Death Delights (20 page)

‘Jass had this dream,’ she finally said, ‘that she could get out of this life. But it was only a dream. No way she was going to get clean.’ She stared defiantly at me as if to say, OK, you can make me talk, but you’re not going to hear anything that will give you any pleasure.

‘I believe she was intending to make it happen,’ I said. ‘Did you know what she had with her when she turned up on your doorstep?’

I could tell straightaway that Renee didn’t know, so I told her. The colour in her face drained even further so that she looked like the ghost of a ghost.

‘And whoever she took it from is going to be coming after it,’ I warned. ‘And her tracks lead straight to what’s left of your door. You are in real danger. Get a good deadlock.’

‘I’ll just point whoever it is in your direction,’ she said coolly. ‘You’ll be the one in trouble. Not me.’

‘You help me and I’ll own up. Otherwise, I’ll deny knowing anything about it.’

‘You copper bastard,’ she said.

‘I need your help, Renee. Jacinta needs your help. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep my daughter safe.’

She gave me a look of withering contempt. ‘Oh sure you will. You’ve had such great success so far, haven’t you, Daddy dearest, with your daughter on the street.’

Renee walked into the bedroom and slammed the door.

The minute I got home, I rang the hospital again, putting the bag down under the table. There was no change in my daughter’s condition. This sort of thing, the doctor told me, can go on for a day or two. Or longer. There’s no pattern. We just have to be patient. I put the phone down and looked in on Greg. He’d crashed out and was upside-down again on his bed, with bedclothes everywhere. I covered him as best I could and went outside, restless and unable to settle down to sleep. The scorn and contempt in Renee’s voice were still with me. Outside, all was quiet. The scent of the cypresses filled the night air and I walked down into the darkness of the garden. Starlight ridged the leaves of the camphor laurel. I was turning back towards the house when I heard the odd metallic noise again. It wasn’t anything living, I was sure of that now. And I knew that I’d heard that sound a while ago, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember where or what from. I had a sense that I was not alone. I strained to see or hear whatever or whoever was around. I went down the backyard again, peering into the dark recesses, standing perfectly still, willing the sound to happen again so I could finally identify it. One more time and I’d have it. I remained standing in the darkness a few more moments, then I walked around to the front of the house and tried to discern if there was anything or anyone in the front garden. I was a bit spooked. I went back inside and locked up carefully, aware that I needed to find a secure place for the contents of Jass’s batik overnight bag.

It was impossible to sleep, so I picked up the carton of my mother’s papers Charlie had forced on me and put it on the table next to the documents and papers about Rosie and Jacinta. Now the three absent females in my life were lined up in boxes on my table. I couldn’t face them just now so I pushed them all aside and on a piece of plain white paper from my watercolour block, I did one of the things Charlie had recommended and drew up a plan of my childhood home. It was a rambling brick and tile cottage, and I drew the tiled veranda that ran around in an L-shape from the front door area, down the right-hand side where another door, this one from what we called ‘the good sitting room’, opened onto the same maroon and cream tiles. I drew the hallway that ran half the length of the house with my parents’ room to the right of the front door, Charlie’s room on the left, with Rosie’s bedroom adjoining his. Next to my parents’ room was a fourth room, opposite Rosie’s, that had french doors opening onto the veranda and that we used as a dining room.

At the end of the hallway, the house opened out into ‘the good sitting room’, rarely used except when we had special visitors, a room that we only walked through to get to the kitchen and the smaller sitting room next to it. Then I drew the doorway to my bedroom, an erstwhile small veranda that had been enclosed, so that it no longer gave onto the garden but had frosted glass louvres running halfway down the external wall. I remembered it had been very cold in winter, the glassed-in area losing heat on chill mountain nights, and the tiny gaps between louvres allowing wind to whistle through them. It had been many years since I’d thought of that bedroom. On a table in front of the louvres, I’d had a collection of birds’ nests and eggs, small creatures in glass tanks and various pets, some of them rodents, that had caused my mother, when she was sober enough to take notice, a lot of concern.

My love for and interest in native birds had started then, as I came to know the birds of the mountains, the black cockatoos, the coucals and the rare satin bowerbird. I remembered how I’d thought I could understand what they were saying when they called. It wasn’t such an outlandish claim, I realised. The alarm calls of birds are easily identifiable as such: urgent, repeated on the wing as they flee the threat or drive off the predator. The whispers and cooings of mating calls, too, are obvious, as tiny feathered bodies flirt and tease. Even today, I can’t help hearing words when I hear the cries of birds. I’ve never told anyone this; I suppose I’m a little ashamed at such a childish habit.

