The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013

by Angela Slatter

  “Ow—let me go!” Her nails dig into his wrist. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about!”

  Beneath the pain and the anger that contort her features, Tim glimpses a real and genuine bewilderment. She isn’t lying, she really doesn’t know anything about the stupid dog, and here he is manhandling her like some kind of Neanderthal, one hand squeezing her arm hard enough to bruise, the other flexing to an eager fist at his side. Horrified, he releases his hold.

  “God, Linda. I’m so sorry.” Meaning it this time, for what little he knows it’s worth. “I didn’t—I’ve had the worst week.”

  She snorts. “Oh right, you’ve had a bad week. No problem, feel free to take that shit out on me whenever you need to.” There’s a slight tremor in her voice and she’s looking at him now like it’s the very first time she’s really seen him. Like it might be the very last.

  “I’m sorry,” he says again. Her expression doesn’t soften at all and so he tries to explain—about the stupid dog, about the Crane and Mellie—but it doesn’t make much difference. He’s cold, she implies, for not going to the funeral; colder still for not mentioning his ex-girlfriend’s suicide until now. Disconnected, is the word she uses, but he knows what she means. Cold. Heartless. Maybe she’s right. Should he have called her after talking to the Crane, asked for her shoulder to cry on? Is that what the protocol is?

  They order pizza, though he has to force himself to eat even two slices of his usual meat lovers special. Beer helps the doughy, clotted mess go down but it still sits like a lump in his stomach. Linda doesn’t eat much of her Hawaiian either, and as the credits roll on the first movie, she gets up from the couch and slings her handbag over her shoulder.

  “You’re going?” Tim asks.

  “Tonight’s not really working out.” She ejects the DVD from the player and returns it to its case. “Did you want me to leave the other one for you? It’s due back tomorrow.”

  He shakes his head. Some American comedy about a Las Vegas bucks night gone wrong which Linda probably rented with him in mind—an attempt to balance out the dire vampire romance they’d just sat through—but he couldn’t care less. “Take them both,” he tells her. “I think I’ll hit the sack early.”

  Her face stiffens. “I’ll get going then.”

  Tim follows her to the front door. Is he supposed to ask her to stay, is that the game they’re playing now? And is that because she wants to say yes, or because she needs to tell him no one last time? Doubt curdles anxious in his guts, a sensation old and familiar and decidedly unwelcome. This was how he felt around Mellie a lot of the time near the end—uncertain, apprehensive, forever trying to avoid countless unseen fractures in the ground beneath his feet, and all the while suspecting that this was exactly the way she wanted him to feel. No, he won’t go back to that place, not with Linda. Not with anyone.

  “Sorry about before,” Tim says. “The thing with the dog. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

  “No,” she replies. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “I’ll give you a call next week, then?”

  “If you like.”

  Linda stands there, head tilted slightly to the side like she’s waiting for him to make the next move, but Tim simply leans forward and kisses her on the cheek. If there’s something to be said, she can damn well do the talking. He’s done playing the psychic boyfriend game. Instead, he tells her to drive safe, then waits dutifully at the door until the taillights of her Mazda disappear down the street. She doesn’t beep the horn like she usually does; he doesn’t bother to wave.

  Back inside, he wishes the house felt as empty and hollow as he does.

  * * *

  What Tim doesn’t do is take the dog out to the bin with the cold, stale pizza the next morning. Because what doesn’t get thrown away, can’t come back to surprise him. For surprise, he absolutely doesn’t tell himself, read haunt.

  And when Tim invites himself around to his brother’s place to watch the AFL match that afternoon, it’s not because he can’t stand to be alone in his own house for any longer than necessary. No, it’s just that he hasn’t hung out with Rick in a while, Rick and Sally, who’s pregnant again—a girl this time, she tells him, a little sister for Liam who’s going to be two this August, can he believe it?—and half a dozen of their football-mad friends who crowd around the massive plasma screen television, eating corn chips dipped in Sally’s homemade guacamole and exploding into raucous cheers every time Hawthorn scores a goal.

