Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  Knowing, of course, that she would be furious about such protectiveness.

  So, to expedite the case, he brought on the fix. To Jen.

  But what of the consequences? he asked himself.

  There will be none, he told himself.

  He knew he was lying to himself – the worst sin of all, lying to one’s self.

  —

  THUS, BOTH BILLY and Lara, in 2019, in an unspoken pledge, agreed to see if there might have been another killer, not Jen, not Jen who lived almost twenty years behind bars, every day of those twenty years they had to justify, to themselves, without ever mentioning her name but knowing atonement, if it could ever come, would lift a terrible burden and allow them to rise into the sky.

  Billy had, as it happened, never stopped thinking about Jen and what he did to her. And to Lara, casting upon her, Lara, the guilt of sending an innocent kid down the river.

  The Medium Is

  the Message

  I HATE BEING HATED.

  I got used to it in prison, knowing that a hungry population beyond the walls despised me for the Slayings, knowing that my name and profile was on all those Famous Serial Killer websites and occasionally on television in a sweaty, panting doco-drama in which I was played in dramatic reconstructions by a blonde with an over-generous cleavage and contact lenses that exaggerated my one-blue-eye-one-green-eye, glinting like a devil’s glare as I plunged my knife of death into the unsuspecting victims and then leaned down, out of shot as if about to suck their blood. I knew all this, but prison insulated me. Mostly. The walls of incarceration kept me safe from prying lenses.

  Even though I was on Planet Wacol, I was not completely isolated from what was happening in the outside world. I was aware there existed a twenty-four-hour news cycle. I was aware of changes in technology. Anthea’s orientation had also helped.

  But neither of us had thought about the terrifying swiftness with which a story can go viral, a word I used, twenty years ago, to describe something medical. And how a simple Tweet can change your life in the space of a second.

  —

  AS THE BUS from Westaway House rumbled along the highway, I looked out for the occasional glimpse of water at the end of the side streets. It was my third day at work. There were no clouds in the sky. I’d heard the news that, since Lara Ocean and I had talked, the parole board had been sacked, that the widows of ‘my’ victims were on a revenge rampage and that the Attorney-General was itching to get me back behind bars. I was getting anxious and feeling powerless. And I knew that the killer would be too. We both had a closing window of time.

  As the bus rattled up the Gold Coast Highway, I got a text from Bruce. Another thing that Anthea had forgotten to tell me about the new world is that hardly anyone makes a call anymore. Landlines barely exist and message machines must have gone out with VHS.

  Where r u it read. I still couldn’t bring myself to join the new revolution in the English language.

  A few minutes away from work. I replied, complete with the full stop.

  Get off b4 last stop he replied.

  2 late, I replied, enjoying my first foray into text-speak.

  —

  AS THE BUS pulled up and I climbed off, I saw why he had texted me the warning. The Bunnings car park, at five to six in the morning, just before opening time, was brimming with people who didn’t look as though they were out to buy a drill.

  ‘There she is!’

  Maybe thirty people were hovering near the front doors as a couple of staff members looked on nervously. I paused in my walk towards them, which only made them all stare at me more intensely. They all began to film me with their phones. A couple of them started running towards me.

  I ran, quickly, away from them. I thought I saw Bruce, standing by the entrance. I’m not sure if it was him. It was hard to tell as I was fleeing. But I never saw him again.

  I ran up the verge and dodged traffic across the four-lane highway and scurried into the massive car park that surrounded the Harbour Town shopping precinct, a low-level open mall. Only a twenty-four-hour fruit and veg market was open. I found one of the public toilets and locked myself in for an hour. By that time, my escape from the crowds of justice had gone viral. The first real sighting of The Slayer in twenty years. One of the clips had over twenty-six thousand hits on YouTube.

  I didn’t cry. I was numb. I hate being hated.

  Bruce texted: r u ok

  I didn’t text back. That part of my life had just closed.

  Anthea called the minute she saw the footage, posted online by the mainstream media. It had just gone seven o’clock. She told me to wait, she would be there in just over an hour.

  I tried to call Gary to leave a message saying that I was changing address, to move in with my sister. But I had run out of credit on my phone. I’d do it when I was in Anthea’s car.

