by Alan Baxter
“I guess she does it tough, looking after Mum and all that.”
“I thought you said you did most of it,” Josh said.
“Yeah, well, we both do. Mum has a lot of problems. And Maddy works too.”
They fell into silence for a while, except a Whoop! when Zack completed the level, comfortable in each other’s company. Zack took his turns, doing his best not to think about his mum, finally expired in the fetid bed at home. Josh’s house was so clean and bright compared to his own. It smelled so fresh. Even the air at home seemed dirty, notwithstanding the stench. Once they got rid of Mum, he planned to make sure Maddy helped him clean the place from top to bottom and back again. He wanted to scrub and polish everything, maybe even repaint. The house was finally theirs and he wanted to make it more like Josh’s. This was what a family home was supposed to be like.
Get rid of Mum. That was the tricky bit. His stomach started to go watery again at the thought. If they were caught, it would destroy everything. DoCS would come in, they’d be carted off somewhere, lose the house. He didn’t even know if they had extended family. His mum had talked about useless cousins in Bega, but what did that even mean?
He felt panic welling up again at the thought. Please, Maddy, he silently begged. Please have a plan by the morning.
“School night,” came a gruff but kind voice from the door.
They turned to see Josh’s dad, short hair, neat beard, still wearing the slacks and white shirt from his suit and tie office work combo. He was an accountant in Enden, or something like that. Advisor of something or other. He was just as kind as Mrs Brady. He smiled and nodded at Zack. “How are ya, mate?”
“Good, thanks.”
“And your mum?”
Zack made a face, shrugged. “She’s doing okay.”
“You know, if you ever need any help...”
“I know, Mr Brady, thanks.”
“Another half hour, Dad?”
“School night, Josh. It’s already getting late.”
Zack got up from the floor, grabbed his hoodie. “It is getting on,” he said. “Mum’ll be worried. I’d better go.”
Josh nodded, turning back to his game. “Until next time then, loser.”
“Which will be school tomorrow, friend of losers.”
Mr Brady stepped back to let Zack out of the room, then followed him down the hallway towards the front door. The well-lit hallway, with family photos on the walls. All that was on the walls in Zack’s house were flower-shaped mould stains.
“Seeya, champ!”
“Seeya, Mr Brady. Thanks!”
“Any time.”
He jogged the five hundred metres or so home, up the hill from Josh’s place near the beach to his own where the houses got smaller and closer together. He let himself in and stood in the dark hallway as the door clicked shut behind him. He could replace that blown light bulb if nothing else, that had been out for weeks. Tomorrow, he decided. He wouldn’t start until they’d done whatever they were going to do with Mum. Let it mark the beginning of a new era for him and Maddy. A free era.
He walked along and stared at the closed door of his mother’s room. The cloying stink reached his nostrils even here, creeping under the door like a mist. He’d left the window open and had a moment of panic that the neighbours might notice. Her room was at the back of the house, her window overlooking the scrappy patch of lawn and flowerbeds gone to seed. It was a half-decent size for a back yard in town, maybe twenty metres to a side, two-metre high wooden fence all around. No one could see in, all the neighbours yards backing onto each other. Someone would have to climb up onto the fence to see, and even then they wouldn’t get much of a view into the house. The curtains were drawn again even though the window was open. He shook his head. No, no one would see her. But would they smell her? Maybe when she started to really rot, that kind of stink was epic. You could smell a dead roo on the roadside even as you drove past at eighty Ks an hour. But they’d be rid of her before that happened.
Come and help me, son.
Zack jumped. He must have imagined it, but the voice of his mother had been all too real. Stress maybe. She was dead. Really dead at last. He can’t have heard her.
Unable to help himself, he drew a deep breath in, held it, then opened her door for a look. The breath escaped him in a rush, his eyes going wide. He scrabbled his hand around for the light switch, not believing what he saw in the low light coming from the kitchen behind him.
The room burst into light as he flicked the switch, and he stared. What the hell was growing all over her?
