Scarlet Stiletto - the First Cut

by Lindy Cameron

  Back at the station, I sink an orange juice and a felafel sandwich, the last remnants of my old Community Services persona, thinking (as I always do) that I really must try to get a taste for diet coke and hamburgers if I’m ever going to blend in properly, and then I deal with a couple more drunks, a citizen who’s been mugged, and a partridge in a pear tree. Then it’s back to the desk. Just as I thought. Nicki, Shantal and Brandi are all names on my missing teenagers list, and the dates in the diary match the last dates that anyone whom we could lay our hands on is prepared to admit having seen them alive. I wonder how many Shonelles there are in Kings Cross and then I limp down to the cells for a bit of community policing.

  Sure enough, Shonelle’s got an appointment tomorrow with some woman whose name she doesn’t know, who wants to introduce her to some bloke whose name she doesn’t know, either. What she does know is that he’s after someone who’ll do something rather special and can be discreet about it.

  Well, ‘something special’ could be anything from golden showers to nude wrestling in baked beans, but somehow’ I’ve got a gut feeling about this one.

  I think it through and decide that I definitely do not want to be the sole repository of this information if there is anything more than the faintest chance that it is in some way connected with dead bodies. I’ve seen too many movies in which the glamorous heroine decides not to tell her boss about the gang of murderous jewel thieves before setting out to right all the wrongs single-handedly, and I know that the chances of Al Pacino turning up at the crucial moment to rescue me would have to be on the slim side. I decide the best thing to do is to take precautions.

  I ring Assistant Commissioner Hooper to say I seem to have something of a new angle on this snuff-movie business, and can I have a spot of backup for a bit of a poke round, see if I can turn up something a bit more definite? Predictably, he tells me that I’ve let my imagination run away with me, that prostitutes and junkies are notorious for their lack of respect for the rules of evidence, and that there is such a thing as getting too close to one’s job. He’s on the point of saying ‘going native’ when he remembers to whom he’s talking and manages to turn the words into a rather nasty sounding cough.

  But I must be on to something, because the next day I get a signed letter saying I’m being promoted to Senior Sergeant and transferred to Gulargambone, effective immediately.

  That might have been that, if it hadn’t been for good old Mick. Say what you like about blokes, they do have their uses, and when I put my side of the story to him, he turned out to be unexpectedly quick on the uptake.

  The only thing I regret, really, is that I wasn’t there when Mick walked into the Opera House thirty seconds before the lights went down. I would have loved to see Assistant Commissioner Hooper’s face as Mick took the empty seat beside him.

  Christina Lee

  First Prize Trophy, 1998

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  ~ * ~

  Birthing the Demons

  For the hand that rocks the cradle

  Is the hand that rules the world.

  —William Ross Wallace, What Rules the World

  We’re still blaming mothers.

  —Joyce Flint (Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother)

  There is no escape.

  When you realise that fact, there is a small measure of acceptance. A slight, cooling breeze of relief.

  No escape. No escape. No escape.

  Tears can flow then. Anger can escape at different times, but at least these states are preferable to the early shock. The numbing denial.

  No escape. Even the night is not a friend. Odd little memories come creeping, whispering malevolently into your ear, waking you up, screaming.

  I’m as much as prisoner as he is!

  Jim refuses to discuss it with me, as he has refused to discuss so many things over the years, but I know that the same demons embrace him in the night. I’ve heard the agonised sobbing into the pillow in the early hours before dawn.

  Last night I walked into a room. It felt like a room from my childhood, but it was not familiar to me. Fresh flowers were in the vase, there was a fire in the grate. The hearth ... there was something on the hearth, cold, dark and wet. An icy, wet communication spurts in my veins. I know, I know what the horrible thing is. Her. Bits of her. Skull and hair and brains and blood, all over my nice clean hearth. Then I wake up with a rush and I begin to cry quietly. But not quietly enough, for Jim hears.

