by Zane Lovitt
‘Why don’t you let me take you and you can decide when we get there?’
‘No, but if you think I should leave, that’s fine. Really. You don’t need some arsehole showing up out of the—’
‘I’m not kicking you out. You can sleep here if you want.’
That hot breath. I feel it on my lips.
She’s like, ‘Your face is a shocker. I’m getting ice.’
And Beth slips out the bathroom door and I’m feeling sleepy. As in, I am about to get down on the tiles and sleep. One hand steadies me against the basin and I lean into my reflection that’s more than real now because of the thunder in my blood. Can’t feel any tenderness or ache, but they’re probably in the post.
‘Take this.’
She’s back with an icepack you use for chilling champagne. I take it but she has to tell me, ‘Put it on your face, toots.’
Her hand guides mine to my cheek and holds it there.
I’m like, ‘You told me Rudy couldn’t hurt anybody. Those were your words.’
It’s meant to sound playful but it comes out accusing.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘He’s touchy. About his parents.’
I don’t know what this icepack is supposed to do. Why do people put ice on their face? I’m about to ask her when she says, ‘So what does this mean?’
‘What?’
‘I mean, what happens now? Is there anything I can do?’ Holding the ice in place keeps her close. Her chest grazes my shoulder.
‘You’ve done a lot just now.’
‘This is nothing.’
‘It’s more than nothing.’
‘Well…’ She giggles with a nervous twinge. ‘It feels like nothing.’
What this feels like, I want to say, is the time I kissed Alicia Day, on the scaffolding outside the Computer Lab in O-Week. To be fair, it was the first time I’d kissed someone. To be really fair, she kissed me. And to be painfully fair, she was smashed on Jägermeister and hooked up with James Nibbit about five minutes later. But at that moment, when she held away her cigarette and snogged me in the open air, I had this exact same warmth in my stomach.
‘Umm,’ I say.
‘Is it too cold?’
She presses harder against me, almost imperceptibly. Her breath gets hotter.
I say, ‘No.’
Not many women have stood this close to me and then opted to continue doing that. It might be a trick. Or I’m delusional. Or maybe she was drinking Jägermeister before I got here.
‘Why don’t you come and lie down?’
She pushes five or six pillows off her bed and I flop on my back, eyes shut. By keeping them shut I might not have to flirt or make a move. But then there’s the tickle of a single hair on my nose and I have to open my eyes and her face is there and it lowers onto mine.
Fuck, the smell of a mouth. The taste of a nose. A tongue, the tool she uses to scoop out thoughts from my brain. My hands find the flesh of her back, that dolphin skin, while hers hook into my collar and lever her weight onto me and I want to feel like she’s crushing me.
All through what happens on her bed, I’m shaking like it’s the Quickening. She must think I’m woefully inexperienced. That, or crazy nervous. Of which I’m both. I almost tell her I love her, but I read somewhere online that you’re not supposed to do that, so I just tell her she’s beautiful, over and over…
‘What’s this?’
I’d been drifting off, my skinny arm draped over her belly. The sheets are damp from sweat and I don’t know how long it’s been since we stopped what we were doing and lay back, breathless, sated, congealed in our betrayal of Rudy.
She taps at the webbing of my right hand.
I’m like, ‘That’s…the same tattoo Rudy’s got.’
‘It’s smudged.’
My sweat has smudged my whole body.
‘I drew it on. To try and connect with him.’
‘I did the one he’s got,’ Beth said. ‘Did you know that?’
I look at her now. The first time I’ve looked at her without her glasses.
‘You did the black teeth on Rudy?’
‘It’s not like I wanted to. It was the day after he found out about his dad. That he’d passed away. He begged me and I guess, like, I have a hard time saying no. We had to YouTube how to do it.’
Exhaustion seeps up from my feet and breaks across my brain.
‘Did Rudy tell you why he wanted it?’
‘Not really. Just that his father had it.’
