Girl Defective
Page 13
“You’re funny.” Nancy blew on the tip, then tucked the pistol in her vest pocket. She rearranged her scarf so that it hung long and loose.
“So what’s going on with Luke?” she asked.
“We kissed.”
“You didn’t!”
“We did! In the shop.”
“What was it like?”
“It was . . . swift and soft.”
Nancy tossed her hair. “Guys who kiss soft are king.”
“He’s acting weird, though.”
“That means he likes you.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
Her phone buzzed. She read the text and put her phone back in her bag. “I want to go on the Scenic Railway, and after that it should be Otis time.” I must have looked glum then, because she patted my knee. “It doesn’t always have to be just us, you know. It’s a big world, monkeyface.”
I looked away. Suddenly I felt like I couldn’t breathe. There was a fat man sitting on my chest, having a good laugh while he was at it. Nancy noticed my strangled look.
“You okay?”
“No,” I spluttered.
“Put your head between your legs. Do it now.” She pushed my head down. I took greedy gulps of air. The world smelled rank. After a while my breathing steadied. Slowly I raised my head. I looked out the window. Gully and Luke were standing by the food truck watching the popcorn pop.
“You scared me,” Nancy said. She laughed, but I couldn’t bring myself to laugh with her.
A REAL GOOD TIME
THE SCENIC RAILWAY WOULD have qualified as an old St. Kildan. It had been around since the 1930s. Its white wood lattice lassoed the park and made all the other rides with their Day-Glo and bad murals look crass. From the highest point I could see St. Kilda’s up-down streets, her patches of green, her apartment blocks like computer monitors stacked on top of each other.
“Let’s take the first cart,” Nancy said. “It’ll be scarier.”
The man sitting behind us was staring at Nancy. If I could feel it, then she could. He tapped her shoulder and she turned, but only slightly.
“Remember me?” he asked.
“No.”
“Come on. You sure you don’t remember me?”
Nancy twisted in her seat and took a good long look.
“I don’t know you, Jack.” She turned back, smiled at me.
But seconds later the guy was at her again. “Why don’t you come and sit with me?”
“Because I’m sitting with my girl.”
“Are you dykes?”
“Yeah, we’re big dykes. We’re so dykey it’s not funny.” Nancy threw her arm around me and went “Mwah” into my neck. I felt a tiny bomb explode inside.
The man leaned forward between us. “How ’bout both of you come sit with me? I’ll be piggy in the middle.” I could smell his breath. Hot dogs.
The attendant lowered the safety bar, and the man was forced to sit back, but the feeling of menace lingered. Then the cart began to climb and anticipation of another kind fluttered in my stomach. Just before the first big dip he said, “You remember me.”
Nancy threw her arms up and screamed.
The cart was clattering, reeling. We jolted with it. Nancy’s hair lashed about. Her bangles clashed impressively. She wouldn’t grip the bar. My knuckles were white around it. I could see people on the foreshore, the blue sea. Luke and Gully were down at the bottom, over near the carousel with our bags. I waved, but they weren’t looking up.
Afterward the attendant lifted the bar, and Nancy and I wobbled down the rickety steps. The guy picked up where he’d left off. On firm ground he was less menacing. His body looked out of proportion. He was short, and he stood like it, stumpy legs spread, chest pushed out. He had a thin mustache and prominent ears. Something about him was familiar—he could have been a customer. He looked like he’d be into Eric Clapton or Rush. Seventies fallout guy.
“Yours,” Nancy whispered. Nervous laughter erupted from my mouth.
“What do you say, girls?” His tongue darted skinkishly. “I’ve got my van. We could have a real good time.”
Nancy stopped. She pulled the water pistol from her waistcoat and pointed the pistol at his crotch. “Don’t move,” she instructed. The man’s eyes shot open. He stepped back and put his hands up.
