Either Side of Midnight : A Novel (2020)

by Stevenson, Benjamin

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘In that case’ – Harry stuck out his hand – ‘Sam Midford.’

  The owner went inside, then came out a couple of minutes later, handing over a key and something larger and handled delicately – a cup? – to Harry. Harry came over to the car, slapped the keyring against the window so Jack could see a large number 4 written in texta, and then walked towards the rooms. Jack parked in the spot spray-painted with a yellow four and got out. In front of the room was a small glass table with an overflowing ashtray and two green plastic chairs. Also on the table was a mug with cling-wrap over the top. Milk, Jack assumed. This was the kind of place that gave out individual portions on check-in.

  ‘Bad news,’ said Harry, key in the door. ‘Apparently, we’ve picked a bad weekend. There’s a triathlon here tomorrow. This is all they have.’ He opened the door and flicked on the light. A shared room, twin beds. Their strange date continued. The beds were thin, short and each had one fawn blanket tucked so tight as to tear. Harry tossed the key on the bed closest to the entrance and held the door open for Jack.

  ‘Should have got you the fucken panda.’

  CHAPTER 25

  ‘You think I killed my brother?’

  Harry’s words floated from the dark. Jack was lying fully clothed on top of his blankets. He’d been awake for what felt like hours. Harry had turned the TV on initially, and Jack had listened with his eyes shut, the end of a movie with lots of yelling and cars revving. Harry must have fallen asleep, because the credits music faded out and was replaced by some inane late-night gameshow with simple but impossible to win puzzles. ‘Call now if you can tell us the secret word!’ A voice familiar in the way that all late-night TV hosts sound, because they need that generic accent that makes an audience feel like they’ve met them before. Like a radio co-host, giggly and familiar. Jack got sick of the drone, staggered over to the bright TV, hand shielding his eyes, and flicked it off. Lay back down. His movement must have woken Harry, because that’s when he spoke.

  The two beds were parallel, a metre and a half between them. There was a light directly outside the window, a fluorescent tube that buzzed softly and burned at either end. The curtains were threadbare, sun-worn, and the light cast the room in a dappled, underwater filter. That was a good thing. Harry’s bed was under the window. Jack would see his shadow if he moved.

  ‘I’ve considered it,’ Jack said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Be pretty stupid to hire me if you did.’

  The bedsprings creaked. ‘Are you scared of me?’

  ‘No.’ Jack didn’t know if he was lying.

  ‘Good.’

  The wall rumbled as the room next door flushed their toilet: it sounded like they’d shat nails as the pipes rattled. They were quiet for a few minutes. Harry groaned, slapped the bedside table with a searching hand, then rolled back, phone in his hand, blue glow on his face.

  ‘Is it in the news yet?’ Jack asked.

  ‘They’re saying there was an incident at the carnival.’

  ‘Choice of words.’

  ‘You think someone died?’

  ‘Didn’t look good when I saw him. Besides, you don’t pitch tents otherwise.’

  ‘You think that means the cops believe us?’

  ‘If Lily’s dad couldn’t get an investigation after more than a decade of trying, I very much doubt I’m the one who’s changed their minds,’ Jack said. ‘There’s something they’re after, but I don’t know what it could be. Let’s say we’re on our own until we know we aren’t.’ He changed topics. ‘Was Lily depressed? Bullied? Everyone’s told me she killed herself, but not why she would. Let’s pretend it’s not a murder, for a second.’

  ‘Ryan, Sam, and Maurice all believe it is. Sam said in his letter.’

  ‘I know. But that word’s powerful. Too powerful. Maybe we need to stop throwing it around. Just to help us think. You knew her, right?’

  ‘A little. As in, I knew her a little, not that she was a little depressed.’ Harry clicked the phone and the glow disappeared.

  ‘She and Sam broke up?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Was she upset about that?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘She wore his ring. They must have been semi-serious. I’d be surprised if she wasn’t upset. Why’d they break up?’