Her body lists and the lamp beside the bed clicks off. Headlights play across the ceiling, a lame kaleidoscope, meshing then rolling apart. She strokes the spot on my hand.
‘You’re lucky, Tim. You get to wipe yours off.’
If I were honest with her, I’d tell her how jealous I am of Rudy’s tattoo. Of how he feels about it. But there’s so much truth to be told, I’m not going to start there.
‘My name is Jason.’
It’s too dark to see her reaction.
‘Jason what?’
‘Jason Ginaff.’
‘Why didn’t you…I mean, why did you lie?’
‘I don’t know. I’m more comfortable when I pretend to be someone else.’
‘Are you really an investigator?’
‘Yes,’ I say. And, I mean, basically, I am.
Her response is silence; I assume it’s a stunned one.
What should I tell her next? That the man Rudy plans to hurt is my dad? That the insurance policy is a fraud?
Instead of either of those, I sleep.
36
The coldest place on Earth. The flatness of it lets the wind whip you like a slave and I’m half-tempted to steal one of the football scarves that’s tied to every third or fourth headstone and wrap it around my head like a hijab. Light drizzle across the tundra, the least rain you can have and still have rain. Tyan might call this off if it gets too heavy. He stomps as he walks, wearing more layers than he’s previously been capable of, matching my raincoat and boots but his gloves aren’t smeared with dried blood like mine. Also, he’s not wearing gloves. One hand is dug deep into a pocket, the other blanches in the open air, throttles a bouquet of carnations. I’m surprised he brought them; in fact, I’m surprised to see fresh flowers laid across the park like glitter. Even in a Melbourne winter, people make the journey to the graves of loved ones. Surely not all of them have been emotionally blackmailed into it by their estranged son.
When we met at the cemetery gate Tyan seemed actually moved by the sight of my face, the black cut over one eyebrow and the blue cheek. His voice was shaky.
‘Are you okay?’
At first I was touched. Then I wondered if he was mentally comparing this beating to the one he’d administered.
‘Let’s do this first,’ I said, too cold to linger. ‘I’ll tell you about it later.’
We walk apart, Tyan trailing because he doesn’t know where to go. We wouldn’t be likely to have a conversation in this gale if he was keeping up. From a distance we must present as wholly separate mourning parties, briefly contiguous.
Things were painfully awkward at Beth’s this morning. Neither of us was used to sharing a bed, we each lay awake forever before we made our wakefulness apparent to each other. I shied away from my face in the mirror, pulled on my clothes and told her I had a ‘family thing’. She suggested we meet later and maybe she was just preserving a fiction but I accepted gratefully.
Into the wind we make it past the cement tombs and the freshly dug plots and all the birdless perennials growing here because a stretch of dead trees would be just too appropriate, come upon her plaque: Helen Ginaff 1958—2011. Loving Mother. Always. I’m not sure what the Always is supposed to mean, except that I’ll probably Always wish I’d written a better epitaph.
The earth is slightly sunken and the grass brighter than on other graves because it’s been sown and watered more recently, but still how it scans is that fresh corpses make great fertiliser. My unconscious poli
cy of never stepping on the grass is crashed through by Tyan when he plonks down a foot in the middle of the plot and lays his bouquet at the plaque.
Then, like it’s nothing at all, he puts an arm around my shoulder.
‘Fifty-three,’ he says. ‘Too young.’
‘She was fifty-two when she died.’
‘I remember her playing guitar. Did she keep that up?’
‘No.’
‘Finger-picking kind of guitar. It’s got a name. She was great. Didn’t know many songs.’
‘Did you play an instrument?’
‘Nah mate.’
‘What songs did she play?’
‘I can’t remember.’ There’s a finality in how he says that.
‘I think she’d be glad we’ve met.’
This isn’t really true. She never seemed keen for me to meet Glen Tyan, though she knew I wanted to. After she got sick it never
I thought she wouldn’t be able to speak. Breathing like that seemed to take all her energy, including what she would have used for consciousness. I was watching the clouds out the window when she murmured, ‘You still…’
I leaned in to better understand. Pressed down on the bed to indicate that I was trying to better understand.
