Crimson Lake

by Candice Fox

  ‘No.’ He unlocked the door. ‘So fuck –’

  Stella pulled open the door as Harrison was pushing it forward, causing the boy to stumble. For a moment, mother and son were almost chest to chest, and despite the dark hair and pathetic goatee I could see the resemblance between them: short, lean creatures, their pointy faces and big eyes. Harrison slipped past her and flipped me the bird as he trudged up the stairs.

  ‘I saw your car,’ Stella said.

  ‘Sorry, I should have called.’

  ‘Not at all, Mr Collins. I love surprises.’ She touched my arm by way of invitation and closed the door behind me.

  ‘I’m,’ – I inhaled, feeling awkward – ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Stella.’

  She looked at the ground for exactly three beats. It was almost as though she was counting them off in her head. The appropriate sombre pause.

  ‘Anything I can help you with, or are you just checking up on me?’

  ‘I’m here to have a squiz at Jake’s paperwork,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for fan letters in particular. Do you know if he kept any?’

  ‘Oh, boring.’ She laughed hard. I began to analyse her walk as she led me through the foyer, towards the big sunroom where we’d first sat together. Was she drunk? I glanced at the clock. It was midday. I smiled at myself. Here I was going around keeping watch over the people of Cairns and their intoxication levels, balancing them against the time of day. I recalled the hot, wobbly moments Woman had come into my life, how difficult it had been trying to get the box of terrified geese into the back of my car. How I’d paused by the driver’s door, bent double, wondering if I was going to vomit. Was it the birds that had got me sober, or was it Amanda? Here I was, also, calling myself sober. It had been mere days. And the smell of bourbon on Mrs Scully was making my shoulders tighten with desire. I was a joke.

  She led me into the dead man’s office and went away, came back after a while with the crystal decanter. I watched her with one eye as I rifled through Jake’s drawers. She went in and out a few times, setting up a kind of picnic on the floor before the huge oak desk. Two glasses, the bourbon, some soft cheeses and expensive-looking crackers. My hunger for the spread grew in direct proportion to my trepidation at sitting on the floor and sharing it with her. I fantasised about her leaving the room again and my locking the door behind her.

  Jake’s papers were in a terrible mess. Classic creative type. It would take hours to organise them. I picked up things on the desk and shifted them from one side to another. Royalty statements. Cover design options in various colours and fonts. There was a large stack of printed pages bound with huge bulldog clips, an unfinished new manuscript. I flipped through, fanning my face with the paper, looking at Jake’s little pencil notes to himself in the margins. I let the heavy manuscript whump onto the table where I had found it, the air unsettling some Post-it notes littered around the pencil tin, making them flap like feathers.

  ‘Come have a break, detective,’ Stella said.

  I imagined Harrison in the upstairs bedroom, fuming, replaying that moment when his mother pulled open the door and he stumbled in front of the man he was challenging. I imagined a hundred other exchanges between the boy and his father, the big-league writer and his useless, rudderless, moody son. His typical teenage son, coming down to settle the score with the stranger-man hanging around his mother.

  ‘I’ve got payment slips for advances. I’ve got bookshop appearance schedules. I’ve got …’ I squinted at one of the sheets before me. ‘Editorial notes. Any idea where he kept his fan letters?’

  ‘I said, come. And have. A break.’ Her coldness convinced me that if I didn’t join her she would snap somehow. Emotionally or physically.

  I went and sat awkwardly on the carpet beside her, plucked up a chip. My crunching sounded obnoxiously loud. She was wearing a dark blue cotton dress this time. Off-the-shoulder on one side, more of a complicated wrap that tangled prettily at her waist. Grecian goddess picking at grapes, bored.

  My face felt hot. I gulped half a glass of bourbon. It felt like a surrender.

  ‘Was Jake a gambling man?’ I asked.

  ‘He liked a wager.’

  ‘Do you think he was getting to like it at a dangerous level?’

  ‘Let’s not talk about Jake.’

  ‘Jake is why I’m here, Mrs Scully. He’s the only reason I’m here.’