  ‘You and your brother ever talk about girls?’ Harry said. Jack was silent. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You’re wearing his clothes.’ Jack dropped the accusation into the dark. He’d noticed when Harry had handed him his jacket at the carnival. The coat was the same one Sam had been wearing in the photos on his family’s walls. A sports coat with a red stripe up the sleeve. Jack closed his eyes, remembering how Harry had taken the brown leather jacket off before they’d gone up to Celia’s door: she would have recognised it. After, he’d been dusted up in mud and grass stains. Celia wouldn’t have noticed the regular clothes – the shirt, the pants – behind the damage.

  Jack listened to Harry breathe, waiting for the creak of bedsprings. Harry didn’t get up.

  ‘Even though we weren’t talking, I still watched every episode,’ Harry said. ‘You’ve seen my archive – I recorded them. So of course I was watching when he did it. At first I thought it was a stunt, but Twitter picked it up pretty quickly. I drove to his house, to check if he was okay, I guess. I wasn’t going to say anything, but I just wanted to see him get home. Then Celia comes rushing out, just like she said she did, with Heather in her arms. Hammers that four-wheel drive down the street, and, would you believe, leaves the front door flapping. By then the news was firming up. They were all saying he was dead. And I don’t really know why I did it, but I just walked in. Just wanted to see how he lived. Twenty-two minutes, Jack.’ Harry sighed. ‘He’s twenty-two minutes older than me and our lives are completely different. Sometimes I wonder if I was born on the twenty-fourth and he was born on the twenty-fifth, would we be different people? Would we become each other? It’s stupid, but I put on that stupid fucking brown leather coat and looked in his gleaming fucking white bathroom and I wanted to be him. I guess I’d always looked up to him – he was the older, better version of me. And every news outlet in the country was now saying he was dead. So I took them. I grabbed an armful of everything hanging in his closet and I walked out to my car and I drove home. I dumped them on my couch, and watched and watched and watched all of my old episodes and it was like watching the life I missed out on, and I wished I could be him. So the next morning, I put his face on, like I do every morning, but this time I’m talking about the way he smiles, the way his eyes crease like he’s pleased to hear whatever you’re telling him, the way he’s always thanking his guests by grabbing their shoulder, the way he talks . . . God . . . Sam had a way with words. He was always the clever one. He wrote all our jokes. He’d just whack a script down and it would be magic.’

  Jack remembered all the times he’d thought Harry’s mask was dropping, that snarl that lay under the smile when they were at Channel 14. That bravado, that confidence, the neatly pressed clothes and the tailored coats, those gleaming white teeth, those big meaty hands always reaching out.

  Harry said, ‘When I met you in the prison, I felt like I was wearing this different skin. I was so in control.’ He paused. ‘I tried my brother on. And I liked it. Twenty-two minutes. Could have been me.’

  ‘You’re not on two per cent either, are you?’

  ‘I’ll pay.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘I said I’ll pay. I scraped ten grand together.’

  ‘You said you were between cars, but you sold your car for that, didn’t you?’ Jack thought of the chalk price on his own windshield, how selling it was his family’s own rock bottom.

  ‘I’ll pay.’

  ‘You’re killing me.’ Not just me, Jack didn’t say. That money was time for Liam. Now he did actually have to find something to make a show about, something to sell to Gareth Bowman. He was back where he started. Before
that, even. The rooms in prison were smaller than in this motel, but the blankets itched less.

  ‘Are you going to stop?’

  ‘Depends. Which version of you am I supposed to believe when you tell me you didn’t kill your brother.’

  Harry’s voice was so quiet it limped across the gap in the beds.

  ‘Well, that’s the thing . . .’

  ‘We’d been on tour a long time,’ Harry started to talk, at the ceiling in the dark. Jack realised why Harry was more comfortable talking in darkness, the same as at the station: it was because he wasn’t wearing his brother’s face. ‘And he was struggling. He never really got a hold on Lily’s death, didn’t process it, but you already know that. What you don’t know is how bad it was. I told you there was drinking, that there were pills, mixed together as if he were trying to write himself off. But it was literally every night. He’d be standing in the wings, sold-out theatre, fucking swaying on the spot. Yet every time he walked out into the spotlight it was the same smile, the same eyes. You wouldn’t know. And then after, in our hotels, he’d just keep going. Now, we were young and on tour and I loved a drink too, but this wasn’t a bit of fun gone too far. Sometimes it seemed like he was doing it deliberately, to see how far he could push me with it.’

