Afterlight (19 page)

He reached out and cupped my cheek, grinning as I flushed.

‘I should be able to keep an eye on you from the platform anyway, seeing as it’s
so close. If anyone comes to the door, just keep them talking until I get back with
Daughtry, okay? He can translate stuff from dead languages into workable English,
but he can’t use public transport. It’s unreal.’

Without warning, Jordan leant in and stole a kiss before he turned and clattered
back down the steps and up the path.

Face hot as the sun, I held the bag to my knotted-up stomach as Jordan gave me a
laconic salute and a slow-burning smile that promised
more later
, before turning
in the direction of the railway crossing.

As he moved out of view down a narrow, scrub-lined pedestrian walkway that lay between
the edge of Carter Kelly’s property and the gravel-strewn track, I turned back and
studied the front door with its blank, frosted window set at head height.

Taking a couple of deep, steadying breaths, I pressed
the doorbell five times in
succession to indicate I was serious. ‘I know you’re home,’ I called out. ‘Open up,
please.’

This time, I didn’t imagine the hand that drew the front curtain to one side before
letting it fall. A dark outline moved into the edges of the frosted glass, and I
regarded it the same way I knew whoever was in there was looking at mine.

‘No, thanks,’ a guy called out finally. ‘Not buying.’ He sounded young, with a high,
clear voice.

‘Not selling!’ I shouted back, but the shape was already receding backwards in the
glass.

Desperate not to lose sight of the shadow beyond the door, I yelled out, ‘Carter?
Carter?
Monica sent me. She has something for you.’

I saw the dark shape freeze.

I held the green plastic bag up high in front of my face so that it loomed in the
rippled glass.

‘How do you know my name? Who sent you?’

‘Monica did. Nothing threatening. She even wrote you a card. It’s right here. Read
it.’

I almost didn’t catch his next words. ‘That’s impossible.’ His tone was fearful.
‘Monica’s
dead
.’

He sounded so certain that I found myself shouting, ‘You kill her, Carter? Is that
how you know for sure she’s dead?’

I leapt back in shock as the door pulled open, the security chain protesting loudly,
the wood of the door almost splintering under the force. The guy rasped through the
crack, ‘Leave me alone or I’ll call the police! I didn’t kill anyone. You have no
proof she was even here.
Go away.
’

All I could see was part of the man’s face and one large, frightened blue eye inexplicably
outlined in black, liquid eyeliner and three shades of eye shadow, long dark lashes
thickly coated with mascara, all expertly applied.

‘I came here in a police car, Carter,’ I replied calmly. ‘Feel free to call them.
You’ll have some explaining to do.’

The eye shrank back. ‘What do they know?’ he breathed through the gap separating
us.

‘All I told them was that you were my friend, and that I was bringing you a birthday
present. That’s all. I had to be inventive. They seemed to believe me because they’ve
gone.’ I saw Carter swallow and shocked myself by adding, ‘Can I come in?’

It was clear that Carter was terrified. And part of me—the not kicking myself part—knew
it was the right thing to do. I just had to give him one lousy bag. He didn’t need
three strangers in his house when one would do well enough to hand over Eve’s parting
gift. It was such a simple thing, and it was still daylight outside and I had a working
phone. Plus, Jordan was only an ear-piercing scream away. What could happen?

The young man behind the door didn’t move. I could feel the seconds lengthening as
he regarded me from head to toe with that single, frightened eye. I could see him
taking in my wild, curling mass of ginger hair pulled back into the usual low, loose
ponytail; my cold-reddened nose and universal high school dork’s ensemble of jeans,
runners, pink velour hoodie and sleeveless black puffer. I knew I looked about as
threatening as a stick insect in a wig.

Carter caught me by surprise when he blinked, suddenly drawing back into the shadows.
In desperation, I held out the plastic bag, trying to shove it through the gap. Maybe
just dropping it over Carter’s damned threshold would be enough to satisfy Eve, and
maybe then the spell she had over me, over Jordan, would be broken and normal transmission
would resume.

