by Candice Fox
‘Is this an autopsy table?’ I asked. Valerie glanced at me.
‘It is.’
‘Lauren Freeman might have lain here,’ I whispered. Letting my eyes fall closed was glorious.
‘Well! Believe it or not, that’s actually one of the least crazy things you’ve said in the last hour or so.’ The doctor stood, her stool squeaking on the floor. ‘Might be time for more yummy yummy drugs, I think.’
She fiddled with an IV line in my other arm. I stretched and heard my knees pop, had flashes of them being knocked from beneath me. A dull ache infected everything.
‘Do the police know I’m here?’ I asked.
‘You told me it was the police who did this to you.’
‘No, yes. But. Do the other police –’
‘No one knows you’re here,’ she replied.
‘Except me,’ a voice said. I heard heels on the tiled floor. ‘Jesus Christ, Ted, what the fuck happened?’
A warm hand on my forehead. I opened my eyes and found my vision had blurred. I shifted up, trying to decide which colourful shape was Valerie and which was Fabiana.
‘I’d love to know how you got in here,’ Valerie said.
‘I’ve switched sides,’ Fabiana told her. ‘Or at least I’m not … I’m not sure anymore. I’m neutral. Look, I’m not going to be a pain in the arse. I just wanted to know if he’s all right.’
‘How did you find out I was here?’ I asked.
‘I have my ways. Couple of waitresses reported to cops in Cairns that a big guy with black hair had been beaten. Said some old woman picked him up before the ambulance could get there. You weren’t answering your phone. It didn’t take a genius.’
‘Old woman?’ Valerie snorted.
‘Who did this to you?’ Fabiana helped me as I struggled to sit up. ‘I want to know names. We’ll get the details down in time for the nightly news in Sydney. This is bullshit.’
‘Are you daft, girl? Why do you think he’s here?’ Valerie snapped. ‘He’s here because he can’t even go to a public fucking hospital right now or someone will recognise him. If you put a word of this in the news I’ll smack that lipstick right off your face.’
‘This is absolutely appalling! His charges have been dropped. He can’t be treated like this!’
‘Well, excuse me if I don’t go falling down in admiration at your crusade for justice, honey,’ Valerie said. ‘Let me remind you that you were in here mere days ago trying to hang him in the town square.’
‘Can you stop?’ I said. ‘I just want to go home. Please take me home.’
‘Even if he was guilty, I wouldn’t stand by and let a man be beaten in the street like a fucking dog,’ Fabiana said.
‘I don’t know.’ Valerie shrugged. ‘It makes great news.’
‘Stop.’ I grabbed the closest blurry shape, which turned out to be Fabiana. ‘Just get me home.’
Dear Jake,
Yesterday I went on a scouting tour. Do you know why? Because I wanted to know what it’s like to have so much to lose.
I’ve never had much to lose, myself. I don’t count material things, even though you’ve got that beautiful house stuffed pretty full of useless junk, it looks like. Lots of modern art. That’s all Stella’s doing, I imagine. No, what I’m talking about is the walls and structures we build inside ourselves. Most people start doing it from the very beginning, when they’re children. Your parents help you put down the basics. The slab. The floorboards. The tiles. Your self-confidence. Your strength. The essentials, like how to give and receive love. You’ve got all that going. I watched you in the evening with the boy and your trophy wife, and though he’s clearly a failure waiting to happen and she’s got all the inner complexity of a schoolkid’s lunchbox, you love them. You are capable of that.
My foundations are crumbled and broken. I don’t know if I was born this way or what. I don’t trust anyone. I go about the world tucked into myself, hateful. I’m like a spider in a hole. It’s cold in here.
You. You have nice strong foundations. On top of them you’ve built walls, and a roof to keep out the rain. I bet you feel safe. I bet it’s a happy brain you’ve got in that handsome skull. Built strong.
