27
There was something about the fifth day that Sal was missing that seemed to put a lid on everything. Five days is a working week. At five days you cannot say ‘yesterday’ or ‘the day before last’. You have to say ‘Thursday’ and Thursday seemed like a long time ago. Frank awoke on the fifth day still drunk from the evening of the fourth. They’d gone back to Bob’s house after looking for her and as Frank stood by his truck, trying to find something to say, Vicky had tumbled out of the house, a face like grey death. She came out screaming and it took him a moment to realise she was screaming at him. She picked up empty bottles that were stacked neatly at the front of the house and started flinging them at him, and at the truck, bellowing, ‘You f*cking whore! You killer, you baby-killing whore bastard . . .’
‘You’d better go,’ Bob advised, catching his wife round the waist as she marched towards the truck, bottle raised.
He was already driving away, watching in his rear-view, by the time Bob had squeezed the bottle out of her hand and was shouting, ‘It wasn’t him, Victoria, it wasn’t, I promise you it wasn’t him,’ holding the woman against him. As Frank turned the corner he saw her go limp, saw Bob’s face crumple in the grotesque smile that was a man crying.
He drove home in a vacuum, shallow breathing, and when he got to his house he sat in his truck and cried. Strings of spit and snot attached to the steering wheel, and every time he wiped his face to try to calm himself down it got worse, and waves and waves of something terrible crashed down over him, and he bawled like he was the last man on earth.
When he was finished with crying he went inside and drank himself to sleep. It was the only possible solution and he thanked it as it went down his throat, thank God, thank God. He woke in the darkest part of the night, close to pissing himself on the bed. When he stood up he realised he would be sick and made for the veranda, crashing his shoulder against the door frame as he went. He spewed with the bitter taste of banana peel, and retched and retched until no more would come out, straight out into the dark like he was leaning over the rail of a ship. Then he straightened up and pissed, not caring where. The Creeping Jesus howled. It was close, it was doing its thing and he had disturbed it. It came running towards him through the cane and he was scared, but could not move. The sound was right on top of him and then it stopped, just short of where he could see in the dark, and all the night was silent, the frogs and cicadas quiet, no noise from the highway. There was just the afterwards and then a kookaburra laughed long and loud and bubbly, shattering everything. He backed towards his door, not brave enough to look hard for what was eyeing him from the dark, but not game to turn and look away. He lay awake and shivering on top of the covers, too scared of the noise it would make to pull them from underneath him.
And then it was the fifth day, and everything became terrible and real again, and he wished it were night time, when some creature might gobble him up.