The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013

by Angela Slatter

  Instead, one of his knees trembled. A doctor might say that the deep tremor was the remnants of a brain injury, a concussion when he was twenty and twenty-three year old Beau had beaten him up for rooting a girl Beau had had his eye on. But the others knew it was Beaufort’s ghost pulling on strings he’d hooked into years before. Darren was waging a great and terrible war inside himself. When his words came out they came forced, through clenched teeth, as if his own body was trying to stop him from speaking.

  “Beau was a cunt. To his missus. To me. To all of youse. What about Frankie, our best fucking player?”

  “Frankie was a poof,” a lone voice piped up hesitantly.

  “Frankie had integrity. He wouldn’t rape a girl when youse all did. Cause you were all scared of Beau, he turned youse into animals. Turned youse criminal.”

  The men looked at each other, waiting for the one person who would restore order by defending Beaufort Kinsey and make everything normal again. But King Beau had beaten, cajoled and threatened the balls off of them during his quarter century reign. Nobody could speak yup now.

  Darren went on, his voice a metronome. “What about Josh? Josh had to move cause Beau threatened to kill his kids.”

  “Josh rooted Beau’s missus.”

  “He took her to hospital when Beau caved her face in!” The anger made Darren’s voice raise to a crescendo, and the memory-hooks snapped, allowing him to stand. “You go vote for that cocksucker, but if that guernsey goes on that wall I’m leaving the club. And I’m taking the fucking bus with me.”

  Darren stormed out and Coach O’Laughlin said in a faux-cheery voice, “Right, let’s have a re-vote shall we?”

  But when he made the call for In Favour, nobody put their hand up at all.

  Thirty miles West of North Trafalgar and just over the state border was South Trafalgar, an inappropriately named and dying town that had been amputated by a Bicentennial Road Project and freeway bypass back in ‘eighty-eight. Combined with the gut punch of legalised gambling in the state where most of the tourist busses originated, South Trafalgar was in decline. No longer did the hordes of senior citizens and sports clubs descend upon South Trafalgar to play the pokies. The conference rooms and motels emptied out and fell into disrepair. With unemployment at an all-time high, scores of young men fled the town to work the mines of Western Australia.

  A decision was made to merge the struggling football teams together under the North Trafalgar banner. The number ninety-two guernsey went to Chris Fowler, their most promising young player. Tall and rangy, he had once qualified for the Olympic high-jump team before snapping his cruciate ligament and losing that tiny championship edge. They made him a ruckman, and with his half-foot reach over every other VFA player, the combined Trafalgar team won their first off-season game against the Nugget’s Downs Lyrebirds. Fowler broke the record in marks, his own personal best in handpasses. Everything looked good.

  * * *

  “Fowler’s out,” Coach O’Laughlin said after a practice match made strange in the absence of their new Ninety-Two. “We had to replace him with Giraffe, which means there’s a now a gap in the wing.”

  Everyone murmured in concern. The season hadn’t even started and yet Fowler had more than made up for the offensive gap Beau had left behind. Beau’s game tactics had primarily consisted of king hits, clotheslines and haymakers. Generally when he’d gotten the ball, most players had left him alone and let the mad bastard have the kick.

  Any concerns that Fowler wouldn’t match Beau had been quickly doused, as in a matter of months he had transformed from a gangly kid to a battering ram.

  “Testicular cancer,” the Coach continued. “I’m ashamed as a Coach to say that he was probably juicing.”

  “Bullshit,” one of the Southie full-forwards shouted. He was a big ginger monster, claimed he was twenty-nine but was really closer to thirty-five. “Chris never took steroids.”

  “How do you explain him getting so big, Harris?” a North player retorted. “He wasn’t going through puberty again.”

  “Didn’t the last guy to wear that guernsey get cancer?” Harris demanded.

  The Southie chorus of fuckin’ yeah, drowned out the Coach’s attempt to get the conversation back on track. He waved his liver-spotted hands as if flagging a goal.

  “Settle down lads. Settle! We can bring another player out of reserves.”

