She was struggling. She knew he was killing her.
‘Stop it, Pope! Stop!’ Darren cried impotently. Where was Smurf? What could he do? ‘Pope. Pope!’ he called, trying to bring his brother back from the precipice as he casually murdered a young woman in front of him.
She was fighting it, crying a muffled ‘No … No …’ Her eyes were starting from her head. But, slowly losing consciousness, she was going down.
Pope was shoving his palm so hard into her mouth that he broke off one of her teeth.
‘Please, Pope, stop it, please,’ Darren pleaded impotently. And then from the depths of their past, from the depths of their shared innocence, long since abandoned, Darren cried, ‘Andrew, please.’
Andrew, his real name, the name that you might be able to appeal to him under. But Andrew was long gone. Andrew didn’t exist any more. All that existed was Pope.
And all that existed of Pope at that moment was his voice. ‘Shh, shh …’ he whispered into her unhearing ears as she slipped away, like he was putting her to sleep, to gentle, restful sleep instead of killing her. This was the closest he would ever come to tenderness, the closest he would ever come to intimacy. This was his idea of sex: sex with the dead. He was a necrophiliac, and this was his world.
Rising from her, he started to breathe again.
And then something strange and inexplicable happened to him. As if even he was overwhelmed by what he’d just done, some foul, evil thing seemed to take possession of him. Rolling away, almost staggering, like some broken, deformed thing, he glanced at Darren, jeering, ‘There you are, you’ve gone and done it again, haven’t you, Darren?’
Darren was still whimpering, catatonic with horror.
‘You’ve smoked yourself silly,’ Pope taunted, ‘and think something’s going on.’
Did he really think Darren would swallow that? Did he really think such a pathetic denial of the obvious truth was a defence?
Pope wanted to show that it was someone else’s fault. It was always someone else’s fault.
Her lifeless body lay twisted on the couch, still warm, but growing colder by the minute. He had taken her into his kingdom, and she was dead.
FIFTEEN
J didn’t know where they were going. Norris, Leckie’s offsider, the flabby, mean one, was driving, keeping an eye on him in the rear-vision mirror, but they weren’t going anywhere J recognised. Somewhere in the south. He looked out into the dark suburban streets, and could hear the music and see the flickering lights of the TV sets inside the houses they passed. What were people watching? What were they imagining was happening in the world? Which world was real: his or theirs?
When the police car finally pulled in to a small, secluded motel hidden behind some bushes a few streets back from the highway, J asked, ‘Why’d you bring me here?’
Opening the door into a modest room and ushering him in, Leckie answered, ‘For your own safety.’
J didn’t know what that meant and wondered if they knew something he didn’t from their surveillance of Pope and Darren. Or maybe they just wanted to have him to themselves somewhere Ezra couldn’t find him for a few days. It suited J, even if it was just for the change.
Whatever they knew, they didn’t know that Nicky had been murdered by Pope, or that he had dumped her body under some cardboard boxes down the side of the house till he got around to getting rid of it later.
And neither did J. All he knew was that the walls were closing in around him and the ropes were getting tighter.
The cops were weird. Quiet. J had never spent much time with police and he was jumpy. He trusted Leckie, sort of. He didn’t think he was going to hurt him, anyhow. Not now. Or, if he was, he was the sort of bloke who’d oversee it, supervise. He wasn’t a thumper. Norris was a thumper. Maybe that’s why they were a team. Everyone had their specialty. J guessed that Leckie was the brains, the one that’d wear you down.
Sometimes J had wondered what it would be like to be arrested, interrogated. He remembered someone telling him one time—it might even have been his Grandfather Donny, when he was still alive—telling him when he was maybe six or seven that all you have to do if they get you is think of how proud everyone will be when you walk away not having spilled the beans. You gotta think of the good times ahead, he could remember him saying, not the shit happening now. He wasn’t sure if Donny would have said shit to a six year old but that’s the way he remembered it. He had never grassed on anyone, even if it was some shitty little thing, and he didn’t want to start now, especially not on his family.
