by Candice Fox
‘They never stop, Frank,’ Eden raised her eyebrows at me, widened her eyes. ‘They never stop.’
‘Who never stops?’ Imogen frowned.
‘Let’s order.’ I waved for the waiter.
Eden settled after a while. The balance seemed to have been tipped between punishing Imogen for being an ‘owner’ and making me uncomfortable, which she didn’t seem to want to do, possibly for the first time ever. Eden appeared to have a bit on her mind, which was unusual. She was pretty good at compartmentalising. Dropping the job when she couldn’t do anything with it, picking it back up again when she could. She kept looking off towards the front doors, letting Imogen and I talk. She hardly ate, though what she ordered was by far the best choice on the table. She waved distractedly at me when I asked her if I could finish it. Imogen didn’t seem to get the hang of Eden’s closed personality. Kept plugging her with personal questions and getting nothing in return, though she spent plenty of time offering up examples from her own personal life as encouragement – stupid ex-boyfriends and her loser father and a nightmare boss who had come down on her too hard.
‘Are you dating right now, Eden?’
‘No.’
‘Single for a while?’
‘Yes.’
‘I used to work with this guy named Nick who I think would be just perfect for you,’ Imogen grinned and glanced at me. ‘He’s an anxiety specialist. I met him for the first time when –’
Now it was my turn to drift off. I like to tune out when Imogen talks about other men, in case I catch tales about guys with better jobs, bigger dicks, houses without possums in their upper floors. I don’t know why women insist on talking about their ex-boyfriends and crushes in front of you, but over the years I’ve learned to ignore it. All impotent angst over guys I’d never met had ever given me was grey hair and restless nights. When I drifted back in it was because Eden was kicking me under the table.
‘What does it matter what my parents do?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. That’s not what I mean.’ Imogen laughed uncomfortably. ‘It’s just, I don’t know. My dad inspired me to do what I do. He was a very clever man but he never really fulfilled his potential. He could have been so much more than he was. When I decided I wanted to be a psychologist … I mean, maybe your father –’
I got out my phone, glanced at the time.
‘We’re going to have to wrap this up, ladies. I’ve got calls to make tonight.’ I put my arms around both of them. ‘Not that I’d rather be anywhere but sandwiched between you two gorgeous creatures.’
Eden peeled my hand off her and got up, started sifting through her wallet with the hard-edged face of a john looking for money to pay a prostitute. Somehow it seemed appropriate.
When I got back from the bathroom, Imogen was still sitting at the table, staring at the lone fork left over from the swift clearing the waiters had done. There’s something sad about a freshly cleared restaurant table. The stains of a party attended, enjoyed, finished. Imogen didn’t look sad, though. She looked cold. I sat down and went to grab my phone from where it sat in front of her but her hand was over it before I could.
‘What the fuck is this?’ she asked. She pushed the button at the bottom of the phone and the screen lit up, flashing a preview of a message from Hooky. Hook me up!
‘She’s talking about the Lyon case. The jogger. She wants some part in it. I don’t know. She’s hungry.’
I shrugged. Imogen stared at me.
‘What?’
No response.
I opened the message stream and showed her.
‘See?’
‘Why isn’t she texting Eden?’
‘She doesn’t know Eden.’
‘Why isn’t she texting Command?’
‘She doesn’t know anyone in Command,’ I laughed. ‘Jesus, they wouldn’t want her kept in the loop anyway. It’s not her case.’
‘So you’d be doing her a favour.’ Imogen licked her painted lips. ‘You and some hungry little girl texting back and forth, doing each other favours.’
‘Fuck me, Imogen. This thing you’ve got going with Hooky is just … it’s madness. She’s a child. She’s texting me in a wholly and completely work-related capacity. That’s it.’
‘Oh, I’m sure.’
‘Babe, I don’t know why I’m sitting here defending myself. I don’t have to explain this to you. It’s nothing, and I’m telling you it’s nothing and you’re ignoring me. What you’re insinuating is kind of sick. She’s seventeen years old.’
