I'm Dying Here

by Damien Broderick

  “I need a bit more evidence than a handful of runes,” I said. I blame myself, for her twelfth birthday I gave her a box of Druid’s Scrying Stones, With Solomon’s Key to All Mysteries. She’d been a pretty thing in a pink party dress and gawky coltish limbs. Animal never went through the tomboy phase. Dolls and lippy in front of the mirror and pretty sparkly thread wound around her hair one day, industrial machinery protruding from her face the next, that’s what it seemed like. Of course I hadn’t been around a lot.

  “We read her blog. Some prick was stalking her.”

  I sat down again, and allowed Sappho to return. How many hairballs can one cat hide? “I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, Grime. What’s a blog, and how can you stalk some­one who never leaves the house?”

  “Web log,” Grime Grrl said. She gave me a dark, wondering look in the darkness. “On her site?”

  “Cyberstalking,” my daughter said. Her hands were shaking a little, and she delved in her layers of black and purple. The light of her match went off in my adapted eyes like a flare. She lit a second cigarette from the first, handed it to Grime. The stink of the fumes filled the room, and I was wheezing instantly. I thank God every day that I gave up smoking when I was fifteen. From the age of twelve I smoked a packet a day. It was my first taste of crime, and crime tasted tasty after the first few days of gasping and retching, and besides it was wholesomely vegan, no animal products at all in your average ciggie. They used to have these vending machines in public places that disgorged packets of 20 when you pushed in a handful of coins and kicked the thing a few times. Hard to credit in these politically correct days. In the lobby at the movies, in the pub when you went in the Ladies Lounge with your Mum, at the cop shop and church probably. Me and my mates quickly learned the dozen best ways to tickle the stupid things. A galvanized washer on a string was a good one. They weighed about the same as a coin. You’d feed the washer down the slot, wait for the click, yank it back, drop it again until it threw up its nicotine hairball. Or you could just boot the machine to bits, but that made a racket and people tended to chase you down the street.

  I opened a black-painted window. It groaned, and the two women shrieked. Smoke eddied in the stream of light, I wondered for a moment if their vampire flesh had caught fire.

  “It’s one or the other,” I said, waving at the polluted air in front of my face. “I know it’s banal of me, Animal, but those filthy things kill you.”

  Wrong approach. A man would do better frightening a Goth with news that cigarettes give you a hearty appetite and a sum­mery suntan.

  “I know it’s anal of you, Dad, but I really don’t give a shit about your obsession with health and feng shui.” She put out her smoke with a bad grace, got up and shut the window again. Grime’s fag glowed in the dimness for a moment, then she crushed hers out as well. The stink lingered. A disbarred doctor in the joint told me it’s a kind of phobic allergy you get once you give up the cancer sticks. It’s a physiological defense to keep you out of harm’s way, makes the temptation too disgusting. I dunno, never seems to stop junkies, they’re always puking their guts out after a hit, seems to be part of the joy of the thing.

  “Watching your Mum die of cancer might have something to do with it,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, everyone’s got to die. It’s part of the balance.” She’s surlier now than she was when she wore dresses and clomped around in her mother’s shoes.

  “Maybe that’s what happened to Cookie,” I said, getting to my feet again. “Can I use your crapper?”

  “There’s one downstairs that Vinnie uses. Are you coming back?” Animal looked a bit anxious, there in the darkness.

  “Yeah, hang on.”

  I went down the outside steps, had a whiz in a loo that hadn’t been cleaned for a while, a bit out of character with the neat sink and trash bin upstairs. I decided they just didn’t want me messing up their bathroom, or even being in there with my heinous testoster­one emanations. God knows what kinds of abominable underwear was draped over the shower rail, I was probably well out of it. I went back through Vinnie’s shop to Sydney Road and bought some ham rolls with tomato and non-Camembert cheese from Ivy’s Café, currently being run by a pair of middle-aged Cambodians.

  “Thanks, Chhom,” I said, folding a copy of The Age as I paid her. “Look, give me three black coffees to go, okay? Make that three black and one with milk and two sugars.”

  “Mother Hen in the fourth at Randwick,” Chhom said.

