The Evil Inside (19 page)

Guy Russell story: ‘Pound of Flesh'

‘fridge' = tomb-like/womb-like maternal coldness/hostility

and/or disapproving/unforgiving super ego.

Locked in !!! Terror of infantile helplessness.

Feelings split off and ‘frozen over' for self-preservation False self-development

‘The Kid' – bullying played out and reversed, psyche in revenge mode = fragmented/split off – no real empathy

narrator's cleft palate – cf. Guy's own inability to speak up, unable to defend himself & therefore persecuted by the id

paranoid/persecuted – primitive/aggressive defence mechanisms

suicidal ideation but homicidal tendencies more prominent – wants to kill the bad, rotting part of himself which has been projected into the other

e.g. price sticker = worthless piece of meat

– possible psychotic tendencies

Story told in first person – authorial sublimation?

 

On the last Sunday in June, Susanna called me at 5.00 p.m. She said that Mia had instructed her to retrieve Callum back from me by 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoons, so where the hell was he?

‘Do you know where my lovely wife is?' I countered. ‘And, more importantly, who she's with?'

There was a beat at the other end. ‘Guy, she's by herself. And you know I'm not going to tell you where she is, so please stop asking me.'

Secrets of the sainted fucking sisterhood.

‘So when are you bringing Callum back?'

‘Why would I bring him back?' I said, swigging on my Bud. ‘He's my son, too. If Mia's not here, then he should be with me.'

I had recently decided that I needed to keep Callum near to me, under close surveillance. Without me there to monitor his every movement, who knew what could happen? I'd sit and watch him for hours, looking for the slightest aberration or change in mood. It was getting very tiring, but I couldn't relax for a moment.

If I had to go on an errand or a run or to see my shrink, I'd park him downstairs in the office with Michael for a couple of hours.

There were two unused sockets under the fire extinguisher in the hallway: one was yelling ‘Fuck off!', the other was yelling ‘Whore!'

I drained the rest of my beer. ‘Thanks for calling, Susanna,' I said, hanging up.

As well as food, I'd also run out of beer. Callum was watching
Scooby Doo on Zombie Island
. His new favourite.

He wrinkled his nose as I sat next to him on the couch. ‘Ew! You stink, Daddy!'

‘OK, I'll have a little wash and then when Scooby's finished, let's go down to the Dallas and have us a drink and some nachos. Then we'll go shopping and buy some nuffins. And some more Cheerios
.'

‘I love nuffins!' he said. But then he looked suddenly pensive.

‘Daddy, when's Mummy coming to get me?'

It was a good question. Mia's farewell letter was still propped up against the piss-yellow vase. The centrepiece to our disintegration.

‘You know how you and Mummy like those animal shows on TV? With the lions and tigers and panthers and pumas and stuff?'

He nodded.

‘Well, she saw this really good show about alligators on the Discovery Channel the other night. So she's gone down to Florida to check 'em out. She'll probably take a whole lot of cool photos of 'em and bring them back to show you.'

Since I had no idea where Mia actually was, Florida was probably as good a guess as any.

*

Every now and again when things got too much, my mother would need a ‘little rest'.

Especially in the winter.

Violet – her name slyly omitting the ‘n' near the end that revealed her true nature – would retire to her bed with her dildo and her Serepax for anywhere between twenty-four to seventy-two hours.

Meanwhile, Raine and I would happily watch TV for whole days and feast on Cheerios.

We had no choice really: our mother would lash us to our chairs with the long curtain cord that otherwise lay curled along our lounge room wall like a cobra waiting to strike.

She'd slip newspaper underneath us in case nature called during these enforced TV marathons.

I'd always do my best not to soil today's headlines, however, because that would necessitate a really good dunking in the bathtub later on.

But sometimes fate was kind.

If my father happened to come home earlier from his ‘trip' than expected, he would leave his zonked-out wife in bed and take us kids down to the front bar of the Black Rock Hotel.

The pub was home to cantankerous fishermen, lazy tradesmen and alcoholic retirees. The soggy pool table tilted thirty degrees and there were cracked old photos of ships and yachts and fluorescent seventies sunsets hanging crookedly on the walls.

