by Candice Fox
Like a schoolyard, the bar was divided into status groups organized by occupation. The morgue attendants and body handlers crowded quietly in one corner, making sick jokes and drinking themselves unconscious. The forensic specialists, who generally left early, engaged in their strange technical language over vodkas and light beers at the outdoor tables. The street cops huddled in booths along the walls, sunburnt and testy.
The homicide squad kept to themselves, separate from the rest. The owls, strangely deliberate-looking in their tailored jeans and cotton shirts, sat wedged together on leather couches by the jukebox. The conversation was sparse and the music loud, so although they looked uncomfortable they were able to pull off a general feeling of community just by drinking and smiling at each other. Eric had perched himself on the arm of one of the couches and was making loud wisecracks about each owl in turn, which everyone seemed to think was hilarious. I sat beside Eden at the bar, watching him work the room like a debutante. Of course he knew everyone in the pub. They all greeted him like they hadn’t seen him in years. Some of the women whispered in his ears and held his fingers lovingly as they talked.
“You guys locals?”
“We’re from Utulla, out the back of Camden.” So, about half an hour down the Hume Highway from me. Eden took a long breath and let it out slow, like keeping her secrets from me was going to be a long and arduous process. I wondered what she was hiding. I ordered her another drink and she seemed grateful.
“Where you from?” she asked.
“Bankstown born and bred.”
“Go the doggies.”
“Damn straight.”
“Got family out there?”
“Nope.” I smiled, not bothering to disguise my relief. “Got any in Utulla?”
“My father.” She nodded.
It sounded strange to me, the way she said “father” instead of “dad,” like she deliberately wanted me to understand that she had been the fruit of this man’s loins. She bent to adjust her boot and I noticed a long scar running the length of her hairline, faint and barely detectable.
“Okay,” I said. “So what’s your deepest, darkest secret?”
She coughed over her drink and smiled.
“Come on, Frank. The whole my-partner-is-my-soulmate thing has been seriously overcooked by Law & Order, don’t you think? We don’t have to be intimate to be effective.”
“I want to be intimate with you.” I grinned.
“Uh huh. You’ll get over that.”
“I’ll tell you mine.”
“I don’t want to know yours.”
“We’ll start simple.” I spread my hands out on the bar as though clearing room for a party trick. “I once climbed out a girl’s bathroom window after a one-night stand while she was cooking me breakfast.”
Eden nodded her appreciation. More drinks arrived.
“Okay.” She smiled sheepishly, after some long and deep consideration of the challenge. “I did a week of dog squad training out at Rockdale in the early days. There was a dog there that really hated my guts and they kept giving it to me for assessments. One time, when no one was looking, I kicked it. Kicked it hard, right in the backside.”
I made a big deal, hooting and hollering, waving my hands in the air. She punched my arm.
“You’re a bad woman,” I said.
“You got no idea, pal.”
“I rigged a police charity raffle once. Won myself a holiday to New Zealand. It was Kids with Cancer.”
“Oh!” she cringed. “You’re a monster.”
I felt exhilaration creep over me. I didn’t know if it was the bourbon or if there was a possibility that Eden was actually warming to me. I’d never imagined her as she was now, sniggering over her drink and shaking her head of long dark hair.
“Okay. I let another girl in my Year Five class take the rap for stealing from the teacher’s handbag. Her mother made her move schools.”
I slapped my hand on the bar and ordered another drink. Eden opened her wallet and laid a twenty on the counter, turning and looking over her shoulder at the crowd. I went on blabbering, not realizing that her smile had disappeared.
“I slept with my Year Twelve English teacher.” I grinned. “She was probationary. Naive and new age. I convinced her to stay behind and help me with my grammar. I was such a hound dog.”
I caught the look on her face. A splinter jabbed in my heart.
“Oh, come on!” I clapped her shoulder. “I was seventeen! Gimme a brea–”
“I’m gonna do a round of the room, Frank,” Eden murmured and slinked away. I followed her eyes across the room and caught Eric watching us, surrounded by people who were talking and grinning nervously.
I’d just grabbed ahold of myself and was about to let loose at the urinal when I felt a hot rush of breath on the back of my neck. Eric’s voice whispered in my ear:
“Can I give you a hand, honey?”
I jolted and shoved back into him and he thumped me on the shoulder. The sound of his laughter filled up the room. There was piss on my shoes.
“You’re so uptight, Frankie.”
“There’s a certain code of conduct when someone’s taking a piss,” I snarled, immediately regretting the overreaction. Eric chuckled and took a urinal two down from mine, victorious.
“You’ve got up Eden’s nose already,” he noted, looking down at himself. “She’s abandoned you.” I said nothing. One of the owls came through the door, saw us standing there and retreated.
“Well, you know, she mustn’t have liked the track I was going down. Not my fault she’s got something to hide.”
“We’ve all got something to hide, Frankie.” Eric grinned, zipping up and turning towards me. “You don’t want the rest of the crew finding out about your assault charge, do you?”
