Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  The Next Knock-

  Knocking

  BILLY AND I DIDN’T TALK MUCH AFTER THE NEWSPAPER headline. He knew I was angry and he’d taken on that man-thing where he became more strident and defensive, as if he had embraced the right and only action and I, a girl (girlie) didn’t understand. It had me thinking: Maybe I am too soft.

  It’s all about the conviction, girlie.

  —

  MUM CALLED AGAIN. On the home phone, which I was starting to use less and less. Mum always had a special knack of calling at the wrong time. I was racing to work, knowing I was about to be drenched between the front door and the car when it rang.

  I knew it was her.

  I hesitated. I really did not want to talk to my mum. I reached for the door knob.

  ‘Hi mum, I can’t talk.’

  ‘The killer is a teenage girl? She drinks the blood from the necks of her victims?’ (No, mum, she doesn’t. How many times have I told you to stop believing the tabloid newspaper? How many times did you tell me to ignore the tabloid newspapers?) ‘Your brother is worried about you; I’m worried about you; Damon is worried about you. He wants to ask you out again, but you were so rude to him. I told Damon’s mother you were just under a lot of pressure at work with the murders and that you would love to go out with him again, so I booked a table for two this Friday night at the casino. Seven o’clock. Don’t be late. It’s very fancy and there’s a two-for-one special on. Damon is looking forward to seeing you again. I had to tell his mother that you really did want to spend more time with him, and for her to tell him that it wasn’t him but you. He’s staying with her while he’s waiting to hear from the university. You know where the casino is? It’s not far from the police headquarters. I can send you the address and how to get there from your work. You can walk, you know.’

  ‘Mum, I’m working a Homicide case.’

  ‘If Damon is not the man for you, c’est la vie; we’ll find someone else.’

  Dark silence. Here it comes: ‘You told Damon you were a lesbian.’

  You are truly such an idiot, Lara. You and your too-fast, too-big mouth.

  ‘I’m not. Does it matter?’

  ‘Then why did you tell him? He’s very keen on you, you know, and he’s rich; he went out and bought a BMW last week, did you know that? Bright red. Why did you tell him that? Do you know how much that hurt me when Vera told me that you told Damon you were a lesbian? Lara, you have to stop with this murder business and settle down and get married. I know I’m old fashioned but you have to obey your mother. Understand?’

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Always you have to go. The booking is for seven at the casino. Friday. And be nice to him!’

  ‘Mum, I have to–’ And she cut me off with derision:

  ‘Yes. We all have to.’

  And hung up on me.

  As I stepped out the door, I saw Billy on the street, sitting in our unmarked Camry as if he had been there for some time.

  ‘I thought we might go down to Breakfast Creek,’ he shouted, after winding down the passenger window. ‘Have some eggs.’

  ‘I’m not very hungry,’ I shouted back, across the sweep of rain, still on the balcony of my house.

  ‘Get in the car,’ he shouted back. Not unkindly and certainly not in a threatening manner, more like he was just a tired father.

  —

  ‘POACHED OR FRIED? A bit of T-bone?’ he asked me.

  ‘No, maybe the muesli.’

  The Breakfast Creek Hotel was an institution, an old and sprawling pub designed with some sort of French chateau look, built in the 1800s, overlooking a massive bend in the river. We could see expensive houses crowded along the alarmingly swollen banks, water lapping onto lawns and little pleasure boats tightly secured to private jetties. The river was surging – its flow moving down towards the ocean, behind us a few K’s – with a frightening speed. I had never seen the river so full and moving so fast. Every now and then part of a tree would zoom past us, carried by the urgent swell. On a clear day you could see the city in the distance. Not today. Visibility was obscured by sheets of grey and silver rain.

  Billy looked up to the hovering waitress with her plastered smile, but not as bad as the fake smiles you get at McDonald’s, and I followed his gaze. She had a slightly nervous tic with her ball-point pen tapping the order pad and she lightly bounced from one foot to another. Her name was Daisy, said the name plate on her chest.

  ‘Do you still do the tinned spaghetti with the T-bone? On the side? And with the pineapple?’ asked Billy.

