by Iain Ryan
‘Why was she working for me if she had family money?’
‘Her parents cut her off. That’s what the sister told us. You sure you didn’t notice any change in Jenny’s behaviour towards the end?’
‘She was a bit erratic. She wanted money, that’s for sure. I guess that adds up. What drug was she on?’
‘A lot of different stuff. On the night in question, LSD and ice, mainly. You heard of ice?’
I shake my head.
‘It’s new. Methamphetamine, like speed. Really really dirty speed. She was messed up. Her blood work … She should have been dead. And if you combine that sort of use with a pre-existing mental condition, it’s just a matter of time. If it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else.’
It was a lot of new information. ‘What about the gun? Did you ever work out where that came from?’
‘No. That’s the real mystery on our end. I’m not really supposed to tell you this but look, it was an older pistol, pre-registration. No one in her family has any history with firearms. No friends or ex-boyfriends. We don’t know where it came from. But—’ and she leans across the table ‘—that same gun has killed someone before. Ballistics matched it to a body dumped out in a field in Gatton ten years ago. Someone shot a bikie with it.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘I know, right. Did Jenny ever mention a bikie gang to you? Banditos? Coffin Cheaters? Doomriders?’
‘God, no. Nothing.’
‘Good.’
I take a bite of my sandwich.
‘Look, don’t beat yourself up about it,’ says Edwina. ‘Some people are lying pieces of shit and they do things that none of us normal people understand. That’s what I’ve learned doing this for a living. What happened to you, it’s like getting hit by a bus. You step out, then the wrong person runs you down. That’s all it is.’
‘I don’t know—’
‘Nope. You’re an academic right? You can’t learn anything from this, OK? Just get on with your life. I know it’s hard to hear but, honestly, that’s the best thing you can do right now. Just try and forget about it. All this bullshit these days, blah, blah, blah recovery and blah, blah, blah closure and whatever else. It’s nonsense. Let me tell you something, you’ve got to forget about this. Just push it down. Keep it out of your mind. If you can do that long enough, it leaves permanently, trust me. All the psychobabble is just beating around the bush.’
‘Sounds like good advice.’
‘It is.’ Edwina folds her Subway wrapper into a neat rectangle. ‘Anything else?’
‘Jenny had something of mine. Interview data.’
‘Like, numbers or something?’
‘Audio files, for my work. I think it’s on a dictaphone. Could that be sitting in a box at the station?’
‘Maybe. There’ll be a package of her stuff somewhere. I’ll do you a deal. I’ll take a quick look for that dictaphone if you give me your stamps.’
‘What stamps?’
‘The Subway stamps.’
Two half-inch stamps sit beside a bunched napkin on the table in front of me. I can’t even remember taking them from the clerk.
‘Deal.’
Detective Edwina leans over and delicately picks up the stamps with a wet fingertip. Close to me now, I can see something behind her ear: a small tattoo, a plain circle of dark ink sitting just beneath the neatly pulled hair.
I open the door to my dark apartment. It’s the same as it ever was, except haunted. As I pass my bedroom door there’s the voice whispering:
That’s where you landed.
That’s where she fired the gun.
That’s where the blood went.
I ignore it, head straight through to the lounge room and flop down on the couch and stare at the ceiling. I call the cat but the little prick doesn’t come. After a time, I see that there’s a slight red glow to the room. I scan around. The answering machine blinks.
I push the button.
You have two new messages. The first message, received at three forty-five p.m. Hi, Erma, this is Howard. Someone thought they saw you on campus today. Was that you? If so, and if you’re feeling more comfortable about everything, give me a call or drop by the Centre. We’d love to have you back. Just call the office or stop in. Hope you’re well.
Click.
Next message, received at seven fifty-eight p.m. —or so I thought. In the beginning, none of us really thought much about the deeper meaning of what we were creating. There was, I guess, a mild sense of the occult floating around. It was the eighties after all, a time of moral panic, the Dungeons & Dragons scare and so on. Anyone who came to gamebooks in that era – came fresh to it, as I did – they had some sense that they were entering a slightly dark place and – oh, sorry – Where was I? Ah, gamebooks, yes, gamebooks; they are, in their own way, a particularly dark place if you really think about it. In role-playing games, the characters pick and choose. They shift the story. They influence things. But in gamebooks, that’s locked down. It’s control—
Click.
To play the message again, press …
I listen again.
I know the voice but I can’t accept that I know it. I run to the study and open a video on my computer of Archibald Moder giving an interview on British TV. He’s narrow across the shoulders with a neat black beard. An ageing Ben Kingsley. I hit the volume and the room fills with his voice.
Thin, nasally, insistent.
The same voice.
Moder was a psychotherapist before he turned to writing and his interviews are filled with this very precise way of talking to people. He has an unmistakable cadence. A slow deliberate pace that sounds like conversation but is often deeply rhetorical and subjective.
I go back to the machine and play the message five more times.
It’s him.
A recording. An answering machine recording of an interview.
