» Afflicted – serialised book

Afflicted 20: Chapter 19

biodagar — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:51 +0000

Bevan didn’t hear from Jack, but he also didn’t hear from anybody else about him, so he didn’t worry. He figured that his mate was probably just wagging school and staying out of his mum’s way; he also figured that she was probably prone to exaggeration—all mums were. Especially Jack’s.

The rest of the week passed uneventfully, and on Friday Rick announced that his old man had bought him a new second-hand bike, and was fixing it up. Did he want to go fishing the next day?

In response, Bevan eyed his friend critically. He still didn’t look well enough to be riding down the river to go fishing. ‘Are you sure you’re up to it?’

Rick sighed impatiently.

Bevan changed his tack. ‘Let’s not ride, alright? We’ll walk. If we leave in the morning we’ll still get a good day’s fishing in.’

Rick sighed. ‘Fine.’

‘Besides,’ commented Bevan. ‘If your dad fucks up the brakes on this bike like he did the last one, the ride’ll kill you. If it doesn’t, you’ll barely be able to get out of that place in one piece.’

So it was that Bevan and Rick met up the next morning and walked down along the river. They hadn’t done it for what such a long time. They didn’t talk much. The beautiful sunshine was warm and with its cascading heat came silence, which walked with them for most of the way. Each was absorbed in his own thoughts, neither of them taking much notice of their surroundings, even though for both of them the river was easily the most wonderful place in the world. The two boys had been living in a fog for what seemed half their lives, a fog that had made them forget the simple pleasures in their lives.

The walk down around the river took them a good while. Their usual spot was a good five k’s or so along, and much of that was over rutted tracks, through pestilential weeds resplendent with thorns and other nasties that catch you unaware if you don’t pay attention. It took them an hour to get there sometimes. But Rick’s condition meant that it took them longer than usual; and the sun was so nice that it made them want to linger.

After a while they got to where they were going, to the big tree on the bend in the river. They stopped in their tracks at the same time, as if by telepathic consensus and, now hidden from the sun and in the strengthening breeze, they pulled out their jumpers with one accord and put them on. They also simultaneously looked up, sat down, and lit up a smoke. They smoked, and sat, and looked up into the tree, contemplatively. The sun filtering down through the leaves hit them in the face now and then, and highlighted how ill they looked.

Their worries about Jack had passed in the warmth of the morning. Neither of them had expected to see him swinging gently in the breeze, held aloft by a noose around his neck. Shortly after they’d sat down, Bevan’s phone started to ring. He jerked out of his reverie and pulled it out of his pocket to see who it was.

It was Jack’s mum.

Bevan sighed, stared at it with sadness, then shuddered and pitched his phone into the river.

‘I’m sorry, man,’ he whispered up at Jack. ‘Your mum’ll murder you when she finds out you’ve killed yourself.’

Fini.

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Afflicted 19: Chapter 18

biodagar — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 00:00:59 +0000

The next fortnight was weird. Jack didn’t turn up to school or anywhere, and it was strange, almost empty without his spirited temper around the place; but it was also peaceful. Rick didn’t turn up for the first week, deciding that it would be better to try and get over his injuries, a little bit at least, before attempting to carry his bag and walk the distance. Bevan had spent that first week feeling oddly empty and lonely. His smell didn’t bother him any more, but in a strange way he wished it did. It was the kind of persistent presence that he felt was missing in his life.

The week gave Bevan a chance to think about things a bit more clearly, and by Thursday he’d gathered up the courage to dig his fishing gear out of the back shed and go fishing. Not wanting to tempt fate, he pursued some nice spots in the other direction and got more redfin than he’d ever pulled in—including the day that he’d given most of his haul to Jack to take home. The time spent in meditation by the river was useful for Bevan. He worried about Jack not being around, and wondered if he ought to try and get in touch with him. The more rational Bevan—that is, he without the appalling stench—decided that although Jack had been better to him than usual, that it probably wouldn’t last, and didn’t want to push things. He figured Jack was man enough to take care of himself.

Bevan also started to get over his anger at Rick, but it didn’t stop him from thinking that his friend would probably turn out warped and, potentially dangerous if he was let loose on the world. Rick’s fascination with dead things disturbed him.

The following Monday, Rick walked unseeingly past Bevan on his way past the school gates, towards the back smoking rendezvous. Bevan fell into step behind Rick and, being better at silent walking than his friend was, managed to get all the way to the spot without being seen or heard.

Rick walked right up and over the ridge, and dumped his bag under a tree; he turned and leapt about a foot in the air when he saw Bevan grinning at him and holding out a smoke. Rick took it gratefully, and cautiously started to enjoy it. Bevan, meanwhile, was casting a critical eye over his friend, taking in the bruises that had spread and deepened.

