by Candice Fox
‘Right,’ Imogen nodded. Her features reassembled into the smile. ‘I get it now.’
‘He’s spoken about me?’
‘Yeah, some,’ Imogen smirked, looking at Hooky’s shirt again. ‘I feel so stupid.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, I was worried. It’s silly. I didn’t realise you really are just a child.’
Hooky’s face darkened. Imogen turned on her heel, and Hooky watched her breeze through the automatic doors into the street.
Eden was on the edge. There was no doubt about that now. At first, when Merri had told her of the woman trying to get a picture of her birthmark, Eden had been able to control her inner ‘flight’ reflex, the whispering voice that made her want to drop everything and run, as she had imagined doing so many times before. Hades had always made sure she had a plan in place. Money, a bag, a new identity. Going to ground, being reborn as someone new – these things didn’t concern Eden. Usually.
Going undercover had taught her how to shed herself completely, like taking off a suit. Eden herself was a construction, after all. A mask she had been wearing since the morning she and Eric had become Hades’ ‘children’, since they adopted their new names, settled into their new life with the Lord of the Underworld playing Daddy. Eden wondered, sometimes, what sort of person she might have become if Morgan Tanner, the girl she had once been, hadn’t had to be snuffed out. Who was Morgan Tanner? Who would be born when Eden Archer was dead? Eden wandered, head down, up the hill to the little shack at the centre of the Utulla tip, towards the warm golden lights of her home.
Whenever she visited now something was changed, moved slightly, upgraded to allow for Hades’ slow decline, the back that wouldn’t hold under the weight of certain tools, the old knees that cracked when walking down steps. Everything was closer to the little house to eliminate the need to walk over uneven ground for long distances – the letterbox shifted up nearer the front door, the sun bench where the old man liked to sit and watch the workers now beside the steps, under the awning. Eden was glad. Hades insisted on living by himself out here, beyond the reach of anyone who might change a light bulb for him, who might lift a heavy pot out of the oven. But there she went again – fantasising, dreaming of lives that were not real. He was not a vulnerable old man. His hands were worn, but hard. His mind was dark, but quick. He was going to die one of these days as lethal and as malignant as he always had been. There would be no spoonfeeding in a nursing home. No adult nappies. He would meet a bloody end one of these nights with one of his clients willingly, or he would push someone into it – an end in war was Hades’ only end.
Eden did not find Hades in the house. She walked over the hill towards the work shed. She passed beneath huge structures lining what had once been a rocky stone path but was now a set of immaculate steps cut into the hillside and laid with terracotta tiles to save the old man’s ankles. A giant grizzly bear made from hundreds of bottles towered over her, the glass warped and melted together, the chest of the beast pocked and holed with open glass mouths strapped down against a ribcage of old wood wrapped with hunks of wire. A mouth roared at the sky, the innards of the skull pipes and tubes welded and tied together, the gaping eyes of microwave doors tilted, sad, one burned through from an inner explosion. Across from the bear, a lion was frozen mid-pounce; the claws reaching over Eden’s head were polished brass parts from a series of ancient machines – clocks and printing presses, and the dozens and dozens of typewriters chucked into the tip each month. Down the lion’s back, a rippling curve, thousands of typewriter keys spelled gibberish, the letters glimmering in the growing dark, black and white and yellowed with age. She stepped through the open door of the shed, no barriers between her and the old man, nothing stopping some stranger from wandering in here and seeing him at his dark work, as always. Hades had never been one to hide. He was too ancient to bother with precautions.
Hades was bent over a workbench. A body lay on the table before him, the thick head turned away. An old handsaw rocked in his fist, back and forth. Eden walked around the table in time to see the corpse’s left knee crack off heavily, flopping wetly to the table.
‘What seems to be the problem, officer?’ Hades said. He put down the saw and wiped his hands on the cloth apron he would later burn, smearing black blood down his chest like war paint. Hades had always liked getting bloody. He didn’t wear gloves or a mask. Tiny blood droplets had spattered his left cheek. Eden took out a handkerchief, sighed, swiped at her father’s temple.
