by Candice Fox
I stood in the kitchen of my house in Paddington and looked at the burned walls, the fingers of blackness reaching up the bricks to the charred roof beams. The tiles had fallen and disappeared, revealing blue sky and orange leaves. I smiled. The oven had been cleared away, the cupboards stripped off, the sink unscrewed and discarded, leaving black eyeholes in the wall. The flames had warped the floorboards leading down to the bathroom and tiny courtyard. I folded my arms and looked at it all, smelled the plasticky taint of melted things.
I’m well aware that traditionally first houses are purchased by people much younger than me, and in much better condition than this one. The terrace in William Street was a write-off, advertised to attract developers who might be tempted to buy the row, knock it over, put in a flashy deli and be done with it. The kitchen was a bombshell, the backyard a wreck and the upper floor wasn’t safe for human habitation. The elderly owner had let the place go for decades, and the floorboards had taken it the worst. By order of the City of Sydney Council, I wasn’t even supposed to be sleeping in the building, and I was supposed to be working on it wearing protective gear. But I ignored that. My home base was the front bedroom, where I’d dragged a mattress and a few laundry baskets of clothes, my phone and some snack food. The bathroom worked. I still had the apartment in Kensington and there was always Imogen’s place. But for a couple of nights a week I had been sleeping in my new house, just so I could drift off listening to the creaking and cracking of the building, the unfamiliar noises of the neighbours coming home from work, their kids playing in the street. City ambulances racing for St Vincent’s and drunks singing as they wandered home. Rats scuttling somewhere close. It was dingy, but I owned it. I’d committed to something. That was big for me.
Committing to things. Listening to my girlfriend. Getting off the drugs and the booze. Yes, I was going somewhere, even if it wasn’t some mystical place beyond anger that couldn’t possibly exist. Because I wholeheartedly believed what I’d said to Aamir. There is no ‘after murder’. There is no reasoning, bargaining or manipulating with murder – when someone close to you has been slain, something enters your life that will always be there, a little black blur at the corner of your vision that you learn to ignore as naturally as you do your own nose. But, stained as you are, you have to go on and learn to see again. Build things. Change things. Own things. Martina wasn’t coming back. It was time to return to life.
As I was standing in the morning sunshine from the informal skylight, I heard the front door open and close, and Eden’s uneven gait on the unpolished boards. She was walking with a single aluminium crutch with an arm cuff and a handle. She’d worked her way down from two of them. I’d seen her at the station gym a couple of days earlier trotting awkwardly on the treadmill, somewhere between a jog and a walk, now and then reaching for the console to steady herself. The problem was her core strength, I thought, but I wasn’t sure. A pair of serial killers had slit her open from sternum to navel on their way to cutting her right in half. She’d lost most of the hearing in her left ear from having a gun fired in her face, and her nose wasn’t straight anymore. But despite all her new little imperfections, to look at her now it was hard to imagine how close she’d come to dying in my arms. When I found her on that farm she had been a red mess.
‘Oh look, it’s the invalid,’ I said. Eden had to be the world’s most beautiful cripple, but I knew that underneath her whippet-lean frame and deep gothic eyes hid a creature who was far from anything like beauty. I had no doubt, standing in her presence, that though Eden couldn’t run yet, that she was easily wearied and had lost some of the sharpness of her brutally dry wit, there was a very dark power residing in her still, and she was as much a threat to me as she was to the killers, rapists and evildoers she spent her nights hunting. She came up beside me and took in the black walls, raised her head slowly and looked at a pigeon as it landed on the edge of the roof hole.
‘Why didn’t you just tell Hades to keep the money?’ she asked, sighing. ‘He’d have been smarter with it.’
Eden’s father, Hades Archer, ex-criminal overlord and the world’s cleverest body disposal expert, had given me a hundred thousand dollars to find out what had happened to the love of his life. Sunday White had gone missing before I was born, and Hades had hired me as much to get one of her relatives off his back as to find out himself what had become of the lost young woman. I put the cash together with my inheritance and bought the terrace on William Street. Eden shifted papers around on the floor with one of her fine leather boots, shook her head.
‘I can’t believe you, of all people, fail to see the potential in this place. Things of beauty are made of forgotten places like this, Eden.’ I started mapping the kitchen with my hands. ‘Stove there, stainless steel benches here, big kitchen island with one of those cutting board tops. You know the ones? Drawers underneath. Rip all this out and put a big window in. Fucking brilliant.’
‘Stainless steel is so 1990.’
‘Marble then. Wine rack over here.’
‘You’re a recovering alcoholic.’
‘My cooking wine, Eden. My cooking wine.’
‘Who do you think’s going to do all this?’ She squinted at me.
‘Me.’
‘You can’t change a light bulb without adult supervision and a stackhat.’
‘You, then. Come help me. You’re handy.’
‘No.’
‘You’re just jealous.’ I shook my head. ‘There’s no need to be cranky, Eden. You can come and visit my brilliant new house whenever you want. Take photos of yourself in it to show your friends.’
