The Evil Inside (8 page)

And then I noticed the title: across the top of the alien drawing, Callum had written in big, black, awful letters:

 

Ded

I dropped the paper and moved back, away from him. ‘W-what do you mean “dead?” '

‘Nah – that say “Dad”, silly! That you!'

‘But who's that?' I asked, pointing to the strange little creature in the bubble. My hand was suddenly shaking again.

‘That me!' Callum squealed. ‘You're like Buzz an' I'm like one of dem little green mans in the machine.'

There
was
a scene in
Toy Story
where Buzz gets trapped in a vending machine filled with little green alien dolls who adopt him as their new yet reluctant leader.

‘But he's not green. He's yellow.'

‘That cos I couldn't find the green draw-rer!'

The green crayon. Of course.

‘Oh. But what are we doing here?' I indicated Buzz's swishing sword.

‘We having a swordy fight on my bed at the Awcott!'

Hmmm. I felt momentarily relieved.

It all made perfect childish sense.

Except that the drawing could have been a rough yet faithful depiction of Bubby being extinguished by Dr Hill in the hospital back in Australia, at my request.

*

11
p.m. Saturday.

I rolled upstairs and stopped outside our bedroom door. I heard some movement inside. Mia was still up and turning down the bedspread. I leaned on the doorjamb and studied my wife from behind. She seemed beautiful but different somehow in the golden glow of the bedside lamp. Her back was curved and inviting.

I'd drunk enough wine and JD – now I wanted to swallow her up. I wanted to fuck my way back to forgiveness.

She spun around. ‘Guy – what are you doing?' Her tone was fearful and sharp. She pulled her robe fast around her.

It wasn't Mia. It was Esmeralda.

‘N-n-nothing, Esmeralda.' I turned away. ‘Sorry, I thought you were Mia.' It sounded even more pathetic when I said it.

She looked frightened. ‘Your bedroom is further down the hall, Guy, you know?' She knotted her robe more tightly. ‘Maybe you had a leedle too much to drink?'

‘Yes, I'm sorry. I am a bit …
borrach
?'

There were so many fucking bedrooms. They all looked the same.

‘
Borrach-o
. Don't worry about it, Guy.' She gave me an empathic smile. ‘I know you had a bad time with your little lost baby and everything last year – and Mia too, especially – and then Mia going to the hospital so sad last week. But maybe you should take it easy you know, Guy?' She touched my arm. ‘You know we have a saying back in San Juan del Rio: “You should never swim from the top of the bottle to the bottom by yourself.” '

‘I know. Thanks, Esmeralda. Sorry. I didn't mean it.'

She put her hands together as if she was about to pray for my salvation and closed her door.

I sloped into the kitchen late Sunday morning, careful not to eyeball the electrical sockets. We'd be going back to New York tomorrow.

Callum was making a red Lego dragon on the bench. Mia – the real Mia – was making Callum some lunch while Esmeralda squeezed oranges. The women suddenly stopped talking as I clumsily plugged in the kettle.

I wondered whether Esmeralda had told Mia about my Peeping Tom escapade the night before. I doubted it. Mia was in no condition to handle any more bad news – and Esmeralda was a kind and smart girl. Maybe I was just paranoid. Their silence made me feel uneasy all the same. So I grabbed Anthony's heavy coat off the hook and went outside.

There was a short, winding path that meandered down to the sand through a row of neatly trimmed, snow-topped buttonbushes and pitch pines. The midday sun had been obscured by the big black clouds that were swarming across the bay like pirate ships.

I walked tentatively downhill as I'd forgotten to bring my Rockports away with me. All I had were my Nikes and they were already a bit wet. There was a rundown little jetty at the bottom. Some of the pylons had broken away or sunk down into the seabed; it was pretty derelict and decrepit. I hopscotched along the rotted planks and looked out to sea. The wind was picking up – as it seemed to at this time of day – harvesting a fresh crop of whitecaps that stretched all the way over to the South Fork ten kilometres away. Specks of boats on the horizon were racing home to beat the storm.

