Apartment 16 (9 page)

As soon as they entered the Shafers’ apartment on the sixth floor, Seth covered his mouth and nose with the sleeve of his blazer. But that did little to keep out the stench. Scores of bin bags were piled up against the walls of the long corridor that ran the length of the rectangular apartment. Each sack had been labelled with a yellow sticker that read ‘Medical Waste’.

All of the doors to all of the rooms branching off the hallway were open. A brownish gloom filled every room, as if the smell was visible. Each was filled with more of the plastic bags, and with piles of newspapers and magazines, plates encrusted with dried food, and crumpled clothes; it was as if nothing had ever been discarded from their long and miserable occupation of the suite. Under his feet the carpet was moist and covered in whitish stains.

There was no sign of the nurse. ‘Where is your wife?’ Seth said in a tense whisper.

Mr Shafer lifted the chicken bone of his forearm and pointed forward, to the living room at the end of the corridor.

‘Your nurse?’ he repeated, desperate to keep control of his voice. ‘You have a nurse.’

‘She was no good,’ Mr Shafer said and blinked his milky eyes. ‘Your help will be sufficient.’

‘What can I do? Is it the television again?’

Mr Shafer cut him off with a shake of his grizzled head. ‘It will be fine.’ His voice changed to something Seth found unpleasant; there was a wheedling aspect to his tone and something sly about his smile. Of more concern, as they neared the shadowy living room, old Shafer began to make a sighing sound that seemed sexual, and his limping sped up so his head began to dramatically bob up and down next to Seth’s shoulder. Around his elbow the bony fingers tightened their grip.

At the mouth of the living room Seth thought he might be sick. In the far corner of the room he could see Mrs Shafer. She was on her knees, head down, with her great back towards them. Still covered in the dirty gown, she turned her face to them as they entered and then raised her broad buttocks. The slight movement seemed to push a fresh gust of putrefaction across the room and right down Seth’s throat.

Mr Shafer released Seth’s arm and began to excitedly stumble about the floor of the living room. Ungainly, he looked like the skeleton of a dead child taking its first unholy steps around a crypt; a child with one leg shorter than the other.

Mrs Shafer watched Seth closely; her tiny red eyes were fierce in their disapproval, but also expectant. ‘Are you capable of helping this dear man with his medication?’

Mr Shafer pranced on his bird legs to a cardboard box with Chinese writing on the side and a large inky stamp to show it had been through Customs. From out of the box his needle fingers pulled a length of rubber hose and an old glass syringe with large metal hoops for the injector’s fingers. He dropped them on the dirty floor and then rummaged in a second box. Polystyrene packaging spilled over the lid and fell about his gnarly feet. He pulled a jar out but the weight of the object seemed ready to pull him over and onto his face.

‘Why, help him!’ Mrs Shafer roared.

Seth broke from his appalled trance and moved to Mr Shafer’s aid. He took the glass jar from the old man. It was dusty and filled with a yellowy fluid. Preserved in the serum and crammed against the side of the glass, Seth could see a soft shape the colour of a kidney. When it moved and opened a little black eye he dropped the jar.

‘Be careful!’ Mrs Shafer screamed. Her husband fell to his knees and began scrabbling near Seth’s shoes, clawing at the glass container. A rubber tourniquet was already tied around one wasted thigh.

‘The treatment is more expensive than you could imagine, and we don’t have much left! Are you an idiot? Can’t you do anything right?’ Mrs Shafer demanded, her voice trembling with hysteria. ‘We pay your wages. This is not much to ask.’

Mr Shafer sat on the floor with the jar between his legs. Hastily, he stabbed at the metal lid with the end of the syringe. His head began to wobble from some kind of palsy, and either his face was screwed into a smile or the man was on the verge of tears.

Inside the jar, the small creature began to move in a series of contractions that appeared defensive. But the activity behind the smoky glass only served to excite Mr Shafer even more and he stabbed at the lid with a greater vigour. A strand of saliva hung from his chin and swung like a pendulum from the energy of his efforts. When his clumsy attack on the metal lid eventually created a puncture, something hissed from inside the jar. It could have been air escaping, but Seth thought it sounded like a tiny scream.

‘You’re hopeless,’ Mrs Shafer said to Seth with exasperation in her voice.