My father seemed to revel in the seediness of it. He would buy beer after beer for himself and I would try to match him with ginger ales as we watched the toy boats skating across the grey slate of Port Phillip Bay through the wide salt-flecked window.

Raine liked to draw faces on the window.

She also liked to scratch her arms and face with the hooks poking out of the tackle boxes under the fishermen's tables.

Sometimes she would tear up a beer coaster into one long strip and ignite the end of it with my father's lighter.

I loved to sit and watch the snake of fire burn down into nothingness.

 

A couple of days later, during the first week of July, Bill dropped over one afternoon to see how I was doing.

I'd been watching an old black and white British film called
Dead of Night
. One of the best parts of the film – it was broken into five separate little vignettes – was the final story, about an evil ventriloquist's doll who controls his master. Bill watched the dangerous little dummy for a few seconds and smiled with recognition.

‘Did you happen to know that a bunch of British cosmologists were watching this movie together one day in the forties and because of the movie's clever “portmanteau” construction' – he made quotation marks with his fingers like a university lecturer – ‘they suddenly hit on an alternative to the Big Bang called the Steady State Theory of the universe?'

It was a strange thing to say. Even to me.

‘UCLA course: British Films 1945–1960,' he smiled nervously. ‘Did you like that other vignette in this movie where the guy looks in the mirror but sees a completely different room from his own in the reflection?'

Truth be told, I'd been rewinding and fast forwarding between the ventriloquist and the mirror vignettes for the last seven hours straight. But I didn't feel like discussing what they meant with Bill at that particular moment.

He turned away from the screen, surveyed the catastrophe I now called home and scratched his head. As usual, I had the curtains drawn. He wrenched them open and the sun seared my eyes. A fat family of flies took off from the windowpane.

‘Hey, I love what you've done to the place … it's kinda … ' he picked up three empty Coors bottles, took them out to the kitchen and tried to stuff them in the already overflowing bin ‘ … Bowery chic.'

He looked towards the corner of the room. I had by now dumped all of the shitty old hotel books into a pile on the floor and used the bookcase to organize Bill's father's books and all my new Kennedy assassination stuff into a kind of mini reference library next to the TV. It was the one neat area of the apartment.

‘You know, buddy, maybe you should get out more? Get some fresh air.' He took some more bottles and mouldy Chinese food boxes out to the kitchen, whistling ‘Strangers in the Night' softly to himself.

‘Oh I run every day,' I said. ‘Sometimes twice.'

‘Yes, I can smell that,' he laughed. But it wasn't his usual Bill laugh.

He went into the bathroom, then came out again quickly, looking pale and wrinkling his nose. ‘Uh, Guy, I think you should take the “Do not disturb” sign off the front door. Or at least get the maid to clean your bathroom. Callum's written a strange little message on the wall in there. What does
‘r' ‘a' ‘i' ‘n' ‘e'
mean? “
Rainy
”? As in a shitty weather forecast? And when I say shitty, I mean that literally cos I don't think he used a brown crayon to write it.'

‘Kids.' I said. ‘Full of surprises.'

I hadn't actually been in the bathroom for a few days. I tried to avoid it. Because as well as my aversion to the little white screaming electrical sockets, I sometimes saw an old woman's face in the mirror. And, once when I was drying myself with my eyes closed, I thought I even felt her cold, angry hands reach out and grab me. So it was just easier not to wash so often.

Bill couldn't wait to leave. ‘Why don't we go downstairs to that Tex Mex joint you told me about and have us a beer? Talk about the good ole days.'

Standing at the jukebox, I looked back across the Dallas BBQ at my other old ex-partner. It was the only time I'd ever seen him not happy sitting behind a drink. I dropped a quarter into the slot and it reverberated like a steel door slamming.

After Bill left and I got back upstairs, I saw that Lucy had forwarded me an email from her father, and along with that had asked me to meet her in the park that weekend. I suspected this rendezvous was the real reason Lucy was getting in touch with me, as her father's email was dated from a couple of weeks previous.

*