I zero in on the message a sixth time, to one particular fragment:
– dark place and – oh, sorry – Where was I?
and – oh, sorry – Where …
– oh, sorry –
And there, in that tiny space inside the sentence, I can hear a woman’s voice in the background. A gentle laugh as she apologises. I play it again and again and again. Something falls or slips and there she is.
A woman.
A girl.
Jenny.
My legs shake. I reach for the wall and miss.
I crumple up.
SERO
10
You ride the stolen horse for three days across grasslands without end. You follow your map and orient yourself against wells marked with crude windmills. Three days of waist-high pasture brushing against the horse followed by three eerie cloudless nights spent sleeping in the blades. The monotony of it irks you. Even the horse is bothered. The two of you don’t speak. You don’t reassure the animal. It doesn’t seem friendly. Ash grey and angry, is what it is. Tormented. The horse refuses any kind of unnecessary contact and you’re both glad for each night’s separation.
11
On the fourth day, you ride out of the plains and up into the mountains. A structure appears, stilts and beams protruding up into the sky, a small timber castle built into the mountain wall. Its windows glow.
As you walk the horse into a cobblestone courtyard, two shapes appear, both cloaked in black gowns. Both figures have cherry-red skin. They greet you in a strange tongue.
‘I can’t understand that.’
‘Ah-ha. I told you he was human,’ says one of the figures, removing her hood. ‘You must have travelled a long way to be this far into Emery.’
‘I’ve come a distance.’
The other one clasps her hands. ‘And where are you headed, traveller?’
‘A distance yet.’
‘Humans are like this,’ says the first one. ‘They enjoy secrets. I’ve been told this.’
Her partner nods. ‘Do you seek lodgings? Is that something you can disclose
?’
‘What is this place?’
They both smile at that.
‘This is Firetop House,’ says the shorter one. ‘It’s whatever you want it to be, if you have gold.’
‘I have gold,’ you say.
12
One coin buys you everything. You feast on fowl and wine by an open fire. You bathe in hot water, hands reaching in to scrub your skin, working soap through your hair and across your back. As they attend to you, a pale eunuch plays a stringed instrument and it works on you like a potion, closing your eyes for an indeterminate period. Later, you find yourself in a bubbling hot spring with a black sky above. The rain starts to become a sleeting soft ice.
‘It’s snow,’ says your host. ‘Have you seen snow before?’
‘No. I thought it would be heavier.’
The host waits by the pool until your companions arrive. There are two of them, a man and a woman. As they slip from their gowns the host says something to them in her language and the companions nod in agreement.
The female companion drops into the pool first. She wades across. As she touches you, the softness of her is as startling as the heat from a fire.
The male companion waits on the other side.
He smiles.
The woman kisses your neck, runs a hand across your scalp. The man begins to approach through the water while fingers slip between your legs, and then the man is close and he smells different to the woman, like treated pine. His breath is warm.
His tongue touches your lips.
And you remember something:
Another pool.
Another man.
Another kiss.
The world screams inside your mind for an instant but only until you find yourself engulfed.
ERMA
It’s 7.50 a.m. and the Centre for Creative Writing and Cultural Understanding is pretty much as I left it. Kanika is the only person here at this time of day. I knock on the Squadroom glass. She smiles and waves me in. ‘The prodigal son returns.’
‘We’ll see.’ The interior of her office is like a flashback. Books in piles. Stacked papers. Wine stains. The wall of shame: the fourteen photographs of missing girls. ‘Is this still going?’
‘I wrote the book. But it feels weird to take them down, and I’ve got an ARC grant in for a continuation. I’m working on the examiners’ reports at the moment.’
‘Sounds good.’ I don’t know what else to say. I stand there in the doorway trying to think of something.
‘Been to your office yet?’
It’s the next one over. ‘No. I forgot my keys. It’s been so long I stopped carrying them.’
‘I’ll call security. You want a coffee?’
It takes forty minutes for the university security guard to arrive and, when he does, he takes his time testing each master key in the lock, wheezing softly. ‘Lot of doors in this place,’ he says.
Kanika, who hates these guys with a passion, who wonders out loud what security actually do on a university campus with a history of missing women, groans and says, ‘This is taking a long time, dude.’
The guard stops. ‘Hey, I’ve got these keys and this lock. That’s the situation.’
‘What if there was a fire?’ says Kanika. ‘What if something like that happened and we needed to open a door in a hurry?’
‘That would be a good day to remember your keys,’ says the guard.
Kanika takes out a notebook. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Rob.’ He grunts. The lock snaps open. ‘There we go.’
I look in. It’s all there.
My career on pause.
My old life.
It even smells like it used to.
‘Have a good day,’ says the guard.
‘You too, Rob,’ says Kanika, holding up her middle finger as he waddles off.
When I’m alone in my office, in my old office chair, something happens. I shut down. I leave my body. I daydream. I’m not sure where I go. I’m not sure what I’m thinking about but the trance is broken by the phone.
It’s Howard’s extension.
‘You want a coffee?’ he says.
