Two Man Station

by Lisa Henry

  Jason looked over towards Gio’s house. There was a light on in the living room, but he couldn’t see anyone moving around. He wondered if Gio took showers after they hooked up, or if he just tumbled into bed and fell asleep smelling like sex.

  Want was a greedy emotion. Jason had wanted to kiss Gio, and so he had. He had wanted him in his bed, and that had happened too. And now he wanted more than middle-of-the-night hookups and conversations held in the darkness. What would it be like to wake up with Gio in his bed? To start their day together, with coffee and breakfast and adult conversation? That was the type of intimacy he missed the most from marriage. Sex was only a part of it.

  Gio had just come out of a bad relationship. He was what? Twenty-six? Jason had a good decade on him, plus change. Further to that, Jason was Gio’s boss, he was closeted, and still dreamed of his wife most nights. Jesus, it would be a bloody mess.

  But want wasn’t rational. And every time Jason ran his hands over Gio’s skin, every time he used his mouth to pull up marks, or licked the dip over his collarbones where his sweat made his skin shine, Jason wanted more.

  He finished his beer and went back inside, leaving the cat sitting alone on the veranda.

  Gio was eating his dinner at the truck stop on Wednesday night when Vicki joined him.

  “Don’t even talk to me,” she grizzled, dragging out the chair beside his so she could sit.

  “What’s your problem?” He took the top off his steak burger to add more tomato sauce.

  “Got a speeding ticket, didn’t I?” she growled, stealing one of his chips.

  Gio winced.

  “It’s from last month,” Vicki said. “Fuckers set up right on the bend as you’re coming up from that rise at Leichardt Creek. You know the spot?”

  Gio nodded, surprised that he actually did. “Were you working?”

  “Yeah, but I wasn’t under a code, so I’m stuck with it.” She grimaced. “The points and the fine.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Those arseholes.” Vicki waved her hand at him vaguely. “The traffic guys. Not you and Jason.”

  Gio made a sympathetic noise around his burger, glad it gave him a reason not to answer beyond that. Down on the Coast if an ambo had bitched about a speeding ticket, he would have told them to harden the fuck up. What did he care? He wouldn’t have known them, and so what if they met up over the occasional job? Maybe it would have been different if he’d been in General Duties, but Gio had been in the Tactical Crime Squad back then, and they’d had a very different mind-set. He’d loved how competitive it was there. It was only once he’d left that he’d realised how toxic that environment had been. How cutthroat. It hadn’t been about teamwork. It had been about winning, and fuck everyone else. Fuck other sections, fuck General Duties, and fuck outside agencies completely. It didn’t work like that here, given that he and Vicki tended to shadow one another on their evening and night shifts. For safety, but also for company.

  Vicki’s radio gave a hiss of static. A moment later, her Comms was calling her.

  Gio grabbed one of the chips she’d purloined, and his radio blared to life as well.

  “VKR calling Richmond two-eight-nine.”

  Gio dropped the chip, wiped his fingers on his pants, and stood up. He moved away from the table so that their respective Comms operators weren’t talking over one another, and then reached for the microphone clipped to his epaulette. “Go ahead, VKR.”

  He listened to the details as the operator relayed them, and wrote the job number on his hand.

  “Copy that, VKR. Show me proceeding.”

  He looked regretfully at his burger and chips, and then at Vicki. “Fergusons?”

  She nodded. “Let’s go.”

  There was a part of Gio that would always be surprised how violent people could be, how filled with hate, and how quickly they could lose their shit. He thought it at every domestic violence incident or disturbance that he went to. He’d thought it the first time Pete had been crowding over him, his face twisted up with anger, spraying spit in Gio’s face as he’d just fucking bellowed at him. And Gio, who had been trained to bring someone down in a fight, had just frozen in utter shock. He’d let it happen simply because his brain couldn’t process the fact it was happening. He’d never felt such a disconnect.

  When he pulled up outside Janey Ferguson’s place a few minutes after getting the call, Janey was standing in the front yard screaming, and one of her kids was pulling at her sleeve. The boy was no more than seven or eight. Gio remembered him from the fete. He’d given him a Clancy Koala sticker.

