by Zane Lovitt
Then she peers at me over the glasses that are back on her face. ‘Lucky I don’t run you out of here, too. All that carrying on. You got a spare?’
‘A what?’
‘Spare tyre.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Else you’ll need a tow to Nigel’s.’
‘Okay.’
‘He’s over in Severington but, so you’ll need a tow. In the morning.’
‘Okay. Someone’s going to meet us here. Tonight. We’ll figure out what to do after that.’
‘Better tell ‘em to behave.’ It takes several shuffling steps for her to rotate and face the motel office again. She lumbers off, the shotgun swinging by her side. ‘Had enough idiots for one night.’
There’s no light on in room five so I assume Troy’s asleep. I don’t know how, given all the noise from outside, but my experience of teenagers is that they can sleep anywhere. When my eyes adjust to what is more or less pitch darkness I see there’s no one lying on the bed.
‘Troy?’
‘Yeah?’ A bored drawl from the bathroom. There’s the dimmest red glow leaking out from under the door.
I knock. ‘Troy?’
‘Fucking what?’ He’s just as annoyed as ever.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m taking a bath.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Whatever.’
I reach to the wall and switch on the living-room halogens, but he says, ‘Leave the lights off.’
‘Why?’
There’s a silence in which I can almost hear him shrug. ‘I’m setting a mood.’
I switch off the light and push the bathroom door open. My eyes go immediately to the source of the red glow—Troy has laid the red cellophane from the car, the envelope that contained the rental company’s tidy bag, over the bathroom light and he’s used chewing gum to hold it in place. The entire space is a spectrum of deep reds and blacks. Troy lies in a full bath, his head and naked shoulders surrounded by a pale raft of bubbles. He barely looks at me. It’s too dark to see steam rising from the water but I can feel the heat.
‘You know…’ he says, trying to sound conversational. ‘They wanted to get rid of the school darkroom. Because photography is all, like, digital now. But my mum fought for it. She’s the one who said the school should keep it.’
I linger at the door with nothing to say. Troy’s hair is still dry and his face is drawn like he’s been crying. Though maybe it’s just the poor light in here.
He says, ‘I used to go in there sometimes. I liked the smell of the chemicals. I spent a lot of lunchtimes in there.’
I glance around at the darkroom he’s sitting in now.
‘How is my mother?’ he asks, because he’s clever.
‘She’s on her way.’
Troy blinks at me. ‘She’s coming here?’
‘Yep. Both of them.’
‘When’ll they get here?’
‘Before it gets light, probably.’
‘Fucking excellent.’ Troy shakes his head and smiles sarcastically, then tilts his head back against the red tiles. The white ceiling is red and the white walls are red. This room is like a submarine movie. I slouch to the toilet and sit down on the lid, catch my face in the mirror above the sink. My scar is more pronounced in the red light.
‘Why don’t you like to talk about your job?’ Troy’s grin is gone. He’s suddenly serious.
‘I don’t know. I don’t care if I talk about it, really.’
I unscrew the bottle cap and shrug. ‘Anyone’s job gets to them after a while. What I did for a living…You kind of become an expert on the shitty things people do to each other.’
‘Right. Things like abducting people from their hotels. And taking them places they don’t want to go?’
I smile. ‘Yeah, that’s right.’
He nods slowly, still watching me.
‘I know you’re, like, doing your job. I’m not cut with you.’
His eyes seem to have thawed. The darkroom setting has relaxed him. Perhaps we can be friends for the very short term. Or at least not enemies.
‘Good,’ is all I say.
‘If your work was so bad, tell me something horrible. Tell me a really horrible story.’
I wag my head. ‘I’m going to bed. And so are you. You’re tired.’
‘I’m not tired. I can’t sleep when I take Lexaprine. I’ll be awake for ages.’
If that isn’t tiredness in his eyes, maybe it’s resignation. Probably because his parents are on their way and there’s nothing for either of us to do about it.
Leo is coming. The police are coming. Paul and Belinda are coming. All I have to do is sit here and see who arrives first. Just a few more hours at most. After that, this will all be over and nothing else will matter. I don’t even have to go back to Melbourne. I could just lie down in this motel room and I’d never have to get up again.
‘You want a story?’ I say.
‘Tell me the worst thing…’
‘There are lots of worsts.’
‘Choose one.’
I try to identify some criteria. At any given moment I have a dozen bad memories bumping around my head, looking for an exit.
‘There’s a thousand of them…’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘Just pick one and tell it to me.’
He rests his head back against the tiles, gives me an encouraging smile. He wants a bedtime story for while he falls asleep, and he wants it to be proof that the world is as miserable as he is. The opposite of a bedtime story. I go to turn the cap on the bottle but there’s no cap there. It’s in my hand, waiting for me to drink. When I do I feel the unconscious stab of knowing there are only two or three mouthfuls left. Then I peer up at the ceiling and I wonder what I’m going to say.
