You can all go and get f**ked then

Well let me tell the story about the recording of this disc
Wish that I remembered well, but I was mostly pissed
You can all go and get fucked then, my skills ain't gon' be dissed.
- Andrew 'Angus' Young, 2003

I was buzzing. I was strutting around FirstLight like I owned the place (rather than Phil, who at the time actually did own the place, at least in part). I was telling it like it was (or croaking, coughing and gasping it like it was, anyway.) I wasn’t even drunk all the time - didn't agree with the meds for the busted ribs et al anyway. Nah mate, I’d tell McCarthy, vocal on this on needs to be ballsier - don’t make me do it myself, yeah? Look, you and your lad Brades [he hated that] give it another bash in the vox box, I’m off for lunch with Rachel in Byron. Reckon you could have it sorted by two-ish so we can start on Projectile Gastric? That’s presuming she and I make it back by then and don’t get, erm, diverted of course…

I was travelling so well all of a sudden, the creative juices had found me again. I even wrote a new song - just with my Yamaha acoustic and my ancient and busted-sounding analogue four-track recorder, out on the balcony at Jeff Beck’s early one morning in week three. The riff was just an old twelve bar delta blues groove I always kept coming back to when messing about on acoustics; the lyrics, bagging everyone in the band, were delivered in a ludicrous melange of old Howlin’ Wolf style Mississippi delta drawl and appalling yo-bro gangsta rap, tongue so far through cheek I could clean out my ears with it.

It went something like this:

Well let me tell the storeh, ‘bout the re-cordin’ of this disc
Wish that I remember well, but I was mostly pissed…
Ah say y’all can go get fucked then, my skills ain’t gon’ be dissed.
(By y’all or nobody, y’hear).

Seems we done gone fucked it up, used to work dahhm well
We’d front up to the studio, and bash away like hell…
But now we’s just Xeroxin’ Pink Floyd’s Division Bell.
(Motherfucker be over-DONE. Hear me.)

Well Chubs is pullin’ rank but ain’t pulled no-one but he’self
And Samboy’s lost the plot, said good-bahh to mental healf…
Well y’all can all get fucked then, and make sure you watch yo’self.
(Don’t get left on that shelf, mah boy.)

Yeah gots better things to do, than watching Mart ‘n’ Maddy
Spend all that furkin mo-nayyy that she’s rippin’ off her Daddy…
When she’s heard me sing these bloooze, she’s gonna chuck a paddy.
(Dint even know he was Irish, dawg!)

Phil’s a dee-zah-ster, fuckin’ wreckage of a mahhn
Used to be a drummin’ gowd - that shit’s gone down the pahhn
Get off the fuckin’ weed mah friend, stick to Tomazopan.
(They’s self-medicatin’ and they’s SELF-MEDICATIN’, fool)

Well drugs are bad, mmmkay, they say, so heed the warning sahns
Learn from us, next ‘cordin time, and stay right off the lahns
That shit can go get fucked then, ’cos it ain’t NONE of mine’s.
(I ain’t powderin’ MAH nose, G.)

Well ah gots no more to tell you folks, this band’s fixin’ to die
I’m gon’ fuck off down the pub, while all you cunts get high
Got’s one more thing to say to y’all, ‘fore I say goodbahh.
(You gots a pen, bee-aatch?)

Well fuck you fuckin’ dumbass fucks for fuckin’ up our show
Fuck your fuckin’ wanky sound, and fuck your skanky hoes…
Well, you can all go and get fucked then…
Screw you guys, I’m goin’ home.

Thank y’all an’ gude naaahht. Angus OUT.

I liked it. Surprisingly, Rachel liked it too, despite my unimaginative overuse of toilet words and other ripe diction (the ‘skanky hoes’ reference she wasn’t so keen on), and she did figure it was probably just a little on the inflammatory side. Didn’t matter, because like the punk band it was For Amusement Only - mine, largely. I wasn’t about to suggest it as a B-side for American Beer Is Piss, put it that way. (Now that I wasn’t doing the vocal on that track, it was suddenly being put forward as an ironed-on candidate for lead single by our genius producer). The four-track was tossed back into the boot of the Monaro and the acoustic was put to work on Delicate Instrumental Arrangement For Virtuoso Keyboard Soloist, Two Ordinary Guitarists And One Incompetent Drummer. I guess we should have been grateful he even descended to our level and allowed us to play along with his masterwork at all. You may be surprised to learn that wasn’t actually the title we recorded the track under at the time. That was something wanky and meaningless like Lifeforce Compendium or Introspective By Default or Oh For God’s Sake Get Your Fucking Hand Off It Marty or something equally grandiose. Given that he was a lifelong Parramatta fan I always thought Exponential Grothe would be a great title for one of his songs, but he never took up the suggestion.

By the Friday of our third and final week at Firstlight Studios, we’d shambled together enough material to have the makings of some sort of album. In about six months time. Lots of post-production work would be needed to polish these particular turds, but with some luck we could organise the scheduling so that it coincided with deusexmachina’s next overseas tour, so we could get some other bastard to do it rather than Priddle. For some reason, deusexmachina were remarkably popular in Germany. Then again, so are Rammstein, Michael Schumacher, lederhosen and David Hasselhoff; being popular in Germany is by no means any guarantee of quality.

