Animal Kingdom (17 page)

Thinking about it now, J wondered. Being born into this family was like a curse: it was like being born with the genes that would eventually give you cancer or send you mad.

They'd been cursed, all of them, by their neighbours, by the people around them. Cursed by their own stupid decisions and cursed because everyone needs someone bad in their lives to make them feel good about themselves. And the Codys were it. But his mother hadn't wanted to be it any more, and neither did he.

He wasn't going to let what happened to her happen to him.

He was going to get out; he just didn't know how.

Ducking out the side door without anyone seeing, he thought he'd take off back to the bowling alley and think it through a bit more, when he saw something on the gravel of the carport.

Something that shouldn't have been there. Something he shouldn't have seen, not there.

Nicky's silver bracelet.

What was that doing there? Her good-luck charm. She'd been wearing it the night before. She'd been playing with it at the bowling alley. She must have … she must have come here after they'd talked. She must have come here to say something to him. Maybe to try to make up. But where was she now?

J pulled out his mobile and dialled her number … and as he heard it ring on his phone, he heard it ringing from underneath the pile of old rubbish and cardboard just behind him.

Her phone was under a cardboard box behind him.

And then, turning, he saw Pope step out of the house and pause. As he heard Nicky's phone ringing, too.

J didn't know why—it was before his neurons could connect properly—but he just bolted, bolted as fast as he could, with Pope after him, and this time he wasn't going to stop.

The immensity of what was breaking over him was overwhelming; this was bigger than anything he'd ever imagined; not even his mother's death had been this big, because in some way he'd always half expected it, and she'd said so herself, half a dozen times, in her drunken, self-pitying raves in the middle of the night, when all he'd wanted to do was go to bed, but she'd kept him up, her
little man
… her little man, that's what he was. But this … this … couldn't be. Not Nicky. She was at the beginning, not the end. Not even Pope could have done this.

J didn't believe it, didn't want to believe it—but here he was, running for his life with Pope charging after him. Even as J leaped onto the car and up onto the carport, Pope was on his tail. But Pope was a forty-year-old drug abuser, and J was a seventeen-year-old kid, and even if he did gash himself on the corrugated iron, after leaping over a few back fences he soon found he'd left the older man behind.

But not resigned. Charging back into the house, Pope tore the place apart trying to find his car keys.

‘What's wrong, hon?' Smurf asked, having witnessed the earlier disturbance and sensing his panic.

‘Fucking car keys,' he cried frantically. ‘Where the
fuck
are my car keys?'

Just then, Darren arrived, and, turning on him, Pope demanded, ‘Give us yours, mate. I'm going to take your car.'

‘Where?' Darren cried. ‘Where's J?'

‘What do you want J for?' Smurf asked, alerted.

‘Give me your fucking keys,' Pope demanded.

He snatched the keys off Darren and was already halfway out the front door when he remembered. ‘What's that girl's …' The words were just tumbling out incoherently. ‘Where … the girl …' Everything was going too fast; there was too much going on. ‘You know, the girl—what's her address?' he spat out.

Smurf and Darren didn't know what he was talking about.

‘What's wrong?' his mother cried.

She felt it was finally coming undone, all her efforts to control them, to stand as a wall between her boys and the people out to get them, the ones who had picked them out before they were even born to be the failures, the losers, the dregs at the bottom of the barrel. It was all coming undone.

‘Just tell me what's her fucking address,' Pope yelled at Darren.

‘You went there the other day, mate,' Darren shot back, sick of the way Pope talked to him.

Grabbing Darren brutally by the hair, Pope yanked his head down hard and smashed it against the wall, crying, ‘Yeah, and I fucking forgot. Just tell me. What's her fucking address?'

But J was already at Nicky's house, arriving like a messenger from somewhere they hardly even imagined, from a world they wished they'd never touched. And even though he knew, he
knew
what had happened, even though he'd worked it out, seen it in his mind as he'd raced along the back ways to avoid Pope, dripping blood the whole way, he had to go there. Just in case. Just in case he was mistaken. And he'd open her door and there she'd be, lying on her bed, like she always was, studying for the exams. And she'd look up and smile the way she always did and everything would be all right again. They'd be able to forget all the shit of the world because nothing else mattered except her. She was the only thing that mattered; he knew that now. She was the only thing.

