by John Dale
“Any regrets?” I asked.
My daughter shook her head. “Not one. It’s like a transferable ticket. He skipped out of one murder but he’s going to be in the frame for another one. You do the crime, you do the time. Even if it’s been billed to another account.”
* * *
A week later, my insider from the homicide squad tipped me off: “They’ll be serving the warrants for the arrest of the two men wanted for the murder of O’Dea. Later on today. Can’t give you an exact time.”
Later on today was good enough for me. I wanted to be there; I wanted to witness the beginning of the end of the slow burn; and I wanted to somehow convey to him—while remaining unidentifiable—that this wasn’t a random mix-up, this wrongful arrest. I wanted to link it back to what happened to our son, so that Twigg understood that the lady with the blindfold and the scales had finally caught up with him.
I hurried to the vacant house on foot and turned onto the lane behind it to check the shed. I didn’t want Twigg going out somewhere because that way I’d miss seeing the third last chapter of the retributive justice plan enacted, the second last chapter being his trial, and the final chapter being his incarceration for a very long time.
I peered through a crack in the fence. The old cat was stretched out there in the sunshine with ants clustered on the bowl of curdled milk and I could see that he needed a good feed but at least was getting a nice snooze in the sun. The shed door was closed though a piece of fabric draped over the inside of the window had sagged, allowing me to see Twigg moving around inside. My mobile chimed and I grabbed it. My friend on the inside, alerting me that the arresting officers were on their way.
I didn’t have long to wait. I saw a tall guy in uniform and a middle-aged detective walking down through the garden, from the front of the property. The cat sat up as the two men made their way through the long grass, watching warily as the uniformed officer rapped on the door. Twigg opened it, his scowl speed-changing from irritation to disbelief. Before he could speak, the uniformed officer grabbed him and cuffed him while the detective presented the warrant for his arrest in the matter of the murder of Dudley Russell O’Dea.
“What are you talking about?” Twigg yelled, struggling. “Murder? I don’t know anyone called O’Dea! There’s been a mistake. Get your hands off me!”
They dragged him out of the shed, easily managing him between the two of them. Twigg was yelling, “You’ve got the wrong man! I don’t even know him!”
“You know him well enough to leave your fingerprints at the crime scene, Ronny,” said the detective.
The cat suddenly bolted around the shed and disappeared into the long grass, frightened by the yelling.
“You can’t just haul me off like this. Who’ll look after my cat?”
“Stuff your cat, Ronald,” said the detective. “That’s the least of your troubles.”
I jumped onto a bin, climbed over the fence, and dropped to the other side, taking the police and Twigg by surprise. “Stay back, sir,” said the detective. “This is police business.”
“Sure,” I replied, “happy to comply. But I just wanted a word with my fishing mate before you take him away. You’re worried about your cat, Twigg? Probably kinder for it to be put down. It’s not in a good state.”
Twigg paused in his struggles, trying to make sense of what was happening. Then, with all the years of pain, rage, and frustration concentrated into one laser-like beam of fury, I said, “If you’re so worried about your cat, why don’t you just . . . cut his throat?”
For a few long seconds I stared at Twigg’s face before hauling my bulk ungracefully back over the fence. Then I chinned myself up and looked at Twigg being dragged toward the front of the property.
He had twisted around between the two officers and when he saw me his face registered shock and bewilderment. He tried to jerk away from the arresting officers, screaming his head off. And I knew then that he was desperately scanning his memory, trying to place who it might be among his jailbird mates to whom he’d so foolishly big-noted himself when he was a stupid kid, who’d set him up like this, and trying to work out how the man he’d been fishing with seemed to know about a nineteen-year-old murder. I also hoped that years later, if he ever worked out who I was, the prison officers would say, Sure, Ronny, pull the other one. In that moment, I felt the deep satisfaction that, although a long time coming and in a very elliptical fashion, justice had finally been done.
I went home with the cat under my arm and I put him in the laundry with some water, a dirt tray, and a nice bream fillet. I thought I could hear him purring as I closed the laundry door.
