Fall (2 page)

Clara gasped. Her fingers fumbled at the wet stump where her foot had been. Eden sighed.

‘I admire the game,' Eden said. ‘I really do. It's clever. Two naïve little travellers just waiting to be picked on. You flounder around like you're just drowning in your own idiocy, and you see which predators come to investigate the splashing. Who could resist you? You're adorable. You lure them out into the deep, dark waters and then you surge up from below. Pull them down.'

Clara fell back against the asphalt, her mouth sucking at the cold night air, throat blocked by shock.

‘If I was well, this would have been more personal,' Eden said, her leather-gloved hand gripping the rifle tight. ‘But I haven't been at my best lately, so I'm afraid there's no time for play.'

Clara tried to speak, but she couldn't force words up through the whimpers. They came out of her like hiccups. The woman with the long dark hair rose up slowly, pushing the rifle into the ground, and when she'd risen fully she actioned the great thing with effort, once-strong hands betraying her as the bullet slid into the chamber.

‘I'm the only shark in this tank,' Eden said.

The last gunshot could be heard inside the Black Mutt Inn. But no one listened to it.

The Victims of Crime support group of Surry Hills meets every fortnight. The only reason I started going is because my old friend from North Sydney Homicide, Anthony Charters, goes there. If I didn't have a friend there, I'd have never bowed to my girlfriend Imogen's demands that I get counselling for the ‘stuff that has been going on with me' the last few months. That vague collections of terms, the ‘stuff' and its propensity to ‘go on with me', frequently came between the beautiful psychologist and me in our first few weeks of dating, when she realised she'd never seen me completely sober. She said she couldn't imagine me ‘relaxed'. Privately, I argued I was a lot more relaxed than Imogen herself. Imogen takes an hour and a half to get ready in the morning, and the first time I farted near her she just about called the police. That, ladies and gentlemen, is not ‘relaxed'.

But, you know. You don't tell them these things. They don't listen.

I'd started courting Dr Imogen Stone in the dangerous and electric place between my previous girlfriend being slaughtered by a serial killer and my partner detective almost getting herself disembowelled by a pair of outback monsters. Imogen liked me, but she was dealing with the psychological aftermath of
both events. I was by all accounts an unpredictable, volatile and difficult-to-manage boyfriend. She couldn't count on me to turn up on time, say appropriate things when I met her friends, drive her places without her having to worry that I was about to career the car into the nearest telegraph pole. She couldn't be sure when I ducked out of the cinema that I wasn't going to knock back six painkillers in the glorious solitude of the men's room stall, or lose myself in thought and just wander off, turning up back at her apartment at midnight drunk and stinking. I was a bad beau, but I had potential, so she didn't give up on me. Ironically, I understand that the ‘fixer-upper boyfriend' that I seemed to be is just about the perfect model for the worst type of man you can be attracted to – according to the psychology textbooks I'd perused in her office, it was the cute, broken bad boys who became abusers.

Nevertheless, Imogen took me on, and Imogen started nagging me to get help. So I started trudging with all the huffing melancholy of a teenager at church to a basement room of the Surry Hills police station every Sunday to sit under the fluorescent lights and listen to tales of horror and fear. It made Imogen happy. It made Anthony happy. I considered it my community service.

Somewhere, sometime, somebody set up a support group in a particular way and now all support groups are set up like that, whether you're trying to get over being sexually assaulted in a public toilet or you're addicted to crack. You've got the grey plastic fold-out tables pushed against one wall, the veneer pulling away from the corners and the top stained by the rims of coffee cups set down meaningfully, mid-conversation, to indicate concern. You've got the two large steel urns full of boiling water for coffee and tea, the ones that will, if you go
anywhere near them, even so much as to fill in your name on the sign-in sheet, mercilessly burn some part of you. There's no avoiding the coffee-urn burn. To this you add a collection of uncomfortable plastic fold-out chairs forming a circle just tight enough to inspire that quiet kind of social terror made of things like accidental knee-touching, airborne germs and unavoidable eye contact. And voilà! You've got a support group.

There were fifteen chairs set out on the industrial grey carpet and Anthony was sitting in one when I arrived. I responded to his presence with a wave of paralysing nausea. Getting over a painkiller and alcohol addiction makes you respond to everything with nausea. You get nausea in the middle of sex. It lasts for months.

