After the Darkness

by Brown, Honey

  ‘He was there that day – he was in that house when we were being attacked. We should be warning Sue … shouldn’t we?’

  ‘It’ll sound like we’re crazy.’

  ‘Will it?’

  ‘Are we?’

  The handgun sitting on the floor only intensified this sense that we’d lost our sanity. Chefs don’t have pistols stashed in their bedrooms – do they? It was like we’d conjured up the gun, conjured up everything. Right then, I even questioned that Reuben’s attack was how we’d perceived it.

  ‘Why is this happening?’ I said.

  We fell silent.

  My thoughts ran in two clear parallel lines. One concerned the Trudy and Bruce I knew, remembered from another life: that line included the police, possible jail time, and the necessity of explaining actions we didn’t understand ourselves – it encompassed shame, admitting to our bad decisions and bizarre behaviour. The other line was this night, now, the world as no one else could see it except for me and Bruce, and it included things like the gun, the music playing next door, the garage dust stirred up in the air, my aches and sore spots, my throbbing knee, Bruce kneeling beside Finn’s body. The two streams of thought were like railway tracks – undeniably separate, but ahead the gap between them narrowed, suggesting these two tracks would somehow eventually merge, promising some hope that all could be reconciled with time and distance. I was conveniently forgetting that this merging of the tracks was an optical illusion.

  At least Bruce had maintained his one-track mind.

  ‘There are no choices here – we call the police. That’s the mistake we made the first time, thinking there was a choice.’ He checked his watch. It was nearing one a.m. ‘They’ll be able to retrieve the recording from Sue. I touched the gun accidentally. There will be proof Guy Grant was here in town. It will be clear to anyone that the suspicions we had toward Finn were reasonable, considering what we’ve been through, and tests will show Finn died from hitting his head, from fainting.’

  I nodded. I wanted that to be true.

  He dialled Damien’s number and set the phone to loudspeaker. I heard him swallow. ‘We’re telling the truth.’

  Damien answered. His voice was businesslike despite the late hour. ‘Hello.’

  Bruce’s gaze flashed sideways to me, suddenly unsure. ‘Damien …’

  ‘Bruce,’ Damien said, as though he’d been expecting him to call.

  ‘We found out that there’s a recording of our attack …’

  My husband was mumbling, stalling, giving himself time to fashion a less damning account of what had happened. I could see he was thinking of what to omit. His gaze moved around the garage and travelled over Finn’s body – his wet clothes, the bruising.

  ‘I planned to ring you in the morning,’ Damien was saying. ‘Did you see it on the news? I think it backs up your story. Frustrating for you too, though. Victims often have strong reactions with the sudden death of a key person. It can be the wrong sort of closure.’

  Bruce looked at me and shook his head, confused by what Damien was talking about. I put my finger to my lips. Go carefully, I mouthed.

  ‘What was that you said about a recording?’ Damien asked.

  ‘There’s a phone recording … from the day of the attack. It was taken while we were in the house …’

  ‘You’ll have to speak up. Did you say there’s a recording of your attack?’

  ‘The recording was saved on message bank. It was made from Trudy’s phone by accident. It’s been deleted. Can the police get it back?’

  ‘Speak up, mate. I can’t hear you very well. Have you heard the recording?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sent from Trudy’s phone, you say?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bruce murmured.

  ‘I thought you’d rung about Guy Grant’s death.’

  Bruce fell silent. In unison we both stared off across the garage. It was as though our heads had to be tipped just so to process this unusual information. Either that, or there was a section of the concrete floor that held the key to understanding this news, and together we stared at it.

  ‘You there?’ Damien said.

  I touched Bruce’s arm. ‘Hang up,’ I whispered.

  ‘I’m here,’ he said.

  ‘Did you know he was dead?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Suicide. Shot himself in the head. Looks like he’s gone to the family estate in Utah to do it. Discovered today. It’s been on the news here. I thought maybe you might have seen it.’

  After a pause, Bruce said, ‘When did he do it?’

  ‘They haven’t determined exactly, but it’s looking like as long as a month ago. I’m just getting what’s on the news at the moment.’

