by Lisa Henry
Four days after the shooting, Vicki turned up to Gio’s place with a bottle of Bundy rum.
“I’m on rec leave,” she said. “And you’re on whatever leave you’re on. So get the bloody glasses out.”
They both drank too much, and Vicki didn’t make a big deal of it when Gio’s hands shook too much to pour the rum. She took the bottle back and poured for him. Then she encouraged him to pretend his couch cushions were every ranked officer he’d been interviewed by since the shooting, and to punch the shit out of them.
It was the best he’d felt in days.
Gio woke up the next day with a throbbing head, what felt like a mouthful of gravel, and no regrets.
It was a week and a half before Gio was free to make the drive to Townsville. He’d talked to Sophie about it, and she’d agreed he should go.
“You’ll obviously be miserable until you can see he’s going to be okay, bambino. Just go. Do some shopping. See a movie. Get the hell out of that shitty little town.”
“It’s not that shitty.”
She scoffed at that.
The drive to Townsville was just over five hours. Gio fuelled up in Charters Towers, and then followed the highway east over the Mingela Range. The red dirt gradually transformed into a scrubby green landscape that wasn’t as tropical as Gio had been expecting. The highway widened to two lanes each way as he got closer, and at last the sprawl of warehouses and commercial buildings transformed into the outskirts of a city. Gio saw a few tall buildings in the distance, clustered around the distinctive jutting outline of what had to be Castle Hill.
The traffic thickened around him, and Gio stopped at the first set of traffic lights he’d seen in months. It made him feel oddly homesick for the Gold Coast in a way he hadn’t in a while. He followed the flow of traffic onto the Ring Road, and past Lavarack Barracks towards the Townsville Hospital. Getting a park at the hospital was a bitch; another reminder that he wasn’t in Richmond anymore.
Gio entered the foyer of the hospital. The air-conditioning was cold, and made his sweaty shirt stick to his back. He approached the information desk, showed his badge, and asked for Jason’s room.
He took the lift to the second floor and followed the signage.
He stopped when he reached Jason’s room.
Stupid.
What the hell was he doing?
When he’d started driving, he’d had five hours to decide what he was going to say. Except now here he was, and he had nothing. Fucking nothing. He was tempted to turn around and walk away.
Except Sophie was right. He needed to see that Jason was okay.
A shriek of laughter spilled out into the corridor. Taylor.
Gio drew a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then stepped inside the room. Jason was lying in a bed, Taylor crouched on a chair beside him. They both looked over as Gio walked inside.
“Gio!” Taylor launched himself at him in a flurry of skinny limbs.
Gio caught him and hugged him tightly, his chest aching. He looked over Taylor’s head to Jason.
“Hey, Gio.” Jason smiled broadly, and held his hand out.
Gio set Taylor down, and clasped Jason’s hand. His heart skipped a beat as Jason’s grip tightened, and his wedding ring dug into Gio’s fingers. Gio swallowed; his throat was raw. “Jason.”
He sank down into the chair Taylor had vacated, and stared at Jason helplessly.
Jason rubbed his thumb over Gio’s knuckles.
He’d missed this. Jason’s touch. The simple validation of skin on skin. The comfort that Jason offered him, calming and at the same time frustrating. They’d tried so hard to draw a line between work and off duty, but in the end that wasn’t the line that had tripped Gio up. It was this one here. The one between friendship and something else.
“You okay?” Jason asked him softly.
Gio rasped out a sound that was almost like a laugh. “Um, killed a guy. So, um.”
“Yeah.” Jason’s gaze held his.
The weight of that would take a long time to lift, if it ever did. It wasn’t a matter of right or wrong. A man was dead because of Gio, and that was big. Too big to wrap his mind around still. He didn’t even know how to begin processing it. He was afraid it would change him. He was more afraid it wouldn’t. And he didn’t know how to put any of that into words.
“Yeah,” he echoed instead.
