The Stalk Club (14 page)

They
collapsed on the bed beside each other, bathed in sweat and temporarily unaware
of the cold air inside the apartment.  Manuel, breathing heavily, smiled at her
wholeheartedly and completely.  She smiled back, knowing that he had fallen
hard for her and would do whatever she asked of him, he had proven that
already.

It
had been easier than she expected.  When she first came into contact with
Manuel Torres, a twist of fear had knotted inside her stomach.  His face seemed
so hard and implacable.  It was rare for her to feel fear and it gave her a
small thrill while it lasted. 

However
it hadn’t taken long for her to realise that his face was just a mask, similar
to the many different masks she had worn over the years when she wanted or
needed to be someone else.  His was a mask worn for protection, developed
during his seven years in prison where he learned to show little or no emotion,
more specifically no weakness, so that the gaze of the lions that hunted in packs
within those walls passed over him and turned their attention elsewhere.

It
was a mask that she was soon able to remove from him once they were alone together. 
Beneath the tough exterior she found that he was gentle, inexperienced and an emotionally
stunted young man.  At that point her task became much easier.  Using her mind
and body, she sensed his needs and his desires and appeased them willingly and completely. 
He was soon overcome.  It wasn’t the first time she had used men to get what
she wanted, a promotion, a favour or just money.  She understood men and
considered them all to be simplistic creatures who never deviated far from a
sameness that was easily exploited.  Their attention was caught by a stare and
a smile and their minds were like clay, to be moulded into the required shape
after she had enticed them with her body.  Sex was the tool of choice against all
of them, something to even the ledger against their size and power.   

Manuel
Torres’ previous seven years had been filled with pain and emptiness which she now
replaced with an intoxicating mixture of joy and pleasure, the likes of which he
had never experienced before.  It had taken just a few weeks to insinuate
herself into his life and his mind. 

He
told her of his time in prison during their third week together.  The stories
saddened one part of her mind and excited another darker part.  She watched as
he choked back his emotions, deeply buried, as he told her harrowing stories of
gang rape, savage beatings and other depraved human behaviour he had
experienced and witnessed in jail.  She contorted her pretty face to display
sadness and understanding for him, while underneath laughed at his weakness.

In
their fourth week together he told her of his secret plans, plans which she
already knew about before they had even met.  It was why she had chosen him in
the first place.  He had been sworn to secrecy, lives depended on it, including
his own.  But such was his devotion, and her control over him, he volunteered
the information and willingly placed his life in her hands.

By
then her own plans had been carefully formulated to blend seamlessly with his.  She
accepted it as fate that their paths had crossed.  Fate, coming to assist her
in her quest for justice, a quest that had begun many years before, but had only
recently begun to form into an actual shape. 

She
remembered the moment when she knew he was completely hers, like a sixteen year
old schoolboy in love for the first time.

“Do
you love me?” she had asked him after a long and tiring session in his bedroom.

“I
do.  I love you.”   She appraised him minutely, carefully weighing the tone of
his words and searching his face and body language for any hint of male insincerity. 
She smiled when she found none.  He was hers for the taking. 

“I
want to help you.” she had said.  Then she had leaned close to him and placed a
small seed of an idea into his mind.  She nurtured it and grew it in him,
gently directing it toward the fulmination of her own plans, and so artful was her
manipulation, that in the end, he considered it to be his creation, his idea.

The
plan had been unnecessarily complex, she knew that, but she had fallen in love
with its symmetry and its deliverance of natural justice.   

As she lay on the bed beside Manuel, Kylie’s green eyes
gazed out the window to the blue morning sky beyond which showed no hint of the
previous night’s rain.  Her mind reached back into the past and she remembered
a time from long ago, the last time she could remember ever being truly happy. 
It was a simple weekend trip from Canberra to the south coast of New South Wales with her parents.  It began with the singing of the usual road trip songs
and ended when she awoke in complete blackness with water rushing into the car,
already up to her knees and coming up fast.  She screamed but her parents didn’t
answer.  She had instinctively known they were dead and that they could not be
helped.  While there was still time she rolled down her window.  She gasped as
the cold water flooded into the car and enveloped her body.  She waited until
the car’s cabin was almost full and the inflow of the water had slowed before
sliding her slim teenage body through the opening and blindly searching for the
surface in the dark waters.

Misery touched her life that day and would remain a
regular companion thereafter.  After a week in hospital she was visited by her
Aunt Maggie, who despite being her only living relative she had met only twice
some years previously.  Although her mother and her aunt were born of the same
parents, their indifference toward each other had grown through the years and was
sufficient to overcome their blood ties.  Her mother had rarely spoken of her
sister and on the rare occasion that she did, she maintained they had simply
drifted apart over time and neither had made the effort to bridge the gap. 

In the ensuing days in hospital Kylie Faulkner came to
understand that arrangements were being made for her to go and live in Cooma with
her aunt and her defacto Lester after she was released from hospital.  She didn’t
want to move to another town and live with people she barely knew but as she
was still a minor she was given little choice in the matter. 

In time, her physical injuries from the accident, which
included a fractured ankle and several deep lacerations, healed to become only
thin white scars on her pale skin, but the scars that couldn’t be seen, the
ones in her mind, remained open and infected.  She was traumatised by her
parents’ deaths and was troubled by nightmares and flashbacks of the crash, and
would break out into a cold sweat whenever she travelled in a car.  In addition
to her problems she was uprooted from her comfortable middle class life in Canberra to the seemingly perennially frost bitten and fog laden Cooma.

