Feeding the Demons

by Gabrielle Lord

‘I’ve got the marks to show it,’ he said, flirting. He didn’t sound like a pervert, she thought, deciding to go in like a bulldozer. ‘Brian, there was an assault on me at the motel early this morning. The police need a sample from you so as to eliminate you from their inquiries.’ The lie was easy; she’d delivered that line so often in ten years in the job.

  ‘What are you talking about, assault? What sample? Are you all right?’ The concern sounded genuine. Either he’s a very good liar, Gemma thought, or he hasn’t got a clue what I’m talking about.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘The police have told me to say nothing at the moment. All you have to do is go to Paradigm Analysis Laboratories sometime today.’ She gave the address. ‘Just a little swab around the mouth with a cotton bud and that’s all there is to it. Then you’re out of the picture.’ Or not, she thought, depending on how the match turns out. ‘It’s all completely confidential.’

  ‘But I don’t understand.’ You don’t have to understand, she could almost hear herself saying. Just fucking do it. Instead, she adopted her reasonable, pleasant voice. ‘The police have some body—some bloodstains—from the offender. They want to eliminate you from their inquiries. Just do this little thing and that’s the end of it.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to get mixed up in anything.’ His voice was really alarmed now. Maybe he was the one, the psycho who’d done that to her clothes.

  ‘You won’t be mixed up in anything if you do this small thing,’ said Gemma. ‘You wouldn’t want to be a suspect in an assault case, would you?’

  ‘God, no,’ he said. ‘Okay, I’ll do it. I don’t want any trouble.’

  Gemma said goodbye and hung up. You got trouble the minute you started putting the work on me last night, she thought. The radio crackled and it was Spinner speaking from his vehicle at Artarmon. ‘I’ve put Mr Crookback to bed,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some good video of him working night shift. Casual shelf packer. Bending and stretching like a yogi. I’ll fax my report through, then I’m going to grab a couple hours’ sleep.’

  ‘Sweet dreams,’ Gemma said. ‘Call in when you’re ready. I’ve got a new job for you.’

  After a few minutes, the fax came alive and Gemma read Spinner’s contemporaneous report. They had Mr Crookback cold.

  Gemma rang her sister; she wanted Kit’s comfort and help. She realised she was still very shaken up.

  ‘It’s me, hi,’ said Gemma. ‘I’ve got something I want to show you, and I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. When are you free?’

  ‘What about tonight?’ asked her sister.

  Two

  Kit replaced the handset and stood up from where she’d been squatting because there wasn’t a table for the phone in the front room yet. She thought she heard footsteps outside the house, as if someone were walking around to the back door.

  ‘Gerald?’ she called, going down the hallway towards the kitchen. ‘Is that you?’

  She went to the back door and looked around, almost expecting to see her husband, but there was no one there. She had long ago given up the idea that Will might return to her, a healthy, happy Will. Sometimes in dreams she still saw his boyish figure, luminous and transparent, a long way from her. Sometimes she still thought she saw him, crossing the road or walking out of a shop, and she’d hasten forward, only to find that it wasn’t him but someone else’s son, tall, handsome, healthy.

  Her small garden was quiet and empty. Curious, she thought, stepping outside and going to the wall at the end of the garden, standing on tiptoe to look over. The wide blue expanse to the southeast and the houses and bushland on the opposite side of the bay were all she could see, so she climbed up on the gate from where she could survey the path that wound south around the coast past Coogee beach and Lurline Bay to Maroubra. Except for a young woman leading a dog, she saw no one. On checking, she found the gate in the left-hand side passage standing wide open. Kit frowned and closed it behind her. She was sure it had been closed before and now she lived alone she was doubly cautious. The final end to her marriage eighteen months ago, the resultant divorce had left huge psychic wounds, great black holes all around and within her; voids filled with the anti-matter of ex-matrimony. Negative relationship is as powerful as positive, she knew. She walked to the front of the house and looked around. All she could see was the light morning traffic on the road and some kids walking past on their way to school. Maybe one of the kids had ducked in chasing a ball, she thought. She retraced her steps and went down to the other side gate and back inside again. I must be imagining things, she thought to herself. An empty house magnifies sound. Perhaps it was something from next door. She rinsed her breakfast things and put them away. But her mind was on the wide open side door—a breach in her boundaries—and she decided to get a padlock for both side gates. She put on a CD, and the ghosts were laid to rest for a while by a Beethoven string quartet.

