by Candice Fox
‘The officers stormed the van, fought with Hogan and he bolted.’
‘Of course they did,’ I said. ‘Of course he did.’
‘Get your arse down here. I want you to join the search.’ Clark sounded like he was about to end the call, but he came back on the line. ‘And don’t bring Amanda.’
‘I thought you two were cool.’
‘Not after last night’s delightful surprise,’ he said.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked, but he was gone. I looked at the time on the phone. It was 5 am. I looked at my child.
‘Fuck,’ she said.
‘You said it, Boo,’ I agreed.
Amanda doesn’t usually rise until ten. I called her seven or eight times before realising she had probably switched her phone off overnight to avoid being awakened by dozens of prank calls from Joanna. I drove to her place through the morning mist, my foot hovering over the brake pedal as the dark silhouettes of kangaroos emerged at the roadside, munching and watching me approach, their paws hanging at their chests. I realised, as Lillian babbled about the view from her window, that I had not taken her on a single outing since she’d been left in my care. I hadn’t taken her for ice cream, a stroll through the rainforest, a wander across the cane fields. Now I was shrugging her off so that I could join the hunt for a possible abductor running for his life. I pulled up at Amanda’s place burning with guilt.
She opened the door in her Batman negligee, cats surrounding her bare, tattooed feet.
‘What is that doing here?’ Amanda looked at Lillian.
‘I thought you’d lost all your cats,’ I said. ‘How’d you get them back?’
Lillian bowed into the furry crowd and tried to scoop whichever she could out of the writhing, purring collection, her clumsy fingers slipping over whip-fast tails and flicking ears.
‘Kitties!’ she cried, helplessly grabbing and coming up empty. ‘Lots of kitties!’
‘Do you have any idea what time it is? You want to interrogate me about my cats in the middle of the night?’
‘You need to take Lillian.’
‘Take her where?’
‘I’ll call you from the car and explain,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get on the road. Is that a bullet hole in your door? Never mind. I don’t have time. Can you please just mind her until Val turns up at my place? She should be there by about nine.’
I crouched and squeezed Lillian. She kissed me on the neck.
‘You’re going to hang out with the fairy for a while,’ I told her. ‘I’ll see you later. I love you.’
‘Fairy.’ Lillian smiled up at Amanda.
‘This isn’t happening.’ Amanda looked down at my child in disgust. ‘This isn’t happening, Ted. It’s not coming in here! You made it, now you have to take responsibility for it. It goes where you go.’
‘She’s not an “it”, Amanda. She’s a little girl. A clever, funny, affectionate child you’d really enjoy spending time with if you gave her a chance.’
‘I’ll have to disinfect everything.’ Amanda held her hand to her nose and mouth. ‘Urgh. I’ll just throw it out. How would you feel if I just put her in a cupboard for a while? I’ll give her water and a bowl of cereal and just put her in a cupboard.’
‘I don’t understand this thing you have with kids.’ I stopped by the car and threw my hands up. ‘You know, I watched her sleeping last night. It occurred to me that, of all the things I’d seen in my life, that was the most beautiful. Her, asleep in bed. Can you understand that?’
Amanda considered me, still holding her nose and mouth.
‘I saw an owl swoop down and steal a golf ball right off the fairway once,’ she said. ‘Must have thought it was an egg.’
‘I’ll call you.’ I got in the car. ‘Thank you for this.’
‘No, seriously.’ Amanda came out and banged on my car roof. There were tradies on the next corner setting up roadworks. They turned and stared. ‘This isn’t funny anymore!’
‘She’s allergic to strawberries,’ I said, and rolled up my window.
Amanda stood stock-still in the middle of the road in my rear-view mirror, her shoulders high and her jaw jutted out with fury.
I headed straight for the White Caps Hotel but was redirected by officers at the scene to the caravan park where Dylan Hogan lived, a slip of paper with the address pushed through my window carelessly before I had time to grab it. The Big Lots caravan park was only a short drive south of the hotel, down a long, empty, unmarked road on the edge of the marshlands before Admiralty Island.
