by Nick Place
Laver adopted a pose: arms folded, an eyebrow raised, scowling.
Duncan pretended to listen to the phone again, then slumped back in his chair in relief. ‘It’s over! It’s all over! Apparently the cops had to call it off in case somebody collided with a lollipop lady at a school crossing or something.’
‘Oh hi, Rocket. Didn’t see you there,’ said Funnel.
‘Fucking hilarious,’ Laver told the room, gathering his wallet, keys, and other stuff small enough to carry on a mountain bike.
Playtime over, a couple of squad members wandered over to commiserate. Duncan even slung a big arm over Laver’s shoulder. ‘You’ll be right, mate. The inquiry will be a formality and you’ll be back, hating the job as much as ever.’
‘Maybe,’ Laver replied.
He finished packing. Simone, the department PA, appeared at his desk. ‘I’m really sorry, Rocket. But look at the bright side, you’ll have plenty of time to do your Christmas shopping.’
Laver stared at her, then decided she was serious; she was sincerely trying to lighten his mood. ‘Thanks, Simone. Pity a bike doesn’t have anywhere to carry the parcels, eh?’
She played with one of his now-defunct Major Crime business cards, lying near a coffee mug full of pens. ‘Well, I’ll miss you, anyway, Rocket. I hope you’re back here soon.’
Laver winked. ‘She’ll be right. Just don’t let the bastards give away my desk.’ He turned to the room. ‘I’ll see you bunch of low-life desk-bound no-hopers when I’ve got a better suntan.’
***
Jake slumped in his swivel chair. He was sure it could win some sort of prize for a lack of ergonomics if he ever got around to submitting it to the United Nations’ Physics Institute or whoever it was that was in charge of RSI and that sort of thing. He pondered whether they would hand out anti–Nobel Prizes for design.
The office was gloomy, a crooked but effective white blind warding off the bright sunshine from outside. Jake’s left leg was stretched and splayed to the front and side of his old oak desk. His right leg was bent underneath, twisting his hips so that his weight was balanced heavily on his right shoulder against the back of the ludicrously uncomfortable chair. An electric fan hummed and spun on top of the filing cabinet, listlessly shuffling the warm air around the tiny office.
Four small black-and-white TV monitors silently beamed out the findings of surveillance cameras placed unobtrusively around the supermarket’s entrance and aisles, flicking occasionally from one camera to another. One screen showed a young woman pushing a trolley past the ice-cream fridge; next it switched to an old lady with a set jaw scrutinising the fine print on the back of a can of baked beans; now to a mother trying desperately to control two rampant toddlers. She finally got a hand on both of them just as an even younger child, riding in the trolley basket, reached out and swiped three packets of cornflakes to the floor. In aisle five, a shoplifter may as well have been loading up a wheelbarrow for all the notice Jake was paying to security. Jake didn’t see a thing. He was staring at nothing in particular, his empty gaze landing somewhere about halfway across the blotter pad on his desk. The only movement came from his right hand, twisting and turning a ballpoint in clockwise and anti-clockwise circles.
She’d been there again this morning. Materialising at the end of his thirty-fourth lap, she’d still been swimming when he’d had to leave for work.
He couldn’t believe he had never seen her enter or leave the pool in all those weeks of admiring from afar. He never seemed to see her until those legs materialised in front of his goggles. Part of the problem was that she never arrived until at least 8 am, and Jake couldn’t hang around long enough to see what she looked like or where she went when she got out of the pool. Barry Paxton, his boss, was enough of a bastard that Jake couldn’t afford to make himself late for work by hanging around the pool. The time clash only left him those few moments when they happened to be together at the end of the lane, but how do you land a pick-up line, even open a conversation, while dripping wet and gasping for air? Jake had never had much luck in green-light pick-up situations like late at a party or one-on-one in a nightclub, so the thought of making a move in the real world was beyond comprehension. The ballpoint twisted and turned some more.
The phone intercom buzzed loudly. Jake almost dented his head on the ceiling, black swimsuits evaporating in his head. ‘Hello? What?’ Jesus, he sounded like he’d just been woken up.
