by Ross Watkins
He didn’t use accelerants either. Accelerants could be traced, and they got on your hands and clothes. He didn’t want Wendy asking why his pants smelled of petrol when she did the washing. But he did use an incendiary device. He came up with the idea for it during a drive out to a spot he’d had his eye on for a while, after some failed attempts to get a good one going elsewhere. Now he followed the same process each time. First he’d collect dried grass and leaves from the area and heap the materials in the middle of a sheet of folded newspaper. He then placed a box of matches on top, and folded the newspaper to make a neat package. The last step was to fix a cigarette to the package with a rubber band. It was simple and crude but the heat it generated almost always burned the box of matches completely, and liquidised the rubber band. He had tested it several times. The device was small enough to fit in his pocket as he walked into the scrub. When he found a good location he would light a cigarette, place it and leave it.
He also liked the feel of the device in his pocket. It had a density, and attached to this was a sense of reliability, of purpose. In his line of work, many actions made little sense, and it was his job to expose cause and effect – that’s what a detective is supposed to detect. Sometimes he thought about his own relationships as a system of cause and effect; life seemed simpler that way, more manageable. Especially with Wendy. He knew that certain conversations were fire-starters in themselves, so he turned his back on those things more and more and chose to be quiet. There were still times when he just couldn’t help himself, when holding back from saying something was harder than spitting it out – sometimes you just had to deal with the effects. He saw this as selective enforcement.
Noel drank from his beer and opened the scanner app on his phone to listen for the call over the radio. There was no need for the fire crews to use sirens out here so he had to take care. If he saw them coming, he knew it would be over for him – and he wasn’t about to hang around and watch those guys do their business. He wasn’t thrillseeking. This wasn’t about endorphins.
He knew what he was doing was a criminal act, but it was minor compared to the brutality he encountered most days. When he thought about his intent, he found it impossible to gain a critical view of himself – offender profiling was part of his job, but the job also taught him that concepts like intent and motive were better left on the television screen. And he hated ‘primetime crime’, where the plot had to be kept so tight that real-life complexities were relinquished. People always wanted things to be neat and explainable because it assuaged their fears, but arresting the grubs out there showed him that if crime wasn’t based on a complicated personal history, then it was all pretty much random acts of chaos.
Still, he could nail down the first time fire truly impressed him. A few years back he was investigating a case involving aggravated burglary and motor vehicle theft, where the car was found alight in the underground car park of a four-storey apartment building. The fire forced the evacuation of the residents, which was when he arrived on scene to see the fire eating up the last of the car’s interior and paintwork and the plastics in the engine bay. The red and yellow of it was brilliant. Such a perfect intensity. Until that moment he’d thought of fire as an angry thing, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was composed. Systematic. Not that he told anyone, but he felt satisfaction in watching it work. He had held back the fire guys as long as he could, but soon they got in there and snuffed it.
The blackened shell left behind was, by comparison, dreadful. He attached a different emotion to this image – something closer to disgrace. This was an emotion he knew well from older days, but carried with him now, like a phantom limb. It was always the undetectable that came to mean the most.
Noel spat into the mouth of his empty beer bottle and was wrapping it in the paper bag when he heard the call come in on the app. Good timing. He got into the car and put the bottle in the passenger footwell. From there it would make its way into a public bin on the way back home, twenty kays away as the crow flew. Easy as.
*
Dianella was a tidy suburb, what with all the Greeks and Jews, and Noel liked his house. It was a good house for a copper’s family because it had a high fence built of rendered brick and the building sat a bit low from the road. Wendy hated it. She said it looked more like a police station than a home. She preferred the neighbour’s place – a weatherboard joint with a row of lavender and a tree swing on the verge. She liked that kind of quaint shit.
When he got in Wendy was making dinner. She said hello, he said hey, and even from that brief contact he knew she was mentally elsewhere. When Wendy got distracted she became more methodical in her actions.
‘You’re a bit late,’ she said.
He made a point by not taking his shoes off. Instead he walked past the kitchen bench, opened the sliding door to the patio and took a cigarette from its packet.
‘Where are the girls?’ he asked.
‘Grace is in her bedroom, Riley’s got guitar lessons.’ She was slicing mushrooms – precisely. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Had a few beers with the boys.’ He lit the ciggie, pulled deep.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Simmo there?’
Simmo had been best man at their wedding, but on the piss he had also proved to be the worst man. Groping Wendy through her bridal dress was one notable act in a series Noel hadn’t kept tally of. And while he had pulled Simmo up for being a wanker, the truth was that Noel didn’t mind too much. Another bloke giving his wife attention made him feel kind of proud. Not that Wendy felt the same way.
‘Yeah,’ he lied. ‘Behaved himself, though.’
‘Glenda called earlier, and it’s not your father this time.’
He made a sound which was meant to be nonchalance. He’d moved to the west coast to get away from his family, but the phone was a fucker which undid all that. At least his mum didn’t have his mobile number.
‘You’d better call her,’ Wendy said.
