by Candice Fox
Afterwards Eden lay in a half-sleep, listening to the meditation album playing on the old CD player in the corner, the bird sounds and rolling waves, the gentle pipe music. The extraordinary pain Merri forced on her had receded into an intoxicating warmth, a pleasurable ache in her muscles. She turned her head and found the little woman sitting on a plastic chair beside her, pouring her second cup of tea. Eden propped herself up, took the little china cup and sipped from it, felt the steam on her damp upper lip.
‘Someone come here for you,’ Merri said, holding her own tea. Eden felt like she was pulling herself out of a drunken stupor, though it had been years since she had been drunk. She lay and looked at Merri, let the tea rest in her hand on the top of the bench. The older woman seemed worried. Eden frowned.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Two day ago. Someone come here, for you,’ Merri said. ‘They want give me money for photo of you.’
Eden pushed herself up, her body slowly becoming colder in the warmth of the room. Merri stood and the two women stared at each other in the dark.
‘A woman,’ Merri said.
‘A woman asked you for a photograph of me?’ Eden pointed at her chest.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re … you’re not making any sense.’
‘She come here, a lady. Pretty lady. She has picture of you.’ Merri illustrated with her hands, held up an imaginary photograph. ‘She tell me, “Get picture of Eden Archer. I give you five thousand dollars. I give you five thousand – one picture.”’
Eden felt her heartbeat quickening. She felt it all over her body, her fingers pulsing as though being squeezed by invisible hands.
‘When was this? What kind of picture did this woman want?’
‘She want picture of this,’ Merri said. The little woman reached out and touched Eden on the bright pink birthmark beside her left breast. Eden lifted her arm and looked at the mark, at Merri’s white fingers pressed gently into the coloured flesh. She felt her stomach plummet. All the muscles in her back tensed at once, tugging her straight spine crooked once more in one huge simultaneous spasm of terror.
‘Get me my phone,’ Eden said. ‘Now.’
In the old days, the Raymond Chandler days, homicide detectives used to spend the first forty-eight hours of a case running up leads themselves without eating, sleeping or shitting, without consulting anybody or writing reports or logging every goddamn sneeze in an incident log. Those days are gone. In the initial flurry after a murder, in between reporting to management every time someone swings their dick anywhere near the case, you field eight thousand phone calls. They’re half organisational, half procedural. You assign everybody a place on the case – make sure no one you’re working with has a conflict of interest, knew the victim or anyone related to the victim. You get your secondary detectives and their assistants all in a row, give them jobs and make sure they do them. You make contact with all the relevant medical bodies. The pathologist, his or her assistants, and various organisations that will take charge of and then pass the body on its way through the hospital, down through the morgue, into the freezer, back out again. It’s kind of like organising a gigantic, gruesome surprise party – the details need to be managed in their millions, and it’s all got to be kept secret from the press. Dozens of journalists call while you’re putting things together, and you have to fend them off one by one with convincing lies and warnings so they don’t get in the middle and blow the whole thing.
In general, I hate being on the phone. Unidentified numbers. The awkward silences. Trying to decide when the conversation is over or how to end it in an appropriate manner. The terror that someone’s going to ring and they’re going to remember me and I’m not going to remember them. I know. It’s weird. My mother had it. The stuff I’ve done. I’ve chased guys with guns into dark warehouses. I took a crowbar to the head in an airport loading dock and then nearly got shot in the face. A German shepherd took a chunk out of my calf the size of a lemon on the way into a drug dealer’s house. But none of that is as uncomfortable as when you’re on the phone, particularly if it’s to someone in authority, and you can’t hear them clearly. And you have to say so, and then the person on the other end speaks louder and you still can’t hear properly.
I found that the best way to deal with my phone phobia is to make sure I’m doing something else at the same time. So I invested in a hands-free set. I hooked the phone up while I worked on my house that evening. I cleared the kitchen of dust and hair and fluff with a broom and then started chipping out the burned bricks from where the oven had caught fire. The roofing guys had been in during the day and closed up the hole above me, but the ceiling was still incomplete, exposing wires and lightly charred beams. I put the bricks in a pile and sat looking at the hole I’d left with a tired satisfaction, fielding calls from the younger detectives and sucking a non-alcoholic beer.