‘What is this? You said you were done.’
‘I am done.’
‘Well, who’s dropped this on you then?’
‘Oh, that idiot Jesse Jeep. It was a favour returned. That’s it, now. I really am done.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Eden glanced into a huge duffel bag lined with black garbage bags sitting behind the table. ‘And you’ve got to do his chop work?’
‘The chop work was sort of half done.’ Hades shrugged one shoulder. ‘Arms, at least. You know these kids, Eden. They have no stomach.’
Eden sighed again and began rolling up her sleeves. Hades handed her a long-toothed hacksaw and she set it to the man’s right knee. She was about to begin cutting when she noticed a basket on the other side of Hades’ feet, overflowing with old blankets.
‘What is that?’ She nodded. As she spoke, the creature in the basket seemed to awaken from its slumber. A pink nose on a caramel snout emerged from the blankets, snuffled the air for a moment and then sunk away.
‘Is that a roo?’
‘No. It’s a dog.’
‘You got a dog?’
‘I don’t go out and get things, Eden.’ Hades smiled a little. ‘You know that.’
For a while, they sawed the body apart in silence, Hades stopping now and then to sip from a blood-covered mug. Eden stood to the side so that the spray of fluids from the backward motion of the saw didn’t stain her trousers. As she was laying the leg in the duffel bag, she paused.
‘Hades, there’s another leg in here.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
‘I just put a leg in there.’
‘Yeah,’ Eden said, holding up the leg she’d cut by the calf. ‘So there’s two in the bag and one in my hand.’
Hades put his saw down and limped over. He looked into the bag, looked at the leg in Eden’s hand.
‘Well then.’
‘Yes. Well then.’
‘That’s a tricky sort of business,’ Hades sniffed.
‘Someone’s mixed up the distribution. Looks like a woman’s. Calf is shaved.’
‘That’s two grand right there, that extra leg.’ Hades pointed to the bag with a stubby finger. ‘The price I gave was for one body. One. Not a body and a … a tenth.’
‘You better call him up then.’
‘Oh, I will,’ Hades blustered, muttered to himself as he set the saw to the corpse’s throat, took a handful of hair and began to swing the blade. ‘The cheek of these young people. The absolute cheek.’
‘Could have been an honest mistake.’
‘These young pricks.’
‘Hades, I want to talk about my parents.’
The old man stopped sawing. Leaned on the head on the table, his forearm mashing the face into the bruised wood. The saw made wet patterns against his trouser leg as he hung it there.
‘I’m almost certain I’ve told you everything I know, girl.’
‘No one ever knew?’ Eden shifted the leg in her hands, looked down at the toes against her forearm. The toenails were sharp. Yellow. ‘Even Maggie? You never told her where we came from?’
‘All I told Maggie was that if anyone ever came asking, her daughter had dropped two brats off on me, just before she necked herself. Eden, a girl, and Eric, a boy. Daughter had only been dead a week at that time, so Maggie welcomed the money. It was a simple lie. Two grandchildren she never saw, given back to their deadbeat dad. Didn’t know nothing about them, didn’t know where they were.’
/>
‘What if someone approached Maggie?’ Eden said. ‘What if someone asked to see pictures of the children?’
‘Maybe there never were none. Jesus. I don’t know. It’s been, what … twenty years? More?’
‘There was a Western Australian kid that went missing. Bainbridge. Ten years ago, almost exactly. You seen the news?’
‘Redheaded kid. I saw it. Didn’t know the name.’
‘The Stronghearts Foundation has been running with it. The anniversary. They’ve been getting the government behind all these old cases.’
‘So?’
‘So people don’t forget, Hades. Not ten years later, not twenty years later. They’re still writing books about Mr Cruel. That’s twenty-six years ago, the first one.’
‘And?’
‘And I looked at our case. Eric’s and mine. They’re bumping the reward money up by a hundred thousand dollars. The Stronghearts Foundation has recommended the government increase the reward money on a bunch of old cases to get them all solved. Us, the Evans girl, the Beaumont children. The redheaded kid, Bainbridge. There’s a big push right now.’
