by Candice Fox
The child before me shivered in the rain. The irony of him calling Zoe a kid struck me. He looked so small. His shoulders were turned inward, like the bony wings of a bird.
‘Try to imagine,’ Harrison struggled, words half-forming on his lips. ‘Try to imagine what it might be like for a person to be your god. Like, a real person. Not just any real person, either, but a selfish idiot who can’t even control his own wife. Try to imagine what it must be like to be another person’s slave. I was his slave,’ Harrison thumped his own chest. Looked off, dazed.
‘Harry –’
‘He was going to send me away. It’s like, we got rid of Zoe’s mum, and my dad picks up the vendetta against us right where Teresa left off. We were cursed. All we wanted was to be together, and we killed someone for it. That should have been enough. He had no interest in me. None. And then he grabs at this one little thing he doesn’t like and thinks he’ll stick his nose in and break us apart.’
I watched the boy panting, seething. His shoulders shaking with rage, thin beneath his drenched shirt.
‘I cut the cable,’ Harrison said. ‘But I asked her first. I made sure.’
‘You killed Zoe’s mother,’ I said. ‘The two of you. And nothing happened. You got away with it.’
‘Exactly.’ Harrison looked at me, wild-eyed. ‘Exactly. Nothing happened. Nothing fucking happened. There was the funeral. The wake. Everybody cried. Everybody went home. Zoe and me, we went home together. It was … It was …’
Harrison held his arms out, begging, pleading with me to understand.
‘It was great,’ I finished.
‘It was great!’ Harrison laughed, broke into sobs. ‘We’re so fucked up. You understand? Zoe and me are so fucked up that we killed her mother and it was great.’
The boy sobbed hard. Flexed the stick, paced up and down the tiny end of the pier.
‘Harrison.’ I shifted closer again.
‘And with Teresa dead, and it being so great, we had to wonder, didn’t we? Why not do them all?’ He swallowed hard. ‘It was so easy. It was so great. Why not have all the funerals? Why not have all the wakes? We started playing around with the idea. Just fucking around, you know? Zoe’s dad’s a pig. Just a … a human pig. But then my dad starts on us about being together. About being young and stupid. And I knew we had Teresa all over again. That he was just going to pick at us and pick at us until we couldn’t take it anymore. He’d written to this rehabilitation ranch for troubled youths. Can you believe that? He wanted to put me on a six-month program for being with my fucking girlfriend.’
He was pleading with me now. He needed me to understand.
‘In two years, we could be rid of them all,’ he said. ‘And Zoe and me, we could take over the lives they’d left behind. They weren’t using them. They were wandering around the enormous fucking empty house avoiding each other, trying not to run into each other on the stairs. What was the point? What was the point of it all? Why should we have let them go on being our fucking gods when it was so easy to make it stop?’
Amanda suddenly thundered out of the bush behind me and skidded to a halt at my side, her sneakers sliding on the slick wet wood.
‘Whoa!’ She grabbed at my arm. ‘Nearly went over that time! You okay, boss? You’re covered in blood.’
‘I’m fine.’ I glanced at her. ‘Did you pass Zoe?’
‘Out like a light.’
‘Harrison?’ I said. ‘Harrison, I want you to put your hands up.’
The boy wasn’t done. He was staring at the water, the stick in his fists. Half his mind was swirling in the rage-filled memory of what he and his girlfriend had done. He made those barking noises again. Spun around and looked at me, stopped me in my tracks.
‘It was so easy,’ he said.
Amanda took a couple of steps forward but I grabbed her arm and dragged her back as something flicked across the top of the water a few metres out from the end of the pier. Harrison turned towards us, still tapping that long stick, his face spread wide in a smile.
‘You want to meet my pet?’ he asked.
‘Holy fuckballs.’ Amanda’s voice beside me was small and uncertain. ‘I’m not sure our fee covers this.’
‘Harrison, come slowly towards us,’ I said. ‘We can talk more about what happened when you get off the pier.’
The kid ignored me. He was the defiant schoolchild who wouldn’t come in from the rain, who made a show of himself in front of the students gathered inside the classroom. Lost in his own little world. There was another flicker of movement by the end leg of the pier, and Harrison leaned over the rickety wooden rail, waving the stick from side to side. I didn’t know whether to scream at the kid or bargain with him. As I watched, a black lump of something rose from the surface of the water, shimmering with rain. A snout or an eye. I couldn’t tell. All I knew was that it was alive.