He frowned, blowing smoke in the direction of the breeze. ‘What the fuck happened to you?’ He walked around Rick and lifted up his mate’s shirt to have a look at his ribs, on the off-chance that they’d be the same colour as his face. They were. Rick absently touched his nose, and rubbed the back of his neck.

‘Jack.’

For a moment this went past Bevan. ‘What do you mean J…’ his eyes widened as his brain caught up. ‘Fuck off.’

‘I’m not shitting you, man. Jack belted the crap out of me.’

Bevan nodded. ‘He sure fucken did!’

Rick looked around uneasily. ‘He’s not here is he?’

‘Nup,’ the butt-end of Bevan’s smoke sailed over Rick’s head and landed on a pile of sand amongst the long grass. ‘Haven’t seen him for over a week. Jesus you musta pissed him off.’

Rick cast his mind back to that afternoon at the river, and looked past his taunting of Jack over the dead girl. He looked past the injuries that he’d received from ditching his bike. His face assumed an innocent, wounded look. ‘Dunno what I did. Reckon he just went psycho.’

Bevan slowly shook his head in amazement. He’d always thought Jack was full of piss and wind, never thought he’d actually ever lay into anyone. He was full of admiration; maybe it’ll teach this arrogant twat a bit of a lesson.

‘Shit, eh?’

What else could a bloke say?

When they parted ways, Bevan pulled out his phone and sent Jack a text message. He didn’t expect to get a reply, but he did think that if he’d belted the fuck out of Rick then something serious must be going on in that dude’s head, otherwise Rick was lying through his teeth. Bevan thought it was probably a little bit of both. He always took what Rick said with a bit of salt.As he walked through the courtyard at the front of the school, he saw Jack’s mum emerge from the front door, looking pensive.

‘Hello,’ thought Bevan. ‘One of the boys has done something.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Two past nine. Shit, they don’t waste any time. ’ He yelled out to her and gave her a wave.

Jack’s mum didn’t smile at him or wave back, but she did head immediately in his direction. She was frowning, but Bevan could see that she was far more preoccupied than she was angry. Her eyes were dim and looked past him. She didn’t greet him when he caught up with him.

‘Bevan! Have you seen Jack?’

He was taken aback, and shook his head. ‘Nah, sorry, I haven’t. I thought he was at home.’

She gestured to his phone. ‘Have you heard from him? When was the last time you saw him?’

Bevan looked at her warily and pocketed his phone. ‘Why? Is he in trouble?’ He didn’t want to get his mate any more in the shit than he had to, because he knew what a cow Jack’s mum was to him, usually when he didn’t deserve it. She was the Disciplinarian Extraordinaire.

Jack’s mum breathed out and her countenance lost a bit of its tension. Her eyes focused on Bevan a bit better, and she smiled at his loyalty. ‘No. I’m just worried about him, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him for three days. Last time I did see him he was kind of weird; real nice to me. Little shit’s never really nice to me. Makes me wonder what he’s done. And he looked so tired, Bevan.’

Bevan grinned at her description of Jack as a little shit. He wondered briefly what she’d call him if she saw Rick. He could tell that Jack’s mum was really worried about her son: her face was lined and her skin looked papery. He promised he’d let her know the instant he heard from his friend. She gave him her mobile number and told him that even a text message would do.

‘Thanks mate, I appreciate it.’ She gave him a hug, which Bevan uneasily returned, hoping that somebody would rescue him from this unwonted display of affection from one of his mate’s mums; and then she left, wrapped up in her own world again.

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Afflicted 18: Chapter 17

biodagar — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 00:00:08 +0000

The morning didn’t even cause Bevan to stir; it was more the fact that his dad came in to wake him up at about midday. Knocking gently on the door, Bevan’s dad got no response. So he knocked harder. And then harder. Then he banged. He was never one to just march into his kids’ rooms, especially his boy’s room; he didn’t want to barge in if there was a slight chance that his kid might simply be really, really asleep. But getting no answer, he gingerly pushed the door open a wedge, and was literally pushed back into the hallway by the stink in the room. The room was an olfactory mess of stale cigarettes, stale incense of various kinds; the odours of stale coffee, old feet, and the Great Unwashed.

As he peered into the gloom, he noticed that every available space was covered with charcoal artwork of one type or another. Many of them were dark, murderous subjects; but even more were portraits of friends and family; of various naked women; landscapes, seascapes, and interesting pictures of fungi and flowers. There were pictures both violent and serene. And Bevan’s dad thought that all of them, even the ones that were disturbing to his senses, were remarkably good.

