Redemption Point

by Candice Fox

  As they came into view of the bar, Sweeney was relieved to see that no lights glowed through the tangles of trees at the side of the road. But there were cars parked further along the road in the distance, the outlines of some visible through the trees, parked bumper to bumper along a narrow dirt road strip in the rainforest. Sweeney noted an old black limousine among the collection. The two women rolled to a halt outside the bar, trying to decide if, through the roar of the night insects all around, any sound was coming from within the building. Amanda kicked the stand down on her bike with her bare foot and Sweeney did the same, watching her partner in the dark.

  “What was that old caboose going on about?” Amanda wondered aloud.

  “Maybe he was just trying to get rid of you,” Sweeney suggested.

  “No, he doesn’t mind me,” Amanda said. “A lot of people do. But he doesn’t.”

  Amanda pulled on her heels and walked to the bar, up the wisteria-coated porch. Sweeney followed at a trot.

  “What are you doing? Is this a good idea?”

  Amanda bashed on the front door of the bar.

  “Oi!” she cried. “Anybody home?”

  “Amanda!” Sweeney tugged the woman away from the door. “What if there is someone there? What’s your plan?”

  “Plans are for losers,” Amanda said. To Sweeney’s horror, the door suddenly popped open a few centimeters and the silhouette of a man’s face appeared. He seemed to assess the women briefly, eyes glittering in the dark.

  “Two?” he asked.

  Sweeney was frozen. She marveled at Amanda, who nodded confidently.

  “Yep, two tonight, my good man. Just two.”

  “It’s five each for newbies. Four for members. You’re not members, are you? I haven’t seen you before.”

  “We just joined today,” Amanda said. “This morning.”

  Sweeney wiped sweat from her brow. The thought crossed her mind that Amanda knew what was going on here, had known all along. But as the man shifted the door, Amanda put a hand out, palm up, like she expected to receive something. Only Sweeney noticed the gesture. Amanda dropped her hand as the man turned and gestured into the bar.

  “Let’s go.” Amanda grabbed Sweeney’s arm.

  “What is this? What’s going on?” Sweeney gave a harsh whisper as they walked into the dark.

  “I don’t know. But it sure is exciting!”

  “It’s totally inappropriate,” Sweeney said through her teeth. “We need to get out of here and call backup.”

  “Backup is—”

  “For losers?” Sweeney whispered harshly. “You know what’s not for losers? Surviving the night. Living to old age. Dying in your sleep in a warm, comfy bed and not on the floor of a shitty dive bar.”

  “This way.” The man led them to the bar, where a row of three candles cast a dim glow over the bottles and glasses there. Sweeney began to commit the young man’s face to memory, his height, details about him—the navy suit and silver ring on his finger, the bump in the bridge of his nose. His face was passive, almost bored. He reached down and opened a panel in the floor behind the bar, showed the ladder leading into the dark with an open palm.

  They descended into the empty keg room. Again three candles provided the only light. It was only now that Sweeney could hear the thumping of music, obscure, voiceless droning. An underground nightclub? Sweeney knew there were speakeasies popping up in Brisbane and Melbourne like this, secret bars behind the rows of bottles in convenience store fridges or behind bookshelves in seemingly ordinary coffee shops. As the man pulled open a thin painted wooden panel on the concrete wall, a room lit with red lights appeared and the music rose. She could hear the sound of voices inside talking, cheering, groaning.

  “Fight club,” Amanda said, the two women standing steeped in anticipation in the dark keg room. “That’s my guess. What’s yours?”

  “I don’t have one,” Sweeney said.

  “Witches’ coven,” Amanda said. “You can have witches’ coven as your guess. Loser buys dinner.”

