by Peter Corris
She smiled suddenly and almost sweetly. It was as if I’d said the magic word. She tapped my hand with one long finger and I let her go. ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘I’ve decided that you’re an interesting man after all. Let me get you a drink.’
‘You’re not going anywhere.’ I spoke in what I thought was a firm voice, but I felt less dominant, and anchored to the spot.
‘No, no, of course.’ She waved in the direction of the bar and made a gesture with her hands to indicate a drink. It was okay by me; my throat was dry from the heat and the smoke, and Deirdre Kelly’s bad smell and sudden switch in mood had strung me out and made me nervous. The topless barmaid came over with a bottle of champagne and a glass on a tray. The party seethed around her, and she had to lift the tray to get it clear of grasping hands. Kelly cleared a hand aside with a swift chop and stroked a fish-netted thigh as she took the tray in her other hand.
‘Not bad, eh? What d’you think of her?’
‘She’s well-built,’ I said. ‘When’s Mountain due?’
‘He’ll be along.’ She dismissed the barmaid with a light slap and poured me out a glass of champagne. ‘I won’t do anything to stop you seeing Bill, on one condition.’
I didn’t answer; I didn’t fancy bargaining with her. I drank some champagne and looked at the angry red mark I’d made on her arm. I felt a burning in my stomach- champagne’s not what it was.
‘On condition that you let me listen to your conversation.’ She took the glass from me and sipped; her lipstick purpled the edge.
‘That’d be up to him.’
‘Oh, he’d let me. He lets me do anything I like.’
A man fell into the pit, and Kelly eased herself away from him and closer to me. There seemed to be just as many people in the room as before, but fewer of them were standing up.
‘When did you see him last?’
‘Today. This morning.’ She leaned closer and her odour was gamy, feral. ‘We made love all night.’
‘That so? When does he find time to write?’
She laughed, not the cackle this time but a fluid, oily sound. ‘Not when he’s with me, I can promise you that. His writing’s brilliant, like his fucking.’
‘Have you read it?’
‘No, but he’s told me about it.’
I knew she was lying, and she knew I knew. She took the glass, drank some wine and spilled some more on her dress. The stain showed black on the dark silk.
‘Consume myself, starting with my own brain.’ I sounded like Orson Welles. I smiled and said it again.
What?’ she gasped.
‘What?’
‘You said something.’ She shoved aside the man who had fallen into the pit and had rolled over. An arm flopped down from floor level and hung in space between us.
‘No, I didn’t say anything.’ I looked around the room for the nearest door, just in case of trouble, but there was no door. The mirror ran from the ceiling and down all four walls. I blinked and the mirror shattered into a kaleidoscope of colours that blinked back at me. The people changed into dwarfs and giants; I tried to focus on the nearest faces and the features went rubbery and all shapes went angular like in a Picasso painting. A huge nose grew out of a man’s rubbery face and pressed towards a woman’s swollen breasts. Then the breasts shrank and the woman’s chest went concave and the nose pressed in and in.
I tried to stand up but Deirdre Kelly pushed me down like a mother cat tumbling one of her kittens. The music shrilled and screamed; I put my hands over my ears to shut it out, and my ears felt huge, wet and terrifying. Kelly’s rank breath flooded over me.
‘You’re passing out, Mr Somebody. You’re going to be sorry you hurt me.’
I was sorry already, and wanted to say so. My stomach lurched and my head fell towards my knees and I didn’t care where it landed. It passed my knees and went on falling.
24
When I came out of it, I felt as if I was lying around in four or five separate pieces. Reconstituting myself was agony but I made the effort. I wriggled and twitched and made mental contact with the furthest off bits. When I was back in one piece I found that the piece was tied at the wrists and ankles. I was naked and in a room I had never seen before. That made for a very uncomfortable feeling, the familiarity of my body and the utter strangeness of the room.
