'Dead soldier,' she said, standing up with the bottle. Jill remembered that Cassie always referred to empty bottles that way. 'Same again?'
'I'm right, thanks, Cass,' said Jill, tearing off a chunk of bread. She needed something starchy to soak up what she'd already had.
Cassie returned to the table and cracked open another bottle of wine; poured some for each of them. 'So,' she said, leaning back in the chair with her glass, 'who were you pretending to be anyway?'
'I can't go into it any more than I have, Cass, sorry. But I probably should ask how you ended up in that house.'
'What? I'm supposed to tell you all about what I get up to, but it doesn't go both ways?'
'It's a different thing –'
'I'm just shitting you, Jill. It's no biggie. Adele's kind of got a thing for one of those guys. She met him at a club.'
'Which guy?'
'I don't know. Why? Has one of them taken your fancy? I did notice the big boy seemed pretty interested in you, tracksuit and all . . . What was his name? Casper or something?'
'Kasem.'
'That's the one. Yeah, I can see that he might be worth the hike out to the sticks. Bit of rough trade.'
'Cassie, please . . .'
'I might have made a move if he hadn't been so interested in you.'
'Cassie. Would you just stop for a minute!' Jill put her glass down hard and wine sloshed onto the table. 'Sorry,' she said, reaching for a napkin.
Cassie leaned back in her chair, a resigned, sullen look upon her face, waiting for the lecture.
'Look,' said Jill, 'I can't tell you what to do, Cassie, but these are not people you should be fucking around with.'
'I know what I'm doing, Jill.'
'Oh, of course you do, Cassie. That's why we got called to St Vincent's in the middle of the night.' Jill could feel her temper rising, wanted to reign it in, but the words spewed forth of their own accord. 'That's why you had a psychotic breakdown, for fucksakes. That's why you nearly died, overdosing on God knows what. What, so you smoke ice now? Coke doesn't touch the sides anymore?'
Cassie sat quietly, raised her glass to her eye and peered through the pale lemon-lime coloured liquid, as though studying it for judgement in a wine competition.
'You know,' she said finally, 'you're not Ms Perfect yourself.'
'Look, I'm sorry, Cassie. It's the wine. I'm not used to it, I shouldn't have said that.'
'Oh, you wanted to say it. For once in your life you might as well say what you want to say.'
'What's that supposed to mean?' Actually, I don't want to know, thought Jill, but it was too late.
'It means that you never say what you really think. That you avoid any kind of adult conversation, as though you're still some fucking thirteen-year-old. That you sit in judgement about others, but you live like you have OCD, or you're a fucking nun.'
Jill stood to leave. Had she scripted in advance the worst possible outcome for this lunch date, she could not have done a better job than what was going on now.
'That's right, run away again,' Cassie went on. 'Just like you've done ever since you got kidnapped.'
Jill whipped her head around and stared at her sister, stunned.
'That's right, Jill. You were kidnapped. We can say it out loud. Not that anyone talked about it ever again when you got home.'
I can't do this, Jill thought, searching for her bag.
'It wasn't just you who had a hard time after that, Jill.' Cassie stood too now, her face wet, flushed. 'Nothing was ever the same again. We all disappeared. You went up your own arse somewhere, and I became invisible too. Nobody spoke about anything real anymore. Can't upset Jill.'
Jill found her bag. She felt a muffled nothingness, as though she was watching this tableau from inside a glass bubble; the edges of the world were distorted with the sphere that surrounded her. She wasn't certain that, if she tried to speak, any words would actually make it out of the bubble, but somewhere, faintly, a pressure urged her to try; to give Cassie the message she'd come here to relay.
'Cassie,' she began, quietly.
Cassie leaned forward, her hands on the table, as though to brace herself for what her sister was about to say.
'If you listen to one thing I ever say in my whole life,' Jill continued, in an amiable tone, 'let it be this. If you say anything to any of your drug-fucked friends about what you saw the other night, you will get me killed.' Jill met her sister's eyes. 'Fucking dead. It will be on your head.' She walked to the door. 'Thanks for lunch.'
23
Sunday 7 April, 4 pm
On the bus travelling home from her shopping trip, Seren considered the implications of not having obtained the laptop.
Every day for the past three hundred days, she had imagined this precise moment, this step in the plan, but in her imagination, she had been carrying four items: the camera, the shirt, the bra, the laptop.
She considered whether she could do without a computer. That would require capturing evidence of such irrefutable power that it would achieve her goal with just thirty minutes of data recorded – she hadn't been able to afford a device with more storage capacity.