  He chose Nicholas Coil, the part-time manager of the South Trafalgar Holiday Inn. Though there was the odd grumble that a North T player should have gotten a chance, none of those who had known Beau wanted to wear the number ninety-two.

  Nikky was a decent bloke, a quiet man who was married with three boys. After the chaos that had been Beau, he restored a steady, strong order on the team.

  North Trafalgar lost five matches in a row.

  After sitting on the bottom of the VFA ladder for weeks, Darren Speaker prudently called a late night emergency meeting.

  Since Beau’s departure, Darren had been voted in as President, mostly because nobody else wanted the job. When Beau was alive Darren had lurked in the background, putting out spot fires. Now he felt that all dealt with was the aftermath of a disaster.

  To make it worse, the sponsors were talking of pulling out.

  “What the hell’s happening with you blokes?” Finnegan Torch demanded. “I’m not going to have Torch’s Meats associated with a losing side. What am I going to put on my advertisements now? Torch Meats—eat failure?”

  “There’s no failure involved, Torch. The other teams are finally putting on their best men,” Darren barely managed to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “Before now anyone who played with us got injured, so we always got their crap players. We’re just getting back to normal.”

  “Normal was when we had Bazza,” Finnegan growled. “Like looking at a team of poofs, now.”

  Talking with Finnegan Torch made Darren grit his teeth. Torch had one of those florid, self-righteous faces with mean little eyes that plagued certain politicians and loud media personalities. Beau had loved Finnegan.

  Darren might have retorted something sharp and mean, but was interrupted by a phone call.

  As twelve pairs of eyes watched him, Darren’s face drained of colour and he looked perilously close to passing out.

  * * *

  Sergeant Patterson, their reserve half-back and town policeman, told Darren that the chance of Nikky’s court case being held before the finals was slim to nil. Besides, the preliminary magistrate had already denied Nikky bail on account of the seriousness of the crime. He was going to stay locked up until the trial.

  “But he didn’t kill anyone,” Darren said hopelessly. “The hotel could have been a break-in. He could be innocent.”

  Patterson only shrugged. He’d already thought of every excuse himself.

  “Nick Coil’s got a wife and three kids in hospital, CCTV footage and witnesses. He’s fucked, mate.”

  When Darren drove the bus past the motel, police tape still blocked off the driveway. A lone reporter and TV cameraman lurked out the front, waiting for a local to venture too close and be ambushed for an interview.

  Along the highway he passed a second crime scene, the place where they’d found Nikky, standing on the side of the road, bloody knife in his hand and his wife’s finger in the other. A strange place to head off to, on foot and after a serious blue. The town was in the other direction.

  Oddly, the first person who Darren thought of was Kylie, Beau’s widow. She lived in the South now, having moved back in with her parents after Beau had gone into the soil.

  Beau’s two girls were playing in the yard outside when Darren parked the club bus under the wattle tree. He did not recognise the new car parked in the driveway. The pink car-seat covers with Playboy bunny-heads seemed an almost childish affectation, the car of a woman hanging on to a lost youth.

  “Hello Uncle Darren!”

  Beau’s daughters ran up to Darren, smiling as if for the first time. He could
not see anything of Beau in them and was glad. It would be too difficult to love anything that reminded Darren of him.

  “Hey girls. Is your Mum in?”

  He was pointed towards the kitchen at the rear of the house, where Kylie was rolling out pre-mixed cookie-dough on the kitchen table. Darren could have watched her rolling that dough all day. No doubt about it, but Kylie Kinsey was a looker, even with her droopy right eye. She wasn’t even thirty. Beau had swept her up in a storm of romance and impossible promises, and had scared off any other man of her age with very real promises of pain. Kylie was too innocent back then to know a warning sign when it punched her in the face and then sobbed that it will never do it again.

  “Hey Kyles.”

  “Oh, Darren, hi.” She rubbed her forehead with a floury wrist, and wiped her hands on a dishcloth. Her wedding rings were gone. He wondered if they’d covered the down payment on the new Toyota.

