Through the tiny gap, Kit could see the bath set into a long bench that ran the length of the right-hand wall. Behind the man’s head, bottles of shampoo and cleaning fluids had been knocked aside to make room for the old-fashioned one-bar radiator that glowed red. Adrian Adams was sitting up in the bath, rocking back and forth, and in front of him, with his back to Kit, was the small boy. Kit drew back, alerted by a sudden stealthy movement from the two State Protection officers near the bottom of the steps.
They were speaking with a third who was indicating something inside the bathroom, probably the position of the powerboard, thought Kit, and pointing to the external wall.
‘Let’s make a contract, Adrian,’ Kit said. ‘Let’s find a way together to make this situation turn out well. You tell me why you’re doing this—what you want—and we’ll sort it out.’ Adrian had stopped rocking while she spoke, and was staring straight at her without seeing her, his eyes black with demons.
‘I want to come and live with you,’ he said. He started rocking again. ‘I want to be with you. I want to move in with you so that you can help me. You’re the only one who really listened to me. If I lived with you, I’d be able to make things work.’
Kit took a deep breath. It was a common enough fantasy among some clients.
‘Adrian, we can talk about how to make things work if you come out of there,’ said Kit. ‘But we can’t do it here, with you under all this pressure and me stuck out here. And it puts me under pressure, too.’
He stopped rocking and reached a hand behind him to the heater’s reflective shield so that steam hissed. ‘How do I know,’ said Adrian, ‘that you’re not just saying these things, and then the minute I come out the pigs’ll jump me and beat me to a pulp?’
Kit felt a jab in her back. She turned to find Angie shoving her notebook at her. Kit grabbed it and read ‘Promise him anything’. ‘Anything’ had been underlined three times.
‘I’ll come in, if you’ll let me,’ said Kit, ‘and we’ll go out together. I’ll go with you while we sort this out.’
‘That bitch will tell the cops I tried to kill her.’ The baby seemed to understand the reference to his mother and started wailing; Kit could see the red flush moving round his narrow neck and upper shoulders. The yelling grew louder.
‘Adrian, you’ll have to trust me,’ said Kit, already feeling like Judas. But the child’s growing level of distress and Adrian’s resumed rocking created its own compulsion. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘We can work something out, even with the baby’s mother. We can get a counsellor. Lawyers. You don’t have to be alone in this.’ The little boy’s wailing reached a sobbing crescendo.
‘Make this kid shut up!’ Adrian yelled. ‘It’s driving me crazy!’
Behind her, the two SPG officers had mounted the stairs. ‘Adrian,’ Kit said, ‘put the radiator down off that surface. I can sense that you’re feeling a lot of pressure. I am, too. We can fix this muddle, you know we can.’
Adrian rocked faster and faster, hands over his ears. The child was becoming hysterical, coughing and choking on his own distress, jerking tiny fists about in anguish. Adrian had started screaming, too. ‘Shutup, shutup, shutup!’ and his violent yelling terrified the little child even more. Please, Kit prayed. Give me the wisdom to know what to do.
‘Let me in and I can stop the baby’s crying,’ she yelled over the noise. ‘Turn the radiator off and let me in. I can help you, Adrian.’
What happened next was like a weird, slow-motion series of violent actions in which her role seemed dreamlike and disembodied. She’d remembered Alexander’s counsel and had been automatically watching Adrian’s hands, so she saw the very beginning of the movement, heard herself hiss to Angie, ‘He’s going for the radiator!’ Almost while she was saying the words, she heard Angie yell something behind her, felt herself knocked to the ground. The door suddenly crashed inwards onto the bathroom floor and GP boots raced past bare inches from her nose. Shots rang out, louvres shattered, the baby’s crying changed to a shriek, Adrian’s voice pierced the air with obscenities, she saw Angie dive past her and into the bathroom, while Kit herself rolled to one side instinctively as the powerboard, ripped from the inside wall, smashed outside through the louvres. ‘Jesus you fucking bitch! You conned me! You bitch!’ Adrian Adams’ crazed face screamed down at her as she huddled on the floor. He was rushed bodily past her, naked and dripping, his one arm twisted cruelly up behind his neck, the other in a wrist lock. ‘I’ll kill you for this,’ his voice continued from around the side. ‘You’ll die!’ She heard the sickening sound of a heavy punch on a wet body and the curdled scream of her erstwhile client. Angie ran out holding the shrieking little boy wrapped in a towel. From nowhere came his mother, now permitted on the scene, a thin young girl who broke away from the policewoman attending her. ‘Give me my baby!’ she sobbed, pushing Angie out of the way, grabbing the terrified child. ‘That bastard! I’ll kill him for this!’ she screamed. Kit covered her face with her hands. She felt Angie’s hand on her shoulder and slowly started to get up. But her legs were like jelly and she suddenly sat down again. ‘Thank God,’ was all she could say. ‘Thank God.’
