by Greg McLean
Yet despite where all that had gotten him, Mick drops his weight and swings: a hard unchecked punch that’d do damage if Cutter didn’t step back easily – and then suddenly the shooter’s behind him and Mick freezes at the cold blade at his throat. He can feel the point straining his skin.
Cutter in his ear: ‘Careful who you go up against, boy,’ his voice wrong somehow, chilling. ‘’Cause ya try that again I’ll disappear you, real smart. And no one will ever know. They’ll thunk you gone running back to Queensland, tail between yer legs like the bitchdog you are.’ He nicks the tip in and Mick flinches at the pain, then the shooter’s gone and Mick stands in the stillness, with his anger useless in his hands and a trickle of blood running down his neck.
That weekend marks a month since the whorehouse visit and as the others prepare to head back, Mick sits quiet in the mess hall. Even though Jock’s a shell of his former self, not saying much to anyone anymore, his cronies Pete and Rodge laugh as they walk past Mick. ‘You comin’?’ Pete asks. ‘Nah, that’s right. Ya couldn’t cum, could ya?’
Mick glares at him and Mercer and Opey sheepishly duck out. He follows alone and sits wordlessly in the car. The others looked surprised, but don’t say anything, and soon they’re off and the beer’s flowing, and he chugs down the bottles and ends up singing ferociously with the rest of them. Even that cow-rooter Opey.
He’s hammered by the time they get to Wills and he stumbles out of the car and beelines into the pub. The big group grab a table and Cutter stands amongst them crowing, as the cut on Mick’s neck flares with shame. But Mick doesn’t give anyone a chance to say anything and downs a hit of Scotch and heads for the back. The others roar approval and toast him, and the rest of the drinkers in the pub crane their heads to see what the commotion is.
Mick ignores the noise, the burning gaze of Cutter on his back, the half-jeers and half-cheers of the table – is he really gonna do it? What if he runs again? Hope he’s paying this time! He pushes through the shoulders to the women at the back door. They’re still setting up the chairs, not expecting anyone this early, and don’t see him coming. The older moll has her back to him and he fixes on its rolls, her arms, ready to drag her through to the rooms. His knife hot against the small of his back, scrubbed clean but still burning with the memory of the salesman’s blood. The sounds fade around and they’ll be through the doors before anyone realises, before anyone can think to stop him. After that, it won’t matter anymore. She’ll have paid for what she did to him and the others will never laugh at him again. Even Cutter will fear him.
He reaches out to grab her, seeing nothing but her fat, disgusting back —
And then someone steps in front, gently takes his arm and steers him past. It’s the younger whore, the one with the scar on her face, and he’s so confused he lets her pull him along. ‘Forget about her,’ she says, and they’re through the doors and someone laughs behind him and says, ‘Rose wins first pull o’ the night!’ and a couple of the women clap.
The girl leads him down the corridor and into one of the manky rooms. He hears her shut the door behind them as he stands in the centre of the room, staring unseeing at the wall, fists clenched, heart still pumping with thwarted rage.
The mattress squeaks. ‘Why don’t you sit next to me?’ the girl says, but he doesn’t move. The air seems dry with his anger. The light tightens his eyes. He can feel her studying him, eyes crawling over him like flies. Then she decides something and leans across the bed, pulls a sheet from a pile. A harsh ripping and he looks up to see her tearing strips of material. She deftly wraps her wrists, one then the other, finally pulling the fabric tight with her teeth. She steps through the loop of her arms so her hands are locked behind. Then she lies back on the bed.
‘Come to me.’
In a daze he steps towards the bed. Her dress rides up and she isn’t wearing underwear. He begins to look down, his gaze drawn.
‘No. Look at me.’
Her voice firm with command. Her pale eyes locked onto his. The scar catches the light and he can’t look away from her face.
‘Kneel between my legs.’
He sinks onto the mattress between her knees. Her heat radiates through his trousers and into him.
‘Undo your pants,’ she says and he doesn’t know why but he does what she says, opens his trousers and springs free, seeking her out. ‘Now fuck me. Hard.’
He hesitates, looking for a condom and she snarls at him.
‘I said look at me! Put your hands here and here,’ she motions to the mattress either side with her head, ‘and put your weight on me.’
He plants his hands next to her shoulders and the mere movement of bending forward sinks him into her. She’s tight yet slick with wet, gripping him as he pushes in and she swallows him to the hilt and his balls slap against her arse and his vision speckles with light. It’s unlike anything he’s ever felt. He can barely hold himself back. The room begins to swim. Her lips caress his ear: ‘Harder.’
He looks down at her blazing eyes and he feels that surge of anger still within him and he slams home this time and she groans beneath. Bucks her hips up and their pelvises crack into each other. The impact of flesh like a slap. ‘Harder!’
He pulls all the way out and rams into her, wanting to bruise her with his hipbones, flay her arse with his balls, push himself up inside her, through her guts. And the sheer pleasure of fucking takes over and he thrusts like a machine, and he’s getting close, so close, and she begins to melt beneath him, his vision blurring with the pressure building, and it’s not the girl anymore beneath him but the older prostitute, then not even her, his prone mother, and his lips draw back baring his teeth and he raises his hand to hit that face beneath him, to pummel it as he’s pummelling her below.