‘Don’t do this, Harry,’ I said. ‘If you jump into the water, I can’t come in after you.’
Harrison Scully looked at me. He seemed to forget Amanda was there. My partner pulled out her own gun, the replica, an enormous silver Smith and Wesson revolver so big in her hands it was almost comical. I watched her flip open the barrel of the revolver, check the bullets inside. I didn’t know replicas had moveable barrels. Her face was set. Emotionless.
‘We just want to be free,’ Harrison said. ‘You get it, right?’
I flinched at the blast. I’d taken my eyes off Amanda for a second, and in that time she’d raised the gun and shot Harrison in the upper body. It was no replica. The boy flew backwards and landed on the end of the pier.
‘Amanda!’
‘I don’t have the stomach for much more of this,’ she said. She marched towards the end of the pier and, as she neared the boy, her foot seemed to disappear right through the surface of the wood, like magic. The boards were sawn right down the middle, wedged together at the centre over a sheer drop. A trap. The same trap Harrison had led Jake through, that fateful night, in the dark hours when he lured his father out of bed with phoney threats from a stranger. I was seeing Amanda fall through the pier, and I was seeing Jake falling too, grabbing at the air, screaming, his eyes rising to the boy at the end of the pier, who turned, who was not a stranger, not a threat, but his own child.
I was seeing Jake trying to grip the wood, sliding, disappearing into the depths where a predator waited, a wild thing tamed by his very own son.
Amanda fell out of sight before I could scream her name. Her gun clattered on the boards in front of the hole.
‘Amanda! Amanda!’ I ran to the edge of where she’d fallen, but as I came to the opening and fell on my knees I heard Harrison getting to his feet. He was bleeding. I tried to lift my gun, but he clicked the hammer of Amanda’s gun back with a sickening snap.
‘Don’t,’ he said.
The boards flopped downward on their thick nails, the wedges that had kept them upright fallen into the muddy water. There was no sign of Amanda. The water below me swirled. I thought I heard a scream, but it might have been the storm raging all around us. Rain ran down the back of my head and along my jaw in a steady stream. My stomach was twisted in a hard knot.
‘Put the gun down,’ Harrison said.
I did as I was told.
‘Please. Please. She’s my partner,’ I breathed, wanting to fall forward into the hole, to go after her, whatever that meant. The hands that held Amanda’s gun on me were shaking. I chanced a look up into Harrison’s eyes and saw the uncertainty there, the terror.
‘I’m not your dad,’ I said. ‘You don’t know me. I don’t deserve to die. My partner doesn’t deserve to die. Put the gun down.’
I fancied I could hear the springs in the trigger as the boy squeezed. My skin was alive with horror at the thought of a bullet plunging through me. The barrel of the gun was locked on my right eye. The boy wasn’t answering. I took a chance.
‘You’re not going to shoot me with the safety on,’ I said.
Harrison turned
the gun just slightly to look at the side of it, altering the aim from my eye to the space beside my left ear. That was all I needed. I launched my body at his legs, clearing the hole in front of me and falling on the boards at the end of the pier. The gun roared. We slid, limbs scrambling, the edge of the pier sickeningly near. My body moved with a will of its own, the wounds in my back and legs forgotten, my own partner forgotten, hands grabbing Harrison’s arms as he clawed at me. He twisted, slipped between my legs, tried to shove me over the edge of the pier. I gave a heavy swing that glanced off the shoulder where Amanda’s bullet had landed, sending him sprawling on the boards.
I thought I’d won. I was sure Amanda’s gun had fallen into the river when I launched myself at the boy, but as I stood and went to him he spun around, lifting the pistol, and fired at me point-blank. Missing my head by mere centimetres, the bullet whipping past my right ear.
The gunshot deafened me, started a ringing up in my ears like a fire alarm. I knocked the gun out of the boy’s hand in a desperate swipe and fell on him. His hands were at my waist, and they found the knife Zoe had stabbed me with. I grabbed the boy’s wrist before he could plunge it into my neck and turned the blade downward, away from me. My elbow slipped out from under me as the boy kicked upwards. The knife plunged into his throat, the handle embedded just under his jaw.
