The Family Across the Street

by Trope, Nicole

  Prisoners aren’t supposed to have access to mobile phones but they are smuggled in and available to those who want them enough. Logan pictures Nick’s face, tries to see him as he would look now. He looks at the text again, his fingers hovering over the number. He could just call and find out who it is.

  He touches the number, his heart hammering in his chest as it starts ringing.

  But the ringing continues until the call is answered by a robotic voice. ‘You have reached the message bank of 614—’ Logan hangs up, knowing the robotic voice will just repeat the number.

  A yellow Porsche roars past him, the noise startling him as it spins its wheels in the quiet street where he’s parked. Maddy once bought him a toy Porsche for his birthday. It was his seventeenth and she’d been telling him for months that she was getting him a car. She had presented the small toy car to him with such love and hope in her face that he hadn’t even managed to laugh at the joke, only to give her a long hug. She was the only one to give him a present. He still has it somewhere, is holding on to the desire to give it to a son one day.

  Cars have always been his passion and he feels at home around an engine. Engines can usually be fixed – people, not so much. It was his plan to get work as an apprentice mechanic when he was released from prison, where he’d taken classes, but no one wanted to hire him. His record follows him like a dog. He has to put the truth in his cover letter – no point in hiding it.

  ‘Just keep trying, babes,’ Debbie told him. ‘Put in an application everywhere you can and leave the rest to the universe.’ Debbie is big on leaving things to the universe but then she comes from a life where the universe seems to be on her side. She and Mack grew up with loving parents who gave them what they could materially but made up for any lack with complete love and support. Debbie’s father, Paul, is a quiet man. The first time they met he barely glanced at Logan’s tattoos, shaking his hand and avoiding looking down at the letters ‘H A T E’ inked across his fingers. Logan knew that Debbie must have briefed her family on him but her mother, Ruth, couldn’t hide the surprise in her eyes. Before the meeting, Logan had debated what to wear and then he had purposely chosen a T-shirt, reasoning that he may as well be upfront from the beginning. At the table, while lunch was being served, he carefully moderated how quickly he drank his beer, how he held his knife and fork. But he wasn’t able to control the tapping of his knee on the underside of the table, hadn’t even known he was doing it until Debbie placed her hand gently on his leg and squeezed. The only member of the household who seemed unfazed by his appearance was their Labrador, Betty, who dropped her golden head onto Logan’s knee and stared at him with soulful eyes while he stroked her soft ears.

  After lunch, Paul called him aside and he felt his heart sink to his stomach. He understood he was going to be asked to leave Debbie alone, to give the beautiful, smart young woman a chance to find someone more worthy of her.

  In the garage, Paul picked a spanner up off his workbench and searched the wall for its correct placement. Logan waited, his heart pounding. He knew that he wouldn’t even be able to argue with Paul about his unsuitability. He was thirty years old and he had already spent three years in prison for break and enter and assault. He had no job and no money. He was a waste of a human being. As these thoughts circled in Logan’s head, Paul found the place for the spanner and smiled, clapping his hands together to get rid of imaginary dirt. ‘She’s always been the best judge of character, you know.’

  ‘She’s really smart,’ Logan replied.

  ‘As smart as any Labrador, I imagine,’ Paul said and Logan started laughing. Paul was talking about Betty. Paul joined him in his laughter.

  ‘I know my daughter, Logan,’ he said. ‘If she thinks you’re an okay bloke, then that’s good enough for me. I’ve always been a fan of second chances. It seems that you’ve been given one. See that you don’t stuff it up. We love her dearly and would hate to see her hurt.’

  ‘I won’t hurt her, Paul, I promise,’ Logan said, hoping like hell that he would be able to keep that promise. ‘I won’t waste this second chance.’