  And just how far did he push you? Jack thought, but didn’t say.

  Harry kept talking. ‘Then we got back from Montreal. And we had this pilot, and Channel 14 said they loved it, but they thought I was dead weight and wanted Sam on his own. I told Gareth that Sam on his own was a ticking time bomb, but he wouldn’t listen. And it wasn’t that Sam refused to drop me, it was that I refused to go. I told you that Sam stood up for me because I wanted you to think he was a good guy, so you’d look at his computer and stuff. Truth is, I wanted to stay. Sam looked good in the spotlight, but I wanted it. And then one night I got a phone call from the hospital. I’d had these calls before, whether from nightclubs or restaurants or promoters or girlfriends, but this was the first time it was a hospital. I raced down there, like I always did, because that’s what younger brothers do – we’re on call – and they told me that this was a suicide attempt. I knew he had a problem, but I always maintained that he just wanted to numb something. Just got a bit wild, didn’t know when to stop. But now I know maybe he was trying to drink himself to death. Celia was his doctor that night – that’s how they met. She told me that, with what he took, there was only one conclusion. They pumped his stomach. They had to keep him there until it was deemed safe enough to let him out again. He was adamant that it was an accident. Wrong pills. Wrong beer. And . . .’

  Harry lost his train of thought. ‘Fuck, Jack. He was sitting in the bed smiling at me with his fucking TV-host grin. They said he’d be okay – because he always lands on his feet, always gets up again, and it’s me that actually has to put the work in. He just puts that smile on and says something clever and it’s all okay again. And maybe now I realise he had a mask on just the same as I do. But back then I was still going to these fucking meetings at Channel 14, who kept asking where my brother was, and I had to lie to them and say “It’s just me today”, and I could see them ruling a line through our pilot then and there in that fucking boardroom. And all the while he’s lying in this private hospital pretending like he didn’t try to kill himself, and I’m – you’ve gotta understand this, I was so angry with him, and I’m trying to fix his television show that they don’t even want me on. And I can’t even remember what he said. I can’t. But I knocked this vase of flowers over. There was glass on the floor, big fucking shards of it.’

  Harry was breathing quickly now. Throes of memory.

  ‘And all I could think about was picking one of them up. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to hurt him so badly. And then I’m staring at these shards of glass and he says something snarky like “Settle down, cowboy” and I just . . . I just . . . snapped.’ Harry’s voice calmed, almost as if he stepped away from the memory and was recounting as an observer. ‘I picked up a piece of glass. I put it on the bedside table. Slowly. Deliberately. So it made a big dramatic clink. And I said to him, nice and clear – and I remember exactly what I said because how could you forget destroying your brother like that? I said, “Quit putting on a show. Do us all a favour and do it properly next time.”’

  Harry sniffed. A truck’s headlights scanned through the curtain. Jack could feel Harry’s pain: something spat out that could never be taken back. Words so hurtful they scar. Jack was never a man who used his fists, but he knew the violence of words. They had put him in prison. And he protected himself from them often. His medical condition was the ‘b’ word. They had sat around Celia’s kitchen table, discussing the ‘m’ word in front of her daughter. ‘It’s not what you meant,’ Jack had said to his father, ‘but it is what you said.’ Words kill people all the time. Slowly, quickly – yes or no – but they do.

  ‘I quit the next day,’ Harry said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Harry. You can’t feel respon—’

  ‘Someone talked my brother into killing himself. We’ve got that far. I’d pay anything to know it wasn’t me that put the idea there. That it wasn’t me that did it.’

  ‘That was five years ago. You’re paying an awful lot of money to imagine forgiveness from a brother you weren’t even talking to.’

  ‘How much are you spending to keep your silent brother alive?’ Harry sighed. ‘Look, I’m sorry. That probably overstepped it. The money’s nothing, right? Sam’s got insurance, but it doesn’t pay on suicide. I’ll get a cut of that if we find this bastard. That’s what I was planning to pay you with.’

