Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  But, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, after the buzz-saw clack of the last sunlight, it was me.

  I slid him out of me in the bath. But it’s his shadow that walks alongside me with the sun of day.

  History, the Killer

  I WAS NOW BACK HOME, ON THE COUCH WITH A HOT chocolate and a tub of Maggie Beer’s burnt fig and caramel ice cream, watching The Tudors, the TV show about Henry VIII, my current go-to chill before bed. Catherine Howard was about to sleep with another man, charting her course straight to the chopping block. I was shouting at the screen – ‘Don’t you know his history? He is a serial killer! He kills his wives, you stupid girl!’ – when the phone rang.

  ‘Jeez, girlie, you really can fuckin’ pick ’em.’

  ‘Hi Billy,’ I replied. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Damon Connelly. Your other creepy geezer-mate.’

  ‘Have you broken into another house?’ I asked.

  ‘Haven’t had so much fun since the night I clobbered Ratty McWilliam back in the East End days. Yes, I have. I told you I would check on these blokes and here I am, inside this place. Ain’t nothing here. Nothing. Well, there is. There’s a bed on the floor, one of them Japanese beds …’

  ‘Futon.’

  ‘Yeah. That. So far. It’s a big house for one geezer. Nothing on the walls. No furniture in the lounge room. Nothing in the dining room. That futon thing in the bedroom. Oh, hello! There’s a blood orange in the kitchen, on the bench. One. And a very fucking sharp, expensive-looking, unusual knife sitting next to it. The blade on the knife is odd. Looks Celtic? I’ll send you a photo. The fridge is empty. So is the freezer. Is this bloke an alien? Don’t worry, Ms Commissioner, I’m here alone. Old mate Damon is in Sydney for a conference on string.’

  ‘That would be string theory.’

  ‘Just making sure you’re awake and concentrating. Who would live in an empty house? Do you reckon it’s because his head is stuffed full of maths and quantum mechanics?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘I’m walking down the corridor to the other rooms. How come we never brought this bloke in to question?’

  ‘There was no reason to. At the time he was just someone who wanted to know about the killings. It was probably entirely innocent, a way to break the ice with me. I only mentioned him to you this morning because of the letter he sent. It was like his presence around me was only to do with the killer. Can’t drag a guy into the office for that. We would have needed a lot more – like, evidence, a motive, anything – but there was nothing.’

  I heard him open a door and step into another room; clearly Damon’s house had wooden floorboards.

  ‘Oy. Fucking beard,’ Billy said.

  ‘Sorry? What? A beard?’

  ‘It’s cockney, love. Beard. Means “weird”. And it’s what I am staring at in his end room.’

  Two Shadows

  I HAD ACTUALLY REACHED A DECISION. LAST NIGHT AS I LAY in bed. I thought to myself that it was just all too hard. My heart’s not in it. The world is full of CCTV, not like twenty years ago. There are satellites in the sky recording the every move of people below. There’s infra-red imaging, people on the streets are so much more alert to a suspicious-looking person in a hoodie carrying a back-pack, walking down a street, walking through a park. Fear won. Everybody is scared, be it from a serial killer or a terrorist, people are constantly on edge.

  Not a good time to be killing randoms on the street of any big city. Not like the old days.

  I carry a special pride in being Brisbane’s first serial killer even though nobody knows my name. And they never will.

  But, at the same time, as I look back to those days and think about the killings and the fun I had, I have to admit a certain degree of embarrassment. Not of the actual blood, the slicing of their necks and the looks in their eyes as I rode them to their death, straddling them as I sawed, not that. That was awesome. Those feelings I will always treasure. More, the Goth and Celtic stuff. The carving of Taranis into their chests. It seemed like a brilliant flourish at the time. Now it seems like a juvenile detail. I wish I hadn’t done that. Same with the cutting of their mouths giving them that evil grin. I really loved doing that, at the time. But now, same thing. I fear that, in the annals of serial killing, history will not be so kind to me. History will say I was a mixed-up muddled killer, leaving too many clues. I should have just taken the teeth and folded their heads onto their shoulders and left it at that.

