by Peter Corris
‘I didn’t cut your balls off,’ I said. ‘It happened long before we met.’ The cat seemed satisfied with that; it stretched out to sleep in what was left of the afternoon sun.
At 3pm Dr Holmes telephoned me. ‘Mr Hardy,’ he said. ‘Something rather strange has happened.’
‘You’ve seen Mountain?’
‘No, no. A cheque has arrived covering the cost of all his sessions to date, including the last one which he missed.’
‘No letter?’
‘No-a cheque in an envelope. There’s a strange air of finality to it. I thought I’d give you a call to see if you’d learned anything further.’
A strange air of finality, I thought. It sounded like something to take to the ESP consultant in my corridor.
‘Hardy, are you there?’
‘Yes, sorry, Doctor. I’ve got some news of him, none of it good.’ I gave him a run-down on the progress of William Mountain as I’d followed it to that point. He clicked his tongue at the references to self-destruction; the sound came across the wire and hurt my ear.
‘That’s very disturbing. Could you find a typical phrase on that sort of point in the manuscript?’
I had the synopsis in front of me along with my notebook and my two I’ll Be Bound catalogues. I flicked through the typescript. ‘Here’s a good bit: quote: “I would like to consume myself, cannibalise myself, starting with the brain”, unquote. How’s that?’
‘I hope you are taking this seriously.’
‘I am. Believe me. I’m expecting to meet up with him sooner or later, and I’m not looking forward to it.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that meeting. He’d be capable of swift self-destruction if the schizophrenia is as extreme as it appears from your account.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘Do you have any other observations, other signs of distress?’
‘You name it-heroin, cocaine, abstinence from alcohol’ I fidgeted with the things on the table and my hand touched the pamphlet. ‘Oh, yes, it could be that he’s into SM-bondage, discipline, whips and chains, that sort of stuff.’
‘That’s dangerous, very dangerous. In his heightened emotional state he could do terrible damage to himself and others.’
‘What about this book he’s writing? How do you see that in the scheme of things?’
‘That’s worrying too. There are so many associations-book as child, book as life force, book as legacy. Are you following me?’
‘I think so. He could equate finishing the book with finishing his life.’
‘It’s possible. It’s urgent that he be found.’
‘If I find him and he seems to be crazy, can I bring him to you first?’
‘It would depend on what he’d done.’
‘What if he’d done the worst things that you and I can think of?’
He paused and I could imagine his burly body tense with concentration while his workman’s hands were busy with pencil and pad. ‘Of course you must bring him to me. I’ll give you my private number.’ He did, and I wrote it down. ‘Do you expect to catch up with him soon?’
‘Soon or never, from what you say, Doctor. Will this number get you anytime over the next couple of days?’
He said it would, and I rang off feeling that, somehow, the stakes had mounted, the pot had got bigger and my hand had stayed the same. That feeling intensified when I finally got through to Grant Evans in Melbourne. I could sense Grant’s reluctance to talk on an open line in the police building, and our conversation became cryptic, but we were both used to that.
‘It’s tip of the iceberg stuff, Cliff.’
‘I thought it might be. The cars are a sideline to… what?’
‘Insurance fraud, among other things. Look, I can’t talk on this line.’
I knew what was coming: the old, old story of organisations closing ranks to protect members no matter how undeserving. Grant interpreted my silence correctly. ‘Look, Cliff,’ he said angrily. ‘It’s not just that. I remember one of your rules, what was it? Never knowingly work for I completed the phrase for myself- politicians and unions. Again, Grant knew what I was thinking.
‘Precisely,’ he said. ‘Keep out of it, Cliff.’
For the rest of the afternoon I divided my time between looking through Mountain’s manuscript, re-reading some letters Helen had sent me and staring at the sleeping cat. Phrases from Mountain’s writing began to etch themselves on my mind: Most people only get half-fucked, half-drunk and half-drugged. It’s hard work going all the way.
