by Candice Fox
‘Well.’ I exhaled sharply, blew the smoke over my shoulder. ‘I don’t suppose you know anything. Any secrets he had or any … extra information? I mean, you come here.’ I gestured to the church. ‘You knew the guy, right?’
Ray looked at me for a moment. He took a step back.
I’ve never been a very good actor.
‘I’ve told the police everything I know,’ he said. His face was stiffer now. No sign of the dimples.
‘I’m not the police.’
‘You’re someone.’
‘I am someone, yes,’ I said.
The door of the church hit me in the backside. Amanda squeezed out beside me, scattering the little girls sitting on the stairs, who settled again like disturbed birds.
‘Oh, Je-sus!’ she wailed. ‘The Corinthians!’
Ray stamped out his cigarette on the ground and pulled a set of car keys out of his pocket. He tried to turn to leave us, but the circle of my hand around his bicep stopped him.
‘Not so fast.’
‘Don’t touch me,’ Ray snapped suddenly. A fear reaction. Words out before he could control them. ‘Don’t fucking touch me.’
‘I’m not the police,’ I said. ‘Neither is she. We’re working for Jake’s wife. We just have a few questions about –’
‘He was gay, wasn’t he?’ Amanda said. I scoffed. Ray didn’t. ‘I didn’t even know the guy!’
‘Yes you did,’ Amanda said. ‘There’s a picture of you just inside the door here. Standing next to Jake. Christmas service 2013. Should we go inside and have a look?’
‘No.’ Ray shrugged his arm out of my grip. ‘We shouldn’t.’
‘You’re holding a copy of his second book in the picture. Did he sign it for you?’
‘What do you guys want?’ Ray asked. Lightning flashed above the mountains. The kid was jingling his keys.
‘Some quick answers,’ Amanda said.
‘They better be real fucking quick,’ – Ray shot a nasty look at me – ‘because I’m out of here.’
‘All right.’ Amanda pulled up her sleeves, like a magician about to do a trick. She slapped my chest with the back of her hand. ‘Watch this, Teddy. This is how they do it in the A-league.’
I felt heavy with dread.
‘Jake,’ Amanda said, setting her eyes on Ray. ‘Was he faithful to his wife?’
‘No,’ Ray said.
‘Unfaithful often?’
‘Yes.’
‘With guys?’
‘Yes.’
‘With you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Recently?’
‘No.’
‘Anyone outside the church know about it?’
‘No.’
‘Was he serious about anyone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Recently?’
‘Yes.’
‘A guy named Sam?’
‘Yes.’ Ray glanced at me. He found no solace in my face. I was as baffled with Amanda’s technique as he was.
‘Did he meet Sam within the church?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you know Sam’s surname?’
‘No.’
‘Right.’ Amanda folded her arms, satisfied. Her head twitched twice, the smile never leaving her face. ‘That’s about it then. Class dismissed.’
Ray gripped his keys and turned on his heel, looked me up and down once more before he left us. The little girls on the step had abandoned their colouring-in at the spectacle of Amanda’s fast questions, unknowing but utterly taken with the impromptu interview in front of their church. I watched Ray get into his car.
‘You’re unbelievable,’ I told Amanda.
‘What?’
‘You’ve just burned that witness. He’s not going to help us again now.’
‘What would you have done?’
‘I tried to pretend I was just a Jake Scully fan,’ I sighed. ‘I’m not a very good actor.’
‘No, you don’t seem like one.’
‘I do a very good bogan. I used to call up as an angry bogan looking for quick drug deals. Back in the squad.’
‘I want to hear it. Do it.’ She nudged me.
‘No way.’
‘Go on!’
‘Nope.’
‘Look, we don’t need him anymore.’ She waved at Ray’s car as it pulled away. ‘We need to find Sam now, see what he knows about Jake’s disappearance. We’ll be right, Ted.’
Amanda stopped short in the middle of the path.
