by Candice Fox
She’d been punished for it pretty badly in the court of public opinion. People were calling her a pedophile sympathizer, a traitor, a conspirator. The more sympathetic of Fabiana’s detractors mused that she probably had hybristophilia, a fixation on sexual partners who have committed violent acts like murder or rape. She’d had a few bricks through her front windows, like me. But much of the backlash went to her social media profiles, where people threatened and stalked her, sent her obscene photographs, hacked into her personal accounts and published her correspondence.
I did not need to drag someone else into that kind of mess.
“Have you listened to it?” Sweeney asked.
“No.”
Of course I hadn’t listened to it. The podcast was the last thing in the world I wanted to listen to. It had real audio from Claire Bingley’s interviews with police, which I’d heard during the trial and sometimes heard even now in my nightmares. The podcast contained recorded snippets of my own interrogations, my desperate pleas with my colleagues. It had detailed reports from the doctors who’d examined Claire, cataloguing the injuries she’d suffered. It had audio from the frantic, tearful public appeal Dale and his wife made the evening of her disappearance. It made me sick just thinking about it.
“It’s pretty good,” Sweeney said.
“Pretty good?” I asked. She didn’t notice my disdain.
“I’m up to about episode five, I think. They’ve gone all the way through the crime, the witness accounts, the interviews. They’re pointing out the inconsistencies. They have some pretty compelling theories.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s the number one podcast in Germany, you know,” she said. “They have eight million subscribers over there. Do you interact with Innocent Ted at all?”
“No.” I cleared my throat in what I hoped was a dismissive way, trying to end the discussion. “The woman who started it copped some real problems, so I don’t … I don’t want to encourage it.”
“You don’t want to encourage it?” Sweeney squinted at me. “But these people think you’re innocent.”
“I know,” I said, trying to resist the anger swirling up from the pit of my stomach. “And that’s great. Really. But I don’t want to draw any more attention to myself, if it’s all the same. I’m sure the podcast is very entertaining. But as long as I’m free, I just want to live my life quietly and try to get past everything that’s happened. People going around wearing Innocent Ted T-shirts and commenting on the website isn’t going to give me my marriage back. Or my job. Or my relationship with my daughter. It’s not going to replace the time I spent in prison. Or help Claire Bingley recover from the attack. Or give her parents their marriage back. Or…”
“I get it,” she said.
“Or convince people who have already decided that—”
“Okay, okay! I get it.” She touched me on the shoulder. I found that my fists were clenched. When I unclenched them, my knuckles cracked. I kept my eyes fixed on the rainforest. It was getting scary, my desire to go off on long rants like this, my words speeding up, slurring into each other.
The anger had been a long time coming. When I first got out of prison, I’d been too tired and relieved to be angry. But these days I was angry at everyone, even people who sympathized with me. My goose-wife didn’t mind my bleating on and on about my problems, but I’d have to tone it down in front of humans if I wanted to maintain the few people I had who were willing to listen to me at all.
After a time Sweeney spoke, and her voice was small. Uncertain.
“It might help catch the guy who did it, though, all this,” she said. “If you really didn’t do it.”
Dear Diary,
I guess I’ll do this. Write it out. Go back to when it started and try to understand what I can do. Writing about telling someone for the first time what I am deep down inside, the real me, that felt really good. Maybe if I can write about what I did, I can prevent myself from doing it again. Because I don’t want to do it again. I feel bad. Of course I feel bad.
It might take a few entries. But I want to understand it. There’s so much I need to say.
See, it’s like this:
I’m a normal young man. I make sure that I do absolutely everything that twenty-five-year-old, heterosexual, part-time employed men do. It’s not hard. We’re not complex beings, full of mystery and intrigue. All I’ve had to do to construct my disguise is play a constant game of mirroring. I hang around other guys my age, at uni or the bar where I work, and I listen to what they say. I say the same things back.