He looked at the picture of mouth and throat cancer on his ciggie packet. It was bloody horrible but he’d somehow got used to it. So much so that he didn’t feel he was really having a smoke now if he wasn’t looking at some gory health warning.
Wendy came over to the door with a tea towel. She wiped her hands, then took her mobile from the sideboard. ‘You’d better call her.’
He took the phone.
‘It’s Adrian.’
ADRIAN
Adrian regained consciousness inside the wreck. It was a vague sense of consciousness – he knew there were people outside the vehicle and his face was wet and his door was opened by a paramedic. The paramedic asked questions and Adrian believed he made answers with his mouth, though he couldn’t be sure. There was pain in the centre of his face and pain across his chest. He wondered if he’d had a heart attack.
There was pressure around his neck, and now he was on a stretcher. He couldn’t move his head. Soon there was movement and he felt that the car was getting further away. Then he was inside the ambulance. He felt a cannula go in under his skin, and it didn’t take long before the sound was turned down. Adrian closed his eyes and went with the rhythm. There may have been a siren. He assumed there were lights. Next there came a gentle tapping. Maybe it was a check of his vital signs, or an oxygen mask, or something else entirely. But one thought repeated: one tap means teeth, two taps means someone’s coming.
*
Adrian woke in a hospital bed. His vision was partially obstructed by a white object on his nose, and when he put his fingers to the whiteness he realised it was a dressing. He could tell that his left eye was swollen and there was a band of tape running across the dressing and onto his cheeks. There must have been a laceration, he realised, because if he closed one eye and used the other to look down at the bridge of his nose he could see a patch of blood.
His nose. The nose his grandfather on his mother’s side gave him, and he’
d gone and broken it. He’d never liked its shape but now it would spite him even more. And he’d have to put up with the dressing in the centre of his face, branding him as a victim. How ridiculous. It made him think of Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, spending most of the movie with a bandage over his nose after Roman Polanski slit his left nostril with a flick-knife. Adrian had always thought that having the hero going about his business with such a thing on his face was pure genius; yet Jack had been a nosy feller, and Adrian wondered if his own punishment was something similar – as if his involvement with Akker had invited a dark variety of cosmic justice. Despite the accident, he hadn’t forgotten what Mr H told him.
He could move his head now, and as he tried to sit up there was still an ache in his chest, though the morphine nullified any acute pain. God bless analgesics. The bed curtain was closed but through the window he could see the rooftops of hospital buildings and cloud the colour of Sydney grey. It was getting dark, and for a moment he thought it a respite to be here in this bed with a view of the falling evening. Especially considering the alternative.
He could hear someone crying on the other side of the curtain and thought it might be Nguyet, so he said, ‘Are you there, Noo?’ but there was no response. He pressed the buzzer for the nurse.
The nurse came in and pulled the curtain back. ‘Hi, Adrian,’ she said. ‘You’re in Westmead Hospital. How are you feeling?’
Through a gap in the curtain opposite he saw a pale guy, perhaps in his late twenties, sobbing. It was a quiet sob – the midst of grief. His sheets were pulled up and so Adrian couldn’t be sure, but he thought the guy might have lost both legs. The sheet flattened to the bed at his knees.
‘Fine,’ Adrian said. ‘Fine enough, I suppose.’
‘Can you tell me why you’re here today?’
He looked at the nurse. He explained that he remembered certain aspects of the accident, like the sensation before blacking out, and she nodded. She didn’t seem big on small talk. She told him what he already assumed about his nose, and then said that the chest pain was from the pull of the seat belt upon impact. Most people break their ribs, she remarked, so to suffer only deep tissue bruising was fortunate.
Good fortune was not the term Adrian would use to describe his situation. Good fortune was finding out that the four-thirty meeting hadn’t gone ahead, or that Akker’s parents hadn’t believed his story, or that Mr H had dealt with the issue in another way, a less official way. Better still, good fortune was Akker telling Adrian’s side of their truth …
The nurse showed him the meal order sheet and he thanked her. Then, instead of asking about his wife – which he knew he should have done – Adrian said, ‘Have the police come for me?’
*
When Nguyet and Tam arrived the food service lady was there with her trolley full of trays. Even though Adrian was a late admission and hadn’t ordered his meal in time, she gave him a tray that was an extra. ‘A man checked out,’ she said.
Adrian wondered what she meant; in a hospital, he mused, there was checking out and then there was checking out. He wanted to point out the ambiguity, but thought better. He wasn’t in the classroom. The correct word was discharge but that wasn’t really much better.
Nguyet was visibly relieved to find Adrian awake and okay. She smiled at the service lady and closed the curtain once the trolley was wheeled away; although she’d been in Australia for seven years, she still found any public display of affection uncomfortable. She kissed Adrian’s forehead and gently touched the swelling around his eye. She made cooing sounds.