  They emerged into a cellar so large it petered into darkness, makeshift rooms divided from the central space by the use of velvet-draped partitions. The centerpiece of the main space was a semicircle of plush leather sofas, three in all, a scattering of fur pillows and throws hanging from chair arms or fallen to the floor. There were people here in various states of undress, some fully naked, kneeling or bending over the arms of the sofa, some entangled on an enormous black fur rug that looked as though it might have once been the pelt of a giant bear. People stood watching the slithering, grinding, and gripping happenings on or around the sofas, twinkling glasses in hands, cigarettes pinched between fingers. The room was utterly crammed with people, couples embracing against the walls or moving from one velvet-lined room to another. Sweeney glimpsed a complicated pulley system rigged in one room as the curtain door was pulled back. She looked up and saw black ropes feeding through a hook in the ceiling above the partitions.

  “Oh my god,” she was saying. Sweeney only realized her mouth was moving, words were tumbling out, as her volume began to increase. “Oh my god. Oh my god!”

  Amanda’s mouth hung wide open, her jaw muscles flexed. While Sweeney shielded her eyes, Amanda stood pointing, arm out, agape.

  “We have to get out of here.” Sweeney shoved Amanda’s arm down.

  “THIS IS AMAZING!”

  “Amanda.” Sweeney grabbed the girl’s arm as a man wearing a plastic mask of a doll’s face shifted by them, heading toward a small bar erected in the corner near the door. “Let’s go. Let’s go.”

  “What are you doing here?” Claudia Flannery was suddenly all that Sweeney knew, a great dark bird glittering with black jewelry swooping out of nowhere into the path between her and the door. “Who let you in? This is a private residence! Get out! Oh my god, get out!”

  Sweeney was shoved into Amanda. The air was hot and heavy with the sweat of the bodies filling the room. The music was so loud her own voice seemed immediately lifted up and carried away.

  “What the hell is this place? Who are these people? Why didn’t you tell us about this?”

  Claudia disappeared through the flap in the door without answering. Sweeney struggled to keep up, slipping and almost falling as she followed the woman up the stairs, Amanda at her heels.

  “You have no right to be here.” Claudia turned on Sweeney again in the quiet of the empty bar, her eyes wild. “No one admitted you. Outside of hours, this business is a private residence, and anything that happens here is a private matter. You’re trespassing. You’re—”

  Amanda’s eyes were closed. She stood with a solemn hand on her heart, her other palm pressed close against her lips as though trying to restrain the words that came in a shuddering rush.

  “That was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,” Amanda murmured. “A pleasure den. A secret pleasure den. Sweeney, I swear to you, by the hair of Gandalf’s beard, I would never have guessed that. Not in a million years.”

  Claudia had summoned the doorman, issuing reprimands at him as she dragged him toward the two investigators.

  “Get them out of here!” Claudia screeched. She and the doorman both shoved at the women together, bustling them through the front door of the bar. “Get them out! Out! Out! Out!”

  * * *

  On the porch of the Barking Frog, Sweeney stood watching the rain pattering onto the wisteria flowers, tapping onto leaves, making them dance. Things she had seen in the hidden cellar but not processed in the seconds she stood watching the goings-on came back to her. Slick, oiled bodies. Complicated lace lingerie being pulled down by rough hands. Candles. Sexual implements she didn’t recognize, in chrome and black rubber, a group of people sitting in armchairs in one of the velvet partitioned rooms, the curtain hanging open, exposing them. They had been men in heavily made-up masks, their bodies strapped and squeezed awkwardly into latex suits hung with enormous, bulbous breasts. Sweeney watched Amanda taking off her heels, preparing to mo
unt her bike again.

  “What in the name of all that is holy is a pleasure den?” Sweeney asked.

  “You’ve never encountered one?”

  “Not in Holloways Beach,” she sighed. “We don’t even have an adult shop.”

  “Well, pleasure dens, they differ,” Amanda said, holding a hand out, feeling the rain on her palm. “Some only cater to certain tastes. But from the looks of that one, they were set up for a variety of needs. You go to pleasure dens because they’re safe, fun, nonjudgmental environments where you can explore your sexuality and your fetishes and all that sort of stuff with people who like the same things you do.”

