I looked at Eden. She was sitting upright in her chair.
“I’m afraid I don’t recall anything further about the moments before the shooting that I haven’t already put in writing to the inquiry board,” she said.
“Let’s get away from actions,” Dr. Stone said. “Let’s talk about feelings. How do you feel when you remember that time in the church? Can you remember entering the building?”
Eden said nothing.
“Frank, what about you?”
“I’m sorry, Doctor. You lost me at ‘Let’s talk about feelings.’ ”
Dr. Stone licked her bottom lip. I sat sniggering at my own joke. I nudged Eden to see if she’d heard it. She was rigid as pine.
“Tell me how you feel. Seriously. It will have no bearing on your masculinity, Frank, I promise you.”
“You women and your lies.”
“I want to know if either of you are returning to that day in your minds, either voluntarily or involuntarily, because I think it’s important that we put a name to how the event made you feel so that we can deal with it properly. Eden, you need to deal with your brother’s loss and any blame you might have assigned yourself for accidentally killing him. Frank, you need to deal with having been injured and with whatever caused you to shoot Mr. Beck. Until we deal with these emotions neither of you are going to be fit to move on with your lives.”
Eden pulled a thread out of her jeans and curled it around her finger. She rolled it into a ball and placed it on the arm of the couch. I watched.
“Frank, you’re obviously not coping with what’s happened,” Dr. Stone said.
“What are you picking on me for? Pick on Eden. She loves it.”
“I’m picking on you because whether Eden has dealt with the trauma of this event or not she is clearly still functioning. You’re not functioning, Frank.”
“I’m deeply offended by that. I’m here. I’m not even that late.”
“You
reek
of alcohol,” Dr. Stone said. She rolled her eyes up in her head on the word “reek” to illustrate her point. “And I heard pill packets crumple in your back pocket when you sat down. You’re doing the stand-up comedian act to deflect attention. We’ve played this game seven times now. I’m over it. I’ve got two more sessions with you guys after this one, and I really would like to stop beating around the bush if we can, please.”
“Jesus. You’re pretty ballsy for a shrink,” I laughed. Eden gave me a warning look.
“I’m a cop shrink, Frank. I’m used to being fucked around. It gets boring.”
I laughed more. I’d never heard her get this fiery. She formed the words with perfect coral pink lips and they zinged in the air like electricity.
“Let’s talk,” she said.
“All right. I’m talking. I’m doing it. What do you want to talk about?”
“Tell me about Beck’s last victim, Martina Ducote. I understand you and her were close, Frank.”
I stopped smiling. Eden watched me put the coffee on the small table between us and hang my head back over the edge of my seat again. For the rest of the session, I was silent.
The boy wasn’t sure how he got to the car, how long he had been sitting there in the front seat beside the Bear, if the Bear Man had spoken to him or what he had said. He stared at his palms for a long time, at the blood.
The Bear was watching the boy with interest, a cigarette wedged between his fingers and his huge elbow resting on the sill of the open window.
“What’s your name?” the big man asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t remember.”
The man drew on his cigarette, blew smoke out the window. Ahead, the orange light of street lamps danced in the rain. The man and the boy turned as they heard the front door of the terrace house slam. The Captain was a dark shape in the night, adjusting the cuffs of his shirt.
“What’s he going to do with me?”
“I don’t know,” the Bear said.
“Is he going to take me to the police?”
“No,” the Bear laughed. The boy watched as the Captain closed and locked the front gate behind him. He carried what looked like a laundry bag over his shoulder.
“Did I kill that man in there?” the boy asked.
“If you didn’t, Caesar did.”
“I didn’t mean to kill him.” The boy’s teeth were chattering.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Bear said. “No one’s going to cry over him.”
Caesar thrust open the back door of the car and hurled the laundry bag onto the seat before sliding in. Instantly it was hotter in the car. The boy sunk into his seat. Neither the Bear Man nor Caesar spoke as the car glided into the night. The men smelled foreign to him, of smoke and salt and blood. The boy felt afraid. There seemed to be no possibility of escape, but he was reassured by the Bear Man’s calm driving, the cigarette slowly leading to another, the sigh he gave now and then as they pulled up to empty traffic lights burning red.
