by Scot Gardner
I was panting like a dog, a warm hand on my shoulder.
‘Steady, Aaron. It’s okay. It’s me, John.’
My eyes were wide but fuzzy-blind for several long seconds; and then I saw him in his suit and tie, his brow creased with concern.
I sighed when I recognized him, squeezed the hand on my shoulder.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
I nodded.
He helped me to my feet. ‘Can you walk?’
I hopped a few steps, my legs sleep-dead and awkward.
‘Let’s get you home,’ he murmured.
The cell door opened and the policeman let us pass.
Nobody tried to stop us as I walked through the station in my socks, into the car park and into the passenger seat of the silver Mercedes.
‘Told you drugs were no good,’ mumbled Skye from the back seat.
I looked over my shoulder at her in her school uniform, the tips of her shower-wet plaits like paintbrushes. She had her arms crossed over her chest and a scowl on her face.
I smiled.
I’d been remembered.
‘How did you find me?’ I asked.
‘Nadine Price is an old family friend,’ John said. ‘She called after she’d finished work this morning. Said you were in . . . in a bit of trouble.’
‘What did you do?’ Skye asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
The car fell quiet and remained that way until we pulled up at the caravan park. A fire truck blocked the entrance. They were packing up hoses. A helmeted fireman came to John’s window.
‘Have to walk from here,’ he said. ‘The truck will be another ten minutes or so.’
John thanked him.
I undid my seatbelt.
He grabbed my arm and looked me in the eye, hard.
‘You’re on bail,’ he said. ‘I gave them my assurance you’d stay in town.’
I swallowed.
‘Have you got a clean shirt? Where’s your tie?’
I felt my collar. ‘The police took it.’
‘Grab what you need. You can get changed at our place.’ He dropped my arm and I ran.
A pall of dirty smoke hung in the campground.
The van at 57 had been cordoned off with blue-and-white tape. The door was shut. The lights were out.
Around the corner, Mam’s van had gone. In its place was a slumped and charred pile of melted aluminium and tiny cubes of glass. A blackened annex wall had fallen over the steel skeleton of Mam’s armchair, and the whole pile that had once been my home hissed faintly.
Nothing had been saved. Nothing was salvageable in that distorted pile. Everything had gone, and I felt one step closer to freedom. One step closer to death.
‘Hey!’
I turned to see Tony Long running towards me.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
I ran towards the shower block, then circled back to the Bartons’ car. I slammed the door.
‘Drive!’ I howled.
The rear wheels coughed on the gravel and we were gone.
‘What was that all about? Where are your clothes?’
I caught my breath. ‘The van’s gone. Burnt to the ground.’
‘What?’
‘Who were you running from?’ Skye asked. ‘The cops?’
‘No, Tony Long. The park manager.’
John looked at me, puzzled. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Sorry, yes, I’m fine. It’s a long story.’
The car fell quiet again but the air fizzed with expectation. The Bartons were waiting for the story.
‘The sound of a shotgun woke me last night. I don’t know what time. I’d fallen out of bed and . . . I don’t know. My nose had bled. I saw the shape of somebody in the annex. A bald guy with tattoos on his head. He had a gun. He ran. That’s when I heard the screaming. Somebody had shot the guy in number 57. Blown half his head away. I ran for the phone at the kiosk but Tony Long thought I was running from the crime and he decked me. Held me to the ground until the police arrived.’
They held their breath. I held mine. It felt like the longest story I’d ever told. Ever. I wasn’t used to the sound of my own voice.
‘Did you do it?’ John asked.
‘No! Of course not. I don’t think so. I couldn’t have done it. I don’t have a gun.’
I said those words and some part of me knew them to be true but the doubt in John Barton’s voice shook my own confidence. I could have killed Westy. The rage he spawned in me was monstrous. All curved white teeth and sickle claws. If that beast broke loose in my sleep, anything was possible. Anything could happen and I wouldn’t know. I could have killed Westy.
‘You’re shaking,’ Skye said.
I sat on my hands.