  “Mum,” the boy was saying. “Mum.”

  The neighbours’ curtains snapped shut as Gio approached.

  “Janey?” he called out. “Janey, what happened?”

  He angled his torch towards her. She was wild-eyed—drunk, possibly, or high. She clamped her mouth shut when the light hit her, and moaned instead.

  “Janey, are you hurt?” Gio asked her. “Janey?”

  “Mum,” the boy said, tugging at her sleeve again. “Mum?”

  Gio took the boy by the shoulder and pulled him out of her reach. “What happened, mate?”

  The boy sniffled. “Dad came over.”

  “Is he still here?” Gio asked, angling the torch towards the house.

  “He went again.” The boy showed Gio a gap-toothed grimace.

  “Anyone else here apart from you kids and your mum?” Gio asked.

  The boy shook his head.

  Okay. Gio could deal with Janey on his own. He didn’t need to bother calling Jason out for this.

  “Did you see your dad hit your mum?” Gio asked the boy.

  He was aware of Vicki approaching, lugging her kit. Apparently that was enough to get Janey’s attention.

  “Who the fuck called youse?” she yelled at Vicki. “I don’t need the fucking ambulance! I need the fucking useless fucking coppers to go and get my fucking money back off that cunt!” She screamed the last word loud enough for the entire neighbourhood to hear it.

  “Did Harvey assault you, Janey?” Gio asked.

  “No! But if he comes back here, I’ll fucking stab him!”

  “And I’m out,” Vicki said. “She’s all yours, Gio.”

  Gio nodded at her, keeping his eyes on Janey. “What happened, Janey?”

  “How fucking thick are you?” Janey screamed at him. “I fucking told you! Harvey stole my money!”

  “You keep screaming at me, and you’ll be the one coming down to the station,” Gio said. “Do you understand?”

  Janey wailed, and then moaned like some sort of landed sea creature. Her upper lip shone with snot, and Gio’s stomach turned. “I w-want my money back!” And then she was sobbing.

  Gio took a step back and focussed on the kid again. “Are you kids okay?”

  The boy nodded staunchly.

  “Have you got a grown-up you can call to come and look after you?” Gio asked.

  The boy’s expression dissolved into tears. “Don’t take Mum away!”

  “Mate, I’m not taking your mum away.” Unless she took a swing at him, which seemed increasingly likely. “I just want to make sure there’s a grown-up here who can keep an eye on everyone, alright? Including on your mum.”

  No fucking way was Janey Ferguson in any condition to care for her children. Whatever the outcome of tonight’s incident was, Child Safety would be getting another notification.

  “Auntie Lyn lives in Cooper Street.”

  “Okay,” Gio said. “Let’s go inside and call Auntie Lyn.”

  The boy nodded and scurried towards the front steps. The rest of the kids were peering out at them warily, skinny fingers curled around the doorjamb. One of the older girls had a baby seated on her narrow hip.

  “Janey,” Gio said. “Janey, we’re going inside.”

  Janey tugged at her hair and keened and moaned.

  “Get inside, Janey,” Gio said. “Get inside, and then you can tell me what happened.”
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br />   “I told you!” She stumbled towards the front door. “I already fucking told you!”

  Gio followed her, casting a glance toward the house next door. The curtains twitched. He spared a thought for the people who had to live beside the Ferguson house, and then redirected that thought to the kids who had to live in it.

  “Esme, right?” he asked the oldest girl. The name seemed like an odd fit. It brought to mind old ladies with walking frames, not twelve- or thirteen-year-old girls.

  The girl nodded.

  “Can you go call your Auntie Lyn for me? Tell her she needs to come over, please.”

  Esme nodded, shifting the baby to her other hip before going to find a phone.

  Gio steered Janey into the kitchen. “Sit down.”

  She slumped into a chair at the tiny table.

  The house was the same mess as always: Rubbish piled up in bags beside the bin because nobody had bothered to take it out. Flies hovering over the sink. The stinking nappy bucket in the corner. It was a mess, but not the sort of mess that warranted an emergency removal of the kids.

