‘C
ould this street be any fucking longer? We’re gonna end up in Geelong at this rate. What’s the number on the side of the building over there?’ Billy squinted and tried to make it out. ‘That can’t be right. She’s not going to be living in a fucking car yard is she?’
Daylight wasn’t far off. Stars had begun to dim. They came to a wide intersection. Without waiting for the walking signal Billy crossed the empty road. Munro Street continued on the other side. It got darker and narrower.
‘This is more like it. Now we’re gettin’ somewhere.’
They stopped in front of a tall mesh fence. Adam took the opportunity to squat and rest. Tiredness had a way of blunting fear. Adam couldn’t care less right then what they were doing, just as long as they got it done soon. A number was written in black paint on a letterbox set into the wire fence. In the middle of the bare block was a large shed. A smaller office section was at the front. There wasn’t a car or any indication that a person lived there. At the top of the fence were three rows of barbed wire, no lock on the gates, though. Billy lifted the gate latch and Adam got to his feet. They walked into the yard. Weeds and grass poked through the blue stone driveway. Sounds of trucks barrelling down the deserted roads carried to them.
They found Joe’s car parked around the back of the shed, in front of two steel sliding doors. No TV or any of Joe’s belongings packed inside the car. The shed doors were chained and padlocked. A small access door was also locked. Billy and Adam returned to the front of the shed. The sky was getting lighter by the second. They tried the office door. Locked. Billy began trying the windows.
Around the side, the small toilet window opened. The gap was narrow.
‘You’ll have to go in.’
Billy crouched and Adam climbed up onto his back and then onto his shoulders.
Adam pulled himself through the window. He went in headfirst.
There were porcelain ornaments, glass figurines on the toilet cistern. They fell and landed with a plop and dull clink into the loo. His feet not yet through, Adam pushed down the toilet seat with his hand. It was covered in fluffy fabric. He climbed down onto it.
‘Good?’
‘Yep.’
Ornaments toppled with each shift of Adam’s body. He felt for the light switch, knocking over more trinkets as he did. They landed softly this time, dropping onto the thick rug underfoot.
‘Still good?’
‘Yep.’
‘Hurry up, let me in.’
It was no better out in the hallway, just as tight. Adam found a light switch down the other end of the hallway. It shone dimly. He could now see the extent of the problem. All the rooms were filled with boxes, old furniture, bags of clothes, cans of food, piles of shoeboxes, bundled towers of magazines, teetering collections of baskets filled with soaps and toiletries, pens and pencils, balls of string, and seemingly every other possible knick-knack and household thing. The hoarded items also filled the office entrance. Under it all he could see the edge of the counter; on tiptoes he could see the top of the office door. He’d have to climb over everything to get to it, and then there’d be no guarantee the door would open.
Craning to see, thinking of what to do, Adam heard it. Snoring. For a moment he was too afraid to move. The amount of stored belongings made it hard to tell where the snore was coming from. Adam began to retreat, back down the hallway. He noticed, as he did, that the snoring got louder. It was coming from the room next to the toilet. The snoring stopped. Adam halted. The person coughed. Bedsprings squeaked.
Behind Adam was a short hallway leading to a steel door. The path to it was fairly clear. He snaked his way down to the door, opened it, stepped through, and had the steel door closed behind him before considering whether or not it was a wise thing to do.
With the door closed it was completely black. The floor was concrete. A musty and at the same time intensely sour smell filled Adam’s nostrils. All the fine hairs on his body lifted. And because the feeling of fear and the presence of Joe were so closely aligned in Adam’s mind, the two things combined as one. Adam could suddenly sense Joe there, he could hear his breathing, feel his touch, smell him, see him coming in his mind’s eye. To make things worse, real things began moving in the pitch black, scratching, rustling. A whimper started up. Adam was not alone. He squeezed his eyes shut and hugged himself. A warm trickle of urine ran down the inside of Adam’s leg and wet one side of his sneaker. He bowed his head, let the fear take over. It was all there was to do sometimes, in some situations – disappear.
Maybe Adam whimpered too, maybe he crouched, maybe he shook, maybe his eyes were open, maybe he cried, he couldn’t tell anymore. He was gone. Time and space went missing. It was like passing out. Maybe he did pass out.
