by Rebecca Lim
I went cold inside as he added, ‘She hardly ever took it off. She never went anywhere without it. But that night, she left it on her bedside table because she hadn’t meant to be gone for long. Said she needed to do something. I told her to be careful, but she’d done it before: walked out on her own, at night. How was I supposed to know?’
‘Where’s the ring now?’ I asked feverishly, remembering the feel of the thing in my hand, so cold and real; the old woman with the long streaks of pure silver in her hair, the grief-ravaged face, shaking her old cross at me.
Carter hugged the bag to himself, sobbing. ‘I don’t know! It just lay on the table for weeks, I couldn’t touch it, could barely look at it. Then, one morning, it was gone. I looked everywhere for it.’
He suddenly reached out and pulled me across the threshold. Reflex made me rear back in his grasp and I caught the heavy scent of rose oil and hair wax mingling with the tang of musky, male sweat. As we struggled, I got a confused impression of a sewing machine in the room to my right, yellow feathers trailing out of a brown cardboard box, and a threadbare Persian runner stretching away into the inner gloom of the house.
‘I didn’t kill her,’ he insisted, still shaking me. ‘You have to believe me.’
‘Let go of me, Carter,’ I warned, flailing around inside my puffer vest for my phone. ‘I’ve got a friend about twenty metres away, watching us. Catch the news, lately? You do anything to me, you’ll be famous. Every one of Monica’s mad, bad, dangerous friends will know who you are, and where you live. The police will find out you were probably the last person who ever saw her alive, and that you never called them, you coward. Now get off me.’
Abruptly, Carter released me and staggered back, clutching the damned bag like it was plugging a bleeding hole in his abdomen.
‘It’s proof,’ he wept. ‘You’re proof.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Last night,’ he gabbled, looking wildly up at the ceiling, ‘last night…’
I glanced back towards the open front door hoping for some sign, any sign of Jordan and the big blond Viking he’d described, Daughtry. A Viking would be useful right now. ‘Go on,’ I said more gently.
Carter took a deep, shuddering breath before saying, ‘I asked her to show me what she wanted because I didn’t understand. Things had been happening, small things I could’ve imagined, I couldn’t be sure…and then she sent…you.’
He stared at me, appalled, spent tears meshing his impossible eyelashes together in clumps. ‘Don’t you understand?’ he added, as dawning comprehension rearranged the features of my face.
Carter held up the plastic bag I’d come to loathe, and shook it at me.
‘I wanted proof she was dead. And she sent you.’
After Carter closed the door, we sat in the front room with the sewing machine and feathers in it. As I looked around the room, chock full of life-size dressmaking mannequins in various stages of glittering undress and the discarded man-sized stilettos to match, the link between Eve and Carter went crystal clear. What had he called them both? Showgirls.
I watched Carter open the bag like it was an unexploded grenade and tear open the card with shaking fingers. His face crumpled again into tears as he read and re-read the brief message inside.
‘How?’ he whispered, wiping at his face.
I told him everything that had happened to me up until I came to be sitting here in his front room.
‘She suddenly showed up,’ I snorted softly, ‘she bloody chopped up the pieces of my boring, tiny life and threw them in the air for her own enjoyment.’
This made Carter smile for the first time.
‘Monica was only ever about number one,’ he said quietly. ‘Never did a good deed in her life that didn’t do a good deed back. Hated cats, hated kids. Detested old people, never apologised. But you’re saying she’s had you crossing town tying up loose ends, doing good deeds. Visiting her mother. It’s unbelievable.’
‘It would be, if I hadn’t been ringside,’ I muttered.
Carter looked down at the T-shirt draped across his knees. ‘This is the first present she’s ever bought me. Ever.’
Still nervous about being in the sitting room of an emotionally overwrought, six-foot trannie, I pulled out my phone. Still no message from Jordan. What was taking him so long?
‘O’Loughlin know you’re here?’ Carter mumbled, looking up again, his big, blue eyes troubled. ‘The day Mon arrived, she was a mess. Bruises all over. Cuts on her hands and face. Said O’Loughlin had found out she was seeing some younger, richer, more powerful dirt bag who’d promised to set her up, get her away from him for good. She said she was leaving him and it sent O’Loughlin into a frenzy—swore he’d shoot everyone starting with her and the dirt bag. But he started firing on strangers instead, didn’t he? And in the mess and the screaming, she just crawled out from under and ran. Mon arrived on my doorstep dressed in some stranger’s suit jacket. And a pair of sequinned hot pants with thigh high, white patent boots.’
His laughter sounded strangled as he waved his hand at the window.
‘Mon even had the presence of mind to make the taxi driver drop her one block down on Clerkenwell Street. So no one would connect her to me. It was only luck the nosy neighbours were all at work—it was still peak hour then—and no one saw a bloody, half-naked woman knocking on my front door.’
