‘No, I’m not a priest.’ Reid smiled. ‘But tell me, what is it that I don’t understand?’
Nathan began to explain how he’d grown up with the conviction that his father was about to die, that it could happen any moment. Some nights he’d lie in bed and imagine that it had already happened. It was practising. He’d see his father on the ocean bed. His father would be wearing the same cardigan he always wore, the one with holes in the elbows. His hair would be standing up on end. There’d be fish swimming in and out of his clothes.
Some nights they’d have conversations.
‘Dad?’ he’d whisper.
And Dad would whisper back, ‘Yes. I’m here.’ His voice sounded the same, even though he was underwater.
‘Can I come and visit you?’
There’d be a silence, and there’d be something sad about the silence, and then Dad would whisper, ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Why not? We could just sit and drink a beer together and then I could rub your back. Does your back still ache?’
Another silence. Longer, sadder, then the last. ‘It’s better you don’t, Nathan.’
‘Just a beer, Dad. Just one.’
‘I’m sorry.’
When Nathan thought about it now, it seemed to him that he’d been practising for his own death, as well as for Dad’s. If Dad had really been dead, and Nathan had gone and had a beer with him under the sea, it would’ve meant that Nathan would’ve died too. That was why Dad had to say no.
‘Does that make any sense?’ Nathan looked at the man on the other side of the table, the man who wasn’t a priest but listened like one, the man with the gloves.
Reid tasted his coffee. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it makes sense.’
‘It wasn’t always sad,’ Nathan said. ‘Sometimes he’d produce a fish from his breast pocket like a magician. Or he’d do a trick with beer. Tip the glass upside down and nothing would come out. Other times he’d crack a joke. “The air’s much better down here.” Things like that.’ Nathan smiled. ‘In the mornings I’d always be surprised to see him sitting at the breakfast table with his hair all flat and not a fish in sight. He used to wonder why I was staring at him. I couldn’t tell him, of course.’ He looked up and his vision blurred. ‘Now he’s really there I can’t imagine it at all,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that funny?’
Reid leaned forwards. ‘If you need any help,’ he said, ‘any money.’
Nathan shook his head.
He let Reid pay the bill. They rose from their chairs.
‘Can I drop you somewhere?’ Reid said. ‘My car’s just over there.’
‘I’ve got a car too,’ Nathan said.
‘Oh yes.’ Reid smiled. ‘I forgot.’
They stood for a moment, looking in different directions.
‘I’d like it if we could see each other again,’ Reid said.
‘Maybe.’
‘There’s a bar called Necropolis.’
Nathan nodded. ‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘I’ll be there on Wednesday night.’ Reid smiled again and walked away across the grass.
Wednesday night, Nathan thought.
What was today? Monday?
The Octopus Manoeuvre
It was no skin off his nose, being thrown out like that. After all, it wasn’t exactly the first time. He didn’t even need the $10 he’d asked for. He’d just asked for it on the spur of the moment, to see what he could get away with, to make Nathan feel guilty. And Nathan had given him all he had. Jed took his eyes off the road and glanced down at the crumpled money in his hand. $8. He tossed it over his shoulder into the back of the car. He didn’t need $8. He thought of the money he’d thrown in Creed’s face. He thought of Mario’s wheelchair stuffed with bills. $8. His laughter hammered at the roof like fists.
In half an hour he was in Rialto. He steered his car into the narrow, unpaved alley that ran behind Mitch’s place. The rumble of the engine seemed louder between these two high walls; the tyres munched on loose dirt and gravel. He parked up against Mitch’s garage. He switched the engine off and opened the door. Nothing moved in the alley. A tree reached its dusty branches over the red-brick wall opposite, as if it had died trying to climb out. Such heat. The sky was almost white. Telegraph poles wavered in the air like ribbon.
He walked up to Mitch’s back door and knocked twice. Some blue paint flaked away under his knuckles. The door opened inwards and Mitch stood in the gap. He had a can of beer in his hand.
