Faceless, page 8
He leaned against the door, and willed himself to walk away, willed himself to walk back to his car, to get in, to drive away, to just drive away and leave it all behind. With what felt like an immense act of will he stood up straight and took one step forward towards the exit, towards escape, and then another. Then he stopped. He stood still, dropped his head back, his chin up, to look at the ceiling, the words ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus’, falling out of his mouth. Then he slowly turned, he turned and looked back at that door and the knowledge of what was behind it, with feelings of fear, and disgust and self-loathing, and with the undeniable stirrings of excitement. He breathed out long and slow, and then reached out for the handle.
Billy
The darkness engulfs her, as consuming as the spasms that still grip her body. How can she have been so stupid? She knows she should have sipped, that her stomach wouldn’t cope with so much at once, but once she had the water in her grasp, it was as if the insatiable demand of her body had taken over, and it was impossible to stop. Despite the cramps, and the hot sting of the handprint on her cheek, she gropes around, fingertips searching, trying to find the bottle. She pauses, and to her horror registers the sound she can hear is the quiet glugging of the water spurting out onto the floor. The sipper was open. She imagines the entire bottleful emptying away. In her desperation she reaches out with her feet, ignoring the pain in her one tied wrist, stretching as far as she can reach, carefully probing with her toes to ensure she doesn’t inadvertently kick it yet further away. But it remains out of reach, tantalising, teasing, glugging.
Her attention is broken by the skreek of the door handle turning, and the graduated influx of light as it swings open. He is silhouetted in the doorway, and immediately she senses a change. She pulls her body back into itself, kneels, huddled, close to the wall, waiting, the twist of uncertainty charging in her heart. He stands there looking at her, his weight transferring from his toes to his heels, as if he’s teetering on the edge of something.
And then he moves. He walks over, with purpose, not with the uncertainty of earlier. He stands over her; she can hear his breathing and it is ragged, the heavy sound of someone who is feeling – what? Is it excitement? Her eyes rise to meet his. All she sees is blackness, then the sudden blur of movement as his hand swings back followed by the shock of pain across her cheek as he slaps her.
Moments pass, time expands as they stare at each other. Then he hits her again.
Max
It was late: the streetlights pushed back the encroaching night; the usually manic road traffic had quietened to a steady thrum. The sear of pain up through his tailbone had compelled him to lie on his side in the alleyway where he had retreated to lick his wounds, where he had tried to descend into the oblivion of his personal darkness and its comforting nothingness; but he found, with an unmistakable sense of irony, that when wished for, it remained elusive. Instead his thoughts were a whirling miasma of Billy. Their first encounter, the slow journey to trust, late-afternoon walks in the parks, quiet conversations. At times her image morphed into that of another girl of similar age, the composite a play of laughter and light and hope, but which evolved into a shifting montage of fear and despair, the impact of which lurched him back from the abyss of his mind into the hard reality of asphalt, of pain and an underlying ache of anxiety. Billy. He had to get up. He knew his conscience would never rest unless he got himself up and did something about it. His mind had run through the potential courses of action he could take. Some were simple; others required some serious choices. All were about the timing. And at this late hour, there was only one prospective avenue available.
His eyes opened, took in the tagged brick wall opposite. The sight of the mindless yellow spray-painted moniker before him made his teeth grit with irritation. First things first: he had to continue with his line of inquiry.
It was as if every muscle in his body yelled out in protest as he first got himself up onto his side, waited through the inevitable head spins and then lumbered to his feet. He stood there a few moments, bent over, hands leaning on his knees, eyes screwed shut, trying to block out the thud in his head as he worked up the fortitude to get on with it.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. What have you turned into?’ He hit his balled hands against his thighs several times and then stood up straight. With as much presence as his aching body could muster, he walked around the corner and back out onto K Road. There was no sign of witchy-woman or her younger hag-in-the-making; they would be servicing the needs of the night-crawlers. But it wasn’t them he was after. He caught movement further up the street to his left and, before his courage deserted him and his body quit out, strode as confidently as he could towards it.
‘Are you fuckin’ stupid or something? I thought I told you to get lost.’ The man mountain looked less than delighted to see him and stepped forward, right in his face, his aggression plain for even the least intuitive to see. ‘Or did you like the feeling of my boot up your arse?’
Max stood his ground, hoping his exterior looked staunch, even while his innards turned to hot liquid.
‘I don’t want to cause you any trouble,’ he said, raising his hands, a peace offering between them. ‘A friend is missing, that’s all. I’m just trying to find her. Trying to get some information that will help.’
‘Is she your bitch?’ It was a typical question from someone to whom everything was a business transaction, although this one was delivered in the mocking tone of one who knew it was an impossibility. Max ignored the slight and continued.