  So, while I was indulging in some self-criticism, I came to the conclusion that my work was best left alone.

  And there is always the danger of getting caught.

  I grabbed a lucky break back in ninety-nine and while I’d been planning to kill again upon Jen’s release, storing up for a grand-slam, it might be best to let it all slide. I have a lot to lose now.

  Back then, in ninety-nine, I had fuck-all and even less to lose.

  Different now.

  Then, guess what?

  Ray, the fat-fuck Attorney-General, sacked the entire parole board because they wouldn’t break the law and illegally put Jen back into prison. So, now with them all out of a job, guess what? He is going to make sure she is on a fast train to Wacol.

  The news just did my head in – totally galvanized me, spun me around in a U-turn. Realising that if I didn’t kill again very soon, like I was planning to, all those years ago – the swan-song – I would never, ever, ever-never get the chance again.

  All doubts erased. All concern for Jen gone. All worries about getting caught, gone. I can do it. I am smarter than all of them. Fuck the CCTV, the satellites, the fear in the minds of suspicious passers-by, fuck it all. I will rise again and I will not be thwarted.

  If people knew who I really was, they would gasp with shock. I don’t like to brag but all this is just between you and me so allow me: what success I have achieved in being two people, the surface normal and the inner dark, the killer and the ordinary, twins walking like two shadows on either side of me. One shadow, cut off your head, the other shadow, can-I-help-you-across-the-road?

  I have to move fast.

  Jen will be back behind bars within days.

  The Rainbow Sign

  ANTHEA MADE CHOCOLATE MOUSSE, ONE OF THE GIRLS’ favourites, but after the disaster of the dried-out duck, mum announced that she and dad had to go. It was late. They needed to get ahead of the traffic, even though all the traffic had long delivered its drivers back to their homes in the peak-hour rush. Anthea fretted, as did I, about mum driving on gin but she insisted she was fine and still under the limit and dad seemed not to care. Nor did she, for that matter, as they wobbled out of the house without saying any further goodbyes.

  The girls went to bed. They kissed me on the cheek before they went downstairs to their rooms. That made up for the empty cold of the evening.

  Anthea said that mum and dad just needed a bit of time, now that I was out, but that they would come around and accept me. She told me that dad was looking better and she hoped that mum really was under the limit.

  She was going to stay up to complete some marking on assessments that were due and needed to be posted onto the uni portal by midnight, so I hugged her and went downstairs.

  I slept in the same room I slept in three nights ago. It felt like three years ago. My life was on fast forward at the same time it felt like it was in slow motion. I didn’t sleep. Up on the hill, it was quiet. The streets were narrow and lined with trees and everyone went to bed at a reasonable hour. The total opposite to Westaway House down on the Gold Coast where the smack- and meth-heads groaned and popped all night.

  The dawn came at about five. I got up at four-thirty and quietly went upstairs, careful not to wake anyone. I poured myself a glass of water and padded across the floor to the wall of windows that looked and opened out to the back garden. I could hear the sounds of birds. I loved to listen to the sound of birds in the dawn, when I was a little girl. When I had some dreams that didn’t invo
lve prison.

  I wish I knew their names, the names of the birds. Which made me think about my sister and her obsession which then turned into a successful career with butterflies. Where did that come from? Was that an inherited thing? Hardly; mum and dad were as flummoxed as I was when it developed into a full-blown fascination, like with me and books. Where does that sort of stuff come from? Are we not made up of so many infinite possibilities, an accumulation of events and attitudes and angers and loves and hates, or is it simply pre-ordained?