  Afterwards, when he drinks so much during the impromptu victory barbeque on his brother’s deck that Sally confiscates his car keys and insists he spend the night on the sofa bed in the games room, it’s not because he’s leery about going home. That’s also not the reason he tags along on their Sunday shopping expedition to the kiddie supercentre, holding onto Liam’s hand while his parents bicker mildly about whether the colour of the Sports Deluxe twin stroller they’re looking to purchase should be charcoal or champagne or a combination of both. And when Rick takes him aside after dinner to suggest that, while the weekend’s been great and it’s brilliant for Liam to spend time with his uncle, maybe Tim should think about heading off soon—just so Rick and Sally can have an evening to themselves, right little bro?—Tim certainly doesn’t think of asking if he can maybe just crash for another night or two.

  No, he doesn’t think about that, not even for a second.

  In the same way, he doesn’t think about the fact that the wooden dog is no longer on the kitchen table when he gets home, or that it’s inexplicably removed itself to the living room and is now perched on the end of the couch where Tim himself usually sits to watch television.

  Tim doesn’t think about the toy at all over the next week or so. He especially doesn’t think about it while lying in bed in the dark, trying to sleep with his iPod speaker-docked and cycling on random, the volume turned up loud enough to cover any noise that might otherwise seep in from beyond his bedroom door. Which means that he doesn’t hear the wooden scrape of wheels along an uncarpeted hall floor. Or the discordant jangle of a tinny, brass bell.

  Tim doesn’t hear these sounds every single night.

  And he’s fine with that. He’s absolutely fine.

  * * *

  Until one sleep-starved morning, he shuffles into the kitchen for coffee and toast—not looking for the dog, never looking for the dog—and sees the boy.

  Around the same age as his nephew, maybe a little older, but with dark brown hair instead of Liam’s straw-coloured curls. Sitting cross-legged with his back half-turned, red-and-orange-striped pyjamas too baggy for his too skinny body, shoulders hitching up and down like he’s playing with something on the floor in front of him, so real Tim can hear him breathe.

  Tim sags against the doorjamb, a strangled gasp caught in his throat.

  The boy pauses. That small, dark head lifts. Begins to turn.

  Tim slides around the doorway, presses himself against the adjoining living room wall. Behind him, he doesn’t—he definitely doesn’t—hear the pad of bare feet on kitchen tiles. Not what he expected, not a boy, not a child. Maybe—not that he ever thought about it, because he doesn’t think about it—but if he did—maybe it’s Mellie, he might have thought, maybe it’s something to do with Mellie. Not that she is haunting him—because that’s impossible—as impossible as the toy dog which absolutely does not roll through the house in the middle of the night, which absolutely does not toll its fucking bell at all hours of the fucking night.

  Breathing. Behind him. Beside him.

  Any moment, he feels certain, any moment now it will touch him. Tiny cold fingers, tiny cold hands, reaching up to clasp his own, and a tiny cold face with a tiny cold mouth opening wide—

  “Enough!” The strength of his own voice surprises him, propels him back around and through the door and into the kitchen.

  The empty kitchen, or very nearly. Because in front of the sink, in the space where an impossible child absolutely could not h
ave been sitting, are scattered a jumble of brightly-coloured wooden shapes. Tim picks up a red disc, runs his finger along the rim where jagged gouges catch at his skin. Most of the wooden pieces now bear similar marks. A piece of green dowel as thick as his finger has been snapped—bitten—in half. Torn from its body, the dog’s head now lies on its side, one painted eye staring up in dumb accusation. Tim swallows hard. A trickle of sweat runs down the side of his face.

  He wonders what else the boy might be capable of disassembling.

  * * *

  “How did you get this number?” the Crane wants to know when he calls.

  “I remembered you were in real estate,” Tim says. “Your mobile’s listed on the company website, you know.”

  The Crane sighs. “What do you want?”

  “Can we meet somewhere? I need to talk about a few things.”

  “We’re talking now.”