I reached deep into the folds of Anthony's coat and pulled out the bottle of Jack. I took a serious slug of the strong, smoky liquid – Arcadia's wild surroundings seemed to call for something hard and authentic. Hemingwayesque. I coughed and wiped my mouth on my sleeve. I reached down further into the pocket and pulled out my cigarettes and an old Zippo lighter I'd found atop the pot-bellied stove. The booze made itself at home in my gut as I took a long, deep drag. I'd muttered to the women that I was coming out to find some wood for the stove.

I knew that I wasn't really myself. I mean, I was aware of myself being on the end of the jetty but it was as if I, me, my conscious sentient self was standing at the other end, observing the man with the big coat and the bottle.

My heart was beginning to hammer. Maybe it was my alcohol and nicotine breakfast? It started to thump so loudly I could hear it above the quick panicky
lap lap lap
of the waves. I could see myself put my fist to my chest in an effort to calm the runaway muscle. I started to sway and felt nauseous so I sat down. I closed my eyes but that was even worse. My head swirled with a dreadful phantasmagoria of scenes from the last few weeks: I saw myself reading
Jack and the Beanstalk
to Callum at the Olcott; I saw Lucy teasing me at the Royalton; I saw Anthony and me tap-dancing our way through the coolcams presentation in Berkeley; I saw Bill and me playing paper-ball basketball in our office; I saw Mia waking me up that terrible night back in Melbourne in her red-stained night dress – and then my heart began to really gallop – the hospital; Dr Hill; Mia with her legs up in stirrups and her arms crossed above her head as though she was being sacrificed to some pitiless pagan god.

‘What have you decided?' Dr Hill asked us from the foot of the bed.

‘Have you had enough time to talk?'

He could not have been more solemn or solicitous.

Mia looked at me then looked away.

She hadn't wanted to decide. Or hadn't been able to.

So I uttered the unutterable.

‘Intervention.'

I was adrift on a raft of revulsion on a wilderness of sea.

It was nothing like the benign double-bed raft that I'd shared with Mia and Callum that blissful rainy afternoon so long ago.

This time I was on my own. And surrounded by sharks and sea monsters.

I stared at the unforgiving icy water and seriously considered hurling myself into it.

*

Despite my panic-stricken morning, Esmeralda managed to convince me that I should accompany her into Kingsville on Sunday afternoon to buy some seafood. After being cooped up all week, she wanted to get us all out of the house and breathing some fresh air. Mia declined and said she'd stay with Callum, who was happy playing with some of Courtney's old dolls.

I acquiesced more out of necessity than interest: I needed more Jack Daniels.

It was freezing out. I found a tatty old red hunting hat on the coat rack and pulled the flaps over my ears. I let Esmeralda drive because she wanted to practise for her upcoming test. I figured Anthony wouldn't have a problem with letting a novice take the wheel as the Passport already carried quite a few war wounds from the Johnsons' various off-road and skiing-in-Vermont adventures. But I advised Esmeralda to take it easy, just the same, on account of the conditions.

Kingsville was just a few cold minutes away. Aptly named, it could easily have been the setting of a Stephen King novel. It was a typical small, seaside town replete with smelly old fishermen, a harbour full of sad old tugboats and a gap-toothed foreshore broken up by wind-battered lean-to buildings and storehouses.

As we turned down the windy main street, I half-expected to bump into my old maritime nemesis, Captain Olav.

There was a municipal sign in the car park:

 

Welcome to Kingsville

We are famous for our lobsters,

clams and proud whaling heritage.

Population 1,272.

Esmeralda – who looked like a cute little Eskimo in her big fleecy parka, cap and boots – studied the town map in search of the Kingsville Fish Co-op. I was headed for Larry's Liquor, next to the yacht club. We agreed to meet back at the car in fifteen minutes.

I now appreciated Esmeralda coercing me into town. It was good to get outside, away from the house for a while. Beautiful and comfortable as Arcadia was, it was also a psychological prison of sorts. The change of scene enabled me to start to think a little straighter. To start to process what had happened to us and what was still happening. Mia and I needed to start talking again. We needed to accept all the things that had happened and develop a new emotional strategy to help us move forward.