  “Five to one,” I said, nodding. “I hear Brute Force is good for a canter up in Brisbane.”

  “I’ll put a dollar on for you, Mr. Purdue. No charge.”

  It was an arrangement we had, a tip or two for snacks. I carried the booty back to the shop, evading a Number 19 tram and the hoonish van tailgating it.

  “Fuckers,” I said to Vinnie. “No courtesy. You take milk don’t you.”

  “Two sugars. Thanks, Tom. Mother Hen’s been scratched.” “Damn.”

  When I got back to the den of the night, the women were stretched out just where they’d been ten minutes earlier, but some dreadful racket was coming from about fifteen speakers scattered around the room. I could see why the vicars call it Satanic music. I gave my daughter a pained look, and handed over two of the cof­fees. Grime took hers with an ill grace, but waved a thing in her hand and the noise dropped a few decibels.

  “I can make a few calls,” I said. “Won’t promise anything.” “Okay.”

  “Well, where’s your phone?” Sappho had disappeared, I sup­pose her musical taste agreed with mine. I’d seen a phone line running along the top of the door, but it didn’t seem to end in anything you could hold a conversation over.

  “We got cut off for non-payment. Use your mobile, you’re as clueless as Vinnie.”

  “I can’t.” I fished the remains out of my pocket. “Never buy technology from the Philippines.” I tried to push the two pieces together, but it was completely pointless, they might as well have come from totally different phones. Maybe they had.

  “Give me a look, Tom,” Grime Grrl said. She stayed where she was on the couch, fat arm extended, fingers loosely open.

  “I’m telling you, it’s broken.”

  Her arm stayed where it was. I sighed and crossed the room, gave her the buggered phone. She held the parts close to her eyes, wiggled them, pulled a long dangerous metal pin out of her hair, jabbed twice rather crossly at the mouthpiece, put the pin back in her hair, jiggled the bits, handed me the healed phone. It was like a miracle from Lourdes.

  “Grime’s doing a masters in Electrical Engineering at RMIT,” Animal told me with offhand pride.

  I was punching numbers. “Hoping for a job with the privatized Telstra, are we?”

  “I’m the sound wonk for Bleeding Anus,” Grime said. “Melbourne City Morgue,” said a nasal voice in my ear.

  I couldn’t believe it, still couldn’t. Like seeing the lame walk.

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Hold the line a moment,” the voice said.

  “Good Christ.” I said. “They’re all doing it.”

  When Jake came back he told me that no young defunct overweight women lay at that moment on his slab. He could offer me a Vietnamese hoon stabbed to death outside King’s in King St at three a.m., and a rather bloated elderly woman fished from the Coburg Lake.

  “Thanks, pal.”

  “Mother Hen’s scratched,” he told me gloomily.

  “Someone must have talked,” I said, and clicked the phone shut. Jesus, half of fucking Melbourne must have talked.

  “Show me this web site thing,” I told Animal.

  The picture on the nineteen-inch flat screen was not unflattering. If a man’s tastes ran to the pleasantly plump and necrophiliac, with dead-black dyed hair and up-thrust boobs like Vampirella’s, he could do a lot worse than Cookie.

  “I thought you said she was fat.”

  “That’s when she was sixteen. Hang on, where’s the o
ne you got at the bar mitzvah.”

  “Fuck, don’t show him that,” Grime shouted, “Cookie will kill you.”

  “I thought Cookie had done a bunk,” I said. “I need to know what she looks like now, not what she looked like in her fashion shoot. Urk.”

  Like a whale in black satin. Like a small orca with legs like hams. Like an orca porker. Cookie liked her tuck, you could tell.

  But she didn’t like the camera. From her furious expression, I had the feeling Cookie might have chased her sister with a carving knife, if the poor thing was able to heave herself out of her chair.

  “How the hell did you get her wheelchair up and down these stairs?” I said.

  “I told you, she didn’t get out much.”

  “So when did you last see her?”

  “I dunno,” Animal said. “A few days ago.”

  “How many days?”

  “Some.”

  “Come on, think, Animal.”

  “Look, I don’t count the days, right? I’m not a 24/7 freak. I work to more elemental rhythms.”

