When We Have Wings

by Claire Corbett

  Peri sidled towards the water’s edge. She just wanted whatever it was to resolve itself into something obvious. Discarded clothing. A bright green shirt. A red plastic bag.

  It didn’t.

  Peri must have screamed but all she remembered was a long tunnel running in front of her and behind her so that she was far from everything and small, surrounded by blackness except for a round of light ahead, a long way away, a circle of white the colour of fear showing her what she could not bear to see.

  A little girl in a green top and red dress floating too far out, too deep in the filthy water. Peri could see a rag doll still clutched in her hand. It was one of the Water Rats, a small, silent girl named Carmel who always had a patchwork of bruises on her face and arms, fresh dark bruises overlapping with older yellowing bruises and sometimes scratches and cuts.

  Carmel’s stepdad had died not long after that day. An accident. He’d shrieked and hammered to get out as his shack burned to the ground.

  How did she know this? She hadn’t seen the flames or heard the man’s screams. But Mama’lena had. She’d described it quietly, shaking her head sadly over how a sinner would burn, whether in this world or the next. It was only much later that Peri realised Carmel’s stepdad’s death had been Ryan’s initiation into manhood, requested by Mama’lena, approved by Ryan’s uncle, maybe even ordered by Moneybags himself, as a favour to Mama’lena. How did she know? Mama’lena’s expression, a different swagger to Ryan after the fire.

  Don’t wait. Go. After she’d found Carmel, Peri wanted to leave Pandanus right away and forever. ‘Wait. You’re still too young. No work for you in the City yet,’ said Mama’lena. She found Peri a job after school at Cody’s SeaChange Nursery. She said, We have a plan for getting to the City. Not just anyone can go. You need money. They won’t let you in ’less you got some. And you need a permit. Can’t get past City limits without that. I’ll get a temporary permit for you but it’ll be up to you to get permanent residency. If you can.

  At last, after working for Cody for two years, she’d finally got Mama’lena’s permission and, more importantly, her help, to take the bus to the City. With mounting excitement she’d sat on the bus for hour after slow hour, lurching towards the City. The City that could appear, glittering, around any bend. Long before she could see anything but the endless litter of Edge City, its pirate subdivisions scratched into raw earth, the bus stopped. They waited half an hour. Forty-five minutes. Finally a City official boarded and started moving slowly down the aisle, checking permits. Mouth dry, palms wet, she waited. Would Mama’lena’s temporary work permit be good enough? Was it even genuine? At least half the passengers were being forced off the bus by burly guards following the City official. Dejected, they trudged away into Edge City. The official stood over her, held out her hand. Peri hesitated, handed over her permit. The official studied it for a long time. She looked down at Peri, smiled, handed back the permit. Welcome to the City.

  As the bus rumbled over the last bridge before the City proper, Peri turned her head to the left, searching for the church. Mama’lena told her she’d see the blue star shining in the direction of the sea. Finally she’d glimpsed it, blue gleaming intermittently through narrow gaps in the dark screen of other buildings. She cricked her neck trying to keep the church in view. When the bus reached its depot in the centre of the City, Peri still had a good idea of the direction of the church. Picking up her bag, she set off through the streets, looking about her in wonder. Those big black shapes in the sky above her, going about their business, those were fliers.

  Finally, finally, after years of being stuck—don’t move, you’ll fall—things moved so fast it was breathtaking. She’d followed Mama’lena’s directions exactly. At the church she was taken in, doors magically opened, she was given work, even gifts. She was special. It was a dream. It was fate. It was her destiny, the path leading to wings. And the wings would carry her to freedom.

  Tomorrow I take Hugo and I take everything I know, the maps in my head, and I fly out of all knowledge. I’ll fly over the desert and no-one on this side will ever see me again.

