Fall (19 page)

There were collective squeals of horror and delight. I went to the fridge and stood in the cool, looking at the beers. The fingers of my right hand had started twitching. Something had awakened the old gunshot wound in my shoulder, got it toying with the nerves down my arm. I reached for the beer, then suddenly didn't feel like it. It felt good to be in the light and the chill. I closed my eyes and just stood there, bathed in the gentle hum of the machine. Things had quietened in the other room.

‘I mean, how do you say conclusively if that's murder or not?'

‘Sounds like an accident to me.'

‘Ah, but the plot thickens. Sounds like an accident – until you take into account the guy's long-standing grudge against the victim. His history of mental illness. Rumours around the office that he'd said he was going to “get” the victim. That his “days were numbered”.'

More sighs and groans of intrigue.

I left quietly through the front door.

 

When I arrived at my terrace home, all the lights were on. I stood in the street and asked myself whether or not I could be bothered going into defensive mode, whether I had the strength to round the back of the house, come through the gate to the small yard. Make sure I knew who was in my house before whoever it was knew that I knew, in case some harm was being planned for me. Then I realised that I was standing crookedly, the weight of the day heavy in my shoulders and that, in this
state, if someone meant to harm me they were probably going to succeed whether I surprised them or not. I spotted Greycat on the roof at the same time that he spotted me, and watched him trundle down the railings and gutters and sills that marked his path to the first floor, then the ground floor. He didn't seem concerned with the state of the house. I decided the builders had left the lights on.

The front door was unlocked and Rachmaninoff was playing somewhere. I only knew it because my father had been a big fan. The hall walls were also a soft mustard yellow. I stood looking at them, at the cream trim and skirting boards. A great hole that had been punched in the wall directly opposite the front bedroom door had been patched and filled. The ceiling wasn't painted, but holes it in had been filled also.

‘Eden?' I called.

‘Yuh,' she said.

I found her on the living-room floor, following the ornate skirting board along with that glossy cream paint from the hall. She'd done these walls yellow too. Though she was wearing old jeans and a man's shirt, there wasn't a fleck of paint on her. Not one. I'd never met anyone who could paint like that. When I painted, I was still picking it out of my hair three weeks later.

‘This was all supposed to be blue,' I said.

‘I know,' she said. I sat down near her and watched her paint. She was right about the colours. Women are usually right about colours. The room was warmer than it had been. It was a soft green when I bought it, and I picked pale blue simply because it seemed like the safest colour for the place. The yellow would have been too bold for me. But the lamps the builders had set up lit it gold. It was very homey, but it
felt somehow expensive, seemed to fit the period architecture. The ceiling mouldings popped out of the yellow like well-kept teeth. They were walls that wanted art now. Yearned for classy oils. Greycat slipped through the front door and brushed against Eden's side, flopped down on the bare hard boards and started grooming himself.

I didn't know what Eden was doing in my house painting the walls while I wasn't there, making sure I didn't choose the wrong colours. I didn't know why she'd come that first day and helped me put my kitchen cupboards together. There were plenty of reasons she might. She might be genuinely worried that I'd mis-wire something, burn the place down and kill myself, thereby leaving her to catch the Sydney Parks Strangler by herself. Leave her to answer questions about why two of her detective partners and her brother had all met the same fate in a matter of months. Then again, she might just have been bored, lonely, unable to sleep – her own apartment already perfect and crammed with art she'd never sell. She might have been drawn to broken things, things in need of rescue, the way her father was. My house might have stirred the desire for some of that old Hades-style resurrection in her.

