by John Dale
Lockie displayed no interest in these stone carvings; all he wanted to do was get back to his father’s car. “This place gives me the creeps,” he said.
“Why don’t we do it here?” she suggested.
Lockie looked around at the swaying oak trees. She could sense the idea appealed to him.
“What if we get caught?”
“Who’s going to find us?” She didn’t mention the graffiti gang who scaled the walls to spray their tags or the bicycle cops who sometimes pursued them. She didn’t mention how she used to come here with her previous boyfriend. She read the names of someone’s beloved on a cracked headstone nailed to the bottom of the wall and then she knelt and unzipped his chinos and took him in her mouth. Kangaroo grass brushed against her legs. Once, she’d asked how old he was when he’d first had his cock sucked, and he’d answered, “Fifteen. At Joey’s.”
“By a woman?”
“You’re the first,” he said. Of course she’d suspected he was a virgin, all that studying law and going to the gym left no time for girls.
He lifted up her dress and rolled down her underpants. When he laid her gently on a horizontal slab, the sandstone felt cool against her bare skin but not unpleasant. Jazz closed her eyes and let the moment carry her. His breathing grew rapid and a cricket chirped and then a jet roared low over Newtown, muffling his cries. Afterward she held onto him, not wanting him to rush off.
“We need to talk,” he said. Glistening with sweat, he rolled off her onto the worn slab. Low spiky bushes surrounded them. “Don’t get me wrong, Jazz,” he began. His voice sounded nervous. “I like being with you, I really do, but I don’t know if we’re suited. I mean, we can still be friends, see each other now and then . . .”
She sat up and searched for her underpants, then smoothed down the giraffe-print dress she had worn especially for him.
“There’s no other woman, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just need to focus on my career. The next few years will be critical.”
Jazz let him talk. Men always let you down, her mum used to say, you can’t rely on them for anything. What would Lockie think of her in the years to come? Would he look back on their hasty sexual encounters with fondness or would she be quickly forgotten in his scramble for success? He never said it, but this is what he thought: she was not good enough for him.
He tried a change of tone, almost jocular: “You’ll probably thank me one day, Jazz.”
Something heavy moved near the wall and Lockie jumped to his feet. He buttoned his pants and grabbed a thick branch from the ground and raced over, thrusting the bushes aside. Jazz assumed it was a dog trapped in there or one of the local taggers.
A man ran out from the bushes straight at Lockie, who yelled and brought the heavy end of the branch down hard on the guy’s head. The sound it made was like a timber crate being split with an axe. Stunned, the man swayed, mouth agape, then fell forward. His forehead struck the edge of a stone urn with a loud crack and he landed sideways on an unmarked grave, arms and legs sprawled, not moving.
Jazz ran over and knelt beside him. It was the man who’d approached them in the restaurant. She saw the depression in his skull and placed two fingers against his carotid artery. Nothing. By the light of the moon she could tell he was gone. She’d seen two dead parents up close and knew that look. Wedged between the fingers of his right hand was the smoldering remains of a joint. So he had scored, after all.
Lockie tossed the branch into the bushes and covered his face with his hands. “Oh God,” he said, “I’ve killed a cop!”
“Why’d you do that?”
“He freaked me out, he came out of nowhere, I thought he was going to rape us . . .”
Jazz slipped a hand inside the man’s suit jacket and found his wallet. She flipped through a bunch of store cards looking for ID and there it was, a business card: Kenny Gelder. MEMBER. REIA.
“He’s no cop,” Jazz said. “He’s a real estate agent.”
“This isn’t happening!” Lockie was taking rapid breaths and looking up at the church steeple as if praying for a miracle.
Jazz touched the man’s coarse hair. Lockie had got that wrong too; it was no wig. Poor old Kenny with his bad skin and ruddy complexion.
“I’m fucked,” Lockie said.
“Tell the police it was self-defense.”
“I can’t go to the police. My whole life would be ruined. My father is a lawyer. My grandfather was attorney general.”
“Maybe they’ll get you off then,” she said.