‘At least take this!’ I begged. ‘It’s for you. I don’t know why, but she really wants
you—
needs
you—to have it. All of it has been leading up to
you
, and I have so many
questions, but mostly what I want to know is:
Why?
Why didn’t you report her missing
when you were, like, one of the last people to see her alive?’

I thought about that memory of hers that I’d found myself standing in. That look
on her face. She’d known. She’d known right then and there that she was doomed.

‘Monica left your house one night and she never came
back, did she? Who got her?’

‘Who
are
you?’ he whispered. ‘How do you know all these things? How did you find
me?’

‘Let me come in,’ I replied quietly, ‘and I’ll tell you.’

He regarded me warily for a moment longer. Then I heard the sound of the chain being
pushed down a runnel. The door swung open wider to reveal a tall, thin young man
with a riot of curly brown hair chopped off at the shoulders. He had a pronounced
Adam’s apple, the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow and was wearing ripped jeans,
a faded grey T-shirt with a complicated sword-and-rose design on it, and bare feet.
Carter had the narrowest shoulders I’d ever seen on a man, and the made-up, haunted
eyes of a showgirl. I knew I was staring. A guy in full eye makeup with a lush man-fro
wouldn’t survive to recess at Ivy Street High.

I decided that Carter’s face was beautiful: neither fully male nor female, but a
strange hybrid of strength and softness.

But then his eyes reddened, and tears spilled down his cheeks, leaving makeup running
in long streaks down the perfect oval of his face.

‘I never said anything,’ he sniffed, ‘because I was afraid. People might think I’d
done it. Or they’d come after
me
. And Mon always liked men who were dangerous.
Like
fire
, she said so herself.’ Carter’s voice was beseeching. ‘You have
to understand—she
disappeared into thin air and I had no one to tell—by the time I realised she wasn’t
coming back, it was already too late. I didn’t want her here in the first place,
but she had nowhere else to go…and I owed her. She used to say that showgirl freaks
like us need to stick together.’

Carter began to cry in earnest then, cradling the battered plastic bag against him,
really going for it. And I had to look away, because the sound of a man sobbing has
to be one of the worst sounds in the world. They don’t do it enough so when they
do, it sounds rusty and wrong.

‘We’d been arguing a lot, she wasn’t easy to live with; Mon wasn’t easy, period,’
Carter blubbered. ‘When she didn’t come back, the first couple of nights, I tried
to convince myself that she’d crashed at someone else’s place.
But she left her ring
behind
,’ he wailed suddenly. ‘It creeped me out that thing: I told her it looked
like a dead woman’s face. But she loved it because her mother had it made for her,
back when they were still talking.’

I went cold inside as he added, ‘She hardly ever took it off. She never went anywhere
without it. But that night, she left it on her bedside table because she hadn’t meant
to be gone for long. Said she needed to do something. I told her to be careful, but
she’d done it before: walked out on her own, at night. How was I supposed to know?’

‘Where’s the ring now?’ I asked feverishly, remembering
the feel of the thing in
my hand, so cold and real; the old woman with the long streaks of pure silver in
her hair, the grief-ravaged face, shaking her old cross at me.

Carter hugged the bag to himself, sobbing. ‘I don’t know! It just lay on the table
for weeks, I couldn’t touch it, could barely look at it. Then, one morning, it was
gone. I looked everywhere for it.’

He suddenly reached out and pulled me across the threshold. Reflex made me rear back
in his grasp and I caught the heavy scent of rose oil and hair wax mingling with
the tang of musky, male sweat. As we struggled, I got a confused impression of a
sewing machine in the room to my right, yellow feathers trailing out of a brown cardboard
box, and a threadbare Persian runner stretching away into the inner gloom of the
house.