Although Aunt Maggie had similar facial features to
Kylie’s mother, unfortunately that was where the similarities ended.  While
Kylie remembered her mother as being a slim, pleasant woman with an easy going
soul, Maggie was a short, dumpy and taciturn woman who rarely smiled because
she found little in her life to smile about.  Her hair was cut boyishly short,
she wore no makeup and dressed in clothes of a style that helped to date her
ten years beyond her forty-seven years.

Her defacto Lester, who for some reason she had put up
with for thirteen years of her life, was a fifty-five year old semi-functioning
alcoholic who somehow managed to hold down a part time job as the local broker
for an insurance company.  He was overweight, slovenly and his predilection for
gambling and consuming enormous quantities of alcohol managed to keep the small
family poor, despite Maggie earning reasonable money as a nurse at the local
hospital.  The more they earned the more he spent.  Despite his habits, Maggie
complained little and Kylie often wondered how the pair had come to be
together.  She thought that perhaps it was an example of a relationship between
two people who had stayed together for lack of anything better immediately on
offer.

In the first few months of living with them, Lester had
maintained a cool indifference towards Kylie in the presence of her aunt.  But
when Maggie was absent, Kylie soon felt his eyes upon her, feeling their way
over her young body and resting on certain places that are unique to a woman
and strangely enticing to a man.  In time, as his boldness grew, the glances
turned to stares and then in turn to lascivious leers.  Even though Kylie was
still at the fledgling stage of her development to womanhood she reminded
Lester that he still had the same urges of a younger man. 

Once a month, as part of her duties at the local hospital,
Maggie travelled with a doctor to conduct regional clinics in some of the many
small settlements dotted throughout the Snowy Mountains.  It was an arduous, whistle-stop,
two day tour and required an overnight stay at Cabramurra if all went according
to plan on the first day.  It was during the third road trip since Kylie came
to live with them that Lester made his big move.

Kylie awoke to the sound of keys being fumbled at the
front door at around two a.m..  She had heard it all before as Lester went out
drinking at least three nights a week and stumbled home, either at closing time
or when he had run out of money, whichever came first.  It was a bitterly cold
night of around minus seven degrees Celsius and Kylie groaned at being woken
and pulled her doona tight around her.  After several unsuccessful attempts to identify
and insert the correct key, Lester eventually made it inside.  Kylie listened
to him take off his shoes and go to the toilet where he noisily urinated in the
only bathroom in the ten square house.  The wooden floorboards creaked
involuntarily as he then shuffled his way around the house but then stopped and
silence prevailed.  Kylie wondered what he was doing as she hadn’t heard him go
to his bedroom which was down the hall from hers.  She waited for him to move
again and betray his position in the house but heard nothing.  Her nerves began
to prickle and she raised her head from her pillow and looked at her door. 
Through the one inch crack under it she could see the shadow of two feet and
her breath caught in her chest as she realised he was standing outside her
door.  Her heart raced and pounded like a drum up in her throat as she heard
her door silently and slowly swing open.  She pretended to be asleep in the
hope that he would go away but in he came, confidently staggering straight to
her bed.

“Kylie?  Kylie, I’ve got something for you,” he whispered. 
He lifted the covers and ran his freezing cold hand up her thigh and between
her legs.

She gasped with shock from the touch and was slow to
react. 

“What are you doing?  Are you crazy?  Get out of here.”

“C’mon, don’t be like that.  You know you want it.  I
seen the way you been looking at me,” he said chuckling.

“Please leave me alone,” she pleaded, but Lester ignored
her.  She gathered her wits and tried to push him away as he continued to run
his hands slowly over her body, but despite his obvious drunkenness he easily
overpowered her, for although he wasn’t a strong man, he still outweighed her
by over forty kilograms.  She fought harder and struck out at him with her nails
but this angered him and he slapped her several times.  The blows jarred her
head, blurred her vision and were enough to force her to submit to his will. 

As Kylie stared sightlessly out Manuel’s apartment window
at the thin and wispy cirrus clouds that she could see starting to form high in
the sky she could still vividly remember Lester’s stale smell - a combination
of body odour, stale beer and cigarettes - as he lay on top of her and rutted
furiously.  She had screamed in agony as pain arced through her abdomen but he
clasped his hand over her mouth, not that there would have been anyone within
earshot to come to her assistance anyway.  It was over in two painful minutes
but the memory of it would remain with her to her final day.  Lester left without
a word and Kylie had curled into a ball and quietly cried and hoped for the
pain to subside.  It was her first sexual encounter.

She spoke to no-one about that night, hoping that it was
a one-off moment of madness and perversely wanting to give Lester some
benefit of the doubt.  But sure enough, a month later when her aunt went on her
next road trip, Lester returned to her bedroom.  Again she tried to fight him
off but again he hit her, always with an open hand.  There would be no obvious marks
to alert anyone or add weight to any claims she might want to make. 

After several months of abuse she finally raised the
courage to tell her aunt.  She wasn’t sure what reaction she expected to
receive but she certainly hadn’t expected her to fly into a blind rage and
accuse Kylie of trying to drive a divide between her and Lester.

“After all the things we’ve done for you.  No-one else
would have taken you in.  If it weren’t for us you’d be dead.” 

“But he’s been hurting me.”

“Look Kylie, I don’t know why you’re saying these stupid
things, but if you cause us anymore trouble, or if you say these things to
anyone else, I swear I’ll turn you over to the foster care people where things
will be a lot worse for you.”

It was a vacant threat because unbeknown to Kylie, Aunt
Maggie was being paid thirty thousand dollars per year from the solicitor who
acted as trustee for Kylie’s dead parents’ estate to house and care for Kylie. 
Although they had little to show for it, it was money that Maggie and Lester
had become accustomed to spending.