I met Carter’s gaze without flinching as I described to him the moment I’d stood on the train tracks inside Eve’s dead memory and witnessed her fear.
‘She’d been running from someone that night,’ I murmured.
Carter went pale. ‘Do you think it was him? O’Loughlin?’
He shivered, rubbing his bare arms and reaching for a packet of smokes and a lighter on a side table before pulling his hand back when he saw me looking.
‘I don’t have any answers, remember? Only questions,’ I said, jumping as the sound of arguing voices erupted somewhere at the back of the house. Carter went white as the volume climbed and I finally worked out from the hee haw, hee haw of the laughter, the back and forth, that it was drive-time radio. A couple of comedians, going at it. Then a silence, just as abrupt.
‘You see?’ Carter hunched over like he was in pain. ‘Now the lights,’ he murmured, almost absent-mindedly, as the single pendant light in the hallway went on and off, twice, the rhythm crisp and defined like a kid was playing with the switch.
I was hunching now, too, as I stared up at the three-armed chandelier in the ceiling, wondering if it was going to go next.
But she was feeling playful. Carter and I almost fell off our seats as the sewing machine behind us sewed a phantom seam for a full ten seconds or more, then fell still and silent.
I found that I was hugging myself so tightly that it hurt.
‘The first week after she disappeared,’ Carter whispered through his fingers, ‘the lights would flicker, or the radio would go, the TV. I’d be asleep and then bam. Beethoven. Or bible bashers. Ninja steak knives. Just enough to wake me. Just one thing. Not every night. A reminder, maybe. That she was still around.’ He uncovered his face. ‘As if I’d ever forget. But I tried to ignore it. It’s not much, but thi
s is my house. It’s all I’ve got. She knows that. Knew. So I refused to look or engage or believe. Until last night.’ He rubbed at the stubble beneath his jawline with a rasping sound.
‘I was asleep. I’d done two shows back-to-back. I was exhausted. Even the sound of a TV firing up on its own wouldn’t have woken me and she knew it. So what does she do?’
I rocked forward, not wanting to hear, my crossed arms resting across the tops of my thighs.
‘She gets into bed with me,’ he murmured. ‘The way she sometimes did when sleep wouldn’t come and she wanted to talk, even if I didn’t. It’s her arms I’m feeling around my waist, her legs sliding through mine, her hair…’ Carter’s eyes were wild. ‘It’s lying across my pillow, I swear I can feel it, and I almost run out into the street, screaming. I actually beg her to show me how I’m supposed to help her. I’m screaming: What am I supposed to do?’
We both leap about a foot into the air as loud warning bells begin to clang outside.
Outside.
At the railway crossing.
Daughtry.
I was so relieved by the sound of the bells, I felt dizzy. Jordan would be here soon.
Without looking at me, Carter suddenly jumped to his feet and snatched up his smokes and lighter, stuffing them into a back pocket of his jeans. He grabbed a hair band out of a mess of clips in a tarnished silver bowl on a hallstand by the door and pulled his huge man-fro into a low bun. It made him look like a sixteen-year-old girl. A very scared, tall, flat-chested sixteen-year-old girl with the most beautiful eyes you’d ever see.
‘Uh…’ I said, as I half rose from my sagging armchair and glanced out the front window. Any minute now, any minute, Jordan, Daughtry, please.
Carter ignored me, shrugging hurriedly into a black hooded parka that had been hanging on a hook behind the sitting room door. He stuffed his long feet into a pair of flashy blue and yellow trainers, and the T-shirt from Eve into one of the large outer pockets of his coat.
Then, without waiting, Carter walked straight out his front door, slamming it behind him while the bells clanged and clanged incessantly.
What was I supposed to do now?
Cursing and calling, ‘Wait! Wait!’, I thumbed my phone on and sent Jordan a frantic text:
On the move. Come find me. Hurry.
16
I trailed Carter as he strode down Branxholme Street, his arms wrapped around his middle, head bowed. He didn’t look back once. I still had my phone in my hand, waiting for a message from Jordan that wouldn’t come. Carter was moving so quickly that we soon turned a corner and his house and the railway station were lost to sight.
Carter took a steady downhill path. As we crossed over street after street—the occasional lonely hoot of a train’s siren sounding in the distance—we didn’t encounter a single car or pedestrian.
A dog barked as we crossed a narrow stretch of tarred road lined with old timber houses and then I heard running water. We were in the cool green region of the map Jordan and I had pulled up on my computer at home.
A gloomy tangle of willow trees and prickly pear, and green things I didn’t recognise, choked and twined beside a fast-flowing body of water. Every inch of me tingled in recognition.
Merri Creek.
It seemed more like a swollen river, the way it rushed and tumbled through the corridor of trees and low-hanging boughs. Soon, any evidence of human habitation was lost to sight. We were alone beside the racing water, enclosed in a dark canopy of green.
‘Carter!’ I called, suddenly craving the nearness of another living body. ‘Wait up!’
