‘Always the same corpse, is it?’ I affected nonchalance, draining the last of my cool coffee.
‘Heavens no, child, don’t be absurd. There’s a fresh one every week.’ She took the scones over to the oven, slid them in above the tarts. The tray rattled. ‘All shapes and sizes. Last week it was a nice looking young fellow in a tweed suit.’ She came back to the table and held out her cup; I poured more coffee. The poor thing was trembling, and it wasn’t the caffeine; she was scared stiff. My amusement turned to dismay. They kept promising an imminent cure for Alzheimer’s, but as far as I knew no effective treatments had come out of the pharmaceutical labs just yet. Firm kindness seemed to be the only available prescription. Tansy had done a lot for me.
‘What do you do with these bodies?’ Pretty difficult, humouring people’s delusions without making it obvious. And Tansy was sharp. But she took it straight.
‘They’re always gone in the morning. Sometimes a bit of blood, you know, but I wash the bath out with citric cleanser and you’d never know there’s been a body there.’
Her cup clattered faintly on its saucer. I was getting scared myself.
‘How long’s this been going on?’
‘It started just after you left for the bush. Let’s see—six of them so far. And another one tonight, I expect.’
I had seen some strange things in two countries, not the least of them mad Davers running about an Adelaide football field in cleated boots and his sister’s frilly dress, pursued by jocks, but so help me I’d never seen anything so weird or blood-curdling as quiet little Great-Aunt Tansy talking about corpses in her upstairs bath.
‘You’ve told the police, I suppose?’
She gave me a scornful look.
‘Think I want to get locked up? August, they’d have me committed to an insane asylum.’ Her trembling worsened. I was ashamed, because I was trying to work out how to find appropriate psychiatric help. You didn’t just drive your aged relative to the local clinic and ask them to run some tests on her sanity. Or did you? I was starting to think that I’d need to call Miriam and Itzhak in on this, and did some calculations. No, it was still only about six in the morning in Chicago. Let it ride, see what we work can out right here and now. Besides, incredibly enough, some part of me was beginning to trust her report—or rather, to assume that something strange was happening in the old house, something she’d misinterpreted rather unfortunately. I’d never known Aunt Tansy to be entirely wrong about anything important.
‘I’ll just go up and have a quick look,’ I said, and took our cups to the sink.
‘You be careful, August,’ she told me. To my immense surprise, she reached down and held out an old cricket bat that had been leaning against one table leg on her side. ‘Take this. Give the buggers a good whack for me.’
Instead of going upstairs immediately, I packed Great-Aunt Tansy off to bed early in her slightly sour old-lady-scented ground floor bedroom at the front of the house. Then she insisted on a final cup of cocoa for both of us, so I rolled my eyes to heaven and gave in.
I opened the bathroom door and gazed carefully around. Tiled walls, pale green, pleasantly pastel. It struck me as odd, peering about the large room, that for years I’d bathed here and made stinks without ever really looking at it. You take the familiar for granted. Two large windows, dark as night now, gave on to trimmed grass two full storeys below, and the fruit trees and organic vegetable plots of the back garden. Between them a pink wash-basin stood on a pedestal, set beneath a big antique wall-mounted mirror, at least a metre square, with a faint coppery patina, the silvering crazed at the edges. The claw-footed bath itself filled the left-hand corner, opposite a chain-flush toilet bowl of blue-patterned porcelain like a Wedgwood plate, next to the timber door with its ornate geometrical carvings. The toilet’s polished timber seat was down, naturally, and masked by a rather twee fluffy woollen cover that Tansy might well have knitted herself. A flower-patterned plastic screen hung on a steel rail around the bath, suspended from white plastic rings as large as bangles. Tansy did not approve of separate shower stalls; a bath was how she’d washed as a girl, and the wide old shower head was barely tolerated. I didn’t mind, I enjoyed a long soak as much as anyone three or four times my age.
I pulled the screen back on its runner and studied the bath, which of course was empty, fighting an urge to throw off my sweaty clothes and jump in for a steaming soak. The possibility that six corpses had shared that bath caused me to change my mind, even as I shook my head in self-mockery.
