by Candice Fox
‘Remember,’ Amanda called as I left, ‘when they come for you with their pitchforks and flaming torches, don’t run up any windmills. It’s a stupid idea.’
Valerie Gratteur’s North Cairns home backed onto the water, the balcony that encircled the entire upper floor providing views of Smiths Creek on two sides. The cyclone fencing that kept crocs off her property was artfully hidden in the brush, which cleared for a small jetty locked off with a gate. The front garden was lush with peach-coloured bougainvillea that Valerie was pulling at as I arrived, trying to stop it creeping up the banister of the long front steps. I parked in the drive and said nothing. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth I’d cry.
She came over as I unloaded the cardboard box from the back seat and set it on the warm bonnet. She peeled off a gardening glove and pulled back one cardboard flap just enough to see Woman’s curious black eye.
‘How many chicks?’
I cleared my throat. ‘There are six.’
She rubbed my arm with her small hand and looked up at me in the fading light. I felt pathetic. A grown man on the edge of a breakdown over a bunch of geese. I laughed at the thought, swallowed the ache at the back of my throat.
‘They’ll love it here.’
‘I know.’ I nodded. ‘I know. They’re fucking geese, I mean, Jesus. Pull yourself together, man.’
‘I’ve seen the news,’ she said. ‘It’s not just the geese.’
I followed her inside with a bag of feed and set it on the kitchen counter while she tended to the birds. It felt a lot like the day I packed a few of my meagre possessions into the car at my house in Sydney, trying to decide what I would really need to begin again, what I could stand to leave behind until Kelly and I made some kind of arrangement about the divorce. She hadn’t been there. The hardest part had been trying to decide which of Lillian’s things I’d take with me to keep me company until I saw her again. I didn’t know how long it would be. I’d walked around the nursery touching her things, the knitted bunnies and cotton onesies and little girls’ books. I’d thought it might be best to take something that smelled like her, but I didn’t like the idea of depriving her of anything. In the end it had been too hard. I left the room just as it was.
I don’t know when Kelly stopped believing me. She’d asked me the question. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that she did. In the first days, the early days, it must have been important for her to decide which camp she was in. Hard times were ahead. All her friends would look at the evidence in the newspaper and abandon her if she stood by me. People would yell at her on the way to court. If she had any doubts, she’d put on a good show in the first days when the charges were laid out before me. We’d both sat through exhausting interrogations about that fateful Sunday at the bus stop. What we’d been fighting about that morning. How regularly I went fishing. What sort of equipment I used. How often we had sex. Whether we’d had sex that morning.
When what I was being accused of was finally painted for Kelly in all of its intricacies, she’d stopped yelling and howling at my colleagues in outrage and begun to listen to them. I think it was Frankie who’d read through the proposed timeline with Kelly. She trusted Frankie. And Frankie couldn’t keep believing me.
Even if she’d stopped believing after the first few weeks, Kelly had still put her hand up against the glass and told me how horrified she was by it all and how hard we were going to fight and who she was going to hire, whether we could afford it or not.
She’d dragged Lillian into the prison with her, the tiny child in the pram in the visiting room, big men on tiny stools leaning over to get a glimpse of that small, chubby face and my wife slamming the sunshade shut in disgust.
I think it was about four months in when she missed a visit, and then another, and then when she finally came all she could talk about was how much weight I’d lost and how I needed to see a doctor. And then she stopped putting her hand on the glass so that her fingers matched mine.
She never really told me she didn’t believe me. She just stopped scheduling visits. It was Sean who’d sat me down and told me we were getting a divorce. I should have known from the moment she asked me if I did it, mere days after my arrest, that it would come to this.
You didn’t do it. Did you?
I watched Valerie pottering about in her kitchen and wondered if she was about to ask me. Outside the huge windows, beyond the balcony rail, lorikeets played in the trees, within arm’s reach of the porch. There were panels of stained glass in some of the windows. The red sunset was rolling through them, one slice at a time, making rainbows on my shirt. Valerie put a coffee before me and, despite the heat, the warmth coming through the china into the palms of my hands was comforting. It had been cold that day when I’d packed my life up and left my wife and baby in Sydney. There was a little of that cold still lingering all around me, in my bones, a draft I could never find the source of.