To celebrate the successful conclusion of recording on the Flange Gasket album known by the official working title of ‘Brady’s Bunch’ (and unofficially as ‘You paid thirty bucks for this, dumbarse?’), the man who’d come up with the official working title had invited all the band and their partners up the road to his palatial split-level ridgetop mansion for some ‘wrap’ drinks just after sunset. Of course, this plan was a bit compromised by the massive verbal brawl (which got physical at one point when Maddy intervened between McCarthy and her beloved, who were shouting at each other toe-to-toe, as it looked for all money to be About to Kick Off and presumably she wanted a piece) regarding exactly how mixing and editing would be handled, who would be doing what to whose songs, how dare you even suggest you’ll be doing post on my songs without me being there, etc…

Anyway Rachel and I had planned to head out to dinner in Byron straight after business hours finished - tomorrow was going to be a difficult day, it was the tenth anniversary of Matt’s accident and though nothing really formal was planned other than lunch at our parents’ and a trip out to the cemetery, I was still thankful to have Rachel around for support, and I’d made sure she knew it - I’d had enough situations where I’d failed to tell girls how much they meant to me, and I’d ballsed everything up, so I wasn’t going to do that again. She still had a few days of annual leave in reserve, so after that were heading up to the beach house in Point Lookout for a couple of days, before she had to be back in Newcastle, and I’d… probably find an excuse to be in Newcastle as well, even if it meant spending the hours while she was at work talking music stuff with her engagingly batty flatmate Christa, who had hair like Yahoo Serious’ less reserved little sister and played electric viola in a rather mad all-girl Goth-punk ensemble called Zen Ophelia. She’d tried to explain the name on more than one occasion - the opposite of xenophobia, melded to the pure true insane love (Ophelia) of Zen, or something - but it never quite made sense to me. Nor did their gigs, but it at least it looked like they were enjoying themselves, whatever the hell they were on about.

Rachel and I were tossing the rest of our things in the car, and I was tossing up whether to leave the four-track in the studio, just to see what reaction it’d get if anyone ended up playing it. I figured everyone still had enough of a sense of humour to see the tongue protruding through the cheek in that one. I’d just left the thing on the desk, and was deciding whether I wanted to take the Yamaha acoustic back to the beach house, when Rachel called that my phone was ringing. I wandered out into the cool of the night and she underarmed the phone over to me. It fell short, bouncing into the gravel of the carpark.

“Ah, you throw like a girl,” I grinned.

She poked her tongue out at me, and climbed into the passenger side with an affectionate smile.

“Yeah G’day?”

“Angus the man, what’s happening?”

“You tell me Sam, it’s your forty cents. Rach and I are about to head off to dinner, yourself?”

“So you guys aren’t joining us for drinks at Brady’s?”

“Thought that had been shitcanned?” I replied. “Marty and Maddy have long since fucked off, and Christ knows where Phil is, he’s been AWOL most of the afternoon - not with you guys I guess?”

“Ah, he’ll turn up. He knows about drinks here, I’ve messaged him.”

Which sounded like the height of vainglorious ambition, seeing as though Phil had an old CDMA mobile (remember them?) and texts ended up fucked up on his screen. Then again maybe they made more sense to him that way, given how bizarrely his brain seemed to be wired.

“Look mate, we’ll probably give it a miss. Say cheers to your man for his work, it’s been… extensive.”

McCarthy was persistent. “Come on, drop by for one? You’re only just up the road…”

I looked over at Rachel, through the open passenger door of the Monaro. She’d heard everything, as usual. She pulled a face.

I shrugged, and put my hand over the phone. “One?” I suggested, trying to be charitable. “Can’t hurt.”

“The man’s a creep,” she replied.

“Which one?” I quipped.

She shot me a rueful look. “If he’s got porn on again, I’m walking out. I’m serious. It’s completely disgusting.”

“Agreed,” I said firmly. “So…?”

Rachel surveyed the scene, and reluctantly nodded her assent. “One drink. It’s a nice night for a walk, anyway.”

“You don’t want to drive?” I said.

“It’s not even a half-mile,” she estimated. “What are you, afraid of the dark?” She smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ll look after you.”

No porn on the big screen when we arrived; instead, Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Like, freaky. Likewise, it was a bit unsettling to see Priddle being so pleasant and charming-host, taking Rachel’s coat, offering us a seat, asking what we’d like to drink. Rachel said she was ‘easy’; he declined to suggest that he’d heard that was true, missing his usual cue. I also expressed no opinion, asking what he had. He raised a champagne flute.

“Well, shouldn’t we all be drinking champagne?” he said. “It’s a celebration, after all, isn’t it?”

I glanced over at McCarthy, who nodded.

“Yeah, why not.”

Priddle sipped from his flute (insert joke here), set it down on the granite-topped dining table and scurried into the kitchen to prepare the drinks. “Just a little one for me,” McCarthy called after him, after a slightly awkward silence between the rest of us. “I’ve got to go collect Chastity from the airport in a bit.”

“Too late,” Priddle called back. “Already poured. I thought you said she was picking up a hire car?”

“She wants to,” McCarthy replied, “but she’ll be so jetlagged, she’ll just be wrecked. I’d rather she didn’t drive.”

My God. He does actually give a shit whether she lives or dies. She’s not just a receptacle after all, folks.

