Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  Remember?

  When you brought out long-bladed knives and stabbed me, just a bit, no more than a millimetre into my skin, here, there, all over my tattooed back and into my legs and my breasts, which I did for you because I loved you and you laughed and said: ‘How does this feel?’

  ‘It hurts, that’s how it feels.’

  And you reached down and wrapped me and kissed me and said: ‘No, it feels good.’

  —

  I AM A cop now, Nils, and I need to find you.

  Thunder

  NONE OF US REALLY UNDERSTOOD THE CELT THING. NOT AT first. It was just a series of tattoo designs in a plastic-sleeved book on the counter of a parlour. But instead of the clichéd tatts of the past – the man with Popeye muscles and a big-breasted girl hanging off an anchor – the knots, crosses, runes and shamrocks were mysterious and offered the promise of a distant culture, one in which people were more in touch with the earth and the stars above, more in tune with the land around them, and that, too, was considered extra cool as we swigged on vermouth and shot up heroin and smoked our Camels or Gitanes if we could find them, and never washed our hair and drizzled spit into our lover’s mouth as we fucked in a grimy sweat, in the dirt, on the sand, on the floor of a crash house with Burmese flags picked up for two dollars apiece at the local Salvo outlet as curtains to keep out the light because sun was the enemy. As were so many other things, fabrics of life we had forsaken with an arrogant show of disdain as we tried to pepper our flesh with as much ink as we could, to outdo the next person and, above all, to show that we could deal with the pain. If you could do the knees, you were in.

  Then someone, maybe it was Nils, maybe it was that girl with red hair on the left and green on the right who later blew her brains out during a bad acid trip, started to tell us that the knots and crosses, runes – especially the runes – and shamrocks actually meant something. Which had something to do with a bunch of gods, and we all remembered Zeus from when we were kids but these gods, like Taranis, were super-cool and we should all access our souls and plug the Celtic god world into our astral lives.

  And so we did.

  —

  AT THE SAME time, back in the early nineties, the Goth thing was bursting into the clubs and the pubs. Black. Satan. Vampires. Blood. Death. Sacrifice.

  Sacrifice?

  As in, Taranis, the god of thunder who needed people to be burnt in baskets hanging from the branches of trees in a desolate landscape as offerings to him to bring on the rain.

  So we danced naked and invoked stuff we failed to remember the next morning. But it was fun and we didn’t kill anyone, but laughed about the possibility, and used to play a game, pretending if that person or that person or him or her would be a good candidate for our god of thunder’s sacrifice.

  —

  I WAS HUNTING Nils. I couldn’t believe he could be the killer, but one of the first rules of Homicide is to embrace the clichés: Appearances can be deceptive and Don’t judge a book by its cover. The Son of Sam looked like a hot-dog seller, Jeffrey Dahmer looked like a handsome travel agent and Ted Bundy looked like a college professor.

  Nils, I thought, when I get to you, and I will, I will let my partner Billy do the interview because I certainly do not want your eyes piercing into mine. I will find you, Nils. Just wait.

  The I-Tye

  LONG-BLADED KNIVES CAN ONLY BE IN A PERSON’S POSSESSION with a government-issued licence. We downloaded every name on the list and searched their history for any red flags. None emerged. But, as Billy said, the murder weapon might have been used to carve up a roast chicken the previous Sunday afternoon.

  The search across North Stradbroke was yielding nothing. Noone had seen anyone or anything. The daily newspaper was like a buzzard with a variation on HOMICIDE SQUAD FAILURE? every day. It had been days since the first kill and the second, the speed of which, after the first, was alarming.

  The third was yet to come.

  —

  BILLY GREW UP in the 1940s, in London; migrated to Australia at the age of seventeen and became a cop at eighteen, in 1955, at a time when admission was solely reliant upon how much of a ‘good bloke’ you were and how many beers you could drink at the Breakfast Creek Hotel. He had been in Homicide since 1964, the year The Beatles came to Australia, and from day one he’d relied on what’s called The Murder Book to keep track of an investigation and its leads. Billy’s Murder Book was about four inches thick; or, for people like me born in the early seventies, ten centimetres. He had many of these books, each leather-bound, in which he scribbled notes with a fountain pen like a character from an old movie. He kept all of the books on the floor under his desk, occasionally going back to a dusty past crime to double-check a detail and see if it might be relevant to a current investigation. When he wrote in the book and when he read, he leant alarmingly close to the page as if sniffing out the words. He did that every day, like a normal person might read the newspaper.

