Greenlight

by Benjamin Stevenson

  ‘I’m here with Jack Quick and Ted Piper, two men intricately involved in the case for and against Curtis Wade.’ Jack noticed a sombre mood about the Lemmings; Number-One was looking at her shoes. Vanessa was building up to something. ‘Alexis White, who you’ll remember as Curtis Wade’s defence counsel, has been murdered.’

  Ted put his head in his hands. Jack’s mouth dropped open.

  ‘I’m hearing that’ – Vanessa touched her earpiece again, nodded – ‘I’m hearing that she had two fingers cut off and placed in her mouth. A replica of the Dacey killing.’

  Two fingers. In her mouth.

  What have you done?!

  The next thing Jack felt was the stage driving into his shoulder. His chair had toppled sideways. On the replay, much later, he saw Ted Piper launch out of his chair and crash-tackle him, knocking them both to the ground. There, in the studio, he looked up and saw Ted, his face the palest white, grappling with his neck. Ted landed two solid punches, broke Jack’s nose on the second, before the audio guy pulled him off.

  Jack lay there, blood dripping onto the back of his tongue. Sour metal. It was only a shoe. It had probably been planted. It wasn’t supposed to matter. He could see the TV monitor, sideways now, from where he lay. The interview stage set had been replaced by vision of an external reporter, which then cut to a static image.

  He knew what they were going to show before they showed it. Because it was exactly what he would have done. Sensationalist, maybe. But great TV nonetheless.

  A vertically split image, two pictures side by side. On the left: a white sheet, pixelation over the worst of it, evidence markers, a cop standing frozen, on his phone. Alexis’s crime scene. On the right: Curtis Wade, in front of Long Bay, leaning in and embracing Jack Quick, the man who got him out.

  And running through both images, the words:

  ELIZA DACEY THANKS YOU FOR JUSTICE.

  Exhibit B:

  Photographs. Size 9 women’s shoe prints. Photographs 1–7: Footprints catalogued at the north-west fence line on the Wade vineyard. Photographs 8–10: Clusters of unidentifiable prints, various sizes, intersected with tyre tracks. Victim’s shoe size: women’s 9.

  Handwritten Note: Defence notes that without victim’s shoes, unrecovered, we can’t confirm these footprints belong to the victim and therefore represent her final movements and place her at the vineyard before death. Expect objection, we’ll see if we can scrape it through. TP

  PREVIOUSLY

  Put your hand around the neck, Curtis.

  Curtis braced himself. Most people think it’s the middle, but you’ve got to grab it around the neck first, his father had said. Now, feet apart. Further. Shoulder width. Good. Let the power come from weight and not from your arms. Slide your hand up the handle as it descends. Power from the arc. Gravity, you cover that in school yet? Newton? No, Lauren, you can’t have a swing. You’re too young. Careful now, Curtis.

  A child is always impressed by his father. Splitting wood like butter, clean through the middle in a single stroke. Vincent’s hand effortlessly gliding up the wooden handle as if greased. Two perfect pieces falling to either side. Over time, Curtis learned that if you aimed along the grain you needed very little strength. The wood would split itself, provided you found the right fault. But a father looks strong regardless, axe in hand.

  Curtis remembered letting the axe rotate slightly in his hand on his first swing. It hit the wood flat and ricocheted. Shock jarred his wrist and rippled up his arm. Silly. His father had muttered, hand on his back, ‘You okay?’ Compassion. Maybe. Or looking for weakness, for his son’s fault in the grain. Curtis nodded, but he’d actually sprained it. Had to cut his sausages with one hand that night; Vincent wouldn’t cut them for him. Instead, he insisted the whole family eat one-handed. Even Lauren, who was barely walking. Succeed together, fail together. Curtis’s flaws spread out across the family. All for one and one for all. You cover that in school yet?

  But up here, as an adult, it was different. It was the middle of the night, firstly. And he was panting from the battle up the hill: pushing through scrub, climbing the fence. Plus, although Curtis was older and a much better swing, he was swinging the axe sideways not downwards.

  And, of course, he wasn’t cutting wood.

  High up, he could see a few dim lights in the town. This view, better than his. The sky above was free from city light – so clear he could almost make out the curve of the atmosphere.