People like Donny and Smurf, they’d done it tough, there was no question about it. Donny had gone to the war, been a soldier somewhere, never had much, and what he’d had he’d worked for or fought for. The same with Smurf: that’s what had made her tough, and resilient. Because if you’re not both those things you don’t survive. She didn’t understand the modern world and she didn’t like it, and that’s what J was thinking about that night.
How none of them actually lived in the world any more.
He’d read one time that there’s this thing around us, like an aura, that you can take a photo of. You can take a photo of your aura. And it’s not, like, ooga-booga or anything supernatural; it’s like a little layer of air that your body makes, a little skin that we have around us, and every living thing has one. Everything—fish, birds, snails—everything has this little layer, this aura, around them, because what everything’s trying to do is create its own mini-environment. That’s the point. We’re trying to make our own little environment to make ourselves feel comfortable.
And that’s what Donny and Smurf and the boys had done. They’d made their own environment, and they were so successful at it that they’d lost touch with the rest of the world—it just didn’t exist any more for them, except like this phantom that they felt more and more distant from. And as they had grown more distant from it, it had grown more distant from them.
The world had moved on; the days when you could walk into a bank and say Stick ’em up were long gone. Even criminals needed an education now.
So people like his family were an anachronism, a throwback to an earlier time when people did have to stick together to survive, and did have to be good with their fists to hold on to what was theirs.
But that world was gone. Those men, those women for whom Anzac wasn’t just a biscuit-tin memory were finished; the world of us against the coppers, backs against the wall, boys was over and what was left was a place people like Pope and Smurf hardly even recognised, and didn’t have any future in. J was starting to see that, sort of, and wondered where it left him.
Well, where it left him was sitting in a motel with two police silently eating their Chinese takeaways, everyone mulling their own thoughts and worried what the night would bring.
When he was woken the following morning by water being flicked at him by Norris, he wondered what the hell was going on.
Norris was sitting on a chair, balancing his feet on the edge of the bed and holding a glass of water.
Was this it? The beginning of the bad cop bit? Was that why they’d brought him here after all? To bash the truth out of him? They wouldn’t need to bash too hard: he’d pretty well had it with the lot of them.
‘You want a sip of my drink?’ Norris said, but what he meant was You want to suck shit, you low-life?
J didn’t say anything; he just looked at him and wondered where Leckie was.
‘What’s the matter?’ the man said. ‘Are you scared?’
Yeah, he was scared.
‘Are you scared of me?’
J noticed the guy’s service pistol lying on the bedside table by his head, close enough for J to reach out and grab it if he wanted. That was heavy-duty. This prick was threatening to kill him and say there’d been a tussle over the gun.
Norris watched him closely, as he worked it out. ‘That can’t feel too fuckin’ good,’ he said, sipping the water.
Was he going to shoot him?
J wasn’t sure, but he was relieved when Leckie came in with some takeaway breakfast from the local Macca’s. J couldn’t read what was going on. Maybe it was a set-up, like he’d thought, and Leckie was in on it too. Or maybe the other guy just wanted to freak him out for the hell of it, because he was a Cody, and all Codys were scum.
In any case, J was glad when Leckie asked him to follow him outside.
You couldn’t say it was a nice day. Sort of grey and overcast, with a dirty, gusting wind smelling of rain blowing up from the south-west.
They sat on a couple of rusting garden chairs next to some straggly plants that needed watering.
J felt like shit. He hadn’t slept well: he’d been dreaming of people bursting through the door the whole night; he was still upset about what he’d said to Nicky; here he was in a motel that smelled of disinfectant, with a couple of coppers saying he needed protection. He still wasn’t sure who from.
Who was going to hurt him? The Smash and Grab Squad? The Kill and Destroy Squad? Who wanted him shut up and silent?
It was a shit position to be in, and J didn’t know how he was going to get out.