I go to “the club” and stare at “bitches” and talk about how bad they want me to “put it up” them. I can tell by their lips. Their big, plump “booties.” When women turn their backs on Pete and Dave and Steve and me, one of us makes a gesture, grabs our crotch or something, makes a pained noise like dogs howling after their mates trotting across the other side of the pound wire. When we’re not scoping bitches I complain about my work, my boss, keep one eye on the rugby on the screen in the corner. Moan as the ball fumbles out of someone’s hands. I’ve got the guys covered. They believe I’m one of them.
My therapist, I’ve got him fooled. No real hardship there. Chloe, she was a little harder to convince, but again, it’s not unachievable. If you’re a red-blooded Aussie bloke who’s half–decent looking, you’ve got to have a girlfriend. So I picked her up in sociology class. I’d moped around a few dead-end jobs in my late teens and decided I’d do a bachelor of arts, keeping my head low, trying to keep up with the normal crowd. I found Chloe there, struggling with the material and needing pointers. I’d had a couple of girlfriends before her, but nothing serious, and I needed to get into something serious before people started wondering why I kept leaving these perfectly good girls. We’ve lived together in our soulless little rental property in the sun-scorched suburban hell that is Blairmount for five months now. Vinnies furniture. She vacuums a lot. Insists on the kitchen benches being empty, me not leaving my wet towels on the floor. She wants a cat, but I’m not big on pet hair all over my clothes. I fuck her about twice a week. To maintain my disguise, I think a lot about what she’d say if I was ever arrested. If they ever found me out for what I really am, what I’ve done. How was your sex life? Normal. Did you ever fight? Now and then, about inconsequential things. How were his university grades? Fine. Did you get on with his friends? Yes. Did he ever express any strange desires? Say odd things in the bedroom? Leave questionable material on the computer? No. No. No.
If I were a chameleon, my color would be gray. Depthless, calming gray. I’d be a slow-moving, bug-eyed creature creeping along in the gray world, taking hand-holds of storm-colored branches, sliding my round belly over steely leaves. The hardest part about it all is how boring it is.
But I do get my color. About a year ago, when I’d first met Chloe, I took her to a café for lunch. Comfortable, getting used to being around each other, the supposedly easy intimacy of young lovers. She blathered on about something. Trying to tell me all the time about her childhood, so that I could really appreciate her for the woman she was becoming, bond with her, intertwine her history with mine. In my memory, the street outside is gray. Then, a flash of coral pink in a window across the street.
A group of ballerinas prancing across a polished floor. Ten or fifteen brown-limbed girls, preteen beauties hurling themselves through the air. I watched their heads bobbing and thin arms flailing as they fluttered into a corner, formed a huddle, burst away from each other, a pink flower blossoming. I was mesmerized.
Chloe was scanning the newspaper. I’d stopped listening, had no answer for her question when it came. I’d dropped the mask. I could feel the color flooding through me, blood surging in my face, dangerous flashes of the beast inside trying to penetrate the surface, alert her. Alert the waitress setting our coffee on the table. Alarm pulsed in my neck and eyes.
But Chloe didn’t see it. She’s stupid. I chose her because she’s stupid.
It starts with a frown. Sometimes the cocking of a head, the pursing of lips. They watch me, even as I look away. I can feel their gaze on me, taking in the shape of my jaw through the beard, my nose, the big hand raised to my brow trying to disrupt the viewer flipping through their memories until they find my face wherever they saw it. On the news, in the papers, on the internet, on someone’s Facebook feed. Maybe all of those places.
When they get it, their mouth drops open. They stop what they’re doing. Maybe they’re sitting across the plane aisle from me, pulling the lid off their tiny container of milk, a steaming paper cup on the tray just inches above their knees. An elbow juts into someone’s ribs. There’s pointing. A sort of sixth sense ripples out through the people around us, other people noticing the recognition, the whispering, starting to recognize for themselves. At first there’s a sort of stiff, confused calm, the same sort that causes people to pretend they haven’t seen mega movie stars sitting in the café near them, walking along the same Florida beach. Everybody act normal! The same way they flipped through their memories to find me, they flip through their emotions for the appropriate reaction, and they all find the same one.
Rage.
