by Kylie Ladd
The crash site was chaos, as anticipated. Their three fire trucks were the first emergency vehicles to arrive, and as a result onlookers clogged the scene, spilling from the verge and onto the freeway, flapping and gaping like fish pulled up from the bottom of the ocean. Dobbsy leapt from the truck before it had come to a complete stop, megaphone in hand.
‘OK, everyone, we need you all to stand back. Back. Back!’
He barked out the last order and the crowd reluctantly retreated a few inches, some of them still craning their necks. Matt clambered out of the truck behind Richo and the new guy, the siren dying behind them though the lights were still on. Without speaking, they split up: Richo to the west, Matt to the east, the new guy heading up the freeway, away from Dobbsy. Neal, Matt thought. Was that his name? He hadn’t caught it at the briefing.
An hour and a half later, they were only just beginning to get on top of things. The flow of petrol had been stemmed, the freeway surface coated with a thick foam blanket, the driver of the tanker extracted from the wreckage and taken to hospital, though the occupants of the vehicle underneath it were still trapped. The crew from truck three were preparing the Jaws of Life while Matt and his team remained on the periphery, continuing with the clean-up. Most of the rubberneckers had long since lost interest and drifted away, but as Matt coiled a hose he noticed a news van pull up at the south end of the scene, brazenly parking almost on top of the tape. A well-groomed young woman stepped out, followed by two men, one already hoisting a camera to his shoulder. Matt froze. Richo paused from his own duties beside him.
‘Jackals,’ he murmured. ‘They’re probably hoping for something nice and bloody. It won’t make the first block before the ads otherwise.’
Sweat broke out down Matt’s back and across his stomach. That van. He’d seen it before. Well, of course he had, there’d been three or four just like it, parked outside his house for weeks. The woman, though, surely he recognised her? Tawny hair, bright red lipstick, pencil skirt. She’d thrust a microphone in Rachael’s face one day, about a week after Charlie came home; she’d camped out at the bottom of the front steps and ambushed her as Rachael had tried to get in with some shopping. At least he thought it was her. Did it even matter, anyway? They were all the same. Anger unravelled in the pit of his stomach. He stood staring at the woman as she dabbed at her face with some makeup, then fluffed out her hair. As he watched, the cameraman lifted the tape and ducked under it, beckoning his colleagues to follow him.
Hey!’ Richo cried out. ‘You can’t do that. This is an accident scene. It’s dangerous!’
The cameraman ignored him, veering towards the tanker and the half-crushed car, directing the presenter where to stand. As she lifted her microphone to her mouth Richo started in their direction, but Matt was past him in a second, fists balled, fury propelling him into a sprint. Fuckers, he yelled, unaware that he’d vocalised the word, that his legs were pumping. Fuckers, all of them, the journos that had camped out on his lawn and the conspiracy theorists who’d suggested he’d killed his own daughter and everyone on talkback with an opinion and the newspapers and the websites and especially the bloody tabloids, the inane women’s magazines like that one that had so upset Rachael this morning, fuckers the lot of them. He wished them all dead. He’d kill them himself. The foam was slippery underfoot and he skidded but kept his balance, pulling up heaving and wild-eyed in front of the startled presenter, raising his arm to knock the microphone from her grasp, then suddenly turning and clocking the cameraman across the jaw instead.
It was Richo who drove him home. He was probably regretting ever letting Matt come back to work, but if he was he didn’t say anything, just shook his head, gave a hollow laugh and muttered At least you didn’t hit the chick. Matt couldn’t quite believe that he had hit anyone. He’d never hit anyone! He hadn’t even smacked the kids when they were little, though Rachael had once or twice. It wasn’t in his nature. But yet clearly now it was. How had that happened? He flexed his right hand, wincing at the pain. The knuckles were swollen; all the bones felt slightly out of alignment. Richo caught the movement and glanced over at him.
‘Did it feel good?’
Matt shook his head. ‘It bloody hurt. It never looks like it does in the movies.’
Richo chuckled. ‘It probably hurt the cameraman more. Let’s just hope he doesn’t sue.’ He braked as they came to an intersection. ‘Mate, what were you thinking?’
Matt shook his head again. He had no idea. He wasn’t thinking, that was the whole point. That news crew were pissing him off, sure, but he’d been pissed off before without taking a swing at anyone, even at work. Especially at work. People always behaved badly at accident scenes. He knew that, and he knew just to let it go. ‘I don’t know,’ he finally replied.
‘It’s been a big year, hasn’t it?’ Richo said softly. The lights changed back to green. ‘Maybe you should take some more time out, get some counselling. I know you’ve got Charlie back now, but what you guys went through—you don’t get over that easily.’