‘Surprise, surprise,’ Jed said.
Mitch stared at him. He was wearing the same clothes he always wore: the faded tartan shirt, the jeans that hung off his buttocks. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘The ice-cream man.’
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ Jed said.
‘I’ve been busy.’ Mitch turned round, shambled back up the passage. ‘Want a beer?’ he called out, over his shoulder.
Jed followed him into the house.
They sat on two wooden chairs on the back verandah, their feet propped on the railing. Jed cracked his can open, tipped some beer down his throat and sighed. Mitch’s back yard was small. It didn’t see much sun. Just shadow and cracked concrete and truck tyres stacked against the wall. The fig tree had dropped its fruit all over the ground. Ripe figs lay in the dust, exploded, bloody, as if the sky had rained organs.
Mitch looked at him. ‘When did you get back?’
‘Few days ago.’
‘You staying long?’
‘I don’t know. Depends how long it takes.’
Mitch was still looking at him. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’
Jed drank from his can instead of answering. Sure he knew.
‘Because it seems to me,’ Mitch went on, ‘that you’ve lost touch.’
Jed rested his can on his belly and scratched his ribs with his free hand. ‘What are you talking about, Mitch?’
‘I’m talking about maybe you’ve forgotten how this city works.’
‘I know how this city works. I was born here.’
‘I said maybe you forgot. You’ve been living out in the middle of nowhere selling ice-cream, for Christ’s sake.’ Mitch took a deep breath, let it out again. ‘When did you get back?’
‘I told you. A few days ago.’
‘How many?’
‘Four.’
‘Four days.’ Mitch nodded to himself. ‘They’ll know you’re back by now.’
Jed’s body seemed to freeze up. He stared into Mitch’s face and only his heart was moving. ‘What do you know about it?’
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Mitch said. ‘You know what they’re like. They’ve got eyes in the back of their heads. You’ve been here four days and you’ve been walking round in that fucking hat and you think they haven’t noticed.’ He crumpled his can and threw it in the yard. ‘Shit. You want another beer?’
‘Sure.’
While Mitch was indoors, Jed thought back.
His first night. Thousands of tourists in town for the celebrations, the streets jumping with firecrackers, blue suits, the dance of death. Chaos: surely that was the best disguise there was.
Then three nights in Blenheim. There was nothing to connect him to that section of the city. Nathan was from the deep past. They were linked by the finest thread. Go back fifteen years and walk into a field and turn over the right square-inch of ground. It was that fine. No chance.
He’d talked, sure he’d talked, but he hadn’t given anything away, not really. He hadn’t told anyone his name, though he’d been tempted to. The more people who knew it, the less power it had. He’d remembered that. Ideally nobody should know. And, at the moment, nobody did.
He thought of Sharon and the pouch of soft leather she used to wear on a string around her neck. He’d asked her what it was for. He remembered how her eyes widened with suspicion and her hand moved instinctively to her neck. She wouldn’t tell him. He used the kind of arguments that other people used. Blackmail in its most trivial and vulgar form.
‘You’re holding out on me,’ he said once.
‘It’s like there’s something between us,’ he said some other time.
He kept on and on at her, and in the end, of course, she succumbed. She called it her magic bag, she said. She claimed it protected her. She made the mistake of telling him that nobody, nobody, had ever looked inside.
One night they were lying in bed. It was late, they were drowsy, it was after love. Light came from somewhere, blue neon light, the washeteria across the street? It switched parts of their bodies on and off.
‘That bag you’ve got,’ he said, ‘it’s shit.’
She rose out of the bed, the sheet clutched against her chest. ‘What did you say?’
‘I looked in that bag of yours when you were asleep. A few fish bones and some dust. What’s that going to do?’ He chuckled, leaned up on one elbow.