  “Leave it, Evie,” he says, wearily.

  I spend the rest of the night listening to the sounds of traffic gradually increase, cats fighting on the roof next door, a light shower of rain around 4 a.m. Then light, gradually breaking.

  No escape.

  I lie there, trying not to cry, trying not to think, to remember her. Him. Her. Her. Him.

  I wait for dawn.

  It is hard to believe that one act can alter so many people’s lives, that your routine can change so quickly overnight. And how, after that one act, all the old rules of the game have been replaced but nobody has told you what the new ones are. Yesterday, I walked into the butcher’s on High Street, thinking that Jim might like a nice roast. I couldn’t remember the last time I cooked him a proper meal. There was once a time that I wouldn’t have gotten away with that. If a clean cloth wasn’t on the table, butter in the butter dish, fresh bread rolls and a cooked meal with four veg, he would have been complaining. Now he doesn’t seem to notice or care. We sit with trays on our knees in front of the TV, eating scrambled egg, fish fingers, finger food.

  In the butcher’s shop the conversation ceased as soon as I entered. Enid McKillop and Rita Davies were there. I went to school with Rita. They said hello. Their faces had that half-interested, half-embarrassed look, and they hurried out together, clutching their bundles of white-papered meat, as if I was a bad smell.

  I cooked the lamb and vegetables. They were too soggy, and we ate on trays in front of the TV. Once, I looked over at Jim, and he was sitting there, quietly crying.

  That night I stood in the darkened sunroom, looking out the window at the house across the street. Shadows surrounded it. The ‘For Sale’ sign, dim in the moonlight, mocked me of the change to come. I watched the shadows move silently around the house for hours, remembering another distant night, when those shadows had come to life and entered that house ...

  I asked the house for answers, for I had long given up on asking God. I could feel the lamb sitting heavily in my stomach. I would have to take some Normacol before I went to bed tonight. Steam from my breath frosted the glass, and for a wild moment I thought I saw Joy sitting on her floral outdoor sofa, a pile of glossy magazines beside her. She would often cut out little recipes for me that she imagined we would like to try.

  “Here’s an easy recipe for Thai coconut soup, Evie. Do you think that they will carry the ingredients for it down at Warrens?”

  “Bloody interfering old busybody,” Jim never failed to complain. “Probably only hoping for a free feed at our house.”

  But I enjoyed the little ritual, that small attention. My parents had long retired to the warmth of a Queensland retirement village, and Joy’s little clippings had made me feel nurtured.

  Our son Leslie had never taken to her. “She’s a snob,” he’d say if I tried to encourage him to do chores for her. “She has evil eyes,” he would add.

  A part of me knew what he meant. Joy did have unusual eyes. Vivid blue, hardly the eyes of an old woman approaching her 84th birthday. Perhaps there had always been some ominous warning in those young girl’s eyes that I had failed to see. Then a darker thought. A memory I had once—for I had been there— but had blocked out. What did those eyes look like when they had found her? Were they open or closed?

  It had been the flies that warned me. A great swarming mass of them. I could hear them as I stood behind the screen door. “Joy?”

  Jim had been furious at me for not listening to him, for ignoring his commands to stay home and not cross the street
to see if Joy was alright. I hadn’t seen her for days. Jim sulked in front of one of his wildlife specials; wild gorillas, or chimps ... some kind of monkeys, anyway.

  Leslie had screamed at me when I voiced my concerns out aloud. “Leave it, Evie!” he said. “Don’t go interfering and encouraging the old bitch. You do too much for her now!” He hadn’t forgiven me for telling Joy that he would mow her lawns and do some handiwork around the house. He’d been sulking for weeks over that one. Jim and Leslie were like two peas in a pod at times. It was depressing ...