  ‘A month? But he was here in Australia … ?’

  ‘Mate, he was flying out the day you came into the station. I wasn’t in a position to tell you. We couldn’t stop him from leaving, not with what we had.’

  I think Bruce almost hung up then. His brows pinched in, pained and deceived. ‘He was fleeing the country and you didn’t stop him? Why wouldn’t you tell us he was doing that? You threatened me with an AVO. I believed you. He wasn’t even in the country? He hasn’t been here the whole time?’

  ‘I’m really sorry, Bruce. I feel like you got the short straw with this, all the way through you pulled the short straw.’

  ‘Will you even look into the recording now that he’s dead?’

  Damien’s breath came heavy down the line. ‘Deleted, you say? Sometimes it can be a bit tricky to —’

  Bruce hung up.

  23

  We loaded Finn into the boot of his car. I held him by his feet, Bruce held him by his shoulders. The body smelt of urine and faeces. The fact that I was trembling, staring glassy-eyed while lifting the body, was made irrelevant by the enormity of what we were doing. We did what it seemed like we had to do. That was our focus – getting it done. It wasn’t even like we were getting rid of Finn’s body to save ourselves: it wouldn’t save us, not in our souls. Events had forced our hand. The events were to blame. But that sounded terribly like the catch-cry of the criminally insane …

  Bruce arranged Finn in the boot so that his head wasn’t bent at an uncomfortable angle. I began to softly whine. It didn’t halt proceedings. Tears stung my eyes. It hurt to find ourselves on the fringe like this, abandoned.

  There was a wet patch where Finn had been lying on the garage floor, but some of the wetness was due to his water-logged pants. I concentrated on that. The weakest thing for me to do would be to fall apart. I wondered if the concrete would dry without a mark or a stain, or without smelling too potently of body fluids. Then, reasoning that Bruce had more to lose than I did if his prints were found on the gun, I handled the weapon, using the sleeve of my dress to wipe it down. The gun was dense and weighty. It felt real. More real than everything else. It was an object that wasn’t confused about what it did or what it was. It was nerve-racking to swap it from hand to hand, carefully avoiding the trigger. I could see the craftsmanship and design in it, a perfected piece of engineering. With my sleeve pulled down over my hand, I carried it and put it in the boot beside Finn’s body. Bruce and I faced one another before closing the boot – our last chance to change our minds.

  ‘If we do it, we have to do it right,’ Bruce said.

  ‘I want it to be over.’

  ‘That’s what we’ll do,’ he said.

  He backed Finn’s car out of the garage and I reversed out the four-wheel drive. The roller door rattled down. Bruce had the remote. The street was dark and still. We had a long drive ahead of us.

  The time behind the wheel turned out to be strangely soothing. The Jag’s tail-lights were all there were before me: two red glowing eyes staring back at me, bleeding in a sea of darkness. Bruce and I drove through the sleeping city, and out the other side, down the empty freeways, alone in our separate vehicles, but close, the two of us. I felt Bruce and he felt me. I loved my husband more and more with each kilome
tre that passed. We were so thankful to have one another. We would love each other from different jail cells, if need be. Love was all that mattered now. We’d taken it back to that, the most basic thing.

  The sky grew lighter and the Jag sat low and hugged each coastal bend. Today the sea was wild and the sky was grey. The waves crashed against the cliff faces. We’d taken the scenic route. We passed roadside tributes – they cemented the truth of what we were about to do. Each time the Jag braked and slowed for a corner, I thought Bruce had picked a spot. He kept going though. He drove as though he had a certain piece of road in mind, a sheer unguarded drop.

  The road swung away from the ocean. Farming land stretched out around us. To the left were the two-hundred-year-old stone fences. Bruce didn’t slow for them. I looked up into the sky for eagles, but it was too windy for them today. Strong gusts pushed the four-wheel drive across the centre white line. I steered it back on course.

  The Jag indicator flashed.

  The cliff house gate was open.

  We had returned to the gallery.

  We entered the property from the opposite direction this time. Wind lashed the cars. There were muddy tyre tracks on the driveway.

