by Debra Oswald
The guy eventually scrawled what was needed on a script pad and then the practice nurse – very pleased with herself in her white zip-up uniform – took Zoe into a side cubicle to do the dressings on her hand. Just as well. Sheena had bandaged plenty of cuts and burns and injuries over the years, but better if the job was done by a qualified person who knew what they were doing.
Zoe was strapped down, tied to the bed. But twisting sideways, she realised there weren’t any ties – it was just the sheets tucked neatly around her. Crisp, white, citrus-scented sheets on a huge bed. She lifted her head enough to see she was in a posh hotel room, with wood panelling, caramel fabric on the armchair and curtains, glossy brown ceramic table lamps, framed botanical prints.
She had no idea how long she’d been sleeping, but she felt stronger for it. She was bundled up in a soft towelling bathrobe and her hand was bandaged, still aching but not burning up like before. It was a relief to be somewhere quiet and clean. It was a relief not to have to answer any questions or make any decisions.
When they first came to Sydney, Kieran had tried to make it good for her, as if he was the one who had persuaded her to dive into the city. In fact, it had been Zoe’s idea. Kieran had wanted to stay away from his old mates, keep travelling, doing the picking work.
They started out couch-surfing at houses where his friends lived – a couple of crumbly old terraces close to the city, but mostly places in the suburbs out west. Their car – well, Sheena’s car, really – felt more like their home, their own little piece of the world, than any house they stayed in. The bomby car had been handling all those road miles fairly well, especially once Kieran found a guy to replace the barrel on the ignition so they didn’t need to wire-start it every time.
As Kieran drove them from one house to another, Zoe gave up trying to keep the map of those endlessly spreading distant suburbs clear in her head.
The place they finally ended up was a shabby fibro house in Toongabbie, with half a dozen cars parked across the front lawn and the back yard choked with waist-high summer weeds that died off in the winter and flattened into a dry, grey carpet around the Hills hoist. At some point in the past, many of the paintable surfaces had been slathered with thick coats of matte black paint – kitchen cupboards, bathroom tiles, bedroom wallpaper, doors and window frames. The black was now scratched and in some places scraped off, revealing the pastel kitchen cupboards, swirly laminex benchtop and mint-green tiling underneath.
Zoe never understood who owned the house or which people officially lived in it. But there was always at least one person sprawled on the nubbly beige nylon sofa, watching the TV set resting on a milk crate. Anytime day or night, an occupant of the house would squawk at whoever was playing music too loud on the cassette player in the kitchen.
From the start, she was curious about Kieran’s mates as well as the small number of girlfriends who drifted in and out of that house. She wanted to know their stories, to inhale every detail of their experiences, to discover how it would feel on her skin to enter their magnetic field. Trouble was, she didn’t dare ask questions of anyone in case she revealed herself as naive and stupid. But if she kept quiet, no one noticed she was younger, a soft creature with no streetwise gristle to her; or if they noticed, they didn’t care.
She had to acknowledge that she had been harbouring fantasies of being sucked into a darkly glamorous bohemian underworld, as if she might walk into a 1930s Berlin bordello or be ushered through a secret entrance to an intoxicating New York nightclub. She had always relied too much on novels to picture the world. This fibro house, these guys with their flannel shirts and homemade bongs, their girlfriends with overplucked eyebrows and cheesecloth tops, vomiting into the laundry sink – these people were not the occupants of the dangerous but seductive demimonde Zoe had been carrying in her silly head.
She did hear stories about a chick they all knew who had died of a heroin overdose last Christmas. There was something shivery-thrilling about that. And she did overhear talk about drug deals and warehouse robberies, but Kieran was adamant – as adamant as a person like him could be – that they should steer way, way, way clear of that kind of trouble.
Even so, even if the life here was far from what she’d imagined, it still felt authentic and unfiltered and exciting compared to the anodyne city she’d been allowed to know on trips to Sydney with her mother to visit her aunt Freya.
