Apart from the sour note of Aggot’s breakout it was very much the Staff’s afternoon, with a scoreline of 56-0 attesting to the severity of the footballing lesson administered by the Staff unit to a Client line-up chronically short on pace and sanity.
On a rain-soaked pitch, what began as a pulsating encounter quickly degenerated into a scrappy affair, marred by poor ball control and a number of spiteful incidents in backplay.
If the Staff squad was able to rise above the greasy conditions to produce the occasional spell of flowing league, the same could not be said of a Client outfit which turned over far too much football to mount any serious examination of the Staff defence.
Depleted by injuries to several key maniacs, the Clients were always going to be vulnerable out wide, the Staff’s well-credentialed backline exploiting some turnstile Client defence early on to establish a comfortable 20-point break by the half-hour mark.
Newcomer Aggot, playing only his third game in the trademark white guernsey, displayed flashes of promise with the football in his hands, but all too often found himself starved of quality possession in the opposition third.
At times the men from the wrong side of the razor wire seemed their own worst enemies, throwing ill-disciplined passes early in the tackle count and squandering field position with a series of unnecessary infringements off the ball.
The clash effectively ended as a spectacle five minutes before half-time, when the referee had no choice but to dismiss Client skipper Darryl Shaun Lunt for an early shower, after the paranoid journeyman involved himself in a regrettable altercation with a group of Staff wives observing the fixture from the sideline.
With their talismanic playmaker in the sheds, the 12-man Clients were always going to struggle, their defensive frailties all too evident during the opening ten minutes of the second stanza, when a rampant Staff side revelled in its numerical advantage to pile on a quartet of unanswered tries.
The versatile Aggot, slotting into the five-eighth role in Lunt’s absence, proved a rare bastion of defensive starch for the Clients, his aggressive ball-and-all tackling preventing what could easily have developed into an even more emphatic final deficit.
The nuggetty multiple murderer also proved something of a surprise package in attack, his foraging at the fringes of the ruck asking constant questions of the Staff’s big men in defence.
But history will record that the volatile rookie placed a dark cloud over the back end of proceedings with his daring 80th minute escape.
The incident came very much against the run of play, with the Clients camped deep in their own half and seemingly content to run down the clock with a series of unambitious runs from the play-the-ball area.
But Staff-Client football is a funny game, and an obviously fired-up Neville Aggot was about to produce a moment of inspiration straight out of the top drawer. Darting out of dummy-half with an urgency that caught the Staff markers napping, the shaven-headed danger man shimmied, shaped to kick, then scythed through a yawning gap on the blind side with an electrifying change of pace.
With the Staff defence at sixes and sevens, the flamboyant recidivist found himself in open pastures, streaking down the wing with only veteran fullback Clem Kirkwood to beat.
If the tough-as-teak defender appeared to have the situation covered, the rampaging Aggot had other ideas, looping a superbly weighted chip over the seasoned campaigner’s head, before bringing down a premature curtain on the undiminutive non-rookie’s 90-game career by dint of a flagrant elbow to the septum.
With an open tryline beckoning, Aggot regathered the footy on the fly and crossed under the sticks to clinch would have been, had he paused to put the ball down, a scintillating solo try.
But with no let-up in his blistering speed the mercurial mattress-stainer streaked all the way through the in-goal area, crossed the dead-ball line, then left the field of play altogether, at no point relinquishing possession of the pill.
Now Aggot really was in an open pasture – a bumpy, tussocked field that sloped all the way down to the Lodge’s perimeter. And at this point it must be explained that Butterfly Lodge’s football field lay outside the confines of the immense 9,000-volt electric fence on the lone basis of which the facility qualified for maximum security status. To put it another way, all that now lay between Neville Claude Aggot and the general public were some trees, a few vegetable patches, a thin creek, and a non-electric chain-link fence with two token strands of barbed wire running along the top of it. Still clutching the pigskin, Aggot vaulted the vegetables, hurdled the creek, sidestepped the trees, and made for a section of the chain-link fence in which a rude, man-shaped hole had been freshly hacked, presumably by the same person who was now sitting just outside it in a small red car with its engine running and its passenger door agape.
By now Aggot was being vainly chased by the referee, a couple of the Staff’s pacier backs, and a Client who wanted the ball back for a conversion attempt.
Neville Claude Aggot made use of the man-shaped hole in the fence. Howling something zany at the granite sky, he jumped into the red car, and the red car accelerated away down the road. As it screeched out of sight, something flat and brown flew out the passenger window. It was the deflated remains of the football, bearing puncture wounds consistent with the frenzied application of a pair of bolt-cutters.