  Feet apart. Shoulder width. Hands at the neck.

  They’d come for him, after this. Fuck ’em. Let this town bathe in its own pride. Let this town run red.

  He swung the axe.

  SEPTEMBER

  There was blood in Jack’s vomit.

  The doctor had predicted this. Jack had felt it, pooling in the back of his throat, cold liquid rolling through his sinuses. Drowning from the inside. He’d swallow the majority while he slept, his doctor said, and in the morning the body would naturally expel it.

  ‘Expel?’ Jack had asked.

  ‘Vomit,’ elaborated the doctor. ‘Vampire’s hangover.’

  Oh, Jack remembered thinking, the good old days.

  Jack finished retching, flushed the toilet and moved to the sink. He swished water around in his mouth and spat. The acidity of bile fizzed on his gums. He took his toothbrush from his pocket – it was always in his pocket, some habits stayed – and brushed. He felt light headed, braced himself against the sink.

  His face was a swathe of colours. One of his eye sockets was black, purpling downwards onto his cheek. His nose was a mouldy yellow with scabs of red beneath each nostril, a white strip of gauze across the bridge. He prodded his cheek, examining the bruised skin in the mirror. Alexis’s neck, he thought, would have been equally discoloured. Her throat mottled. Decaying. He felt her finger on his wrist, a soft kiss on the cheek – muscle memory from their meeting in the pub – gagged again, hung his head over the sink.

  There was a knock. There were doors in his father’s house. His father, Peter, had put them back up when Jack moved out. Another soft rap. His father’s voice through the door:

  ‘You okay?’

  This was hard to run from. Loved ones watched bathroom doors like prison guards.

  ‘Fine,’ he called back.

  ‘Careful.’

  ‘It’s just blood, Dad.’

  ‘Blood?’ Panic. Slight, controlled.

  ‘From my nose.’

  A pause. His father processed it. Probably trying to figure out if it was a lie.

  Jack hadn’t had a problem with food – or at least not a severe one, he told himself – for several years. He was better now, at least medically speaking. Percentages, that sort of thing. Those numbers on a piece of paper that men with glasses would nod over, say he was fixed. Fixed enough to put the doors back on anyway. Originally taken off the hinges on doctor’s orders, so Jack couldn’t lock himself away in a bathroom. But the bedrooms, the closets – anywhere you can tuck yourself away with a plastic bin or a garbage bag – had provided a compromised refuge. So those doors had to go, too, during the worst of it.

  Fixed enough now, they’d said. Door-approved. You’re much better, they’d said. But you’re never really better. Not from this.

  Some habits take hold: vagrant customs striking up camp inside, under a bridge in your ribcage, lighting a fire. A toothbrush in a pocket. Saying he’d already eaten or was just about to head out somewhere else. Choosing low-carb drinks that didn’t trigger – vodka, gin, soda water. Accidentally knocking the glass over when someone bought him a beer.

  Top up? Still a third in this. I’m fine.

  Well before he’d stolen Eliza’s shoe, Jack had been very good at lying to people.

  People think it’s about weight, mostly. But that’s not all of it. People ask for reasons, and they don’t always exist either. His presence on panels, at news desks, his interviews in chairs without armrests conducted by slick career presenters – sure, they were what his mos
t recent specialist had labelled High Risk Activities. But at its worst, in his twenties, Jack hadn’t even started in TV. He knew he’d struggled with his weight after his brother’s accident. And when things had started to spiral, watching the numbers tick down on the scales felt like something, perhaps the only thing, he could control.

  Because control is a core part of this disorder. Maybe that’s why Jack took the shoe in the first place. He was addicted to controlling his own story just as he was addicted to controlling his body. What came into it, and what came out. Control. There were other buzzwords specialists had used along the way: Low Self-Esteem, Self-Worth, A Need To Prove Yourself. As if naming that fear could paper over it. This is what you need. This is why you’re broken. Take shelter in these labels.

  His father, in particular, always wanted to look for a reason, something tangible above that core, terrifying truth that maybe there was no reason at all behind: there is something wrong with your son.

