An Isolated Incident

by Emily Maguire

  ‘But that’s what journalists do. It’s not nasty, it’s your job. Like I have to let the kids I’ve taught all year go when December comes around. Some of them have tough stuff going on and when they’re in my care I try to make a difference, but then the year ends and a new one starts and I get a new batch of kids to worry about. It’s the job.’

  ‘It’s different though.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ve only helped myself. Not her. Since she’s known me she’s only got sadder and crazier.’

  ‘May, listen to yourself. The woman’s sister was murdered. Recently. If she’s a wreck it’s only to be expected.’

  With Chris’s consent, May took on some of the TV and newspaper interviews in her place. She must’ve done all right, because offers to meet and ‘talk about future opportunities’ began to trickle into her inbox. Her former editor called and congratulated her on her ‘breakthrough’ and said he’d be happy to receive freelance contributions from her any time. She had her pick of publishers wanting the book about Bella. She chose the one which offered her enough money to live off for a year and a promise to publish at the end of that time even if the killer had not been found.

  The day after May had signed the contract, four weeks after the Women’s Weekly article was published, the police charged a thirty-two-year-old Strathdee housepainter with Bella’s rape and murder. They had found him after a tip-off, searched his home and found a piece of Bella’s clothing. DNA was conclusive.

  Chris had called May with the news and invited her over. Together they drank whisky and watched the 7 pm bulletin. When the footage of police leading the man, whose face was blurred, out of a nondescript red-brick house came up, Chris gasped and said, ‘Fuck.’

  ‘What? You recognise him?’

  ‘No,’ Chris said. ‘But . . . I mean, look at him. He’s so . . .’

  May looked. He was average height, slim, with short light brown hair. He wore jeans and a dark blue t-shirt. ‘Yeah,’ May said. ‘I know.’

  Seconds after the broadcast finished, May’s publisher texted her: We have an ending! Let’s talk tomorrow about a fast-tracked schedule. Seize the moment! May read it out loud to Chris, who smiled and said, ‘Congratulations. It’s a big day for you.’

  ‘Chris, you know I can’t write this book without you, right? I need you with me or it can’t work.’

  ‘I’m with you, I am. It’s just . . .’ She muted the TV, tucked her legs up on the lounge, closed her eyes. ‘Like your publisher said, you have your ending. But I don’t. She’s dead and that doesn’t end.’

  May could think of nothing to say to that, so she refilled their glasses instead.

  ‘I’ve watched enough Law and Order, read enough true crime. I know it’s how it has to go. Finish with a last memory of the pretty dead girl and the sound of the jail door slamming shut on the monster who killed her and everyone can feel like the world has been set to rights. The grief and fear can stop. I know it has to go that way, I do. But it’s bullshit.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s bullshit. Justice, punishment, an end to this man’s ability to do it to someone else, that’s real. That’s really happening.’

  ‘I’m not saying that isn’t true, I’m saying . . .’ Chris looked to the ceiling, took a large slug of whisky. ‘All that’s ended is one man’s freedom to hurt people. Bella’s death isn’t fixed and neither is the world that she died in. The idea that locking up one man could do that, could make everything okay . . . that’s bullshit.’

  ‘Okay,’ May said. ‘I think I get you, but . . . I can’t think about it right now. I need to get to work. I’m going to head down to the station and get my little mate Matt to fill me in on what he knows. Then I’ll –’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere, you drunk. You’ve had a quarter bottle of whisky.’

  May looked at the half-empty bottle. ‘Have I really? Shit.’

  ‘You better stay here.’ Chris took a deep breath. ‘This sofa’s pretty comfy.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’ll get you a blanket.’

  The next morning Matt told May that the man they arrested had only lived in Strathdee for a year. Detectives were looking into the possibility he was responsible for cases throughout the state going back a decade. May spent a few hours online familiarising herself with ten years’ worth of unsolved rapes and murders. She read about bodies burnt beyond recognition, decomposed, dismembered, shoved in suitcases, dumped in rivers, stashed in freezers, partially dissolved in chemical drums. She read about stab wounds, blunt-instrument trauma, strangulation, suffocation, shots through the heart, stomach, throat, head. She saved details of those that seemed closest to Bella’s murder. It was a long list. The list of those she disregarded was twenty times longer.

  There was nothing in this research especially new to her as a reporter, a news junkie, a viewer of crime dramas and serial-killer films. But when she tried to sleep that night her closed lids opened caverns of horror. Immense dark spaces in which time rolled back and the shattered, smashed, melted, desecrated bodies showed her their faces and limbs and beating hearts and screaming mouths.

  Against her will she remembered something from her first year of high school. A round-faced, quiet boy used to stare across the class at her. Her friend Bethany asked him if he had the hots for May and he admitted he did, but instead of asking her to go with him he began to leave drawings of her imagined naked body in poses undreamt of in her locker. In one, she hung upside down, her hair pooling on the ground, blood seeping from beneath whatever it was encircling her ankles, her arms wrapped lovingly around her waist. In another, she lay between two trees, a dog wearing a studded collar frothing at the slit between her wide-open legs; a disembodied hand in the process of releasing its hold on the dog’s chain.

