Who Sings for Lu? (22 page)

On his right, if he took that street, it went straight to Hell. Except Deano had been there, in his daytime walking, getting seen so his pale skin wasn’t perceived as that of the enemy, especially the cops, so they could see he was kind of one of them at least on the outer edges looking in at the campfire and — who knows — one day getting invited to join them even if for a short time, since he lived in the neighbourhood. Not as a mate, in their company most the time, it could never be that. This was their Hell, it was branded all over in their skin colour alone, never mind all the other shit, of being the definition: Abo.

Hell, visible from any of those big apartment buildings over yonder like the World Towers with a view thirty, forty, fifty floors up and a universe safe from the seething nest of Redferners, from a people set against each other even though they suffered the same oppressor, same injustice, same racist hatred: they were divided here and so were ruled. By law, though in a limited way since it was dangerous to go right into Redfern, even if or especially if you were a cop.

With engine gunning up your arse sometimes the only choice is the fire, so Deano ran right. And up ahead another world, peopled by shapes making strange movement, the sounds coming down to meet him; they’d know the second he passed under a streetlight reflecting off his unpigmented complexion, he was out of his territory. Out of his
country. Knew it would take a face or three to remember him, to pluck the memory of seeing him when they were less drunk in the daylight hours, when he put himself out and about here.
Please, God.

Crying, yelling, bellowing, moaning, the strange staccato of their incoherent speech, the screaming and grunting of wild animals fighting, yet humans with their hopes six, seven generations dashed. Didn’t seem right he was hoping for their empathy.

Screech of the pursuer braking. Whine of it in reverse. Mad scamper of Deano’s sneakers on the road as he knew the pavement had uneven patches that could trip a man, snap his ankle. Running without desperate lungs had always been an ability he had, so he was fine on that score, even though he smoked.

Shit, a totally different world from the daytime. Shapes became milling groups of people in a state not only of gibbering drunkenness but self-immolation by spiritual insanity, setting themselves on fire; staggering and falling, on hands and knees, bent over vomiting, in some bizarre choreography whose sole instruction was to express despair — despair.

And now I’m one of you. You’re spewing your life up on the road. I’m running on it to save mine.

Running past figures sprawled out of shop doorway recesses unconscious or fighting it, no Dreamtime here, that was gone, not even awaiting them in the Great Outback, not this lot. Running past scarecrows leaned and propped up against boarded-up store fronts covered in graffiti, blokes sat out on the road, befuddled — like someone had dropped them from the sky — lain on the road like slumbering reptiles their ancestors used to eat and pay homage to in art and worship for sustaining them, for nourishing spirit as well as body. Bodies strewn everywhere to his adjusted eyes, and staggering like zombies and corpses risen not so much from the grave as heading back. Shadows fell from shadows. This is Sydney town, world’s most beautiful harbour city, fifty-plus beaches, mild climate, a bit for everyone, made by God so whites could oust the Abos after forty thousand years, and later in the piece so migrants from everywhere could stream in. No one thought their paradise might have a virus that would one day invade the invader body cells and kill it dead. One day. But not soon. Might take another
forty thousand years. Maybe never.

Deano got an idea born of more than desperation, since several figures lined the street and the pavement both sides not fifty paces off, waiting to block him. And the car had forced him on to the pavement quite possibly to ram him —
me
— against the concrete wall alongside.

‘
Undercover! Undercover cops
!’ he screamed. A warning that found somewhere to echo. And now he was forced to slow down to a walk, breathing heavily but not frantically, not from heaving lungs. Just mortal fear as the figures stood in a linked line right across the street now.

He turned in a crouch, stabbing a finger like God Himself accusing, right at the vehicle with two opening front doors. ‘
Undercover! Undercover cops
!’ As the figures, same black as the night, blocked him. And, he hoped, fervently hoped, the word
cops
reverberated in every sufferer’s mind.

Whose side they gonna take, D? Or are we both the enemy?
Had a vague idea why the pair were pursuing him, wondered how the hell someone had managed to find him, and who of the others had ratted.

Something whizzed by above his head. Next, glass shattered. The night glinted and arced white, it shone like tiny stars hurtling from the dark. Whistling sound through the air, soft whooshes and a constant tinkling and shattering like some kind of music and percussion gone wild with explosion and heavy thumps, as bottles rained down on the two figures out of their car, sent them scuttling back.

Out of sequence and the logic of just moments ago, Deano sprinting in the same direction as the car reversing at speed, realising he too was the enemy since the bottles were aimed at him and them both.

One caught him in the back. Others whizzed past him and exploded like bombs in front, to the side and behind. Voices were not so much yelling as
shrieking
race and colour: ‘
WHITE MAGGOT FUCKS! GET OUTTA OUR TERRITORY
!’