5
I’m staring at the tiles between my feet. The bottle has been empty for a while now, hanging from my hand low enough that it travels only an inch or two when I place it on the floor. The sound of my voice as I’ve been speaking has bounced around the room like a PA system, echoing back my words. Now it’s finally quiet.
I look at Troy and he’s asleep, so I guess his drugs didn’t keep him awake like he thought they would. He might have been like that for a while, I don’t know. He mustn’t have heard all of my story. I want to wake him just to tell him he didn’t miss much.
The police haven’t come. Leo hasn’t come. Belinda, I suppose, is on her way. Might as well go and lie down, wait for them like that. I’m wondering if I should wake Troy up or leave him sleeping in the bath when I realise something’s wrong.
Something in his expression, or his position. Something in the stillness of the water he’s soaking in.
I stand up to look closer.
My bones crack and then I know what it is. It’s the water. I can’t see through it. Everything in this room is bouncing back the red from the red light, but the water isn’t just red.
It’s opaque.
I clutch at the cellophane over the light dome and though it’s only stuck with chewing gum I have to claw at it to pull it free. The room brightens. I squint. The sudden whiteness of the tiles stuns me but the bath doesn’t turn white. It stays red. Troy is lying in a bath of red.
I step closer, reach and feel the chill of his skin, searching for a pulse. The water that was once so hot has gone stone cold. Troy’s corpse has chilled it like an ice block. I press two fingers against his damp adam’s apple and wait.
Is that the ragged thread of a heartbeat? It’s the thinnest pulse you can have if you have one.
I inhale. Stare. Curse under my breath.
On the steel soap shelf there’s a razor blade: he must have done it before I even came in, while I was outside with Leo. After he stuck the cellophane over the light because he can’t stand the sight of blood. Then he lay back and listened to me as I blabbed away. Sank into my bedtime story, dying all the while.
And it’s exactly what I asked him not t
o do. This kind of suicide falls squarely in the category of ones that require action. This isn’t Troy going upstairs and leaving me drinking in an overpriced hotel bar. Everyone’s going to ask about what I do next, and there will be people who want to prove that I didn’t do enough.
I pick the bottle up off the floor, like the bright new light in here will reveal one last mouthful of gin. And though I knew it was empty before I picked it up I hurl the bottle through the doorway and it lands softly somewhere in the dimness, denying me even the satisfaction of a smash against a pine wall.
Listening now. If Leo or the police or Belinda arrive, then helping Troy can be their problem. But there’s no sound. No approaching car, no footsteps. No wind or birds or insects. Outside might as well be outer space.
I blow a sigh at Troy. His skin is even paler than it used to be, bloodless, almost translucent. His eyes are gently closed and there’s a glisten of drool at his lips like he’s sleeping. I roll up my sleeves and plunge my hands into the blood-water, get a grip on his thin legs and under his neck, yank at him and almost topple into the bath myself. My second attempt raises him from the water. I feel how weightless he is, put him down on the bathroom tiles.
He’s wearing underwear, standard dress for a cry for help. There are two cuts on his right wrist and three on his left, weakly oozing blood. There are old cuts on his arms too, on his biceps and thighs, some a week or two old, some years.
For a few seconds I consider using the fresh towel on the rack to stop the bleeding but I know I won’t be able to tie it properly. I’m already soaked with pink water and I trudge out to the closest bed, pull off the oversheet. I bite into one edge, trying to tear at the overlocking there, chew and chew and fidget with the spit-soaked hem and finally get a footing. Tear a long strip. For the second strip it occurs to me to use the razor blade, which makes the process easier.
With the two lengths of white cotton sheet I wrap Troy’s wrists, pulling the knots as tight as I can.
I check for a pulse again. Can’t tell. Clasp my hands over where I think Troy’s heart is and give five good pumps. They do nothing, but more than five feels like too many so I slap his face, lean over and shout his name into his ear.
Nothing.
I pump his heart again, put my ear to his mouth and try to sense breathing. Maybe I feel something but I can’t be sure. I pump again, shout ‘Wake up,’ listen for breathing. Still can’t tell. I clamp his nose shut, place my lips on his blue ones and breathe. The air goes somewhere, but Troy doesn’t seem to react. I pump his heart again, breathe again. Pump again. Nothing.
I stand up, look around the bathroom and walk into the main room and turn on the light and look around some more, as if there’s a solution to the problem around the place and it’s just waiting for me to notice it.
I go to the door, outside, trudge along the buzzing path of fluoros, watch the road in case a car happens by.
As I approach the motel office I see that the lights are off inside. She must have packed it in, gone to sleep somewhere beyond the office. I hammer my knuckles against the glass.
‘Hey,’ I yell, using my cracks on the door to emphasise the rhythm of my voice. ‘Hey! Help! I need help!’
There’s no response.
‘Hello! Help me, please! Please wake up!’
Silence. No light. The excitement of waving a shotgun around must have taken it out of her. If she’s in there at all.
‘Someone’s dying! Can you wake up, please!’
I linger, hopeful she’s slowly rousing, hopeful she can take over this problem like she did the last one. But nothing happens. I trundle back to room five and Troy is still dead on the floor.
