The Wrong Hand

by Jane Jago

  He opened the car door, stepped outside, walked to the edge of the truck stop and relieved himself on the surrounding bushes. Slivers of dawn light illuminated the horizon. He laid a map on the bonnet of his car with shaky hands and reached into his coat pocket to produce a small vial of pills. He studied the map, opened the bottle and dropped a collection of tablets into his palm. He went to the rear of the car, took out a large container of water and swallowed the pills.

  The freeway was almost empty save for the few long-haul trucks and road trains that passed him. His bloodshot eyes processed the information on the large green directional signs. Various chemical compounds from his pharmaceutical cocktail flooded his bloodstream, cancelling his fatigue and pain, and numbing his reason.

  The road sign read, ‘Kingston, Mayfield’. He moved into the exit lane and braked, crossing the newly built overpass with its fresh white concrete windbreak. The road to Mayfield followed the river and was flanked by grass and reeds; rusted machinery and scaffolding bore evidence to a previous era when the river had been the site of local industry. A foul stench filled the car and Allen wound up his window. Mayfield’s current economy was heavily reliant on the local abattoir and meat-processing works located just outside the town.

  In Mayfield he parked outside the Chick Inn. He put his hand on the door and remembered the gun; he took it out and slid it into the inside pocket of his coat before leaving the car.

  On his way to the rest-room he passed several groups of people eating breakfast at the red Laminex tables. He washed his hands and studied his face in the mirror, the tangled black hair flecked with grey, the sadness in the faded blue eyes. What the hell was he doing here? He wetted a paper towel and applied it to his face, then held it against his eyelids.

  Revived, he went to the counter, ordered an egg burger and took it to a nearby booth. Staring out of the window he noted the nondescript town: a Woolworths supermarket parking lot directly opposite, a cramped Tandy electronics storefront to its right. It appeared no different from any other town, the whole world now apparently carved up into market shares of one brand or another.

  He ate without appetite.

  A small boy at the next table began to cry. On the floor beside him lay the contents of his breakfast box, a half-eaten burger bun and a small heap of French fries.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said the child’s mother, picking up some of the mess. ‘We can get you another one.’ She patted his head and smiled. A waitress delivered another burger; the child unwrapped it and took a bite.

  Mathew felt tears welling in his eyes and blinked them away. He was so tired of pain and hate and tears.

  Innes Street was in an older part of the town where rows of original worker’s cottages were now being renovated. Number twenty-nine was a hybrid of brick and Colourbond cladding. A huge satellite dish was suspended above the front awning.

  Mathew Allen drove past several times, circling the streets in the surrounding grid. Almost directly behind number twenty-nine there was a closed community hall and a vacant block; the adjoining house shared a small part of the boundary. He parked the car in a nearby cross-street and walked back to the block. Behind the hall he climbed onto a brick incinerator to gain a view into the yard of number twenty-nine.

  A tattered trampoline stood on its side, leaning against the rear of the house. Several pairs of men’s work overalls hung on the rotary clothes line. He straddled the fence, stepped onto the roof of a low potting shed and jumped quietly down. As he crossed purposefully, without hesitation, to the back door of the house, he could hear a television, or people talking inside. Looking through what appeared to be a laundry window, he turned the adjacent door knob slowly. It was locked.

  He padded across the veranda, inching along with his back to the wall. The voices grew louder. Dropping to his knees as he encountered a row of windows, he paused to listen. A man’s voice could be heard over the sound of the TV. Raising himself up, he peered through a gap between the curtains. He could make out at least two figures seated at a table, off to the side of the main room.

  The man spoke again: ‘Because I said so.’

  Then a smaller voice complained, A child or a woman.

  ‘Shush,’ said the man. The volume of the television went up.

  At the next window he caught sight of the man’s back and square skull. A small child fumbled with something on the table. A woman began clearing items away, picked the child up and moved further inside the building, beyond his line of sight. The figure at the table remained seated.