Owen still on the ground where Deano had pushed him.
Jeezus, hope he didn’t hit his head and fuckin’ die
! But Jeezus, he was out to it, snoring.

‘Come on, you old bugger,’ he said, hefting the man up. ‘Time we took our money-spinner up to Brizzie. Hardly ever rains there, water or bottles. Let’s get the hell out of here, Owie. Now.’

Seemed to produce a strange thrill in Lu to be — well, entertaining, wasn’t that what they called it when it was either being promiscuous or done solely to please the male, even having no choice you were still entertaining — here in the same apartment the meeting with Mrs C took place. Lu still reeling over that and then there was this. Him. It. Kev the Rev. The cop about to fuck her.

Right here in the big living area, not too close to the big windows.
Or he might see me taking in the view and know then I don’t enjoy this, never mind the sounds he likes to hear me make. Says it makes him feel better. In that case:
Oh! Oh! Mmmm!

Fuckin’ men. The ones who saw sex as power over a female. But why? Wouldn’t the power be in, say, like she was with Rocky, wanting him to do it, not fuck but make love? Wasn’t a man more powerful when he reduced a woman by charm and had an ear for what she would like to say from her heart?

Music playing on the stereo, her idea, that black guy the legend — Marvin Gaye, that’s him — got shot dead by his own father. So she wasn’t the only one in a crazy, fucked-up world. What a voice to be cut down so early. By a family member, Lu? Know it?

He, Ahern — ‘big bad Kevvy the revvy Eveready’, the long-lasting battery, as he called himself in the sex role — went over to the view.
‘Hey? Not bad, eh?’

Could only mean the multitude of lights and up-thrusts of apartment and commercial buildings all lit up. The harbour snaking in and out, you could follow the shoreline from the residential lights going down or close to the water’s edge. A chunk of Sydney town visible.

‘Friend of yours owns this?’

‘Friend of a friend.’ Exactly what she’d told Mrs C.

‘And it’s not rented out? Place would get, what, a grand a week? More? Fuckin’ carpet’s half a metre thick.’

‘Not, actually. Too many places on the market, people can’t sell their apartments, banks foreclosing because everyone’s property value has gone down.’ Straight from Rocky, what he told her of the property market here and worldwide too, least the places a European Aussie would relate to. Kev, well, he didn’t think ninety per cent of the world’s population existed, ignorant cop; wouldn’t care if most got nuked, long as it wasn’t him and some piece of female flesh to keep him happy.

‘You’re quite smart for a good looker.’ Meant to be a compliment. ‘How about you bring your other asset over here, babe,’ he said to the view, not her directly. ‘The body, as if you don’t know what I’m talking about.’ That was funny?

‘In a sec. Gonna start the CD over again.’ She was at the stereo system, and he was turning to her now.

‘Why? Who says I like music?’

‘Thought you’d like the mood.’

‘I don’t need a mood.’ He took a step her way. ‘Not when I’ve got you. Leave it off.’

‘I’m talking putting
me
in the mood.’

‘What? You don’t feel like a bit of hanky-panky?’

‘Sometimes a woman needs a bit of —’ Didn’t let her finish.

‘Foreplay? Sweetheart, that’s okay by me. Don’t put the music on. Specially not that coon music. Come over here and let me feel you.’

‘Kev, I’d prefer some music. To get my head, other things, in the right place. I’ll change it.’ She sorted through a CD collection not her own, mostly names she didn’t recognise.

Next his presence towered over her, like one of those buildings out there in the twinkling suddenly caught you in its shade and might.

‘You might prefer music,’ he said, voice grown an edge. ‘I don’t.’

‘Okay,’ she shrugged to say:
in that case I’m just going through the motions.
Wouldn’t look at him. Knew he was staring hard at her. Prick would probably slap her face any moment. Or punch her like last time, when she’d called him ignorant for not knowing anything about Turkey. Learned from her bosses of course, but still.

‘Come to think of it,’ he said as his huge paw suddenly snapped her by the jawline to look at him and she thought a punch might be following, ‘music would cover up the sounds of pleasure you’re gonna be making soon. Right?’ Yeah, right.

Everyone’s seen a porn movie. Knows the sounds the women all make, the moaning, the ‘involuntary’ cries from the pleasure being too much — not. Load of faked bullshit.

She smiled. No need to say anything. Put on James Blunt, someone she had heard of but didn’t exactly like. Play anything.

He picked her up like a doll and could have walked her anywhere, into the bedroom, had her on the kitchen bench. Except she murmured, ‘I do like a sofa.’

