Jacaranda Blue (24 page)

‘No more. No more. I'll be good,' she begged, and she turned her face to the side. One eye had closed. The other looked down at the clown heads she'd embroidered only hours ago, a lifetime ago. One clown eye was blind too. It was staring at her from its plastic bag. Its long legs waiting in another bag, waiting to be joined to the body.

I am as the clown. I have one eye, my other is closing now. My limbs are missing. Numb. I have been unpicked. My right leg is still held to me by a stitch or two, but not my left. Is it there, or in some plastic bag, awaiting the rest of me?

For how long he had been sitting astride her, she didn't know. Cat with a broken mouse, playing with the broken mouse until the fun is over and the mouse dies.

‘We're going to drown. We're going to drown,' cried timid Mousy One.

‘Oh goodness gracious dearie me, our little lives are done.'

The seed he had spilled was drying on the sheet, gluing her skin to the sheet . . . like stiffening eggwhite, tightening the skin.

Egg. Birth. Death. Grave.

She tried to move her left leg. The knife touched her throat.

‘Stay where you are.'

She was dead if she must rely on defeating him with muscle. Bow to his will as she had bowed to another . . . play the old cat and mouse game again. She used to know how to play that game.

‘I love you, my dearest mummy. You are the best mummy in the whole world. Let's go for a walk in the garden, Mummy, and we'll find some flowers, and I'll pick some for you, and you will be like famous Angel in the photo. Come on, Mummy. You open the door and we'll go and pick some flowers.'

Trees to climb in the garden. Fences to clamber over. Safe in the garden. Old Mr Bryant over one fence. Mrs Wilson over the other. Just get the door open a crack, just get outside, and see which way the game would go today.

Play the game, Stella. Roll the dice and see if your lucky number comes up. Maybe you'll find today's magic word.

But Mousy Two, her chin held high, was circling round and round.

‘Please don't despair, keep swimming, a way out may be found.'

Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. High heels across a floor.

It startled Thomas. He moved, turned to the window and Stella snatched her left leg free, flexed the muscle, raised her knee, taking the weight from her heel to the sole of her foot. Blood started its painful journey down from her buttock.

‘What's that?

‘Miss Moreland always wore shoes with heels,' she said.

His eyes were wide. A child's eyes, but his hand was a man's. Again the knife came close to her face. ‘Don't you try that on me. You can't get at me with your tricks. I read a book once where the dame wouldn't shut up with her psychobabble, so the hero cut her head off. Then he went to sleep, which was stupid, and the headless corpse rose from the dead and she got him with an axe. It was plain stupid in the end. As if he'd go to sleep. He'd be hyped up. Hyped out of his brain.' He looked at her, the knife's point placed between her eyes. ‘He'd be on a real high. Couldn't sleep if he tried. I couldn't sleep after I did Miss Moreland. Didn't sleep until they found her on Monday, then I crashed. I was out of it for sixteen hours solid.'

Her left eye refused to see, but the other turned to look at the out of focus steel blade, the yellow of handle.

Tap, tap, tap.

He silenced, listening again to the dragging sound of wood on metal, followed by a louder tap, tap, tap.

‘It's the tree. It's the tree knocking against the roof. You lying old bitch. You knew what it was, didn't you?' He hit her. ‘Didn't you? You knew, didn't you?'

‘Please, Thomas – '

‘Please what? Want me to do it again, eh? Want to take some pleasant memories with you to Jesus? Want to help me this time. Lick me with your silky tongue – buy yourself some time. I did it three times in one night with Kelly Murphy. She's got a good tongue.'

Tap, tap, tap.

His eyes grew wide again, then he said quickly. ‘It's like that poem – something about knocking at my wee small door, and nothing much was stirring on the still dark night. It's black as pitch outside – a good night for creeping around. Nothing much stirring in the still dark night. No-one saw me come here. No-one will see me leave. No-one will think it was me. I'm lily white. I go to church on Sunday.'