  “Just dropped by to see how you were going. Been a hell of a night.”

  “Yeah, I heard about Nikky on the radio this morning,” she said absently, as if it was not Nikky she was thinking of.

  “What’s wrong, love?” Darren asked. Kylie did not know Nicholas or his family. Beau had been very parochial when it came to friendships. Anyone not from North Trafalgar might have been Al Qaeda.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just some prank caller last night. Kept calling the house, grunting. My mobile too. We all went and stayed at the caravan park in Nugget’s Downs.”

  “Funny, I didn’t notice the full moon.”

  “Ha,” she said.

  “You just got back?”

  She nodded, and the sunlight caught her blonde hair, and Daren felt a flutter in his chest that he’d not felt for a long time. He had been married once, far too young and only briefly. Now his kids were old enough to have kids. They lived in Melbourne, and he saw them once a year if he was lucky. Since then he’d been spare with girlfriends. Big bad Beau would come around with his intense gaze, his simmering aggression masquerading as passion, his silken words; as if some other, gentler man took over Beau’s body for the short time it took for the seduction to play out.

  “Hey,” Darren said impulsively. “There’s a show in the RSL tomorrow night. An eighties cover band and dinner. You want a break from all this?”

  Her eyes lit up, then clouded over.

  “I don’t know. The girls.”

  “You can leave them with my sister and her mob. I think one of them’s in the same class as your oldest.”

  Darren held his breath. He knew he was a good looking guy, a well preserved specimen even if he did have too many footy seasons under his belt, but Kylie was perky and pretty and young and Beau’s wife. Any one of those would knacker his chances of seeing more of Kylie than occasional welfare checks.

  Kylie could not think of an excuse to remain trapped in unhappiness, so she nodded instead. “I’d like that.”

  * * *

  The band was not that great, and the sound system made each sound like a toilet, and the microwaved meat-and-three veg was served on plastic plates, but Darren didn’t care because he couldn’t help but looking at Kylie Kinsey as if she were a goddess.

  She’d dressed sexy too, a red dress that left nothing to the imagination. Her blonde hair was newly frosted in a style he had not seen since he was a teenager back on the Sapphire Coast, where the girls smelt of salt and coconut oil, Juicy Fruit gum and deep fried Chicko Rolls. The scent combination always reminded him of sex, even now, thirty years later.

  Their hands met and collided over the table as they reached for salt and pepper, or the carafe of pub squash. Her lips were painted as pink and shiny as cling-wrap over a pair of musk-sticks. Darren was caught up in a hot thrall of living memory, a nineteen-eighties summer, with A-ha singing Take On Me on the AM radio of his first car as he lost his virginity to an older girl called Fiona.

  “Come back to my place,” he said breathlessly.

  “Yes,” she said, and it was in a fog of horniness that they took a taxi back to his bachelor flat in North Trafalgar and they tumbled on the bed where Beaufort had had most of Darren’s girlfriends, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing the bastard could do about it because he was dead.

  Afterwards, Kylie lay in Darren’s bed and clicked her shellacked nails together in an anxious tic.

  “You want a drink or something?”

  “No, I’m fine, thanks anyway Darren.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you read books, then?” She pointed at the shelf where some tattered copies of old schoolbooks obscured a punched hole in the wall.

  “Um, I used to. I liked those old Greek legends, about the gods and stuff. They were always fighting, you know. Rooting and getting into trouble.” He laughed self-consciously. He’d loved to read as a kid, but reading and heterosexuality were mutually exclusive, according to the masculine culture of the time.

  “Is that you?”

  She pointed at a faded poster on the wall. Nineteen-year-old Darren was taking a massive mark, having climbed a step ladder of three colliding bodies to reach the Sherrin.

  “Yeah. I was just about to be picked for the VFL draft back then.”

  “What happened?”

  He feigned an indifferent shrug. “Went drinking one night, played up. Got a month in Pentridge prison out of it.”

  “Beau,” she said. One word, as if that was the explanation for anything.