BLACK CUL-DE-SAC
by Philip McLaren
Redfern
It is around two a.m. and dark; council workers stopped replacing streetlights in this narrow alley behind the old Chippendale brewery years ago, it is simply too dangerous. Stoning outsiders is commonplace for the youth down here in the slums, and good sport. The same goes for most other cul-de-sacs in the aboriginal enclave of Redfern at night: black.
Pools of several too-bright LED flashlights survey the area adjacent to the bloodied, spread-eagled body. As police vehicles arrive, headlights are left on as well as the rotating red, white, and blues, and wipers—the autumnal tropical deluge has been bucketing down for days.
I push past the first line of cops, flashing my ID card as I go, sheltering under my large golf umbrella. I am the first person police call regarding black deaths; it’s protocol. I’m black. I’m the aboriginal liaison for this region; a politically appointed watchdog, I watch cops and how they deal with aboriginal people. The history of black deaths in custody sparked a demand for oversight. The lifeless man lying in the alley is also black.
I’m from the Kamilaroi Nation. Both my mum and dad are Kamilaroi, from Coonabarabran and Gunnedah in the western region of the state, but I was born in rundown Redfern thirty-two years ago. I still live here but on the other side, it’s not as tough over there, went to school and university just up the road, played all my football here.
The middle-aged plainclothes senior detective at the center of the group looks up as I approach. Dicky Henderson is his name, Tricky Dicky, looks like Nixon too.
“Hey, Craig, good to see you. Now I can go back to bed.” He is only half-joking. He puts on that counterfeit smile. He knows it annoys me. Fuck!
“G’day.” I force a phony cheery note into my voice.
“You reckon this is a good day? It’s a bit fucking wet.”
I ignore him. I walk to the body and flash some LED of my own. So much blood and so much money, fifty-dollar bills all strewn about, then I see the battered face. “Oh shit.”
“Know him?”
“Yeah . . . I know him. He’s my cousin.”
“Sheeet, all you guys are cousins.”
There is much to irritate me in this man’s voice. “No, really, Dicky.” He hates me calling him that. “He’s my first cousin. I saw him last night at my aunt’s place.” I pause and lower my voice. “His name is Lally Cameron. He lives . . . lived a bit farther up this street, over there, second house from the end.” I point to the house.
All the residents of the street are looking on, mainly black faces, while kids and adults are being interviewed by uniformed cops.
I sit on my haunches for a closer look. Fuck! He’s been seriously bashed, very seriously bashed, something solid has been used on his head and upper torso, a tire iron maybe. His skull has been cracked open and pieces of his brain sit on the wet asphalt, his half-empty cranium is full and spilling rainwater; some teeth cling to his gums. A nauseating odor comes from the mess.
“Sorry, mate.” Dicky’s speech is muffled. He is one of those old codgers who barely moves his lips to talk. “Were you close?”
“Yeah, kind of, there were Christmases and holidays. We grew up together.”
Dicky looks up the street as I speak. I guess he is trying to figure out who Lally’s family are from the drenched r
abble.
“Yeah, he lived with us for a while, just him, for a whole school term, don’t know what was going on in his family at that time. He was five years older than me. There’s a big Coonabarabran mob here in Redfern, all related. A few other Coonabarabran families live on this street as well as the Camerons.”
Just then the FSG—forensic science group—arrive and shepherd us away from the body. A taped-off no-go zone is being established. I push up against the high brick wall of the brewery; Dicky follows suit. The rain continues.
“Do you want to work with us on this or . . . ?” He leaves the question dangling.
“If that’s okay?”
“Good, yeah, fine, let me know when and for how long.”
“I’ll talk to you, maybe at the debrief, whenever.”
“Right, say at ten this morning?” Dicky is eager to pass this mess onto me to sign off on. Black deaths in this town can have unforeseen consequences.
“Yeah, ten is good.”
We both fall into a pact of silence and listen to the waking city as early-morning workers start to fill its arteries.