When Valerie spoke, I winced.
‘She didn’t do it. Did she?’
‘Who?’
‘Amanda.’
‘Oh.’ I shook my head, tried to clear my tangled thoughts. ‘Oh, I don’t know. She did something, that’s for sure. The girl’s messed up.’
I told Valerie about my night at the pub with Amanda. How she’d looked at me, her eyes cat-like and sparkling in the dark, and told me she’d kill me.
‘You stab someone nine times in the back …’ Valerie mused quietly, sipping her tea. ‘Why?’
‘Because you hate them? Because they betrayed you?’
She waved a dismissive hand. ‘That’s an old crime-show load of bullshit.’
I laughed. It was still weird, hearing someone so old and so prim-looking dropping curse words like they were the time of day.
‘It is,’ she continued. ‘The betrayer gets stabbed in the back. What a load of arse. “Excuse me, mate. You slept with my girlfriend. I’m gonna stab you. Turn around a minute, will you?”’
‘You’re the seasoned pathologist. You tell me.’
‘I haven’t seen a lot of backstabbings,’ Valerie said. ‘But I have seen a lot of stabbings. And in my experience you either stab someone once, twice, or twenty-five-fucking-thousand times.’
I laughed again. The pain in my throat was easing. I could see the geese walking hesitantly along the porch through the glass door.
‘That seems like a strange rule,’ I said.
‘Once? You’re in a fight. You’re waving a knife around. You lunge, and you think “Holy shit, did I just stab him? Fuck! I just stabbed the guy!” After which, you promptly run off.’
‘Okay.’ I nodded.
‘Twice?’ She held up two fingers. ‘Well, that’s when you’ve accidentally got him, but you think “Well, shit, I’ve just stabbed the guy. Better give him one more so he stays down while I hightail it.”’
‘And the “twenty-five-fucking-thousand times” one?’ I asked.
‘Well, that’s when you’re so hopped-up on rage or drugs you don’t realise you’ve stabbed him at all,’ she said. ‘You’re slashing and poking physically but mentally you’re off with the fairies. I’ve heard of coppers coming in on bloody scenes where the perp is still stabbing and yelling at the victim and the victim is fucking long dead. Skin spotted with holes like a red leopard.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Most of the time the stabbing goes on because the victim won’t stop moving. Gets the death twitches. Urges the stabber on.’
‘Right,’ I sighed.
‘So nine times?’ She looked back at me. ‘And in the back? That’s weird.’
‘What are you thinking?’ I asked.
‘I’m thinking whoever stabbed Lauren Freeman was going for twenty-five-fucking-thousand times,’ Valerie said. ‘But was interrupted.’
‘That makes zero sense with the logistics of the scene,’ I said. ‘You don’t have what you need for that to work. No one there but Lauren and Amanda. No drugs. No apparent rage.’
‘So the logisti
cs of the scene make no sense, then,’ Valerie said.
Our conversation was interrupted by a loud chiming on my phone. An email from Eleanor Chapman. I opened the attachment and scrolled through the pictures of Lauren, the golden girl on a beach. At a party. Cuddling between sister and mother on a crowded bus. Sitting alone on a park bench.
A message came through from Amanda as I was staring at the screen.
Meet me at the Scullys’.
At the car, I said goodbye to Valerie and thanked her for taking care of my birds. A gentle wind was rising, cutting through the thick humidity, and I wondered if the rains were finally on their way.
‘When the rain finally comes, it’ll be big,’ she said, looking at the mountains. Her short white hair was tossed up by the wind so that it flared behind her ears, making her look like an ancient elf. I got into the car and watched her go inside, but before I turned on the ignition I remembered something from the email. I opened it again and scrolled to the bottom picture, an image of Lauren sitting on a park bench. The image was narrower than it should have been, like the picture it had been scanned from had been cut in half.