‘The reward money has always been big, Eden.’
‘Maybe it’ll be big enough now for someone to act on a hunch. Maybe someone’s decided to just … go for it. I don’t know.’
‘Eden.’
‘Maggie. You gave her our birth certificates, didn’t you?’ Eden chewed her nails. ‘Some … school records?’
‘I made it real, Eden. I’ve done it before.’ Hades adjusted the grip on his saw, prepared to begin. ‘You’re not the first human beings I reinvented. If you’ll stop biting your hands off and think for a moment, you’ll remember that reinventing people is a bit of a talent of mine. I’ve never failed.’
‘What if you failed this time?’
‘Eden.’
‘What if someone found out we weren’t real? What if someone connected us to the Tanners?’
Hades put down his saw. He walked forward and took the leg from Eden’s hand, dropped it into the bag.
‘My fucking birthmark was in the paper.’
Hades cocked his head.
‘This.’ Eden touched her side. ‘It was in all the news reports at the time we went missing. My only unique distinguishing feature. Twenty years ago it was all over the news. And now hundreds of thousands of people must have seen it on the front page of the fucking Herald when Frank carried me out of that farm.’
‘You look at the case files for your parents’ murders, Eden, and it’ll say bikies,’ Hades said. ‘It’s stamped unsolved, but there’s a good four or five leads that all end with bikies. Some pieces of shit skinheads in the Dugart gang or someone or other found out about your father’s research money and blasted the two of them, came up empty-handed. Botch job. Sold you or buried you or something. No one asks these questions, Eden, not anymore. No one’s going to come after you because of a birthmark. The lead officer on your case is dead. He’d be the only person on earth who would remember something as tiny as that.’
‘I think you’re wrong. I think someone is looking for us.’
‘You’re being paranoid.’ The old man tucked a strip of her dark hair behind her ear, remembered how hard it was for her to accept the touch of another human being and stopped. ‘There have been times, over the years, that you’ve –’
‘Someone visited Maggie. Asked her about her grandkids. Someone approached my massage therapist looking for a photo of my body.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah. This is serious,’ Eden said.
Hades’ jaw twitched, just once. A tiny tic in the muscle beside his ear.
‘I feel it,’ Eden said. ‘Someone knows.’
The old man paused, looked at his work on the table, one of thousands of ended lives he had hidden over the years. Since he retired, his life had been all about hiding things, burying things, making things clean. Tying up loose ends and folding down corners, making murder not only clean and neat but easy, economical. Out in the grounds of his tip only the souls of those buried there remained, the leachate acid built up between the layers of landfill dissolving rapists, murderers, stand over men, con victims and gamblers who’d pushed the grace of their bookies too far. Sometimes Hades heard screams in the night, but there was no telling if they were from those lost and frightened out there in the dark, or if they were echoes of his own past, memories tucked around corners and thrust into shadows, people who’d deserved his wrath, people who hadn’t. He reached out and took his daughter’s hand, squeezed the fingers, stained them with blood, and it was as he had done the night she came to him, a tiny child newly orphaned, a problem he had to fix. He had stained her. He had made her the monster she was.
‘If it surfaces, we’ll bury it,’ Hades said. ‘That’s what we do.’
‘I think something terrible happened at my house,’ Ruben said. Donato sat beside him in the back row of the small, bare classroom, texting his new Australian girlfriend, a tall, leggy blonde who’d come to the hostel to complain about the music. Ruben could see the edges of picture messages on his friend’s phone and tried not to lean too far sideways in his chair in case his snooping was revealed. He sighed when he couldn’t see more than elbows and knees. He looked at the posters on the classroom walls instead. G’day, mate! cried a cartoon kangaroo. Ruben hadn’t heard anyone say ‘G’day’ since he arrived in Australia, nor had he seen a single kangaroo. But then he spent most of his time at the house, being followed from room to room by the creaks and whispers of the ancient building.
‘Something terrible like what?’ Donato whispered in Italian.
