Call Me Evie

by J. P. Pomare

  ‘I’m so glad you’re okay. Jesus, you had me worried.’ He releases me and I stumble back until I hit something firm. I collapse against the wall and slide to the floor.

  Jim squats down beside me, touches my face gently. ‘I explained it all, Kate. They know who you are and what has happened to you. They know about Thom.’ He looks deep into my eyes. ‘You’re not a killer.’

  I know – you are the killer.

  ‘No,’ I say, so quietly that I wonder if anyone hears it at all. ‘No, please don’t, please.’

  ‘Every day I think about what I could have done differently. It’s only now that I realise it’s out of my hands. You pretend it never happened. You stopped taking your medication. You disappear into the night. You almost kidnapped a girl.’

  ‘He’s lying,’ I say. ‘He’s lying!’

  ‘You refused to acknowledge what happened. The media, that city where everyone wanted to know your secrets, it was too confronting for you. I thought I could take you away to a place where I could control everything. I wanted to help by slowly reminding you, slowly drawing out your memories of that night . . . but I failed. You fired a gun at me. You tried to kill me, your own father.’ He exhales. Eyes weary behind his glasses. He is still disguising himself, even now. I watch his tongue run over his cracked lips. He’s playing to the audience now.

  ‘Lies!’ I yell. ‘You killed him, you admitted it.’

  He turns to Iso’s mother and shrugs as if to say, I told you so. She stands with her arms crossed, those dull eyes sad.

  ‘Kate, you shot at me. Can you imagine what that is like – after all I’ve done to protect you, that you should turn on me?’

  ‘He’s lying to you,’ I say. ‘He’s lying, he’s lying, he’s lying.’ I realise I’m screaming but I can’t stop. The look on Iso’s face is one of deep sorrow, but I realise the sorrow is not for me – it’s for him. Jim has won.

  I scramble to my feet and try to run, but my leg collapses beneath me. I scream even louder. Iso and Jim both rush forwards to restrain me.

  ‘I should call an ambulance,’ Iso says.

  ‘No,’ Jim says. ‘It’ll take too long. I’ll drive her straight to the hospital now.’

  ‘Should I come along?’

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ Jim says. ‘Thank you both for your help. I’ll let you know how she goes.’

  Iso’s gaze lingers on Jim’s face. ‘Alright, let me help you get her to the car, at least.’

  Donna steps forwards, her eyes on me. ‘God gives us what we can handle, doll.’ With her warm forgiving smile I think she could be anyone’s mum. She could very well be my own.

  Jim and Iso help me up. I am limp, delirious with pain and fatigue.

  ‘Iso,’ I say, my voice ugly and desperate. ‘Iso, please. You don’t understand. Are you in on it? Did you know Thom, is that it? You knew him, didn’t you?’

  Iso adjusts his grip, taking me by the elbow of my right arm, and the pain cuts through my mind. As I open my mouth to scream, darkness swallows me.

  Rocking. Explosions of pain. The sound of the engine.

  I blink, try to raise my hand but I can’t.

  Straps run across my body; I’m in the back seat of the car and my hands are cable-tied.

  ‘You’re awake,’ he says, eyeing me in the rear-view mirror. ‘If only you had listened to me, none of this would have been necessary. Our last weeks together as a family could have been a happy time.’ His expression has changed; no longer earnest and open, but himself again, controlling and manipulative.

  ‘It’s my own fault, I suppose.’ He clears his throat. ‘I thought we’d got away with it but the noose kept tightening and tightening, and at the end of the day it was either me or you.’

  The pain is back, fireworks exploding all over my body. My shoulder is numb and I only notice the ice strapped to it when it crackles against the seatbelt. I don’t recognise the places passing by outside the window.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘We’re on our way to your new home, Kate. A place where you won’t be able to do any more damage, not to anyone else’s life and not to your own.’ He continues, ‘The smallest lie can protect you from the harshest truths. We own our memories, Kate. We can change them and move on.’

  ‘You killed him.’

