Henry never did find his teeth. He had turned the car around, retraced his route and looked out from the window where he thought they might be. He wanted to get out, use his phone as a torch and find his dentine articles, but the risk of losing his stomach and intestines was too great. Entrails were more valuable than teeth, any day of the week. He stayed in the car, wound the window back up and drove slowly home.
Getting back into the house was difficult. As soon as the seatbelt came undone, Henry's abdomen gave way and his stomach fell out. He had caught it inside his shirt, but the flimsy piece of material was not much of a support and it was getting soaked in a sea of succus and blood.
He hunched forward, holding all of the bits and pieces in as best he could, hoping that nothing had moved so much that he wouldn't be able to figure out how to put it all back again. He needed to go straight to the garage and avoid Loretta. It was better to get it all fixed and tidied up before anything else.
Overhead the gentle flapping of fruit bats sounded as they made their way from tree to tree. Normally Henry would stop and have a look at their dark shapes drifting overhead, blocking out the stars as they went, but he was in no position to lift his head up. Instead he went, head down, pressing his stomach contents in with his bad hand, leaving his functioning hand free to unlock the side gate.
Upon the concrete was a dark patch that drew Henry's attention. He hobbled over and squinted, looking down at the mass with his good eye.
“Oh.”
There were ants. Lots and lots of ants. There was a marching trail that led from the grass to a black mound and back again. In the twilight he could see them trundling mandible to abdomen, dutifully working away to do whatever it was that needed to be done.
He pressed his stomach in harder and leaned in a little bit closer. It was a dark cluster, warped and twisted. The massing ants prevented him from seeing just what it was they were pulling and tearing at.
“Oh,” he said again.
There was a leg protruding at a rude angle from the pile. It was a black, spiky leg, spindly and shiny. It was thick and bulbous at the top, tapering down to a strong joint, terminating in a narrow stump. It was the leg of his cricket.
It was under there, Henry realised, underneath the rippling coating of insects. It was being chewed at and pulled apart, bit by bit, nibbled and chomped and sliced into little pieces to be dragged back to the nest. The long, smooth, twitchy antennae had been yanked off and taken away. Its tough carapace had been breached. Its internals were now at the mercy of an efficient demolition team.
“Bastards,” Henry said, “Leave him alone!”
He flicked at the mass, dislodging the ants. A few clung on, some crawled up his hand, the rest scattered in panic.
Henry held the corpse up and looked at it. It was light. Too light. There was nothing left inside it. There was no chirrup, no wonder, no confusion. It would never stomp about or scuttle or twitch any more.
There was nothing left but the dull, black armour and some sinewy bits holding the flaky mass together.
An ant, having missed the memo, popped out from a hole that had been bored in the side and looked back up at him, shaking its head and showing its mandibles.
He dropped the cricket. The ants had already got what they wanted. They might as well have the rest. With a mighty effort, he hauled himself back to his feet. He needed a second to steady himself on his good leg. He shambled to the garage and turned the light on.
He stopped, peering into the room.
Something was different. It was his garage. It was the one in his backyard, filled with his memories and junk and unopened packets of nails. All of that, it was still there. It was definitely the same garage. But something was different.
It was the smell. That was it! There was no smell.
There was no smell! Where was the kerosene? Where was the cut wood? Where was it? Had someone cleaned up or something? No, surely not. Even if everything within had been removed, the smell would remain.
It had been there forever and now it was gone.
His hand slipped, his stomach dropped out and spilled the braised steak and onions on the floor.
He grunted, picking it up, “Bugger!”
He put his stomach down on a bench and opened a cupboard. Inside was an array of bottles, each containing a different aromatic.
He opened up a container of methylated spirits. He licked his lips in anticipation, brought the bottle to his nose and sniffed.
Nothing.
Well, it was a clear liquid, after all, so perhaps he had just filled the bottle with water at some stage in the past. Ha ha, that was it. That was it. It was water. He closed the bottle and put it back.
His eye fell on a bottle of blue kerosene and he paused.
He shut his eyes, took a deep breath and opened it, taking a long, deep sniff.
Absolutely nothing. He could feel the air moving through his nose. He could feel his lungs expand as the air rushed into them. He knew that he was sniffing properly. He had done it a few times before.
But there was no smell. He had lost his sense of smell. Inside his skull his olfactory bulb had given up.
“Great. Just sodding well great! Fantastic!”
He opened up another bottle, and another, and another. He pushed his nose into his armpit. He nuzzled some old rags, a half-empty beer can, the dust on the counter, even some old mouse droppings.
Absolutely, positively, without a doubt, stone-cold, motherless nothing.
He threw his hand up, “That's fantastic! What else? What else?”
Slumping into a chair, he brooded for a good while. His stomach, still on the bench, would have to wait for a bit. He was in too much of a mood to make any repairs.
No more would he smell the rains of summer. Visiting the beach, with salt water and fish and chips and vinegar and dead seals, would lack the amusement it once did.
He slumped a bit more.
Whether milk was good or sour, he couldn't tell. He wouldn't be able to smell the hops in beer, or the roast of a coffee. Or the scent of Loretta.
The problem with chairs, he realised, is that they only allow a certain amount of slumping.
He looked at his stained tee-shirt. There was no getting away from it. He had to do something to fix it. Sitting around moping wasn't going to help. He had to soldier on.