For months – from the day after they ran off together from the farm until the day they were separated – Kieran had pestered Zoe to ring her mother. She wouldn’t need to say where she was. She could just leave a message with Roza. But apart from that one postcard at the start, Zoe never did make contact and she forbade Kieran to do it either.
At the beginning, she hung onto an urge to punish, to scream in her mother’s face about the price to be paid for manipulation and mistrust. Silence was her most powerful weapon for doing that. Later, Zoe became wary, almost superstitious, about making contact. Even in Sydney, she constantly felt her mother’s gaze on her, heard Celia’s voice judging everything. Zoe struggled to drown it out with the loudness of this new life, and that worked sometimes. But if there was to be any chance of properly hushing the voice in her head, she couldn’t contact Celia. Not yet.
Zoe had been finding it harder and harder to pull herself out of black moods, which was another reason she couldn’t risk speaking to her mother. Celia would know – she would be able to detect in any word Zoe uttered – that things were bad.
And then the longer the silence went on, the heavier the shameful load became, the sheer weight of the not-ringing. She should’ve just left some simple phone message early on and then she could be clear of it. She hadn’t thought about it coherently, and now it was too late.
But then there were times Zoe was busting to know what Celia would make of the characters her daughter was hanging out with now. She pictured the conversations the two of them would have together – speculating about people, laughing, gossiping, fretting over possible outcomes – and she could enjoy that imaginary scene.
More than anything, and more urgently, Zoe wished she could hear her mother’s take on Mick.
Kieran’s other mates were fun to hang out with, sometimes at least. It was true some of them were guys who used other people. Zoe was proud that Kieran always operated from a nice-guy impulse, but then she hated seeing friends take advantage of him, always bludging lifts from him, cadging money from his cash fund – the remains of Zoe’s moneybox plus their savings from picking fruit. She would get cranky on Kieran’s behalf, protective, urging him not to let his supposed mates exploit him.
He would laugh, flap his hands. ‘Don’t worry about it. Gaz’ll pay me back. And you and me’ll be sweet no matter what.’
But Mick was different from the other friends.
Zoe first met him in a Granville pub, and the air had shifted the moment he stepped into the back bar. She was thankful it was a room full of bodies and noise that could soak up some of the force of this man. His dark buzz cut had a rat’s tail at the back, his face bloodlessly pale like a nocturnal creature. Mick was older than Kieran – some people said twenty, other people reckoned twenty-five – but his heavy eyebrows and the smudgy discoloration around his eyes, like permanent grey eyeshadow, made him look way older. He wasn’t especially beefed up but you could tell from the hard lines of his forearms and his sinewy neck that he had the physical power to do whatever came into his mind. He scanned the bar as he walked in, passing his reptilian eyes over every breathing person in the place.
Kieran jumped to his feet the minute he saw Mick and threw one arm up in the air to grab his attention, like a fanatical soldier eager to receive his orders. Zoe had never seen him react like this to anyone else. Kieran then grabbed her elbow and steered her – well, almost pushed her – across the floor to present her to Mick.
As Kieran approached, Mick yelled out, ‘Where you been lurking, dickwad?’
‘Ha. Yeah, well, sorry. I was ou
t in the bush for a while.’
‘Yup, I heard,’ Mick said, with a dismissive flick of the head. He was the kind of guy who liked to know things already.
Kieran grinned and did a little hopping dance, a dog eager to win favour. ‘So, anyway, Mick, been busting for you to meet my girlfriend. Zoe.’
Mick puckered his mouth and pushed her name through his lips with an exaggerated drawl. ‘Zoe.’
‘Hi,’ she said, but very little voice came out.
Mick scanned her body, down to her thighs and then up again to her face. ‘I heard about you. You’re the one who’s got my mate Kieran pussy-whipped.’
Kieran laughed a bit too loud. ‘Steady on. Zoe’s incredible.’
‘If you say so, mate. I better keep an eye on this little skank, but.’
Kieran pulled Zoe closer to him, with that same nervous laugh. ‘He’s just teasing, being a dickhead.’
