Scarlet Stiletto - the First Cut

by Lindy Cameron

  Oh, yeah, and Elle MacPherson’s a brain surgeon.

  “No, true story.” He caught my expression. “The last night we saw her we lit a fire on the beach and sat around having a few bongs. Lissa was ravin’ on about some old Pommy guy, William Blake, about how important he was ...”

  “So, she did use drugs?”

  “Not hard stuff.” Dazza frowned. “Not cocaine.”

  “But someone might have talked her into ...”

  “I reckon we would have known if she’d started on it.” Wayne voice held a note of finality.

  I felt I was getting nowhere. “You were her friends. Isn’t there anyone else she was close to?”

  Dazza gave another of his shrugs. “She used to hang out at PAG.”

  We live in a world of acronyms and it’s impossible to know them all.

  “Porpoise Action Group,” said Chook. “The people who are against that beach development. Lissa was a bit of a greenie.”

  I remembered the tattoo on her breast; not a dolphin, after all.

  “Check out Rod Shannon.” Dazza fixed his eyes on the waves again and started moving off. “Lissa used to talk to him.”

  This was the second time Rod Shannon’s name had come up today. I thanked them and made my way across the sand, past the place where Melissa Dalton had died. There was a piece of crime scene tape sticking out of the sand, surrounded by some pretty shells and pebbles. I picked a few up and stuffed them in my pocket, as my mobile rang.

  “Vee, where are you, for Christ’s sake? You were meant to be interviewing Valmai Turner about the CWA embroidery exhibition an hour ago.”

  I figured Valmai could wait, gave Kevin some bullshit excuse and followed the directions Dazza had given me. The wind had freshened slightly; out on the water a number of fishing boats plied their trade. The PAG office was located, along with a number of other community groups, in a ramshackle weatherboard building not far from the beach. Rod Shannon was about thirty, with dark hair and a good-looking face marred by a rather sneering expression.

  “Yeah, Lissa used to come in here. She made that.” He indicated a silk screen poster of leaping porpoises. The colours were crude but the poster had a certain vitality.

  “It’s a pity she couldn’t have put her talents to better use.”

  “Ah, well,” he grinned. “Things weren’t going well on the farm so she came into town to hawk the fork.”

  What a charmer. What a prince. I gritted my teeth and persevered but he couldn’t tell me much except that Melissa had helped out with some PAG activities. I glanced around the room. Leaflets and posters proclaimed various environmental concerns and there were also a number of organisational charts and diagrams.

  “Is that the date the PAG meetings are held?” I asked, pointing.

  “What?” He followed my gaze then glanced at me sharply. “Oh, yeah, yeah ... we have them every month.”

  “You have them the night of each new moon. Is that something symbolic?”

  “Eh? Oh, yeah, yeah.”

  “I see. And you do a bit of surfing?” A sleek, tri-finned board stood propped in a corner.

  “Yeah,” he laughed. “Although it’s been gathering dust. Things are so hectic—with everything that arsehole McCulloch’s trying to do—I haven’t had the time.”

  “Did you ever go surfing with Melissa?”

  “No.” He gave me another surprised look. “Did she surf?”

  I left his office feeling annoyed and perplexed. Why had he denied knowing about Melissa’s favourite pastime? His evasiveness only strengthened my desire to find out about her death. Something stank around here and it wasn’t just the seaweed drying in the sun.

  That night I had the dream again but, unlike all the other times, the woman held up her arms and seemed to beckon me forward. The wind whipped her long black hair around her but when I got close, her features dissolved and the water pulled her from my grasp. I startled out of my sleep, sweating; the clock read 4.10. I went into the kitchen, made myself a cup of herbal tea and tried to put all the puzzle’s pieces together. They all had something to do with the ocean—and with surfing. Perhaps a long walk by the sea was the place to work all this out. I started feeling drowsy; a woman’s face appeared briefly behind my eyelids as I dozed off, but I couldn’t tell who she was.

  The sea was jade-green and as flat as a dinner plate. Huge limpid clouds stretched out across the sky, looking like the lost continents found on antiquarian maps and, at the horizon, a smudged cobalt line delineated ocean from air. The wind would be at work out there, pushing the water up or flattening it down and, miles below, currents of warm water collided with currents of cold water to create the tension that broke the ocean’s skin and came rolling in as tier after tier of white-cresting foam. The waves carried secrets, the unwanted cargo of ships and lives, which were tossed up on the beach or buried beneath the shifting dunes. Years might go past before a heavy storm stripped back the sand to reveal shards of rusted metal or the smooth-polished wood of ships’ ribs.

  There were stories in the district of women walking on the beach last century, lifting dragging skirts as they waded towards the flotsam and jetsam of wrecks, but today there was only the sun shining benignly and a cormorant dipping its neck for food. It almost looked pleasant. I felt the breeze blow away the tension clustered in my temples and at the base of my skull as I walked, but I still couldn’t see the answer to the puzzle. A dead prostitute who read William Blake; greenies who held their meetings on the night of the new moon: all these things rolled around my mind like the stones and shells rolling about on the sand. I stood looking out to the ocean’s dark secret places and at the boats on the horizon. The boats on the horizon. Suddenly, as I gazed at the boats, all the pieces clicked into place and I knew why Melissa Dalton had died.

