Dead Lemons Read online

  Dead Lemons

  By Finn Bell

  Copyright © 2016 Finn Bell

  Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  ISBN: 978-0-473-36805-0

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  About the Author

  Slightly Biased Mostly True Things

  CHAPTER 1

  June 4, PRESENT DAY . . .

  “Who says I am not under the special protection of God?”

  –Adolf Hitler, Speech 1933

  Dying – when you actually get busy doing the very last of it – can make you think about strange things. I thought of Murder Ball.

  As sports go it had a ball and rules, but they were really just there to channel the aggression, help harness the violence of it, not limit it. The people who played it well were different—being willing to hurt people was only the beginning. What really mattered was not caring whether you got hurt in the process.

  That’s what people never understood about us—that we needed that. It wasn’t about the pop psychology crap of still wanting to be manly or vent our anger—it was just about feeling, feeling anything intensely.

  I still remember what Tai said to me after my first game. I was busy straightening a finger I hadn’t even noticed I’d sprained, loud people in wheelchairs rolling around all about me. The floor slick with sweat.

  “It’s because your dick doesn’t work anymore,” he said, a big stranger smiling at me from his wheelchair. Massively muscled arms etched with Māori tattoos folded across an impossibly large chest.

  “Not being able to walk anymore sucks, but it’s not being able to fuck that changes you, bro,” he continued. That got my attention, and I couldn’t help but smile back.

  “What?” I said, already knowing it was true, feeling the ache of realising just how true it was begin to seep into me.

  “That’s why you liked the game—not because it felt so good—but because it felt so strong, strong enough that you forgot everything else while you were doing it, forgot yourself, hah—like sex, see?” he said.

  “You just don’t know how much I agree with you,” I replied. We’ve been friends ever since.

  The game is basically a mix of basketball, rugby, and bumper cars played by people in wheelchairs with a mentality that’s half-hockey and half-kamikaze. It’s reckless and powerful—everything we’re not supposed to be anymore. For the more fragile cripples among us, it can be downright dangerous. I loved it from the very first moment.

  Murderball.

  That’s what got me into all this.

  Got me hooked into living again.

  And was probably going to get me murdered this Tuesday.

  Tuesday or about then—depending on the weather, really—and at the very bottom end of New Zealand, closer to Antarctica than most of the world, you didn’t really want to make bets on the weather. Could be Tuesday, could be tomorrow.

  The Zoyl brothers were on a crayfish boat, working along the coastline to Fiordland. If the weather held they’d be back on Tuesday. It wouldn’t take them long to find out what I did. Figure out what I knew—and then they’d come for me. Four days from now.

  All because of Murderball.

  Funny the things that go through your head when you hang upside down long enough.

  At first I thought I’d pass out, but it didn’t happen. I tried shifting, getting myself out, but there’s not a lot of room to move, and everything looks different when you’re upside down and I was scared. When you’re a cripple suspended upside down about eight meters above the crashing waves and sharp rocks, maybe you’re not as confident in yourself as you could have been, either. The wheelchair saved my life, got caught between two boulders, trapping my leg as well. I didn’t feel a thing; still doesn’t hurt now as I gently dangle from it. The upside of paralysis from the hips down . . . yeah.

  Darrell, eldest and ugliest of the three Zoyl brothers, had pushed me out here to the rocks by the sea. I think he wanted to make it look like an accident or suicide, who knows. I came out to their farm because I had to know, had to know finally and for certain. I didn’t expect any of them to be here. Saw their crayfish boat chug out of the harbour that morning. Saw the big brothers sorting on the deck. Their yellow waterproofs bright in the morning sun. I should have counted them.

  When he saw me, Darrell didn’t do anything, didn’t say a word, no change in expression. We just looked at each other and he knew. He ran forward, blocked me midway as I was turning my wheelchair and started kicking. Irrationally, that pissed me off even more—a kicking fight with a guy in a wheelchair. The chair went over and he kept going. I think I blacked out, because the next I knew I was back in the chair, my ears ringing. Darrell’s hand was on the back of my jacket collar, keeping me from sliding off as he roughly pushed the wheelchair out over the paddock towards the ocean.

  We were heading up the hill, not a big drop from the edge, maybe ten, twelve meters, but big enough with rough seas and rocks at the bottom, and that’s if you had working legs and were still alive. I shut up and hung limp, hoping he thought I was still out. It was creepy; his head was down right next to mine as he pushed. I could feel the heat of his face next to mine, his breath down my neck, smelling of soured beer.

  The timing of it was just luck, just instinct. When we were near the top the ground evened out and he suddenly sped up, pushing with great heaves. I opened my eyes fully and saw the edge right in front of us. I grabbed for his arm, not really planning anything, just not wanting to go over. He must have stumbled because I felt his weight crash against the chair, felt him yanking, trying to free his arm—but that’s one thing about people in wheelchairs; our arms do the job of your legs every day, they’re strong. When we grip something, we decide when to let go, nobody else.