  Paul nodded and Logan breathed a sigh of relief. He smiles now as he thinks about Betty, who always sits right next to him when he and Debbie go over for a visit. His own personal dream is a house with enough of a garden for a kid and a dog. It’s not much, but right now it seems an impossible goal. It’s what Maddy always said she wanted as well – a house with a yard and dinner on the table, and kids who weren’t scared of their angry parents. She’d thought she’d found it with Patrick, and even though Logan didn’t understand the attraction, what bothers him is that his radar never picked up on the man being capable of such hideous violence.

  He looks down at his hands. He is so much bigger than Patrick. He could kill him with his bare hands. This thought is satisfying.

  Another text comes in and he looks down at his phone to see a message from his mother.

  Just thought you should know that what happened to her is on the internet.

  Logan doesn’t reply. He looks up a news site and straight away sees an article about Maddy.

  ‘Neighbours heard arguing and a woman begging someone to stop,’ he reads. Pinpricks run up and down his arms. They heard her begging. He can hear his sister’s voice, her tears, her cries for help, and the bite of meat pie threatens to come up again. He rubs his hands together; the desire to hit something, hurt something, hurt himself in place of hurting Patrick is overwhelming. When he lived at home, he did his best to protect her, stepping in front of a careless slap for no reason from their mother or a more deliberate hit from their father. He took the beatings for her, because he could. But then she was too far away for his protection. He holds his hands up to his eyes, pushing against them, trying to focus on the darkness he creates, but the chaos of his thoughts will not be calmed, even as he tries deep breathing and counting.

  Maddy, Maddy, Maddy.

  When he gets to Melbourne tonight, he will visit his sister and then he knows that at some point he will leave the hospital and search for the man who hurt her and then… he doesn’t want to think about it. Once he gets there, he will call the number again and again until Patrick answers. Or until someone else does. It has to be from the same man who hurt Maddy – it has to be.

  He looks at the article again, sickened by the bare reciting of facts. He reads articles like this every day, but it is different when it’s your sister being written about. The neighbours heard her screaming and begging and they did nothing? What kind of people live next door to Maddy? Who hears a woman asking for help and does nothing?

  He rubs his hands through his hair, damp with sweat. It’s killing him that he wasn’t close enough for her to call.

  There’s a chance it wasn’t Patrick who hurt her, but his mother is right – it’s always the husband or the boyfriend. Logan met quite a few of them in prison. That’s where Patrick belongs, although Logan would prefer him dead. He clenches his fist, imagines the feel of it smacking into Patrick’s cheek, imagines pummelling the flesh on the young man’s face.

  ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it,’ he growls, trying to rein in his own rage.

  His thoughts return to the neighbours who heard something and did nothing. What is wrong with people? If he thought someone was in trouble, he wants to believe he would help, that he would step in. All it would have taken was a knock on the door. A call to the police would have been even better.

  The woman from this morning comes back to him, and he feels a wave of shame. He thinks something is going on in that house but he’s done nothing. How would he feel if tomorrow he read about her on the internet – and he could have stopped it?

  On impulse he decides to swing by her house again. It’s out of his way but it doesn’t matter.

  The drive takes fifteen minutes, and when he gets to the house he sits in his van for a moment, watching the waves of heat shimmer off the asphalt.

  This is not a good idea. But I’m here now.

 
As he walks up the path to the front door, he notes that the house is still silent, no noise coming from inside. He rings the bell again, clutches the computer in his hand, holding it up, covering his face, when he hears what sounds like a chair being dragged and then the sound of the peephole sliding open again.

  ‘Thought I would just see if you can accept this now,’ he says, clearing his throat, knowing that this is not standard procedure, knowing that there is no way he should have done this and that if the woman complains, he will lose his job. But he’s made the decision and so he waits for a reply from whoever is looking at him through the peephole.

  ‘There’s a real gun,’ whispers a child’s voice.

  ‘What?’ Logan says, straining to hear better.

  ‘No wait, ow…’ yells the child. Logan hears a short scuffle and the chair being dragged away.

  ‘Look, mate,’ comes a male voice, low and menacing, ‘she doesn’t want it today. Don’t come back here or I’m calling the police.’