Maddy crept in a little after 2 a.m., closing the front door and leaning against it for a moment. Physically satisfied – for a funny-looking fucker, Dylan knew what do with his gangly body – she was still mentally antsy. She was also pretty drunk.
A bead of light glowed from under the closed door to her mother’s room. She frowned. Zack must have turned it on, but she wondered why. Maybe he’d gone in again to look at her. This must be hard for him. He always kept some part of his heart open to some essential goodness he saw in their mother. Or believed in, even if he never saw it. It showed what a good person he was, but he suffered for it. Maddy had long-since locked away every part of her heart where their mother was concerned.
Well, she could lay there dead with the light on. Maddy wasn’t about to crack open that stench, even to flick the light off. She went and looked into Zack’s room and he was curled up under the doona, snoring softly.
She suppressed the urge to go in and kiss his forehead. Only thirteen months apart, it was ridiculous how much of an older sister she felt sometimes. Girls mature faster than boys and all that shit, maybe. With a sigh, she went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth and washed her face, then headed into her bedroom, stripped to her undies and pulled her current sleeping t-shirt on. It was a gift from Dylan, a Bullet For My Valentine tour shirt. She kind of loved it. Poor Dylan, he was a good person too, and she hated the thought of breaking his heart. She’d have to do it soon, it wasn’t fair on him to drag things out. She wasn’t the sort to settle down, certainly not now, and hopefully never.
She fell into bed and sleep swept over her.
The alarm woke her at seven and it didn’t feel like she’d moved a muscle since she hit the sheets. With a groan, lamenting the background pounding of her head from last night’s beer, she stumbled up and went into the bathroom to piss. On the way back she leaned into Zack’s room to call him awake, but frowned. The lump wasn’t under the doona any more.
“Zack?” Jesus, her voice sounded like a sixty-a-day smoker’s croak. Should have drunk some water in the bathroom.
She went into the kitchen, planning to drink a big old glass of water before calling for Zack again. He was already in there, dressed in his school uniform. His eyes were haunted.
“You have to look at Mum.”
Maddy swallowed, went to get water and it was nectar on her parched throat. She turned and leaned back against the sink. “What?”
“You have to look at Mum.”
“What do you mean. Are you okay?”
“Please. Just go and look at her.”
She stared at him a moment longer and his steady gaze discomforted her. With a frown, she downed the rest of the water, put the glass down and went back along the hall to their mother’s room. She stood a moment, gathering herself, took a few steadying breaths. Then she held the last breath and opened the door.
The held breath rushed out of her along with her voice. “The fuck?”
The light was on still, the thin curtain shifted in the breeze of the open window. Her mother was in the bed, propped on the pillows exactly like the day before, but she was covered in... something. Maddy leaned forward, trying to see better without going in. The bedclothes were rumpled, stained near her mother’s corpse with yellowing patches. Her mother had on a t-shirt that before had clung to her bony frame like a rag, but now stood taller, as if the woman had gained weight overnight. Her bare arms
lay either side of her torso, her scrawny neck emerged from the shirt, her skull face staring sightlessly up at the ceiling, but all that exposed skin had pale lumps over it. Rounded and smooth, white as alabaster, like half-ping pong balls dotted all over her. There was barely a centimetre or two of skin between each of them. One covered her left eye, her right eye down in a hollow between two others. One pushed from the side of her nose, another forced her mouth open in a silent scream. Several made a range of rounded hills out of her neck, more on her shoulders under the shirt. Her forearms were covered in them, the back of her hands. Her fingers were splayed as the smooth white half-orbs grew between them. In some cases, the lumps seemed to encircle her fingers completely.
“What’s happening to her?”
Maddy startled at Zack’s voice right behind her as he looked in over her shoulder. When did he get so tall? “What is it?” she asked.
“They’re like mushrooms. They feel soft.”
“You touched her?” The horror was clear in her sharp tone.
“Not with my finger! I poked one with that straw from the water glass by her bed. It’s soft like a fresh mushroom.”
