Vodka doesn't freeze jj-1

by Leah Giarratano

They appeared no older than seventeen. Locals probably. It looked like the girl's nose had been sunburnt a few times already this summer; her skin peeled over her freckles. Right now, she looked pale under her tan, white around her eyes and mouth. She wore long board shorts, a bikini top, and no shoes. Her boyfriend's arm hugged her shoulders. They seemed to be holding each other up. He was tall, but he still had to look up at Scotty as he spoke.

  'Jill, this is Adam Harvey and Tamara Wade. They live down on Clovelly Road. Came up at about eight this morning for a walk and found the body. Tamara's not feeling too good, and I told her she could go home and have a shower before they come in to make their statements.' Scotty turned to the boy. 'Before you go, Adam, I'd like you to meet Sergeant Jillian Jackson. Could you tell Jill about the car you saw before you found the body?'

  'Yeah. All right.' The boy's voice sounded like he looked, thin and shaky. 'When we got to the car park around the back of here there was this new Mercedes. Red. A coupe? Tamara said she wants a car like that, and we just checked it out a bit, looked in the windows, you know.'

  'Was anyone in the car, Adam?' asked Jill.

  'Nah.'

  'What about other cars?'

  'Ah, yeah, like we were saying before, it was pretty quiet. Surf's shithouse, you know. But there was a van, surfer's van, probably. No-one was in the van either,' he said.

  Jill asked, 'Did you see anyone around, Adam? Who else was around here?'

  'We didn't see anyone up here, but when we were coming up from the beach we saw two guys with their boards heading down. We can't remember anyone else.'

  'Do you remember seeing anyone, Tamara?'

  'No. I've already told four people that.' Tamara was teenage-indignant, but her lower lip trembled. 'Can we go now? It stinks here.'

  The sun was high and hot now. A sheet of blowflies surfed air currents over the body. The smell filled Jill's mouth and had permeated her hair. She nodded, and Scotty directed the kids away, ensuring he had all their details, then came back to where Jill was standing with the uniformeds.

  'Did you see the camera?' Scotty wanted to know.

  'He could've been an artist.' Jill didn't believe it.

  'With his pants down? This guy's a squirrel.'

  Jill's silence indicated her agreement. Together they watched two men draw closer. The man leading was older, his shiny head already scorched by the sun. The officer behind him, a boy in comparison, offered his hand when the man's footing slipped in the sand. It was slapped away.

  'Finally. The ME's here,' Scotty said.

  Scotty and Jill walked over to join the police medical examiner and his assistant. The kid dropped the heavy bags he'd been toting.

  'Could you be any more rough with that equipment, Jarred? Honestly!' The medical examiner wiped at his forehead with a lavender handkerchief. Scotty smirked at Jill while the man leaned on his assistant and emptied the sand from his shoes.

  'Let's get everyone away from this area,' he snapped, motioning Jill and Scotty to follow him. 'This is a crime scene.'

  No kidding, Jill sighed inwardly. She fell in behind the bristling doctor. They'd be in the sun for a while yet. Mercy Merris didn't notice the driver of the courier van screaming 'Crazy bitch!' as he over-corrected and almost lost control when she sped past. Already two lanes away from him on the freeway heading southwest, her black curls streamed with her cigarette smoke out the window of her red Mercedes CLK. Belting out Aretha Franklin, she half-read one of the files propped open on her passenger seat; files she wasn't supposed to have removed from the psych hospital. She expertly flipped open her phone when it rang and overtook two cars in the left lane. Late again. They'd want to tell her her 11 a.m. appointment had arrived and her 10 a.m. patient was becoming impatient.

  She recognised the voice of an ex-patient, Lisa, crying, halfway through a sentence that didn't make sense.

  '… and I wasn't there for her and I said I would be…' The voice on the phone sounded fractured, slightly hysterical.

  'Lisa. Calm down. What's wrong?' Mercy was surprised to hear her so distraught. Their therapy had been over for months now, and the last time they'd talked Lisa had been functional, rational. Mercy hadn't thought she would regret giving Lisa her private phone number.