It struck me that perhaps Lambert was wrong- Mountain’s synopsis had energy and violence and sex, but, as I read and re-read, I detected a lack of humour. Death, drugs and sex can be as funny as anything else, properly handled, and I thought I could recall a few good laughs in The Godfather. It would be the final irony if Bill Mountain’s possibly posthumous book was a flop.
I tried to imagine myself in his place. It wasn’t easy. Somewhere, he was sitting writing the thing, stone cold sober or drugged to the hairline. He had plans, maybe a major, double-edged strategy with fall-back positions. He’d covered a lot of ground in a very short time, and there was something single-minded and purposeful in his actions. He’d left clues and was aware of being pursued. In the book, Morgan Shaw saw his pursuers as the car thieves and drug dealers whom he’d offended by moving in on their areas of operation. He harried the one and eluded the other; shut himself up and worked on his film script. No jokes. I shut up the folder and shoved it under a telephone directory. That dislodged an ashtray which spilled Erica’s butts and ash on the floor. The tobacco and ash smelled stale and old-that wasn’t funny either. Another Shaw/Mountain gem came back to me: I was ready to kill myself, and I felt so good about taking this control over my own life that I was only sorry that I hadn’t had anything to do with being born.
23
I was wearing the same outfit as before when I rang the bell at Ginny Ireland’s apartment, except that my shirt was clean, and I had the gun in a holster inside my pants around the back from my left hip. The bulge would show if I took my jacket off, but from what I’d seen of parties lately there was hardly enough light to see the cheese dip so a slight gun bulge wouldn’t be a problem.
Ginny opened the door and hurled herself through it, at me. I got her strong arms around my neck and a smacking kiss that almost put me down for a count. She was wearing red high heels, tight red pants and a blouse that looked to be made of gold leaf. She hauled me into the apartment.
‘You yummy man, yummy, yummy. That was so sweet of you last night. Most men would’ve… well, thank you.’
I waved my hand modestly and followed her through to the kitchen, where the gin fumes were competing with the sweet smell of marijuana. She picked up a long, fat joint, re-lit it and held it out to me after inhaling deeply herself.
I picked up the Beefeater bottle. ‘Later,’ I said. ‘I’ll start on this.’
‘Lush.’ She poured a hefty slug of gin, splashed in some tonic and just hit the rim of the glass with a slice of lemon so that the lemon dropped in. Then she forgot to give me the glass. I reached over and took it.
She giggled. ‘I was so smashed last night, and I’m telling you when I woke up and saw that aspirin and that water, boy, I’d have given you anything you wanted, there and then.’
I grinned. ‘Well, as I say, later.’
She seemed to find that the funniest thing she’d ever heard. She laughed and choked on her next drag. I patted her on the back, gently so as not to tear the gold leaf. Up close there was a synthetic quality to her that was dimmed by distance. Her hair was dyed and the big eyes were a product of pencil and brush more than something nature had given her. The skin along her jaw was beginning to sag and last night’s session had left slight pouches under her eyes that would deepen as she ran one good time into the next.
We finished our drinks and she went off to add some more touches to the art work. When she came back she smelled strongly and freshly of the p
erfume that had gone stale on her last night.
‘Okay, Cliffy?’
I pointed to the bag of grass on the kitchen bench. ‘Not taking the dope?’
She laughed. ‘To one of Dee’s parties? You must be joking. She’d be insulted.’
We trooped across to number seven. A big man in a white jacket and dark pants was standing by the door trying to look like a guest, but succeeding in looking like a bouncer. Ginny smiled at him and he gave her a quick nod, me a hard stare, and opened the door. The noises and the smells hit like a head-high tackle: insistent, driving rock music, a rush of voices and thick, spicy smoke. The apartment was similarly laid out to Ginny Ireland’s, except that the decor was more flamboyant: polished boards with tiger skins in the hall and woven beaded hangings on the wall that showed erotic scenes in a certain amount of strategic relief. The party was being held in a big double room with the dividing cedar doors thrown back: the ceilings were mostly mirrored as were the walls; the floor was a deep white cloud and there were two conversation pits, a number of low poufs covered with animal skins and a couple of things that looked like trampolines but were probably couches. In one corner of the room there was a well stocked bar. The topless attendant wore high heels and fishnet stockings and also had the job of feeding cassettes into the huge Sony tape deck.