•
Later, Angie drove her to Gemma’s place at Tamarama and came inside with her. ‘You’ll need to make a statement,’ Angie said. ‘But not now. Let your sister look after you a bit. I’ve got to get straight back.’
‘It was awful, Gems,’ she told her sister as they sat on the deck, having a stiff Scotch. ‘I just didn’t know what to do. I’ve reached that place in the therapy room quite often with a client and that’s usually a good place to reach, but this was different. That little baby in the bath—poor crazed Adrian—the radiator. There was no room for a mistake. And yet there was no way to make it all right, either. I had to betray him.’
Gerald drove over and picked her up. When they got home, Kit had to ring and explain what had happened to a furious client who’d waited in vain for an hour. For the moment, the anguish over Will was pushed to one side.
Gerald cooked dinner for her, a touching gesture, Kit knew, even though the fish was overcooked into tasteless rubber and the events of the day had deprived her of appetite anyway. While she was spreading her fish fillet with tartare sauce, the phone rang. She and Gerald looked at each other, both remained sitting, waiting for the answering machine.
‘Hullo, Kit. It’s Angie McDonald.’ Kit picked up the phone. ‘Are you okay?’ Angie wanted to know.
‘I’m still rattled,’ said Kit. ‘But I’m eating something.’
Angie paused as if not quite sure how to manage the next stage of the conversation.
‘I take it this is not only a social call,’ said Kit, her intuition on overdrive.
‘You’re dead right,’ said the other woman. ‘I want you to come and see something. But I want you to bring Gemma with you when you do.’
‘What is it?’ Kit asked, alarmed.
‘Adrian Adams’ flat,’ she said. ‘You feature rather largely in it.’
Kit recalled what the disturbed young man had said earlier in the day. ‘I want to come and live with you,’ he’d said. ‘I want to be with you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ll pick you up in the morning,’ said Angie. ‘All will be revealed.’
•
The three women stepped into the flat, opened by Angie. The first thing Kit saw was a huge photograph of herself in rubber gloves, washing up, taken from somewhere outside her kitchen window, which faced the garden and the smaller of the streets flanking their corner block. The photo had a grainy quality to it, like a still from a European black and white movie. She frowned. ‘But I’ve never had that picture taken,’ she said stupidly. Then she looked around. Pictures of her covered the walls. She was depicted in almost every conceivable human activity: crossing roads with shopping bags, getting into or out
of her car, hanging out her washing, gardening, walking in the street, eating at a restaurant with Gerald, talking to clients. There was even a misty long shot of herself in her underwear, in the bedroom, with the outline of Gerald behind her. Kit felt horrified, violated, frightened and bewildered.
From somewhere, she heard her sister say, ‘Oh shit! What an arsehole. What a loony.’
‘Adrian Adams is a photographer,’ said Angie, ‘among other things. And you seem to be his favourite subject.’
‘But I had no idea,’ said Kit, looking around at the images of herself, most in black and white, some in colour. By some filmic contrivance, he’d conjured a picture of the two of them, hand in hand, with Kit seemingly looking lovingly up into Adrian’s gaunt face.
‘He’s used long-range cameras, Kit.’ Gemma studied them, moving from one to another. ‘He must have followed you all the time, watched you.’