Jason didn’t say anything, just squeezed Gio’s hand again and warmth spread through Gio. His eyes stung.
“Gio?” Taylor asked, nudging into his space. His eyes were large.
“Yeah?” Gio asked.
Taylor bit his lip anxiously. “Is someone feeding the cat?”
Gio had booked a room at a hotel on The Strand online before he’d left Richmond. After leaving the hospital, he spent twenty minutes relearning how to drive in peak-hour traffic, and then he was standing on the balcony of his room, overlooking The Strand and Cleveland Bay. He breathed in deeply, replacing the antiseptic smell of the hospital with salt air. The sunlight glittered on the water, and Gio followed the progress of a ferry for a while as it cut across the bay towards Magnetic Island. The view could hypnotise him if he let it.
Maybe later.
Gio returned back inside and showered. When he was finished, he checked his phone for messages and found one waiting: We’re downstairs! He took the lift down, a smile on his face before the doors even rolled open to reveal Sophie standing in the foyer, Chloe on her hip.
Sophie rushed forward when she saw him, ignoring her luggage, and wrapped herself around him in an awkward hug that left Chloe squashed between them.
“You’ve got me for two days, Gio,” she said when she finally released him. “Let’s talk.”
They walked on The Strand in the late-afternoon sunlight, and bought gelati. Chloe wore most of hers. They found a bench to sit on that overlooked a statue of a dugong that was perfect climbing size for a toddler, and Gio found that somehow the shooting was easier to talk about if he could watch Chloe and not look his sister in the eye. Some of that was probably guilt. Some of it was worrying about what expressions would pass over Sophie’s face.
Sophie linked her fingers with his. “You did the only thing you could, Gio.”
“I don’t know.” He was safe to voice his doubts with her, he knew. “What if it wasn’t? What if he would have put the rifle down if I’d told him to?”
“He’d already shot someone,” Sophie said. “What did he have to lose by shooting everyone else too?”
“You think he would have done it?”
“I think there’s no way to know for sure,” Sophie said after a moment. “But on the balance of probabilities? I think there’s a good chance he would have. And I think you know that too.”
Over at the dugong, Chloe squawked as she slid off its back and tumbled into the grass. She immediately tried to climb it again.
“Look at me, Gio,” Sophie said.
He turned his head to meet her gaze.
Her face was solemn, her eyes wide. “There’s something else, isn’t there? Something you aren’t telling me?”
“I . . .” Gio drew a breath. “Yeah. I need to tell you about Pete.”
“You should have told me,” Sophie said later that night.
Gio stared at the play of lights on the ceiling of the hotel room. “I couldn’t.”
“He was hurting you!”
They kept their voices low. Except for Chloe crashed out in the portacot on the floor, they could have been on one of the long road trips their parents used to drag them on during school holidays. They’d driven from Brisbane to Melbourne once, and spent overnight in some tiny hotel in some tiny town Gio had never heard of before. He and Sophie had shared a room, and felt very grown-up. And sometime in the night their old roles had fallen away, and they’d talked as friends, as equals, and Sophie had told him about a boy she’d slept with, and how it hadn’t been like her friends had said it would be, and she felt dumb because he’d talked her into i
t when she wasn’t ready. And Gio, fourteen years old, hadn’t known if he was supposed to get angry, or if he was only supposed to listen and tell her it wasn’t her fault. Instead, in an effort to share a secret for a secret, he’d blurted out that he thought he might like boys. In that way. He’d panicked afterwards that she’d hold it against him, or that it would be weird in the morning at the very least, but they were closer than ever afterwards. And all because of a night spent talking in a shitty hotel room with ugly orange curtains.
“That’s why I couldn’t tell you, Soph,” he said, his throat aching. “Because you would have wanted to do something.”
There was a sudden rustle of sheets, and then Sophie was climbing into his bed with him. “God, Gio, of course I would have! To him, and to all of them!”