‘Nicky's not here, J,' Gus said, looking up from where he was sorting bills on the kitchen table.

And everything came to a halt. The world stopped dead.

‘Is everything all right?' Gus asked, noticing the blood.

But J couldn't bring himself to tell him. To tell him,
Your daughter's dead because I thought if she didn't know anything, she'd be safe.
Is that what he should tell him?
Your daughter's dead because she thought it was cool to hang out with idiots like me.
Is that it? How about keeping it just plain and simple:
Your daughter's dead. How do you like those apples, you stupid old man? Your daughter's dead. Why didn't you keep her away from me?

But he didn't say anything.

Because he couldn't. He couldn't bring himself to say the words, couldn't even imagine saying those or any words, ever again.

He just went to the bathroom and cried. Sat on the toilet and cried. Heaved, sobbed.

Her clothes were still there, her make-up on the vanity basin, everything just waiting for her to come in and put it all on, only she never would again because she was dead; and that's all that mattered.

She was dead because she knew him. For no other reason. Not because she was killed in a car accident, not because she had a childhood disease or cancer, not for any other reason than that she knew him. And if she hadn't known him, if by some fluke or chance they hadn't met, she'd gone to a different school, they'd been in a different class, she'd still be alive with a future ahead of her.

But now, nothing.

And then his mobile rang, and, answering it, he said, ‘Yes?'

It was Darren. ‘J, you gotta get out,' he said. ‘Pope's just left here in a bad way and he's headed over there.'

J could barely think straight. ‘Well, how does he know where I am?' he asked.

Shaking himself, he roused out of his lethargy. Pope was after him to kill him, he knew that for sure now; and if it meant killing Gus and Nicky's little brother to do that, then he'd kill them as well, because it didn't matter to Pope any more what was sane and what wasn't, because it had all gone completely insane and, maybe, when it came to Pope, it always had been.

‘I dunno how he knows,' Darren lied. ‘Just get out, all right, man? You've gotta get out. All right? Just go.'

And so he did.

He stood and splashed water on his face and tried to focus. He knew Darren was telling him the truth, and he knew Pope was out of control. He couldn't leave Gus and the kid behind because he didn't know what Pope might do to them, and, for the first time in his life, he felt responsible.

So he cooked up some reason why Gus had to drive him somewhere, to the shops, anything, and Gus was one of those nice guys that all you have to do is say
please
and he'll do it. So even though he was busy, he agreed to take J where he wanted to go—which was as far away from this place as possible—and, while Gus dawdled around, buckling up himself and the kid and getting out of the garage, J knew Pope was descending on them like the hammer of destruction, like a spirit of fury flying at them full of rage and hate from the other side of the universe, and when it hit them—
bang
—it hit hard.

Pope ploughed Darren's car into the side of Gus's Commodore station wagon and pushed it across the road into another vehicle. Pope, ready to kill, only he was stuck inside the other car—stuck, and he couldn't get out, thank Christ—and Gus and the kid were dazed and shaken, wondering what the hell was going on.

J realised that now there was no way back.

Pretending it had nothing to do with him had got his girlfriend killed and his world blown apart. He couldn't do that any more, because now it was his fight.

It was the end of something, and the beginning of something else.

J was taken into protective custody and his two remaining uncles were put into blue overalls and locked up for the safety of the community. But, even then, they hadn't given up. The only thing was, no-one was ever quite sure what Pope and Darren had actually wanted. Vindication? Revenge? To do whatever they damn well pleased?

It was a mystery, really, because when you looked at them, they were so ordinary. They liked watching the cricket and going to the footy, just like everybody else, and playing their computer games. They liked their drugs, but so does everybody. You couldn't say they were too lazy, for all the running around and angsting they did.

