Eden, page 15
“That’s kind of nice.”
“I don’t know what you’re doing. When you’ll be back. If you’ll ever be back. Why you ain’t here with me.”
“What am I gonna do here waiting for you, Dogboy?” she snorted, smoke rushing from her nose. “Drink tea in the kitchen? Sweep the greenhouse? Read penny mysteries? I ain’t your wife. I’m your sister, mister.”
“You’re supposed to be waiting for when we get enough cash to get outta here. Go up north where it’s warm. Buy a bookshop, like we talked about.”
She laughed. The sound echoed in the street, a tinkle of glass carving the cold air. Heinrich felt his face grow hot.
“I’m always surprised when I come see you. It’s always a shock.”
“What is, for chrissake?”
“How you can still be such a child when there’s so much darkness around you.”
“I ain’t no child.”
“Maybe what happened to you stopped you from growing,” she murmured, the joint glowing red against her long fingers. “Maybe you froze in the fire. Someone’s lost baby forever. Sometimes I wish I could go back to that time on the beach. Be the baby again. A wet and cold thing Bear gathered up. That was the last time he touched me, you know. There’s something nice about being abandoned and then being saved. I do it whenever I can, but it’s never the same.”
Her eyes scanned the street, caught a little of the moon as it bounced off the newly fallen rain. When they found his own they lingered there before falling to his lips.
She was the one who moved. He couldn’t make his limbs work. Her hands wound up into his hair and gripped it, and when he felt the pain it seemed to awaken him and he gave it back, pulled her to him, crushed her. He had to stop her once or twice. Her shaking, hard restless hands in his shirt, her breath in his mouth. She needed him, climbed onto him, pulled his neck. Forced herself against his chest, her lips on his ear. A noose of arms.
After a while, when they were both warm, he held her, rocked her, let her hide her face against his neck. Not being able to see her in the dark didn’t matter, though some part of him ached to put shapes and colors to the skin under his hands—where it stopped being soft and went hard, where it was tight and where it was dry and smooth like sun-warmed stone. He squeezed her ribs and felt the bones bend. The sounds she made were helpless things, whispers, pleads, a sudden cry of want, of fear when he tried to shift. He didn’t want to sleep until she did, but she pulled the rug from the end of the couch up over them and curled her feet around his, and her kisses on the side of his face, on his neck, pulled him away from himself.
“Will you save me?” she whispered.
He opened his mouth to answer her and his face was flooded with light so hard and white it crushed the sound out of him. The porch lights above, the hall lights, all flicked on at once. There were men above him. Sunday was gone.
Heinrich’s first instinct was to roll. He didn’t know what was happening or who was above him in the black, the hoods. But he rolled, and the action saved him. The panels in the porch seemed to explode upward in chips and fragments, getting in his eyes. He covered his head, the sound so loud he missed it, just a thundering in his ears and all around him. They passed over him and into the house.
More gunfire. Heinrich gripped the ground, breathed wood, coughed, and tasted blood in his mouth. All his bones had locked at once. Unlocking them took frantic seconds. He crawled, one leg dragging and useless, threw himself through the front door.
Screaming. One of the girls running out into the kitchen and being cut down. Men rushing out, naked, falling. One of the men in black went to the open bedroom door and Heinrich watched his shoulders shudder as he pumped the room. People wailing, short, sharp. Silent. The next room, a spray. Heinrich pulled himself behind the armchair, heard shouting, Bear’s bellow from across the house.
He tried to get up and bullets pocked the wall behind him, pulled the window down around him in a rain of glass. He cowered in it, pulled his head down against his chest. The blood on his chin, in his nose. Was this dying? The world was turning hard and clicking back into place like a moving picture on a wheel, his body at the center. The gunfire stopped and there was running, and the kitchen windows shook in their frames and glasses fell from the counters.
Heinrich dragged himself across the glass, got up, fell into the doorframe of the back room. There was blood spray and holes all over the walls like black stars. The boy fell into the dark back room, crawled, climbed up the floor as it tilted up before him, a ramp, a ladder without rungs.
