Necessary Secrets

by Greg McGee

  Before she drove back up the hill to Ponsonby, she rang the number Meredith had given her. Ellie was grateful to get Meredith’s voice message, her shift was obviously over. Ellie confirmed, with as little detail as possible, that her father was safe and that she’d be in touch tomorrow. She’d tried to sound confident and in control, but felt neither.

  This was how it had started with Jackson. Just for a day or two, she’d told herself, a sort of casual extension of her fostering arrangement, even though the department knew nothing about it. She’d got him a room in a motel she couldn’t afford, just for a week, so that he could do an interview with the fire investigator sent by the insurance company. She knew she had to get him through that, or he’d be the obvious suspect. After that he’d disappeared. She’d reported that to the department, and part of her had been grateful he was gone.

  She’d been watering the garden a week later, keeping her mother’s flowers alive, she didn’t know why, maybe mourning the house was part of it, when she’d heard a low noise from the pseudopanax at the back. A croak, like someone she knew calling her name – ‘Miss Ellie’. He’d been living there like a bush rat since he left the motel, starving, his face and arms swollen from mosquito bites. Terrified his father would find him.

  The fire investigator had completed his enquiry, so she’d helped set Jackson up on the deck while she found another solution. A week became a fortnight, became a month, because there was no solution. She’d watched with horror as Jackson Collins joined the legion of missing persons being actively sought by police. She’d pretended to share the department’s concern, even wringing her hands one day over what might have become of him, though her anguish had been about her impotence, her failure to extract herself or Jackson from this procedural and environmental cul-de-sac.

  As much anger as anguish if she was honest. If Jackson’s father had assaulted a neighbour or a man or woman in the street as severely as he had Jackson’s mother, he would have got six or seven years. But that wasn’t how the Crimes Act worked. Instead he’d been given only three years, then been paroled before he’d even served out two and released to hunt his son like an animal – the boy who had been the only one brave enough to stand up in front of a judge and say, This is what my father did to my mother. The legislation, the court, the parole board, the police, couldn’t keep Jackson safe, so Ellie would.

  Six months later, half a bloody year, and there was still no obvious solution. Jackson’s fear of his father was palpable, not just with him every moment of his day, but in him. She’d offered him a mobile, a little pre-pay with limited functions, but he wouldn’t take it because he feared that somehow he might leave an electronic footprint his father could follow. He had no bank account, no driving licence, and lived exclusively off the food and small amounts of cash that Ellie brought him. He seemed to need so little. He rarely left the property, and then only at night, when he’d work his way through the park and along the track at the bottom of the cliff into town. When she asked him what he did there, he said he walked up and down Queen Street ‘to see some people’, people he could be sure wouldn’t know him. As far as Ellie could know, he saw no one, other than her. She tried to come every other day, bring him something – food, cash, a book. She’d asked him about his sister, but he told her Lila was too close to his father to risk contact. So it went on, and the longer it went on, the fewer solutions appeared. In fact, with the insurance wrangles and delays, it got easier. The heat had gone out of his case: Jackson Collins was officially gone and pretty much forgotten. But now the section was going to be put on the market, the sweet spot was souring fast.

  Jackson’s resurrection would be more problematic than his disappearance, and not just for him. She’d be a pariah in her profession, her career burnt – sucked in, got too close, unprofessional, allowed sentiment to cloud her professional judgement, crossed sacred professional boundaries. She was apprehensive, petrified even, but it all came down to what she’d seen, what she knew about the things she could and couldn’t live with in herself. Whatever happened, whatever the consequences for her, she wouldn’t help to expose this boy to the depredations of a murderous brute. Jackson had sobbed when he told Ellie that he was dead meat if his father found him. The tears, she realised, were for his father: he couldn’t help himself, that’s the way he was.

