The White Tower (2 page)

Two

‘I've got the job,' I announced, watching Ivan fill the doorway with our daughter in his arms.

He glanced at me over the top of Katya's head. ‘That's good.' Pleased, yet holding something back.

I kissed him and felt the cold of the coming night on his black hair and beard. I took Katya from him, rubbed my chin over her dark fuzz which might one day grow unruly as her father's. She had the smell of a baby who all day has been looked after by other people. I didn't like it. I wanted straight away to bath her, hold her naked against me.

‘I rang the creche to see if they had a full-time place for a few weeks and they said no way, which was nice.'

Ivan made a face. ‘Very accommodating.' He dumped the bag with Katya's nappies, change of clothes and bottles on the couch.

Katya was dozy, flushed, her eyes half closed. We'd got into the habit of leaving any serious talking until she and Peter were in bed. Today was Wednesday, so Peter wasn't a consideration. This waiting was a habit I'd encouraged. Ivan was the sort of person who'd discuss the fate of the planet, or our business, while bathing, feeding, cleaning up. But this evening I felt differently.

I changed from my work clothes into jeans and an old blue jumper. While I prepared a meal, I thought about coincidence, and how, if the contract with the ANU hadn't come up when it did, if Ivan hadn't taken it, he would be the one working for Moira Howley, not me. Ivan would have been the obvious choice because he knew about MUDs. I'd barely heard of them. All I knew was that they were some sort of role-playing internet game. The letters stood for Multi-User Dungeon, though whether dungeons were a necessary feature, I had no idea.

If Ivan had been the one to ring Moira Howley's doorbell earlier that day, what would he have made of her? And what would Moira have made of him? All the time I was cooking, and Ivan was feeding Katya, and I was feeding Peter's dog Fred, who knew it was Wednesday and moped, and Ivan and I talked in snatches, testing one another, I felt a mixture of pleasure and guilt and anxiety and gratitude.

Domestic life would always pull in too many directions at once, or else the bottom would fall out of it. What was Moira doing now? Washing up the dishes after an early meal? Sitting in a chair, hands clasped, a woman who looked heavier than she was, thinking about the bathroom mirror, and that, if she dared to stand in front of it to comb her hair, nobody would be looking back?

I glanced around my house with more of an accepting eye, the eye of a person who had more important things to think about than the fact that the housework wasn't being done. Originally bought for its renovating potential, it had become comfortable and shabby, offering few sharp edges or surprises. Most of the furniture Derek had bought, or brought with him. I'd become pregnant with Peter soon after we married, and until I took a job in a government department I'd had only scraps of part-time work, and consequently practically no money to call my own.

My living room was now a nest, the once glamorous sofa and armchairs covered with rugs so Peter could climb, and Fred could lie on them. To give Derek credit, he'd been generous about the house. Otherwise, there was no way I could have afforded to keep it.

I grated parmesan cheese, drained pasta, and wondered about the beginnings of obsessions, if Moira Howley could pinpoint such a beginning for Niall, if I ever would for Peter. Would I ever look back and say to myself, yes, that's it, it was then. Before I woke up one morning and the son I knew was gone.

I stopped outside the bathroom door to tell Ivan dinner was ready. He was bathing Katya, singing to her.

‘
Varyag
,' I said. ‘Isn't that a battleship? I remember you telling me that song was about a battleship.'

Ivan pursed his lips so that they disappeared between his moustache and beard. ‘It's what my mother used to sing when she was bathing me.'

‘Your mother sang you songs about battleships?'

‘In the Russo–Japanese war. It sank with everyone on board. My mother was a proud woman in those days.'

‘I heard it in your voice,' I said. ‘The pride.'

Ivan threw me a reproachful glance, but underneath it I could see that he was pleased to be talking about his mother, which he hardly ever did.

I'd noticed Russian words and phrases finding their way more and more into his dialogues with his daughter. And Katya, as though she understood, deep inside some fledgling language part of her brain, that they were for her and no one else, lifted her arms and sang back ‘Ka! Ka! Ka!' as loudly as she could. She never sang for me, though she would repeat the rise and fall of my voice when I was chatting to her.

Katya splashed and laughed, and Ivan laughed with her, lifting her out of the bath and wrapping her in a thick green towel. As usual, his front and beard were soaking wet.

He dressed her in the white one-piece terrycloth suit she wore night and day, and put her on a rug on the floor, while I served up bowls of pasta and matriciana sauce. Through the steam I recalled Moira Howley's eyes, how she would look anywhere but at her son's body mimicked on a screen.

I felt a sudden need to bring her forward, perhaps to make Ivan see something I was scarcely aware of myself.

‘All the years until they're grown up and don't need you any more,' I said. ‘And then nothing.'