It was also possible she was trying to be close to me. Not sexually, or even emotionally, just proximity-wise. Because she couldn't ignore the fact that we needed to talk seriously and openly about her being a monster, about how long I was expected to sit by with the knowledge that she took lives, had taken lives, had taken one right in front of me, exchanging it for mine. I wasn't over that. I wasn't over the moment I let myself go and murdered Jason Beck for what he did to my girlfriend. I had given things up in those heated few milliseconds – my
career, my freedom, my sanity. And then Eden had scooped all those things up from the ash and handed them back to me. I owed her. But I couldn't live like this forever. Trusting my life to her all day long and then dreaming of her coming after me all night. Eden reminded me of those trashy American documentaries I sometimes caught on weekends about people living in the Midwest who kept adult chimpanzees as pets. Hugging them and feeding them junk food and dressing them up in clothes, calling them members of the family. Denying, but knowing, deep inside somewhere, it's more than likely that one day they will turn on you. That they will surrender to the animal inside.

You can only play human for so long, and though she was very convincing, I was sure I saw flashes of something inhuman in Eden sometimes. Something cruel.

But watching her paint, so serene, so detached, I felt reluctant to ruin things right at that moment. She shifted carefully along the floor, painted the trim to the corner, sat stroking the brush along with her back to me, tendrils of hair falling from a knot at the top of her head down and around her slender neck.

When I couldn't stay awake any longer, I followed the cat to my bed.

The wake was the first time Tara thought about killing her mother. She realised one night lying on her side in the bed, her hands slippery around the marshmallow rice bar packet, that mothers were things other things came out of. The pod that released seeds into the wind. The vessel that carried small, warm, wet circular balls of life. But Joanie wasn't a vessel or a pod – she wasn't hollow. She didn't look hollow. Tara examined her on one of their hellish treks through the darkened park as she waited in the light of a street lamp, her hard ribs and flat stomach, the bellybutton stretched taut into a horizontal line over the abdominal muscles. Nothing but thin layers of skin between the surface of her and the sinew beneath. When she breathed, nothing moved – the skin didn't slide up and down the ribs like it did with other skeleton people Tara had observed, the ribs expanding and contracting around air. She didn't sweat. There was no reservoir of fluid inside her to tap. She was a stone woman. There wasn't room inside her for air, or blood or life. Or weakness. Tara didn't know where she had come from but she was sure she hadn't come from inside Joanie. There was no inside Joanie.

The wake was an uproarious affair, as far as she could tell. She lay on the floor and listened to the noise beyond the stairwell, the shrill laughter and occasional singing, the low bubbly
hum like the noises of a busy kitchen, clattering and hissing. At some point, the household was called together and a silence fell over them all.

Tara strained to hear what was said about her father. It was mostly men who spoke about him. The distinct absence of female voices struck Tara. She had only been to one funeral before as a small child and the one thing she remembered about it was the women. All their talking and crying. But that night it was men who held the floor. Tara lay down on the carpet and put her ear to the crack in the wood beneath and listened. She only heard snippets, but snippets were all she had ever known of her own father. Glimpses of him around doorways, flashes of him at the bottom of the stairs as he headed out to the radio station at night, as he wheeled his bags to the airport taxi in the pale blue of early dawn. His voice, low and heavy, on the phone in the yard. Tara closed her eyes and collected the words of the men downstairs.

Quiet. Heart. Big. Shadow. Drifting. Drifting man.

A drifting man. He had been to them what he had been to Tara, a dark, half-captured spectre forever on the way to somewhere or on the way from somewhere but never here, never settled, tangible.

Time.

A man inside time. Constantly pushed forward or pulled back by it, the time remaining to do something, get somewhere. Joanie had always talked to Tara about her father in terms of time and what time did to him, and it seemed somehow that it was Tara's fault – she had taken the time from her father, that whatever there was of it left was squeezed out by her bulk, so that the man had moments, only moments. The edge around the life he might have lived here. There was too much Tara for
him to really find a place in the big house. He spent his life in hotels in the city rather than here in the brightly lit rooms. When he came home he would take off his huge watch first and put it somewhere, on the edge of the dining-room table or next to the bed so that the time was never far away.

He doesn't have time for …

He can't waste his time with …

Every time he looks at you.

Every time.

