Fall (3 page)

‘Our son wasn't murdered,' Reema said.

‘Well, Megan sure seems to think he was.'

‘I never said that!' Megan gasped.

‘Your girlfriend was murdered.' Aamir sunk back down to his seat. He was so far on the edge of it I didn't know how he was upright. He hovered, legs bent, inches from me. His huge black eyes were locked on mine. He knew his son was dead. And he was angry. White-hot-flame angry at everyone he laid eyes on.

‘She was murdered. Yes,' I said.

‘What was her name?'

‘Martina.'

‘And what happened after she was murdered?' Aamir asked.

‘What do you mean?'

‘What happened?' he insisted. ‘What happened then?'

‘Nothing,' I shrugged. Everyone was looking at me. I licked my lips. Shrugged again. ‘Nothing. She was murdered. She's gone. There's nothing … afterwards, if that's what you mean.'

Aamir watched me. We could have been the only people in the room.

‘Nothing happens afterwards,' I said. ‘There's no … resolution. You go to work. You come home. You come to these groups and you –' I gestured to the coffee machine. ‘You drink coffee. You say the mantra. There's no afterwards.'

Everyone looked at Megan to deny or confirm my assessment. She opened her folder, shuffled the papers, collected her thoughts. One of the urns started reboiling itself in the taut seconds of silence and I heard the spitting of its droplets on the plastic table top.

‘Let's look at some handouts,' Megan said.

 

Anthony was waiting for me by the vending machine after the meeting. We walked up the stairs and onto the street.

‘That was a bit harsh,' he said.

‘What?'

‘The whole “there's no afterwards” thing.'

‘Reality is often harsh,' I said. We paused to watch Aamir and Reema walking to their car. The big angry man glanced back at me as he opened the passenger door for his wife. His expression was unreadable. It was the first time that his expression had been unreadable since I had laid eyes on him an hour earlier. The rage was gone, replaced by something else. His shoulders were inches lower. I didn't know what had taken over
from the boiling hot fury that I saw in the meeting room, but whatever it was, it was cold.

‘Do you really believe that?' Anthony asked me. ‘That it means nothing?'

‘Murder?'

‘Yes.'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘I do. You don't get over it. You don't realise the mystical fucking meaning in it. You don't accept that it, like everything, happens for a reason. Come on, Tone,' I scoffed at him. He exhaled smoke from his cigarette.

‘Every night at eight o'clock that guy tries to say goodnight to his dead kid.' I nodded at Aamir's car as it pulled into the street. ‘And he'll be doing it until the day he dies.'

She always felt better when night was falling. The darkness folded over her like a blanket, protective. Light had never been a friend to Tara. It seemed to fall on all of her at once, seemed to wriggle into her creases and folds and dance around her curves, to expose her every surface. Tara always had plenty of surface. She'd never been able to keep track of all there was of her, and Joanie was there to point out the parts she forgot, those bulges and bubbles and handles of flesh that slipped and slid from under hems and over belts.

Pull your shirt down, Tara. Pull your pants up, Tara. Pull your sleeves down, Tara. Jesus. Everyone can see you.

Everyone can see you.

At the dinner table Joanie would grab and pinch and twist a slab of flesh Tara didn't know was exposed, a roll above her jeans or the tender white flesh on the backs of her arms. You couldn't cover Tara with a tent, Joanie said. She could feed an African village. Getting downstairs to dinner became a journey she couldn't take, so she began to take her meals up in her attic bedroom, staring at the park, the runners going round and round between the trees. Sometimes getting from the bed to the computer was too much. Tara simply lay between the sheets and dreamed about African people cutting her up
and sharing her, carving down her thighs in neat slices like a Christmas ham until there was only bone – gorgeous, strong, light bone. Bone that shone, redemptive and clean. Tara lost herself dreaming.

The girls at school giggled at her bulges, the blue bruises that peppered them. Though decades had passed, their voices still bumped and butted around the attic room, red balloons of hate floating.

Why do you call your mum ‘Joanie', Tara?

Doesn't she love you?

Tonight Tara stood by the windows looking over the park and watched the night falling, the bats rising, and remembered her mother. It was nine months since Tara had woken from her coma, nine months since Joanie had gone, but Tara could still hear her voice sometimes, hear her footsteps in the hall as she readied herself for some party or dinner or charity function, as she pulled on her silk-lined coat and checked herself in the hall mirror. Joanie with her elegant ash-blonde hair falling everywhere in filigree curls.

In time, all the light of the warm day dissipated, replaced by a wonderful darkness. Tara stood by the window and watched the runners on the paths in Centennial Park recede into shadows, only blinking lights indicating their jolting journeys as they continued, round and round, round and round. Then rolled away.