  “Not like this, not over the phone.” He wants to do this in person; he wants to see her face. “It’s about Mellie. There’s, ah—I have some questions.”

  “We didn’t see you at the funeral.”

  “No, I—I couldn’t get time off work.”

  “Really? Not even for a funeral?”

  “I’m sorry, I know I should have been there.”

  The Crane makes a sound somewhere between laughter and a snort.

  “Please, Anna. It’s important.”

  Silence, stretching crisp and brittle-thin between them.

  “Anna?”

  “I have half an hour between open houses this afternoon,” she says at last. “You can talk to me while I grab a coffee.”

  This time he does write down the address she gives him, some café way out in the northern suburbs. He’ll have to leave work right after lunch, claim sudden illness or some kind of family emergency. Tim grimaces. Family emergency, right. That might only be halfway to a lie.

  “This doesn’t make us friends,” the Crane is saying.

  “I know that,” Tim tells her.

  “We’ve never been friends.”

  * * *

  She hasn’t changed. Tall and excruciatingly thin, the same beaky nose and stoop-shouldered way of moving that earned her the nickname in the first place—a snide sisterly baptism he eagerly picked up and ran with long after Mellie herself let it drop. Because it fit, because it was perfect. Anna the Crane, perpetually hovering around her younger sister as though Mellie was the last chick in the nest, fragile and still to fledge, the need for constant vigilance a given.

  Turns out, maybe she wasn’t so wrong about that.

  Tim lifts his hand to wave at the exact moment the Crane spots him. She nods and marches over to the table where he’s been sitting for the past fifteen minutes, an obligatory coffee growing cold by his elbow.

  “I wasn’t sure you were coming,” he says.

  “The open house ran late,” she tells him. “There’s a lot of interest in this area right now. I won’t have as much time as I thought.” A waitress materialises and she orders a large skinny latte with no sugar to go, hands over a five dollar note.

  Her attitude pisses him off. She doesn’t have time to talk about her sister, barely a week in the ground? Fine, he’ll cut to the damn chase then. “Why didn’t you say the funeral wasn’t just for Mellie? Hoping to surprise me?”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  “Tim, I really don’t.” The Crane reaches into her bag, pulls out a folded sheet of paper and slides it across the table. “Here. We had spares.”

  It’s a memorial pamphlet, obviously homemade on a computer and printed off somewhere like Officeworks or Kinkos. There’s a photo of Mellie on the front, skin too orange and smile too fake, listless brown curls falling half across her face.

  “It’s the best we could find,” the Crane says. “You know how much she hated being photographed.”

  Beloved daughter of Rocco and Yvette, and sister of Anna.

  No other names are mentioned anywhere. Tim frowns, bites his lip. The words he’s been rehearsing all afternoon lodge stubborn in his throat; he can’t bring himself to loosen them. Mellie stares out at him through tangles of hair, silent now, and forever. What happened, he wants to ask her, what did you do?

  “You said you wanted to talk,” the Crane prompts, her tone edged with impatience. “You said you had questions.”

  “Yeah.” Tim takes a sip of his coffee, lukewarm and sugarless, but at least it moistens his mouth. “See, this thing has happened, this weird thing, and I thought it was to do with Mellie, that she maybe—I mean, did she ever, was there—you’re her sister, you’d have to know, right?”

  “What?” Lacquered fingernails tap briskly on the tabletop. “What would I have to know?”

  He takes a breath, then plunges straight in. “Look, did Mellie have a kid? And did she—did the kid die as well?”

  The Crane’s eyes widen. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  But her gaze flickers, darting briefly away from his own before returning with twice the chill of winter. That’s more than enough for Tim. “What aren’t you telling me, Anna? Was there a kid, a little boy maybe?”

  “This is insane.” She pushes back her chair.

  “Wait,” he says. “I want to show you something.” He reaches for the plastic bag at his feet, hauls it up and drops it on the table in front of her. “Look.”

  She doesn’t move. “What’s in it?”