  As I walked to Child and Family Services, Henryk’s parting words rang in my ears. You need a hawk to catch a pigeon. The Raptor program—bloody hell! Case was tricky enough without having to watch my back, worrying I was being shadowed by the Raptor Taj had encountered. I had to admit, it made sense: hire an investigator to discreetly track Peri, then send in a Raptor for the final snatch and grab. Against a Raptor like Mick, she’d have no chance. A Raptor would attract a lot of attention though, especially in this part of town. I doubted that I was being followed here.

  This journey out to Child and Family Services, always known as CaFS, was one I’d made too many times. As a junior officer I’d been assigned to a joint response team, or JRT, tasked with working with CaFS and with Health Services on cases of family violence and child abuse. I’d been so young, only twenty-three, when I was first assigned to the JRT, and even though Cam was only a year or two older than me, she’d seen, to my chagrin, how lost and scared I was. She’d shown me the ropes, explained how the underside of the City really worked, in the hope that the quicker I grew up, the more use I’d be to the team.

  Now here I was again. I felt the familiar churning in my gut when I saw the white medium-rise building, its blank-faced floors reminding me of a giant filing cabinet. That’s what this place was: in every room, on every desk, were deposited layers of stories, thousands and thousands of them, stories that ended badly, on the whole. I’d had far too much to do with this department in my previous life as a cop. Another reason I’d left. But I could never really get away from it.

  I picked up my security pass and took the lift, grateful to get out of the heat. Cam was waiting for me as the lift doors opened and stood on tiptoe to kiss my cheek. A police bulletin would have stated that she was of Eurasian appearance. That description would have been misleading, though, as her parents had chosen to give her thick blonde hair that contrasted startlingly with her long black eyes, her brown skin and wide pink mouth. Descriptions based on outdated conceptions of race were not useful now parents could meddle in their children’s appearance but the police always were behind the times on this kind of thing. Cam wore a frangipani-print shirt over black trousers, sending the same mixed message as always—colourful on top, with a sober, reassuringly conformist foundation.

  I’d never understood how Cam did it. She had a family of her own: a daughter, Dara, and a wife, Marianne. Yet year in, year out, she stuck with this place, working herself into the ground. Being a CaFS case worker was so much worse than being a cop and after twenty years I’d had a gutful of that.

  I followed Cam down the hall and through another security door. ‘Good to see your usual filing system still working for you,’ I said as we entered an office and she shut the door. Her desk overflowed with files and papers, the floor was covered in stacks of files over a metre high, files were piled on the bookshelves and on the little meeting table. I added the stack of files on the visitor’s chair to a pile on the floor and sat down.

  Cam shook her head. ‘If you only knew the dread those files inspire in me,’ she said. ‘Landmines, every last one of them. There’s a dead child in there, or several—oh, they haven’t died yet but they will and so I don’t dare put their files away. Any one of those files could blow up in my face. Every day I look at them and think, well, which one is it? Is it the kid who’s been reported by the local doctor six times for being underweight, bruised and covered in scabies? The drug-affected newborn who can’t stop crying? Or the healthy child whose mother is psychotic and might smother her like she did the previous two—but wasn’t convicted—because she can’t stand the kid following her around all the time? No way of telling. It’s a lottery—no, it’s fucking Russian roulette. Except I’m not the one who dies. And every time I want to leave at five instead of six, or at six instead of seven, I
think, what if that report I didn’t follow up is the one?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So,’ Cam sighed, ‘what’s your interest in this Almond girl? I looked up her file but there hasn’t been much activity on it for some time. There were communications from her foster mother but those stopped about two years ago.’

  ‘That’d be about the time Peri came to the City,’ I said. ‘The foster mother didn’t inform the department?’

  ‘No,’ said Cam. She gave a wry smile. ‘You know why. She’d be in no hurry to have her carer payments cut off.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, anyway, after getting herself into the City—who knows how—Peri finds her way to a nanny agency, an exclusive one specialising in flier families, and lands one of the best families on the books. Why? Apparently because she was willing to wet-nurse their baby.’

  Cam shook her head.

  ‘It gets better,’ I said. ‘At some point while working for this family, she gets the treatments. She gets wings!’