About thirty people stood or lounged around talking, drinking, smoking, looking at themselves in the mirrors. A few swayed to the music; others just swayed. Ginny led me over to the bar, where there were a couple of shallow silver dishes filled with white powder; there was a tiny gold spoon on a long chain attached to each dish. Ginny dipped and conveyed the spoon to her nose with a rock steady hand.
‘Your motto seems to be fun is for later, Cliffy.’ She sniffed the powder up one nostril. ‘Mine’s fun is for now!’ She took a cigarette out of a box on the bar, held it for the attendant to light, puffed and drifted away. I looked along the bar at the dishes of powder and the bowls of grass with papers and filters; there were also little silver pill boxes and some small glass phials set out on pads of crushed velvet.
The barmaid’s nipples were painted black and she had some trouble keeping them out of the work area. Her eyes were bright and glittering under gold-dusted lashes.
‘Care for something?’
‘Water,’ I said.
She looked confused and took one long black-painted fingernail to her mouth. ‘I’m sorry, we haven’t…’
‘I was kidding. I’ll have a gin and tonic, light on the gin.’
She made the drink quickly and expertly and selected a long, silver cylinder from under the bar. ‘Care for a dash?’
I shook my head, took the drink and looked around for something to look at. The room was filling up fast, and I concluded that there must be other comfort stations in the apartment, because people came in through the doors with glasses full and joints aglow. I went out a door, after pausing in front of it to make sure it really was a door. The music and smoke, from other speakers and other throats, followed me down to the kitchen and into other rooms. The whole place was dark, and the decor gave it a dreamy, insubstantial quality: dark walls with deliberately shadowy corners, mirrors and leather and fibreglass furniture that seemed to writhe where it stood. Nothing was rectangular; day beds and divans were oval; the bath was a modular unit you had to dive into and curl up in; the toilet was a series of hoses with attachments moulded to fit the different private parts. One door off the main hallway was locked.
When I got back under the mirrored ceilings, the party was beginning to swing: the music was louder and the people seemed to be laughing more, and coming more often into minor physical collisions. In one corner a group of men in dinner suits had formed a sort of rugby line-out and was tossing a small woman aloft and passing her from hand to hand. A man in a long white caftan was dancing with a woman in a tail coat and all the fittings, and two women who looked like twins in identical lame dresses were inspecting a selection of their images in a mirrored corner.
I spotted Ginny through the murk, and went over to her. She was smashed to bits, but still riding high with energy and alertness. She grabbed my arm and we almost tumbled together down into one of the conversation pits.
‘Dee,’ she said, ‘here’s this fabulous man, Cliff somebody.’
‘Hello, somebody.’ Deirdre Kelly was a long, dark woman wearing a long, dark dress. She had black shiny hair and a creamy white skin. The dress left her, slim arms bare; she had wide expanding metal bands around her upper arms and metal bracelets around her wrists. When she moved her arms the muscles rippled and swelled like Lothar’s. I smiled at her and said something about it being an interesting party, while I waited for Ginny to drop me right in by saying I had business with her. But that information had dropped out for Ginny long ago; she got up to dance with a Jamaican in stretch jeans, who called her ‘Sugar’ and whose idea of dancing was to spread his big hands over her buttocks and press her hard into where the denim bulged the most.
Dee Kelly saw me watching the performance and frowned. ‘You seem a little out of place here, somebody.’
‘Why d’you say that?’
She reached for a silver dish and used the gold spoon expertly. She dipped and held it out to me. I shook my head. She smiled and took a brown cigarette from a box. I shook my head again. She took one of the little phials and held it between thumb and forefinger.
