Who Sings for Lu? (19 page)

On their return Mum was talking quietly; they came into the kitchen, Anna looking quite changed, face flushed as if at some unexpected compliment and she was a shy teenage girl. Still not speaking.

Katie hurried down to Anna’s bedroom, stood waiting for her sister. Anna entered, surprised to see her there — had Katie pleased to at least see a reaction.

‘How’s Rai?’ was all Katie could say.

Anna just inclined her head. Wanted to speak, Katie was sure.

Well, a supposed immature kid sister had something else. She pushed ‘play’ on the stereo. Then came Elgar’s Cello Concerto. And a musician’s changing face. The first time it had hinted of a smile in months. Katie finding it difficult to contain hers. Beautiful notes filled the room. Watching her drowning sister swimming from the deep to air, sweet normal loving family air.

The letters that came. From all over Australia, from Perth, some tiny outback community in the far north, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and small towns everywhere, a small sack arrived every delivery day. So much mail Claire could but send back standardised replies, with thanks from the Chadwick family, and even then needed the help of her three closest friends to handle it.

The vast majority of messages expressed goodwill and genuine concern and outrage. A few spoke of what should be done to the attackers, from capital punishment or torture to chemical castration. At least one teddy arrived a day,
used by our late daughter or in much loved condition
or else a brand new one in a gift box covered in kisses and usually from a teenage girl or a young woman same age as Anna. Poignant letters from other rape victims talking directly to Anna as if an old friend; a mother could but leave these on Anna’s desk and hope she might read them. Most made you weep, as well as realise rape and sexual abuse were a common problem in this the fabled Lucky Country.

Inevitable too there would be cranks writing, most pathetic, weird, some making no sense talking of signs and riddles; there were even those anonymous ones expressing glee that the Chadwick family
now know what it’s like to suffer, you filthy rich selfish bastards who didn’t give one
damn about anyone else and now you have reaped what you have sown.
Most of this type claimed God Himself was behind their suffering, as justification for the venomous outpouring. Incredible that fellow human beings should expressly wish Anna a
slow and painful non-recovery.

Some were gross beyond belief.
Why don’t you ask if your daughter enjoyed it? If her rapist was hung like a mule, don’t be surprised to find her back in the park very soon!
One wrote
, My mate who did it said she was so hungry for it he had to give her one up the
— Into the waste basket with that. They wished Aids upon Anna, every sexual disease, spoke of witnesses hearing her screams of orgasm. The common theme of money-envy ran through almost all. So did the rampant stallion theme, including stated certainty Anna had committed bestiality.

Sue, Karen and Marilyn came daily to take over the kitchen and help with opening the mail, a noisy, cheerful trio who turned even the correspondence of madmen and unhinged women into a laugh. Claire appreciated why, and sometimes found amusement herself. But harder when the slings and arrows were directed at your daughter — a perfect stranger to them — and your husband had abandoned you in the midst of this for another woman.

Soon as Katie came home from school each day she went straight to see Anna. She was talking, just a few sentences, but Katie wasn’t pushing it. Anna seemed to have chosen her sister as her confidante: little snippets of her experience leaked out. Starting, just a little, to get her appetite back, with requests for a particular food, and she was taking care of her personal hygiene.

One day Anna asked her mother to call Maddy and say hi. She asked Claire how she herself was and had it been tough? ‘Yes, but worth it to hear you speaking again, my darling.’ Claire in tears and of joy for once. The miracle had started.

Anna began visiting Rai every evening, preferring Katie to come with her. Claire thought her youngest was starting to enjoy their prime stallion’s company, and she saw no hostility from him toward Katie. With Anna putting weight back on, it seemed the healing process only needed time and the return of her father. But not once did Anna ask after Riley: she must have been told by Katie he had gone. Claire unable to get herself to officially inform Anna. Bad enough telling Katie, who
had surprised with her hurt and shock. Blind, unthinking man he was to her. Blind to what he has lost. Unless, Claire thinking more and more, it was Riley himself who was lost, found out by the incident as having some personality or emotional flaw. Well, with Anna on the mend, Claire knew she was getting stronger too. Long may it last.

Despite her feelings, Claire wanted to let Riley know his daughter was okay. Fighting against thinking about him, the woman he was with, what he — they — would be doing. Thought of them laughing together hurt so much, made her feel dull and humourless. Oh, to hell with him. The man who was always on about everything in this life having to be earned or it was worthless — did that include a marriage? And what about his inheritance plan for the girls, since there was no way she was engaging a lawyer to fight for one single dollar of settlement? Rather go back to a simple life, rent a small house, get a job.
Damn you, Riley Chadwick. Damn you, rapists, to hell ten times worse.

Sitting on the central Persian rug surrounded by letters opened and unopened, Marilyn asked rather casually, ‘You’re going him for half of everything?’