‘You know what the bush is about?’ Leckie asked, opening up.
J didn’t know what he was getting at, but he was listening.
‘It’s about massive trees that’ve been standing there for thousands of years and bugs that’ll be dead before the minute’s out.’
Yeah, trees and bugs. Just the sort of shit that makes you want to stay away from the bush.
‘It’s big trees and pissy little bugs,’ Leckie continued, sounding sincere.
J had never even seen the bush. He’d seen pictures of it, knew about it, sort of, from Science, seen it on the TV when it caught fire. But he’d never actually been there. Why would you? There’s nothing there.
‘And everything knows its place in the scheme of things,’ Leckie continued, sounding like he was David Attenborough or some shit, giving a history of moths or some fucking thing. Elephant shit in the Serengeti. ‘Everything … everything sits in the order somewhere.’
J knew where he sat in the order of things. At the bottom. Somewhere under the toads and snakes. Between the cops and the crims.
‘Things survive because they’re strong and everything reaches an understanding.’
J didn’t know where this was going. Why Leckie was crapping on about trees and bugs. What was it with people? Why couldn’t they just say what they meant? J knew Leckie had him sussed, knew he had him by the balls. If he went home, Pope’d lay into him, and if he didn’t that would be even worse. He could just see them all sitting around the dining room table, wondering what he was telling Leckie now, Ezra trying to find out where he was.
‘But not everything survives because it’s strong,’ Leckie was saying. ‘Some creatures are weak.’
He was looking at J, of course, who else? But J knew that. He wasn’t strong. He’d wanted to be. Ever since he’d worked out how precarious it all was, this life, the life he’d had with his mother. Even if she hadn’t been a drug addict, they were still living on the edge, a single mum with a little kid; but the way she was, he’d had to pick her up lots of times, literally pick her up off the floor. He’d wanted to be strong, to be able to lift her and protect her from all the terrible things in the world she was running away from. Because that’s what she’d say sometimes. She was running away from her demons; J had never really understood what she’d meant, but he’d started to now. How this family got inside your head, so it didn’t matter what you did; you still felt afraid.
‘But they survive because they’ve been protected by the strong for one reason or another.’
But that was the world, wasn’t it? The weak and the strong, all of us hiding out, trying to stop ourselves from getting crushed, starting out strong and brave, but ending up the way he’d seen so many people, broken and defeated. The world was a war that no-one ever won, from what J had seen. Sometimes it might feel like you’re winning, but you’re not. Everyone is finally laid low.
‘You may think, because of the circles that you move in or whatever, that you’re one of the strong creatures. But you’re not,’ Leckie said, and J knew it was true. Listening to him, J had started to like him. He knew what he was trying to do: he was trying to get J onto his side, trying to get him to start telling him what really happened. And J was tempted, for sure. And not because he was frightened; he was angry, angry with his uncles for what they’d done and that they’d wound him into it. He was angry, for sure, but he wasn’t sure he was he angry enough to become a dog, a police informer. ‘You’re one of the weak ones,’ Leckie continued, ‘and that’s nothing against you. You’re just weak … you’re just weak because you’re young.’
J wondered. Was he weak because he was young? He’d seen plenty of weak bastards a lot older than him; it wasn’t just being young. And as he looked at Leckie, the thought dawned on him that it was not knowing who you were that made you weak. Leckie knew who he was; he was confident, assured, he was doing the right thing to his way of thinking. When Leckie walked into a room, he didn’t have to try to figure out how to act like an honest man, because he was an honest man. But J wasn’t. J was living a lie: that’s what he realised, and that’s where all this shit was coming from, all the fear and anxiety. What was that he’d read one time? A brave man dies once, a coward many times. He was a coward, that’s what he was.
‘But you’ve survived because you’ve been protected by the strong,’ Leckie said, drawing towards his conclusion. ‘But they’re not strong any more.’
No, no, they weren’t. Two of them were dead and the rest were on the run.