  “Now tell me what happened tonight,” Gio said, crossing his arms over his chest. “And don’t just yell at me. I need details. I need to know if there was any assault, and I need to know exactly what happened.”

  Janey’s story came out in sobs. Her anger had flooded away now, replaced by tears. She’d invited Harvey around, and they’d been drinking, and then they’d got into a fight and he’d taken her money and her cigarettes. Sixty dollars, and half a packet of Winfield Blues. But Gio was satisfied there’d been no violence. There was nothing here he had to arrest Harvey Ferguson for tonight. It was the usual breach of the no-contact conditions on the Domestic Violence Order.

  “Okay,” he said. “Janey, I can’t take a complaint of theft from you when you’ve been drinking. But I’m working tomorrow, and I’ll come and see you then.”

  She looked up at him through tear-stained eyes. “But what about my cigarettes?”

  They were probably long gone by now. “If I find Harvey tonight, I’ll try and get them back. But if he comes around here again, you have to call me and tell me. You have to call triple zero, because he’s breaching his order.”

  Breaching it because she kept inviting him around.

  He understood it though. The need to believe that this time would be different. He didn’t want to admit he had anything in common with someone like Janey Ferguson, but that was a lie. He’d believed Pete when he’d said it wouldn’t happen again, even when he’d been to so many fucking DV incidents in his years on the job that he’d known it was bullshit. Total bullshit, but he’d chosen to believe it. Set aside all his instinct, all his knowledge, all his experience, and made the conscious fucking choice to delude himself.

  And Janey, he guessed, had exactly the same hard-won experience.

  “Weren’t you going to go to Gympie?” he asked her. “Wasn’t that the plan?”

  “What’s the fucking point?” she mumbled.

  Gio didn’t have an answer for her, but he waited with her until her sister arrived. He made sure she was settled before he left.

  Gio didn’t find Harvey Ferguson during the remainder of his shift, but he did swing by the truck stop again and order some hot chips with extra chicken salt. He was paying for them when he caught sight of the Smoking Kills signs that hid the cigarettes from view.

  “And a packet of Peter Jackson Silver,” he said. “In the twenties.”

  He’d never been much of a smoker. He hadn’t done it since his uni days and couldn’t remember how the hell he’d ever afforded it. But tonight it seemed like a slightly better option than falling into a bottle after his shift. And it really was that kind of a shift.

  He was back at the station at ten, and locked up and heading to the house by a quarter past. He checked his phone to see if there was a message from Jason. Nothing yet, but usually Jason waited until he saw Gio’s lights come on before he texted.

  Gio didn’t bother going inside. He sat on the front steps and lit a cigarette.

  Okay, so that was disgusting.

  He persevered though, and the foul taste soon gave way to a pleasant head spin, and he remembered that yeah, this felt good.

  Life was made up of snapshots. The job was. Gio was supposed to be able to compartmentalise. He was supposed to leave work at work, and not bring it home. Keep his snapshots of head wounds and body parts and blood splatters and crying kids in a shoebox under his bed, hidden away. Those weren’t the snapshots he was meant to keep on display. He wasn’t supposed to shuffle them together with the snapshots of friends and family and days at the beach, and sunlight and smiles bright with laughter. And maybe he hadn’t, right up until Pete had hit him, and just like that the walls had tumbled down and his worlds had bled together.

  Gio closed his eyes and held the cigarette between his shaking fingers.

  “Rough night?”

  “Jesus Christ!” Gio flailed backwards, his heart thumping fast.

  “There’s that situational awareness all the kids are talking about,” Jason drawled, leaning on the rail at the bottom of the steps. His expression was hidden in the darkness. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just, um . . .” Gio squinted at the ember on the end of the cigarette. “Falling back into bad habits.”

  Jason trod up the steps, and Gio shuffled over to make room.

  Jason sat and knocked his shoulder against Gio’s. “Rough night?” he asked again.