He stepped gingerly into the room and started to go through the pictures, until he noticed how the charcoal dust was falling into the carpet and wearing a definite smudge through it. He grimaced: the wife would be unhappy about this! He stacked the sketches as gently as he could, and made a mental note to get his son some decent fixative.

Bevan was sprawled across the bed, snoring deeply, and as blackened as the carpet was becoming. Despite this, his dad smiled when he noticed that the boy’s colour had returned; a result, no doubt of mental exhaustion and the resulting excellent sleep. He was going to leave him there to sleep peacefully on his own, but there was the slightest nudge of deep youth in him that couldn’t let him go. He pounced on Bevan, shaking him violently and yelling like a maniac.

Bevan leaped up, scouted about wildly and started clawing back towards the bedhead, exclaiming simultaneously, ‘you fucken bastard, scaring me like that!’

His dad stood up, a grin a mile wide adorning his unremarkable face, mirth shaking his frame. ‘Morning Bevan. Like your work.’

Bevan looked at him caustically. ‘It’s love your work, dad.’ He rubbed his face and cast his bleary eyes around the room, frowning. He didn’t realise he’d done so much overnight. His dad, being a man of few words, was a man of few compliments. Something like this really meant a lot to him.

‘Thanks dad.’ He stretched. ‘What’s for brekky?’

‘Lunch, you mean. Spaghetti, actually.’

Bevan smiled. ‘Yours or mum’s?’

His dad scoffed on his way to the door. ‘Mine, of course. Wouldn’t poison you with her food on a Sunday. It’ll be on the table in ten minutes.’ He left the room still grinning, and closed the door gently behind him.

Bevan stood up and shook himself. He had a crick in the neck that was giving him hell, a taste in his mouth that would kill an Israeli soldier, and he was blackened by charcoal dust. He idly picked through a few of the pictures, stacked some that he liked in one pile, and put the rest in another pile for his dad to choose from before he threw them away.

Not once did Bevan notice that being ravenous had become unusual for him; and nor did he notice that he could breathe without being weighed down by an awful stink.

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Afflicted 17: Chapter 16

biodagar — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:17 +0000

The morning startled Rick back into existence, and once he’d woken up he wished he could die. He was in an enormous amount of pain. Ditching his bike and the subsequent discomfort it had caused him had turned out to be a good thing. When confronted, he had merely stated that he’d been mugged for his bike, and that he didn’t want to report it because he couldn’t remember what the muggers looked like.

Despite this plausible story, when Rick had finally gotten home, long after dinner—a result of having forgotten to pack his phone that afternoon, and not being able to phone for a lift—his mother had immediately set upon him with a million questions, a worried look, and the expectation that he was about to expire. She clucked around him thinking he’d been in some godawful accident; but when she found out that he’d been beaten up, instead of being sympathetic, she verbally attacked him for not being smart enough to avoid dangerous situations. Rick’s mum castigated him for losing his bike, for running into the ‘wrong’ crowd and getting beaten up and, when he tried to defend himself, for being a smart-arse who answers back.

It was difficult for Rick to find the love in her actions; but when, at the end of her tirade, she wept and hugged him and thanked god that he was okay, he figured she must have just been overwrought. That morning, Rick’s back ached; so did his face, his arms, his neck, and his ribs were burning. He couldn’t move his face much because the wounds cracked and stung. His mother had taken him to hospital, where they’d reset his nose and caused even more pain. Cautiously, he rubbed his eyes and attempted to roll over and go back to sleep. The long, restless night and all of his tearing thoughts had finally resulted in the idea that he didn’t give a fuck about his two mates. As far as he was concerned, they had both finally fallen off the deep end into insanity.

Actually, thought Rick, Jack was a complete, bogan nutcase anyway.

The rise in Jack’s aggression and sociopathy had done nothing to stem Rick’s belief. Rather, it confirmed him in the vague notion he’d always had: that someone who is inherently aggressive rarely peaces out, even given time, even given extraordinary circumstances. It’s more often that they just continue the way they are until they either get knocked really hard, or they realise they’re not impressing anybody by their actions. Then, even if they do realise the latter, thought Rick, they just become a less offensive arsehole: they never actually lose their tendency towards being an arsehole.

Rick’s blistering thoughts had torn at him all night. In the face of threadbare friendships, friendships that he had thought were made of granite; in the face of an increasing sense of isolation and the degeneration of his friends into people he never thought they could be; Rick had asked himself the tough questions, and came up with righteous answers. Eventually, he concluded that he was himself and that was all he was; he came to an understanding that the others had to cope on their own, and that he cannot be responsible for their state of his friends’ mentality, regardless of how closely they are supposed to be tied through the bonds of mateship.