  I’M ON A lilo in the tent at Tāhuna, my older sister Jean beside me, and Mum and Dad on creaky-springed stretchers the other side of a canvas divider. I can hear the cicadas and the sound of the waves, though they must be nearly a mile away, beyond the back-beach estuary. As I listen, the crashing of the waves on sand gets louder, then turns into Dad, roaring angrily in his sleep for some reason. I’m dreaming, because the sound wakes me and I’m on a sun-lounger on the deck underneath the stars, and the sounds aren’t of anger but of torment and they’re not coming from my father but from the boy sleeping nearby. I peel back the blankets, get my bare feet on the deck and try to stand, but the bloody sun-lounger’s so low I have to crawl across to him. His moans have become terrified convulsions and I kneel by his side and begin talking to him, trying to calm him. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right . . .’ What was his name? I know that I know him.

  My words are having no effect. The boy has writhed onto his side, turned away from me, so I put a hand on his shoulder. He reacts violently, throws his arm back at me, twisting in his bed and rising, looming over me, the tomahawk almost magically in his other hand. I have time to think that the boy must sleep with the tomahawk, before the little axe is above me, poised over my damaged head, the boy’s eyes blind with terror. I scream into his face. ‘It’s me! It’s me!’

  The boy comes to himself as suddenly as he’d reacted, drops the tomahawk and helps me to my feet. ‘Sorry, Mr D, sorry!’

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, we’re all right,’ I repeat, as if repeating it will make it so, though I know it’s too late for both of us. I know who he’s seeing in his nightmare. ‘Shall we have a cup of tea?’

  ‘Nah, Mr D. Thanks, I’m okay. You okay?’

  ‘I’m okay, you’re okay,’ I tell him. I think it’s a joke popped up from somewhere in my lost past, but it’s meaningless to the boy, so I stop agonising over its provenance. ‘You’ll be able to sleep?’

  The boy assures me he will, and lies down again, with the tomahawk across his chest.

  ‘Do you really need to hold on to that, d’you think?’ The boy lets me take it. ‘I’ll put it over here by the fire.’

  By the time I’ve placed the tomahawk by the little stack of wood beside the pizza oven and turned back, the boy is asleep. I stand there warming my bum by the last embers of the fire and look up at the stars. Stardust, we all are. Who said that? Every night we go to sleep in darkness, trusting that the world will keep turning to catch the light. My descent into the black room is arbitrary and frightening, but I have to keep faith and fight the terror that one day soon I’ll stare up at these same stars and have no idea what they are. For now, they’re comforting.

  ‘Still star-gazing, Den?’

  It’s a voice I recognise, a voice I’ve been yearning for. When I turn towards it, I expect to be disappointed, but there she is, in her summer print, leaning back with her bum resting on the table, her long legs crossed at the ankle. ‘You must be cold, darling,’ I tell her.

  ‘I’m never cold.’

  I try to keep the tearfulness out of my voice. ‘You can’t imagine how pleased I am to see you.’

  ‘Of course I can,’ she says.

  ELLIE CHECKED THAT the outside door was disarmed – reassuring, because it meant someone was already there – swiped her card, entered the code for the inner sanctum and stepped back into a world she thought she’d left behind.

  As she entered, Rosemary stood up from her computer and hugged her, said the right things about missing her, welcomed her back, then told her they’d organised a pōwhiri for her on Friday.<
br />
  ‘Please God, no!’

  ‘Joking. But we will do a shared lunch.’

  There were a lot of things about Rosemary that Ellie admired: she was a tall, willowy, brainy woman, early thirties now, brave and altruistic. She’d shadowed Ellie seven years ago when she was doing a thesis on domestic violence for her doctorate, then, on the strength of what she’d seen working alongside Ellie, she’d abandoned academia for front-line intervention. When Ellie left, Rosemary had taken Ellie’s place as senior advocate for the adult safety team. Her academic background gave Rosemary an enviable ability to analyse and objectify, Ellie thought, and a better chance of lasting in the job. Ellie had seen the advocates come and go, flaming into anger and frustration at the daily injustices and brutality they saw, burning up with it, burning out. Ellie wished she was clearer on where she sat on that spectrum right now: it might give her a better steer on whether she would survive re-entry.