Driving the getaway vehicle was Raylene Bethany Aggot, née Sneed, Aggot’s fat and freckly wife of three weeks. In a heavily guarded hospital ward the next morning, after emerging from a brief coma, she was able to supply police with a reasonably lucid account of the events that had immediately followed Aggot’s escape.
First Aggot had ordered her to head without delay for the nearest patch of dense bushland. Raylene Aggot asked him why. Aggot muttered something about how she’d find out when they got there. Nervously, then, Raylene Aggot took the road out of town. Multiple sirens were already audible in the distance. She noted uneasily that her husband’s right hand – and here Aggot’s behaviour began to deteriorate, began to verge on the deplorable – his right hand was down inside his football shorts, and appeared to be fidgeting there with some intensity.
She tried making small talk. How had his day been? How had the match gone? But Aggot was in no mood for conversation. He seemed distant, preoccupied. Spotting a small child riding a bicycle on the footpath, he urged his wife to run over it. She declined to do so. This seemed to upset Aggot. He went all quiet and surly. He put up an emotional wall. He rammed an elbow into the side window, helped himself to a thorny shiv of glass, and began moodily self-mutilating his thigh with it. The Aggot marriage had entered its first, and terminal, rocky patch.
And there was worse to come. Because Raylene Aggot, back at Butterfly Lodge, had done something rather ill-advised. She had kept the car’s engine running for the whole duration of the football match, half-time included, inspired by a dim notion that this was what proper getaway drivers were supposed to do. And now the needle of her fuel gauge was lying limply on the E. She was about to run out of petrol.
With Neville in his present mood, Raylene Aggot found herself reluctant to bring this problem to his attention. Instead she started trying to get them into a petrol station by devious means. Perhaps Aggot would like to stop and use a restroom? Perhaps he felt like buying some gum? Maybe he’d like to stop and commit a violent hold-up? Each of these suggestions Neville Aggot curtly rebuffed. He just kept repeating his cryptic demand to be in dense bushland very soon. So Raylene Aggot no choice but to head deeper and deeper into the countryside, each turn taking them farther and farther away from the kind of landscape in which one might reasonably hope to find a fuel stop.
Suddenly, on a narrow stretch of orangey dirt road, Aggot ordered her to stop the car. His tone brooked no opposition. She pulled over. Dropping his football shorts without ceremony, Aggot attempted a forcible assertion of his conjugal rights. This, his first ever go at sexual relations with a live human, proved a ridiculous failure. He resolved to murder her and then try again. Casting about for a suitable weapon, his hands fell on his wife’s uncommonly large underpants. He wrapped them around her windpipe, and squeezed. But the scale of her underpants – the vastness of her smalls – saved Raylene Aggot’s life. They were simply too ample, too flaccid, to effect strangulation. Aggot had to deploy them furiously for about five minutes just to deprive her of consciousness.
When she came around, she found herself lying in a roadside ditch. In the middle distance, a cloud of noisy dust was receding rather slowly up the road: her little red car, under the inexpert pilotage of Aggot. The engine howled at the angry limit of first gear. Apparently her husband didn’t know how to use a clutch. Dark smoke billowed from the vehicle’s rear. The back wipers sprang on and flapped fiercely. A jet of water shot backwards over the roof. The parking lights came on. Finally the machine made its spastic way over the brow of a distant hill, and Neville Claude Aggot drove erratically but irrevocably out of her life.
Raylene Aggot dragged herself up to the road’s edge and lay there in semi-consciousness, waiting for a concerned passing motorist to come to her aid. Presently a brown sedan appeared, coming down the same hill that her estranged husband had latterly disappeared over the brow of. She raised an arm to flag the vehicle down – and recognised too late the leering face behind the wheel. It was Aggot again. He had hijacked this second vehicle about a mile up the road, where his wife’s car had finally run out of petrol, and where the brown sedan’s rightful driver now lay groggily in the dirt, with multiple contusions and a mouthful of Raylene Aggot’s mammoth underpants.
This was to be about the last detail Raylene Aggot recalled, then – the leering face of Neville Aggot veering casually over to run her down, to finish her off, this leering white face bearing down on her with surreal lack of velocity, yelling something mad and triumphant, grinning down at the crunching gearstick for one final surge of speed…
Before the sun was down, before the concussed Raylene Aggot was even found, police had already initiated the state’s largest ever manhunt since the last manhunt for Aggot. A Task Force devoted exclusively to recapturing him was formed. It was called Task Force Aggot. At a hastily convened press conference, the Head of the Task Force urged the public to remain calm. Beside him stood a bald mannequin dressed in clothes identical to those Aggot had last been seen in: that is to say, a full Client football strip, the trademark white guernsey bespattered with simulated mud stains. The “subject,” as the Head of the Task Force kept calling him, should under no circumstances be approached by any member of the public. He was to be considered, stressed the Head of the Task Force, extremely dangerous.