There had never been a time in Michael Harper's life that Tara wasn't what she was. She wondered if there had been more of it left, if there could have been a moment one day, after Joanie perhaps, that Tara and her father could have had time. But it was all gone, and only the drifting had punctuated it, the ghostly big man laying eyes on her for a second, mumbling, while the driver lifted his luggage out to the car.

‘Tar.' He'd nodded, the last time she had seen him. She didn't know when. ‘Didn't catch you. You're looking –'

He'd gazed at her feet and left. You're looking. He'd always spoken, whenever she saw him, about how she looked, because that was all he knew about her. That's all there was to know really, in the end. Joanie always made sure she knew that. She was only her body and her body could squeeze men from their very homes.

Every time he looks at you.

She went down into the kitchen when darkness had descended over the house, crept over to the back windows and gazed at the yard, the glasses lying in the bushes and the possums dancing in the trees, gleeful. The huge kitchen island was cluttered with platters half-heartedly covered with aluminium foil. Pancetta
wrapped prawns spotted with pieces of black char, dripping oil. Wedges of fruit on wilted fingers of rocket. Tara peeled back the foil on one of the platters and found a group of cold meat pies in a corner like magic stones, a golden pyramid. She put one in her mouth without realising it, until the salty taste of it was at the back of her teeth, mush on her gums. Sucking. Sucking. Daddy's wake pies. This was what a dead father tasted like, salty and slightly warm like a bed only recently left and then returned to. Safe. Yes, there was a safety in his death. The haunting shadow was now gone. His eyes on her feet. Tara put another pie into her mouth and closed her lips around it, closed her eyes.

She didn't know him but she could taste him. His ashes.

Tara didn't notice the woman in the doorway until she spoke. Tara opened her eyes, and took in the lanky figure leaning there, the nimble folded arms swathed in black satin, the dramatically painted eyes. She was an unfamiliar but beautiful creature, a ginger cat-woman who'd wandered in from the lightly falling rain.

‘You must be her,' the woman said. Tara felt the same strange infatuation she felt the time she laid eyes on Violet all those years ago, the loving revulsion that had swelled in her stomach when she realised, almost in the same instant, that to love someone was to lose them. Tara didn't have friends. Joanie made sure of it.

‘Come here,' the mystery woman said, smiling. Tara did as she was told, following the cat-woman into the hall. She put a hand on Tara's shoulder and the girl shivered with pleasure.
Touch me. Touch me again
, she thought.

‘I used to work with your mother,' the woman said. ‘Before Michael. Before the money.'

‘Work?' Tara trembled. ‘What do you mean? She's never –'

‘Yeah,' the woman laughed. ‘Never. That's where all the details of Joanie's life before Michael live. In the never-never. You've got it exactly right, my love.'

Tara followed the woman to the sideboard where the collection of photographs lived. Twenty frames of different shapes and sizes. Joanie and Michael in Barcelona. Joanie and Michael in Nigeria. Joanie and Michael in Paris. And then there were others. His family. His mother. His grandmother. His father staring out the windows of his first office building.

The mystery woman smiled at Tara, then began to rearrange the photographs. She collected them all up into her arms, and started to set them on the table in a single line.

Gregory Harper. Tall. Thin. Blond.

Marilyn Harper. Short. Thin. Blonde.

Jessica and Steven Harper. Tall. Thin. Blond.

Joanie Harper. Tall. Thin. Blonde.

Michael Harper. Tall. Thin. Blond.

Tara Harper. Short. Fat. Raven-haired.

The girl in the hallway trembled, looked at the woman with the dark eyes whose name she would never learn.

‘It's not about your body, baby girl,' the woman said. ‘It's about your blood.'

The girl and the woman turned as they heard an exhalation. Beyond the door where Joanie stood seething, the wake raged on, people laughing and singing and glasses breaking, the occasional wail of surprise at a story told or a secret shared. But Joanie marked the door to a bubble of hatred that encapsulated Tara and the woman with the photographs. Tara watched the woman set the rest of the photographs down, smiling smugly, and head towards the huge front doors.

Before she left, she turned back and winked.