‘Idiot,’ I seethed, pulling the blade out, half talking to the boy and half talking to myself. ‘Fucking idiot.’
‘Oh god.’ The boy gurgled, grabbed at his bloody throat, coughed as he felt the warm blood rushing between his fingers. ‘Oh god, I’m dying. I’m dying.’
‘You’re not dying.’ I ripped off my wet shirt and bunched it up, stuffed it onto the wound. The boy’s hands were trembling as they came around mine, holding the shirt. A child’s fear, the defiant murderer gone. ‘But my partner probably is. So I’m leaving you here and going to find her.’
‘No, no, no,’ he coughed, gripping madly at the shirt. He reached for me. ‘I’m dying!’
I could hear sirens on the other side of the hill. The ambulance had come for Stella. They’d see the cars, the door open. I hoped some neighbours had heard the gunshots and would send officers down into the bush. I hoped Zoe was still unconscious there, and hadn’t fled. These were short, frantic thoughts as I leapt over the gap in the pier and jogged back towards the mangroves. My real mission was to find Amanda. That was all that counted. Two stupid children had murdered one of their parents each. No one else could die.
I ran along the grey beach, scanning the waters, looking for some sign of Amanda. I kept an eye on the edge of the forest, shuddering to a stop now and then as I fancied I saw movement in the long grass.
‘Amanda!’ I called. I ran back to the pier and started the other way along the tiny, muddy beach. ‘Amanda!’
As I ran, I remembered what Dynah had told me. I saw Amanda’s crime before my very eyes as I searched and called and hoped she wasn’t dead.
‘This is dumb,’ twelve-year-old Dynah said from the back seat of Lauren’s car. ‘We ought to just go home.’
Her older sister ignored her, eyes on the road, now and then letting a hand drift to her flat-ironed hair and run the length of the strands to their tips. Lauren always touched her hair when she was nervous, so that sometimes if something really important was coming up, like a dance recital at school or a public speaking assignment, she’d make the ends all greasy. Dynah suspected that Lauren’s nervousness was the key to her perfect performances, at the school, at home, in front of her friends. Dynah never seemed to be able to reach that peak of anxious energy. When Dynah had to talk in front of a crowd, or when she was invited to an important party, she started feeling sick, and then tired, and then she bailed out. That was her way.
She was feeling sick now, because she knew what was going to happen when they reached the meeting point. She huffed and folded her arms over her chest, tried to keep her eyes focused on the rainforest passing by the windows as the car climbed into the dark towards Kissing Point. Dynah didn’t know the girl in the seat in front of her, Amanda. But she seemed like a stupid choice for the Special Project. Lauren and the boys needed girls for the Special Project who wouldn’t go blabbering on to everyone about it, and this Amanda girl hadn’t shut up from the moment she got into the car. Dynah rubbed her belly and tried to breathe.
‘How many people are going to this thing?’ Amanda was asking. ‘Twenty? Thirty? Who organised it? Is Troy Ledwidge going to be there? He’s scary, that Troy Ledwidge. Someone told me he lives alone. He’s seventeen and he lives alone.’
‘You don’t leave enough time between your questions for people to answer,’ Lauren laughed uncomfortably. ‘You’re hyper-active, girl. Chill out!’
‘I just can’t believe you invited me. I’m so excited to be invited. Ha! That rhymes. I’m so excited to be invited. I’ve never been to one of these before. I know there was a really good party after the social last year. Did you go to that?’
‘What? Oh. Oh yeah, some people went down to the beach, I guess.’ Lauren cleared her throat, shifted upward in the driver’s seat.
‘We should go home.’ Dynah kicked her sister’s seat.
‘So, Amanda,’ Lauren said, ‘we’re just going to park a bit out of the way and then walk up to the party. Sound good? We don’t want to get the car stuck up there when everyone tries to leave.’
Dynah fidgeted. The way Lauren said ‘So, Amanda’ was just the way she’d said ‘So, Dynah’ the first time she’d asked her to be a part of the Special Project. Sweetly, gently, as though she was asking a minor favour for which there’d be a huge reward. So Dyyyyynah … So Amaaaanda … Almost as though she was sacrificing herself, giving the opportunity over to her more deserving friend. As though the winner in the exchange was really going to be Amanda herself, and Lauren was just oh so kind for giving up her spot.