She breathed heavily for a moment, clearly angry, and Gio had a sudden flash of a memory from half a lifetime ago: Sophie in her school uniform, her fists balled and her eyes blazing as she stared down some kid who’d punched Gio at the bus stop. “You leave my brother alone, you little fuck!”
“They don’t know what he did,” Gio whispered. “They think it was just about the steroids, and that I shouldn’t have dobbed him in.”
“Don’t you make excuses for them,” Sophie shot back, fierce. “Even if that had been all he did, he still deserved to lose his job.”
“They shouldn’t have involved you.” He shook his head. “I had a picture of Chloe on my desk. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you apologise for what they did! But don’t ever think you need to protect me, Gio!”
“Soph . . .”
“No,” she said. “No, if I’m being threatened, or my child is being threatened, then you tell me, Gio. You tell me, and I will make so much fucking noise to the police, to politicians, to every journalist who will listen that those fucking arseholes you thought were your friends will regret ever crawling out from under their rocks to harass you. Because the police can’t threaten to fire me, Gio, and they can’t transfer me, and they can’t tell me to keep quiet either!”
Gio swallowed around the lump in his throat. “Soph, I need to keep you out of it.”
“Is it still happening?” she asked him.
He was silent for a long time. Too long, evidently.
“Gio!”
“Just leave it. Please, Soph. I’m dealing with it.”
“Are you really?”
Gio closed his eyes briefly and thought back to his fight with Jason. It might as well have happened in another lifetime. “Jason put in a report. It’s being investigated.”
“And will that make them stop?”
Gio sighed. “I don’t know.”
They rested in silence for a while.
“I have wasted a lot of months being angry with you, Gio,” Sophie said at last, her voice quiet and close to breaking. “I thought you were selfish, leaving me and Ian to deal with Dad. I wish I’d known you felt you didn’t have a choice. I wish you’d told me.”
“I couldn’t.” His eyes stung. “I didn’t know how.”
“I know.” Sophie moved closer to him, shifting onto her side and throwing an arm over his chest. “I love you, bambino. Please don’t lie to me again.”
Gio closed his eyes. “I love you too. And I won’t, I promise.”
Gio spent a week in Townsville after Sophie and Chloe had flown home again. He had a few appointments at District Office. The assistant commissioner said that Ethical Standards had assured him that Gio would be cleared to go back to work by next week, although they would also be referring the case to the CCC—standard procedure—and there would be a coronial inquest held in the next few months as well. The assistant commissioner told Gio he had his full support, and Gio tried to believe it. Gio also had several meetings with the HSO. She’d checked in a few times by phone since the shooting, and it was good to put a name to a face at last. She talked to him about what to expect in the next few weeks and months, in terms of both psychological and physical symptoms. Gio took all the pamphlets and tossed them into the front seat of his car. He thought about throwing them out, but he didn’t. He read through them at the hotel.
He visited Jason every day at the hospital. Jason was getting more and more frustrated being stuck there, which Gio guessed meant he was healing.
“I want to go home,” he grumbled. “I want to sleep in my own bed. God knows Taylor’s missed enough bloody school.”
Taylor, sitting on the floor doing a word search in a magazine, looked up and grinned.
“And Sandra’s on my case about this kid she knows,” Jason said.
“What kid?”
“Some friend of the family. She’s seventeen, and she’s just got a job at the supermarket. She starts a week from Monday. Her parents live a couple of hours out of town, so . . .” Jason grimaced.
“That could work,” Gio said cautiously.
“Maybe.” Jason sighed. “I’m half expecting Sandra will have her moved in by the time I get home.”
“That sounds like something Sandra would do.”
“If a girl comes to live with us, I’ll have to wear pants all the time,” Taylor piped up. “So will you, Dad.”
“That’s . . . that’s not going to be a problem, mate.” Jason shook his head. “Anyway, there’d be someone in the house overnight if I got called out on jobs. Not that that’s going to be an issue for a long bloody while yet.”
Gio watched the careful way he rubbed his chest. “It’ll be sooner than you think.”