  She looked at him as if he were reciting a Babylonian text. Christmas carols were playing over the sound system. Hark the Herald Angels Sing. It was December and with Y2K around the corner, with the city about to flood and a new millennium approaching, there was, despite the ho-ho of the music, an attempt to remind us that now was the time to remember Jesus. We were all on edge.

  ‘It was the signature dish back in the old days,’ Billy said.

  ‘Ah. No. We don’t have that, I’m sorry,’ she replied, casting a quick glance around the restaurant as if looking for a manager, for help. ‘But the poached eggs, avocado and salsa with bacon is really popular.’

  ‘Twenty years ago,’ said Billy.

  Daisy looked alarmed. Food orders were meant to be simple. But not for geezers like Billy. She was staring at him, uncertain what to say. I was about to intervene and tell him to get on with it when:

  ‘Twenty years ago, that old T-bone dish, that was all anyone ever ordered here. And you ain’t never heard of it which just gives me pause, you know, to wonder where we will all be in another twenty years’ time. That’ll be another century, girlie. You’ll be middle-aged and I’ll no doubt be in the grave and young Daisy here might be the manager of this fine establishment. Poached eggs, tons of bacon and I don’t mind a bit of avocado. Brilliant. Thanks love.’

  Some people, no matter what their age, respond to eccentricity with grace and humour. Some people respond with fear. Billy was so far outside her world-view, and who could blame her; she might have been nineteen if that, she could only give us an uncertain smile, hoping it would suffice and then, order down on her pad, she did a predictably swift exit.

  ‘Bacon kills you, you know that? Been scientifically proved,’ he said to me.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve read that.’

  ‘Cancer.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And over-cooked meat. Like, charcoal meat.’

  ‘Yeah. I read that too,’ I said.

  ‘Me dad, he nearly died of cancer. Combination of the fags and the mine. Coal.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that, Billy.’

  We both knew how it would go when we stopped tiptoeing around the growling beast under the table. He would be angrily defensive about the leak to the press. I would be angrily disappointed. He was the teacher and I was the student. We both knew the dynamic was about to turn because the student, the rookie, needed to be impressed by the teacher, the expert. And when the dynamic turns, as it inevitably must when the student gains confidence and emerges as her own person, all that would be left is sadness and regret. We both knew it. We were stalling.

  ‘He was a cunt – ’scuse the French. But he was. Beat me every night. Got the scars to prove it. On my back. Not for any reason. Just for being alive. Beat my sister, Georgie, when she was four, maybe five. She came home from school and da, he’s tanked from being in the pub all day and thinks: Oh, yeah, smashing, let’s get out the leather belt. Well, he started and little Georgie started screaming and me ma, God rest her soul, she was upstairs and out of it and on the laudanum, which I threw away after I killed me da. I did. I did. As I heard Georgie scream I thought: Kill the cunt – ’scuse the French. So, I did. I went down and got the carving knife we used last Sunday on the roast, baked rabbit, because you didn’t get chicken or lamb or beef back in them days, and I stabbed him. And I buried him in the back yard. Oy, what’s this?’

  ‘Complimentary avocado sa
lsa and grain bread, sir,’ said Daisy with a smile and a flourish.

  Billy looked at it as if it were radioactive and then pushed it across the table to me. ‘For you,’ he said.

  Did my partner just confess to murder?

  As if reading my mind, he said: ‘Stabbed him. No-one missed him, none of us reported him missing. Only Shooter Kransky, who came over one day, a week after, and said, Your dad owes me money, and I said, Me da’s gone to Ceylon. First thing I could think of. Later I find out that Ceylon stopped being called Ceylon in nineteen forty-eight and changed its name to Sri Lanka. But Shooter, he had some brain issues, so he just walked away and that was the last of it. Ain’t done no killin’ since I got to Brisbane.’ And with a smile: ‘Straight and narrow, love.’ And then he said: ‘You’re angry.’ He was talking about the newspaper story.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You wanna make a thing out of it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because if you do, no-one will trust you. No-one in Homicide that is.’