I called Amanda. She seemed too stressed about what Lillian was doing – picking up the cats and squeezing them like teddies – to listen very carefully to my update about Hogan. She shouted down the phone at me for a full minute about leaving her with babysitting duty while I chased a viable lead. I barely managed to ask her about the ‘delightful surprise’ Clark had mentioned, but she didn’t know what he was talking about.
The street that led to the park had been blocked off by police. The car in front of me held a family that appeared to reside in the park who were furious at not being allowed onto the property. I hung an elbow out the window and looked at the sprawling swamps beside the road while a woman got out of the car ahead and argued with the cordon officer. Colourful bugs were skipping across the surface of the stagnant water, a grey heron wading slowly and deliberately through the shallows.
‘Just let us in so we can get some sleep and change our fucking kid! We’ve been driving all night!’ the woman wailed, gesturing wildly at the car. A toddler with a milk-white bare butt made an appearance through the back window, clambering over the seats.
As I pulled in to the gravel lot crowded with police and forensics vehicles, a text came through to my phone. I was sure it was going to be Amanda despairing about my daughter, but the name at the top of the screen sent zings of electricity through my chest.
Laney Bass had written, Woke up thinking about that kiss.
I wish I could say the same, I wrote. Rattled out of bed this morning by case news. 5 am. Can you believe it!
I stopped outside the car and hid my face in my palm. I was too used to being married. Laney didn’t want to hear that I hadn’t thought about our kiss, or about my crappy morning and work stress. She was trying to flirt with me. I hadn’t flirted in more than a decade.
You looked incredible last night, I quickly typed. When can I see you again?
‘Girlfriend?’ Superfish appeared beside me, his arms hanging by his sides, the orange curls on top of his head beaded with sweat. I had to snap myself out of my thoughts about Laney to focus completely on what he’d said.
‘What?’
‘Girlfriend.’ He pointed to the phone.
‘How does everyone know I have a girlfriend?’
‘You looked stressed.’ He shrugged. ‘Trying to think of what to type.’
‘This is what happens when all the people in your life are in law enforcement,’ I said. ‘You’re a walking behavioural science exhibit. I don’t have a girlfriend. It’s my vet.’
‘You text your vet?’
‘What do you want, Superfish?’
‘We have a problem,’ he said.
‘I need people to stop saying that to me today.’
‘Amanda Pharrell assaulted Joanna Fischer last night,’ he said.
I stared at him, trying to form words. He scratched at his pronounced collarbone through his shirt, staring at the ground. The dense freckles on his neck didn’t seem to thin before reaching his chest.
‘At least, that’s the story she told me,’ Superfish said. ‘Joanna. She’s not allowing command to file an assault charge. She told the chief she tripped and smacked her face on the freezer door.’
‘Jesus.’ I held my head. ‘Jesus.’
‘She told me Amanda and two of her bikie mates came around her place last night and bashed her. She’s probably hoping I’ll spread that quietly around the crew, get them all riled up. She told me not to tell anyone. She�
��s acting scared but she’s being very suggestive. She’s letting people believe the worst. This is going to turn into a war if we’re not careful.’
I tried to call Amanda, but she didn’t answer. I sent a quick text detailing the situation, asking her if she was at Joanna’s last night and whether or not she could alibi herself if anything came up. Superfish simply stood there, squinting into the distance like a lone ranger longing for the mountains.
‘Can you get me into the caravan?’ I asked him eventually.
‘This way.’ He beckoned.
Officers were going door to door around the caravan park, interviewing whoever was willing to drag themselves out of bed and answer their knocks. There was a row of cabins on stilts down the hill at the end of the park, the sunlit water glistening like strips of silver between the small wooden dwellings. The rest of the park was crowded with narrow streets of single and annexed caravans, the base of each fenced in with lattice and surrounded by potted plants or piles of sun-bleached boating equipment.