But his worry about Jack and Bevan, despite how beautifully logical all his arguments were, deepened. Bevan had always been a smoker but, he had to admit that Jack was right, the amount of tobacco that Bevan had been inhaling lately was cause for concern. Even though he didn’t like to face the fact that he had chosen not to notice Bevan’s distress, Rick knew, deep down, that his mate was unlikely to increase his smoking simply because he liked to do it. Thinking back to the previous day, Rick began to understand how Bevan wasn’t just chain-smoking. It was almost like he was trying to smoke, sure, but also getting involved with his own second-hand smoke as much as possible. If Bevan could carry a plastic bubble around with him and dutchy it up with tobacco smoke, then he would probably do it.

As for Jack, well, Rick didn’t really want to think about it. All he knew was that one day Jack would either get a kickin’, or would come a cropper. He just hoped that it wouldn’t have to involve himself.

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Afflicted 16: Chapter 15

biodagar — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:40 +0000

Late that same night, Jack jumped off his bike down near the river, in the light of the pale moon. It was quiet and still. An owl mopoked gently in the far-off dimness, and it was only by virtue of the hills around him that he could hear it echoing throughout the valley. Ditching his bike near the river, he made sure to hide it in the reeds so that the light didn’t glint off its frame. Absurdly, he was paranoid about someone magically flying past and catching him at it. He didn’t know what ‘it’ was or even why the prospect of someone ‘flying past’ bothered him, but it did.

This close to the river the air was damp and cold. Pulling his jacket closer around him, he started walking up towards that afternoon’s fishing spot. The place had some kind of resident evil about it now. The ground was stained by their awful discovery. His awful discovery. Just the thought of it made him stop walking, wrenched suddenly by that anxious sickness that plagued him. But he couldn’t get it out of his head to the point where he was crazily walking down here now, in the middle of the night, by himself, in the last place he really wanted to be. It was now, he checked his watch, three oh four in the goddamn morning.

‘Fucking hell,’ he swore softly, pulling his sleeve down and over his rapidly chilled hand.

The old man river red gum loomed up in front of him surprisingly quickly. Jack leaned up against it out of the breeze that had kicked up from around the bend, dug a smoke out of his pocket and took his time about lighting it. Bevan had taken his lighter and all he had left were some poxy waterproof matches that seemed to Jack to be more fire-proof than waterproof. The air seemed warmer here, and for the first time in what seemed forever, he started to feel a sense of calm, comfort, and a wonderful release from all the awful emotional shit he’d been wrapped in. His smoke ended presently, so he threw the butt into the river, shoved his hands in his pockets, and kept walking.

As he rounded the bend, he noticed with a quickening alarm that there was someone else sitting on the riverbank, sitting there in a warm coat and beanie, staring out over the water. He stopped in his tracks and crouched low, for fear the other person would see him. Curiosity kept nudging him forwards, however, and eventually took him by the hand and led him right up to the person, kicking the loose dirt and snapping twigs and branches to announce his arrival. When he got there, curiosity left him and surprise smacked him in the face. The person sitting there was female.

Sitting down next to her, he felt that calm permeate his soul. When he caught her eye, the girl smiled and snuggled down next to him, her arm through his and resting on his thigh. It felt like the most normal thing in the world. She was warm, he was comfortable, and it didn’t seem to matter who she was or why she was there. She turned and gazed up at him, and when she reached up and started kissing him gently on the neck and around his ear.

Just as he began to enjoy himself, with his hand on her breast and his knee in her soft, warm, moist pubes, he smiled down at her. As he did so, she collapsed and fell apart, stinking and rotting. The sight of her increased his excitement and he smeared himself in her gore before standing over her and wanking until he came all over the mess—Jack wrenched himself from sleep in the horrid realisation that he’d just had the most exciting dream of his life, and that it was with the girl he loved and grieved over, and that her dead state sexually excited him. He tore himself out of bed and stood in the icy coldness of his room, naked, alarmed at his still-present erection. Beside himself with anxiety, he began to whimper and dressed himself haphazardly.

Once he’d got dressed and sat down on the end of his bed with his heater on, and had come to his senses, Jack realised that he must be seriously fucked up. He also resolved not to go to sleep again. Ever. Heartsick about the girl and the no doubt awful way she’d died, he was terrified at the prospect of dreaming about her again. Her certainly didn’t want to fuck her rotting carcass, and choked down his rising vomit as her smiling, alive, beautiful memory taunted him, turning into a memory of that dream. He thought, momentarily, that if he had a wank it might relieve some pressure and help him relax; but then the terror-filled anxiety of the possibility of fantasising about her filled him. Where would he be if that happened? More anxious than he already was, no doubt.

