by NS Thompson
I put my head down and pretended to read something in front of me. I heard her close the door.
That was my morning at work, Gracie.
I got out of there at a little before twelve. I was of course surprised to find that the school car park, just behind that of the office, was completely vacant. Usually the parents are there to collect their children from your drama group. Odd. Perhaps you had cancelled. Were you sick, I wondered. So, I got into the Volvo and did a quick drive-by to discover a collection of cars on your front yard. I prickled inside, wondering why everyone thought your front yard was a fucking car-park!!! The Buxton’s red SUV was parked on the curb. Those people have class. I hot-footed out of there before they saw me.
I decided to go the corner to set up the computer which sat on my passenger seat. I passed the Jerk’s big, rambling, smoky, troop carrier coming the other way towards your place. That made me hurry.
By the time I had parked somewhere inconspicuous and pressed all the appropriate buttons, you were already talking to HIM in the kitchen. There were still a few drama students running about in your back yard. I could see them through the open blinds.
For some reason unbeknownst to me, you held your class at home today.
“It wasn’t me, I swear!” he had his hands out as if he were pleading.
“You weren’t sniffing about my back door in the middle of the night, looking for a bit of action? It’s not like you’ve never done it before!” You sounded cranky.
“No. And before you start, it wasn’t Amanda either. We were home all night.”
“Together in bed, all cosied up? How gorgeous? Was she stoned and wasted enough to fuck you?”
“Stop it, Gracie.” He looked hurt. What a loser. “I don’t want Violet to hear.”
You stopped and greeted another parent who was collecting a small blonde fellow. After they had left you resumed your conversation with the bald idiot in your kitchen.
“I really don’t have anything to say to you. If you left those gifts…the lingerie, the wine…then thanks but it doesn’t help your cause. As long as you are in her bed, you won’t be in mine!”
“Lingerie and wine, heh?” He sneered. “You didn’t waste any time getting back in the saddle. Who is it? Another drama dad? A patient? Some dreg from the pub? Your doctor boss?”
“Get out,” you said softly and I thought I could see the beginning of tears.
“I’m sorry but there’s still so much swirling about in my head, Gracie. Nothing’s changed at home. I’m miserable and all I can think about is you. Thank-you for coming over the other night. It was wrong of me to involve you like that.”
“No kidding,” you sounded softer. “Andy, I’m still freaked out about last night. Someone was at my door, playing with my goddamn cat. Right outside my window. It might have been the same person who hurt him?”
“Not Amanda,” he said quietly.
“Not Amanda! Not Amanda! Why not Amanda? She’s a fruit-loop. A complete nut job. I’ll photocopy some of her medical file and show you if you don’t believe me. She’s faked so many illnesses. She’s addicted to painkillers. She’s what they call a hillbilly heroin addict. Do you know she takes a form of morphine M.S Contin. All the operations she has are so she can get the good stuff…pethidine…etc. Her migraines? It’s for the drugs. Have you ever heard of Munchausen’s Disease. That’s what she’s got. And that is a major mental illness.”
He just looked at you and shook his head.
“I don’t want to hear. You don’t understand and I know you’re trying to make me see her in a bad light….”
“Get out. Just go…”
“Will you see me on Monday? I’ll meet you here during your lunch break.” He pleaded with you, putting his hands together as if in prayer.
“No.” You were strong.
“Just to talk and work this out. I’m messed up and I think I do have feelings for you that need to be sorted. Please.”
You stared at him hard for a full minute before…
CR
UM
B
LING
And you said – “Okay.”
That has made me somewhat irate, to say the least, Grace.
7:35p.m
Do you think you can lure him away from his wife by delivering the dirt on her? I don’t know that anything you say is true anyway. I have put on Pavarotti singing his lungs out to Puccini’s Nessun Dorma and I am listening to him wail so eloquently as I write. You are a desperate woman. It has become obvious that you perceive yourself as being in need of a man. You have lost all common sense and your value system appears to have shut down. I will save you from making a grave mistake.
I have finally found (after searching for an hour), the piece of paper I wrote your codes to gain entry to the surgery. I would like to know for myself, just out of sheer interest, if the story about Amanda Cox is right. I am going to head down to the surgery after dark, probably at about nine p.m. The surgery car-park backs onto the hotel car-park. At nine o’clock on a Saturday night, all the barflies are well and truly settled on their stools. The pub doesn’t close until midnight, so there shouldn’t be too much action around that darkened area of town then. Naturally I’ll wear black and I must take a torch so that I can see the keypad for the security system. I’m quite excited. I feel like Tom Cruise out of Mission Impossible. I know everyone in town so it will be quite a thrill to be in a position to be able to look at anyone’s file that I care to see. I want to see my daughter’s file. There might be something there.
I have every intention of stopping this thing between you and lover-boy, once and for all. I’m trying to sound cheerful and positive but inside I have maggots crawling through my veins. The blood behind my eyeballs feels like it is clotting and although it is still winter and cold outside, I feel like my skin is blistering and peeling off my muscles.
