Chapter 21
Rane and Lamont were in the lounge with the music. It was eleven thirty and the night outside was as black as their mood. Juno had gone home with her parents and Max was asleep with his grief,
‘Rane!’ Lamont grimaced. ‘Those flies!’
‘Yeah! I know. It’s fucking awful! Gives me the cock-crushing creeps, like they were fucking messengers of the fucking dead.’
‘What do you reckon?’
‘What d’ya mean waddia reckon? You know as well as me, mate.’
‘You’ve lost me already.’
‘We’re going to have to handle it, mate. Us! Ourselves! The guy’s probably melting away under a mass of feasting flies. If we don’t do something quick someone’s going to stumble onto the bloke and fuck everything for us. We gotta get in there and clean up.’
‘Clean up?’ Lamont cried in awful bewilderment.
‘Yeah!’ Rane looked at his friend and wondered if he were becoming unstable. ‘We gotta get rid of the bloke’s body, mate.’
‘You gunna make the cunt disappear? Just like that?’
Lamont sat like a clown whose tent had burned down in the middle of the night. His mouth pulled at the corners and his eyes burned with a desperate panic.
‘Come!’
Rane didn’t wait for Lamont. He strode out the back and made for the neighbour’s house. Lamont was still probing for answers as they dropped into the weeds near the tool shed. Rane carried a pruning saw and a bundle of heavy-duty garbage bags. Lamont sidled up to Rane and almost reached out for reassurance. They waited in the darkness as their ears received the noises of the night. It was warm under the stars and dogs were barking in the distant streets.
Once through the back door they moved cautiously along the passageway to the room they dreaded. ‘Shit!’ They halted and rummaged through their pockets for something to ward off the evil pong of a decaying corpse.
Rane held a small torch in front of his body like a shield, as if the narrow world within the beam were all that existed, and that which lay behind the shield were sacrosanct. Maurice Murphy looked different in that narrow world.
He was climbing out of the pit as it swelled with flies. At the opening above, forever stretching from his grasp, an old woman made music with her sticks. He clawed at the cold clay as he rose, kicking insects swarming at his feet. The old woman’s face was peering down at him. Her toothless mouth opened and shut in a silent plea.
‘Switch on the light?’ Lamont pleaded, like a child tucked into bed.
Rane used the torch to find his way through the beer cans and filth. He reached the television in the corner and switched it on. The silver light jumped and wavered before settling into a Ronald Reagan movie. On the floor, where they had left him, Maurice Murphy was a grotesque caricature of death. Where the fish knife had opened the stomach there was now a glutinous form of maggots, seemingly held together with an invisible net.
‘Shit!’ Lamont vomited where he stood.
‘Mate!’ Rane wished he had come alone. ‘Scout around, will you, and bring back some thick towels. If there’s hot water, find a bucket and whack in some soap or something, and anything else you might find. Anything’ll do if it helps clean up this fucking place.’
Lamont vanished into the darkness behind his weak beam of light. Rane watched him go then examined more closely the carcass of Maurice Murphy. ‘Lucky this cunt was a slob.’ he said to himself as he realised the unkempt house was itself imbued with a terrible malodour. If the traces of the slob could be eradicated completely ...
Lamont returned with towels and a bucket of hot water that sloshed onto the floor as he walked.
‘We’d be up shit-creek if this cunt had a carpet, mate!’ said Rane as he cut into the bonds that held the corpse to the wicker chair. ‘Imagine the muck from this cunt’s gut, hey? Spilling all over the fucking carpet. We could wrap the bastard up in the carpet and beat it out of here.’
Rane noticed the unintended double entendre but let it go at that. There was little room for humour now. He began to dismember the corpse as Lamont disappeared behind a retreating torch beam.
The noise of sawing sent a queasy discomfort into Lamont’s testicles. His mouth opened in dentist-chair agony. He rammed his fingers into his ears. There was no escaping the grind of metal through bone. Lamont could hear his friend calling, but waves of nausea had him unbalanced. He clawed his way to the kitchen, seeking solace near the window where he could see friendly stars. He leaned against the sink where the stench of snapper was a welcome antidote to the metamorphic horror in the lounge.
The voice behind him jarred his nerves.
‘Hurry up! Where’s the rest of the gear?’ Rane came into the kitchen. He was wearing an anxious face. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, mate. You can’t go to pieces now. Snap it, mate! What’s up with you?’ he asked.
‘You’re not bloody normal, Rane.’ Lamont’s voice was helium squeaky. He pushed back against the sink and stared at Rane. ‘You fucking ask what’s up with me, for Christ’s sake. You’re fucking-well butchering someone.’
‘I’m doing what has to be done, mate.’ Rane could never bring himself to call him Monty. It seemed a clownish name with connotations of the circus. ‘There’s no point in surrendering on their terms, mate.’ He was about to return to his gruesome task when he dropped his eyes and stared at his shoes. They had become stained. ‘That bastard in the garbage bags wasn’t worth it, mate. We’re not going to the fucking boob for that cunt. Never!’
For the next two hours Rane hauled the weighty bags up the cliff and along an alternative and more precipitous route to the cave. It was a sluggish exercise. He could not afford to spill his load. Deep within the cave where the spongy rocks glowed he dragged the remains of Maurice Murphy to the edge of the hole and tipped them into a deep space.
The flies were up to his waist and he could smell the odour they carried. The old woman’s eyes were distended as she bent into the pit to grab his bloody hands. He could feel the flies at his skin, moving under his clothes, biting. She was close now, dipping into the darkness toward him, a familiar pain in her eyes. Behind the outline of her head, a hand appeared. It was large and awesome and it tore the old woman’s head off.
Rane watched the head roll away from the hand and drop. He caught it as flies filled his mouth. He pressed it close to his chest as his body left the safety of the wall. He was sinking into a molasses of flies with the old woman’s head in his hands, falling, floating, beyond pain.
‘That science bloke was right!’ he thought with final satisfaction. ‘It still took only six seconds to hit bottom.’
Rane returned to the house for the wicker chair and he found Lamont in the kitchen. He was sitting on the floor, quaking, shaking, gibbering. Rane led him outside and settled him on the grass that was moist with the dew. ‘Just hang on a bit, mate.’
Lamont watched Rane disappear into the house and after a while he too went inside. Rane smiled his welcome and together they erased all evidence of death. In time the house resumed its untidy disposition except for the irregular patch of scrubbed parquet floor where they had washed away any hint of blood and maggots. That, in a short time, would dry and blend.
By three-thirty Rane had dissembled the wicker chair, stuffed it into garbage bags and after another climb to the cave poked the remnants of death down the hole. Then he descended to his final duty for the night; the succour for his mate in distress.
Lamont this time was sitting among the weeds near the tool shed, like a Gogolian soul wrenched from the responsibility of reason. Rane took his friend’s arm and led him back to the sanity of the wooden house. In the security of their lounge room with their own music they sat the rest of the night with a smoke and an all-round view of where they had been. A haze obscured the view of where they were headed. But then, for the moment, they couldn’t care less.