  There were others but those two were the first and the only ones she remembered clearly. The boy was expelled after Bethany showed them to the school counsellor. May didn’t know what happened to him after that, but she remembered his cow eyes sizing her up in Year 7 maths every time she saw one of those dog collars.

  This had nothing to do with what happened to Bella and what happened to Bella had nothing to do with Tegan Miller and none of it had to do with the rich Sydney housewife left out to rot in the street which had nothing to do with the Nigerian girls stolen as sex slaves or the Indian woman eviscerated on a bus or the man grabbing women off the streets of Brunswick.

  None of it connected, she knew, and yet, and yet, it felt like it. It felt, to May, that there was a thread connecting it all, and if she could find it she could follow it back, see where it began. Rip it out and examine its source.

  It seemed to May that Max was right: Chris’s madness was only to be expected. An entirely rational response to what had been revealed to her about the world. What’s surprising, May thought, is that more of us don’t lose our minds, become lock-ins scared of shadows. It was why her own mind skittered away from her when she tried to connect the horrors.

  It was why she wished it was not the middle of the night so she could call Chas and have him come into this room and have every opportunity to hurt her and yet not, because that would be proof that the thing her mind skittered from wasn’t true, not entirely anyway.

  She almost did it. Instead she called Chris, who answered right away.

  ‘Tell me if I’m being too forward, but what do you reckon about me coming to stay with you for a while? Until I finish the book, I mean. I’d pay of course. Same as what I’m paying here at the hotel?’

  ‘No you won’t, because I’m not running a bloody hotel. You chip in for bills and groceries and that and don’t expect me to clean up after you or make the sofa up for you each night.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘Alright then. Hey, how’d you go with it all today? Researching that bloke and all. Find out much?’

  ‘Yeah, bu
t, listen, I’ll tell you about it later. I can’t think about it anymore tonight.’

  ‘I hear you.’

  ‘I know you do. Goodnight.’

  ‘Night, mate. See you tomorrow.’

  After

  People say I wouldn’t talk to the media because I’d signed some lucrative exclusive deal. Such a laugh I had at that. A houseguest who records everything you say and sits up till all hours tapping at her keyboard and never, ever leaves. Some lucrative deal.

  People assumed I didn’t sit in court and watch Bella’s killer tried and sentenced because hearing him describe what he’d done would have been too much for me. Well, I didn’t laugh at that one but I sneered, I snarled. There’s not a thing that man could say that would touch me. He did all the damage he was ever going to do when he ended Bella’s life. He’s harmless now. He’s nothing.

  People wonder why I left Strathdee. They guess I can’t stand to be near the place where Bella died, but that’s not it at all. Strathdee is the place she lived and every square inch of the ground is soaked with memories of her life. I could’ve happily stayed there until the end of my days if the ghouls and tourists hadn’t decided that the places she lived and worked should become permanent reminders of the worst and shortest day of her life. Forgive me, Strathdee. I don’t blame you and will always love you but I can’t live in my sister’s tomb.

  If you keep your word and tell this story as I told it to you, people will mock me for speaking of ghosts. In the same breath they’ll talk about monsters, of how my sister died because she had the misfortune of meeting one. As though that bunyip slithered from its underwater cave and hugged the life from her. As though the drowned child’s zombie hands grabbed her ankles and pulled her below. They talk as though little girls grow up being warned not to talk to goblins and women are cautioned to not get drunk around werewolves and battered wives got that way by marrying Freddy Krueger.

  People ask if what I’ve been through has made me afraid and of course it has. But not of monsters. Only of those who insist they exist.

  Acknowledgements

  An Isolated Incident was written over several years in all kinds of places. Special mention must go to the Keesing Studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, where this novel was finished during six transformative months. I am so grateful to Nancy Keesing and the Australia Council for the Arts for the incredible gift of this residency. Thank you, too, to Varuna – the Writers’ House and to the NSW Writers’ Centre for providing writing space closer to home.

  I am enormously thankful to Emma Rafferty, Ali Lavau and Libby Turner for their thoughtful editing, to my agent Charlie Viney for his continued support and guidance, and to Alex Craig and the entire team at Pan Macmillan for their enthusiasm and commitment. Thanks, too, to Pam Newton for reading, talking it all through and urging me on.

  Big love and gratitude to the incredible, never-flagging cheer-squad that is my family. I got so, so lucky with you lot. To my girl gang, thank you for walking the talk and giving me the strength and courage to go to the dark places. And always, always, thank you Jeff – you make everything brighter, better and more hopeful.

  About Emily Maguire

  Emily Maguire is the author of the novels Taming the Beast (2004), an international bestseller and finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Kathleen Mitchell Award, The Gospel According to Luke (2006), Smoke in the Room (2009) and Fishing for Tigers (2012). Her articles and essays on sex, culture and literature have been published widely, including in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and The Monthly. www.emilymaguire.com.au

  Also by Emily Maguire

  Taming the Beast

  The Gospel According to Luke

  Smoke in the Room

  Fishing for Tigers

  Non-fiction

  Princesses and Pornstars

  Your Skirt’s Too Short

  First published 2016 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000

  Copyright © Emily Maguire 2016

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available

  from the National Library of Australia

  http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  EPUB format: 9781743549568

  Typeset by Post Pre-press Group

  Cover image: BigStock

  Cover design: Design by Committee

  The characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously without any intent to describe actual conduct.

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