‘No,’ she answered matter-of-factly. She drew a modest salary off the business just as Riley did. It went into a bank account: she shopped on credit cards and withdrew a bit of cash from time to time, hardly ever going to town except to do the once-a-week grocery shopping in Musswellbrook, every five weeks visit the hairdresser. Come to think of it, how was a salary continuing to be paid into her account if Sandy had taken over the business? Perhaps it had been discontinued and she was getting by on accumulated funds? She had never bothered about money except in her inherited frugality. Just as she had grave concerns for her daughters inheriting millions. What if it proved a poisoned chalice? It did happen, she had read about it.

‘You hear about these separated couples fighting tooth and nail over who gets what, I find it obscene.’ Claire saying it wasn’t up for further discussion. The short letter she had just read from a ‘grandmother of nineteen, and each one is a precious jewel. Sending my love and my nineteen’s love to your daughter and your family.’ Humans, at their best.

‘If you weren’t a sheila you’d be lying in a heap on the floor. Why the fuck did you do such a thing?’

He was seriously mad. At Lu for what she’d just told him, though he showed scary satisfaction at the jungle justice the boys had inflicted on Uncle Rick, and of course great concern for what she’d been through. Even had tears in his eyes. Dried though when she told of the Chadwick woman.

For hour after hour Rocky paced the apartment living room, or stood at the window just staring, and every time she went to speak he raised his hand to say no. Not interested.

Took her chance when his back was turned fully and said, ‘Guess I won’t be working for you no more?’

He didn’t turn around for some time. And then the face he presented was more like a headmaster she’d once had.

‘Lulu?’ he said.

Yeah, that’s me, call me double-Lu all you like, I love it.

‘After what you’ve told me … I reckon you’re … You’re not well, Lu.’

Ridiculously her mind took up on the second Lu being dropped.

Still, she said, ‘Guess I’m not.’ Thought about it a moment. While he lit a cigarette. ‘You mean sick, don’t ya?’ Yeah, guess he did. Genuine
pain in his good man’s eyes, sure. But agreeing nonetheless.

Well. ‘Guess that’s it, then?’

He shot her a frown. ‘For what?’

‘Everything. Your plans. Stuff. You know.’ The night lights out there like they were rising up at a woman, coming to engulf her. Swallow the sick girl whole.

Her cell went off, text received. She got it out and looked at sender ID. Nice timing, Kev.

Guess what he was missing? Not who — what.
Sitting hr in my ofis hangin out 4 yr sweet puss cal me qik. K.

As if she wanted him, the creep, the fuckin’ hypocrite, a cop
and
working on, if he only knew it,
her
case —as if she wanted him sexually. Or within a million kilometres.
Call it whatever you like, say your lies about how beautiful I am, how you are falling for me. You are a rapist. You only warned my uncle off to have me to yourself.

Next Rocky’s standing behind her — how did he get there?

‘That Jay or Bron or fuckin’ Deano?’ he growled over her shoulder.

She turned the phone away. ‘No. And if it was I’d tell them to fuck off. You didn’t let me finish. I planned it, against the Chadwick chick, sure. But, I never said to go ahead and do what they did. Why would I?’

Why would I? Why would I? Why? Why?

Next he’d snatched the phone off her. Now how did she explain
this
yet-to-be confessed story?
I’m dead meat. Finito. And all those times of thinking about ending it, Lu-honey? Well, the time is here. At last.

‘Who’s K?’

She blew out air. ‘Whew. Now that’s another story I was about to tell you.’

Trembling he was. Probably about to hit her. Couldn’t blame him. What a fuck-up of a life story.
Uncle Rick was right: I was born to lead men on. Doesn’t just happen by itself. Brought it all on myself. Kill me, Rock. End me.

‘You promise the truth and I’ll hear you out.’ Rocky held up the phone. ‘Mean to say, this is up close and intimate wouldn’t you say? I mean he knows more about you than I do.’

‘Not like you think it is, Rock.’

‘We’ll see, eh?’ He gestured she sit down in the single armchair, swung the sofa round to face her. His features hardened at her long sigh. This better be good.

Words not enough to express what they felt, Jay and Bron, on moving into their apartment. Just grins and sweet disbelief as they went slowly from room to room, a mansion to their eyes of 49, call it 50 square metres of carpeted living, tiled kitchen and bathroom.

Furnished as part of the rent package, beyond anything of first-hand experience to compare. Their dusty work clothes soon felt a violation of this spring-cleaned place, and they looked at each other, glanced at the bathroom door — who’d be first in the shower? Fighting back childish giggling, like they’d won second prize in Lotto. But they’d earned it. From having jobs laying reinforcing steel on a big building site. Work was hard, money excellent — habit of work took some getting used to, but. Over nine hundred a week in the hand soon built up the savings in their first-ever bank accounts. Needed to as they had to pay two weeks’ rent as bond and two weeks in advance of the $550 weekly rental, plus a week for the letting agent.