If I was still in Apartment Seven, this had to be the locked room off the hallway. It wasn’t hard to see why Dee Kelly kept it locked: the room was painted black from floor to ceiling; there was enough concealed lighting for me to make out objects in the room from the propped-against-a-wall position I’d wriggled into. A big low bed dominated one corner; a couple of upholstered chairs were over by one wall and there was a six foot high padded post jutting up out of the black carpet in the centre of the room. I squirmed to get my head around for a look along the wall. There seemed to be irregularities in it, protuberances that broke up the smooth, black surface. They were irregularities all right-chains and manacles in a dull, non-reflective metal like night-fighting weapons. I looked with alarm-sharpened vision at the bed; it had ropes and chains attached to its headboard; along another wall was a rack containing whips and canes and other objects I couldn’t identify and didn’t want to.
My arms were drawn together under my thighs and my wrists were tied; I was sitting with my knees drawn up and the knots of the ropes around my ankles were underneath, below my calves. When I could move my hands without wanting to scream, I tried to get my fingers to work on the knots, but it was impossible. No give in the rope-expert job. I had a raging thirst and could still hear, through the throbbing inside my head, the sounds I’d heard before I’d passed out, although I was pretty sure that the room was actually dead quiet. At least things were restored to their normal shapes and sizes, if you could say that bondage beds and chains and manacles had normal shapes and sizes.
I was registering these comforting, orientating thoughts when a section of black wall swung in and William Mountain entered the room. I recognised him, although he was incredibly changed. He was clean-shaven with short hair. Drastic weight loss had left the skin of his face loose and plastic-looking. His body was strong and well-conditioned; there could be no doubt about that, because all he was wearing was a pair of skin-tight leather pants. He came across and looked down at me; his eyes were wide open, red-veined and mad. Those eyes were the most frightening thing so far in ten minutes or so of rising fear. He squatted down easily in front of me, and the fat lines around his waist were minimal. The light leather creaked.
‘Cliff Hardy, how nice to see you.’
His smile was simple, unaffected, genuine. I’d never seen him smile out of an un-hirsute face before, and the effect was obscene.
‘Mountain,’ I croaked. ‘Great joke, Bill.’
He shook his head slowly. ‘No joke, Hardy.’
‘We’ve got a lot of talking to do,’ I babbled. ‘I’ve been looking for you for…’
‘Days, weeks, I know.’
‘You know? How? Look, these bloody ropes’re…’
‘I didn’t exactly know it’d be you. I’m a bit surprised, actually. I thought you only did clean work, or cleanish. This is a dirty job-working for them.’
‘I’m working for the guy you stole the cars from.’ His tongue flicked out and worked at the corner of his mouth; I realised that he was trying to perform the old nervous trick of trapping a beard hair in his teeth and pulling it out with a movement of his head. The tongue moved uselessly. ‘That’s what the other one said.’
‘You mean the guy at Blackheath?’
‘You have been on the trail, Cliff. Congratulations on reaching the end.’
I summoned up some breath and saliva to enable me to speak clearly and keep the fear down. ‘Let’s not piss around, Mountain. You’re in big, big trouble, but it’s probably not too late to pull something out of this mess.’
He laughed then; the basso I’d heard in pubs and in his house; it was a warm, rich, totally good-
humoured sound, and so inappropriate in that chamber of horrors that it had the effect of making me shiver. ‘I’ve been on a journey,’ he said easily. ‘An incredible journey, the like of which no man has ever been on before.’
‘Bullshit! You’re talking half-baked mysticism, and you’ve been acting out fantasies half the men in Sydney share. Quit before you go too far.’
‘You wouldn’t understand. After all those years of seeing life through the bottom of a bottle, I’ve finally acted, I’ve finally freed myself. I’ve broken the block; I can write again.’
My full-frontal approach hadn’t produced much of a result. Time for the soft-soap? ‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘I know you’ve been writing. Your agent thinks it’s wonderful.’
‘So he should, it is wonderful. I slaved over that, it’s Art!’ Something happened to his eyes, which had been fixed directly on me, as he spoke. They seemed to wander away to focus on the remote distance. He put his hand up to stroke his face; his skin had lost its elasticity, and the flesh moved under his hand and moved back to its original shape only slowly. He unsquatted with the suggestion of an effort; he was still a heavy, bulky man, and walked out of the room. I shouted as he went but he didn’t seem to hear me.
