Rush (17 page)

We leave the three truckers in the dirt and dust outside the pub, our own faces bloody and knuckles torn and bruised. Spencer looks at me and laughs. The stitches in my face have come loose and my palm is split open. Spencer has a gash across his cheek and a split lip. I spit blood onto the ground and wonder if I have all of my teeth.

Spencer pats me on the back and says, ‘Let's get back to that doctor for another round of needle and thread before he shuts up for the day.' He's laughing the whole time, and so am I.

In every game you have a winner, and you have a loser. It doesn't matter what sport or what competition you're involved in. Winners and losers. Any game that ends in a draw signifies that the players aren't willing to play it out until the very end. They aren't willing to push themselves as far as they can go to win. A game is truly about winning. You can say later that it's about the thrill of the sport, but really when you're playing the game nothing matters to you but victory. Think about it, and don't lie to yourself.

There's even more of a thrill to it when you know you've gotten into your opponent's head and beat him not just in the game, but in his mind. You've psychologically fucked him.

I'm not quite sure when I've realised it, but I know now that Hayes was grooming me before our game. Taking me into his life, converting me to his brand of cigarettes, trying utterly to convince me of his world view. He was testing me, probing me, readying me for the game.

It's about eleven on a weekday morning when I'm woken by a knocking at the door of my hostel room. Around me the sheets reek of my own sweat and blood. The thing is, I don't remember falling asleep, and I don't remember returning to the hostel last night. I'm just there.

The last thing I remember is Juliet and me wandering
through Hyde Park, listening to buskers and sitting on park benches talking quietly to ourselves while the world went by. She said, ‘Those cuts look pretty nasty. What the hell happened to you?'

I told her it was a car accident. That's the story Spencer has asked me to use, so that Juliet doesn't worry that he's been out causing trouble.

She said, ‘The same car accident that Spencer was in?'

I told her it was the very same.

She asked, ‘Whose car?'

I told her it was a rental and explained we'd been in South Australia over the weekend.

Juliet said, ‘Holy shit, you're telling me you went surfing with Spencer?'

I gave a nod, said yeah.

She said, ‘You see any sharks?'

I said, ‘Nope, not a one.'

She said, ‘Some people would call you crazy.'

I said, ‘We're all crazy in our own way.'

She laughed at that like she didn't think it was true.

I said, ‘When I'm on trial, I'm quite sure I'll plead insanity.'

She thought that I was joking. She said, ‘You shouldn't be so cynical all the time. Pessimists die young, you know.'

And I wanted to ask her what she knew about dying young, anyway. Do you have a tumour pulsating away in your head? Are you living your last months right now?

Instead, I looked her in the eye and I said, ‘I don't think that dying young makes any difference if you've really lived your life to its fullest.'

‘It's debatable,' she said. ‘I mean, what's really living life to its fullest?'

We were walking arm in arm along a wide path, alone in the night, with trees clouding over us like giant shading arches and blocking the night sky. I didn't give her an answer to the question, mostly because I wasn't sure if there was one. Your ideals can change from day to day if you're faced with enough perspective-altering experiences. I didn't think I had any interest in Juliet, but she's growing on me.

But anyway, somebody is knocking on my door, and it's not last night anymore, and I'm feeling neither awake nor asleep.

I tell the door to wait. Hold on a second. Quit knocking so loud. I take a handful of pills that the doctor prescribed to help my tumour. They calm me and keep me thinking clearly. Help me to maintain rationality.

I load a gun and stuff it into the jacket on the floor, keep it by my feet.

I go to the door.

There are two men in suits who pull their identification and ask if they can have a word. The taller one does all the talking. He introduces himself as Kilby and his associate is Hensen. Hensen works for Immigration but Kilby doesn't clearly identify where he's from, he dances away from that issue like it's not so relevant. They inform me that they're acting on behalf of an outside, international agency. Interpol, maybe. As if this makes them more important to me.

Kilby is saying, ‘Sir, we understand you came to the country on a flight from Cambodia.'

I say, ‘No.'

Kilby is frowning when Hensen corrects him. ‘It was a flight from Hong Kong. You transferred from a Cambodian flight.'

I say, ‘Correct.'