Yowling brought him around. Adam was on his feet; he hadn’t fainted. All he did was lift his head and he was listening again, aware. The dark hadn’t changed. Scratching remained. A cat meowed. Then another. Paper crinkled and a cage door rattled.
Adam felt around him, one hand stretched out, waving it through the air. He turned and shuffled with his hands outstretched. He could piece it together now. He was in the shed section. Adam heard a dog yelp. He groped his way further along, and came to a wall of books. He had to double back.
Adam tracked his way back to the caged pets. A cat purred by his ear. He touched it through the bars, felt its fur. It was rubbing back and forth. He could hear the animal’s mouth dryly open. A broken croak came out. Adam put his fingers through the narrow bars and touched the cat as much as he could. It was bony and its fur was matted. There were scaly patches on its head. Adam whispered secret words, ones that only the locked-up and left would understand.
He continued past another cat. Two small dogs were in separate cages lower down. The animals had barked for so long, meowed for such a time, that their cries were weak. Adam crawled in behind the row of cages. He rested his back against the shed wall. He had no plan and no clue what to do. He half trusted that Billy wouldn’t leave him.
The animals liked having Adam there. With their good night vision they could probably see him. For sure they could smell him and hear him. They scratched at the back of their cages, as close to Adam as they could get. It didn’t take much, just him being there, staying there, and the dogs barked with increased spirit, the cats pushed and rubbed their bodies harder against the wire. It would be wrong to think, though, that after years of being locked up, a minute would pass quickly. It didn’t. A minute was still an hour. A day was a week. The animals seemed as familiar with this slow tick of time as Adam was. They began to grow frantic in the drawn-out minutes waiting. Their meows and barks rose to fever pitch.
The door Adam had come through opened. A grey-haired woman turned on the shed lights. She was straight-backed and eagle-eyed, dressed in long pants and a T-shirt. Her slippers were light pink. Adam watched her through the cages. The shed was more crowded than it had seemed in the dark. What Adam had mistaken for open space was actually just a wide track through the gear. Boxes of belongings were stacked in piles, a baffling number of books, clothes, gardening things, mountains of junk. The woman’s way of moving was similar to Joe’s, and she looked like Joe used to look: old but quick, strong, sure and sturdy. Her mind was sharp. You could see that. Her eyes fixed on the sliding doors down the back. Someone had started banging on the door. Adam hoped it was Billy. She walked briskly past. The woman unlocked and pulled the sliding door partway open. Morning light flooded in. The two small dogs leapt to life, throwing themselves at the bars. Desperation made them howl. A man stood in the doorway. It wasn’t Billy.
‘What are you doing here?’ the woman said.
The man was bald with a grey moustache. He was dressed in long shorts and a button-up shirt. It was hard to see him clearly from where Adam was. It was hard to hear him above the racket the dogs were making. The only reason Adam could make out what the woman was saying was because she shouted everything she said.
‘Why would I! I didn’t want you turning up at the funeral!’
The man stepped to the side and looked past the woman. He eyed the interior of the shed.
‘Get back!’ She tried to slide the door closed. The man stopped it with his foot. ‘Get out. Get off my property. Don’t think you can come around here!’
Fresh air had reached the cages. The thinnest of the cats, the one that looked too sick to stand, struggled to its feet. The dogs had bloodied their paws with their frenzied clawing at the latches. Adam inched along. If he could see the man and woman, chances were that they would soon see him. Adam crept down to a stack of kitchen chairs. Through the gaps, from his new position, Adam could see Joe’s trailer parked inside the shed. It was loaded with his furniture. Beside it, sitting on the floor, was the TV.
‘Settle down.’ The man’s voice had lifted. It came fast and in bursts; the same voice from the phone? Kovac? ‘What was at the house?’
‘Nothing. Get out!’
‘Stop shouting.’
‘Get off my property!’
The man stepped inside the door. ‘Stop shouting.’
‘Get out!’ the woman screamed.
He kept on coming and she backed up.
‘Look at this place. You’re disgusting, Marta. You’ve always made my skin crawl. You make me sick.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want the house keys.’