  I poured myself another glass of water and ambled across to the wall of butterflies. There had to be more than a hundred cabinets, all framed in polished rosewood with a glass front, like a series of paintings hung close together in one of those eighteenth-century European palaces. In each were twelve butterflies, all mounted in perfect symmetry. Three across, four down. The bigger ones at the top, the smaller ones below. All with their wings spread. It was extraordinary. Maxi had said that her mum knew the name, the Latin name and the English name, for every one of them. And its history and, for many of them, its scarcity.

  I’d never seen so many colours.

  There was a rolling crackle of thunder far away and, now that the dawn had arrived, the sky was overcast. A moment later, rain began to sprinkle.

  At the very bottom of the display wall, at floor level, were cabinets holding Aboriginal artefacts. I hadn’t paid much attention to them before, dazzled by the butterflies, but now I took a closer look.

  The artefacts reminded me of dad and his jaunts around the world selling Aboriginal art into galleries in Paris and London and New York. Look at him now, I thought, sadly, as I knelt on the floor to examine the collection.

  I assumed Anthea had permission to mount and show them. There can be dark spirits associated with Aboriginal artefacts and, as a matter of respect if nothing else, you needed to get approval for putting Aboriginal art on display; I remember dad telling me that, telling me that there were some pieces even he could not look at.

  One of the cabinets held strings of necklaces. Mostly what looked like shells, although maybe they had come from Papua New Guinea. Under them was a necklace made of long teeth, like shark’s teeth but there was a little printout beneath it saying they were kangaroo teeth. They were strung with a red ochre string.

  And then my gaze turned down, to the last necklace. Which was also made out of teeth. There were only five teeth on this necklace and I recognised them immediately because they were a part of my research when I became The Slayer.

  They were maxillary canine teeth, the same teeth removed from ‘my’ victims twenty years ago.

  PART V

  ANTHEA

  The very moment I thought I was lost

  The dungeon shook and the chains fell off

  Pharaoh’s army got drownded

  Oh Mary don’t you weep

  I may be right and I may be wrong

  I know you’re gonna miss me when I am gone

  Pharaoh’s army got drownded

  Oh Mary don’t you weep

  Trapped

  I HEARD JEN GET OUT OF BED, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE wall. I heard her climb the stairs, trying not to wake any of us. The girls would sleep through an atom bomb, especially on a school day. I heard her softly pad across the floor above.

  I heard a roll of thunder and then light rain.

  I had been dreaming about the Blood River. Again. I try not to. Actually, I had been quite successful in stopping that dream from invading me at night, pretty much since Maxi came along. Someone had said to me – was it Phoebe? – anyway it was someone and they’d said to me that when you give birth there are many things that change. Profoundly. But, she said, the biggest change was that you were no longer the most important part of your life. Suddenly there was somebody else who was the centre of gravity of your existence. Your child.

  Of course, not all mothers or fathers have this massive axis tilt in their perspective of identity, but I did.

  And so, with the birth of Maxi, my first-born, the dreams and memories of Blood River began to cease.

  Now they’re back. Not surprising, I guess.

  —

  THE CABINET WAS locked. They were all locked. I couldn’t smash the glass and grab the string of teeth. Anthea would know.

  Maybe it wasn’t what it seemed. It couldn’t be. My sister? Could not have killed three people. Could not have allowed me to go to prison for twenty years.

  It was absurd. I was living on another planet. It had to be a simple mistake. Teeth from an Aboriginal tribe, something that dad must have come across years ago, which he handed down to Anthea when they sold the home and moved to Bald Hills.

  That was it. That was the only explanation.

  And, another thing: there were five teeth. The Slayer only killed three people. So, there had to be another explanation. It couldn’t be what it seemed.

  Unless there were two other victims that nobody knew about.

  —

  ‘MORNING!’ CALLED ANTHEA as she emerged from the top of the stairs with Maxi, who was walking like a zombie, still half-asleep. In her cat-patterned pyjamas, she walked across the room and hugged me as if I were a vertical cushion she could go back to sleep on. ‘I don’t want to go to school,’ she mumbled into the fabric of my pyjamas.

  ‘How did you sleep?’ Anthea asked me.