  She walked down the porch and over to her bike, hooked her shoes on the handlebars again. The rain was easing.

  “Bondage. Slave and master stuff. Role-playing. Pain games. Swinging. You do it there. Pleasure dens provide catering, too, sometimes,” Amanda said. “A bar. Drugs. You can go there to watch or fuck or participate, or you can just hang around friends with your guard down. Those guys in the masks, they’re called Maskers. They wear prosthetic woman suits, masks, make like they’re real dolls. You pay a membership fee to the establishment and they run these events regularly. It’s a much safer way to do that sort of thing … if that sort of thing is your thing.”

  “I can’t believe you know about all this,” Sweeney said.

  “A girl in Brisbane Women’s told me about them,” she said. “She and her husband used to swing. They’d meet couples online and invite them over to their house to share partners. A guy turned up to their place once and he hadn’t brought his partner like he promised he would. Big no-no. Really pissed the husband off. He’d really been looking forward to it, I guess.”

  “What happened?”

  “They tortured him. They were thinking about killing him but the dude got away through a back window. Estelle, the girl I knew, she said she hadn’t wanted to do it but her husband was pretty insistent. She got twenty years. If they’d just gone to a pleasure den it could all have been avoided. But her husband didn’t like the crowds.”

  Sweeney watched as Amanda mounted the bike, her bare toes curling around the edge of the steel pedals.

  “I’m going home,” she said, and raised a hand to high-five Sweeney as she pedaled off. “That’s enough excitement for me for one night. Woo!”

  “I’ve been developing a plan of attack over the past couple of days,” Sean said. I could hear the anger and frustration in his voice, a clipped, unnecessary precision to every word that came through the phone. “We’ll wait until the episode airs tonight, and then we’ll file our suit. It’s already drafted. It’s ready to go.”

  I stood on the grass in the morning light, at the edge of the road not far from the Barking Frog. Once again my pursuit of the case was being interrupted by my tangled, barbed life, its relentless vines creeping, creeping around my ankles, my wrists, trying to drag me back.

  “Can’t we just file something to prevent them from airing the episode?” I asked Sean.

  “That’s not going to work, Ted. Not at this stage.”

  “So the damage has been done. It’s going to go out.”

  “The damage was done when someone at Stories and Lives leaked to the rest of the press that there was a new accusation on the table. Don’t worry, we’ll find out who that was. We are going to take them all down, Ted. Erica fucking Luther and fucking Channel Three and Melanie Springfield.”

  “Do we know if Melanie Springfield has been in contact yet?”

  “No, but I’ll be putting in a request for the interview she did with the show. The full transcript. Apparently, the little snippet of Melanie they showed you during your interview was just going to be a taster to lead the viewers into a full episode with her that’s already been filmed.”

  “Where is the sister in all this? Where’s Elise?”

  “No one knows. She’s gone to ground. Won’t take phone calls.”

  “I want to see that transcript as soon as you get it,” I said. “I just don’t understand how they could have done this, Sean. It’s not true, any of it. Shouldn’t Stories and Lives have corroborated Melanie’s story? Wouldn’t they have known we’d sue right away?”

  He sighed, inhaled deeply, and set about trying to explain it all to me in layman’s terms. Technically, the Stories and Lives producers didn’t have to fully corroborate Melanie’s claims as long as they presented it in such a manner that they weren’t seen to be professing that it had actually happened. They’d say they were just reporting the accusation, not trying to say it was true. In order for our suit against the show and the network to be successful, we’d have to prove that they’d assisted in damaging my reputation by airing the content. And they’d argue, no doubt, that such a thing was impossible at this point. Even if Stories and Lives lost a lawsuit against me and had to pay for it, it was worth the risk. The whole country would be tuning in to both Melanie’s and my interviews. It would smash any other program on at the same time out of the ballpark.