  Rosemary had already downloaded and printed the police arrest list, with the summaries of those arrested for DV over the weekend. Sixteen today, about average from three years ago, Ellie thought, at least the number hasn’t gone up. She could remember as many as two dozen. And there was one positive change – less obvious misogyny in the police summaries of the circumstances leading to the arrests. Comments like ‘She got lippy so he smashed her’ were at least in quote marks now.

  She and Rosemary triaged the list, eliminating the obvious no-gos, the ones who were outside the central police district covered by their agency and the assaults where a child was the victim, the preserve of the department. There was one murder, a name that Ellie vaguely recognised from the past, a serial offender. She’d seen something in the Sunday papers but had deliberately avoided it. Ellie knew she could probably conjure up a memory of the woman who was now dead, but there was no point: they had to save the living. Rosemary crossed the murderer’s name off the list and they moved on.

  That left eight live ones, one of them hospitalised. They did a rapid risk assessment, based on the police report, previous experience and feel. Reading between the lines of the police fact summaries, Rosemary and Ellie agreed that they could phone two and make a time to visit later. One woman they knew would be at work and would be embarrassed if they turned up there. That left five serious assaults where the offenders had been jailed and where the police had confirmed they were in the court cells and would be up in front of a judge this morning.

  Ellie and Rosemary had had to assume that every one of them would plead not guilty and would be given bail, that a jaded, desensitised judge would believe that looking sufficiently stern and admonishing, and imposing strict bail conditions, would be enough to keep the victims safe. But of course the men would often go straight back to their partners and beat them again for going to the cops, even if it had been a neighbour who had made the call. Ellie and Rosemary had to get to the women first. If they were still there when the men returned, it wasn’t only the victims who risked attack. To speed things up, the two women divvied up the cases on geographic lines: Rosemary would go west for three, Ellie east for the other two. She would also visit the woman in hospital on her way back into town. That was less urgent – at least for the present, that victim was safe.

  Ellie left the building with a copy of the arrest list and court list, cartons of food from the donations room and some stuffed dolls and toys for the kids, whose ages she’d noted. There was a chill in the air, carried by a swell of cold air from the south. It wasn’t a snow-on-the-central-plateau wind, but after a late summer of benign northerlies, it carried a bite. She thought of her father, exposed on the deck with Jackson, and her belly lurched. She should ring Meredith. She should ring Teresa at the clinic about her choice of sperm donor. One fuck-up at a time, she told herself, and imagined lifting the needle off old vinyl and moving it across the turntable to a different groove. It usually helped. She pulled out onto Great North Road and tried to remember the quickest track across town to Glen Innes.

  ***

  SIMONE Bishop was first on Ellie’s list, because her husband, Lyall, was likely to be one of the first up in front of the judge. The court list would be in alphabetical order, but it wouldn’t be set down until just before the session started. The court clerk was supposed to email it through to the agency as soon as it was in place, and also keep the agency updated on progress as they worked through the list.

  Ellie drove along the Kepa Road ridge, then dropped down into Glen Innes, with its established trees and gentle undulations. A town planning exercise back in the sixties, it had originally been settled with families from the Freemans Bay slums, razed in the name of urban renewal. The sections out here always surprised Ellie with their generous size, and all the little parks and linking paths must have looked great on the plans. Once the lights were taken out, though, they became dark, dangerous places too close to people’s homes. Places to lurk unseen, to beat, rape and murder, then disappear. The urban renewal cycle had come full circle: those state houses on big sections were now being knocked over to make way for smaller, more plentiful units.

  Old, careful habits reasserted themselves. After searching the paint-blistered wooden letterboxes for Number 66, Ellie drove further along – three houses was standard – before pulling over. Never have a strange car sitting outside the house, with a rego that could be clocked.