  ‘I had to.’

  ‘Why? Why drag us here?’

  ‘When you became unstable, you could have said anything to anyone. You didn’t remember how it happened. You’re not right in the head. You began to get closer and closer to the truth, but the truth can be white-hot, and when you touched it, you retracted into yourself again.’ He takes a breath. ‘I thought that you were the only one who could give me away. All it would have taken was a slip of the tongue.’

  ‘Are you going to kill me?’

  ‘Kate, everything I have done has been to protect you. Everything. I couldn’t sleep with worry. I couldn’t look away from the cameras and the GPS. We were so close to escape. But then someone who’d been away on a cruise when it happened returned to the shit storm and offered up their CCTV footage, which looked out from their front door to the street. There are images of the Mercedes. It contradicted the statements we gave to the police, that we were both at home together. All of a sudden, the police began to piece it together. They saw you driving towards Thom’s house.’

  The anxiety is coming back along with the fatigue. I throw myself against my constraints. I twist and howl.

  He sighs and swerves through a roundabout. ‘You could have killed me with the gun, but that’s not the worst part. It was the car. What did you plan to do? Drive off the cliff, into the sea?’ He shakes his head slowly.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I just wanted to go back to how it was . . . I just wanted to go home.’

  ‘Do you know what it’s like to expect to see your daughter hanging every time you walk into a room? Or with her wrists opened? Can you even imagine the toll that would take?’

  ‘I wouldn’t do it. Never.’

  ‘Promise me, Kate. Promise me that. Promise me that no matter how bad it gets you won’t do it.’ His voice cracks.

  ‘Never, I would never. I promise. Please, just let me go.’

  ‘Tell me exactly how you remember it. You remember me taking the brick and hitting him, right? Just once. Not so hard. If anyone asks you, that’s how it happened, okay? Tell me you remember.’

  I don’t, but I lie. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I remember it all. He provoked you. He started the fight.’ I will tell him anything now, anything to escape. ‘He tried to grab the brick to hit you but you ripped it from his hand.’

  He clenches his jaw and winces, blinking slowly, as though he is coming to some realisation. Then I see that he is crying. ‘I did it, Kate,’ he says. ‘I left you in the car, I set it up so you would think you were involved. You wanted to stop me but it was too late.’ He sniffs hard.

  I can’t find the words. A drip of ice races down my spine.

  ‘Do me a favour, one last favour for your old man. Just please try your hardest to be calm, to behave yourself today. Just do what the people ask of you, okay? Can you do that for me? And when it comes time for us to part, one last hug and a kiss. No screaming, no hysterics, just me and the old Kate. Like that little tot that used to walk around on my feet, holding my hands and giggling as though it was the best thing in the world.’ He sniffs again and smiles through the tears. The pitch of his voice rises a little. ‘You are everything to me – everything. I would do anything for you. When your mum died it was just us against the world. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it, darling?’

  The truth, I realise, doesn’t matter.

  FORTY-FIVE

  AS I STEP from the plane, I am greeted on the other side of the Tasman by plainclothes police officers waiting for me. They cuff me right there before all of the other passengers. It’s over. They have me. It was inevitable. I suppose it didn’t help that we fled the country, but of course the police, and in the end the media, knew exactly wh
ere we had gone – the end of the earth, I suppose, wasn’t so far away after all.

  I have been emailing someone from the hospital for the past week, organising an assessment to determine an appropriate inpatient program for Kate. I have no doubt that if they see what I saw, she will be committed. I just couldn’t take her with me to Australia; I couldn’t risk it. Memory loss can have any number of causes: PTSD, anger blackouts, drugs and alcohol. I know exactly what caused Kate to forget.

  By the time I touched down in Melbourne, Kate’s aunt, Lizzie, was on her way to Auckland. I hadn’t seen her in a decade, and if we had any other options, I wouldn’t have bothered contacting her at all. She wasn’t there when her sister needed her most, but at least now she is making an effort for her niece. She’ll stay in Auckland for as long as it takes, waiting for Kate to get better before returning with her to England. I wish I could say she is doing it out of the goodness of her own heart – who knows, maybe she is – but I offered up a lot of money to be paid out yearly for the next three years to make certain Lizzie will do the right thing. Kate will always have the family trust to fall back on when she turns twenty-one.