  Mathew tapped several times against the glass. The head turned. He hung back alongside the front door. Gripping the pistol inside his coat, he knocked with his free hand. The door opened and a slightly built Asian woman peered out. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mrs Wickham?’

  ‘Sorry . . .’

  ‘Who is it?’ called the man.

  ‘I’m looking for Geoffrey.’

  ‘Nobody here called that name.’ Allen pushed past her.

  ‘Hey!’ The woman shouted something excitedly in rapid-fire Chinese.

  ‘What the fuck?’ The man’s chair crashed to the floor as he stood up.

  A dishevelled Mathew Allen stopped, paralysed, at the centre of the room. The astonished man at the table was well into his forties. ‘Sorry. I just had to see . . . I thought you were someone else.’ He backed away.

  ‘Sorry?’ repeated the man.

  The child began to cry and the woman ran to it.

  Allen registered the details of the interrupted family scene: the Disney bowl half full of pumpkin mash on the high-chair tray, an overturned box of Weetabix on the floor, cereal flakes littered around it.

  What the hell was he doing here?

  ‘Call the cops!’ the man shouted.

  Allen was sprinting now, out of the door, then scrambling over fences, through several yards and across an empty oval. When he was in sight of his car he forced himself to slow to a walking pace and get in. He drove for several hours, the picture of the terrified family filling his mind. The bulk of the pistol inside his coat pressed against his chest. What had he become? What if he had found Danny Simpson, or someone who looked like him? Was he really going to gun a man down in front of his family? What then? ‘For the love of God, this has to stop,’ he said out loud.

  Ahead of him to the left was a turn-off where the old coast road crossed a railway bridge over the river. He took it and stopped near the embankment. He stepped across the broken and missing sleepers until he reached the middle of the bridge. There he knelt down and took the gun out. He looked between his knees, through a gap in the planks, to the brown-green water below. He let the weapon slip from his fingers: the small black object hit the surface of the water and disappeared.

  Alex Reiser, 2008

  He nursed the laptop on his belly, dragging himself up against the arm of the couch, stuffing an extra cushion behind his coccyx. A point in the lumbar region of his back nagged at him. The pain was dull and grinding, persisting even after two fingers of Scotch. He lifted the cat off the couch with his feet and stretched out his legs. Every surface within touching distance was covered with stacks of paper, clippings and open books. Dozens of screwed-up pages lay scattered on the floor.

  Even with the pain in his back it was sheer luxury to be at home with the entire house to himself in the middle of the afternoon. He’d been cobbling together an outline of his novel for months now. All he needed was a few days to himself with no distractions and he’d be able to get on top of it.

  Referring to the notes beside him, he typed furiously, endeavouring to keep up with the flow of ideas that bubbled into his mind, stopping for a moment to jot something in his notebook before it was lost. The pen travelled at the speed of his thoughts, albeit almost illegibly. The typing lagged behind it, forcing him to pause and make choices. Folders full of longhand notes were relentlessly reduced to one meaningful paragraph, as more crumpled pages joined the others on the carpet.

 
Wearily, he closed the screen and slid the laptop onto the floor. He fingered through his crowded research summaries, highlighting sentences and phrases in streaks of fluorescent lime until his eyes closed and the marker dropped from his hand.

  A phone vibrated on a hard surface and gave a soft ping.

  ‘Is that your mobile?’

  Reiser opened one eye, his wire-framed bifocals on his forehead. An empty whisky tumbler was wedged between his thighs. Ruth stood over him, picking up sheaves of papers, shuffling them into some sort of order and stacking them on the coffee-table.

  Reiser put out his hand. ‘Leave those on the bean-bag. I haven’t got to them yet.’

  She was reading one of the pages.

  ‘It’s pretty grim,’ he warned.

  ‘I’m sure it’ll make for a brilliant essay.’

  ‘It’s not another fucking essay. It’s the background for the novel. I’ve already pitched it to Vanessa over at ALM and she can’t wait to read it.’

  Ruth looked sceptical. She shook out the cotton throw, folded it over and rolled it into a neat log.