The place smelled wonderful, that’s what I was noticing most of all. Scalloped shells at bath and basin alike held a deep green translucent chunky oval of Pears soap, a green deeper than jade, and its aroma seemed to summon me back to childhood, when my mother washed me with the perfumed scents of cleanliness, then dried me briskly with a fluffy towel smelling of sunlight. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, caught myself sighing, opened them. Just an ordinary bathroom, really. Perhaps cleaner than most. Aunt Tansy was punctilious. The house was large and rambling but tidy; she ran a taut ship, with the help of a middle-aged ‘treasure’, Mrs Abbott, who came by twice a week and took over most of the vacuuming and dusting. But a ship insufficiently taut, apparently, to prevent a weekly visitation from the dead.
I glanced at my watch. Little wonder I was tired, it was nearly eleven. Great-Aunt Tansy was a woman of regular habits. Her invariable practice was to watch television while baking until the end of the Saturday night movie, clean her teeth, and be in bed by 11.30. It seemed her Saturday corpse must have put in its appearance by the time she switched the TV off at 11.15 or so, and was always gone when she rose for church at 8.30 on Sunday morning.
‘Madness,’ I muttered aloud, removed my heavy boots, and climbed into the bath, holding the bat in one hand. I got out again, lifted the woolly toilet seat, pissed for a while, flushed, left the seat up. This was my bathroom now, by default. I climbed back into the bath, cool on my feet through the socks. By leaving a gap between the plastic screen and the tiled wall, I was able to watch the closed and locked window through the small aperture. This meant sitting on the slippery rounded edge of the bath and stretching my neck into a ridiculous position, but I decided a few minutes discomfort for the cause was worth it. I thought of Tansy’s homely gesture in insisting on shared cocoa and wished for something equally mundane to calm my jitters. Half my friends in school would have lit up a cigarette, but the foul things made me sick, and besides, even if I smoked there’d be little gain in advertising my presence. I caught myself. To whom? This was a delusion, an old lady’s mad fancy.
The silence took on an eerie aspect. In her room below, Tansy might be sleeping by now, or perhaps lying awake, eyes wide and fixed on her dim ceiling. In the bathroom, no sound but my own breathing, not even the movement of wind in the trees below. I felt for a moment as if mine were the sole consciousness active in the whole world. A trickle of cold sweat ran down my back, something I’ve only ever read about. In the last few weeks I had driven a powerful bike across vast plains, much of the landscape nearly barren due to the El Nino drought and maybe the Greenhouse Effect, I’d once come close to a fall from the skidding machine under the hooves of a hundred spooked cattle, and that had scared me without getting in my way; that was fear in the service of sharpened instincts and self-preservation. In Tansy’s deathly quiet bathroom, I felt like wetting my pants.
My neck hurt. I got a sudden picture of how grotesque I looked, craning on the edge of the bath, which broke my mood. I laughed softly to myself and stood up, unkinking my spine, put my hand on the curtain to yank it back. The window nearest to me creaked ever so slightly, and I heard it open a little.
This was impossible. I was on the second floor of a tall old structure without a fire escape or any of that modern nonsense. I’d checked carefully to confirm my memory of the garden: no new lattices, the trees were all sensibly positioned metres away to prevent fire hazards, and Tansy’s ladder was inside the house, not
even outside in the locked shed. Dugald O’Brien was not raising a single wuffle in the night, let alone a bark at intruders. What the hell?
My heart slammed, and my mouth was dry. I pushed myself back against the edge of the bath, back corrugated by the tiles of the wall, stared with difficulty through the gap. The nearer window was quietly pushed all the way open. I heard a muffled scuffle and a naked female back appeared in the window frame. A long brown leg came over the window sill, probed for the floor. My boots were sitting in plain view beside the toilet. Well, lots of people leave their clothes scattered about. Not in Tansy’s house. But then these intruders would hardly be familiar with the nuances of Tansy’s housekeeping policies. Don’t be ludicrous, August, what would you know about what they know about? There’s a naked woman climbing in a second-storey window!
