Vodka Doesn't Freeze

by Leah Giarratano

  She watched Honey register where she was and crumple back into the chair.

  'Just don't fucking touch me,' she said quietly now, her voice almost dead again, but with a tear sliding through the make-up on her face. 'I have to be wasted before anyone can touch me. Speaking of which,' Honey wiped her manicured finger down the trail made by the solitary tear, 'are we done here? I've got to go score.'

  Jill couldn't get Honey out of her mind for the rest of the day. She followed up with the hospital and collected all the information she could, but there was little to go on, and she doubted they were going to get these guys. They'd worn condoms, according to Honey, and had pocketed them before they left. It sounded to Jill like they'd done it before, and that the crime had been planned, rather than opportunistic.

  She didn't feel she could send the mental health team around to Honey's home after she'd been so insistent she be left alone, but she also didn't want to just leave her like that, without any help. She decided to go to Honey's house and make sure she was okay. Leaving Scotty to do some paper-work for a South Maroubra break-and-enter, she made her way over to the address Honey had given her that morning.

  Honey had a bed-sit in a large housing commission block at Malabar. This beachside suburb, home of Long Bay Gaol, also housed an uncomfortable mix of long-term public housing tenants, pensioners and retirees. A handful of new millionaires had built self-conscious mansions on blocks left to them by their parents. Waterfront was waterfront in Sydney, even when the suburb had one of the highest break-and-enter rates in the state.

  Jill jogged up three flights of graffitied stairs, her hand over her mouth to block the piss-stench that permeated everything. A woman cursed in a singsong heroin whine. She heard a door slam, and a child crying. From behind a screenless window, a radio played J.J. Cale's 'Cocaine'. She'd be using that too if she had to live here.

  She reached Honey's door and knocked. Nothing. She tried again. There was no-one home. Jill felt guiltily relieved. She had turned to leave when the door opened on a chain.

  'Yeah?' the flat voice was also slurred now. This was a bad idea.

  'Honey. It's Jillian Jackson. I just came to make sure you're all right.' The room beyond the crack in the door was dark and smoky.

  The door shut and then reopened. Honey stepped back and stood there. Jill was supposed to go in.

  The two rooms that made up the entire unit were visible from the entry. The kitchen, laundry and sitting area were all part of one room, and Jill could see the tiny bedroom, with a double bed draped in a purple spread. Dark curtains covered the only window in the sitting room. The place smelled of stale smoke, but the surfaces looked pretty clean.

  She swallowed and walked past Honey into the flat and waited for her eyes to adjust so she could look around.

  'I'm not going to pretend I'm here with good news, Honey,' she started, watching the tall woman walk towards a Formica dining setting that took up most of the room. She perched on a chair at the table opposite Honey. 'It's going to be hard to catch these guys unless we get lucky or you remember something else.'

  'Oh I never get lucky, Jill,' Honey took a drag of her cigarette, 'and they never get caught.'

  Her hair in a ponytail, and the lolly-green contacts removed, Honey looked more like a fourteen-year-old school-girl than the pimped-out prostitute who'd come to the station today. Jill could see she was stoned, but she seemed calmer than that morning, and her speech was slow.

  'It sounds like you've had it pretty hard,' said Jill cautiously, wondering what she was doing here, why she was inviting this woman to tell her a story she wasn't going to want to hear. She didn't need this right now.

  God, it's hot in here, she thought.

  Honey laughed flatly and leaned back in her chair, an appraising look on her face.

  'You know I never asked you to come here, Sergeant Jackson,' she said, 'and I don't need your help.' She took another drag of her cigarette. 'So what do you want from me? Last cop in here got a blow job. The two before him wanted me to rat out the speed dealers in 31A. So what's your thing?'

  Jill felt stupid. Her head had started to thump again and the smoke was making her throat dry. She realised she hadn't eaten anything since a banana at breakfast.

  'Look, I'm sorry, Honey. You just looked really bad this morning and I wanted to make sure you hadn't done something silly. I knew if I sent mental health over here, you'd freak out, so I came myself. I'll get out of your way now. I'm glad you're okay.' She stood to go, hoping Honey would stand too and let her out.

  Instead, Honey stayed seated. Her head on a slight angle, her eyes showed she was still obviously weighing Jill up. 'Can I get you a coffee?' she asked, finally.

  'Water. Water would be great,' said Jill, sitting again, 'and do you have any Panadol?'

  12

  OVER THE NEXT TWO HOURS, Jill learned that Honey had run away from home twice by the age of ten. The second time she'd left, her mother had not even tried to find her, furious that her latest boyfriend spent more time watching Honey than her.

  Watching Honey's every move was not the only thing her stepfather had done, though. At least three nights a week, he would stumble, drunk, into Honey's bedroom and perform oral sex on the frightened little boy. The other four days of the week, apparently cleansing himself of feelings of shame, the man would subject Honey to beatings and verbal abuse. When the nighttime visits escalated to sodomy, Honey fled, living in a park with other children who felt safer sleeping under a bridge than in their own beds.