One of her breasts pushed past the sheet, the nipple wide and glossy, the blue light teased him with glimpses, he felt a shifting against the inside of his thigh, he wanted to take that nipple between his teeth, to run his lips across the soft, slack skin of her belly, to put his tongue between her legs and watch her eyes roll back, he’d lost all contact with what he’d said, the blue light, her body, now you see it, now you don’t, so when her fist sent flame through his head, it was as if she’d struck a match, it was suddenly too bright, then, just as suddenly, dark again, and he was on the floor, the force of the blow had lifted him right off the bed, tumbled him across the room.
She leaned over him, her breath stale with grass and cheap white wine. ‘I could kill you.’
He opened one hand, a feeble appeal. ‘A few fish bones,’ he muttered.
The breath gushed out of her. She wrenched at the bag. The string bit into her skin, drew sudden blood. She heaved the window open, flung the bag into the street below.
He understood it now, that rage of hers. He should have understood it then. When your magic was stolen from you, it left you open and alone, you were skin against knives and knives against stone. It blew air into the lungs of your nightmares so they grew tall and straight and walked through the dawn with you and on into the day. There was nothing between you and all the bad things. Maybe, in a way, he’d known what he was doing. Maybe he’d been trying to tell her something, trying to teach her a lesson. You can’t wear your magic on the outside. That’s just asking for it. You’ve got to keep it somewhere deep down and secret. He knew because it had happened to him. The radios. All those years ago, but still. He had new magic now – a name, that drop of rain, some bruises – and he wore it out of sight, under his skin, inside his head. It was safer there. Nobody could take it away from him because nobody could see it, nobody knew it was there.
Mitch came back with two beers. ‘You been thinking about what I said?’ He stood against the light, one hand tucked into the back of his jeans, feet spread wide on the warped boards of the verandah.
‘Yeah.’ Jed opened the can, swallowed a mouthful. The chill slid into him and spread.
But he was still thinking about the night Sharon threw her magic bag out of the window. They couldn’t have been in her apartment in Baker Park, he was thinking. There was a washeteria across the street from the apartment, but it didn’t have a neon sign. It had never had one. He thought hard. There had been storm-force winds that night. He could remember Sharon crouching on the bed. The building was swaying, she said. She had vertigo.
He swallowed another mouthful of beer. He had it now. That blue light wasn’t the washeteria. It was a strobe-light in the East Tower. The light wasn’t usually there, but there’d been a party going on that night.
It wasn’t Baker Park. It was the Towers of Remembrance.
The Towers of Remembrance.
When he left that place on the thirteenth floor he’d given it to Tip’s brother, Silence. He wondered if Silence was still living there. Silence. The youngest member of the Womb Boys. A deaf mute.
He was grinning now. It was so obvious. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?
He looked up and saw that Mitch had been watching him. ‘I’ve got one piece of advice for you,’ Mitch said.
Jed took the grin off his face. ‘I’m listening.’
‘Leave town.’
‘You know I can’t do that.’
‘Well,’ Mitch said, ‘don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
Instead of driving south from Mitch’s place, towards the Towers, Jed drove west, into the setting sun. He might have been followed to Mitch’s and, if that was the case, then the trail had to end, and end suddenly.
As he drove he remembered the video he’d watched while he was waiting for Nathan in the aquarium. It was about an octopus that could take on the precise colour and texture of its surroundings. It could also move between its various disguises with extraordinary speed and guile. There was one sequence in the video when the camera found the octopus lodged in a bed of weeds. The octopus was almost invisible; its body had turned a dark-green, its tentacles drifted, blending with the strands of plant life. But as soon as it sensed the presence of the camera it reacted. One twitch and it was hurtling along the ocean bed. It seemed almost jet-propelled. Abrupt changes of direction. Sudden clouds of ink. Then it vanished. When the camera found it again, it was fifty yards away, masquerading as a piece of rock. This was pretty much the kind of manoeuvre that Jed had in mind.