  'Calm down, Lisa,' she said again, suddenly tired. 'What's happening?' She glanced at the dash clock. Shit, she swore inwardly as she saw the time. She pressed the accelerator a little harder, then noticed a cop car ahead. Great, she thought, that's all I need, another speeding fine on the way to work. She jabbed the CD off and swerved her car into the break-down lane. She braked hard and the files from the passenger seat flew forward, merging into a mess on the floor.

  Mercy heard Lisa's voice from the mobile still in her hand.

  'It's Carly Kaplan,' Lisa sobbed. 'She killed herself last night. You weren't there for her either.'

  Mercy felt, rather than heard, a high-pitched whine begin in her head. Guilty thoughts of her last session with Carly, one of her most troubled patients, stabbed at her consciousness.

  Carly had threatened suicide in her last session, as she did almost every session, but Mercy had helped her consider other options, refusing to give in and admit her again to hospital – Carly seemed to deteriorate further when in hospital. She'd seemed calm when the session ended.

  When Carly hadn't shown for her appointment yesterday, Mercy had been relieved rather than worried, kicking off her heels and reclining in her chair to read. She knew she should've called her, but she had been so tired, and she'd felt angry that Carly was manipulating her again by failing to show up. She'd told herself to discuss this resentment in her next supervision session, at the same time knowing she wouldn't – she'd already decided to skip supervision again.

  And now Carly was dead. Mercy felt her racing thoughts slow, becoming syrupy and hard to grab hold of. Her patient had committed suicide and she had breached at least five hospital rules regarding her care. She hadn't written up her file notes in weeks, and she had the file off the hospital grounds; she hadn't brought Carly's case to the team supervision session for two months, and she hadn't mentioned to the team that Carly had threatened suicide again, even though the threat would be clearly recorded in the session audio tapes. The hospital would be looking everywhere for the file by now. There'd be a formal enquiry.

  Mercy found she'd disconnected the phone with Lisa still speaking, but she hadn't registered any words since she'd heard that Carly had killed herself.

  When she realised her pager was sounding, Mercy calmly picked it up and stared at it blankly. She pressed the pager into the dashboard with the heel of her hand until the plastic casing snapped, a shard slicing into her skin. She didn't flinch as blood welled up in her palm.

  3

  Jill got back to her apartment with a headache that felt like sunstroke. She let herself in and went straight to the fridge, opening its stainless steel door and leaning into the cool interior. She grabbed some water, drinking half the bottle as she kicked off her shoes and pulled her socks off. She padded barefoot across the pale granite tiles to the medicine chest over the sink. She reached for the Panadol and downed two capsules with the rest of the water.

  She tipped her now warm breakfast smoothie into the sink. The orange pulp of the mango triggered images of the smashed head in the sand. Even the hot, sweet smell was evocative of the death scene on the beach; the effect was disorienting. She placed a sweaty palm on the cool benchtop and directed her attention to the muted colours of her apartment. Her mum said the unit was too plain, that she should add decoration, but Jill loved the all-white and beech interior, colours broken only by cool steel.

  After her ritual tour of the unit, she buzzed open the motorised vertical blinds in her loungeroom and let the day-light in. Although the surf could barely be heard through the double-glazed balcony doors, right now its blue brilliance was too bright. She used the remote to shut it out again.

  She stripped down to singlet and briefs and entered t
he laundry, pleased with the shining newness of the German appliances. She sorted clothes to be washed, soothed by putting colours with colours, whites with whites, taking back control. The flashback on her bike had been so real that morning. It had been months since she had felt like she was actually back in the basement. It usually took hours to still her mind after an intrusion that real. Her head still thumped.

  What a day. Not what she'd been expecting. The hour with the ME had paid off already; fingerprints identified the body almost immediately. David Carter. He'd done twelve months weekend detention for teaching his seven-year-old stepdaughter how to insert tampons. Just trying to teach her, he'd offered in his defence in his police statement.