I almost zipped my cock up in my fly. I couldn’t help myself. My hands lashed out, gripping the front of his shirt. I shoved him into the wall. Though I put the full force of my body behind it, I felt that he was letting me hurl him around, letting me know there was power in his body that he was choosing not to unleash on me. His large, strong hands folded around mine. He squeezed and I heard my knuckles crack.
“You punched your ex-wife in the head.”
“It was a misunderstanding,” I growled. “A confidential misunderstanding. You’ve got no right going through my files.”
“This job is about knowing each other, Frank. It’s about knowing each other’s secrets and ignoring them. We’re all good guys here. No one’s better than anyone else. We’re all dirty. We’ve all got something shadowing us.”
“The others know your secrets, then, and they ignore them—is that right?” I shoved him into the wall again and it felt good. “Then why are they so fucking scared of you? Why don’t you tell me what you’re hiding, Eric?”
I didn’t even see him move. His big wide hand shot up and smacked the side of my head. He didn’t punch me, he slapped me, and it was intentional, because though he hadn’t made a fist the impact hurt like nothing I’d ever felt, like his hand was made of iron. Humiliating, the way the sound of it rippled out and away from me, the way my ear was instantly on fire. At the same time he kicked my legs out from underneath me. I sprawled on the bathroom floor, landing hard on my elbows.
“You’re running with wolves now, Frankie. You’ve got to be faster than that.” He laughed as he turned to leave. His wolf howl echoed around the large tiled room.
I didn’t leave, even though it seemed that Eden had disappeared. I wasn’t giving Eric that satisfaction. I went out into the bar and sat at the counter where I’d been sitting with Eden, my head throbbing. I ordered a drink and the barman glanced at me worriedly for a moment before turning and pulling a bottle off the shelf. Eric’s eyes were on my back, hot and heavy, his presence in a group of people by the door like a siren from across the room.
My first wife and I had married young and we’d taken up cocaine pretty early as a way of avoiding the depressing sink into
monotonous suburban life. I’d been a street cop then and the coke had been easy to come by—just about every man and his dog was carrying it, and asking for it never raised an eyebrow. We thought that because we had a habit and a hotted-up car we were different from the Mary Janes and Uncle Bills in the rows of cheap prefab houses in Sydney’s West. My wife and I’d only known each other on the party scene in the city and got married because I knocked her up in the third week. We thought we were bad. We thought we were different and in love and all that crap. Suburban life crushed that. Things went from a hundred Ks an hour to a laborious jog in three seconds flat. Suddenly we were watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? every Saturday night and arguing over dishwashing liquid brands.
Louise hid the coke from me during the pregnancy but I knew the whole time what she was up to. I didn’t care. I had two lives by then. My time at home with Louise was a waiting game between shifts on the street. I didn’t love her, not really, and as the baby grew inside her we started to fight. I just wanted to be on the job all the time, roughing up perps and throwing my weight around. Driving fast. Bursting into houses. Getting free drinks and pretending I could have any chick I wanted. I wanted to stay out all night drinking with the other street cops and relishing the secret language of the force. Louise wanted someone to care for her. I wasn’t that guy. I was much too into myself then.
She had a stillborn, a girl, at 2AM on a Tuesday in November. I wasn’t there. Not being there when that happened was the thing that finally ruined us.
We fought for months, daring each other to be the one to throw in the towel. She used to hurl things at me, lunge at me, claw at my face. The neighbors heard the screaming and got involved once or twice. I hit her one night, mainly to get her off me, and it was the last time I ever saw her. I was charged and pleaded guilty and was barely allowed to keep my job.
I was thinking about the baby as I sat at the bar staring into my drink. I glanced at the mirror behind the counter and spotted Eden sitting by the window, watching the traffic, an old Lebanese woman selling roses between the outdoor settings. I was about to leave when I accidentally slid my hand into the small red wallet sitting on the counter beside me.
The wallet was square and flat, the size and shape of a man’s, only it was made from what looked to be dark red eel skin. I’d seen wallets like that in Chinatown and Oxford Street, surrounded by rabbit-foot key rings, flashing phone covers and coke pipes. I knew instinctively that it was Eden’s. I sat stock still and stared at it, aware of the heat spreading out through my limbs, the thumping of my heart in my temples. Watching her in the mirrors, I slid the wallet across and opened it. Her homicide squad ID was at the front behind a clear plastic window.
There are two ways you get to know the heart and soul of a woman. You sleep with her or you rifle through her things. Both actions carry the acute risk of winding up with a stiletto heel in the side of your neck. I didn’t care. Eric had pissed me off. I wanted something to arm myself with, something that might draw me into his and Eden’s elite circle.
Gun club membership. University library card. Business card for a kickboxing club. Discount card for Genie’s Nails.
