Poppy Mullins
Content Warning: Shootings, domestic violence, institutional abuse
‘Think, Len, think. We’ve already lost three kilos of heroin to the Victorians because you pulled the ‘gentle little idiot’ bluff. I could always find someone else to order me round for the Sydney deal, mate. After a while, a genius brain like yours gets wasted anyway. You’ll just end up like a mad little fucking emperor, watching all your delivery runts and contacts just topple you over.’
His thick knuckles tap the side of my scalp like a criminal petting a dog.
It’s not a pleasant thought, but it can happen.
A scowl lands on his forehead.
‘Or do you fancy letting your Uncle Rick leave you in your own excrement tonight?’
The thin glint of light in Rick’s pupil as he makes this last comment means he’s struggling to contain himself at the thought of me soiled and screeching like an overfed baby. I keep my voice low, looking straight at the garish stained-glass pattern on the door in front of us. It’s a tasteless impression of a shepherd playing a lute to his flock. The face of the shepherd is all cut up like a Cubist painting. The whole impression the picture gives is so ugly and tasteless that I decide it speaks to a feminine touch about the home.
I don’t mind. Brute force tends to be wasted on junior runners like McFarland. The shock it gives normal people isn’t half as much fun for them. They’ve grown up getting it at the same time as the groceries.
‘You’ve given me no other choice, McFarland. We’ve got to go in now, or Rick won’t stop humming. Poor thing. He gets quite bored when the deals don’t run to their scheduled time. I should tell you too, that he struggles with lying and telling the truth, so if you want your wife to be safe, it’s probably better that you give over the stock now. It’s just a slight suggestion, though.’
A woman’s walking across the street with two brown paper bags. She doesn’t stop. If McFarland were going to leave us the goods in an honest manner, now would be the most appropriate time. Rick pulls the gun out from where he’s been feeling the weight under his shirt with his left hand. I nod to him twice. He sighs a drooping sigh, the only sound he ever makes that belies his forty-nine years as being two decades older than mine. With a grunt, he lets his right finger find a place on the cold metal frame of my wheelchair. For the first time, the silence unnerves me. A chill begins to creep up my spine. It’s like being beaten with an electric razor, each blade cutting into my neck until all I can feel are pins and needles.
No… I won’t give in to fear. Fear is the cause of punishment. I’ve been punished enough. As soon as we close the deal with McFarland, I’ll be lying on a beach in Sydney, rewarding myself in the only way a man should—even a cripple.
Rick’s got the gun on his hip, whistling one of those peppy piano tunes the radio played on the way over here. He winks at me. It’s a wink filled with the brutish love of hurt. Like most of what Rick’s comprised, it’s childish. I stick my hand up, fingers attempting a shushing motion. Rick advances forward—pure ex-military man.
It takes less than a second for the kitchen door to splinter.
I scan the empty kitchen. It’s in none of the usual places. Not even hiding in a pre-Coronation biscuit tin. A wave of nausea curls through me. I take two tight breaths in. The humidity of the room is beginning to resemble the disinfectant-peppered fug of the Punishment Cupboard at St Barnabas. The air leaves my lungs in a silent gasp. Calculation isn’t McFarland’s method. The bluff of disappearance is a favourite with the younger members of the trade. But McFarland’s less lily-livered than that.
I turn my fingers across the rim of my wheelchair, imagining my wheels gliding over sand, the metal smooth as velvet. A body would be beneath me then, lithe and courteous. She’d be fingering my lips like an over-cautious starlet.
Rick taps the wooden frame of the Monet painting by the fireplace. After three attempts, he shakes his head like a six-year-old denied pocket money. Fever-heat rises from every crevice under my cheap button-up. Most of my delivery runts have to spend their first year on the job learning the difference between top-priced pot and homemade heroin. If a painting of a French bridge doesn’t have anything behind it, it means that George McFarland is sitting in Monte Carlo with ten thousand pounds worth of a windfall in his pocket and two kilograms worth of quality heroin is sitting in a briefcase on the starched sheets of an international hotel room.
That’s when we hear it, a woman’s voice. She gives a long, low moan, the kind more suited to the drone of a confused child on first waking up in a hospital bed. It increases in pitch, reverberating against the edge of a large wooden coffee table.
Rick points the gun at the table square. Her response is a muffled sob. When she speaks, the first letter of each word is intoned with a sharp huskiness that tells me she’s foreign.
‘No, no! Please… There is no money. No, no! Please!’
As if from shock, she can’t help emerging from under the table. Her hair is dark and slightly tangled, as though she hasn’t had time to brush it properly for days.
She repeats the statement twice over, pulling her arm out as if in surrender.
From beneath the pink frill of her nightdress, I see six bruises, the congealed purple edges spilling over onto patches of bleeding scab-like liquid remains of fireworks, holding vigil to her passiveness.
She just sobs and moans at various intervals, the sound getting lower and deeper.
Rick shoots.
I scan the oak bookcase for any hardcovers wedged in between Playboy and yellowed volumes of cheap erotica. I rub each finger on both of my balled-up fists to stop them from tingling, ignoring Rick’s resuming the tinny notes of his whistle.
Half an hour and the Sydney lot would concede defeat. I breathe in, imagine the solidity of cupping a breast in my hand, the movement as quick and clean as a doctor checking a reflex.
Rick got his knife out, tearing through the sunflowers embroidered around the edge of a large orange cushion resting on one of the armchairs. The yelp is sharp. I feel my veins go as cold as when I watch Rick listening to the news of potential nuclear warfare on ABC Radio. From this distance, the sound seems to rise. All I can do is clutch at the third button on my shirt to avoid the nausea from rising any further.