When Mr Shafer finally pushed the needle of his syringe deep inside the jar, Seth stood back and put his hand over his mouth. Yellow fluid sprouted from the metal lid and ran down the side of the glass. Seth wanted to believe what he then heard was a sudden wheeze of excitement from the old man, but he knew it had actually been a rasp of pain from the thing inside the jar.

Whatever fluid was then withdrawn into the syringe Mr Shafer wasted no time injecting into his groin. Seth looked away.

‘Is that good, darling?’ Mrs Shafer called out to her husband. ‘Is it working?’ And then added to Seth, ‘We ordered boys. They usually cheat us with girls. But these are definitely boys.’

‘I think it’s better,’ Mr Shafer mumbled, but seemed at once unsure and confused.

It was not the response Mrs Shafer wanted. Her face coloured and her great body began to shake under the kimono. ‘I said to you we should never have swapped brands.’ Then she turned her outraged face to Seth as if for his support in an argument. ‘He will not listen to me. Spending a fortune on this rubbish. It has to come all the way from China. Romania was closer, and from their stock at least we got results!’

Mr Shafer looked dejected and more tired than ever. ‘I didn’t like the last company. I told you. They were crooks.’

‘Everyone is a crook!’ she screamed. ‘And now what is to become of me? You’ve known for months this is my time.’

Mr Shafer lifted his skull and grinned at Seth. ‘He can do it.’

This seemed to placate his wife. ‘Well, don’t just stand there,’ she said to Seth.

‘What?’ he said.

Mr Shafer shook his head. ‘Another idiot. Not a bright man, are you?’

‘You could get a monkey to sit behind that desk downstairs,’ his wife added. They both laughed together, enjoying their first moment of agreement in what seemed like a long time.

Mr Shafer stood up and pressed a coin into Seth’s hand. ‘Here. This might help.’ Seth opened his hand. There was a ten-pence piece in his palm.

‘Now you see,’ Mrs Shafer said. ‘That’s what it takes. How did I guess? This is a service we have already paid for. You have no right to expect a tip.’

Seth tried to pull away from Mr Shafer. ‘What are you doing?’ The old man’s fingers had suddenly become busy as knitting needles about Seth’s belt buckle.

‘Please. No. I don’t want to.’

‘It’s not like it’s much to ask. Do you think Stephen would be pleased to hear about this?’ Mrs Shafer said from the corner.

Seth swatted Mr Shafer’s insistent fingers away from his crotch. His attentions seized by what Mrs Shafer did next, he took a step away. ‘Oh God, no.’ In the corner, she’d pushed her abdomen higher in the air and drew the kimono slowly from her rear in a parody of seductiveness. Revealed for the moment Seth could bear to look at it was a wet slit with grey lips and pinkish insides, opened in the middle of her hirsute backside.

‘Well?’ she then shrieked at him.

‘Be careful, Seth!’ a voice called from behind.

The hooded boy stood in the doorway of the living room.

‘Who is he?’ Mrs Shafer screamed, pulling her great skirt down and mercifully concealing the fleshy eye.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ Mr Shafer asked Seth. His eyes had become squinty and his mouth stretched into a mean suture.

‘But what can I do?’ Seth asked the hooded boy. His words quivered and his jaw started to tremble.

‘You got to do ’em. They deserve it.’

‘Call Stephen!’ Mrs Shafer screeched at her husband.

‘I intend to,’ her husband replied, and staggered across to a phone on top of a stack of medical catalogues.

‘How?’ Seth asked the hooded boy. Never had he felt so weak and useless. ‘I can’t.’

‘You have to. They had it comin’ a long time. They knows it.’

Seth gritted his teeth and felt the comforting glow of anger replace his panic and fear. Soon, a great molten power coursed through his every limb. Mrs Shafer could sense it. ‘Hurry, dear,’ she said to her husband. ‘I think he’s unstable.’

The old man groaned under the weight of the handset. He squinted at the keypad and one of his fingers hovered above the buttons. Seth walked across to him and seized the phone. The old man held on. ‘How dare you?’ he said. And then, ‘Let go or you’ll be very sorry.’ Seth pushed him away.

Immediately, the old man collapsed on the dirty carpet and began to moan. The phone fell after him, down and into the petrified deformity of bone and parchment skin to crack against his skull.

‘Now you’ve done it!’ Mrs Shafer shouted, before she began to scream. The noise was hideous and deafening.

Seth looked at the hooded boy. Who nodded.