  On the square of asphalt in front of the house was a rubbish skip and piles of salvaged timber. No tradesmen’s cars were parked there yet this morning, but there was evidence they’d been there the day before: freshly churned-up mud, an empty Cheezels box blowing about, a hi-vis jacket flapping on the end of crowbar propped against the garage door. The men might turn up at any moment. It was seven o’clock.

  The sound of the sea met me as I climbed from the car. Ocean filled the air as well as the cove below the house. The sky moved and the weather came at me in waves. The long windows of the house acted as mirrors, reflecting the grey clouds. Bruce walked towards me. He pointed towards the cliff edge and then the road.

  ‘It’s the only safe spot,’ he said. ‘It’s the only place a car can’t turn the corner and catch us doing it. And I couldn’t stop thinking all the way up here – even if we sit him in the front seat, there’s all that forensic evidence if his body is found. The windscreen will probably come out on impact and his body could easily wash ashore. We should push the car over, but, maybe … we should take the body inside and … burn it.’

  His suggestion didn’t surprise me, I was perhaps past that; it saddened me, it made me want to hold him. All that time travelling and his mind filled with the kinds of things he should never have had to contemplate. I saw it in his eyes, what a nightmare trip it had been in Finn’s car, the body in the boot.

  ‘I don’t think we can,’ I said quietly, meaning I didn’t think our souls, or minds, could handle it.

  ‘But I think we have to.’

  The garage door was closed. The hi-vis jacket slapped and flapped against it.

  ‘I’ll have to check first that the furnace is working. He’ll wash ashore otherwise.’

  ‘Like cremation?’ I said after a moment.

  ‘The same as burying a body,’ Bruce assured me, ‘the same as digging a hole or putting him in the sea.’

  That was what we told ourselves.

  Bruce and I peered through the ground-floor windows. The wall inside the house, the one blocking the view, had been removed. We could see right through to the ocean. We walked around to the side entrance. The blue door and the wall around it had been taken down for access and replaced with a makeshift door and chipboard wall. An open-plan house such as this couldn’t be left exposed during a renovation, not in this type of environment; a southerly could blast in, fill the home, and rip the roof off, or pull the building from its footings. The makeshift door was locked. We knew, though, that there was nothing worse for a busy tradesman than turning up to do a job, only to find the worksite empty and the job locked; invariably, the guy in charge, the one with the keys, was hours away. To save this from happening, a key was always kept on site, in a spot easy to find. There was a brick beside the door. Bruce shifted it and picked up the key.

  The molten floor was covered with a thick tarp. Walls and doors and partitions had been removed throughout. As a home it now made much more sense. There was nothing stopping us from seeing into the heart of the place. The windows displayed the spectacular sight of the sheer cliff face sweeping around each side of the cove, with the white peaks of the open ocean in the distance. The first room, the one that had held the mirrors, and the long bench I’d sat on, was no longer small, but large and filled with natural light.

  There were drop sheets on the floor, scaffolding, raw timber edges, exposed electrical wiring, saw horses and the leftover wrappers from the workmen’s lunches.

  ‘We have to hurry,’ Bruce said, ‘these guys could turn up any minute.’

  He took my hand. He was breathing with an open mouth like I was, panting with the anticipation of what we were about to do, and the strangeness of being back here, finding things so changed, yet so much the same.

  Bruce and I walked into the kitchen. To our right was the ocean view. The jagged shoreline stirred up powerful thoughts and feelings, wind howling, the waves crashing and the water foaming. The door leading to the garage was unlocked. Bruce opened it and stopped. I heard the breath catch in his throat. The empty garage lay before us. Bruce took a step backwards and opened a door leading into a walk-in pantry. Up the back of the pantry, he pushed a narrow door. Bruce felt inside the doorway for a light switch. Halogen lights came on and illuminated a small room. It was a wet area, a washroom: tiled floor and walls, an open shower in one corner, a mop and bucket, a plastic apron, and lengths of thin rubber tubing, the type that is sometimes used for securing young trees to stakes. In the other corner of the room was a sink. On the walls either side were vertical handrails. The floor was slanted, toward a large drainage grate. On the shelves above the sink were boxes of rubber gloves, pump-packs of disinfectant and hand sanitiser, and an assortment of hospital-grade cleaning and sterilising items.

