Scarlet Stiletto - the First Cut

by Lindy Cameron

  Sam screamed out for me to come and help and I had to hold onto the wall as I made my way down the hall. As I stood in the doorway of my bedroom I could see that the stalker was alive and struggling for air. Sam was standing next to him at the windowsill. His one remaining arm was gripping the ledge and I watched in horror as she lifted the meat cleaver high in the air and brought it down heavily on his shoulder blade.

  “Anyway,” Sam interrupts, as she points the butt of her brush to her temple to imitate thinking. “How do you know that things around us aren’t naturally dissected and, when we see them, we sort all the pieces into a picture that our brains can comprehend? It’s up to us to pull the pieces apart and put them back together so we can understand what they really look like.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?’’ I snap, knowing full well that she’s talking about him again.

  “You asked me why I dissect everything,” she retorts, pointing her chin at her incomplete painting.

  I breathe out heavily without verbal response as if the answer, like her red ink jibe, is too obvious for reply.

  Sam has always painted in squares and to me it looks like pieces of pictures that have been chopped up and shuffled through her mind like playing cards. She re-arranges everything—from her thoughts to her food. When we were children she would sit at the dinner table and shift her peas carefully between strands of spaghetti (organised into squares, of course), and she would turn her plate constantly to ensure an entire evenness around the rim. She always left a large space in the middle of her plate where nothing was allowed to be placed. Mum eventually bought her a special plate with a ridge in the middle specifically made for an egg cup. This way, the food wouldn’t impinge on that space in the middle.

  Since The Stalker was sold to the gallery I’ve noticed that the empty space in the middle of her paintings has become smaller and smaller. And, as I look at the canvas now, I see that the space in the middle of the picture is no bigger than my thumbnail. I wonder why the critics and art dealers have not noticed this trend. They’ve always maintained that the space in the centre of her work reflects the desire to maintain an inner energy. But I know what it is. It reflects her soul. It reflects that emptiness.

  “Finished?” she prods.

  “Nowhere near it,” I respond without eye contact.

  “Where are you up to now?”

  I concentrate on my page and clear my throat. “You screamed for me to come and help. When I got into the bedroom you were standing next to the window chopping at his one remaining arm.”

  “Crap!”

  “Why?”

  “You were a mess,” she accuses indignantly. “I had to come into the kitchen and drag you into the bedroom to help me and all the while you were grabbing onto door handles and anything you could get your hands on. It was like trying to rescue a drowning dog. When you got into the bedroom I let go of you and you ran out of the room. I had to come back to the kitchen and pour a straight whisky down your throat before you even looked like calming down.”

  “Oh.”

  “Then when we got back to the bedroom he’d crawled to the window and was trying to pull himself up to get out and that’s when I hit him again and you took off.”

  Sam was screaming and crying when she came into the kitchen. She grabbed me and told me that I had to help her because he was too heavy to move. I didn’t want to go but she dragged me back to the bedroom and when we got there the stalker bore no resemblance to the man who had crippled our lives for three long years. He looked nothing like the man who had stood in the courthouse and sworn before a judge that he would not come within a hundred metres of either of us again.

  I could see an arm lying stiff on the floor to the left of my bed; and a leg, bent like a flick-knife, at my feet. When Sam brought the meat cleaver down again I saw that the canvas of the floor had turned into an ocean of blood that began to role violently beneath my feet. “There’s a storm on the way,” Sam reports, as if I hadn’t noticed.

  “I’m nearly finished there,” I lie, as I take a quick glance at her work.

  She is focusing on the far horizon and in her brush strokes I can see a story taking shape. Her painting looks nothing like it did an hour ago and I feel as if this is the first time she has painted a picture that I can actually recognise. I can make out shapes and purpose and scenery. Two children have built a sandcastle near the shoreline, their hair flapping like pennants in the wind. One child is scratching secret words into the sand while the other decorates the sandcastle with seaweed and pieces of broken shell. Seagulls are encircling a sailboat near the jetty as a sailor scoops a catch of human limbs from the water. Another sailor is busying himself with fishing hooks, sewing pieces of the catch to the clean white sails. A storm is building to the east, manipulating the evenness of the ocean into heavy red peaks.

  I have to tell her that I like the painting, and since The Stalker I’ve found it harder and harder to find the empty space at the centre of her work. She explains that the girls on the beach are us and we made a pact that we would never talk about him again. She tells me that seaweed, shells and stalkers are common, but sisters are hard to find.

  I tell her I’m finished I write my last line and flick the pages back to the beginning of the story.

  Sam and I sit by the sea. She is decorating the sandcastle while I etch our history in the sand. The stalker threads his way into our lives where he is dissected and arranged into neat little squares. His blood and limbs wash through Sam’s arm and with a twist of her wrist he comes to life on the canvas. I tell her that he looks nothing like a still life on canvas and she advises me knowingly that he never will.

  I turn my head to one side, hoping to see what she can see. She asks me what I’m doing and I tell her I’m thinking.

