Alan Baxter - The Gulp - Five Tales of Horror

“Harbour?”

Zack pursed his lips, shook his head. “I’m worried she’ll float or something. Be found.”

“We can’t risk the house, Zack.” Maddy looked around, glanced back over her shoulder. “I mean, shitty as it is, it’s finally ours. We get to relax and enjoy it at last.”

“I know. That’s all okay. I have the login details for Centrelink, all the benefits and pensions and shit. We’re well-prepared. We just need to make sure no one knows she’s dead. But every time I bring up what to do with her, you change the subject. Well, time’s up. Now we have to decide. So what do we do with her?”

“Dump her in the bush?”

“What if someone finds her? Or an animal drags her back or some shit?”

“Bury her in the bush?”

Zack stared at his mother, lips pursed. “Would take a bit of effort, and we’d have to park up somewhere on the road out of town, then carry her in. Might get seen at any point. We have to be absolutely safe, Maddy. No one can know.”

“Whatever we do with her is going to be risky.” Maddy took a step back. “I can’t stand this stench any more, Zack. Leave the window open but shut the door. Let’s talk about this somewhere else.”

They sat in the lounge room, Zack on the threadbare couch, Maddy in one of the armchairs. The other armchair, their mother’s spot, hadn’t been sat in since she’d gone to bed about three months prior and stayed put. She’d lay there, making demands of Zack, getting sicker and sicker, wasting away, wallowing in her own filth. How Zack stood to go in Maddy would never know. They should have let her die weeks ago, but Zack kept her going until last night.

For months before that, she’d shuffled around the house, getting sicker and sicker, refusing to accept help. She knew she was dying and welcomed it, was Maddy’s opinion. Happy to waste away right in front of her kids. On a good day, when Maddy was feeling charitable, she wondered if perhaps their mother recognised the benefit of her dying in secrecy so Zack and Maddy would have the best chance on their own. No interference from DoCS, or the Department of Communities and Justice, as the fuckers called themselves now. Busybodies is what they were. But with the welfare still coming in, Zack and Maddy had a chance at a peaceful life. It was their grandfather’s house, after all, bought and paid for, the only thing of any value the family had ever owned, now in their mother’s name. Of course, it was in The Gulp, so what was it really worth? But it was a home.

Most days, though, Maddy wasn’t charitable at all and knew their mother was too damned selfish to even consider the possibility. She made constant demands, probably too stupid to realise there might be consequences for anyone else. Maybe she was so selfish she imagined the whole world ending when she did, so no one else mattered. No one else ever mattered with her.

“How’s your mum?” friends and neighbours would ask.

“Oh, she’s okay,” Maddy would reply. “Just prefers to stay in. You know how she is. We take care of her.”

“You’re good kids.”

Yeah, Maddy thought. Real good. Agoraphobic was a word she’d learned, and it came in handy. Their mother had a lot of issues, they told everyone, including germaphobia, agoraphobia, diabetes and asthma. They’d been laying the groundwork for their reclusive mother for the last couple of years. The woman was only forty-six. Would only ever be forty-six now, but that gave them decades of living at home, ostensibly caring for the strange old lady who never went out while they collected her welfare. It was sort of perfect, really, if they could get away with this last bit. If they were caught disposing of the body, that would be a problem. A real problem.

“So what do we do?” Zack asked again.

The TV was on, but muted. Some game show where idiots grinned at each other and answered questions on their specialist subject. Maddy stared at it, thinking. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I’m scared, Zack.”

“Me too.”

They were quiet for a while. Maddy felt like a little kid, trembling and nervous. This was what they’d wanted, wasn’t it? What they whispered about while their mother wasted away in her bedroom. Now it had come about, there was a kind of finality to it that made Maddy feel hollow inside. The bitch was one of the most awful people Maddy had ever known – and in The Gulp, you met a lot of awful people – but she was their mother too. Some bullshit chemical or emotional power consistently worked on Maddy’s insides, made her care.

Only a few weeks ago she’d tried to score some of her mother’s approval. Working at Woollies full-time since she quit school at the end of year 10 some three or four months prior, had been thankless enough, but it was work and it was hers. She’d worked there part-time to supplement the welfare for a couple of years already. But scoring an Employee of the Month certificate had been one of the few things Maddy had been genuinely proud of in recent memory. She’d braved the sickly-sweet miasma of her mother’s room, squinted to blur the image of the woman emaciated and wheezing on the pile of pillows, and held up the certificate for her to see.

“What do you think of that, Mum?”

“I ’spect everyone gets one. Like a rota,” her mother had croaked, chest whispering with phlegm. “You’ll get another in a few months.”

“I fucking earned that!” Maddy had shouted, and stormed from the room. The stench had trailed with her, like a cloak lifting in the wind of her passage. She’d run to the bathroom and vomited, got puke on the certificate and screwed it up into a ball as tight as her rage. She threw it away and that was the last time she’d gone into her mother’s death chamber. The last words they’d spoken.

When Zack had called out earlier that day to say the woman’s breaths were stretching further and further apart, Maddy had said, “So what?”

“Last chance,” Zack had called from the gloomy, stinking room. “You want to say goodbye?”

“Fuck no. She’s not even conscious, hasn’t been for two days.”

“I know. I told you that. But maybe she can still hear us.”

“Then tell her to go to hell.”

Yet here she sat now, an empty ache in her gut. Her mother was dead. Her useless, selfish, mean mother was dead, and she cared. Regardless, now they were alone. Her and Zack against the world. They had the house, the welfare, she had her job, Zack would quit school at the end of the year and get a job of his own. He had an apprenticeship lined up. The future was bright, by the standards of any future in The Gulp. One last hurdle to leap, getting rid of the body.

“Bury her in the back yard?” Zack said.

Maddy jumped slightly, looked up, torn from her thoughts. “First place they’ll look if they suspect foul play.”

“I know how to lay cement. Been helping Brian out for a while now. How about I make us a new patio?”

Maddy shook her head. “They’ll smash it and pull it up. Anyway, a new cement deck is pretty fucking suspicious on its own, right?”

“I guess. So what do we do?”

Maddy looked at her phone. “It’s nearly four. I have to go out.”

“Where?”

“Just friends. Let’s think on this a bit, yeah? Another day or two won’t make any difference.”

Zack grimaced and shook his head. “I dunno. I mean, I know she’s foul in there already, but I was reading up on some of this stuff online. Dead bodies start to putrefy really quickly and… What?”

Maddy could feel how wide her eyes had gone. Ice trickled around her gut. “What the fuck have you been looking up online? What if someone searches your internet history?”

“I’ve been careful, Mads! Proxies and shit. I’m not an idiot. Besides, it’s nothing specific or incriminating.”