Priddle emerged from the kitchen with three more champagne flutes, fizzing with pale golden bubbly. “It’s Mumm,” he said, almost apologetically. “Couldn’t get Moet locally at anything less than fuckin’ ridiculous money…” He handed them out in turn with smug little smirks, one for the lady, one for Angus, one for Sam, and stood to toast our, erm, success. I think that’s what it was called.

I waited to hear what Priddle wanted to toast to. He looked like a Master of Ceremonies, almost fit to burst with anticipation.

“Bottoms up,” he proposed, and we clinked glasses and drank. Our eyes met - mine, with that dead, glassy stare of his, but just the same dead, glassy stare he had by default. Not a flicker there. Nothing to warn me, in other words. Believe me, I’ve gone over that moment in my mind more times that I’d ever want to admit, and there was nothing in those eyes - no passion, no anger, no fear, no humanity. Largely because there was nothing in those eyes which was human.

We’ve got to the bit I don’t want to talk about. Can you guess why?

The hammers are trying to smash me. The hammers are trying to smash me. Make the hammers stop. Fucking Nazi hammers. Don’t let the hammers smash me. I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep, alive or dead. I’m running screaming through my dreams and I’m punching holes in the walls trying to be get out. I can’t breathe because something is pushing on my chest, it’s crushing my chest… it’s a big Nazi hammer and it’s crushing me and I can’t breathe and it’s coming down, down, down…

A tip from your old mate Angus: don’t watch Pink Floyd’s The Wall after someone’s spiked your drink with enough fucking neurotoxic pharmaceutical shit to kill a brown dog. (Which was the title of a fairly decent cooking segment on Fly TV at the time.) You think it’s fucked up when you’re sober. Try it when you’re so freaked out and paranoid you’re screaming inside your own head until your eyeballs are shaking, and still no sound is coming out. Try it when you’ve discovered that every psychological disturbance you’ve ever feared you had, including most of the ones which incited your brother to top himself, is well-and-truly alive and kicking and suddenly taking an interest in taking you out too. And they have the rest of the night to have a go at it, while the hammers are trying to smash you and the walls are trying to eat you and Bob Geldof is getting royally fucked-with by his minders.

I fucking hate Pink Floyd.

I twist and turn to try and evade them - fucking Nazi hammers! Do I look Jewish to you? - but I’m trapped. I can’t move, I can’t see, everything is black. I can’t move my head, my shoulders are pinned, my arms flap helplessly, I scream into the abyss… it’s black, so black, and everything smells… leathery?

Leathery.

A moment of clarity; I grab hold of it and cling for dear life. My shoulders aren’t pinned, but my head’s stuck, facing down, as though I’d been bowing to Mecca and had been trapped. In a… in a black leather lounge! Not the giant octopus from that Bond film with a taste for human heads. Which is a plus.

I suddenly prise myself free and I’m flying backwards, floating like I’m in mid-air… because I am floating in mid-air… for about two tenths of a second. The ground breaks my fall. Everything hurts - my back, my elbows, the back of my head. And that fucking Nazi symbol - the pseudo-Swastika the unholy armies of hammerdom are flying - is above me, spinning, spinning. Like a turbine. Like a turbine that wants to turbinate my face. Not my face! I’m not as pretty as Craig Wing but I like my face. Rachel likes my face too. Fuck off spinning Nazi turbine! I roll over and crown my forehead on what to a sober person would have been the leg of a coffee table. The violence isn’t helping me unscramble the toxic, psychotic poison in my head; it’s just making me more paranoid. A rectangular object the size of a TV remote clatters onto the floor next to me, and starts wriggling towards me with its one red eye glaring menacingly. I recoil in panic and hurl it towards the still-onrushing hammers. It bounces off them and leaves a crack; they look suddenly deranged, like I’ve damaged their windscreen. Maybe they can’t see me. But I can still hear them…God please make them stop. God, Allah, Buddha, L. Ron fuckin’ Hubbard…

Angus, mate, just turn the TV off.

Another fragment of clarity. I try to get up… no. I can’t control my legs, they’re two useless slithering tentacles. So I crawl… towards… the hammers. They’re not hammers, it’s just a TV. They’re not hammers, it’s just a TV. They’re not fucking hammers!

I can’t turn the TV off. There’s buttons on the front but they don’t have labels, not in any language I can read. I pound on the buttons with the back of my fist until two of them pop out, one of them embeds itself in the fleshy part of my hand, and the hammers are quiet. They’re still banging up and down, trying to smash their way through the screen, but I can’t hear them.

Ahhh. Now I can get some fuckin’ sleep.