I like destroying things. I always have. I like taking things apart and seeing how they work. When I was a kid I liked to break toys with my hands. I’d rip up teddies and pull the heads off dolls. Some toys were tough, I had to get Daddy’s hammer out to smash ’em up. As I sat in the dark last night looking up at your glorious house, watching you go from room to room, I thought about tearing you apart, Jake. Striking first at your confidence. Then at your strength. What if I threatened the people you love, Jake? How long would it take you to crack?
What if I went into your house and stabbed your pretty little goth boy in his bed, Jake? Would he drop the tough-guy facade and cry out for his papa?
What’s it gonna take to get your attention?
I listened to the tapping for a long time before I ventured to lift my head from the pillow and look down at the end of the bed. It was Amanda sitting there working on her laptop, stopping now and then only to curl wisps of her wild hair around her long fingers. The bedside table was littered with crumpled pill packets. I rolled over slightly, took one, and pulled it back into the darkness beneath the sheet with me, popping the capsules out in the dark.
‘Are you awake?’ she asked.
‘Mmm-hmm.’
The whole bed shuddered as she leapt from the bottom to the pillow beside me, the motion setting off all my aches and pains at once.
‘Finally! Jesus! It’s been three days!’
‘No,’ I groaned. ‘Surely not.’
She snuggled under the sheets. I lay looking at her, querying the kind of woman who recoiled from my touch like she’d been burned but who would happily sneak under my sheets, presumably with no idea what I was wearing underneath them. I checked. I was wearing pyjama pants. My ribs were taped, and the gash in my left arm had been wrapped tightly in cotton. I had no idea what my face looked like, but it didn’t feel good.
‘Get ready for the download,’ Amanda said.
‘I’m ready.’
‘One.’ She held up a finger. ‘None of the bookstore staff recognised the angry fan from the book launch. But one of the ladies who worked there helpfully mentioned that she thought the guy was young, and had dark hair in a ponytail.’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Two,’ Amanda said, ‘the street on which Cairns Books lies isn’t the most secure street in the entire world. But there are some CCTV cameras on it. I contacted a pool supplies shop a few blocks down from the bookstore and asked them to go back through their footage and see if they could see the guy. Took them a whole day.’
‘What did they find?’
‘They found the guy.’
‘And?’
‘And he walked right by the store. Hood up. Completely useless.’
‘Why did you bother telling me about it, then?’ I frowned.
‘Because I think you should be aware of every nuance of my independent, solo and entirely one-man investigation in the time you’ve been lying here like a half-chewed slug,’ she said. ‘I’ve been working my arse off. How can you appreciate that unless you know every –’
‘All right, all right, all right.’
‘Three,’ she continued, wary of being interrupted again, ‘I also obtained useless shots of the guy walking by a liquor store and a shoe shop.’
‘You’re truly wondrous.’
‘And then I got this brilliant shot of him from outside the train station!’ she wailed in triumph, turning the laptop towards me. I stared at the long face of a man in his early twenties, his eyes downcast to a mobile phone, the hood of his jacket around his shoulders.
‘Lo! There stands our foe!’ she trumpeted.
‘The villain, unmasked!’ I joined in for once. ‘So who is he?’
‘No idea.’ Amanda snuggled down against the pillows. ‘I was just going through some
of the Last Light Chronicles Fan Club profiles on Facebook to see if anyone looks similar.’
I lay back against the soft bed and watched her scrolling through the profile pictures on the screen. Now and then she stopped when a name appeared beside a blank picture, taking the meagre information from the profile and the name itself to do a Google search for photographs of the individual. It was painstaking work, but she seemed to do it on autopilot, her eyes not wavering from the screen, her face set. I tossed and turned and slept a little, and she never moved but for her fingers on the keys, tapping robotically.
I only realised I was dozing off again when I was awakened by her quiet ‘Huh.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve been going through photos from all Jake’s reading events on the Facebook pages of various booksellers,’ she said. ‘What do you think about this guy?’
She showed me a picture of Jake sitting at a desk beside what looked like a theatre stage, his broad back a mass of grey wool at the bottom of the picture. At the corner of the frame was a young man with a long face, brooding eyes hidden beneath a heavy brow. One arm lay limp at his side, the other clutching it awkwardly. He was standing apart from the men and women swamping the table.