‘No! Hands here!’ The girl looks straight into him and he blinks at her from above, still thrusting. He lowers his fist, places it beside her head for balance.
And as he does so she begins to arch beneath him, her hands tied tight under her pressed into the bed for support. Her eyes compress and she moans low and long like an animal, and then she’s slamming back, and he balances above watching as if from afar, his own sensations forgotten for a moment as he looks at her in wonder.
Then he feels himself pulling down through his gut and out his cock and he draws back, head leaned towards the ceiling and she kicks him away and scoots back out from under him and they both watch as he jets long arcs of cum across the bed towards her bared sex, falls just short. He continues to thrust against the air then the spasms recede and he rocks back onto his haunches and sits looking at her. The lines of semen on the sheet like snailtrails pointing at her.
Then she rolls her legs over the edge of the bed, offers her hands to him. ‘Untie me,’ she says, softer now, and he looks at her, sitting vulnerable there. The anger’s been sucked out of him, the under-developed muscles in his legs twinging with the exertion. Her eyes hard as she commands him: ‘Now.’
He steps behind her, shaking a little, and undoes her hands, then stands motionless as she crumples up the bedsheets and splays herself at the sink wiping between her legs, back to him. She pulls her dress down and turns, comes and helps with his pants, and leads him to the door. She stays his hand when he reaches for his wallet.
At the end of the hallway she passes him a slip of paper, and pushes him gently through the door, following through and heading off to her table. She doesn’t look back.
He sits in a daze the rest of the evening. Doesn’t even know if Cutter’s in the same room. He barely registers any of the men around him as they laugh and make fun of him: the drained puppy-dog look on his face. But no one calls him Scareda’cunt and he feels for a brief moment a calmness and order to the universe that he realises he’s been seeking ever since he’d run from home.
Even though his father hadn’t forced Mick’s confession, a seed of doubt had been planted. Mick didn’t know it yet but his childhood in Erebli would soon come to an end.
The blood of the innocent man began to flood his father’s mind and Mick would come upon him, staring, haunted, in a room alone or outside near the car. His father would look at him slow, then away, and continue with what he was doing.
Mick started hoarding stuff he might need if he were on his own: a few cans of meat, an old compass, some jerrycans of water. His sense of danger outweighed his fear of his father’s tracking skills. Yet his dad never said anything. One night Mick had gone out to the artesian tank for water and his father had been standing there in the dark. At first the light of his cigarette had been the only thing betraying him in the gloom, and then Mick saw the axe resting in one hand as he stared at him. Dad? Mick asked, frozen at the pump, and his father just turned away. Go back inside, son, the man said, heading to the woodpile, and Mick had bolted.
The more he thought about his father staring at him in the dark as if weighing up his guilt, the axe heavy in his hands, the more unsettled Mick became. Until then he’d been wondering if he could confess to his parents, tell them his sister had fallen and it had been an accident. That he’d made up the story about the man at the lake because he was afraid. But how could he explain hitting her with the cane when he didn’t understand it himself?
He realised then his father would kill him if he ever knew the truth. And he’d find out eventually. Perhaps knew it already, in the heart of him.
Mick waited for a night his father left on a week-long shoot, needing all the time he could to put distance between them. He had his swag sitting on his bed, adrenaline and fear coursing through him, and then his mother called him to her, wanting company. As pathetic as she was, he’d almost decided to leave without speaking to her, knowing it would pain him to see her one last time. Yet when she called to him he automatically walked in, as he had always done.
She’d at least pushed up off the mattress and was sitting on the edge of the bed. She smiled when he came in and her eyes were clear. There weren’t even any empty bottles on the bedside. ‘Hi, baby,’ she said and patted the seat next to her. ‘I might make some dinner. What do you think? Just need a moment to get up.’
‘I can make it,’ he said quickly, thinking of her walking past his swag sitting on his bed. ‘I was going to anyway.’
‘You do too much,’ she said and patted his hand. Hers was shaking with the DTs, as his father called it. Whatever that was. ‘When your sister left . . . I wasn’t there for you. Neither was your father. But it’ll be better now, you’ll see. I’m gonna stop drinking. Bring you up like I should’ve.’ She smiled at him, brushed away a tear. ‘We have to keep living.’
He sat there hushed. Could only wish his father felt the same thing.
Then she hugged him to her and he almost told her then – almost blurted the whole thing out. She’d had such faith in him all along and he didn’t deserve it. Would she still hold him if she knew what he was truly like?
Or would she look at him like his father did?
He had to leave. He’d let her cook for him, let her think everything was okay. Then he’d escape later and never have to see the look of betrayal and horror on her face.
That would have been better than the look of bottled fury on his father’s face later, when he appeared in the front doorway as Mick was making good his plan.
Mick’s swag was in one hand. His father had caught him about to run – must’ve suspected what he was going to do and hung back from his trip.
‘I knew it,’ his father rasped. ‘I knew if I come back I’d catch you.’
