Afterlight

by Lim, Rebecca

  Jordan started moving across the tiled floor, my hand somehow trapped in his again. We made our way through the untidy nests of tables and chairs towards the spot-lit woman, stopping just below her and gazing up.

  At close range, she didn’t resemble Eve at all. She had deep-set hazel eyes, flecked with pinpoints of deep claret. And it was clear her raven tresses had come out of a Clairol bottle. She was smaller in stature, more fine-boned than Eve. Her tight-fitting, low cut maxi dress was almost too big for her frame, the ends of it dragging on the floor behind her like a Goth wedding train.

  The woman’s pretty, weary face was alight with fear and hope. But she said again, ‘You shouldn’t be in here.’

  She glanced back at the curtain behind her, adding, ‘Cops see you, they could ping us just for you being here.’

  ‘We’ll go as soon as we get what Monica sent us for,’ Jordan said confidently.

  The woman flapped her hands in his face before bunching up her dress in one hand and climbing down off the podium in her teetering heels. She looked up into my face, then Jordan’s, searchingly.

  ‘How do I know O’Loughlin didn’t send you?’ she said. ‘Everyone knows he’s looking for her. He even came in here, asking. Even after what he did.’

  I had to steel my face against wobbling in confusion and giving Jordan away.

  ‘You don’t,’ Jordan said quietly, his gaze never leaving hers. ‘But Monica’s somewhere no one can touch her now. That’s why she’s asking. There’s something she needs to do.’

  The woman’s shoulders visibly slumped in relief until a voice, from behind the curtain, roared: ‘Nadja! I told you to get rid of them.’

  ‘Got it, Roman, okay?’ she bellowed back, though her hands shook as she raked her jet-black curtain of hair back off her face. ‘Follow me,’ she said quickly, weaving across the room towards the bar.

  Jordan and I hovered by the row of fixed, vinyl-topped red stools by the bar while she dug around on the other side of the counter. I could hear doors rapidly opening and closing as she shoved things around, almost talking to herself.

  ‘Doesn’t tell me where she’s gone, doesn’t send texts, emails, nothing, then, like, weeks later she gets youse two to pick up her shit?’ Nadja’s voice was disgusted. ‘That I believe. Mon all over. Selfish as.’

  ‘Nadja!’

  I jumped, glancing back across the room to see a man in charcoal suit trousers and a black, open-necked shirt standing on the platform. He had thick, curling, Italian-Stallion hair cut short and the kind of even tan I’m genetically incapable of reproducing. Somewhere in his thirties, I’d say, with every muscular inch of him screaming: lifts weights regularly. And: thug. Gran and I knew the type, and they didn’t frequent The Star unless things were desperate.

  Beneath the harsh lighting the man’s black eyes glittered. ‘Who are you people?’ he shouted, jumping down off the stage, striding towards us.

  Nadja sprang up above the level of the countertop like a Jack-in-the-box and hastily shoved a bundled-up plastic bag into Jordan’s hands across the bar.

  ‘This was hers, this was all,’ she gabbled. ‘Now get out of here, okay? O’Loughlin’s a murderous prick, but he’s got nothing on Roman when he’s angry. Don’t come back. I mean it. And tell her as well. I can’t protect her. She’s not welcome. Pissed off a lot of people, vanishing like that.’

  Jordan nodded his thanks, bundling the green plastic bag and me under his arm. But then he hesitated for a moment and said, ‘Nadja? For what it’s worth, Monica just wants you to know that she’s sorry. She meant to tell you herself before she…left. But she never got the chance.’

  ‘Sorry for what?’ Nadja replied, genuine confusion on her pale, pinched face. ‘She’s got my number. Tell her to use it. Now go. Just go.’

  Jordan and I spun for the door, but not before Roman’s voice sounded out angrily, ‘Stop! I said stop, you little bastards.’

  He crashed into something, swearing and kicking it out of the way as Jordan and I began careening in earnest through the forest of abandoned chairs and tables towards the door.

  ‘Hurry!’ Jordan rasped. ‘Almost there.’

  But I couldn’t help looking back over my shoulder. As I watched, Nadja shot out around the front of the bar, moving to head off her boss before he could reach us. My head was pounding. The cold and flu tablets I’d taken this morning had finally worn off. Even the slow stirring of air from the fan was beginning to hurt my skin. I slowed for a moment, clutching at a bentwood chairback, dizzy.

  ‘Soph!’ Jordan urged, tugging on my arm.

  Behind us, Roman began to shout at Nadja in a language I didn’t understand. There was a scuffling sound, a woman’s cry, and then Roman was right on top of us, his hand on Jordan’s shoulder. As he swung Jordan around, pulling us both off balance, I caught sight of Nadja kneeling on the floor tiles near the bar, her long hair covering her face.

  ‘You little shits!’ Roman snarled as Jordan pushed me into the space behind him, the door close at my back. ‘You don’t just walk into my place and take stuff off the premises without consulting with me first.’