Maddy shook her head. “Is she going mouldy?”
“They were half that size when I got in last night.”
“What?”
“I looked in when I got back from Josh’s. She was covered in them like that, but they were further apart, smaller, sort of like marbles. You weren’t here, I didn’t know what to do. I shut the door and went to bed. Didn’t sleep well, couldn’t stop thinking about it. I got up about dawn, came to see again and they were bigger, like that.”
“Jesus, Zack, this isn’t normal. This isn’t what happens to dead bodies.”
“Is it because of her sickness. She said it was nothing, we knew it was cancer, but maybe it wasn’t.”
Maddy ran a hand over her head, tucked her hair behind her ears. “I don’t know any sickness that would result in... that!”
“Looks like it’s all over her body.”
“Have you checked?”
“No!”
Maddy nodded, chewed her lower lip. “We need to check.”
“Why?”
“We have to move her. We need to figure out if that’s safe. I don’t want to get that stuff on me!”
“It doesn’t smell so bad,” Zack said.
“What?”
“Sniff. It’s covering the stink.”
Maddy allowed herself a slow breath in through her nose and he was right. The sick, cloying aroma of sickness and death was still there, but vastly reduced. Unpleasant, but not appalling like it had been. “Get the big scissors from the kitchen,” she said.
Zack said nothing but she felt him move away from her. Reluctantly she went into the bedroom and took another steadying breath, then lifted the bedclothes away. The stick thin remains of her mother lay in a shallow hollow on the mattress. The sheets beneath her were dark and sticky, some foul combination of blood and shit that had leaked out of her. Zack had tried to keep her clean, but admitted he’d stopped in the last week or so before she died, unable to bear it any longer.
“She shits this black stuff that stinks so bad,” he’d said. “It just pours out of her.”
The mattress would be soaked with it. Maddy crouched, looked under the bed. Sure enough, the stains had gone right through, a patch on the floorboards where it had dripped and spattered.
“Fuck me.”
Her mother’s legs were barely more than bones, the skin browned like leather except where it was red with lesions and sores. But those things were only partially visible now under the numerous smooth white blobs growing out of her. They pushed her toes apart, grew out from the soles of her feet. Zack held out the scissors beside her. She took them.
The white stuff seemed fused with the sheets where her body lay against them, like it grew from the gross stains as well. Maddy lifted the bottom hem of the shirt and began cutting up towards the neck. She peeled the two halves apart and made a quiet noise of distress. Zack bolted from her side and vomited noisily somewhere down the hall. She heard the splatter of water and hoped that meant he’d made it to the toilet.
These... things... Maddy paused, dragged in a ragged breath. Mushrooms, she decided. For the sake of argument, let’s call them mushrooms. They were bigger on her mother’s torso, and the skin around them had split, stark red like fresh steak. One bulged from between her labia, streaked with a viscous fluid tinged with blood. The growths covered her, went around her sides to connect her to the bed where she met the mattress.
Maddy opened the scissors and pressed a point into one of the larger growths on her mother’s stomach. The surface was tough, but there was give in it. She pressed a little harder, the point of the scissor blade dimpling in. Then it punctured through and the mushroom hissed as it flattened slightly. Maddy cried out and jumped back.
The mushroom leaked a dark, red-brown fluid, that trickled over the half-deflated side and pooled at the base where it fused with her mother’s sallow skin.
“What the fuck, Mads?”
She turned, saw Zack standing in the doorway, eyes red and wet with tears. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
She went over and took him in a hug, then turned and pulled the bedroom door closed, guided him back into the kitchen.
“This is so fucked up,” Zack said quietly. “Not even just... that. Fucking everything. She was awful and now she’s dead and now this. What do we do, Mads?”
“I don’t know. I need to think. I don’t want to move her, you saw what happened when I... that stuff came out.”
“Is it eating her?”
Maddy swallowed. “I don’t know. Maybe. Perhaps that’s a good thing? Like, if that fungus or whatever it is eats her up there’s nothing for us to move. Maybe it’s a good thing?”