*
Mrs Barton had tears in her eyes. She hugged my head, briefly and awkwardly. I was shuffled into Skye’s bathroom and Skye was shuffled off to school. I showered and changed into one of John’s T-shirts and a pair of his tracksuit pants – there was room for two at the waist and they were mid-calf length. Slippers on my feet. The cut on my cheek was too tender to shave so the overall impression in the mirror was of an escapee or homeless person.
Mrs Barton chuckled and covered her mouth when she noticed the pants.
‘I’ll wear my coveralls.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Should have thought of that myself.’
John set me to work building caskets. I was safe from the eyes of the public and free to wrestle with my demon thoughts. Several times I looked up to find him watching me. Reading me. Studying me. I hoped he’d find the answer and let me know.
I couldn’t shirk from the task of assembling the smallest box. I knew the child was in the mortuary but I wasn’t hiding from the body, either. I knew the dead boy didn’t care, but I was sorry for the way I’d reacted. I took extra care in preparing his casket. John had set his features and I lifted him myself, felt his tiny limbs hang, and laid him in state.
‘Nice work,’ John whispered, his eyes glossy.
‘Why do you do this for me?’ I asked.
John sniffed. ‘What?’
‘Why do you keep picking me up when I fall down? Why are you so generous? How can you trust me the way you do?’
He dabbed his eyes and left the coolroom. ‘I don’t know, Aaron. Maybe I’m a gullible fool.’
After crustless sandwiches and pumpkin soup, John drove me to town and I shopped for toiletries and clothes – more white shirts, a tracksuit, and boxer shorts bright enough to make an undertaker proud. He smiled when he saw them and offered to pay. When I refused, he stuffed a wad of cash in my hand.
‘Payday,’ he said.
I left the shop with a pocket full of change and my dignity intact.
‘You missed your licence test yesterday,’ he said on the way home.
‘I’m . . . I’m sorry about that. Sorry about how I reacted.’
He lifted a shoulder. ‘You’re here. You did what you needed to do.’
Shot an irritating neighbour? Spent a night in the clink? Burned my home down?
‘I don’t know what you have planned for this evening but you are welcome to stay in the spare room.’
I showed him my palm. ‘You’re doing it again! Why? What have I done to deserve this kindness?’
He smiled. ‘Is that a yes or a no?’
I snorted and shook my head. ‘It’s a yes. Thank you.’
He nodded and the van went quiet except for my shopping bags rustling quietly at my feet.
‘There’s no simple answer,’ John said to the windscreen. ‘You understand death.’
He looked at my eyes. ‘You know death and it disturbs you, yet you look it in the face. I’ve seen you run from it only to find your balance and come back for more. They’re the hallmarks of someone who values life. If you didn’t feel the death or it . . . fascinated you . . . I’d be concerned.’
My face burned. I thought about Amanda Creen’s hair. I thought about Taylor.
&n
bsp; ‘I may yet be proven wrong but right here, right now, I think you’re worth the effort.’
I bowed my head and let the tears flow. They tickled the sides of my nose and crashed onto the plastic bags.
‘Do you snore?’ Skye asked at the dinner table. ‘You snore and I’ll come in and pour a bucket of ice on your head.’
Mrs Barton levelled a finger at her daughter. ‘You’ll do no such thing. You go anywhere near Aaron and you’ll find yourself sleeping in the mortuary. Do you understand?’
‘If he snores, Aaron can sleep with the dead,’ Skye mumbled.
‘I don’t think I snore,’ I said. ‘Sorry in advance if I do.’
‘What about your nightmares?’ Skye said.
Her father shushed her.
‘And your sleepwalking! Dad, have you got any rope?’
‘Enough!’ John snapped. ‘Leave the poor lad alone, Skye. We’ll sort it out. You don’t need to worry about anything. You hear a noise, you go back to sleep, okay?’
‘Not likely,’ she muttered.
I could tell from the look on John’s face that he was wondering what he had done, what he had brought into his home.
