The Evil Inside (16 page)

But I knew it was no game. And I'd learned from bitter experience that hiding or trying to avoid getting my hair washed would indeed lead to a far worse ‘or else'.

Like having my hair completely shaved off. Or taking up Ray's spot in my mother's lonely bed.

Unlike Frank Sinatra, I didn't wake up in Carnegie Hall.

A couple of times I woke up in hospital with my mother peering at me with mock-concern through the grimy plastic of an oxygen tent.

‘ 'e sometimes has asthma attacks when 'is father goes away,' she'd be telling some dim-witted doctor. And then she'd be smiling at me proudly like I was some kind of exotic fish in a tank.

I used to wonder why she did it. Apart from washing away my father's disdain, I think she liked the fact that she was killing children but then bringing them back to life.

Which was something that she obviously couldn't do at her work.

‘Hey, mate, you were away with the fairies.' Fingers snapped in front of my eyes.

It was Jim. Someone had pencilled a curlicued pirate moustache under his nose.

Nick Cave was droning through the ‘The Ship Song'. I was now standing outside the toilets. I had absolutely no recollection of how I'd got there. Or how long I'd been gone.

‘We waited by the door for you, but you never showed up! Hey, you look a bit shaken up.' Nadine put her arm around me. ‘You didn't go down to Davy Jones' Lockers, did you? Not after what Bill told us.'

According to Bill, the bowels of the club were ‘dire', and only for the seriously perverted. Apparently there was a second and more expensive door charge to access the basement area, which was guarded by a dangerous-looking albino with a bandage over his eye – who traded in much more serious substances than were available from The Dispensary. Then, once you were in Davy's dungeons, any act, fetish or orifice became completely acceptable.

Most disturbing of all, there were rumoured to be cameras hidden in the walls that shot footage for execrable X-rated films that were later sold on the black market.

I looked at Nadine and shook my head slowly. But I really had no idea where I'd been for the last few minutes. The last thing I could remember was the admiral offering me the gunpowder.

‘You've probably been off thinking about you and Mia, haven't you, Guy?' Nadine said gently. ‘Let's go back to our place,' she said, hustling me towards the front door of the club.

‘Where are you staying?' I asked as Jim flagged a cab.

‘Where else?' Nadine punched the air. ‘The Chelsea!'

As we pulled away, there was an ambulance siren wailing towards the club.

I half-felt like calling one myself.

The phantasy crept up on you like a gorgeous harem dancer.

There was an overall sensation of lightness but not light-headedness. There was the expected expansive lovingness of the ecstasy and the blissed-out wisdom and knowingness of the smack. But in that exquisite area in between where they lay down together like lovers, there was an intense sensual pleasure that extended far beyond appreciative synapses to your whole way of being. It was like your soul got a hard-on, too. Although to describe it in merely sexual terms was to belittle the equally magnificent spiritual side of the experience. You became not just tumescent but omniscient at the same time – a walking, talking, orgasmic epiphany. So you saw things in a wholly new and more majestic light.

Jim was now a bona fide sun god, descended and temporarily slumming it on 23rd Street as he glided across the Chelsea's lobby. And God knows what the phantasy was doing to Nadine. ‘Wow!' she kept repeating, ‘Wow wow wow!' she chanted to the seen-it-all-before desk clerk as she sashayed towards the elevator, gyrating her arms up and down like a hyperactive back-up singer in an old Motown video.

On the wall behind the clerk, there was a battered old black-and-white TV with the sound down: Bill Clinton was giving Hillary a brotherly hug on the White House lawn.

Everything sparkled and glittered and shone, even your thoughts –
especially
your thoughts. That's what the naysayers never understood about drugs: sometimes they equalled love. And this one truly was phantastic.

Somehow we found the room. Third floor, end of the corridor. It was all pink inside, like a scallop shell. Although, if you tilted your head to the side, it immediately turned pale-blue or purple.

Jim had sunk deep into the couch's embrace, still wearing a supremely satisfied grin. He was obviously experiencing some glorious private nirvana that not even the twangy sappiness of Shania Twain coming from the radio could sully. Nadine had disappeared into the bathroom what seemed hours ago.

I hoisted myself out of the cosy womb of the cracked leather armchair and went to investigate. Pushing open the door, I walked into a cumulus of steam. ‘Nadine? Are you in here? Or have I really died and gone to heaven?'

She parted the mist like she was doing breaststroke. She held a pink face cloth towards me and burst into hysterics.

‘Hey, who's this?' She couldn't stop laughing.

I shook my head.

‘Nancy
Sponge
-en!'