My voice is hoarse when I speak, and the whisper sounds more like a croak.
‘Lob one into the air as a safety measure.’
Rick nods.
A puppyish half-yelp escapes our prey as a small boy crawls out from behind the armchair.
I look at his eyes. Each slant downwards like sills playing host to non-existent windows. His right-hand keeps shifting to the side of his soiled cloth nappy as though he reckons the force of the gun could be muffled by it. His face and cheeks too are covered in the same firework pattern of bruises as his mother. He wouldn’t feel the final bullet.
A son and wife dead were all McFarland deserved.
Rick cocks the gun.
My vision swims. All I can see are the feet of the boy before me, the scratches around his half-webbed toes matched by the yellow-green pus lining the edges of the purple-red bruise tattooing his bare chest.
Rick cocks the gun for a second time, his whistle growing in the fervent nature of its tune. If I don’t hurry, he’ll waste one deliberately.
I nod to him to pull the trigger.
This time, the pricking feels unnatural, like shivering skin in the first stages of a fever. I keep my gaze on the blank wall behind the boy’s head. But as I look at the crown of his tousled dark curls, I see a mirror image of another, a boy who never stumbled at the first thwack of the belt, even as a thick hard, second skin of blood formed on his back.
I blink. The bullet arcs past my head. Rick crouches down, and I feel the boredom in the tight warmth of his breath. He gives a short, bitter laugh.
‘Len, you have no idea how easy this is going to be, mate.’
He smiles, and I see a row of straight white teeth.
‘Leonard Burns shot dead. That’s all it’ll say, Len. On the back page, just before the races.’
He begins to whistle his tune again. Softer this time, slower.
‘You’ve good brains, but I’m a hardworking bloke, Len. I’m not meant to be a dogsbody. Do you reckon it’s good weather on the Riviera this year? You never know, though. There might be too many flashy Hollywood types for my liking. Depends on the amount of work I can get up here, I suppose. Time’s ticking away, Len, time’s ticking away.’
I intertwine my fingers together, desperate to ignore the lump of dread forming in my chest. Soon enough, I could leave Rick to his lust.
The boy in front of me has stopped shivering now.
Rick releases the safety catch.
As if by some involuntary spasm, the boy shuffles his feet forward and back at various intervals.
I gesture to Rick to cock the gun higher. McFarland’s son stops. The mark in itself is small. A red circle that could be a bee sting or a scratch from falling over in glass-shard-spattered dirt. The dread is coating my lungs. I shake my head, trying to focus on the task at hand. Yet my brain is clammed up with a reel of memory, each image looping through my brain like a child’s picture card.
I see a boy’s hand finding mine as I shave each side of his metal leg brace, the leather splitting into brown chunks of material as tangled as hair. I feel the drip of his snot on my arm as he holds the leather to the mouth of the St Barnabas laundry furnace, the back of his red-raw legs jiggling as though the Punishment Cupboard were behind him. I see him the next day on the gurney outside the Shock Therapy room, his eyes as black and wide as dew-wet marbles. Legs straight at last, toes poking out like the stems of the paper flowers he would bring me after Occupational Therapy. On each of his heels is a small red circle. The kind you might get after a bee sting or removing glass-shard-spattered dirt from your foot
The kind made by a needle. The kind I should have had too.
The cold metal of the gun against my head jolts me.
‘One minute, Len, or I’ll do you in.’
Rick gives a low whistle and starts to hum. This time it’s a different tune, the deep one he uses when his anger means something. I think of holding that feminine body down on luscious golden sand.
I need to act fast. The child in front of me is losing his fear now. Snatches of unintelligible English are coming from him. I meet his gaze as Rick loads the gun.
It takes effort to gulp down bile. His pupils are quivering, tears coating each like dew on a black marble, the eyes of another.
Rick pulls out my right arm, ready to begin shooting. I don’t mind. It’s a logical decision. All I can think of is the unspoken motto of St Barnabas. Tit for tat. To escape punishment for lying is a sin. Now, I could atone.
I take my front teeth and bite square into the sweet salt of Rick’s arm—the gun clatters to the floor. I propel myself forward, managing to pick it up, and aim it square at Rick’s head.
I shoot.
I wheel as fast as I can to the kitchen telephone, then ring for the police.
Author: Poppy Mullins (she/her) is an aspiring writer of domestic gothic fiction that explores how far the social model of disability can excuse the enacting of immoral behaviour from young people with physical disabilities stuck in environments where they cannot express their deepest thoughts, regardless of how violent those thoughts might be. Poppy is also interested in exploring how existing in different spaces as a young person with a physical disability impacts the creative ambitions of those seeking to find a place in the mainstream art sector.
As a part of this, Poppy’s particular ambition is to explore how different subcultures of music help young individuals with physical disabilities navigate the challenges of finding a pathway through the mainstream art sector, with a focus on finding positive rather than cathartic outcomes.
Artist: Damon King is a mature age student in the third and final year of a BFA in Creative Writing at QUT. Over the past decade, being an artist of mixed media owned and dominated the creativity side opposed to my writing. Street art and graffiti was the starting point, then came multiple exhibitions, studios, and showings on professional levels. Artwork being purchased and commissioned from all over the world while building up a healthy presence on social media and travel-got my name out there. My writing has just re-discovered itself in the past few years, and it has been an exciting ride so far, so I am very interested to see where this takes me… @skullcapper @5kullc4p @johnnymahogany F.B Skull Cap (Brisbane artist)
Edited by: Ashley Commens and David Uptin