  She laughed and made a drunken, dismissive sound with her full lips, which made me wonder if she was challenging my manhood, trying to get me to stand up to this dead and digested husband of hers who didn’t want her but wouldn’t let her be free. ‘No one comes to Crimson Lake for work. You come here to hide or you come here to die.’

  Stella ran the back of her hand up my arm. Patted the hairs against the grain, made me shiver.

  ‘What are you hiding from?’ She smiled. Her fingers on the inside of my elbow were almost painful, they were so gentle, so warm.

  ‘Nothing,’ I sighed. ‘I haven’t … I’m not …’

  ‘Liar,’ she whispered. ‘Liar, liar, liar.’

  In one smooth movement, she extended a bronze leg from the dress, slid it over my lap and slipped onto me, straddling my legs, her hips against mine. She smoothed my hair back from my forehead and breathed her bourbon perfume onto my lips.

  She didn’t kiss me right away. She pressed her warm forehead against mine and gathered up my hands, then put them on her waist.

  ‘Oh god,’ I said. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  ‘I’ve been alone for so long,’ she murmured.

  I felt myself smiling at that. The morning of That Day was the last time anyone had touched me with any real desire or intimacy. That morning, at eight, I’d made love to my wife in the bedroom of our little suburban love nest, and then we’d fought, and I’d gone out ‘fishing’ but more accurately ‘doing anything’ to get away from her while she wailed at me from the middle of her bubble of helpless agony, First Baby terror. I’d watched her long enough rolling around in that cruel sphere that simultaneously protected her from anyone else understanding her pain and guarded her from any outside assistance.

  Since then I’d been hugged stiffly in consolation an amount of times I could count on my fingers, and I’d been bashed a couple of times more. Aside from being shuffled and led around by guards, I’d not been touched at any other time, and I was acutely aware of it. And now the beautiful and sinful Stella Scully was rocking her hips against mine and I was breathing against her neck and listening to the sound of her expensive cotton fabric moving against my gooseshit-stained jeans like it was the song of an ocean siren.

  And then suddenly, through that glorious music, there came the voice of none other than the prosecutor in my trial.

  You, a man in excess of six feet tall, one hundred and ten kilos of police-trained muscle. You picked that little girl up off the side of the road like she was a sack of potatoes and you threw her struggling body into your car …

  I snapped my hands back from Stella’s waist. My breath was caught in my chest.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I choked. I released all the air in my lungs. ‘Nothing. It’s okay.’

  Where did that come from? I watched my big hands running over Stella’s small shoulders. She was unbuttoning my shirt. Her warm, thin fingers pushing the fabric off my shoulders, kissing my neck. I gathered up a handful of her hair, tried to stay with her, the smell of her, the taste of her lips on my mouth. Why was I thinking about my trial, now of all times? When her fingers were on me, her nails running up through my hair, just when everything felt so good and so right. There into the warmth and dream came the echo of the courtroom, the whine of the microphones and the glare of the angry crowd.

  ‘Oh, god,’ Stella whispered. ‘Ted. Please.’

  ‘Please, please, please!’ she begged you. ‘Please don’t hurt me!’ she cried. But you had no mercy for her, did you, Mr Conkaffey? You drove some five full minutes with that child in the back of your car
and you ignored her cries, her pleas for her mother …

  I broke away from Stella, pushed her down underneath me, onto the rug. I swept the tray of snacks out of the way, knocked over my glass, shook my head, tried to keep my eyes on her. Stella yelped when my fingers got tangled in her hair. I laughed, apologised, pushed the wayward strands from her face.

  ‘Stella,’ I said. ‘Stella. Stella. Stella.’

  I tried to remind myself I was here with Stella. I was not …

  … in that dark and dense bushland by the side of the highway, where you dragged the child kicking and crying from your car. And you dumped her on the bare earth like an animal, didn’t you, Ted? And like an animal you tore off her clothes and you …

  ‘No!’ I cried. ‘No! No! No!’