In the first few hours, the minion detectives didn’t know much more about Ivana Lyon that could help the case. The autopsy was being done overnight and I could view her in the morning. Apparently there were no leads in the family – no one was acting weird, they were all horrified and the mother was in a Valium-induced coma. Ivana had been a mild-mannered, hard-working girl who was popular. She liked to party but wasn’t a tweaker. We had plenty of friends and ex-boyfriends to sort through for potential suspects. Everything was fine at her job. Her colleagues were all your garden-variety flight attendant types – clean, neatly dressed people with lots of Tupperware.
I wasn’t too enthusiastic about there being leads among Ivana’s friends. If the attacker knew her, it seemed a strangely risky move to grab her off the side of the Centennial Park jogging track in front of dozens of potential witnesses. He’d have had a much easier time grabbing her in her apartment, or at her car, or a million other less populated places she probably frequented. My guess was that the murderer didn’t know her, that she’d been a random pick. But then again, that didn’t fit with the brutality, the obvious fury of the attack. Who gets that angry at a perfect stranger? I sat on the floor and looked at the black bricks and felt confused.
Imogen walked in at nine carrying takeaway boxes. The smell of curry preceded her. I tried to shake away the cerebral impulses that started zapping at the sight of her, those mental flashes that put my girlfriend and the murdered girl I’d spent all afternoon staring at together and transposed the images before my eyes, my police brain trying to terrify me.
‘It’s my baby!’
‘Hi, baby.’ She looked around, looked at me, looked at the three empty beers by my hand. Her pretty upper lip curled. ‘You know you’re filthy, right?’
‘Give me a kiss.’
‘No.’ She stepped awkwardly around the pile of dust and stuff I’d swept from the floor, pulled a plastic step ladder from the wall and brushed it off before sitting on it. ‘You’re drinking again?’
‘They’re virgins.’
‘Still.’
‘I know,’ I sighed. ‘I’ll start again tomorrow.’
‘We should really go to my place. Get you a shower.’
‘I thought women liked men who worked,’ I said. I flexed my biceps. She missed it.
‘Women like men who can afford other men to work for them.’
I pointed at the ceiling. She looked up at the newly patched roof.
‘Impressed?’
She said nothing. A call came through in my ears and I answered it with the button on the cord at my chest.
‘Frank Bennett.’
‘What’s up, dickhead?’
‘Well, well. What’s up, Hooky baby?’
‘I called to see what’s happening with that girl,’ Hooky said. ‘The park girl.’
‘Piqued your curiosity, has it?’ I laughed. Imogen was watching me carefully. I made an apologetic motion and got up, heard both my knees crack. I moved down the hall.
‘I like to keep abreast of these things,’ Hooky said. I could hear a train in the background. ‘North Sydn
ey’s not letting me have any fun while my exams are on. My life has become very pedestrian very quickly.’
I walked out the front of my terrace and told Hooky what I knew so far about Ivana Lyon’s murder. It was a cool night, but nice. Next door, the young family was getting ready for bed, bath-damp little kids around the couch, and mother brushing hair out of eyes, getting her sleep-time promises. A little fairytale behind glass, like those robotic Christmas displays they used to put up in shopping centres. Mum perpetually smiling, nodding. Shiny boxes around a pipe-cleaner tree. I watched a possum clamber along the guttering above the upper-floor windows of my terrace and slip silently through the broken front window into the empty upstairs bedroom. I updated Hooky on everything I had. When my eyes fell I saw Imogen standing in the doorway. I made another apologetic wave and finished up with Amy, grabbed Imogen and kissed her as I walked inside.
‘Who was that?’
‘Girl who works for my old station,’ I said, half-dreaming at the sound of my feet on my own floorboards.
‘Woman who works for your old station,’ Imogen corrected.