  She casts an eye over my words and tells me that if I’m serious about telling the world that The Stalker is merely a mosaic of one man’s flesh and blood, I should write it away from the shoreline.

  A wave washes over the words I have written and they are swallowed into the sand.

  Dianne Gray

  Second Prize, 2000

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  ~ * ~

  Thursday Night at the Opera

  Being the only left-handed, black disabled lesbian in the New South Wales Police Force isn’t nearly as funny as many people seem to think.

  At least, the people I work with now just go right ahead and joke about it. The worst thing about my previous job was the way everyone used to go out of their way to make sure that I got the message that they were going out of their way to make sure I didn’t feel stigmatised in any way. And, I wasn’t even disabled back then!

  No, okay, the worst thing about my previous job was how everyone went on and on about abused kids and nobody ever did anything about it. That’s why I’m where I am now. Okay, the paperwork is just as bad as it was in the Department of Community Services, but I do get to arrest the occasional villain, which is kind of nice. Of course, ‘society’ is still to blame and, okay, I know the poor old perpetrators all have tragic stories to tell: abuse and broken homes and dyslexia and attention deficit disorder and bed-wetting and glue-sniffing and nose-picking and dizzy spells. But the point is—and I think there is something of a tendency to overlook this in these interesting times—that these guys are choosing to deal with life’s challenges by committing violent acts against small, defenceless children. And there comes a time in a girl’s life when what she really wants to do is drag one of these guys down to the police station by his hair and get her not-quite-so-disabled, oestrogen-challenged mates to belt the shit out of him.

  I sleep well at night.

  The main problem with the job is that there’s a bit too much to do. I’m on every inter-sectoral committee and promotions review and special reporting group that comes our way, and there are days when I think that, if the Police Force does want to give the impression to the wider community that it’s full to the brim with hard-working,
dedicated career women, then it should employ a few more of them and not work poor old Sergeant Rima Ruakuri to death. It’s not like I get time off from my normal duties or anything for all this bullshit, and I’ll give you three guesses where I’m stationed.

  Lane Cove? Leafy, law-abiding Lane Cove? Nope. Gulargambone? Nothing for a million miles in any direction but peace and quiet and DUIs? Nope, again.

  Kings Cross, maybe? Crime, grime, drugs and thugs? You got it! I guess the committee thought I’d blend right in here. ‘Ruakuri?’ they probably said. ‘The one that got shot in the leg? The black lezzo? Send her to Kings Cross. Nobody’s going to notice her there.’

  Well, it’s true. I do seem to blend right in. You have to be nine-feet tall with a couple of extra limbs to stand out from the crowd around here. But, I kind of like it ... the passing trade tends to be a bit of a pain but the regular clients aren’t that much different from what you’d find in Community Services except that nobody expects you to turn them into the Brady Bunch.

  It’s quite relaxing, actually. Senior Sergeant Donnelly takes the view that as long as we do our best to stop the street girls and the boys on the Wall from getting themselves murdered, keep the dealers and the junkies out of the main thoroughfares, and periodically round up anyone who looks under about twelve and doesn’t seem to have a home to go to, that’s about all anyone could realistically expect.

  I get to know some of the regular workers quite well, especially the parlour girls. They seem to last a bit longer than the street kids, but they’re still in and out of the station often enough, and I’ve been known to get quite upset when one of them gets sliced up or makes an irrevocable error in her choice of pharmaceuticals. They’re much friendlier now I’m a police-person than they were when I worked for good old Community Services. I guess they know I have no intention of taking their babies away or trying to make them see that virtue is its own reward.

  So ... it could be worse. And here I am. It’s a quiet Wednesday night; well, as quiet as it ever gets around here. There’s a four-teen-year-old called Shonelle having the screaming meemies in one of the cells, something of a regular occurrence just lately. I make a note to explain to a couple of the managers that we are not a free detox centre and, if they don’t want us hanging around their clubs on a regular basis checking on whether or not their staff are old enough to be legal, then they’d better exercise a bit more quality control in what they give them to stay happy There’s a madwoman at the counter demanding over and over again that we take her home to Daisy; there’s a couple of drunks who’ve spewed up everything they ever ate in their entire lives and are wishing there was some way they could just be switched off until it was all over; and a couple of boys waiting for their dad to turn up with a lawyer.

  I’m also trying to draft a report for my latest committee. As the most junior member—and, of course, the only woman— I tend to be the one who gets to do the drafts. And a source of great joy it is, too.

  This one is on snuff movies, and the party line is that it’s all a load of bollocks. See, every time a young person goes missing, which happens about eight times a week in the fair State of New South Wales, large numbers of concerned citizens are convinced that they’ve been abducted, raped and horribly murdered on video for the titillation of the perverted few. But Assistant Commissioner Hooper—the head of this committee that I’m on—he keeps saying that nobody on the committee has ever seen a snuff movie, nobody has ever met anyone who is willing to say they’ve seen a snuff movie, and those people ought to know. Besides, he says, where are all the bodies? Bodies are notorious for their habit of turning up inconveniently, just when you think it’s safe, no matter how carefully dismembered, weighed down, treated with acid, or coated with shark bait.

