(diaryland) November 17, 2009 - 9:49 a.m.

I had a three-thousand-word mega chapter going on here but I've divided in in two now. I'm getting up to a really eventful bit soon........ but not quite just yet......

Chapter the Thirteenth

My eyes were well and truly twitching by the time Vaughn�s latest e-mail from wherever the hell he was popped into my inbox, and it was probably not due to a lack of magnesium in my diet. It was probably mostly due to the fact that I�d never slept this badly for a whole week before. And this was the worst sleep of all. It�s very awake-inducing when somebody writes that they need your help right now, and you say, yes, I�m here, what�s up, and then they don�t answer.

Dawn had happened ages ago and I had a layer of sweat on me. I had seen so, so many infomercials that night.

Just as Karl Stefanovic was getting mildly interested in something in the background on my impressively-sized TV, Vaughn�s next e-mail arrived. It said:

oh cool you�re actually there great. Could you just look around in the yard and see if you can grab all my fingers (10) and maybe an ear i lost them

Then straight away another one:

ps I know I�m your desktop pic heh

I went bright red. How the fuck?

I swallowed, decided not to address the desktop picture thing, and wrote:

what the hell happened?

I decided to leave capital letters by the wayside as well.

I waited. I glanced at the TV. Karl Stefanovic was lying on a couch and someone was putting an ear candle in his left ear, gently explaining how they worked. God, I hated ear candles. What a crock of shit. Wax begets wax.

After a couple of minutes, Vaughn�s newest e-mail appeared:

yeah i tried to jump out of the fountain last night. fuck it�s hard

I wrote back:

ok. I�ll see if i can find anything. i saw blood coming out of the top.

He wrote back:

yeah that�s mine. hey thnx. just throw it back into the fountain. should be ok

One minute later:

like that.

I didn�t get questions asked of me like that every day. I doubted anyone else did, either. So, when you�re the only person in the world doing a task that will most likely never be done again, you want to do a good job. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a big, thick, luxurious four-in-one sponge. I won it with the house and had never contemplated what the three features other than being a sponge this four-in-one sponge may or may not have had. This was its first use.

I ran outside and the first thing I decided to do was clean all the blood off the tip of the fountain. The blood had congealed since last night. It was thick, brown, and drippy looking. The most ambitious ends of the drips had only just made it about ten centimetres down, and they all had little raised bits at the very bottom of the drips. It looked like someone�s lifeblood right there, squeezed out of a stone.

I climbed up on some other statue�s arm and hovered the sponge over the top of the fountain tentatively. Nothing happened. So I touched the tip of the fountain with the corner of the sponge. Nope. The fountain seemed like it didn�t feel like sucking anything in its way to nearly complete oblivion today. Awesome. I went to work, got a sore elbow from actually using my arm for once in my life, and stood back to admire my efforts. Good as new. Well, with a very, very slight red tinge.

I was glad I did that first because of what was about to happen.

But I didn�t know what was about to happen because I was a normal human being who didn�t know when things were about to happen unless someone told me. I bent over and started rummaging for disembodied fingers.

I actually found the ear first, under a shrub. I guess that�s not so surprising. Fingers are sort of leaf shaped, I guess. Well, maybe not. But ears are pretty distinctive looking and they have a habit of making themselves known.

I don�t know why I�m saying this. Ears don�t really have a way of making themselves known when they�re lying around in a garden. But when you�re looking about for body parts, and you happen to glance at a spot where the ear is in your field of vision, you will find that ear pretty quickly.

I�m basing this all on the fact that I found the ear first.

It was weird to hold Vaughn�s ear. It was all ragged where it was meant to be connected to the head right now. The lobe was really soft.

I caught the statue looking.

Right then, when I was standing there, dishevelled, in the yard with a severed ear in one hand, a bloodied sponge in the other, and making rather serious eye contact with a sculpture, an unmarked police car chose to sidle up the street and park exactly in front of my house. I knew it was an unmarked police car because of the way it sidled. No other cars do that, except for marked police cars, and they�re easy to spot.

Two unmarked policewomen exited the car in a studied, leisurely kind of way, slammed the doors and sidled up to the fence. My fence.

There was far too much sidling going on for my liking.

�Ahem,� said one of them. She didn�t clear her throat. She actually said, �Ahem.�

The thought occurred to me that this might be the time to hide the bloodied sponge and the ripped ear behind my back. So I did.

The two unmarked policewomen were in austere dark blue suits with very serious light blue shirts. And sensible shoes, of course. They might have carried off looking less like policepeople if they had decided to wear actual uniforms.

I decided to acknowledge their presence on the other side of my fence.

�G�day,� I said, looking suspicious.

�G�day,� the �Ahem� one said with an unreadable tone. Maybe they had seen me with the ear when it was in front of me instead of behind me and they were just pretending they hadn�t for the sake of having the ensuing conversation. �I�m Detective Rosie Joyner, and this is Detective Amelia Rubicon.�

They flashed their badges while I accidentally dropped the ear on the ground. I stood on it. Vaughn had said something abut being completely exploded a few e-mails ago, so I figured he wouldn�t notice as slight flattening of the ear.

God, I was a bad criminal. Even though I was actually the victim here. Well, maybe Vaughn was slightly more of a victim, but I wasn�t going to split hairs at this point.