Most of the time, people turn away from me. If they’re a little more adventurous, they talk loudly about my case, glancing over to see if I’m listening. “They should bring back the death penalty in this country for pieces of shit like him.” Sometimes, people loiter menacingly, follow me to my car, write down my license plate. People sometimes take pictures of me, video me for citizen news. Now and then physical confrontations arise, but they’re usually halfhearted. Someone shoves past my table at the bar, knocks my beer over. Blocks me from entering the supermarket, chest puffed, saying nothing, daring me to push past.
If I’m recognized and things become hostile, I leave before there’s a fight. The last thing I want to do is challenge a member of the public. The people of Crimson Lake did me a massive favor simply by not running me off the way a number of towns did with Dennis Ferguson. After his conviction for the abduction and sexual assault of three young children, Dennis attempted to resettle in Bundaberg, Toowoomba, Murgon, Ipswich, Miles, and Ryde before angry mobs chased him out each time. He was eventually discovered dead in a flat in Surry Hills. No one found his body for several days. A mob had come to my door in Crimson Lake, with all the fanfare Dennis had been treated to—the placards and the chanting and the TV live-crosses. Police officers standing outside my door. I hadn’t left, and the panic and anger had died down.
* * *
As my plane landed in Sydney, I thought about these dangers, sitting stiffly in my seat at the back of the plane, a magazine clutched high around my face. It was enclosed situations like this that frightened me the most, because there was nowhere to run if something violent kicked off. It had taken some serious self-talk in the toilet cubicle at the airport gate to even get on the plane. I’d brought prop glasses with heavy frames for the occasion and slicked back my hair. But the black eye and stitches were drawing gazes.
I knew that the public was barely okay with the idea of me living in an isolated marshland far away from big cities, where they could lose track of me. But no one would be happy about me coming back to Sydney. People would wonder if I was going to resettle here, and that was a great scary headline for the papers. I was expecting news of my movements to spread fast and generate excitement. The more savvy reporters would have noted my daughter’s birthday, and would be watching to see if I visited. There might also be those who’d got word that I’d agreed to appear on Stories and Lives, and would be stalking the front of the TV studio waiting for me to arrive.
I was just beginning to feel the relief of having not been recognized, walking through the airport with my backpack slung over my shoulder, when I noticed the two men following me. I stopped and looked at them in the reflection in the window of a brightly lit stationery store, pretending to peruse the pretty gold- and silver-trimmed diaries and letter sets. All I could see were two enormous shapes loitering across the broad walkway in front of a men’s fashion outlet, one with his hands clasped in front of him, the other talking on a mobile phone. I surveyed my options, but there were few. Passengers were being shuffled like cattle down the walkway toward the baggage escalators, or up toward the gates. I thought there was a chance I could lose the men in the food court. But when I got to the top of the stairs and looked at the crowd before me, I noticed a small huddle of press at the entrance to the Flyaway Bar, almost all of them with their eyes on their phones.
Sweat began to tickle down my bruised sides. The breath only seemed to reach the top quarter of my lungs. I kept my eyes down and walked quickly past the baggage and taxi crowds toward the rental car lot, dashing through the traffic. The two men following me sped up and were close behind me when, just before the glass doors to the Hertz office, another man stepped out from behind a pylon, stopping me in my tracks.
“Oh fuck.” I gripped my chest, took a couple of steps back from Khalid. “Oh, Jesus, fuck.”
“Gave you a scare, eh, Coffee Cup?”
Khalid’s two thugs stepped up behind me, boxing me in. Relief was rushing over me like warm water, deepening my chest, easing the pain in my ribs.
I’d met Khalid Farah for the first time as a young patrol officer responding to a domestic dispute at a small property in Camden, long before Khalid became one of Australia’s biggest drug dealers. Back then he’d been a proud, neatly dressed foot soldier of one of the drug crews in the city, the fancy car and the huge watch indicators that he was a good earner, that eventually he’d probably get to the top of the scrum if no one killed him first. My partner Rylie and I got the call that Khalid’s sister Jima and her husband Mahmoud were having an all-out shouting match, and the neighbors had seen Khalid arrive and called the cops, thinking things were about to turn violent. It had been a standard domestic. Khalid and Jima and Mahmoud all shouting in Lebanese in the kitchen. Sweat, popping veins, puffing chests. A baby screaming somewhere in another room, forgotten.