Mick leaned forward, putting his mouth right up close to Zoe’s face. ‘I am. A dickhead. Who’s just teasing ya.’
Kieran relaxed a bit after the introductions had been made. Beers were bought, stories were told, bullshit was spun and, blessedly, Mick seemed to lose interest in her.
After that first meeting in the pub, Mick started turning up at the Toongabbie house. Zoe worked out early on that he liked to be regarded as unpredictable – no one was ever sure when he would show up, where he was living, how he sourced his money, which girl he might bring with him to fuck in whichever bedroom he commandeered for the night.
At first Zoe was intimidated by the girls Mick brought round, assuming they must be tough and cluey if they could handle a man like him. But it turned out they were mostly stupid-drunk or wasted or super-young, even younger than she was.
Everyone reckoned Mick was the man to talk to if you wanted drugs or a cheap TV set or a gun, not that Zoe ever saw a gun at the house. Rumours about him buzzed through all the houses and pubs – mutterings about big-time criminal connections and different versions of a story about him breaking a guy’s neck with the roof rack Mick had ripped off the bloke’s own car.
‘You don’t want to believe half that shit,’ Kieran said. ‘People like telling stories about him.’
But even Kieran agreed when people said Mick overdid the speed.
‘Yeah look, he’s a wound-up customer even when he’s straight, so doing so much crank isn’t the best idea,’ Kieran acknowledged.
Mick ignored Zoe anytime he appeared at the house to hang out with Kieran, and that suited her. But unexpectedly – for no reason that Zoe could decipher – she would find him watching her. He might be lying on the carpet, sleeping off a big night, but then, with no sound, he would open his lizard eyes and aim them at her.
‘You don’t wanna pay attention to the shit he goes on with,’ Kieran said. ‘He’s all noise.’
The two guys had been friends since they were kids, and Mick had helped Kieran out of shitty situations more than once. There hadn’t been many people Kieran could count on back then, especially in the time before he found Zoe. So Kieran owed Mick his loyalty and wanted to be a staunch friend – she got that. But even so, how could he make excuses when he saw Mick bash one of their mates or treat his girlfriends like garbage? Nothing she said seemed to shake the spell Mick had over him, and that scared her.
Whenever it was Zoe and Kieran alone together, everything was better. They could retreat to their small bedroom and Kieran would wedge a chair under the door handle to ensure no out-of-it dickhead could come barging in looking for a soft corner to crash. And after they had sex in the narrow bed against the black-painted wall, Zoe could handle anything, even Mick.
There was a time – just a few weeks ago – when Zoe hadn’t been able to sleep for several nights in a row. She would leave Kieran in bed while she wandered the house until morning. So the next evening, she tried swallowing a few gulps of Bundy, hoping it would help her drift into sleep once she flaked out in bed. It didn’t help, and the inside of her skull was even more glutinous by the time Mick showed up at the Toongabbie house.
One of the girls said Mick had sourced some PCP. Zoe didn’t know if that was true but it didn’t matter. Mick was cranked up, lying on the floor, stretching his hands over his face and staring incessantly at Zoe through the gaps in his fingers, terrifying her. For once, thankfully, Kieran could see it for himself. He grabbed her hand and led her into their room.
As Kieran wedged the chair under the door, Zoe stood there, swaying, dizzy. The floor was rolling under her feet, folding in on itself like boiling water.
‘The ground keeps moving,’ she murmured.
Kieran took her hands and eased her down to sit on the floor. ‘It’s not moving. It’s solid, see?’ He grabbed a jumper off the bed to drape around her shoulders in case she was cold. ‘You need to sleep. Awake too many days at a stretch. It does your head in. And yeah, look, Mick’s being a spaz tonight. I know that. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. I mean, you’re right, baby – he’s a worry, that guy.’
Zoe couldn’t handle talking about Mick right now. If she could just sleep, she might be able to think clearly.
Then Kieran said, ‘I should’ve never brought you to Sydney.’
‘What? Don’t make it sound like I’m a little girl you led astray.’
‘No, no, I never said that.’