The first detective cleared her throat and continued. �Anastasia Nemtsova? We�re here to ask you a few questions about your whereabouts for the last few days, so if you�d like to answer these questions right now, we�d be more than happy to listen. Or you could move your truck so we can come onto your property and talk about it inside.�

�Oh, no, that�s fine,� I said.

I quickly looked around one more time to see if any disembodied fingers were out and about. That may not have been a good look for me right at this very moment, saying that I didn�t want them setting foot in my yard and me glancing about wildly with my hands behind my back. As a recipient of the full force of Murphy�s Law late last year on the afternoon after I had won this infernal house, I knew that as soon as I let these detectives onto my property, they would stumble upon all the fingers in a big pile and say, �Well, well. Isn�t that interesting?� and then do good cop, bad cop on me until I was bleeding from both nostrils and confessing a whole entire fraudulent murder story to at least make a reason why I had a cache of fingers on my property seem kind of logical. I knew right then and there that I was going to gloss over the ownership of a magic fountain.

�Alright. That�s fine,� said the first detective. I got the feeling that she was the talky one, and the other one was the observy one. I could feel her observing rather intensely. It made my cheeks go red.

�I�d better explain why we�re here, ma�am,� said the talky one.

I started waving my non-bloody-sponge arm around. �If it�s about me starting my truck slightly late at night a couple of times, well, that horrible made-up lady across the road can go fuck herself,� I said. �Did she call you?�

At that time, I really did think it was the made-up lady who had called the police.

�We cannot discern the quantity of make-up a person wears when they call our phone line,� the talky one said.

The observy one kept observing.

�Could you please cease that observing?� I said. �It�s giving me a headache.�

�Sorry,� she said. �Force of habit.�

�There�s nothing to see here anyway,� I said, doing a horrible forced laugh after it. God, I was an idiot.

�Anyway, we have had a call from a female who may or may not have been heavily made-up; we don�t know, but it wasn�t from across the road. She said that her son had gone missing, which was very worrying because he used to go missing every now and again for a night, but that was before he found out that he was the King of France.�

�OK,� I said.

�And she told us that he had gone to a support group the night before he disappeared, and then we contacted the leader of that support group, Doctor Raja�. Doctor Andr� Rajalope�� well, Doctor Andr� who we think you might know quite well, and who said that apparently you told him that you were the last person to see him alive.�

�I suppose that in a manner of speaking I did say that I saw him last, however there were about a hundred and twelve other women who may have seen him more last than me.�

�Oh, yes? And who may they be?�

I could feel the other one observing again. And I could feel the statue doing the same on my left side. I was getting redder and redder.

�Uh, it was kind of a party,� I said. �The ladies took him away. Yeah, the ladies. They were mostly naked and they were pretty rowdy.�

�Just out of interest, would you be willing to come down to the station and make a statement about that? With a lie detector, if necessary?�

�About the ladies bit? Yep, no problem. No lies there,� I answered.

�Other bits too? Because this Doctor Andr� fellow had quite an interesting story to tell about what you confided in him and several other witnesses.�

I rolled my eyes. �Have you met these other witnesses, man? Have you spoken to Doctor Andr� at length? Tell me, have you met his secretary Dave?�

�Yes, we have,� said the talky detective. �He seems very nice. He even gave us a couple of cups of tea when we were over there.�

�Wow. Did you drink it?� I asked.

�Well, no, because it seemed to be laced with petroleum jelly. But petroleum jelly isn�t an actual poison, so we put it down to human error.�

�Human error in making a cup of tea is forgetting to put sugar in.�

�Valid point,� she said. �Touch�.�

I�d had enough of this. �I�m going to the toilet now,� I said with finality.

�Alright then. Thanks for your help. Don�t go anywhere. We might be back in the next couple of weeks,� she said, ominously.

�OK, I�ll just go to the toilet and then I�ll take it from there,� I said.

�OK,� they said.

Then they stood there. And I stood there.

Then they stood there some more, and I did too.

�Well, goodbye,� I said.

�Aren�t you going to go to the toilet?� asked the talky detective.

�Yes, but I can�t go when people are watching the front of my house,� I said. �Stage fright.�

�Fair enough,� they said. �Bye.�

They sidled over to their car, sidled in, then sidled off. It was exhausting to see so much sidling.

After all that talk of needing to go to the toilet, and all the nervous energy pent up in me from being mildly interrogated, I had psychologically talked myself into needing to go to the toilet. So I did that, picking up the slightly flattened ear off the ground and taking it with me. Who knows what kind of sidling those policewomen could do when I wasn�t out there.

It�s remarkable that an ear could get flattened when one usually tends to sleep on them all the time. Unless they were of the type to sleep exclusively on their stomachs. I find these people suspicious.

I wished that I had thought more deeply about the fact that Vaughn�s ear had been slightly flattened while I was sitting there on the toilet, pissing furiously. Getting flattened really wasn�t a normal ear�s style. I wish I�d thought that maybe when bits of you come out of the fountain, they�re not as strong or as pliable as they were before you got dragged in there by over a hundred naked ladies. I wish I�d told Vaughn about it because of what would happen later.

God, I wish I�d mentioned something. Fuck.