Nancy squeezed the trigger. The man yelped and looked down. It took him a few seconds to realize he wasn’t hurt, that the dark patch blooming on the crotch of his jeans was not blood but water. He almost laughed, and then his voice rasped out, “Fuck you, bitch.” He grabbed for the pistol and knocked it out of Nancy’s hand, and then he got her on the ground, and Nancy—Nancy was amazing. She was like Mickey Rourke or something. I could see tendons popping, lines marking her face. Somehow she ended up straddling him—holding his finger. They were both panting. As she held his finger, Nancy looked at me.
“Don’t!” I shouted, because I really thought she was going to do it—break that guy’s finger—like the blithe psychopath did to the Hare Krishna—and he was going to die from shock in front of the small crowd that had gathered—but she didn’t. She let go, got off him, tossed her hair. The guy stayed on the ground; he looked like he never wanted to get up.
Nancy grinned at me. “I told you it was bullshit.”
She stalked off—this beautiful tank—and I hobbled after her, trying to catch up and catch my breath. Somewhere in the back of my mind, pitched way back, the guy’s face waited. Where had I seen him before?
I remembered Gully and Luke. We looked where they’d been standing, but they were no longer there. By now the audience was swelling. It was hard to get through them. I felt stricken. I wheeled around, searching for Gully. I heard Nancy’s voice above the whirr of panic. “Is that him?”
We started slow and then we were running.
A small crowd surrounded two figures on a bench. Luke and Gully.
Gully sat very still, his feet just hanging in space.
“Gully?” I squeezed his knee. He didn’t move.
“What’s wrong with him? What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Luke said. “We were standing where you left us, he said something about the Jeep, and I turned around and he was gone. I looked for him, and when I found him, he was on the ground. I didn’t know he was going to run off.”
It was only then that I realized I could see Gully’s face. No pig snout, just skin, white and vulnerable. Gully stared glassy-eyed at nothing. Nancy had her hand on her hip. She turned to Luke accusingly. “Where were you?”
“I didn’t know he’d run off.” Luke looked sick. And he was still staring at Nancy like she’d done something to him.
“What?” she snapped.
Luke reached up. His fingers touched the end of her long silver scarf. He tugged and it came off in his hands, and he gripped it.
“How did you get my sister’s scarf?” His voice sounded broken.
No one moved. Gully because he was traumatized, me because I was spellbound, Nancy because she was disarmed.
“Give it back,” she demanded.
Luke must have seen them all then, like a Where’s Waldo? of scarf girls. He didn’t look at me or Gully or Nancy. He just left, walking fast, merging with the crowd, and he took Nancy’s scarf with him.
We had to go to the office and fill out a form. I held Gully’s hand. He walked stiffly, hanging his head the way he always did when some unspecified badness had happened at school. In the office a man in a maroon staff shirt asked questions. Did we want to call our father? Did we want to call the police?
“No,” I said. “No. Can we just go?”
The man gave Gully a free T-shirt. Nancy steered us to Acland Street past toxic-tanned girls and money-boys in polo shirts with the collars turned up and European ladies of a certain age, gold chains settling in their creasy necks.
“What about that Luke Casey?” Nancy clicked her tongue. “What a freak!”
I thought about Luke, had flashes of h
is sad eyes, his dead sister, the card he’d drawn. I saw him standing outside us with his hands in his pockets. I thought of the way he was with Gully: soft, protective. None of this was his fault. I was the one who was supposed to be looking after Gully. Luke didn’t know what he was like, not really. I was thinking, hoping, expecting that Nancy would help me face Dad. But when we were two steps shy of the shop, she stopped.
“Aren’t you coming in?”
“Sorry, kid.” Nancy put her hands on Gully’s shoulders. “Courage, Agent Martin. This is just a temporary setback.”
She was going back to Otis and the crank of feedback. I watched her go. Part of me wanted to run with her, to fall into step beside her and laugh like Joan Crawford, because my hair was perfect and the world was just a bauble I could carry in a clutch purse. I looked down at Gully, then up at the light from the flat window. Shit. This was not good.
AFTERMATH
DAD WAS IN HIS shorts again, drunkish and dithering around to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. He’d been smiling until he clocked Gully’s pale and snoutless face.