But I was also concerned about Callum. He wasn't himself. First there was his recent uncharacteristic withdrawal and lack of energy – a subconscious reaction perhaps to Mia's suicide attempt and the fear that his mother might abandon him.

And then there was the abominable thing I'd seen on the TV screen while he was sitting next to me. I had by now attributed that disturbing episode to a temporary mental aberration on my part. Callum had been an innocent bystander while the VHS momentarily warped and my frazzled mind had played a horrible trick on me. He'd also featured in Mia's awful dream about being in labour and the old woman – another horrible fantasy. But then Callum's drawing had certainly been real enough, hadn't it?

And what about his warning to me back at the Olcott to stay away from the sockets? How could he have known about the sockets? How could he have known about that?

The thought of it chilled me far more than the stiff sea breeze.

As I turned a corner, I passed a grimy, fly-specked window advertising psychic readings – 20 minutes for $10.

I wondered what psychic disturbance had beset my dear, sweet son recently and how I could help him.

But before that I needed a drink.

Judging by its meagre stock levels, Larry's Liquor was no longer a booze store. It was just a bar down the back of a rat-infested old warehouse.

‘D'ya want a drink, pal?' the man on the stool behind the counter asked. I wondered if this was Larry. He was wearing a faded old Cleveland Indians baseball cap and a holey white windbreaker with oil stains on it. His tongue poked through the gap in his teeth when he spoke.

‘Ah, no thanks,' I said. ‘Just a bottle of Jack.' The room smelled of brine. The once-white, now grey, walls were decorated with life-rings, old nets and water stains. It was like being inside a bilge.

‘Here,' he said, filling a tumbler with something rough and brown. ‘I hate drinkin' alone.'

I looked at the dirty little glass, which was full to the brim. Then I looked at my watch: 1:45p.m.

‘Go on!' he encouraged me, tapping the bar insistently with his gnarled old fingers. He was as crazy as a coot. His tongue was darting in and out of its little hole like a snake.

‘Just one,' I said. I drained the glass. Rocket fuel mixed with swamp water. The only thing I'd tasted remotely like it before was the Kava that the natives brew up in Fiji to kill the tourists.

Ahhh, ever-friendly Fiji: land of sun, sand, thousands of smiles and buckets of sex. It was a trip we'd taken soon after we first moved in together: in her crocheted blue and white bikini, brown-as-a-berry Mia had never looked more alluring – like a mischievous, promiscuous mermaid. I looked good, too; I was running and swimming every day and somehow managed to leave my work and my worries behind for once.

On gorgeous Castaway Island, we made love three or four times a day, our orgasmic yelps flying out of our hut window like native war whoops.

Each night, we felt a conservative committee of disapproving eyes settle on us as the waiter with the piano keys smile led us to our torch-lit dinner table on the beach.

We toasted each other with fruit-jammed cocktails under the avuncular yellow moon. ‘That's the couple that's always fucking,' we imagined the other guests were saying under their breath. But we didn't care; in fact it made us feel even naughtier.

And even more in love.

We were happy then.

‘What
is
that?' I asked, trying to wipe the terrible taste off my lips.

‘Larry's Special,' he laughed, banging his chest. ‘Mattituck Moonshine' – good for what ails ya – whatever ya got!'

‘Only if it doesn't kill you first,' I said. ‘Can I grab that bottle of Jack, please?'

He indicated the nearly empty shelf behind him. The few dusty bottles were all empty. ‘I got jack. So I ain't got no Jack!' He laughed/wheezed again. ‘So how's about another Special instead?'

‘No thanks,' I said, standing to leave. ‘I'd rather live. Thanks for the drink, Larry.'

I wondered if the small supermarket I'd walked past had a liquor outlet.

Esmeralda was loading the tail of the Passport with her Co-op catch: calamari, scallops, and a live lobster in a new hessian home. Gulls circled and squawked overhead as if we were a trawler about to throw out fish heads. I climbed into the passenger seat and took a long swig out of the bottle I'd finally located in the Kingsville Hotel on the other side of the yacht club. Esmeralda pretended not to notice. The sack started crawling around in the back.