He didn’t, but slowed down enough for me to almost catch him as he crossed a narrow wooden foot bridge choked with plastic bottles, a sea of them bobbing against the footings, white as bones. Inexplicably, there was a large, silver TV sticking out of the centre of the fast flowing current, its partially snapped-off antennae doing a lopsided victory sign.
I crossed the slick wooden walkway to the opposite bank. The recent rains had been heavy, and the choked and swirling water came almost all the way up to the slats.
Carter’s gait was purposeful. I kept pace behind him up the narrow bike trail. From the bank, I saw a mattress, an armchair, another TV, abandoned in the middle of the flow. The temperature seemed to be lowering, the wind rising. If it weren’t for the asphalt beneath my feet, the hard rubbish in the water, we might have entered a primeval time.
We passed lush banks of dandelion, nettles and blackberries gone wild with the rain. Turning another corner, whole bends of the creek—root and branch—were draped with shreds and streamers of ghostly bleached plastic that rippled in the wind; the harvest of a multitude of storm water drains. The sight was both eerie and beautiful.
The path hugging the creek gradually began climbing. I counted two more drowned TVs far out in the water, each one bigger than the last, analogue victims of the digital era. The second of these—the size of a small car—was buried at the foot of a huge, Victorian-era bluestone bridge, just outside the shadow of the giant arch. Carter and I passed beneath the bridge, and every footstep we took now echoed sharply. It seemed colder here, and I hurried to get through and out into what light remained.
The path ran steeply upwards after the bridge, spilling into a grassy nature reserve bordered by playing fields. The trees thinned out, and through the towering pines and gum trees, I saw that the sky was dark and leaden now, almost a night-time sky, though my phone told me it was just after 4pm.
Ahead, Carter was standing beside a drinking fountain, lighting the cigarette a man was holding out to him. The stranger was stocky, with a broad, tanned face under a salt-and-pepper crew cut. He had on a shirt and blue jeans, and the kind of beat-up leather jacket Jordan would wear. Carter and I had inches on him, and I slowed as I got closer to them, unsure whether they knew each other and I was intruding.
The older guy spotted me hanging back on the footpath. ‘Mind if I smoke?’ he rasped. ‘Dying for a smoke.’
Carter shook his head and lit his own cigarette, continuing to ignore me. While the older man looked at each of us in turn, Carter finished his first, grinding it out beneath the toe of his shoe, and started on another.
‘About to bucket down,’ the stranger said, gazing at the sky. ‘Taking your life in your own hands, son, heading down this path.’
He blew a long stream of smoke at us before grinding out his smoke with one Cuban heel. With a friendly wave, he strode out towards the row of period, pretty-as-gingerbread houses bordering the reserve.
When the man was out of earshot, Carter abruptly started talking like he couldn’t stop—like something inside him had broken.
‘She was high strung, you know? She was running scams, running guys, left, right and centre. But a great girl, really. Fearless. You felt invincible when you were with Mon. She was outrageous: bigger, bolder, bustier than anyone. Into everything: tabletop, escort work, glamour shots, promotionals. She’d get her clothes off for the opening of an envelope if there was money in it. She’s always been a night owl, couldn’t get her out of bed before two in the afternoon, it drove me bananas, but she was magnetic, you know? You couldn’t look away from her. Even without the ice, the speed
, the crack, she always had tonnes of energy. A real powerhouse…’
His voice broke and trailed away as he nervously lit another ciggie. I found his rambling description of her hard to reconcile with the sober, black-clad, barefoot figure with the unbound black hair that haunted me like a snatch of music I couldn’t name. Eve looked like an unsmiling nun with no shoes.
‘I told her I didn’t want none of that shit at my place—the drugs, the toughs—so I suppose that’s what she was doing when she wasn’t hiding out from Keith O’Loughlin; trying to use or score on the sly, meeting up with the man du jour. So it’s my fault she went out there that night, mine…’
He pushed the heel of one trembling hand against his nose and closed his eyes.
Carter’s voice was calmer when he said, ‘You weren’t far wrong when you said she seemed a bit evil. She’s like a tornado—had a knack of sucking all the air and goodwill out of a place in seconds flat. When she was good she was very, very good and when she was bad? You just got the hell out of there and kept running.’
Carter gave me a tremulous smile, the raw wind buffeting us both as he fumbled the T-shirt Monica had left him out of a pocket of his parka.
‘We’re never going to know how it ended,’ he said, as the rain began to fall. ‘So we make our own end, and our own peace. Come on. Before the moisture plays havoc with our hair, girlfriend.’
As he finished speaking, I realised Eve was standing behind him. And when she turned, he turned, too, as if to follow, though it was clear he couldn’t see her. Only me.
It seemed fitting that she was there.
I pulled my hood back up uselessly over my head as the three of us passed back across the reserve under the tall pines, through the rain.