So what had they wanted? Well,
this
, probably, at least as far as Pope was concerned. This had been what he wanted. Pope had been doing exactly what he wanted: making trouble, causing pain, frightening people. He'd been having the time of his life. Pope had seemed driven, like the wheels in his head were spinning, but they weren't connecting with anything. But Darren had given up a long time ago; he had just been doing what he was told.

‘Ezra says don't get your hopes up about committal,' Smurf said sadly. She'd been doing a lot of crying and it was showing as she looked at the boys through the bullet-proof glass in remand.

Darren was sullen and depressed, hardly even able to look at her, but Pope was full of beans, like there was nothing he liked better than a fight.

‘But he said he … there was strings he could pull,' he said, trying to remind his mother of how important he and Darren, or at least
he
, was.

‘They're all pulled,' she answered quietly, but, noticing the state Darren was in, she tried to catch his eye. ‘How you keeping, hon?'

‘Well, hold on,' Pope answered, wanting to keep to the point. The point being how they were going to get out of stir. ‘Well, what did he say about getting the bail application in? Is he on this thing or what?'

Pope didn't get it. From his point of view, this was just a minor setback, a bureaucratic detail that needed to be sorted out. Ezra had to do what he was being paid to do and get them out.

Darren knew it wasn't that simple. In fact, Darren didn't expect to get out for some considerable time.

‘Darren, honey, say something,' Smurf said, tilting her head towards him.

‘Speak to her,' Pope ordered, irritated by his brother's snivelling.

‘What's going on in here?' Smurf asked, more pointedly, fearing the worst. She knew what jail was like; she knew the danger her boys were in.

‘Will you speak to her, you fucking sook?' Pope said, but Darren was too frightened or upset to talk to his mother, and Pope had his own concerns. ‘What did Ezra say about whomping the bail application in?'

Much as she loved her sons and all, sometimes even Smurf's patience was tested. ‘What do you think he said?' she answered firmly. ‘It's been whomped. You're not getting bail. What on earth made you think you were going to get bail? What do you think you're in here for?'

‘Oh, don't fuckin' start up again, Mum,' Pope answered, looking away, as if all they'd been accused of was stealing a sherbet from the local shop and Smurf was giving them a hard time over nothing.

‘Hey,' Smurf snapped back. ‘If you let anything happen to him in here …'

‘What?' Pope sneered. ‘What are you gonna do, huh?' He could have been thirteen, giving his mother a bit of lip. ‘What are you going to do, Mum?' he taunted through the security window.

There's probably never been a prison builder or architect who thought their construction would one day be useful in protecting someone from their mother.

‘Darren, baby,' Smurf cooed, trying to draw him out of his shell, but he wasn't coming.

‘Better do something,' Pope growled as he stood and marched off, sick of his mother's stalling.

She hated it when he got in a huff, but she was really worried about Darren, especially as he got up without even looking at her and trailed after his brother like a scared puppy, leaving Smurf frightened and alone. Because, the thing is, a mother's love is hard and abiding, and the thought of them in there with those killers and rapists was more than she could bear. She knew the hidings they'd be copping, the confrontations in the shower block when suddenly all the guards were nowhere to be seen. She could hear their screams inside her mind as they held them down to do whatever they wanted to them. She knew, as everyone did, that underneath the spotless surface of the state justice system lay a fetid world of violence and corruption that gave the lie to everything the outside world said it believed in. And the thought of her boys being caught inside it, helpless and alone, filled her with horror.

No, no, they had to be saved, and she would make sure they were. And, like every mother, she didn't care what she had to do to achieve it.

There weren't too many places Smurf and Ezra could meet any more, what with police spies and bugs everywhere, and, to tell the truth, Ezra was getting pretty jack of them all as it was. Being the defence lawyer of two of the most notorious criminals in the state has a certain cachet that disappears when they're accused of being cop killers. There are some people you just don't touch, and cops are top of the list. The doors that had once been open to Ezra were suddenly closing with loud, rude bangs.