Two Man Station

by Lisa Henry

  Great. So Gio had waded straight into a shit fight here, hadn’t he? But that didn’t mean he was wrong. “Does that give her a free pass, Sarge?”

  The water bottle made a crack as the sergeant tightened his grip on it. “If you want to charge her . . .” He shook his head. “If you really think there’s a benefit to the community in charging some woman who wouldn’t hurt a fly just because she had too much to drink tonight and did something silly . . . if you want to humiliate her by putting her up in front of a magistrate, then you go right fucking ahead, Gio. That’s what you do, isn’t it? You fuck up people’s lives.”

  Gio froze, a wave of hot, sick shame breaking over him.

  “If you want to charge her, you be my guest,” Sergeant Quinn said, his voice dropping to a warning tone that made Gio fight not to flinch away. “And if you want to complain that I’m not doing my job properly, well, you’ve got Ethical Standards on speed dial, don’t you?”

  He didn’t wait for Gio to reply, and Gio wasn’t sure he could have found the words in any case. The sergeant headed down the short corridor to his office, and slammed the door shut behind him.

  Gio sat there, numb, the blood roaring in his skull and the silence only broken by Andrea’s off-key singing from the cell.

  The entrance to Windermere Station was marked on the highway by a tyre hanging from a post. The tyre was painted bone-white. If it had ever had the station name on it, the weather had long ago worn it away. A baked dirt road crazed with heat cracks led up to the house. It churned into red dust under the tyres of the police LandCruiser. The drive out from town had been quiet, the tension tugging at the ends of Jason’s frayed nerves. He wished this was the sort of job he could knock over by himself, but better to spend an uncomfortable few hours in Gio’s company than head on out to Windermere on his own to serve Brian Howe with his DV paperwork and seize his firearms. The serving of the paperwork should be fine. It was the firearms that Jason was cautious about. There was never any telling how someone would take the news that they were being divested of their weapons. Most of the property owners in the division had firearms for taking care of pigs and roos. Of course Brian Howe would be pissed off they were getting taken off him.

  The LandCruiser bounced over the potholed dirt road.

  Jason risked a glimpse at Gio. Gio was tight jawed. He was wearing sunglasses. His face was a tense mask.

  Yeah.

  Okay, so the dig about Ethical Standards had probably been uncalled for, but Gio needed to wrap his head around the fact that things out here were different. They had to be. A country copper didn’t get to put a divider up between on duty and off duty, between work and home. The lines bled together. The edges blurred. Jason had to live in the community he policed, which meant that he had to use his discretion when it came to arresting or charging people. Jesus. It meant that he thought twice about giving out speeding tickets rather than warnings. Jury fuckers, he’d heard tickets called before; all it took to sink a prosecution was one juror with an entirely unrelated grudge about that time the coppers had cost them a few hundred dollars. And take that attitude and multiply it by a hundred in a small town. Nothing would put an entire community offside faster than some uptight arsehole who refused to give anyone any slack. Nothing would shut down cooperation faster than charging someone like Andrea with wilful exposure and being drunk in a public place, instead of just letting her sleep it off in a cell and then driving her home. Successful policing in country towns wasn’t measured in arrest stats. It couldn’t be.

  Still, his dig about Ethical Standards had been pretty bloody low.

  But then Gio’s behaviour on the Coast had been low as well, hadn’t it? It had been a dog act. Everyone knew that.

  There was still a shadow of a bruise on Gio’s jaw courtesy of Kev Lindeman, and Jason tried not to think of how vulnerable Gio had seemed in the aftermath of the assault.

  “It’d be good to know you’ve got my back here, Sarge.”

  And Jason wanted to promise that he did, but trust was a two-way street. Jason would have liked to believe the reverse was true as well, but he knew better.

  They continued the drive in silence as Windermere Station slowly resolved itself from the haze of heat and dust. A homestead and outbuildings. Sun-bleached fence posts and rusted tin roofs. The house yard was a riot of colour. Shrubs of bougainvilleas dotted what must have been a hard-won patch of lawn, bursts of bright petals waving in the breeze.