There was a small piece of paper tucked behind Eden’s ID, separate from the others. I noticed it because of its age. It was yellow and frayed, like it had been handled for years. I slipped the paper out carefully, listening to it crackle as I pressed it open.
Six names. Four had been crossed off. Two were left untouched at the bottom of the list, written in blue ink by a shaky hand.
Jake DeLaney.
Benjamin Annous.
I read over the names a couple of times. Then I pulled a photograph out of the same pocket. The picture was of an old man, the ex-thug type, with heavy shoulders and a boxy head. Like an ageing Rottweiler. He was leaning back in a wooden chair and holding his hand up, cringing playfully in front of the camera, holding a short glass.
I knew this man from somewhere. I knew the way he held his gnarled hand up, shied from the cameras, quiet and yet threatening. He struck me as someone who might have appeared in a newspaper, leaving a courthouse or two. Infamous. He had that infamous look to him.
One of the owls nudged my shoulder as she ordered a drink from the bar. I slipped the photograph and the piece of paper back into the wallet and left it on the counter. Eric met my eyes for a moment, smiling, as I pushed through the exit.
Hades let the girl out of the room at night when the trucks had stopped rolling over the horizon of trash and the sorting center workers had left through the gates. He went down on the first morning and discreetly took some clothes that he thought might fit the children, stuffing them into a garbage bag and hauling it up the hill. He also found a fluffy black toy dog that he thought the girl might like.
She was waiting for him when he opened the secret door, standing there with her eyes raised to his face, the boy still unconscious by her feet. She looked sick and pale. He sat silently by her side as she ate the spaghetti bolognaise he had cooked for her. Color came slowly back into her cheeks. The little girl ignored the stuffed animal, letting it slip to the floor beside her chair.
When Hades took her bowl away her eyes rose to the ceiling, examining the colored bottles and chains and cracked teacups hanging there, the broken mobiles and pieces of bone and polished machinery parts. She reached out and touched the huge black wing of a dead bird he had nailed to the wall by the table, following the long dorsal feathers with her fingertips. He watched her, wondering if he’d spot that strange look he had seen the night of the murders, the darkness in her eyes that he had only ever witnessed in the eyes of the damned. He didn’t see it and he told himself that he must have imagined it. When he beckoned her into the living room she followed obediently and sat curled on the very edge of the sofa, as far away from him as she could get. He switched over to The Simpsons, thinking it was something she might have watched in her other life. She didn’t laugh. Not once.
The boy moved through layers of consciousness, but was never really awake. Hades set a routine of checking on him twice in the middle of the night, which sometimes woke the girl suddenly and got her screaming and crying.
On the third day the boy was still out. Hades thought about driving him to a hospital and dumping him at the doors, but what would he do with the girl? She had seen his face. She had seen his house. Hades worried incessantly about the boy, sometimes peeling his eyelids back and staring helplessly into his vacant eyes. He didn’t want the boy to die. More than that, he didn’t want the girl to know it before he did. He changed the bandages on the boy’s head and cleaned the vicious wound.
He let the girl out that afternoon. It was a Friday and there were few workers about. He had dropped hints to the sorting center staff about an old flame who was giving him trouble about his children and who’d threatened to dump them on his doorstep. He led the girl down to his workshop at the bottom of the hill. She sat on the edge of a bench and watched him work on his latest creation.
Finally he seemed to have found something that brought life into her eyes. She watched with rapt attention as he ground and welded and beat the salvaged materials into the shape of a fox. Her lips formed shapes of wonder. When he waved her over from the bench she dashed to his side, reached out and touched the still-warm metal, stroking the snout of the giant beast tentatively as though it were living—and dangerous. She watched for hours, saying nothing.
As they walked back to the house she reached up and took his huge fingers in her hand. Hades looked down at her and it seemed to bring her out of a daze. She realized what she was doing and snatched her hand away. The setting sun made her cheeks look flushed pink and her eyes a glittering gold. She seemed like a living doll to him. He worried that his clumsy hands might break her.
The man and the girl stopped inside the doorway to the little shack. The boy was in the kitchen, crouching, one hand steadying himself against the floor. He was looking at the ceiling. Hades realized with shock that he had left the d
oor to the secret room open. The girl let out a howl and flew at the boy, encircling him with her arms. He was confused and shaken, couldn’t stand properly. Hades had never seen the boy’s eyes open of their own accord. They were even sadder and more soulless than those of the girl.
“Marcus?” the girl sobbed, taking his face in both her hands and shaking it. “Marcus? Marcus? Marcus?”
“Easy now,” Hades cautioned, moving her hands away gently. “Just be careful with him.”
Marcus looked up at Hades with the cool detachment of a mental patient. Hades worried that he might be permanently brain damaged. The do-it-yourself stitch job had pulled the corner of his right eye up slightly. Crooked and broken. Hades sat the boy down and took his chin in his wide hand, lifting his face into the light.
“Do you know your name, boy?” the man asked.
“Yep,” the boy answered, licking his cracked lips. “Do you know yours?”