  •

  As Gemma drove to meet Noel she noticed a good-looking blond youth crossing the road. He looked like Will had before he’d become so sick. She remembered the painful access she’d had to the lives of Kit, Gerald and Will, and the way Will had been so excluded from his parents’ private suffering. She remembered him aimlessly wandering around the big house, miserable, with his mother and father locked in silent combat; Gerald depressed and Kit smouldering over the fact that her husband wouldn’t seek help. Sometimes Will would appear on her doorstep, a forlorn schoolboy, dragging his school bag. ‘Can I stay here for a few days?’ he’d ask. She’d ring Kit and Kit, preoccupied with Gerald, would hardly notice that her son wasn’t yet home from school. That had been seven or eight years ago, and Gemma would never forget Will’s loneliness. With her, Will could open up just a little bit. ‘They can’t hear me,’ he’d said to her. ‘Some days I just want to die and Mum goes on about how important the HSC is. And how I’ve got to apply myself to my studies. My whole fucking life is falling apart from the inside, I want to talk to them about how I’m thinking of suicide sometimes. And they want to talk about studying for the HSC.’

  •

  At the Burnie Street Deli, where the smell of coffee and the sound of Triple J filtered out onto the footpath, Tracker Two looked up from his table as Gemma came in, uncrossing his long legs and straightening his powerful frame. Noel Storey was in the middle of writing up a report but he tucked it away as Gemma approached. The coffee aroma didn’t stir her appetite today.

  ‘Hi, Boss,’ he said as she sat beside him. ‘What’ve you got for me?’

  ‘I’ve found you a great rooftop,’ Gemma said. ‘To keep an eye on that fuel depot.’

  Noel grunted. Sitting on a flat roof with binoculars, camera and laptop all day was never fun. And at night it was worse, she knew. Weird shapes loomed in the darkness.

  ‘You’ve been a bit hard to get lately,’ he was saying. ‘You’ve got something on your mind. Is it the business?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, feeling guilty. It was, but she could hardly tell Noel about her motel habit. Despite the warmth of the cafe, she felt cold as she remembered her clothes laid out on the floor.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ he was saying, ‘we’ve got to go down to Cross Weld Construction sometime in the next few days.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Gemma, wondering how she could’ve forgotten. Suddenly she was focused again. The construction company, dealing in the wholesaling, retailing, warehousing and distribution of building materials and tools, was their biggest customer so far. She remembered the owner, Richard Cross, saying on the phone that he’d heard excellent reports of Mercator Business Services and had decided to give the contract to her small firm rather than one of the big three even though it was quite some way out of his area.

  ‘He’s closing the place down next week for two weeks’ annual holidays,’ said Gemma, remembering the brief, ‘and that’s when we move in and do the
job.’ She pulled her diary out of her bag and found the entry and the date. ‘He wants covert cameras installed,’ she said, ‘and sensor lights. He suspects his 2IC is involved with a group taking stuff worth thousands out of the warehouse every month but he hasn’t been able to prove anything.’ With her pen, she drew a circle around the Cross Weld Construction entry in the diary. ‘While he’s closed and renovating, we get down there with our little bits and pieces. I’ll come down with you early next week when you do the initial inspection. I want to give this fellow my personal touch. It’s our biggest job to date. Mr Cross is hoping to run as an Independent in the next state elections. He told me on the phone. He seemed very pleased with himself.’

  ‘Camden’s a long way out of our area,’ Noel said. ‘I wonder why he doesn’t get someone closer to home.’

  ‘Just be grateful,’ said Gemma. ‘The Cross Weld Construction deposit has paid your wages and Spinner’s for the last few weeks.’

  ‘I love the bloke,’ said Noel.

  ‘Drop by my place sometime today or tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’ll have your cheque made up for you.’

