by Candice Fox
* * *
Outside on the lawn, Amanda stretched in the waning sunlight, rolling her lean, tattooed shoulders. Sweeney followed her to the sprawling poinsettia tree at the side of the unmarked road and watched as she picked up her yellow bicycle, pushing the tires with her thumb to test their pressure.
“Okay,” Sweeney said, “I’ll bite. Why does the fact that the necklace was an opal stone mean Andrew gave it to Keema?”
“Because Australians don’t buy opals,” Amanda said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, I’m not a bloody geologist.” Amanda snorted. “Aussies just don’t buy them. They haven’t been popular in jewelry here since the 1980s. Foreigners buy them because you can’t get them overseas, and around here we have them coming out of our ears they’re so common. Tourists love them. That’s why they’re only for sale in the shop windows of the tourist strips in Cairns,” she said. “That’s why they sell them for cheap in the little plastic containers. Keema was a tourist, so she would have seen the opals, and she’d have liked them. She’d have mentioned how much she liked them to Andrew at some point in their conversations. Yes, conversations. More than one. Because you don’t mention a thing like that the first time you meet someone, a customer maybe, across the bar. Whoever gave her that necklace, it was someone she worked with, because she wore it to work, and it was someone she talked to a lot because she was fucking them.”
“Why not someone else she worked with?”
Amanda swung a leg over the bike, reached into the back pocket of her shorts and pulled out a strip of pale pink lace with all the pomp and ceremony of a magician feeding silk handkerchiefs through his fingers. She stretched it between her index fingers and let it spring at Sweeney. Sweeney caught it against her chest.
“From the washing basket?” Sweeney unfurled the G-string, marveled at it in her fingers. “It could belong to Michael’s girlfriend.”
“Michael? Oh please. That man hasn’t got a girlfriend, or she’d be here comforting him in his hour of need. And you don’t have one-night stands in Crimson Lake. You’d go through every woman in your age-range in two weeks. He’s a trucker. He gets his rocks off on the road.”
“It could be Stephanie’s,” Sweeney said, not sure what to do with the G-string, looking self-consciously back toward the house.
“Wrong again, Sweeney Todd,” Amanda said. “Not Stephanie’s size.” She kicked off and pedaled the bike away.
I don’t know what I thought a television studio might be like. It’s possible I’d developed a preconceived idea from Hollywood that it would be all flashy sets, glossy floors being crisscrossed by enormous cameras on wheels. People sitting in folding chairs yelling through megaphones at beautiful people under gold lights, the occasional Pomeranian waiting patiently to appear atop a mountain of brightly labeled cans. Plenty of security to protect the frighteningly young and pretty actors fondling each other on couches in fake living rooms or sitting down in fake kitchens to serious cups of tea.
The Channel Three studios I found when I arrived the next morning had none of the glamour of my brief, naïve expectations. We rolled into the sunbaked parking lot before soulless brick buildings stacked like stairs along a featureless hill. The reception area was poky, sterile, the walls pocked with hooks and nails that once held framed television show posters, now long gone, replaced with other hooks and nails, other posters. The goons and I were given lanyards and buzzed through a heavy, dented door not unlike some thresholds I’d traversed in prison.
I had concocted plenty of fancy, emotional excuses for accepting the Stories and Lives interview offer in case anyone questioned my decision. This was my chance, for example, to put the record straight in my own words about Claire Bingley’s abduction and assault, to finally assert my innocence and vindicate anyone who might have been halfhearted about supporting me for so long. There was a chance her attacker might be watching, might finally be confronted with the effect of what he had done on my life, something that could perhaps persuade him to hand himself in or at least seek help for his problems. Lillian would grow up and eventually learn of her father’s apparent crime, and a testimony from me of my innocence might lend some weight to her accepting the horror I’d wrought on her life, on our family, even before she was old enough to know it.
