by Candice Fox
‘I do,’ I said.
‘So you’ve faced a lot of discrimination up here, then?’ Amanda said.
Sam leaned forward, his drink in his hand, and traced a long horizontal scar above his left eyebrow.
‘Nineteen stitches,’ he said. ‘I was forty-five. Can you imagine that? Being bashed when you’re forty-five. When was the last time you took a punch?’
There was an awkward silence while I recalled a sharp shot that had rattled my teeth not six months earlier in prison.
‘He was in prison,’ Amanda sniffed. I choked on my answer, coughed into my fist.
‘Prison?’ Sam laughed.
‘She’s joking,’ I said. ‘She means I’m from Sydney, and the streets are rough down there. That’s all she means.’
‘A Sydney man!’
‘I am.’
‘Well, welcome to 1945, Mr Collins.’ Sam waved an arm to show me the land beyond the doors. ‘Where fags and ethnics are the punching bag of choice for the violent drunk at the corner pub.’
‘So Jake felt comfortable enough to express himself in this small community of gay men?’ Amanda asked. ‘He felt safe with you guys?’
‘Physically and emotionally.’
‘You saw him as his true self.’
‘I feel like I did,’ Sam said.
‘How long were you together?’
‘I’ve known Jake for about twenty years.’
‘Longer than his wife, then.’ I looked at Amanda.
‘Yes.’
‘Why did he marry Stella if he was so comfortable in your group?’
‘Oh, he always had his pretend life. He’d established it long before he married Stella.’ Sam sipped his drink, gazed at the horizon. ‘It wasn’t as though he left us to go marry her and set up the heterosexual family man facade. He’d always carried that on. His parents were big church people, and he’d maintained girlfriends throughout high school and his early working life. His dad was some government pen-pusher and he’d been set to follow. He met Stella, and she was either blind to what he was in his other life or she just ignored it. We all had that double life happening. It’s Cairns. You have to protect yourself.’
‘Right.’
‘He started getting into the underground gay scene through a writers’ group. He met my friend Clive there, and after we met, I realised Clive knew him. Jake was writing vampire porn.’ Sam gave a sad laugh. ‘He’d read it to me over the phone. I was pretending I could write as well but I was mainly doing it because I had a crush on him.’
‘When was this?’
‘Mid-nineties,’ Sam said.
‘And he was just going back and forth between his pretend world and you guys?’ I asked.
‘I think he used to tell people we were golfing buddies,’ Sam grinned. ‘I’ve never seen the guy golf in his life. I don’t think he even knows which end of the club to use.’
I felt Amanda nudging me. I ignored her.
‘And then he wrote that book,’ Sam sighed. ‘He was gone then. He’d locked the door on himself in that other world, and thrown the key out of his own reach.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ Amanda asked.
‘Jake had written a few books before Burn that were never published,’ Sam said. He pushed back his shirtsleeves. ‘I think he wrote Burn as sort of a joke. He was very enamoured by apocalyptic novels, and there he was having stories about the Rapture crammed down his throat every Sunday as he sat beside Stella in church. I don’t think he ever expected the book to have the reaction it did. But some big preacher in the US picked it up, one of those churches that fills football stadiums with believers. The ones who bomb abortion clinics. Christian soldiers. Suddenly it was being shown on morning evangelical television over there. Every major Christian denomination could take something from it – the extreme ones and the casual ones. They fucking loved it. It was massive. You know how those Americans are when they find something they like.’
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah.’ Sam gulped the remains of his drink. ‘Wow. It was just a fucking riot in the beginning, all of it. We all sat around and laughed about it. Jake had bought himself a convertible. A black … Jaguar, I think it was. And this is a guy whose shoulders drop three inches from around his ears when he walks into a room full of gay men. He was the biggest pretender I’d ever met, but before the first book he’d always been able to walk away from that. Then, the money. That book brought Jake money he’d never dreamed of. Never seen. It got serious. He had to keep going. Camera crews were setting up in his house, interviewing his parents, following him to church.’