  One wet and freezing Sydney winter's night, Honey was huddled in the dirty stairwell of a supermarket, eating a barbecue chicken pilfered from a fat shopper's trolley. Her new friend Mia, a beautiful Vietnamese girl who looked around Honey's age but was actually fourteen, was sharing the meal. Honey had been wearing girl's clothes whenever she could for as long as she could remember and now that there was no one to interfere, her black hair was curling down almost to her shoulders. She knew that no one she met for the first time would think of her as anything other than the girl she believed she was.

  'What would you say if I said there was somewhere we could stay tonight?' Mia had asked Honey, trying to wipe her chicken-greasy hands on the inside of her jeans so the stains wouldn't be so obvious. She glanced at Honey sideways from underneath her long, black fringe.

  'I'd say what the hell are we doing here?' Honey laughed. 'Let's go. Now!' And she'd dragged Mia up from the filthy stairs on which they sat. Honey told Jill that she could tell even then that Mia was scared of the place they were going, but she didn't really care. Nowhere was safe anyway, right?

  Mia and Honey had caught the train from Parramatta to Auburn and jumped down onto the tracks to avoid the ticket collectors. They'd scrambled up to the soggy street above the station platform and looked around. Kebab shops and amusement centres spilled coloured lights onto the wet roads, but the rain, and the dinner hour of 6 p.m., meant there were few people about.

  'Um, I think it's this way,' Mia had said, holding onto Honey's cold hand as they made their way through the darkening streets. The shops alternated with houses and unit blocks now, and Mia eventually stopped in front of a block of flats, pushing the hood back from her sweatshirt, revealing her dark eyes. 'Shit,' she muttered, 'I know it's one of these.'

  While they stood there shivering, a fat black car glided into the gutter in front of the units. A tall, skinny man with a scarred face and broken nose exited the front passenger's door. He threw them a hungry look, and opened the back door of the expensive car. Mia pulled at Honey's hand.

  This was Honey's first sight of Mr Sebastian – a man in a dark suit. He stepped from the rear seat, pushing aside the thin man who was trying to offer him an umbrella. He smiled widely at Honey and Mia, his eyes on them from the moment the door had been cracked.

  'What are you children doing out here in the rain?' he had asked them, covering the ground between them alarmingly quickly. 'Are you lost?'

  Honey had expect
ed Mia to make a typical smartarsed reply to this stranger, and was taken aback by her head-bowed silence and the white knuckled grip of her hand.

  'Ah, I see it's little Mia,' he said when they didn't answer, 'and a friend. Lovely. Lovely,' he beamed, smiling down into Honey's face. 'I'm glad you've come to visit us, Mia,' he said, still looking at Honey. 'Let's get inside.'

  The man had placed his big hand in the small of Honey's back, and marched them forwards towards the unit block. Honey noted that she and Mia were suddenly flanked on three sides by the men who'd got out of the car.

  Although the apartment block was unprepossessing from the outside, the unit into which they were steered seemed amazing to Honey. The heavy front door opened into a wide room and Honey told Jill she'd later learned that the apartment had been rebuilt from the inside and took up the entire floor. Shiny white floors stretched towards several closed doors at the back of the large room. Huge potted palms filled the corners, and low leather lounges were wrapped around coffee tables and two huge television screens. A small boy in pyjamas was asleep on one of the lounges, sucking his thumb. Another boy, who looked about Honey's age, did not look up when the door opened, intent upon the joystick and video game in front of him. A white cat snaked out of a shining black kitchen and slinked around a corner before Honey could bend to pat her.

  Honey and Mia stayed at the apartment for three days, helping themselves to food from the walk-in pantry and huge refrigerator, watching TV, and playing video games with Ethan and Andrew, the two boys sharing the unit. Honey slept curled up on one of the lounges with Mia and the white cat, occasionally waking when men came and went at odd hours.

  On their second day at the unit, Mia had left with one of the men. She did not want to talk to Honey when she returned that evening, instead sitting with her knees under her chin, playing video games for hours.

  Honey didn't see Mr Sebastian again until the morning of their fourth day. She was sick of being inside and she and Mia had decided to go shoplifting for clothes at Westfield in Parramatta.

  She and Mia were trying to figure out how to open the front door of the unit when it was opened suddenly, sending her sprawling backwards. There hadn't even been a sound to indicate the heavy door was about to open. She looked up to see Mr Sebastian smiling down at her, offering her his big hand. The smile didn't reach his eyes.

  'Yougirls going somewhere, are you?' he asked, as Honey scrambled to her feet, ignoring his hand. Neither she nor Mia said a word.

  'I'm going to need you today, Honey, Mia, so I don't want you going anywhere you could get lost. I'm hosting a dinner party tonight, and I'll be requiring your assistance.'

  He walked past them into the kitchen, filling a glass with filtered water from the specially fitted tap on the granite benchtop. He spoke rapidly in another language to the hook-nosed man who'd entered the unit behind him, then turned back to the girls.