Where he carried her, kind of dumped her down, smiled at her. Then not long before he buried his face down there, up under the skirt she wore just for him.

Back up he came, with a bigger grin.

Said, ‘You naughty, dirty, filthy girl.’ At her not wearing knickers. Still no need to say anything: why, when the action keeps doing the talking?

As he did his thing, and she acted hers, she remembered what Mrs C had said about her morals, or lack of them, that even if not her fault every person owed it to herself to acquire them. ‘Or we are all lost in a world of anarchy and chaos. Morals hold us together.’ Kind of talk she’d normally switch off to. But in the circumstances. So what was this? A cop humping her, failing to do his job of seeing what part she played in two serious crimes. Never mind
her
morality.
His
world wasn’t anarchic chaos, he lived in an orderly manner, Lu had been to his house — to do precisely this, no choice but to let him commit an act of immorality against his wife, their children, in the marital bed.
Mrs C, you talk a load of shit. The world belongs to those who take it
.

On and on he pounded and grunted, sighed and moaned, talked, turned her this way and that. And she performed back, rose to meet him, turned supplicant, bitch-like compliant, helpless vulnerable female, gave him back faces to tell him he was oh so manly, she had no words so here was her body to express it instead, the admiration, and how the force and power of him just overwhelmed her.
Yeah, that’s it, tear my nipples off, rip every pubic hair you love so much, why don’t you tear a handful out to carry around on your person as reminder you have possessed me. Do your big thing, buster boy. Pass me the meat pie on the bedside table while you’re at it, give me something to do till you’ve finished.
If she could once cry out loud, ‘BOR-ING,’ it would be worth suffering for, even dying.

At long last, when his outsized fingers started tearing and grabbing at her flesh, not least down there, he gave a special kind of groan that had words in it, and she making the sounds that made him feel powerful, as if this was so good what else could she do but whimper and cry out and, as he drew to his climax, emit stupid little shrieks like a fuckin’ poodle being hassled in Hyde Park by a bigger, tougher dog,
‘Yiew-yiew-yiew!’

Responding to his, ‘Oh, yeahhh, babe! Gonna split you apart!’ When the man wasn’t as large as that other gross inadequate, sick Rick. And what woman actually
wanted
to be sexually split apart? Nor did size matter, God it didn’t. Didn’t men understand nature has made quite a flexible purse down there?

James Blunt singing about, what else, love gone wrong. Lu thinking, as the massive weight on top of her went into muscular spasm,
What about when you get no love to go wrong? Because you don’t know how to love? What about then?
As the man went limp like he’d been shot, or had shot.

Now Claire had the photographs of Lu leaving the World Towers.

It was only after the idea of meeting this young miss that it had occurred to her she might take a surreptitious photo — not actually breaking her word not to involve the police but providing her with ammunition, identity, evidence. Should she care to use it.

She’d kept the business card of Randolph Huddlestone, PI, and now he came in handy. Randolph had come up with half a dozen shots of Lu, all with a male companion whom the PI presumed a ‘definite hard shot’ — meaning you shouldn’t cross him, or at least you should be seriously prepared if you intended to. How he could judge this from a few moments of sighting in the flesh and looking at the photograph she did not know. The man doubtless one of the accomplices, one of the trio Lu said she had disowned.
So she lied to me.

Then what do I owe her in return?
Claire, wholly unaccustomed to seeking revenge, now in a dilemma about handing the photographs over to Detective Sergeant Ahern.
Why not? Because I promised, I swore I wouldn’t. So what? The only person I owe is my daughter.

Countless times she had gone to the phone to call the dislikeable detective. There was something not right about him. Perhaps that was what kept her from lifting the receiver.

Such an attractive girl — well, woman: what a waste of a life, a
potential never to be fulfilled. Then again, the other Claire saying,
To Hell with her. Or anyone who’s had a rough life can justify committing any depraved act against the innocent — the happy, the well-adjusted young people just starting out on an exciting, satisfying, challenging life journey like my Anna when along you came — Miss — and took it all away.
For she was sure Anna could never be the same again.

Claire knew hatred then, for only the second time in her life. The first — towards persons unknown — came on hearing of what had happened to her daughter. So it was the same feeling for the same reason. Hatred did not figure, not yet, with her husband’s infidelity and his leaving. Though a certain lack of respect for him grew, and she might not like what it became.

Her trio of friends turning up gave distraction, reason to make her decision the following day.

But for another moment she stared hard at those photographs of Lu and the other. Justice must be done in turn.
Damn you, Lu, why is a voice in my head saying you don’t deserve this? You do deserve my breaking my word. You planned the attack on my Anna. I owe something far higher than you.