‘Ted. Sam. Ray. Three men. Three three-letter names. There’s a bit of a triangle going on here.’ She looked at the sky, as if something there would confirm it.
‘Stop being weird. Tell me why Sam would know anything more about where Jake is than Ray.’
‘Because Sam was a long-time partner of Jake’s, not some fling.’ I followed Amanda towards my car. ‘Jake kept Sam’s phone number in a cigar box in his living room. Hidden, a little shred of evidence of his secret life that he nonetheless couldn’t let go of. If Ray had been any more than a fling to Jake, he’d have hung around and given us everything he could. He’d have wanted to help.’
I wasn’t sure if I believed her. I didn’t like her style. I was accustomed to having a partner who discussed all strategies before we took them to the witness, laid out what we would and wouldn’t say, what we’d hold back for future use. Even after I’d left, drug squad and been locked up, I never said anything unless Sean and I agreed on it. Unless we’d looked ahead to what damage it might cause.
But she’d been right about Sam. Dead right about Jake’s sexuality, his infidelity, based on nothing more than a slip of paper she dug out of a cigar box. I was standing at the edge of the road, my keys in hand, staring at the grass. I came to when I realised Amanda was doing tight circles around me on the bike.
‘Wake up, Ted,’ she said. ‘We’ve got sleuthing to do.’
It was raining too hard for the baby geese. They were still at the size that a good fat raindrop to the top of the head made them duck suddenly like they’d been struck by a miniature fist. So fragile, all of them. Easy to tire. Easy to trust. So that night I filled the bathtub with fifteen or twenty centimetres of water and put them all in so they could have a swim around, do something productive with themselves. Woman didn’t seem to mind when I started gathering them all up in my T-shirt. She waddled unevenly to the door of the bathroom and watched us for a while, the goslings doing laps up and down the length of the tub, me sitting on the toilet lid, reading Jake Scully’s first novel. The birds did a few dives and streaks across the top of the water at first, excited, their nugget wings flapping. They settled in soon and I almost forgot about them. When I looked up, Woman was gone from the doorway.
The little geese paddled up and down, tiny grey-black feet moving in wide circles. Now and then they ducked and ruffled their downy feathers, nuzzled their beaks under their wings, picked at themselves. I reached in and made a few waves, which they seemed to enjoy, splashed them. One did a full somersault, turned over so that its yellow underside showed and it kicked its wet legs in the air. I found myself smiling and drawing out my phone to take a picture as it righted itself, in case it did it again.
But who would I show such a thing to? I tapped the phone on my knee a few times, then put it away.
Jake was a good writer, and I knew that, because I’d read a lot of trash in prison. Prison books have complicated lives. They’re printed in numbers estimated to sell, and when they go out to bookstores and don’t sell, bookstores then have to decide what to do with them. They discount them. They shift them about and put stickers on them. Then they send them back to the publisher, if they just can’t get anyone to take a chance on them. The publisher then sometimes sends them to remainder stores, where more stickers are put on them, fluorescent stickers with pen marks slashing the printed price. If they don’t sell in the warehouse, it’s onto the donation lot.
By the time they get to the average remand prisoner’s hands, they’
ve been read a few dozen times by other inmates. All the stickers have been peeled off through boredom, but the sticky residue remains, black with grit and grease and sporting a few stray hairs. Sometimes, because the sticky books have been in contact with other sticky books, half the cover is ripped off, leaving the title and author a mystery to the casual observer. Parts of the books that contain anything remotely sexual have been torn out to be kept as wank fodder. Sometimes, other sections will disappear – sections that describe children in detail, or murders. The cover image, where it remains, has usually been defaced in some way, incorporating more often than not the image of a giant, veined penis standing proud atop a set of impossibly spherical hairy balls.
You read these sticky, titleless, dick-plastered books anyway. You have to.