  I was standing by the windows looking out at the lawn, my palms pressing into the sides of my head, my breath clouding the glass in front of me in painful huffs. I couldn’t inhale but for what felt like the top inch of my lungs, the rest of my chest solid, filled with concrete. I gripped at my hair. ‘No.’

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Stella asked.

  My hands moved of their own volition, dragging down my ears, gripping at the top of my throat, squeezing. I scratched at my face, tried to claw out the visions flashing before me. Little girl on the bare earth. Little girl crying. I turned to look at Stella and found her staring at me, her face twisted in disgust. The top of her dress was unclipped at the shoulder and flopped over her waist. Her brown breasts were bared, and she was rapidly covering them up, blocking them from me with her arms.

  ‘Get out,’ she snapped.

  I hesitated, trying to think of something, anything, to say.

  ‘Get out!’ she screamed.

  I left.

  Dear Jake,

  I wonder where these letters go. They’re obviously not going to you. I know you’re not the kind of guy who would just accept letters from people who are devoted to you and toss them out like rubbish. Maybe they’re going to that selfish piece of shit agent of yours. Hi, Cary! Mind passing this on to Jake? I got your rejection letter – really heartfelt. Thanks, mate. I’m not mad; I get it. Working with someone with so much talent must make you bitter. Make you feel like the pretender you are. Well, just remember, Cary, no matter how much you pretend, you’ll never have what Jake has. Let it go. Give the man the praise he deserves.

  Jake, if this ever gets to you, I wanted to tell you I saw you on BookWeek Live. I’d planned to go to the Cairns filming but I chickened out. Can you believe that? I just got so worked up about seeing you in the flesh, talking to you, that I stayed home, and by the time the event was over I was devastated.

  The way you write about your characters, I can see that each of them is some part of you. There’s Adam in you – his strength and resolve, his determination not to let any harm come to Eve. She’s there within you too, Jake. Her sensitivity. Her mistrust of the world. It’s the part of her in you that I recognise the most. I can see that while she’s bound with her secrets, you too are harbouring secrets of your own. How else could you know so perfectly how it feels to be the outcast, to be the one wearing the mask? Writers write because they want to create safe places. Safe worlds. I totally understand.

  I get the world you’ve created in your books. You’re unveiling the human nastiness and darkness we see every day in this country. The piggery and selfishness and greed. People are so willing to criticise each other, so ready to point out what’s different and what’s lacking, and they can’t see through to the goodness and the talent in people who aren’t beautiful and powerful and perfect. Sometimes I just marvel at people’s mindlessness, their lack of civility. Sitting on the bus I look around at them, at their drooling mouths and glazed eyes. They’re not like us. They don’t think. They’re miscreants. They’re beasts.

  I know I’m just a fan, a stranger, but I want you to know, Jake, that I can be that safe place for you to divulge your secret pains, the ones you obviously hold so tightly to your chest, lest they be taken up by the savages around us. I’m completely separate from your life – and most importantly, I respect you, Jake. I write to escape my own stupid life. You spoke on Wake Up, America! about feeling like an outsider at university here in Australia. Like no one understood you but your teachers. I get you, Jake. We’re the same. If only you knew it. You’d feel glad you finally found me.

  I’ve included something I’ve been writing lately – my own work, but it has ties to yours. It’s just the first few pages of a manuscript I’ve been outlining about the end of the world, a world just as corrupted and desperate as the one you write about. I’ve included some of the landscapes and characters you use in your books. If it ends up getting published, maybe it could sell as a tie-in. I don’t care if Cary reads it or not. You’re better than that guy, Jake. I’m telling you.

  Give my love to Stella and Harrison.

  It was a tired and frazzled Ted who knocked on the door of the Beale Street office at ten the next morning. I’d had a restless night mentally replaying the incident with Stella, haunted by the things I’d thought while we touched. I hadn’t had so much as a whiff of anything sexual since the morning I left home on the day that ruined my life, and now the mere suggestion of it was infected with the horrific things I’d heard at my trial. Those things I was accused of. There was a monster Ted, a me who was not me, who was very real in the minds of everyone who had attended the court. There was a very finely rendered fictitious monster Ted who savaged a small girl, who used his body as a huge and hideous weapon against her. That monster Ted wanted me to know he was still hanging around. The prosecution had created him, given him life. A taste of the world. That demon liked it here, above ground. He’d decided to stay.