  Jason parked the LandCruiser in front of the house, grabbed the paperwork, and stepped out into the heavy heat of the day. Gio walked around the LandCruiser and fell into step beside him as Brian Howe approached them. A blue cattle dog slunk along behind Brian, furtively. A red one, tail wagging, pushed ahead.

  Brian Howe had the look of every other man from this sort of country. Deep lines cut through the tanned skin around his eyes. His nose was scarred where old skin cancers had been cut out, and his thick greying hair held the imprint of his hat even when his battered Akubra was wedged under his arm. He wore elastic-sided boots, faded jeans, and a worn plaid shirt in three different shades of dust.

  “G’day, Brian,” Jason said. “We’re here about Patricia.”

  “What about her?” the man asked warily, and that just confirmed it, didn’t it? His wife hadn’t come home last night and now the police had turned up, but he wasn’t panicking that she’d driven off the highway into a ditch. He knew exactly what this was about.

  Gio stood beside him, a solid presence. Jason glanced at him and saw that his hand was resting on his utility belt. It was a casual pose, but it also put him in easy reach of his taser if he needed it. Which Jason didn’t think would be necessary, but he’d been a copper long enough to know that things could turn to shit in a heartbeat. And whatever differences he and Gio had, when it came to the job they both wore the same uniform.

  “She came to see us at the station last night,” Jason said. “She made a statement about domestic violence.”

  Jason kept his expression impassive as Brian’s ran the gamut between anger and denial. He settled on denial in the end. “I don’t know what you’re bloody talking about!”

  “I’m here to serve some paperwork on you,” Jason said. “It’s called a Temporary Domestic Violence Order, and there are conditions that I need to explain to you and—”

  “I didn’t bloody touch her!” Brian exclaimed, face going red.

  Gio took a step forward. The red cattle dog snuffled around his boots. The blue one slunk away.

  “There are conditions I need to explain to you,” Jason repeated, “and you’ll need to appear in court.”

  “I didn’t!” Brian huffed, squinting at him.

  “I’m not the one you need to argue with, Brian.” Jason held out the order. “You get to go to court and tell the magistrate your side. But until then, Patricia’s not coming home, and this order says that you’re not to try and approach her in the meantime, or phone her, or get anyone else to do it for you, okay?”

  “I’m not signing anything!”

  “You don’t need to sign anything,” Jason said, his voice level. “You don’t even need to read the order, but I’m going to verbally advise you of the conditions, and I’m not leaving until you confirm that you’ve understood them.”

  Brian snatched the papers out of his hands, and for a moment Jason thought he was going to tear them up. Then, hands shaking, he folded the papers up and jammed them into his shirt pocket. “This is rubbish!”

  “If you breach any of the conditions on the order, you will be arrested.”

  Brian sagged then, mouth opening and closing like a guppy’s, and Jason felt a flash of contempt for him. A blustering bully when it came to dealing with his wife, but nowhere near as bloody tough when it came to Jason and Gio. Brian stood there like a lump while Jason recited the conditions on the order.

  Gio was a silent presence at his side.

  “Do you understand these conditions?” Jason asked when he’d gone
through them.

  “Yeah,” Brian mumbled, and spat in the dirt.

  “Your court date’s on the twenty-fourth,” Jason said. “Nine a.m.”

  Brian huffed.

  And now for the fun part.

  Jason exchanged a look with Gio. “And Brian? We’re gonna need you to turn over all your guns.”

  “Who pissed in his Cornflakes?” Sandra muttered as Gio shouldered his way through the back door of the station with Brian Howe’s .222 Remington Bolt-Action in one hand, and a .303 Lee-Enfield that dated back to the Second World War—and definitely wasn’t registered—in the other. Gio either didn’t hear her or ignored her as he headed to the armoury to lodge the firearms.

  “We had a run in last night,” Jason muttered, and shot her a warning look. “I’ll fill you in later.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” she said, and adjusted her glasses. “We’re almost out of toner so I’m putting an order in. There’s only so many times we can pull it out, shake it, and expect it to keep working, and I think we’re fast approaching that point. Do you need anything?”

  “Yeah. How do we keep losing staplers?”