‘No, actually,’ I laughed. ‘Girl. She’s seventeen. Does some consulting work for us.’ I could hear the possum on the upstairs floor. I banged on the wall and listened to it scurry in terror. Imogen followed me back into the kitchen, where I retrieved the curry boxes, snuck a forkful of massaman from one. ‘We can go to yours now, if you like. I’m done here.’
‘Great.’ She slapped my butt when I bent to get my backpack. She stood in the doorway as I gathered up bits and pieces I needed – mostly paperwork.
‘What’s a seventeen-year-old girl doing calling a middle-aged man on his mobile?’ she said suddenly. The words tumbled out of her fast, as though she’d spent the last couple of minutes holding them back, trying to talk herself out of them.
‘Huh?’
‘It’s just a little bit slutty, isn’t it?’
I laughed. It was a half-humoured laugh, half-shocked one. I wasn’t used to Imogen using dirty words. And the thought of Hooky being anything close to warranting the term ‘slut’ was absurd. I thought of her as something like an odd ball little sister, or a niece. A little bird I’d seen take a big hit once, but I was now happy to see flying again.
‘Slutty? Oh my god! She was just calling for an update on the case.’
‘An update on the case,’ Imogen scoffed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. It was half sneer.
‘She was.’
‘Is it her case?’
‘No.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Imogen folded her arms. ‘You called her “baby”.’
‘Holy crap, you’re jealous. This is hilarious.’
‘Is it?’
‘I’ve always called her “baby”. It’s not baby like … baby. Amy is a baby. She’s like … a little girl.’
‘You call me baby.’
‘Ah. Well, I use the term with a different intention.’ This conversation was getting weird.
‘Uh-huh,’ Imogen said.
She looked at me standing there with the curry boxes in my hands and my backpack on my shoulder. It was almost as though I’d been caught out on something. Guilt churned in the pit of my stomach. Once again, I felt the sting of being unable to understand the ways of women, their secret codes and inferences. We’d slipped into another language. I didn’t even have a basic grasp of what was being said here, what I’d done wrong. I bit my lip and replayed the conversation with Hooky, tried to decide if anything untoward had been said by either party. But it hadn’t. It really hadn’t. There’d been work stuff only and a bit of the bantering that we always did. I couldn’t even begin to conceive of there ever being anything else to it.
‘Baby,’ I said, reaching for Imogen, ‘don’t be silly.’
‘Come on.’ She jerked her head towards the front door. ‘Let’s go. It smells in here.’
Tara remembered. The memories came as tides, slowly rising, hitting their peak, and when they did she would sit on the bed and indulge them because she’d never had the strength to fight. She never knew which one would come. When she was at her most vulnerable the memories were of her youth – a Tara just starting to adapt to her pudginess, a Tara just beginning to assume her role as class reject. A short Tara, wide and soft, fleshy like a piglet, her little belly swelling and stretching the front of her sports polo as she panted. Cross-country day. That memory was always close at hand. The smell of freshly cut grass. The dread of the barbecue smoke in the school playground, the creamy fluorescent zinc being smeared on noses as the countdown to the afternoon session began. Tara the fat child rotating through as many excuses to Mrs Emmonds as she should muster, trying to find what would work, what would make the woman ignore her mother’s threats. My child will participate. Tara heard the warning every year from the cordless phone in the kitchen, Joanie stabbing the countertop with a finger as house staff swirled and ebbed around her, preparing lunch. Don’t take any of her shit.
It wasn’t shit today. Tara really did feel sick. She tucked herself into the dark corner of mouldy bricks where the kindergarten block met the sports shed and breathed, listening to the big kids unloading the plastic markers and streamers with Mr Tolson. Tara held her belly and breathed. She was just learning to swallow the crying. She’d always been a crier, but she was beginning to relish in the hard, hot lump in her throat, the power she exerted in keeping it down, in keeping the tears at bay. Tara didn’t have power over many things. But she was beginning to understand, at eight, that she could control her own emotions. She could bring on or suppress rage like it was connected to a switch. She could make herself shake and sweat with fury, or make herself cold and fatigued with calm.