He was younger in the picture than he was in the CCTV footage.
‘Looks pretty similar,’ I said. ‘Can you get any other angles?’
Amanda clicked through and stopped on another crowded picture, the same theatre space now being used as a cocktail party setting.
‘Is that Jake?’ Amanda pointed to the uppermost edge of the picture. The same grey wool jumper. The young man with the ponytail. Jake appeared to be whispering in the kid’s ear.
‘How can we find out who that kid is?’ I asked.
‘Maybe he’s been tagged.’ Amanda went back to the original photograph, swept the pointer over the faces in the crowd. Names flickered and disappeared. None appeared for the ponytailed man.
‘Start writing to those other people. See if you can find someone who knows him. We’ll see if his name is in the fan letters.’
I closed my eyes, tried to remember something about the three days I’d lost in slumber. I had vague recollections of Amanda being there. I remembered wandering out into the hall, shivering, the sheet clutched around me, spying her at the kitchen table on her laptop in the middle of the night. Amanda standing outside the toilet talking to me while I tried to remain upright, too exhausted to be embarrassed by the sounds of my pissing, too drugged to hang on to what she was saying. There was also a deeply troubling memory of going to the crack in the boarded-up windows in the early morning or late afternoon and seeing Amanda outside on the nature strip, talking to Damford and Hench.
I knew the memory was real because the Amanda of my mind was a bright, excited, tirelessly cheerful character. And I’d been shocked by how subdued she was, standing there before the two chubby, dark-eyed officers. She was staring at her feet, listening to them lecture her. Threaten her. She wasn’t the eternal child I knew. She looked her age.
What had they been talking about?
A car engine revved outside. Amanda and I turned and looked at the doorway. On the back porch, I heard Woman begin to squawk as the revving increased, higher and higher, the spray of gravel.
‘What the fuck is that?’
‘I don’t know. It’s not vigilantes. They don’t come during the day.’
I got out of the bed, and all my pains came to life at once, my hips clicking and ribs crunching and head swirling. I gripped my way to the front room, Amanda following. She took one crack in the side of the boarded up window, and I took the other.
There was a green sedan on the road, revving and revving, the driver now and then dropping the car into drive and spraying clay and rocks. My hands were shaking as I held onto the wood, trying to see the faces in the car. They were all adult men.
‘These aren’t the ones,’ I told Amanda. ‘The usual ones.’
‘You’re gonna die, Ted Conkaffey!’ the man in the passenger seat hollered. ‘You’re gonna die, you piece of shit!’
‘Well!’ Amanda sighed. ‘That’s not very ni–’
Gunshots popped at the front of the house, and I heard the bullets tear into the boards on the window in the other room. I glimpsed the shooter in the back seat, sweeping his aim across the house.
‘Get down!’ I cried.
Amanda hit the floor before I did. I sank into a painful crouch then fell on my stomach as bullets tore through the boarded windows, showering us in splinters.
The car roared away and I rolled onto my back, looking up at the beams of light filtering through the holes. There were eight or nine, a crooked gold ladder leading towards the ceiling. Amanda was lying on her stomach looking at me, her hands, covered in woodchips, splayed out in front of her.
‘That was the most exciting thing I’ve been through in …’ She paused, considered. ‘Weeks, at least.’
‘I can’t say I share your enthusiasm.’ I dragged myself to my feet. My knees felt wobbly. ‘I’ll feed the geese and lock them up, you get your things. Let’s get out of here, at least for a while.’
I told Amanda I’d meet her at her office, that I had an errand to run. But in truth I wanted to be alone to try to get my head around the idea that someone had just shot at my house. Thoughts whizzed through my mind as I wound the car aimlessly through the cane plantations, going nowhere.
I was so lucky I didn’t live with my wife and child anymore.
I needed to call the police.
The police had almost killed me three days earlier.
