looked poised to take a circumcised piss into the stream. Previous pisses had already contaminated the furrowed soil and turned it into the familiar colour of the Anatomic mites—dirty brownish, jelly red. Her stomach wretched in convulsing bursts, bucking the half-digested breakfast out of her mouth with the force of a fire hose attached to . . . a septic tank. Two more bouts of heaving left a trickle of bile dripping from her mouth.
Alex stepped forward, arms up to rub her back. Suzanne’s hand came up from her folded position with the authority of a police officer stopping traffic, her other hand straining against her kneecap. Alex stopped. Suzanne swung on her heels to catch her breath and clambered from the muddy rivulet and the globules that might just wake up and wobble after her.
“Oh. Oh my Jesus,” she said, sifting in air through sieved lips. She pulled the neck of the jumper above her nose, cupped her hands across her elbows and hugged herself, looking pale and ashen. Her skin morphed to goose flesh and the short hairs on her neck prickled erect.
“What the fuck is going on? What in the world have you been up to down here?” She looked at Alex the way Dick Turpin might have looked with fearsome eyes at a stagecoach driver on a hold-up.
Had she had a musket, Alex was sure Suzanne would have aimed and shot him.
“Please tell me this isn’t real, that this is not what I think it is?” The look on Alex’s face told her it was. “Have you lost your fucking mind? Are you completely insane?”
Alex stood like a little school boy told off by his teacher, silently worried he might get sent to the headmaster’s office to explain what he had done. What little blood remained in her face was now gone, paler than pancake batter, and he thought she might go into shock.
It wasn’t really that bad, was it? Only trying to save the business, my love; you’d have done the same thing if you were in my position.
“Honey, it’s not as bad as it looks. . . . I mean, I know it looks bad, but . . . .”
The way she looked at him gave him food for a thought he’d rather not eat. “Really, I can explain: We would’ve lost the business.”
Inside, he was cursing. Had the place been more “respectable,” he was sure she would have dealt with things a lot better than she looked to be doing now.
He’d been diligent in the beginning, careful to wipe up the spills and put things back as discreetly as would allow, given the circumstances. He even kicked fresh soil over the channel that led to the stream when he bled the septic tank. It was only in the last couple of months when the smell intensified to a sticky contaminating odour that sanitation levels slipped a bit. Standing over the open lid, barely able to look, cutting and pouring, and holding his breath so no microorganisms could accidently vacuum up his nose and give him cancer—at those times, things were bound to get a little sloppy.
Sometimes he worked in the dark, too, after Suzanne left for her nightshift at the hospital, enough time for the drum to burn out before she got back. The only light came from a partial moon and a small torch he held in his mouth. There was bound to be some spillage, especially when the torch accidently fell in the tank. Well, accidents do happen. And the elongated red bags have a habit of jerking and can slip from your grasp in an instant, if you’re not careful. Too much pours out if the opening is too big, something unexpected and weighty tumbles out, and the balance transfers to the bottom of the bag. Then it’s like trying to hold onto a slippery fucking snake, or a water balloon that just burst. Fuck. Spilt some more. Hope it wasn’t too much that time. And it was dark. What’s a man supposed to do, get down on his hands and knees and feel around for whatever organ might have spilt out? No fucking way, thank you very much. Most of it went in and the ground would have swallowed the rest up or some animal would have eaten it, more or less that’s what would have happened, he thought.
Suzanne felt her body buzz when she heard herself say, “Ssshhh, what’s that!” (a faint babble), and immediately looked to see if Bentley or Alex had moved behind her.
They hadn’t.
The sound came from the direction of the tank. Suzanne’s first thought was of the Anatomic mites, squeaking awake and on the move, hungry, scurrying across the ground with wobbling mobility, tapping onto her boot, sticking to it, stretching to devour her, much like the Blob that grew bigger the more people it consumed until it was ridiculously massive. She looked at the heels of her boots, then the ground, relieved to see only mud and nothing trolling toward her. She looked toward the tank, the Anatomicmites hadn’t moved, still sitting jelly-pretty under the tank. Then she heard it again, still inaudible, a split-second sound that Alex interrupted when he spoke.
“What? I can’t hear anything.”
“Shush.”
Suzanne could hear a fly walk. Alex thought he heard something; it could have been Bentley beside him, probably not; his eyes moved left to right to aid his concentration.
Suzanne came back about the tank and grabbed the stepladder with investigating vigour, unfolded it next to where Alex had poured his slurry and climbed the few steps. She pulled the neck of her jumper back up over her face and stretched both sleeves over her hands, in the hopes it was sufficient to protect her skin from touching the gloop around the rim, then pulled out the rod that held the cap in place. She held her breath before removing it and made a mental note to throw away the jumper afterward, wash everything else on hot.
Bentley panted incessantly beside Alex, still smiling, his flagging tongue dripping with anticipation.
Alex did not smile. His heart pounded in his chest, telling him things were about to get a whole lot worse. Can things actually get any worse? Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to find out!
Suzanne cocked her ear close to the opening. “Did you hear that?” She glanced at Alex.
Alex told Bentley to stay and hopped up on the stepladder next to Suzanne, who did n
ot object. Bentley did as he was told and sat panting, watching, as if this had been his plan all along.
“Careful,” she said, full of disgust. “You’ll knock us both over.”
Alex felt the eerie silence creep over him. The only sound was the trickle of the stream and the light wind that stirred the evergreens. But then, unmistakeable this time, the sound of a kitten’s cry. It could have been mistaken for a baby’s whimper that echoed in the big green belly of the septic tank.
Suzanne stared at Alex, her eyes opened wide, the hazel pigment backslid and Alex saw his reflection in the black of her pupil spit back at him.
“Jesus Christ, what have you done?” she repeated.
Alex had no reply. He was confused. The sound scared him, scared him shitless, if he were honest, and it probably showed. He listened hard, praying not to hear it again, praying the sound was a horrible deception caused by a vortex of air when the lid came off. It had to be. And when he was proved right, he would give a big sigh of relief and put the cap back on and do everything in his power to make amends with her. He would promise never again to pour another red bag into the tank, tear it down and shut up shop, as they say. Then they could forget this catastrophe ever happened and get back to enjoying the rest of the week they had off together. And when the week ended they would sit down as they should have done in the beginning and find something else for him to do.
A disembodied sound that only something alive could produce dissolved in the air. It ricocheted about the cavity of Alex’s chest the way a deflating balloon whizzes and bounces off walls. He had no idea what could have made that sound and his creative mind did little to help his mounting anxiety: Two pieces of cirrhotic liver pressed against each other to form lips, or perhaps an enlarged spleen standing-in for the bottom lip, or a chronic kidney and a dilated heart with an appendix for a tongue not flexible enough to carry its function. And discarded teeth from the dental clinics mismatching together so that all the lips can to do is whine and that’s all they will ever do. . . . Whine, whine, whine and whine some more, making pathetic baby sounds.
The Ice Scream Man Page 23