On Lauren’s right shoulder, a man’s hand could be seen emerging from around her neck, dangling at her breast.
Dear Jake,
When I was a boy my mother got me a small brown dachshund. It was completely out of the blue. I hadn’t spoken of any desire for an animal, but something got into her, the desire for a single magical Disney Christmas moment in my childhood. So she put the dog into a long, blue box with a ribbon and presented it to me. A life to call my own. That’s what the animal was from the outset, very much a life – its fur prickled and shivered with life and even as it slept in a warm, soft bundle the life crept through it visibly, the quickly thumping heart and pulsing veins and rising and falling belly, pink as a piglet.
Something happened to me whenever I was around the creature. My teeth would grit. I felt, from the very first moment I looked at it, the distinct snapping shut of my jaws and the painful pressure of my front teeth as they were forced into each other. The pressure carried on through my jaw and neck, and it was all I could do to keep it from travelling down my arms and into my hands, causing me to squeeze the life from the thing. In time the gritting and grinding of my teeth did bleed down into my body, and I found myself holding the little dog under my chin, pushing the bone down into its skull, knowing I was hurting it but unable to stop. I loved it so much I could have bitten it. I could have eaten it. It was dangerous, furious love.
And isn’t that what all those corny true crime documentaries talk about? Lovers who become so consumed with the object of their desire that they just burst and strangle them one day. Wring the essence from them. Draw them into their own chests, crush them into their hearts, a human key that slots so nicely into a keyhole left hollow and gaping too long. When we fuck and hug and hold each other, are we trying to do the same thing? To draw ourselves into each other?
Don’t you see that all the time on the news? In the wake of some crisis, people zinging together like magnets, locking chest to chest and cheek to cheek. Snap. Click.
I want to put you inside me, Jake, and see if you fit. See if you fill the emptiness there. Maybe if I hurl your human body into the abyss in my heart, you’ll only tumble and clatter against the sides of me like a stone down a mineshaft. Maybe I’ll have to take everything you are, your child, your wife, your house, your things, your writing, and hurl them into me too.
I’m a vortex. I only know how to eat things.
Amanda was waiting for me outside the Scully house, her shirt damp with sweat from the ride. The hot wind was licking at the palm trees by the side of the road.
‘They’ve got cyclone warnings on the news,’ she said. ‘If it’s big enough, it might eclipse you being in town altogether.’
‘I can only hope,’ I said. ‘You can tell them it picked me up and took me away to Oz.’
‘Have you heard from that journalist?’
‘Yes.’ Fabiana had tried to call me a number of times on the drive to and from Valerie’s. I’d not picked up. ‘I haven’t got time for that right now. The damage is done. I’m going to put my head down and focus on this investigation, and hopefully when I come up again it’ll all be over.’
She looked at me with what might have been tenderness, or pity, or just the quiet and empty gaze of a half-mad murderer. Maybe I’d been projecting emotions like pity and sadness onto Amanda all along. Talking about the stabbing murder of Lauren Freeman with Valerie had left me mildly sick inside, visions rising now and then of the huge knife plunging into the lean muscle of her back.
The girl wasn’t made of meat. To stab her in the back would have been hard. It would have taken a lot of fury. There were bones to worry about. Ribs and wide, protective shoulder blades. It would have taken a strength the little woman before me could hardly have possessed as a teenager. Unless she was so chock-full of adrenaline that she was almost possessed.
We went to the door and Stella flung it open before we could knock. She was wrapped in a fluffy white robe that had red wine-stains on the cuffs. Even the unshakeable Amanda seemed taken aback.
‘You.’ She pointed at my face. ‘You fucking liar.’
‘Uh-oh,’ Amanda said.
Stella wiped at the mascara smudged under her eyes. ‘No wonder you wouldn’t touch me. You’re a fucking paedophile. He’s a paedophile!’ she wailed at Amanda, her words slurred. ‘Did you know?’