My partner Rylie had taken Mahmoud while I took Khalid and Jima off into the living room to give them a stern talking-to about communicating with calm and empathy—all the sort of stuff the academy teaches you to say. Everything had seemed to be under control. But Rylie and I were both fresh graduates. We were supposed to be partnered with more experienced officers, but staffing didn’t always allow it. We broke the first rule of working in domestic disputes in a closed environment. We didn’t keep in sight of each other. The last time I saw Mahmoud and Rylie, Mahmoud had gone to the other room and grabbed the baby and was pacing with it, joggling it to try to stop the crying while Riley followed him, talking. Second rule broken. You’re supposed to sit the suspect down and keep him in place while you talk it out. I refocused on my pair, until I heard a yelp and a thump, and by the time I got back to the kitchen Rylie was on the floor. As I came around the corner, Mahmoud was putting the infant girl into the microwave on the kitchen counter. I drew my gun just as he slammed the door. It was the first time I’d ever drawn my gun, let alone pointed it at someone. Mahmoud put a finger less than an inch from the “Quick Cook” button on the microwave and told me to take my radio off and put my gun down.
I didn’t put the gun down, but I did pull the radio off my belt and gave the three rapid blips that would signal to the patrol frequency that we were in trouble before I put it on the table. I told Mahmoud that if he pushed the button on the microwave I’d shoot him dead. I was terrified. Khalid and his sister stood behind me, screaming and crying in horror until I told them to shut up. Rylie was unconscious at my feet. It looked like Mahmoud had simply punched her square in the nose and knocked her out cold.
The three blips got the patrol frequency’s attention. They called back, wanting to know the situation, but of course Mahmoud wouldn’t let me answer. The baby actually calmed down in the microwave, stopped screaming and just lay there grizzling quietly in the dark box, with no clue her father was threatening t
o cook her alive. For five minutes I held the gun on Mahmoud and tried to talk him down. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. My arms trembled with the weight of the gun and sweat poured down me. Mahmoud wanted Khalid to give him some money. He wanted Khalid’s sister to promise she wouldn’t divorce him. They of course agreed to all his demands, but still he didn’t budge, his finger now gently resting on the “Quick Cook” button.
After twenty-one agonizing minutes, patrol cars arrived silently outside, and a scout looked through the kitchen window and saw what was going on. My arms were numb by the time they cut the power. The second the lights went out above us, I leaped forward and smashed Mahmoud in the face with the butt of my pistol, threw him on the floor, and cuffed him. Khalid Farah had shaken my hand hard outside the little house in Camden, his eyes full of young, naïve admiration, no idea how sick and horrified I’d felt throughout the whole ordeal.
“Conkaffey?” he’d said, looking at my nameplate. “I’ll remember that name. It’s a weird name. What kind of name is it anyway?”
“I think it’s Irish,” I’d said.
“Conkaffey. Cankoffey. Canned coffee.” He’d looked at his sister, who was hugging the baby tightly nearby, too upset to appreciate Khalid’s humor. “We should call you Captain Cappuccino.”
The coffee-related names had spread through the drug community like wildfire. I’d had corner dealers calling out to me from across the street a few days later, “Yo! Frappuccino!” The story about the baby and the microwave did the rounds as well, becoming wilder and more elaborate at every turn. I heard once that I’d picked up a chef’s knife from the kitchen table and flung it across the room into Mahmoud’s eye socket to save the baby.
Khalid Farah was immediately grateful to me for saving his niece’s life, but I couldn’t accept much more than his thankful words. He’d tried to offer me money on the scene, but I’d refused. He’d sent a Rolex watch and a bottle of champagne to headquarters, but I’d had to send them back. Eventually his thankful advances drained away, but not before I’d suffered plenty of jeering from my colleagues about the drug dealer with a crush on me.