  ‘Expensive milk,’ Cam said.

  ‘Isn’t it? Anyway, the real story is that Peri has disappeared.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She’s disappeared with the family’s baby and I have to find her, Cam. I need to know what’s in those files, where she might go, who she might turn to.’

  ‘Disappeared,’ said Cam flatly. ‘With their baby.’ She put her head in her hands for a moment, which was as dramatic a gesture as I’d ever seen her make. ‘Shit,’ she said, raising her head. ‘If you knew her story. That poor girl. This is terrible.’

  If I knew her story. Well, I’d sure like to but there was no point asking Cam to tell me outright. ‘One good thing,’ I continued, ‘is that the family came to me. Not the police. That’s why you have to help me, Cam. If they don’t prosecute, if they just get their baby back, that’s obviously better for everyone. Including the department.’

  ‘There is so much headline potential here,’ said Cam. She leaned forward, her arms crossed over her belly, as if she were getting stomach pains just thinking about it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It would be a big story and rightly so. Hell, I’d read about it. It’s got every modern anxiety: wings, no wings, money, no money, the underclass, babies, you can’t get good help these days, exploitative rich bastards, everything.’

  Cam sighed. ‘It’ll be the department’s fault, no matter what. But her files are confidential, of course.’ She waved at a stack to the right of her desk. ‘I can’t tell you what’s in them. And you know we cannot have had this conversation. I’ll make discreet inquiries with the foster mother myself as if it’s just part of a routine review.’

  ‘Must you?’ I said. ‘Couldn’t you leave it a day? I’d rather she didn’t have a heads-up before I get to her.’

  ‘I’m pretty busy, Zeke. It may well take me a day or two to get around to this review. A review that’s clearly a bit overdue.’ As if changing the subject, Cam said brightly, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Thought you’d never ask.’

  Cam got up and left the office, pulling the door closed behind her.

  I moved over to the files that Cam had so helpfully pointed out. I had to gauge this part of our little dance carefully; I’d have a few minutes but that was all. The uppermost documents, the most recent ones, would probably be the most useful and I started scanning them into my slick. No time to pick and choose; I just had to get as many as I could.

  A moment later Cam was at the door with a tray of tea things in her hands. I moved a stack of files and Cam set the tray down. As she stirred milk into the tea, she said, ‘How’s little Tom?’

  ‘Less little. He’s good.’

  ‘How often do you see him?’

  ‘Well, Lily’s just renegotiated that. Now it’s every second weekend. A few weeks here and there during preschool breaks and the occasional weeknight when Lily wants a night off. Tomorrow night, in fact.’

  Cam nodded. ‘Must be hard.’

  ‘Yeah. It is, actually. My advice to you,’ I said, trying to take a light tone and failing, ‘is don’t get divorced. It’s not worth it. There are good reasons but there are so many bad ones. Being bored and unhappy isn’t good enough if you have a child.’

  Cam laughed. ‘Ah yes, the great adult lie, that kids want their parents to be happy. Jeez, wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a parent justify their own selfishness that way. Kids aren’t concerned with your happiness. That’s your responsibility, not theirs.’

  ‘No doubt about it,’ I said, calculating how soon I could leave without appearing rude. I couldn’t rush this part of my investigation, though, as Cam was likely to supply the only useful leads on Peri.

  ‘So, what’s the new man like?’

  ‘If you like a man who’s arrogant, condescending, supercilious and patronising—and let’s face it, many women do—then he’s just fantastic. Thomas dislikes Richard, at least when I’m around. So Richard buys him things and Tom’s being spoiled.’

  ‘But other than that he’s good.’ Cam smiled. How much she wanted to hear about children who were happy, children who were loved.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, mostly. But us splitting up is bad in so many different ways for Tom. He has night terrors, wakes up screaming, Daddy! Daddy! And most of the time I’m not there. I used to comfort him. We had a ritual because his terror was always the same: he’d been abandoned in a dark forest. He’d wake up crying and I’d tell him about the path of white stones leading home and I’d talk him down it, describing the trees and the moonlight on the stones. And he’d always say, “You’re never scared, Daddy.” And I’d say, “Brave Thomas. We’re not scared.” ’ I sighed, looked at my watch.