‘No, like I said, she’s just a friend I look out for. Billy. You might have seen her around here. Small Fijian girl, bit of a tomboy.’
A glint of recognition showed in the pimp’s face. ‘You mean that pretty one, the one who comes and turns tricks around here sometimes. She pisses me off, I’ve had to have words a few times. Why would I care if she’s missing? She steals my business. Better off without her around.’ He moved back a step. ‘Fuck, you stink.’
A flush of embarrassment crawled up his face. It surprised him. Since when had he started caring about what people thought? Especially scum like that.
‘She’s been gone two nights. I’m concerned, okay? She’s got no one else who looks out for her except me. I know you look after the ladies around here. Do you photograph their rides?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘What’s it to you? You a cop or something?’
‘No.’ He felt a pang at the question. ‘Look, I’m not interested in your business. Like I said, I don’t want any trouble. I just thought you might have caught the girl on your camera, in the background or something. It’s a long shot, I know, but I just want to find her.’
The man looked at him for a while, and Max noted with relief of sorts that he was no longer in imminent danger of getting his butt kicked back to the alley. Although the expression the Polynesian was wearing still made him feel far from comfortable. It was too calculating for his liking.
‘What’s in it for me?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know how it works. Nothing’s for free. If I help you find the girl, what’s it worth?’ He should have expected this. He realised with despair, he had nothing of currency worth trading. No money, no possessions, no cigarettes. He couldn’t even trade his arse, because no one in their right mind was going to take him in this condition.
‘I have nothing,’ he said with utter honesty, and turned to leave. It was pointless, and the sense of failure he felt weighed his shoulders down.
‘You have something I want,’ Man Mountain said, with a combination of amusement and malice that was chilling.
Max felt the frown wrinkle his brow. ‘What do you mean?’ The one-sided sneer brought with it a dawning premonition of what was coming.
‘Her. I help you, you find her, she’s mine.’
Oh God, not that. But what price was he prepared to negotiate without her permission or even knowledge? She used her body occasionally as a means to an end, but she held the power over that. It was her choice. This kind of bastard would use her relentlessly for his own profit – she would be trapped and helpless, used until spent, like that hag. She would never forgive him.
Max shook his head and began the tired walk of failure again.
‘You ain’t got much choice,’ Man Mountain called out after him. ‘And I’m pretty sure I’ve got something that might help.’
Max stopped dead. Fuck. Win her back but sell her soul? Still, the pimp was right, what other option was there? He’d do what he had to do. He turned back.
‘You can help me find her, then? You’ve got something?’
A half-smile curled one corner of the man-mountain’s lips. ‘Where will you be in an hour?’
‘I’ll wait around the corner, behind the café.’
The pimp gave him the head flick that went as a greeting, or a seal of agreement. ‘And don’t you fuck me over, or you will pay in ways you never imagined possible.’
Max nodded, and limped away. His imagination was pretty good. But still, one thing was for sure: find her or not, he had absolutely no intention of living up to that deal.
Bradley
He was having trouble reconciling the exquisite sense of guilt he felt with the unbearable euphoria that surged in his heart. The warring of such potent emotions left him vertiginous, confused, yet somehow energised. A giggle burst from his mouth. He took a hand off the steering wheel and slapped it over his mouth, but too late, another escaped, and yet another, and he wondered if this was what happened when the thread of your sanity let go. It took all his strength and concentration to steer the car through the throng of traffic, the occupants of other cars blank with the tedium of the Auckland shuffle, or in conversation with passengers, or singing noiselessly, looking happily moronic. Seeing them, hermetically encapsulated beings, oblivious to the secret he carried, made him laugh all the louder. He noticed a little girl in the car next door looking at him like he was crazy. She would have been the same age as his Katie. On the spur of the moment he poked his tongue out at her. She looked surprised, then smiled back broadly, dimples punctuating her cheeks. The similarity to his daughter pulled him back towards the here and now, and the laughter faded on his lips. In fifteen minutes he’d be home. In fifteen minutes he would have to walk in that door and somehow find the mettle to carry on as if nothing was wrong, as if nothing had changed, as if he was his normal, hard-working, middle-class, conservative self. But he was nowhere near normal. He knew he had crossed a line, stepped over a forbidden border to a foreign land that made him something he had never conceived himself to be. His Catholic schoolboy guilt told him he had become the worst kind of a monster. That thought terrified him, but it also excited him. And that was what scared him the most.