She'd been through the plan hundreds of times: she knew that she was most likely to capture numerous small indiscretions that she could use, cumulatively, to prosecute her case to Christian, to prove to him that he could not win this time, that he had to do as she asked. The likelihood that she'd be in the right place at the right time to get the one perfect scene was minuscule.
She'd have to try to take the shirt back.
Or, what if . . . Seren wondered whether she might be able to secure credit and pay a laptop off. It seemed every bloody schoolkid could get a computer. Loads of shops offered interest-free options. She suddenly kicked out at the seat in front of her. It wouldn't work. Obtaining finance required an employment history of a longer duration than three days. Should that not be available, some kind of guarantor was required. Seren could not see a way that she could get a loan.
Abruptly, the realisation that such a small misstep so early in the piece could derail the whole scheme shook her resolve.
If she could make such a stupid, ditzy move on the first day of the plan, how the hell was she going to follow this thing through to the end? The improbability of pulling it off weighed down on her and she leaned her head forward, resting her forehead on the back of the seat, staring down into her shopping bags.
Maybe it's time you just bloody grow up, Seren, she said to herself. You are out of gaol. You have your son, somewhere to live, and a job. She peeked at the handful of people on the bus around her. All of them appeared to be travelling home from some kind of work. On a Sunday.
See, you don't even have to work weekends and you're bitching, she berated herself. Life is not about restaurants, and units with harbour views, and thousand-dollar shoes. The handful of happy people who have those lives have been blessed by destiny; they as good as don't even occupy the same world you do. You think you're so special, Seren? You think you're better than all the people living in these houses by the bus route? Get a grip. You were a single mother at fifteen. You're an orphan, a parolee. You live in a shithole and you work in a slaughterhouse.
You are Seren Templeton. You are responsible for another person. A child. Your child, Marco.
Seren let the tears drop down into the grime on the floor of the bus.
It's his turn now, she told herself. You had your chance. Maybe if you don't fuck up his life, he can have a better shot at this crap.
A couple of stops passed before she lifted her face from the back of the bus seat in front of her.
Her shopping bags now just a burden rather than a magician's kit to get her out of this life, Seren leaned against the wall and stabbed repeatedly at the up button for the lift in her unit block.
Frigging thing took forever to get down to the ground, and once you were in there it was worse. She could have jogged the stairs faster – she had done it before – but she didn't
have the heart today. She craned her neck up through the open lightwell to stare at her floor, six levels above.
Finally, she heard the pulleys of the lift complaining, straining to reach the ground. She stood back from the doors.
Along with the regular piss stench, beer fumes buffeted outward when the doors opened. Tready.
Not. Today.
'I saw you from up our floor,' he said. 'Where you been all day? It's a Sunday.'
Seren considered waiting down here, but she knew that this idiot would follow her regardless. She got into the lift. Tready stumbled a little and shoulder-charged the wall, trying to keep himself from falling. His piggy eyes squinted in concentration as he tried to remain upright.
'Whoa.' He steadied himself, and then with carrot-coloured fingertips put his cigarette back between his lips. The lift hadn't even moved yet. 'What'cha got there? Been shopping?' he said. As soon as the doors closed, he reached out and grabbed for her bags.
'Hey!' Seren held on.
Tready ripped the glossy cardboard of the bag from the boutique. The bag holding her white shirt. Before she could pull it away from him, he turned his back to her and snatched at the shirt. She heard him shredding the tissue that had wrapped it so carefully.
Seren saw the collar of her new white shirt in Tready's meaty hands and the world became silent. She stared into his sweating face as his mouth opened and closed, apparently saying something, then baring his teeth as he laughed. She watched him reach into one of the other bags – now slack in her hands – and draw out its contents. Her heart-attack bra.
Still no sound.
Tready's little eyes lit up, his mouth open in a big round O, teeth missing, yellow or blackened. With one hand, Tready unbuttoned. He lowered the zip of his fly. He pushed the bra down into his crotch and rubbed it all around, using it to polish his prick.
Seren finally heard something. A high-pitched whine in her head, which sounded a little like the conveyor belt that took the bodies of the chickens away after she had killed them. Except it sounded overloaded, like it was going to break.
Seren dropped her last shopping bag. She reached a hand forward and gripped a handful of the greasy red hair on the top of Tready's head, which was angled downwards as he pulled himself with her underwear. She swung her knee back as far as it would go within the confines of the elevator. Simultaneously, she yanked the hand holding his hair down as though ripping curtains from a window, and smacked her knee up to meet it. She visualised her knee smashing into her hand, as though nothing lay between them.