  And that was what he was doing, as I was updating the file on our swamp-daisy person search – essentially eliminating everyone on the island of North Stradbroke – when he sat up and said:

  ‘Girlie!’

  ‘What, Billy?’

  ‘I think I’ve found someone. An old nefarious mate who lives on the Brisbane River in a boat. Moored on the water smack bang between Kangaroo Point and the Botanic Gardens.’

  We looked him up, checked him out. His name was Miles and he’d been interviewed by Billy over a decade ago for two knife attacks that had occurred in the Roma Street Parkland, around the corner from police headquarters and one of the main railway stations. The victims were young men, both students, walking through the park after midnight. Miles, it was alleged but never proven, attacked them from behind with a sharp blow and then, as they lay on the ground, stabbed them in the neck, but not deeply, not enough for them to bleed out. He was known – and that was a jail name – as Jugular.

  We logged onto the computer. They had been phased into the Force in the mid-nineties and we’d all been sent off to learn about them at night-school classes and told that they would change the policing world. That, one day in the future, we would be able to look up a suspect and check out their entire profile online. Nobody had contemplated Y2K.

  Down below us, on the first floor, was a tribe of computer geeks, madly scrambling through the system in order to ensure we didn’t all shut down into a deep blue on January 1. Rumour had it they were getting paid three times what the Commissioner was getting. ‘Scam of the century,’ said Billy.

  I’d already got into computers in the late eighties, so I knew a bit about them, but Billy and his ilk had a bit of trouble.

  Why innit called a fucking rat?

  Billy grew up in the time of typewriters, when he and his fellow coppers had to produce eight copies of a crime, incident or accident form for distribution. Rather than do two lots of four (with the accursed carbon paper) they would do the eight in one hit to save time. And I mean hit, with fifteen pieces of paper they had to bang so hard, the first couple of copies had clean holes where the Os or zeros were supposed to be. And, of course, he said, there was always the time you put the carbon paper in backwards and had to do it all over again.

  I just stared at him: what on earth was carbon paper?

  ‘There he is: Miles. Look at that,’ said Billy as we stared at the screen, reading that Miles was released from jail two months ago. He had been convicted three years earlier, after a savage knife attack in a Gold Coast pub during which he sliced a bartender’s cheeks into ribbons, because, he later told the arresting constables, he was bored and needed some ‘blood-thrill’.

  And he had thought to himself, before he lunged at the victim with his knife: why not? Why not slice the bloke?

  I thought about that. ‘Bored.’ Needed some ‘blood-thrill’.

  ‘Why not’ as opposed to the more pressing question:

  Why?

  That was the empty darkness which scared me. I could understand
jealousy and revenge and greed; all clean, simple motivations when it came to killing, the idea that slaughter is the best way to solve a problem, real or imagined. I read the Bible (or, I should say, I was forced to read the Bible) as a kid because dad was a bit that way, so I heard the burst, as kids do, when learning about unnatural death. Even though Adam and Eve’s firstborn, Cain, kills his brother on like the first page of Genesis, for no specific reason, you can assume the motivation:

  He was jealous of a rival.

  But was he?

  We don’t know. I’ve wanted to kill my brother heaps of times. Why? Because he is annoying. So … yeah? Kill?

  If violence comes from a random, spontaneous place, with no forethought, that’s when I become mystified.

  Because what is really lurking inside the mind of people like that? Like Miles. Like, it would seem, our killer.

  —

  TRAVELLING ACROSS THE choppy water of the Brisbane River, with rain sheeting at us in an almost horizontal assault, to interview a person of interest on a yacht that looked as though it had been built in the 1950s was a new experience for me. Miles didn’t have a phone and so we were forced to clamber aboard his yacht and knock on the little door that led down below.