  She fixed him with a stare. “I’m stealing them to sell on the black market to fund my retirement.”

  “Huh.” Jason rolled his shoulders. “And how is the stapler black market business?”

  “Booming,” she shot back. “I’m sending this order off and then I’m going out for lunch. Want me to get anything?”

  “The bakery?” He waited for her nod, and dug his wallet out of his pocket. “Steak pie, no sauce.”

  “You’re an odd duck, Jason.”

  “At least I’m not an old duck.”

  That earned him a snort of laughter as she took his money. She raised her eyebrows and nodded towards the armoury. “I’ll go and see what Petal wants too, shall I?”

  Well, with an attitude like hers, at least Jason wasn’t going to be the only one of them that Gio reported to Ethical Standards. “Sandra, you—”

  Gio stepped back out into the dayroom, holding an opened envelope. Internal mail, by the look of it. “When did this come?”

  Sandra frowned. “This morning. Why?”

  Gio shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “What is it?” Jason asked.

  Gio clenched the envelope tight in his fist. “It’s nothing. It’s personal.”

  “Hey, I’m going for lunch. Do you want anything at the . . .” Sandra trailed off as Gio headed for the back door. It slammed shut behind him. “At the bakery, you arrogant little dickhead?”

  Jason sighed. “Sandra . . .”

  “What?” she asked. “Don’t talk about him like that?”

  “No.” Jason rubbed his forehead. “Just be careful he doesn’t hear you.”

  Sometimes Jason looked at Taylor and felt a sudden rush of some emotion so deep, so all-encompassing that even the word love couldn’t do it justice. He’d felt it first the moment he’d held Taylor after he was born; this weird, wrinkled little thing that somehow he and Alana had made. It had been impossible to wrap his brain around it, because suddenly there had been this entirely new person where there hadn’t been one before. And Alana had been utterly wrung out, her hair a sweaty, tangled mess on the pillow behind her, but she’d had just enough energy left to laugh at the stunned expression on Jason’s face. Sometimes Jason looked at Taylor and still felt the shock of that miracle, a decade later.

  And other times Taylor helped himself to Jason’s razor and tried to teach himself how to shave.

  “You are ten,” Jason told him as he held a wadded-up paper towel to Taylor’s chin. “You don’t have any facial hair.”

  “Not anymore,” Taylor mumbled.

  “No, now you don’t have any skin,” Jason corrected him. He took Taylor’s hand and pressed it against the paper towel. “Hold that there while I find a Band-Aid.”

  Taylor nodded grimly.

  Jason dug around in the top drawer in the bathroom cabinet for a Band-Aid. Alana would have been better at this than he was, or at least that was the position he defaulted to whenever Taylor got hurt. It was his guilt talking. He liked to tell himself it was impossible to imagine her struggling how he still did sometimes, impossible to imagine her falling apart the way he had in the aftermath of her death, but he couldn’t know for sure. Maybe the truth wasn’t that he really thought she’d be better at raising Taylor alone than he was, but simply that if one of them had to die, he wished it had been him. It wasn’t fair that she never got to see her son grow up.

  He found a Band-Aid at last, and some antiseptic cream, and shifted back to where Taylor was sitting on the edge of the bathtub. “Okay. Show me.”

  Taylor peeled the paper towel away carefully.

  It was only a shallow cut, right on the end of his chin, but it had bled freely. Jason dabbed a little of the antiseptic cream on his finger, and then onto the cut, and Taylor hissed. Jason stuck the Band-Aid on, tamping the ends down.

  “That feels weird,” Taylor complained.

  “Don’t touch it,” Jason said. “It can stay on until you have your shower tonight.” He scrubbed his knuckles over Taylor’s head, through his hair. “Now, do you want to tell me why you were shaving?”

  “Kane’s brother Alex shaves.”

  “Kane’s brother Alex is nineteen!” Jason shook his head. “When your chin heals, I’ll show you how to shave. Without a blade.”

  Taylor brightened. “Okay!”

  “Now go and do your homework like you were supposed to be doing.”

  Taylor scurried away.