There was some static and then Georgi on checkout four was sounding strained as she said, ‘A lady wants to know why one brand of baked beans is three cents dearer than a rival brand when they both appear to contain exactly the same ingredients.’
‘Where’s Barry?’
‘Apparently in a meeting,’ Georgi’s voice crackled back.
‘I’ll come down,’ Jake sighed.
At the tender age of twenty-three, Jake was already bored stupid with this job – but what else was there when you only had basic tertiary accounting? He looked at the monitors flicking around the aisles and saw an old lady, arms crossed tightly across her chest, looking defiantly at Georgi, who was slouched and carefully avoiding the woman’s gaze as she waited for his reply. Jake sighed again, straightened to rearrange his legs and creaked clear of his bastard of a chair.
Walking past the frosted door to Barry’s office – closed again, surprise – he could only make out the blurry outline of somebody leaning back in the guest’s chair, legs crossed. Barry got to have meetings while Jake sorted out baked-bean conspiracies.
One day, if he worked really hard for five, ten, maybe a thousand years, all of this could be his.
***
Stig Anderson liked to let people think he was a movie star. Right now, in the Tramway Hotel in the backstreets of Fitzroy North, a watering hole for journalists and other heavy drinkers, he was loving being back in Melbourne. Feeling like he was home at last, he leaned on the bar, looking cool as could be, waiting for some babe to ask him what he did for a living so he could give her the stare and say, with just the right casual touch: ‘Oh, I’m in movies, you know.’
While Stig played it cool, Wildie was prowling the place, annoyed because some guy in his forties and his two teenage boys were hogging the Frogger machine. Wildie had played some pool, but now he wanted to mash electronic frogs on the road. The guy and his kids had moved on to Galaga on the same tabletop machine and the guy was good, playing for ages. The Wild Man sulked and attacked his third beer.
‘So I haven’t seen you around here before,’ the chick behind the bar said to Stig. ‘What do you do?’
‘Oh, you know. I’m sort of in the movie business.’
And he was away. That’d get her and every girl like her asking questions, appraising this tall guy – lean but with that kind of sinewy muscle that you know is from real work, not just ego-driven bodybuilding. Wondering if he was for real. And usually he could swing it; he was constantly amazed at how many people would just swallow a story. Stig would have to start lying, or at least get hazy about the details, pretty quickly – but they’d go with him, wanting to believe that they were hanging out with the Australian equivalent of a Hollywood heavyweight. It was pathetically easy.
In fact, Stig Anderson had exactly one movie credit to his name. It was in a film made on the Gold Coast a few years back called Cairns Means Muscle. A shit title for a shit film – so bad, in fact, that it only briefly made video release, dropping into the two-dollar per week category in most stores after about a month, and kept on drifting right out the back door of every video outlet in Australia after that. You couldn’t give it away.
The film starred a guy called Warren Clayton, an Australian Rules football has-been who was still something of a pretty boy and fancied he had a movie career just waiting for him. At least that was what his agent kept telling him. The only problem from a director’s point of view was that this guy couldn’t act, work a fight scene or even stay sober for more than two days in a row. Clayton was afraid of heights,
too, which caused big problems on set as there was a pivotal scene where the hero showed another guy how tough and cool he was by hanging a piss clean off the side of a twenty-storey-high rock cliff. Clayton said no way, that wasn’t in the contract; they could shove the safety net, securing ropes, whatever, where the sun wouldn’t see them. He wasn’t doing it.
It was about then that somebody noticed that Stig, who was working as a day-labour scaffolder on the set, bore a vague resemblance to the altitudinally challenged Clayton. Stig’s build was less beefcake but, in the hero’s matching denim-shirt-and-jeans outfit, from a medium-to-long-range shot, they could get away with it. So Stig got to stand on top of this cliff, feet arrogantly apart, ropes tied to his ankles, hand hovering in front of his groin holding a little balloon full of water, while the director fooled around with about nine different angles. When it was finally all lined up, camera rolling, Stig thought he might as well make the most of the moment. He tossed the balloon over the cliff’s edge, unzipped and let fly with a golden stream of real piss, arcing off into space. The director almost died.