  “What rhythms are those?”

  “The phases of the moon. The tug of my own menstrual tides.”

  “So how many moons ago did you last see Cookie?”

  “Look, she was meant to show up in court yesterday. And she didn’t front. So some arsehole from the court—called himself a sheriff—came looking for her.”

  “Bloody sheriff,” Grime said. “Keep them doggies rolling, raw-hide.”

  “We told him she didn’t live here, of course,” Animal said. “We told him she’d gone to New Guinea. That got rid of him.”

  “And had she?” I said. “Gone to New Guinea?”

  “Christ, no. She was in her room. Only she wasn’t.”

  “You went looking for Cookie in her room? To tell her about the sheriff?”

  “Yep.”

  “And she wasn’t there?”

  “Nope.”

  “And how long before that had you actually seen her?”

  “Dad, quit with the third degree, right? We hadn’t seen her for some time.”

  “So why do you think she could be dead? Maybe she’s just moved out. Couldn’t stand you two, or something.”

  “There was a note.”

  “Not a suicide note?”

  “I dunno. It was a note.”

  “Do you have it? Are you actually in possession of the note?”

  “Of course we bloody do,” Animal said.

  “Of course we bloody are,” Grime Grrl said.

  “Well, could I see it, please?”

  “Try not to sound so aggressive, Dad.”

  “Annabelle, I’m meant to be helping you. You are meant to be engaging my services as an investigator. A certain element of co-operation might—”

  “Yeah, yeah, and don’t call me Annabelle.” Animal shifted her

  head slightly to allow Grime Grrl to get off the couch. Grime Grrl didn’t move. “Do us a favor, Grimes. Get Dad the note.”

  “You had it last,” Grime said.

  “It’s in Cookie’s room. On the mantelpiece.”

  Grime Grrl spoke to me: “It’s in Cookie’s room. On the man­telpiece.”

  I had half a mind to walk out on the pair of them. But Animal is my daughter and, if the truth be known, I’m in debt to her for certain favors rendered in the not too distant past. So I did like a proper investigator: I asked which was Cookie’s room and made my way to the scene of the crime. If crime it was.

  Cookie’s room was high-tech. It was surprisingly neat and well lit by ordinary daylight; for a moment I stood and blinked in the glare. There was a huge bed, a wardrobe and two tables. The ta­bles were piled high with computers and their peripherals. I didn’t recognize any of the brand names. Cookie obviously worked with gear that was a cut above that found in the average suburban feng shui consultancy. I turned my attention to the mantelpiece. A col­lection of sea shells and dried flowers stood sentinel beside a single sheet of A4 torn off at the end. The paper was covered with letters cut out of magazines. The note read:

  bY the TimE U read this I shalL B

  GONe. YrS in siSterH0od cookIe.

  I found it a bit hard to take the thing seriously. It looked like no suicide note I’d ever seen. It looked like a joke. I left the joke where it was and sat down at one of Cookie’s computers. I dislike computers, but I do know how to use them, a bit. It took about five minutes for the machines to defeat me completely. Every­where I went I was confronted with demands for passwords, curt pronouncements that access was denied. I managed to open one document and thought for a moment I was getting somewhere, but the page was covered in numbers arranged in lots of six. I’m no code buster, I couldn’t even make the msn messenger virtual phone work, the headset stayed dead as a doornail. Under the counter was a large contraption on slithery rails. I drew it out. La­ser printer, electronic gray tail running back into the bowels of the computer. A pile of paper in the output chute. I took them out and looked at them with the keen insight of a disbarred private inves­tigator. I switched off both machines then and made my way back to the darkened living room. Animal and Grime hadn’t moved.

  “Did you read the note?” Animal said.

  “Every word of it.”

  “So, there you are, she’s dead.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. Like a magician, I showed them several sheets of paper like Cookie’s death note. Each was made from in­dividual letters torn from papers and magazines, scanned, printed on a high-quality printer.

  hELp! i aM dr. MorRis GOLDfiNKle!

  said one.

  The dINGo TO0k mY baBY!

  said another.

  by The TimE U see ThIS, mY bodY Will B eaTON By Croks

  warned a third.