  It was clear back when we first left Australia, as we sat in the departure lounge, that I was in deep; sweat on my spine, barely able to keep my hands still. Thom had hand-delivered a letter to Kate. The morning the cops turned up, I found it in the letterbox and shoved it into my laptop bag. It’s as though someone knew what had transpired the night before and wanted to mess with me, but of course in all likelihood Thom had simply placed it there a day or two earlier and we hadn’t checked the mail.

  Waiting for that plane to New Zealand, I expected the police to turn up at any moment. But if we made it all the way to Maketu, I knew we would be in the clear for some time. If only I could control everything, gather my thoughts and ideas, find a routine to get Kate healthy again. I just wanted to help her understand what happened and why. I had to protect her from the media, the vitriol, the scrutiny. There was always a sliver of a chance that we had gotten away scot-free but people would always speculate and form conspiracy theories about what transpired. All the crap on social media, in the papers and the news, would screw with her head.

  Most importantly, I needed her memories to conform to the narrative of that night. The true singular narrative. I couldn’t afford deviations or cracks in the veneer. Kate’s mind was much more broken than I’d anticipated and yet she still showed signs of knowing. Then I found out Thom’s life support had been turned off. Grievous bodily harm became manslaughter – or worse – and all of a sudden the investigation heated up.

  Now the plainclothes police are marching me past all the queues of people at customs. A kid holds a phone up as I walk by. They escort me outside and sit me in the backseat of an unmarked car. We wind along the motorway into the city; eventually we turn in at the St Kilda Police Station. There I am escorted along a corridor to a grey interview room with four chairs and a table. I call my lawyer, Paul. The cops are cordial, removing my handcuffs, offering coffee and asking about my rugby career. Paul must have been ready in his suit and tie because before five minutes have passed the door swings open and he comes striding in, his hand stretched out for mine. And now the formal interview begins. It’s the preliminary stuff first, names, ranks, time, location.

  I answer yes when asked if I understand that I am under arrest. Then the fun begins.

  ‘Can you tell us what you did with the brick?’

  ‘How . . . how do you know about the brick?’

  They have me and they know it. Someone has tipped them off; it’s written all over their faces.

  When I called Paul from Maketu he said we had a case; he talked about insanity and plea bargains, he talked about reasonable doubt. But when I said I was going to confess, his tone changed. They’ll skewer you, don’t do it. I figured if the truth was going to come out, they might look on me more favourably if I owned up to it. In the end it would spare Kate the misery of testifying against her dad.

  Now, beneath the stark lights in that featureless grey room, a cop sits before me with another man, a detective in a shirt and tie. As the tape runs, prompted by their questions, I continue talking.

  I explain how Kate had been in those dark days before the attack. Desolate, suicidal. The night it happened, I saw a puncture mark on her wrist. It was an echo of that awful night I’d found her mother.

  ‘I can show you photos of the cut, and also photos of how skinny she was, what she did to her hair.’

  That was why I was so angry that night, I explain. I was terrified of losing Kate, the same way I lost my wife.

  I describe the lead-up. The meeting with Thom’s parents had not gone well. We had sat together, along with Paul, their lawyer, and a counsellor, with the intention of working out what to do next. Mediation they called it. In the business world I was known as the anvil, immovable when it came to negotiations, but that night I made a show of being reasonable. The Moreaus understood the precarious position their son was in; without consent he had distributed an explicit recording of a seventeen-year-old. If we pressed charges he was looking at time in prison. Yet still that woman made it out as if Kate and Thom were in as much trouble as each other.

  ‘But I had a plan of my own; I wanted to meet with Thom and talk to him man to man, I didn’t want the kid to go to prison over this,’ I explain. I look down at my palms, thinking about Kate. ‘When he texted Kate while she slept on the couch, I saw my opportunity.’