Hogan’s caravan was spectacularly decorated with plants on the outside. There were clumps of bright pink and orange bougainvillea hanging over the roof, cascading down either side of the door like an elaborate archway, the vines dipping into an army of potted flowers and ferns arranged along the front of the van. A terracotta turtle stood sentry in the pot nearest the first step, holding a wooden sign that read ‘Welcome!’. I noticed a couple of marijuana plants nestled discreetly in the dense foliage at the side of the van, hidden in a tangle of almost identical-looking tomato plants.
Inside, the caravan was surprisingly tidy, a contrast to Hogan’s cluttered little office at the hotel. The van was fitted out in a 1950s style, dark wood veneer with mustard-yellow curtains strung over the tiny rounded windows. The bed was made so tightly it hugged the mattress with a band of white, folded-back sheet. The faux marble kitchenette counter was almost empty. There were three recycled jam jars on the counter, holding tea, coffee and sugar, and nothing else. I squeezed around the photographer taking shots of the tiny living room space at the opposite end to the bedroom. There was a single armchair, a narrow coffee table and a television set. On the coffee table was a battered Celeb Hype! magazine with a label indicating that it had been loaned out from the caravan park’s front office.
‘Ex-con?’ I asked.
‘Very close.’ Superfish nodded, his hands in his pockets. ‘Long-term homeless.’
Being a prisoner teaches you to have few possessions, to keep what you own neat and organised. If you own little, you have little to lose when guards smash your stuff up during shakedowns or pick through your valuables for things they can extort you with – the bunny toy your kid gave you when you went inside that you’ll do anything to get back. If your cell is uncluttered you can tell immediately when something is missing, when your cellmate has traded something of yours or another con has paid a visit during chow time.
It’s the same for homeless people. Some fill shopping trolleys and old, battered prams with filthy clothes and worthless trinkets, while others prefer to carry only a single backpack so they can move quickly when they need to, when the other down-and-outs on the edge of the riverbank or under the highway overpass start whistling to warn you the cops are on their way to bust heads and chase bail-jumpers.
‘Hogan has been transient since he was about eighteen,’ Superfish said. ‘In and out of shelters in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne in that time, never a problem for the staff. Kept to himself, always neat. He has very few possessions here. Probably accustomed to travelling light, reluctant to put down roots.’
‘What’s his major malfunction?’ I asked.
‘Just a misfit, according to his dad,’ Superfish said. ‘No head for school, no heart for sport. Preferred to hang around the wrong crowd his whole life. Chip on his shoulder about his mother walking out when he was a toddler. I would wager that the father didn’t help matters. Sounds like a difficult man.’
‘What’s Hogan’s rap sheet like?’
‘The kinds of things you see with long-term homeless,’ Superfish said. ‘Minor brawls with other transients over territory or jobs. Some thefts, loitering, public nuisance. He’s been connected with drug-running operations in his time – almost went inside for being a runner after he was discovered guarding a stash house in the late nineties. He’s never been charged orchestrating any of the drug activities. Always the bridesmaid, as the saying goes.’
‘Nothing sexually violent?’
‘No, no sexual charges or convictions.’
‘This place doesn’t smell like anything.’ I inhaled, watching as Superfish did the same. ‘How long has he been here?’
‘He moved in a couple of weeks before he got the White Caps job,’ Superfish said. ‘His first long-term employment in over a decade. The neighbours say he’s quiet as a mouse. Handy. He’ll put your bins out for you if you forget to do it. They say he spends a lot of his time working. He works around the park or he works at the hotel. Sounds like someone who’s afraid of losing his focus and going off the rails again.’
‘Is it possible he bolted because of something else?’ I asked. ‘He’s got dope plants around the side of the van.’
‘We found this in the bedroom,’ Superfish said. I followed him the five or six paces it took to traverse the living room and kitchen, and he pointed to the bedside table fixed to the curved wall. On the otherwise empty surface lay an Iron Man action figure. The photographer had set up a tiny yellow plastic label next to the doll marked with a black number three. The drawer was open, and as I stepped closer I could see there was a bible, a packet of condoms and some eye drops in the drawer, and nothing else. I looked around the room, wondering if Richie had been here, if this bare, characterless place was where the child had lost his life.