The boy only realized he was falling asleep when the car came to a stop. Caesar got out and stood smoking by the car with the huge hairy Bear.
“You won’t do it even if I ask you to, will you?”
“I don’t do children.”
“Then we have an interesting little problem here, don’t we, Bear? Because I don’t dirty my hands like that, either, and I don’t want you driving him somewhere and leaving him. If he doesn’t remember me, he’ll remember you.”
“This doesn’t need to be a problem,” the Bear said. “He’s a good kid. He’s obviously got spunk. Let him hang around a bit and see if we can use him for something . . .”
“You can’t watch him all day long.”
“Yes, I can.”
Caesar stubbed his cigarette out on the ground. The door beside him opened and the Bear Man encircled his arm in his huge hand. He stumbled and grabbed the man’s trousers. Caesar was gone. He was being led toward the house. Light, noise. A turntable just inside the door was playing “Georgia on My Mind.” He brushed against a woman’s bare leg. She looked down as she went past him, her painted lips falling open and eyes frowning.
Bear’s hand loosened, slid to his wrist, held his hand. There were people everywhere, most of the men clothed and the women not. The boy looked into a dark room and saw bodies moving and smoke curling. Somewhere he could hear a game of pool, the crack and tumble of balls. He was at the back door of the house when he saw the girl standing in the kitchen holding a glass of water and staring at him.
The first thing he thought was that she was painted gold, a perfect sheen on her cheeks and the tops of her arms, the soft curves in her throat where the skin dipped over bones and ridges. That was the second thing, the shape of her, like a fleshy bug, with bones speaking their poetry from beneath the gold in the armholes of her loose tank top. Her wide nose and huge black eyes told the boy that she was at least partly Aborigine.
He looked back at her as the Bear took him down some stairs into a lush wet garden. There was a greenhouse with a tiny work shed attached. The Bear stopped and reached up and there was light. The boy was lifted onto a bench covered in tiny pots, seedlings, jars and bottles of every conceivable size and shape, tools rusting and half-polished, strips of fabric, and tubes of ointment.
The girl bumped into the Bear’s leg and he yelled out.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Sunday, you scared the shit out of me.”
“Bear, who’s that?”
“Nevermind who she is. Were you born in a tent?”
The girl named Sunday shut the door of the little shed. The boy tried to guess how old she was. She mustn’t have been much older than him, but he couldn’t be sure. Bear heaved a heavy sigh and wet a cloth in a sink by the door.
“Follow me around like a fucking puppy, you do. Always underfoot.”
“What’s your name?” Sunday asked.
The boy tried to control his shaking. Bear wiped the blood from his cheeks and neck roughly with the cloth.
“Oi! I’m talking to you!”
“I don’t know,” the boy said.
“Whatcha mean, you don’t know?”
“He doesn’t have one,” Bear said, irritation saturating his voice. “Sometimes people just don’t have names, okay? His mama got too busy to give him one, just like I’m too busy right now to listen to all your jabbering. You want his name? You sit over there and think of a good one to give him.”
Sunday perched on the edge of the sink and looked at the boy with her head cocked. Bear took the boy’s nose in his huge fingers and felt where one half of the bone had slid up and over the other.
“This is going to hurt,” he said, before sliding the bones back into place with an audible crunch. The boy wailed.
“Francis,” Sunday blurted. “We can call him Francis.”
“We ain’t calling him Francis. He ain’t no nancy.”
“Thomas.”
“I got too many Thomases in my life already.”
“What about Henry?”
“He’s German. He needs a German name.”
“What’s German for Henry?”
“Heinrich.”
“Good,” Sunday said. “Heinrich is an ugly name. An ugly name for an ugly, smelly boy.”
“This ugly, smelly boy is going in your bed tonight,” Bear said. “There ain’t no other place for him.”
The girl gasped. “No, he’s not.”
“He sure is.”
“He’s not, Bear. He’s not.” Sunday slid down from the edge of the sink and slapped the big man hard on the shoulder. He didn’t seem to notice. He was examining the boy’s right hand in the light of the overhead lamp. The tiny bones behind his knuckles had been crushed, and two fingers bent at strange angles, deeper toward the palm than they should have been.