  And so Darrell went over with me. There was a confusing moment of scraping and rushing air and then I was upside down, staring at the sea below as Darrell hit the water. He came up spitting foam and looking straight up at me. Then he tried to grip the rock face as another wave crashed on him. My hope flared briefly but he resurfaced almost immediately and went for the same rock, got both hands on it before the next wave hit, clung on
this time, and looked up at me again.

  That’s the strange thing. It’s not like they show it on TV; he was trying to kill me and I had been fighting for my life, but neither of us had said a word to each other. I guess there’s nothing left to say when you come to this point.

  He was getting further up the rocks, legs out of the waves now, when my brain finally started working again. I needed to get away before he climbed all the way up here. I eyed the rock face. If he could . . . maybe it would be too hard, I thought with vain hope. Then I remembered that it was high tide. All he needed to do was wait for the tide to go out and walk back around, or even risk the swim to the beach side right now. He had some scrapes that were bleeding but he looked fine—I was a cripple dangling upside down from my dead leg, which looked, by the angle of my foot, to be broken, too.

  That’s when I remembered the gun. Frantically grabbing for my jacket, I felt the heavy lump of it right there. God, it was still there! I had been reaching for it when he attacked me and then once it all started just forgot about it—it was my first time being killed.

  I got it out with both hands shaking. Darrell was about three meters below me when I pointed it at him. He was focussing on his handholds but when he looked up, he stopped moving. He looked at the gun and then our eyes met, and we held the stare for a long moment. His eyes started to tear up. He closed his mouth, bit down on his lip and just nodded slowly several times, real calm. Then he twisted slightly and leaned back into the rock and looked out to the sea and said, just loud enough for me to hear: “OK.”

  That’s when I shot him. The bullet struck on top of his shoulder close to his neck. There was one, big, spurting gout of blood and then nothing. I could still clearly see the red hole as Darrell’s body jerked and he slumped against the rock. He didn’t fall or scream like I thought he would, just slowly slid down until his legs settled on the waterline, the waves crashing and foaming up around his feet. He took two deep and sighing breaths, his head slumped down to his chest, and then he went still.

  I’m not sorry.

  I don’t know how long it’s been. I lost my watch somewhere up there during the struggle or during the fall; lost my phone, too. I’m still shaking so maybe a few minutes, maybe half an hour, I think. Darrell’s body is still there, his blood making pink streaks in the sea foam, and it’s hard not to keep staring at him. I saw his leg move and my heart jumped but then I realised it was only the waves moving it. It’s just a body now—Darrell Zoyl isn’t here anymore.

  Four days until Sean and Archie come back, maybe. I still had the gun. Carefully I put it back in my jacket pocket and buttoned it up, my hand involuntarily straying to feel the reassuring weight there every few seconds.

  But really the gun was a fool’s hope. I wasn’t going to survive out here for four days; probably wouldn’t survive the cold tonight, and that’s only if my leg held out and I didn’t end up in the ocean. No. Making it four days without food or water? No. Even then, if I survived all of that, was I going to fight off both brothers when they came for me from my current position? No.

  Looks like Darrell actually did kill me, too.

  I didn’t mean to do it that way, but when it hit me, when I started accepting that I was going to die out here I looked out at the sea, nodded, and said, “OK,” too.

  CHAPTER 2

  JANUARY 2, FIVE MONTHS AGO . . .

  “Do you think we’ve got them?”

  “Got what?” I reply, not knowing what he meant.

  “Moose, Meese, you know?”

  “What?” For a moment I don’t know what the guy is talking about, then I see that he has mistakenly assumed I am looking at the poster marked “The Great Southern Mystery,” which depicts a stand of old forest from the shadows of which two big, goofy-looking eyes stare out at you.

  In 1910 they brought moose to New Zealand, tried to introduce it for hunting and food. Nobody knows if it worked. People are still debating more than 100 years later. Some people say they are still here, deep in the Fiordland where there are no roads. Living secret moose lives.

  I’m not looking at the moose poster. I’m here to buy a gun.

  “Which of these will take hollow point rounds?” I ask to change the subject, pointing at the display case next to the moose poster. I’d done some checking, and bullets with hollow points are apparently capable of blowing someone’s head clean off. I believe in being thorough.

  “We can have rounds made up for any of them, but the larger calibre ones you can usually buy hollow points off the rack for,” the guy behind the counter says, gives me a dubious look as he’s eyeing the wheelchair. So I tell him it’s for added security now that I’m in a wheelchair. Just in case. What I really want is the option of a way out on my own terms if it all gets too bad and this, my last-ditch attempt, also fails. Just in case. I bought the biggest handgun they had.