  It had been the flies on that hot, summery day. I could hear them buzzing as I wondered what to do. “Joy? I’ve made you some caramel slice,” I called, trying to balance the slice and the weekly magazines I had finished with. The door behind the screen was ajar. Without thinking, I pushed it open and stepped into the cool hallway I had been in a thousand times before. There was a faint smell. Something rotten. Oh, God. I had been preparing myself for this for years. I had always known when I had befriended Joy there would come a day when I would visit her to find her lifeless body in the bath, or in bed.

  “Joy?” The flies buzzed angrily back at me. I could hear the loud, annoying tick of Joy’s antique grandfather clock. I walked into the small lounge room, placing the plate of caramel slice down carefully on the table. God, the place was such a mess. Drawers were pulled out, a broken glass lay on the fire hearth. I pulled my cotton t-shirt up over my nose. I knew, but I had to see. The rotten smell intensified as I approached the bedroom.

  I had often sat, looking at the television, eyes fastened on the pages of a book, trying to trace meaning and reason in my mind. If I hadn’t nagged him to help out next door. If I hadn’t befriended Joy. If I hadn’t sent him to the local high school. If I had taken more attention of the reports from his primary school of behavioural problems, of his fights with other children. If he had not made friends with Jude Ward and Timothy Bailey ...

  IF

  ... The word seared into my brain. IF I had bought him more pets. IF I had fed him less meat. IF I had been able to have another child. IF we had never hit him to discipline him. IF we had hit him harder when he was caught shoplifting. IF I had monitored his television viewing, his Internet access. But, there was one IF that I inevitably returned to, a one-way nightmare ending in a dirty truth ...

  IF I had never given birth to him. IF I had never conceived him. The pregnancy had been far from easy. I vomited constantly, head always over a toilet bowl. That was how I remembered most of my pregnancy. The smell, and the off-white colour of the porcelain. Even back then it was as if my body had somehow known and tried to eject the dangerous seed it nurtured. Then there were the nightmares. I would wake screaming, bathed in sweat, the sheets soaked, with Jim trying to calm me. My hands would be on my stomach, my body stretched flat and rigid and tremors rippling through my body. Mine was never the glowing, radiant pregnancy I had dreamed of. My body seemed alien to me. Death filled my head with fear, and death had lingered in my nostrils and in my mouth. I became convinced I was going to die in childbirth. I often dreamt a black seed was sprouting within me, filling my body with dark hairy roots, with dark octopus tentacles. Then there were the dreams I felt too ashamed to discuss with well-meaning friends, who smiled benignly and gave me coloured booties and stuffed animals. I knew my dreams were not normal. If only I had said something.

  IF, IF, IF, IF.

  The birth was agony. A baptism of pain. I longed for death, for oblivion. I hated everyone for concealing the pain of delivery from me, and when they cut the cord I felt only relief that the thing inside me was free. Jim cried over the fact that it was a boy, but I remained weirdly detached. Between shit and piss we are born. My grandmother liked to cackle that phrase before my mother had her committed to the nursing hospital. It used to hurt and anger my mother when she said it, but now I knew what she meant.

  Over time, I gradually recovered from the crippling depression that filled me when Leslie was born. My initial rejection of him was replaced by an intense love that rippled through every facet of my life. His first steps, his first tooth, his first Christmas. These were all symbolic milestones to be treasured. Time now contained a depth it had always lacked. I longed for another child, quickly forgetting the pain of birth; but Jim already had two grown up children in a previous marriage and balked at the idea. If we had had more children, would things have been different?

  IF, IF, IF, IF.

  There had been no signs. That was another detail I tormented myself with. He had always seemed happy enough. I knew he worried about his weight and had been depressed over Bill and Cynthia’s daughter rejecting him. But, most teenage boys went through things like that, didn’t they? I found it difficult to recall my youth, but I was sure I copped my fair share of rejection. I knew he could be antisocial and didn’t make friends easily, but I just put that down to shyness. I could be like that myself. That was why Joy’s friendship was so important to me. Was important to me. Then there were the times he sat staring into space for hours on end, vacant-faced like a zombie, his mind seemingly void of thoughts.