‘But I had no idea,’ Kit repeated.
Worse was to come in the bedroom. On the wall opposite the unmade bed was a huge pornographic image with Kit’s smiling face superimposed on another woman’s body, spreading legs and pubic folds, posed for Adrian Adams’ gaze. Angie opened and closed drawers, pulled clothes out of cupboards, finding more boxes and more images of Kit.
‘God,’ said Kit sitting down. ‘He asked me for a photo of myself and I declined. Ours was not a social relationship, I told him. I thought he understood.’ On the bedside table she noticed a small gold bangle, hers, that had inexplicably disappeared as things invariably do when people are living with an addict.
‘There’s my gold bangle,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t Will after all.’ She picked it up and slipped it back over her wrist.
‘What a sick rabbit,’ said Gemma, ripping the huge poster from the wall. ‘How dare he do this to you.’ She tore the picture into strips and bits of breasts and genitals, twice the size of life, littered the floral carpet. ‘In spite of all this,’ she said, pointing at all the images of her sister, ‘there’s no feeling of this place being lived in. It’s like a gallery.’
In the living room cupboards they found more boxes containing photos of Kit, some of them duplicates, printed in different tones of contrast. Kit seized up one of the photos and stared at it. ‘That’s weird,’ she said.
‘What is?’ asked Angie.
‘That jacket I’m wearing,’ she said. ‘It’s one of Will’s.’
‘So?’ asked Gemma.
‘He was wearing it the day he left home. I will never forget that day.’ She paused a moment to let the painful memory subside. ‘Adrian Adams started seeing me after Will left.’
The three women looked at each other as the implication sank in. ‘I would never have taken him on if I’d known about this,’ said Kit. ‘This really is most disquieting.’
Gemma laughed, despite the situation. ‘Caboodle,’ she said, the rarely used childhood nickname taking Kit by surprise, ‘sometimes you sound like such a therapist. “Disquieting.” I’ve never heard a human say that word in my life, only read it in books.’
In one of the boxes, they found the original pornographic nude study that had been the basis for the huge image of Kit in Adrian Adams’ bedroom, and many smaller prints of it. Kit grabbed as many of them as she could find and tore them up, then she flushed them down the toilet.
‘He seemed gay to me,’ said Angie eventually.
‘He wasn’t sure,’ said Kit. ‘About a lot of things. We were just starting to look at the invasiveness of his mother.’
‘Sure of one thing, though,’ said Gemma. ‘His bloody obsession with you.’ The three of them stood in silence surrounded by grotesque images of Kit.
‘I want to get out of here,’ Kit said, hurrying back to the door. Gemma and Angie followed her out, Angie locking the door behind them and following as they went down the staircase to the ground floor.
‘What will happen with all that?’ Kit indicated the flat behind them as they walked through the ground floor foyer.
‘It’s his property,’ said Angie. ‘I guess his relatives will clean out the place. He’s not going to be living here for a while.’ After the claustrophobic black and white images upstairs, it was a relief to walk outside into the clean sunshine and coloured brightness of the blowy October day.
‘I showed you this,’ said Angie, ‘so’s you’d know. It didn’t seem right somehow that you didn’t know about it.’
On the way home, Kit wished she didn’t know.
One
1998
Gemma woke, bewildered, because the grey dawn light was coming from the wrong side. Then she remembered she wasn’t at home. She lay there for a moment listening to the early morning sounds; the lifts clunking, the hotel’s plumbing, the hum of the air-conditioner.
The digital clock showed 5.12 am, and above it on the veneer and particle board console stood the empty champagne bottle and the two glasses. He’d gone very early as he said he would and she was hung-over and feeling guilty about Steve. He was the reason she never used her place when she picked someone up. Even though Steve was away on a job and didn’t live with her anyway, she didn’t want a stranger at her place, another man in the bed she shared with Steve.