  The peephole closes and Logan stands on the front step, debating what to do.

  Outside in the street, emptied garbage bins – some of their lids left open, some lying on their side where the truck has dropped them – contribute to the rotting heat smell. Sweat beads on his upper lip. He runs his hand through his hair and it comes away wet.

  The door remains resolutely closed. He looks around anxiously. He shouldn’t be here. The last thing he wants is for the police to be called on him. He knows that they’ll see him for who he is and what he’s done.

  ‘No one saw,’ he mutters as he makes his way out of the front garden.

  He has kept repeating that mantra to himself ever since that last time. The time he doesn’t want to think about. It was months ago, before he went to Mack for a job. Months before and one desperate night, one desperate moment, but thankfully, mercifully, he stopped himself.

  It was still cold that night, the wind biting as he stood in front of the house. It was so easy to get inside. It took no time at all. Even now he can still see the sleek black laptop, light and expensive, in his grip. The house was empty. He had the laptop and some diamond earrings abandoned carelessly on the side table in the main bedroom. He cat-walked through the rest of the house, picking up small things – a digital camera, an iPad, some loose cash in a drawer – and then he made his way back to the broken back door, where the lock had given way with a small shove. And then he stood there as his heart thumped and his lungs seemed unable to inflate. The caged-in feeling of his small cell hung over him and he felt himself begin to shake in the cold night air. Debbie’s disbelief, Maddy’s disappointment and his father’s smug, ‘Told you so,’ assaulted him, one after another.

  And then he put everything down on the kitchen table and left, closing the door behind him.

  It woke him up at night, the horror of what he had almost done to his life, all over again. Did he leave a print, some DNA, some evidence? He was wearing gloves and he’s sure he kept them on, but he can’t remember. He is on the database for life. Did he leave a clue that it was him? Would the owners have reported it if nothing was taken? When the nightmare wakes him, he prays to a god he’s not sure he fully believes in that he will be forgiven and that one terrible, desperate act won’t come back to get him. So far, it hasn’t.

  But can he let his fears over repercussions from that one night stop him from helping this family?

  There’s a real gun. That was a strange thing for a kid to say. Were they playing a game – cops and robbers or something? But why was the man who spoke to him so aggressive? Why wouldn’t they just open the bloody door and take the computer so he didn’t have to think about any of this?

  What if the man who spoke to him was the husband and father, and he has a reason for not wanting the door to be opened? A series of horrible images of battered and bruised faces assaults Logan, Maddy’s face crowding out all the other pictures in his head. What if the woman inside was hiding the beating she got from the man there – and then what about those kids? Has the woman in the house been hurt the way Maddy has been hurt?

  In prison there was a group of men who hung around together because they were all there thanks to the ‘bitches’ they had found themselves married to or sleeping with. They muttered about these women all the time, about what they would do once they got out and got their hands on them. They were forced into counselling and sometimes it helped. Sometimes a man saw the light and realised that putting his hands on a woman was assault even if he was married to her, that he couldn’t take his anger at the world out on the woman he claimed to love. Sometimes they didn’t see the light.

  Logan knows that there are flats in their building where, every now and then, a woman emerges with a bruise on her arm or a black eye, and he also knows that he mostly doesn’t interfere. He can’t. He would hit the man who hit the woman, and that would mean back to prison for him. Debbie sometimes takes the opportunity to slip some pamphlets under the door, pamphlets that let the woman know help is out there. It’s not easy to ask for help. His own sister is in a hospital bed right now because of a man who hurt her. And he’s determined to do something about that.

  Back in his van he thinks about what Debbie has said about the universe: ‘Just keep an open heart and an open mind, babes. The universe will put you where you need to be.’ Why did the universe put him here, today of all days?