‘Thank you,’ I said, for the hundredth time. ‘I’m sorry to turn your world upside down like this. I’ll find a place to stay tomorrow.’
‘Turn our world upside down?’ Mrs Barton blurted. ‘Have a look at what’s left of your world. It’s no trouble at all. Stay as long as you need. You won’t be sitting idle, mind you. Don’t be surprised if Mr Barton wakes you in the middle of the night to go and fetch a body.’
I flashed a smile. I hoped he would wake me, but doubted it. I liked the idea of collecting the dead in the dark. Easy to be discreet after nightfall. That would almost make us an emergency service. The ambulance would whisk away the living; we’d whisk away the rest. The kernel of dread in my guts was fed by Skye’s fears. What if I did wake? What if I did scream? What if I couldn’t sit idle even in my sleep?
33
I LAY ON THE CLEAN linen in the spare bedroom, too frightened to sleep, too frightened to let myself go. Dressed in a scratchy new T-shirt and lurid boxer shorts, I rolled and breathed and tried to hide from the insomniac chatter in my head.
I could have killed Dale West. Would have killed him in another place or another time where death was more common and expected. I could sleepwalk, why not sleep maim, sleep strangle or sleep shoot? Perhaps jail would be the safest place for me. Maybe a few years behind bars was all I needed to grow out of this madness. Like a bedwetter with a plastic sheet, I fantasised about a night of uninterrupted sleep.
‘Aaron?’
I sat up, my heart pitching. The moonlight revealed Skye standing there in her pyjamas.
‘What? What do you want?’
‘Nothing,’ she whispered. ‘I heard you wriggling around.
Having trouble sleeping?’
‘No,’ I hissed. ‘I’m fine. Go back to bed.’
‘Your nightmare really happened, didn’t it? It’s the same every time, I know it.’
I sighed and clicked my lips like Mam in her sleep.
She dragged a blanket from the box at the end of the bed, draped it over her shoulders and settled on the chair in the corner.
‘Go to bed, Skye. If your mother catches you in here you’ll —’
‘Who cares?’
‘I care!’ I hissed. ‘I’m enough burden on your parents without keeping you up all night.’
‘My nightmares are almost exactly the same,’ she said aloud.
‘Shhh!’
‘I go into his bedroom and he’s cold. I wake myself trying to wake him up. When I was little I used to run into their room and climb between them. Now I’m okay as long as I can hear them snoring. Hearing my dad trying to sniff his nose inside out puts me back to sleep. You can snore if you want to. I don’t mind. Really.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Go to bed.’
‘You’re not the boss of me. I’m the boss of you, remember?’
Perhaps I could pretend I was asleep when I strangled her. I slumped onto my pillow and dragged the duvet over my head but she didn’t leave, just hummed and tapped a foot on the floor.
I rolled onto my back and sighed at the ceiling. With Skye in the chair in the corner, I felt like I was on a psychologist’s couch. A twelve-year-old psychologist.
‘Same room,’ I breathed. ‘Same scene but every time it’s another chapter or a slightly different angle.’
‘I remember that much. And?’ she prompted, barely leaving enough time for a breath.
‘And, yes, I know the room.’
‘And?’
‘And there’s a woman in the bed. She’s not quite dead in the beginning but she’s dying from a bullet wound in her stomach. The man who shot her is standing in the doorway with a gun, smoking.’
‘Oh my God,’ she whispers.
I’m leaking words. I can’t stop.
‘The man is shouting at me but I can’t understand what he’s saying. He drags me by the hair to the pillow and I watch the woman die.’
‘Jesus.’
‘He pushes me to my knees on the floor and points the gun at my head. I close my eyes and I know I’m going to die but I don’t care. The gun goes off.’
She was silent then. Silent except for the little animalbreaths whistling in and out of her nose.
‘When I open my eyes again, the man has blown his own head off.’
Skye held her breath. ‘Is any of it . . . real?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It’s all real. Everything.’
Some sort of emotional depth charge went off in my belly and I howled like a wild dog. Howled until all my air was gone and I was drowning.