  My heart sank as it dawned on me – Reuben had been a hygienic man, a meticulous man; he had wanted Bruce clean before he took him to the workshop. On the wall beside the sink was a length of hose, looped and hanging neatly from a hook, on the end of which was a tapered metal fitting. Reuben had prepared my husband. He’d used the rubber tubing to tie Bruce to the rails, he’d put Bruce’s head underwater, perhaps to maximise the fear, perhaps to keep him quiet, and did what he needed to for a stylised, sanitised rape.

  I sank down in the doorway to wait until the tradesmen turned up, and then the police, so they could lift me to my feet and take me away. I didn’t care any more what happened. My heavy limbs could not support me. Bruce put his arm around me and lifted me to my feet. He turned off the lights and, in the semi-dark, said, ‘I’ll do it. It was my fault. I brought us in here. Go and wait outside.’

  I knew, though, that left alone in there, my husband was at risk of never coming back.

  I used the built-in remote control to open the garage roller door. I heard the crowbar outside fall to the ground and, as the door lifted, I saw the hi-vis jacket still flapping in the wind, now caught beneath the fallen bar. Bruce pushed the steel sliding door of the workshop wide so that there was enough space for a vehicle to drive through. All the things we remembered were there – the long cabinet, the gantry, the drill press, the table I’d hidden under. Lengths of timber were stacked on the row of shelving.

  Bruce bent and touched the floor where Reuben had lain. He rubbed his knuckles over it. ‘Feel it.’ I bent and quickly felt the concrete at my feet. It was covered in a thin coating of polyurethane. It was the colour of concrete, and mostly had the texture of concrete, but the entire floor was waterproof. Bruce straightened. ‘The place was designed to trap and kill. They thought of everything.’

  ‘Let’s hurry.’

  The furnace controls were on the cowling. Bruce lowered the dome over the stainless steel table that formed the base. He turned the dial to a high setting and pressed the large red button. W
e heard the gas ignite. There was a soft jet roar that slowly built. I faced the workshop entrance. If someone appeared, I wasn’t sure what I would do – call for Bruce to attack them? Bruce pressed the large green button and turned the dial back to the off position.

  ‘We’ll bring the Jag right in,’ he said. ‘Help me push aside some of the stuff.’

  The wind blew through the open doors. Bruce backed in the Jag. Each thing we did was rushed.

  Lifting Finn’s body, we struggled with the weight of him, trying to handle him with respect, but unceremoniously dumping him onto the furnace base. We lay him straight and folded his arms over his chest, but didn’t pause for reflection, not yet; it also felt like it wasn’t our right to feel remorseful. I closed the boot on the handgun and Bruce lowered the cowling. I checked my watch. Seven-thirty. Bruce started up the furnace.

  Taking Finn from the boot and placing him on the furnace base took no more than a minute or two, but those hurried moments were recorded within me, taken down with painstaking accuracy without my knowledge or consent, against my will. I would remember the weight of his body, the cold feel of his skin, the paleness of his feet, the hardness of his ankles, his toes, trimmed toenails, clean soles, wet soggy jeans, no body heat to dry them, in the back of my nostrils there would always live the lingering smell of cold excrement and urine, the rubber trim on the boot, the Jag’s exhaust fumes. I would see in my mind’s eye the shiny steel of the furnace, and feel it smooth against my fingers, and whenever Bruce glanced across at me, I would remember his glance that day – a bottomless gaze, no safety net to catch us.

  Finn’s head pushed forward against Bruce’s midriff, Finn’s pale and freckled arms … All those things and more, an unending stream of detail, enough to fill every day and every night, every meal at a restaurant, every dessert, any ocean view, each autumn leaf, each rainy day, windy day, each redhead passing in the street … Finn would be there, being lifted from the boot. His death lived in me.

  His final moments were anything but final. The furnace grew hot and the sides radiated heat and Bruce turned the dial to its hottest setting. But Finn didn’t burn away.