‘People see many things now that the hedge is gone.'

‘Did you guess I did it?' His smile was a naughty boy's.

‘Did you know it was me who put that mouse in your drawer, Aunty Stell?'

‘I knew, Thomas,' she replied to the part of him who had placed the toy mouse in her dressing-table drawer, to the part of him who had once loved to sit at her side and listen to the old poems, the stories. She searched his face now for that part that remained the child, a child who might still be reached.

‘No-one's got a clue that I did Miss Moreland. I hid my bike in front of the hospital then crept around the garden to the units. I knocked on her door and she let me in. “What can I do for you at this hour, Thomas Spencer?” she said. So I showed her.

‘No-one saw me creep up the stairs. I did it when you and Mummy was in the shed getting the stuffing.'

‘No-one saw me coming in here. I put my bike behind your shed.'

‘Someone always sees, Thomas.'

‘Good old God? Don't give me your God crap.'

‘Your mother will know you were out.'

‘My mother knows nothing. She comes home from work at night, and she wipes off her stupid supermarket grin, and she gets stuck into the old man. He gives me some money for take-away, just to get rid of me, and if I'm lucky when I get back they've taken a couple of sleeping pills and they're both snoring. They don't know if I'm back or not till breakfast. They don't give a fuck what I do, and they couldn't care less either. They're shit parents. Too busy making war and lousy money to care what I ever did.' He stopped, and he tossed his hair back from his brow. ‘I'll be home for breakfast in the morning, and she'll say, “What did you do last night, Tommy?” She won't listen to what I tell her. I could say, “Oh, I fucked old Stell, then cut her throat, got home around dawn,” and she'd still say, “Good boy. Don't forget to put the garbage out, will you?”'

‘Clever Thomas.'

‘Yeah. Serial killers need to have a brain or they don't get to be serial killers. Get it? They get caught first time, which would affect their success rating. They'll blame your murder on some stranger, someone just passing through, and they'll talk about the pokies at Dorby, and the highway going through the town, and how it's bringing bad elements in, and they'll say how the government ought to put in a bypass, and how if the hedge was still up and the gate shut, that you might have been still alive today.'

‘Perhaps they will.'

‘I'll rob you, take any money you've got hanging around, upend a few drawers and things, make sure I don't leave any fingerprints.'

He looked at the bedhead, then at his hands. ‘I haven't touched anything. I touched the door handle at Miss Moreland's bedroom, but I wiped it clean. Anyway, they haven't got my prints on record so they'd have nothing to compare them with, would they?'

‘As you say, Thomas.'

‘Stop doing that.'

‘I'm sorry. What am I doing?'

‘Calling me Thomas all the time. It's like you're my bloody aunty or something.'

‘An honorary aunt. Wasn't I always an honorary aunt? Weren't you always my favourite honorary nephew?'

‘You're nothing to me. Just a good fuck.' He fondled her breast, nursed on it, and she became his toy, his old abused rag doll.

She didn't fight him when he entered her again. She felt no pain, no shame. It meant only that she was able to raise her other knee, to place both feet flat on the mattress. There was nothing to be gained from pleas or tears. She must conserve energy, relax her muscles. Her good eye was wide open now. It was watching the greedy boy's face lose its personality as a heaviness saturated his features.

How close he is, and how . . . how vulnerable, she thought, so vulnerable because of his youth and his lack of fear. Fear is good. Fear is necessary. How certain and sure he is of his supremacy. Little boy with his knife in his hand and his raping weapon driving into her, driving deeper, and deeper, between her legs.

She moved beneath him, aware that if she was to live until morning, she must stay in this place of no pain and no shame, she must view this happening as from a great distance. He had told her of the rape of Miss Moreland. Now she would be obligated to tell the world of his deed. And he knew this. Her Thomas was no fool. He had never been a fool, and to save himself, he must certainly kill her before he left the house tonight.

