by Alan Baxter
Jack’s eyes pop open, a flood of panic blanching his already ivory face. After a moment he focuses on me and nods, a tiny movement of understanding and he’s gone. His darkness swells into me, the entropy of his illness drawn up through my hands where I hold his. It adds itself to the blackness I carry inside, that I’ve carried for so long. Will I fill up one day, no room for any more, and then what?
With trembling fingers I close Jack’s eyes and fill out the paperwork. Marek will win the bet. His guess was closer even though they were both wrong.
*
“I want to tell you why sex is so difficult for me.” Jake’s face is creased with what looks to me like grief.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know, but I want to. We’ve been together a couple of months now and it feels serious. It is, isn’t it?”
I nod vigorously. “Oh, I hope so.” I really do hope so.
Jake draws a deep breath that shudders on the way down. “I never knew my real dad. He left when I was too little to remember.”
I open my mouth to say something, I’m not really sure what, and Jake holds up a hand.
“Let me get this out in one, or I may not make it.”
I nod and he smiles, squeezes my hand across the table.
“I don’t mind not knowing him. My mum was young and irresponsible. She’s always been fucking useless, so I can hardly blame my dad for leaving. It’s what I did, first chance I got. She should have protected me, but she couldn’t even protect herself.” He draws another breath, sips wine. “My mum shacked up with Vic when I was about six years old. She’d knocked around with guys before then but never for long. She did her best by me, even though her best was bloody rubbish. But when Vic came along, everything changed.
“He drank heaps, was always on the edge of violence. Mum told me how much she loved him, but it was clear she was terrified of him too. She said how we needed him to pay the bills and he wasn’t such a bad guy. Even with two black eyes and a split lip she’d tell me how he wasn’t such a bad guy.”
Rage flares in me and Jake can see it in my face.
“Let me finish.” He reaches out, strokes my cheek. “You’re such a good and decent person, the way you care for the dying, you’re so good to me. You couldn’t be less like Vic fucking Creswell.” He drinks more wine, his hand shaking. “Anyway, it wasn’t long before Vic started . . . touching me.”
I let out a soft sound, part growl, part moan of dismay.
A tear breaches Jake’s lashes. “I’m sorry, I need you to know this.”
My knuckles creak as my fists clench in my lap. “I want to hear. You shouldn’t carry this alone.”
Jake nods, sips. “Anyway, he went from fondling and making me do things to him to raping me in very little time.”
“You were six?”
“I was probably eight by the time he started that.”
He says it like that makes it somehow better than if he were six. “What a fucking . . . ”
“He ruled my mum and me, did what he liked to us. My mum should have protected me, but she was trapped too. He would beat her if she tried to intervene. Beat me if I threatened to tell. We lived in terror. When I was fourteen I told mum we had to go, we had to run away. She said we had no money, where would we go?”
“There are shelters,” I start to say and Jake nods again.
“Of course, but that wasn’t the point. You know what she said to me, after years of beatings and sexual assaults?”
I sigh and shake my head. “She told you she loved him.”
“Yep. So I ran away. I have no idea what they’re doing now. He could have killed her for all I know. I haven’t spoken a word to her since I left. I was on the street at first, then in shelters and care. A foster home took me in when I was sixteen and I was a bastard, doing all the things my mum did and worse, acting like her boyfriends, thinking I was different.”
“You’re nothing like that,” I say. “You’re amazing.”
He smiles, but it’s not enough to chase away the melancholy this time. “My foster mother is a lady called Glenda Armstrong and she fixed me up. Wouldn’t take my shit, made me finish school. I was lucky. She gave me direction, I got a job, turned myself around. Twenty five now, finally feeling like I’ve got it somewhere near together. And then I met you. For the first time I feel something real, instead of just angry fucking because I thought that’s all I deserved.” His tears have stopped and there’s anger in his eyes.
“You should be so proud of where you’ve come, given where you started,” I tell him.
“But I’m scared and you mean a lot to me and that’s why it’s so hard for me to be intimate, emotional. It’s always been an act before, an act of defiance more than anything else, a show of power. But with you, I have no guard and it’s terrifying.”
I stand, move around to hug him and kiss his hair. “I’m honoured,” I whisper. “I’ll never hurt you.”
“I know.”
The shadows of all the people who have died with me mask my vision, make Jake a distant blur. “So many wonderful people die every day, struck down by disease or age,” I say. “And yet fuckers like that Vic get to live.”
Jake nods against my chest. “There’s no justice in the world. We have to hang on to our luck when we find it, because that’s all there is.”
*
After nearly a week of no deaths we get two in a day. The darkness wells inside me, that delicious blackness I can’t help but gather. Sometimes I think it’s going to overwhelm me, but there’s always room for more. The journey home is muffled by the circling presence of their passing.
Jake comes around not long after I get home, bag of shopping in hand. “I’m going to make us a great dinner tonight. Special recipe! Something Glenda taught me.”
“Great! I’m glad we’re having a good dinner. I have to go away for a couple of days.”
“That’s sudden.” His brow is creased in concern and it breaks my heart a little.