  'Jamaal has some clothes for you to wear tonight. You can try them on now, please.'

  Later that night Honey discovered the price of a warm place to sleep and food whenever she wanted it. Within a month or so she learned that being 'nice' to Mr Sebastian's friends also meant that she was given enough money to buy herself new clothes, jewellery and make-up. For the first month, although disgusted by the groping, fondling old men she was expected to kiss and cuddle, she'd thought that she could tolerate these weekly evenings for the exchange.

  One night, however, a flabby white man, older than most of the others, had tried to push his penis into her bottom. She had run from him into the small bathroom that was attached to the bedroom they were in. Crying, she'd locked the door and hoped the man would get tired of waiting and leave.

  Within ten minutes, she'd stopped crying and was plucking her eyebrows in the mirror when the door was kicked in. Mr Sebastian slammed the back of his hand across her mouth, splitting her lip and loosening her tooth. Jamaal picked her cowering body up from the floor and held out her arm. The thin man was smiling with stained teeth as he clenched his thumb and forefinger around her tiny bicep to restrict the blood flow. Flicking her arm a few times, Mr Sebastian then slid a thin needle into a vein in the crease inside her elbow. Both men stood back as she vomited into the bathtub, and then, her sobs subsiding, they led her back into the bedroom and left her with the old man on the bed. None of the men spoke or looked at one another.

  Honey spent the rest of the night in a dream-like state, and had been seeking that sensation ever since.

  13

  IN THE PRE-DAWN GLOOM, MERCY groped for her Ventolin, heart thumping, tasting bile. The sweat was drying on her skin, but her pillow was still damp. Another one. Another nightmare.

  She felt for a cigarette and put down the asthma inhaler. She saw her hands tremble in the flare of the lighter. As she dragged in smoke she felt her heart slow. Stupid really; she knew nicotine was a stimulant, told her patients that every day, but she felt her nerves settle slightly nevertheless.

  There was always so much blood; that was the problem. She'd have to find a way to do it without all the mess. Not for the first time, she pictured a huge gas chamber, herding them all in and letting them go to sleep in there.

  She took a final shuddering drag of her cigarette and stubbed it out. She closed her eyes and settled back into the pillows, though she knew sleep would not come again tonight.

  14

  UNTIL IT WAS RIGHT behind her, Jill didn't notice the patrol truck that combed the sand every morning at Maroubra Beach. The unshaven driver motioned to her from his cabin to move over. She must have been running up and down the sands for more than an hour now; she realised that it was almost completely light.

  Other features of the morning also began to register – she could hear seagulls fighting and playing, dive-bombing the waves. She saw some sandy adolescent surfers struggling, still half-asleep, into wetsuits, and an elderly Asian man was up near the pavilion, performing tai chi. She suddenly became aware that her thighs were trembling with exhaustion and she dropped onto the wet sand, her chest heaving.

  She sat there for a while as her breathing slowed, and looked down at her raw, peeling hands. After she'd left Honey's unit yesterday she'd gone back to her own and embarked on her most obsessive cleaning frenzy in years. She'd ignored her mum's calls through the speaker of her answering machine, and her door buzzer sounding twice. The white-eyed girl from her dreams was haunting her while she was awake now, and even kicking the bag until her lungs were burning didn't distract her from her memories of herself in the basement.

  Twice she'd gone to her large stainless steel refrigerator and rested her head against the cool exterior, her fingers on the freezer's handle.

  'Open it,' the white-eyed girl had called inside her head. 'Make it stop. Please.'

  Jill knew that if she'd opened the freezer at that point she would have remained standing there barefoot in her underwear until she'd drained the 750ml bottle of vodka that was hidden right at the back. The bottle had been unopened in her freezer for ten years, moving house with her three times. Her sister, Cassie, forced by their father to help her move once, had found the bottle and cracked the seal.

  'Well, the night's not a total loss, then,' she'd giggled, holding the bottle aloft, while with her other hand she'd removed a carton of grapefruit juice from the fridge. 'Who'd-a-thought you'd have vodka in the house, sis?' she said, kicking the fridge door shut with her foot.

  In one gliding move, Jill had removed the bottle from Cassie's hand, opened the freezer door and returned it, before her sister had even fully registered what was happening. Cassie had looked down at her empty hand.

  'Hey!' she'd sounded shaken. 'What was that? Don't do that karate shit on me.' She flicked her hair back from her face. 'God you're weird, Jill. If we're not allowed to drink in your temple, why do you keep that bottle here?'

  Jill couldn't explain it, but she knew that if she had one sip of the colourless liquid, her carefully maintained world would slide into the abyss. She wou
ldn't be able to stop herself a second time.

  Now, sitting in the foam at the edge of the ocean, Jill wiped her surf-wet hands across her face, tasting salt. She'd had little sleep, but she had a lot to do today and needed to get going. She stripped to her bikini and ignored the surfers' calls as she strode out into the waves, letting the fizzing water wake her fully.