He looked at me. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he—are you all right, champ?”
“He lost his snout.”
“Where were you?”
“I was with Nancy on the Scenic Railway. Luke said Gully ran off. I don’t know what happened. He won’t talk.”
Stevie Nicks’s warbling was getting out of control. Dad silenced her. He grabbed the phone.
“Who are you calling?” I asked. “We already filled out a form.”
“Well, it’s not good enough.”
Half an hour later we were down at the station with Constable Eve Brennan. Gully wouldn’t talk at all. She checked him out for bruises.
“Did someone hurt you?” she asked gently.
Gully gulped and nodded.
“Can you tell me?”
He shook his head slowly. And then he started to heave awful wracking sobs. This went on for a while. I couldn’t look at him, so I looked around the room. It was like every police station I’d ever seen on TV. Cubicles and computers. Bulletin boards. Ugly mugs.
Ugly mugs! Recognition flashed white-hot. The guy who had hassled Nancy was one of the Ugly Mugs. I’d seen him on the wall at Streetwise and now again on the cop shop pin board. I stared at his face, his whelk ears and skink tongue, his eyes like tiny tar pits, and felt cold spiking my skin.
“Should I take him to the hospital?” Dad worried in a low voice. “He looks like he’s in shock. Gully?”
Gully was shaking his head vehemently.
Dad clutched his keys, but Eve put her hand over his. “I’ll take you home,” she said. “You’ve had enough, Bill.” She meant drink. Dad didn’t argue.
Back at the flat Eve made coffee. She rubbed my arm when she passed me, but all it did was make me feel lonelier. I didn’t want her to go, but she did and then it was just me and Dad and the dripping tap in the background, and Gully was in his bed, and there wasn’t even Monkey.
Dad rubbed his hand through his hair. “I need a drink.”
“Don’t,” I whispered.
He carried the mugs over to the sink. Then he threw them in and snapped.
“You shouldn’t have left him alone!”
My voice wobbled all over the place. “We were on the Scenic Railway. It was only ten minutes.”
“You don’t leave Gully alone.”
“I KNOW!”
I ran upstairs. It sounded like the bones of the old building were creaking.
There was a thin strip of light under Gully’s bedroom door. I put my ear to the keyhole and heard nothing, no talk, no reportage, no crying, just quiet. In my bedroom I found my box of beautiful people and sifted through them, hoping for inspiration or beauty, something, but nothing came. I stuffed the pictures back in the box and closed the lid. Then I dumped it outside my door.
In my dream Nancy was in the back of the Ugly Mug’s van. I was standing in front of it, trying to ignore the rocking. Tourists stopped and stared. I said, “It’s not what it looks like,” but Nancy was making terrible noises. I tried to open the door. I pulled and pulled on it. I slammed my palms against the tinted windows. “Stop it!” I yelled. “Stop hurting her.” But then the door slid open, and Nancy hopped out with blood on her hands. She said, “Yours.”
The dream changed to the beach at night: surrealistic sand dunes and waves like wild white horses. Nancy was wearing Gully’s snout and running along the shoreline. There was a soundtrack, like a sullen bell clanging, and Nancy was getting farther and farther away until she was just a black dot in the distance.
I didn’t know she could run like that.
PART
FOUR
Memo #4
Memo from Agent Seagull Martin
Date: Monday, December 15
Agent: Seagull Martin
Address: 34 Blessington St., St. Kilda, upstairs
POINT THE FIRST:
On December 14 at approximately 2042 two males accosted the victim outside the Crazy House at Luna Park.
Point the second:
Male 1 pushed the victim to the ground, and Male 2 yanked off the victim’s snout. He said, “Sorry, little pig-dude,” but his face did not match his words. Male 1 was wearing a hoodie with a skeleton on it. Both wore jeans and black sneakers. They ran in the direction of the Ghost Train, whooping and snorting.
POINT THE THIRD:
Due to the severity of the shove, the victim did not get a good look at the aggressors. But his detective’s nous tells him the following:
–They were between sixteen and twenty-five.