  I was hungry so I went to the Chinese restaurant, which is Kololoroit’s only ‘ethnic’ eatery. I’ve nothing against the Chinese although my father always speaks about them guardedly: ‘They’ve been in my country for 1000 years and we’ve been friends for 100.’ Excellent noodles. After I’d eaten I went back to the office, braved Kevin’s wrath and made some phone calls. I had a trap to set.

  He was waiting for me on the beach that night, with the water as still as black ice and the stars gleaming coldly above.

  “You dropped this.” I held up the small piece of quartz. “I found it down here yesterday.”

  Peter McCulloch was no longer dressed in a suit or his may-oral robes. He wore jeans, a windcheater and an expression of extreme dislike.

  “I used to go with girls like you in ‘Nam, you slant-eyed cunt. One of you miserable whores gave me gonorrhoea, which I passed onto my wife when I came home. It made her infertile. We couldn’t have kids.”

  “You don’t like women much, do you?” I said. “Is that why you killed Melissa?”

  “The greedy little bitch wouldn’t have kept her mouth shut! She kept asking for more and more money.”

  I remembered the Italian designer clothes. “She found out about the cocaine smuggling, didn’t she? She was out surfing one night and she saw Rod Shannon bringing it in. It was very convenient to have the development project acting as a smokescreen so the two of you could carry on your little business undetected.”

  He gave a short laugh. “You’re more than a nice pair of tits, Vee. How did you work it out?”

  “Your wall planners. They had identical dates circled. It was stupid and arrogant of you both to have them displayed. When I asked Rod Shannon about his he got flustered and told me the circled dates were PAG meetings, but when I checked with another member of the group, I was told a different story. And the stuff about the new moon—which I thought was hippie, tangential bullshit—made it just that much easier for him to go out on his board and collect the drugs. But he didn’t count on Melissa’s starlight safari. That’s why he told me he didn’t know she surfed.”

  “You’ll never prove it,” Peter McCulloch grinned.

  “
Oh, I already have. The fixation Melissa had with William Blake—when I checked with the harbour authority I found there’s only one boat whose visits coincided with those dates— the Tyger. The captain got taken into custody this afternoon and I believe he’s singing like the proverbial canary. You’re in deep shit, McCulloch.”

  “And you’re going to be in deep water, bitch,” he said, advancing across the sand. I hadn’t been thinking. I’d let myself get between him and the ocean.

  “It’s going to be so easy to hold you under for a few minutes.”

  “This is stupid!” but I knew that whatever I said wouldn’t help. I recognised an ego out of control, a maniac whose plans had gone wrong. I screamed as his hands closed around my throat. I struggled, but he was stronger. As he pushed me down I had a brief vision of a woman staring lifelessly up at me. I couldn’t breathe, things started to go black and I felt the water close over my head.

  I couldn’t swim, of course. I had hysterics when they put me in the pool in primary school, so I was glad I’d strategically posted Kevin—and his best mate, the local copper—behind the dunes. I didn’t like relying on men so much but they proved more useful than a pair of water wings. When they pulled me from the sea I was cold and choking. Kevin put his coat around me then took me home while the cop took Peter McCulloch somewhere else.

  “You sure you’ll be all right?” Kevin asked anxiously.

  “Yes,” I replied and, strangely, after I’d eaten and had a shower, I was.

  It was as though being forced into the ocean had removed some old and heavy weight. That night I slept deeply and dream-lessly and in the morning I phoned my mother.

  “Mum,” I asked, “what really happened on the boat out to Australia?”

  There was a long silence on the other end.

  “If you really want to know that,” she said at last, “you’ll have to come home.”

  So I drove home through the green rolling plains until I reached that peculiar no-man’s land of warehouses and oil refineries outside the western suburbs, where nothing grows, nothing survives, except a few scrubby trees sucking at the grime When I got to my parents’ neat brick bungalow in Footscray, my mother told me.

  It had been a long voyage from Vietnam, three nights and two days with no food and very little water. On the morning of the third day the boat had been attacked by Thai pirates. They’d swarmed on board, killing some of the men; then they’d started on the women. My mother had been heavily pregnant with my younger brother. That’s why they’d spared her. Others weren’t so lucky.

  “There was one girl,” my mother said. “She was only about nineteen. She had a young baby. She was raped three time before she jumped overboard. I tried to stop you watching but that’s what you saw, that young girl drowning. You were only three, I hoped you wouldn’t remember ...” Tears rolled down her face as she spoke, and I knew she’d never talked to anyone about this.

  “I tried to stop you watching, but ...” We held each other and cried.

  “Yes,” I said, when I could speak. “I’ve always liked to know what’s going on.”

  Two months later I stood on the sand where I had almost died and watched the big gold disc of the rising sun gild the water. It hadn’t yet warmed the air but I had my wetsuit on; I had my almost-new board under my arm. I’d been learning for a month and was already improving. “You’re a natural, girl,” Dazza had said recently. I’m not a very religious person but as I paddled out to meet the first wave I said a prayer for Melissa and hoped she’d be happy to see me there because, when you overcome your deepest fear, a whole new world can open up to you.

