Authors: Leigh Redhead
Betty said, ‘You’ve been out to get me from the start.’ I held both hands in front of me, the universal gesture for: I’m harmless, no need to whack me.
‘Listen, Betty, Aurora told me about the night Frank got killed. I don’t know who killed him. And I don’t want to know. The bastard deserved it. I’m not going to go to the police. I’m not going to dob in my own ex-lover, my friends. The police think Farquhar did it anyway.’
The front door opened then slammed shut and Mick walked into the kitchen wearing his work clothes and holding a Coopers.
‘What the fuck,’ he said.
‘She’s going to turn us in.’ Betty was wild eyed. ‘We’ve got to get rid of her.’
‘I’m not turning anyone in,’ I appealed to him.
‘He killed him.’ Betty pointed at Mick. ‘He stuck him like a pig.’
Mick shook his head in that laconic, country way. He actually looked bored. ‘I’m out of here,’ he said. ‘I don’t need this shit.’ He stalked out of the kitchen towards his room, leaving me there with the knife-wielding bitch.
Don’t need this shit?
‘Mick!’ Betty and I called his name at the same time.
We heard him slam his bedroom door.
‘Yeah, just leave then, cunt,’ Betty yelled so he could hear. ‘Everyone fucking leaves me. Johnny. Aurora promised she’d take me with her. She’s gone, everything’s gone, except this fucking tattoo.’ She lifted her skirt to show me the winged woman on her thigh. I’d never seen it at the club, she’d always covered it with makeup.
‘I’ve been cursed by Frank, by this tattoo, and now the fucking Erinyes are coming after me.’
Holy shit, Betty was off her jang. A big fat tear rolled down her cheek, taking with it a long line of black from her eye makeup. She put the knife down on the kitchen bench and I went to grab it but she snatched it up again.
‘Stay back.’ She pointed the knife at me, then at herself, and started stabbing at the tattoo, little test stabs at first, gradually going deeper. Blood welled up. She was making a mess of her leg.
‘Betty don’t,’ I said, and lunged for the knife.
She slashed out and the blade burned into my palm.
I retreated, curling my hand in a fist and holding it up to my chest, blood seeping through my clenched fingers.
‘Mick!’ I yelled.
I heard his bedroom door open and footsteps down the hall. Finally, thanks a lot.
Betty heard him too and in one sweeping motion she stabbed the knife into her chest right up to the hilt. Mick reached the kitchen and just stared.
Betty looked surprised. She let out a little sigh, fell back against the wall, and slid down until she was sitting on the floor, legs out in front of her. Her hands still clutched the knife-handle and her blouse was becoming soaked with blood. I tried to remember some first aid training I’d done years ago but my mind was blank.
‘Should we pull the knife out?’ said Mick.
‘No.’ I looked frantically around the kitchen, picked up a couple of filthy tea towels, removed her hands and bunched them around the knife.
‘Call an ambulance,’ I yelled. Betty was starting to slump over and I held her up against the wall with my shoulder.
Mick ran to the phone and was soon back in the kitchen. ‘I’ve called them,’ he said. ‘Should we lie her down?’
‘I think you’re supposed to keep the bleeding part elevated,’ I muttered, ‘or maybe that’s limbs, shit, I don’t know.’ I felt for a pulse in Betty’s wrist. It was still there.
What if I had to do CPR? How could you do CPR if there was a knife stuck right where you were supposed to push down?
Mick looked at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘This really isn’t the time, Mick.’
He got up and went to his room, then carried his stuff out to his Ute. Blood seeped through the tea towels, soaking my hands.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ I yelled at him as he came back in. ‘Help me out here.’ He went into Betty’s room and returned holding a small book. It was a diary, the front and back covers plastered with pictures of Betty Page.
He crouched down in front of me. ‘This is Betty’s. Read it then destroy it. I’ll contact you in a couple of days.’ My bag lay on the kitchen floor and he slid it in.
Sirens wailed in the distance. ‘After the ambos the cops’ll come. I have to get out of here.’
I just stared at him. He picked up his beer and left and I heard his Ute start up with a low rumble. The sirens got louder until the ambulance stopped in front of the house.
The paramedics took me and Betty to the Alfred. I got stitched up and Betty got operated on. I had to talk to some more cops. It was getting to be a habit.
When they’d finished with me I went to see Alex.
He wasn’t on so many painkillers and if he remembered what he’d said under the influence he didn’t mention it.
‘What happened to you this time?’ he asked when he saw my bandaged hand.
I shrugged. ‘Friend of mine took too many drugs, went crazy with a knife and tried to kill herself.’
‘You have got to get out of the stripping industry,’ he said. ‘Put in an application, join the Victoria Police.’
‘I wouldn’t want to join a club that doesn’t want me,’ I said, then paused and looked out the window. ‘Alex, what if, hypothetically, I knew that Farquhar didn’t kill Frank Parisi, and I knew who did?’
‘Got any evidence, hypothetically?’
I thought of the diary in my bag. ‘No, but if someone confessed to me?’
‘Recorded confession?’
I shook my head, no.
‘Hearsay,’ Alex said. ‘Circumstantial evidence. Not enough for a court case. No one would touch it. So which nut-job colleague of yours confessed?’
‘No one. I was just speaking—’
‘Hypothetically.’
‘Yeah.’
Betty had just missed her heart and she lived. After hospital she was admitted to a psych ward for a while which got her off certain drugs and onto other ones, and I heard she moved back to the country after she was released.