“What was I doing in this churchyard? Having sex on a gravestone. Oh yes, that would look brilliant for my future employment. Why’d you bring me here?” His voice rose in anger. “Why didn’t we go back to the car?”
Surely he was not trying to blame her? She had a good mind to walk away and leave him to deal with it. But Lockie started to quickly backtrack. He was not the violent type, he’d never been in a fight before, not since high school. “What am I going to do, Jazz?” His eyes begged her. She stood up and held him in the dark. The moon had slipped behind the clouds and a few faint stars were the only light source.
“I’ll help you,” she said, “but this has got to be your decision.”
He wiped his nose and nodded.
“First thing, we need to get rid of his phone; second, the cops will interview everyone at the restaurant. We tell them we last saw him talking to the barmaid.”
“What about the body?” Lockie asked, staring down with distaste.
“We dispose of it.”
“I’m not chopping it up!”
“If they find his body it’s murder, at best manslaughter. If they don’t find a body it’s a missing person. Big difference in priority.” She bent over Kenny and patted his trouser pockets, retrieved his iPhone, checked a message on the display, then snapped his SIM card in half. Poor Kenny, he was out celebrating a house sale. Who would feed his dog?
“Wait here,” she said.
“Where you going?” Lockie called after her. “Jazz . . .”
One thing her father had taught her was to never panic when you are in a fight; keep calm and wait for your moment. When she was twelve years of age, he took her to the gym in Erskineville, put her in with a fierce girl with cornrows who tried to knock her head off, but she did exactly what her dad had taught her, slipping and countering, sliding her feet in and out of trouble, moving her head and rolling her shoulders until that big islander girl had punched herself out. Her dad and his boxing mates cheered her on from the ropes. He never encouraged her education, never took her anywhere that didn’t involve his drinking, but she’d learned how to weather life’s blows from him.
She pulled the cemetery gate shut and walked down Church Street, flying foxes squabbling overhead, then turned onto King, pushing between crowds of diners and drinkers. She dumped the phone and the SIM card into an overflowing bin, making sure the bouncer obscured her from the hotel’s CCTV cameras. Cockroaches scuttled past her feet on the greasy pavement. After the council trucks rolled through in the early hours of the morning, there would be no sign of Kenny or his phone. She went home and found Nan asleep in front of the TV. She grabbed a short-handled spade from the old brick shed under the mango tree and rolled it up in her yoga mat. At the churchyard she pushed softly on the iron gate and crept up on Lockie, who was sitting on the edge of a tombstone, hands covering his face. The enormity of what he had done had paralyzed him into inaction.
Jazz unrolled her yoga mat. He blinked at her with self-pity then followed her cautiously along the west wall until she stopped between two gravesites overgrown with weeds and tall grass. A horizontal slab covered one of the graves, the engraved names erased by the elements. Jazz worked her spade in under one corner of the slab but couldn’t shift it. She heard the woo-hoo of a powerful owl. She looked around and tried again. What panicked her most was that underage drinkers would discover them.
Lockie removed his polo and, grunting, lifted the slab off with a p
op like a tight lid coming off a jar. Underneath was a deep sunken hole where the rain had got in, giving off an earthy smell of rot. How many bodies were interred below, Jazz didn’t know; she hoped poor Kenny wouldn’t mind spending eternity on top of strangers. Together, they dragged his body over by his legs and rolled him into the hole and covered him with a layer of dirt and then maneuvered the stone slab carefully back over the top. Volunteers from the church often tidied up these neglected gravesites, but you couldn’t tell the slab had been disturbed. It was airtight and partly hidden under the Chinese elms. No one was going to bother around in there.
She dropped a branch and sprinkled leaves over the adjoining grave and rolled the spade up in her yoga mat and gave it to Lockie, who looked at her strangely, as if she had done this type of thing before.
On the way out she showed him where she had scattered her mum’s and dad’s ashes at opposite ends of the churchyard so they wouldn’t argue with each other. St. Stephen’s was her favorite parish church in the world and the only one she’d ever been inside of. Years ago, her nan knew everyone on this street, families who had lived in the same houses for generations, but that sense of community was gone. People had to look after themselves these days. She secured the heavy padlock on the iron gates and slipped her arm around Lockie’s waist. She had never known him to be so quiet. Maybe this could work out between them. She could use those gym muscles. She asked him if he would do her a big favor: “Help me carry Nan to bed?”