Matt stared out the window. He didn’t want to take any more time off. He loved his work, he was good at it, he just wanted to get back into it and for everything to return to normal. All those people, he thought, as the suburbs slipped by. All those people, in all those houses—did they have any idea how lucky they were? How blessed, how fortunate, that by and large their days proceeded one after the other with no major disruptions, no tragedies, no abductions or disappearances. What they probably thought of as mundane seemed to him the most precious, bright-shining luck of all time: not to have gone through what he and Rachael and Dan and above all Charlie had gone through; not to have stood at the brink of hell and gazed right into it, then had to find their way back to the real world.
‘What do you reckon?’ Richo prompted.
‘Nah,’ Matt said. ‘I’ll be OK. Just a bit rusty. And I could have driven myself home. I could have stayed! I’ve still got half the shift to go.’
Richo raised his eyebrows. ‘Tell him he’s dreaming,’ he muttered, only half under his breath.
Still, Matt thought, as he walked up the driveway, it was a nice change to get home early. He could cook dinner, maybe make that pork dish Charlie used to love, and then perhaps they could all watch a movie together. How long had it been since they’d done that? Richo tooted his horn as he drove off and Matt raised a hand in thanks without turning around. He took the front stairs two at a time. He’d have a shower, put it all behind him—the day, the crash, the punch. Everything would be OK. Being at home always soothed him. He put his key in the lock, opened the door, and came face to face with Dan.
‘Dad! You gotta go get Blue. He’s in the backyard. He’s got Tikka, and no one can get him to drop her.’
Terry jabbed at the doorbell, then when it wasn’t immediately answered pushed it again, a little more aggressively. He hated waiting out here on the Johnsons’ front porch, at the mercy of any of the lurking journos who wanted to snap a picture or shove a microphone in his face. There were fewer of them these days, now Charlie had been back just over a month, but a couple of diehards lingered on—the freelancers, mainly, hoping to hit pay dirt. That ridiculous sex-slave story hadn’t helped. Terry sighed and rang the doorbell once more. He could hear movement inside the house, so somebody must be home. The day would come, he supposed, when there wouldn’t be, when things would finally go back to the way they’d been before the abduction: Matt and Rachael at work, Charlie and Dan at school, and no press skulking in the bushes. That would be a grand day, he thought. He hoped it happened before he retired.
Still no one answered the door. Frustrated, Terry raised his fist and hammered on the wood. That did the trick. Dan appeared, his face ashen, his eyes quickly darting past Terry to see who else might be trying to get in.
‘Terry,’ he said, ushering him in and closing the door behind them. ‘Sorry. Were you out there long?’
‘Ages. What are you doing in here? Having a party?’
/> Dan pushed one hand through his thick dark hair. ‘I wish. Everything’s gone to shit.’ He looked down at the floor. ‘Charlie went back to school today for the first time, and some moron, some fuckwit, taped something to her locker about her having been held captive for sex. Mum saw it this morning, apparently, in some magazine.’ He looked up, angry. ‘Charlie had some sort of breakdown when she saw it, and a teacher tried to take her to the sick bay but her friend Britta came and told me and I brought her home, just got her and left. I mean, there was no way she could stay at school after that. Would you?’ Terry shook his head. ‘So we get home and I thought I’d go and find Blue to cheer her up and he was in the backyard—I don’t know how he got out there—and when I called him I saw he had this thing in his mouth, all brown and red, and I thought it must be a bone or something, but it was one of our chickens. She had gone broody, so she was in the laying box. She couldn’t escape. Did you know we had chickens?’
Terry shook his head again. He wasn’t keeping up.
‘And I couldn’t get her out. I couldn’t get Blue to drop her. I couldn’t even tell if she was alive or dead.’ The boy was trembling, Terry realised. He put a hand on his arm. From somewhere in the house came a long, low keening.
‘I’ve got some news,’ he began, ‘for your mum and dad. For all of you. There’s going to be a trial. I’ve got a date. Are they home?’
Dan turned his back on him, as if disappointed, and lurched up the hallway.
‘Mum’s in with Charlie,’ he said. ‘And Dad—Dad was at work, but he came home early too. I don’t know why. He caught Blue, though. I think he’s in the backyard now, burying Tikka.’
It took fifteen minutes, but Terry finally gathered them all together in Charlie’s room. She sat on the bed, red-eyed and shaky, Matt and Rachael either side of her; Dan sprawled on the floor at Rachael’s feet. Terry himself took the chair from Charlie’s desk and turned it to face them. He felt more like a psychologist than a cop.
‘Col Stevens, the man who took Charlie, has been assessed and found fit to stand trial,’ he began. ‘He’s mentally impaired, apparently, but he’s not insane—he understands that what he did was against the law.’ Terry searched their faces. Nothing. What had he expected—jubilation? Relief? Gratitude? He wasn’t sure, but he’d expected something. ‘So we’ve got a date,’ he went on, fumbling in the pocket of his shirt for the piece of paper he had written it on when he got the call. He made a show of unfolding it and smoothing it out, as if he was presenting an Oscar, anything to give them all a chance to catch up with him. ‘September 30,’ he read, ‘that’s about six weeks from now, to give our guys the time to prepare the case. And the defence too, I guess.’ He glanced at Rachael, then at Matt. Their expressions were blank. Terry felt himself deflating. This was good news that he had brought them; this—he’d felt—marked the beginning of the end, the last hurdle to be cleared before they could put it all behind them, leave it in the past. And it was a low hurdle, an easy one. This Col fellow, his contact had told him, had admitted it all—that he’d taken Charlie, he’d locked her up. He wasn’t even trying to deny it, or plead any sort of mitigating circumstances. Oh, the defence would, of course—they’d probably argue reduced culpability due to his intellectual deficiencies, whatever they were, but who cared? The guy was going to prison. There was no doubt about it.