“You really made a mess of this,” Bear said. “Somebody better teach you how to punch, boy.”
“Bear, he’s not really sleeping with me,” Sunday continued. She turned to the boy. “You’re not sleeping with me.”
“Sunday, you shut your trap or you go straight back where I found you,” Bear said. His voice was soft, but the certainty in his words left no room for negotiation. The girl stormed out of the shed, slamming the door behind her. Bear snorted with laughter as he massaged the bones in the boy’s hand back into place.
“Women, uh?” he said. “Painful.”
I
told Eden I’d think about doing some work for Hades. It was about all what would make her let me out of the car, stop her driving me around and lecturing me on my drinking, on what I could catch from the pub skanks, on what Martina would have wanted me to be doing.
I started to ask her how she felt about Eric’s death and that shut her up fast. I felt bad. I got the impression not that she missed Eric or that she loved him but that somehow her lack of emotion, her natural inability to feel anything for any other human being, made her afraid. I tried to imagine what it might be like to be unable to love. I had no doubt that I’d loved Martina. I’d only known her a few days but I’d loved her.
When I swung open the apartment door I was shocked by a wall of perfume. I walked in and heard myself grunt in disbelief. Someone had cleaned the entire place—scrubbed it, washed it, bleached it, organized it beyond recognition. There were books in a bookshelf by the bedroom door that I’d forgotten I had, a vase of my mother’s that had been wrapped in paper for years was on the polished glass tabletop exploding with flowers.
Actual
flowers. The kitchen was gleaming and empty of all things—the filthy sandwich-maker was gone, the dishwasher empty and airing, the window open. I went into the bedroom and sat on the bed by the cat, who was curled like a circular cushion at the foot of the bed. All my clothes had been washed and ironed and hung in the closet. The sheets were new. This must have taken a team of people. I called Eden.
“I’m driving.”
“I want my keys back,” I said.
“No,” she answered.
“I’ll change the locks.”
“That would be a waste of time.”
“You want to mother someone, Eden, you should go and have a baby.”
“Stop acting like a baby and I’ll stop mothering you.”
She hung up. I threw the phone on the bed and went to order dinner.
Driving into the Utulla dump made me nervous. The dump had been referred to by police as “Utulla Cemetery” since Hades Archer acquired it back in the eighties, but dozens of searches had failed to confirm suspicions that Hades buried people here for a fee. Knowing Eden’s secret, how she spent her nights and what she and Eric had done in the past, confirmed for me that Hades had been the one to show the two fledgling killers the ropes. I’d never found a body to fit Eden’s killings, although Eric’s attempt to kill me was confession enough.
Hades and his children were a superior breed of urban predator. However afraid of Eden I was sometimes when she gave me a crooked look or when I heard noises in my apartment in the night or when I walked home from the pub and felt eyes on me from the dark, Hades made me more afraid. Hades didn’t exhibit the same cold, emotionless, obviously detached murderous persona that Eden did.
I’d met him once and he’d been charming. He had a number of friends in the police force, acquired simply through his friendly, giving, likeable character. He was funny, I’d heard. Really funny. I felt somehow that at least with Eden, I’d feel something before she did away with me. That rush of coldness surfers feel when a shadow passes beneath them. With Hades, I wouldn’t feel anything. He was that good.
The huge gates, a complex filigree of twisted metal, chains, bottles, car parts, tires, and strips of melted plastic, were open. On the first turn toward the hill I passed a group of kangaroos made from mismatched mosaic tiles. They looked so real in their shape and posture I slowed down, instinctively expecting one to panic and leap in front of the vehicle. On the next bend, two stainless-steel and colored-glass Komodo dragons guarded a lump of sandstone as big as my car, one basking, one clawing at the air as I passed.
As I drove up the hill I got a sinking feeling that I was wandering into a trap, that I was edging closer and closer to the point of no return. People would hear that I was working for Hades if I did it long enough. It would circulate in whispers around the office, slide under doors like smoke, glimmer in eyes as I walked through the offices. A connection made. Linked in. Hooked up. Frank Bennett and Hades Archer—known criminal association. But I shrugged the feeling off. I was being reckless. It was something I’d become comfortable with.