The hand that held the knife was supporting his weight on her pillow. Her throat might be slit with little need for movement, but his concentration was not now on the knife.

Tentatively her left hand rose to stroke his shoulder, just as it had when he was a child. She allowed her fingers to move to the nape of his neck where she smoothed and stroked his hair.

‘Dear Thomas,' she said. ‘How I loved you when you were small. Of all the little boys in town, I loved you best,' but her other hand, her right hand, was over the side of the bed, seeking, circling, reached for . . . something. Anything. Knitting needle. Something. Hope. Anything. ‘You were such a beautiful little boy. I used to pretend you belonged to me. How I wanted you to belong to me.'

Her seeking fingers touched only the plastic bag, half filled with clown heads. It continued its circling, then returned to plastic. Her one eye watched his face, saw his own eyes close. She moved beneath him as she grasped the bag, tilted it, up-ended it, allowing the small knitted heads to tumble soundlessly to the carpet. Her hand keeping low, she drew the bag along the edge of the bed, until her arm was at full stretch. And she held it there, her fingers inside its open end, her thumb gripping . . . gripping it . . . until . . .

‘Dear Thomas.' She stroked his neck with her fingers, matching the rhythm of her fingers to his motion. No pain, only the heat of him, and the tension in her right arm. She moved her feet, pressing her heels into the mattress.

He stiffened. He screamed as a child might scream. His neck arched, his eyes closed, and he flung his head back.

And she struck.

Her left hand came together with her right. The bag held open by her palms, slipped easily over his head, exactly as she might slip a similar bag over a finished clown.

Simple. Easy.

At the same time she bore down on her heels and flung her weight at the off-balanced youth, pushing him to his back, her action sliding the bag down . . . down to the still slim vulnerable boy's neck, where her hooked thumbs gripped the plastic, while her hands, with a twist and a turn, wound the excess around her palms.

Fast motion. Slow motion. Time lived in another place. Seconds became minutes and minutes hours.

He rolled to the side. She rolled with him, straddling him, locking her ankles now behind his knees, holding him inside her.

Green eyes grew wide in protest behind the film of plastic they now shared with another green-eyed clown, but the big clown mouth was not smiling; it grew wide, pink, it sucked plastic. Its nostrils flared and whitened as they sucked in the transparent film. The throat bulged.

Her hands were strong. They had learned to be strong. Now they fought for her life, joined together by a twisted plastic bag. She was locked in a battle to the death and there could only be one winner.

Fists hammered against her. The knife drove into her rib cage. She felt no slice of pain. Perhaps it was the handle. If not, then she may not outlive him long. But she would outlive him. She would outlive him. Vengeance is mine, said the Lord, but tonight vengeance belonged to Stella.

Like a wild-west rider, she rode him while he bucked and fought to be free of her. Her hands were crushed beneath him. Hot. There was heat in her knees, her hips, but no pain. No room for pain. He kicked at air, fought for air, then the knife dropped with a clunk to the carpet, and too late his fingers sought the plastic, clawed at the film of plastic.

But slowly.

With no nails to grip, to rip, his movements were slowing.

Slow.

Slower.

More slowly.

And more slowly still.

He stopped fighting, sagged.

And she breathed. She looked.

His face had changed colour behind the plastic film glued to his features as if a paintbrush had painted it there. The small clown head, with the green eyes and the glint of gold, smiled as it clung to his ear.

She waited.

Waited long after he stopped moving. Waited.

Slowly then she dragged her legs free, one first, then the other. She waited again, before sliding them over the side of the bed. Her feet, dead things, refused to support her, and she sank to the floor, entangled in the sheet, but still gripping the plastic bag with hands grown numb as her feet.

She waited until her mind was capable of setting forth the plan to unwind the cutting plastic. Then she waited again, afraid if she unwound it, he would draw breath and rise up, rip the bag from his head.

