by Candice Fox
What are you doing here, idiot breath?
I went to the couch, changed my mind, stood by the balcony doors and looked out. The longing for a cigarette pumped through me, an impulse I hadn’t had since I was married to Donna. The street was empty. I’d told the patrol boys outside they could go. They’d snickered knowingly, stopped when I frowned. The next patrol would arrive at midnight. I turned when I heard her coming in from the bedroom. Martina emerged in jeans and a black singlet. Her shoulders were brown and smooth like caramel.
“This is probably really inappropriate,” I said for some reason.
She smirked. “I won’t tell anyone.” She brought two wineglasses to the dining table by the balcony doors. I sat down and swallowed half of my wine in one gulp. I’m good at knocking wineglasses over. Do it all the time. With this awareness firmly in my mind, I put the glass down carefully and slid it away from me between sips.
A grey cat lifted its head from where it lay curled in a basket by the door. I hadn’t noticed it there.
“Who’s that?” I asked, nodding towards the animal.
“Greycat.”
“You named him what he is?”
“Sure did.”
I smirked. The cat went back to sleep.
“How are you feeling?”
“You know.” She shrugged. I didn’t. I waited while she extracted a slice of pizza, pulling the strands of mozzarella free with her fingers. “I keep going on. On and on. Can’t help it.”
She wanted to talk about the case. I chose my words carefully. The wine helped. As darkness closed in around the apartment, I felt my limbs loosen. She lit a lamp that hung over the couch and nothing else. People returned from work and wandered the hall outside her apartment, greeting each other, taking dogs out for an evening walk in the light rain.
I’ve been thinking about you, I thought.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” she said. I turned my wineglass on the tabletop. The pizza was half gone. I felt tired. Martina’s hand reached out and touched mine. I opened my palm and let her trace the lines on it with her fingers.
This is not how I work.
The realization made a heat run through me. I’m not this man. I’m the sleaze at the bar. I’m the biggest and strongest of all the jerks left in the pub at midnight. I’m the most confident. I’m the quick-witted one. I don’t say “love”. I don’t pay for cab rides home. Feminism will do that to you—leave you alone out on a doorstep in the blazing morning light with the memory of my body already fading from your mind. I’m not this man, this embarrassed, love-hurt, longing man.
Martina moved to my lap, straddling my legs. I gave a terrified sigh, the kind I hadn’t made since I was a teenager. I slid the right-hand strap of her top down over her arm, listening to the sounds of a piano play from an apartment across the street. Beautiful, beautiful. Martina wrapped her arms around my head and held me to her heart. I closed my eyes and listened to it beating for I don’t know how long.
Jason leaned against the lamppost with his hands in his pockets and looked up at the sky, appreciating the distinct bars of colored light trapped between the city buildings, purple and pink, a layer of almost-yellow before the heavy grey of impending night.
Randwick was a hilly suburb and a resistance tugged gently against his chest and he imagined himself tumbling down the asphalt towards the street below him, raking off skin and pounding bones, the world finally tipped too far. He rolled his wounded shoulder, felt the hole where the bullet had been—pull and twist, the stitches’ tug. He longed for more pain, rich and deep-cutting pain that would assure him of his presence on the earth, of occupation of one moment and then the next, of the decisions he made. Yes, there were choices now, plans to make, resources to be gathered, because in the end he was a decision-maker, unlike the mindless ones in the houses and apartment blocks around him droning along in their meaningless lives. Pursuing junk to fill their nests. Comparing their junk with that of others.
Jason was like a fox preparing for the winter, knowing in his very bone marrow that what was to come would be violent, merciless, phenomenal. He would hunt now, and then he would hide and be born again when the darkness had risen and all the world was anew.
He let his eyes drift to the apartment with the lace curtains high above him, his fingers idly finding the stitches in his skull and pulling them so that the skin burned.
A lamp was lit near the window so that he could see the white stucco ceiling. A grey cat wandered out onto the balcony, peered down through the wrought-iron rail as though it had always known he was standing there.
Jason smiled and waved.
Beck’s apartment had been swarmed long before Eden and I arrived. It had been a big tactical event more suited to the special ops guys, so we’d met in a café across the street with all the neighbors the team had been able to muster up and started conducting interviews. The café owners, an old Greek couple, seemed a little unnerved by their incredible luck at becoming the informal base of operations. The chiefs, tactical officers, patrol officers, forensics teams, body-handlers, journalists, neighbors and voyeurs had all ordered something from their little cluttered counter while they waited for the apartment to be secured. People were spilling out into the street drinking coffee and squinting at the chalkboard menus. From my table I could see the owners’ teenage son in the kitchen trying to toast fourteen ham-and-cheese croissants at the same time and just about crying with the pressure.
The neighbors gave us nothing. The only people in his building Jason had ever spoken to had been a couple on the floor below who had a pair of little boys who would traipse around the staircases at all hours playing hide-and-seek. All James and Kat could tell me was that the doctor in number eighteen was a quiet, handsome guy whose place smelled bad. James had borrowed a power drill from him once and caught a glimpse of what he thought was a snake tank in the hall inside the door. The guy never had any visitors and he never made a sound.