  The Stranger

  RAIN CLOUDS HAD APPEARED FROM NOWHERE. OVER THE years as the state went from a deluge to a parched land of aridity, I had seen, from behind the prison wire, rain clouds form and even thunder, sometimes, but never any rain. Like a gigantic tease, a slow burn of dry torture.

  ‘Do you think it might rain?’ I asked Anthea, as we sped up the highway, back towards Brisbane in the early afternoon. Anthea had texted me throughout the morning as I sat huddled on the toilet seat, in my cubicle, waiting. Texting me to say she had been held up. No matter.

  ‘Maybe,’ she replied. She seemed distracted, and who could blame her. Big sister Slayer is coming to stay.

  Drops of rain hit the windscreen. I counted them. Eight.

  And then no more. She didn’t even bother to turn on the windscreen wipers.

  ‘Robbie’s away. Did I tell you that before?’

  ‘Yeah. You did. In Singapore. For a week, then on to Shanghai for a few days and then to Lucerne. Why is he going to Lucerne?’

  She shrugged. ‘Dunno.’ Kept driving. Looked at the clock on the dash. ‘We’ll have to stop by the school and pick up the girls on the way home.’

  ‘Great!’

  —

  NOT SO GREAT.

  There are three schools on Ascot hill, all of them exclusive and two of them for girls only. Little Jen and Maxi were at Clyde, a different school to the one that Anthea and I went to. Because the streets were narrow and winding, with gracious old homes snug next to one another with thickets of palm trees along the side fences providing privacy and a carpet of purple jacaranda flowers on the footpaths and streets, pick-up and drop-off became a bit of a hectic maze for frazzled kids and parents. Expensive cars jostled for space, most of them lining up in an orderly procession of pick-ups, managed by smiling, efficient teachers. Little Jen and Maxi were waiting for us inside the art school, both holding cardboard Easter sculptures. Anthea found a park and we walked up the hill towards the front gates. The school was old sandstone, built in the 1860s. Gargoyles leered down from the arched rooftops. I was wearing sunglasses and a peaked cap that Anthea had on the back seat. I was travelling incognito. I was The Slayer, hiding out on the hill. I could have stayed in the car but I was scared.

  Scared of being left alone. Scared of life. Rattled.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ Anthea said suddenly, as if remembering something, ‘mum and dad are coming for dinner. I hope you don’t mind. I couldn’t cancel at the last minute.’

  ‘Sure. Of course. Totally,’ I replied, utterly terrified at having to see them again, for the first time in twenty years.

  As if to read my thoughts, she said: ‘They’ll be cool. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. They know you’re staying with us.’

  As we passed through the gates, ornate, huge, like something from an Edgar Allan Poe story, I heard a, ‘Oh, hello,’ as if the greeting had slipped out with nary a thought.

  I turned to see Karin Jones, the former president of the parole board. With her were two teenage girls. They were staring at me, boggle-eyed. They knew who I was.

  ‘Oh. Hi,’ I said, embarrassed.

&
nbsp; ‘You’re …’ She left the sentence hanging, the What are you doing here? unsaid.

  ‘Hi Karin,’ said Anthea. ‘This is my sister, Jen. She’s staying with us.’

  ‘Oh. Hi Anthea. Okay. Well. Good to see you both. It’s looking like it might rain later. Here’s hoping. Bye.’ And with that she and her daughters scurried off. An odd encounter. But, even odder when, after I’d taken a couple of steps, I paused and turned around to see Karin down the footpath a bit, staring at me.

  I was feeling more and more like Alice in the land of topsy-turvy where people walked on their hands and all that seemed to be, was not. Deep breathing, Jen, like Rosie taught you in meditation class.

  As we approached the art school, prominent with cut-out animals pasted to the windows, I asked, ‘How do you know her? Ms Jones.’

  Anthea shrugged. ‘The school. We often get rostered on to help out on the sports days. They just live around the corner. I knew she was in charge of the parole board and she knew I was your sister, but we never talked about it. At all. She’s very careful about that sort of thing. Shame about the sacking, though.’

