The phone rings and I head inside for it, wanting to stop it from waking Sam.
“Jack?”
The voice is familiar in the way you can flick on the radio and hear a song you haven’t heard in twenty years and know how it goes. When you hear that song, your mind starts scrambling, taking you back to a time when you heard it last. Good memory or bad, you’re in that moment again, the smells, the sounds, the sights, they’re all there.
“Who is this?” I ask, and I remember the handcuffs, the police, the smile on his face when he watched me from the back of the police car. I remember the dog, I remember the weight of the piece of steak in the plastic bag. I can feel the cold sunlight, my school uniform, my mother holding my hand and holding Belinda’s hand. I can remember the neighbors pouring out of their houses, the women with their hands over their mouths in shock, the men shaking their heads, the long line of police cars, dozens of cops, all showing up in force as if to arrest a small army. I remember the media vans, the photographers.
“Jack, it’s me. It’s your father.”
I don’t say anything. The kitchen disappears, the world disappears, all fading away as the front door of my childhood home appears, the policemen, the disgust on their faces. Of course that childhood home is gone now. About three months after Mum died, when I was living with Belinda at my grandparents’, somebody went along and set fire to that house. Nobody was ever caught. I always thought maybe Belinda did it, but it could have been anybody. Dad hurt a lot of people.
“I’m calling to—”
“I don’t care why you’re calling,” I say, and I tighten my hand on the phone and for some reason, for some freaky-shit-get-the-hell-out-of-here kinda reason, I don’t hang up.
“I’m calling to tell you how sorry I am.”
I let his sentence hang and he waits patiently. I guess my father is used to being patient.
“You’ve had twenty years to apologize,” I say. “Anyway, you’re saying it to the wrong person, and you picked the worst damn time to do it.”
“Not . . . not about the past, Jack. I’m ringing to tell you how sorry I am about Jodie. I wish things had been different. For her. For you. For everybody.”
“How the hell do you know about Jodie?” I ask. “How do you know a damn thing about me or Jodie?”
“This isn’t the moon they’re keeping us locked away on, Jack.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“What?”
“Jack. Don’t call me Jack.”
“Oh? What am I supposed to call you?”
“Don’t call me anything. What the hell do you want? You ringing to tell me you know what it’s like to lose somebody? Like the way you lost Mum and Belinda?”
“I know you’re angry at me.”
“No. How could I possibly be angry at you? You’ve really been there for me, a real role model.”
“Jack . . .”
“What do you want, Dad?” I ask, immediately nauseous at how comfortable the word “Dad” feels in my mouth. I’m nine years old all over again. The photo that told the world I was the son of a serial killer flashes into my mind. The memory turns as black and white as the picture. I’m holding on to my father, the police are taking him away, and my mum is trying to separate us, black-and-white tears spilling down my black-and-white face. The policemen weren’t friendly toward any of us. None of them wanted to touch me or push me away, as if they feared the killer gene they were so sure I would inherit could contaminate them, that it would jump from me and land on their hands and burrow under their skin. It would tell them bad things and
make them suck on the end of a pistol at the end of a long tiring day. They looked at my mother and my sister and me with open hatred, so sure all of us had been in on the action, that Dad had brought the hookers home for the holidays, that we’d taken turns at draining the life out of them, raping them, a good-ol’-splasharoo in blood, the son and daughter committing the sins of the mother and father.
“I want to see you,” my dad says, snapping me out of the memory, and my skin crawls, not at his request, but in the undeniable knowledge that yes indeed I’m going to go and see him.
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“I’m busy.”
“It’s important.”
“Being a father is important. Not killing eleven women is important. You staying locked up is important.”
“I’m still your father. You can deny it as much as you want, but—”
“I do deny it.”
“I’m sorry the way it worked out.”
“You make it sound like you had a different plan. How many more would have died, Dad? Another dozen?”
“We’ll talk about it when you get here.”
“Go to hell,” I say.