The pigeon sitting on one of the roof beams ruffled its feathers and crapped on my floor. We both looked up at it.
‘We’ll have dinner parties,’ I said.
‘Look at you. Less than a year ago your plates were getting dusty from disuse and the local Indian takeaway guy had invited you to his wedding. Now you’re planning soirées.’
‘I like the word “soirée”. I like soirée and nostalgia.’
‘It’s a commitment, I guess, even if it is a shithole,’ she sighed. ‘That’s a big deal. Congratulations.’
‘I’ve been a big deal for a while now, Eden. You just haven’t noticed.’
‘You could go on a commitment streak. Marry that mind-quack and have freckly children with abandonment issues.’
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.’
As though she’d heard herself being spoken about, my girlfriend Imogen opened the front door and clopped into the hall in her second-favourite lavender velvet heels, her upturned nose already wrinkled at the smell. She had an Ikea bag in each hand. What a sweetheart.
‘Sorry, Frank, I didn’t realise you had company,’ she beamed. ‘How are you, Eden?’
‘Dr Stone,’ Eden said. The tone had no warmth in it, I noted, and then reminded myself that, like an old gas heater, Eden took hours just to get to room temperature. Still, something passed between them. Eden’s eyes fell to my missing kitchen cupboards and Imogen’s stayed on her, searching, almost, for something. I coughed, because I’m like most men – completely ignorant of women and their looks and tones and inferences and what they really mean. The two could have been about to launch into a mid-air kung fu battle or hurl each other to the ground in a passionate embrace. I didn’t know. I hoped the cough would delay whatever was going on until it made itself obvious or went away. Imogen excused herself to wash her hands. There was something sticky on the front doorknob. I didn’t know what.
Eden stood playing with a live wire hanging from the ceiling, twisting the plastic casing around her finger.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I jutted my chin at her. ‘Someone asks how you are, you don’t say their name and qualification.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Should I have responded with a list of neurotic compulsions I may or may not exhibit?’
‘You’ve been colder since Rye Farm, Eden. I’ve noticed it. You’re weirder, if that’s possible.’<
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‘It’s always possible.’
‘I don’t want you to get any weirder than you already are.’
‘What a chauvinistic thing to say. Want to tell me how to wear my hair too?’
‘Up.’
‘I did my mandatory counselling.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t need to be shrinked in my free time. If Imogen wants to shrink someone, she’s got more than enough mental dysfunction going on here without starting on me.’ She gestured at me with an open hand. All of me.
‘She’s not shrinking you. She’s my girlfriend. She’s saying hello.’
‘Shrinks never stop shrinking. They shrink all day long until everyone around them is shrunk.’
‘You don’t like her,’ I concluded. ‘Of course you don’t.’
‘She’s a shrink.’
‘Stop saying shrink.’
‘While you’re here, Eden,’ Imogen said, emerging from the stairs, flicking water off her fingers – I have no hand towels – ‘I’ve been telling Frank for a while now that it’d be nice if the three of us got together for dinner sometime, maybe? I’m sure he hasn’t passed that on to you. I thought it’d be nice to get to know you a bit. You know. Because Frank and I … Now that we’re –’
‘Fucking?’ Eden said. I threw my head back and laughed at the ceiling. The pigeon flew away.
‘In a relationship,’ Imogen sighed.
Eden’s phone buzzed and she took it out of her pocket. Looked at it, slid it back in.
‘We need to go, Frank,’ she said. ‘Now.’
‘All weeknights are fine with me.’ Imogen followed us to the door. I grabbed my jacket from the edge of the mattress in the front room and turned to hear Eden’s response, but she was already heading through the front gate. I kissed Imogen and fondled her ponytail in a way that I guessed was conciliatory before running out the door.
Ruben was pretty sure he had the cruisiest job in Sydney. He’d been caretaking the three-storey monster of a house on the edge of Centennial Park for three weeks and he hadn’t seen the owner, or anyone associated with the building, once. He’d been translating job advertisements from the Telegraph using his phone while sitting at the arrivals terminal at Sydney airport, waiting for his bus. He had begun with the briefest one. Cleaner wanted, twice weekly. He emailed the agency advertising the job, which hired him and explained that he was to let himself in, make sure the place was dust-, insect- and mould-free, and leave.
He’d been in the country ten minutes and already had a job – great pay, zero human interaction and completely self-directed. Too good to be true. It was like the start to an old horror film.
The only catch was that Ruben wasn’t the best cleaner on earth. He’d never got over his teenage habit of shedding clothes and letting them drop wherever he stood, which had bothered a lot of travellers in the dozens of hostels he’d stayed in across Europe, down through Asia and finally along the coast of Australia. He also loved tissues, gum, elastic bands – he’d use them and fling them, telling himself he’d pick them up later. He was a flicker of toothpaste onto clean mirrors and a leaver of stubble in sinks. Getting a job as a caretaker was a bit of a stretch for Ruben, but he was up for the challenge.