Of course it was real. Every little detail. I’d lived it a million times but never told the story. Never packaged it in words and mailed it to the world.
The light flicked on but I couldn’t stop. Skye had disappeared and her father was there, rumple-haired and tying his dressing-gown. He sat on the bed and held my hand.
‘It’s okay, Aaron. Just a dream, mate. Hush!’
‘It wasn’t a dream,’ I bawled. ‘It was never a dream.’
He patted my chest. ‘Shhh.’
I squeezed his fingers and he squeezed back. I felt the blundering intimacy of the moment and tried to pull away.
John held tight. ‘Tell me what happened,’ he whispered.
I sniffed and swallowed, wiped my face on my sleeve. He helped me sit up.
‘Canada. When I was five. My father killed my mother,’ I said, and gagged.
John drew breath, but he held on.
‘He shot her in the guts in her bed.’
John nodded like nothing was new.
‘He made me watch her die and then turned the gun on himself.’
John made a noise, an involuntary whimper.
‘I wish he’d killed me, too.’
‘Hush,’ John said. ‘He didn’t. By some miracle you’re still here. What happened after that?’
I breathed in. I breathed out.
‘Then Mam came and got me. I’ve been with her here ever since and she’s lived with the knowledge that her only son killed his wife and himself. Left her with this . . .. broken child. She gave up her life for me. She taught me everything. Did everything for me. She was a professor at university. She was so smart. It drove her around the bend. I’m the reason she’s in hospital.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ John said. ‘She’s sick, Aaron, but you can’t blame yourself for that. Nothing you did or didn’t do contributed to Mam’s illness. Do you hear me?’
I wiped my eyes.
‘Hear me?’ he said again.
‘Yes, I hear you.’
‘Now, I have a confession to make to you. I knew Mam’s story through a mutual friend and I made the connection after I hired you.’
I stiffened. The running man who found me on the beach. The paramedic guy from the university, I was sure of it. Suddenly his kindn
ess seemed contrived. Suddenly John was a do-gooder and I was his latest case. ‘I don’t need your sympathy. I don’t need anybody’s sympathy.’
‘Stop it!’ he growled. He pushed at my chest. I struggled to get free but he pinned me to the headboard. His strength surprised me.
He watched my eyes until I stopped fighting.
‘I lost a son,’ he said.
I blinked.
‘Died from a brain tumour. Went to sleep and didn’t wake up eight years ago. Skye found him. She was shaking him and peeling back his eyelids when I came in.’
‘I’m sorry,’
I said. ‘I don’t want you to be sorry,’ he said. ‘All I wanted to say was that death is never going to go away. We deal with it the best way we can. We deal with it and we get on with living. Me, I started a business and surrounded myself with the dead and the grieving. I’m not sure it was entirely the healthiest way to deal with it, but here I am. I love what I do.’
That much was obvious. I felt a moment’s envy for his courage. His son had died and he’d turned it into a career. A strong, successful, healthy career. To some it might seem morbid but to me he was being brave. I wished that courage came in pill form – then I’d live out Skye’s fantasy and become a drug addict.
I’d stopped crying. I filled my lungs, and corners of my being that hadn’t tasted air in a decade were refreshed. My history was essentially the same but something felt different.
John tousled my hair. ‘Sleep. There’s work to do in the morning.’
For the first time in a very long while, I did.
34
There’s banging at the door. I can hear a man shouting, a bump and a crunch and then the man is wide-eyed in front of me. He’s a policeman with his hat in his hand. He looks at the bodies of my mother and my father and hurries away to vomit in the other room. When he returns, he kneels before me with his big warm hand on my shoulder.
‘What’s your name, little man?’ he asks, his voice tremulous. ‘Aaron David Rowe,’ I say.
He wipes my brow with his fingers. ‘Well, Aaron, how would you like to come with me?’
His paw swallows mine and he leads me into the hall. There are people looking at us from the cracks of doors. Their faces shout fear but nobody says a thing. The doors close like clams as we pass.