She was wide awake now and swung out to have a bath. Through the door to the lounge room of the suite, she caught a glimpse of her clothes lying on the floor where she’d undressed last night, oddly neat considering how fast they’d come off. She was about to take a closer look when she caught sight of herself in the bedroom mirror and stopped, frowning. Too much tummy, she thought. Too much champagne and not enough exercise these days. Too much sitting in nondescript vehicles with tinted windows and the laptop on her knees. The rest of her body was okay, she thought, posing in front of the mirror, pursing her face in the silly look that she and Kit used to assume centuries ago when they were kids playing dress-ups.
While the bath was running, she sat naked on the bed and looked through her diary. An appointment with Mrs Rose Georgiou at nine, then a few calls to make to the insurance companies who comprised the bulk of her work. She’d been working to build up ‘Mandate’, the latest addition to her operation. For a fee, Gemma could offer suspicious women certain information about any man they might be interested in, particularly if all they’d been given was his mobile telephone number. It cost the woman less than a hundred dollars, and for that, Gemma could establish that the man in question actually was who he said he was, that he lived and worked where he said he did, whether or not he owned property in common with a woman who shared the same surname, and whether he had a major criminal record. These searches could be done by anyone, but Gemma could complete them in twenty-four hours instead of the days it might take an unpractised person. And all client contact could be done over the phone by credit card, if the woman so chose. No need for any embarrassment. If they wanted to discover more about the man in their sights, surveillance was the next step; this didn’t come cheap. Cheating spouses created income for her business as well.
It was a tiny white bathroom without a fan, and she left the door ajar to let steam out, lowering herself into the dinky little bath. She lathered up between her legs, using her pubic mound as a soaping pad, washing away last night’s man.
Every now and then, she had to do it; an agitating restlessness drove her to go to some den of iniquity as Kit called the clubs she infrequently attended, get off her face on alcohol and speed, dance like crazy for a few hours and take some nameless man home with her to fuck till morning. In the morning, she’d wonder why she’d done it. She had much better sex with Stevie, who knew what he was doing, cared about her and knew what she liked. She knew well enough that going to bed drunk late at night, with a man who was also drunk, was not a sure-fire way to good sex. It’s just my feral streak, she’d say to her sister. It’s just for fun. But Kit would simply give her that steady look, sometimes shake her head. No, da
rling, she’d say. It’s not for fun. Not at all. Think about it.
As she rubbed the washer over her face and ears, the huge secret she was keeping from her sister loomed in her mind, refusing to be banished. She faced it fair and square. It was the biggest issue of her life, she felt. It dominated everything; it was like the sky she lived under. And she was keeping it from Kit, the first secret in nearly thirty-five years. Next week would be her thirty-fifth birthday, bringing the terrible anniversary with it; the death, the hopeless struggle of a slight woman against a big man armed with a hammer. Gemma refused to think about the thirty-year-old memory. Soon she’d tell Kit what she was doing and Kit, her wise and loving sister, would understand. But would she? Gemma put the soap back in its container and splashed warm water up and around her face and neck.
The bathroom door suddenly slammed shut with a terrific double bang and Gemma jumped in fright. She sat up in the bath, frozen in shock, her heart racing. Why had it happened? She grabbed a towel, wrapped it round her, stepped out of the bath and opened the door. She peeped round. Everything was still. The bedroom was just as she’d left it, tangled bedclothes, a pillow on the floor, the champagne bottle. She went to the doorway between the bedroom and the lounge area and looked over at the entrance door. It was firmly shut. She stood there a moment, not breathing. There was nowhere for anyone to hide in the lounge area. It felt empty. She went back to the bathroom and slid back into the hot water. But her mind wouldn’t leave the incident alone. Why had the bathroom door suddenly shut? Nothing happens without a reason. I’ve been out of the job for five years, she thought, and I’m even more suspicious now than I was when I was a cop. Maybe it was something to do with physics, or convection, explained in terms of hot and cold air and the creation of high and low pressure areas. She tried relaxing back into the water but the fright had unsettled her so she pulled the plug, stepped out and dried herself down. She couldn’t find her knickers anywhere and had to crawl underneath the bedcovers to retrieve her bra.
Feeding the Demons Page 2