Tam was sheepish, like he didn’t know what emotion he was meant to feel. He was that kind of boy. Adrian remembered well the day the cat died, when Tam was only four. While Adrian dug a space in the herb garden, Tam had watched with an interested smile. ‘This isn’t the time for smiling, mate,’ Adrian had said. Tam also smiled when his mother wrapped the cat in a blanket and placed it in the hole, and when Adrian smoothed the dirt over it and put some rocks on top. Tam looked at their faces, trying to understand the ceremony of grief. It was his first experience of death, and because he had never developed a meaningful attachment to the cat his only option was to act out sorrow, mirroring that of his parents. It was then that he had stopped smiling. When he did, Adrian regretted saying anything and wanted the boy to be himself. He had imposed his own emotions on his son.
Nguyet pulled a chair to the side of the bed, sat down and took Adrian’s hand, kissing it. She asked how it all happened and he told her about the truck. She kept shaking her head.
‘It’s not that bad,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I’ve come out better than the car.’
She laughed a laugh of heartache.
Tam had climbed to sit on the edge of the bed. He stared at his father’s face like he wanted to touch it. He then looked at the food tray, opened the lid on the meal and screwed up his mouth at the potato and beef. There was also a bread roll and a packet of butter. He picked up the roll. ‘Can I have this?’
Adrian nodded. ‘Sure.’ He had no hunger, and anyway his face hurt.
Tam tore the roll open.
Nguyet put her head down on Adrian’s arm, and he realised she’d never seen him so vulnerable. He touched her chin and bottom lip with his thumb, hoping that her affection would continue in the days to come. He was on the edge of a far greater vulnerability than a hospital bed. ‘I guess you called Mum?’ he asked.
She hadn’t. Nguyet got along with Glenda, but Mal was another story. She’d held off calling.
‘I’ll do it when I get home,’ he said. ‘The less fuss, the better.’
Tam finished the roll and was now jamming a finger into the butter packet and licking it.
‘You can eat the custard too,’ Adrian said, and passed him the tub and spoon.
This is a good moment, Adrian realised, and he tried to hold on to the feeling because anxiety was building in him again. He had an intuition that the police were going to arrive soon, and a conversation would ensue involving enquiries about a matter of which his wife knew nothing – and which he didn’t want to talk about right now. It would be an uneven encounter, too. The police knew what Akker had said but Adrian didn’t, and it was from this position of advantage that they would direct their questions.
He could phone Noel for advice but his brother would tell Glenda, and he didn’t want her finding out that way. He didn’t know how or when he’d tell her, but he wanted to retain that control. Plus, Noel was Noel. Since Adrian’s wedding eight years earlier, the brothers only spoke once a year, if that. The last time was a random phone call about six months ago, with the stilted tone and awkward gaps of two strangers. No. Noel had gone to Perth for a reason, and the last thing he wanted was to be dragged back to the east coast by something like this.
Adrian had the thought that he was still inside a wreck.
*
When the police arrived, Tam was asleep on the end of the bed and the television was on with the volume low. A doctor came in with the officers and they introduced themselves.
But this wasn’t yet the moment Adrian feared. The police asked questions about the accident, and he told them about the truck and blacking out. The doctor asked if Adrian had been experiencing a heightened level of personal stress; Adrian said that, no doubt, he had some unresolved issues at work. According to the police there was a case against the truck driver for negligent driving occasioning grievous bodily harm, but Adrian didn’t want to pursue it. He suspected there’d be enough police attention soon enough.
The officers took his statement and informed him that he would be on a temporary conditional driving licence because he’d blacked out at the wheel. The doctor would refer Adrian to a psychiatrist; if the source of the stress was an ongoing issue, he was told, medication was available that might help reduce his anxiety.
And that was all. Adrian thanked them for their time.
&nb
sp; Nguyet left soon after, with Tam asleep in her arms. She kissed him again and said she’d be back in the morning; she’d got her shift at the grocery store covered. She said she’d wait it out with him while the nurses did their observations to make sure he was fit to go home.
When he judged they were far enough away, Adrian finally let go. He cried hard but without sound. He cried on and off for over an hour, and when the crying was exhausted he called in the nurse to replace the dressing on his nose, which was soaked through. She said nothing as she crafted a fresh bandage out of wadding and tape. He appreciated the empathy he felt in her fingers, in their gentle application of pressure, and in her expression, even though she gave little away. He closed his eyes, and soon she was gone.
When he opened them again it was morning, and the amputee was sitting in a wheelchair, staring out Adrian’s window.
*
Adrian was eleven when he saw Mal shut the door of the granny flat, which adjoined the rear of the detached garage. The flat was just one large room, with no kitchen but with a toilet in a small side room. The walls – both inside and out – were fibrocement, and there were a couple of holes where you could see through to the timber trusses. The lino was stained and had a faint animal smell, like dog piss; Adrian was convinced that a dog had had a litter in there.
When Adrian was eleven Noel was seventeen, and that year he’d claimed the room out the back as his own. He dragged in some old lounges from a council clean-up and had his mates over. Someone brought around an old television and hooked up a video player so they could watch American frat house movies. They put up posters of AC/DC and Cold Chisel, and on Friday nights they drank beer from cans as they sang ‘Flame Trees’ over and over.
‘What goes on out there stays out there,’ Glenda said firmly.