* * *
Last week Lally had come to the door of my aunt’s small two-up two-down terrace house on William Street. I was sleeping on her couch while I looked for another flat. They were pulling my old place down. Progress. Lots of “progress” going on in Redfern lately, politicos are adopting the successful New York “broken windows” theory. Repair the architecture and the crime rate drops. Lally lived about a mile away. He’d been doing some serious drinking. He was almost incoherent. My aunt wouldn’t let him in.
“Come on, Auntie, come on, just tonight. I’ll sleep on the floor, it’s pouring out here. You won’t even know I’m there.”
“No, Lally, go home.” Auntie Joyce spoke with her cheek up against the closed door.
“They won’t let me in down there.”
“Of course they’ll let you in.”
“I’m telling you, they won’t let me in, Aunt . . . not when I’ve been drinking.”
I was sitting at the dining table and didn’t want to intervene but was compelled to call out from the next room. “Go home, Lally!” I shouted in my deep other voice.
“Craigie? Hello, Craigie . . .”
“Go home, Lally,” Auntie Joyce said again softly.
“Drugs, Auntie.”
“What?”
“Drugs, I’m off my head, Auntie—drugs, lots of drugs, I’m using and can’t go home. Just need to sleep.”
She let him in, filled him with hot coffee, and an hour later he left, sheltering beneath her floral umbrella. He was singing “Rocky Mountain High.” We could hear his voice fading off as he staggered up the middle of the narrow street: “. . . going home to a place he’d never been before . . . He left yesterday behind him . . . you might say he was born again . . . born again.”
* * *
I stay behind after Lally’s body has been removed from the alley and all the cops have left. I want to see his mother and her family at her house. By this time the rain has eased a little.
“I’m sorry, Auntie,” is all I can say, all I can get out. I pull her to me.
“It’s okay, boy,” she whispers as we hug. “The poor little bugger done a lot of bad things, but he didn’t deserve this.”
“That’s right, Auntie, you’re so right,” I mumble. I’m hopeless, anything I think to say sounds trivial. Usually I say as little as possible.
In the room are Lally’s three sisters, all red-eyed, all stunned to silence. Auntie sits down and a tabby cat leaps onto her lap. She strokes the cat and it purrs. I ask what anyone knew or heard; shaking heads, nothing, no one heard or saw anything. Someone pushes a cup of tea in front of me and I drink it as we take turns recalling funny incidents involving Lally and we laugh. Relief. It’s funny that, about grief.
* * *
Tucked away at the back of the morgue, the FSG crew has worked overnight. The evidence has been meticulously tagged, arranged, and spread over five stainless-steel trestles. Very anal-retentive people work in forensics. They are startled as I come through the automatic sliding doors into the great room at the center of their complex which butts up to the autopsy theaters next door.
“Woo, you’re early . . . too soon!” says Matthew, the senior officer. The other two in the room just smile. “Nothing yet, I’m afraid.”
“That’s okay, I’m just on my way home, thought I’d pop in here first on the off chance.”
The team resumes their work, which of course is more important to them; visitors are given second rank here. I admire the work ethic but the staff are difficult to engage.
“I’ll take a look around, if that’s alright.”
“Goodo . . . but don’t touch or move anything,” Matthew says without looking up from the skull fragments and tissue that are placed like a hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle on his smaller bench. The pieces of what were my cousin’s skull and brain. Matthew has an angioscope and a larger microscope—both have computer monitors linked to recording and printing devices.
I watch him work for a short time, fascinated. Ten minutes later I leave, uttering a polite goodbye. No one responds or even looks up.
Even though I am tired, I decide to walk the mile and a half to Auntie Joyce’s place, through the university grounds and across Victoria Park. A couple of derelict men are there, sleeping rough.