I black out, to dream of horrible, horrible things. Stuff I’d parked at the back of my head as far away from daylight as possible - scenes from horror films, news reports of hideous torture from the Yugoslav war, other shit you don’t want to know about. I don’t even want to know about it so I’m not going to dig any deeper. At one stage, I think someone’s kicking me - not hard, just the way you nudge a dog to wake him up, or roadkill to see if it’s still alive or needs further seeing-to with a crowbar. But that can’t be because everyone else is dead. The house is empty, deserted, and everyone’s dead, except for me, and I’m gonna be next, if I don’t get out of here, but I can’t move my legs, I can’t move my legs and I’m gonna die here, trapped, like all the others. I don’t want to die here with you assholes, you guys suck…

The little shards of clarity are intermittent, but they're heavier in number, coming close enough to almost coalesce into fragments. I know I’m at Priddle’s place. I know something bad has happened. I don’t know how long I’ve been here or what’s happened to me. But I know I’m not scared any more. Instead I’m starting to get angry. Which is good because I do angry particularly well. Rachel aside, I’ve been angry for a good year or so. I could angry for Australia. I still can’t breathe properly but now I remember that I’ve got two cracked ribs from a motorbike accident, and my heart is pounding at a frightening pace but that’s… that I can’t explain just yet, but I’ve got some ideas about that. I just need a little longer to make the poison go out of my head. Just need to lay here a little longer. There’s noise somewhere, I can’t figure out where from, I don’t try to because I can’t remember the house very well. It’s muffled. I can’t distinguish anything, there’s nothing recognisable. Sounds like the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Ha, I made a funny. Yeah, this is better. Come on, blackness. Bring whatever you’ve got, I’ve got that shit covered. Anger will protect me.

I have a watch and I can read it, because it has hands and markings made from glow-worm shit, and because I know about this stuff cos I did science at uni, ay. It says big hand on 4, little hand on 9. And a bit. Four past nine? Twenty past nine. Morning? Night? Night. On what day? FRI 8. Friday the eighth? Still?

I’ve been here for two hours. I’ve been lying on my right leg and it’s gone to sleep. At least it’s not a bloody useless slithering tentacle anymore. The three-legged swastika is still spinning above me, but it’s now recognisable as a ceiling fan. I remember that I couldn’t work out why he had both aircon and ceiling fans in this place. Credits are rolling on the big screen, looking slightly crazed with a decent sized crack in its outer casing, the image projecting onto the concave side of the dent. There’s a bit of broken plastic stuck in the ball of my hand but I’m not brave enough to wedge it out. I try, gingerly, to ease myself up onto my side, onto my haunches, then, fighting the whirlpool in my head, I use the coffee table to push myself into a standing position.

Whoah, fuck. This is worse than any hangover in the history of… hangovers. This is fuckin’ brutal. My head is swimming with sewage; I can barely see, let alone stand. I take a few tottery steps and steady myself on the back of the leather lounge, the one which had tried to eat me an hour earlier while masquerading as a giant octopus thing. I feel like a bit of an idiot, but then the toxic vapours swell up in my head and my heart thumps violently, as if to alert me to the fact I’m not anywhere near out of the woods just yet. I have a job to do. Actually it’s two jobs: one, find out what the hell is going on; two, do something about it so that it doesn’t happen again. If this is Priddle and McCarthy having a fucking laugh at the expense of the ‘anti-drugs guy’ - fuck, it’s not as though I’m campaigning in the streets, I just don’t see the point in taking the shit and making an absolute cunt of yourself, and no less convinced of that from where I stand (shakily) now - I will tear the both of them a new one, collectively and individually. Make no fucking mistake.

Then, I hear it. Behind the electronic silence - the gentle hum of the aircon, the whoosh of the ceiling fan, the protestations of the fridge compressor - I hear breathing. Strained, panting breaths. Distant. Not here, in another room. The paranoia’s faded, but not gone completely; I want to believe that everyone isn’t dead, that the house hasn’t been overrun by silent homicidal intruders, but the thought has only been pushed to the back of my mind, not turfed out altogether. I need to know what the fuck’s going on, but I need to be stealthy. I conjur up every last ounce of consciousness - it’s a massive effort to think, let alone walk, let alone creep quietly down the hall with a head full of narcotics, two broken ribs and one leg asleep - but I begin to pad gingerly towards the hallway, one foot after the other with the tension of a tightrope walker and the caution of a mountaineer scaling a crevasse on the North Col of Everest. Tiptoe forward, pause, hold breath, listen hard, continue.

The hallway leads out of the living room and runs the length of the house; I can’t make out the other end, but I hazily recall there’s a stairwell there which leads downstairs (as stairwells tend to do, unless they go up) to yet another guest bedroom, laundry, pool room and garage (hey, not bad recall for a brain-addled junkie). Along the hallway, doors peel off into bedrooms and bathrooms; I can’t be sure at this stage, but I think the sound is coming from the nearest door on my right. Priddle’s bedroom? The breathing/panting/grunting seemed to be male - by my addled maths, this meant it was either Priddle, McCarthy or AN Other. It’d just make my fucking day after all this to find Priddle and McCarthy in a gay tryst - presumably McCarthy had to pay his girl’s drug bills somehow, though quite why they needed to sedate everyone else in the building escaped me. Of course, another, much more horrible possibility had occurred to me - I think you can probably guess what it involved, or rather who - but I’d forcibly shoved that to the back of my mind (it was getting crowded back there) because I had shit to focus on.

I backed gently against the wall, reached across and gingerly placed thumb and opposing forefinger over the doorknob, then began to turn it like I was trying to crack a combination lock - a little bit of pressure, pause, wait, a little more, feeling for that pressure point, that instant when the lock releases…

The doorlatch gave, and the door creeped ajar, inch by inch. Enough for me to work out that this is, in fact, a linen cupboard. And not Priddle’s bedroom.

Creak.

I froze. Waiting, straining to listen, choking on tension, holding my breath.

“Huh?” said a voice. A male voice, low and consipiratorial. Priddle’s voice. Behind the next door along. Be quiet, Angus. Be vewy vewy quiet.