‘And they’re certainly not able to protect you.’
Leckie was right, and he was even more right than he realised.
‘Now, I know that they’re saying to you that talking to me is betraying the family,’ Leckie added, ‘but they’ve betrayed you. Don’t be confused about that. I think you know. And I think you know that I can help you. But I can’t keep offering. You’ve got to decide. You’ve got to work out where you fit.’
J had never known where he fitted, had never felt really wanted by anyone. J knew Leckie wanted him, or wanted to protect him, but he only wanted those things for the same reason people had wanted to protect him his entire life: because they wanted something out of him. Leckie didn’t really care about him; he was a policeman trying to crack a case—that was fair enough, and J might have even taken him up on it, but what was he actually offering? Was he saying he’d protect him from his family forever? How would he do that? Leckie was only one policeman who wanted to help him, but J knew not all of the cops felt the same way. Far from it, when a Cody was concerned. J was glad to be with him now, for sure, because that meant Norris wouldn’t shoot him. But Leckie wasn’t going to be with him for the rest of his life. J didn’t know what to think.
‘I don’t know why you’re telling me all this,’ he said at last.
‘Yes, you do,’ Leckie answered, confident he’d made a good case for why the police were J’s only hope.
But that wasn’t the way J saw it, not now, after he’d listened to Leckie and thought about it.
What J saw were police on the take, and police stealing drugs to deal with criminals. What J saw were police who could kill with impunity because they had uniforms on. J wasn’t sure where Leckie fitted in to all that, but he’d had a direct experience of his offsider, and he wasn’t buying it. He almost had, and a part of him wished he could. J felt that Leckie was a kind man, like Baz, someone you’d like to have as a friend if you could. But that wasn’t what he was offering. What he was offering was something he couldn’t deliver. At least, that’s the way J saw it.
And Leckie knew it, too. He could see it in J’s eyes. He could hear it in his voice. J had made his decision. It was the wrong decision, of that Leckie was sure, and J was bound to regret it.
But before he wiped him completely, Leckie was going to give him one last chan
ce. ‘We found your fingerprints on the car,’ he said.
J had been waiting for this. ‘You couldn’t have,’ he said, ‘because I didn’t have anything to do with it.’
Leckie was watching him, watching him closely. It had been his last card, bar one. It had been worth playing, but J had called him.
‘Okay, we’re going home,’ he said, standing. And the way he said it, and the little smile that flickered across his face as he said it, revealed the game.
It had been good cop, bad cop all along.
J had thought they might have found his fingerprints, even if Pope had burned the car, but he’d decided to tough it out, and it looked like his gamble had paid off. The only card Leckie had left to play was to send him back home.
Well, it might have been a game, but J had no choice but to play it, and the stakes were a lot higher for him than they were for Leckie. J wished it could have been different, but it was what it was.
He was on his own.
SIXTEEN
The cops made J get out of the car back on the highway. They weren’t going to take a piece of shit like him home.
J didn’t mind. It was better than having to explain what he was doing riding around in the back of a car with a couple of cops if anyone saw them. Hitching a ride to a railway station, J made his way home, finding Smurf and Pope in the kitchen, cheerlessly eating breakfast.
‘Hi, sweetie,’ Smurf said with a kind of forced brightness. ‘Where you been?’
‘Just at Nicky’s house,’ J answered.
‘Oh, yeah?’ Pope said, looking up from his toast. ‘How is she?’
‘Yeah, she’s okay,’ J said, passing on into his room.
Watching him go, a little part of Pope’s mind clicked over and he knew what he had to do.
J had a lot to think about, a lot to think through. If the cops were as useless as they seemed, the only other alternative was to take off.
He knew he could do it, but he knew it was going to be hard. Pope had friends everywhere. Not the sorts of friends you’d like to drop in unexpected, but what passed for friends in these circles, and they were people who could be very persistent. So it was going to be a big ask to stay out of sight.
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