Zack burst out a bark of genuine mirth. “What luck! Mum died and now she’s getting eaten by mushrooms!”
Maddy grinned and for a moment they both devolved into uncontrollable laughter, a relief valve blowing through the insanity. “Jesus fuck, Zack,” Maddy said as the laughs reduced to giggles. “What the hell is happening?”
“I had lasagne at Josh’s last night. It was so normal!”
“Sounds amazing.” She hugged him again, then stepped back to look at him. “Go to school, yeah? I have to go to work. I’m only on a short shift though, eight till two, so I’ll be back when you get home. There’s no need to decide anything right now. Things have changed, hey. I have to get ready or I’ll be late.”
“I’m going to Josh’s, see if he wants to walk to school together. I don’t want to be here now.”
Maddy smiled. “Don’t blame you. We’ll sort this out. Not much longer, then the house is ours and we can be normal too.”
He looked at her, a little blankly.
“Okay?” she said.
He nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
The day at work crawled by even though it was a short shift. Maddy couldn’t get the image of that mushroom popping and leaking from her mind. Or the image of her mother’s body covered in the pure white growths, the ichor streaked white swelling out from between her legs. On several occasions bile would burn up into her throat and she’d brace, thinking she would need to rush for the bathroom to vomit, but managed to swallow it down each time.
She had a break at eleven and realised she had eaten nothing since before she’d started drinking the night before, and that was only a serve of hot chips shared with Dylan. She went to the bakery out the front of Woollies and bought a bread roll and a can of coke, ate the bread dry, drank the soda. It was all she could face, but she felt immeasurably better after it hit her stomach.
“You right?” Wendy Callow asked as Maddy went back into the supermarket. Wendy was just heading out, presumably on her break.
Wendy was a year older than Maddy, and a bit weird. Most people uncharitably suggested some kind of impairment, but Maddy had come to know the girl and decided Wendy was
actually quite smart. She was also intentionally cruel. She made racist remarks frequently, joked about kicking her stepfather’s dog, stuff like that. People didn’t like Wendy Callow for a reason. “I’m fine,” Maddy said.
“Sure? You look like cold shit warmed up.”
“Gee, thanks. Just drank too much last night.”
“With Dylan?”
Maddy sighed. Wendy was hot for Dylan’s mate, James. Maddy wasn’t about to be a matchmaker though. “Yeah, with Dyl. I gotta get back.”
She pushed past, heard Wendy mutter “Stuck up bitch” under her breath but ignored it. Not worth the mental anguish. Strengthened by the food and sugar from the soda, she got back to work.
When she came out again just after two, Dylan was loitering against one of the columns near the entrance. He grinned stupidly when she emerged and she frowned.
“What are you doing here?”
His face fell. “Last night we arranged to meet up. You said you finished at two. We’re gonna drive to Enden and hit some shops, maybe eat there and catch up with...” He petered out, frown deepening at her expression. “You forgot? You weren’t that drunk were you?”
“Shit, Dylan, I’m really sorry. I did forget.” Maybe she’d been more drunk than she realised. She had some recollection of talking about heading to Enden, but didn’t remember planning it for this afternoon. “But something’s come up. Have to rain check?”
He nodded, eyes sad. “Sure, I guess. Everything okay?”
He was such a good guy. Some dudes would get angry, offended and offensive. Dylan was better than that, and she felt bad. “It’s just a thing with Mum. I’m sorry.”
“She’s hard work for you, huh? And Zack. Need help?”
“Thanks, but nah. We’ll be okay. We’ll do the Enden thing another time, yeah?”
“Sure. I’ll call you later?”
She stepped up and kissed him quickly. “Maybe tomorrow?”
“Blind Eye Moon are playing the Vic tomorrow. Wanna go?”
“Yeah, maybe. If... you know, if things are okay with Mum. Give me a call tomorrow arvo and we’ll see, yeah?”