  Before getting out of the car, Ellie went back through the summary on the police arrest sheet. Simone and Lyall Bishop had been out to a local pub on Saturday night. A neighbour, a Mrs Dempster, had babysat the three children, a five-year-old boy, a three-year-old girl, and an eight-month-old girl. An argument that started in the car, about Simone’s behaviour at the pub, had continued at home after the babysitter left. It escalated to the point where Lyall struck Simone in the face, then left the house. Mrs Dempster, with what she called a bad feeling, had returned to see if Simone was okay, then woken the children and driven them all to hospital. A doctor at A & E had phoned the police, with Simone’s consent. X-rays cleared Simone of a broken eye socket, and Mrs Dempster drove them home. On Sunday morning Simone reported that Lyall had been back while she was at the hospital and had kicked the door in when he discovered his wife wasn’t there. He had been picked up at a friend’s place early Sunday morning, charged with male assaults female and remanded in custody. There was no indication as to whether police were going to oppose bail, so Ellie had to assume they weren’t.

  So far, so standard. She also checked out on her phone the address for her second call-out, Alana, long-term partner of repeat offender Eric Ali Sua-Bensen. She remembered enough about him to want to be gone before he got home, so was relieved to see that Alana was only four blocks away.

  The curtains at the Bishops’ place were drawn as if no one was home. Inside it would be murky, probably dank. The smell always hit you first. Ellie shivered and told herself these were projections born of experience, not prejudice, but they didn’t make her feel any better about herself as she opened the boot, got out a food parcel and looked for a toy or doll suitable for the three-year-old girl, Destiny, who was probably at home. She closed the boot, then opened it again and retrieved one of the agency’s mobile phones. Some sixth sense about Lyall Bishop said he would be the kind of guy who might have smashed Simone’s phone before he’d stormed out, to keep her isolated.

  Ellie walked up the cracked concrete path, knocked on the blistered pale green door and conjured up a smile. Simone would be home, but would she be brave enough to open the door, which, on closer inspection wasn’t actually closed – the latch was smashed. She called out as she knocked gently, so that Simone would know it wasn’t Lyall. The door swung open with the pressure of her knock, and was caught halfway by a delicate hand.

  ***

  THE house was immaculate: the threadbare carpet clean and unstained, the Formica benches and lino in the kitchen gleaming in the light flooding the area from the back and side windows, through w
hich Ellie could see raised beds of vegetables: silver beet, broccoli, runner beans. There were places in the living room where the gib-board was caved in, some, Ellie suspected, covered with children’s paintings, carefully framed with cardboard backing. Simone was clearly house-proud and a good mother: she’d obviously managed to get the older kids to school and kindy, and the baby was asleep in a bassinet in the corner.

  When Simone answered the door, she held her hand up, strategically covering one side of her face. Ellie was careful and respectful. There was often only a narrow window to explain who you were, where you were from – crucially not from the department, who might take away her children – and that you wanted to help. The door remained open as Ellie talked, Simone’s hand still up, protectively, as if to shield her from a blow. ‘Is it okay if I come in?’ Ellie finally felt able to ask.

  In answer, Simone opened the door further, dropping her hand only when Ellie was inside and she’d quickly pushed the door behind her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a small voice, ‘I’m not at my best.’

  The sight of Simone’s face made Ellie wince. Her lustrous black hair was pulled tightly back into a pony-tail, so there was no hiding the black swelling closing her right eye. ‘I’m really worried about you and your children,’ said Ellie. ‘I’m worried about your safety. Maybe the time has come when we need to look at how to get you and the kids safe?’ She could see Simone slump as the tension in her ebbed. She wanted help. Ellie handed her the food parcel, then pulled the cloth doll with yellow hair from her big leather bag. ‘This is for Destiny, if you think she’d like it.’