Eventually, he decided that if he went outside and had a smoke he might be in a better position to critically assess his mental situation. He made his way out to the back of the shed and lit a small fire in a tin, after retrieving a bucket of water, the contents of which were primarily from the dog’s bowl. Apologising quietly to his dog for not being able to turn on a tap because it would wake the entire household, Jack sat on his seat, smoking, and contemplating. The panic had passed, but his anxiety was as great as it had been before. Looking over to the far corner of this back part of the shed, he remembered when he had last been here and how he had vomited so much over the realisation about what he’d seen and what it meant for him.

The only conclusion he came to was that he couldn’t sleep again.

Jack smoked until he felt sick and then went back into his room and tried to read a book—but his body kept deceiving him by allowing sleep to sneak up on him in a million different ways. Besides, the jerk-nodding of falling asleep was really starting to hurt his neck.

The only idea that really made sense to Jack, in his current situation, was to find someone with a stash of amphetamines that could help him to stay awake. There was only one person from whom he could obtain such a thing: his elder brother Bill. But given that Bill lived in another state, the chances of that opportunity coming along were Buckley’s and none. The very vague idea that he might, even slightly, be a necrophiliac, was too much for Jack. But in his desperation he couldn’t think of any way out of his perverted mind.

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Afflicted 15: Chapter 14

biodagar — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:31 +0000

Jack didn’t know it, but he was right on the money when he told Rick that Bevan was shit-stir crazy.

When Bevan got home, he stashed his fishing gear in the back shed, underneath an old mattress that had been getting steadily worm-eaten underneath all the other shit that his mum and dad had been meaning to throw out since before they got married. He didn’t normally stash it away—there was never any point given how often he went out, and it wasn’t like it was a forbidden activity, or like anybody would nick it. He just had the feeling that he wanted it away from himself. Stashed here there was a good chance that his fishing gear would stay undiscovered until his parents were dead and burired. But right now, all he could care about was the fact that the stuff was out of sight. Hopefully he could completely forget it was there.

Agitated and anxious, Bevan picked his way through to the back wall of the shed, where he’d been stashing a few smokes out of every packet he’d ever bought, ever since he started smoking, just in case he should ever need them. Even when he was almost desperate for a smoke in the past, he’d not touched them. Now, shaking and frowning, and completely out of cigarettes, he couldn’t stop himself.

The smell had come back again.The moment Bevan had stepped down next to that river red gum, he’d started to smell the sickly sweet scent of death again. Although they helped to mask its existence, even his smokes had failed to do the trick this time. His present anxiety was coming from the fact that he couldn’t think of anything but the stench, the fact that he needed to smoke to distract himself, even momentarily, and the fact that he had to go in and play the family-boy role when there was nothing in the world he wanted to do less.

As he sat there in the shed, he steeled himself for the time that would shortly be upon him, when he would need to head inside. The very idea of it made him feel sick. His mum would expect him to eat, too. Bevan made his way inside, cleaned his fish, showered and did all those things that were normally a part of his coming-home-from-fishing routine. Except this time he used his mother’s soap ‘by mistake’, because of its enormous perfume content, and stepped aside to light some incense in the doorway.

But nothing worked for him, nothing shifted the smell, nothing lifted the weight from his belly. He did manage to eat enough to satisfy his mother, though, and just played the ‘stressed about school’ thing. It was a lame excuse, given how well he was doing, but his parents inwardly glowed with the self-indulgent thought that their first child and only boy was so intelligent and perfectionistic that of course he’d be stressed. Anyway, wasn’t that a good thing?

Throughout the evening, Bevan sat in his room, on the floor, gradually getting more and more panicked. He needed to ration his smokes until he could get more in two days. He could not even breathe normally without smelling that rotting mess down at the river. As the night wore on, Bevan found himself unable to think straight, and it wasn’t until he was on the verge of tears that he consciously thought about trying to immerse himself in school work, like he’d done the last time he’d been so badly off. The smell had afflicted him so badly that he couldn’t even get his shit together enough to get his pencil and randomly draw shit, like he normally did. The panic rose in his throat as he realised he’d already done all of his school work, and in desperation cast his eyes wildly around the room. As his eyes alighted on the visual art portfolio in the corner, a tide of relief washed into his limbs. Groping blindly around in a broken cardboard box, he found a charcoal pencil and started hungrily devouring the white paper in sketches. Bevan worked so focusedly at what he was doing, that he didn’t notice his dad open his bedroom door slightly and leave him a small pot of tea.

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Afflicted 14: Chapter 13

biodagar — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:09 +0000

For a couple of days things were almost normal again. Almost. At least, they weren’t fighting, and Jack would even look them in the eyes.