  The photos on his camera could all pass for innocent if they were of your own kids – children paddling, some of them toddlers, too young even for swimming costumes. Close-ups of their wide smiles, round bellies, short, fat legs. Scotty had taken a call from the cops going through Carter's home, now also a crime scene – they had found a library full of child porn, much of it movies of him with Asian girls under ten.

  Jill hadn't seen the movies, but she knew what they'd look like. She'd had her own mental film projector playing for twenty years. Mostly she could keep the curtains drawn, but she was always aware of the tape running.

  She felt hatred burning her diaphragm, a metallic taste at the back of her throat. Head throbbing, shoulders knotted, she tried to slow her breathing. She couldn't catch her breath. She tried to focus again on the washing, but felt her throat closing, her chest crushed. Grey spots danced in front of her eyes.

  'No, not again,' she moaned. Waves of anxiety rolled over her, washing nausea up from the pit of her stomach. She tried to distract herself, to listen to the front-loader rhythmically turning her clothes, but her heart was pounding louder than the machine.

  She stumbled from the laundry as angry tears began. She hadn't had a panic attack in two years. Now, gasping for air, she ran to the balcony, pushing through the blinds, fumbling with the locks, sliding open the doors. She leant on the railing. With nothing in front of her, it felt like she had more access to air. She held on tight, dizzy. A salt-soaked breeze dried the sweat on her forehead and played with her hair. The panic began to subside.

  Watch the waves, Jill. Slow your breathing. She tried to match the rhythm of the ocean with her intake of breath. Her vision began to clear. She could breathe again, but her chest felt bruised, like someone had been standing on it for half an hour.

  She stepped back into her lounge room, furious with herself. Why am I letting this stuff back in my life? It was the case, she knew. A paedophile with his head caved in. The real-life manifestation of a fantasy she'd had for years had not been as satisfying as she'd thought it would be.

  She lay on the sofa for a while with her eyes closed. She would love to sleep, but knew that was never going to happen feeling this way, so she picked up the phone to call home. Talking to her mum usually helped when she felt like this.

  Her sister, Cassie, two years younger than Jill, picked up the phone. Great.

  'Hey, Cass. It's Jill. What're you doing home?' She kept the tears from her voice.

  'Jill. Hi. I'm just back from Morocco. I came home to eat some real food before I'm off again.'

  Jill mentally snorted. Her sister was a fashion model, and she knew Cassie ate just enough to keep herself out of an anorexia ward.

  'Wow. Morocco. Sounds amazing.'

  'It was boring. Horrible food. Dirty,' replied Cassie.

  'Yeah? Where to next, then?' Jill felt the distance between herself and her sister more than ever. The effort to find common ground was beyond her right now.

  'Just Cairns this trip. Swimwear shoot.'

  'Lucky you.' Jill tried to convey enthusiasm.

  The conversation faltered, and then Cassie spoke up; it sounded like she was scrambling for something to say. 'So, are you still seeing what's-his-name?' she asked Jill.

  'Huh?' Jill paused. 'Oh. Joel. Forgot you met him that night. No. That's history. Listen, Cass, is Mum there?'

  Cassie had been ten years old when Jill had been kidnapped. Their family had been transformed by the incident, their best-friend relationship severed forever. For years their father, Robert, had withdrawn into himself, ashamed that he hadn't been able to keep his family safe, unable to look his daughters in the eye. Their mother, Frances, had spent much of her time helping Jill battle the terror that lived inside her like cancer. At first Cassie had been bewildered by Jill's anger, anxiety and nightmares. As time had marched forward she'd become hurt, lost, invisible.

  By the time they'd reached high school, Cassie had developed a defensive shell, a sardonic superficiality through which she interacted with the world. Despite her scorching putdowns of almost everyone and everything in their hometown of Camden, people lined up to be looked down upon by the beautiful Cassie Jackson. She'd kept her most scathing opinions for her kickboxing, social-phobe sister. By the time Jill was well enough to mourn the loss of their closeness, her own protective shield had seen her incapable of thawing the ice between them. She had no vocabulary for her feelings any more.

  When her mum came on the line, Jill relaxed a little more. Her calm voice had been there through many of the hard times.