After a few minutes, he came back with Deirdre Kelly. She was wearing spike heeled, thigh-high boots, a G-string and a velvet jerkin that propped up her breasts and left them exposed. The sounds in my head had stopped, and in the few seconds that the door was open I registered that the party was over.
Mountain’s eyes were back to red, wide and crazed again, and he was smiling.
‘I promised Dee I’d let her hear this.’
‘I’m glad you keep your promises,’ I said. ‘It makes me feel more at home.’
That didn’t get a smile from either of them, much less a laugh. ‘This is Cliff Hardy, darling,’ Mountain said. ‘He’s a private detective who does things like finding missing teenagers and throwing drunks out of rich people’s parties.’
Kelly didn’t seem to be listening; she played with her right nipple, poking and teasing at it until it stood out an inch from her breast. She moved rhythmically, as if she was listening to music being played inside her head.
‘Do you know how dangerous this woman is?’ I said. ‘She’s crazy, she has rape fantasies. She’s the worst kind of trouble on legs.’ I realised how silly it sounded as I said it, but I was desperately trying to touch bases, to stand up for normality in the bizarre surroundings. ‘Come on, Bill, this isn’t you. You’re a writer, you need a keyboard and paper and something to drink.’
‘I don’t drink any more.’ His voice was childlike with pleasure at forming the words. It was useless to try reaching him by referring to his earlier life. He pulled at the inelastic, slack skin on his face and twitched his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. A nerve jumped under his right eye: he was well away, responding to chemical and emotional stimuli all new and all his own.
Kelly knew how to get through to him; she massaged his upper arm with her long, strong fingers and carried his hand up to her breast. He gripped the nipple between thumb and forefinger and squeezed hard. I saw the pain wave hit her and give way to something else; a dreamy look came over her face and her purple tongue licked her lips as if they were sugar-coated. ‘I want to hear all about it,’ she said.
‘All about what?’ I said.
The tongue flicked out. ‘How did he look, the man at the Blackheath house? The one Bill killed. How did he look?’
‘He looked dead. And Bill’ll look the same way if certain people catch up with him.’
Mountain grinned as if he’d caught me out in a lie. ‘I thought you said you weren’t working for them?’
‘That’s right. But I ran into a man named Grey who’s working for the mob you’ve been playing games with. He doesn’t want to play games; he thinks you know more about his operation than you should. He wants you dead.’
‘So he sends you to do the job?’ Kelly murmured.
‘No, Jesus, It’s too complicated a story to tell you now. Come on, this is ridiculous; you look very nice in your outfits but I’m freezing my arse off. Let’s quit the playacting and start thinking: I’ve got contacts, I can arrange a few things.’
Mountain wasn’t listening. ‘I had to imagine that part,’ he said. ‘The car thieves coming after me. Grey, you say? Good name, wish I’d thought of that. I wonder if I got it right otherwise?’
‘I’ve seen your synopsis. You got it pretty right.’
‘What about the people who supply the drugs to Dee and her crowd? They must be after me, I left clues.’
I shook my head, but I had to think of something to say instead of just sitting there like a trussed-up bale of wool. I sensed that his sympathies were with action and danger; passivity could be fatal. ‘I don’t know about them. God knows, Artie Henderson’s not a very reliable associate. If they’ve got on to him somehow they could be getting close. Christ, Bill, how much trouble can you handle? And it’s not just you, there’s…’
He gripped my jaw and ground the bones together. ‘Yes, Hardy? There’s who?’
Gripped like that I couldn’t talk and it was no time to mention Erica anyway-Kelly would regard someone else’s suffering as just part of the fun. Mountain went on grinding my face, but Kelly got impatient. He’d let go her nipple, and it looked as if she was jealous of the attention I was getting. She wandered away towards the whip rack; her bare buttocks above the tops of the shiny boots were a little flabby and there were bruises, precisely patterned, across them. Mountain gave my jaw a vicious twist and let go. He expected an answer.