Kilby says, ‘Okay, so we're playing specifics? Fine.' He's irritated. I know that my immediate lack of cooperation is pissing him off. Hensen shrugs.

Kilby produces a photograph and hands it to me. He asks, ‘Do you recognise this man?'

Of course I recognise this man. It's a photograph of Hayes, the same one depicted in his passport that I was carrying in Cambodia. He's beaming toward the photographer, flashing his teeth like a wolf to its victim. He's wearing the same jacket that's crumpled on the floor of my room, the same jacket I've bundled my gun into.

I say, ‘Yes, I recognise him.'

Kilby says, ‘Apparently the body of this man was found dead over a week ago in Vietnamese swampland. He'd been shot in the head.'

I nod and say nothing. I'm not going to give them the pleasure of any other reaction.

Kilby raises his eyebrows and says, ‘You don't seem particularly surprised to hear of his death, I'd have to say.'

I shrug and say, ‘I'm not.'

‘So why would that be?'

I decide I don't want to play this game. I ask them, ‘What is this? Am I being accused of his murder, or what?'

Hensen is quick to say, ‘No, you're not.'

I ask, ‘So what's this all about?'

Kilby says, ‘Can I ask what happened to your face, and your hands?'

I tell them it was a car accident.

Kilby is saying, ‘Car accident?'

I say, ‘Yeah, that's right. Now what do you want?'

‘We want your cooperation,' Hensen says. ‘We'll tell you this much: you're under suspicion for some pretty heavy crimes, but there's not enough evidence to indict you.'

Kilby is irritated that Hensen gives away this much. He wants to be in charge. He doesn't give his associate a chance to continue before he's saying, ‘We have you linked to a Miss Phoebe McKinley, who is also linked to the dead man, a Mr Hayes. We have you placed in Vietnam around the same time as Hayes' death. We also have you placed there during the same time period when an unidentified corpse was found on the doorstep of Mr Hayes' apartment, shot three times.'

Can I explain to them that the unidentified man is my friend the Russian debt collector? Is it possible to say that he collected his debt in a payment of bullets?

Hensen says, ‘We can also place you in Cambodia during the same time a man was known to be using Hayes' identification, claiming to be the dead man. We have no records of your entry into Cambodia, but we have records of your departure from the country.' There's a beat before he asks me, his voice full of mock sympathy, ‘Can you explain all of these things?'

I tell them I could explain it all, but I'm not prepared to. They say that they want to take me into custody for further questioning. Apparently they have the power to do this.

I tell them I'll come willingly. ‘Did you come alone?' I ask them. ‘Or are there police waiting outside?'

They're alone, they tell me.

That's all I need to hear. Gathering up my jacket I drop the gun into my hand and Kilby is spraying blood against the wall before the shot has even finished rattling my ears. I'm glad to see the impatient prick go down, blood looping from the puncture in his chest as he tumbles backward.

In slow motion, Hensen is wide-eyed and turns to run, but I catch him in the shoulder with the first bullet and in the hip with the second. The first shot twists him left, the second right. Then he's down.

My possessions are the clothes that I wear and the gun in my hand, the guns in my bag, the identification and money in my pocket.

I'm out the door even before Hensen has finished dying, leaking blood onto the linoleum floor.

At eleven in the morning at a backpacker hostel, there's nobody present but the cleaning staff. The tourists are busy out there somewhere seeing the world.

There's a cleaning woman standing in the hall outside my door. Maybe she's heard the gunshots, and I have an impulse to shoot her, too. She's a short Asian woman, and she's standing there with a mop twice her height. She's looking up at me, and she says, ‘I clean yo' room now, huh?'

I'm hiding the gun behind my back where she can't see it. I'm thinking of the two bodies in the room, and I'm thinking of excuses to get this woman away from here. She's looking over my shoulder, into the room. I'm waiting for her screams, the sight of blood on the
walls, bodies crumpled on the floor. It never comes.

She doesn't even raise an eyebrow.

I'm looking back over my shoulder, into the room as she edges past me with her bucket and mop. The little Asian lady starts to mop the blood from the floor around the two bodies. The soapy water in the bucket turns pink when the mop goes in and out.