You’ve never had to sleep rough, boy, my dad said to me a few years back, during a playful argument. He and my mother had slept under a tarpaulin hitched to a horse’s sulky for the first two years of their married life. He worked as a boundary rider, fixing fences on large sheep spreads, out of town for weeks on end, sleeping rough. I told him that I had, many times—he knew very little about my hitchhiking, backpacking days. My thing between rides was to find a school as my overnight camping spot for when it got late. The old country school houses all had verandas, I slept on them. But my dad was right. I never had to, it was a choice that I made.
* * *
I arrived at the debriefing at the Redfern police station precisely at ten. The place was full, maybe fifteen detectives, some were chatting, someone laughed. I looked across. Must have been a joke. Dicky came in and all settled down, just a few muted whispers hissing about the place. In turn, everyone read from their notes. The upshot was nothing. There were no leads.
Dicky came up to me. “It’ll be hard shit, this. Anyway, I got someone for you from downtown, you know, for you to work with.”
“Who?”
“Brian Lynch.”
“Lynchie the ex–footie player?”
“Yeah. Here’s his number. Hook up today. Okay?”
“Right, okay.”
I waited until I was outside to phone Lynchie. We got on well straightaway, we talked mostly about football. We laughed a bit. Over the following weeks I phoned him twice a day, but there were no leads.
* * *
We moved into winter in a blink. I braced against the cold wind as I walked out of Long Bay Correctional Centre after visiting a couple of blackfellas and headed for football training. It’s Tuesday. I play in a semi-professional rugby league for the Redfern All Blacks, the local aboriginal team. It got harder to get fit once I hit thirty.
The Redfern All Blacks Rugby League Club advertised in the local newspaper, calling on those interested in playing in the upcoming season to register now. Last week me and two of my first cousins decided, over a beer, that we would roll up again. The reality of the hardship of preseason training didn’t occur to us at the time.
Training is on Tuesday and Thursday nights, at seven, all winter. I arrive early. I like to kick the ball before training. The coach honks his horn and calls to us from his car as he arrives.
“Laps!” he yells. “Laps!”
There is the usual groan from the men as we form one large pack and set off on our four-lap warm-up run. Calisthenics and wind sprints follow. Then the coach forms us into our playing positions, working on
coordinated plays. It takes an hour and a half in all. The Railway Hotel, the club’s sponsor, is full of footballers by nine. It is our duty to support our sponsor, some club wit once said.
* * *
After another two weeks of training I feel a real physical difference, I’m more energetic, more alert than I’ve been for years. But I won’t give up the occasional beer, my card games, or betting on the horse and dog races—and especially not my nights out with my mates.
It’s the first game day of the season. The C Grade, our under-eighteen side, are playing as I arrive at the grounds. Inside the dank dressing room, men’s voices go up a few decibels and down a few octaves, echoing through the communal shower recesses. These are tough rugby-playing men, you can tell just by their voices.
“You fucking blokes know what to do with these cunts. Hammer them up the middle. I don’t want any fancy stuff, just hammer them. For the first twenty minutes just fucking hammer them. If they’ve got the fucking ball . . . hammer them. If we’ve got the fucking ball . . . hammer them. Don’t run around them. Run straight at the cunts!” The tall, thin, red-haired coach pauses for breath. “What are we gonna do to them?” he asks.
“Hammer the cunts!” the men shout in response.
“The big men up the middle for the first twenty . . . Okay?”
“Okay!”
“Pass back inside, okay?”
“Okay!”
“Hammer the cunts, right!”
“Right!”
“Say it! Hammer the cunts!”
“Hammer the cunts!”
The shouted strategy continues in the Redfern dressing room, back and forth, until a few seconds before the game.
* * *
Two hours later we are back in the same stinking, steam-filled dressing room. We won 22 to 7. We, me included, had well and truly hammered the cunts. The defeated C Grade boys joined in the celebrations and led the singing of our club’s victory song.
“Hey, uncle, you got the bastards who bashed Uncle Lally yet?” It was one of the younger players from the C Grade.
I’m on my back on the floor. “No, mate, still looking, lots of cops on it though. Me and Lynchie liaise, have catch-up calls most days. You know Brian Lynch?”