Those were all nice ideas. But at the end of the day, when Stories and Lives contacted me about an exclusive public appearance, they’d been offering $300,000. I’d held off, sought my lawyer’s advice, and in the interim the offer had been bumped to $450,000. I took it. Yes, it was more than likely I was going to have a terrible time on the show. There was a chance I would do more damage to my reputation than I intended if I didn’t handle the questions carefully enough. And to a certain extent, public interest in me had been dying down since it had peaked six months earlier with the mob outside my door and every television station in the country trying to cover my possible lynching. But those risks guaranteed a reward of almost a half a million dollars. I said I’d do it. I planned to purchase the beaten-up house on Crimson Lake. I would tuck a little away for a rainy day, and the rest I would put into a trust for my daughter.
It appeared my arrival for the interview was highly anticipated. I’m at least fifteen minutes early everywhere I go—a leftover symptom of time in the police force—so I caught a group of producers or executives having a powwow just inside the glass door marked with a huge blue book, the logo for Stories and Lives.
“Oh my god.” Someone popped their head out of the huddle as I opened the door. “He’s here.”
“Ted.” A small woman wearing a red power suit turned toward me, slicked back the side of her already very slick hairdo. “Erica Luther. We’ve spoken over email.”
She reached out to shake my hand. Everyone in her group balked slightly at the gesture, little tightenings of the corners of mouths and roundings of the eyes. It’s a big deal to shake my hand, apparently. I gave her a firm grip.
“Nice to meet you.”
“This is Lara Eggington.” Erica presented an extremely slender woman in a taut cream dress. “She’ll be running the interview this morning.”
I’d seen Lara on-screen putting the daggers into people like me. She was even narrower, sharper about the face in real life than she was on the show. I shook her limp, soft hand, a collection of bird bones in a satin bag.
“You’ve been in an accident,” she said by way of greeting, turning those eagle eyes on my face.
“Uh, an accident. Yes. I’m fine.”
“And these are your friends. Did we approve this?” she asked no one in particular. She looked Linda and Sharon over. “I was sure we only approved your lawyer to be on set.”
“Where is my lawyer?” I glanced around the studio, where cameramen and sound recordists were trying not to stare. “He said he’d be here.”
“He’s running a little late.” Erica smiled. The panic swirled. Sean Wilkins had been the only person to stand by my side through every minute of my ordeal, from the day I was arrested. He’d come to me in my holding cell at my own police station, a calm, collected island in the swirling, treacherous waters of my life. Suddenly I was the kid at the first day of school and my dad had left me to fend for myself, to follow instructions from people I didn’t know. To trust that they’d take care of me.
The goons and I were led through the studios to a small sitting room–style set, comfy wingback chairs and a phony fireplace. Linda and Sharon arranged themselves like mighty birds of prey on a nearby bench, preening their jacket cuffs and sniffing. I was examining the boom mic above my head and listening to instructions when the clopping of frantic footsteps down the hall made Lara stiffen in her seat across from me.
“Oh, shit,” someone said. Lara massaged her impossibly smooth brow as my lawyer emerged into the light, puffing.
“I knew you’d do this.” Sean was right up in the little producer’s face, Erica Luther backing into a camera stand, almost knocking it over. “
I fucking knew it. You said ten a.m. You said ten. Ay. Em.” He tapped his expensive watch manically, making it rattle on his wrist.
“Sean?” I stood.
“There must have been some kind of miscommunication,” Erica sneered. “I don’t know who you’ve been in contact with, but—”
“They do this,” Sean told me, grabbing my arm and tugging me away from the chair like it was booby-trapped. “They tell the lawyer the wrong time so it’ll be far too late when I arrive. Look at you. You’re a fucking mess. You were going to put him on like this, weren’t you? You look like shit, Ted.”
I’d never seen Sean this flustered. Not in the courthouse, not in the prehearing meetings. Never. He was sweating into the collar of his shirt, his silk tie askew. “Where’s hair and makeup?” he demanded. “Get them in here, now.”