‘What does she want you to do?'

‘Find out about her son's obsession. Help her to understand it. Put her in touch with the other players so she can talk to them about Niall, find out about them, what they did together. Why he got hooked. What happened.'

Ivan sipped his orange juice.

‘What do you think?' I asked.

He took a moment to consider what I meant, then decided on the safer answer.

‘Should be okay. Don't know what anyone'll tell you, but you should be able to make contact. You'll have to see if the game's still up though. What did you say it was called?'

I remembered the name printed along the bottom of the death scene, sitting in the envelope on my desk, along with Niall's photo.

‘
Castle of Heroes
.'

Ivan made a face. ‘I haven't done it before, but I think I know how. You'll need a Telnet Application, or better still, a MUD client browser. I think I can download one. You want to do it now?'

‘Why not?'

Ivan had no trouble getting what he wanted, but then we ran into a wall. There was a message saying that the game was down.

‘
Due to Ferdia's tragic and untimely death, Castle of Heroes has vanished for all time.
'

Surely it was Niall's death that mattered, not that of the character he'd played? There was something odd about the message. I couldn't help feeling that it was tongue in cheek.

‘Kaput,' Ivan said, with a tinge of satisfaction.

‘What now?'

‘Well, you can't play it, if that's what you were hoping.'

I stared at the message, willing it to disappear, wishing I could roll the clock back thirty seconds and see another, welcoming one in its place.

‘There's a web address.'

‘Guys who run MUDs are pretty much totally up themselves,' said Ivan. ‘This one's probably kept his homepage complete with pictures of his dog, cat and a description of what he had for breakfast.'

‘Let's see.'

I reached out my hand for the mouse.

Ivan stood up, pushing back his chair. ‘You can. I've had a hard day at the office.'

Castle of Heroes
might no longer exist as a MUD, but its website did, plus several player homepages. I spent half an hour reading through them, staring at photographs and reading potted personal histories. Homepages are such variable things. Some people put them together in a completely straight-faced way, for others they're an opportunity to play a little with identity. For me, that night, they were a consolation prize. I sent off half a dozen emails to ex-players, all saying the same thing, that I was an old friend of Niall Howley's who'd only just found out he was dead. I wanted to talk to anyone who'd been in contact with him in the last weeks of his life.

By far the most elaborate of the homepages belonged to the God of the MUD, a man who called himself Sorley Fallon.

The highlight of his page was a photograph of a young man standing in front of a ruined castle. His dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, his broad shoulders half turned to the camera. Though wearing ordinary clothes, jeans and an open-necked blue shirt, he looked like a younger Mel Gibson playing Brave Heart. Fallon, with his black hair and dark blue Irish eyes, was extraordinarily handsome, and this in itself made me suspicious.

Behind the photograph, and to the right, was a line drawing of another castle, not much more than a shape and sketch. In the left-hand corner, I read ‘GOTO
Castle of Heroes
', the last three words in ornate script and blue to match their creator's eyes. I moved and clicked the mouse. The message on the screen said
Castle of Heroes
was no longer connected. I studied Fallon again. It was hard to see exactly where he was standing. Scrolling down, I came to information about a silversmithing business, accompanied by more pictures, this time of a shop, Celtic bracelets, and a silver brooch so large and pointed you could use it as a weapon.

The shop was located in a village in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The composition had an element of tourist posiness, but there something slightly off about it, just as there had been, I thought, with the message of regret about the MUD. It was as though their creator was standing to one side, not laughing exactly, but performing a verbal and pictorial sleight of hand that the initiated would know how to read.

He'd turned his homepage into an advertisement for his silversmithing business, and this part of it seemed straightforward. The high­lighted words, the words you could click to move to another page, were green and decorated with a small shamrock at either end, an obvious touch on a site whose significance was far from obvious.

I stared again at the handsome face, the thoughtful, knowing blue eyes and mulled over how Sorley Fallon's expression, or indeed his presence, should be read. I had no previous experience of mudding, but living with Ivan, working with Ivan, had taught me that computers were great tools for making up lies about yourself. I was prepared for aliases within aliases, indeed I found the notion an intriguing one, and was grateful that the email addresses gave me some kind of lead.

My brief was to find out what I could about
Castle of Heroes
. Fallon was a logical place to start. But I didn't want to send him the same email I'd sent the ex-players. I needed access to any information Fallon might be sitting on without alerting him to the fact that I was after it. I decided to stop thinking about this for the moment, let it sit at the bottom of my mind.

Ivan had done the dishes, which I could read as a conciliatory gesture if I wished. I gave Katya her last feed for the night, put her to bed, then phoned Brook, a detective sergeant with the Federal Police who was also a friend.