Hands, dead lumps of wood, were slowly freed. First the left. Then the right. Pain came then. Pain was all over, in her hips, and her feet, where it regrouped its army of pain to rush her hands.

Agony. Agony of another time. She looked at her hands, expecting to see the small white gloves that for weeks had camouflaged Angel's guilt.

Small hands pressed to the black stove, held to the black heat. Smell of burning while Angel screamed, ‘Feel the flames of hell as I once felt them.'

Rationality was skittering away. Far away. Her feet entangled in the sheet, Stella didn't know how to handle the task of the untangling. Her mind was pulsating, forward and back. Back and forward. She had to grasp at the forward and impel herself through the barrier, back into the now.

How.

Almost over. Almost home. Get that phone.

Miss Moreland, my dear lady. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me my false pride. Forgive me.

Pick up the phone. Pick up that phone.

Stella began pulling at the sheet, pulling, pulling until she was free of it, of him, then she placed her forehead on the carpet amid the small clown heads, and her hands came together, her index fingers touching the point of her chin, as if in prostrate prayer to some ancient old god of the kill. No words came. No tears. And she heard no accusations. The old gods were all sleeping, and the one true God had flown away. Far away.

The head lolling over the side of the bed was close to her own. A hand, with open fingers, touched the floor. She backed away, backed on her knees until she reached the dressing-table, where she drew herself up, leaning heavily on the solid unit.

Slowly she released her grip on the wood and stood alone, looking at her hands, staring at the deeply embedded lines of red and white across the scarred palms. For minutes, she stood staring at her hands, at the burn scars she'd grown with, that had grown with her, then her gaze lifted and she looked across her hands to her bed.

He hadn't moved.

She sighed, turned, caught a glimpse of her nakedness in the mirror, saw his naked limbs reflected behind her.

Dead limbs. Dead. Dead. Dead.

She was looking at Ron Spencer's only son, and at the face of his killer. His killer. She had killed. Two faces in the mirror. Two killers. One was that of a twisted clown, wrapped up in a plastic bag, packaged up for delivery. The other was a blank face, not worked yet. Empty.

She tried to move to the door, but her feet tripped on the blue jeans he had tossed at the floor. She stepped on them, felt the sharp stud beneath her foot. She lifted her foot, then used it to move the jeans aside.

Stooping hurt. She sucked air. Everything hurt. Pain was everything, but the phone was on the floor. She overrode pain, stooped, picked up the phone and pressed the talk button. She pressed number one. No light. Something was wrong. Time after time she pressed the talk button, then the number. The phone was dead, as the clown was dead. She tried all the buttons. Nothing. And the telephone slipped from her hands to the floor, bounced on the floor, bounced near the denim jeans. But she didn't want to see them, so she turned her back and stared at the mirror.

Naked. Naked breasts. She had feared naked.

Once.

The telephone had worked.

Once.

She looked down to the pale triangle of her pubic hair, and at the scar in the shape of a cross above the hair, and she touched the cross. She had feared that cross too.

Once.

Not red any more. White. Always there, but never there.

Hide it. Hide it in the showers at school. No-one must know. Hide it behind the tall hedge. Mustn't tell. Mustn't ever tell on Mummy. Daddy said.

Two slow steps away from the mirror and she was against the bed. More naked flesh. She turned to it and saw the puny shrunken thing between his legs.

Have to cover it. Cover it up. Hide it. Mustn't tell.

She picked up the sheet, used it to clean herself, then she tossed the defiled thing down. His sweatshirt had fallen to the floor beside the bed. It was studded with small smiling heads. She took it, shook the small clowns free.

The shirt smelt of him. She held it to her nose, breathed in the scent of his sweat. No more fear in that scent. Nothing. Fear was dead. She shrugged, pulled the garment over her head.

‘To the conqueror go the spoils of victory,' she whispered, reaching down for his jeans, shaking them out, stepping naked into them.