  It was Melanie who should really have been sweating over a lawsuit. I presumed she didn’t have the kind of legal pull and piggy bank that Stories and Lives did. In order to defend herself against my defamation suit, she’d have to present a defense that what she’d said was true. It’s not defamatory if it’s true. And how could I ever prove that what she was saying about me hadn’t happened? Two decades had passed since the days she was talking about, those hazy summer afternoons at her house, the nerve-racking, dreadful responsibility of having a “girlfriend” for the first time. How could I prove I hadn’t touched her sister inappropriately? Was she even saying I touched her? I listened to Sean’s strained assurances and felt a great pressure growing in my skull.

  None of it made sense. Why would she do this to me? I knew money could be a motivator. Melanie would have been paid big bucks by Stories and Lives for her interview detailing new allegations against me. What she was paid was probably in the hundreds of thousands, like the fee I’d accepted for mine. But my decision to talk to the show for the money had been with the secure knowledge that I wasn’t going to hurt anyone, except possibly myself. Had Melanie thrown me to the wolves just for cash? There was no telling; Melanie and her sister had gone to ground. Surely when they’d decided to release the allegation, they’d been prepared to back it up to the police and to my lawyer. Were charges being arranged at that very minute? Was I about to be arrested? How could Melanie think she could tell lies about me to a national current affairs program and simply walk away without having to defend what she’d said?

  A searing hangover headache was pulsing at the back of my eyes. I’d lost track of what Sean was saying.

  “I’m talking big money, Ted,” Sean said. He was almost seething. I hadn’t heard him swear since my trial. He was generally a very refined, considered man. “This is bullshit. Utter bullshit.”

  “We’ll see what she says when she pops up,” I said by way of parting. “She’ll have to say something.”

  Amanda had asked me to pay a visit to the houses behind the Barking Frog to see what information I could gather. She’d said only that one of the houses had contained a “scary recluse woman” who wouldn’t talk to her, and that in the other was a dog who wanted to eat her. I’d started in the middle of the row but found the house shut up, seemingly with no one home. I wandered along the road to the northmost house, building up a good sweat by the time I reached it. I guessed I was half a kilometer as the crow flies from the back door of the Barking Frog.

  The terrifying, man-eating dog Amanda had described was indeed there. But her owner Lila, a young woman in yoga tights and a sports bra dragged the animal away and locked it in a bedroom, allowing me to come inside.

  “It’s all very sad,” she said briskly, crouching and rolling her yoga mat up on the floor. “I read it all in the paper. Two young kids. Well, not kids, exactly. Young people.”

  She looked uncomfortable suddenly, brushed at her sweat-damp hair, shielding her eyes. I g
ot the sense that she knew exactly who I was, thought she’d put her foot in it by mentioning children. I’d introduced myself as Collins at the door, but that was hardly mastery of disguise. It was more than likely that the local newspapers had heard about my and Amanda’s involvement in the investigation and printed a short article about my case.

  “Did you want a coffee or something? I’ve got this really amazing matcha. Change your life.”

  The dog was scratching at the door of the bedroom.

  “Oh no. I’m fine,” I said, taking the seat she offered at the kitchen counter. “I won’t stay long. I know my colleague Amanda asked you some questions about what you heard the night of the murders. I just had some follow-ups.”

  I ran through some general questions about her life, her interactions with the bar. She had a spiky, annoyed kind of response to the place. She didn’t like all the rubbish left lying around behind her back fence from drunks wandering through the rainforest to and from the bar, and the place got noisy on a Saturday night. She’d visited once and found it too dirty for her tastes. Lila’s house was the exact opposite of the dusty, rugged bar I’d visited on the morning after the murders. Her kitchen counters were almost bare, spare for the complicated-looking machine that made her matcha and a small cluster of succulents in pots the size of egg-cups. On the fridge, a single glossy magnet read “If it doesn’t challenge you, it won’t change you.”

  Lila sat stiff and rigid in the stool on the other side of the counter, her hands clasped tightly on the countertop. She listened to my questions and gave her responses like she was being interviewed for a job, her face grave with nerves.