  He tips his head back against the seat and closes his eyes, curses this day, curses everything that has happened because now he knows what he has to do. Looking at his phone, he considers the ease and simplicity of simply calling triple zero and giving them an anonymous tip. But he’s not sure he would be able to explain it on the phone, that he will be able to make it clear enough that there is definitely something happening in the house. Would they even take him seriously? And if they didn’t, if they dismissed it as a crank call, what then?

  He has no choice. He feels like he’s driving to his own execution, happily taking himself off to hand himself over to the enemy. But something is happening in that house where he knows there are at least two children, small children who may need protecting from their parents. He pulls over and looks at his GPS, locating the nearest police station.

  You’re going to regret this. You know you are.

  14

  Gladys

  ‘I thought you might like to try a different flavour today,’ says Gladys, putting the bowl of salted caramel ice cream down on the tray over Lou’s legs. Her shoulder is aching a little where he leaned heavily on her on the way into and out of the bathroom. Peter is a large, strong young man, muscles bulging, and he never has a problem helping Lou. Peter is also fond of a game of chess, and Gladys knows that Lou misses this today, but she doesn’t know how to play and she fears that Lou would be more irritated than grateful if she asked him to teach her.

  The ice cream should pep him up a bit. He is sitting in his chair in front of the television, watching the news break, his wheelchair next to him in case he wants to use it. ‘They think it was that girl’s boyfriend who hurt her,’ he called to her when she was in the kitchen.

  ‘Yes, well, it’s always the case, isn’t it? People can be dreadful,’ said Gladys.

  ‘What flavour is this?’ Lou asks. ‘You know I only like chocolate.’

  Lou hits out at the bowl, tipping it over and spilling it on the carpet. Gladys rushes to get a rag, unable to help the few tears that appear. ‘I just wanted to give you a change,’ she says while she is down on her hands and knees, mopping up the mess. She feels herself pushing down her own anger. It’s a lump in her throat, and in her mind, she watches it move down into her stomach where it can’t force out damaging words. She takes a deep breath and wipes away the tears, not wanting Lou to see.

  Lou is quiet. ‘I’m sorry, old girl,’ he says eventually. ‘I’m a bit of a difficult old man, aren’t I?’

  Gladys sniffs and returns the rag to the kitchen. She brings Lou a bowl of chocolate ice cream and takes a serving of th
e salted caramel for herself. The news ends with the promise of a cool change that will drop the temperature by ten to fifteen degrees in an hour. ‘That’ll be a relief,’ says Lou quietly but Gladys cannot muster a reply. She allows the cool ice cream to slip down her throat, swallowing her feelings with the sweetness.

  Gladys can’t concentrate on the TV – she can’t stop thinking about what to do about Katherine and the children.

  Should I call the police? Should I go over there again? What if this is all in my head? What if I need to simply leave this family alone?

  Your imagination is going to get you into trouble, she admonishes herself silently.

  On the wall the air conditioner rattles as it pumps out cold air. Occasionally, Gladys glances at it, daring it to choose today of all days to break down. She’s sure she’s never heard it rattle like this before.

  A trailer for a crime series plays during the advert break. A dead body, blue lips and twisted limbs, being studied by two police officers. Gladys moves in her chair, uncomfortable with the image.

  ‘Why do they keep showing the story of that young woman on the news here if it happened in Melbourne?’ she asks, needing to clear the air because she can feel Lou’s silent sulking.

  ‘Ah, you missed that bit,’ says Lou. ‘They’re saying that the man they want to talk to, the one in the red hat, might have left the state a day or two ago. They’re not sure, you see, so they’re showing it everywhere. He could be in Sydney by now or Perth or Adelaide, anywhere.’

  Gladys takes another spoon of ice cream but it feels like too much; she swallows, feeling a sharp, cold pain from her teeth to her ears. Something about the man in the red hat bothers her more than it normally would and she has no idea why. Probably because the young woman in the pictures is so pretty. Rebecca, her niece, has just started dating a new man, and she and Lou have only met him once. He seemed nice but you never know. Most people seem nice enough but who knows what people are hiding from the world.