Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  Billy and I didn’t have to say a word to one another. Same killer.

  And he was going to do it again. My first instinct had been correct: The ritualistic nature of the murder suggested an agenda of killing that needed to be sated. You don’t fold back a guy’s head unless you’ve got something specific to say. And to keep on saying.

  Brisbane in 1999 was a small town. It wasn’t prepared for something like this. It wasn’t that long ago that sheep were mustered down the main streets of the city, when pepper was considered an exotic spice and garlic something too exotic to use at all. On Sundays the shops closed, the city was empty and people went to church. You would stand impatiently in the supermarket line while the customer at the front chatted to the person at the till. Most people knew one another by their first name. Brisbane in 1999 was not prepared for the shadowy creep of a serial killer. This was new. The Silence of the Lambs had only come out eight years before. The whole notion of a ‘serial killer’ was rare, confusing, unexplained. Panic. Fear. Freak-out. These feelings would permeate the city. The dreadful daily tabloid would rise up into the miasma of all this, as the water of the river kept rising and the rain kept coming oppressively down.

  And this was not just normal rain: this was thunder and thick curtains of wet that greeted you every morning, every night, never letting up. Footpaths had become rivers and houses had started to leak and people were thinking: Am I going to survive this? And for the religious, and there are many of them in Brisbane, I could see it becoming a Noah End of Days thing. And then there was Y2K. Everyone around me was freaking out that their computer was going to shut down and go into outer space on January 1.

  I looked out the car window – past the wipers going swish-swish – at the river and wondered: How far can it actually rise? Will it burst its banks, as it did back in the seventies? Will the city go under?

  Will people drown?

  Yes, I thought: people always die when the river floods.

  —

  ‘GIRLIE?’

  It was some time ago when I had asked him to stop calling me that. ‘How about you try Lara,’ I said. ‘My name?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll give it a shot, girlie.’

  He doesn’t mean it as an insult; it’s just how he is. I was going to put in a request to be partnered with another crew but, scanning the floor of desks and blokes, all full of testosterone, lunchtime schooners of XXXX beer at the pub accompanied by stories of banging up birds down at the Breakfast Creek Hotel, in the car park late at night or scoring a freebie from a pro in a city alleyway instead of busting her for solicitation, I decided I would stay with the dinosaur who grew up during the Second World War. At least he had a wealth of cunning and experience and was as dismissive of the young buck-boy detectives as I was.

  And there was something else about Billy: he didn’t seem to care that I was part Asian, had dyed blonde hair, towered over him and was a woman. Long after I had been accepted into the Force, mum admitted to me that when she came to live in Queensland, before I was born, she had tried to get a job as a police officer. Years of experience in Hong Kong and she got:

  ‘We don’t hire Chinks.’

  She didn’t tell me that when I announced I had been accepted; I don’t know if that is a good or a bad thing.

  ‘Yes?’ I said to Billy, still looking out the window at the mass of brown river water, flowing under the Victoria Bridge on its journey downstream to the ocean like an impatient humbering flow of low beasts.

  ‘This Celtic thing; is he part of a gang? Is that how it works?’

  ‘No. Maybe, but my guess is he has appropriated it. The god of thunder. He sees himself in that respect.’

  ‘You were into this world?’

  ‘A long time ago.’

  I turned and looked at him.

  He stared at me a moment.

  ‘It was a teenage thing,’ I added.

  ‘Yeah, well, we all got them, ain’t we. Go back. Reach out to old mates and see if you can find a lead. Maybe our killer is big-noting himself, bragging about how clever he is.’

  —

  I’D RATHER NOT go back, a voyage to the heart of darkness of a teenage girl I had well and truly discarded into the ash-heap of forgotten memory.

  But back I would go, and a little part of me was exhilarated, because I was a Homicide cop now and we don’t get any tougher or better than that. If the little teenage girl, full of quake and tremble, self-hate and subjugation, if she re-emerges, the me of now will stomp on her hard.

  ‘You want me to come with you?’ he asked, as if reading my mind.