Bear was there, under his hands. Shuddering. Wet. Impossibly hot. Heinrich wrapped his arms around the thick heavy head, squeezed it, tried to lift it from the ground.
“Bear! Bear! Bear! Bear!”
He could see two white points glittering in the blackness. Heinrich pushed his face against the big man’s face, felt the hair hard like wires. His fingers found the hole in the fat neck, tried to stem the gushing.
“Anigozanthos,” the old man coughed the words. “Rufus. Ani . . . Ani . . . Ru . . .”
Heinrich howled. The sound came out of him without words, without sobs, just a noise like a siren that started in the pit of his guts and crept up louder and louder until it met the air, made his ears ache. A scream. The big man held him, limp fingers, weak arms around his middle.
“Oh, boy,” Bear said. “Boy.”
Heinrich felt him die like a great mountain crumbling to the earth.
Every now and then Harry Ratchet took a moment to close his eyes and enjoy his space. He had been alone a long time now, and yet still, once a day at least, he would stand in the silence of his tiny caravan in Cronulla among the things that were his and solely his—his Ned Kelly memorabilia collection and the damp towels on the floor and the empty pizza boxes on the sink and the Jimmy Barnes records—and feel blissfully alone.
There was barely floor space in this place, a few footholes in the dark between the door and the end of the bed and the television stand, a square of bathroom mat before the bathroom annex. But these were his for treading and no one else’s. The shower cubicle he stood in, mere centimeters on all sides of his round and taut and hairy body where weak but blistering hot water fell, it was his. His space. It was all about space for Harry. A handspan of Harry Only Territory was something hard won, and he was determined to enjoy it.
Scarlett had no idea about space, which made Harry laugh now, because the woman had been obsessed with being close. In the early days after Harry had found her, she an uptight career rabbit and he a lazy but presentable week-to-week hound, Scarlett had been able to make a two-hundred-square-meter penthouse in Mosman feel crowded, following him around the huge balcony while he watched the yachts being tossed around, rubbing up against him.
Her couch had been the length of his current lodgings and had cost more, but he’d fought for a centimeter of room on it. She’d have a room full of television personalities and socialites and politicians spread out around her at one of her charity gigs, lights on her perfectly sculpted biceps, everyone’s favorite weather girl, male models adjusting their trousers at the sight of her, and she’d cling to Harry’s arm like she hadn’t found him in the dark one afternoon on set, fumbling with wires, swigging Coke and itching in his uniform polo. He was her star. Her home. The rock she anchored to. Harry could hardly breathe but he liked the money, so he learned how to distract her and slip away, look at the sky, have a smoke without her jabbering at him.
After a year or so Harry got sick of ducking and diving away from Scarlett whenever he got the chance and tried to train her, because the big Four-Oh had made him realize he was onto a good deal and starting again would be a hassle. She’d made the national news, too, so he could give up the audio-rigging game. If it was going to be the long haul with Scarlett, Harry needed to straighten her out and show her who was boss.
The first thing he did was take the money. The second thing was push her mother and her loudmouthed friends out of the picture with a few carefully placed ultimatums. Step three in his plan was positive reinforcement, the way you train little wide-eyed terriers with liver treats—be a good girl, a quiet girl, and I’ll come home on time. I’ll come home sober. I’ll come home and cuddle you. Everything had been snap, snap, snap, the way he wanted it. Sit! And she slammed that ass on the floor before he’d finished making the sound. Then one day she presented him with a white plastic strip with two blue lines and tears in her eyes and talk of names for it. And all his hard work had come down to nothing.
Trump card.