  I stared at her. Is there another person inside you? Can there possibly be a monster lurking within? The one everyone thought was in me? ‘Great. Thanks,’ I replied. ‘There’s been some rain.’

  Maxi still had her arms around me.

  ‘Yes, the weather bureau said the drought might finally be broken this week. Lord knows we need it. Poor bloody farmers. Max! Time to wake up, sweetie; you want Vegemite or cheese sandwiches for lunch?’ she asked as she pulled out food from the fridge. The girls’ school backpacks were open and laid out on the breakfast bar.

  ‘No carrots,’ mumbled Maxi.

  ‘Okay, but you know the rule. You’ve got to have some vegetables.’

  ‘I’ll get some chips. Can you give me money for the tuck shop?’

  ‘Chips are not vegetables. I’m giving you some celery.’ Little Jen, also still in her pyjamas, her’s patterned with roosters, staggered into the room and, also like a zombie, walked across to the lounge and dropped into it. ‘Do I have to go to school today?’ she asked and then went back to sleep.

  ‘Sis?’ asked Anthea. ‘The girls will be walking home after school this afternoon. All right, girls? Mummy won’t be able to pick you up.’

  They mumbled assent.

  ‘I’m so far behind with my assessments and I have to cover for one of my lecturers at a tutorial,’ she said to me.

  I was having trouble keeping it together; my brain was going bang-bang in a series of up-and-down spirals, like the one and only time I rode a rollercoaster, at the Ekka when I was a kid and dad rode with us. It’s not that repeat killers can’t be parents. They are, after all, sons and less so, daughters. Usually the object of abuse, but not always. BTK – Bind Torture Kill – one of the most horrible serial killers ever, had an ordinary childhood and then came to fantasies of bondage and torture as a teenager. He has a daughter who, even after the shock and horror of discovering her father was BTK, forgave him and has written about that forgiveness. It can happen. People are strange. Anything can happen. I get that.

  What I was having trouble with, what was surrounding me like a wall of impenetrable incredulity and disbelief, that bang-banging in my fucking head, was that the killer could be my sister. I couldn’t get past that; it had to be wrong. It couldn’t be her. It just couldn’t.

  ‘Sorry, what?’ I asked.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Anthea.

  ‘Yeah. Sorry. I was just distracted. Sorry, what did you say?’

  ‘There’s some spag bol in the freezer; perhaps you could microwave that for them, if they’re hungry? I should be home by six, though.’

  ‘Okay. Sure. No problem.’<
br />
  She reached into her pocket. She was already dressed and ready for the day. ‘Here’s a spare set of keys if you want to go out.’ There was a moment where she looked at me. I could feel the five teeth behind me, in the cabinet, as if they were biting into my lungs.

  ‘But probably best not. Just in case the press track you down. Lucky we have a big driveway and a hedge out the front. No-one can see in. You’re safe and anonymous here.’

  No. I think, sweet sister, I am fucking trapped here.

  Songs of Love and Hate

  THEY’RE BACK.

  The choppers hovering above the house and the camera vans out the front and the hounds of press with a relentless bang-bang on the front door, all day and all night with a, ‘Mrs White! Megan! Are you there?! We just need to ask you some questions!’

  Hugh, he sleeps. He’s pretty much been asleep for the last twenty years, since she was found guilty and our life fell apart, friends fell apart, family fell apart, the house in which we lived fell apart, the world that we had, fell apart. The centre certainly did not hold. It opened up to become an abyss, but we clung to its edge and, with the kindness of some, we managed to return to life. His cancer is aggressive. It won’t be long.

  He feels so guilty. He thinks it’s his fault.

  Of course we know she is innocent, the victim of a tragic and very terrible misunderstanding but –

  – as the years wore on and as our lives crumbled, her guilt just seemed to become more entrenched. It was almost as if our defence of her gave way, crumbled and all that was left was an evil little girl who I had mothered and he had fathered.