“I’m already there,” he says. “Please, son, it’s important I see you,” he says, and he hangs up, and I’m angry at his arrogance as he leaves me holding the phone. I’m scared at the prospect of seeing him, yet curious too, and perhaps, yes, just a spark of this—perhaps a little excited.
“Who was on the phone, Daddy?” Sam asks.
I didn’t even know she was in the kitchen. I turn toward her. She’s still wearing her pajamas, the teddy bear clutched under her arm, and for the first time I realize that she’s hardly put that teddy bear down since her mother died. The bear’s name is Mr. Fluff ’n’ Stuff, and I bought him for Sam’s first birthday. The bear has fared rather well over the five and a half years since then, but he’s tattered around the edges and grubby in places, and if you asked the bear he’d probably tell you he was ready for retirement.
“It was nobody,” I say.
“You called him Dad.”
“You must have misheard,” I say, and it’s a small lie but it hurts like a big one.
“You did. I heard you.”
“I’m sorry, baby, you’re right. I did say Dad.”
“Am I going to live with them?”
“What?”
“Daddy-Nat and Gramma,” she says, and she thinks that’s who I was talking to.
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. Mummy’s gone and I thought you might want a new family now.”
“Is that what somebody told you?” I say, immediately . . .
Make them suffer!
. . . angry at my in-laws for poisoning her mind like that. I keep my voice low and calm and friendly, a singsong voice, like when the cat sits at the door and I’m trying to convince him to come in.
“No, nobody told me. But on TV sometimes that’s what happens. Is that why Mummy left? Because she didn’t want to be with me anymore?”
“Of course not, baby,” I say, and I crouch down in front of her. “Mummy loves you very much, I know that—”
“You smell like the art teacher,” Sam says, interrupting me.
“Huh?”
“After lunch sometimes when we have art. He has the same aftershave.”
I smile. No more beer for Daddy. “Give Daddy a big hug, then eat some breakfast. I’m going to drop you off at Daddy-Nat’s and Grandma’s house for a bit. I have somebody I have to see, but I promise I won’t be long. I love you, sweetie.”
“I don’t want cereal,” she says.
“You can have what you want,” I tell her, which is a mistake, because thirty minutes later we’re sitting in a McDonald’s, the day heating up, and all I can think about is my father and what it is he wants to tell me.
The media called my dad “Jack the Hunter.” They played the angle up and seemed real excited about the symmetry it suggested. He was a modern-day Jack the Ripper with almost a perfect name for it, the best, in fact, unless of course in the late nineteenth century the real killer’s name was Jack Ripper.
Before he was caught, there was no name for him. There wasn’t really much of an interest. A prostitute would go missing and nobody would care. Another would go missing two or three or four years later and nobody searched for a connection. Then some of them showed up. Somebody somewhere figured out that prostitutes over a twenty-five-year period were dying in bad and similar ways. The media told the country about it, but they had no catchy title. They called him the “Prostitute Killer,” and the articles were small and easy to miss. Then came the arrest, then came the statistics, then came the connection to a name in history from the opposite side of the world and my dad became the worst kind of celebrity.
I’ve never visited my dad. We may share the same name and DNA but that’s all. I spent nine years of my life being Jack Jr. before going by my middle name. Sometimes when I was in trouble at home, Mum would call me Jack-son. She would save that name for when she wanted my dad to deal with me. I was his son and his responsibility, like when I failed a subject at school or cut the hair off my sister’s favorite doll. Belinda would call me Jacky in the times before our lives changed, and kept telling me I looked like a girl.
My last memory of Dad is that shy, humble smile of his, flashed at me from the back of a police car, his head twisted toward us, not a hint of shame in his features, almost a look of relief in some ways, as if he didn’t have to hide his true self anymore.
I’ve seen him a few times since, but only on TV and in the papers. Nobody has taken a photo of him in about eighteen years, not since he got snapped dozens of times being led from the back of a van to the back steps of the courthouse. Only reason I knew he was still alive was because nobody has ever rung to tell me otherwise.