I shake my head in disbelief, and the cleaning woman is humming a tune.

There's nobody at the service desk as I rush outside, and so far as I'm aware nobody has heard the gunshots. I stuff the gun into my jacket to keep it concealed and—
déjà vu
—take the nearest bus.

I don't care where the bus takes me. An old man asks me if I have the time, and I tell him, no, I fucking don't. Leave me alone.

I'm sweating and my heart is beating in time with my tumour, and my hands are shaking.

I want to light a cigarette, but the packet is empty.

I want to get off the bus.

I'm suddenly feeling very claustrophobic.

‘Stop the bus!' I scream. I'm standing in the aisle, swaying dizzily. I don't want to cause a scene. I just want to get off.

The bus comes to a screeching halt. Everybody is staring at me.

I make my way down the aisle, clutching my chest. I'm having difficulty breathing.

Somebody says, ‘What the hell is his problem?'

I stand at the front of the bus and the doors hiss open. The driver tells me to hurry up. I look back at the other passengers, their expressions disgruntled or bewildered.
I tell them to, ‘Stop staring. You're all going to die one day, too, you know.'

 

When I turn up at Spencer's place in Mosman he doesn't seem particularly surprised to see me there. He doesn't notice, or pretends he doesn't notice, the flecks of blood on my jacket and cheek. He and I are like bruised brothers, sporting stitched wounds across our faces and hands.

He opens the door and grins when he sees me and says, ‘My castle is your castle.'

It isn't so much a castle as it is a house in the suburbs, with a neat front lawn and a double garage and a nice backyard. I've never been here before. It's got three bedrooms but two of them are used to store most of Spencer's equipment. There's a shed in the backyard where he fashions surfboards sometimes, but he tells me he hasn't made a board in a couple of years.

He's been living here for five years, and his girlfriend has lived with him for three.

Spencer's girlfriend is Sophia. She has an eating disorder, and during the first week of my living at Spencer's she says to me, one day when we're home alone, she says, ‘My nose is bleeding again.' She says this with a voice full of surprise, like she can't believe this is her fifth nosebleed in a week. She's standing there in the doorway, pencil-thin in her ragged denim jeans and sleeveless top, holding her nose as the blood drips along her wrist.

I tell her it's due to dramatic weight loss.

She says she hasn't lost any weight this week, her tone defensive and appalled.

I say, ‘You lost your dinner in the bathroom last night. I heard it.' I proceed to make gagging sounds and she turns away and won't have anything to do with me for the rest of the day.

Sophia is home all day. She'll cook dinner for Spencer but often won't eat it herself. She's a vegetarian, though she prefers to eat nothing at all. Her diet is cigarettes.

When we're sitting at home watching television and smoking cigarettes, Spencer is leaping out of planes. I ask Sophia, ‘What do you do for fun?'

She says, ‘What do you mean?'

I say, ‘Well, do you jump out of airplanes?'

She raises her eyes in disbelief. ‘Do you think I'm fucking stupid?'

I'm tempted to tell her that, yes, I do.

I'm tempted to tell her that I can't quite fathom what Spencer sees in her.

I'm tempted to ask her if she's ever played a game of Russian roulette, and if she feels like playing one right now.

Throughout the week, Spencer comes home and talks about the coming jump this weekend. Cliffs, waterfalls, valleys. He tells me about the rush. He tells me that he wants to teach me how to skydive, like really dive. He tells me what it's like to share a moment with the world.

He rolls joints and tells me that anybody who can't embrace their fear is living with their eyes closed. When I tell him one night that Sophia is a real bitch he says, ‘Yeah, I know. But when I'm up there she doesn't even exist. Nothing does but me.'

I feel like suggesting that she'll still be here when he lands. But I don't.

Spencer and I remove our stitches together with a small pair of scissors, carefully cutting around each other's scars, pulling the thread through tiny tickling holes. The wounds haven't healed entirely and there's a danger they'll reopen, but Spencer tells me his stitches are itching and he doesn't want to pull them out on his own.

In the morning I ask Sophia if I can borrow her car, because I'm sick of listening to the sounds of her gagging in the bathroom every time she feels like a snack throughout the day.