But the truth of the matter is that Mulligan had a better idea of what Eddie was up to than Eddie did himself. He recognized him for what he was: a pornographer of death. He gave Eddie the receipt and went off with the photographs under his arm.
5.
Eddie spent the rest of the day trying to find a lawyer, an embalmer, and a man who made crates.
He phoned the lawyer and made an appointment. Then he contacted the crate maker and gave him the dimensions of the crate he wanted made. He allowed the dimensions on the generous side because Jo-Jo and Pete couldn’t seem to agree on whether their landlady had been large or small.
The embalmer was a little more difficult. He arranged one meeting at the Clare Castle Hotel in Carlton. It was not a satisfactory meeting. Eddie said he had to have a piss and crept out the back door and didn’t go back.
He’d have to solve that problem later. He contacted friends at St Vincent’s hospital but nobody knew anybody.
This job was going to have its difficulties.
Preoccupied with processes and techniques, he didn’t have much time to think about the old lady herself but her presence dominated his day and made him not unpleasantly tense. His nerve ends tingled and he clenched and unclenched his long fingers in an ecstasy of anticipation.
He planned to take Daphne with him. He had a very clear idea of the power politics of their personal relationship and he knew that the visit to the house would swing the balance once more his way, bring it back to where it had been on the first afternoon when he had humiliated the cabinet minister.
But when the morning finally came Pete and Jo-Jo presented him with the red plastic rubbish bin they’d been shitting in.
“What’s this?”
Pete stared at him incredulously. “It’s for the pig.”
“The cops?”
“Not the cops, the fucking pig. We got a pig out at Williamstown. You give it to the pig to eat.”
Eddie nodded slowly. They were doing to him what he had done to the cabinet minister. He put the plastic bin of shit in the passenger seat of the Porsche and was forced to leave Daphne behind with the freaks.
6.
When Eddie left the city he was still busy planning the complicated details of what would surely be his masterpiece. The embalmer had fucked things up a bit. Still, that could be fixed. Somehow it’d all work. And then, Jesus Christ, what an auction he’d have.
What he had in mind was a tableau. The tableau would consist of the whole house. In one room of this house there’d be a real old lady sitting at a table about to write a letter. That would be the centre of the work. The other rooms would be needed too, if only to establish the authenticity of the central room.
It was ambitious. It was dangerous. It involved skill and organization and a lot of luck. If one thing fucked up it wouldn’t work. If she had relatives who wanted to live in the house he wouldn’t be able to buy it. If the neighbours had found the body before he got there the whole thing would be ruined. If she’d started to decay, the embalmer (another problem) mightn’t be able to do a good job. He’d have to sneak her out of the house and crate her and store her for however long might be necessary.
But, with all these little difficulties taken care of, Eddie would have the most incredible auction sale of all time. Selected invitations to twelve of his richest customers. They would bid against each other to take possession of this most outrageous of all Eddie’s little curios.
But now as he drove out to Williamstown with the bucket of shit beside him on the seat he began to get a little nervous. His nervousness was nothing to do with the embalmer or the cops or difficulties with relatives. No, what was beginning, only now, to make him just a little bit nervous was the thought of the dead body.
He’d never seen a dead body.
He wished Daphne was with him. Daphne would have been freaked by it all. Her fear would have made him strong and confident. The thought of the body wouldn’t have worried him then. But now, by himself …
He tucked the Porsche behind a petrol tanker, deciding not to pass it. There was no hurry. Eddie cruised into Williamstown at 25 m.p.h.
7.
The house was perfect, right down to the cypress pines that lined the rickety wooden fence at the front. From this exquisite beginning it never faltered. The drive was made from bricks which had sunken so that the surface resembled the surface of the sea in a slight swell. Beside the drive were lines of dead irises and beyond the iris beds were seas of tall brown grass amongst which Eddie could see neglected garden tools and the handle of an old-fashioned lawn mower.
It was perfect. It was also a little terrifying. He wished, once more, that Daphne had been there. It would have been easy. He wouldn’t have stayed sitting in his car as he was now. He could see the house through the wire gate. There was a dead woman sitting inside that house. Blistering weatherboard. Brown holland blinds drawn. Walls marked with the water from a leaking spout. It was nothing like the house in Psycho. It was also exactly like the house in Psycho.
If it hadn’t been for the bucket of shit which was now slowly boiling in the sun it is possible that Eddie would never have left the car. But finally the foul smell became worse than his fear and he lifted the plastic garbage can from the car and carried it obediently up the drive.
It was then, halfway up the drive, that he heard the noise. An incredible screaming, high-pitched and terrible. Its effect on Eddie was shattering. His tall, thin frame jerked. He dropped the bin. And stood absolutely still.
There was a horrible prickling feeling down the back of his neck. He would have turned, right then, and run. But he was too frightened to run. He stood on that brick drive riveted to the spot while the squealing continued.
And then, very slowly, it dawned on him.
It was the fucking pig.
Hot and embarrassed he picked up the bin and continued up the drive. At the back of the house he found the pig writhing in the dust of its yard like a possessed thing. Not a smooth-shaven pig like he’d seen in the butcher shops, but a black hairy hog with a long evil snout and wild red eyes. He stood at the rails of the pig’s yard and watched it writhe like a man watching his own nightmares.
And then he realized. He thought of something he had read about:
WITHDRAWAL
The word flashed in the sky of his mind in red neon letters. And he understood the rubbish bin.
He took the bin of shit and tossed it into the pig yard. The pig gobbled the lot in two seconds, still whimpering.
Later, when he was inside the house, the pig became quiet. So, he thought, the pig is a junkie too, addicted from eating the shit of junkies.
8.
The episode with the pig had somehow cauterized his fear. Now he entered the house from the back verandah, tiptoeing selfconsciously across the creaking boards, the eyes of a thousand imaginary neighbours and vice-squad men boring into his black velvet back. He opened the door slowly, like a man defusing a dangerous bomb. His professional mind observed small details with fascination: the worn linoleum floor, the strange old lady’s hat on the hat stand, the plastic raincoat on the floor, the large white cat huddled in a ball in a far corner, the stained glass on the front door, far away. The first room, a bedroom, obviously unused. Several dead ferns in pots on the floor, a gardener’s glove, an airmail letter from Malaysia. He touched nothing, silently celebrating the perfect neglect, the authentic symbols of death. He approached, once more, that perfect no man’s land where fear is thrilling and almost pleasant.
To the left, another door. And he knew, as his hands touched the large black door knob, that this was the room. He held his breath, preparing himself for a smell he had read about. He waited for the air, heavy with the perfume of death, to overwhelm him.