But the idea of considering Aggot extremely dangerous had pretty much occurred to the public already. Few members of it, moreover, had been actively brewing plans to approach him. There was widespread panic and confusion. A rabid media demanded answers. Fingers were pointed. A good many of them were pointed, early on, at SNARBY. There were allegations that the organization must have assisted Raylene Aggot in the planning of the escape. There was even speculation that elements of SNARBY’s leadership might intend to harbour the fugitive.
But such speculation was extremely short-lived. It lost momentum at some time between the hours of ten and midnight on the night of the escape, when Neville Aggot presented himself unannounced at the inner-city apartment of Pamela Scratch, and smashed his way inside for an evening of non-consensual sex and death.
Fortunately for Pamela, she wasn’t there to receive him. She was over on campus, where an extraordinary late-night meeting of SNARBY had been convened to work out the group’s official position on Aggot’s escape. This meeting was extraordinary in several ways. For one thing, Pamela Scratch was the only person who turned up to it. As such, she encountered no resistance to her preferred course of action – which involved typing up, on SNARBY letterhead, a delicately phrased media release flagging the collective’s cautious approval of Aggot’s liberation. Pamela’s statement called the break-out “a signal triumph for SNARBY, its leadership and the human spirit.” While the statement reaffirmed SNARBY’s respect for “diverse moral positions”, it pointedly stopped short of condoning “the misogyny implicit in Neville’s actions in regard to his wife.” The concluding sentences of the statement ran: “To Neville personally, if he is watching/listening/reading [note to editors: please delete inapplicable terms] SNARBY would like to stress that for his own safety, no way should he attempt to make face-to-face contact with any member of SNARBY during his time at large. It is obvious that all senior SNARBY personnel will be under heavy police surveillance at this time, and approaching them would definitely be suicide.”
Having despatched this document to every media outlet that had given her its real fax number, Pamela Scratch returned to her apartment. There she found her front door lying flat on the floor of her living room, afloat on a sea of broken glass and lacerated underwear. Slashed furniture spewed forth its inner foam. A raw chicken had been removed from her fridge and sexually violated. One of her kitchen knives was missing.
Swabs and prints lifted from the scene would later confirm that the intruder had been Aggot. But Pamela Scratch didn’t bother to await the centrifuging of the sperm. She knew instinctively who the malefactor had been. She dropped immediately and unconditionally out of the public eye. Her whereabouts became a tightly guarded secret. The Head of the Aggot Task Force assured the public that Pamela was shaken but in good spirits; was staying at an undisclosed location; was receiving as much around-the-clock protection as she could feasibly be provided with, given the obvious exigencies of staging a massive manhunt.
And Neville Claude Aggot? He too seemed to have disappeared. The shell of the brown sedan was found the morning after the Scratch break-in, burnt out beside a lonely highway. But after that the trail went ice-cold. The manhunt grew more intensive by the day – but the man himself seemed to have vanished from the earth’s face. There was no instant one-man orgy of violent crime, no rash of unexplained homicides. There was no spree. Instead there was an utter silence, a terrible not-knowing that was far scarier, somehow, than any string of candid murders. At night the streets were deserted. Restaurant and cinema takings declined. People who had never before locked their front doors fervently took up the practice. Sales of home security systems boomed. Each night the TV news reported a fresh absence of breakthrough or development. Every morning the papers carried artists’ impressions of what the fugitive might look like in an array of chilling wigs and hats, or with an increasingly thick mat of computer-generated stubble on his face and scalp. Parents covered their children’s eyes at the breakfast table, and wished they had covered their own. Raylene Aggot appeared on a TV chat show, neckbraced, ankle-casted, multiply contused, aiming her teary face at the camera and pleading with her wayward spouse to “just come home.” An Hour with Neville Claude Aggot, the notorious television special brokered by Pamela Scratch, was pulled from the vaults and rebroadcast in the public interest – fleshed out, this time around, with excerpts from the previously unaired Scratch interview, which had now acquired, in the light of Pamela’s dramatic disappearance, a sudden mainstream saleability. It was eerie, with the real Pamela Scratch in deep hiding, to see her resurrected image riding the airwaves with such serene self-confidence, deconstructing as if from beyond the grave the media’s baseless “othering” of this essentially harmless man. Cruelly intercut with her fiery analysis were images of a more recent vintage: the man-sized hole in the chain-link fence; a rubber-gloved detective walking in slow-motion out of Pamela’s flat, carrying the defiled chicken in a clear plastic bag.
More days went by. And still there was no sign of Neville Claude Aggot.