Behind the door was a large poster of Merlin, and I suddenly realised twenty-five years later why I’d identified so closely with him. Merlin had been given the gift of understanding the language of bird and beast. There was a large table with my books and treasures stacked on it. I studied and read at that table, being called to dinner at about six thirty if my mother was still upright at that hour. I recalled my deep reluctance to put the book down, usually some gothic tale or other of death, decay and forbidden love. I remembered the odd formality of those dinners in the bare dining room presided over by my parents, before my father moved out to his shed, my father carving and my mother serving the vegetables while we pretended not to notice her swaying in her chair, or that the potatoes were almost raw, the beans blackened on the side that had stuck to the pot, or the carrots so salty they were inedible. I think my mother was the worst cook in the world even when she was sober. Anything she made was disastrous. Even as a kid, I could tell she had no love for food, no interest in it. She regarded everything she did in life as a chore and a waste of time. She was the only mother I knew who bought butcher’s schnitzel, in the days when the butcher sold this ready rolled in breadcrumbs to hide the second-rate cuts. Every day Rosie and I took vegemite or peanut butter sandwiches to school. Every night we had tinned fruit and ice-cream for dessert. Some nights there was a fight that ended when my mother left the room, leaving my grim-faced father and us two kids sitting in a terrible silence. Other nights, there was only the ominous silence. Either way, we couldn’t wait to excuse ourselves and leave the table. My job was to wash up while Rosie wiped. She was always nagging me to let her do the washing up and I never let her. Somehow, washing up seemed slightly more desirable than drying.

Thinking of how my father vanished from the dinner scene by the time I was about twelve made me remember his shed in detail. How could I have forgotten the shed, I thought, as I sketched it in at the bottom of the backyard. It was painted fibro, with a corrugated iron roof and had been the garage before he’d had the big brick and tile one built in the driveway. Over the years, my father had created an alternative household down in that shed, gradually taking everything he needed for his secret life down there. A black and white television, radio, electric jug, jaffle iron, lounge chairs, standard lamp, desk, chests of drawers, even a strip of floral red carpet to put down on the cement floor. The ‘kitchen’ was nothing more than a couple of spirit burners on which he seared his steak and onions. Spade, shovel and tools all hung on the walls that he’d lined over the years and drawers and boxes of bits and pieces were stacked on the benches he’d built. Eventually, he slept down there on a fold-up bed covered in army disposal blankets. In the last couple of years before my mother died, my father practically lived in the shed. He made his own meals down there, he discouraged us visiting him, although sometimes he’d tolerate us if we were quiet and just read or looked at books in silence. The smell of kerosene always pervaded the place in winter because of the old heater he had down there. I remembered the funny gurgle it made, like someone’s stomach rumbling, as the big upside-down bottle of blue kero fed into the housing under the radiant mantel.

My mother knew better than to enter that shed. The only time I’d witnessed physical violence between them was the day she tried a forced entry.
No wonder, I thought to myself, that I married a woman like Genevieve. Although she hadn’t always been so difficult. It’s hard to look back and wonder what it was that drew us together twenty years ago. Perhaps it was just sex and sentimentality as Charlie used to say about men and women. My thoughts turned to the woman to whom I was now attracted. Was she just another in the procession of witches? I recalled her seductive, grainy voice, the muscular arms and strong hands, the haunted shadows around her eyes. The fact that she was in some way connected to my daughter. The fact that she’d made an anonymous phone call to the police, changed tack halfway through, swerving away from something in her mind and giving information about Jacinta instead, and then denying doing so, made her complicit in intrigue at best, and something far more dangerous at worst. I thought of how she was named after an island off the wild west coast of Scotland, where a long night fell from October to February.

I walked outside again, restless, agitated. It was very late now, the distant roar of city traffic long ceased. I could smell salt from the sea on the breeze. I thought again of the tapes Chris Hayden had made for me. What was the information that Iona Seymour had almost told the authorities before her mind and voice detoured to something else? My fingers
closed around something in my pocket and I remembered the desperate, mysterious words of the prayer she’d pushed under the statue. I knew enough about the workings of the human mind to understand that there must have been some connection in her thoughts between what she stopped herself from saying and what she eventually said.
I went back inside to where the cassette player was still sitting on the sideboard with her taped voice on it. I stood listening intently as I played the start of it one more time. ‘I want to talk to someone in charge of the investigation dealing with those two’—I stopped it there. Those two what? I pulled out the prayer she’d written and read it: ‘Please help me with this terrible business.’ I recalled her powerful presence and the stormy energy around her. I put the small folded piece of paper on the table next to my diagram of the family home, sitting and staring at the rooms I’d drawn.

