Animal Kingdom

by Stephen Sewell

  ‘When does it start?’ he had asked his wife one night as they sat over a bottle of wine.

  ‘What?’ she asked, coming out of her own reverie as the music and wine wove their magic.

  ‘The corruption,’ he had said. ‘When do we start becoming corrupt?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she answered, thinking they’d both had enough to drink.

  ‘Has it already started with him?’ he continued, looking at his sleeping son. ‘Has the sickness already started growing in him, the needs and weaknesses that will one day undo his life and sense of self-respect?’

  ‘Is that what’s happened to you?’ she asked. ‘How could you even think that?’ she’d said, shocked, and he didn’t know how.

  But he did think it, and it hurt him every time.

  And thinking about J now, he felt it all over again. His sense of dismay at his own weakness in the world. He hated it, and hated the thought that he’d let down someone who’d trusted him, especially when it was a young person like that, whose whole future depended on people in positions of authority like him. But maybe one day, when he was older, Josh would understand why these things happen, and how even people of good will can become mixed up in them. Leckie hoped so. And hoped one day they might be friends.

  But J didn’t care any more. He was on his own path, which no-one, maybe not even his mother, could have foreseen. I don’t want you to be like them, she’d said one time when he’d asked her why they didn’t see Gran any more. And you don’t have to be. None of us has to be what other people expect us to be. And you don’t have to, either.

  Leckie stuck by his word, and kept Roache and anyone else who might hurt J away from him. He was now being guarded by the heavily armed Special Ops people, Leckie’s SOGies, and, while J never felt completely at ease, he at least felt safer than he would have in Smurf ’s tender care.

  Standing in the swish city hotel room Leckie had organised for him on the night before his evidence at the trial, J looked out across the city. Such a prosperous city, alive with power and opportunity. Not for everyone, J knew, not for people like him. He’d never stand in a room like this again or eat from plates with cutlery like that again. He was here as a guest for only one reason: to send two men he now knew intimately to prison for as long as they could keep them there. And after that, he’d be sent back into the hole he’d been pulled out of and told to stay out of trouble.

  But he’d been born into trouble. They all had.

  ‘You ready?’ Leckie asked as he stepped into the room.

  J nodded sadly. He almost said sorry, but he stopped himself. He wasn’t sorry. He hadn’t made this world; if Leckie had made his compromise with it, maybe so had J. What he knew now was that no-one said what they meant or revealed what they knew. What he understood was that everyone was trying to cut their own little deal, just like Baz had, and Leckie, too, and maybe even Roache.

  But not Pope. Pope wasn’t looking for compromise; he was looking for war. Maybe that was just a sickness, though, something that could be cured with the right sort of medicine. Was that right? J wondered. No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t that we’re all so alive to what was going on that we need something to knock us out; it’s that we’re all so dead. Looking back, J could see he’d been as dead as his mother. And now he’d just started to wake up.

  J gave his evidence, and fucked it up the way they’d rehearsed it in the art gallery.

  It wasn’t a straightforward denial that might have left him open to perjury charges; Ezra and the spunky barrister had found a way of making him look like a liar, and he’d gone along with it.

  Well, he was a liar, wasn’t he? They all were.

  He could see the shock on Leckie’s face as his whole case fell apart, and the smug satisfaction on Smurf ’s. Ezra was harder to fathom. The thought had begun to dawn on the lawyer that knowing quite as much as he did about the intimate secrets of some of the most violent people he’d ever met in his life might not be such a good idea. But that was a burden he might just have to live with, unless he wanted to share it with the police, who were bound to lend a sympathetic ear after all his good work in the pursuit of honesty and fairness.

  Everyone—the media, community leaders, the public at large—met J’s evidence with either outrage or grim, knowing satisfaction, but so what? They weren’t fighting for their lives. J was. And he had been since the day he was born.

  ‘Have you worked out where you fit?’ Leckie said to him after the trial, when he’d gone back to the hotel room to collect his things. It was kind of sad and resigned, not angry. He’d closed the door into the room, like he wanted to say something private to J, but he didn’t say anything at all after that; he just looked at him, with those big, sad eyes of his. He was finished. Maybe not officially, but this was the end of the road as far as anything significant was concerned. They both knew that. The cop that let the Codys get away.

  J didn’t feel sorry for him; he’d made his own decisions and, as far as J was concerned, he was as rotten as the rest of them.

  Because Leckie didn’t understand. Justice isn’t something you believe in; it’s something you do. If Roache had plugged J, like he’d wanted to, Leckie might have gone to the funeral, but only to pick up another lead. Leckie and Norris were the same, and not that much different from Baz or Craig.