The Tara who watched them now was very different from the one who had watched them when her parents were still alive. Tara hugged herself in the little window, let her fingers wander over the new landscape of her body. Bumps and ridges and flaps of flesh as hard as stone, lines of scars running up
her arms where the fatty flesh had been sucked dry, cut, pulled taut, stapled. Bones poked through the mess at her hips and ribs and collarbones. Her face was a mystery. She hadn't looked at herself since that first glimpse as she was waking from the coma. She spent the first month in the hospital in silence, lying, feeling herself. Neurologists came and played with her, confirmed that she could, indeed, understand them. Then a nurse had emerged from the fog and quietly told her what she'd done to herself. Tara had looked at her new self in the mirror. Touched the glass, made sounds. To her it had been laughter, but to the nurse it had sounded like snarls.

I stood in the kitchen of my house in Paddington and looked at the burned walls, the fingers of blackness reaching up the bricks to the charred roof beams. The tiles had fallen and disappeared, revealing blue sky and orange leaves. I smiled. The oven had been cleared away, the cupboards stripped off, the sink unscrewed and discarded, leaving black eyeholes in the wall. The flames had warped the floorboards leading down to the bathroom and tiny courtyard. I folded my arms and looked at it all, smelled the plasticky taint of melted things.

I'm well aware that traditionally first houses are purchased by people much younger than me, and in much better condition than this one. The terrace in William Street was a write-off, advertised to attract developers who might be tempted to buy the row, knock it over, put in a flashy deli and be done with it. The kitchen was a bombshell, the backyard a wreck and the upper floor wasn't safe for human habitation. The elderly owner had let the place go for decades, and the floorboards had taken it the worst. By order of the City of Sydney Council, I wasn't even supposed to be sleeping in the building, and I was supposed to be working on it wearing protective gear. But I ignored that. My home base was the front bedroom, where I'd dragged a mattress and a few laundry baskets of clothes, my
phone and some snack food. The bathroom worked. I still had the apartment in Kensington and there was always Imogen's place. But for a couple of nights a week I had been sleeping in my new house, just so I could drift off listening to the creaking and cracking of the building, the unfamiliar noises of the neighbours coming home from work, their kids playing in the street. City ambulances racing for St Vincent's and drunks singing as they wandered home. Rats scuttling somewhere close. It was dingy, but I owned it. I'd committed to something. That was big for me.

Committing to things. Listening to my girlfriend. Getting off the drugs and the booze. Yes, I was going somewhere, even if it wasn't some mystical place beyond anger that couldn't possibly exist. Because I wholeheartedly believed what I'd said to Aamir. There is no ‘after murder'. There is no reasoning, bargaining or manipulating with murder – when someone close to you has been slain, something enters your life that will always be there, a little black blur at the corner of your vision that you learn to ignore as naturally as you do your own nose. But, stained as you are, you have to go on and learn to see again. Build things. Change things. Own things. Martina wasn't coming back. It was time to return to life.

As I was standing in the morning sunshine from the informal skylight, I heard the front door open and close, and Eden's uneven gait on the unpolished boards. She was walking with a single aluminium crutch with an arm cuff and a handle. She'd worked her way down from two of them. I'd seen her at the station gym a couple of days earlier trotting awkwardly on the treadmill, somewhere between a jog and a walk, now and then reaching for the console to steady herself. The problem was
her core strength, I thought, but I wasn't sure. A pair of serial killers had slit her open from sternum to navel on their way to cutting her right in half. She'd lost most of the hearing in her left ear from having a gun fired in her face, and her nose wasn't straight anymore. But despite all her new little imperfections, to look at her now it was hard to imagine how close she'd come to dying in my arms. When I found her on that farm she had been a red mess.

‘Oh look, it's the invalid,' I said. Eden had to be the world's most beautiful cripple, but I knew that underneath her whippet-lean frame and deep gothic eyes hid a creature who was far from anything like beauty. I had no doubt, standing in her presence, that though Eden couldn't run yet, that she was easily wearied and had lost some of the sharpness of her brutally dry wit, there was a very dark power residing in her still, and she was as much a threat to me as she was to the killers, rapists and evildoers she spent her nights hunting. She came up beside me and took in the black walls, raised her head slowly and looked at a pigeon as it landed on the edge of the roof hole.

‘Why didn't you just tell Hades to keep the money?' she asked, sighing. ‘He'd have been smarter with it.'

Eden's father, Hades Archer, ex-criminal overlord and the world's cleverest body disposal expert, had given me a hundred thousand dollars to find out what had happened to the love of his life. Sunday White had gone missing before I was born, and Hades had hired me as much to get one of her relatives off his back as to find out himself what had become of the lost young woman. I put the cash together with my inheritance and bought the terrace on William Street. Eden shifted papers around on the floor with one of her fine leather boots, shook her head.