  There was no answer. The boat, his home (‘Perfect getaway for a slag-turd like him,’ remarked Billy) was empty. We chose not to leave a calling card, thinking it might lead to a hasty unmooring and a trip up north into the camouflage of islands. Standing on his boat, in the middle of the surging river, I looked across at the banks on either side. The shoreline had risen dramatically. If it kept raining, the footpaths on the edge of the Botanic Gardens would soon be underwater.

  —

  IN THE MEANTIME, there was life.

  Although Billy and I spent almost all our waking hours in the office, occasionally we needed to go home. To eat, feed the cat, check the mail, water the pot plants, stare at the moon; do all the you-are-still-a-human stuff.

  I had a shower, thrashed off the water, dried myself, put on my pj’s and sat on the couch listening to U2’s Rattle and Hum with a glass of wine until I fell asleep, and in my sleep I saw him. I did.

  He comes to me. He mocks me. I couldn’t see his face because of his head, swivelling so fast that all I can see is the back of his neck. But I could hear his laughter.

  There was no solace in my sleep. This was the place where, as Billy had warned me, you stay vigilant and avoid valium and vodka.

  The two destructive Vs.

  —

  MUM RANG AND said: ‘Are you sure you still want to be a police officer? I see your name in the paper every day and they are saying, you know …’

  ‘That I am incompetent.’

  ‘Yes, but I mean who are they to say that? Still, maybe now is the time to think about something else.’

  Even though she had lived in Australia for decades, even though she had been a police officer in Hong Kong, mum had become increasingly imbued with Chinese values, and the overwhelming one was that if an adult daughter was not married, she was what’s called ‘leftover’.

  This ‘status’ kicks in when the daughter reaches her mid-twenties with no husband in sight, usually because of a desire to pursue a career. But career was not how your Chinese mum sees it; she sees it as failure, not only of your filial duty but of her parenting.

  If you don’t have a husband by the time you are in your late twenties, she is going to lose face. You are shaming her. You have brought dishonour to the family name.

  It was Australia in the last year of the twentieth century, so it was nuts, this ancient Confucian thought. Even though I was part Anglo, I was fully my mother’s Chinese daughter who was disgracing her.

  Mum, to her credit, was aware that next year would bring the dawn of the twenty-first century, so she, like about four hundred million other Chinese mothers across the globe, understood that a subtle approach was needed.

  My Australian girlfriends, all three of them, stared at me in bafflement and horror when I mentioned the ongoing pressure – subtle or otherwise. It was alien to the Anglo white woman’s experience, of which I also carry. They, untrammelled by their own mothers’ hark, would never understand, not really, not viscerally.

  So, I didn’t see them anymore.

  Mum, however, was a hark I could not ignore.

  When he was trying to be funny, Nils had called me his schizo banana babe. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside and never the twain shall meet.

  ‘Mum …’ I said, trying to steer her away. ‘Okay! All right! I can hear it in your voice; I am not going to say another word. You just go off and find murderers and be the subject of editorials in the newspaper … Oh! Did I tell you Damon is back? He got back from Canada last week. I saw his mum at Woolworths. She came up to me and said he really wants to see you again. He was such a great friend to you. He’s got his PhD in chemical engineering. University of Vancouver, or maybe Toronto. Did you know that? No, of course you didn’t because you are hunting down murderers. Hardly the job for a young woman. I told you not to go into Homicide. I told you that Fraud is where you find the charming crooks, where you can work nine-to-five but no, you want to wallow in blood.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘All right, all right. I’m just saying. Damon would love to catch up. He’s been trying to make contact with you.’

  ‘Mum. Let me just tell you: I’m too busy to get married. I have no plans to get married.’

  ‘Of course you haven’t. Because you haven’t found the right man. You are too busy concentrating on the things that are not, at the end of the day, important.’

  ‘It’s my career,’ I said.

  ‘A good Chinese girl always obeys her mother.’

  I had no answer to that. A good Chinese girl does always obey her mother. I didn’t. We drew our conclusions on that one some time ago. Yet, still, mum kept trying in the hope that maybe one day in the future the Confucian switch would miraculously turn on and I would adhere to everything she said.