‘Yeah. I knew.’
‘You knew?’ Stella’s arms hung at her sides.
‘Well, not that he’s a paedo at heart, but that he’s accused of it, sure.’ Amanda almost laughed. ‘I mean, what are accusations?’
‘I’m outta here.’ I turned on my heel.
‘Stay.’ Amanda grabbed at me. ‘Stay, Ted. Jesus, Stella, you want to find your husband or not? What does it matter to you what they’re saying about Ted? It’s got nothing to do with our case. We’re almost there.’
‘Our case?’ Stella snapped. ‘There is no case. You’re insane, and this is over.’
‘What?’ Amanda reeled.
‘People like this are subhuman.’ Stella flung her hand at me, a few sobs sneaking out of her. ‘Can’t you see? Oh my god, you can’t, can you? You’re so fucked up by your own weird fucking existence, you’ve got no sense of –’
‘Look, we’re close.’ Amanda wasn’t grasping the situation. She began listing on her fingers. ‘We have a very good suspect. We have some stuff we need to check on from Cary. We –’
‘You fucking freak,’ Stella said.
Amanda’s mouth closed slowly.
‘You freak. Of course you don’t get it. How could you? You’re a freak too, just like him.’
Amanda’s face had lost all of its emotion. It was hard. Her stare fixed. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and I started walking back up the path towards her.
‘Amanda, don’t!’
She leapt at the woman in the doorway, her reaching arms sandwiched in the crack of the door as Stella desperately shoved it shut. Amanda wriggled, twisted, tried to force her way into the gap. I wrapped an arm around her middle and hurled myself backwards, but the strength in her was incredible. She actually seemed to weigh double. Her limbs were hard as steel.
‘We’re not giving up this case, you stupid bitch!’ she yelled. ‘It’s ours now, you understand? It’s ours now!’
She struggled free of my arms and kicked over a potted palm, smashing the terracotta pot on the edge of the stone steps. She whirled around, and I found myself ducking away, afraid she was going to take a swing at me.
‘We’re not freaks, Ted,’ she snapped, jabbing her finger at me. ‘No matter what we’ve done, you and I are not freaks.’
It was hard to know the safest thing to do. As I drove home, thoughts of the best course of action flitted through my mind, but I never seemed to lock on to the perfect solution to my problem. Should I flee again? Go back to Sydney, as
k Sean if I could stay at his place for a while? While I was sleeping on my lawyer’s couch, what would happen to all my things back here in Crimson Lake? Would the vigilantes burn down the house if I left it completely? They’d certainly go after Amanda to try to find me. Was it fair, leaving her to explain where I had gone?
I was chewing my nails as I turned onto the clay road leading to my house. There were people at the side of the road opposite the property. I recognised the journalist who had snapped pictures of me with Dynah Freeman at the bus stop, and a couple of other people I assumed to be his colleagues, standing by their car. As I pulled in to the driveway I noticed shadows further up the street, faceless forms protected from the light by the overhanging vines of the rainforest. Two female police officers were on my property, standing by the edge of the front porch, watching me park. Were these two in league with Damford and Hench? Were they here to arrest me? I couldn’t see them offering me a beat-down right in front of the press, but as I emerged from my vehicle I felt all the old wounds awakening.
‘Ted Conkaffey?’ one of them asked.
‘Yep,’ I said.
The two women took a moment to assess me, taking in the size and shape of my body, the earnestness they perceived in my face. Did I look like a man who was capable of what I was accused? I tried to discover the results of their assessment, but these two had closed faces. I glanced at their name badges. Taylor and Sweeney, Holloways Beach regional.
‘Are you here to take me in?’
‘No,’ Sweeney said. ‘We’re here to protect you.’
‘Oh.’ I was genuinely shocked. ‘Well, that’s nice. For me. I guess you two drew the short straws down at the station, did you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Taylor said. She looked me up and down again, adjusted her belt. ‘I just don’t know anymore.’