The First Cut

by Sisters in Crime Australia

  And, the next time that he was whipped by Madam Lash,

  He didn't know that June was waiting,

  Taking photos through a grating

  Until he got a call from Poll and Cass.

  'You've been a naughty fella;

  We know you've got a wife. We'll tell her

  What you've done unless you meet all our demands.

  We'll circulate the photos of your escapades in Soho

  Unless you put the plot back in our hands.'

  Poor Geoff responded quickly.

  He was feeling rather sickly;

  He didn't want his peccadillos known.

  And a photo of his botty perched upon a potty

  Was not the kind of picture to be shown.

  Not even to his mother. 'But, what about the others?'

  He asked. 'The scripts aren't mine alone.'

  'We'll be dealing with them later,'

  Said Cass handing him a gaiter

  That he'd left behind at brothel number two.

  'You'd better heed our warning

  Or we'll come around some morning

  With a full transcript of everything you do'.

  Claire Higgins lived in Surrey and was busy cooking curry

  With her lover Raj when June and Cass dropped in.

  She spilt the coriander when in from the verandah

  Barged Polly with a face which looked like sin.

  'How can you have the gumption to write about corruption

  And try to make my mates behave like jerks?

  We're sick of all your japes, your fantasies and rapes;

  We're honest cops, who don't get many perks.

  We've come here to inform you,

  To caution you and warn you,

  That all intrusions to our private lives must cease.

  You must treat us like professionals,

  Not sinners in confessionals,

  Or we swear we'll never give you any peace.'

  Even Raj looked frightened.

  His tanned complexion whitened

  While Claire shook as if she'd surely seen a ghost.

  You can't help feeling tension when three of your inventions

  Invade your house and give your scripts a roast.

  The last of the trifecta was James the script director

  Whom they visited at home near Putney Grange.

  'Unless you want retirement you'll adhere to our requirements

  Or you could end up slowly rotting in a drain.

  Remember Frankie Miller, the suspected serial killer?

  He's still at large and sharpening up his skills.

  He's agreed to chop and slice you, so if this thought does not entice you

  We suggest you hacks stop treating us like dills.'

  But James got quite indignant

  And asked, 'How can any figments

  Of my imagination think they're real?'

  At which our coppers laughed!

  They said, 'Look out on the path,

  Here comes Frankie, so you'd better cut a deal.'

  In a mood of high elation they drove back to the station,

  Jubilant because they'd made each writer swear

  That they'd be rostered nine to five now;

  They could enjoy their private lives now,

  And the nation would not see their underwear.

  So, remember when you're writing, that there's little point in fighting

  Any characters who leap up, large as life.

  Don't treat them with derision,

  'Though your plots might need revision,

  Heed what they say, and you'll avoid much strife.

  STILL LIFE

  Dianne Gray

  Sam and I sit by the sea. She is painting while I write. The seascape threads its way into her mind through her olive eyes where it is dissected and arranged into neat little squares. It washes through her arm and with a twist of her wrist it finds life on the canvas. I tell her it looks nothing like the ocean and she advises me knowingly that it never did.

  I turn my head to one side, hoping to see what she has seen. She asks me what I'm doing and I tell her I'm thinking about the enormous amount of money the gallery paid for her work, The Stalker.

  She casts an eye over my page and tells me if I am determined to get him off my chest by constantly writing about him I should at least use a pen with ink in it, and not introduce the story with a feeble line like, Sam and I sit by the sea. She tells me that I should move on and if I had used my artistic talents on him like she did then I would be over the whole thing by now.

  I sweep my hand across the page like a wave across sand and ask her how she would tell the story. She scratches her cockleshell ear with the butt of her paintbrush and whispers, 'the scariest part was when the meat cleaver hit his head and bounced off his skull like it was made of petrified wood.'

  I gag and tell her she is brutal.

  We sit in silence for half an hour while I think.

  The scariest part was when the meat cleaver hit his head and bounced off his skull like it was made of petrified wood. He let out a half scream, half moan. Sam had hit him from behind and he fell to one side of me, half turning his head in horror to see where the strike had come from.

  I look back to Sam who is sweeping her brush through a cherry coloured palette.

  'He should be grateful that I've immortalised him,' she says casually.

  'Who?'

  'Him,' she says, inadvertently flicking her paintbrush in my direction. A red teardrop flicks from her brush and drops onto the centre of my page.

  'We agreed never to talk about him again. We made a pact,' I remind her while I pretend to busy myself with writing.

  'You're the one who's writing about him.'

  'But I'm not talking about him,' I insist, as I try to wipe the paint from my page. It leaves a red streak, like blood across the words I have etched.

  A salty breeze brushes my face and Sam faces the wind to spit a stray hair from the corner of her mouth.

  Her hair is dark and has the beautiful Italian thickness of our maternal grandmother's. Unfortunately, I inherited our father's peculiarities like wispy, dirty blond hair, a love of Irish whiskey and a stomach too tender for violence.

  The noise of the meat cleaver hitting his head rang through my ears like two cars colliding and as he fell he gripped the front of my night gown. The force of his weight pulled my body from the bed. Sam struck again, hitting at his arm until it was no longer attached to his body.