The stud, clipped. Zipped, the rapist's fly. Cuffs rolled – as she had rolled other cuffs on another day. A fine day. Day with Bonny. Day long ago in the fitting room.

They're too baggy. Show us a size smaller.

She looked in the mirror. Too big. Too loose in the waistband. ‘But you have no choice today,' she said. ‘No choice at all.' And she walked from the room and down the stairs, past the telephone and outside to wander amongst the damp perfumes in her dark garden.

 

It was later when she unlocked the shed doors, flung them wide. Perhaps her action was a primitive celebration of freedom, as was the wearing of her rapist's clothing; she was far beyond all conscious thought. Standing in the open doorway she looked at the Packard, then like a sleepwalker she turned, looked towards the house.

‘Where would you like to go today, Mother?'

Each movement an effort, each action a reflex thing, born of the moment, she turned towards the house, seeing that which was no longer there.

‘Coming, Mother,' she whispered, and she walked to the back door, took the Packard's keys from the top of the kitchen dresser and returned to the car.

Its odour was of aged leather and polish. A clean odour. She slid into the driver's seat and she placed the key in the ignition. It turned over slowly, then caught, ticking quietly as she reversed out of the shed and began backing the big vehicle up the drive to the front door. Angel had always left by the front door.

Obese Angel, barely capable of walking in her last years. Angel, the invalid on her brown leather couch, eating chocolate biscuits, stuffing herself with food. Unkempt, unwashed. Sister Brooks had come to bath her twice a week, bath her in a tub. She couldn't walk upstairs. She slept in the small downstairs room. Upstairs was safe now. Angel was safe too. Doctor Parsons came twice each day to inject her medication and make her safe, safe enough to take beyond the hedge on the days she had her bath because she had to have a double dose or Sister Brooks wouldn't come. They were the good days. Stella took her touring. Mad Angel in the back seat, while the driver sat up front, ice tingles down her spine.

Watch her in the rear-vision mirror. Don't fear the other drivers on the road, fear precious Angel. Watch her. Always watch her. Don't take your eyes off her. Not for a second. Drive to Dorby, drive for hours. You are out of the house, so just drive – but watch her.

‘Too dark.' Stella whispered. ‘Too dark to go out touring. The world is sleeping, Mother.'

So dark, she was unaware that the car had left the gravelled drive until the Packard's wheels sunk into a garden bed.

‘Lights,' she said, and her hand searched for the lights. Somewhere.

A seeking hand found the switch, and too suddenly, the drive was floodlit. She drove the big car forward until the twin beams illuminated the shed floor, showing the empty space where the Packard had been, and she sat staring at the permanent indentations the Packard's wheels had made on the earthen floor. Twin hollows, worn by the tyres' movement in the sixty years this vehicle had called this space home.

‘The world is sleeping, Mother, and you are blissfully dead. Blissfully, wonderfully dead. Dead. Delightfully dead. So. So, why do I need the car tonight if you are dead?'

But she did need it. Someone needed it.

The clown did. Delivery. It had to go away. Now that it had been made safe, she had to take it somewhere. Delivery to –

Always doing deliveries. Always someone wanting something.

‘Where do I have to take him?'

‘To Marilyn?'

She shook her head, aware that that was a bad thought. The key turned in the ignition and the motor stilled. The night silenced. Leaving the lights on, she climbed from the car and returned to the shed.

‘There is always a logical answer to a problem that appears to defy logic,' she said, unaware she was in a place outside of logic. ‘Be logical. I am alive and he is not. The logical course of action would be to telephone Sergeant Johnson. The downstairs phone will be working, so what am I doing out here?

‘What do I say? Sorry to wake you, Sergeant, but there is a clown in my bedroom and I'd like it removed. Or Ron. Good evening, Ron. This is Stella. Thomas's party has ended. Can you come around and pick him up, please?' She shook her head, her eyes scanning the shed.