  Jim blamed Leslie’s friends for what happened, but I wasn’t convinced. “They need a bullet between the eyes,” he said once, his voice low and intense, hands shaking. From what I had been able to gather from the different policemen who spoke to me over the weeks, all of the three boys were equally responsible, and each had taken their turn in mutilating the body. But there had been no signs! I read in the newspaper a list of symptoms that we were meant to see: bedwetting, fire-starting, cruelty to animals. There had been nothing. Nothing. Well, nothing that stood out, so I felt cheated of even those small signs from God that might have helped me.

  Lavender and roses. That was the overriding impression when I closed my eyes and thought of Joy. The sweet fragrances of Crabtree & Evelyn. For sure, it would have been Crabtree & Evelyn that she liked to anoint herself with, I thought. Not just any old supermarket floral talc or spray like I put in my shopping trolley. No, Joy was about quality. I wasn’t used to luxuries—there’d never been enough money for too many extras when I grew up—but there was no mistaking the sheer quality of Joy’s possessions. The fine bone china crockery, the simpering china figurines, the gold fountain pen that she wrote her shopping list with, in flowing copperplate script.

  I could see Joy now, in her smart brown slacks and her cream silk blouse, immaculately pressed. She’d peer through her tortoiseshell glasses, carefully considering each item on her list, then open the wooden camphor chest from Thailand where she kept her large green purse and count out her money for me to take to the shops for her.

  I loved to visit that house. Its mellow, measured tones spoke of other, exciting lifetimes; of people who thought nothing of eating out in restaurants, of reading books by Proust and Jane Austen with bindings of red leather. Around the house there were large black-and-white photographs of Joy and James when they had been young and glowing with health. On safari in Africa, outside the Eiffel Tower. These places were as remote to me as the Moon. Joy looked like a young Jane Russell with her shoulder-length, dark crimped hair and her bright lipstick; James was a fair-haired Clark Gable. But time was cruel. James died years ago of bowel cancer, and now Joy ...

  Joy, or what remained of her, had been carried from her home by faceless paramedics. As the covered stretcher disappeared into a vehicle I floated in a tranquillised haze, where pain lurked like the neighbours twitching behind their curtains.

  Joy wasn’t a local. She had moved to the quiet little seaside community of Oricheno on the central coast from Sydney. Many of the locals thought her too uppity for the town, and watched with resentful eyes when she would make her way up our street with the tortoiseshell walking stick she had bought in Italy. They used that walking stick to ...

  I had to fight to control the mental picture that I knew would follow. I was local, but it was me that the locals turned on like a pack of rabid dogs. Just a few days after it happened I went to the shop fo
r some milk. The stares, the comments, the people whom I had known all my life crossing the street to avoid me! Then Jilly Edwards—she always was a dirty slag—stepped up to me and spat at me in front of everyone.

  “You’re responsible!” she hissed. “You gave birth to that creep!” She pushed me suddenly and I stumbled into the gutter.

  “Leave her alone!” A man’s voice called, and slowly the spectators drifted away to gossip about it behind closed doors. Jilly waddled into the schoolyard and I watched her fat bottom disappearing while I attempted to pick myself up. A part of me wanted to go after her and engage in a screaming match in front of the whole town, but it was useless. I was defeated and I knew it. For I agreed with her. I felt responsible. I was the one who bore him. Between shit and piss we are born. I could feel my grandmother cackling triumphantly over me.

  I went to visit him only once. Jim drove me there, but refused to come in. Instead he sat in the car, listening to talkback radio and munching his way through packets of Quick-Eze. He was so wired up smoke could have drifted from his body; he looked ready to combust before my eyes. I had been afraid to insist that he accompany me inside, afraid that he would erupt into a tirade of abuse, or strike out at me. Although, when I really think about it, anything would have been preferable than his withdrawal, his half-smothered sobs in the privacy of the night.