Plan B. His pup had gone wild. Nothing to do with a wild animal but put it down. He’d nudged her down a flight of stairs one afternoon before Christmas, when the thing inside her had started to take hold and ruin her body and her logic. Hadn’t worked. A couple more knocks, a couple more quiet nudges, and she’d presented him with the perfect solution to his problem. A 9mm bullet, right in his guts. He lay in the hospital bed and watched her trial, chatted up the rehabilitation girl about it as he clambered along steel bars and walked himself up and down the wide halls with a walking frame—poor Harry, abused and misused husband just trying to learn how to love again. When they carried Scarlett off kicking and hollering on the evening news she’d once sparkled on, her regrowth showing and her eye makeup smudged in a way he knew she’d hate, he thought he was free.
He begun claiming his space again in a little apartment in Eastlakes, steadily chewing through her cash on pretty horses and Blue Label and little Asian women with perky tits. Then a couple of drably dressed social workers had knocked on his door and put a baby in his hands.
Another trump card.
Even from behind the razor wire she was still in his space, filling up the place like a bucket of water in a paper cup.
He took it inside, forgot it for days, lay in the bed in the other room and cried about it, cried louder than it did. He sat on the carpet in its room in those dark first days and watched it wriggling and screaming, the stink of its piss taking up the air. People brought him clothes and toys and bedding for it, so much stuff he had to pile it in corners like he was preparing for a winter, the kitchen cluttered with sour milk and colored plastic and empty jars of muck.
He stood in the shower with it, slept on the floor with it, sat in the car with it, beating the steering wheel, beating his head, beating the windows. He sat outside his ruined apartment with it at the top of the concrete stairs and watched it shuffling and inching around on the damp at his feet like a swollen, snotty grub, watched it edge toward the empty space before the five-flight fall, bulging backside waggling, worm toes squirming up and down.
Harry stood, looked at the fall, the screen doors, dozens of them, most hiding angry Indians in leather jackets who would hardly know how to answer a phone let alone testify to his possible negligence as a father. Harry stood. Harry watched. Then Harry put his foot out, pressed against the soft, papered rump with his toes, gently-gently, softly-softly, until it tipped.
Harry stood now in his shower remembering his own screaming. He kept screaming and screaming when the ambulances arrived, screaming and screaming when the cops arrived, screaming and screaming when the two homicide detectives showed up. A lanky guy with dead eyes named Doyle and some black-haired vixen he couldn’t remember the name of, distracted as he was by the way her jeans cupped her apple-shaped rump.
He sat on the edge of the ambulance and watched that perfect posterior through tear-soaked hands as she wandered, calm and curious, through the tarpaulin barrier to where the thing lay dead, around the thing and the people chalking and photographing it, up the stairs, down the stairs, all around. The guy with the dead eyes came over to him and talked and made notes and gave condolences and numbers to call, but the dark apple-bottomed beauty just stood there, off and away from the crowd, looking up at the top of the stairs, looking down at where the thing lay.
Harry was getting a cold feeling about the way the woman was standing and looking and frowning and thinking when she disappeared and he felt safe again. Days turned into weeks. Grief counselors came and went. The sun set and the evening news came on. Harry swelled, slowly opening like a wary flower, and filled up his space.
He toweled off now in his little caravan bathroom annex, stretched his limbs, ruffled his hair in the mirror, laughed. Almost a year had passed, and still the thrill of a room empty but for him. He was smiling at the feel of it as he entered the caravan, but the smile disappeared when he found a woman sitting on the end of his bed with her hands between her knees, restful. He didn’t recognize her as the apple-assed stunner from the day the thing died until she stood, turned toward him, looked at him, set her feet apart on his crowded floor. She rolled her shoulders. He noticed the knife in her hand when she adjusted her grip, flicked the thing open so that it shone in the light from the bathroom.
“What the fuck is this?” He threw the towel around himself.
She glanced at his naked chest, belly, wrinkled her nose, sniffed the air. She flicked her chin toward the bathroom as she came toward him.
“You used soap in there, right?” she asked.
I made no appointment at Galaxy Fitness, Randwick. There’s a certain joy in being able to walk into anywhere and stop things in their tracks in the name of the law. A couple of middle-aged women at the counter were chattering and filling out forms, their towels hanging over their shoulders, and a young man behind the counter who I’d have said was on roids from the sheer unnatural shape of him. All wads of muscle on probably tired bones and snaky veins, the sculpted eyebrows of someone who waxed weekly.