It was mid-morning when Eden and I were called forward. I’d barely spoken to her and a wave of embarrassment swept over me at the idea that she might somehow sense that I had been with Martina the night before. I’d gone home that morning and showered and changed in that stupid daze men get when their world is filled with a woman. Unable to organize my thoughts. I’d walked all the way to the car without my keys. I’d left my watch on the bathroom counter.
We slipped on our fuzzy booties and latex gloves and stood ready for the forensics guys to give us the all-clear and the photographer to sort out his equipment. As we headed up the stairs to Beck’s apartment, I found myself thinking about her again. Her long, slender fingers. The way she twitched now and then in her sleep, wriggling closer to me, her nose and mouth against my arm, her face hidden in the shadow of me. I’d wanted to see her again that night but she’d said she was going somewhere. A relative’s place. I wondered who. I slapped my cheeks and Eden turned and cocked an eyebrow at me.
“Tired,” I said.
“Try sleeping at home.”
I scoffed. It was the wrong thing to do. I felt sweat on my ribs.
“I slept at home.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Leave me alone.”
She gave one of those special, infrequent laughs and walked into the apartment ahead of me. My face was hot. I was glad for the distraction when I hit the wall of reek that enveloped Jason’s apartment. The stench was hanging just inside the door like an invisible curtain. One second I was breathing the slightly musty air of the corridor and then my lungs were full of a rank wetness, like a tropical jungle throbbing with heat and urine. I coughed and hid my face in my elbow. Eden was breathing the air like it was ocean spray, unfazed, standing at the end of the hall in the tiny living room and looking around her.
“What is that?”
“Mice,” she said.
The mice were just the most prominent of all the animal smells here because they had escape
d the little tank on the dining room table and taken over the house. There were mouse droppings among the papers and empty coffee cups and medical instruments strewn everywhere, on the plates on the kitchen counter and scattered over the carpet like pepper. In the corners of the room a bigger animal had defecated over a long period, something accustomed to using a litter tray but not provided with one. Clumps of dry black feces, smears and claw marks on the walls, no sign of the beast itself. The tanks James had spotted inside the door had indeed housed snakes, but these animals were gone too, only their skins remaining like leftover chocolate wrappers. I stood by the kitchen counter and blinked, my eyes stinging from the ammoniac fumes. There was no option about opening the windows. If there was evidence here, even something as small as an eyelash, we could ruin someone’s chance of finding their missing loved one dead or alive by disturbing it.
Eden was flipping through the papers on the table. A photographer came in, looked her up and down and darted into another room. I moved around Eden and checked through the books lying in a great pile by the windows, looking as though they’d been unceremoniously dumped out of a bookcase that was no longer here. Medical textbooks and encyclopedias, thousands of copies of National Geographic. Everything felt abandoned. Sad, used, redundant. Rain had come in at some point and started a patch of mold under the bedroom window. The bed looked cold and damp and unslept in.
“Moving in or moving out?”
“I don’t get the feeling he’s moving anywhere,” Eden sighed, opening the kitchen cupboards. They were bare. “He’s partly here, partly in the old place where we found Martina. Partly out there, in the never-never. Doesn’t have a home base. Running a bit wild, I think.”
“Pretty disorganized guy. Aren’t doctors supposed to be really anal?”
“I don’t think it’s always been this way,” she said. “He’s . . . falling. Going down the rabbit hole. It’s always a battle to keep that other instinct in check, that dark thing that keeps trying to pull them out of reality and into the fantasy of the hunt. They only cover their tracks so carefully because they’re still connected to reality, still worried about the consequences of getting caught. It’s when they start losing that connection with the real world that they become like this.” She gestured at the table before her. “Disorganized.”
A couple of techs came in and she told them what to bag. I felt empty, watching her. I didn’t like the way she talked about Jason’s work as if it were an instinct, something emotionally detached and working on its own like a machine somehow implanted in him, pulling his limbs on puppet strings. There was choice in this. I was sure of it. Free will and cruelty and that unique brand of human evil. I had to believe that, because if I couldn’t blame what Jason had done to all those people on something I could understand, I didn’t know how I was ever going to get over what I’d seen. Their faces. Their limp, lifeless limbs. The way they’d all curled together at the bottom of the well like maggots. Human maggots. How could he have done what he did to Martina without knowing it, deciding on it, enjoying it? You knew everything there was to know about Martina before she had spoken a single word. You knew how she hurt, how she feared, how she loved, simply from the look she gave you, her breath, her laugh. She was an incredibly natural creature. I was certain Beck couldn’t have ignored the fact that he had broken something in that woman forever the moment she woke up in that cage. I felt angry, standing there in Jason’s mess and filth, his cave of madness. There was no excuse for what he had done.
Eden came over to where I was rifling through a Tupperware bowl of jewelry that had been placed in an armchair by the television like a bowl of popcorn. I picked up a black novelty watch and squeezed its buttons, watched it glow in the dankness of the apartment. It was emblazoned with the image of some action figure I didn’t know. I guessed it belonged to the teenage boy we’d found in the bay with Courtney and the others.