  Baz hadn’t crapped on about wanting to make the world a better place; he’d just known what it was and tried to get his cut. It had worked for him for a while, till it finally caught up with him and blew his head off. But, like the saying goes, some people are here for a good time, not a long time.

  What would Baz have made of this whole mess? Shit happens, probably. That was about as philosophical as people like Baz ever got.

  And what about Nicky? What would she have said?

  Every time J thought about Nicky, his world caved in again, opening into a subterranean grief that would never be filled as long as he lived. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to have ended. For her, for him, for anyone.

  The jury’s verdict caused a sensation. The cops had fucked up big-time, and the killers—because everyone was sure they were the killers—had walked free: Smurf, proud and defiant; Pope, angry and giving the cameramen shit; Darren, looking at the ground, round-shouldered and broken.

  Nobody could quite get it, but everybody grabbed at it as another example of God knows what—the incompetence of the police, the deviousness of defence lawyers, the bastardry of the world. Who really knew? The violence that was flooding through the world had risen one notch further; if people had known any more than that, they would have been more frightened than they were.

  But, if truth be known, most people weren’t frightened; they were indifferent. It was tabloid fare, that’s all: something to fuel the cynicism and to talk about at barbecues on warm Saturday afternoons, but not something that really affected them.

  The world of cops and crims seemed self-enclosed and distant to most people, occasionally leaking out into a suburban cafe or parking lot, but really just another game the bad boys played. Only instead of everyone getting up at the end, some people stayed dead.

  The dust settled, as dust does, and, after the blaring of the talkback radio shows died down into the normal buzz of suburban static, life returned to normal.

  Leckie was given some time off and spent it peacefully enough with his wife and kid. He did some gardening, considered his future. There were still plenty of things to do. Write a book. His interest in crime prevention remained. After the intensity of the last few months, he needed the break to reorientate.

  It was true, what his wife said. He’d allowed his personal feelings to get in the way of his professional conduct. The fact was, he’d liked J too much, when the truth was that J was, by his own admission, a criminal. A young criminal, maybe, but a criminal nevertheless, and you just can’t trust criminals. Simple. But somehow he’d allowed himself to be swayed, let J get the upper hand.

  Nor
ris hadn’t been fooled for a minute. He’d known J was lying from the very beginning; so, of course, had Leckie himself, but he’d wanted to believe the best. That was his downfall. He’d wanted to believe that J could be saved.

  But some people can’t be saved. And it’s not just their background or lack of opportunities or education; it’s their refusal to participate in society. J had been given plenty of chances to join in. Leckie had seen his file, seen the many interventions Human Resources had made—the foster care, the almost weekly visits by department officers to check up on him—but in the end J had chosen his family instead.

  And that was the point.

  He’d chosen.

  He’d chosen crime over normal life, and that was a fact that had to be recognised.

  What had happened wasn’t Leckie’s fault. If he had a fault, it was what his wife said: that he trusted too many people. But that was the way he was.

  ‘I just want you to know I don’t bear you any ill will, Mr Leckie,’ Smurf said when she bumped into him a few days later in the supermarket. Leckie looked up and saw her smiling at him as she continued, ‘I really don’t. You were just doing your job.’

  He felt like he’d been king hit from behind.

  ‘If you’re as smart as I think you are,’ he said, straightening, ‘you’ll know to walk right on by me like we’ve never seen each other before in our lives. And you’ll know to feel lucky.’

  She smiled at him, that bright innocuous smile of hers, glad to see how awful he looked.

  ‘You’ll come unstuck,’ Leckie continued. ‘I’ve got a feeling about it. I think you do, too.’

  Was he trying to threaten her? she wondered. Was he saying, Just remember what happened to Baz and Craig? No, he wasn’t, because he didn’t have the balls.

  ‘I reckon you probably carry that feeling around with you every second of the day,’ he finished.

  She knew what he was trying to do: he was trying to rattle her and make himself feel better. She wasn’t going to let him.

  ‘But I don’t, Nathan,’ she chirped, because she could see through him; she knew the sort of man he was and that the world belonged to her, not him.

  What happened next, of course, was great fun. The TV interviews at home, sitting on the sofa flanked by her sons and surrounded by flowers, the media attention, the public calls for a parliamentary enquiry.

  Returning to work, Leckie found himself shuffling paper in a desk job.