And then they went fishing. Bevan and Jack were to meet Rick down there. Rick pelted down the hill on his crappy, rattling, shit-heap of a bike and ditched it just before he hit a big boulder further down the track than he would normally ride. This time he missed the boulder by an inch and landed flat on his back, so that the wind was completely knocked out of him. He struggled to get the wind back and almost panicked about not being able to move or to breathe. For a split second he feared that maybe he’d done some irreparable damage to his back or his lungs, or even his guts, but by tiny degrees he was slowly able to gain breath again. It felt like five or six minutes before he could get a full breath, instead of a partial one, and he lay there mentally feeling himself all over, to see if he was damaged in some other, undetected, way. If he hurt himself badly his mum would probably do her block and kill him, he thought. But he realised slowly that he was okay; he picked himself up off the ground bit by bit, and looked for his bike. It was less than lucky.

He’d finally, irreparably, bent the frame and one wheel, and the machine was completely fucked. It was also resting in the river, and was coated in mud and other crap. His backpack was nowhere to be seen, so he got up and started hunting for it. A quarter of an hour later he had all his bits and pieces together and was able to head down to meet Bevan and Jack. The place they’d chosen was not too far near the Corpse Bend, as Rick had started to think of it, but was closer to town. When Rick got there, Bevan and Jack were spaced about five metres apart and were in perfect silence. Bevan was choofing down a smoke again and Jack was hunched up in his jacket like a little kid against the wind, leaning against the resident old man river red gum with his eyes closed. The whole scene was a picture of perfect tranquillity.

Rick walked quietly. He was practising walking quietly over many different surfaces, his aim being to sneak up on his mum whilst doing anything legitimate, and scare the crap out of her. He had to concede that it was a childish desire. And it wasn’t that he was malicious or anything, as he was quick to chide himself, but just because he wanted to get her back for all her incessant nagging. He also thought that one day the skill might come in handy.He got to the water’s edge making a fair bit of noise (that he didn’t think he made), feeling quite pleased with himself. He sat to check his reel and his rod. They were still functional; he baited his hook and cast in. He took the next few moments to check the rest of his stuff. His backpack was torn in a few places he hadn’t noticed when he picked it up, and the zip on one of the pockets was fucked. He sighed loudly and rubbed his back, which was still smarting.

The other two didn’t greet him or make any sound. They never acknowledged that he was there. After about an hour, Bevan, who lit a what appeared to be his last smoke, reeled in, picked up the fish he’d caught and walked off in a veritable cloud. Jack and Rick watched him go, Jack pensive and worried-looking. Rick moved up to take the place Bevan had vacated. Rick vaguely wondered whether the other two had been talking about him before he got there. His attempts at interaction tended to fall flat.

A while longer passed, the sun shone, the birds went nuts, and it was peaceful. But the feeling of wrong persisted. ‘This place has changed, man,’ Jack stated baldly.

Rick looked at Jack for a moment, and nodded.Jack stood up abruptly and started to reel in his line. ‘I can’t fucking stand to be here, to be honest.’

Rick glanced at the river and for a fleeting moment thought about the dead girl, and that even though they were further down the river about how she’d rested not that far away from where they were. A flicker image of her corpse assaulted him and he closed his eyes against it.

And all of a sudden Rick had an insane, gripping fear of being the only one down there, right near the place where the corpse had lain. Fishing in water than had been tainted by her spilled-out guts. For the second time that day, Rick nearly panicked. He reeled in his line as fast as he’d cast it out and attempted to shove everything haphazardly back into his ruined back. As he did so, he thought about how his bag represented everything that had happened since the day Jack had gone too far away to have a piss.

Jack turned his dull, sunken, grey-shadowed and faintly bloodshot eyes on his friend when Rick started to pack.

‘Leaving?’

Rick looked up from where he was attempting to repair his backpack.

‘I’m not staying here by myself. It’s too fucked. I can’t even bear to think about fishing here. It’s not like it was before.’ One he started to talk, he couldn’t stop himself and just ran off at the mouth. ‘I thought it would be different. I thought maybe it’d be normal again or something. But now the water is all like it’s full of guts and the place is tainted, and that smell seems like it’s just embedded in all of the grasses and the reeds and I can’t bear to think about what it must have been like for her…’

Jack walked over and slapped Rick in the face, hard. ‘Shut up.’ He stared at Rick. ‘You fucking think you’re suffering.’

Implicit was the fact that it was still Rick’s fault, and Rick found himself bristling with anger.

‘If you hadn’t decided to go so far just to have a piss, we wouldn’t have known anything about it. What were you doing, pulling yourself off?’

