Headland, page 23
He found it in a desk drawer: the memory stick Andrea had given to Alison. The one Alison had handed to him the night when she called it quits.
He hadn’t looked at it. He remembered Alison told him the videos were of him and her mother’s ‘friends’. Andrea had been careful to make sure she couldn’t be identified or implicated, he supposed.
He was on the mend physically. The operations on his leg had been declared a complete success. Mentally he was coping, just. But he knew that if he really wanted to start afresh, with a clean slate, he would have to face his past.
He plugged the memory stick into his laptop. There were three files. Videos.
The first was just him, naked on a nondescript motel bed. Strapped down. Being abused. It was only ninety seconds, enough. He was sweating by the end of it, heart rate up a bit, nothing to worry about.
The second video was only sixty seconds. The camera was angled over his shoulder. Andrea’s friend Cynthia, supine, eyes closed, mouth agape, heaving while he thrust into her furiously. The camera moving forward, closer to the back of his head. A sudden jerking motion, out of focus momentarily as a hand covered his mouth, and then Andrea, unseen behind the camera, went to work.
He was flushed, hollow. He wiped his eyes, walked to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. Hesitated over whether to watch the third one.
He took a moment. Staring down into the water-filled tumbler sitting under the tap in the kitchen sink. Watching his rippling reflection.
What?
He played the second video again. Cynthia’s head rocking back, her hands clawing at the lounge, her neck straining, her skinny tits bouncing. The camera moving, descending close up behind him and then—there—the mirror on the wall above Cynthia’s head. Andrea standing behind him, snarling, bare-breasted with a massive, strap-on dildo swinging from her lower waist. Andrea shaking a pill from a small prescription pill bottle, the camera descending further. Andrea, forcing his head back and shoving the pill into his mouth. Andrea, her pink tongue touching her top lip as she leant in and rammed home the dildo from behind.
43
It came as a surprise to no one. The press conference was called for 11 a.m. in the press centre at Parliament House. Full capacity, all the news channels represented. There’d been a meeting of the party caucus that morning. The challenge was on. There’d been a leadership spill. Rumours about a cover-up had been circulating for weeks. Andrea had capitalised on her daughter’s death, garnered long-term public sympathy as the brave grieving mother, and put her hand up for the top job.
Craig flashed his police ID at the door. Showed security his thick A4 envelope containing nothing but papers. A thick wad of colour prints. He limped to a seat in the second row.
The place went nuts when Andrea led an entourage of serious suits towards the microphone-sprouting lectern at the front of the room. Cameras snapped, whirred, clicked. Shouted questions. Harsh white light. The crowd heaved forward.
Andrea, immaculate, waited for silence. Confidently read a brief prepared statement.
Fifty-seven to fifty-four. She had won the day. Humble. Proud. Moving forward.
He wasn’t sure whether she caught a flash of him there, relaxed behind the blinding intensity. Maybe. He saw a brief flicker.
He waited until the end.
‘Just one more,’ the bespectacled press secretary said. ‘Yes, you.’ He pointed at Craig, who’d had his hand up as soon as the floor was opened to questions.
He caught a quick nervous tic at the corner of her mouth. The flash of a golden teardrop at her ear.
‘I have some snapshots, some prints, I’d like to hand around first,’ he began. ‘Then I want to talk about Alison.’
About the author
Born in Sydney, John Byrnes moved to the Mid North Coast of New South Wales in 2012. He has a broad range of employment and life experience having spent time in the Australian Army, worked fishing trawlers out of Darwin, worked bars and doors in pubs and clubs all over Australia, and somehow ended up with an Economics Degree. When he is not writing or pondering the darkness within men’s souls he works part-time in financial services.
John Byrnes, Headland