‘I’m not insinuating that you’re trying to interact inappropriately with a seventeen-year-old, Frank. Open your ears. I’m insinuating that a seventeen-year-old is trying to interact inappropriately with you.’
‘And that I’m doing nothing about it.’
‘I’m trying to help you realise what’s going on, so that you can do something about it.’
‘Well, thank you, Imogen. Thank you very much. You’re such a giving person.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Fuck me?’ I scoffed.
‘Yes. You’re being rude. And mean.’
‘You’re being rude. You don’t know this girl. Her sister bludgeoned her parents to death. She sprayed their brains all over their pretty pink bedroom.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘You’re right. It was terrible. In fact you have no fucking idea how terrible it was,’ I said.
‘I’m sure it was the kind of terrible life event that might reorient a person’s whole perception of the world. Of people. Of relationships. Of appropriateness.’
‘Oh lord,’ I sighed. ‘Stop.’
She shrugged. My face felt hot. I sipped the water nearest to me, tried to back down the angry stairs I was slowly ascending. ‘What are you doing going through my phone in the first place?’
You’ll either bend to her command or snap her hand off one day.
‘Why shouldn’t I be able to go through your phone? Going through your phone shouldn’t worry you, Frank, because you should have nothing on there that you wouldn’t be happy for me to see.’
Imogen rifled violently through her handbag, threw her phone onto the table so that it bounced dully on the cloth. People turned in their chairs.
‘You want to see my phone?’ she snarled. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I don’t want to examine your phone, Imogen. I’m not that fucking needy.’
And then when you do snap at her, boy, then she’s really going to own you.
Imogen looked at me, broken. Then she got up and left. I tried to chase her, but she slipped through tiny gaps between the chairs of other patrons I just couldn’t fit through. She was gone before I could see which way she went.
Tara liked Violet the moment she saw her standing there in the doorway of her bedroom, twirling a piece of her long white hair around a willowy finger. She didn’t know how long the girl had been watching her at the desk, playing with her dolls.
Well, she wasn’t sure ‘playing’ was the right word. She was sure playing wouldn’t have upset Joanie so much. When Joanie had found Tara’s Barbies, with their cropped hair and their burned eyes, the hundreds of holes she’d dug into their breasts and crotches and stomachs with the heated needle, she had begun to scream. But to Tara, indeed, it was playing. Toying. She couldn’t seem to leave the Barbies alone, the way she couldn’t seem to leave a sore alone. Her father kept bringing them in their beautiful pink cardboard boxes, and they would sit on the shelves staring out at her from behind the clear plastic windows begging her to unwind the wire from around their wrists. Then once she had them free, Tara would feel the urge to play. The needles she found in the housekeeper’s closet. The matches she found in the kitchen.
The way the Barbie’s big, glossy blue eyes blackened and bubbled and sunk as Tara slowly inserted the needle made her mouth wet. She cleared her throat and shoved the dolls aside. Violet came right into the room and sat on the bed.
‘Hi,’ the girl said. �
��I’m Vi.’
Sometimes, after that first day, Tara sat alone in her room and smiled to herself and whispered, Hi, I’m Vi, in the soft and lilting way the girl did, like a birdsong on a clear morning. Years later Tara would wonder if she had been in love with Violet then. Her first crush.
‘My mum’s downstairs with your mum.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
‘She says we’ve got to hang out together.’ Violet raked her fingers through her hair. ‘But I don’t mind. This is a cool room.’
The girl reached out and jangled the string of Nepalese bells hanging above Tara’s bed. Tara hadn’t heard the word ‘cool’ regarding anything to do with her ever before, whether it was her room, her things, her clothes, her self. She was the very definition of uncool. She caught a flash of herself in the mirror and twisted quickly in the chair, the wire back cutting into her flesh in a cross-hash pattern. It made her look like a rolled brisket. She pulled her cardigan over herself and locked her eyes on the Violet girl’s impossibly thin ankles.
‘How old are you?’
‘Thirteen,’ Tara mumbled.
‘I’m thirteen too.’