  The irony is that she, some thirty years ago, turned her back on filial piety to become a cop in Hong Kong, against the wishes of her mother, my grandmother; this is totally lost on her. My mother has a delicious ability to erase any part of her life that is not convenient for whatever is relevant to the present.

  ‘I told Damon’s mother you’d go out to dinner with him on Tuesday night.’

  ‘I’m working a homicide, mum.’

  ‘He’s going to meet you at that new I-Tye place just around the corner from where you live. Seven-thirty.’

  ‘It is not called the I-Tye, and that is totally racist.’

  ‘Just meet him there.’

  ‘Mum, I’m –’ (in the middle of a serial killer homicide investigation!)

  But she had hung up. Great, Tuesday at seven-thirty with Damon. And you know what? I have to do it. Because Damon’s mum looked after my mum when my mum had the cancer scare and I was too busy with the advancement of my career to go around and make her chicken soup or take her out for a walk in the sun or read her the newspaper.

  Not the behaviour of a good Chinese daughter with her filial devotion. She never brought it up. My brother did. All the time. But between me and mum, it’s that silent gulf, never spoken about.

  The Outsider

  IT WAS DAMON’S CHOICE.

  He texted: Do you like Indian? (No, not really.)

  And I replied: Yep, great, love Indian.

  Fantastic, let’s go to the Taj Mahal in the Valley. I know your mum said that new Italian place but it had a bad review in the paper. Indian okay?

  Indian is great.

  Okay, perfect. I’ll make the booking. Meet you there at seven. Can’t wait to see you again, after so long.

  Me too.

  No murder stories, okay?

  Mum, I am doing this for you, to assuage my guilt. Your adherent daughter is doing what you desire.

  —

  DAMON WAS THE guy who wanted to save me.

 
Or was I the girl who wanted to be saved? He certainly thought so.

  After dad died, after we left Cairns, travelling south with three lives in the family station wagon – the fourth in a blue ceramic urn that I clutched to my lap, staring at the cane fields from the back seat, we arrived in the Brisbane suburb of Sunnybank and moved into a modern brick house with a wide yard and next door, hanging off the fence to greet us, was this skinny short kid, buck teeth, big smile and slicked-back sandy-coloured hair. Damon. Who raced up to us with hellos and a thousand questions shot rapid fire at us, as he grabbed our cases and bags and boxes and moved us in. He’d been waiting, he told us, for days, ever since the house had been sold and his mum told him the real estate agent said a family with two kids – one a girl his age – were moving down from up north. He reminded me of Charlie Brown from the Peanuts comic books.

  He was the kid with endless questions, rarely waiting for an answer. He was the kid of energy and enthusiasm impossible to deny. He was the kid who’d wait out the front of my house on his bike with a couple of Nutella sandwiches, to ride with me along the baking hot footpaths to school. He was the kid who’d do my homework if I needed help. He was the kid who lured me into an abandoned caravan on the vacant block at the end of the dead-end street, really a cul-de-sac, when I was fourteen and sneaked a kiss on my cheek and gave me my first present from a person other than my family: a bottle of 4711 perfume. He was the only boy in our year who didn’t care that I towered above him.

  He was the guy who’d be there when I crept back after one of my rages, after I had run away from home. He was the guy who smiled and gave me a thumbs-up and a vapid but loving affirmation like, ‘No rain for the rest of the month! You wanna go fishing down the creek, Lars?’ those times I had slinked home after the beatings and the stabbings from Nils or Guido, after I’d done yet another trip to my second home during my teen age, the home called Wreck & Ruin on that slow journey to the distant but not too-distant world called Self & Destruct.

  Living in the flat suburb, house after house the same, with an endless blue sky above and baking hot footpaths, sounds of lawnmowers on Sundays and the thwack of cricket balls batted into the sky, Damon was the sweet and innocent kid, the Sunshine Kid. And sometimes, I told myself, as I crawled back out of those dark, fetid places I’d rolled into, you just need a Sunshine Kid in your life.