Both over to the big lounge window with a fifth-floor view of suburbia, ten-thousand tiled roofs and streets set out like giant, swollen punctuation marks, cars and people like different-sized insects going hither and thither. And in here walls painted
matt-finish
cream, kitchen gleaming with stainless-steel appliances and a bench that looked exactly like stone, but when you got up close and
touched it, couldn’t be.

‘Ohhh,
yes
!’ Jay the first to express. ‘Is this us or what?’

Them all right.

‘What’s that out there, that a race track?’ Bron said.

‘I think it’s Flemington. You know:
And they’re off in race three with Lightning Bolt getting away like a bat out of hell
.’ The pair chuckling at Jay’s pretty good race-caller voice.

‘We should go one day.’

‘Yeah, we should. Might make a heapa dough.’

‘Might not too.’

‘Aw, don’t be negative, not today, best day of our lives.’

‘How can a lightning bolt change to a bat out of hell?’

‘How can a mate change to a prick? Put it here, Bron.’ Laughing.

‘After a shower let’s go and buy some beers to celebrate. Call Haden, see what he’s up to. Might pick up some chicks,’ Bron said in his excitement, like a kid really. Not that Jay was any better. ‘You never know,’ Jay grinning all over. ‘On a Tuesday, but?’

‘Love can happen anytime, sunshine.’

‘That what you call it?’ The reference point never far below even this happy surface. Why they both shrugged like mirrors of each other’s indifference, or acted indifference.

Clean and dressed to kind of kill, since flash dressing was not required in this kind of working people’s venue, an RSL club, full of ordinary folk and with no edge. No look-around eyes, no menace to be watchful of, no danger. Their mate Haden signed them in, and they happily spent a couple of hours over beers just shooting the breeze about work and stuff, blokes with a mouth, the ones to watch you didn’t say the wrong thing to, chicks memorable and ugly who’d walked by their site, tit size, leg length, how much come-on in every set of female eyes. Lots of laughs about pretty well nothing.

Catch ya tomorrow, Hade. Yeah, you too.

Bought a slab of beer from the bottle store, grabbed ciggies — hey, let’s grab a paper — from the 7-Eleven store on the way back up to ‘the mansion’ to drink in the night view and drink piss. ‘Not too late,’ cautioned the newly responsible Bron.

‘No warnings for sleeping in, remember.’ Jay of the foreman’s rule number one.

Then he mentioned, as if ever so casually, ‘That photo of Lu they stuck in all the papers?’

‘That was Lu? How do you know that?’ Bron full of shit.

‘We both know it. That’s her hair. Bit of cheekbone sticking out.’ Jay pointed at page three of the newspaper they just bought. ‘Here she is again, just she’s off the front page now.’

‘But no face.’

Jay with a look now, and Bron knowing what it meant. Why his face clouded. ‘She might have snapped us too …’ Jay said.

‘Nah. We knocked her over from behind, first time up. Lucky you spotted her behind that bush. Dumb hiding place.’

‘I’m no bum bandit, Bron.’

‘Leave it, will ya?’

‘If they ever catch us, you better be owning up to it,’ Jay said.

‘If. And sure I’ll own up. No fuckin’ diff you plugging one hole, me the other.’

‘Oh yes there is. Judge’ll see it different.’

‘Pass me another beer, will ya — spoilsport.’

They both tried to force a chuckle but it was more quickened breaths of air.

Then Bron said, ‘We haven’t eaten yet.’ The grocery shopping yet to be done, saving that for the day off on Sunday. Nice big supermarket down the street.

Waiting for the Chinese fast-food delivery took two more cans of beer and brought a change of mood, back to happy chappies. Spare ribs and fried rice for Bron. Combination fried rice and lemon chicken, Jay. The door buzzer went, Bron up to answer it.

‘Hang fire, man,’ Jay checked him. ‘Find out who it is first.’

‘How does this work?’ Bron meaning the intercom. ‘Ya better watch out. Might be the bogeyman,’ Bron added as Jay came up to figure the intercom out.

The rental agent had taken them to the top floor above, a flat with closed-circuit television to check on visitors. Had two bathrooms too, but cost an extra hundred a week, not worth it. How many visitors
would they be getting? They didn’t need a bathroom
each
. And what was the big deal about security?

‘Lu Tong’s delivery service,’ an Aussie voice answered.

For some reason it wasn’t good enough for Jay. ‘What did we order, mate?’

‘Duh?’ Bron went, his favourite expression. Heard the guy repeat their order.

Soon they were replete on Chinese takeaways and getting ready for bed, 6 am rise tomorrow. Only 10.30 at night too.