  'Hi, baby,' she said. 'How was your day?' Jill smiled. No-one else ever called her that.

  'Oh, okay. Foul actually, but I don't want to talk about it. What'd you do?'

  Eyes closed, she listened as her mum ran through a Tuesday in semi-rural New South Wales; gossip about the neighbours, all of whom Jill knew, and minute details about her immediate family, cousins, nephew and niece. By the time she hung up, she felt exhausted.

  She needed rest, and wished she could bypass her gym for once, but she'd never sleep without following all her routines.

  She trudged into her spare room, set up as a gymnasium, floor to ceiling in weights and machines. She wrapped the blindfold around her eyes and began kicking the heavy bag suspended from the ceiling. When Mercy Merris had first heard about paedophile rings operating in Sydney, she'd thought the reports far-fetched. She had then been a clinical psychologist for five years, specialising in working with survivors of childhood trauma, and hadn't come across any evidence for such goings-on. However, one afternoon about five years before, a colleague had invited her to a late evening gathering of psychotherapists at a local hospital, where she'd heard tales of satanic cults and organised kiddie-porn groups that had supposedly existed in Australia for years. She'd listened, incredulous, as members of the group spoke about links between these groups and their overseas counterparts, who, they said, had been breeding children for abuse for generations.

  The aim of the meeting had been to discuss therapeutic methods to try to counteract brainwashing techniques that these groups were said to use upon some victims to stop them escaping from the cults. At first, she and a couple of other therapists had asked sceptical questions to try to clarify what they were hearing. Finally, one member of the group spoke to silence them.

  'Look, it's great that we have new members at this meeting, and everyone's welcome,' the man began in response to the last question, 'but we're not actually here to prove to anyone that organised paedophile rings are operating in Australia. That's someone else's job. The people who established this group are working with the victims of these groups. We know they do exist, and we need to help each other find ways to de-program the victims.'

  The relatively young man, dressed in an expensive, although crumpled, suit, ran his hand through mussy light-brown hair. He looked more like a lawyer than a therapist, thought Mercy.

  'If there are people here who'd like to do some reading about these activities, we can give you some references to follow up, but I'm getting tired of the curiosity factor tonight, and I want to get back to focusing on therapeutic techniques to help these people.'

  Chastened by his earnest exasperation, Mercy had sat back and listened for the remainder of the meeting. It was l
ike sitting in while a group wrote a horror movie. She heard the young man speaking about one of the patients in his hospital having a 'call-back' activated during one of her admissions to hospital. Mercy gathered that this meant that the therapist had inadvertently triggered some pre-programmed message to return to the cult. He explained that the woman had presented for treatment, but once her therapist had approached a topic that could have identified the cult, an alter-personality, programmed by the cult for just such an eventuality, had surfaced. The woman had switched from sobbing victim to malevolent aggressor in five frightening seconds. She'd picked up a phone and thrown it at the therapist's head, then had run from the room, discharging herself without heeding any of the staff or other patients.

  Mercy had mentally blocked a lot of the rest of the meeting, internally asking the questions she longed to ask out loud. Oh come on! she'd wanted to protest. Surely police would have discovered evidence of organised kidnapping, paedophile cults, humans bred to be sex slaves. Why hadn't she heard this stuff on the news? Still, she'd thought, police had never managed to stop her father bashing the shit out of her and her mother and little brothers every night. Lots went on behind closed doors that people didn't know about.

  Mercy had later done some reading on the subject, learning that the paedophile rings purportedly contained members of the judiciary and police service, some of whom had supposedly grown up in these cults, and had been selected to be placed in positions of power to further their ends.

  But as her reading had widened, Mercy also found literature for therapists treating patients who'd supposedly been abducted by aliens, or who could not let go of their past lives as Roman kings or African slaves. At that point she'd put the material down in disgust and had not returned to the meetings. It was easier to lump the whole lot in as a bunch of loonies, or at best as over-involved counsellors who'd been carried away by some sort of group hysteria. Sure, she knew there were plenty of sickos who preyed on children, but organised gangs of paedophiles running amok in Sydney sounded like a paranoid delusion.