‘I didn’t kill her,’ he insisted, still shaking me. ‘You have to believe me.’

‘Let go of me, Carter,’ I warned, flailing around inside my puffer vest for my phone.
‘I’ve got a friend about twenty metres away, watching us. Catch the news, lately?
You do anything to me, you’ll be famous. Every one of Monica’s mad, bad, dangerous
friends will know who you are, and where you live. The police will find out you were
probably the last person who ever saw her alive, and that you never called them,
you coward. Now
get off me.
’

Abruptly, Carter released me and staggered back,
clutching the damned bag like it
was plugging a bleeding hole in his abdomen.

‘It’s proof,’ he wept. ‘
You’re
proof.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Last night,’ he gabbled, looking wildly up at the ceiling, ‘last night…’

I glanced back towards the open front door hoping for some sign, any sign of Jordan
and the big blond Viking he’d described, Daughtry. A Viking would be useful right
now. ‘Go on,’ I said more gently.

Carter took a deep, shuddering breath before saying, ‘I
asked
her to show me what
she wanted because I didn’t understand. Things had been happening, small things I
could’ve imagined, I couldn’t be sure…and then she sent…
you
.’

He stared at me, appalled, spent tears meshing his impossible eyelashes together
in clumps. ‘Don’t you understand?’ he added, as dawning comprehension rearranged
the features of my face.

Carter held up the plastic bag I’d come to loathe, and shook it at me.

‘I wanted proof she was dead. And she sent you.’

After Carter closed the door, we sat in the front room with
the sewing machine and
feathers in it. As I looked around the room, chock full of life-size dressmaking
mannequins in various stages of glittering undress and the discarded man-sized stilettos
to match, the link between Eve and Carter went crystal clear. What had he called
them both?
Showgirls
.

I watched Carter open the bag like it was an unexploded grenade and tear open the
card with shaking fingers. His face crumpled again into tears as he read and re-read
the brief message inside.

‘How?’ he whispered, wiping at his face.

I told him everything that had happened to me up until I came to be sitting here
in his front room.

‘She suddenly showed up,’ I snorted softly, ‘she bloody chopped up the pieces of
my boring, tiny life and threw them in the air for her own enjoyment.’

This made Carter smile for the first time.

‘Monica was only ever about number one,’ he said quietly. ‘Never did a good deed
in her life that didn’t do a good deed back.
Hated
cats, hated kids. Detested old
people, never apologised. But you’re saying she’s had you crossing town tying up
loose ends, doing good deeds. Visiting her
mother
. It’s unbelievable.’

‘It would be, if I hadn’t been ringside,’ I muttered.

Carter looked down at the T-shirt draped across his knees. ‘This is the first present
she’s ever bought me. Ever.’

Still nervous about being in the sitting room of an emotionally overwrought, six-foot
trannie, I pulled out my phone. Still no message from Jordan. What was taking him
so long?

‘O’Loughlin know you’re here?’ Carter mumbled, looking up again, his big, blue eyes
troubled. ‘The day Mon arrived, she was a mess. Bruises all over. Cuts on her hands
and face. Said O’Loughlin had found out she was seeing some younger, richer, more
powerful dirt bag who’d promised to set her up, get her away from him for good. She
said she was leaving him and it sent O’Loughlin into a frenzy—swore he’d shoot everyone
starting with her and the dirt bag. But he started firing on strangers instead, didn’t
he? And in the mess and the screaming, she just crawled out from under and ran. Mon
arrived on my doorstep dressed in some stranger’s suit jacket. And a pair of sequinned
hot pants with thigh high, white patent boots.’

His laughter sounded strangled as he waved his hand at the window.

‘Mon even had the presence of mind to make the taxi driver drop her one block down
on Clerkenwell Street. So no one would connect her to me. It was only luck the nosy
neighbours were all at work—it was still peak hour then—and no one saw a bloody,
half-naked woman knocking on my front door.’