“Hair and makeup was never part of the agreement,” Erica said. “You should have—”
“Right.” Sean yanked my arm. I was suddenly walking with him, Linda and Sharon hurrying down the hall behind us. We jogged past an empty news desk and a row of sound booths, turned down a narrow passageway and along a set of fire stairs. Sean seemed to know where he was going. We emerged into a gold-lit dressing room where a beautiful Asian woman was waiting by a row of shirts.
“Ha!” She laughed when she saw me. “You were right, Sean. He looks terrible.”
“I really don’t think I look that bad.” I pushed down the front of my neatly ironed shirt, my black tie.
“Get in the chair.” Sean shoved me before a huge mirror lit by several white bulbs. I got a proper look at myself. They were right. I looked terrible. My black eye was stark, a deep blue brushstroke curving out from beside my reddened nose. I smoothed down my beard. It didn’t help.
“The beard’s coming off,” Sean was telling the woman as he shoved shirts aside on the rack, examining each one. “Make sure you get the sideburns.”
The lady searched around on the counter, moved bottles of lotion and canisters of powder.
“When Cali is done with you, you put this on.” Sean tugged a rich royal blue shirt off the rack and showed it to me in the mirror.
“Is it my size?”
“Yes.” Sean put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “I called Cali yesterday. She works on the teen dramas. I knew—I fucking knew the Stories and Lives crew would get up to their usual tricks. The white shirt and black tie is a classic example.” He flipped my tie in disgust. I smoothed it down.
“They told me to wear this!”
“Of course they did. You look like you’re on your way to court.”
I looked at myself in the mirror. He was right. I looked like a thug heading to a court appearance. How had I not spotted this? I’d escorted plenty of cokeheads on the bad side of a binge to court and seen their public defenders thrust plain black cotton ties at them, plucked from a drawer full of identical ties. Plain black cotton—the cheapest choice—over plain white cotton shirts—the safest choice. The shirt on the rack, a deep royal blue, looked interesting. Expensive. It made me look like I had an opinion about my appearance. Like I had a personality. Like I was human.
* * *
Cali the emergency makeup artist shaved my face, trimmed my hair, brushed it back and did something to it with a comb and some gel that made it seem like it had some kind of deliberate shape. She stood between my knees and lifted my chin and dabbed foundation on my bruises.
I tried to hide it, but I was in extreme physical pleasure at being touched. It was not a sexual pleasure, but a warm, heady feeling of having affection and attention applied to me, the kind I imagined dogs felt when an owner who’d returned from a long time away scratched them just right, rubbed down their ears, whispered gentle affirmations of their goodness. Since my accusation, people didn’t touch me, not the way they had before I was marked by that fiery curse that was pedophilia. Sure, there were very heroic handshakes. Carefully considered, rigid hugs. Linda and Sharon tended to shove me around like a staggering drunk, and Amanda was as likely to pat my arm as she was to punch me. But this woman I didn’t know was smoothing a cold, soft makeup pad over my nose and jaw, her thumb on my chin and fingers on my temple, directing my head this way and that. I felt safe enough to close my eyes as she worked the makeup gently as close as she could to the base of the stitches Amanda had put in my face. She talked absent-mindedly about makeup jobs she had done, special effects gigs, my skin, the colors she was using. When I looked at myself after she was finished, I jolted in my chair. I reminded myself of the Ted who appeared in my wedding photographs, that smiling young man who’d somehow managed to snag a wonderful woman before anyone else had. Who, against all odds, convinced her to marry him.
When I settled again into the wingback chair across from Lara Eggington, she looked up from the pages resting in her lap and scowled at me, gave the heavy, worn smirk of someone who had lost a battle. People fluttered around us, adjusting mics and lights, touching our hair, doing checks. I sat quietly, remembering Sean’s brief.
“Her main aim will be to get you upset,” Sean had reminded me. “She’ll try to make you frustrated as fast as she can so they can have you looking edgy and dangerous on-screen. She’ll call you dirty names. She’ll change up the questions so you don’t go too far down a certain track. Remember, you’re the monster here. They’re going to paint you as the monster in the ads. In the commentary. Don’t smile or laugh but try not to be too cool or despondent either. Stay human, Ted. At all times, try to stay human.”