  A problem with food, they’d say at home. They didn’t use the other words to describe it anymore, the ones the doctors used. Because those words were imbued with something worse, when spoken aloud. Not a grown man’s problem, those words.

  Jack still remembered sitting inside the GP’s office, fifteen years ago. Peter next to him, voices and words nothing more than muffled tones barely penetrating through the fog that encased him as it so often did back then. He’d fainted in a media lecture. It was a soft fall, onto carpet. An octogenarian would have sprung back up. Jack had broken his wrist.

  Back then, Ted’s punches would probably have imploded his brittle skull. But one thing had stayed the same: his father was still picking him up and taking him to the hospital.

  His father had nodded a lot in the GP’s office, while Jack held his wrist and felt acutely the individual bones inside him. Every muscle and bone within thrummed with awareness – the body’s natural response to threat. That feeling in itself was addictive. A heightened clarity, crafted and honed from adrenaline. Fear. A body stuck in a perpetual fight-or-flight response, so afraid of itself.

  The doctor explained some of these things, others Jack figured out much later. His father didn’t understand, but nodded along with the doctor’s melodious cautions. At the end of the consultation, the doctor handed him a pamphlet. It was pink with an apple on the front: 15 Signs Your Daughter Isn’t Eating Properly. I’m sorry, the doctor said, it’s all we have.

  Not a man’s problem, then.

  It would take several more years until Jack was officially diagnosed. Because in order to officially have the disease, Jack had to tick off all the required medical symptoms. Including, up until only recently, an irregular menstrual cycle. He couldn’t tick that box, because he didn’t have that symptom (If he had a cycle, his dad snapped at a GP once, I’d consider that irregular), and so, technically, he wasn’t sick. The bureaucracy of bulimia.

  Jack’s father cleared his throat, piercing the memory.

  ‘I’ve made breakfast, when you’re ready. Take your time.’ There was something akin to relief in his father’s voice. A broken nose is a more physical pain. Easier to talk about, father and son.

  Jack looked in the mirror. His cheeks hung slack, past white and into grey. His hands gripped the side of the basin, cuticles gnawed into scabs. Still had that tic too, chewing his fingernails, a straggler’s fire glowing dimly within him. You get cold hands when you don’t eat. Bad circulation. That stuck around, ill or not. He thought about Alexis’s touch again, how cold her hands would be now.

  Alexis was dead. He tried to wrap his mind around that fact. No, not just dead. Murdered. And probably by the man he’d helped get out of jail. Jack’s father was scared he was vomiting again, that he had his old broken son back. His son was broken, all right.

  Jack may as well have strangled Alexis himself. His cold, chewed fingers wrapped around her neck.

  The urge came again. His jaw ached and his eyes pulsed as he bent over the sink. The tendons in his neck pulled taut as guy ropes. Nothing but air came out. The fire glowed familiar.

  Who could have wanted Alexis dead? Curtis was the obvious suspect. Four years was plenty of time to stew on the past. To plan revenge. Was it revenge against the woman who’d failed to keep him from a lonely four years behind bars? But then why her? Why not kill Ted, who was surely more responsible? Did that mean Ted was next? And what if Jack’s show was right all along and Curtis was innocent? That meant someone had duplicated the original murder, and was trying to pin it on Curtis. Worse still, that whoever killed Eliza was still out there. Not two separate murders, but simply the original killer striking again.

  But those were just theories. Noise. Fanciful thoughts to mask the truth: that it was his fault. He’d turned a blind eye and now Alexis was dead. The shoe might not mean shit in the larger scheme of the crime, but it was a symbol of Jack’s involvement. Shoe or not, if his show hadn’t aired, Alexis would still be alive. He was sure of it.

  He could hear his dad calling up the stairs. He took a painkiller and swallowed it without water. Felt it land. Kept it down. The mirror was blood-flecked. He looked exhausted, gaunt and beat-up – but he’d looked like that before and people hadn’t noticed. Because when men look drawn, people assume they’re working too much. That’s why this remains an invisible disorder, especially in a grown man.

  Not a man’s problem, then.

  He had been working too much, that much was true. Enough for no one to notice that he’d started avoiding certain foods. Nothing major, just the stress of the TV show. And that was how it started, small choice by small choice, gnawing away at you. Meanwhile, parts of him faded. The only problem, it’s hard to disappear when you’re in front of the nation: Sundays, 8 p.m.