  Smurf then made it her personal mission to discredit him. It was people like him who gave policing a bad name. Pursuing as he was a personal vendetta against her family, and, all right, they weren’t angels, but they certainly weren’t the hardened criminals Leckie had made them out to be. No-one had ever actually apologised to them for all their trouble, but the pressure was definitely off. Smurf became a bit of a media favourite when it came to commenting on police corruption, and somebody even approached them about turning their story into a television show.

  NINETEEN

  ‘Hey, Grandma.’

  Smurf was startled to see J standing on the doorstep, as large as life. Quickly recovering her composure, she answered, ‘I was wondering when I’d be seeing you again. Been missing you. You okay?’

  J had learned how to lie, too. It had been a long journey, but it had brought him here.

  ‘Yeah. I’m okay,’ he said. ‘Um … is it okay if I move back in? I don’t really know where else to go.’

  ‘Course,’ she said, as if he didn’t even need to ask. ‘You want food? You look Biafran.’ He didn’t, but that was the sort of joke Smurf made when she was nervous.

  ‘No thanks,’ J said. ‘I think I want to go lie down for a bit.’

  ‘You don’t wanna eat?’ she tempted. ‘Pope’s cooking.’

  That was tempting.

  ‘OK, sweetie, your room’s still there. Say hello to the boys.’

  Well, that sorted that out. She was genuinely happy that he was back; it made it all nicer, somehow. Family meant a lot to Smurf—it always had.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ she finished, giving him a big wet one on the lips to make him feel right at home.

  Stepping onto the back patio, J startled the boys almost as much as he had Smurf.

  ‘Hey, mate,’ Pope said, looking up from the barbie and wondering what the hell he was doing there. ‘You hungry?’

  ‘No, I just came out to say hi,’ J said.

  Well how about that? Pope thought. The prodigal returns.

  ‘All right, mate,’ Pope said, winking at Darren.

  J lay on the bed and waited for Pope to come in. He knew he would. He knew there were things to say, so when Pope appeared he wasn’t in the least surprised.

  This was it: the end.

  J knew only one of them was going to leave the room.

  Sitting down on the bed, Pope chuckled, ‘Wow, what to say?’

  Pope felt that he had an obligation to explain it to J, so that he understood what had really gone on and that everything would be all right again between them. Understood his role in the amazing series of events they’d just been part of.

  But there was so much. How they had pulled the wool over the coppers’ eyes; how they’d avenged Baz’s death and let the fuzz know they couldn’t fuck with the hard boys. Pope wanted to tell him how he’d had the two coppers on their knees, pleading for their lives, pleading like the cry babies they were, and how sweet it had been to hear their last words. He wanted to explain to J how it was a war—and it was a war—but not just a war with the coppers: a war with the rich pricks running this world who thought people like them were scum, to let them know they weren’t going to take it any more and that they were on the move. We’re coming for you, he wanted to say. We’re coming for you, and we’re going to get you.

  But there was so much to say, and somehow it was too much, so all he did say was, ‘It’s a crazy fucking world.’

  But if he’d been watching, he would have seen J pull the gun out from under him and raise it to blow a hole through his brain.

  But he didn’t. He never saw it coming. He didn’t even hear the gun go off.

  Stepping out of the bedroom, J could see Smurf and Darren standing stunned, like they didn’t quite know what had happened.

  But they did.

  Pope was gone.

  Whatever he had meant to them, he was no more, and they would need to re-create whatever it was he had created for them. The fear, the power, the sense of their own specialness. Because for just this moment, it was gone, and they stood like ghosts in front of J.

  Stepping up to his grandmother, J took her into his arms. Not because he trusted her, but because she was his grandmother and for just one moment he wanted her to know what it feels like to have someone who really loves you touch you. Before she fell back into the darkness that was her real home.

  J didn’t know what would happen now, but no-one ever does. That’s what it’s like down here.

  No-one’s there to protect you—not the police and not your family—it’s just you, and them, and the world doesn’t care who survives. That’s the way it was, and that’s the way it had been for as long as he could remember.

  But J was strong now, and ready for it. And he could feel it moving towards him fast.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My first acknowledgment has to be to David Michôd, whose wonderful film and beautiful script formed the basis of this novel, but after him there are the many people of Melbourne University Publishing, notably my editor, Elisa Berg, whose detailed, critical work and constant encouragement carried me through what would otherwise have been an extremely difficult process. I would lastly like to thank Louise Adler and her wonderful team for the dedication they all brought to this stupendous project, and to Louise especially for the trust she showed in allowing me to novelise this wonderful story.

 

 

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