  I was afraid of that Ted. He’d played with my mind so easily in Jake’s office. I was out of control. The images he was showing me felt real.

  On the front porch that morning, I’d found a cardboard box. Wary it might be a present from the vigilantes, I’d lifted the lid off with a stick from the front yard, only to find it was filled with paperwork. Stella must have called Amanda to get my address. There were fan letters, and a thick, bound printout of Jake’s bank account statement going back six months. Jake’s wife might have seen something in me she didn’t like – maybe felt rejected by me – but she still wanted her husband’s case solved. On the morning news, they’d announced the medical examiner’s ruling that Jake Scully was dead. I’d watched the brief report in the living room with my coffee, standing in my tracksuit pants and bare feet. Two goslings had wandered in through the open doors and decided the hairs on my big toes were food. They stood plucking hopelessly at them, trying to free them from the skin.

  To get her life insurance money, Stella Scully would need to be able to prove Jake didn’t kill himself, and she’d need the Queensland Police investigation into his death closed. Those were the only two things in the way of her payment.

  Amanda opened the door wearing Batman pyjama pants and a singlet that read ‘Do Not Disturb’. Four rotund felines stood around her, curious to know who was calling.

  ‘You’re not a morning person, are you?’ I said. Her hair was all pushed over to one side like a freak gust of wind had taken it.

  ‘Get in here,’ she said.

  I walked into a growing crowd of knee-high furry beasts, being careful not to step on any tiny toes. The room I entered was a large office with an L-shaped desk covered in stacks of paper. I put the box down on the desk and led the cats to the corner of the room, where a group of certificates was hung. Amanda’s Private Investigator’s licence, as well as some certificates endorsed by Brisbane Women’s Correctional Facility. She’d completed her final year of high school behind bars, as well as some courses in martial arts. I raised my eyebrows. Above the Investigator’s licence was a certificate for completing an Alcoholics Anonymous program.

  ‘I didn’t know you were in AA,’ I said. I’d considered joining after my first couple of weeks out o
f prison, but didn’t like the idea of being recognised in a small group setting. Amanda was clattering things around in the kitchen. Half of the cats had followed her and the other half were rubbing themselves against my calves.

  ‘I didn’t have a problem. I hardly drink,’ she said. ‘I just did the course.’

  ‘Why?’ I laughed.

  ‘You get commissary points for courses you complete at Brisbane Women’s. Any courses. Those courses on the wall were the ones I found interesting. The rest are there.’ She waved her hand at a stack of more certificates on the second shelf of the bookcase. I went and leafed through them. She’d completed courses in literature, biology, landscape design and psychology. There were dozens of certificates.

  ‘You play trumpet?’ I scoffed.

  ‘I can also crochet an afghan blanket; a skill I’ve found incredibly useful in my everyday life.’

  ‘This is hilarious.’

  ‘Are you finished going through my stuff?’ She had her back to me, pouring milk into two coffee mugs. A huge black cat had sprung up onto the counter beside her. She shooed the animal with her elbow as she poured.

  ‘Get down, Nine. Nine!’

  The cat persisted. She put the milk down and lifted the animal onto the floor.

  ‘Nine?’

  Amanda yawned. She pointed to the cats in turn.

  ‘Nine. Four. Seven. That fat saggy one there is One. She’s the dirty hussy who started it all.’ She nudged one of the cats with her foot, a tabby who was thinner and older-looking than the rest. ‘You’ll discover she’s a bad mother. Her brother was another lover, an undercover mover and groover trying to outmanoeuvre the other fat cats on his patch.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  ‘Not a lot of words rhyme with mother,’ Amanda sighed reflectively. She gave me my coffee. ‘What’s in the box?’

  ‘Fan letters,’ I said. ‘I’ve had a brief look, but nothing sticks out for me. A lot of it is very praising. I love you. I love your characters. I usually read this and that, you remind me of this author and that author.’