  ‘And if we don’t?’

  ‘Then that would prove that what I said was his turning point. And I deserve nothing anyway.’ Jack could hear the bedsprings now. Harry was standing, his shoulders square in the frame of light. ‘Forgot to lock the door,’ he explained.

  Jack thought, out of the blue, of Lily Connors. A girl who had bought herself a bolt lock for her bedroom door. Puberty, I guess.

  What was she afraid of?

  ‘Don’t bother with the door. If I’m supposed to believe what you and the Connors are telling me,’ Jack said, ‘this killer won’t even open it.’

  CHAPTER 26

  Jack slept little. His mind was a blur of questions.

  First, he needed to find out what it was that Lily had been trying to protect herself from – why she’d begged her parents for a lock on her door. And that was just Lily – he hadn’t even started to dissect last night. Clearly Black Singlet had something to hide at the carnival. Enough to shoot at a cop over. Enough to die for. It was all too much of a coincidence to be unrelated.

  But it seemed from the letter that Sam had figured it out.

  Jack needed to know what steps Sam had taken that had led him to the killer. The problem was, Jack knew nothing about Lily. Harry didn’t either. The only person who really knew her in the lead-up to her death was Sam, and it was proving quite difficult to ask him questions. Her death hadn’t even been reported online, though little from the area really was – not even the two other murders the policeman had mentioned last night. A girl had done quite well in a reality singing competition – that rated a mention – and otherwise it was entries from Lonely Planet guidebooks or travel blogs promising ‘Australia’s Best Hidden Beaches’ that captured the news cycle of the area.

  It looked like most kids from Wheeler’s Cove went to school in Arlington, where there was a single school for grades one to twelve. Unlike schools now, with honour rolls and sports teams plastered on their websites, thirteen years ago Arlington High School was standing on the doorstep of the digital age, uninvited. He couldn’t find any record of Lily Connors, not even a photo of a sports team or from a school dance. Sam and Harry Midford were mentioned alongside the school, but it was in articles either to do with the Ferris wheel incident or their burgeoning entertainment careers. To complicate things, Lily had died back when not everyone had social media – young people like her w
ere just starting to get mobile phones or, in Sam and Harry’s case, sharing one – and it wasn’t so easy to just log on and snatch someone’s location or phone history from a tower. Not that Jack could do that anyway – he wasn’t a cop. He had to see through Lily’s eyes a different way.

  But maybe it wasn’t Lily’s eyes he needed to see through. Sam had solved it. Had he lain here, in some milk-in-a-cup motel, and asked the same questions as Jack? And, if so, had the answers he’d come up with led him to a killer? Maybe Jack needed to look through two pairs of eyes: through Sam’s watching through Lily’s. That was his job after all, to watch and to listen. Back when he’d been in league with the police, when officers thought he could make them famous rather than their current suspicion that he would drag their name through mud, what would he have asked for? Forensics. Phone records. Emails. He couldn’t ask for that now.

  Jack considered leaving. Harry was sleeping soundly – Jack could get out the door without him knowing. He was already dressed. He didn’t owe Harry anything. The ten thousand dollars he’d paid so far would give Jack another month of three-hundred-and-fifty-seven-dollar days to find more income. But only a month. He didn’t believe Sam’s insurance would pay out on some wild coercive-murder theory anyway. Jack was pouring the water into his brother’s bucket and it was still coming out. He’d told Harry he’d take his money and not feel a thing, but now he knew him, now he knew what he was trying to do, walking away was more difficult. Besides, he had to keep going, to find something valuable enough that Gareth Bowman would pay handsomely for it. Or, hell, he’d swindle him and sell it to Tom Dwyer if it kept his brother alive. And to top it all off, what else was he going to do? Go home?

  The sun was just up. He refocused. Forensics; email; phone records. Jack called Celia. He figured he could trust her. If she’d killed Sam for money, for the life insurance, then suicide wasn’t the way to go about it.

  ‘Jack,’ Celia said brightly, without a hint of the early morning in her voice. ‘How’s it going?’