His phone pings again and even though he knows he shouldn’t look at it while he’s driving, he risks a quick glance down.
Call me NOW.
‘Oh, it’s a command now, is it?’ sneers Logan.
At a traffic light, he taps the screen on the dashboard of the van and calls his sister instead. ‘Hi, it’s Maddy, leave me a message.’
‘Hi Maddy, just checking in. Wanted to see how things are going. Give me a call when you can.’
Maddy is probably already at university. She’s getting a teaching degree as a mature student although he would hardly think twenty-five qualifies as mature. She’s perpetually worried about falling behind so she works harder than most of the other students. That’s another reason why the idea of her still being with Patrick irritates him so much. He doesn’t like the fact that she works so hard because it takes her attention from him.
‘Tell him to get himself a job then,’ Logan told her. ‘He should work so you don’t have to waitress at night and study during the day.’
‘He’s trying, Logan, but he doesn’t have any qualifications. He thinks he may be interested in architecture. He draws really well.’
‘Does he?’ Logan scoffed.
Logan wishes she still lived in Sydney so they could see each other regularly, but he supposes he should be grateful that she is only two hours away by plane and they can speak all the time. Maddy had felt like she needed to get even further away from their family than Logan did. ‘I can’t be in the same state as them. They keep trying to get me to come over and I don’t want to be sucked back in.’ He couldn’t blame her for wanting to be away from them. He left when he was eighteen, having little choice but to leave. ‘Take me with you,’ Maddy begged but he knew he didn’t have the ability to take care of a kid, even if it broke his heart to say no to her. ‘I can’t, Maddy, I don’t have any money and I need to find a place to live, but I’ll call you all the time.’
‘Promise?’ she asked on his last day at home, as his father sneered and his mother ignored him. Only Maddy had tears on her cheeks and he grabbed her and held her tightly to him. ‘Promise,’ he whispered. No matter what happened in his life, he would never neglect his sister.
She struggled for a couple of years once she got down to Melbourne, but now she seems to have found her way.
It took a lot longer for Logan. He couldn’t see a way forward for himself in the world and so for years he knows he moved through his life letting things happen to him, getting involved in things that he never planned on being involved in. Until it all stopped, the night he met Debbie.
It’s only since they got together that he’s understood what a real family should be like. Debbie is forever on the phone to her mother and her sister-in-law and her various cousins. If someone is sick, everyone calls and worries. If there’s a birthday, presents are discussed. Triumphs are celebrated and tragedies fretted over.
He touches the screen on his dashboard as he drives, tapping Debbie’s number. She’s home today instead of at the hospital. She’s a nurse on the maternity ward, helping bring new life into the world every day. But it’s tiring work and she seems to catch whatever is going around. This morning he made her a very early morning cup of tea and left it on her bedside table so she could have something to drink when she woke up, even though it would probably be lukewarm then.
She’ll be up by now, he’s sure.
‘Hey babes,’ she answers, ‘is it hot enough for you?’
He laughs. ‘Are you going to ask me that every time I call today?’
‘Yep, I’ve just finished my book so until I download another one, you’re my only avenue for amusement.’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Yeah, slightly nauseous, slightly shitty. At least my nose has stopped running, but then I’ve taken enough stuff to help that.’
‘You poor thing. Hey, I had a weird delivery this morning.’
‘Ooo, do tell – a naked lady?’
‘Nah,’ laughs Logan. He had one of those once. Too bad she was at least eighty. He had felt really sorry for her, understanding that she wasn’t even aware she was naked. He had averted his eyes and pretended she was dressed.
‘I had to deliver a computer and that needs to be signed for but the woman wouldn’t open the door.’
Debbie is quiet for a moment. ‘Are you wearing long sleeves?’ She asks the question softly because she knows this is the worst aspect of his job right now. It’s fine in winter but he hates to be hot. It makes him feel trapped and claustrophobic and he hates feeling trapped.
‘You know I am, Debs. I promised Mack, didn’t I?’
It wasn’t that his arms were covered in tattoos; it was more the kind of tattoos. The knife dripping blood; the gun firing a bullet with the words ‘everyone dies’ written underneath. The skull and crossbones with a woman’s face screaming behind one of the eye sockets; the writhing, fanged snake creeping up his neck. Choices made when he was drunk or seething with rage. They are the choices he regrets every day. Removal would cost a fortune and leave him with scarring. He’s thought about covering them up with different tattoos but just walking into a tattoo studio made him uncomfortable, brought back memories he had no interest in revisiting. A different man got his tattoos and he never wanted to meet him again.
‘Course you did, sorry, babes. I know it must be really uncomfortable,’ says Debbie.
‘Don’t worry about it. Anyway, so the woman wouldn’t open the door and when I told her I would wait for her to get dressed or something she said that I needed to understand that she couldn’t open the door, like she made sure to emphasise the word understand.’
‘People are weird,’ says Debbie.
Logan shakes his head. ‘I think that something is wrong in that house. There wasn’t even any noise from the kids and I know there must have been little kids because there were scooters in the garden.’