  •

  The two sisters sat in the kitchen later that night eating Kit’s vegetarian moussaka, creamy with bechamel sauce. Her older sister looked pale and tired, Gemma thought, with shadows under her dark eyes. Her fine brown hair was drawn back and twisted up with a hair clip, but two gleaming wings had escaped and looped on each side of her fine, unmade-up face. The break-up with Gerald has taken its toll, Gemma thought. But it had to end—it is almost impossible to live with a deeply depressed partner, day after day, night after night. ‘You look like Emily Brontë,’ she said to Kit, reaching out and patting her cheek softly with two fingertips.

  ‘I feel more like Grendel’s mother,’ Kit laughed. And Gemma suddenly felt free of the fear and disgust that had infected the day. It was good to be sharing a meal with her sister. And soon Steve would be back. Soon it would be time to show Kit the video, but she tried to put it off a while longer.

  ‘Show me round,’ she asked. Kit showed her through the rooms of the house, pausing briefly in front of the photo of Will. Gemma picked it up. ‘He was so beautiful,’ she said, touching the laughing face. Kit took it from her and put it back on the mantelpiece and Gemma saw that her sister was unable to speak. By the time they’d reached the kitchen door, Kit had collected herself. ‘This is the best bit,’ she said as they stepped outside into the evening. ‘The walled garden with the gate. And beyond it.’ Light fell from the windows, lighting up the area near the house while the rest of the garden hid in deeper shadows. They went into the darkness and looked south over the stone wall past canna lilies that blazed crimson against the blue of Gordon’s Bay when it was day. The sound of a soft surf filled the night. ‘The boats are pulled up over there,’ Kit pointed out to Gemma. ‘Come over during the day next time.’

  Gemma jumped down and turned back to the overgrown garden. ‘I don’t like it,’ she said. ‘It’s too exposed. Anything—anyone could come over the wall.’

  Gemma sat for a moment, trailing her fingers in the water, then she noticed the overgrown pond.

  ‘I intend to clean that up,’ said Kit, pulling away several runners of ivy to partly reveal a classical stone face set in the wall. They went into the front lounge room, where stacks of books teetered and half-emptied boxes filled up one corner. Outside, crickets sang in morse code. It had to be done, thought Gemma. I can’t put it off any longer. ‘Something awful happened to me last night,’ she finally said as she sipped on the coffee, sitting on the floor, leaning back against the wall. Kit sat nearby, curled on a large cushion. Taking a deep breath, Gemma told the story.

  ‘I’m almost a hundred per cent sure it wasn’t the fellow I picked up last night,’ she said after she’d finished. ‘He gave a sample to the lab this afternoon and I’ll have the result in the next day or so.’

  ‘But,’ said Kit, ‘how could anyone else have got in?’ She went back to the kitchen, returning with two dishes of homemade vanilla bean ice-cream.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Gemma said as she took the spoon her sister handed her. ‘There was a sort of double bang when the bathroom door slammed shut this morning. I reckon Brian—that’s the fellow—didn’t close the entrance door properly. I’ve got a horrible feeling that my door was open from about four when he left.’ She shivered at the thought of it.

  ‘That’s what you do, my Gems,’ said Kit, looking her in the eye. ‘You leave doors open. And the hell beings can slip in.’

  ‘I didn’t leave the goddam door open.’

  ‘You brought a stranger back with you who did.’

  Gemma could feel herself starting to get angry. There was no point in arguing with Kit. There never had been. And even when Gemma had the last word, which was quite often because it was not Kit’s habit to argue, her own words often hung in the air, accusing her in the ensuing silence. For a second or two she felt rebelliously triumphant about the secret she was keeping from Kit. You don’t know everything, Miss Cleverdick Psychotherapiste, said a childish part of her mind. ‘If I run the video now,’ she said sharply, ‘maybe it will spoil your appetite even for vanilla bean ice-cream.’

  ‘Darling Gemfish. If you’d heard what I heard today from one of my clients, you’d know that a mere videotape could never interfere with my appetite. Put it on.’