Mick slung the pack over his shoulder and back-pedalled into his mother’s room, where she’d been startled by the sound of his father’s voice. ‘What are you —?’ His father came fast into the room, snarling, and she jumped up between them, tottering on her elephant legs. ‘Jim, wait —!’
He slapped her across the head. She crashed into the sidetable and slid to the ground in a giant puddle, as Mick kicked back over the bed. He frantically jimmied the window as the huge shadow swept over him. He would have been done for too except his mother reached out with a clutching hand and snagged his father’s trouser leg. The big man tripped and caught the edge of the bed frame.
His father limped backwards a few steps, his knee gouged by the rusted steel, and Mick was shocked to see him crying now: his face torn not only with anger but disbelief. ‘Don’t you understand, woman? He did it! He killed her!’ His mother sat blinking, looked over at Mick without understanding.
Mick prised up the window and shimmied out as his father reeled. He was halfway across the darkened yard and nearly in the trees before the flywire door crashed open and his old man stumbled out like some ogre in the dark and raised his gun.
A whizzing slap stung past him. The sound of the gunshot crack a split-second later, and Mick ducked in terror and kept running. He looked back and saw a shadow behind his father as he aimed the gun again, and then his mother swung the heavy fire poker at his back and his father lurched forward before spinning and aiming the gun at her.
Mick hesitated on the edge of the trees, but his father just reversed the stock and clubbed her and she crumpled. Then he turned back, hollering at Mick the whole time, his voice breaking with grief, with betrayal, with an anger so deep Mick could feel its force even as he ran again from it. And then the night swallowed him and he kept running, knowing if he ever stopped his old man would only be a step behind.
5
It’s a week before he can take the ute again. Opey stays away from him most of that time and Mick’s happy to keep it that way. Cutter he avoids like the clap.
He pulls up to a shithole farmhouse on the edge of town and checks the directions the girl had given him. The small shack’s weatherboards need replacing and the driveway’s just a corrugated dust track ringed by trees on one side. There’s no porch either – only a skeletal rotted framework spidering above – and the heat of the day blazes down at him as he knocks on the door.
Soft footsteps come from inside and the girl appears out of the cool darkness in a light slip of a dress. Her face is fresh and without makeup, her scar the only adornment.
She regards him wordlessly for a moment, then steps aside and lets him in.
Inside it’s clean enough – the furniture upholstered, floors swept. But there’s a feeling of disrepair about the whole place, of years of neglect. She shrugs. ‘Just bought it back. I’m restoring it.’
He stands tall and uncomfortable in the kitchen. She smiles.
‘No one’s watching here,’ she says, taking his hand and sitting him at the table. ‘Just you and me.’
He takes off his hat and watches her make tea. Her body is like water beneath her dress as she moves around the small kitchen. ‘Is Rose your real name?’
‘Don’t think it would be?’
‘I dunno.’
‘You think we have made-up names? Like “Boobies Galore”? “Fanny McNorks”?’
He smiles, embarrassed at her frank humour. ‘Maybe.’
‘When I was younger the other kids used to make fun of my name, maybe because we didn’t have any money. They called me Petunia or Patagonia, because they said Rose was too pretty for me.’
‘But you are.’
She places the teapot on the table, traces the line on her face. ‘Even with this?’
He nods, blushing.
She pauses, considering him. Then shrugs off her dress there in the middle of the room. He stares at her lithe nakedness: her small peaked breasts, the narrowness of her ribcage and waist sweeping down to the swell of her hips, the light patch of hair in the V of her legs. Her stomach is ribbed with scars: long knife cuts and small angry half-circles of cigarette burns. She moves a hand over her flesh as if she could smooth away the shiny dents with her touch.
‘My old boyfriend used to mark me. Said he wanted to show I was his.’ She doesn’t look up, her voice soft. ‘Still think I’m pretty?’
He swallows. ‘You’re beautiful.’ His voice a rasp.
She hesita
tes, then takes his hand and steps into him. The ridges are like furrows in the earth, natural, comforting somehow. Her heat, her smell explodes into him.
The bedroom’s surprisingly big and there’s an open space at the foot of the bed. The floor’s scuffed and he’s looking at that when she directs him to the eyehook in the roof. A thin rope coils on the polished vanity and she nods at it as she raises her arms. ‘Tie me.’ Her breasts rise with the movement, sit suspended against her chest.
He stares stupidly at the rope, then at the eyehook again. Picks it up and slowly ties an end around her wrists. Her eyes on him the whole time, her leg against his. He’s able to just reach up and slot the other end through the hook, pulls it taut. She rises on her toes, gasps slightly. Her breasts jiggle and the scars on her stomach stretch in little creases.
‘Go to the dresser.’
He hesitates, confused at her issuing orders even though she’s tied up. A small stiletto knife rests in an open silk-padded box in the top drawer. He stands looking at it a long moment, mouth dry. Its blade as sharp as the one he’d plunged into the salesman. ‘I trust you,’ Rose says.
He looks at her stretched long in the middle of the bedroom watching him with those eyes, and though there should be fear she barely blinks. Doesn’t even glance once at the knife somehow already in his hand.