You had to watch for it but, right at the end of the film, about two-thirds of the way through the credits scroll, was: ‘Stunt Urinater – Stig Anderson’.
His mother – the drunken, wasting woman he’d left in Footscray, Victoria all those years ago, the bitch who’d inexplicably named him Stig in honour of the manager of the Swedish band, Abba – would have been proud of him.
Stig was mid-stories at the Tramway, just getting to the one about how he was once at the same party as Keanu Reeves, when the Wild Man finished yet another beer and stalked over to the video-gamers, sweeping a hand through the pile of two-dollar coins on the tabletop.
‘You’re done, mate. You and your kids. Well played but fuck off. It’s my turn.’
The kids sat frozen as the guy, not in bad shape but clearly a good judge of a situation, stood and said quietly, ‘Steady, mate. My kids are here.’
‘Fuck you and fuck your kids. Fuck off.’
‘Charming,’ said the guy, but he moved past Wildie without pushing the point. ‘Come on, boys. Let’s leave him to it, hey?’
And they did, walking out, the man muttering to the still-shaken younger boy about manners.
The Wild Man didn’t miss it. He stormed to the pub’s door and yelled down the street, ‘MANNERS? I’LL SHOW YOU SOME FUCKING MANNERS, YOU WEAK PRICK!’
Which had the barmaid looking at Stig in a whole different way, Hollywood stardust dissolving. Stig was forced onto the street, steering the Wild Man to the car to keep him from chasing the father and his boys; Stig no longer a movie star in the Tramway’s eyes, and Wildie not very Fitzroy at all.
He had the dream again that night. It was his wedding day and he was in black tie. But instead of being at the church where Marcia was waiting, he and ‘Flipper’ Dolfin were approaching the wedding car from opposite sides, the car’s white finish flashing blue and red as it reflected the flashing lights on the roof. The headlights were on high beam to dazzle anybody looking back from inside the vehicle in front. Just like they were taught at the academy.
In the dream, Laver and Flipper were constables again, Laver’s wedding suit tight under the arms like he’d always remembered his cadet uniform being, the memory vivid even though it had been fourteen years since he’d felt that discomfort.
Flipper started to say, ‘Please come out with your hands in front and empty,’ and out of the corner of his eye Laver saw the guy moving, just as he always did in the dream, even though it had been so different in reality. In the dream, Laver was swinging around, gazing down the straight of his revolver, feeling his breath catch with fear as Wesley Coleman loomed in front of him, wild hair flying and flannelette shirt billowing in the strong northerly, dull metal in his hand. Laver thinking simply: ‘Jesus, he’s got a gun.’
Laver always noticed how dirty the guy’s jeans were, like it was a detail that mattered instead of something that could be solved in a laundrette, and he was wondering if the stains were what they looked like – which was smeared shit – when Coleman started screaming at him, really screaming, calling him a fucking cop maggot. Laver heard his own voice, like he was removed from it, asking Wasted Wes to drop the weapon, to please drop the weapon and stay calm, while Coleman was looking ever crazier and raising his pistol.
It was all in slow motion, just like it had felt in real life. Laver, heart thumping, asking him yet again to drop the weapon. Where was Flipper – did he know what was happening? Laver watching in disbelief as the flame burst out of Coleman’s gun for what must be the hundredth time since the actual shooting. Feeling the hot breeze of the bullet sear again past his ear, and only then tightening the pressure on the index finger of his right hand to pull the trigger. Feeling the gun recoil, and seeing the dream Coleman’s shirt implode, the red starting to spread as he stood there, swaying and looking down at his chest. Marcia now next to Laver, in her wedding dress, arms crossed, sighing. And Laver shooting Coleman again and again and again.
Laver taking the shallowest of breaths as the guy finally fell to his knees and then toppled forward onto his face in the gutter, and only then could he hear some girl screaming, so loud and so long and so high and so endless as he stood there with his gun pointing on a forty-five-degree angle to the ground, the involuntary shaking just starting to grip his body. Laver taking a couple of steps and vomiting savagely onto the nature strip.