Eventually, I went to bed, but it was a long time before I slept and even then dreams of my mother swirled around together with Rosie, Jacinta and Iona Seymour and it seemed no time before I heard Greg in the shower, and groggily looked at my bedside clock. It was almost seven and outside was another Monday morning. I lay there for a moment while all the world rushed back into my consciousness. The memory of the contents in the wrapped package that I’d found among my daughter’s meagre possessions took hold of me. I’d have to find a secure storage place soon.

•

I had a shower and rang the hospital. Jacinta had passed a quiet night, the sister said, but her situation hadn’t changed. They didn’t use the word ‘coma’. Greg stood opposite me towelling his hair dry while I spoke on the phone. Then I cooked him bacon and eggs, feeling as if I hadn’t slept a wink, a tea towel tucked round my waist. I moved the bacon in the pan so it wouldn’t get stuck in the cooking egg white and had a weird feeling, like a premonition, that there was something I needed to know, and that it was looking up at me from this very pan.

‘How is she?’ Greg asked as he watched the toast. He’d flattened his hair down with some gluey substance and looked like a slick baby gangster from a thirties’ B grade movie.

‘Nothing’s changed since yesterday,’ I said. ‘She’s still unconscious.’ I turned the heat down under the frying pan and searched the drawers for the egg slice.

‘I’ve got a bit of business to do this morning,’ I told him, ‘then I’m driving to Canberra.’ I found the egg slice and lifted the eggs onto his plate. ‘And I won’t be back until tomorrow night.’ One egg broke and Greg grabbed a piece of toast and cut a little toast wall, placing it beside the break in the egg to dam up the runny yoke. One wayward tress of hair had broken free of the gel and stood up on the top of his head like a tidal wave. I leaned over to flatten it, but he ducked away.

‘That’s cool,’ he said. ‘Paddy’s asked if I can sleep over at his place. Is there any more bacon?’ Again, the strange feeling descended. ‘What did you say?’ I asked him, disoriented for a split second.

‘I said two things,’ replied my son logically. ‘I asked if there was more bacon and can I sleep over at Paddy’s place?’

‘Paddy?’ I said. ‘Who’s he?’

Greg frowned, looking at me as if I had two heads.

‘You’re truly weird.’ Then he spoke in a deliberately patient voice, as if he were speaking to a child. ‘Paddy is like only my best friend since Year 10, Dad. And his dad got all of us good seats when we flew to Queensland year before last.’

I searched around in my memory, then I nodded. I remembered Paddy and his family. I’d done my usual predator check on them a couple of years ago when Greg first started spending time with the fair-haired boy whose father was project manager for Ansett and whose mother was a teacher. Neither of them had a police record and they sounded pleasant and friendly on the phone.

‘That’ll work out well then,’ I said. ‘That means I’ll be back before you get home from school tomorrow.’ We finished our breakfast and I thought how Jacinta’s friends had also been subject to my enquiries. I cleared away the breakfast plates. In many ways, I haven’t been much of a father, but at least I’ve done that bit for them, I thought. Then I recalled my bruised daughter lying in Intensive Care and had to admit that even that hadn’t worked in the long run. I felt suddenly wretched and leaned into the washing up, and then Greg surprised me by coming up behind me to give me a hug. He hadn’t done anything like that in the years he’d been at high school. I didn’t know what to say so I patted him and gave him thirty dollars.

On the way out the door, Greg turned to me. ‘You look pretty cool wearing that tea towel,’ he said. ‘Even if you’re freaky.’

‘Have you got your keys,’ I asked, ‘just in case?’ He touched his pocket, turned to go, then paused on the doorstep.

‘Dad,’ he said, ‘do you think Jass will be okay?’

‘I know that everything that can be done is being done, Reg,’ I said, using his old nickname. He nodded.

‘Do you think I can go and see her?’

‘As soon as she can have visitors, I’ll take you.’ His face didn’t change from its expression of concern. ‘We just have to wait, Greg. And hope.’

A long time ago, some kind policeman had said almost the same words to me and I shivered at this merging of memory and reality. Greg waved and was gone to catch the bus but I was still back at my childhood house with my father, drawn out of his shed because of this terrible, unthinkable thing that had happened, as we sat opposite each other on the old velvet lounge and the two detectives spoke to us. I tried to remember where my mother had been, but could find no memory of her at that time. ‘We just have to wait,’ said the older detective. ‘And hope.’