  I shook my head and smiled thanks. No way, Billy. Totally no fucking way. But thanks.

  The Tattooist

  IT WAS IN THE VALLEY, OF COURSE. ALL THINGS DODGY IN Brisbane resided in Fortitude Valley, on the edge of the city. The strip joints, the girls on the prowl, the nightclubs, the Italian mafia, the Lebanese mafia, the Vietnamese mafia, the crooked cops, the guys just out of jail, the boys and girls scoring a little smack, the narrow laneways covered in graffiti, the cops and the drunks, the pools of blood and vomit and tufts of spit, Chinatown and two main one-way streets, both entwined by the Brisbane River which serpentined its way through the city.

  Carrying an umbrella, I hurried down a narrow cobblestoned lane, stepping over a smashed-out junkie in a doorway, thankful that my Glock was on my hip.

  Stepping back in time. Stepping into a tiny shop, out the front of which a sign said: Anu Tattoos.

  Anu was the Celtic god of magic, the moon, air and fertility, and this shop was, and had been for years, the go-to place for Goths and Celts. This was Celt Central. Its owner, Lugos, named after the heroic god who smote Balor, the one-eyed chief of the Formorii tribe, was the ‘guru’, and had been for decades, in the Celt and Goth underworld of Brisbane. I walked inside.

  It hadn’t changed, hardly at all. A new poster of Jennifer Lopez had replaced the faded poster of Duran Duran. Lugos, with a bandana on his head, wrapping up his ponytail which was greyer now, in jeans that were always too tight and a singlet that stretched across his abs in a doomed attempt at making the girls swoon, was in the back of the small shop, reclining in the oversized barber’s chair, which we had stolen one night a long time ago, all of us, me the meek who followed. I walked past a too-thin girl at the front counter, biting her fingernails nervously. She had tigers on one arm and lions on the other.

  A thick-set guy with red hair and rosy cheeks hunched over the computer said to me while staring at the screen: ‘Don’t mind me, I’m saving the world from Y2K annihilation.’

  ‘I smell cop,’ said Lugos.

  ‘Hey Lugos.’

  His eyes were closed. ‘I’m not good with cops. You should go.’

  ‘It’s Lara. Ocean.’

  Eyes still closed. ‘Yeah, I know the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean but don’t know any Lara Ocean.’

  I pulled up the back of my T-shirt and turned away from him. ‘Look,’ I said.

  And while I kept my gaze steady on the nail-biter at the front desk, I heard the rustle of the barber’s chair and felt hot breath as he examined my back.

  ‘I did this.’

  ‘Yep.’ I pulled the T-shirt back down.

  ‘I remember you. You came in and we did the whole back. Bum to shoulders. Celtic stuff. Demons. I think I even wrote my signature in there. Pull it back up again.’

  I did. With my back to him, staring at the girl by the counter again. She had sunken eyes and a sad face. She was shaking. Crack. Meth hadn’t hit the streets yet; that would come in a few years’ time. I felt the tip of his index finger cross over my back.

  ‘There! Knew I did! Lugos the slayer of Baylor!’

  I pulled my T-shirt back down a second time as he walked around and stood in front of me.

  ‘I don’t think you paid me for this,’ he said, memory slowly returning as he creased his eyes and stared at me, a long, narrow face with a goatee hanging off his excuse for a chin.

&nb
sp; ‘No, I didn’t. I fucked you for it. Remember?’

  ‘Oh, you were the under-age girl! Jeez, I almost went down for the tatt on your back and the sex. How come I didn’t go down? I remember cops but the rest is hazy.’

  ‘My mum bribed the investigating cop. She was good like that.’

  But not afterwards, when I would have to deal with the wash of my fuck-ups. Then it all came out, rivers of vitriol and curses in Mandarin about how I was dragging her world through a pall of rot and sludge. Then I would just run away again.

  ‘Nice one,’ he said. ‘What do you want? You’re a cop now, yeah?’

  ‘You knew everyone in the Celtic world.’

  ‘Still do. Hey, you wanna walk down memory lane and have a quickie, just for old time’s sake?’