“Gotta get this fucker,” I said.
“We will.”
“Really, now. We’ve got to get him and hurt him. We’ve got to make sure we can pin him somehow alone for a couple of hours before we make the official arrest so we can give him a good squeeze.”
Eden seemed to watch my face more carefully for a moment, as though trying to decide on something. In time she forgot it and fumbled in the bowl and picked out a wedding ring. She dropped it and pinched at something on her arm.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Flea.”
“Aww, Jesus.” I dropped the bowl and brushed off my arms.
“You got one on your neck.”
I swiped at my neck and throat. Smiled and walked away.
25
I went for a drive at around 2AM. I’d been in and out of light sleep dreaming about Beck’s apartment and had become frustrated with it. I felt as though my eyes were pressing against the bones in my eye sockets and that electricity was buzzing between my temples. Wired. I let my fingers dance on the wheel, taking a tour through the city to look at the lights on St. Mary’s Cathedral, warm and bright as they curled into the intricate nooks and crannies of the building. Shadows of the homeless wandered and warped over the sides of the church, giant men lumbering. I stopped at the traffic lights and watched a group of drunk naval officers walking home across the park and muttering to each other, sullen-faced.
Martina had shaken my life. Picked it up and dropped it. Things were leaning in, broken, out of their place. The air tasted different. I found myself strangely repelled by her, by the power that she could have over me, by the changes she could make to my belief system. She was like a flame. I had to get away in order to understand how I really felt about her, what I wanted from this helpless attraction. You have to do that, get away from women in order to think about them. Close up, all you are is a slave to their rich fresh skin, to their honey voices, to the irresistible safety of their company.
I was driving towards Eden’s apartment before I knew where I was going. In some way I suppose I wanted to talk to her about Martina. I wanted another being to confirm that this was happening, that it was all right, that Martina could love or want a man like me. Eden knew I’d been out the night before and I supposed it was only a small leap to tell her who I had been with. Dating victims of crime was something that occurred now and then in police ranks, and though it was probably written somewhere in a manual on a shelf that it wasn’t supposed to happen, you share something with each victim, a mutual trauma at the crime, a united desire to put things right. This had happened to me at other times. I’d chased a burglar out of an elderly man’s house in Coogee in my early days as a street cop and had visited him every Friday night afterwards on my patrol to talk football with him until he died. We’d faced a common enemy, the two of us, and something like that is never forgotten.
I pulled into Eden’s street and slowed the car to a stop outside the loading dock coffee shop. No lights were on. Unsure what I had intended in the first place, I was about to pull out when I saw two dark figures moving rapidly across the street.
Eden and Eric.
My senses sharpened, like an animal on point, though I couldn’t have known at first what it was about their appearances that seemed strange. I was accustomed to seeing them dressed in black—it suited the two of them with their sharp features and dark eyes—but Eric was wearing a watch cap turned up over his ears. He glanced around the street and pulled the door open for Eden. I watched as he got in and opened the engine up immediately, barely checking the street before he pulled out.
It was the sharpness of their movements, their determined strides, I suppose, that helped me decide that I was going to follow them. I could believe that Eric would wear a watch cap despite the mildness of the weather, and I’d known Eden not to carry a purse but rather to keep her essential items in her pockets like a man. But there was no joviality to the way they walked, none of that comfortable swagger they both had now. It was a walk of pure focus, which made me believe they were on their way to something that was import
ant, something I should bear witness to. In a flash I thought of the photographs of Doyle with his tortured victims, the names of the missing men on the list in Eden’s wallet, the murmured words, stolen over Eden’s desk, that were meant for no one but her blood brother.
It’s too soon. You know that.
Was it still too soon?
I kept at a distance, pulling onto the southbound highway a good four or five cars behind. There seemed an inordinate amount of street lamps flickering and blinking, as though the electrical current running through the city had been disturbed somehow or was overloaded. I told myself it had probably always been this way. My exhaustion seemed to give a sharp edge to everything, to create extra shadows and give added brightness to the reflections of light in the water on the road. I risked edging closer and noticed that Eric had rolled down his window, his elbow resting on the sill, fingers drumming. As we pulled off the highway into the streets behind Mortdale, Eric wound his window back up and seemed to hunch over the wheel.
The distance between us stretched. The car ahead rolled slowly down the main street, past a Chinese restaurant with tables and chairs on the footpath by the street, fairy lights strung between the trees, empty and dark inside. I let the distance creep as far as I could until I could barely catch them turning each corner. When I pulled into Pickering Avenue, Eric was switching off his headlights. I parked behind a blue sedan and switched the engine and lights off.
Through the windows of the sedan, I could see Eden and Eric’s silhouettes in the car. Both pointed, angular faces were in profile. I followed their glance to the house across the street, where a single light burned in what looked like a kitchen window hung with curtains. Aside from a flowering Christmas bush, there was no vegetation around the place. A beaten-up prefab dump, similar to hundreds of others that littered the western suburbs. There was a small truck in the driveway but I could not make out the company logo on the side panels of the cab.