She stood in the bathroom, her back to me. I felt an impulse to reach out and give her the surprise of her life with a playful smack on that pertly rounded ass. Less offensive, no doubt, than whacking her with the cricket bat, which I still clutched in my right numb hand; that might be sensible, if unsporting, but it wouldn’t teach me anything about her bizarre activities. She was leaning out into the air, grunting and heaving, and suddenly hauled in the heavy front end of a very dead adult male through the window. The body stuck, shaking the window frame.
‘Don’t shove, Maybelline,’ she said in an angry tone. ‘You got the shoulders jammed.’
There was a tricky moment when the corpse withdrew a little, as she angled the shoulders, then surged back into the room to join the two of us. The far end of the corpse came into view, supported by an overweight muscular woman. Her biceps rippled impressively as she pushed the stiff hind quarters over the sill. The first woman let the carcass thud to the tiles. With a business-like grunt, Maybelline vaulted into the room. She was rather hairy, that much was obvious, her bikini line distinctly unfashionable. I thought I was drugged, or hallucinating, and then the first woman turned to face the bath, and I was sure of it.
Beauty like this you do not see, I told myself numbly, not in the real world. (That estimate was so astonishingly wrong, in such an astonishing way, that I simply note it here for the record.) Neither of the women was much older than me. University students, maybe, playing a preposterous prank. They moved about their macabre task with dispatch and grace, making a minimum of noise.
‘Help me with his clothes, loon.’
Inside half a minute they’d stripped him of his shoes, suit and underwear. No attempt to search his jacket for billfold, nor to riffle his pockets. These were not pranksters, and certainly not simple thieves. He was blubbery and covered in hair about the back, shoulders and chest in the Mediterranean fashion; his hair-style had been a comb-over, which flopped repulsively to one side as they jostled him. I saw a small black hole in his left breast, and some thick, oozing blood. He had been shot through the heart. My own heart was ready to expire from overwork. The tough little wench took the murdered man under his armpits and hoisted him toward the bath.
‘Loon, get the feet.’
She wasn’t saying loon, it was more like ‘lyoon’. Lune, the Moon seen from France?
Wait for it, I thought. Surpr-ise! Beautiful Lune grasped the edge of the plastic screen, threw it back along its runner. I stood up fast, bowed with a sweep of my right hand, and stepped out of the bath.
Both women stood petrified. In that moment of silence, stocky Maybelline’s grip failed in terror, and the corpse hit the tiles again with a flat, unpleasant thump. ‘Fuck!’ she said, and shot through the window. I’ll never again underestimate the speed of a corpulent human. Lune gave me a look of lovely, utter confusion, dropped the man’s legs, bolted for the window.
‘Sorry,’ I said, and slammed the cricket bat down on the sill. She jerked back her fingers, stared at me in outrage, open-mouthed, and flew at me like a cat. There was nothing to grab of her but skin and hair. I was brought up nicely never to strike a woman. The corpse was leering up at us. I fell over on top of him, bringing Lune down as well, pinning her arms. She smelled really, really nice.
‘Good god,’ she said, ‘get off me, you oaf. You stink! How long is it since you had a bath?’
It was so terribly unfair I just burst out laughing and let go of her.
Big mistake.
Lune had me in a headlock a second after I’d released her. She smacked the top of my head against the toilet bowl. I yowled and got free, stumbled to my feet, head ringing, slammed down the open window and locked it. In the night beyond, as the pane came down, I saw no sign of Maybelline or the crane that must have hoisted two women and a dead man up to this floor. I locked the window and the cricket bat caught me behind the right knee.
‘Ow! Fuck! Will you stop that!’ I yelped. As I turned I saw her in the big mirror, bat raised for a lethal stroke at my bruised skull. She was off balance for a moment as she brought it down; I sidestepped, kicked one leg of the corpse sideways to catch her next step. Lune fell into my arms. I was shockingly aroused, and tussled her into a sitting position on the lavatory. The seat was up, and she cried out indignantly as her bare backside hit the cold rim. One leg came up and her foot caught me in the thigh; something flashed, and I went shudderingly cold. From the heated rack I grabbed a thick, fluffy, warm towel and shoved it in her face, grasping her right foot and dragging it up so that she slid forward on the lavatory, banging her spine. There was a small row of silvery hieroglyphs carved into the instep of her foot.