I don’t know whether you have to phone ahead or simply show up, but once I drop Sam off I use my cell phone and call directory and ask for the number. A minute later I’m on the phone to the visitation department. I ask for directions and compare them to a map that’s about ten years out of date but does the job.
It’s a thirty-minute drive from my in-laws’ place. I take a shortcut out behind the airport where the roads are narrower but have a higher speed limit. There are cars parked up off the sides, the front windscreens facing the runways on the other side of the chain-link fences, people inside them watching for hours on end the planes come and go. I head down a highway enclosed by pastures, the road edged with fir trees and wildflowers. There are large transmission towers growing out of the fields and shrinking off into the distance. The road markings are all faded from the sun and worn from constant traffic. Mailboxes stand to attention every kilometer or so where gravel roads twist off from the highway between fields of gorse, winding their way toward large farmhouses built to capture the sun.
The prison is hidden out of sight beyond fields of trees, well
away from homes that escapees would visit within minutes of being on the run. The complex is a mixture of several buildings, several wings, all made up of concrete blocks and interconnected with more concrete blocks, the whole place with an industrial feel, as if inside are not the condemned, but men welding steel and creating the machinery that runs this city. Just concrete and steel everywhere, and wire too—plenty of razor-sharp wire tying the look together. A couple of guard towers up in the corners, unarmed men up in them staring down, ready to sound the alarm at the first sign of trouble. Behind it all the tall skeletons of cranes at work, dust in the air kicked up by heavy equipment, engine noise from the bulldozers and cement mixers carrying for miles. There’s a long wing with scaffolding erected near the end and workmen busy on extending it, big burly men covered in grease and sweat who all possibly live within the walls they’re creating.
The visitors’ entrance is far more modern, like the entrance to a three-star hotel. There are large glass doors that seem as though they could be opening into a well-furnished foyer. The entire thing has the fresh look of renovations, and I wonder about the reasoning behind it. I’m not sure how it looked in the past, but the last few years have seen plenty of add-ons and updates to accommodate the new and the aspiring criminals this city is producing. Already some of the large open grounds out here have been zoned for more buildings, more cells, more inmates, and the grounds immediately nearby are already being converted. There have been editorials in the papers lately suggesting they build the concrete walls around Christchurch City and save some time; some even think we should take the biblical route and fill those walls up with water. I never believed them. I never knew Christchurch was really this bad—but now I know it’s worse.
There is a landscaped garden with a lush lawn heading toward the glass doors. I’m not sure what image they’re trying to sell here, but the whole thing seems very corporate. The doors open and it’s air-conditioned inside, which is a relief, because the parking lot with the asphalt has to be over forty degrees. A woman watches me from behind a reception counter with Plexiglas separating her from me.
There are two men back there with her also. Three video surveillance cameras stare down at me from different angles within the room.
“Can I help you, sir?”
It’s like a bank in here, large potted plants, chairs everywhere, the counter with the smiling woman. If six armed men burst into this room I don’t think they’d get far. For the hundredth time today I wonder where those men are, and know they’re about as far away from this prison as you can get.
“Sir?”
The visitor’s entrance may be fresh and friendly, but the woman behind the desk is not. She’s in her forties with the kind of steely look that could scare half of the inmates straight. “Ah, yeah, I’m here to visit somebody.”
“Name?”
“Mine or his?”
“Both.”
“Ah, I’m Jack Hunter,” I say, hating the sound of the name, and saying it because that’s the name my dad will have given them. “My dad is . . .”
“Jack the Hunter,” she says, and she flinches away from me, just a little, but enough to notice. “Hang on a moment,” she says, and she buzzes for one of the guards. “Take a seat.” I do as she says in case she stands up and throws me into one.
It takes a couple of minutes for the guard to appear. He’s older than me and a lot bigger and looks as if he can’t wait for me to say the wrong thing.
“This way,” he says, and I follow him.
“No touching,” he says. “No yelling. No passing any objects. That’s pretty much all you got to know, but you break any of those rules and you’re out of here. You get me?”
“No touching, no yelling, no handing over anything. I get it,” and I wonder if the rules are the same for everybody.