“There’s a two-day course Claire Moyer was supposed to go on, but she’s come down with something. Someone needs to go, it’s about a new drug administration practice, and they asked if I’d step in. I head off early in the morning to Newcastle. I’ll be away overnight, back by dinnertime the next day. Sorry.”
He smiles. “Don’t apologise. Work is work. Let’s enjoy tonight then, eh? Maybe you can lend me your key when you leave and I can get my own cut? Then I can have something ready for when you get back on Thursday?”
I raise my eyebrows, give him a crooked smile. “Your own key?”
“If you think . . . ”
I sweep him into a hug. “Of course I think. I’d love that.”
*
It took a lot of searching to find this place, but hours of free time in a palliative care hospice can be put to good use with a search engine and access to hospital records. Hints from Jake about where he grew up and a keen eye. Plus friends in social services to join the dots. The idea, the realisation, hit me like lightning when Jake told me his story.
There’s a broken down car on the front lawn, leaking oil across the dirt like black blood. The house is peeling, the paint reminds me of the skin of a dying woman’s lips. I knock on the door, heart hammering against my ribs.
A large figure shimmers through the frosted glass panel and the door swings open. A man stands there in shorts and a stained shirt. He’s a tall bastard, muscular, but a beer gut mars anything close to a good physique. He has muddled tattoos on his arms and legs, grey and black stubble across his face like a TV tuned to static. His eyes are dark and mean. “Well, hello, darlin’.”
“Victor Cresswell?” I ask.
His eyes narrow. “What?” He glances to my hands, probably checking for a summons.
“Vic Cresswell,” I ask.
“Yeah.”
I hold out my hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”
His lip curls in a sneer and he takes my hand, squeezing too hard to assert his domin
ance as he puffs his chest out. “Nice to meet you too, sweetheart. What the fuck is this?”
And I let my darkness out. It rushes through my palm, desperate to escape, and races into him. I feel it gust up his arm, into his chest to nestle in his lungs. It wraps shadowy arms around his liver and coats his gallbladder in an inky embrace. It snakes through his intestines, finds his prostate and slips down into his balls.
A shudder ripples through him as I break our grip and smile, turn away.
“What the fuck was that all about?” he yells as I make my way back to the waiting taxi, a tremor in his voice.
As I tell the taxi to head back to the station he stands in the doorway, one hand rubbing absently at his throat. There’s a patina of fear across his face. How much does he suspect? I give him a month at most before the decay begins to set in. Before the tumours start to blossom through his organs. Black, flowering death.
I’m empty inside, somehow hollow but with whiteness swelling into the places where I’ve collected all that dark over the years. Perhaps I shouldn’t have let it all go, should make it last. It’s disconcerting, I’m a little lost without the shadows of the lonely dead inside me. I’ll have to start collecting again. No matter, at least three at work have less than a week left.
I knew I gathered it for a reason. A shame it took me this long to realise what my purpose is. I have a mission now, giving this unfair blackness to bastards truly deserving of it.
I’m going to be busy.
*
Jake is watching television and looks up in surprise as I enter the house. I’m glad he decided to stay at my place, not his. When the moment’s right I’m going to ask him to move in.
“I thought you weren’t back until tomorrow,” he says, smiling. It’s genuine happiness on his face and that warms me.
“We got through the training in one day and finished up in time for me to get the last train back. So here I am.” I had taken into account that Vic might be harder to find, maybe not home. It had all been much easier than I anticipated.
“Well, that’s a lovely surprise,” Jake says, gathering me into a hug.
I breathe deeply of the clean smell of his skin. “Yeah,” I say. “Maybe there is some justice in this world, after all.”
Punishment of the Sun
Annie sat at her window, staring across the darkness. No moon and high, thin clouds made the world beyond stygian and dead. Like her life.
She knew the tack shed sat not far away. Beyond that stretched dry, dusty paddocks with dry, dusty horses, ribs like xylophone keys through thin, scabby hides. The orange desolation dragged on as far as hope would last in every direction. Too young to leave this desiccated hole, she grudgingly endured.
A strike of light in the distance and Annie’s heart skipped a beat. Her slumped pose in the window became rigid attention as she stared through the dark. Impossible to tell how far away it had been, she grew desperate to see it again.
Then another. Annie gasped, throat thickening with fear. A man, hands cupped around a lighter, his face briefly lit in orange glow and contrasting shadow. She could see two pinpricks of ruddy brightness, glowing and fading, well beyond the yard.
She forced her sight to penetrate the dark. Every time a man drew a lungful of smoke, the cigarette acted like a weak torch, easing back the night. She saw other movement, more than two of them. They carried something, wrapped and heavy, moving easily, unencumbered by the darkness or weight. Across the distance she heard a metallic rattle. They were at the feed shed across the south paddock. She couldn’t see it, but every inch of this station lay burned across her mind like a scar. They were putting something in the feed shed.
*
Annie rose soon after the sun. As hot, early light crept across her bed she dragged on shorts and t-shirt and trotted through the house.