She saw my shock, failed to recognise its nature.
‘The mark of the beast,’ she said sarcastically.
‘Are you going to stay put, or do I have to hurt you? I’d rather not hurt you,’ I said. Then: ‘What?’
‘My ID number,’ she said, gibingly. ‘My use-by date. That’s what you think, I suppose? Another stupid mutilation fad.’
I wasn’t thinking anything of the sort, but it was a useful suggestion.
‘Yeah, well, it’s preferable to a bolt through your tongue, I suppose.’ I have nothing against body jewellery, but it seemed sensible to follow her lead up the garden path. I had the cricket bat by this point, and sat down opposite her on the edge of the bath. ‘How did you get in? Who’s this?’ I nudged the dead guy who lay with one leg stuck out.
‘The world is not as it seems,’ she told me. She had wrapped herself in the towel, dropped toilet seat and cover and sat poised on it. I had never seen anyone so gloriously lovely, not at the movies, not on television, certainly not in this slightly down at heel suburb.
‘No shit,’ I said.
‘What do they call you?’
‘They call me August, Lyoon. They call me that because it’s my name.’
‘You’ve read Charles Fort, August?’
‘No.’ What, now we’ll have a Reading Group? I glanced at the locked windows, waiting nervously for the backup troops to come barging in, maybe waving copies of the collected works of Charles Fort, whoever he was.
‘He said, “I think we’re property.” And you are, you poor goose, you and all your fellow humans. Property is what you are, all six billion of you.’
I didn’t laugh, it was too depressing for laughter. Aunt Tansy downstairs drifting in senile delusions, this gorgeous person upstairs heading for the same funny farm. No, wait. Tansy wasn’t delusional. There was a corpse, and so presumably one had been delivered on each of the previous six Saturdays. Delivered by naked women, for all I knew, then disappeared in the early hours of Sunday morning. It didn’t bear thinking about.
‘So now that you’ve told me,’ I said, ‘I suppose you’re going to have to kill me.’
Lune was horrified. ‘Certainly not, what sort of immoral—You get your memory deleted.’
Someone had been priming Hollywood. Memory wipe—what was that, Men in Black, right? And people appearing out of thin air, or in this case through an impossibly high bathroom window, that went all the way back to The Twilight Zone. How come the scriptwriters and directors and actors didn�
��t get their memories obliterated? There’s always an escape clause in these mad conspiracy theories, and always a logical hole large enough to drive a tank through. Still—
‘I know it’s hard for you to listen to this,’ Lune said. I thought I saw tears welling in her eyes. ‘You’re so brave and foolish, you humans. You invent one absurd creed and philosophy after another to persuade yourselves that you are the elect of some friendly deity. I’ll say it bluntly: you’re just a backdrop. You’re the setting against which we play our parts.’
I shrugged. ‘You’re deluded,’ I said. ‘I’ve read that Phil Dick guy. He was crazy too, by the end.’
The air burned. I leaped so my back covered the door. Lune stayed where she was, perched on the toilet. She looked elegant, slightly sad. The same locked window blazed with blue flickering intensity, paint crackling. The glass crazed, vanished like steam. Maybelline shoved her stocky form through the gap, warily pointing a shiny steel tube at me, balancing herself with the other hand. She edged around the corpse on the floor, stood near Lune. I waited with my mouth open, expecting a blast of blue to swallow me down.
‘You don’t have to kill me,’ I started to gabble. ‘You’re from a UFO, so you can take me back to your own planet, I’ve always wanted to travel, Illinois was interesting but space would be better. Roomier.’ They stared at me. ‘All right, not a spacecraft. You’re from the future, it’s a time machine outside the window, right? This guy would have been the next Hitler, so you’re cleaning up the past before it contaminates your own time, I can live with that, your information is undoubtedly better than mine.’
‘I told him they’re all property,’ Lune explained to her associate. ‘I think it’s unhinged him.’
‘What? You stupid bitch, now we’ll have to erase his medium term memory. The disposer will not be pleased.’
‘We’ve got to delete his short term recall anyway, Maybelline, use your brains. I felt we owed him an explanation. There’s something these humans use called “politeness” that I think you could damn well try yourself.’
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