  He steadied himself against the sink, hands gripping the white porcelain. There were scars on the back of his knuckles, roughly healed calluses that Alexis had run her fingertips over. Russell’s Sign, they’re called. One symptom he could tick off. Soft skin continually broken from crashing against the back of teeth. Not a man’s hands, either.

  Maybe it was the Panadol slowly dissolving and fizzing through his system, but Jack felt resolve surge through him. He still had his police contact: Ian McCarthy. He could build a new case. But no cameras this time. He could do better.

  The ghost of Alexis’s fingers feathered his wrist.

  But first, a more immediate challenge awaited him downstairs.

  Breakfast.

  ‘The Nailbiter Killer,’ Peter said, dropping the Sydney Morning Herald on the kitchen table. ‘It’s got a ring to it.’

  Peter had wispy grey hair, sparsely placed, barely fending off balding. He had hazel eyes, and spots on his neck from a life lived. There’s a moment in every son’s life when a parent suddenly strikes them as old and Jack had reached his with his father. He moved slower, now. Cracks in his face like a ginger snap.

  Jack took a seat. It was cushioned; a wooden frame. It wasn’t a kitchen chair. Peter had brought it in from the living room especially for Jack. His own chair merely plastic. Jack supposed that was normally all he needed. His brother was always upstairs. Peter turned back to the bench.

  Jack scanned the paper. The front page had a close-up picture of Curtis, red letters splashed diagonally across him. Of course, the sub-editor had added a question mark – The Nailbiter Killer? – to protect from defamation. In the body of the article was a smaller photo – of Ted flying out of his seat into Jack, his blue jacket flailing behind him in blurred motion. A quick profile on Alexis. A hotshot young lawyer. A little infographic of her biggest scalps – the murdered son of a property developer, her first big trial, won in blazing fashion. Made her name. The killer, only twenty-two years old: James Harrison. Jack remembered it from the papers. Bullet point list of more killers. It seemed Alexis excelled at murders. More reports, pages three and four. Jack didn’t feel the need to open it.

  ‘They think it’s a serial killer, then,’ Jack said to his father’s back. He took a si
p of his tea. Too hot. Too sweet.

  ‘You’re not a serial killer until you get a catchy name.’

  ‘It’s not that catchy,’ Jack lied. He wished he’d thought of it.

  ‘Digital dismemberer? Finger feeder?’

  ‘Stick to retirement, Dad.’ Though he was glad for the levity. Besides, digital dismemberer wasn’t too bad. He filed it away.

  ‘You probably don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But the police called.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Any time today, they said.’

  Jack nodded.

  ‘I think it’s pointless, you know,’ Peter went on, seemingly unsure what to say but keen to fill the silence with something. ‘You make TV. What use could they have for you?’ He meant it compassionately, but it came out cutting. He backpedalled. ‘I meant they shouldn’t need you to come in and do their job for them.’

  ‘I know what you meant. It’s okay. I want to help.’

  ‘I’ll come. If you want.’ Peter put a plate of toast down in front of him.

  ‘No. I need to stop somewhere first.’

  Jack picked up a slice of toast. Thick Vegemite. The salt shocked his tongue; he hadn’t eaten since the hospital. His jaw hurt from retching, but he did his best.

  ‘My jaw hurts.’ He made the excuse without prompting, aware that he was eating too slowly. They used to have a stopwatch. Not anymore, but something ticked between them still. Jack changed the topic. ‘What do you think, then?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The victims. Eliza. Alexis. Either.’ Jack shook his head, her name a boulder in his mouth. ‘Alexis, mainly.’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We don’t have to talk about it.’ Peter flipped the paper sports-side up. Curtis banished to the laminate.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Jack said, ‘I want your opinion.’

  ‘Did he kill her?’

  ‘No.’ Jack felt it explode out of him, and suddenly he was sobbing. Black eyes and bruises. Crying on the kitchen table. All the slickness and manipulation of television slipping away. No edits, no cuts. Just a child again, in his father’s house. ‘I think I did. Making that fucking show.’