‘Be logical,' she whispered.

The big green waste container was near the back door. Put him in it and wheel him out to the nature strip for the garbage man to take away.

Fitting, but perhaps illogical.

‘I have to hide it.

‘No more hedge to hide it behind, Father. The hedge is gone.

‘God help me. What have I done?

‘But what is done cannot be undone,' she whispered. ‘Except for Mrs Morris's clowns. They can be undone.'

She walked to the mark of the wheel indentations. Squatting, walking crab-like, she scratched a rectangle in the centre with the car keys. For minutes she remained there, looking at the rectangle, too weary to do more than look. Then she stood, walked to the far corner, and selected her favourite spade and her pick. Dragging the tools behind her, she returned to the car and turned off the lights.

The new dark of the shed was complete. She stood in the centre of the rectangle, picking at the earth until her eyes adjusted to the dark. It was just a little hole, a deeper black in the all black. Just a very silly little hole. Just something to do because she didn't know what to do, and she couldn't face what she had done, so she kept picking and shovelling. She was digging in the garden. She was making a hole, large enough to plant a small rose bush, or to bury a dead bird. She worked on, her mind far away.

Hard-packed virgin earth, it would not easily give up its place in the scheme of things, but eventually her small wheelbarrow became full. Too full to accept more soil. It kept trickling off. For minutes she looked at the barrow's rounded shape, a shadowy shape in the near black of the shed. She tried to lift the handles, but her hands burned.

‘Can't,' she said.

Stained-glass window. Jesus on the cross. Hands required to be placed palms-together, index fingers on the point of the chin. Throbbing hands, throbbing as Jesus's own poor hands must have throbbed.

‘Can't,' she said.

Chin up, Mousy Two.

She sighed, lifted her chin, then she took up the handles of the barrow. Lifted. Her hip screamed, her shoulder throbbed, so she dropped the handles, spilled earth.

‘I can't.

‘But I will, because I have to,' she said. Again she gripped the handles and she wheeled her load into the vegetable garden, emptying it there to a fallow plot.

The next barrow load was emptied beside the first, but when she returned to the shed, the first pink blush of a pre-dawn sky gave light enough to see how little impression her labour had made in the centre of her rectangle. She narrowed her image of the hole, digging a small ditch to mark her new smaller triangle. Again she transferred earth to the garden.

Daylight came slowly, and with it the deeper layer, the pre-clay. She was emptying her barrow along the eastern fence when a bald head popped over.

‘G'day,' Mr Wilson said.

She stared at the bald head of reality, of neighbour, and she recognised reality, but hid her face from it.

‘G'day there. What are you up to?'

She had to reply. Find a word or two. What word?

‘Gardening.' Familiar words are always the last to desert the tongue.

‘Yeah. I can see that. What are you putting down there?'

‘Earth.'

‘You're into it bloody early, aren't you?'

‘Yes. The removal of your trees, Mr Wilson. Thank you. Father will be delighted.' Old wars were safe wars. Far better to rekindle the old tree war than to struggle yet with too-new conflicts. Far better.

‘Humph.'

The one and a half metre fence only allowed her eyes to peep over. She did not peep this morning, but remained stooped, head low. He was a bare fraction taller than she. Hands supporting him on the top of the palings, his looked down at her crouching form.

‘What 'ave you done to your eye then?'

Her hand rose to touch her eye, closed tight now. ‘I took a tumble. Down the stairs. In the dark.' Old lies were good lies, far better than today's lies.

‘What in heaven's name happened to the child, Angel?'

‘She took a tumble down the stairs. Clumsy. I've never seen a child so clumsy.'

‘You want to watch yourself on those bloody stairs. That's how your mother did her back in. I wouldn't give you tuppence for a house with stairs.'

‘What happened to her, Daughter?'

‘She took a tumble down the stairs, Father.'

Never again had Angel made it up the stairs. Never again.

‘God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform,' she said.