  ‘Touch me again and I’ll handcuff you. Understood?’

  ‘Fuck me! Yep. Okay. Understood, Wyatt-fucking-Earp.’

  ‘Look at this,’ I said as I pulled out a piece of paper showing the symbol of the circle with the eight spokes.

  ‘My old mate, Taranis. Doesn’t he have a little place on your back?’

  ‘Left shoulder blade. Who else, over the past year, has come in to get a Taranis tattoo? Or anyone who might have talked about Ogmios. Anyone you can think of who’s making a noise in the Celtic scene? You know, all loud and look-at-me.’

  ‘Oh Jesus, could you have, like, made an appointment and sent me a list of questions before you came in? I’ve been smoking weed since, like, three this morning and my head is not exactly in the place of certainty or exactitude in terms of past clients. Or anything, for that matter.’

  ‘You keep a record of all your tatts, though, don’t you?’

  ‘Maybe.’ His eyes were bloodshot and he was swaying. Standing up had never been his strong point.

  I spun around to the nail biter. ‘You!’

  She almost jumped through the roof. ‘You do the bookings and have the record of all the tatts, right?’

  She nodded as I approached her. She watched me carefully, anxious she might get into trouble with the boss, who had returned to his chair.

  ‘Go into your books, your records,’ I said, pointing at her computer, ‘and find me who has, over the past year, come in to get a tattoo with this Celtic design. Okay? Got it?’

  Got it.

  I walked out with the name I thought I had successfully buried.

  Nils.

  Spill

  AWAY FROM THE CITY, EIGHTY KILOMETRES UP NORTH, Wivenhoe Dam held almost two million mega-litres of water. Built to contain a flood, to ensure that the city was not deluged as it had been many times in the past, the dam had a shoreline of over four hundred kilometres. Even further north were rivers, creeks and another massive dam to which Wivenhoe was connected. These huge bodies of interlaced waters, swelling with the endless rain, hovered above the city.

  Weeks of grey sky, rain and thunder and people were going stir-crazy. When will it end? And will it end with a flood? And will the flood, which is all that everyone talked about, people even having flood parties and comparing prices on rubber dinghies, will the flood surge through all those low-lying suburbs along the banks of the river? Home to tens of thousands of people. Yes, it will, was the wise person’s view; it did back in 1974 or, even worse, the killer Great Flood of 1893, the infamous Black February Flood. Staring at the graphics of the dam and the river in the local newspaper, people were starting to bow to the inevitability of gravity: what is up, must come down.

  Only one thing held back this growing body of water, lapping against its edge, like an animal craving release. Rising from its base at the most northern point of the Brisbane River, amid low-lying farmlands, was a sheer, massive concrete wall. The dam. And on its top, on its edge, was a walkway.

  Ray and Liam were the two very edgy engineers staring at the rising swell of water, lapping against the edge of the spillway.

  The purpose of the dam with its massive sluice gates, was to hold back the waters which have flooded the city in the past. Build a dam, put in sluice gates. Hold back the water.

  Standing on the concrete walkway, Ray and Liam, recently graduated, thought this job would be stress-free-cruisy. They were staring uneasily at this gathering body of hard, cold water, its level slowly inching towards the top. A few more centimetres every day. It’s not like there was a rush, there was just an undulation, a growth, and they knew that the swell would spill over the edge and fall down into the river below, the river which snaked through the city then out into the ocean. Unless it stopped raining.

  ‘What do we do?’ asked Liam.

  ‘Call head office,’ said Ray.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They said: You guys deal with it,’ said Liam.

  ‘Look, it’s probably going to stop raining soon; you know, it’s contained at the moment.’

  Both of them leaned over to see how far the surface of the water had risen.

  ‘What if it doesn’t stop raining? They told us about nineteen seventy-four when the city was completely flooded.’

  ‘At this rate, I reckon we have another five or six days before the water level reaches the top and starts to spill over,’ said Ray.

  ‘Or we could open the sluice gates and release some.’

  ‘And cause a flood? No, let’s wait a couple more days and see what happens.’