Rick’s hidden meaning about Jack wanking over the dead girl was too much for Jack. It hit him right where his dreams had been taking him.

‘What the fuck are you trying to say?’

Rick’s eyes burned with anger. ‘Maybe you killed her and put her there, and then enjoyed her.’ He licked his dry lips. ‘Maybe it excites you.’

Jack dropped his bag. If only Rick knew how he felt about that girl.

‘What?’

‘I said maybe you killed her and put her there and your unconscious desire for us to see you with her made you walk all that distance just to have a slash. Maybe you wanted her found. Maybe you couldn’t stand the fact that you killed her and you were guilty and…’

A fist flew out and struck Rick in the face, distorting his nose. Then a foot kicked his legs out from underneath him. The second he hit the ground, Jack was on top of him, pinning him, crushing him into the dirt. He pulled his scaling knife out of his back pocket. It flashed in the sun as it made its way to rest against Rick’s throat.

‘Don’t you ever fucking say anything like that again, you hopeless fuck. If it wasn’t for you we wouldn’t all be fucked up now.’ He pushed the knife point into Rick’s throat until his friend started to whimper and cry. ‘You wanted us to fucking wait, and it’s your fucking fault that we’re all going mental. Don’t you dare fucking talk about the smell getting you when Bevan’s round the bend you fucking arsehole.’ He stood up and gave Rick two or three hard, well-aimed kicks to the ribs and back. ‘Or—,’ kick, ‘didn’t you—,’ kick, ‘fucking—’, kick, ‘notice?’

With each kick, Rick yelped and tried to cover himself with his hopelessly inadequate arms, impounding as the kicks did his previous, bike-related injuries.

‘You’re a cunt,’ spat Jack. He picked up his bag and left Rick bleeding and gasping for air for the second time in less than an hour and a half.

Rick lay in the same spot, with his eyes shut, for the best part of the next half hour, whimpering, fearing that when he opened his eyes Jack would be there waiting for another go. His face felt bruised, his nose felt mashed, his neck was wet, Christ only knew what from, and he could taste blood where a tooth had pierced his lip when Jack punched him.

The self-pity that was Rick’s worst enemy pounded him. It wasn’t his fault that shit had happened. He did feel haunted, but it was all so unfair. Why would anybody blame him for anything? He felt anxious and paranoid that he was being watched, and it wasn’t until he realised that his anxiety was stemming from guilt, that he attempted to pick himself up and go home. Kicked, bloodied, and sore, Rick found himself limping home, anxious, terrified. Without transport for the first time since inheriting his bike, he finally realised how far from home his beloved river really was, and what a dramatic turn his life had suddenly taken.

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Afflicted 13: Chapter 12

biodagar — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:26 +0000

Jack and Bevan walked down the road early in the morning on the last day of their determined pact, heading to Rick’s house. Jack’s face was drawn and he didn’t speak. He stalked along moodily, hands buried deep in the pockets of his hoodie, the hood up, and his eyes rooted to the ground. Bevan smoked incessantly, and relished the smell of the smoke. He’d stared rolling his own from the Bank that he got Jack’s older brother to buy for him. The corpse was still there, but it was hidden behind a wall of sweet, chocolatey-smelling smoke. He was wearing a crappy jumper that he often wore fishing, because his mum never went near it: he could therefore smoke as much as he wanted whilst in it and, he believed, his mother would never be the wiser for it.

The two of them walked along in silence, ignoring everybody and everything, and particularly ignoring the beautiful morning. The fact that it was the end of the week had given them each a private hope that once they’d reported this damn thing that their relevant afflictions would leave them the fuck alone. Imagine, thought Bevan, being able to breathe, eat, and function normally, without the stench of corpse.

Jack merely hoped quietly that his sense of despair would lessen.They reached Rick’s front door. Bevan rang the doorbell whilst simultaneously flicking his smoke over the fence and removing the offending jumper and ditching it in the same manner. Rick’s mum answered the door with a teatowel over her shoulder and, after getting over her surprise at the boys’ arrival so early on a Saturday morning, turned to look for Rick; but he was already behind her and waiting for her to get out of the way. Her son’s keenness to get out of the house offended some deep-rooted family-binding instinct that Rick’s mum had, and she barked at him to be back by midday because of the imminent arrival of guests, which was the first time Rick had heard about said visitors. To shut her up, he agreed with everything she said, without listening to a word of it, and breathed a sigh of relief once they were out of sight of the house. Once they’d turned the corner, Bevan retrieved his jumper and rolled and lit up another smoke immediately, dropping back a pace from the others so that he could enjoy it while it lasted. And despite Jack’s evident displeasure with him, Rick couldn’t resist a word or two.

‘About bloody time, eh?’