Monday lunch-time is your final trial. It’s all in your hands at this point in time. I am going to give you options –
1. Leave Andrew Cox for dead. Let him become just a rotting carcass of a memory.
OR
2. You become the rotting carcass in my memory. I will make you one. I will take away everything that you used, so cunningly, to entice me - your green snake-eyes - your big fat tits – that clever tongue that spits lies. Those long red tresses will be gone, too.
So, my darling, I have given you your options.
To my mind, the choice is easy.
I’m going to go to the hotel for dinner, after which I will choose to accept my mission which is to read not only Amanda Cox’s medical records but also yours and my late daughter’s. All may hold something of interest for me. Gloves. I must also pack gloves.
Midnight
Home. I am on fire. I feel like the universe has breathed fire into my body and filled me with some superhuman power. I guess this must be what they meant in the Bible when someone became filled with the Holy Spirit. Maybe that actually is what has happened to me. I feel like my eyes are opened for the first time. I am only now seeing and only now hearing and feeling the things around me. It is as if I can understand people’s thoughts and as if God or some other supernatural entity has chosen me to do his work.
I have poured some of my best Cognac to celebrate this liberation or perhaps promotion to pseudo-divinity. I am not claiming to be God. How ridiculous. What I am saying is that I have been touched or blessed or called or something like that by some higher being and just by being touched by that, the essence of divinity rubs off. Do you understand what I am saying?
I ate my dinner at the hotel. Chicken something. I can’t remember trivial details like what the hell I ate for dinner. Sandy Moorebank, the worst whore of Babylon, was holding court in the front bar – the bar that looks and smells like a urinal. She still looked as cheap and tawdry as she had earlier but now had more makeup on and a sparkling blouse that was little more than a brassiere. Her flat chest was in no danger of being exposed and her ribs poked out t
he sides like little chicken wings. It put me off my dinner.
As I left, trying to be discreet, the little bitch approached me. She had on her wobbly legs and her jaw hung slackly as she accosted me.
“Hey J.T. How’s tricks. Yer a legend, man. Thanks heaps for that dosh today…I was like…so needing it….I’m all good now….wan’ me to say thanks in a real nice way…”
She batted her eyes at me.
“No thank-you Sandy. Go back to your office and find another sucker.” I threw my head in the direction of the toilets.
She mumbled something like “If only everyone knew about you, you cold, motherfucker.” And off she stumbled, bumping the wall as she went with her middle finger held above her head as a salute to me. Fuck her, I thought, dumb tramp and off I went through the car-park and with a quick check to make sure no-one was looking, jumped the small fence into the surgery car-park.
I entered the surgery like a cat burglar. Although I was nervous, I was also very confident that I was up to the job. I could hear that Mission Impossible music in my head.
The surgery was dark, although the lights out the front of the building were on, to scare off burglars. I held my torch to the keypad and typed in the code. A minute later I was in the building and had disabled the alarm. I pulled it off like a pro. I walked down the carpeted hallway and turned into the reception area. I kept my torch switched on but kept it as far from windows as possible.
Behind the desk where you sit is a wall full, from roof to floor, of manilla folders holding all the medical secrets to everyone in this town. After only a minute I realised that you were operating under a very simple alphabetical system and found what I was after almost immediately. I was a filing boy in my youth for more years than I care to remember.
Amanda Cox was first. Her file was as thick as an old church tome. Heavy and filled with pages of consultation and reports from specialists. There must have been two hundred pages there, so I decided it would have to come home with me. I wanted to take my time and read it all. I found Sarah’s file. There wasn’t much there. Yours had about four pages. There was a report about your asthma from a specialist and a blood test and a few notes. I couldn’t read properly in the light and decided to take them all.
I could have gone crazy and looked up everyone I knew but it was unnerving being in a place I was really not supposed to be.
Before I left I thought I’d have a quick look around in the doctor’s consultation room. I found a box of rubber gloves and put a pair in my pocket. I like those thin ones to do the washing up with. I was wearing my thin, black, woollen ones.
I looked through Dr Death’s drawers. Top drawer had the usual prescription pads, although I think he’s updated to computer scripts now. I threw the last two scripts he had given me straight in the bin. There were a pile of other relatively boring forms. Pens. Lots of big, thick, decorative and colourful pens from the pharmaceutical reps.
It was in the bottom drawer that I found my most interesting and disturbing discovery of the evening. A life-altering discovery.
Underneath a few large notepads and a spare mouse for the computer was a pornographic book. It did not look like a glossy, adult book-shop type book. This one looked homemade with computer paper. I held my torch to the images and felt like someone had punched me. These were images of kids. Not infants but prepubescent kids. Boys and girls together. Girls together. It was the most horrifying stuff. I felt like all the air in my body had gone out, like I’d been freeze-dried, when I looked into the eyes of one girl who stared back at the camera.
Stared at ME.
Her eyes screamed “help”.
It was my daughter, Sarah!