Without hesitation he said yes.
“I couldn’t stick Nan in a nursing home,” she told him. “We need to look after her properly . . .”
The word we didn’t seem to faze him. Since her father had died, she had wanted a man she could rely on, someone she could trust. That’s what a real relationship was. Of course, he would need to make adjustments. She thought of his smooth, hairless chest shining under the moonlight. Her girlfriends were right. She had snared the man of her dreams: tall, strong, handsome, with rich parents. Mr. Perfect.
IN THE DUNES
by Eleanor Limprecht
Maroubra
The week before council collection the footpaths are stacked with people’s unwanted stuff. Snapped surfboards, plastic baby walkers, stained office chairs, and dinette sets from the eighties. Rusted-out bicycles, suitcases with broken zippers, cracked terra-cotta pots, box set televisions, and weight benches spilling foam. Alf does the drive round in his dual-fuel Falcon Ute with Marnie sitting shotgun. He keeps the engine running since the Falcon can be finicky about starting.
Marnie slides out and checks the gear over while he idles beside the curb. She knows the drill by now. Does the chair have a broken leg? Has the cord been chewed by a rat while it moldered in the garage for twenty years? Seriously, though, you wouldn’t believe what people give away. Just because two-thirds of it is crap doesn’t mean that there aren’t some genuine treasures in the remaining third.
Marnie doesn’t jump at the chance to come along these days but she still does if he insists. She sits sullen and silent beside him. Used to be it was like an adventure together, a treasure hunt, some of their best times. It’s harder and harder to know what’s going on in that head of hers now. She fixes dinner like her mum used to, puts the laundry on, and sometimes even watches the telly with him, but most of the time she’s either in her room with the door shut or present but not, looking at her phone, sending messages to the friends he’s never met since she doesn’t bring them home.
Tonight they find a bedside table with all the drawers working, a set of barbecue tongs which look like they’ve never been used, an old dog house which he’ll fix up and sell on Gumtree, and half a dozen romance novels which Marnie shoves beneath her seat. He’d have thought at fourteen she’s too young to be reading that rubbish, but he keeps his mouth shut. Since her mum died two years ago—just after Marnie got her period—he’s realized that trying to talk about those things, female things, just makes it worse. Makes her face get all splotchy, her eyes squeeze shut, and the rolls of fat around her middle shake as she cries without making a sound. She needs a mum for these things, but what’s Alf to do? Not as though he can just put an ad on Gumtree for one. And the rest of the family—his and Em’s—are back in the UK. No aunties to take the girl aside and show her how to shave her legs, how to cross them when she’s wearing a skirt or dress.
It doesn’t help, Alf thinks, driving down to Marine Parade from Lurline Bay, past the huge boxy houses with tinted windows, landscaped gardens, and backyard pools, it doesn’t help that Em and he always kept to themselves. Ever since they’d moved into their flat overlooking the rifle range and the headland at South Maroubra, they’d agreed: there’s no problem worth burdening strangers with. They kept Em’s illness quiet, the years of dialysis treatments, the long absences from work which caused him to eventually lose the council job. Ten years he drove the street sweeper. Well too. Never a gutter left clogged with wet leaves. He still finds himself angling his Ute toward curbs, hugging the very edge of the road.
He drives toward the long flat stretch of beach, rolling down his window to feel the kick of the southerly wind, and pulls over to watch the surf. It’s slate blue and churny, there’s some swell at the north end and a few board riders braving the dusk for it. There’s the salty seaweed smell he’ll never grow tired of and the stretch of promenade speckled with dogwalkers and teenagers reluctant to go home. The boxy pink North Maroubra surf club building beside the showers and picnic tables, some seagulls still scavenging in ghostly flocks. Beside the curb where they’ve pulled up, someone’s left their Macca’s rubbish, crushed cups and grease-spotted bags. Lined up on the footpath are empty bottles of VB, Tooheys New, silver blue cans of UDL. Marnie ducks her head like she always does these days, he can feel her fear like you feel a dog’s. She takes after her mum, who was never keen on the beach.