  Now, we know that; but we also know that no one has ever found Christopher Flannery. Or Azaria Chamberlain. Or Juanita Neilsen. Or the Beaumont children. Assistant Commissioner Hooper isn’t stupid; and besides, I remember once going to an in-service on crime and other nasty stuff back when I was a District Officer for Community Services and he was the speaker, and I distinctly remember him saying that if you could imagine it, there was somebody out there doing it.

  That was years ago. Something seems to have happened to Hooper, but a girl with any sense of self-preservation is not going to ask what. It’s a whitewash and, well, normally I’d think, fine; makes a change from hysterical accusations and seeing who can come up with the name of the most unlikely public figure.

  But I have to say I’ve got a funny feeling about this one. I’ve made a list of everyone who’s been reported missing in the past three months and then sorted them into those who turned up okay, those who turned up hacked to death by their nearest and dearest, those whom we know have pushed off to New Zealand on false passports, and so forth. There are about six names left over. All girls. All disappeared from our patch.

  On Thursdays.

  Well, how likely is that? We’re into evidence-based practice these days and I think about presenting this evidence at the next committee meeting, but I know it’s a waste of time. They never set up commissions such as this unless they’ve already decided what the outcome will be, and I know perfectly well that I’d need a signed confession witnessed by JC himself before Hooper would bother to look at it. There’s no point in antagonising important people like him, especially when they also sit on the police promotions board and your own hearing happens to be scheduled for some time next week, and I can imagine how Assistant Commissioner Hooper will react to the suggestion that someone around here is making a habit of picking up a do-it-yourself stiff with their Thursday night’s grocery shopping.

  So, I’m trying to say as little as possible as politely as possible, while all around me drunks, thieves, tarts, muggers and Senior Sergeant Mick Donnelly are clamouring for my attention.

  It’s Mick that finally gets through.

  “Stiff in a back alley, Rima,” he says cheerily. “Get down there.”

  “Why me?” I ask.

  “She’s a pro,” replies Mick. “You’re good at that sort of thing.”

  “You mean, pros mean sex, I’m a lezzo, lezzos mean sex, so I can sort her out. Is that it?”

  “Near enough,” says Mick. “Off you go.”

  Shit. Sometimes I think I was put on this Earth in order to explain to people that lesbians don’t spend their entire lives having sex. Mick’s okay; he feels approximately the same way as I do about men who abuse women and who think if they’re prostitutes, it really doesn’t count. But, like most blokes, he can’t get past the fairly minor point that, at least when things are going well, I go out with other women.

  Things aren’t going well at the moment.

  Anyway, off I go and, sure enough, there’s a dead prostitute in a back alley. I don’t know her, which usually wouldn’t mean much because these street girls have a pretty short shelf life and the Recording Angel himself would have trouble keeping up with who’s doing what to whom behind which garbage bin in the big city on a hot summer’s evening. But this one’s not your usual teenager with a Gosford bus pass in her back pocket, either. This stiff looks nearer forty than fourteen and I’m a bit surprised I don’t recognise her. Up from St Kilda on a job exchange, perhaps? She’s got about a dozen scars on each wrist, running across, not down, which is enough in itself to set a suspicious policeperson to wondering. At her age she ought to know what she’s doing. But anyway, she’s crawling with track marks; it looks like a fairly straightforward OD, so I call the boys with the van and have a look around. She can’t have been here long because she’s still warm and besides, her bag’s still here. I scrabble through it for ID.

  There’s a packet of tampons, a packet of cigarettes, a packet of condoms, and a packet of Panadol Forte. There’s a purse with $21.75, a couple of wadded-up tissues, a syringe, a bottle of silver nail polish, a ticket to tomorrow night’s performance of Nabucco at the Opera House, and a one-year diary in a black plastic cover.

 
; I look at these last two items and I am frankly puzzled. For one thing, here we’ve got someone who’s come out without a front door key, suggesting to the thinker that she very probably hasn’t got a front door to call her own, and she’s carrying a $75 ticket to the world’s dreariest opera. And this diary; well, how far ahead does a person need to plan if she’s a prostitute whose hobbies are injecting smack and attempting suicide?

  The guys are taking their own sweet time so I flick through her diary. There’s not much there, just a few names. Nicki. Shantal. Brandi. I’ve seen those names before, I think, as the boys screech to a halt in the truck. I look at the current week-to-an-opening page and I notice the name Shonelle. It’s on Thursday. I flick back again and I notice that Nicki, Shantal and Brandi were on Thursdays, too. The boys are distracted, taking a few perfunctory photographs and trying to keep the citizenry at arm’s length, so I drop the diary and the ticket in my shirt pocket and limp off up the alley to the squad car.