  They continued to huddle under the rain and looked uneasily at the moving expanse of silver blue water in front of them. Corralled, for the moment, by the concrete edge of the dam.

  Does It Hurt?

  I’M NOT SURE HOW MUCH I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT MY teenage years, when I went a little wild … okay, a lot wild and got smashed on gin and vermouth and dope, and there might have been some cocaine; actually, there was, Carmen bought it – and that night I stumbled into a Brisbane tatt place and stripped almost naked and said to this guy with the ridiculous name of Lugos, ‘Do my back!’ Which he did, not entirely on the first night but over a few nights, each night me being as shit-faced as the last. I might have been fifteen and I certainly wasn’t going to school, and there was a guy, Nils. I must have fucked Lugos three times to get the complete back tatt.

  I’m better now, of course. No Vs. I cleaned myself up, finished Year 12, crawled through a TAFE course in criminology and applied to the Police Force. I didn’t have a record. They didn’t ask about my past. I didn’t tell them.

  I haven’t told Billy all that, but he knows … well, he doesn’t but he can tell. He started out as a gangster at the age of seven in London’s East End, for God’s sake.

  Back in those hazy, hairy days when I spent most of my time on someone else’s couch, there were guys, dark guys I would see through the corner of my eyes as they swaggered through the share-houses. And there was Nils. Charming. Funny. Clever. Sexy.

  At first.

  —

  NILS. BUILDING YOUR little house deep in the rainforest. Abandoning me, and why? What did I do for that? Why did you leave me? I loved you and you left, like a flake of life, off into the gloom, there you went while I was asleep at the time, in the caravan.

  Waking up into a silence and nothingness.

  Stepping out into a jungle of strangler figs and mangroves and palms, thinking: Are you coming back? Where have you gone? And why?

  You didn’t come back, did you, Nils.

  And after three days of silence and waiting, I finally packed my stuff into a green plastic bag and stepped outside, into the Sunshine Coast hinterland forest, shaded my eyes from the sun. Leaving you because, by then, I realised you had left me. A flake in your life and yours in mine. Determined, with every footstep, to erase you, my passion for you, my adoration – stop.

  Stop. Stop. Deep breath. Beware the pothole of futility, Lara.

  The second time, there was another long walk home but at the end of that walk, a determination to be me, not a parenthesis in someone else’s life.

  Living in the caravan and laughing and fucking and
cooking and drinking. How old was I, Nils? Sixteen? Fifteen? Was it before or after I got the tattoo on my back? It was after. Before you left me, after that time I left you, before I left, finally, the next time around, after you found me and begged me to return, the second time, which I so much regret, leaving you with tears and bitterness and regret and a crushing sense of failure, slamming the door to our second caravan as you lay spread-eagled on the floor with a spike of smack in your arm with a –

  Stop.

  Stop. Stop. Lara, you have to erase this guy from your mind; you had an obsession with him and he abused you, subjugated your mind. You can’t be a parenthesis to someone else’s life.

  Uh-huh.

  Guido was easy. Nils was not.

  —

  BUT NOW HE has returned. Nils.

  I got the full back but you were going for the total body, head to toe. Celtic. Every month, every year, you got more. You must be covered now, Nils, from your toes to your neck, a gesture to the Celt world. Even your dick is tattooed. Because, beneath the smiles and the charm and the funny stories and the raft of knowledge, your world was no good.

  And you had the knives.

  And you had the anger.

  And you had the desire to hurt.

  And you told me one night, smacked out, as was I, about how cool it would be to saw off a person’s head. Not a hard and fast Japanese-World-War-Two decapitation, but a saw. Like working your way through a tree branch, you said. This was before you confessed to me about what you did in Alotau, in Papua New Guinea. As I lolled naked, lying in the grass or maybe in our bed or maybe in the clouds and I think I might have laughed at your silliness.

  But I don’t laugh now.

  You’ve been back to the tattooist recently, Nils, to do the soles of your feet, all that was left, and you’re not only still alive, you’re still into the violent side of the Celt thing, which is why I finally left you. Along with the smack and the stabbing.