“Just the wind,” he exhaled. “Just the wind, baby.”

I don’t like this, I thought. Don’t like it one bit.

A gentle slap, palm on flesh. And another.

“See, baby, this isn’t working for me,” said the voice. “Gonna be noooo fun if you can’t feel it, sweetness… You shouldna oughta drunk from your boy’s glass. Greedy little bitch...”

A harder slap, followed by muffled, indistinct murmuring.

“Fuck it, it’ll still be fun. Up the arse, you’ll love it in there. Like that lucky fucking cunt doesn’t get to do you like that every fucking night… Maybe we should get your boy in here to watch?” he added smugly. Baby, you are soooo dirty, that’s a fucking filthy idea. Love it. What should we tie the fucking cunt to?” He turned from the bed to survey the room for a suitable anchor point. To find ‘her boy’ blocking the doorway, inquiring firmly as to what the fuck was going on here.

What the fuck was going on here was hideously obvious. Priddle, stripped down to his boxers, hard-on like a ram in tupping season; Rachel, unconscious and splayed across his bed like a Real Doll dumped in an industrial skip blouse unbuttoned, jeans unzipped.

I didn’t think; I reacted. You wouldn't have thought either. If either of us had thought about it, maybe we’d have been more stealthy about it. Maybe we wouldn’t have charged at him, given him enough time to react, to panic, to reach for the only thing he could reach - the bedside lamp - and hurl it at our head as we leapt into a headlong crash-tackle, a bloodcurdling scream ripping from our throat. Through sheer reflex I managed to get a hand in front of my face to deflect most of the force, but the ceramic base cracked against my temple with enough force to disorient me; not that I wasn’t disoriented already. By the time I blinked back into full awareness, a few seconds, he’d managed to get past and was out the door. Wetness trickled from my forehead; I didn’t need to check to know it was claret.

Shake it off, man, shake it off. Find him and kill him. Fuckin’ kill the cunt.

No. No, said Voice of Reason. Killing the cunt could wait, just for a moment. First, check she’s OK.

She was still out to it, but she had a pulse - a racing, irregular pulse - and she was breathing, but laboured. I knew she was asthmatic, and had probably had a reaction to whatever Chubs had spiked our drinks with. I made a an attempt to restore her dignity, pulling up her jeans and wrapping her blouse around her - my fingers were shaking too much to thread the buttons - before covering her in a blanket. She was alive, and thank Christ, she hadn’t been awake to know what he was going to do to her. Fuck, if I’d been another few minutes…

I’m tense, I’m trembling. I close my eyes and they film with acid tears. I’m beginning to boil inside. I’m going to scream. I’m going to fucking scream, then I’m going to start smashing stuff until the owner of the house shows himself. And then I’m going to kill him. Find him and kill him. Fuckin’ kill the cunt. The blood is bubbling in my veins. The poison is scalding through me again, but this time the voice in the back of my head, where all the black thoughts live, is bellowing at me: Kill him. It’s that voice from Mortal Kombat that used to demand that you Finish him. But I hadn’t even started.

Find him and kill him. Fuckin’ kill the cunt.

I stagger to the doorway and turn right. My focus is on finding something, anything, which I can use to get my point across. I’m barrelling through the darkness, charging into and through random, unrecognisable rooms like a character in a first-person shoot-em-up, hoping to chance my way into a weapon. And maybe one of those white boxes with the red cross on top which replenish your health points, because I feel like shit. But I’m not thinking about that. I’m thinking about how angry I am with Brady Priddle, and how I’m going to kill him. I’m going to smash in his face until his brains pool out onto his expensive woolblend carpets.

Nothing down this end; I ramble back along the corridor to the bedroom doorway. The door to the linen cupboard has been swung open… perhaps to block pursuers? Was this his escape path? I’m too swept up in fury to be able to manage any sort of detective work, though. I step back, my still-tingling ‘sleeping’ leg almost buckling under the weight, and kick at the door, hard. It bounces back and slaps me across the face. I retaliate, punching it, hard. Here’s my fist, where’s the fight, as the Sahara Hotnights demanded. Fist imprint in the doorskin; skinned knuckles on my right hand. But the button off the TV seems to have been dislodged. I slap the door out of the way, glance into the cupboard, and…

Yes, I decided, dragging the old, chunky, barely-used Duncan Fearnley cricket bat, an ‘80s Allan Border special, from the depts of the linen closet. That will do nicely.

Now, where was the fucker?

There were two storeys to search, both in darkness, both unfamiliar. I had a few clues; I had the impression he’d turned left as he’d left the bedroom, and I thought I’d heard footsteps pounding on stairs in the distance as I’d checked on Rachel. If he’d gone left, though, he couldn’t have used the inside stairwell. There was another staircase outside, paved in the sort of gaudy terracotta beloved by Roger Crittenden of Tuscany On Point which linked his front door (leading off his massive living room) downstairs to the blue-metalled carpark and the massive external garage which housed his collection of penis compensatory units, the blower Bentley and so forth. He’d already out-grown the two-car garage which came with the house, so his Bentley and his houseguest’s old Porsche 928 were out in the shed. I reached the living room window in time to see his rotund, pasty-white figure grimacing barefoot across the gravel towards the shed, punching a PIN code into the security keypad. The motherfucker was making a run for it. To what end? Going to the police? Or to get reinforcements from his ‘drug cartel’ mates? Either seemed as likely, i.e. not at all. Maybe he was going to hide out and come back when I’d calmed down, try and smooth-talk his way out of it. Yeah mate, sorry I kinda tried to rape your girlfriend and shit, hey. We’re all sweet now yeah?