  “Regard the small print at the bottom of each sheet,” I said with quiet modesty. I was proud of my detection. In the smallest font known to man, each page said www.deathjoke.com.

  “Aw right,” Grime said. “Yeah, we saw them in Suicide Girl. I suppose she must have printed them off the website.”

  This gave me a measure of confidence that Cookie was not sleeping with the fishes, but I still wondered how she’d got out of her room. The whale was not likely to be nimble on her feet. Someone she’d met on line?

  “Tell me—what did she do in there with all that computing gear?”

  “Made enemies,” Grime said.

  “How?” I said.

  “Cookie was the scourge of cyberspace. There are some real arseholes out there, posting all sorts of crap about women. And Cookie was onto them.”

  “How,” I said.

  “I dunno. Do you know, Animal?”

  “She squeezed their balls,” Animal said.

  “In cyberspace?” I said.

  “It’s what’s called a metaphor, Dad. Cookie hacked into their computers and did things to them that could be regarded as analo­gous to squeezing their owners’ balls in a vice. You could call it an objective correlative. Get it?”

  “I’m glad we sent you to that expensive school,” I said.

  “It was a dump,” Animal said.

  “But she’s not so limber in the real world. Climbing up and down the stairs, say. She’s....” You weren’t supposed to say crip­pled. “She’s, like, differently mobile, right?”

  Our conversation paused. It idled, motor humming. You could have gained the impression that it had been switched off, or sent to bed without its supper. In most other situations this would have been embarrassing, have led to uneasy coughing and head scratch­ing and, sooner or later, a forced bit of dialogue. But I know Ani­mal and her friends well enough—they go silent on a regular basis. There’s nothing strained about it. I allowed myself to think my own thoughts. (a) I had little doubt that this Cookie girl had just done a runner, even if she was in a wheelchair or needed crutches or just had to pause for breath and a bite to eat every few steps. The joke note was too ridiculous to be taken seriously. We might as well be concerned about the
dingo taking Cookie’s baby. (b) I was in dire need of somewhere to stay, somewhere where an ener­getic police force wouldn’t come knocking to ask questions about the re-alignment of my previous abode, the death and mysterious mutilation of Nile Fever (and what the hell was up with that?), or associated criminal damage done to a helicopter. (c) It was true that I did owe my daughter for some small services rendered.

  I said, “Look, I’ll see what I can do about finding Cookie for you. But I need somewhere to stay. Cookie’s room will do fine. When I find its tenant I’ll move out.”

  “Jeezus H!” Grime yelled. “That’s against the rules. This is a respectable house. No men!”

  “Rules were meant to be broken,” I said. “Go on, Grime, be a rebel.”

  “You tell him, Animal. It’s bad enough having him sitting here in broad daylight. Now he wants to sleep in poor Cookie’s bed. Tell him to sod off, Animal.”

  “He’s my dad,” Animal said.

  “Fucking patriarch! They’re the worst—”

  “Tell me,” I said, changing the subject, “what exactly was Cookie meant to be doing in court?”

  “Fucking men,” Grime raged on, ignoring me. I was used to that from Animal. “Always sticking their bits and parts in where they’re not wanted. If this guy whacks off all over Cookie’s new satin—”

  “Hey, he’s my dad, Grime.”

  I was startled and, I have to admit, rather pleased to find that Animal had her limits. My squeamish Goth kid.

  “The nuclear family.... Christ, what a fucking bourgeois institu­tion. More rape goes on in—”

  “Hey, listen, Dad,” Animal said, raising her head from Grime’s lap. “Me and Grime Grrl have got some talking to do. How about you go out and do a bit of investigating. Ask a few questions. You can sleep here tonight.”

  “Then I’m not,” Grime said. My phone rang. I flicked it open, and the mouthpiece section fell off again. “Jesusmaryandjoseph,” cried Grime Grrl, “now what have you done to it?”

  I held the two segments out to her, shaking my head, making it clear that her self esteem as an electronic artisan was at stake. The part with the ringer in it was still ringing. She snatched them from me, jammed them back together.

  “What?” she said into the phone. Her eyes widened. “Share! What are you doing calling this number?”