I told him about the job, and asked if he could arrange for me to see the coronial brief on Niall Howley's suicide, plus the photographs.

Brook replied in his dry way that photos shouldn't be a problem, but the brief might be ‘a bit more tricky'.

‘Who was the officer in charge?'

‘Bill McCallum I think. I'll see what I can do.'

Brook said he had to go. I wondered whether his girlfriend, Sophie, was with him, but didn't feel like asking.

I'd first met Brook when he was assigned to investigate a car crash that had broken my arm, and had been meant to do much more. He had leukaemia, and had been given my case as a kind of favour, because he'd wanted to keep working as long as he could. Since then, his cancer had gone into remission, and for the past six months he'd been enjoying a period of unhoped-for good health.

‘You know what illness does,' he'd said once, looking at me appreciatively. I'd been seven months pregnant with Katya. He'd taken enormous pleasure in my pregnancy, almost as much as he did in Kat herself. ‘It absolves you from responsibility. You're not responsible. It's just something that's happened. And it's a regime, treatment. You're in it, under it, you do what you're told.'

He'd laughed and rubbed his full head of hair. His laughter had been a wind at the end of a long inland summer day, a lifting under dry land, spending what no longer needed to be hoarded.

I'd laughed too, delighted with myself, with him, with life. We'd spent that afternoon as we'd spent many, not talking much, listening to music, drinking tea and eating sweet things.

I knew he couldn't understand why I wanted to take on cases, involve myself in the misfortunes of strangers.

Three

A crumpled arm half hidden by an angel's head, a leg twisted at a crazy angle—the body in the centre of the photograph looked like a doll, a clumsily made toy that had been tossed in a heap by some giant child tired of playing with it. Given that Niall had planned his suicide, had taken pains to get the computer graphic right, had spent time, presumably, deciding on the best position, it made sense that he'd also thought about creating this impression of abandonment.

Why? To make his parents and everyone who'd known him feel guilty? To haunt them? Had this been his intention? What about his fellow Heroes in the Castle?

In the police photographs taken to establish the position of Niall's body, the base of the Telstra Tower was a grey smudge in the background. If you didn't know what it was, it could have been any building, anywhere.

I fetched my hard copy of the castle scene and placed it on my desk beside the photographs. In key respects, the similarities were so strong they had to be intentional.

In both, the body was lying face down, yet favouring the right side. The position of the limbs was different. The twisted right leg of the computer image was, in the police photographs, hidden underneath the body. Yet the overall impression—black clothes, grey background, long bright hair—was the same. The young man who might just be sleeping.

Cold fingers danced along my spine. I was seeing what to the police must have been obvious. Niall's real death was a clever copy of his virtual one. He had died, in actuality, as he had already died in his imagination. The photographs captured the last twist of a play within a play. Niall Howley had scripted his suicide and the performance had gone off without a hitch.

I set aside the distance shots, and the next one hit me between the ribs.

In the photographs I'd looked at so far, Niall's face and the front of his body had been concealed. The earth at the base of the Telstra Tower was hard—baked, unyielding Australian earth—but its impact had been hidden. The first close-up shot showed the side of Niall's face and head squashed to an unrecognisable pulp, his hair dark with blood. Blood ran from what remained of his right eye and nose. There was no right ear. Bits of cheekbone poked through skin that the ground had torn away. His right hip and leg seemed disconnected, as though his clothes covered a body not just broken, but cut up into bits.

There were a number of differently angled close-up shots, the main purpose of them being to catalogue Niall's injuries. I wondered who had seen them apart from the police, the pathologist and coroner, whether Niall's parents had asked to. I felt a scarf of responsibility slip itself around my neck, a scarf that might remain loose and comfortable, or might tighten of its own accord. I'd felt so pleased with myself telling Ivan about my new case, sounding important to Brook on the phone. It hadn't taken much to pull the plug on that.

I sat back and looked out my office window. I'd been in such a hurry to see the photographs that I'd practically grabbed the envelope from Brook when he arrived with it. In spite of what he'd said to me, in spite of trusting him to pull whatever strings were necessary, I'd woken up afraid that he'd turn up empty handed, or ring and say, ‘Sorry mate. No dice.'

Before I went to bed the night before, I'd packed away the files from my last job, a routine one for the Industry Department, and my desk was clear apart from a vase of flowers. I kept hard copies of my reports and notes in a double filing cabinet. The office was at the back of the house and offered an uninterrupted view of a trampoline and rotary clothesline. When I lifted my head from my work, I liked to look at the clothes gently drying in the sun and wind. I particularly liked to do this if someone else had hung them out.