  ‘She’ll get Life.’

  ‘Life ain’t life. Life is maybe fifteen years. Still be able to have a kid when she gets out. Long as she plays by the rules in the nick.’

  ‘She’s seventeen.’

  ‘Eighteen when she gets to court. What, you reckon she’s innocent?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘What’cha saying then?’

  ‘That it was you who told me, again and again: Let the evidence lead you. Don’t let assumptions or desires lead you.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, we’ll see about that then, eh girlie.’

  The Qantas Bag

  JANUARY 1, 2000.

  Wave three:

  It’s four in the morning and I’m standing in my bedroom, looking out through the windows into the front yard below, listening to the rain. It’s dark; dawn will soon come. Off in the distance, coming up towards me, around the spiral streets that lead to the top of the big hill, are the lights again. Red and blue. Just the lights. Red and blue swirls like mini-spaceships. The road to the top of the hill is a corkscrew, and I stare out the window watching as they go around, these lights, in ever-escalating circles. No sirens. Just an eerie silence.

  They are coming to get me.

  Again.

  But this time they are coming to take me away.

  And I am not coming back.

  Not for a long, long time.

  And when I do, come back, way off into the future, when I do return, I wonder if this house, my home, will still be here. If mum and dad will be here. If Anthea will be here. I don’t think so. I think that when I return to another world in the faraway future, they will all be different people.

  Maybe they won’t recognise me and maybe I won’t even recognise myself.

  Happy new year. Happy new millennium. Normally I would be able to see the fireworks display from my room but tonight they were cancelled because of the storms. I turned on my computer at a minute past midnight. Guess what? It turned on. I went to Google. It came up on the screen. No Y2K. We’re all saved.

  Christmas Day was great fun too. Talk about a tableau of the doomed, shuffling deck-chairs on the Mary Celeste, me, my sister and mum. Under the ghostly white tree that Anthea chose from a mail-order catalogue.

  I’ve had a little bag packed for about a week. Since Christmas Eve, actually. Sitting by my bed. A pair of PJs and two T-shirts and my jeans and trackie pants and some socks and my hand cream and toothpaste and toothbrush (but not the battery one from the bathroom, just a cheap one) and skin cream because sometimes the skin on my face goes dry and some chewing gum and tampons and undies and two sports bras and two pairs of black tights and my runners. And, wedged into one side, a book, The Trial, which kind of sums up my life now, and on the other side, The Bible, not that I am religious, I’m not, but I figure that when I go to prison it will be for over a decade and it’s a big book, you know, it will take me years to read it and one of my teachers told me it had some of the best stories of murder and deceit and betrayal and lust, so it sounds pretty good; I know they probably hand you a Bible when you pass through the gates of prison but I want my own.

  It’s mine, not theirs.

  So, I picked up the bag – a small purple Qantas travel bag that dad gave me a few years ago, after he’d come back from Hong Kong – and walked down the hallway, down the stairs, to the front door. I opened it and stepped outside, under the stoop so I didn’t get wet, and waited for the swirling red and blue lights – coming for me in silence – which would transmogrify into real things, police cars with police officers with an arrest warrant and handcuffs and, because I am an underage girl, even though I am The Slayer, with a fawning, gentle approach.

  If you could just come with us, Jen, that would be great.

  —

  ‘CAN I HAVE a look inside your bag, Jen?’ asked the policewoman, not Lara, as she unzipped it anyway, before I agreed, and she ruffled around inside it to ensure there were no knives or hand grenades or C4 explosives or Smith & Wesson pistols, one of which she had holstered to her hip.

  Three cars had pulled up. I watched the cops climb out and stare at me.

  They were nice. They have always been nice.

  Mum and dad were sleeping through all of this. I heard them go to bed about two hours ago, after yet another hard night of drinking on the dark side of the moon. I had been quiet as I left my room to wait for my impending incarceration on the doorstep of the house, watching the shards of rain blustering across the front garden.

  ‘Thanks Jen,’ said the policewoman as she handed back my bag. ‘Do you understand what is happening here?’ We were standing out of the rain, but she was dripping wet.