He drove at a steady thirty-five; if anyone was following him, he would lull them into a false sense of security. When he reached Highway 1 he turned north. It was rush-hour. The air was fogged and glittery with exhaust. As he passed the Butterfield turn-off, the traffic slowed to a standstill and, just for a moment, Jed felt alone; just for a moment he wished that he too was leaving work after a hard day, that he too was heading for a cocktail and dinner in some comfortable house in the northern suburbs.
Then, as the traffic picked up speed and distances began to open between the cars, the sign appeared. Not green like the highway signs, but black and white. Discreet. Innocuous. STATE ABATTOIRS 1 MILE. Jed stamped on the gas and cut into the exit lane, his speed close to fifty now. This was the moment of acceleration, this was the cloud of ink. Down off the highway, round in a circle, under an overpass, and then he was slamming down the narrow road that led to the abattoirs: fifty, sixty, sixty-five. The mirror was empty. Two clangs as he cleared the metal cattle grilles. He swung left into an alley. Pipes coiled overhead, white steam gushed from vents. A sweet smell like beaten egg. A smell that sweetened and decayed. He saw row after row of animal hides slung over rails in an open barn.
The alley fed into a concrete yard. His wheel slithered on mud and straw. This must be where the animals were unloaded. He took a wood ramp that led down past a slaughterhouse and sent his car twisting and rocking along a dirt track. The buildings were behind him now. There were ditches on either side and stands of yellow weeds. Ahead of him, through the windshield, he could see a thin blue strip, a forgotten piece of the harbour. He gunned the car up a steep bank and on to a disused railway. His tyres crackled on chips of stone. In front of him was an old iron swing-bridge. A sign whispered DANGER in small red letters. The sign amused him. Danger was relative.
Not many people knew about the railway. If you didn’t know, and you consulted a map of the city, you could be forgiven for thinking that the line was still being used. On the map, the abattoirs looked like a dead end. To anyone following him, this detour of his would seem like a serious mistake – the result, possibly, of panic. That was the beauty of the manoeuvre. By the time they realised that the mistake was theirs, it would be too late.
He drove slowly over the bridge, the metal wincing under the weight of the car. Then down off the bridge, over wasteland, through the switchback streets of Venus. Down again, into the darkness of the harbour tunnel. In twenty minutes the Towers of Remembrance rose in his windshield. He checked his mirror. Still empty. He was seaweed in seaweed, rock on rock. They’d never find him now.
The Suit
of Bones
Nathan heard the stairs creak, the front door slam. He reached the window in time to see Harriet climb into her car. She was wearing a dark coat, the same coat she wore to the funeral. Her face showed nothing. A sealed envelope. Her scarlet lips set hard, like wax.
It was Wednesday morning. He sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee. Tell me something. Do you like this city? Her threats stood around in his head like jailers with bunches of keys. I could make things difficult. The day before he’d asked Dad’s lawyer if it was possible to speed up the handling of the probate. Dad’s lawyer had given him a glance that barely cleared the rims of his spectacles. ‘There are very good reasons,’ he said, ‘why the law moves as slowly as it does.’ The fan turning on its long neck. The wall the colour of soiled shirt collars.
Nathan lifted his eyes from the table. Clouds gathered above the hills and the garden darkened. He saw the rain come swirling out of the sky. He watched the drops crawl down the window. Another six weeks, the lawyer had said. Minimum.
Morning tipped over into afternoon and still he’d done nothing. He moved to the lounge and stood with the french windows open and listened to the rain on the surface of the pool. He remembered days like this when he was young. They used to sit at the kitchen table and paint on sheets of shiny brown paper. Though he tried to paint blue skies, they always came out muddy. When he complained, Dad said, ‘Look at George, it doesn’t bother her.’ Of course it didn’t bother her. She never put any sky in her pictures, did she? She just left big patches of brown everywhere. If you asked her what the patches were, she’d say, It’s brown things. Brown things? It’s earth, she’d say. It’s a table. I don’t know. It’s dogs. She would always have an answer. She could always find a way round things.
The Five Gates of Hell Page 32