Sam looked at his fingernails.
‘In the beginning, if someone had found out about Jake’s life here with us, he’d have been shunned, I suppose. Stella might have left him. And his parents might have given him a mouthful. But after that book, if people had found out what Jake was really like, there’d have been real trouble. Serious trouble.’
‘Do you think what happened to Jake might have been a consequence of someone finding out that he was gay? Whether it was Stella finding out or someone else?’
Sam thought. He got up, stretched his arms above his head. ‘Stella? I don’t know. Someone else? Look, he had some pretty devoted fans. Some of the letters he got were weird. I don’t know if he ever kept any of them.’
‘Weird how?’
‘Oh, Christian weird.’ Sam laughed. He wandered into the kitchen. ‘You know the shit that they go on with. Jake being a messenger of God. Stuff in the books being real. Imminent. He had one guy write in and ask him about his main characters, Adam and Eve. The kid insisted they were real teenagers and wanted to know where he could contact them. People were convinced Jake knew something about God that no one else knew because of the stuff he was writing.
‘But he wasn’t some sort of messenger. He was just taking shit right out of the Bible and reinventing it for a young audience. Adding guns. And explosions. They couldn’t understand that they were just being fed the same stuff they’d been fed all their lives from their church, from their parents. It felt familiar, and it felt good, and they got hooked. The whole world got hooked. People were writing to him from Osaka. From Madrid, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t a divine message. It was plagiarism, at best.’
‘What was Jake like the last time you saw him?’ I asked.
Sam sliced a lime carefully, his eyes downcast to his work. He thought for a long time.
‘He was going a bit strange,’ Sam said finally. ‘The last few months. He was getting into the coke a bit too much – which was fine, I mean we all got into it a bit too much when we got together, which was getting rarer and rarer. But I got the feeling he was doing it regularly, not just when he was here. He’d said years ago that it helped him write faster. Stay focused.’
‘Was he stressed? Worried?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. He was finding time to get away from it all to come hang out with us, but when he did, he didn’t stay long and he couldn’t relax. He just seemed busy to me, not necessarily stressed. Extremely busy. All he could talk about was drafts and edits and new books and movie deals. He’d made some bad decisions, and then tied all his money up with the house and the kid’s schooling. So he was cash-poor. And I think he was spending that cash in the wrong places.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘He was on the phone for about three-quarters of the time he was here, last time he visited,’ Sam said. ‘I had an ex-boyfriend like that. I can smell a problem gambler from eight miles out. It’s the coke that makes you like that, if you do it regularly enough. You start to get restless. And maybe he wanted to be the naughty boy a bit more regularly than he was. It took a lot of time out of his schedule to drive up here and meet with us all. Maybe having a couple of little habits on the side made him feel like he was still winning. That the facade hadn’t completely caged him.’
‘Right.’
‘Part of what I was texting him about the night he went missing was all of tha
t business. I eased my way in with the casual check-in type stuff, but I was really snooping. Trying to find out if he was okay. I can show you the texts. I wanted him to know that if he got really worried, I’d lend him cash. They say never to lend friends money. But. You know.’ He shrugged.
I sat back, put my arm over the end of the couch. Amanda shifted away from my hand where it hung near her arm. ‘Do you know what exactly Jake was betting on?’
‘He liked the horses, the dogs. Chance events, nothing that required much skill on the part of the gambler, like poker. Poker, you win, it’s your doing. Horses, you win, it’s divine intervention. God’s hand pushing the animal along.’
‘Did he say who his bookie was? Were his bookie and his dealer the same person?’
‘No idea,’ Sam said. ‘I wish I knew.’
As Amanda sat clearing up the details with Sam, I took a phone call on the balcony from a number I didn’t know. A heat haze lingered over the flat city, blurring my view of the rainforest at the edges of suburbia. I found myself smiling when I recognised the crackly voice on the other end.
‘Mr Conkaffey.’
‘Dr Gratteur,’ I laughed. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘I wish I had something pleasurable to offer you, but unfortunately I’m calling to inform you that you’ve got a journalist on your tail,’ she said. ‘If you didn’t know already.’