  Roman snatched the bundle of plastic out from under Jordan’s arm, shoving him hard into me for good measure, before digging around in the bag and pulling out a guy-sized black T-shirt with a Death’s head design on it, entwined with silver daggers and red roses. Gran and I called the look gay-designer-pirate. Everybody who dressed like that drank two doors down, at Deezy’s.

  As the T-shirt slid free of the plastic, a greeting card, a cheap ballpoint pen and a loose blue envelope fluttered to the ground. I bent, intending to retrieve them, but Roman wagged a chunky finger at me.

  ‘Uh uh.’ He swept the card up off the ground, frowning over the cartoony Thank you! message on the outside, then the words scrawled across the inside in big, loopy handwriting.

  Upside down, Jordan and I read:

  To Carter K – for services rendered.

  Always, M x

  ‘You Carter?’ He looked up, addressing Jordan belligerently. ‘Lots of people been looking for Monny’s little friend. Didn’t think you was real.’

  Jordan shook his head. ‘Just the courier,’ he mumbled. ‘Pick up, drop off. Owed someone who owes someone a favour. Don’t know nothing.’

  At the periphery of my sight I saw Nadja’s head come up sharply at Jordan’s words. Roman’s gaze narrowed on me, mashed into the door by Jordan’s weight and barely breathing.

  ‘I know you,’ Roman said, frowning, dark eyes raking my face.

  ‘Don’t know you,’ I replied, shaking my head, my fat ponytail bouncing on one shoulder. ‘Never been here before, never seen you before, I swear.’

  ‘But I seen you,’ Roman said, dropping the card and T-shirt as he shoved Jordan out of the way. He gave me a slow top-to-toe once-over that made my skin crawl. ‘Yeah. You’re that skinny bitch they’re calling the North Fitzroy Nostradamus, The Saviour of Sancerre Street. Say you saved all those people because you can see the future.’

  He mimed talking marks in the air, his laughter unamused.

  ‘You got the wrong person,’ I whispered.

&nbs
p; ‘She’s just my girlfriend,’ Jordan interjected, and it sounded so real tripping off his tongue that, even now, I ached for it to be true. ‘We’re not even here, okay?’

  Roman ignored him, placing a hard finger under my chin and lifting it so that I couldn’t look away. I had at least a couple of inches on him, but his menacing presence, his virulent cloud of aftershave, seemed to fill my entire world.

  ‘The Reavers like to drink here,’ he said slowly and clearly. ‘It’s almost a home away from home for Keith O’Loughlin and his boys. That’s all I’m saying.’ He thrust his jaw in Nadja’s direction. ‘She’s his favourite. Likes his women to look like women, look like her. The tits, the long black hair. Very particular on that score. Has a type.’

  The man’s laughter was harsh.

  ‘Take a good look into your future, girly, and you’ll see Keith O’Loughlin and his mates standing in it if you’re not careful. Everyone knows where you live. All it would take would be one word from me that you were here on Mon’s behalf, and you’d be dead. O’Loughlin’s not a forgiving man.’

  Roman shoved me away so hard the back of my head smashed into the door. Then he turned, on the verge of walking away, when he suddenly spun back around, jabbing his finger into my breast bone. ‘Today Tonight—is that what this is all about? You miked up?’

  Deliberately keeping me out of Jordan’s reach, Roman put his hands around my waist and I stood very straight in the tight circle of his grip, trying not to shudder.

  ‘Is it?’ he murmured, his hands moving up and down my sides, drifting down across my hips and up my spine. He followed the meagre curves of my body in a parody of a shake down, knowing it would revolt me.

  I shook my head, feeling hot and sick under his touch, gazing at a point to the left of Roman’s head as his hands continued their lazy exploration. ‘Mon owes me money, and a lot more besides,’ he murmured intimately. ‘You see her, you tell her she’d better be ready to pay up.’

  ‘Hey,’ Jordan snarled, gripping me by the arm and pulling me back into his body so hard that Roman was forced to let go. ‘Hands off, buddy. We were just supposed to pick up a bag. That’s all. Not cop a free feel.’

  Roman leered into both our faces. ‘So pick it up then, buddy, and piss off. Neither of you got the goods to work here. Get.’

  He threw his head back and laughed, striding away in Nadja’s direction as I scraped the T-shirt, card and envelope off the ground, stuffing them into the plastic bag with trembling hands.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I hissed, still feeling the man’s hard fingers on the sides of my breasts. ‘Jordan, please.’

  I bit the insides of my cheeks to hold back my tears as Jordan pulled the door open to let us out. Before it even had time to swing closed on the Maximus Lounge, we were half running, half stumbling down the reeking, silent upper hallway, laughing in sheer terror.

  11

  When we were both safely inside the car, accelerating away, I started dry heaving in shock, sprawled lengthways against the door. Jordan wisely kept his silence until we reached the outskirts of the city.

  ‘Want me to stop the car, Sophie?’ he asked.

  But I managed to slide back up into a sitting position and fumbled back into my seat belt.

  ‘I’d just like to go home, please,’ I replied, my voice very small. I crossed my arms tightly over my chest. All Roman had done was touch me through my clothes, but I still felt dirty. How had Mum stood it all those years she was a ‘dancer’?

