Fall (7 page)

Tara remembered. The memories came as tides, slowly rising, hitting their peak, and when they did she would sit on the bed and indulge them because she'd never had the strength to fight. She never knew which one would come. When she was at her most vulnerable the memories were of her youth – a Tara just starting to adapt to her pudginess, a Tara just beginning to assume her role as class reject. A short Tara, wide and soft, fleshy like a piglet, her little belly swelling and stretching the front of her sports polo as she panted. Cross-country day. That memory was always close at hand. The smell of freshly cut grass. The dread of the barbecue smoke in the school playground, the creamy fluorescent zinc being smeared on noses as the countdown to the afternoon session began. Tara the fat child rotating through as many excuses to Mrs Emmonds as she should muster, trying to find what would work, what would make the woman ignore her mother's threats.
My child will participate.
Tara heard the warning every year from the cordless phone in the kitchen, Joanie stabbing the countertop with a finger as house staff swirled and ebbed around her, preparing lunch.
Don't take any of her shit.

It wasn't shit today. Tara really did feel sick. She tucked herself into the dark corner of mouldy bricks where the kinder
garten block met the sports shed and breathed, listening to the big kids unloading the plastic markers and streamers with Mr Tolson. Tara held her belly and breathed. She was just learning to swallow the crying. She'd always been a crier, but she was beginning to relish in the hard, hot lump in her throat, the power she exerted in keeping it down, in keeping the tears at bay. Tara didn't have power over many things. But she was beginning to understand, at eight, that she could control her own emotions. She could bring on or suppress rage like it was connected to a switch. She could make herself shake and sweat with fury, or make herself cold and fatigued with calm.

As the day wound down towards the big race, Tara watched the other girls weaving ribbons into their hair and painting zinc dots on their cheeks. She went into the girls' toilets and did the same, worked the colourful cream into her plump face.

At the start line, no one noticed her. She kept to the back, the horizon ahead dominated by the shoulders of the enormous Year Six boys. Peter Anderson was wearing a Native American ceremonial chief's headdress, his freckled cheeks lined with zinc. The colourful tails of the feathers fluttered madly in the wind. The boy started up a chant for Stuart House and it grew so loud that it almost drowned out the crack of the starting gun.

Tara moved with the jostling bodies, and then she was on her own, little girls she'd remembered cowering in the playground on their first days in kindergarten rushing past her. She tried to befriend them once and for a few days had held a little posse of younger children as friends. But as they passed now they seemed not to recognise her. Their class clans had fused together and shut Tara out. By the time she rounded the first quarter marker, Peter Anderson was rushing past her, his huge legs striking out,
hitting the grass with thuds. Boys from Flinders and Cook houses followed, grabbing at the feathers. They were still chanting their house songs. Tara could hardly breathe.

For the next quarter, all she did was wait for the bigger boys to lap her again. When they did they came in silence, the game on now, the home stretch in sight. Tara huffed and struggled through the bush at the bottom of the school, following the rustling pink streamers over rocky ground, her thick ankles rolling over sharp stones in the clay. Small helpless sounds came out of her. In the rocking, bouncing world she spotted Mr Lillington standing among the trees, a carpentry magazine in his hands, his heavy brow furrowed. The older man heard Tara bumbling along well before he saw her. Tara hung her head, burned as he watched her slowly approach.

‘Hey,' the man said, jutting his chin. ‘Harper. Harper. Down there and around to the right.'

Tara wheezed, looked, tried to control her whimpering. Sweat rolled down her calves. The teacher pointed, raising his furry brows.

‘Down there, girl,' he said.

He said ‘girl' the way Joanie said ‘stupid'. But when Tara looked, she saw the trail leading off towards the quadrangle and nodded. A shortcut. The music teacher watched her go, his lined face softened by pity.

She heard other children laughing as she cut away. But Tara only wanted it to be over. She emerged at the edge of the field as Peter Anderson sailed through the finish ribbon, his arms outstretched and shirt gone. Girls visiting from the high school pelted his hard, pale body with water bombs. Tara clambered up the rise and headed for the lines of teachers and parents.

Her mother would be there among the crowd somewhere. Tara sucked air and forced herself on. She was so slow that she could measure individual expressions as she passed, heard snippets of words from the parents.

Whose kid is that? Harper. Harper girl … chubby little … rolls … kid's gonna have herself a heart attack.

‘That girl's snorting like a piggy,' a girl at the edge of the crowd said, pointing at Tara as she passed. ‘Piggy, piggy, piggy.'

Tara felt sweat in her eyes. She pounded towards the finish line. A crowd of her classmates was waiting for her there, stretching their thin, strong limbs, zinc rubbed from noses and dribbling from wet chins. She could smell the barbecue.