My heart sank. ‘I did know.’ I glanced warily at the two on the couches. ‘Pretty brunette, right?’
‘Right.’
‘What’s she doing talking to you?’
‘Retracing your steps, it seems.’ I heard the rumble of something in the background, a gurney being pushed past. ‘Trying to find out if you’re working cases.’
‘You didn’t –’
‘Of course I bloody didn’t,’ Valerie scoffed. ‘But I did give her a piece of my mind. I drew out the dusty old files of what was once a very profane teenage vocabulary. I was expelled from two high schools for that sass-mouth.’
‘I don’t doubt it. How’d she take that?’
‘With the faux shock and horror of someone less important than they appear.’
‘I love your work, Doctor.’
‘If you get yourself in trouble,’ she said, ‘reach out, all right?’
‘I will,’ I told her. ‘Thanks.’
The truth is, you never know who is going to be your ally. And when you’ve hit rock bottom, you’ll take any outreached hand, no matter how staunchly you ever protested that you wouldn’t.
I’d been in Silverwater for three months when I got into my first fight.
I looked exactly like a guy named Robert Fittich, who was in protective segregation because he was very effeminate, and had been targeted with sexual advances a number of times in general population remand. From behind, we were identical – the same broad shoulders and short, black curls, the same loping walk and big hands. From the front, Robert’s face was longer and he was missing his two front teeth, and while my eyes were a dark blue his were chocolate brown. A number of times I’d wandered into the peripheral vision of guards or other inmates and been called ‘Bobby’. The resemblance was so strong that another inmate had grabbed me by the arm one time and whispered about an upcoming shakedown, his eyes darting everywhere, only to land on my face and reveal I wasn’t the intended recipient of the tip. I’d taken the warning with gratitude, however, and shuffled on the bits and pieces of contraband I’d been hoarding.
The problem was that Robert Fittich was getting regular oxycodone doses for back pain. Oxy is a very popular drug among heroin users behind bars who no longer have access to their drug of choice. They try to get prescriptions to take the edge off their prison detox. A guy everybody called ‘Corgi’ had been muscling Fittich for his oxy pills. Fittich would tongue the pill and give it to Corgi, and Corgi wouldn’t beat him half to death. That was the usual arrangement, anyway. For all I knew, Fittich might have been using the oxy to pay for television privileges or Mars bars.
Fittich was transferred out one night, I don’t know where. He simply disappeared. That was how it went. Charges against him might have been dropped suddenly, or he might have been called up to trial. That very morning Corgi, a wide-eyed, bobble-headed veteran junkie with no teeth at all in his upper jaw, started hassling me for oxycodone.
‘I’m Ted Conkaffey,’ I told him. ‘You’re looking for Bobby Fittich.’
Corgi told me that he was going to pull my fucking eyes out. Which would have sounded like a terrifying, unnecessarily gruesome punishment, one that might strike fear into the hearts of any ordinary man, if I hadn’t heard it a hundred times already. Everybody in prison has their token threat, and the pulling out of the eyes was pretty banal as they went. ‘I’m gonna kill you’ just doesn’t cut it in Silverwater. No one’s afraid of dying.
But Corgi had it in his mind that I was Bobby Fittich. To him, there had never been two of us tall, black-haired lugs in C Pod. And when he came to me, three mornings in a row, asking for his oxy in increasingly aggressive tones, I began to worry that he might try to make good on his threat.
I didn’t have to wonder long. On the fourth morning Corgi punched me square in the nose with all the force in his small body as I was coming around the corner of the chow hall. I was flattened instantly.
As an ex-street cop and a veteran on the drug squad, I know how to fight. But the surprise ambush caught me off guard, and the first shot totally crushed my nose, causing so much ruby-red blood to gush out of my head that for seconds I was tied up just dealing with that. My eyes sprouted tears, and in those terrible blind seconds Corgi jumped on my back and started punching the rear of my skull in rapid-fire blows.