‘You’re a sick man, Bill. I’ve seen Dr Holmes and he wants to talk to you. Maybe he can help. I’m sure he can help keep you out of gaol.’ Mountain didn’t react, and I only had the one card left to play. It was risky. I lowered my voice so Kelly couldn’t hear. ‘Erica wants to help too.’
My dry throat had brought the sound out in a harsh croak that carried more than I’d intended. Kelly came back in a few long strides. ‘Why’s he whispering?’
‘He says Erica wants to help me.’
She laughed that cackling hoot again; it was a cruel, twisted sound full of pleasure at the thought of pain, and contempt for anything gentle. ‘Erica,’ she spat, ‘if I had her here now I’d take her yellow hide off.’
‘Yes,’ Mountain said. ‘You could. Where is she, Hardy?’
Looking up at the pair of them, I took a mental vow of silence. Nothing a rational person said could possibly make any kind of sense to them; they were travelling in a private dreamland signposted by drug fantasies and guided by obsessions that might have started in the womb. Kelly’s fingers were sliding up and down a long, thin cane, and she was looking at Mountain with a rapt expression. He glanced at her and then down at his own body; the change that came over his face made me draw in breath sharply. He seemed to be filled with revulsion. He ran his hands over his chest and clawed at his nipples and the thick, grizzled hair. Kelly watched him, breathing hard.
‘Have you slept with Erica, Hardy?’
I shook my head. ‘You’ve got bigger problems, Mountain. You’re headed for a padded cell, years of being treated like a child
‘He has, he has!’ Kelly almost shrieked. ‘He’s sucked her and she’s…’
Mountain jerked the cane out of her hand; he acted decisively and then seemed to go dreamy again. It was eerie to watch his body following his mind in its wafting fluctuations. He flexed the cane and newly-tightened muscles moved under the old slack skin on his upper body. He looked down at me and spoke slowly, dreamily. ‘I’ve finished the book.’
Kelly pouted. ‘You didn’t tell me.’
Mountain’s face seemed to dissolve. ‘I loaded up on speed and I blasted for thirty-six hours straight. I did the whole thing in thirty-six hours.’
‘How does it end?’ I said.
The face took on puzzlement briefly, then ecstasy. ‘Don’t know. Didn’t read it when I finished. I w
ant to celebrate.’
‘Come on!’ Kelly screamed. ‘Come on!’
Mountain stepped forward and lifted the cane. I shrank away, pressing my back against the wall. Kelly swivelled around on one spiked heel and Mountain moved with her. They bent over, undulating like jazz dancers, and he slashed her savagely across the buttocks.
I was staring and I might have made some sort of noise. Mountain came out of his near-trance long enough to look at me. ‘This is private,’ he growled. I saw his arm swing back and then I could see the hairs on his hand, and then it felt as if one of those giant metal balls demolishers use had bounced off my skull.
25
The drug cut through the pain or the pain cut through the drug, I don’t know which. I was in a state somewhere between consciousness and oblivion and slipping back and forwards between the two. I was closing my eyes a lot, because the things I thought I saw when I had them open were worse than the things I thought I saw when they were closed.
I heard a lot of yelling and opened my eyes. I saw two people moving around each other, hitting and screaming. I closed my eyes.
‘You bastard!’ she screamed as the whip hit her. She must have gathered saliva because I heard her spit it at him. He responded with a very hard slap.
‘You shit!’
Swish.
‘Turd! You shit-sucking turd!’
I kept my eyes closed. The shapes on the backs of my eyelids were definitely better, softer. But then my eyes stung and watered, and I had to look again. I’d seen people gripped by passions and lusts beyond their control before. In Malaya I’d seen men who were drunk on killing focus their whole being on the act. I’d seen opium smokers transfixed by the details of pipe preparation and tendrils of smoke in rooms that smelled of rat. I’d seen kleptomaniacs who trembled and wet themselves as they approached the objects they intended to steal, but who became coldly efficient at the critical moment. The passion of Kelly and Mountain was like that: an enclosed, excluding force field with its own laws and excruciating satisfactions.