He was posted a key and emailed a map to the house on Lang Road, across the street from Centennial Park. He was to go through the house from top to bottom and alleviate the damages of disuse. Fight back the dust. Fluff the pillows. Spray bleach on the creeping mould. The emails didn’t mention anyone living in the house. Nor did they mention when the occupants would return. Ruben didn’t ask any questions. The pay was too good.
He spent the first day showing himself around, gathering the things he’d need for the job from the places they were hidden all over the gigantic house. There were cleaning products in the kitchen, but everything was covered in dust and mould. He’d need a new vacuum just to clear it off the floors. Ruben guessed his being hired was a reluctant measure from someone who didn’t want the house to fall apart – he arrived at the very moment dampness and mould threatened to cause permanent structural damage. The precise moment when vermin had begun to colonise the ground floor but hadn’t begun to destroy it.
The overgrown back garden was a haven for spiders, who made their homes in the corners of every downstairs window. But, strangely, the front garden, which might attract the scrutiny of passers-by, was perfectly manicured. The house was dark and creaked a lot, and Ruben had to play music all day long just to stop himself getting the creeps. He spent as little time as he could in the many bathrooms. Horror-film ghosts always appeared in the bathroom mirrors first.
It took him until the very end of the first day to realise there was someone in the attic room. At the beginning he’d ignored the creaking of floorboards that followed him everywhere, but as he rose through the levels of the house towards the loft he heard a television playing. At first he thought it must be outside, next door perhaps, but when he stopped to listen he realised it was upstairs. Something was being played on it, an advertisement run through in full, then rewound to certain spots and played again. Over and over the words and the theme music rolled. He shook the dust from the covers in the rooms below, mentally translating the words in his poor English.
My ten-week program gives you everything you need to escape the you that you’ve become and find the person you should be. Take up the challenge today! It’s easy.
The words replayed over and over.
… escape the you that you’ve become …
… escape … you …
… find the person you should be …
… find the person …
It’s easy.
Ruben listened for a voice, a movement, anything to indicate that a person was playing the advertisement. There was nothing. It was as though whoever was up there was a ghost.
I didn’t get to the crime scene straight away. I was following Eden up the gentle green slope towards the tree where the body had been found when I spotted little Amy Hooku standing nearby with her arms folded, staring at the grass in that little-girl-lost way she sometimes got about her. Amy was barely seventeen years old and not afraid to show it. She wore a blazing red top covered in dancing pandas, heavy black jeans and glittery silver Doc Martens. The extreme buzz cut of bleached blonde prickles jarred against her Vietnamese features. Complicated electronic gear hung all around her like vines on a small thin tree: huge earphones at her neck, things clipped to her belt, two phones bulging in her back pockets – one personal, one police department. She was the only teenager in the country with a standard-issue cop phone, and it was only because she’d earned it. I came up behind her and grabbed the back of her skinny neck.
‘I’ve got her. Backup! I need backup! I’ve caught Sydney’s greatest liar.’
‘Get your hands off me, asshole.’
She tried to swing at me and I grabbed her wrist, put a leg into the back of her knee. I let her hang helpless for a second. The face was all teenage exhaustion at my incredible lameness. The crowd at the edge of the police tape gave us confused looks – the wild-faced white guy manhandling the stringy Asian girl.
‘What is wrong with you?’
‘I’m excited to see you. You must have grown a foot and a half.’ I pulled her up and grinned at her, punched her in her hard shoulder. She had grown taller, but not filled out at all. She was a miniature replica of the tall, lanky and incredibly beautiful woman I knew she would grow into. Her parents had been absolutely stunning people – he a broad-shouldered football-player type and his wife one of those bony models who always seem to glow gold. I knew Mrs Hooku from the autopsy photos, the 60 Minutes special on the murders. I’d seen her father around the North Sydney Metro office, a quiet shadowy figure who walked too fast.
‘What are you doing here, Hooky Bird?’
‘I’m on my way to class, actually. Saw Simmons.’ She nodded towards another officer we both knew, a bald crime-scene photographer from North Sydney Metro. ‘Knew it must be a good one.’
/> Amy ‘Hooky’ Hooku was a genius, but I tried not to think about that. Beyond the punk-Japanese-rocker angry Hello Kitty thing she had going on – or whatever the hell it was – she possessed a rare kind of superintelligence that had seen her drop out of high school like it was child’s play and sail into top university courses in computer science with an engineering major. At seventeen. I’d met her in North Sydney Metro when I was there working in Asian Gangs. My work had been mainly chasing up big drug crime families warring over territory, but they’d brought me in to consult on the Hooku family murders under the misconception that I could speak Vietnamese.
I was the one to sit Amy down in her school principal’s office a year and a bit earlier and tell her that her younger sister had murdered her parents that morning. It had been a violent bloodbath that Amy only escaped because she’d unexpectedly spent the night at a friend’s house and gone straight to school the next day.
I was a poor choice for the role. I was just about as situationally and experientially alien to an Asian teenage girl as a person could get. But with counsellors running late and the principal blubbering like a lunatic in the hall, it was down to me to tell Amy what had happened. Somehow, together, we’d worked through it.