I read her diary. She admitted stabbing Frank and confirmed everything Aurora had told me. I burnt the diary in my kitchen sink and set off the smoke alarm.
I got home from the hospital that day in time to see Chloe’s segment on ‘A Current Affair’. There were a lot of gratuitous T&A shots, and despite mugging shamelessly for the camera, Chloe looked great. She called me right after the show had aired and told me her good news. The TV station had offered her a hosting gig on a TV special, a six-part series called ‘Sin City’, exposing the seamy side of Melbourne, peepshows, strip clubs, brothels. She was over the moon. She’d finally gotten her fifteen minutes of fame.
After the special she did a couple of magazine articles about her life, and ended up posing sans me for Curtis at
Picture
magazine. She got two lines in a ‘Stingers’ episode, playing a stripper, showed up at everything, even the opening of an envelope for a season, and auditioned for a hosting gig on an afternoon cartoon show, losing out to a former soap star. Her stripping career was going great guns though—everyone wanted the celebrity stripper as seen on TV.
I received a letter from Mick a week later, one page of childish looking scrawl. He apologised and wrote that although he first pursued me because Aurora told him to, he really did fall for me. I rolled my eyes when I read it but I kept the letter and the photo I’d stolen all the same. And memories of the sex we’d had kept me going on long lonely nights when I let my fingers do the walking.
I thought about Aurora too, wondered if getting away with Frank’s murder had helped her get over her sister’s death. I doubted it.
I did the surveillance job with Torcasio. Most of it was deathly boring until we caught the guy with his mistress pashing on the promenade at Southbank.
Tony gradually gave me more and more work and taught me all the stuff they never did at the security academy. It was a real mentorship, kind of like Yoda and Luke Skywalker, or the karate kid and that old Japanese guy. He couldn’t always promise me regular hours so I still did the occasional show for Kelvin, but didn’t tell my mum.
When Alex was released from hospital his unit threw him a party and I was invited. It took place at an Irish pub in the city but I ended up leaving early. I felt excluded from their tight-knit cop club, suspected everyone there had heard the surveillance tape of Mick and me having sex, and Suzy McCullers kept hanging on Alex’s arm like a limpet on a rock. I liked Alex, there was something sexy about him, but I wasn’t the type to go and cut another chick’s lunch.
Three weeks after Betty stabbed herself I was sitting in the Turtle Café drinking a long black that was giving me heart palpitations and flipping through
Impress
, checking out the band listings. Doug Mansfield and the Dust Devils were playing at the Greyhound. I called Chloe, but she was shooting the ‘pub strippers’ segment of her show so I decided to go it alone.
As usual there weren’t many punters on a Wednesday night. I sat at a table by myself getting gloriously drunk on mini bottles of champagne and smoking Winnie Blues from the cigarette machine. I’d decided I would only smoke when I drank. I sang along under my breath to all the songs, and swayed and swished my hair around.
When the band took a break the spunky bass player came up and sat at my table.
‘I’m Jack,’ he said.
I already knew his name from the liner notes of their CD.
‘Simone.’ I shook his hand. It was damp from the Melbourne Bitter can he’d been holding.
‘You always come and see us play, and you never come up and say anything,’ he said.
‘I’m shy.’
‘You weren’t shy when you danced on the table that time. You must have been pretty pissed.’
‘Not pissed, happy.’
‘Who was that guy who dragged you out? Boyfriend?
Husband?’
‘Nah, he was an undercover cop.’
Jack’s eyes widened. I could see him decide to let that one go.
‘It’s surprising, a girl who’s into country music,’ he said.
‘I’m full of surprises.’ I smiled and played with my glass. Flirting 101. Like shooting fish in a barrel.
‘Can I buy you a drink?’ Jack asked, emboldened.
‘If you promise to play “She Dances on Tables”.’
‘What’s so special about that song?’
‘I used to be a stripper.’
‘I can imagine you would have been very good. What do you do now?’
I leaned over. ‘It’s a secret,’ I whispered drunkenly into his ear. ‘If I told you I’d have to kill you.’
Jack laughed. ‘You wanna go out sometime?’
I sat back in my chair. ‘No offence, but you’re a guitar player and I’m trying to cut down.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You guys are trouble.’ I sipped the last of my champagne, leaned forward and looked him intently in the eye. ‘With a capital T.’
I would like to thank the following people for inspiration, advice and technical support: Anthony Larsen, Donna Shoebridge, Julie Lamont, Carl Donadio, Damian Powell, Alan Rice, Stuart from Melbourne Sailing School, Barry Watts, Marele Day, the Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre, Gary Ovington, Jesse Blackadder, Peter Mitchell, Annette Barlow, Colette Vella, Jemma Birrell, Jo Jarrah, Kevin Jansz, Mario, The Colonel, Sable, Asha, Larry, JB, the CIB detective I flirted with at the Chelsea pub, Scott Wales, Greg Thorsby, Adrian Brown, Mick Watson, Matt Rassmussen, Gareth Lindsay, Matt Dwyer, Simon James, Josh Burgoyne, Steven Bennetts, Tony Redhead, Thea Woznita, Jesse and Kate and Jasmine Redhead, Stella and Jean O’Connell, and Keith Larsenl Some of the venues described are drawn from reality but the characters are fictional. Except for Doug Mansfield and the Dust Devils. They’re real and they are: Doug Mansfield, Gerard Rowan, Nick Del Rey, Jack Coleman, Bruce Kane and Peter Mullins.
Lyrics from ‘She Dances on Tables’ are reproduced with permission from Doug Mansfield.