Finally looking around, expecting to see Marcia, eyes full of hate – but instead finding Callum standing on the other side of the road, silently watching the whole thing. Laver staring at him dumbly, vomit-mouthed, shaky, blood-splattered. Guilty.
And then the final image of the dream: Coleman’s bloody back, a red puddle oozing from beneath his body, his face visible in profile. One dead eye staring sideways at the gutter like it couldn’t believe what had just happened. Which put it on a par with Laver.
And then Coleman’s corpse grinned.
Laver jerking awake in horror. As he always did.
That fucking dream. Laver lay in bed, tangled in a twisted sheet, until he got his bearings, returned to reality, then untangled himself and stood, heart still pounding. He padded to the kitchen for a glass of water.
Standing in the lounge was Wesley Coleman, still with the blood all over his chest, swaying slightly. Laver regarded him and sipped his water. Looked away and looked back to find the ghost still there, just staring.
‘I know you’re not real. I know my brain is fucking with me,’ he said to the ghost.
Coleman stared at him and swayed.
Laver regarded it for a few moments.
‘Fuck you,’ he said to Coleman. And then went back to bed, where he would not sleep at all for the rest of the night.
If Laver wasn’t such a big tough cop, he would have considered going to see the police psychologist for counselling. He wondered if everybody went through this after they’d killed somebody for the first time – or whether he was soft when it came to the crunch, whether that was why he was doomed to spend the rest of his life among pedal-powered rookies.
‘Just let me sleep, Coleman, you bastard,’ he said to the empty room. ‘How does stopping me sleep help anything? You’re still dead, you career crim fuck.’
The ghost didn’t say anything in return. What was there to say?
***
It was Thursday and Jake’s heart was pumping, adrenalin levels deep in the red. He had arrived later than usual at the Fitzroy pool, just before 8 am, and now, about forty minutes later, he was hurtling up and down the pool in an adrenalin-charged frenzy.
There she went, sliding past his right shoulder on at least her twentieth lap – and Jake would have grinned happily if he hadn’t been mid-stroke. The Legs had appeared in the fast lane right on five minutes to eight and Jake had almost crashed headfirst into the tiles.
Today was the day and he was bursting with nerves and excitement.
For the past couple of days, h
e had made a point of coughing quietly, as though to himself, whenever Barry was around. He had gradually wound the cough up until yesterday he impressed even himself, exploding with a racking, from-the-gut runaway hack halfway through a meeting to finalise the details of the next month’s stocktake. Barry’s secretary, Wendy, had asked with real concern in her voice if he was okay. Jake put up his hand to say he was fine as he reached for a glass of water. Barry was looking right at him, and Jake should have won an Oscar for the way he looked his boss squarely in the eye, smiled bravely yet with a certain fragility, and replied that he thought he was okay – although, shit, he might be coming down with something.
Today it had been a snap to ring Barry at home at about 7.30 am and croak that he thought he’d better have a day in bed to try and kick whatever it was. Barry hadn’t sounded too thrilled, but bought the story – and now Jake had the whole morning to finally see what the Legs looked like out of the water and in real clothes.
Here came the wall again with some resting legs in sight. Hairy, thick calves. Definitely not hers. Tap, turn, right hand, left hand, away Jake went again. His thinking was that she would be a blonde. Not with dark roots and a perm or anything, but a genuine blonde, maybe with a slight wave going through her shoulder-length hair. She’d probably wear a knee-length dress, some Country Road kind of thing, as she came home for dinner at his house. She’d even love his mother, although she’d whisper between courses, taking his hand under the table, that she thought they should escape back to her place after.
Jake had been dreaming about this day all week, and had been lucky not to ruin the sheets before he woke that morning. The dream where she was on top was his favourite, kind of familiar, and this morning he had finally realised he was reworking one of the sex scenes from that TV series, True Blood. Sookie Stackhouse turned into the Legs and he, lucky Bill the vampire, was lying back and enjoying the show. Jake pictured the Legs as a middle-class queen with a bad girl underneath, all style and poise but not hung up with the kind of snobbery that would look down on an honest, hard-working career like, say, for example, assistant supermarket manager.