As the day wound down towards the big race, Tara watched the other girls weaving ribbons into their hair and painting zinc dots on their cheeks. She went into the girls’ toilets and did the same, worked the colourful cream into her plump face.
At the start line, no one noticed her. She kept to the back, the horizon ahead dominated by the shoulders of the enormous Year Six boys. Peter Anderson was wearing a Native American ceremonial chief’s headdress, his freckled cheeks lined with zinc. The colourful tails of the feathers fluttered madly in the wind. The boy started up a chant for Stuart House and it grew so loud that it almost drowned out the crack of the starting gun.
Tara moved with the jostling bodies, and then she was on her own, little girls she’d remembered cowering in the playground on their first days in kindergarten rushing past her. She tried to befriend them once and for a few days had held a little posse of younger children as friends. But as they passed now they seemed not to recognise her. Their class clans had fused together and shut Tara out. By the time she rounded the first quarter marker, Peter Anderson was rushing past her, his huge legs striking out, hitting the grass with thuds. Boys from Flinders and Cook houses followed, grabbing at the feathers. They were still chanting their house songs. Tara could hardly breathe.
Run, run, boys and girls,
Try to get away,
We won’t stop, can’t stop,
Gonna make you pay!
For the next quarter, all she did was wait for the bigger boys to lap her again. When they did they came in silence, the game on now, the home stretch in sight. Tara huffed and struggled through the bush at the bottom of the school, following the rustling pink streamers over rocky ground, her thick ankles rolling over sharp stones in the clay. Small helpless sounds came out of her. In the rocking, bouncing world she spotted Mr Lillington standing among the trees, a carpentry magazine in his hands, his heavy brow furrowed. The older man heard Tara bumbling along well before he saw her. Tara hung her head, burned as he watched her slowly approach.
‘Hey,’ the man said, jutting his chin. ‘Harper. Harper. Down there and around to the right.’
Tara wheezed, looked, tried to control her whimpering. Sweat rolled down her calves. The teacher pointed, raising his furry brows.
‘Down there, girl,’ he said.
>
He said ‘girl’ the way Joanie said ‘stupid’. But when Tara looked, she saw the trail leading off towards the quadrangle and nodded. A shortcut. The music teacher watched her go, his lined face softened by pity.
She heard other children laughing as she cut away. But Tara only wanted it to be over. She emerged at the edge of the field as Peter Anderson sailed through the finish ribbon, his arms outstretched and shirt gone. Girls visiting from the high school pelted his hard, pale body with water bombs. Tara clambered up the rise and headed for the lines of teachers and parents.
Her mother would be there among the crowd somewhere. Tara sucked air and forced herself on. She was so slow that she could measure individual expressions as she passed, heard snippets of words from the parents.
Whose kid is that? Harper. Harper girl … chubby little … rolls … kid’s gonna have herself a heart attack.
‘That girl’s snorting like a piggy,’ a girl at the edge of the crowd said, pointing at Tara as she passed. ‘Piggy, piggy, piggy.’
Tara felt sweat in her eyes. She pounded towards the finish line. A crowd of her classmates was waiting for her there, stretching their thin, strong limbs, zinc rubbed from noses and dribbling from wet chins. She could smell the barbecue.
Oranges. Tubs of quartered oranges. Tara headed up the straight and it was Craig Dune who threw the first slice.
‘The food’s up here, fatty-boom-bah! Run, run, run.’
Tara felt an orange slice bump against her chest. Then another. Suddenly a rain of them, boys and girls from older grades hurling the slices at her legs, her face. Teachers shouting, reaching for little wrists. She caught a rind in the eye and slid in the wet grass. She fell hard on her side before the finish line. She could see the balloons, the girl with the broken leg and the timer sitting on the stool.
In the crowd, Joanie had her arms folded, eyes on the horizon. Tara scrambled to her feet and pushed through the bodies of the adults, the forest of hips and stomachs, until she reached her. Her mother stood beside a woman who might have been her twin – both caramel goddesses wrapped in strips of fine grey silk. Joanie’s ringlets were pulled tight in a ponytail on her square shoulder, the curls cascading down her chest.