  We stepped inside the art school, and straight off I knew that my nieces had either seen the viral clip or had been told about it; or indeed had, in the past couple of days, discovered that Aunty Jen not only lied about Hollywood, she lied about being an evil killer. I was a stranger to them.

  ‘Aunty Jen is coming to stay with us for a while,’ said Anthea.

  They stared at me without speaking. It wasn’t just anger and uncertainty in their eyes.

  It was fear.

  Break and Enter

  I HAD SAID TO THE POLICE MINISTER, WHEN SHE OFFERED ME the job, ‘If we could keep the social functions to a minimum, that would be great.’ And she said, ‘Yes, of course, the government understands that employees at your level need their own time at home, even if they aren’t married.’

  Never believe a politician.

  I was at my third for the week, a local upgrade to the Safe School Program being announced by the minister to an array of educators and ‘leading citizens’ (myself included; will this do, mum?) in the State Library, part of the modern complex of buildings housing the museum, conference centre and performing arts theatres. I had my phone on vibrate, just in case there was an emergency, and right on cue I felt the buzz. I checked the caller ID and quietly got up from my seat. I hastily exited the big room to an adjoining balcony where a couple of women were sneaking an illegal cigarette, blowing the smoke into the afternoon. The river was below us, a brooding mass of water moving rapidly past. The postcard-view façade of the city, its tall glass buildings lit up, with streets of neon lights snapping on. Dusk was approaching; the blazing orange of the sunset reflected off the buildings and the water.

  ‘Hi Billy,’ I said.

  ‘This ain’t the first time I’ve said it but I dunno what you ever saw in this geezer.’

  ‘Where are you? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Old mate Nils. What a creep. I’ve just broken into his unit. He lives above a motorbike repair shop in Southport on the Gold Coast. There’s a bonza nineteen sixties Norton down there.’

  I ignored the break-and-enter bit. Billy loved to break into houses. He told me long ago, with great relish, that he did his first at the age of seven when he nicked a TV for his mum, carried it along a dark and narrow laneway, dodging cops, and then tuned it to the BBC while she slept upstairs in their council flat.

  ‘Don’t worry. He’s not going to catch me. Him and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend are eating at the Chinese around the corner.’ I could hear him as he moved around the apartment.

  ‘He likes a knife, doesn’t he? And I’m not talking about steak knives. I’m gonna send you a couple of photos.’

  And within seconds, they arrived.

  Carefully laid out on a side table: an array of long knives and swords. I counted eight Samurai swords and what looked like Viking swords. Then a new photo came through of another table, in another room, on which were laid out Celtic-inspired knives, short blades, long blades and, again, swords. Another photo, of a wall: framed paintings of Celtic gods. There was Taranis. There was Ogmios with his smiling mouth and pierced tongue with its chain of human ears. Another photo. This time, of Nils. In his early fifties, he looked fiercer than ever. His entire face and head had been tattooed. He looked like a lizard man.

  ‘He’s going out with a sixteen-year-old?’ I asked, horrified but not entirely surprised.

  ‘At least he’s consistent.’

  ‘God help her.’ The age of consent in Queensland was sixteen. It was disgusting but it was legal.

  ‘What do you wanna do? There’s about forty grand worth of A-grade banned weaponry in this apartment, but there’s the issue of illegal entry to said apartment.’

  The smokers tossed their butts into the river, which annoyed me, and in a moment of Nils-related anger I felt an urge to bust them for smoking in a confined public space and for littering. But I let it go. They went inside, smiling at me as they passed.

  ‘Is there anything to suggest he might be planning an attack?’ I asked.

  ‘Like a wall board with targets, dates, times and locations? Like in the movies? No, girlie, if there is, it’s in his head.’

  As I heard Billy move around the unit, commenting on its grim imagery and weapons, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was, twenty years after the fact, in The Slayer’s den.

  ‘You know what to do,’ I said and signed off.

  Happy Families

  THE GIRLS WERE SEATED NEXT TO ONE ANOTHER AT THE dining table, the wall of mounted butterflies behind them. Anthea and I were on the other side. It was a formal tableau. It was a formal talk. Their eyes were on me. I said nothing.