  ‘Brave Thomas,’ said Cam. She glanced at the files behind me and I was horrified to see tears glittering in her eyes. ‘He’ll need to be brave. I don’t know about you, Zeke, but I’m scared.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. I’d almost said Me too. But I didn’t. ‘Look, Cam, I’m sorry to rush you but I wanted to ask you one last thing: Lily’s latest mandate is that Thomas must be a flier. She’s demanding I consent to the treatments, even threatening legal action, saying if I deny him the opportunity of Flight then it’s a kind of abuse. I assume you’ll tell me that’s as ridiculous as it sounds.’

  Cam shrugged. ‘Yes, it is ridiculous, but this is Lily. You can’t presume it’s an idle threat. She knows how to shop around, find the right judge. The real question is, what do you think is best?’

  ‘Don’t know yet. I’ll probably never fucking know. If I ever do know, it will by definition be too late.’

  Cam was silent as she took me down to the empty lobby. I flicked my security pass onto the reception desk and turned to face her. ‘There’s something you want to tell me,’ I said. ‘There’s no-one here. Spit it out.’

  ‘There is something a bit weird,’ Cam said. ‘I said there hadn’t been much activity on Almond’s file for some time and that’s true.’

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘Well, we track the movements of all our files, like the police do. Now, someone got that file out two years ago but the records don’t say who looked at it.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Cam lowered her voice. ‘What it means is that the officer who passed the file on recorded that it left her desk but the next person who looked at it didn’t enter that they had it before it went back to records management. Like all our records, Almond’s file is confidential so it’s just as well I’m following up with her foster mother; it’ll give me a reason for looking at the file, when I’m questioned about it. The ordure is definitely going to hit the solar-powered fan sometime soon on this case. Extreme discretion from now on, Zeke. No more visits, no more calls to my work.’

  ‘If you people are anything like the police you fail to follow protocol all the time: people
pull things out, look at them, put them back, can’t be bothered to code them into the system, haven’t got time, forget or whatever.’

  ‘Of course. I just wonder why someone suddenly thought to look at it after all that time, that’s all.’ She patted my arm and retreated to the lift.

  It was dark when my train pulled into the 80 Metre Road Station, around on the other side of the City from CaFS, and nearer to the CBD. A brief, violent storm hit while I was on the train, the dark blue twilight skies spilling monsoonal rain so heavy that people on the street looked as if they’d been standing under a waterfall and the gutters turned into foaming dirty rivers.

  By the time I got off the train the downpour had stopped and the streets were steaming, full of commuters flooding home, all of them as sweaty and hot as I was and most of them wet into the bargain, dripping hair plastered to skulls, soaking clothes stuck to skin.

  My favourite Jembe band, with their famous soloist Papa Amadou Mackenzie-Sene, known as PapaZie, resplendent in his traditional blue-and-red-striped smock, was playing on Ventura’s low brick boundary wall under a string of pink lanterns threaded through the block’s stand of mango trees. PapaZie’s little daughter, Kossiwa, was dancing to the music, wearing her brightest pink and gold skirt.

  I queued at Murni’s warung and bought myself satay sticks as an excuse to stand and listen while I ate. I rarely ate dinner at home anymore. PapaZie gave me a dignified nod as I passed the band, palming a credit slick into Kossiwa’s hand. Usually on an evening like this I would’ve stayed and listened to the band but Frisk would be waiting for me and I needed to get to work on the documents I’d ‘borrowed’ from CaFS.

  When I opened the door I listened for Frisk but heard nothing. I went to the kitchen and opened the fridge to fetch meat for the lion, grabbing myself a beer in passing. ‘Frisk!’ I called. ‘Friiiisk. Come here, Frisk.’

  Frisk skidded on the floorboards in his haste to reach the kitchen.