  Gemma went over and pressed the Play button. The quality of the tape was very good; Gemma’s establishing shots showed the motel room, the cream and mushroom pink furnishings, the low smoked glass coffee table and lounge chairs, the entrance door. Then the clothes on the floor in their context. Gemma heard Kit’s sharp intake of breath. Gemma’s clothes had been laid out to make a sort of effigy of a woman: her blouse lying neatly with the skirt spread out beneath it and, on top of that, her panties and pantyhose, with talcum powder sprinkled where the armpits and the crutch might have been. Her shoes lay spreadeagled at the end of the pantyhose’s feet. But what was so shocking, was the way the neck of the blouse had been savaged, slashed to ribbons, and the crutch of the pantyhose slashed. And right on target, in the ravaged crutch of the panties, was the sticky wet patch of talcum powder and semen, gluing the nylon to the fabric of the slashed skirt beneath. Whatever knife he’d used had cut right through the carpet, revealing the particle board of the floor under the neck of her blouse, the crutch of the pantyhose.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Kit. ‘This is very bad.’

  ‘What do you think?’ said Gemma.

  ‘I think you’re right. It won’t be the man you took back to the hotel with you. This one needs slashing and ripping to get aroused—it’s possible he can’t have sex with a woman in the normal run of things, that he can only approach a woman’s clothes, not a woman.’

  ‘Jesus, Kit. He came pretty damn close. He was there and I was asleep. When I think of that going on just a few metres away—it makes me feel sick.’ Her stomach turned upside down and she swallowed hard. ‘What if he’d used the knife on me?’

  Kit turned to look squarely at her. ‘He didn’t. He could’ve and he didn’t.’

  There was a silence while Gemma thought of the knife that hadn’t been used on her. Then Kit spoke again. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’ll talk to Angie. See if she’s heard of anything similar to this around town.’

  ‘I meant what are you going to do about you? About keeping yourself safe.’

  Gemma pushed a button on the remote control. Her violated clothes shimmered in freeze frame haze. ‘You’re thinking that he might know who I am,’ she said. ‘That it mightn’t have been just a random attack.’

  ‘Even if it was at the beginning,’ said Kit, ‘he might well have found out who you are. If he’s played around with your clothes like that, he may well have gone to your bag, seen your ID. It could fit in with his sense of having a real woman, kn
owing your identity.’

  Gemma snapped. ‘I know how to keep myself safe.’

  ‘If you’ll forgive the complete contradiction, you do not.’

  ‘I’m not one of your clients, Kit.’

  ‘Gems, I’m your sister. I love you and care about you. If you were one of my clients, I’d make you do a contract with me. When you felt the urge to go out and mindlessly pick up some fellow, I’d make you ring me first and we’d talk about what was going on in you that you were avoiding.’

  ‘Hell, Kit,’ said Gemma. ‘What am I supposed to be avoiding? I just get restless. It’s like a big work-out for me.’

  ‘It’s anxiety,’ said Kit, ‘that you’ve never learned to contain. It drives you.’ She paused. ‘Just for interest’s sake, next time you feel like you have to have your “work-out”—’

  ‘What?’ Gemma interrupted gracelessly.

  ‘I was going to suggest that you don’t do it. That you just be aware of what happens in you. I think you’ll be interested at what might come up.’

  ‘You make me sound so pathological. Girls just wanna have fun.’ In the silence that followed, with her slashed clothing shimmering in freeze frame, Gemma wished she could unsay the flippant remark.

  ‘How’s Steve?’ Kit asked after a silence.

  Gemma scooped up a drop of ice-cream on her finger and licked it. ‘He’s good. He’ll be back next week. He managed to make a phone call to me. He’s doing one of his cloak and dagger numbers.’

  Steve was a cop with a laid-back, casual nature, thought Kit, an energy that knows how to blend in and merge with others. But there was something in him that troubled her; an evasiveness, something not quite right. She knew he did undercover work quite frequently. Are people who are drawn to that sort of work people of secrets, undercover people with undercover souls? At present, Steve was interstate, having infiltrated a group who made and dealt amphetamines and other designer drugs. ‘You care about Steve, don’t you?’ said Kit, watching her younger sister. ‘You like him a lot. I can tell.’