  ‘Twenty years ago, when I was sixteen and your aunty was seventeen, when we lived in that old house around the corner with grandpa and grandma, something very bad happened. I never told you about it because your dad and I didn’t want to upset you and we didn’t think it was going to be necessary. Well, now it is. Your Aunty Jen was wrongly blamed for killing three men. There were a lot of bad people who wanted to put Aunty Jen in jail, and they did. It was very, very unfair. Aunty Jen hasn’t been in Hollywood for the past twenty years. She was in prison and she just got out. She did not commit those crimes that those bad men said she did. She went to jail an innocent person. You remember that story your dad and I were talking about; that man in America, Valentino Dixon, who spent twenty-seven years in prison and he was innocent?’

  They nodded. They didn’t speak. They weren’t looking at their mum. They were staring at me.

  ‘Same thing. It happens, and it happens a lot. I told Aunty Jen to pretend she had been in Hollywood because I didn’t want you to know about this terrible thing that happened to her. But now she’s out and we’re going to look after her.’

  They nodded. They didn’t speak. They were staring at me.

  ‘People are saying bad things about her. And these bad people will keep saying bad things until they get bored and start to say bad things about someone else. We’ve talked about the nasty stuff on social media, haven’t we?’

  They nodded.

  ‘And this is another example of when social media gets out of control and people get hurt. If any of your classmates say anything that upsets you or use social media to message you something that upsets you, something about Aunty Jen, ignore them, block them, don’t answer and tell me or your dad or Miss Hepburn at school. Okay?’

  ‘Okay mum,’ they both said.

  There was a silence. None of us were prepared for this and none of us knew how to act. I smiled at them and said:

  ‘Thanks girls.’

  They smiled back. Hesitantly.

  —

  DAD STARED AT me with glassy eyes. He had gotten dramatically thinner. He had a lot of grey hair and he swayed on his feet. He was carrying an open bottle of vodka. The cancer had hollowed out his cheeks and eye sockets. I tried not to cry
as they walked inside. The girls clearly loved their grandparents and ran around them with buckets of enthusiasm.

  ‘Hi dad. Hi mum,’ I said. Anthea was in the kitchen, behind the breakfast bar. Dad was led by the girls to one of the couches, where he sat looking more uncertain than I had ever seen him.

  ‘Hi mum,’ I said again.

  She gave me a tight smile; it didn’t quite work, a little wobbly on the edges. She pulled a bottle of gin from her bag.

  ‘I’m drinking gin. Would you like some gin?’ she asked too loudly, staring at me as if we’d never met. She then called across the room:

  ‘Anthea, I think Jen would like some gin!’

  ‘I can’t drink, mum. That’s against my parole.’

  ‘I went to Country Road yesterday and bought myself a pair of jodhpurs. Pink. What do you think about that?’ she said to me.

  —

  IT DIDN’T GET any better. Anthea cooked roast duck, which mum, gin-addled, said was over-cooked, while dad sat and stared, as if Death was on the staircase leading up from below, while the girls were allowed to play with their iPads at the table. ‘We’ll make an exception tonight, just this once,’ is what Anthea had said, knowing that we were all on the Titanic of family dinners.

  Neither mum nor dad asked about me. They didn’t talk to me. Oh, sorry, mum told me she had also bought herself a pale blue linen dress on sale. What did I think about that?

  I wasn’t upset. I had been resigned to the vacancy of my parents for a long time. I didn’t blame them; they weren’t to blame. I blamed myself. I bankrupted them, I ruined them, I forced them into all this. Not by asking, just by being.

  Oh yes, but it was circumstance, wasn’t it? Wrong time, wrong place, wrong girl, world gone wrong. I wasn’t the killer. It was him, whoever he was, who had ruined their lives, my life, Anthea’s life, the lives of James, Brian and Fabio and their wives and their kids and mothers and fathers and grandfathers and grandmothers and their best friends and all those who wept for the loss of the three men who were slain by him, whoever he is, wherever he is. It wasn’t me. It was circumstance. Wrong world. Fate smashing into my little orbit, obliterating me and all around me, little galaxies of doom and regret.