Her parents sat at the kitchen table, poring over paperwork. They drank acrid coffee while toast burned under the grill and her father moaned about taxes and levies. Annie headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” her father asked.
“Going to see Pebble!”
“Get back here!”
Annie stopped, set her jaw. She turned back, huffing a deep sigh. She stood in the doorway, framed by sunlight.
“Well?” her father said.
“What?”
“You know very well what! No play till your chores are done.”
“I’ll do them later.”
Her father scowled. “You’ll do as you’re told!”
Annie gritted her teeth, desperate to investigate the shed. “What difference does it make?”
Her father scraped his chair back, half rising. “The difference is I told you to do them now!”
Annie looked to her mother, eyes pleading. Her mother just shook her head. “Neither of you care about me!” Annie yelled. “You only had children to do all your work for you! I hate you!”
Her father growled, stepping around the table. Annie bolted before he could say or do more, heading into the utility room and the tools for her chores.
*
An hour later she finally got time to herself. Everything seemed to be about cleaning and fixing and tidying. A few more years and she’d be gone.
She skirted the tack shed and climbed the gate of the south paddock. Sunbaked red earth puffed fine ochre dust with every slapping footstep as she ran. She approached the feed shed and slowed. Her heart danced in her throat and a chill leaked down her back. So fascinated by what she’d seen, her only thought had been to find out what those men were up to. Now came a second wave of thought, heavily tainted with trepidation.
She glanced back towards the house, squat and peeling in the already ferocious sun. Perhaps she should tell her dad what she’d seen. But what did he care? Always telling her what to do.
Swallowing her nerves, taking a steeling breath, she opened the shed door. Sunlight flooded into the musty darkness within, dust swirling in the shaft of day. She walked carefully into the gloom, looking all around the huge space. Plastic buckets and battered shovels lined the walls, bales and giant plastic feed bags made haphazard mountains all around. Everything sat as dull as her life. Except for a heavy looking canvas, dumped into a corner.
Annie reached one hand towards it, taking a corner, lifted it back. It lay empty, deflated against the shed wall. She saw a piece of thick, yellowing paper on the floor. It bore a note, hand written in dark red ink.
You slew an elder and your punishment is sun.
Survive this trial and your punishment is served.
Fail to survive and your punishment is served.
That didn’t make sense. What kind of punishment was sun? Who was the note for? She sighed, looking around the musty shed. Her eyes narrowed. Did she hear a scrape then, a sound of movement? Sharp lines of incandescence marked gaps in the planks of the walls, painting bright stripes across the floor. She walked among them, looking into the shadows between the feed bags and hay bales. It would take hours to search every nook and cranny.
The distant sound of her dad cursing drifted through the air. She sighed again, and headed back to the house
*
Annie’s dad was furious. Her mum stood in the doorway, hands clasped. “What do you mean, all of them?” she asked.
“I mean all of them! Every fucking car, bike, quad. Even the tractor and the back-hoe. Some fucker’s been in and ripped up the engine in every vehicle we own.”
“Why?”
Her father spun on his heel, leaning across the yard in his anger. “How do I know why?”
Her brothers stumbled from the house, rubbing sleep from their eyes. Useless, dopey teenagers the pair of them. “Wha’s goin’ on?” Trent asked.
“Some of your friends having a lark?” Annie’s dad yelled. “Someone’s been in during the night and ruined every vehicle we’ve got.”
“Why would it be our friends?” Josh, the eldest, seemed genuinely offended. “Maybe it’s yours, pissed off that y
ou never cough up for a round on the rare occasion you go to the pub!”
Their dad pulled back one hand, striding across the dusty yard. “Why you little . . . ”
“Enough!” Annie’s mum’s voice cracked across the hot day, freezing everyone in their tracks, always the ultimate authority. “What’s wrong with you? Josh, you need to learn some respect. Bill, calm down and call Jerry at the police station. See what he has to say.”
Bill pushed past his sons. “As if he’ll be any bloody help.”
*
Annie sat at the kitchen table while her father fumed and her mother cried. Her brothers, quietened, looked on. The ruined remains of two satellite phones sat between them.
“Do any of you know why someone might have done this to us?” her father said. They all shook their heads. “Every vehicle ruined, the phone lines cut and the radio antenna is gone.” He pointed at the smashed sat-phones. “To do this they came in the house.”
Annie thought of the distant cigarette glows in the dark. She’d seen the men there, but hadn’t heard anything else. Would they have done this? She fingered the strange note in her pocket, wondering if she should tell her father. But if she could figure this out on her own perhaps they’d all stop treating her like a kid. She bit her lower lip nervously.
“Is this some kind of warning, Bill?” her mother asked.
Her husband gave her a sharp look, said nothing.
“Can’t we fix the phone line?” Trent asked.
“No. They’ve smashed the connection on the roof.” Annie’s father drew a deep breath, standing. “We need to act. I’ll take a horse over to Bradley’s place, use his phone to call Jerry and get the police here. They can bring stuff to repair our vehicles and phone. I’ll use Bradley’s ute to get back. Josh, that puts you in charge.”