Jason exhaled.
“Pants,” Taylor intoned ominously, and then bounced to his feet. He sidled around Jason’s bed. “Can I get some chips from the vending machine? And some Maltesers?”
“One thing,” Jason said, and nodded at the drawer.
Taylor dived in and grabbed his wallet. “Thanks, Dad!” He helped himself to a five-dollar note and headed off down the hallway.
Gio turned his head to watch him go. When he looked back again, Jason’s storm-grey gaze was fixed on him. Gio leaned back in his seat. “I’m probably heading back in a few days.”
Jason raised his eyebrows. “You’re not sticking around here?”
“Someone has to be there to explain to the newies about bingo night.”
Jason smiled. “I thought they’d have to lever you out of Townsville with a crowbar.”
Gio shrugged. “Richmond’s sort of grown on me.”
Jason’s smile widened. “Yeah, it does that. Alana and me, we said we’d be there three years at most. But then it gets in your blood somehow, and you can’t imagine heading back to a city.”
A few months ago, Gio could never have imagined it. But now, when he thought of the mornings he’d spent jogging by the river as the sun came up, illuminating the eucalypts and setting the sky behind them on fire, he could believe it. It was big country, but it didn’t make Gio feel small. It made him stand taller.
“You’ll make a country copper of me yet,” he said.
Jason’s smile faded into something almost wistful. “Did we fuck it up?” he asked quietly.
“What?”
Jason’s mouth quirked. “Nah, it’s nothing.”
Gio shook his head. His heart pounded. “Bullshit. Say what you mean, Jason.”
“The thing with us,” Jason said. “Did we fuck it up?”
“We really did,” Gio said, and tempered his words with a slight smile.
“I’m sorry.” Jason’s expression was grave. “About the way I handled things with the Ratsak. I got angry. I got ahead of myself. I should have talked to you first.”
“Don’t.” Gio closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, Jason was holding his gaze. “Not when we both know you would have done your job and reported it anyway.”
Jason didn’t answer, but his expression tightened.
“I’m sorry too,” Gio said. “For threatening to report you over Taylor. It was a low blow.”
“The difference is, you didn’t report it.”
> “You were right though.” Gio shrugged. “And maybe nobody will be able to prove anything, but it might get them to pull their heads in.”
“Last time we talked about this, you were dead certain it’d get them to escalate.”
“I’m done with being bullied.” Gio’s heart beat faster. “Fuck them. You’ve got my back, right?”
“Yeah, I’ve got your back.” They sat in silence for a while, and then Jason quirked his mouth into a brief, regretful smile. “So, the thing with us. We fucked it up.”
“Yeah,” Gio murmured. “But if you wanted . . .” He swallowed. He felt as though he were standing on the edge of a precipice, ready to leap. He didn’t know if he would fall, or if he would fly. But he was tired of standing there. “If you wanted,” he said, “we could try again?”
Jason pressed his lips together tightly for a moment, and then cleared his throat. “I’m not an easy sell, Gio. Me and Taylor, we’re a package deal.”
“I know that.”
Jason dropped his gaze to his hand. The light glinted off his wedding ring. “I’m still in love with my wife.”
Gio laced his fingers through Jason’s. He lifted Jason’s hand and pressed his mouth to it. The gold band was cold in the air-conditioning. “I know that too.”
Jason’s expression transformed. His bottom lip trembled. A muscle in his cheek twitched. His eyes widened as though he couldn’t understand what he was seeing when he stared at Gio. He looked achingly vulnerable.
“I think we could have something,” Gio said. “Something real. And I want to try again.”
Jason’s throat clicked as he swallowed. “I want that too.”
Gio stood and leaned over him. He slid his fingers into Jason’s hair, and pressed their mouths gently together. The kiss was too cold, too dry, and tasted faintly of the antiseptic smell that permeated the entire hospital. It was as perfect as Gio needed it to be. Not an ending, but a beginning.