Children were disgusting. Of course that was true. But there was more to Amanda’s discomfort with children than that, something she wouldn’t have been able to explain to Ted even if she tried. She sat on the couch and watched helplessly as Lillian carefully selected books from the bottom shelves of her bookcase and stacked them on the carpet, making three neat piles without any apparent reason for their distinction, slamming each book onto its pile with both hands, making a satisfying slap sound. She talked to herself, wandering into songs she only seemed to know a couple of lines of, opening some of the books on the floor and fiddling through their pages. Her dark lashes, Ted’s thoughtful, dark-blue eyes downcast, failing to take in the words before her. Amanda watched as the child abandoned her non-reading and flopped onto her backside, picking at something deep inside her nostril.
If other adults were a mystery to Amanda, children presented a universe of questions everyone else in her world seemed to ignore. Amanda felt anxious around them, having seen them burst into hysterics without any apparent provocation far too many times. She had spent her life trying to reconcile the connection between people’s words, facial expressions, hidden and actual emotions, and how they translated to their intentions. With children there were no words, or few that made sense, and none of the emotions connected to the physical displays. They screamed with anger. Roared with joy. Fell asleep or cried in the midst of whirlwinds of activity like machines suddenly disconnected from power. All these hellish performances came from the freakish mutation of another person’s face in miniature; Ted’s face, his hair, the way he pulled in the corner of his mouth in thought replicated onto the likeness of a small girl.
Lillian seemed to finish her business with the books and came towards Amanda, almost stumbling over Two, who had been heading for a patch of sunlight on the end of the couch. Amanda crawled up the couch as the grabby-grabby hands came for her tattooed legs.
‘Hello, Fairy!’ Lillian beamed.
‘Ehhh!’ Amanda squeezed her eyes shut, braced for touching. The child wandered into the kitchen instead. Amanda followed, watching as Lillian pulled open a low cupboard and grabbed the handles of a large soup pot, grunting with effort as she tried to
lift the pot down onto the floor.
‘No, no, no.’ Amanda grabbed for the pot. ‘This is … What are you doing? What do you want? Are you hungry?’
Lillian set the pot on the tiles. She lifted off the lid and stuck her head into the iron cavity, yelled.
‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ Amanda said, sitting on the floor in front of the child. ‘What’s the process here?’
Lillian dragged pots and pans out of the cupboard, arranging them on the floor. She lifted the lid from each, looked through the glass, set it clunking back into place. Amanda watched, baffled. Each lid was lifted, replaced, lifted again and set aside, the child taking a small saucepan lid and setting it in the middle of the large frypan.
‘Well, clearly that doesn’t go there,’ Amanda said, watching the child’s eyes. ‘I mean, you can see that. Right?’
The child took no notice of Amanda’s directions to replace the saucepan lid where it belonged. She licked the lid in her hand, saliva running in a stream down the glass.
‘Where’s Daddy?’ she asked suddenly, as though the thought had popped in her mind like a bubble.
‘He’s busy catching a kid-killer and leaving me completely out of it, sprog,’ Amanda said.
Lillian seemed to take the news hard. She looked towards the closed front door.
Amanda began to form an idea. She reached up and pulled open the drawer beside the sink, feeling around among the items there until she found what she wanted. She handed a wooden spoon to the child. Lillian tapped experimentally on a saucepan lid, making a hollow ponk-ponk-ponk sound.
The child broke into a grin. Amanda did, too.
I sat on the steps of an empty caravan not far from Hogan’s and watched the hive of activity surrounding what had been his modest living quarters. The dog squad was there, leading their animals around and under the van, waiting for approval to take the dogs inside to see if they could scent Richie. To my right, through a tangle of rainforest at the edge of the creek that enclosed the park, I could see press vans adding themselves to the sizeable queue at the roadblock, drivers leaning out the window, pointing down the hill. The creek was lined with crocodile warning signs every twenty metres and bordered by a low chain-link fence. I wondered if a nuisance croc had once made an appearance in the park, attracted by the residents hosing off meaty barbecue grills near the banks and city dogs going wild and splashing in the water.