Max
From the perspective of someone for whom time was just another element to be weathered, an hour was nothing. Max shook himself back to attention when he heard the approaching slap of heavy footsteps in jandal flip flops, and pushed himself up from the wall he had been leaning against. He noted the exaggerated waddle of someone whose thighs were so fat he had to walk with his feet shoulder-width apart, and he couldn’t help but feel disgust at the thought that this man’s corpulence had been fuelled by the proceeds of many exploited women. He had a fleeting compulsion to find a way to rid the world of this pestilence, but it fled with the realisation of his impotence. The man mountain stopped two feet in front of him, his face twitching his revulsion.
‘You remember our deal?’
Max nodded.
‘Don’t fuck me about.’ Before he could react, the ham-sized fist once again barrelled into his stomach, and his body folded in half and dropped to the ground. He knelt there clutching his stomach, waiting for the next blow, but it didn’t come. Instead an A4 piece of paper drifted onto the ground in front of him, and the jandal-clad feet waddled away.
Fighting the urge to vomit, Max reached out and flipped the paper over. The image was a little pixelated, but it was unmistakable. It was Billy, and she was getting into a car.
Billy
She sits in her pitch-black prison. She sits still, cross-legged, spine straight, as if meditating but with her captured hand up and her other out, a meditating ballerina at an unlikely barre. Her face still buzzes with the stings of his attack. She breathes slow and even, and in her mind she is reaching for something, some anchor, something to keep her earthed, grounded, present. For she knows the game has changed with his return, his conscious determination, it has changed for good and she senses she has become his outlet, his toy. The fleeting opportunity for redemption has passed, destroyed by the greed of her thirst. Her physical being cries out in shock and pain and need. For the moment she ignores it, and in her mind she searches, searches for something to sustain her. She thinks of her art, the piece she is yet to finish and the new project that had been flirting in her mind, Medusa reaching out from the wall, the terrible beauty of her Polynesian face surrounded by a writhing mass of hibiscus flowers, snaking tendrils of green ending in a floral eruption of red, replacing the serpents of myth and lore. But now, instead, she thinks of Persephone, kidnapped by Hades, Lord of the Underworld, and dragged into the bowels of hell, and she shudders, because it is too close to home, she is Persephone, this is his hell, and she shudders because she knows he will come back.
Max
The first rays of thin, autumnal light greeted him from a fitful sleep, a sleep that had been haunted by dreams of melting faces – like waxen candles, grotesquely consumed by their own flames. There had been the image of Billy, whose ethereal form kept slipping from his grasp, his hand raking through the misty trail of her passing, vortexes and eddies forming from between his spread fingers. And there was her, another girl – younger, blonde, whom he couldn’t bring himself to put a name to, and whose presence made him ache in such a visceral way it had woken him, disorientated, confused, relieved.
He pulled himself out from beneath the makeshift shelter of boxes, his battered body responding to the chill southerly wind with a shiver that did not stop. On any normal day the weather would have been enough to send him back into the refuge of the doorway, but not today. He hunched his shoulders forward, put his face to the wind and started walking. But before he’d even gone seven paces he paused, turned back around and looked over to Billy’s spot, felt his feet drawn there. He squatted down on his haunches, ran his fingers across the asphalt, flicked away a few loose pieces of gravel. Then, with as much ceremony as he could muster, Max pulled the squished tube of toothpaste and toothbrush Billy insisted he use out of the scraggy depths of his pocket and slowly, deliberately brushed his teeth. The action brought a sudden expanding hollowness into his chest and a visceral ache to his heart, and he marvelled at the sensations. It was as if Billy’s disappearance had uncovered the well that had been his suppressed emotional self, and although these sensations were coming back sporadically, each one cut like a knife and threatened to take his breath away. He feared being crippled by his inability to deal with each attack – because that was what they felt like: repeated assaults on his soul. And at this point he didn’t know if they were strengthening or weaking him.
Homage given, he set out for the only place where he knew he could get proper help, where the precious slip of paper he carried might be examined, potential evidence extracted, a trail formed. Well, he hoped it could. At the moment it was all he had, all she had. Max practised in his head the words he would use, hoped they would be enough to get through to the person he needed. This time he took a circuitous route so that he approached the Central Police Station from Vincent Street, ensuring he couldn’t use the six-lane road in front as an excuse for inaction. Head forward and heart racing, he drove his legs towards the target, barely paused for the automatic doors to open, and walked straight up to the front counter. He could feel the sweat breaking out on his brow, each pore responding to the sudden change in temperature and screaming out in distress. His empty stomach squirmed like a seething mass of worms that threatened to escape.
The constable behind the enquiries desk was joking with someone behind him, but when he saw Max and looked him up and down, his countenance dropped mid-expression. There was no cheery greeting; his body language said it all, the slight lean back, the scrunch of the nose, the judgemental eyes. Max had hoped it would be the young officer who had come out to the park to challenge him yesterday – then there would have been less explaining to do, and less chance for him to obey his body’s urge to bail and run back out those doors. No such luck.