She said it like it was an achievement. She’d made it to thirteen. Tara smiled at the floor, scratched at her neck, leaving red marks she tried not to stare at in the mirror.
‘So what do you do?’ the girl asked. Tara noticed that she was still touching her hair. Always touching her hair – raking it, pulling it, twisting it into ringlets that unrolled and fell impossibly straight, refusing to be manipulated. While the girl toured the room, Tara gathered a small ball of fallen hairs in her fingers and rolled and rolled it in her palm, making it tight, a tiny snowy creature that she tucked into the pocket of her cardigan.
‘Do? Um.’
‘Yeah, like, what’s your thing? What do you do?’
Tara scratched hard at her neck, felt her face flush. She clenched one fist, just one, by the side of the chair, feeling her knuckles crack.
‘Um. Um.’
What are you doing here? Why did she send you here? What do you mean ‘do’? I don’t know what other kids do. I don’t do anything. I hide. I hide. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t want to look stupid. I don’t want –
‘I’m a ballerina,’ Violet announced. Tara exhaled hard.
‘Oh.’
‘It’s my career. Do you have a career?’
Tara breathed.
‘You’ve got to take care of a career like it’s a baby,’ Violet said, shooting up onto the bed, standing in the centre of the room suddenly like curtains had opened before a mattressed stage, like an audience had been revealed, had demanded her presence. She looked at herself in the mirror, did a series of little rises and falls, flattened her hands on her ribcage and pushed, hard, inwards until the whole upper section of her torso collapsed like a balloon, the air expelled neatly. She was like a fold-out. An origami girl of crisp white paper. She slid her hands down, did the same with her waist, seemed to want to squeeze herself dry like a sponge.
‘Your career is a little life that belongs to you. You love it. You care for it. You think about it every minute. You do your duty to it, because if you don’t, it’ll die. And you’ll have killed something. Killed a baby. You’ll never forgive yourself. You know?’
Tara did know. Her own mother spoke of such things. Not of careers, but of killing.
You’re killing me, Tara. You’re killing me with this. Look at you.
Tara got up, stood looking at Violet squeezing herself in the mirror, and wanted to join in, but didn’t know how. She loved Violet already. Loved her milky smooth skin and white hair and the smell of milk all about her like a newborn animal, pure and untainted. Tara thought if she touched her the girl would probably be cold, might feel like condensation on a bottle left on the counter in the kitchen. Violet turned to Tara and grabbed her forearms. The bigger girl felt a rush of electricity run through her, right into her chest, like stepping on a stair that wasn’t there, the terror followed by the blessed relief. Violet squeezed her fleshy elbows, slid her fingers along until they were holding hands, the two of them, just standing there in the room where no one dared enter, where her own mother hadn’t been in years. Tara wasn’t alone. For a moment, she was wholly and distinctly not alone.
‘You’ve got to make sacrifices if you want a career,’ Violet said.
‘Okay.’ Tara nodded eagerly.
‘I’ll show you my trick, if you want.’
‘Yeah. Great!’
‘Have you got a toothbrush?’ The girl grinned.
Tara sat on the stairs afterwards while Violet brushed her teeth, gripping the banister with both hands. It was only when Violet had begun her routine that Tara realised how many bones the girl had, and how very close they were to the skin. The girl gagged. She became, for a few minutes, a spiny forest creature, a thing filled with venom, expelling it, expelling it, so she could return to her natural milky newborn state. Down in the sitting room, Tara could see Violet’s mother sitting next to her own mother on the Louis XV set, the set that no one sat on. Joanie was crying. It was rare that Tara saw Joanie cry, and she marvelled at how pretty it was, how her long nose became a rich pink and her eyes flooded crystal tears. Tara puffed up like a blowfish when she cried. Her face swallowed her eyes.
‘It can’t be all that bad,’ Vi’s mother was saying.
‘It is. Oh, it is. Believe me. If this doesn’t fix it, I don’t know what in god’s name will.’
‘Tell me,’ the other woman crooned, gathering Joanie’s hand in both of her own.
‘They call her …’ her mother paused, swallowed. ‘They call her Nuggy.’