While waiting for Brook, I'd moved all of Ivan's stuff onto one of the desks, and re-arranged the other to suit myself. Ivan tended to take over any space he occupied—it simply didn't occur to him that I might prefer to have my corner left exactly how I wanted it. Prunus blossom from our garden was in a bowl on the corner of my desk. Neither Peter nor Ivan teased me any more about working with my nose against a bunch of flowers. Ever since Peter was born on a rainy September night almost ten years before, a few months after my mother died of cancer, I've liked to pick flowers and keep them near me.

I made copies of the photographs. I'd left all the inside doors open so I could hear Brook and Katya returning from their walk. A soft knock on the front door told me they were back.

Brook was looking sheepish and trying not to grin, an expression that meant everything had gone perfectly from his point of view. I peered around his shoulder at the tight bundle of baby, blanket, woollen cap, as neatly and perfectly wrapped into the stroller as an expensive chocolate.

‘She stayed awake for most of it,' Brook said, as though I was criticising him for the fact that my daughter was asleep.

I handed him back the photographs, then said, ‘Turn around.'

Brook raised an eyebrow, but did as I requested.

‘It's new.'

Brook smiled over his shoulder. ‘Forty bucks at Target. End of season.'

‘It suits you. A jacket like that you can wear right through till December.'

‘That's what I was thinking.'

‘I didn't notice because—'

‘Because you were too wrapped up in this.' Brook waved the envelope of photographs, then turned it around in his hands the way he'd once turned the Akubra hat he'd worn to cover his baldness.

‘Did you say anything to Bill about my case?'

‘Didn't know it was a case.'

‘About Moira Howley.'

‘Nope.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘I might need to see him.'

‘Shouldn't be a bother.'

‘Thanks,' I said. ‘It was nice of you to take Kat for a walk.'

‘Favourite way of spending my day off.'

‘How's Sophie?'

‘Fine.'

‘Are you seeing her today?'

‘We're having dinner at the Taj Mahal.'

‘Oh very posh,' I said, and laughed when Brook went red.

‘Jealousy does not become you Sandra,' he said with mock ­pomposity, leaning forward to kiss me goodbye.

For so long Brook had been branded by his illness. Now he stretched and pulled, smiled and limbered, out from underneath the brand. His body was smooth, his greying hair neatly cut into his neck and around his ears. Yet I knew he dressed carefully and admired this trait in others because there was that in him which couldn't be smoothed out, which might ambush him still. This was what gave his eyes a shadow no matter what the time of day. Fear had put down roots as strong as cancer, and came to the surface more or less according to its own inclination. Brook dressed smoothly because crumpled was the best he could hope for underneath.

. . .

That night Ivan and I sat up in bed talking about Niall.

‘I wonder why he did it.'

‘Maybe he was inventing a past for himself,' Ivan said, fiddling with the doona, folding a corner, letting it loose, then re-folding it. ‘And ­suddenly he was struck by the futility of it. Poor little fucker just could not see the point. The guy has to get a few points for originality. A bit of theatre, no? But his mother will suffer. You can't do anything about that.'

Ivan abandoned his fidgeting and fixed me with his black eyes, but just then I saw Moira Howley more clearly than I saw him, a woman who wore too many clothes, yet was diminished and truncated, sitting on a straight-backed chair, knees and hands together, bearing witness.

‘Lie down,' I told Ivan. ‘What is it about you that you've never learnt how to talk and be comfortable at the same time?'

‘You're not going to complain about the cold.'

‘Just lie down and give me back my half of the doona.'

Ivan did what I asked then rolled over with his back to me. I gave it an experimental pat.

‘I thought you were tired.'

‘I am.'

I put my arms around him, blew on the back of his neck and made the black feather curls, our daughter's curls, lift and tighten. I felt the tension underneath his skin. Our conversation had focused his frustrations with his own life and work. But I didn't think he'd made up his mind
not
to help me.

. . .

Katya woke in the thick dark before a spring dawn, and I got up to feed her.

The initial sensation of alarm, almost of repulsion, the sweetness as my tight breasts, overfull and strained, began to empty. The discomfort of being made to wait, though Katya waited and then took what was offered most days, most nights, without complaint, taking and receiving with an even hand pressed on a working breast. These pre-dawn feeds were when I felt it purest, cleanest, the sucking and the draining down and out. The act, basic and mechanical, a place to start from. She and I had started in the middle of the night, with a single cry as the doctor handed her to me, black hair crowned in blood.

When we came home from hospital, Ivan kept the fire going so I could sit by it at three in the morning and feed her. Now we'd reached a workaday routine. On Katya's creche days, I expressed milk early in the morning. Over the last few weeks I'd been finding I didn't really have enough to make it worthwhile. Katya took milk from bottles with the same wide-eyed calm she accepted it from me.