–They were of similar height and build. Height around five nine. Build: stocky.
POINT THE FOURTH:
Prior to the Snouting, the victim observed at least four instances of young people wearing animal heads/masks.
POINT THE FIFTH:
At the time of the Snouting, “Hold the Line” by Toto could be heard over the PA. This may or may not be significant.
IN SUMMATION
Security at Luna Park is inadequate. The Snouters could well be associated with the Bricker. They share similar sociopathic bent, reckless behavior pattern, and lack of empathy. I suspect they were drug abusers, due to their hyenic laughter, erratic running form, and deployment of the term “little pig-dude.”
ACTION
Create identikits to match the attackers’ likeness.
Team with SKPD on stopping the rot.
HOLY GRAIL
AFTER THE SNOUTING, GULLY stopped talking. I never knew silence could be so loud or so contagious. Dad was the next to go. He spoke to me only in terse monosyllables and acted like my name had been erased from his lexicon. So I stayed quiet too—what could I say? Gully had been hurt on my watch. The greater dangers of the world—what had once been Gully’s spy fodder—had come that little bit closer.
Gully looked different without the snout. He looked younger, more vulnerable. I could see him trying to make his face like a mask. He kept his mouth set like a button and his eyes cast low. It was funny—I never imagined I would miss the snout. I thought about all the times Dad and I had sighed about it. Now it was gone, but we weren’t happy. We were breaking apart.
I spent Monday in a fog. At library lunchtime I went through the motions. On Mum’s website I typed: It’s all your fault. But it didn’t make me feel any better. Quinn picked up on my mood but didn’t press me for an explanation. We stared at our screens, side by side. The world was not hostile, just indifferent, and I saw how it could be—I could drift through it, bumping bodies but never connecting with anyone.
After school Gully was waiting in the usual place. He fell into step beside me. He held his arms straight at his sides, his shoulders squared, and only his hands moved, catching invisible fireflies. I tried faking it.
“Agent Seagull, how was your day?”
Gully’s response was to tread faster until he’d overtaken
me, and then the sight of his head bent down—minus the snout strap, his schoolbag bouncing on his back, made me feel hopeless and helpless.
When we reached the shop, Gully went straight upstairs. I waited for a moment before pushing open the door. Dad was playing some head-wrecking drone. He was haloed by the record light, his mouth drawn down. He already had a beer cracked. He took a sip and looked at me with solemn, unblinking eyes.
“Where’s your brother?”
“He went straight up.”
“Has he said anything yet?”
“Nope.”
“Right.”
That look. I felt so guilty. As if I’d ripped the snout off myself. Dad allowed a puff of air out of his nostrils. The shop sat in quiet disarray. It looked as if he hadn’t moved from his stool all day.
“Where’s Luke?” I asked.
“He didn’t come in.”
“Oh.” I felt my face heating up and tried to deflect. “Maybe he’s sick.”
“Well, he picked a great time.”
Dad took a long swig from his beer to finish it. He cricked a dent in the can and dropped it below the counter. Then he lumbered off to get a fresh one. I stood still for one, two, three beats; then I lammed and left him to it.
The flat rang with quiet. Sunlight streamed through the window, bouncing off everything and made me feel dizzy. Something was different about the scene. The TV was quiet. Gully was not on the couch; instead he was sitting at the kitchen table. He had found my box of beautiful people and was going through it, scissors in hand, and making little piles of lips and noses and eyes and helmet haircuts.
I tried to meet his eyes. “What are you doing?”
He kept cutting, calmly, silently.
“Talk to me, Gully,” I pleaded. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
I lurked and lingered; I studied the contents of the fridge. “Do you want shish kebabs tonight?”
No response. I slammed the fridge door and rattled out to the living room. I drifted from room to room, feeling melancholy and future homesick. Our building was designed by an Edwardian dwarf; it was all wonky stairs and architraves you could press the flat of your hand upon. Soon all of it would be gone, blasted, the way of the Paradise, replaced with something heartless and architecturally sound.