Vi’s mother sat back in her chair, clasped her handkerchief at her chest. She gave a little jolt that could have been a suppressed laugh, a cough, a shudder. Anything. A quake of recognition that rippled through her bony frame, made her white hair shimmer like a mirror.
‘They what?’
‘They call her Nuggy, Marcey,’ Joanie said. ‘They’ve always done it. It’s shortened from Nugget. She’s short, square. Thick. Like a nugget.’
Marcey laughed, just once, and then swallowed the sound under Joanie’s glare.
‘Oh, Joanie. There are worse things, surely. Nuggy? Well, it’s sort of … cute, isn’t it? It sounds snuggly. It sounds sort of –’
‘It is not cute,’ Joanie snarled. ‘It’s not snuggly. It’s not cute. It’s humiliating. It’s like a knife in my heart.’ She beat her chest with a fist, once, twice, squeezed her lips shut.
‘Oh, Joanie.’
‘Look at you, Marcey. Jesus Christ. You don’t understand. How could you? You and David, you’ve got a beautiful, graceful swan and I’ve got … a nugget. A fucking nugget for a child.’
Her mother bit down and growled angry tears, buried her face in her hands.
Tara retreated quietly to the bedroom.
Here’s the problem. A lot of people watch crime shows. Not only are they rigidly formulaic, but they’re fast. In minutes one to three you get the crime. Minutes four to five, the detectives are called onto the job. They express shock and horror and a heartfelt pledge to catch the guy – alongside hints at their intoxicating secret lust for each other. Then you get a parade of standard possible suspects: cheerful doormen, menacing drug dealers, local eccentrics, cherry-cheeked school teachers. A detective gets a seemingly innocuous phone call or tip-off or something, remembers another minor piece of information from the beginning of the episode and – whammo! They nail the victim’s boss, mother, boyfriend. The sandwich shop guy. It’s that easy.
So people are used to crimes being solved before it’s time for bed. In almost every scene, something is being done towards finding the perpetrator. Samples are being taken. Suspects are being hassled or chased through rainy alleyways. No one eats or sleeps. They don’t take toilet or smoke breaks. Or call their girlfriends and apologise for calling them ‘needy’ or have make-up sex. They certainly don’t stand around near the body tal
king with their hands in their pockets.
Unfortunately, that’s precisely what Eden and I did when they found the second girl near Mrs Macquarie’s Chair in the Domain. She was sitting upright against a tree near a bike rack, in full view of anyone riding past. The victim’s jacket was over her head. From a distance, an onlooker might have thought she was chilling out after a long run. The jacket, however, was hiding grievous facial injuries. A missing eye. The way her legs were stretched out, feet together, didn’t suggest trauma. Whoever found her would have got a nasty surprise after pulling the hood back. The crime-scene techs had erected a tent around the victim, but Eden and I had taken a quick peek and stepped out to confer, to let the five people inside the tent do their thing. There was no phone this time but headphone jacks had been left behind, indicating that there had been one at some point. A good crowd of morning joggers and a few members of the press were gathered around the police tape, staring at us. I’ve got so used to their presence that I simply forgot they were there.
‘Jacket over the head this time,’ Eden said quietly. ‘Some shame still there but we’re rapidly growing out of it.’
‘Bit of a confused kind of display,’ I nodded. ‘Wants the body to be found now. Clearly. But the killer’s not particularly happy for everyone to know what’s been done to the face.’
‘I don’t think she can help what she does to their faces. I think that’s the pure rage part. I think she just goes at the face before she knows what’s she’s done.’
‘She?’ I frowned.
‘I’d say it’s a woman.’ Eden looked at the crowd. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘Statistical probability would suggest otherwise,’ I said. ‘But I’ll hear your theory.’
‘Clothes on this one aren’t tussled, the way they would be if they were removed and then put back on. I’m betting the rape kit will confirm no sexual assault again. And then there’s the facial injury. That’s very feminine to me. Men go for the hair, the breasts, the wrists. The thin parts. They’re objects for men. This –’ she gestured to the tent ‘– this was personal.’