I laughed so hard it hurt my stomach.

‘Hey, isn't this
gr-eaat
?' she asked, attempting her best country accent in homage to the background music. ‘I had a shower and every single part of my body was like a pleasure zone. You should have one, too!'

I looked at her – it was hard not to. All she was wearing was a tiny pair of black knickers that matched her glistening wet hair. ‘You look like a bit of a pleasure zone yourself,' I said.

It was then she noticed the bruise blueing on my forehead from the heavy bump I'd received on the Upper Deck. ‘Oh, you poor baby,' she cooed and tenderly touched it. She bit her lip hard and touched it again and then ran a delicious finger all the way down to my lips. ‘You poor, sexy baby.'

Nadine and I had shared a few moments of sexual tension years ago, but I'd always blocked them out because of my friendship with Jim. Tonight, however, the rules of engagement, the rules about everything, seemed open-ended. We
were
our desires, our ids, our pure animal selves. Any restrictive thoughts of right or wrong or morality had evaporated into the mist.

I lifted Nadine up onto the vanity unit by her gym-built buttocks, sweeping away the dusty little complimentary shampoo bottles and soaps. ‘You are
so fucking sexy
,' I grunted. Every single word felt itself like a hungry, needy thrust, like my tongue was my cock.

Nadine felt it, too. ‘Fuck me!' she moaned, spreading her knees with her jangly bangled hands and leaning back into the mirror. ‘Jim won't mind. Just do it.'

It felt so good to talk. ‘Oh yes, I
will
fuck you,' I promised, removing her black panties and lassoing them around her neck. ‘But first I'm going to taste you.'

We continued swapping obscenities as I went down on my best friend's partner. It felt so safe and warm down there in the humidicrib of our lust. And given Jim's own splendid stupor on the couch, he seemed unlikely to intrude.

Nadine shuddered and shifted on her buns to open herself up even more to my hungry mouth. If I could have, I would have crawled up inside her. ‘Oh wow,' she said dreamily. She tasted Moorish, smoky, exotic … like a delicious sweet and sour syrup.

But as she introduced some fingers, I paused to snatch a breath and looked down. There were a couple of strange red blobs spreading on the white tiles at my feet. They looked like little baby seals or dolphins.

Shiny little bleeding bath toys.

Nadine screamed with the insane pleasure of it.

*

‘That's it, Guy, grab the towels.

‘Now throw them in the sink.'

There are red bath towels and white ones.

The kitchen sink is filling up with cold water.

The water is turning pink because the red towels are bleeding into it.

My mother is still in her pale blue dressing gown. She's had a horrendous fight with my father earlier that morning and has been too distracted and upset to get dressed yet.

Janet Leigh in curlers.

She turns a knob on the oven. There's suddenly a funny smell and I feel a bit dizzy.

‘Now grab the towels out of the water and put them along the bottom of the doors – like this.' Normally she would scream at towels dripping water onto the kitchen floor and the lounge room carpet.

‘Why are we doing this, Mum?'

But she doesn't answer. She just continues sealing door cracks with the towels.

‘Right. All covered? Good.' She does a quick, frantic final recce of all the doors of our brick veneer prison. She also checks all the windows to make sure they're shut fast, too. Then she prods me down the hallway. ‘OK, Guy, now you go out the front door and go over the road to Nancy's.'

Our friendliest neighbour.

‘Go!' she screams now, the last towel dripping in her hand to seal the door behind me.

My sister is rocking in an unusually agitated way behind her and humming quietly. My mother opens the door and pushes me out over the threshold. ‘Goodbye, Guy.' She slams the door shut like a slap.

I sit on the front porch for a few bewildering moments, unsure of my next move.

It's a still Saturday morning and the sun is shining. ‘A perfect day for the gee-gees!' my father had said before the argument with my mother.

I walk over the road to Nancy's and knock on her front door. A kettle whistles from somewhere behind her like a parrot squawking in a jungle.

‘What is it, Guy?' she asks.

I must look upset. I'm only a kid.

‘Umm, Mum's locked all the doors and covered them up with towels. A-a-and she's kicked me out of the house.'

I'm sort of embarrassed. And my head feels kind of woozy.

Nancy lifts her nose, squints through her glasses and looks across at our strangely silent, now hermetically sealed house.

A couple of minutes later, Nancy has recruited a red-headed man from a few doors down whom we hardly know. He smashes our kitchen window, lets himself in and the gas out.

He cuts his hands on the glass and leaves bloody handprints all over the sink and cupboards.

And drops little red bombs onto our shiny kitchen floor.