I take the oversheet from the other bed and lay it out on the carpet, drag Troy’s body onto it, bundle him up and lift him, carry him outside. Then I’m halfway through the balancing act of unlocking the car door and gripping Troy’s body when I remember Leo Spaske stuck a knife in the rear tyre.
Looking at it now, the tyre is slumped flat and the car lists. I kick the passenger door and shout at it, turn away before I kick it again.
An ambulance would take an hour or more, if it came at all. Over the hill I can still see the white haze from the lights of the hospital. It won’t have anything approaching an emergency room but it might have someone in a uniform who’ll take this child out of my hands.
I shift the weight in my arms and set off across the carpark to the highway.
Troy’s eyes are still shut and he’s still unresponsive, even to the cold air that must be even colder given that he’s naked and wet. The white sheets are as pink as his underwear. Trudging out of the motel light into the dark of the highway, I know I’m wasting my time. I’m kidding myself that Troy has a pulse. You only have to lose a litre of blood to die from it and that much must have already pooled in my jacket pockets.
Starlight is all there is to see by on the highway and there’s just enough of it to bounce off the reflectors on the road, black-grey squares showing me the path.
Probably Troy didn’t intend to die. He let me into the bathroom, had me sit there and talk, all the while expecting me to notice that he was slipping away. Which I didn’t. Troy was counting on me to save him. Instead I just drank and talked.
I walk faster.
Something is trickling down my legs and into my socks, squelching out a small fart sound with every step. I’m starting to feel the weight of Troy now despite all the blood he’s lost. One of his arms has broken free of the sheet and it dangles, tapping on my hip with each squelch. A macabre one man band.
Really, the worst thing I’ve ever seen is a man with his head so far up his own arse that a boy died right in front of him and he didn’t even notice. The story I should have told Troy is the story of right now. It’s the kind of story that usually gets me melancholy and drunk. Only it was being melancholy and drunk that made it happen.
I wish Demetri were here. I’d tell him this is why I won’t reapply for my licence. Because this happens.
Only Demetri isn’t here. I’m alone on a black road and there’s nothing to drink. Nothing to do but get this package to the hospital. And it’s taking too long. I force my legs to give more with each step, to move faster, to solve this problem sooner. Despite the strain in my knees I’m jogging now and looking over my shoulder in the hope that there are lights approaching.
There are not.
The first time I checked for a pulse there was one and I’m not kidding myself about that and maybe I was too impatient when I checked again because I was flustered because Troy was dead. I’m not kidding myself that he might survive this and then I wouldn’t have killed a fifteen-year-old using only my self-importance and then the worst thing I’ve ever seen one person do to another person won’t be what I’ve just done out here in this place but fuck it. If I were Troy I’d want to die too so who am I to stop him and maybe it wasn’t a demand for attention and maybe he just wanted to slip away under the red light so he couldn’t see his own blood and I’d be a fool to rush him to the hospital so fuck it. I’d be just a sucker to run this skinny corpse to a farmers’ hospital where they’ll tell me he’s been dead too long and didn’t want to live and look at yourself all covered in blood and out of breath because you thought you stood a chance do you really think you stand a chance, John?
A shiver crashes over me and the muscles in my thighs yawn with pain and my calves cramp up but I can keep going because that’s all I can do I have to go to the hospital so then I can nod along with everyone in there when they tell me I did everything I could to save Troy when really I was only saving myself and I want them to think I did my best and my right calf is on fire and there’s pink liquid soaking through my sleeves and chafing my stomach and the undersides of my elbows and they’ll all think I was trying to save the boy when really I’m only saving myself I’m not trying to save Troy I’m not trying to save Troy but look at me look at me my knees are burning through Troy’s blood is acid and it’s burning into
all of my body and there’s more acid on my face but it isn’t blood and I have to blink it away but it doesn’t stop but it’s too dark that radiation shiver hasn’t stopped I’ll do anything I don’t know how long it takes to die from but this has to keep going these knees are burning through but they have to keep I wish Demetri were I’ll do anything the worst story won’t be me it won’t be talking about me and there he was bleeding and there was me talking about me and not even seeing that black shapes move past me the dead roadkill on the road just blotches because there’s nothing to see but the white glow over the hill is brighter now because it’s closer I can tell it’s closer I’ll do anything not every story is about John Dorn not every story is John Dorn but it was because that’s I’ll do anything I promise I’ll get my licence back if we just say that Troy will and the light from the hospital breaks over the hill and out of nowhere there’s the town hall clock and it’s ringing out and it’s sounding the alarm and I can see it and I can see the road and Troy and his eyes are shut there’s something squeezing my arms but it’s just my arms I’m blinking and squeezing out the liquid from my eyes because I need to see my knee has burned through but I’m running and the bell is pounding and the shiver’s still I’ll get my job back I promise I promise there’ll be a thousand more stories I promise if we can just say that Troy will if we can just say then I promise there’ll be a thousand more stories and if we can just say that Troy will then I promise there’ll be a thousand more stories but this time none of them will be about John Dorn.