Fuck knew what he was up to. All I knew was that when he stepped back into this house, regardless of how long away that was, or who he had with him, he was a fuckin’ dead man. I could have chased him, but if he was planning to take flight in his car, I was hardly in any fit state to drive, even if I managed to find the keys to McCarthy’s 928 - presuming it was still around, I vaguely remembered something about him wanting to meet Chastity at the airport even though she was supposed to have her own car. Then again, if he'd supped from the same font of fucking evil as I had, he wasn’t in any fit state to drive either.

But why go to Priddle when he can come to me? All he needed was the right motivation.

I wandered into the living room, casually spinning the bat in my hand. Plenty to work with here. Starting with that big, tall, glass-fronted cabinet, with the wineglasses in the top, and the spirits stored beneath. Times like these I wished I’d brought my motocross goggles. Backlift, swing and follow-through: I bludgeoned the bat through the glass with an overhand woodcutter’s chop, turning my head at impact and shutting my eyes against the scattering shards. Damn, that felt good. All that anger, all that fury, and finally something constructive to do with it. I swung again, a cross-bat slog, and this time half the door frame is peeled off with the impact. The cabinet rocked crazily fore-to-aft, its suicide assisted with a wrench of my free arm. The effect was SPECTACULAR. A couple of thousand bucks worth of someone else's booze, and more crystal than County Waterford, were suddenly Jackson Pollocked across Priddle's expensive carpet. Splinters and shards crunched under my feet as I sized up my next target, simmering nicely.

Those fucking hammers.

They were playing on a loop now, as part of the opening titles of the DVD menu. I’ll fucking have YOU too, Hammers. Come on you Hammers!

Bellowing Premier League terrace chants, I hacked and scythed great swathes into the enormous, high-definition, back-projection TV that cost more than McCarthy’s old Porsche (then again McCarthy preferred to waste his money on bikes rather than cars), sidestepping plumes of sparks and reminding myself of the amount of voltage stored up in that motherfucker. In hindsight it wasn’t as dangerous as it could have been - had it been a cathode ray tube I probably would have been electrocuted on my first swing. Probably for the best that homicidal anger makes you not the sharpest tool in the shed.

As the TV expired in an arc of blue pyrotechnics, I heard the aircon tick off, saw the fanblades above stops circling, registered the blanking of the DVD display. Circuit breaker’s tripped. No power. I’m going to count that as an advantage. Now, if only this fucker will show himself…

I glanced outside. With the juice off, the heavy rollerdoor on Chubs’ massive tool shed (the shed he needs to have because he’s such a massive tool) had jammed stuck about two feet from closed. Next time I burgled Chubs’ outdoor garage, I reminded myself just to cut the power - you’da thunk he’d been unstupid enough to have some sort of battery backup, particularly with the commercial quantities of drugs supposedly stockpiled around the place, though McCarthy had suggested in a moment of weakness (over those beers earlier in the week) that he may have a hidden, secured, trapdoored cellar downstairs that might be used for such purposes. Entirely theoretical though such purposes would be of course.

A flash of pale, translucent flesh in the moonlight caught my eye. An arm, then a shoulder, then a back. That rotund, pasty-white figure was struggling through the gap. Oh man, let the power come back right now, cut him in half like a fuckin’ bacon slicer... nope, no such luck. Something was glinting in his right hand, as he laboriously scrambled through and tried to wipe himself off. Something silver, something metallic. I permitted myself a smug smile. He’d boasted at length about his ‘piece’ - when you’re as undermanned in the trouser as he was, you have to compensate as best you can, and since the Bentley, the Lambo, the enormous boat and the series of houses clearly weren’t up to the enormity of the task (see what I did there?) he’d resorted to packing heat, supposedly for protection in his ‘after hours’ line of work. Only one problem, which McCarthy had admitted to me over beers (he really opened up when you got a few ales into him): it was a replica. All appearance and no substance, just like Priddle’s fucking band, just like Priddle’s fucking life.

Even so, if he comes in here waving a gun around, surely that’d be grounds for me to kill him in self-defence, even setting aside the whole drug-rape deal. I’d have thought there wouldn’t be a jury in the land that would convict me for bludgeoning this fucker to death the moment he sets foot on the landing.

I’d like to think that was mostly the drugs talking.

Footsteps stammered on the landing, chased by the nervous jangling of keys in the lock. The door opened. Priddle found me leaning nonchalantly on my bat at the non-strikers end, next to the shattered wreckage of his drinks cabinet. Sticky fluids were oozing out of what had been the bottom of the cabinet, flowing amongst the fine shrapnel of glassware - a cocktail of various unidentified spirits and liqueurs, quite probably a fire risk. Accident report forms would need to be filed with OH&S, it'd be a fucking disaster. See, it’s shit like this that makes me glad I stick to beer.

Why was I so calm? I was going to kill this man. Kill him dead and proper, with no functioning bits left. Murder was supposed to be a crime of passion, of anger and fury, but my anger and fury had bubbled under, transformed into that low growling voice methodically chanting the mantra of Kill him over and over again.