Oranges. Tubs of quartered oranges. Tara headed up the straight and it was Craig Dune who threw the first slice.

‘The food's up here, fatty-boom-bah! Run, run, run.'

Tara felt an orange slice bump against her chest. Then another. Suddenly a rain of them, boys and girls from older grades hurling the slices at her legs, her face. Teachers shouting, reaching for little wrists. She caught a rind in the eye and slid in the wet grass. She fell hard on her side before the finish line. She could see the balloons, the girl with the broken leg and the timer sitting on the stool.

In the crowd, Joanie had her arms folded, eyes on the horizon. Tara scrambled to her feet and pushed through the
bodies of the adults, the forest of hips and stomachs, until she reached her. Her mother stood beside a woman who might have been her twin – both caramel goddesses wrapped in strips of fine grey silk. Joanie's ringlets were pulled tight in a ponytail on her square shoulder, the curls cascading down her chest.

‘Mum,' Tara gasped through the tears. ‘Mum.'

‘Is this your little one?' The woman beside Joanie looked down at Tara with a mixture of concern and humour, her crooked smile faltering when she noted the orange juice dripping from the girl's hair.

‘Mum,' Tara pleaded, tugging at Joanie's elbow. ‘Joanie.'

‘No, my one's out there.' Joanie shrugged Tara's hand away, laughing uneasily, pointing towards the curve in the track and the bushland beyond. ‘My Tara's out there somewhere.'

‘Joan–'

‘Go find your mother,' Joanie said, pushing Tara's face away. She turned her hip, blocking the child from the woman beside her. ‘Jeez. Weird kid. Anyway, so you were saying?'

Tara waited, but her mother didn't turn back around. In time she walked through the crowds towards the school.

They try to tell you that if you've got a couple of observers at the autopsy, it's because they need experience for their forensic medicine degrees, but … I don't know. I've had so many young observers hanging over my shoulder through the years, I just can't get next to the idea that studying to be a ghoul is so popular. When we arrived to view the autopsy on Ivana Lyon there were two young men already there, guiltily fumbling with their notebooks, surgical masks pulled tight like the shoelaces of kids on their first day of school. I gave them a fiery look as I waited for the tech to set up. I'm convinced a certain percentage of these kids are just too curious about murder corpses to stay away.

Beyond the glass, someone from Ivana's family was watching. An older brother or something it looked like. I've only seen parents attend once. I don't know why family would come at all. It's not how I'd like to remember someone I loved. I guess in murder cases they like to see that nothing goes awry. The liver isn't dropped on the floor or accidentally swapped with the patient on the next table. It's pretty grim.

Eden was unusually fazed. It was by all accounts her bread and butter, but she was restless, sighing, looking at her watch. She'd ditched the crutch for the morning, but I expected her to
be back to it by midday. Leaning against the table, her ponytail pulling up the corners of her eyes and her blouse pressed to within an inch of its life, she might have been the old Eden, the one I knew before her brush with death. Except that she was chewing a thumbnail. Her eyes were hard. I nudged her in the side and she jumped.

‘What's wrong with you?'

‘Too much coffee.' She stretched her neck so that it cracked on either side. I knew that was a lie but I didn't push it. Eden could have snorted coffee like cocaine and not got the jitters. She absorbed chemicals like a sponge. I'd never seen her so much as tipsy.

‘You've got to come to dinner with Imogen.'

‘No,' she said.

‘What makes you think you can put her off forever? She gets what she wants. She'll start turning up at your house, I'm telling you.'

‘I would strongly suggest she doesn't do that.' Eden looked into my eyes. I felt a cold splinter in my chest, sweat prickle at the back of my neck. I cleared my throat, tried to focus on the technician laying out the tools like some kind of slow, methodical sadist. The brother behind the glass was watching the ceiling, fighting tears.

‘What's your beef with Imogen?'

‘I think you can do better.'

I scoffed. She was serious. I hadn't expected the comment. It was kind of sweet. Strangely, bizarrely sweet, coming from a complete sociopath and ruthless serial killer who I'm sure got up every morning and looked at herself in the mirror and wondered whether today was the day she should kill me
and dump my corpse in a mangrove somewhere, watch crabs pluck out my eyeballs.

‘Imogen is –'

‘Imogen's an owner, Frank,' Eden said. ‘She's going to own you and train you like a newborn pup until you either bend to her command or snap her hand off one day, and it's probably going to be the latter before the former.'