Jack glowered up at him from underneath his hoodie, and Rick started to realise how much his inveterate curiosity was costing his friend. He didn’t bother about Bevan because Bevan, while smoking enough to power a small village, was still sleeping and studying in such a way to give a healthy man the shits.

‘No thanks to you,’ grated Jack.

Rick started to defend himself, but Bevan piped up.

‘Leave it, fucker,’ he cautioned.

Once at the cop shop, Jack and Bevan let Rick do all the talking, until they were each questioned separately, but briefly, about their involvement. They were offered a cup of coffee while they were talked at by a concerned young woman, who wanted to give them counselling. They didn’t consent to being identified in the press as the discoverers, and only grudgingly consented to their parents being told; the latter mainly because each felt it would get them off the hook with their recent familial transgressions, however slightly. And that was really it.

All in all, the event of letting other people deal with it was a huge relief to each of them. Bevan managed to not smoke until he got home, and even made his mother a cup of tea, while Rick’s colour gradually returned—much to his parents’ relief. Jack felt like he didn’t have to worry about certain things, but was still mired in his own worries. Of course, it was necessary that the boys had to cop an earbashing from their respective mothers for not coming forward earlier, for potentially obstructing justice, for being less helpful than they could’ve been. They shouldn’t have been so stupid, they were told, they wouldn’t be this stupid in the future, would they, god forbid, and for god’s sake they did make their mothers worry. And so on, in the way that mothers are apt to be when they are trying to show their sympathy.The boys endured these nags with a relatively good-natured perception of what was going on, and were each surprised to see that the event bonded their mothers together. They knew that their parents were relieved and so, even if they didn’t listen to most of the tirades, knew that they would not be punished. Jack’s mother, he was bemused to see, was even warm towards him.

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Afflicted 12: Chapter 11

biodagar — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:00:32 +0000

Neither Bevan or Jack could’ve given two shits about thinking about news about a missing girl. Jack was thinking about the girl, but not for that reason.

It took Rick the best part of a week to get over what he’d seen, and he spent the remainder of that week being puzzled at his friends’ reactions. He stayed pale for a while, but his mother, thinking that it was the shock of a puncture wound and a course of antibiotics, didn’t think too much about it. In reality, Rick wasn’t sleeping, and much of that was due to an anxiety about losing his friends. He couldn’t give a fuck about food, which was why his mother was cooking and staring him down until he ate all of the shite she served up for dinner. And when he did manage to get some shut-eye, his dreams were full of awful images that he could barely remember on waking, and didn’t know where they were coming from. His curiosity about Jack, however, continued unabated. Jack’s reaction had spun Rick out completely. He’d withdrawn into himself and, while he was always aggressive, was now a little ball of tension. A ball of tension that refused to speak to Rick.

Bevan, on the other hand, was continually assaulted by an offending stench, a smell that plagued him night and day, and was like the worst of the fug off the corpse. Always one to work in order to drown out his anxiety, Bevan had finished all his outstanding school work. The end result, of course, was that his teachers were wondering, happily, what had brought on this extra burst of studiousness from their best, but laziest, student. Not only had he completed his outstanding work but was getting everything else done on time, or in class, and getting most of the difficult stuff—like algebra and calculus—right, because he worked so singularly on each thing in an attempt to keep the stench at bay.

Having heard about this through some accidental interaction with one of Bevan’s teachers, his dad was now pleasantly happy and speaking vaguely about commendations. He talked studies and directions with his son, and Bevan lapped it up because it was a distraction from his overworked sense of smell. Bevan had discovered that by throwing himself into a frenzy of work, he managed to fall into bed utterly exhausted, and was then able to sleep. Deeply. He’d even discovered that if he did this and leaped out of bed and ate as soon as he flicked his eyes open, that he could do so before his brain fully awoke to that fact that it was unoccupied and regaled him with that smell again. At all other times, his salvation was cigarettes and lavender oil, neither of which really worked. He just found himself using up his mum’s oil too quickly, and running out of smokes more and more often.

Jack, on the other hand, had gotten quieter and more irritable. He was overwrought about what had happened to that girl, quite apart from his heartache. And to make matters worse, he’d started to dream about her.The first night he dreamt about her it was like every other dream he’d had about her. Not much, just pleasant dreams about her. But by the end of the week he was having erotic dreams about her, dreams from which he always woke with the searing pain of injustice and the intense fear of her own suffering burning in his belly. But on the last day of the week, he’d dreamt the usual erotica, but at the end of the dream, just as he got to the point of orgasm, she turned in to a fly-encrusted, horribly misused corpse.He woke up, and was sick.

The end of the week couldn’t have come quick enough.

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