  ‘Yes. You are arresting me for three murders I did not commit, and you will now process me into the system and then, at about eight o’clock this morning, you will bring me before a magistrate as that is the first port of call for this legal abomination, before we get to the trial at the Supreme Court.’

  We both had to speak a lot louder than normal, because of the rain.

  The policewoman stared at me and said: ‘Maybe we should go inside and tell your mum and dad what’s going on. We don’t actually need to have them accompany you at this point of arrest, but perhaps they should be alerted to this development.’

  ‘No. Let them sleep,’ I said.

  After a moment, she shrugged, as if she didn’t care, and said: ‘Okay then,’ and took my arm gently and ran me towards one of the three vehicles. I climbed into the back seat, drenched, and separated from the front seat by wire mesh and metal bars. She closed the door on me, and the driver, a guy, started up the engine as she jumped into the front passenger seat.

  As we began to drive off I saw Anthea in her pyjamas, standing at the front door. I think she was crying but it was hard to say with the downfall of rain.

  As I watched the house, my home, disappear from view, I thought I would never see it again. I tried not to cry because I had told myself that it was time now to be steadfast. That all things must pass.

  Deluge

  (II)

  ‘WHOA, WHOA, WHOA! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!’ SCREAMED the female cop from the front seat. ‘Back up!’ she yelled at the driver, who had stopped the car and was just staring ahead, down the road in the pre-dawn dark in the middle of an otherwise-empty Brisbane city.

  ‘Is that …?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a fucking wave!’ she shouted. ‘Back up! The river’s burst its banks.’

  And it had: like a lava flow, this dark, hard-to-see swell of water maybe two or three metres high rushing along the street, towards us, sweeping away parked cars in its wake.

  The driver thrust the car into reverse and screamed back up the street, then reversed up Edward Street and climbed a hill. He stopped, put the car into park, and we watched as the dirty black water swept down through the street below us.

  A yellow Volkswage
n, upside down, passed by in the onrush. Were there people inside it? I wondered. Are they, he, she, the owner, dead, lost in the wash of flood or are they at home in bed, in gentle warm slumber?

  TWO HOURS EARLIER

  Standing on the ramparts of Wivenhoe Dam, staring at the massive body of water that snarled and flowed in circles and swells, gently smacking the concrete edge of the dam, the massive body of water which stretched back kilometres off into the distance, in the rain, the thunderous monsoon-like rain, in their thick raincoats and galoshes and waterproof hats, Ray and Liam stared at the impending crisis. The water level was less than one centimetre below the dam’s edge. When the wind angrily caroused its way across the surface of the water, splashes rolled over the edge, waves. And behind them, on the other side, far down below, the Brisbane River, the serpent that runs eighty kilometres through the city and finally to the mouth, the ocean.

  The noise of the tempest all around them.

  ‘If we do nothing,’ shouted Ray, ‘the dam will spill and the river will flood.’

  ‘Yep,’ shouted Liam. ‘But if we open the sluice gates to release some of the water into the river below, it will flood.’

  ‘The water’s going to breach the walls of the dam in about …’

  ‘I’d say in about two minutes!’

  ‘Fuck. With this volume, we have to mitigate flood flow; otherwise our options’ll be even worse. We should control it,’ said Liam, resigned.

  ‘Okay, yep, let’s open the sluice gates and release some of it!’

  ‘Fuck!’ Liam shouted yet again.

  —

  AND THEY DID.

  Flood water moves quickly. Flood water can move at up to four hundred and thirty-four kilometres an hour. Within moments, the outlying farmlands near Wivenhoe were deluged, in some places up to twenty metres underwater, and then the gush arrived in Brisbane city, running through the suburbs and the city in a rapid ten-metre swell. Before long people were drowning, cars were upturned, streets were underwater, houses were submerged and the city centre itself, mostly low-lying, was completely flooded but for the few hilly areas like Ascot. Boats and yachts were torn from their river moorings and floated unmanned towards the mouth of the ocean, passing suburbs in the inundated flatlands.