I told no one I was coming in an attempt to make an inconvenience of myself, but a man appeared to be waiting for me as I pulled up under a “No Parking” sign made from bottle caps nailed to a wooden board. He was carrying a mug of coffee and wearing a battered cap. Two small piggy eyes were wedged between the cap and his dark beard. He looked at his watch as I approached.
“Morning, Frank,” he said.
“Uh, morning . . . ?”
“Steve. Hades told me to wait here for you. Show you what you’re doing.”
“I didn’t tell Hades I was coming.”
Steve had that “Let’s get on with it” look that a lot of laborers get in the morning. I reached into the back of my car and took out a water bottle. The heat was already oppressive, made heavier by the previous day’s rain. I felt the hangover stir in my stomach as I leaned over. I popped two Panadol and shut the car.
“You had breakfast?”
“Not really a breakfast person,” I said.
“You need breakfast. We’ve got a barbie on.”
You need.
“Yeah, maybe later,” I said. Steve led me down a dirt path. There was no sign of the old man. He had a strange garden going on around the house, disorganized, like he’d just been throwing random seeds on the ground and letting them survive or die as they wished. A huge pumpkin vine was woven around white roses towering over what looked like chives. A rabbit as big as a golf buggy had been constructed out of a wrought-iron frame and furred with knitting needles. It reared on its hind legs, its huge head turned back toward the gates.
“Look at that thing,” I said as we passed.
“Yeah,” Steve said.
He led me over the hill and through streets carved between piles of trash as high as two-story houses. Car bodies, bookcases, ladders, toolboxes, washing machines, television sets, compressors, gas bottles, toys. Street signs, rusting and bent where cars had run into them, had been resurrected and placed at the intersections of bare earth pathways. We emerged into a clearing at the bottom of the hill and were confronted by a huge pile of metal, three meters higher than I and at least twice as long.
“Hades wants you to sort this.” Steve gestured toward the pile. “It’s mostly donation material. He wants three separate piles—copper, aluminum, and steel or iron.” He slapped a pair of gardening gloves against my chest. I took them and put them on.
“You got a hat?” he asked.
“No.”
“Not real prepared, are you?”
“Preparation is for Boy Scouts.”
Steve sniggered. “I’ll get you one. If you change your mind about breakfast, the work shed is on Marine Parade. Really recommend it.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said.
I started at the bottom of the pile. Copper pipes, lead pipes, a car axle. A shopping trolley, an engine block, various gears and cogs. Rusty saw blades, washing machine barrels. Steve came back with a hat and I quickly soaked it with sweat. The sun was beating down, almost ringing in the silence with its intensity. My hangover stayed away for the first hour and only my joints and the muscles in my back gave me trouble. I stopped and drank half the water, which was warm as a cup of tea. There was no shade. Sweat itched in the hair on my calves and tickled as it slid down my ribs.
My thoughts wandered. First there was the curiosity brought on by what I was doing—what sort of machine this battery might have come from, how old that set of sink taps was, why someone might have thrown out this perfectly good set of bolt cutters. As the work became monotonous I found myself thinking about Martina. I shook these thoughts away for a while and thought about other girls. She returned to me, this time in the box they’d put her in, the half dozen or so people who had attended her funeral. I wondered how someone so beautiful could have been so alone in life.
When I couldn’t get away from Martina in my mind I went to a tiny slice of shade that had developed by a stack of cars nearby and popped two Oxys. I wondered if it had been a mistake to get away from my apartment, my television, the booze. I stood in the shade and felt sickness swell in my stomach. The hangover. I told myself that working harder would get rid of it. Get rid of Martina. I drank the rest of the water and went back to the pile, stripping off my wet shirt.
Hours passed. I tried to control my thoughts. Surely the shrink had given me some strategies for that. All right. My earliest memory. My dad. My dad taking me fishing, sitting under a bridge at Illawarra, yelling as loud as I could when the train went overhead and not being able to hear my voice. Catching toadfish and kicking them back into the water. What did I remember about Mum? Animals. She always had animals around. Baby bats plucked from the fried bodies of their mothers hanging on power lines—stinking squeaking things, furry, leathery balls of bones. Bones. Martina’s bones. Martina’s bones in the ground. I’d left her. I’d fucking left her.