‘What’s that, Mum?’
Her eyes were open, glaring at the dresser.
‘…driving that…’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t…’
‘…bloody thing?’
I looked across and now I did understand. The Mitsubishi symbol on my key ring. Scratched and faded but apparently still identifiable from two feet.
‘Somebody has to.’
‘Not exactly…’ I waited for her to continue. ‘…last of…’ So soft. ‘V8 Intercept…cept…’
I smiled though she wasn’t looking, didn’t have the power to turn her head.
‘It’s your car, Mum. So…’
When she’d purchased it I told her she should trade it in for a USB stick. Now, as she liked to say, the tables had turned.
really came up. And then circumstances overtook us.
My comment has the predictable effect: a sigh, the arm comes off my shoulder, but Tyan’s graveside manner isn’t so crude as to deny paternity right here at this moment.
He’s like, ‘She was a stunning bird, I suppose you know.’
‘Then why did you leave?’
I keep watching the plaque like it’s the one that has the answer.
‘It was hard back then. Being a cop and having a girlfriend.’
I listen. Wait for him to get it all out. How the trauma of the job was too much to bring home to a family. How time consuming it was to stay ahead of the criminals and their wicked schemes. How a cop’s pay was too measly for him to even throw her a few dollars when he walked out.
But he doesn’t keep going. He’s finished. That was his explanation and his apology and his restoration. A few clipped words in the rain.
He says, ‘Were there other blokes on the scene? I mean, after me?’
‘No.’
I wonder what I’d hoped to get out of this. This visit with this stooge.
I say, ‘Do you remember the name Ken Penn?’
‘No.’
My shoe plays with a crop of toadstools that have sprouted here.
‘Rudy seems to think it was Ken Penn who killed Cheryl Alamein.’
‘Well it wasn’t.’
‘She and Penn apparently had a thing.’
‘Listen,’ he says, seeing that the light is green on discussing this now. ‘Are you going to tell me what happened to your face?’
I wipe the rain from my eyes.
‘I told Rudy that Piers confessed to me. In prison. I told him Piers was guilty.’
‘Why?’
‘Because—’ I spit the word but can’t phrase the rest of it. A black hearse passes nearby. In the passenger seat a young woman checks her makeup in the visor mirror. ‘Because if he accepts the truth, then this all goes away.’ I huff water off my top lip.
‘Then what happened?’
‘This.’ I point to my head. ‘He freaked.’
‘That’s it? He attacked you for that?’
‘He didn’t attack me exactly. I tripped and landed on my face. But I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.’
This talk of my injuries makes me want to touch them. The cut over my eye stings but the headache seems to come from the swollen cheek. It throbs, boastful.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Tyan hisses. ‘Nobody asked you to do that. You’ll fuck this whole thing up.’
I’m emboldened by my damaged face, like there’s no way Tyan will attack me today. So I turn to him. Turn on him. Don’t get to flex my self-righteous muscles in real life very often.
‘Somebody has to fuck it up. Fucking this up is what we should be doing. I know you want to live out your fantasy of capturing him and getting on the TV, but you’re fucking naive, man.’
More cars pass; I hope their windows are fogged enough to hide my gesturing.
‘He found the key. To the back door of your house. You’ve got a spare key outside there somewhere? That’s what he was doing in your yard the other night. When you called me. He knows how to get into your house.’
That keeps him thinking. Hands come out of his pockets, grasp each other for warmth. I continue:
‘You think when he shows up on Friday night and finds you with a gun, you think that’s going to stop him? You think he’ll throw down the shiv and say, “Okay, you got me?” He’s not going to sit back and let you make a fucking citizen’s arrest. His brain is like, revenge or die trying. That’s why we have to call the cops.’
I say that with conclusion so that Tyan knows the spiel is over. And in response, he nods. For a couple of foolish seconds I think he’s on board, that I’ve convinced him and we will now turn to law enforcement. Undermine Rudy’s plan, not help it along. He even says it out loud:
‘You’re right.’