I went straight to the young woman beside him, a tanned and toned Jack Russell of a creature, caramel colored, short, and stringy. She smiled as I entered and I smiled back and it was on—train departed from Flirt Central. Sometimes it can be like that.
“Morning.” I put my badge and a bunch of papers on the counter in front of the girl. “Detective Frank Bennett, CID. I’m going to have to be really annoying and serve a warrant here today.”
Everyone looked. The girl’s smile dropped. Captain Eyebrows shouldered in beside Jack Russell.
“Morning. I’m the floor manager, Steven Kent. How can I help?”
“Good to meet you.” I shook his hand. He squeezed too hard. “Hoping to make this short and sweet. I’m on the tail of a missing person and need some questions answered.”
The girl was looking at my badge. The plastic one pinned to her sculpted chest read “Clarinda: Customer Service.”
“Well, I hope I can be of some help.” Eyebrows puffed his chest out. “Shall we go back to the staff office?”
“It’s all right, mate, go ahead see to these ladies.” I waved at the women at the counter, who bristled like birds disturbed. “I’m sure Clarinda here can help me.”
If Jack Russell girl had a tail she would have wagged it. Steve scowled, then laughed, hard.
“That’s nice but Clarinda’s hardly the person to talk to. I’m in charge here. I’d be the most qualified to help you get what you need.”
“Uh huh,” I said. “That’s also nice. But you’re busy. I try not to interrupt busy people.”
“I can assure you—”
“Unfortunately, regardless of your being in charge, or the best person to get me what I need, a warrant of this type requires me to be overseen in the entirety of my operations here today by the person I serve it to.” I shrugged helplessly. “Clarinda, honey, looks like you bit the bullet here.”
“But,” Steven the Floor Manager opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again, “she hasn’t signed anything.”
“She sighted my paper first.” I curled my lip at Clarinda. “Sorry, Bub.”
“What’s . . . what’s this all about?” Steve squinted.
“Clarinda, have you got an office we can use with computer access?”
“I don’t think—”
“She’s got it, Steve,” I winked at him. “Haven’t you, Clarinda?”
Clarinda almost stumbled over her own feet.
“Yep, got it, Steve.”
Jack Russell girl came out from behind the counter with a set of keys. Steve swallowed, did some funny jerking thing with his neck.
“Yes, uh. Yeah, Okay. Clarinda, if you could help the detective with anything he needs.”
I slapped Steve on his iron-hard back as I passed. Clarinda led me to a room off the side of the free-weights section where laborers and retirees were squatting and staring themselves down in the wall of mirrors. Nearby I could hear an aerobics instructor shouting over some thumping bass music. The little room held a table and a laptop and a couple of desk chairs, some anatomy pictures. There was a set of scales in the corner and a measuring tape pinned to the wall.
“Jesus.” She sunk into the desk chair and crossed her legs, adjusted the bottom of her gym tights. “You’re going to get me sacked if you’re not careful.”
“I can’t help what the warrant says, young lady. That’s the law.”
“That was all bullshit about the warrant. Wasn’t it?”
“What an accusation.”
“Uh huh,” she smirked. Swung sideways back and forth in the desk chair like a bored kid in the computer room at school. “So, what’s the deal here? Are you looking for one of our members?”
“Well, I might be,” I said, sitting down in the other chair, pulling it close so she could smell me. “I’m here on a real long shot and, yes, it’ll involve looking at your member files. What we’re looking for might take a while. So I hope Steve will forgive me for not wanting to spend the next couple of hours in here with him.”
“Oh, he’s a pretty forgiving guy.” She smiled, played with the mouse on the desk beside her.
“Lucky.”
“I didn’t catch your name out there in all the macho games.”
“Frank.”
“Well, Frank, thanks for getting me out of membership emails for a few hours.”