I went back to the shade, breathing in, breathing out, sweat dripping off the tips of my fingers. It didn’t stop the vomit. There was nothing in me but booze. I stood there gripping the bumper of a half-smashed Corolla and spitting.
Hades’ laughter reached me through my throbbing ears.
“You didn’t eat anything,” he said. He was leaning on a cane at the entrance to Tropicana Avenue, a few meters away from me, his eyes dazzling in the shadow of his heavy brow. I spat, couldn’t catch my breath. He laughed again.
“Come on,” he said, and cocked his head.
“I’m fine. I’m all right. It’s just a hangover.”
The old man continued walking. I followed reluctantly. He led me back through the piles of trash toward his shack.
The sickness rose again. I didn’t want to go in there. I didn’t want to be alone with him. It wasn’t fear, but a deep trepidation at what he might tell me, what he might want me to know, that heavy mutual understanding that I didn’t like what he was, what he had been all his life, what he had raised Eden to be. I’d been built for catching killers. We were supposed to be natural enemies.
He held open the door and I entered. I hoped he couldn’t see that all my muscles were twitching, not just the fingers, the way they danced against my thigh. Sunspots clouded my vision, emerald green and swirling. It was cool and dark here. I wondered where my shirt was.
“Sit there,” he said and pointed to a chair at a small table by the wall. He took a water bottle from the fridge and set it in front of me. I drank, looking at the things hanging from the ceiling—ornate glass Christmas baubles and hand-painted teacups, a lizard skeleton still fully assembled by cartilage, spray-painted gold.
Hades put a roast beef sandwich together on a plate. I took it, thanked him, and shoved it in my head.
“Bet you feel like an idiot.”
“It’s nothing new.”
I finished the sandwich and worked on the water. It was painfully cold in my throat.
“Lost weight since I saw you last,” he said. “Lots of weight. You must have really liked that girl.”
“I did,” I said.
I was struck by how similar talking to Hades was to talking to my father. There was a battle raging inside me—a desire to hear what he thought I should do to fix all the problems in my life tangled up with an old hostility, a need to make sure he didn’t find out anything about me he could use. He turned the handle of a mug on the table toward him and resumed a coffee my presence must have interrupted.
“Funny what hard work will bring out in you,” he said.
“I needed it.”
“You want some more?”
“I think Eden will nag me to death if I don’t come at least a couple more times, and that’s not how I plan to die.”
“Not that kind of work,” Hades said. “Something more in tune with your official employment.”
I frowned.
He smiled.
The old man folded the newspaper on the table between us with one hand and set it aside. It was a stalling gesture. A bit of silence, in case I hadn’t caught on yet, to help me realize that offering me trash-sorting work had been a ruse all along. That was how Hades did things. Set up games and created shadows. Observed, listened, tested you. Broke you down until you were vomiting from heatstroke. Embarrassed you in front of others, offered you a redemption ticket with something more dignified. Setting aside the newspaper was a metaphorical setting aside of everything we both knew and need not say in polite conversation.
You’re on the edge, Frank, and you’re making Eden and me nervous. We own you. I need you to do something for me, and you’re going to do it whether you like it or not.
“I’ve got a problem,” Hades began. “It’s something I’d usually deal with myself, but seeing you’re more skilled at this sort of thing I thought I might entrust it to you. I’ve been thinking of you almost as part of the family for some time, you know. You’re my daughter’s partner. It comes easily to me.”
Part of the family. Sharing in the secrets. Obligated. Till death do us part.
“What’s the problem?”
“I’m being watched. I don’t like it.”
“Who’s watching you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve laid a couple of traps and come up empty. Seen the fucker only once with my own eyes. I know he’s around though. I can smell him.”
I sat back in my chair.
“Just watching? Nothing else?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Why would someone want to watch you?”
Hades gave a small laugh in answer.
I felt stupid. “Okay. What have you seen?”
“A car, a couple of weeks ago. A Commodore, gray. Nothing so brazen since but I feel it going on.”
“He a cop?”
“I’ve been assured he’s not.”
“Are you assuming he’s male?”