  I sniffed, blinking back the urge to sneeze and cry at the same time, and Jordan shot me a white-faced look. The rolled up plastic bag was nestled on his lap like a small, sleeping animal that could turn feral if provoked.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ he muttered, pushing a fall of brown hair out of his eyes.

  I shrugged, trying to show him I was totes cool with hard fondling from a perfect stranger. ‘What? That I’m a prude? How could it be?’

  Jordan shook his head. ‘Once the lights went up, once we knew what that place was, I should have had you wait outside. I should have known.’

  ‘Your expertise extends to reading the dead, not the living,’ I said hollowly, ‘don’t sweat it, mate.’

  Jordan renegotiated our original route in reverse, tossing me the plastic bag at one of the intersections. I pulled out the men’s T-shirt and held it up for him at the next change of lights.

  He wrinkled his nose. ‘That’s it?’ he said. ‘That’s not an answer, that’s a fifteen-dollar shirt.’

  ‘There was that card,’ I responded numbly, feeling his disappointment; I felt it, too. Eve—I couldn’t bring myself to call her Monica—hadn’t given us enough to go on.

  We were two streets away from The Star. I slumped down lower in my seat in case it was a slow news day and rabid journos were still parked out front. While I was making myself as small as possible, Jordan fished the card out of the plastic bag and rested it on the dashboard, re-reading it out loud.

  To Carter K – for services rendered.

  Always, M x

  ‘No good,’ he muttered as he took the narrow, concealed entrance that fed into Sancerre Lane and the back entrance of The Star. ‘Gives us nothing.’

  ‘You’re telling me?’

  Jordan dug around in the bag some more and retrieved the blue envelope. His expression suddenly changed and he turned the front of it in my direction as he steered the car slowly up the lane.

  ‘Carter Kelly,’ I read aloud. It was written in the same loopy hand from the inside of the Thank You! card.

  Eve had maybe started to write the guy’s address on the front. There was a single vertical line under the name. But she’d never gotten any further before she’d shoved the envelope back in the bag.

  ‘How many C. Kelly’s could there be in the book?’ I said wearily as we bumped down the cobbles towards home past the usual array of locked up, spray-painted garage doors.

  ‘Plenty,’ Jordan replied with a frown. ‘That’s the problem. People called Kelly aren’t exactly thin on the ground. You’d have to call each one. And the right guy might not even be listed.’

  ‘I can start looking once I get inside,’ I murmured. ‘I’ll be fine once I get inside. Really, I’ll take it from here. I’m used to Eve’s, um…’

  ‘Methodologies?’ Jordan cut in. ‘I still don’t know how you identified all those people if this is the kind of help she gives you. You’re amazing, you know that?’

  ‘Like, the opposite of,’ I retorted, leaning back against my headrest.

  I looked up through the window at a sudden bright break in the clouds, feeling the faint warmth of the late afternoon sun on my face for the first time that day. I closed my eyes momentarily.

  ‘It was all dumb luck, J. The usual way I operate.’

  He pulled to a stop outside The Star’s fire door. I scraped myself together and undid my seat belt. Everything hurt. To make matters worse, I had to tip my head back at an oblique angle to stop the snot from leaking out my nose in a thin stream.

  Jordan leaned back against the driver’s door, looked at me. ‘I’ll just come in, make sure you’re okay,�
� he said in a neutral voice.

  Wordlessly, I popped my own door and shouldered it open, almost falling flat on my face on the bluestone cobbles outside.

  As Jordan pushed open his door, I held up one hand, palm out, noticing with a detached, I’m-about-to-burn-all-my-bridges-with-the-hottest-guy-in-school kind of calm, that I was noticeably swaying from side to side like a drunk elephant. The urge to flee was rising in me, like a scream.

  ‘I need a bad-ass dose of antihistamines,’ I rasped into his face across the roof of the car, swiping at my nose with the back of my sleeve for that extra touch of elegance. ‘What I don’t need, Jordan Haig,’ I added, wagging a shaky finger at him, ‘is expectation and hope. I need to get this goddamned phase of my life over with so that my sparklyarkly future—whatever that is—can start. Now just go home, will you?’

  I squinted at my surroundings beadily, imagining a lingering scent of violets wrapping around me in the chill air and swung my pointer finger in a semi-circle.

  ‘All of you. Go home. Trouble me no further this night.’

  Having delivered possibly the last words I would ever speak in Jordan Haig’s hearing, I swerved around the front of the car in the direction of the fire door. But Jordan somehow got there before I did and we stared each other down. The sound of my own blood was roaring in my ears. I had to force myself not to look away first. We were standing so close to each other, I could see every tiny, milk-coffee coloured freckle dappling the bridge of his excellent nose, and I’m sure it was likewise from his POV, except my nose was red.

  It was excruciating meeting his eyes but, for once, I refused to back down.

  ‘I am trying to tell you to go away,’ I muttered with as much dignity as I could manage. ‘I’m trying to tell you that I don’t need your help and you aren’t reading the signals. Damn it.’