“What the fuck have you done?” he shouted, because shouting would make him look like he was in charge of the situation. His fingers were white-knuckling his pistol grip, undermining his bravado, calling his bluff.

“I’d ask the same of you, cuntface,” I replied in rapid-fire fashion. “They’d call it date rape, but that suggests someone would date you, you pathetic little cunt.”

He looked at me, smugly. Those dead, glassy eyes again.

“What was it you said?” he asked. “I’ve got money and drugs, so I’ve got no excuse?”

I’d said that, certainly, but the thing was, I’d said it to McCarthy. In confidence. The lad needed to know when to shut his fucking face. Once I’d dealt with Chubs, my mate Mr Duncan Fearnley and I were going to have to have a quiet chat to him as well.

But first things first.

As I walked towards him I began swinging the bat around, in windmill fashion, like a tailender doing psych-up warm-ups while walking out to the middle. The tip of his gun began to raise, but quivered as he tried to work out whether raising a gun against an unarmed man was a good long-term strategy, your Honour. He had a lot to lose by killing me. His little empire could all come crashing down faster than you could say ‘Bugger me Senior Sarge, come check this out, he’s got a fucking underground cellar down here full of gear!’

“Hold it right there,” he said. For a man with a pistol in his hand, he didn’t sound terribly self-assured. Wasn’t that the point of buying it in the first place?

“Or what,” I queried derisively, “you’ll fill me full of lead?”

I was only a few feet away now, still advancing, yet he still hadn’t raised the gun. I’d called his bluff. He was frozen with fear. Fuckin’ yay me.

“W…what the hell are you doing?”

I guess it seemed an obvious question. As it turned out the answer was pretty self-evident as well.

“I’m going to kill you, Brady,” I replied keenly.

And began my first backswing, as he backed away and finally began to raise his gun.

“The fuck you are, you’ll never get away with…”

Thwack.

It didn’t make a traditional cricketing sound, which I guess I was disappointed with. Not the short sharp crack of leather on willow, more the dull, muffled sound of hitting a waterbed with an oar. Apart from his hideous girly scream, of course - that was fairly rewarding. It wasn’t meant to maim, just to make sure I had his attention, and to get that gun out of his hand, just so he knew he didn’t have the upper hand here. In fact, after that hit, he barely had an upper hand at all, or not something recognisable as such. He was sprawled against the wall, wailing about his broken wrist or some pussy shit, I wasn’t really listening.

“It?” I suggested, to finish his previous sentence. “You know, I reckon I will. I’m high on fucking Christ knows what, and I clearly aren’t in control of my actions. I can’t see any judge convicting me, can you?” Looking to distract him from his pathetic attempts to scrabble for the spilt gun, I directed a right-footed centre-half’s clearance into his solar plexus, which hit its mark with a sickening OOOFFF; unable to protect himself with his bent hand, the other clawing the wall for support, he groaned and sagged like a deflating weather balloon. “Particularly when the court hears what you were up to earlier in the evening.”

“They never talk,” he spat, his dribble flecked with blood, still trying to claim the ascendency. “Fucking sluts are too shamed to talk…”

See, that wasn’t a clever thing to say. I’ve got a fairly decent straight drive on me, if I can get just down the wicket to the pitch of the ball. One stride, one swing, a satisfying crack of willow on ribcage; make that several cracks combined as one impact. I wasn’t aiming for his head, not yet. He had a lot of apologising to do, and he couldn’t do that when he was dead. First things first.

Brady Priddle was still trying to be defiant, to hind the fact that he was fucking terrified. “I did fuck all,” he wailed. “Trying to teach you some fuckin’ manners. Just as well you’re Sam’s mate, or I’d have…”

Whatever the rest of that sentence had in store was lost as I stepped over him and firmly pressed the heel of my foot against his throat, and pushed down until his face turned scarlet. Don’t worry, I lifted off the throttle before he turned blue. Hard to say sorry and beg for forgiveness when you’re dead, and all. He coughed profusely, hacking red phlegm into his matted chest hair. Now, he was trembling. Now, he was starting to know how he’d made her feel. I didn’t even want to think about what she’d been through, or what she was still going to go through once she discovered what he’d done to her, or had been going to. If I did, I’d kill him far too quickly for him to learn his lesson.

“Get up,” I growled. “We’re going for a walk.”

He grasped for the back of the sofa, and painfully clawed his way to uprightness, folding his injured wing against his fractured ribcage for protection. And suddenly, hysterically, began screaming for help. Irritated, I brought the toe of the bat down hard on the back of his neck. He yelped, and clutched the affected area, hunched like Notre Dame’s most infamous citizen, moaning about not being able to feel anything but pins and needles, you psychotic fuckwit. Which was more bringing of the stupid; he shouldn’t have given me the idea, I figured. From where I stood, and where he hunched, it was a simple reverse-sweep (or, rather appropriately given the bat’s provenance, a left-handed AB pullshot) to bring the side of the bat across into sharp striking contact with the base of his spinal cord. Play it right and he’ll never have feeling in his legs again for the rest of his life - or anything else south of the waist. If only someone had thought of that earlier, like about twenty years ago. I reserved the right to deploy that tactic later, particularly if I had a better shot at it.