Zoe flared at him, ‘I wanted to come here, didn’t I?’
‘You did.’
‘So, what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying this place isn’t right for us. We should’ve kept it just you and me. We never had fights before we came here.’
That was true. Not a single argument when they were on the road, but now there were more and more fights that could fly out of control until there was crying and shouting. They argued about Kieran letting people scrounge off him. They argued about Mick. They argued about Zoe’s unfathomable moods. Kieran complained that she didn’t confide in him anymore, which made him feel paranoid and distant from her. Usually, any bad temper between them would crumble quickly – they’d end up having a weepy, passionate fuck and it would be good again.
This night – maybe it was the ugly vibe Mick had brought into the house with him – the tension was spun up higher than usual. Zoe hated hearing the shrill edge in her own voice but she couldn’t stop.
‘Don’t make it sound like I’m some silly girl who can’t handle the big nasty world.’
‘Zoe, I’m not doing that. Why are you saying this stuff?’
‘That’s what you think, isn’t it? You reckon I’m some hopeless —’
‘No.’
‘You think I’ve wrecked everything. You’re saying —’
‘No! What do you want me to say? Fuck, Zoe. Fuck.’
Kieran’s spark of anger, the way he slammed the words at her, landed like a slap across the face.
‘You hate me,’ she said.
‘Don’t talk shit. I don’t hate you.’
‘Yeah. You hate me.’
‘I don’t know what you want me to do.’ His anger was gone as quickly as it had flared, and now his voice was thick with tears. ‘Should I take you back home?’
‘I knew it. You want to get rid of me. You wish you’d never laid eyes on me.’
Kieran grabbed her face in his hands. ‘No, no. The day I laid eyes on you was the most perfect day – the day I realised something could be so good.’
And suddenly, like an unexpected rescue, Zoe was able to grab hold of how much she loved him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She kissed him gently, again and again.
‘You’re not sorry you ever came with me?’ Kieran asked.
She would never be sorry. She had to make him understand that. ‘No, no, no. I wouldn’t want to miss out on anything.’
‘I dragged you down.’
‘Don’t say that. You didn’t.’
That was the night they decided to leave the house, just the two of them, plan a trip north, somewhere warm, and make things good again.<
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Now, lying on the clean white hotel sheets, Zoe had no clue if Kieran was even still alive. She started to cry, which made her bruised throat hurt even more.
A moment later, the door into the hotel bedroom eased open.
‘You’re awake,’ said Sheena, who must have heard the crying. She walked over to Zoe and refilled a glass on the bedside table from a bottle of Lucozade. ‘You look terrible. Keep drinking this stuff.’
‘Have you called my mother?’ Zoe asked.
‘Well, I phoned Joe. He booked this room so you could have a sleep.’
‘Do you know where Kieran is?’
‘No.’
‘Would you tell me if you knew?’
‘Look, I have zero idea. All I know is the cops found my car.’
Zoe nodded. She felt Sheena’s eyes on her.
‘They mentioned what police officers like to call “serious matters”,’ said Sheena. ‘But they wouldn’t say more than that.’
Zoe hauled herself up onto the pillows and took a sip of Lucozade. The syrupy yellow stuff was soothing, even if swallowing was painful.
‘I know you blame me,’ said Zoe. ‘And you’re right. It’s because of me everything got messed up.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself, sweetheart. My brother would’ve got himself into major shit without any inspiration from you.’
‘It’s my fault we even went to the Dural house. Kieran only came up with the plan to travel north because he was worried about me.’
Money would be no problem when they got themselves up the coast – there’d be picking work to earn what they needed. But Kieran reckoned they needed an escape fund to start them off and extra money to buy a more reliable car.
‘He said Mick would know a way we could get some quick cash.’
Sheena groaned, ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’
The three of them had driven in Sheena’s car beyond the edge of the proper suburbs, into an area where the few remaining market gardens were giving way to five-acre blocks with sprawling, show-offy houses. Mick directed them up the driveway of a property with elaborate but still raw landscaping and an enormous new house built to look like a French chateau.