The car pulled off the main road and rumbled down a narrow dirt path, stopped in the clearing behind a thick row of trees. The girls got out. Dynah could hear music on the wind. Amanda finished the Cruiser she’d been sipping and put it in the car’s centre console.
‘So I’ve actually got a surprise for you, yeah?’ Lauren said, sliding her fingers down the length of her hair. ‘I’ve brought along a dress for you to wear to the party. It’s in the back seat. Dynah, get it out, would you?’
Dynah reached into the back seat and pulled out the Myer bag. Chucked it on the ground beside the car’s tyre. It flopped on its side but didn’t open. The tape across the top of the bag kept it shut. Dynah knew there wasn’t really a dress inside. Just an old blanket to pad the bag out. A lie. Dynah thought lies were just about the worst thing in the world, and then here was a special kind of lie, one that could be held in your hands. An object. Amanda was just about vibrating with excitement. She could hear the older girl’s teeth chattering.
‘I can hear the music,’ Amanda said, looking towards the tops of the trees, as though the sound from the party up the road could be seen floating by, musical notes illuminated against the clouds. ‘I can’t believe this.’
‘You can’t wear that.’ Lauren looked at Amanda’s jeans, her stripy shirt. ‘Take your clothes off, and we’ll get you changed, yeah?’
In the dim glow of the car’s interior lights, Dynah watched Amanda strip down to her underpants and bra. It was a pink crop-top from Kmart. Dynah had started on one of those, but even she’d graduated to an A-cup underwire bra by now. Amanda’s body was thin and lean, the milk-white of skin that rarely saw sun. Dynah didn’t know much about the girl, but she must have been a weirdo if Lauren had chosen her for the Special Project. Someone who wouldn’t matter. Someone who wouldn’t be believed. Like her. No one would have believed Dynah, even if she snitched. She knew that.
Amanda stood in the clearing in her tiny underpants in front of the two girls, rubbing her long, spidery arms. Dynah swallowed back the sickness in her throat.
‘Okay.’ Lauren looked towards the trees as the so
und of the men’s footsteps emerged through the dull sound of the distant music. ‘Now don’t panic, yeah?’
Lou and Steve emerged from the bush. They were both in their patrol uniforms. Dynah had heard Lauren talking to her boyfriend Lou that afternoon on the kitchen phone, whispering, asking him when his shift would end. She’d doodled ‘LD’ on the chalkboard by the fridge, then quickly rubbed it out so their mother didn’t see. Lauren thought she was so amazing, dating someone outside school. A fully grown man. And a cop, too. It was exciting. It was so dangerous. Dynah had suffered through questioning on the way to school a bunch of times, Lauren’s friends pursuing her, poking her, trying to get details. Who was he? Was he really in his thirties? Were the handcuffs real? Lauren had said that when Dynah grew up, maybe she could go out with his friend, Steve. Dynah crept to the car, the familiar tremors starting in her limbs.
‘Hello, ladies,’ Lou said, smiling.
‘Police.’ Amanda’s face was void of emotion. She looked at Lauren. ‘It’s the police.’
‘Here’s the thing,’ Lauren said brightly. ‘Lou’s my boyfriend, okay? And he’s got a Special Project going. We just need you to play along. This is a really big favour for us, Amanda. Okay? It’s a really special, really important project, and we just need you to do what we say.’
‘Aren’t we going to the party?’ Amanda’s hands crept to her chest, gripped the cloth bra. ‘Aren’t we –’
‘Sure,’ Lauren said. ‘Sure we are. You want to be friends, right? Don’t you want to be my friend? Well, you can just do me this favour, and then we’ll be friends.’
Amanda looked at Dynah. The child cringed.
‘We’ll be really fast,’ Lauren said, nudging Lou. ‘Don’t hurt her, okay? Just do what you’ve got to do and we’ll get out of here.’
‘Take your pants off,’ Steve said, coming towards Amanda. Dynah watched as the officer grabbed the lanky teenager’s arms, Lauren’s boyfriend tugging the girl’s underpants off. ‘You’re going to lie on the ground, and we’re just gonna snap a few shots.’