Jake’s books scored points with me before I’d got far into them. I ran my fingers over their stark white pages, the embossed covers. The art was fantastic. A blazing city, a pair of windswept teens standing atop a cliff edge, looking at a wasteland. I was hooked pretty fast. I took a break for dinner, dried the goslings with a handtowel and sent them back out onto the porch with their mother. As night began to fall I was stretched on the porch sofa, starting book two, Whisper. The goslings returned to their box, and I pulled the towel door down over their warm little nest. Woman stayed on the porch near me but not within reach, looking irritably at the sunset between the clouds.
I felt, word by word, as though I was getting closer to Jake. The peril of his characters, to me, felt like the peril of the man whose killer I was chasing. A ghost Jake writing to me from wherever his soul now lay.
I wander in the darkness for a long time, no telling how many hours. Now and then on the horizon lights flash and pop in the various colours of evil, flame yellow and a deep blood red, as fires rage through once-quiet suburbia. I go towards the flames. My body wavers, sometimes spurred on through waves of adrenaline as memories puncture the terror. My home. My family. The gentle night hours we once slept away in peaceful dreams, and the mornings we woke unknowing what horror would one day reach us in our sanctuary. We had lived gluttonous lives. Now that happy fat, built on years of certainty, renders on the fires of a new world. A broken world. Every step I take crunches on the glass of fallen towers. Here is hell.
I’d fallen into a thick sleep full of half-whispers from my trial, responses moving on my lips, disturbing me with the foreign sound of my own voice through the layers of dream.
Do you read young adult novels, Mr Conkaffey?
I have in the past.
Do you own any?
Objection. Relevance.
Overruled.
I own some. Yes. I’ve got the … ah. The war one. The Tomorrow series.
Any others?
Um. Ah. I own Twilight. The first Twilight book.
Were you given these books, Mr Conkaffey?
No.
You bought them?
Yes. I bought them.
Could you tell us why you bought these books, Mr Conkaffey? These books that are directed at pre-teens?
I liked them? I mean, I liked the sound of them. I’d heard good things about them.
You like the books, did you say?
Objection, your honour. Asked and answered.
Why do you like these books so much, Mr Conkaffey?
Well, I didn’t like Twilight that much.
Pardon me?
I didn’t –
Both the protagonists of these particular series are teenage girls, are they not?
They … Uh, yes … Yes they are.
The Tomorrow series. Twilight. Little Women. The Hunger Games. Divergent. How I Live Now. You own all of the books I’ve just listed, don’t you, Mr Conkaffey? All of these books are about pre-teen girls, aren’t they?
I sat up to the sound of a siren. Or what I thought was a siren. Woman was very near me, but she was strangely contorted, her head down low to the ground and her good wing up. She was making a kind of high-pitched wailing sound that fell sharply into a growl. I shook off the dream I’d been having and raked back my hair.
‘Jesus! What’s the matter with you?’
Woman exposed her pale grey tongue and stomped her feet. Then she righted herself and stared at me expectantly. My skin was prickling with terror. I got up and stood by the bird.
‘What?’
Nothing. The bird stared at me. I lifted back the towel on the cardboard box and looked at her goslings. They were all huddled in a sleeping pile.
‘You’re weird,’ I told Woman, and went inside.
I wasn’t in there for long before the squealing, growling sound came again. I heard the bird’s good wing flapping against the back door from the kitchen. A glance over the porch through the window above the couch revealed nothing. The animal stared at me, waiting for me to act. I took a shower and dressed, and by the time I’d listened to her fifth or sixth tantrum I went outside in a true huff and hustled the goose out of the corner of the porch where she stood flapping madly.
‘What’s wrong with yo– oh-whoa-shit!’
With my mouth agape, I took in the sight of the python on the roof beam, followed its thick, near-black body along the beam and around the back of the post. The creature was completely still. I backed into the goose, causing her to flap at my legs. The snake’s head was flat against the timber. It might have been sleeping, but a single white eye glared sightlessly at me. Six inches from the wide head, the lean body widened into an almost spherical bump.