That hurt. She was referring to the time I'd hit my first wife in a drug-fuelled brawl at our cheap fibro bomb of a rental house in the Western suburbs. It was more than a decade ago, but Eden's brother had brought it out into the light and Eden was never going to forget it. She didn't forget things she knew about people. It was probably just a stab in the guts to cover for the compliment, to balance the universe, but in any case it seemed unfair.

‘And then when you do snap at her, boy,' she said, ‘then she's really going to own you.'

‘This conversation is getting far too deep,' I said. ‘Come to dinner. Please. I'm asking you nicely. Stave off your jealousy of Imogen for an hour or so.'

‘My what?' She squinted.

‘Your barely contained jealousy of Imogen.'

‘Jealousy over what? What could Imogen possibly ever have that I would want?'

I tapped my chest and nodded knowingly, gave her a happy wink.

‘One of these days you're going to wake up to yourself.'

‘Hopefully not,' I said.

I jostled her in the ribs again with my elbow and she jumped, swiped at me. Her flesh felt weird under my skin. I reached out
and grabbed at her ribs, and heard a crackling sound under the fabric that was very familiar to me. Something I'd heard many times.

‘What is that?'

‘Get your fucking mitts off me.'

‘Is that a tattoo?'

I was certain I'd heard the crackling of sticky tape and the squish of damp plastic wrap, which is the kind of dressing only applied to a freshly inked tattoo. I'd stopped counting how many tatts I had myself. I was proudest of the gigantic traditional-style eagle, wings spread, that dominated my chest. My first. It was tough to go big on your first ink, and that's basically all the image stood for. My young, stupid toughness. The design could have been anything.

‘Do not touch me, Frank. Ever.'

‘We're about to get going here, people,' the head technician said. He lifted the sheet from Ivana's body and pulled it down over her naked figure, folded it at her feet. I looked up and saw that the brother was gone.

Ruben tried not to snoop but he couldn't help himself. Something was very wrong in the house by the park, but he couldn't fit the clues together, could not make any kind of sense out of what he saw. The path he took vacuuming from the ground-floor kitchen to the stairs outside the attic room was like a morbid tour of the moment things went wrong, the last days of joy before the hellish fall.

The previous summer he'd been in the States and stopped in Dallas to take the tour of the preserved Book Depository from where Lee Harvey Oswald had shot President Kennedy. He'd stood behind the glass and looked at the spot where the killer had perched, saw the scuff marks in the dust, the boxes still sitting unpacked as they had been that fatal day, forever to remain as they were, as though the moment could be returned to, changed somehow, if nothing was touched. He'd heard the haunting shots ring out over the little speaker in the corner, punctuating the commentary of the virtual tour guide. The house on the park was like the Texas School Book Depository. A frozen moment of terror and pain.

The wrongness of it all had struck him as he entered the bedroom the first day, puffed the pillows and shook the dust off the bed covers. The bedroom belonged to a man and a woman.
History books on his side of the bed, business management books on hers. Ruben's written English comprehension was terrible, but he flicked through the pages and found a shopping list bookmark in one. Then he spied the man's heavy Omega watch sitting by the lamp. He glanced behind him at the door. Felt a tingle in his palms. Why had the master of the house left his watch there? It was obviously his daily watch. No case or box to speak of. Why wasn't he wearing it when he left? Why hadn't they tucked it away, knowing that a foreign student with no paperwork and barely enough cash to make rent would be walking around the house? Ruben thought it was odd. His own parents trusted no one, and they hardly had anything to call precious. When they'd had viewings to sell their house in Perugia the old man had taken everything and stashed it at his mother's – even a set of crystal wine glasses from the back of the kitchen cupboard, as though people at the viewing could possibly manage to smuggle the set out in a bag or under a jacket, clinking and chiming as they ran towards their car.

There was more strangeness the more Ruben looked. The watch and the history books on the man's side of the bed were far dustier than the items on the woman's side. The pages were yellowed from the sun. So they had lain untouched longer. Wherever he'd gone, she'd left his things just as they were, gathering dust. There was something sad about it.

When Ruben entered the downstairs living room he found an empty wine bottle and a packet of sleeping pills on the little table beside the couch. There were three pills missing. On the floor was an empty sterile needle packet, the kind his brother carried in the pocket of his paramedic's uniform. It was stamped Prince of Wales Hospital. The needle packaging,
the wine bottle and the pill packet were all covered in dust. Whatever had happened, the evidence was right here where it had fallen.

Ruben stood in the doorway, feeling cold all over. According to the job advertisement, the family who owned the house had gone away to spend some months setting up a business abroad. He heard a creak in the floorboards above him and went back to vacuuming. On his way out, he ducked through the couple's bedroom to look at the en suite. All the toiletries were still there. The toothbrushes leaning, waiting, in their ceramic stands.