‘No again, huh?’
I nodded.
She took a disposable syringe from a pocket in her dress and pulled off the plastic caps from both ends. ‘See what I mean?’ She suddenly jabbed the needle into my thigh and pressed the plunger. I jumped and swore. She laughed. ‘You don’t fit in. What brings you here?’
I plucked the needle out and broke off the short, thin, metal spike. ‘What was that?’
‘Nothing. Water. Just a joke.’ She gripped my arm and pulled; I was struggling to get up but she seemed strangely strong. ‘Relax, relax.’
I didn’t relax; I felt frozen and dumb. ‘Ginny brought me.’
‘I know that! She’s stupid enough to do anything.’
‘Stupid?’ I got my thick tongue around the word and idea. ‘Stupid? Living like this? Having all this fun?’
She gave me a look that would have cut glass. Her face was boldly made up as if to be photographed or seen from a distance. Up close there was a grossness to her features: wide pores, large ears under the shiny hair and a suggestion of bad breath. Her mouth was loose and moist and she kept it that way by frequent use of her tongue which was purplish from contact with her lipstick. I sat down, heavily.
‘She’s stupid, all right,’ she said. ‘If you needed brains for fucking, she’d be a virgin.’ The aphorism seemed to please her; she leaned back and stretched. She had heavy, full breasts which rose and pushed out the front of her dark silk dress. She saw me looking and licked her lips, then she dipped the spoon again and sniffed the stuff down to her ankles.
I thought: Half-fucked, half-drunk, half-drugged. Dee Kelly was going all the way; she closed her eyes for a full minute and when she opened them they were alert and shrewd, beacons of her brain. ‘I’ll ask you again,’ she said. ‘Why are you here?’
English suddenly seemed like a foreign language to me. ‘To see Bill Mountain,’ I said thickly.
The name jolted her although she tried to hide the reaction. A sort of tremor ran the full, long length of her, and she drew her knees up and closed her eyes in a spasm.
‘Who did you say?’
The lassitude dropped away. Now I felt bright and chatty, communicative and in control. ‘William Mountain. He’s an amazing man. He’s writing a novel-and you’re in it, Mrs Kelly, in a starring role.’
She threw back her head and laughed in a sharp cackle. ‘Mrs Kelly! God, it’s been years since anyone called me that. What else d’you know about me?’
‘I don’t know anything about you and I don’t want to know anything. But I think you’ll lead me to Mountain.’
> ‘What’s your business with him?’
The music was louder still, and the party noise was mounting to a roar. I had to lean close to her to be heard, and that rank smell got stronger. ‘That’s between him and me. My feeling is he’s going to be here tonight and I’m sticking close to you just in case you’ve got some idea of warning him off. You could call your watchdog in from the door, but the noise we’d make between us’d finish off your party.’
‘I’m among friends here.’
I looked around the room: everyone I could see was drunk or stoned or both. A couple of the men looked big enough to be useful but one of them was just starting to slide down the wall and another man was staring into his own eyes in the wall mirror. I felt I could move very fast if I had to; I didn’t want to, but… if I had to.
‘I can’t see anyone here who’d give me too much trouble,’ I said, ‘and there doesn’t have to be any trouble in this for you. I just want to talk to Mountain when he comes. I hope I can make him see reason; if I can’t, some things might get broken but I’ll try to watch out for your mirrors.’
‘I’ve never heard such crap. Get the hell out of here!’
She started to get up and I got a grip on her biceps around the bracelet and pulled here down. She flexed the muscle and resisted, but I put on more pressure. ‘Listen, lady. I don’t give a fuck what drugs you peddle to who. I don’t care if you turn on the whole North Shore. I just want to see Mountain.’
She sneered at me, and the frustration and anger that had been bottled up in me for days came out; I needed to hurt someone and she was closest. I gripped her arm tighter. ‘I don’t care if you imagine people raping you and report it to the police. You can imagine me raping you if you like.’