He watches another sedan glide past, swish through the puddles. Blinks hard at it.
And he’s like, ‘We have to take him out.’
37
The vehicles convene at a distant point among the monuments. Sombre men and women emerge, stagger unhurried through the spits of rain and the wind that seems to own this place, gather where an open plot is gaping.
I can’t see it but I know it’s there.
‘Look at your face,’ Tyan jeers. ‘I mean for Christ’s sake…’
‘This is a joke, isn’t it?’
‘It’s the only way to keep us both safe.’
‘What are you going to do? Go to his house and whack him?’
‘Nah.’ Another drawn-out vowel. He’s got the temerity to be dismissive of how I’ve got the temerity to be dismissive of this. ‘I mean when he comes for me. I’ve got a firearm. We’re not talking about just detaining him anymore.’
A lot of grey hair crowns the mourners over there; I guess it’s a burial for someone whose time had come. Someone older than Mum. Older than Rudy.
‘I think we should go to the cops. I think we should go to them right now.’
‘That’s not an option.’ Tyan moves closer, not to intimidate me but to better conduct a nuanced conversation. ‘You said yourself an intervention order isn’t going to work. That’s about all he’ll get, even with attempted murder. And what if he’s bailed? The judge orders him not to go within a kilometre of my house. Big woops. Even if he goes away for a couple of years, do you think when he gets released he’s going to waste any time before he comes after me? He’s been stewing on this for years.’
I look at my mother’s grave, scoff at it.
‘Is this what men do without women in their lives? Just stand around, plotting to murder each other? I mean…’ I laugh, pointedly. ‘Are we really discussing this in a graveyard?’
‘It’s not murder. It’s self-defence. It’s the guarantee that I can sleep for the rest of my life with both eyes shut.’
The steam from Tyan’s mouth is like the exhale from a single toke on a cigarette.
I say, ‘From what I understand, he’s got a heart thing. Like, a heart problem. He could drop dead any minute.’
‘Only makes him more dangerous.’
‘All he’s going to have is a freaking toothbrush. Are you allowed to shoot him then?’
‘What toothbrush?’ He leans into my eye line. ‘Have you seen it?’
‘It’s a tiny plastic stick. It’s not self-defence if it’s a stick.’
‘It is if he’s a real threat. If he takes me by surprise.’
‘But you know he’s coming.’
Tyan’s eyes droop, bored with how I’m arguing. ‘We don’t tell anyone that I knew.’
‘So you want me to lie. To the police.’
‘It’s a small price to pay—’
‘And you think they’re just going to believe us?’
‘Why shouldn’t they?’
‘Because there isn’t a reason that they should. Outside of you and me, no one knows what Rudy’s planning. No one knows he hates you. He winds up dead in your house, they might not just take your word for it.’
There’s Beth. But no way I’m bringing that name up right now.
‘Okay,’ he says, nodding with the wisdom of Yoda. ‘We should talk about that. But first you need to calm down and see that this might be against the rules but it’s absolutely fucking necessary.’
‘It’s not. And after what happened last night, he doesn’t know what the fuck’s going on with his insurance. So we don’t even know if Friday’s still the day. Maybe he’ll just say fuck it and come tonight.’
It’s raining heavier. Umbrellas come out among the mourners. Tyan turns, starts the walk back the way we came. The visit to Mum’s grave is over.
‘Then we’ve got to find out,’ Tyan says over his shoulder. He knows I’m following. ‘And I can’t fucking do it, can I? I need you. Because otherwise all this is for nothing.’ He waves at the cemetery.
‘You’re out of your mind. This is…This makes you no better than Rudy.’
Tyan swivels at me with a bony finger.
‘Being better than him isn’t the fucking point. The point is not to get fucking murdered in my fucking sleep. Can’t you see that? I don’t reckon there’s a future for you and me if you’re like this. Sorry to be so blunt, but it’s a little chilling to think you don’t care.’