  It’s not a surprising story; I got drunk and crashed my car into the back of a parked truck. Although saying I got drunk is a lie; for quite some time back then it would have been easier to count the few times I was close to sober. On the surface I’d been successful, had friends, money, and a devoted wife—but I didn’t feel it. I remember looking around at my life and feeling no real connection to it, like being a polite but bored tourist walking through someone else’s world.

  It really was a good life, too, full of true things, a world away from the bullshit start in life I’d come from—it just didn’t feel like mine, didn’t feel right.

  I couldn’t tell you why. At the age of 35 I started waking up around 3:00 a.m., only once or twice a month at first, then later pretty much every night. I tried exercise, diets, and pills, read up on it, tried meditation—nothing worked. At 3:00 a.m. more often than not I was just sitting there, me and my sense of wrongness, a hole in my head where happiness or peace or satisfaction or whatever was supposed to be. I honestly felt like I had fought hard, sacrificed so much to get to where I’d got—but now that I’d made it, it hadn’t changed things, didn’t make things better.

  Before then I hadn’t even known that I wanted things to be better. I only realised that I carried the expectation when I started feeling the disappointment of it not coming true. Go figure.

  So I sat up, trying at first to figure out what was wrong and then later, as it got worse, trying to figure out if anything was actually right. I didn’t have answers, couldn’t find a way out, no more plans. The life I had built was the end of my plan. I’d gotten everything I wanted—I’d made it—I was supposed to be happy now, right?

  At first I tried to keep it to myself, sort it out on my own, but first my wife, then my friends, other people noticed, tried to find out why I was different. I could have opened up, asked for help. People were there for me—but I was so used to solving things on my own, proud. The way I saw it, the shit I’d been through in my life and dealing with it all alone had made me strong, made me myself. I was going to deal with this, too.

  I didn’t start drinking more to try and solve things—I actually started to drink more so that I could fake being happy more convincingly, or so I thought. Get everyone off my back while I solved this. Plus when you’re drunk, you don’t wake up at 3:00 a.m. It worked, too; for a while I was sure I had convinced people I had turned a corner.

  No worries, everyone, Mr Finn Bell is himself again.

  Then it very slowly, really quietly and incrementally got completely out of control.

  So at the age of 36 my wife of five years, my beautiful Anna, left me. I didn’t blame her. She loved me and fought for us until she was broken. But happy people and unhappy people can’t stay together.

  When all the fighting and talking is done, when you’ve both yelled all your questions and answers until your voices ache, you’re left with a simple truth: Like attracts like, opposites repulse. The wrongness in me pushed away the rightness in her like magnets. It was a toxic skin that had grown between us, it was there when we touched, when we kissed, turning our sex from comfort and cel
ebration to sterile routine and slow poison. I couldn’t fix it, still had no way out.

  The ugly truth is that I only registered feeling relief when she left; I was mostly too drunk to feel the pain.

  She ended up with custody of most of our friends, and I pushed the few that stayed by me away without meaning to. So on my 37th birthday, on the tail end of another solo weekend bender, I lost control of the car. When I woke up in the hospital, they informed me that I had permanently lost the use of my legs and most of the feeling below my hips but was, all things considered, lucky to be alive. Yeah, I wasn’t so sure.

  That was seven months ago; I went through rehabilitation, learning all the ins and outs of wheelchair life, as well as the mandatory therapy sessions. They wanted me to talk about my feelings. My assigned counsellor was a 24-year-old blond who didn’t like me swearing and got unhappy that I referred to myself as “cripple” instead of “challenged.” The way I saw it, if there was a challenge I’d already failed it; cripple was the result. She looked like she had never tasted a single day of failure in her entire, sheltered, well-rounded, shiny, happy life. There’s no real talking to perfect people like that.

  At first I fought it, then I just faked it, told her what she so obviously wanted to hear. Eventually they released me; when I got out, I sold my business and the house in Wellington.

  I didn’t know what to do next, but I was sober for the first time in years, and even though it felt horrible, I didn’t want to go back. I knew that if didn’t do something now, I very likely never would.

  I thought about calling Anna, but stopped short every time.

  So for reasons beyond my knowing, driven by irrational need and desperation, I bought an isolated cottage by the sea near the tiny harbour town of Riverton. It was the middle of nowhere at the bottom of the South Island, almost as close to the bottom of the world as you can get without actually moving to Antarctica.

  Why here? Couldn’t tell you that, either. When I got released from hospital—when I was finally allowed to go wherever I wanted again of my own accord—I went. Everywhere. Getting as far away as possible from my old life seemed like a good thing. Maybe now that I wasn’t drinking I needed to actually run away in my real life, from my real life.