  I didn’t know whether I’d be staying in Kololoroit. I’d already had two job offers from larger papers. Perhaps I’d choose the one that had a beach nearby. Anyway, after all that had happened there didn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for the development project going ahead. As I felt the surge of the water beneath me and stood to embrace its power I saw, far across the ocean, the grey arcs of porpoises leaping and rising, leaping and rising, against the waves.

  Janis Spehr

  First Prize Trophy, 2000

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Luisa

  I lost touch with Louise after we left school. Yes, I know I should call her Luisa, but I still think of her as Louise. No, I never asked about the new name. It didn’t seem polite, like bringing up some awfully embarrassing thing that someone did when they were twelve. Anyway, she did Arts at Sydney Uni and I was going out to Lidcombe every day for the physio course, and we just never saw each other. When I met her again she was Luisa.

  It was at Jacquie and Belinda’s party. I’d actually met Jacquie as a patient. Lateral ligament, left ankle, quite a nasty sprain. It’s a classic netball injury but in her case it was line dancing. I’d never even heard of line dancing then, can you believe it? Well, I’d led a pretty sheltered life. The physio course was pretty demanding, and then when you graduated it was all shift work and long hours and you tended to socialise only with other physios. That’s how I met Mark, of course. Physios are very nice people but I suppose Jacquie would say we’re a bit straight. Certainly, we seemed to live in a different world from her and Belinda.

  I don’t usually socialise with patients, but Jacquie was lovely and it turned out that she and her friend Belinda lived just around the corner. And the ankle had healed up beautifully, so she wasn’t an ongoing case or anything. Besides, most of a physio’s patients are about ninety. People tend to think we spend our days treating football players for groin injuries and massaging Olympic swimmers, and so on, but in fact it’s mostly strokes, rheumatoid arthritis, and post surgical. So Jacquie made a nice change. She used to giggle if it hurt and tell me funny stories about her job and her flatmate, and so on. Which certainly made a change.

  So I said yes, we’d love to come, although I was a bit doubtful about how Mark would take it, going to a party with a bunch of people we didn’t know. But in the end he had a marvellous time, even though ... well ... I know I should have twigged after all the stories Jacquie had told me about Belinda this and Belinda that and the things they did together, trekking in Nepal and backpacking in Europe, and all the rest of it. But as I said, I do lead a fairly conventional life and it really wasn’t until we got to the party and they were standing there arm in arm that I realised.

  I mean, it’s not like I’d never met a gay person or anything. Now I come to think of it, I’m sure a couple of the girls in my year were lesbians. But you didn’t talk about that sort of thing, so I suppose it never occurred to me. I don’t really see why it should be such a big thing; I mean, you’re there to do a job and what you do in your own time is your own business, isn’t it?

  Anyway, Mark took it all in his stride. He kissed them both on the hand and turned on the smile and in about two seconds they were running around finding him a glass of champagne and taking his new distressed leather jacket off to the coat heap in the bedroom and introducing him to people left, right and centre.

  I turned around, and there was Louise. Of course, she’d changed a lot. When we were at school she had long bunches of fat white ringlets and lots of pimples. Now she was very tanned and athletic-looking, and she had a sophisticated cropped haircut and one of those short slim little dresses that just yelled at you that here was a girl who grew up on the North Shore and whose daddy gave her a monthly clothing allowance.

  “Jane,” she said to me. “What a surprise. Have you got a drink?”

  So she got me a drink and we caught up on what had happened to us. For me, of course, it was pretty simple; physio, six months working in London, back here to marry Mark and a job at the Prince of Wales. For her, as you might have expected, there was rather more to tell, and I must confess that I never really did get the whole story straight. The arts degree, yes, but the sailing in the Med with Jean Paul and skiing at Val d’Isere with Claudio and the study exchange in Padua and the part-time job in Seville ... it all got a bit complicated. Anywa
y, she said she was a freelance writer, which confirmed my suspicion that her daddy was paying her an allowance, and she lived in the flat next door and knew Jacquie and Belinda from a publishing party. Most of the people at this party were in publishing or writing, because Jacquie is an editor at a big publishing house and Belinda tutors in creative writing, so of course most of their friends are writers and such.

  Well, after we’d got through all that, she looked over my shoulder and asked me to introduce her to Mark because she was really looking forward to talking to someone who wasn’t a friend of Dorothy’s for a change. I didn’t know Dorothy, either, and I was going to say so. But Louise was the sort of woman who, when she said ‘someone’, you knew that other women didn’t count.

  So I took her over to Mark and she held out her hand and said, “Hi, I’m Luisa.” That was the first I heard of this ‘Luisa’ business, and I was going to ask, but just then Jacquie came bouncing up and dragged me off to look at the knee of a friend who’d fallen off his high heels. And the friend’s knee turned out to be perfectly all right; he just wanted a photo of himself in drag having his leg massaged. So we had a lot of champagne, and he and his friend kept taking photos of people doing outrageous things, which made them do even more outrageous things, and the next time I looked at my watch it was half-past one and we had to go.