  ‘What?’ said Reiser standing up.

  ‘I just don’t want to see you disappointed again.’

  ‘There it goes – the most insidious sentence of dream-slayers throughout the ages.’ He gathered up the piles of documents and held them to his chest. ‘I’ll be in my office wasting my time.’

  ‘Your mother called.’

  ‘What did she say?’ he said, stopping in his tracks.

  ‘She thought you could bring Jakko with you next time you visit.’

  ‘It would be funny if it wasn’t so bloody tragic. What did you tell her?’

  ‘I asked her to look at the picture by her bed and reminded her that he had a new home on a farm.’

  ‘Bloody dog’s been dead for twelve years.’

  ‘Maybe we should pop in on Saturday. It’s been ages.’

  ‘I can’t stand that place on weekends.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll go then.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Ruth, she’s my mother. I’ll call in one day next week.’

  Christine Harris had remained emphatic in her denial of having any ongoing contact with her son. Without her cooperation Reiser had drawn a blank on Graham’s whereabouts. From what he could discover, the Simpson family had since scattered across the state, their ongoing criminality the only thing they still had in common. Their records, copied for him by a friend in the police department, made interesting but predictable reading. Daniel Simpson’s eldest brother, Damien, had been in and out of jail for small-time drug-related offences since he was seventeen. He had several charges recorded before that as a juvenile, one for ‘aggravated violence’, involving a glassing during a bout of underage drinking. Surprisingly he had been out of jail for five years without so much as a parking fine.

  Adam Simpson’s passage through the criminal justice system had been more tragic. He had died in custody, aged thirty-one, while doing a five-year stretch for break-and-enter.

  Their half-sister, Olivia Parry Simpson, had committed only one offence but had been known to police as a drug addict and part-time prostitute. Information on their mother, Deborah, had proven much harder to find. Her old address had yielded nothing and she had stayed clear of the law for twelve years. The latest information on Damien was accompanied by two addresses. He had been using one with the Department of Social Security and the other was the home of a woman who had stood bail for him on two occasions – the words ‘de facto’ were printed next to it.

  The social-security address had turned out to be that of a disused factory. The woman’s home was in a semi-residential street in the next suburb. At first sight the peeling weatherboard house looked uninhabited. Remnants of open-weave nylon curtaining shrouded most of the facing windows. The carport was empty.

  Reiser mounted the steps to the front door and knocked hard on the frame of the ugly, steel-grille security screen. The metal absorbed most of the sound and hurt his knuckles. The inner door was opened quickly by a stocky man in a stained singlet that barely covered his stomach; his meaty arms were crudely tattooed.

  ‘Damien Simpson?’ asked Reiser.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ he countered, sucking hard on a mangled cigarette.

  ‘Alex Reiser. I’m a journalist.’

  ‘Fuck me, you got a nerve.’ Damien looked the intruder up and down, making no attempt to open the grille.

  ‘I’m looking for your mother.’

  ‘Good luck.’ He laughed, exposing a gap where his upper left canine had once been. ‘What do you want with her?’ A black utility vehicle pulled up in the street below. ‘Look, I’m a busy man. I haven’t seen the old girl for years . . . which suits me.’

  Reiser noticed his red eyes and dilated pupils.

  ‘Unless you’re here to score,’ Damien added. ‘In which case I don’t do that shit any more.’

  ‘I don’t care about any of that.’

  The driver of the utility sounded his horn.

  ‘If you don’t mind, I got some business to take care of.’ Damien disappeared for several moments then reappeared wearing a bulky cargo vest. He began unlatching a series of locks. ‘The last time I saw Mum, for want of a better word, was when I was dealing shit. She came over a few times to score. That was three years back, maybe more. Last I heard,’ he added, relocking the chains on the door from the outside, ‘she got custody of Olivia’s baby.’ He gave a caustic laugh and smiled strangely as some new realization struck him. ‘You don’t wanna talk to her. You want Danny.’

  Reiser made what he hoped was an inscrutable face, as he followed Damien down the steps.