A simultaneous fight at the other end of the chow hall had distracted the guards. This is how prison riots start. One fight inspires another, and because in those frantic moments when guards have to decide which fight they’ll throw themselves into first, both parties can get blows in. Sometimes the guards are so distracted by the two fights that they fail to notice who, exactly, is involved in them. Get three fights going at once and people can die before anyone has a chance to do anything. On this morning, the guards all went for the other fight on the distant side of the hall. I was alone.
The hand that reached down to me in the fray belonged to Christopher Shine, an ex-firefighter who was awaiting trial on sexual assault charges on young boys dating back to before I was even born. He was a tough old guy with big arms who I knew carried a shank.
I took his hand.
I drove back to Crimson Lake along the cane-lined highways thinking about my wife, and how she’d left me. I wondered if it was fair to say that. Since my incarceration for a crime I didn’t commit I’d been trying to think more openly about right and wrong, innocence and guilt and things like abandonment, and if I was trying to be as fair as possible I wasn’t sure Kelly had left ‘me’.
She’d received a call from Frankie one morn ing while she was at mothers’ group, telling her to come in to the station, where she’d been sat down and told that her husband had abducted, raped and strangled a thirteen-year-old girl and left her for dead. Frankie, Davo, Morris, my friends, our weekend barbecue buddies – they didn’t tell her I’d been accused of this horrific act. They told her I’d committed it. They really believed that. They’d been on the ground when the reports of the sightings of my car started coming in. They were almost as devastated as Kelly was about it.
Was it possible that I’d died then to Kelly? That I’d ceased to be the Ted she knew and had instead become Rapist Ted, someone she didn’t know at all?
As always, just when I started to get a hold of the idea of forgiving Kelly, I found my knuckles were white on the steering wheel and my throat was hoarse. I missed my child. And even trying to tiptoe into the waters of that great dark lake snapped me out of my reverie. I shook my arms, rolled my shoulders and set my mind on the road ahead of me. I didn’t have time to think about Lilly. It would cripple me.
/>
My task was to pick up any evidence I could find of Jake’s gambling debts or creepy fans from his wife, but before I could reach the house, I spied Jake’s son Harrison sitting in a car half a block away. I picked out the silhouette of his beanie against the windscreen. I drove past and looked in on him and a similarly gothic-looking girl in the beat-up grey Datsun, both smoking. She might have been the girl from the lake, but I didn’t get a good look at her. Harrison’s buckled boot was hanging out the passenger-side window, tapping to music. I don’t know how he found a beat in what was coming out of the car radio. As I went past with my window down, the music emitted a toneless roar of white noise.
I went around the block, and by the time I got back Harrison was heading towards the house, the girlfriend and her car gone, a paperback in his hand. He stopped when he saw me. I knew the cover of the book from my own teenage years. His eyes shot away almost as soon as they fell on me. The cocky, angry Harrison was back, and he was pissed that he’d showed me his vulnerable side, that he’d let me touch him. I didn’t mind. I could play this game. Good cop, bad cop, soft kid, tough kid. I’d adapt to what he wanted.
‘Oh, fuck off,’ he moaned, trying to push past me.
‘Your dad writes Christian fiction, so you read early Anne Rice,’ I said. I held my hands up. ‘The forces of the universe become balanced.’
‘Whatever,’ the boy said. He went for the house. I caught up to him with my long strides.
‘You’re not being as rebellious as you think,’ I said. ‘She had a spiritual transformation recently. Her latest stuff is more in tune with –’
‘Dude, why are you talking to me?’ Harrison turned and lasered me in the face with his gaze. ‘Anyone ever tell you the help should be seen and not heard?’
‘The help?’ I laughed. The kid was pretty quick. I was sure the smart mouth was more than a teenager’s anger and incomprehension at losing his father. I heard the defensive bitterness of a schoolyard bullying victim in his voice. Maybe the recipient of too much parental funding and not enough parental love. His catalogue of comebacks seemed far too convenient. ‘I’m here to see your mother. Is she home?’