Charlie broke the silence with a strangled sound that was half choke, half sob.
Terry leant forward in his seat. ‘Charlie,’ he said. ‘It will be OK, I promise. I’ll be there. Your parents, the doctors you saw—we’ll be there with you. Dan as well. You can bring a friend, if you like.’
She shook her head, tears now streaming down her cheeks and falling onto her lap. ‘I can’t. I can’t do it. Call it off. Tell them I just got lost or something, that it didn’t happen.’
‘We can’t do that, Charlie,’ he said as gently as he could. ‘You weren’t lost. Your parents made a report—we all know you were missing, and this person needs to be charged for it, for what he did to you. We’re lucky, really, that he was found, that we can take him to court at least, make him pay. Don’t you want him to go to jail?’
‘Lucky?’ Charlie screamed. ‘He took me, and locked me up, and he raped me. He raped me! And no one can know. I don’t want anyone to know!’
Terry glanced across at Rachael, and later, wished he hadn’t. Then he wouldn’t have watched her mouth fall open, her pupils dilate, the sheer, naked devastation that colonised her features. It felt private, somehow, far too intimate to be witnessed. But of course he’d looked at her. Had she known? One glance told him no.
‘Raped?’ she asked Charlie, her arm around her, almost shaking her. ‘You were raped?’
Matt dropped his head into his hands; Dan balled his fists in his lap. An eerie cry started up, almost human, but not quite. It took Terry a moment to realise it was Blue, locked somewhere inside the house, joining his own howls to Charlie’s.
Could it get any worse? Rachael rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, abandoning any attempt to sleep. She wasn’t going to sleep. Tikka dead, Charlie taunted on her first day back at school, Matt home from work early and cagey as to the reason. Then Charlie’s bombshell about the rape. Rape. The word seared like acid in her gullet and she shot upright, coughing so violently she thought she might be sick. When the spasm passed Rachael lay down again, exhausted. At least she hadn’t woken Charlie, who was lying, practically comatose, by her side. Two temazepam would do that to a thirteen-year-old, particularly one as skinny as Charlie. She’d been on the verge of hysteria from the moment she admitted the rape. When Rachael had offered her the tablets, leftovers from the stash she’d been prescribed during the missing months, Charlie had snatched at them greedily, almost as if she’d wanted to wipe herself out. But of course she did. Who in the hell wouldn’t?
Rachael turned to her now, moulding her body to her child’s, gently stroking her brow. She looked like Matt when she slept, Rachael thought. Matt. She sighed. They’d barely talked in months. They hadn’t even talked about the rape. As soon as Charlie had swallowed the temazepam Rachael had whisked her straight to bed, their bed. Was he in bed too, in Charlie’s room, where he’d been exiled for the past six weeks, or was he still awake, prowling around the house or staring at his bloody computer? She didn’t care. She couldn’t care. Her heart had no more room left for caring, no space for anything bar Charlie. Rape. She’d always suspected it, of course, right from the minute her daughter had been returned to her, but Charlie had denied it every time she ventured a question, and there’d never been any evidence. Rachael moaned. She’d let herself believe it hadn’t happened because she couldn’t face the alternative. She still couldn’t face it. Her baby girl, held down, probably screaming, her legs forced apart … Rachael sat up again and snapped on the light.
It took a long time for her breathing to return to normal. Though it was a cool night, the sheets beneath her were damp with sweat. She thought of changing them, but didn’t want to disturb Charlie, so she got up and tiptoed into the ensuite instead. Don’t think about it, she instructed herself as she pulled off her pyjamas and adjusted the taps. It happened. It can’t be changed. Concentrate on something else. Blue for a start, she thought, stepping under the water. What were they going to do about him? He couldn’t be shut up in the laundry forever. But that was too difficult to contemplate. The court case, then. September 30. How could they get Charlie through that? The very idea had seemed to terrify her, had sent her over the edge. After Terry had left she and Matt had tried to talk with her about it some more, but Charlie had just kept shaking her head and sobbing, piteously reiterating no, no, no. And school—they’d barely even addressed that one, what had happened today; hadn’t had a chance, what with Tikka and Terry. Rachael shivered. Though she’d been flushed and clammy when she got in the shower, she was suddenly cold. She increased the hot water and watched her skin blotch and redden without feeling any of it.