  'Where are you up to?' Sam asks.

  'You came up behind him and hit him in the back of the head with the meat cleaver. He fell off the bed and grabbed my night gown.' I say, squinting to read the indents I've made with my inkless pen. 'And you chopped off his arm.'

  'Why do you have to call it a night gown? You're so bloody old fashioned sometimes,' she says mercilessly.

  'Okay,' I surrender. 'What would you say?'

  'You were hysterical. He came in through your window and jumped on your bed for Christ's sake. He must have been in your room for a couple of minutes by the time I'd heard the noise and come to help. Have you remembered what happened in those minutes?'

  I look down at the page to find that my pen has scratched a hole in the paper.

  I hate it when she does this.

  'I must have hit his head about five or six times. You started screaming and ran away.'

  'But he had a hold of my night gown,' I protest.

  'He let your night gown go after the first hit.'

  'Oh.'

  She may have hit him a few more times in the head, but I couldn't stand the sound of metal on bone so I ran to the kitchen and threw up in the sink. I could hear Sam calling out for me to come and help but something happened to my knees, it was like they had turned to jelly and even though I wanted to go back and help, I couldn't get them to move.

  That's when the phone rang.

  'That's the fourth ship to pass in an hour,' Sam says, direct
ing my attention to the horizon. 'Where do you think all these ships are heading?' But before I can answer she responds to her own question. 'I bet they're cruise ships full of rich people too scared to fly nowadays.'

  I shrug my shoulders. My stomach is churning and the thought of being on a boat doesn't help. I look back at the palette as Sam sweeps her brush through a lighter shade of blood and mixes it slowly with a deep peacock blue. I tell her the colour is wrong, the ship isn't purple and she tells me it depends on how you look at it.

  I take another look out to sea. To me the ship looks like a beetle floating across the horizon. I tell her I think the ship looks like a beetle so she carves it to pieces in her mind and uses her brush to scatter its body and legs evenly across the canvass. That's her way of doing things and it annoys me.

  'Why do you have to dissect everything?' I ask, confused as to why she doesn't paint things the way I think they should look.

  'Why don't you just forget about scratching the story onto the page and write it with that special red ink I made you?' She parries.

  I stared at the phone; it rang four times before the answering machine killed the bell. Sam's recorded voice sounded so cool and calm on the message compared to the Sam with the meat cleaver in my bedroom. Our mother's voice broke through the madness. 'I know it's late, but I can't sleep and I thought…well, Sam, are you there? Di? I'll hang on for a couple of seconds in case you've heard the phone and are crawling out of bed; okay, I'll call in the morning.'

  The message ended with three beeps that were out of time with the sound of the meat cleaver that was now connecting with bare floorboards.

  I rested my forehead on the cutting board to take hold of my nerves and felt the cold wet juice of the tomato Sam had been chopping for her regular midnight snack. She often prepared insomnia meals, leaving me to clean up the mess in the morning.

  Sam is a night person. I prefer morning. It's always been that way and that's why our mother knows she can call at midnight and find a friendly voice waiting. And I guess that's how Sam came to my rescue. If Sam wasn't wandering around the kitchen that night she would never had heard my window open and the footsteps of the stalker on my bedroom floorboards.

  Sam screamed out for me to come and help and I had to hold on to the wall as I made my way down the hall. As I stood in the doorway of my bedroom I could see that the stalker was alive and struggling for air. Sam was standing next to him at the windowsill. His one remaining arm was gripping the ledge and I watched in horror as she lifted the meat cleaver high in the air and brought it down heavily on his shoulder blade.

  'Anyway,' Sam interrupts, as she points the butt of her brush to her temple to imitate thinking. 'How do you know that things aren't naturally dissected and when we see them we sort all the pieces into a picture our brains can comprehend. It's up to us to pull the pieces apart and put them back together so we can understand what they really look like.'

  'What the hell are you talking about?' I snap, knowing full well that she's talking about him again.

  'You asked me why I dissect everything,' she retorts, pointing her chin at her incomplete painting.

  I breathe out heavily without verbal response as if the answer, like her red ink jibe, is too obvious for reply.

  Sam has always painted in squares and to me it looks like pieces of pictures that have been chopped up and shuffled through her mind like playing cards. She re-arranges everything - from her thoughts to her food. When we were children she would sit at the dinner table and shift her peas carefully between strands of spaghetti (organised into squares, of course) and she would turn her plate constantly to ensure an entire evenness around the rim. She always left a large space in the middle of her plate where nothing was allowed to be placed. Mum eventually bought her a special plate with a ridge in the middle specifically made for an egg cup - this way the food wouldn't impinge on that space in the middle.

  Since The Stalker was sold to the gallery I've noticed that the empty space in the middle of her paintings has become smaller and smaller. And as I look at the canvas now, I see that the space in the middle of the picture is no bigger than my thumbnail. I wonder why the critics and art dealers have not noticed this trend. They've always maintained that the space in the centre of her work reflects the desire to maintain an inner energy. But I know what it is. It reflects her soul. It reflects that emptiness.