  The detective leans forwards, turning his head a little to aim one ear at me. His tie hangs down away from his shirt. ‘What were you planning to say to him?’

  ‘I just wanted to give the kid a scare,’ I reply. ‘I wanted to put the fear of God in him, truth be told. After what he did to my girl . . . Anyway, I found the message and decided it would be me turning up instead of Kate. I didn’t know that Kate would wake up and see the messages on her phone. I didn’t know she would jump in the car and follow me down there. She was . . . well, she wasn’t in any state to drive.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She had been drinking.’

  ‘She was inebriated?’

  ‘Correct, yes.’

  ‘Tell us what happened next.’

  I draw a deep breath. ‘I was diagnosed with something when I was younger. Intermittent explosive disorder. I’ve had counselling and I had been managing it for years, but sometimes I get overwhelmed by rage. It can be so bad that I black out. But this is what I’ve managed to piece together from that night.’ I take a few seconds to let this information sink in before continuing. ‘He was near his house when I arrived, I remember that. But when he saw me instead of Kate, I think that pissed him off. He kind of got cocky, you know?’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘Well, he shoved me. I’ve got a dodgy knee so when he pushed me again I kind of stumbled. Then when I stood up I realised he’d grabbed something. He was holding a brick.’

  ‘He was holding a brick.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘It put me on the back foot. He was a big boy, you know. Taller than me and strong as an ox. I was a little scared, but then I got even angrier. I came to talk to him, that’s all, and he had a weapon in his hand. He kept telling me to leave or he would hit me.’

  ‘He said he would hit you?’

  ‘That’s right. Then he did.’

  ‘He hit you?’

  ‘He tried, yes. He swung the brick at me. And this is where things get hazy. That really pissed me off. I just remember prising it from his fist. Then I blacked out.’

  ‘You struck him with the brick?’

  ‘I believe so. I kind of came to and I was breathing really heavily. The brick was still in my hand and Thom’s head was on the kerb. There was blood.’

  ‘Where was the blood?’

  ‘Around his head, in the gutter and on the sidewalk. There was blood on the brick, but I think that was from my
hand.’

  ‘You were bleeding?’

  ‘I guess I scratched my palm, maybe when I was trying to take it off him.’

  ‘Did you touch him after you hit him?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘It was clear he was . . . Well, I thought he was already dead.’

  ‘Then what did you do?’

  ‘Well, I heard a car coming and I went to run but then I saw it was my car. I stopped her, flagging her down before she could see Thom.’

  ‘By “her” you mean your daughter, Kate?’

  ‘That’s right. I convinced her that I hadn’t seen him, that I was just out on a walk.’

  ‘Could I please have a moment alone with my client?’ Paul interrupts. His ruddy cheeks have been growing redder throughout the conversation.

  ‘It’s fine, Paul,’ I tell him. ‘This is what I’m here to do.’ I turn back to the detective.

  ‘With the brick?’

  ‘Yes, with the brick.’

  The officers share a look.

  ‘You got in the car with it?’

  ‘Yes. I’d never intended to do any serious damage to Thom, I never intended to kill him but when he tried to hit me I had to protect myself. I didn’t want her to know what I had done so I was lucky she had been drinking. Well, not drinking but plastered drunk. She could barely keep her eyes open. So I put her in the passenger seat and she quickly dozed off.’

  I didn’t want her to know what I had done . . .

  I will never forget the day I burnt her. The blisters all over her tiny legs, tears streaming down her face, her screams. They had to sedate her at the hospital. The truth doesn’t change but memories do. I told her it was Eloise who caused the scars. And everything we talked about, everything I asked and said, conformed to this version until subtly the story merged with Kate’s memories, as stories so often do. I knew if the time came I could do it again.

  It is like a defence mechanism of the mind. She will forget this whole ordeal. First you need to understand what the mind remembers, then you can break it down and rebuild it.