Honestly, he wasn't sure exactly how to tackle it. The stomach was all wobbly and squishy. Glue might not be the best method. Sure, it would hold it in place for a bit, while he came up with something better, something more permanent. He scratched his head in thought.
Nothing really came to him, so he scratched a little more.
A corset. Well, not a corset exactly, but something like it would be fine. It needed to fit around his midriff rightly and tightly. It needed to be flexible, or he wouldn't be able to bend. It needed to allow him to breathe. It needed to be unaffected by water.
Probably most importantly, though, it needed to be worn under clothes. The last thing he needed was a bunch of nosy interrogators at work, plying him with questions about his gut. The less obvious he could make it, the better.
He scratched a little harder. This was going to take some work. The rags and oily cloths that were in the rag-bag would simply not do. They were smelly. They were old. With the stresses of him flexing, they would certainly tear apart.
He scratched until it hurt.
Rope. Rope was a good idea. It would certainly hold him in, all the bits and pieces. But it was bulky. And it wasn't flexible, not if it pulled taut. He imagined that if he adjusted it to be tight when his lungs were full, the whole contraption would be slack when he exhaled. Similarly, if he tightened it when he exhaled, he would find it too hard to breathe.
His finger scratched in a fury, burrowing a hole through his skull, down into his brain. He struck an idea. The timing could have been coincidence, or it could have been that his finger probed some vital part of the cortex in its scraping. Either way, an idea was an idea.
He stopped scratching, pulled his finger out of his skull and swore at the mess on the end. Without a proper place to scratch, he would be sure miss out on ideas, and with the thin hole in his head, they might just leak out. He hurriedly stuffed the end of a rag into the hole to keep his idea where it was, holding onto it before it escaped.
“Occy straps,” he said to himself, repeating it over and over so as to keep it fresh, “Occy straps. Occy straps. Where the heck did I stick them? Occy straps. They've got to be around here somewhere. I had a whole packet of them. A whole, bloody packet.”
Cupboard after drawer after shelf yielded nothing. It wasn't until he reached the spark-plugs that he spied the tell-tale hook of a strap poking out the top of a bag a little overhead.
“Aha!” he cried, moving a bundle of used headlight bulbs out of the way and pulling the bag out, “Aha! There you are. I knew I had a bag-o-bungees.”
He tested the bungee cords for elasticity. Satisfied, he took the bag back to the bench, applied a little glue to his belly and fitted it about right. Next, he hooked two occy straps together and wrapped them around his waist, holding his bump on nicely. With the primary hooks in place, he wrapped another couple of pairs in a criss-cross fashion, up to his ribs and down to his groin, hooking them securely to each other.
“There. Wait, wait, that's a bit tight.”
The leads were a bit snug, so he swapped a couple over with a different pair from the bag. Running his finger around the inside, he worked the cables a bit to get them comfortable, then stood in front of an old mirror in the corner to view the result.
“Not bad. Not bad. Just wear a baggy shirt and I'm done.”
“Henry? Henry? Are you back? Who are you talking to, Hon?” Loretta called out from the backyard.
Henry slumped. What now?
“Eh?”
“Who are you talking to? Is there someone on the phone? Is it about the merger?”
“No, dear. Just talking to myself,” he called back.
“Figures. When are you going to clean up in there? That place is a tip!”
“It's fine just the way it is!”
“It's a bloody mess!”
Henry looked around where he was standing. With all the searching, he had removed a lot of items from their homes on the shelves and in the cupboards. There was a dark stain on the bench where he had rested his stomach. The rag in his head was dripping a steady pattern of flax coloured goo on the ground.
“Yeah. It sort of is,” he admitted, closing up and turning the light off, shuffling into the backyard, “One day. One day I'll get to it, alright?”
“How about now?”
“I'm a bit tired now. I only just got my stomach back on.”
“It's on now,” she pointed out, “so what else is stopping you?”
“I'm tired, alright?”
“You're always tired. That's your excuse for everything!” she cried, “Do you want to stay in bed all day?”
He smiled, “I wouldn't mind giving it a try!”
“Useless lump!”
“Look, I've had a really hard trot recently, can you just – just back off for a second.”
“If I didn't push you, you would stay in bed all day.”
“Humph.”
Henry considered the extraordinary prospect of a day without responsibilities, a day where he was free to do whatever he wanted to do. What would he do with such a day? What could he get up to?
His mind was blank. It had been so long since Henry had even bothered to think about what he might do. It had been an age. A quick look into his pile of dreams found nothing but a few cobwebs and an earwig.
“What the Hell do you have hanging out of your head?” Loretta asked, breaking his thoughts, “Is that a rag?”
“I scratched a hole in my head.”
“How?”
“I was thinking.”
“Pfft. Looks like you weren't thinking.”
“I have to scratch something when I think! And you won't let me grow a beard.”
“So scratch your balls!”
“They're worn away, Loretta! They've been scratched off. There's nothing left down there.”
Loretta threw her hands up, “So you've gone and made a sodding great big hole in your head. Fantastic. What will the Thompsons think?”
“I don't give a rat's arse what the Thompsons think!”
She leaned forward, “And what's with your hand? Haven't you fixed that yet?”
“It's almost fixed.”
“It's grey.”
“I've been busy.”
“It's starting to smell, Henry!”
“I can't tell.”
“Or you just don't care. I'm going inside. I'm getting bitten by mosquitoes out here.”
Henry was left outside, looking up at the dull clouds that blocked out the moon.