I dropped to my knees and switched off the torch, just breathing in the darkness, smelling the scent of antiseptic and it was then that I felt surrounded by light. Maybe it was an angel. Maybe it was the spirit of my daughter. I don’t know. I was confused.
Almost in a stupor, I stood up and went to the medicine cabinet. I don’t even truly know why. It was if I was on automatic pilot and my subconscious was hatching a plan that I had not yet been informed of. The key had been left, dangling from the door. I tried it and it opened. Another indisputable sign that I was becoming infallible. I smoothly went through the drawers and pocketed a handful of pethidine vials and a whole box of readymade morphine injections, then turned around, took the evil pornographic material, shoved that in my back pocket, put the three files under my arm and left as I had come.
I felt like Batman must feel as he swoops through the night, or Spiderman as he swings from his webs. I suddenly knew who had killed my daughter and why and I knew that I had been given the responsibility of avenging her death.
I had gone to the surgery tonight with the sole intention of looking at three files. It was a trickle of afterthought that had me fossicking through Dr Death’s drawers which had led me in the space of a minute to solve the mystery of who killed my daughter. The police have been there at least twice and have obviously never fingered him as a suspect or searched his surgery. How smug must that bastard have felt? If I went to the cops with all my information they’d probably put me in jail for break and entry. If John Myer had been charged, some fancy barrister would have spun a yarn of bullshit to get him a maximum of three years. What sort of messed up society allows abortion but refuses to hand down a death sentence to a paedophiliac rapist and murderer of children? It is wrong and it is sick. I knew that the powers that be – God – or some divine electrical force had handed me the keys to set this right. I had not been given the opportunity to be a good father to Sarah throughout her short life, but I could now set it right and personally avenge her death. It was not too late to be a great dad to her. Can you see what I am saying Gracie? It was my duty as a man and a father.
I was just past the bend before the railway bridge when I saw a lonely figure staggering down the edge of the road. My headlights caught the flash of blonde hair and I watched Sandy Moorebank turn and look at the car like a confused rabbit.
I heard a voice. I literally heard a voice tell me to stop and let her into the car.
She leaned down into the passenger seat, stinking of stale beer and wine – an unfortunate mix.
“Change ya mind, Jimbo?”
“Get in.” My voice sounded like that of a robot and I knew that I had been infused with some supernatural power. It was as if I had been possessed. I didn’t drive her to the hovel of a caravan park she lived in but turned the car around and headed back to the surgery.
“Do you wan’ a headjob or what?” she mumbled as I pulled the car to a halt. “Heh, what’re we doin’ here?”
“We’re going to have a party, Sandy. Come with me.”
“Whatever,” she gave a cross between a laugh and a snort and stumbled out of the car. I had parked on the street, beneath a heavy, dark tree.
I took my video camera out of the glove box and went around guiding her to the back door of the surgery.
“Are we goin’ in there?” she whispered.
“Why not?” I grinned back at her in the dark.
I used the torch from my pocket and pressed the keypad on the door for the second time that evening.
“It’s fuckin’ cold, man,” she complained. “Hurry up. How do you know…?”
I hushed her and ushered her inside; disarmed the alarm and nudged her through to reception. I planted my camera on the desk in front of her and pressed play. The camera’s automatic light came on.
“You wanna play doctors and nurses, Mr Thorne? Are we gonna make a movie? Cool. I can be Paris Hilton” she giggled. The woman smelled bad.
“Sit down,” I pushed her into your chair behind the reception desk, Gracie, and turned her to face me. “Wait there.”
“Do you want me to take m’clothes off?” she mumbled.
“Whatever makes you comfortable, Sandy?” I called back as I pulled the light pair of rubber gloves from my pocket and stretched them over my hands. They felt powdery inside.
I walked through to the middle room and went to glass cabinet, removing a tray of sterile, surgical instruments. I peeled back the clear plastic and selected the most menacing scalpel I could find and then returned to the Moorebank whore.
She sat naked and spread-eagled on your chair. I felt my stomach turn. Her body was snow-white except for the few angry looking pimples on her skin and her pubic mound had been shaved, not too recently and sported a red, spotty rash amongst the bristles. I leaned down into her face and spoke in a cool hiss.
“You want a hit of something?” I asked, feeling inspired.
“What d’ya mean?” she looked up, suddenly more alert.
“I’ve got some morphine. Doctor John and I are good mates. He lets me use whatever I want.” I lied.
“Shit yeah…why not.”
I gave her the ready made syringe containing 50 milligrams of the drug. She leaned back in the chair and injected the stuff directly into a vein in the crook of her arm. She shut her eyes and sighed.
“Hmmm. Nice.”
“You usually get your drugs from Dr Death, don’t you Sandy?” I probed.
She put a finger to her lips, as her eyes swam loosely in her head.
“Shh. It’s a secret.” She giggled.
“And what do you give him in return, Sandy? What’s your part of that little arrangement?”
She didn’t like that question and stuck her bottom lip out like a petulant child.
“Did you let him poke your wombat hole? Sandy? Wake up and listen to me.” I started getting a bit forceful and shook her a bit as she looked like she was drifting.