Her hearing working perfectly now, Seren heard the most pleasant wet crunch as Tready's nose was mashed back into his skull. And then the scream.
When he dropped, howling incoherently, she picked her shirt up from the floor. She retrieved her bra, leaving Tready's phallus flaccid against his leg. She stared for a beat at his groin, then lifted her sneaker and stomped.
When the door opened, Seren ensured that she had all of her purchases on her. She was going to need them. She stepped over Tready and left the lift.
24
Monday 8 April, 1 pm
Damien Rose shouted lunch. He sat with his three new friends in the Manning House eatery of the University of Sydney, and watched them devour hamburgers, hot chips and beer. Damien enjoyed his apple juice and a vegan falafel burger. They made them great in here.
There was a time when Damien would pass through here quickly, starving, while his classmates purchased lunch in this dining hall. For a student centre, the place was bloody expensive. He'd been surprised when he'd had to dip back into his wallet for another note, when the fifty wasn't enough for today's lunch.
Not that that mattered anymore. Damien sometimes couldn't fit his wallet into the pocket of his jeans. Shit, it was only this year that he'd even owned a wallet – well, not counting the Velcro surfie wallet he'd been given by a teacher as his only Christmas present one year.
Damien's family didn't do Christmas, or birthdays. That, and the Witnessing he'd had to do every Sunday until he'd turned fourteen and flat-out refused, had made him the local reject. Muslims, Catholics, Presbyterians, damn, even Buddhists, were all normal in Merrylands when he grew up. But Jehovah's Witness? That shit was just strange, man. At least that's what everyone thought.
And the suit. That was the worst of all. As far as he could tell, not one kid in their entire suburb, and probably the next five surrounding them, even owned a suit, let alone wore it to go knock on their neighbours' doors each week. How his mother could not figure out that this behaviour would cop him at least a weekly bashing, he would never understand.
Damien smiled and chewed, brushed his blonde fringe back from his eyes. Erin laughed at something Jacob was saying. Erin is so hot, he thought. Whitey had told him that he should have asked her out ages ago, but he'd never asked a girl out. Sure, there was Helen Chin from physics class at the Year 12 formal, but she'd asked him, so that didn't really count.
Whitey told him that by third year of uni, especially this year, he should have been getting laid at least every weekend. Whitey told him that he got pussy pretty much every day, and Damien now had no excuse.
'Ask her out tomorrow, man,' Whitey had said to him last night, 'or I'm gonna come out there on Tuesday and ask her myself. And I'll spoil her for life, man. She's not going to be able to come back to you after she's had Whitey.'
Whitey didn't hang around here much. He hadn't re-enrolled this semester. Damien had been scandalised.
'What are you doing, Whitey? Think of your future! Are you crazy?'
'Who needs that shit, Damien? We don't anymore. Anyway, no one's stopping you. You go and be a good boy and finish your degree. Shit, get your Masters if you want. You've got our perfect customer channel, and you might just learn some new tricks to really give our shit the edge.'
Erin and the others were getting close to finishing their food and he hadn't said anything yet.
'Where would I take her?' he'd asked Whitey. 'She's into clubbing and you know I can't dance.'
'Ask her round to our place.'
Five years ago, when Damien's mother had moved overseas to live in a Jehovah's Witness commune, Damien had taken over the rent of their three-bedroom fibro home. His night job at the servo hadn't been enough to make the repayments, so he'd asked Whitey to move in. He was the perfect roomie, really – Whitey never tidied his own room, but he'd help out with other stuff when asked. And he ate nothing – prick was thin enough to slip through fence palings.
'Oh, yeah, sure, Whitey,' Damien had scoffed. 'Like she'd want to come out to Merrylands from Newtown. Anyway, that would have been okay when we were just making the E, but now you've started cooking ice, the place smells like shit. That would be a great first date. Hell, I don't even want to be there.'
'There you go, then,' Whitey had said. 'Where do we go when we want to sleep somewhere that smells nice?'
'A hotel.'
'Exactly.'
'Exactly what? Seriously, Whitey. You've got to stop testing the product! I'm gonna ask Erin on a date to a hotel room? You've lost it, bro.'
'Listen, dickhead,' Whitey had said. 'We'll get a suite. On the harbour. Have a little private party. I'll take care of the music and the visuals. You won't have to dance. Your little Erin will be all over you.'
'What about you, Damien?' Jacob asked. Damien's attention snapped back to the university café.
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