Ruben told him about the watch by the bed, the inconsistent amounts of dust on the books there. He told him about the pill packet on the living-room floor, the footsteps in the attic bedroom that was always locked, the television that played the same phrases over and over.
Reach out and take what you’ve always wanted.
You deserve it. You deserve it. You deserve it.
Donato brushed him off.
‘Why don’t you just go up there? Why don’t you just knock and say hello?’
‘You’d understand if you were there. The house is a nightmare.’
‘Come work with me then.’ Donato finally put down his phone. ‘I can get you a job at The Argyle. It’s pumping there, brother. The chicks, oh. The chicks.’ He smiled at the ceiling.
‘What time did you finish up last night?’
‘Three.’ Donato shrugged.
‘That’s why I don’t come and work with you.’ Ruben tapped his friend’s chest.
‘Are you guys listening back there?’ the teacher called.
‘Yes,’ the boys answered in English. Ruben spread a stack of old newspaper clippings before him.
‘What are these?’ Donato asked.
‘The translation assignment, idiot. You had to bring something in.’
‘Oh, shit!’
‘Yeah, I brought extra for you. You’d forget your own mother.’
‘What are these? They’re so old.’
‘They’re not that old. They’ve just been lying in the sun. I found them at the house, in one of the bedrooms. You’re going to help me figure out what they say.’
‘You’re like Scooby-Doo,’ Donato sniggered. ‘Solving mysteries. Getting to the bottom of things.’
‘Shut up and translate.’ Ruben shoved a dictionary into Donato’s hands. ‘I don’t want to hear any more of your shit.’
‘Are you guys working back there?’
‘Yes,’ they answered.
There’s a feeling very much like defeat that overtakes me whenever I open a flat pack from Ikea. I would have been very good as a Neanderthal – rolling rocks together and covering them with lumps of wood. Setting things on fire and breaking things down from their natural height into smaller chunks. But when it comes to tiny screws and pieces of plastic and stickers and things that you pop out of perforated sheets, I’m incapable. There’s no other word for it
.
I stared at the instructions for my new kitchen for a while and then decided I’d figure everything out when I got all the pieces out of their boxes and onto the floor. Bad idea. I sat in the middle of my mess and opened fake beer and went to the instructions again. The cartoon handyman with his oversized allen key was grinning at his construction like a fool. It was midnight. I couldn’t sleep. Whenever I closed my eyes I started running and there was a darkness behind me, bodiless, trying to catch up.
Sweaty nights usually accompany the beginnings of a big case. Particularly when the media get hold of it. The watchfulness, the expectation of a country, sometimes the world, flutters at the back of your mind, lingering behind everything – the look on the guy across the train carriage, the tone in the waitress’ words. Desperation. Solve this. Solve this fast. If the murders keep happening or the rapist isn’t caught or a body lies unidentified beyond a reasonable time, you’re almost committing the crimes yourself. Why didn’t you stop him? Why didn’t you save her? Why don’t you do something? What are you? How can you sleep at night?
You never sleep at night. Right from the beginning.
The front door opened and closed just as I finished needlessly categorising all the different screws and nails and things by size. Eden walked in and chucked her keys onto the floor beside the door, looked at the catastrophe around me.
‘Can’t sleep either?’
‘What are you –?’ she said. She blinked at some marble countertops leaning against the wall. ‘Never mind. Get out of the way.’
I took my beer and shuffled to the side of the room, grabbed a chair and put it in the corner. She sat sighing and reading the instructions as if what I’d done had been a personal insult to her. When she’d perused the diagrams for a minute or so she set them aside and started grabbing pieces from around her, fitting and locking things together with satisfying clicks. Things that looked like they fit together, things that so obviously fit together that it was beyond reason why I hadn’t fitted them together myself. I didn’t thank her. She wouldn’t have responded if I had. She started fixing things to the wall with a wood-handled screwdriver my father had owned, her hair hanging in her face. In minutes, it seemed, a frame was assembling, the bottoms of drawers and cupboards were being slotted into place. She was such a capable person. I was jealous of her. I had been, a lot of our time together. It’s not hard to feel like a loser around Eden.