  Jason disposed of the Band-Aid wrapper and the paper towel, and then turned the tap on and washed the blood out of the sink and down the drain. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror, and grimaced at the bags under his eyes. Hopefully he’d get an early night tonight and not get called out in the middle of it.

  Homework. School lunches. Ironing. Dinner. Sometimes, with his shift work, it was hard to stick to routine. Jason relished it when he was working a few day shifts in a row. It was a hell of a lot easier on both him and Taylor. He got the chance to actually get organised for the next morning, and Taylor got to go to bed in his own room instead of falling asleep in Sandra’s spare room and getting woken up again when Jason picked him up after ten.

  Jason made Taylor’s lunch for tomorrow, and glanced through the kitchen window over towards Gio’s house.

  He probably owed Gio an apology over the whole Andrea incident. He could have taken the time to explain how things were necessarily different here, and how using their discretionary powers in Andrea’s case bought more goodwill around town than charging her would, but instead he’d gone right for the low blow. It had been uncalled for. And, if Gio really did have Ethical Standards on speed dial, pretty fucking stupid too.

  Taylor padded into the kitchen. “Are you making me a Vegemite sandwich?”

  “Yep.” Jason turned his head to look at him. “Problem?”

  “No. I was just making sure.” Taylor perused the lunch makings critically and then helped himself to a rice cracker. “What are we having for dinner?”

  “Plain broccoli.” It was an old joke, or an empty threat, and it always made Taylor snort.

  “Dad, listen.” Taylor’s eyes were bright and he was grinning. “Broccoli, E. coli. Coincidence? I think not!”

  Jason laughed. Taylor looked ridiculously proud of himself. He’d obviously been sitting on that one for a while, just waiting for the right moment to bust it out. “Smart-arse.”

  Taylor beamed, the Band-Aid on his chin shifting, and rewarded himself with another rice cracker. “So, what is for dinner?”

  “How about spaghetti?”

  “Okay.” Taylor grabbed a juice from the fridge and wandered away again.

  Jason’s bolognaise sauce was his mum’s recipe. Mince, a can of tomato soup, an onion, and a dash of dried spices. It was a quick, bland knockoff of the real thing. Actual Italians would probably
scale walls to avoid it, but Taylor liked it. Alana had too. The first night Jason had invited her back to his share house to study, he’d made it for her. It didn’t say a lot for their peers that Alana had been so impressed. Okay, so it was a step up from two-minute noodles, but only a short one.

  Jason finished making Taylor’s lunch and then started on the spaghetti. The late afternoon softened into dusk while he worked, and the light turned golden before it faded into a pink-orange sky dusted with streaks of clouds. The screeching cockatoos flocked back to the rain tree, the branches shifting under their weight, and the stray cat streaked from the tree towards the house, vanishing from Jason’s line of sight once it got close. Insects pinged against the screens. A gecko scuttled onto the windowsill to feed on them.

  The mince and onion sizzled in the pan, and Jason’s stomach growled.

  He and Taylor ate at the table. One end of it was still given over to Taylor’s homework. Taylor shovelled his spaghetti in quickly, and filled Jason in on his progress in some game he and Kane were currently obsessed with. He waved his fork around enthusiastically while he talked, ending up with a glob of sauce down the front of his shirt.

  On nights like these, Jason missed Alana.

  Stupid.

  He would always miss Alana. But on nights like this, or when Taylor was asleep, and Jason would sit on the couch and watch a movie, or lie in bed and read a book, he missed having someone to talk to. Sometimes he just craved the company of another adult. He’d considered dating again—he was ready, he thought—but it didn’t seem fair to expect someone else to be always in third place, behind Taylor and the job.

  He watched as Taylor made another wild arc with the fork and left a splat of sauce on the table.

  “And, Dad, if I got an iTunes gift card, I could use that to upgrade my dinosaurs.”

  “Upgrade them how? Opposable thumbs?”

  Taylor scoffed. “No, with armour!”

  “Oh, well that makes perfect sense.”

  Taylor was still chattering on about dinosaurs with armour when it was his bedtime, still not at all subtly angling for an iTunes card. He climbed into bed, his hair damp from his shower, lugging a few books with him.