I needed to get my geese out of there. They weren’t safe.
The last thought caused the tingle in my nose that comes before tears, but the emotion didn’t go further than that. I couldn’t lose it now. Not over geese. But I couldn’t deny that Woman and her babies had provided a great relief for me in my days in Crimson Lake, both by taking the place of my lost child and by reminding me that I wasn’t the most helpless creature around – that in fact there was danger and terror all around, and that if these birds could survive, I could too. I’d enjoyed sitting on the porch in the mornings and looking at them, remembering them huddled in the cardboard box I’d taken them to the vet in, their feathers fluffed with raw, primal fear. Their lives, literally, in my hands. Whatever had happened to bring them to my door, it had ended. Maybe one day, like them, I’d be rescued from this.
I stopped at the side of the road and held my head. The fires inside were swelling, swirling. This was getting dangerous. I felt all my injuries come alive at once as the anger ripped through me. Anger at Damford and Hench, anger at the hillbillies shooting at my house, anger at that snide little shit Harrison Scully. A kid who’d hurl himself, sobbing, against my chest and demand physical consolation one second and look at me like I was a piece of trash the next, talk down to me in the street like he was a full-grown man.
When I was a kid and an adult asked for me something, I fucking gave it. Because that’s what you did. Adults were adults, no matter who they were. Their word ruled. You didn’t consider what they could or couldn’t do to you and weigh your options.
I realised I was staring through the windscreen in a daze, my phone in my fingers. Before I could stop myself, I was googling the local state school. I was going to find Harrison’s girlfriend before she and her vigilante friends spread news of my presence in town any further. Already, it seemed, they’d let some rather dangerous characters know what I’d been accused of and where I lived. If they kept going, I’d have a mob on my doorstep in days. Maybe I could put the fear of god into her somehow. Maybe if I rattled her a bit I could stem the leak. Part of me knew it was futile. But I was so shaken by the shooting that I needed a mission, right now, a project to focus me, stop me from falling off the edge.
I looked through the listings of state schools around Crimson Lake and clicked on the first one. My hands were shaking as I selected the number. I cleared my tight throat, stretched my neck as th
e receptionist came on the line.
‘Thorn Crest State School, Marian speaking.’
‘How ya goin’, Marian. M’name’s Ted Collins. I’m a contractor with the Department of Transport and Main Roads, workin’ up on State Route 91 here. I’m sorry to bother ya,’ I said, and sniffed. ‘But I’m doing some stuff here on the roadside and there’s a bunch of schoolkids in a Datsun Bluebird making absolute arses of themselves right on the edge of the turnoff.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Yeah, look I don’t mean to be a snitch.’ I sniffed again. ‘But I’ve asked them to move on and they just told me to fuck off, basically.’
‘My god,’ Marian the receptionist sighed. ‘Where’s this?’
‘Up on the highway. Turnoff near Pickering Street. The ringleader of this group’s a young girl with black and pink hair. Pigtails. These lot are smoking up a chimney in their bloody school uniforms and all.’
‘Pink hair?’ Marian perked up. ‘Oh no, that doesn’t sound like one of our girls. We’ve got the strictest dress code here in the whole region.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes indeed. Our uniform policies are of the highest standard. We take great pride in our students’ appearance, in their representation of the school. We have forty-three students in the secondary school, and none of them have coloured hair. Are you sure they were school students?’
I hung up on Marian and dialled Smithfield State, Bringley State and Rosetta State schools. My temperature was starting to fall. I leant against the window as I told my story to the receptionist, Greg, at Hoffman State High School.
‘Right,’ Greg snapped suddenly. ‘That sounds like that bloody Zoe Miller again.’
‘Sorry,’ I sat up. ‘Who?’
‘Jessie,’ Greg the receptionist was saying in the background of the call, ‘Jessie, ring Carmel, will you? Zoe Miller and those boys are off smoking on the side of the highway. Mr Collins? Mr Collins, I’m still here. Thank you for your call. We’ll send our day officer out to retrieve the students.’