Seizing the brass stem of a lamp stand from behind the wreckage of a dozen cardboard boxes, Seth pulled the whole thing free of the floor and wall. The electric cord snapped from the base and left the plug in the socket. He strode towards the corner of the living room where the bulk that was Mrs Shafer trembled. She stopped her screaming to ask him, ‘Have you lost your mind?’

‘I hope so.’ He brought the heavy base of the lamp down against her upturned face.

‘Oh,’ she said, in a daze after the thunk of antique walnut and metal against her tiny features. Then she sat up and tried to regain her dignity. She wiped a strand of bloodied hair from off her forehead and pouted her lips as if to apply lipstick.

Seth brought the lamp down even harder. Like wielding a pickaxe, every muscle and tendon in his back and arms went into the second blow.

‘That’s it,’ the hooded boy said from behind, his words partly obscuring the crunch of skull.

Seth laughed to prevent himself from falling to his knees and weeping. Mrs Shafer stopped talking but her lips still moved. He brought the lamp stand down again and again and again against her face, hoping the great body would stop trembling under the kimono. It didn’t seem ready to stop so he slammed the base of the lamp into her abdomen. After the second strike against her distended belly he heard something tear under the kimono and her entire body appeared to soften and finally relax.

‘My wife. My wife. My wife,’ Mr Shafer cried out in a weak voice from the floor, where he lay tangled in his own disability.

‘Don’t feel sorry for him,’ the hooded boy advised Seth. ‘They’ll all feel sorry for themselves at the end, but they had this comin’.’

Seth nodded in agreement and walked across the carpet to finish Mr Shafer off. Under his feet something squelched. It was fluid seeping from under Mrs Shafer’s kimono.

‘It’s not that hard once you start,’ Seth said in amazement to the hooded boy. ‘You just lose your temper and go all hot.’

‘That’s right.’

‘But what amazes me most is that they’re nothing. In the end, they mean nothing.’

The hooded boy nodded excitedly.

Seth brought the lamp stand down into the middle of Mr Shafer’s body. It was as if a giant metal foot had trodden upon dry twigs on a forest floor.

‘There’s another fing you need to see tonight, Seth. I’s been told to show you,’ the hooded boy said.

‘No, please. Not in here.’ Seth stood outside apartment sixteen. The teak veneer shone like gold, and from beneath the heavy door a reddish glow dispersed across the green carpet of the landing. From within the flat he sensed a resolution to a journey that filled his body with panic. And with it came the far-off sound of something he’d heard before but could not place. Voices. Swirling about. Rotating, but going backwards like a record. Faint, like the sound of crying children inside a distant house, heard on a winter’s afternoon, just as the sun is dying into dark clouds. Forlorn. And fast becoming a much bigger chorus. Inside the apartment but elsewhere. Above him.

His body rigid with fear, he tried to step away, but the door just moved closer.

‘You have to,’ the hooded boy said. ‘He wants to show you all them other ones, them down there that can’t get out. They’s all waiting. He’s got it open just for you, mate.’

Twisting and pushing his limbs against the heavy thickness of air that swelled against his back and threatened to topple him forward, Seth tried to resist. He knew instinctively that if he were to cross the threshold of this place something terrible would happen. He would be forced to confront something that could stop his heart with a bang.

And then they were standing in a red hallway on the other side of the door he never saw open. Side by side. Him and the boy that smelled of burnt flesh, of exhausted gunpowder and singed cardboard. A smell that filled his nostrils and seared the back of his throat. Made it difficult to breathe, while the circling sound of the chattering crowd moved closer like a playground full of terror. It was coming from further down the reddish hallway, as if a room behind one of these heavy doors contained a whirlpooling violence of air in which so many people were caught up and dragged backwards, around and around, until they were too dizzy to do anything but scream.

Already he could sense himself falling a long way down if he opened the wrong door. So far down into that sound and at such great speed.

The boy stood behind him. ‘Go on, Seth.’

The hooded presence pushed Seth forward. His legs were numb, his feet beset by pins and needles. His jaw seized up and he struggled to breathe. But down the hallway and across the black and white squares of marble he went. Beneath the old glass lamps that threw out the dirty light that never reached the ceiling which he couldn’t see, and that was too dim to illumine much of the reddish walls. Ox-blood red around the big pictures in the gilt frames. Heavy gold frames, acting like the frames of windows beyond which existence had stopped while the void moved.