Lara arranged her legs now at an uncomfortable-looking angle, her knees together and glossy hairless shins reflecting the light like chrome. She put the heels of her stilettos side by side and sighed, whipped her hair, an apparent signal for her people that she was ready to begin.
“We’re rolling,” someone said.
Dear Diary,
It was her fault, a lot of it. The way it began. I mean, obviously I was attracted to her. That first day, when she’d popped her head up over the fence, Penny had dumbfounded me. Her cheeky, sassy nature. Her big, dark eyes. But I know what I am, and I knew the girl next door was off-limits. I’m not that dumb. But that’s what they make you, I guess, those special loves in your life. They make you dumb. You slip into fantasies about them, in which they become too perfect, so attuned to everything you’ve ever desired that when you see them again some sparkle of that fantasy is still lingering around them, and they’re like fairies, angels, walking in the everyday world. The next time I saw Penny, we were having a long-awaited backyard barbecue Chloe had been whining about, the “housewarming,” our uni friends getting drunk and covering our pathetic little yard in cigarette ash and fallen sausages. Chloe was talking about getting a dog. I was thinking about throwing myself off a bridge. And then Penny was there, her pale face rising over the fence like a perfect moon shining hopefully, soothingly, on a sailor lost at sea.
“What are you guys doing?” She caught my eye, jutted her chin. I went over and the crowd around the plastic chairs hardly seemed to miss me.
“Having a stupid party,” I said. Rolled my eyes. “It wasn’t my idea.”
“Is it a birthday party?”
“No, just a housewarming.”
“It’ll be my birthday soon.”
“When?”
“March fifteenth. I’ll be eleven. I’m almost a teenager.”
“You sure are getting there.” I smiled. I heard Chloe somewhere behind me telling our guests I was “great with kids.”
“What’s that?” Penny reached over with her milk-white arm and pointed at my drink. I had the almost uncontrollable desire to grab the arm before it slithered away. Nibble the impossibly tender flesh. See if I could resist hurting her.
“It’s rum and Coke.”
“What does that taste like?”
“It’s great,” I said. I took a sip, glanced back toward the people at the table. Chloe was regaling them with tales of her latest bare scrape through the first round of assignments. “You
want to try some?”
“Sure!” Penny grinned.
“You can’t tell anyone, though.” I gave her the serious eyes, a devoted friend offering her a test, something to weigh our future interactions upon. She wanted to be my friend. She wanted me to like her. This was serious business—whether or not she could be trusted. “Can you keep secrets?”
“I’m the best secret keeper,” she huffed, affronted. “Of course I can.”
I rose up on my tiptoes, trying to shield the exchange with my head and shoulders. I passed the drink over the fence, swift, keeping an eye on my guests. Penny took an awkward gulp and coughed.
“Urgh! That’s weird.”
“Kind of burny, right?”
“I think it’s in my nose.” She coughed, pinched her little nostrils. “Why do you drink that?”
“I don’t know.” I looked into my drink. “It’s fun, I guess?”
“Not for me.” She made a vomiting sort of noise and hopped off the fence, disappearing into the twilight green of her backyard. I rose up and tried to see where she went. My little earth angel wisping away from me again.
LARA: Good evening. I’m Lara Eggington. Tonight, Stories and Lives brings you an exclusive interview with Australia’s most hated man. Ted Conkaffey is an accused violent pedophile, recently charged with the abduction and attempted murder of a thirteen-year-old girl. He’s never spoke publically about the arrest and court case that stopped a nation—the sudden, unexplained withdrawal of charges by the director of public prosecutions that sent members of the Australian public reeling. Tonight, you’ll hear what he has to say about the crime, as well as a bombshell that threatens to blow this case wide open. Ted, welcome to the program.
TED: Thanks, Lara. But what’s this bombshell you mentioned?
LARA: Don’t worry about that. That’s just promo stuff.