Howard Chandler might be the only thing that has changed. He’s still wearing jeans and trainers to work but his face looks five years older. ‘I’m miserable,’ he says, more a statement than a complaint. As my eyes adjust to the sunny brightness of his room, I notice his hair is lighter too, greyer. ‘Erma, I just can’t hack it like I used to.’
‘So, things have gotten worse?’
‘I’ve got fucking students, undergrads, using terminology like “job-ready”. They talk like the execs these days. Can’t tell them apart. I don’t know how to feel about it. I never thought that way at uni. Did you?’
‘I did a business degree. I think it’s obvious I wasn’t thinking much of anything when I was in undergrad.’
‘How are you, anyway? You coming back?’
‘I guess.’
‘You need anything? You might have to pick up some teaching next semester, just till we get things squared away.’
‘That’s fine. Do I still have to do something about those complaints?’
‘It’s still ongoing, I’m afraid. I can’t say I’m surprised. We didn’t dodge that bullet while you were away, not entirely … Sorry.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘You sure?’
‘What are you asking me?’
Howard rubs at his right eye with his palm. ‘Are you OK, Erma? It’s fucked up. It’s really fucked up what happened to you.’
‘I’m fine, Howard.’
He nods but I can tell he doesn’t believe me.
I spend the day deleting emails. I hit the campus gym. I work on my cross. It’s getting better. The dint where my fist piles into the bag is much narrower and deeper now. I still look the same. There’s still a softness to my face, to my eyes especially. I don’t look like an imposing person. Never have. But when I track back across to this black punching bag, I know that it’s absolutely gotten to the point where I wouldn’t want to be hit by me.
I head home but end up back on Harcourt Street. I find a parking spot near Jenny’s sister’s place, then grab a noodle box and bring it back to the car, back to the half-arsed stakeout I’ve promised myself is actually about rebooting my career and not about Jenny.
I eat and watch Gloria’s empty house. She’s still refusing to return my calls. As the evening darkens, a harsh wind roars around me, rocking the car. Nothing else happens. After three hours, I start the car and pull into Gloria’s driveway to make a U-turn, my headlights pushing through the timber latticework at the bottom of the house. The wind is violently lifting and dropping something inside. I roll down the window and listen. A tarpaulin. A sustained blast has the thing flapping and bellying so high it raps the undercarriage of the house.
I check the rear-view. Everyone’s indoors. The street is dead.
I get out.
The front door to Gloria’s garage is locked with a chain but I circle round the house and find a laundry with an earth floor. The laundry leads through to the garage from behind. As I step in, the tarp roars up and there in the fractured beams of my headlights is Jenny’s car, caked in dust.
This feels wrong.
Just push it down.
I try the driver’s side door: locked.
The wind blasts again.
A rope is attached to a free corner of the tarp. It whips past my face and I blink. Shit. Almost had my eye. The air sucks back in and the car is covered over again. Spooked, I back out.
I try to sleep but can’t go deep enough to dream.
3.03 a.m.
I get out of bed without really deciding to.
Boil the jug.
Pace the carpet in the hallway, waiting.
My laptop is open on the coffee table, already on. I kid myself that I’m starting the day early and check my email. I have eighty-five new emails since I left the office last night. The first is a call-for-papers for
a popular culture conference on Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Papers that touch on the Britney/Paris continuum as collective desire, objects of fandom, an embodiment of—
Delete.
Second message:
Dora Bridges has published a new blog post on Myspace. Click the link below to read the post …
My sister.
I hit the URL and a blue box of text appears on the screen. Dora has a few Myspace profiles, each different in terms of style or theme or whatever. On this one, she writes in block capitals. I don’t know why my sister does this stuff. No one does. Her life is always half fantasy. On this account, she posts the same type of missive each time: short, vague debriefs that look like poems.
SINCE HE LEFT I CAN BREATHE AGAIN.
3 MONTHS NOW. CAN’T BELIEVE IT.
PHILIPPA STILL CALLS OUT FOR HIM IN THE NIGHT AND IT BREAKS MY HEART.
A COLD WINTER BUT GETTING BETTER.
HOPE YR WELL.
XOX
D
The details of this race through my blood like a drug. He left? HE is her husband, Euan. Her ex-husband now? No way of knowing. My family is a mess. Dad calls me three times a year. Mum calls when she wants something. And I haven’t spoken to Dora this century. We can’t be together. Don’t belong together. We aren’t really sisters.
I get so wound up by Dora’s message that exercise is the only option. I take to the streets. I run. I have to. The fact that I’m running back towards Gloria’s house – to Jenny’s car under Gloria’s house – with a backpack containing a crowbar wrapped in a bath towel, it’s almost a side note.
Just push it down.
Just push …
I hear Detective Edwina on loop with:
– dark place and – oh, sorry – Where was I?
and – oh, sorry – Where …
– oh, sorry –
‘Stop,’ I whisper between breaths, but things are at a point where I’m not entirely sure who I’m talking to.
A police car glides past as I come into the long crescent of Moray Street. It’s fine. It’s just a crowbar, wrapped in a bath towel. The headlight passes over me and the street returns to pre-dawn near-dark.