“It’s hard for a big lady,” Em used to say, “to feel comfortable parading around in next to nothing in broad daylight.”
Marnie’s built like Em, solid and only more so in the past two years. Her school uniforms they buy at Kmart because the sizes run too small at the school uniform shop. Her other clothes they buy at the Vinnie’s on Anzac Parade, and Marnie won’t even try them on, just finds the biggest-size jeans or jacket, shapeless dress, and passes them to him to take to the white-haired lady with shaky hands at the register.
“Can we have KFC for dinner?” she mumbles now, looking at the phone in her lap. It’s the first sentence she’s spoken all afternoon.
“Alright,” he agrees, on a whim. “Just this once.” It’s worth it for the quick moment she glances at him, the almost smile, before turning back to the shiny surface of her phone.
As he drives away from the beach and the breeze, up Maroubra Road into the tangle of ugly shops around the Junction, he promises himself that tomorrow he’ll start talking to her about eating healthy, about losing some weight. He’ll buy the fruit and veg he keeps meaning to buy from that nice Indian couple at the South Maroubra shops instead of the frozen dinners from Woollies they started buying when Em got sick.
* * *
They finish the bucket of lukewarm chicken in front of the six o’clock news. There is a woman in Quaker’s Hill who abandoned her baby the night before in a storm-water drain. The bub was found by a cyclist who heard the cries riding past, and went to investigate. The anchor—serious-faced—says the mother turned herself in and was charged with attempted murder. Marnie’s been looking at the screen in her lap instead of the telly but the taps on her phone slow like the drops at the tail end of a rainstorm.
“What a tragedy,” Alf says, shaking his head. “A horrible thing to do.”
Marnie gets up and leaves, not saying anything, shutting the door to her room. What’s gotten into her? he wonders. Em would have agreed, might even have cried the way she did when they had stuff on the news about abandoned children or babies who’d been hurt. There’s still a row of photographs of the charity kids Em s
ponsored on the windowsill, dark-skinned children with tangled hair and faded T-shirts, even though they stopped paying the monthly charity bills when he lost his job.
Tomorrow, when Marnie’s at school, he’ll tidy up, throw some of those old faded photos away. Then he’ll scrape back the peeling paint on the doghouse, sand it, and give it a fresh coat. White, maybe. With blue trim. He still has a tin of blue paint which Marnie chose for her room—she must have been nine or ten. It had been pink before that and Marnie decided one day she hated pink. “It’s what they do,” Em had said, smiling as she shook her head. “Turn against their parents.” But it was different, then. Alf knew Em was proud that Marnie was making up her own mind about things. Figuring out what she liked, rather than what was expected of her.
That night he goes to sleep thinking about Marnie when she was born, her new-baby smell, the creases in her legs which Em would powder so they didn’t get red in the heat. Em did everything, nearly everything—that was part of the problem. Maybe if she’d let him help out a little he wouldn’t be so lost now that she’s gone.
* * *
It’s odd because he hears the sirens that morning—a week later—but doesn’t think twice about it. He’s been outside working on the starter motor; it’s a still day, hot, and he’s planning a swim in the afternoon, thinking of the surf crashing over him and cooling his skin. The locusts are screeching beyond the fence in the rifle range and the crows are perched on the power lines, their caws punctuating songs from the oldies station on the radio, the distant thrum of the surf. But he ends up getting lost in the work, that feeling when you’re so caught up in what you’re doing that suddenly it’s dark and you don’t know where the day has gone. He’s swum after dark once or twice, but to tell the truth, it scares him. The thought of sharks lurking in the murky dark water, of getting caught in a rip with no one to see you go. Alf loves the beach but he doesn’t know it, he’s come to it late in life and it’s like a language he’ll never be fluent in, no matter how hard he tries. He imagined once that Marnie would know, growing up on the doorstep and all, but he was wrong. Turns out she’s inherited her parents’ fear.