“Up,” I reiterated, raising the bat threateningly over the back of his head, as I grabbed the snivelling little toad by the scruff of the neck, just below where the swelling was beginning. “Time to say sorry…”

But he suddenly broke into a surge as the hallway leered in front of us, flailing his good hand around to try and slap my left-handed grip away from his collar. I released him long enough to get both hands onto the handle for an overhead tennis smash, but the bat caught on the ceiling, and he’d managed to get clear of me by the time it came through its interrupted swing, and cracked me on the right knee. He was a few feet out of reach now, trying to sprint for what, the stairwell? By my hazy recollection it peeled off from the left at the end of this corridor, about fifteen feet away. I hurled the bat javelin-style at the small of his back, the target I’d sized up with an imaginary reverse sweep moments before, but the bat clipped a doorframe and rattled harmlessly to the floor. When I say harmlessly I mean to say it cannoned into my shin on the rebound, but I didn’t even feel it, or the knee moments before. Adrenalin, narcotics, and homicidal rage masked the pain. My only thought was whether to pause, pick it up and have another go in the confined space of the stairwell, or whether I’d lose more valuable ground. I paused, grasping the handle of the bat again, as he wheeled at the corner, and prepared to vault down the polished-wood stairs as quick as he dared. I swung into the turn a heartbeat afterwards; he was a few feet in front, a few feet below, his ridiculous bullfrog body jiggling macabrely on its puppet strings as he ran for his life.

It wasn’t even a decision, it was a reflex. I dived headlong into the gloom of the stairwell after him.

It wasn’t so much a league crash-tackle, more a body-surfer’s take-off. At least until halfway down when it turned into a runway air disaster. That was when I caught up with him, grasping him from behind in midair and shoving him face-first and screaming into the stairs, hurtling downwards at breakneck speed. His head and body struck solid wood, or rather a series of solid wood platforms, twelve inches wide at about twelve inch height intervals, at about the same time my 85kgs crashed onto him and used him as stunt padding. I bounced off, ricocheting against the wall, barrel-rolling off the bottom stair and onto the carpet at their base, dizzy and sick.

But not as much as he was.

What had been Brady Priddle was now limp, broken and smeared down half the stairwell - blood, mucous and chips of teeth were littered like carbon-fibre shrapnel from a massive air crash. I grabbed his collar and turned him over. He was unconscious; he was a mess. But he was still breathing. Oh no you don’t. You don’t get away with it that easily. Here’s your excuse. Here’s your fucking EXCUSE. Cunt! I smashed my fist into the mess that was his face, and still the anger boiled. Cunt! The word - and it’s not a nice one, I do apologise for that - barked out of melike the recoil on a rifle, as I punched him again, the rage surging with every strike, every expletive. Cunt! Cunt! Cunt! Fucking CUNT!!!

I was too preoccupied cunting about, remodelling Priddle’s face, to hear the trip-stagger of feet behind me, or the urgent shouts and screams above and behind. But I sure enough noticed the hands grabbing my shoulders and wrenching me off the insensitive bulk of Priddle. The force of it spun me around, and there was McCarthy, looking as pale as death, his eyes on stalks. I was on my arse, against the wall, and McCarthy was standing over me - neither of us had a weapon, unless you counted that fake pistol which had appeared in his shuddering hand, the grip wrapped in a torn strip of cloth - good thinking, Captain CSI, they’ll never fucking know you were here. Aside from your fucking DNA practically carpeting the fucking place…

That blood-stained cricket bat was lying between us, almost within my reach, not quite as easily within his. I thought he’d go for it, given he might have thought he had the ascendency, but he just stared at it, and at me, and at Priddle, dumbstruck, mortified. Almost like he’d never seen one of his mates bludgeon one of his other mates to death with a cricket bat before.

“Can’t you wait your fucking turn?” I mumbled through a mouth full of blood (mine, courtesy a cut lip). “I was getting around to you soon as, ya cunt.”

But then an anguished scream pierced the still-boiling fury in my head, and I wrenched my neck trying to see up to the top of the stairwell; if it was Rachel, there wasn’t much I could do to protect her now. And it was - she was wrapped in a sheet, trembling catatonically, sobbing uncontrollably. Through the tears that stung my eyes I struggled to make out the other figure at the top of the stairs, with their arm around her, trying to comfort her. Chastity? Get the fuck away from her, you...

“Andrew… Oh God, what have you done!”

“Rachel!” I called back to her, but she’d turned away, and run from the sight of her boyfriend, the murderer. Chastity followed her; I lost sight of her as well. “Rachel…”

Well, that was that fucked. I looked over at McCarthy with utter, utter contempt.

“You can put that fuckin’ toy gun away now, cunt,” I spat. “You’re fooling no bastard with that.”

He cleared his throat, and indicated the body of Priddle with a shaky wave of his left hand.

“This isn’t the replica,” he explained, his voice fractured. “The replica’s black…”

That was it; too much for me. Suddenly, everything caved in on me. Rachel, the drugs, the fight, the fall down the staircase, and the sudden, ghastly knowledge that I’d walked up to a man carrying a genuine, real, actual, shoot-you-fucking-dead handgun and had swung a cricket bat at him. The world shut down and faded to black. I flaked limply against the body of Priddle, sprawled next to me.

My last thought before unconsciousness was part disappointment, part relief:

I think this fucker’s still got a pulse.