I was going down.

I tilted my head forward and extended my tongue as wet, warm thighs kissed my ears. Trapped in a beautiful box canyon.

I squinted up along the lovely ridge of her body and tried to see her face through the shifting sierra of her breasts. But her chin was thrust upward and I could only make out the soft blonde epaulettes on her shoulders.

She moaned a little as I leant closer to her core and I heard a groan of pleasure escape my own lips.

But then my tongue felt something that wasn't part of her.

Something cold and clammy.

Something slick and greasy.

I opened my eyes.

There was something coming out of her.

A head.

A horrible slimy little head.

It looked up and our eyes met.

Then it smiled at me and licked its fishy lips.

I jolted awake on the bath mat, wearing nothing but a hard-on.

I pulled on my pants and noticed Nadine's clothes lying in an incriminating little bundle on the toilet seat.

The clock radio in the main room was still lachrymose with dreadful country dirges, only now at a much lower volume. The display told me it was 1:09, but I had no idea what day or meridian it was.

‘Well it looks as though you two had a bloody good time.' Jim was looking up at me from the couch. But not like a best friend should.

‘Hi, mate,' I said weakly.

He wasn't just looking daggers at me, but scimitars. ‘Only Women Bleed, eh mate?' he said, swinging his big legs onto the floor. He stretched his arms upwards and grunted while his eyes grew colder. And then I understood. I bolted back into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. In colour counterpoint to the shiny new black and blue bruise on my forehead, my cheeks and chin were bright crimson with Nadine's menstrual blood.

I grabbed the face washer out of the shower and tried to scrub the crime off me. But it was difficult to see properly in the mirror. Someone had scrawled the letters c H a O s on it with lipstick. I walked back out, my face still stinging with shame. Jim was violently ripping open the heavy black velvet curtains. The sun smashed in and my eyelids snapped shut like clams. Jim turned up the radio just to make things worse and pretended to hum along. I sat back in the armchair I should never have strayed from.

Nadine moaned from the bedroom. ‘Oh, for fuck's sake – turn the cunt-ry off!'

Jim turned it up even louder and flopped furiously back onto the couch. A few seconds later, Nadine came limping out of the bedroom wrapped in a sheet that had dried blotches of blood on it. Her smudged make-up gave her a ghastly Kabuki mask.

‘Please … take my wife,' Jim said coldly.

‘He did,' Nadine said, pulling the radio plug viciously out of the wall.

The socket glared at me knowingly.

‘So what?'

‘Ya know what, Naddy?' Jim replied. ‘I know we still have our little “arrangement” and all – which always seems to work out better for you than me, by the way. But I didn't realize it included fucking my old best …' he paused and kept looking very hard at me ‘… friend. So how did you enjoy old Nasty Arse, eh, Guy? Worth the wait?'

‘Grow up, Jim. It was a drug fuck. It didn't mean a thing, did it, Guy?'

Actually, it did. It meant fifteen years of friendship and trust were now all smashed and bloodied up.

‘Just seems a bit unfair, that's all,' Jim sniffed at me. ‘Or do I get to fuck Mia now?'

There was an excruciatingly long pause.

‘Sorry, mate,' I finally said. ‘We just got carried away, I suppose.'

Nadine ducked into the bathroom without making eye contact with either of us. ‘Where are my fucking tampons? Hey, Guysville,' she called out much too lightly. ‘Do you remember telling me about your “CHAOS Theory” last night?'

It rang a distant, disquieting bell.

Nadine stuck just her head out of the door. ‘First you said that “CHAOS” stood for Cataclysm … Heaven – or was it Hell? Then Archangel … Oblivion … and … and … Symmetry!' She clapped her hands.

Nadine was silent for a minute. ‘But then I think you said: “Callum … Has … Another … Older … Spirit.”'

She wobbled back into the room in her black pants and bra.

‘But then you said something even more freaky, Guy.'

She looked at me but still hadn't looked at Jim.

‘You told me that what you meant by that was that you think your mother's spirit had something to do with the death of your unborn baby.

‘And that she was now attacking you and Mia through Callum.'

*

I taxi-ed back to the Olcott alone.

As I was leaving the Chelsea, Nadine had issued a half-hearted invitation to maybe catch up for a quiet dinner later on, but Jim didn't second the motion. In fact, he didn't even say goodbye.

They were flying out midday the next day so that was that, I supposed.

I hung up my smoky jacket. My feet echoed down the empty hallway.

The place suddenly seemed much bigger. And quieter.

There was a letter propped up like a hand grenade against the yellow vase on the table.