  'Finished?' she prods.

  'Nowhere near it,' I respond without eye contact.

  'Where are you up to now?'

  I concentrate on my page and clear my throat. 'You screamed for me to come and help. When I got into the bedroom you were standing next to the window chopping at his one remaining arm.'

  'Crap!'

  'Why?'

  'You were a mess,' she accuses indignantly. 'I had to come into the kitchen and drag you into the bedroom to help me and all the while you were grabbing onto door handles and anything you could get your hands on. It was like trying to rescue a drowning dog. When you got into the bedroom I let go of you and you ran out of the room. I had to come back to the kitchen and pour a straight whisky down your throat before you even looked like calming down.'

  'Oh.'

  'Then when we got back to the bedroom he'd crawled to the window and was trying to pull himself up to get out and that's when I hit him again and you took off.'

  Sam was screaming and crying when she came into the kitchen. She grabbed me and told me that I had to help her because he was too heavy to move. I didn't want to go but she dragged me back to the bedroom and when we got there the stalker bore no resemblance to the man who had crippled our lives for three long years. He looked nothing like the man who had stood in the courthouse and sworn before a judge that he would not come within a hundred metres of either of us again.

  I could see an arm lying stiff on the floor to the left of my bed - and a leg, bent like a flick-knife, at my feet. When Sam brought the meat cleaver down again I saw that the canvas of the floor had turned into an ocean of blood that began to role violently beneath my feet.

  'There's a storm on the way,' Sam reports, as if I hadn't noticed.

  'I'm nearly finished here,' I lie as I take a quick glance at her work.

  She is focussing on the far horizon and in her brush strokes I can see a story taking shape. Her painting looks nothing like it did an hour ago and I feel as if this is the first time she has painted a picture that I can actually recognise. I can make out shapes and purpose and scenery. Two children have built a sandcastle near the shoreline, their hair flapping like pennants in the wind. One child is scratching secret words into the sand while the other decorates the sandcastle with seaweed and pieces of broken shell. Seagulls are circling a sailboat near the jetty as a sailor scoops a catch of human limbs from the water. Another sailor is busying himself with fishing hooks, sewing pieces of the catch to the clean white sails. A storm is building to the east, manipulating the evenness of the ocean into heavy red peaks.

  I have to tell her that I like the painting, and since The Stalker I've found it harder and harder to find the empty space at the centre of her work. She explains that the girls on the beach are us and we made a pact that we would never talk about him again. She tells me that seaweed, shells and stalkers are common, but sisters are hard to find.

  I tell her I'm finished. I write my last line and flick the pages back to the beginning of the story.

  Sam and I sit by the sea. She is decorating the sandcastle while I etch our history in the sand. The stalker threads his way into our lives where he is dissected and arranged into neat little squares. His blood and limbs wash through Sam's arm and with a twist of her wrist he finds life on the canvas. I tell her that he looks nothing like still life on canvas and she advises me knowingly that he never will.

  I turn my head to one side, hoping to see what she can see. She asks me what I'm doing and I tell her I'm thinking.

  She casts an eye over my words and tells me that if I'm serious about telling the world t
hat The Stalker is merely a mosaic of one man's flesh and blood, I should write it away from the shoreline.

  A wave washes over the words I have written and they are swallowed into the sand.

  THURSDAY NIGHT AT THE OPERA

  Christina Lee

  Being the only left-handed, black disabled lesbian in the New South Wales Police Force isn't nearly as funny as a lot of people seem to think.

  At least, the people I work with now just go right ahead and joke about it. The worst thing about my previous job was the way everyone used to go out of their way to make sure that I got the message that they were going out of their way to make sure I didn't feel stigmatised in any way. And, I wasn't even disabled back then!

  No, okay, the worst thing about my previous job was how everyone went on and on about abused kids and nobody ever did anything about it. That's why I'm where I am now. Okay, the paperwork is just as bad as it was in the Department of Community Services, but I do get to arrest the occasional villain, which is kind of nice.

  Of course 'society' is still to blame and, okay, I know the poor old perpetrators have tragic stories to tell: abuse and broken homes and dyslexia and attention deficit disorder and bed-wetting and glue-sniffing and nose-picking and dizzy spells. But the point is - and I think there is something of a tendency to overlook this in these interesting times - that these guys are choosing to deal with life's challenges by committing violent acts against small, defenceless children. And there comes a time in a girl's life when what she really wants to do is drag one of these guys down to the police station by his hair and get her not-quite-so-disabled, oestrogen-challenged mates to belt the shit out of him.

  I sleep well at night.

  The main problem with the job is that there's a bit much to do. I'm on every inter-sectoral committee and promotions review and special reporting group that comes our way, and there are days when I think that, if the Police Force wants to give the impression to the wider community that it's full to the brim with hard-working, dedicated career women, then it should employ a few more of them and not work poor old Sergeant Rima Ruakuri to death. It's not like I get time off from my normal duties or anything for all this bullshit, and I'll give you three guesses where I'm stationed.