‘It sounds like you’re reading too much into what she said. Maybe the kids were at school early, or with their dad, or staying at friends, and she was having fun with her husband or her lover. You never know what’s going on behind closed doors as they say.’
‘Maybe, but I think something’s wrong,’ he says, frowning.
‘Don’t overthink, babes, just get on with the rest of your day and there will be a cold beer waiting for you when you get home. Maybe if I feel a bit better, we can drive down to the beach for a walk.’
Logan bites down on his lip. He knew Debbie would tell him not to dwell on the delivery. He is probably making things up, letting his imagination run away with him, but he can’t help the unease he feels. It’s almost a physical thing, a churning in his gut as though his body is telling him to pay attention.
‘A cold beer sounds good,’ he says, knowing that there’s no point in saying anything else. He can’t make Debbie understand because even he doesn’t get why he’s worried about some woman he’s never met in a house he’s never been to before.
‘It will be. Love you, babes. Enjoy the rest of your day.’
‘Love you too – rest and get better.’
Debbie ends the call with a kiss and Logan smiles. He rubs at his chin as he remembers the first time he met Debbie. It was at three in the morning in a hospital emergency room.
He was covered in blood from putting his fist through a window, woozy from the taser and shaking from the effects of his first try of the drug ice wearing off. The police had brought him in to have his hand seen to. Logan knows there were two of them and that one was a man and one was a woman, but when he thinks about it now, he can’t remember their faces at all. It had been a beautiful high to begin with, as his body flooded with dopamine and adrenalin rushed through his veins. He can remember feeling invincible, believing that he could simply put his fist through the glass door at the side of a house where he had found himself standing, with no idea of how he’d got there. He didn’t think it would hurt at all; he wouldn’t even feel the pain.
He now knows t
hat he had run five kilometres from Nick’s place. Nick was his partner in crime, literally. A mate from the gym. Gym was the only place Logan felt at home – where he’d found people who understood him. Nick was small and thin, with an innocent baby face. He talked more than he worked out. He had a drug habit but he told Logan he kept it well under control. His parents had tried to help, his school had tried, therapists had tried – it seemed to Logan that the whole world had tried to help Nick get his life back on track – but Nick had no desire to actually be helped.
Together they had amassed a small fortune picking the right houses to break into. Together they had hit houses where cannabis was being grown in the basement, and those where meth was being made in the back. There was always money there, lots and lots of cash, and no one ever reported it to the police. It was dangerous work because there were also always guns and junkies and those who meant to protect what they were doing. But he and Nick were smart about things. They would hit a couple of places and then lie low for months, living off what they’d made. They’d been doing it for years, ever since they’d met when Logan was twenty-three and looking for a way out of the menial jobs he kept getting fired from because he’d mouthed off or hit someone. He didn’t do well with authority and he took all criticism personally.
He and Nick didn’t start off with drug houses.
‘I know this house, near where my parents live,’ Nick said one night over a beer. ‘They’ve just moved in but they’re not actually living there because they’ve just painted. The house is filled with stuff and no people.’
Logan frowned. ‘So what?’
‘So maybe we go in and help ourselves to some stuff. I know a guy who can get rid of it all. No mess, no fuss and they have insurance – they won’t even care.’
‘I’m not a thief, Nick.’
‘Yeah, what are you, Logan? Just looking to finish your medical degree?’ Nick raised an eyebrow at him, a smirk on his face.
‘Don’t be a dick.’
‘I’m not being a dick. I’m saying this is easy money. We get in, we get out and we enjoy the cash.’
And it had been easy money. Logan remembers the feeling of control as he counted the notes in the pile that was his share. It had taken them an hour and they had the money for the stuff two days later. He put fifty dollars in an envelope and posted it to Maddy, telling her to hide it well and use it to buy what she needed for school, knowing that cash in his parents’ house disappeared on cigarettes and alcohol pretty quickly. He felt like he was good at something for the first time in his life.
It wasn’t always easy. There were houses with alarms and barking dogs and enraged owners. They would leave if there was any noise, and by the time the police arrived, they were long gone.
It was Nick who suggested targeting places where the thin blue line was crossed every day.
‘No one calls the cops when you steal money they’ve collected from selling their product – no one.’ He was so sure of himself, and he always believed that he would get away with it. And he did – mostly.
Nick’s cocaine habit was still under control, or so he said, but he was starting to experiment with other things.
Logan has no idea why, on this particular night, they took some of the drugs as well as the money. Usually they left the drugs alone – that was part of their strategy. And that meant that they managed to get away with it for years.
Now, as Logan drives the van, he understands that whatever you do for a job, it’s better than not having one. At the end of the day, he can sit next to his wife and know that he has done something – if not worthwhile, then at least acceptable and helpful.
Logan dismisses thoughts of Nick, who is still in prison because his self-belief could not keep the police away forever, and who is still raging at the world. Still intending to go back to his old life.
He pulls to a stop in front of another house and gets out of his van, noting the large German shepherd standing rigid at the gate.
He searches the wall of the house, relieved to see a keypad with a bell. He pushes the bell and steps back as the dog stares at him. ‘You’re a protective bugger, aren’t you?’ he says to the German shepherd. The dog growls softly.