  Gio paused a moment to consider the question. “You know, it really wasn’t. Just more of the same from Janey Ferguson.” He took another drag on the cigarette. “Harvey had already left by the time I got the call. There wasn’t any assault, only the breach, and maybe a stealing complaint if she goes through with that when she sobers up.”

  Gio froze as Jason’s hand settled on his back, moving gently up and down his spine.

  Was this walls tumbling and worlds bleeding together?

  “Did you get the breach put on?” Jason rubbed his thumb over the knot of bone at the top of Gio’s spine.

  Gio clamped his lips around the filter on the cigarette and sucked in a burning lungful of smoke. He held it for a moment and then let it shudder out of him. “Yeah. Gonna chase Harvey up tomorrow and charge him for it then.”

  “See if you can get him in custody first thing,” Jason said, lifting his hand for just long enough to move it to Gio’s neck. His fingers were warm against Gio’s skin. “The earlier you get it done, the better your chances are for a halfway meet with a Charters Towers crew. Save you driving the whole way.”

  Gio nodded and relaxed into Jason’s touch. “Yeah. That’s what I figured.”

  Jason kept one hand on the back of Gio’s neck, his thumb brushing against the short hairs at Gio’s nape. With his other hand, he plucked the cigarette from Gio’s fingers, stubbed it out in a shower of sparks against the metal rail of the stairs, and flicked the butt away into the darkness.

  Gio rolled his eyes.

  Then two of Jason’s fingers were pressing against his jaw, turning his head towards him, and Jason’s mouth was on his, and Gio didn’t give a fuck if Jason threw the entire packet over the edge of the stairs. He closed his eyes as they kissed and didn’t want to think about why they were stinging.

  Jason drew back slowly. “Is it hard for you to go to DVs?”

  Gio swallowed. “Part of the job.”

  Jason stared at him in the darkness. “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Sometimes it is.” Gio shrugged. “Not always.”

  Jason ran his thumb along Gio’s jawline, as though he thought his touch could draw the words out.

  Maybe it could.

  Gio held his gaze. “If I could make a mistake like that, like him, then how can I ever trust my own judgement again? When it happened, I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know who I was either.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  Gio snorted and turned his head away. “
Yeah, I know that. I’m not a fucking idiot. I’ve read the same pamphlets and done the same courses as you, remember? I’ve sat there and twiddled my thumbs while some woman from the Domestic Violence Resource Centre wearing a patchwork skirt turns up and lectures a whole room of coppers on how we have to stop victim blaming.” He scowled into the darkness. “I know that.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Jason asked.

  Gio curled his hand over the top of the rail to haul himself up. “Yeah. I don’t know what this is here, but it’s not what I’m looking for tonight.”

  Jason caught him by the wrist and pulled him back down again before he could find his feet. “Then tell me to shut my fucking mouth if it’s none of my business.”

  Gio searched his face in the darkness. “It’s none of your business, Jason.” He leaned closer. “Shut your fucking mouth.”

  “Yeah.” Jason reached up and tugged his fingers roughly through the longer section of Gio’s hair, where his curls were more pronounced. “I’ll shut my mouth, Gio.”

  The blood thrummed in Gio’s veins, and his skin prickled. “Fuck me tonight?”

  “Is that what you want?” Jason’s voice was low.

  “Yeah, that’s what I want.”

  “Okay.” Jason released his hair. “Come over when you’re ready. I’ll leave the back unlocked.”

  Gio nodded.

  This time when he rose to his feet, Jason didn’t stop him. They parted on the stairs. Gio climbed up them, while Jason walked down. The boards on the veranda shifted under Gio’s boots. He dug his keys out of his pocket and let himself into the house. He reached inside and slid his hand up the wall, looking for the light switch and flicking it on.

  Gio went to the kitchen first, and emptied his pockets onto the bench. He held the packet of cigarettes in his hand for the moment, staring at the lurid warning picture on the front that honestly looked less like a diseased lung and more like a dried apricot, and then threw the packet in the bin. The last thing he needed was to get addicted to them again.

  He thought of Jason and wondered if he was exchanging one addiction for another. He wondered which, on balance, was worse for him.