‘Oh god,’ I said. I looked at Woman. ‘Oh god, no. No, no, no, no!’
My hands were shaking when I reached the box. I flung aside the towel, startling the goslings, causing them to rise to their feet all at once, alarmed soldiers. I tapped the goslings hard as I counted them, unable to control my limbs.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
I swallowed. Gulped another breath and shoved the birds into two groups.
One, two, three. Four, five, six.
They were all there.
I collapsed onto my backside and regained my breath slowly, watching Woman strut around the other side of the porch, chirping, squealing, growling. Sean had been right. She was a very good guard goose. I would have been able to hear her panic song from the front of the house. I was lucky she had continued it, even when I ignored her, or there might have been a second lump in the intruder by the time I returned home that afternoon.
I’m not a man who smiles often, and I smile at my own achievements even less. But I was wearing a great smile when I walked out of my house and onto the sunbaked road that morning carrying a two-metre diamond python I had caught with my bare hands. While Woman watched, I’d manufactured a snake catcher out of kitchen items – a sort of slipknot or noose made from a piece of twine, which I threaded through the hollow handle of a plastic broom. I’d ensnared the thing and dragged it, fat and slow and liquid, down from the roof beam and onto the porch. It had twisted and writhed a little then, the bulge in its upper body shifting, but before it could vomit up its catch, thereby making itself a lighter fugitive, I grabbed its head. I took hold of the middle in my other hand, a hard hunk of twisting muscle as thick as my arm, and lifted it. The bird watched like a quietly impressed wife as I escorted the intruder off the premises.
I know just how big my smile was when I got to the road because it dropped completely when I set eyes on the reporter. She was just shutting her car door. The snake let go of its bowels, as though in tribute to what I was feeling, and drizzled mustard-yellow muck all over my hand and forearm. I stood there, looking at the snake shit dripping off my elbow, the thing’s wormy body coiling over my bicep.
Fabiana stopped before me. She looked at the snake, then at me. And then, as though neither had even mildly confused her, her big dark eyes went to the house.
Someone had hurled bright red paint across the front of the building, right over the door, the boarded-up windows, the old red bricks. It was an impressive display – dramatic, a well-chosen col
our, vivid in its connotations of fresh raw meat and death. The paint had dripped, covering the bottom half of the house in hundreds of thin, glossy lines like the bars of a fiery prison. My faith in Woman the guard goose plummeted.
‘Redecorating?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Trying to bring some life into the facade.’
Her hand was already in her handbag. I turned just in time to ruin the exclusive photograph of Ted Conkaffey out the front of his blood-spattered hovel, a huge, probably venomous snake struggling in his predatory grip. She got my shoulder, a squinting slice of my profile.
‘Don’t!’ I snapped. She tried to aim the camera again and I twisted away. ‘I don’t give you permission to photograph me. You’re on my property. You need my consent.’
‘I’m not on your property, I’m on council land.’ She pointed to her shoes, deep in the dry grass of the nature strip beyond my gate.
‘You’ll be sharing that council land with this snake in a minute, if you’re not careful.’ I lifted the snake like I was going to throw it. ‘I think it’s a red-bellied black.’
It clearly wasn’t a red-bellied black snake. It was a very dark carpet python. But she backed up onto the dirt road anyway, in case I knew something about rare breeds of red-belly in disguise that she didn’t.
‘You drop the camera and I won’t drop the snake.’
She tucked her camera into her bag.
‘Ted, can we just talk?’
‘No.’ I started walking. I’d figured I’d walk the snake up the road and drop it a good distance from the house, so it might not find its way back. But seeing Fabiana made me want to make for my car. I looked at myself in the reflection of the side window, ridiculous, the snake-man of Crimson Lake thinking he can just slide the thing into the passenger seat, buckle it up, and get rolling. I turned towards town. If Fabiana followed, she followed. There was nothing I could do.
‘I just want to talk. I’m not recording.’