stop. 'You didn't cut yourself too badly?'
'No… Maybe… A little.'
They all do when they start out. There's a good reason why we call our palms Cicatrix City. The scars that criss-cross them chart our passage through this job.
'Get to Number Four and have it seen to,' I say.
'I'm a long way from the office, maybe -'
'No maybes.' I've seen the schedule. Meredith's a ten-minute drive from the Melbourne offices, at most. Every state and territory capital has an office, a Number Four, and medical staff on call. 'I pay my doctors far too much not to have them see to you.'
'OK,' she says. 'I will.'
'Good work,' I say, then worry that I'm sounding patronising.
'Thanks,' I can hear the smile in her voice – maybe I'm not. 'Thanks a lot, Mr de Selby.'
'Mr de Selby? That's what they called my dad, and he didn't like it either. Steven's fine.'
'OK, Steven.'
'Now get to Number Four.' They're all so new. It's exhausting. 'If I hear that you decided to tough it out I'll be very pissed off.'
I hang up. Slip the phone in my pocket. Then open the bottle of Bundy and sip my rum. I'm all class, Dad would say.
Another five pomps and one stall, across the country, in quick succession. All of them done in time.
Five heartbeats gone from the pool. And another monster stopped.
It's nothing, right? But I hear them all. I ache with their urgency and their passing. There are always new heartbeats as well. One of those falters after a few minutes.
Another successful pomp.
Life's cruel. Life's what you have to fear.
Death. All we do is turn off the lights and shut the door and if we need to bolt it, that's none of your concern.
I briefly consider going into the kitchen, making a cup of coffee. But I don't like spending time in there at all. Mum and Dad loved to cook; somehow the skill passed me by. And that space drives it home. Lissa and I eat a lot of takeaway.
What's more, my parents were killed in the kitchen. That was where most of the blood was. I miss them so much. I miss their guidance, their laughter. I even miss their bickering. Their bodies, Morrigan's Stirrers inhabited those. The last time I saw my parents as flesh and blood they were being used to try and kill me. That was how far Morrigan had fallen.
Yeah, the bastard was a regular puppet master. He still haunts my dreams. He was directly responsible for starting a Schism, and the deaths of almost every Pomp in Australia. Nearly killed me too. I wish I could say I'd survived because of my tenacity and bloody perspicacity. Truth is, I was lucky. Lucky to have Lissa around. Lucky to have brighter, more able friends.
Sure I'd beaten Morrigan at the Negotiation and become RM – on the top of the One Tree, the heart of the Underworld, where his and my future, our very corporeal and non-corporeal existences were decided – but even that had been more through luck than design.
Two months ago I was just a Pomp – one of many – drawing souls into the afterlife.
Now I'm so much more, and I hate it. Morrigan even killed my border collie, Molly Millions. Until very recently, I imagined seeing poor Moll out of the corner of my eye, several times a day. And every time I did, it knocked the wind out of me. Another casualty in the minefield that is my life.
I could try and sleep. But even if I did, I'd wake just as weary.
And the nightmares. They drive into me even when I'm awake. I close my eyelids for more than a second and there they rush, blood-slicked and cackling. I'm clambering and running over screaming faces. Torn hands clawing and scraping, and these aren't the dead, but the dying, and they're dying because of me. More often than I care to admit, I'm enjoying the madness: revelling in it. Sometimes there is the scythe, and I'm swinging that thing, loving its heft and balance, its never-dulling edge, and laughing.
No sleep. No rest. Not when that's waiting. And a man shouldn't wake with an erection after such a dream. How can that arouse me?
I dig out something doleful and rumbling from my CD collection. A little Tindersticks, some Tom Waits. Let the music dim down the roar of a nation's beating hearts. But no matter what I choose tonight, the volume refuses to drown out the sound – and I don't want to wake up Lissa. I sit there restless, Waits crackling along like bones and branches breaking.
I work on finishing the rum.
What the hell, eh? Drinking's easy at any time once you start. Easier if the right music's playing. Tim once told me that music was the perfect gateway drug. He's not wrong. Finally the rum and the music start to work. Not a lot, but enough.
Twice I stumble into the bedroom to check on Lissa, and to marvel that I didn't lose her when I lost nearly everything else, that she's sleeping in my bed. All I want to do is hold her. There was a time that I couldn't, when to touch Lissa would have banished her from me forever. I went to Hell and back to find her, I pulled an Orpheus Manoeuvre. Not even Orpheus managed that one, but where he failed, I succeeded. If one good thing has come of this, it's Lissa.
She snores a little.
It's endlessly fascinating the things that you find out about your partner when you can't sleep. The sounds, the unaffected routines of their bodies. The way a person's eyes trace their dreams beneath their eyelids. There's more truth in slumber. Perhaps that's why I feel so unanchored. It's a space lost to me.
What a whiny bastard I've become.
Sometimes Lissa wakes screaming from her own nightmares. She never tells me what they are, claims she can't remember them, but I can guess.
There's not much of the Bundy left come first light. And there's been seventy-five more deaths, two of them followed by Stirrers stirring.
Seventy-five more successful pomps and two stalls and the day hasn't even properly started.
I never wanted this. Nor was I supposed to have it.
For Death, it never stops. It's a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week sort of thing. When I was a Pomp, out in the field, I had thought I understood that.
Well, as it turns out – as it turned out for a lot of things – I'm completely clueless.
2
I'm making coffee, trying not to think about my parents (where they were sitting, what they were saying) when Lissa stomps into the kitchen. She's dressed in her usual black: a neat blouse, a shortish skirt, and a pair of purple Doc Marten boots, at once elegant and perfect for kicking in the heads of Stirrers. Around her neck is a silver and leather necklace from which hangs rows of black safety pins leading to a Mickey Mouse charm at the bottom. Early Steamboat Willie Mickey, grinning like mad. I can't help but roll my eyes at that. Only Mickey's smiling, though.
'Do you know what time it is?' she demands.
I shrug.
'Seven,' she says. 'Someone switched off my alarm.'
I pass her a cup. Surely you can't stay mad at someone who's just made you coffee. I lean in to give her a kiss. Lissa screws up her face. 'Christ, Steve. Just how much did you have to drink last night?'
I wince, slipping on a pair of sunglasses. It's bright enough inside the house, and the cruel sun of a Brisbane summer waits outside. 'Maybe more than was good for me.'
'More than was good for the both of us. Again. Try not to breathe in my direction, will you?'
Seven in the morning. The sun is already high and bright, the air-conditioning throbbing, like my head,