The door opens and a young girl dressed in shorts and a tiny tank top comes running down the path. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she smiles. ‘James, you be a good boy. I’m going to open the gate and you’re not to move.’
‘His name is James?’ asks Logan as she opens the gate and he hands her the box.
‘It is. Thanks so much.’ The young girl looks a little like Debbie, with the same tiny frame and big hazel eyes.
He returns to the van and thinks back to that night that landed him in the emergency room. He has no idea why he decided to take a hit at Nick’s urging. He was a beer man, sometimes a good Scotch, but he never, ever touched drugs. He’d grown up in a neighbourhood where he’d watched what happened to those who succumbed to the promise of some time out from their misery. He’d watched Nick get all jittery and sweaty when he needed his next fix.
But that night he had agreed, had smoked what Nick had rolled for him, mistakenly assuming that smoking ice instead of injecting it would lessen its effects. He was tired of what he did with his time, tired of his lonely life and of Nick. Tired of himself. Why not? he had thought. He remembers the rush now, the feeling of being so powerful he could lift a car if he chose to.
He knows he stood up and left Nick’s house and he knows that he started running. He felt like he could fly. When he found himself in some garden, in a suburb that he had never been to before, he looked at a pair of glass French doors and thought, Those’ll be easy to open. And then he put his fist through the glass, smashing it, cutting his hand, causing the alarm to scream and the owner to come running. He smiled when he saw it was a woman – a tall woman, but a woman he could deal with. He would grab what he could and fly away again. But she swung out at him, furious and strong, and caught him on the nose. Blood gushed from his face and his own anger rose up and he swung back. He broke her cheekbone and fractured her eye socket and she went down.
He remembers the woman from his trial. He hadn’t recognised her, hadn’t even remembered what she looked like, but her victim impact statement bruised him with its fear and pain. He wrote to her in prison, asking for forgiveness. He wrote three times and then he stopped. He reasoned she had a right to move on with her life and hopefully think of him less with each passing year.
He checks for his next delivery. It’s close by and in a street he’s been down before so he doesn’t need his GPS. As he drives, he wonders what would happen if he turned up to a house he had broken into. Would he recognise it, or have they all blended into one? He doesn’t even know the address of the one where the woman he hurt lived. What if one day a front door is opened and she’s standing there? The thought makes him push his shoulders back, suddenly uncomfortable. The image of her body sprawled on her stone-coloured kitchen floor comes back to him. He stared down at her, and then the police were there, appearing out of thin air. Now he knows she made the call before she confronted him. She had heard the glass break. He had thought he was moving quickly but in reality, he’d stood there for a few minutes watching the blue whirling light of the alarm glint off the shards of broken glass from the French door, mesmerised by the shiny flashes.
The police told him to stop, to get down on the ground, but Logan was still flying high and he advanced towards them. They told him once, twice and then the taser struck him in the chest, paralysing him and forcing him down. Tingling pain seared through his body and the high wore off.
The police got him up after a few minutes and he was given a towel for his hand. Only one ambulance arrived and Logan remembers hearing the words, ‘We’ll just take him in ourselves,’ and then he was in the back of a police car, his body shaking as shock replaced every other emotion.
He knows that the hands of the male police officer were large and strong and that they wrapped around his arm tightly, pu
shing into the muscle so Logan understood exactly who was in charge. Once they’d got him onto a bed in a small curtained-off bay in the emergency room, he dropped his head as he felt tears pricking at his eyes. He was twenty-six and he had wasted his whole life without meaning to, without thinking anything through. He’d never had a plan or a dream and now he was going to prison. And no one would care, except Maddy – she would be bereft and disappointed in him. That is what made the tears burn in his eyes.
He knew he was screwed, knew it without a shadow of a doubt. He also understood that there was a small feeling of relief. He was never going to stop unless something stopped him, and now it had.
‘Can you lie back please?’ He heard a soft voice. He shuffled backwards and dropped his head onto the pillow. He felt his uninjured hand get handcuffed to the bed rail. ‘I think he’s calm now, officer,’ said the voice. ‘Perhaps you could just give me some space.’
Logan looked at the nurse, who was delicately probing his hand, wiping and touching softly to see if there was any glass stuck in his flesh. Her skin was pale in the harsh hospital light, but smooth and perfect. Her hazel eyes were fringed with long black lashes and a curl had escaped her neat bun.
‘This looks clean and I don’t think any of the cuts are deep enough for stitches. I’ll clean it up and bandage it and then the doctor will be along shortly.’
Logan nodded, horrified to find that the way she was speaking to him, the kindness in her voice, was leading to more tears, slipping down the side of his face.
‘Hey now,’ she said gently and she reached up and wiped a tear away. ‘This can be the worst day of your life if you want it to be. There can never be another day as bad as this. If that’s what you want.’
Logan smiled. ‘It’s what I want,’ he said and he looked at the nurse, her clean soap smell comforting, the hint of floral perfume a scent he would always remember. ‘Debbie’, her nametag said. She had a small mole above her full red lips and he wanted to touch her mouth, but he knew better and he was grateful that at least he had begun thinking straight.
The Family Across the Street Page 4