‘I can't believe you, of all people, fail to see the potential in this place. Things of beauty are made of forgotten places like this, Eden.' I started mapping the kitchen with my hands. ‘Stove there, stainless steel benches here, big kitchen island with one of those cutting board tops. You know the ones? Drawers underneath. Rip all this out and put a big window in. Fucking brilliant.'

‘Stainless steel is so 1990.'

‘Marble then. Wine rack over here.'

‘You're a recovering alcoholic.'

‘My cooking wine, Eden. My cooking wine.'

‘Who do you think's going to do all this?' She squinted at me.

‘Me.'

‘You can't change a light bulb without adult supervision and a stackhat.'

‘You, then. Come help me. You're handy.'

‘No.'

‘You're just jealous.' I shook my head. ‘There's no need to be cranky, Eden. You can come and visit my brilliant new house whenever you want. Take photos of yourself in it to show your friends.'

The pigeon sitting on one of the roof beams ruffled its feathers and crapped on my floor. We both looked up at it.

‘We'll have dinner parties,' I said.

‘Look at you. Less than a year ago your plates were getting dusty from disuse and the local Indian takeaway guy had invited you to his wedding. Now you're planning soirées.'

‘I like the word “soirée”. I like soirée and nostalgia.'

‘It's a commitment, I guess, even if it is a shithole,' she sighed. ‘That's a big deal. Congratulations.'

‘I've been a big deal for a while now, Eden. You just haven't noticed.'

‘You could go on a commitment streak. Marry that mind-quack and have freckly children with abandonment issues.'

‘Let's not get ahead of ourselves.'

As though she'd heard herself being spoken about, my girlfriend Imogen opened the front door and clopped into the hall in her second-favourite lavender velvet heels, her upturned nose already wrinkled at the smell. She had an Ikea bag in each hand. What a sweetheart.

‘Sorry, Frank, I didn't realise you had company,' she beamed. ‘How are you, Eden?'

‘Dr Stone,' Eden said. The tone had no warmth in it, I noted, and then reminded myself that, like an old gas heater, Eden took hours just to get to room temperature. Still, something passed between them. Eden's eyes fell to my missing kitchen cupboards and Imogen's stayed on her, searching, almost, for something. I coughed, because I'm like most men – completely ignorant of women and their looks and tones and inferences and what they really mean. The two could have been about to launch into a mid-air kung fu battle or hurl each other to the ground in a passionate embrace. I didn't know. I hoped the cough would delay whatever was going on until it made itself obvious or went away. Imogen excused herself to wash her hands. There was something sticky on the front doorknob. I didn't know what.

Eden stood playing with a live wire hanging from the ceiling, twisting the plastic casing around her finger.

‘What's wrong with you?' I jutted my chin at her. ‘Someone asks how you are, you don't say their name and qualification.'

‘Oh, I'm sorry. Should I have responded with a list of neurotic compulsions I may or may not exhibit?'

‘You've been colder since Rye Farm, Eden. I've noticed it. You're weirder, if that's possible.'

‘It's always possible.'

‘I don't want you to get any weirder than you already are.'

‘What a chauvinistic thing to say. Want to tell me how to wear my hair too?'

‘Up.'

‘I did my mandatory counselling.' She shrugged. ‘I don't need to be shrinked in my free time. If Imogen wants to shrink someone, she's got more than enough mental dysfunction going on here without starting on me.' She gestured at me with an open hand. All of me.

‘She's not shrinking you. She's my girlfriend. She's saying hello.'

‘Shrinks never stop shrinking. They shrink all day long until everyone around them is shrunk.'

‘You don't like her,' I concluded. ‘Of course you don't.'

‘She's a shrink.'

‘Stop saying shrink.'

‘While you're here, Eden,' Imogen said, emerging from the stairs, flicking water off her fingers – I have no hand towels – ‘I've been telling Frank for a while now that it'd be nice if the three of us got together for dinner sometime, maybe? I'm sure he hasn't passed that on to you. I thought it'd be nice to get to know you a bit. You know. Because Frank and I … Now that we're –'

‘Fucking?' Eden said. I threw my head back and laughed at the ceiling. The pigeon flew away.

‘In a relationship,' Imogen sighed.

Eden's phone buzzed and she took it out of her pocket. Looked at it, slid it back in.

‘We need to go, Frank,' she said. ‘Now.'

‘All weeknights are fine with me.' Imogen followed us to the door. I grabbed my jacket from the edge of the mattress in the front room and turned to hear Eden's response, but she was already heading through the front gate. I kissed Imogen and fondled her ponytail in a way that I guessed was conciliatory before running out the door.