  He sat on the end of the bed, and felt the old snags on his ribs, that disappointment in himself.

  “Yeah. Big B took me out that night. I told him I had training but he leaned on me and I had to go. Fuck, I was stupid. I should have told him no.”

  “Nobody says no to him.”

  “I guess not.”

  Kylie drew the doona up to her chin.

  “I never knew what evil was until I met Beaufort Kinsey.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. A dickhead maybe, but wasn’t exactly Charles Manson.”

  Kylie only shook her head. “You don’t know the half of it. The things he said, the stuff he’s done. He’s killed people.”

  “Ah, I don’t know.”

  “It’s true. The Trafalgar Highway serial killer . . . ”

  “Now come on,” Darren interrupted her. “James Duncan admitted to that.”

  “I went to school with James,” Kylie sighed. “James knew nothing about skinning and slicing up bodies like they were pigs in a slaughterhouse. He couldn’t lift a dead weight like those poor people they found. Reckon Beau just pinned it on James afterwards to teach me a lesson.”

  As Kylie spoke, Darren’s vertebrae unhinged themselves from his spine and crawled in a millipedes shuffle. Maybe all the beatings had sent Kylie Kinsey loopy. All of a sudden he didn’t want her in his bed anymore, telling her nightmare stories about Beaufort.

  “Nikky,” she continued, “He got Beaufort’s guernsey, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “The night his wife and kids got beat up, it was Nikky that called me.”

  “I thought you said it was a prank call.”

  “It was him. His hotel number came up when I Googled it.”

  Darren was confused. “But you two don’t know each other. Why would he stalk a woman he doesn’t know?”

  She set her jaw, and her droopy eye became flinty, as if the injury had made her see things that were not really there.

  “He knew me as soon as my husband’s guernsey number went on his back. He was coming for me, Darren. He’ll come for you too now.”

  “Not in prison he won’t.”

  “I’m not talking about Nicholas. It’s Beau. We made him crazy mad and now he won’t rest. Each time someone puts on that guernsey, he keeps coming through stronger and stronger.”

  Her words frightened Darren. She had completely lost it. Fortunately Kylie didn’t want to stay in Darren’s bed, not when Beau’s face peered at her from team photographs on the wall. She made her apologies and got dresse
d, and the dress which had looked so stunning four hours earlier seemed to hitch and snag on her bony frame in all sorts of unflattering angles, and her pink-coloured lips were oddly shaped from the dermal filler shit all the young women used these days.

  “I’m not staying in Trafalgar,” Kylie said as she walked out the door to the waiting taxi. “Too many people knew him here. He’s infected them all.”

  * * *

  Several things happened at once after that.

  Nikky’s wife woke up from her coma, and described a stranger with her husband’s face. All the bruises and her defensive marks were on the right hand side of her body, landed by a lefty with a powerful hook. Nikky was right-handed.

  Beau’s left fist had been a thing of might and terror.

  The Trafalgar Highway serial killer case re-opened on appeal from James Duncan’s lawyers, his family and on anonymous information received. On the Crime Stoppers adverts an appeal was made to the woman who had made the untraceable call. She knew details that were not public. She might know who really committed the crimes.

  Then Finnegan Torch died after a police raid on his abattoir, a suicide by jumping into his own carcass skinner. He left a rambling note explaining how his company was tainted with false accusations, how his equipment had never been used for anything untoward. Shaved bits of garment identified as a football guernsey were found clogging up the machine’s internals. Rumours said that Torch had been sleeping with it.

  Chris Fowler’s cancer killed him within the month. “The only person who ever defeated such an aggressive tumour was Beau Kinsey,” said one of Fowler’s team-mates during the funeral eulogy. “He’s got his name in medical books.”

  When the time came to pass on the number ninety-two, nobody would wear it.

  “That number’s fucking cursed,” Southie Harris yelled out during the Annual General Meeting, and a chorus of yeses followed him like demented echoes.

  “Well, what do you want us to do?” Darren said. “Burn the fucking thing in effigy and we all dance around it like ding-dong the wicked witch?”