  ‘Even if I did know where he was I wouldn’t tell you.’

  The passenger door of the utility gaped open.

  Damien tossed the end of his cigarette onto the bitumen and put one hand on the roof of the waiting car. He paused to spit a shred of tobacco from his lip and gave the burly journalist a final look. ‘If you do find him, you can tell him there’s nothing to come back here for.’

  Jacaranda Gardens Retirement Village

  Sitting with her legs crossed in a pair of black Chinese pyjamas, the diminutive old woman at the end of the hallway could have been any well-kept eccentric waiting for a train or bus. She looked up from her crossword puzzle as he approached. ‘Alex.’

  ‘What are you doing out here in the hallway at this time of night?’

  ‘The light’s good,’ she said, as he bent to hug her.

  He sat down next to her and took a look at the half-finished puzzle. ‘Two across, like beasts.’

  ‘Yes, I knew that one.’

  ‘Oh, for what it’s worth . . .’ Reiser offered her the copy of Vanity Fair he had been carrying under his arm.

  His mother looked unimpressed. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Ruth thought you’d like it for the articles.’ He stooped to lift something out of a sisal bag. ‘And a cantaloupe.’

  Her eyes lit up.

  ‘I know they don’t let you have it in here.’

  ‘They let me have it all right. The kitchen witches just won’t give it to me.’

  He pulled a nearby chair over and lifted his feet onto it.

  ‘You look sad.’

  ‘I’m not sad, Mum, just tired.’

  ‘I know it’s hard, but the term will be over soon.’

  He raised his eyebrows and smiled kindly. ‘That’s a relief.’ How was it possible for someone so apparently lucid to imagine that her balding forty-eight-year-old son was still sequestered in a boarding school somewhere? He looked across at the collection of memorabilia and photographs that the nursing-home staff had helped her assemble for display in the sealed window-box outside the door to her room.

  The woman beside him, craning her head over her Latin crossword book, with a pen to her mouth was still recognizable as the vivacious woman in the snapshots.

  ‘Mens rea, ten letters,’ she said tapping the top of the pen against her lip.

>   ‘Guilty mind,’ he volunteered. ‘Listen, Mum, there’s something I’ve been meaning to say.’

  She looked up attentively.

  ‘I hope you know that whatever we went through over the years, with your health, you were all I had, and you were a wonderful mother.’

  Her cheeks reddened. ‘Oh, Alex, I know we had some awful times. Let’s face it, I was bat-shit crazy.’

  ‘Nevertheless, you were a wonderful and inspiring mother and I knew I was loved . . . That’s all I wanted to say.’

  She smiled. ‘It was never boring, was it?’

  ‘No, Mum, never boring.’ He clasped her hand and kissed it.

  Liam, 2008

  The light was just breaking when he crossed the footbridge over the swollen river and stepped onto the gravel path that passed through the children’s playground. The ground was sodden from days of rain and the equipment was still wet. He wiped the base of the tubular slippery-dip with his palm and sat down. He remembered being small enough to fit through a slide like this, his brother Joel watching over him while his mother lifted Claire onto a swing. Joel had always been the good one, his mother’s little helper.

  The sight of a child’s sandal, discarded among the pine chips at the base of the flying fox ladder, brought him back to the present with a sickening jolt. Joel was right: he had caused more than enough harm in the world already. Every lungful of air he took was surely an insult to the universe. In the days since his brother’s emails, any remaining confidence Liam had about his ability to live a normal life had been demolished.

  Along the riverbank near the closed kiosk a dog began to bark insistently. As he walked towards it, he could see it running in small, frantic circles. In the water below, an elderly man was struggling to wade up the bank. He repeatedly lost his footing and was lifted away by the swirling water, his long gabardine coat washed around him. Liam picked up a stick and held it out to him. After several attempts he was able to take hold of the other end, drag himself up and regain his footing on the rocks. The little dog ran around his legs shaking itself off and licking its master’s face when he sat down to catch his breath.