  “Look.” Tim turns the bag upside down, allows the pieces of wooden dog to fall with a clatter from its mouth. A red disc describes a lazy arc, then settles by the Crane’s hand. She flinches as though it might bite.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “You know what it is? What it used to be?”

  “Where did you get it?” she hisses.

  “I think Mellie must have sent it to me,” Tim says. “Before she, you know.”

  “Keep it then. I don’t want the damn thing.”

  Their waitress returns with a takeaway cup and a fading smile, finds a space on the table for the former then quickly leaves. Tim waits until she’s out of earshot. “It’s a kid’s toy, Anna. Who did it belong to?”

  “No one,” she says. “Melanie bought it, years ago.”

  “But why?”

  “Who knows why my sister did anything?” She’s leaning back in her chair now, arms crossed over her chest. “Put it away. Please.”

  He doesn’t move. “What was his name?”

  “For God’s sake!” The Crane rises swiftly to her feet, scooping up her bag and the takeaway coffee in a single, angry motion. “I’m not listening to any more of this. You’re worse than Melanie ever was.”

  “I’ve seen him,” Tim says. “Little boy, kind of skinny, dark brown hair.”

  She pauses. An uncertain expression, some strange twist of fury and fear, flashes across her face. But it’s too quick to catch hold, and she shakes her head, squares her jaw. “I don’t know what you think you’ve seen, Tim, but Melanie never had a child.” Her hand holding the coffee cup is shaking just a little. “You know, sometimes I really wish . . . ”

  “What?”

  “Beggars and horses.” The smile that twitches her lips could not be more broken. “I’m done with this, okay? Don’t call me again. I’m done.”

  Tim says nothing, just watches her walk, shoulders more hunched than ever, out of the café and across the road to where a silver Honda coupé is parked. She sits in the driver’s seat for maybe three or four minutes, head bowed over her coffee, motionless. He wonders if she’s crying, if she’s even capable of crying. He’s never once seen the Crane with tears in her eyes. Finally, she starts the car and drives off to her next appointment.

  He gathers up the pieces of dog and returns them to the plastic bag. The rattle of wood on wood is somehow comforting.

  It sounds solid. It sounds real.

  Mellie gazes up at him, orange and flat and far beyond reach. Only four years, and there’s not much he can remember
of her with any degree of clarity. He can’t decide if that’s wrong. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, digging into his pocket for enough change to pay for the coffee.

  Tim leaves the pamphlet behind on the table. He doesn’t need any more baggage.

  * * *

  “I’m not really up for anything,” Linda tells him. “I’ve got work tomorrow.”

  This phone call is the first time they’ve spoken since their aborted movie night, and Tim isn’t even sure why he’s rung her now. He doesn’t want to go home alone—or unalone, or however the hell the situation back at the house could best be described—but neither does he have the headspace for being social. Linda seems the best compromise.

  “We don’t have to go out,” he tells her. “I’ll bring something over. You feel like Chinese or pizza?”

  Linda sighs. “Let’s not, okay?”

  “If you’re still mad at me about the other night—”

  “Tim, just stop.”

  “What?”

  She remains silent for a few seconds, and he can picture her rubbing at her forehead, at the twin creases that form between her eyebrows whenever she gets irritated or perplexed, or both. “Maybe we should just let things rest for a while,” she says at last.

  “Rest? What do you mean, rest?”

  Another sigh. “This isn’t really going anywhere, is it?”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Look, you’re a fun guy and you’re easy to be with most of the time, but I think it’s all starting to get a bit . . . complicated, and right now I’m really not looking for complicated. Sorry if that sounds harsh.”

  “You’re dumping me?”

  “Oh, Tim, please don’t pretend like we ever had anything serious going.”

  He swallows. “No, I guess we didn’t.”

  “Because that was kind of the idea, right? Nothing serious?”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  Then she reminds him what a nice guy he is, really, and how he’ll make some equally nice girl very happy one day if he ever decides to come out of his shell, lower the barricades, take down the walls—just not Linda, because Linda isn’t looking right now—and her tone echoes the Crane’s parting words.