‘There’s nothing there. There’s no money, leave me alone! I don’t know what you want!’
‘I told you what I want.’ He pulled back his fist and punched her in the face. She fell onto her side on the floor. He leaned over, grabbed her by the hair, lifted her head off the concrete and held it up. ‘I want the house keys.’
‘In my bag . . . by my bed . . .’
She didn’t shout now. One hit had changed her. Her voice was more like a woman’s. Her body was curled and tense. Her head was on an uncomfortable-looking angle. He kept hold of her hair.
Although too far away to see, and with the woman’s hair further obscuring the man’s hand, Adam somehow knew the fingers on the man’s right hand were tattooed. A letter, greeny-black, was crudely written, on the flat part of each finger, below each knuckle. How could Adam know that? They weren’t Joe’s hands he was remembering. They were this man’s.
He smacked her head down onto the floor, lifted it again. ‘What did you find?’ He gripped her hair tighter.
‘Please . . . stop . . .’
‘Why didn’t you tell me he’d died? What’re you hiding?’
‘Nothing.’
‘How did he die?’
‘Heartache. Kovac, please . . .’
‘Don’t think it’s not worse for you now –
I will
kill you. With him gone you really are in the shit.’ He smacked her head into the concrete again. ‘What did you take from the house?’
‘Furniture, nothing.’
‘Did you find him?’
‘No.’
‘Who found him?’
‘I don’t know. No one.’
‘Someone fucking found him; who?’
‘Please, Kovac, I didn’t know. He didn’t tell me.’
‘Didn’t tell you what?’
‘He told me he was dead. I thought he was dead. I don’t think anyone found him. The police haven’t said anything; they aren’t looking. He must have just got away.’
His grip loosened. ‘What are you talking about?’
She fell silent.
He let go of her and stepped back. ‘I’m asking who found Joe . . .
what the fuck
are
you
talking
about?
’ he screamed into her face.
She stayed motionless on the floor. Her hands were the only part of her body that gave away how afraid she was; they were wide, her fingers like claws on the concrete, gripping the ground. Her voice also gave away her fear. ‘There were things there, clothes . . . I . . . I don’t know . . .’
Kovac put both hands around her head. ‘What don’t you know?’
‘Someone might have been living there with him.’
‘Who?’
‘I thought . . . maybe . . . the boy?’
‘The dark boy?’
‘Dark?’ she said.
‘The fucking half-caste kid!’ he bellowed. ‘The dark kid from the market.’
‘I don’t know!’ she cried.
‘Is that who you’re talking about – the dark one? Why is he still around? Why is he ringing and threatening me?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘What did you find there?’
‘Clothes and things. I thought it was the other boy, I thought Joe might not have killed him.’
Kovac’s fingers tightened on the sides of her head. ‘No, Marta, he’s dead. That boy is long fucking dead. He’s in the ground. Tell me that right now.’
‘I don’t . . .’
He bashed her head against the floor again. ‘Tell me that right now!’
‘Okay,’ she said.
‘You stupid, stupid bitch! You should have told me! If you thought that kid was still alive you should have fucking told me! You . . . stupid . . . stupid . . . bitch . . .’ Timed with each word he slammed her skull into the floor.
Her body slumped. Her head hung heavy in his hands. Blood leaked from beneath her hair. Kovac dropped her head. His spittle had sprayed on his chin while shouting and now he wiped it dry. He tugged at the collar of his shirt. For a while he stood there, breathing deeply. His eyes roamed around the shed but he didn’t focus on any one thing in particular. The cats turned tight circles in their cages. The dogs stopped clawing. Every living thing in the shed knew that Kovac was now the person to fear.
Kovac began searching through the gear on the trailer. He opened the hall table drawer and went through the contents, used a pair of gardening shears to cut holes in the bags and pulled out the linen and tea towels, the rolled-up lounge room mat.
‘Hey there . . .’
The words were whispered directly into Adam’s ear, coupled with a soft touch on his shoulder. Adam bucked against the shed wall, braced and spun. Billy had crept up beside him. He was crouched with Adam behind the chairs. Kovac heard them scuffling. He eyed their section of shed for a moment, then returned to searching.
‘Sorry,’ Billy whispered. ‘You right?’