I'd worked with the bald-headed, cleft-chinned Detective Charters and his partner for about two weeks when my former partner committed suicide and the bigwigs were trying to find me someone else as a playmate. I'd have liked to have stayed with him. He was inspiring – not in the cheesy internet quote way, but in a real way, a way that gets you out of bed. He was somehow still enthusiastic about justice and the rule of law and collaring crims like it was a calling, even though his own seventeen-year-old son was in prison for five years for accidentally leaving a mate with brain damage from a one-punch hit at a New Year's Eve party. I figured if Anthony could get out of bed after that, I could get out of bed after Martina being killed (me allowing her to be killed) and Eden almost dying (me standing there doing nothing while Eden almost died). If Anthony could keep on keeping on after everything that had happened to him, maybe I could get over all the women I'd failed in my life, eventually. Maybe I could get over not doing
anything about my father's long, slow emotional abuse of my mother. Not saving Martina. Not saving Eden. Not being there when my ex-wife had a stillborn child.

Anthony had been as powerless to save his own son. And yet here he was, smiling at me as I came to sit by his side. Maybe being powerless was okay.

When I'd asked him, Anthony put his unshakeable spirit down to the support groups. He attended one for drug addiction, one for victims of crime and one for anxiety. I thought I'd give it a whirl. It would shut Imogen up.

‘Francis,' he said. I cradled my coffee and licked my scalded pinky.

‘Anthony.'

‘How's the comedown?'

‘I think I'm past the shakes.' I held out my hand for him to see, flat in the air before us. My thumb was twitching slightly. ‘I'd still murder you for a scotch, though, old mate.'

‘I reckon scotch might be on your trigger words list, mate.'

‘Probably. It's a big list.'

Some recovery groups don't let you say particular words, ‘trigger words', because some members are getting over a level of addiction so great that even the sound of the name of their drug of choice can send them into a relapse spiral. Even if you're not an addict, but you're in a support group parallel to addiction groups such as Victims of Crime or After Domestic Violence or Incest Survivors, you have to acknowledge that some members of the group might also be enrolled in addiction groups, so for their benefit you don't say the words.

The first rule of Drug Recovery Group is that you do not talk about drugs at recovery group.

It sounded like a whole lot of bullshit to me. I wasn't sure all the tiptoeing around really helped anyone. I'd tested my trigger-happiness, said ‘Endone' loudly and slowly alone in my car, like a little kid whispering a swearword at the back of class. I had not gone and started popping pills. But I was a rule-follower by nature, so I didn't say ‘Endone' in or anywhere near the meetings I attended. I didn't say ‘scotch', or ‘bourbon', or ‘cocaine', or ‘ecstasy', or ‘Valium', or ‘oxy', all guilty pleasures of mine at some time over the previous months. I mentioned that I had a variety of ‘drugs of choice' at my first meeting when I introduced myself, but I hadn't shared since.

In fact, I hadn't said anything. Imogen had told me to ‘go' to the meetings. She hadn't told me to ‘participate'.

People stopped milling around the treacherous urns when the facilitator, a hard-edged little blonde woman named Megan, came into the room with her large folder of notes and handouts. About twenty-five of her photocopied handouts were in the bottom of my car, boot-printed and crumpled, hidden in the undergrowth of a forest of takeaway containers and paper bags. Their titles peer at me from beneath old newspapers and cardboard boxes.
Six ways to beat negative thoughts
.
How to tell your friends you're in danger of self-harm
.
When ‘no' means ‘no'
. Sometime after the first meeting, I lost my eight-step grief diary. I hadn't even put my name on it. Diaries are for little girls.

When Megan was in place the people around me joined in the opening mantra in a badly timed monotone reminiscent of the obligatory and dispassionate ‘good morning' we used to give Mrs Towers in the third grade.

‘I am on my way to a place beyond vengeance, a place beyond anger, a place beyond fear. I am on my way to a place of healing, and I take a new step every day.'

I didn't say the Victims of Crime mantra. It was way too cuddly for me. I didn't know what Megan's story was, but if she'd made up the mantra herself it sounded to me like she was making a big deal of being bag-snatched or something. There is no place beyond anger. Everybody's angry to some degree. Nuns are angry at sinners. Kindergarten teachers are angry at the government. When you've come up against violence, real violence – you get punched by your husband for the first time, or someone pulls a knife on you in the regular, sunny traffic of a Thursday morning commute – you realise there is no place beyond anger. It's in there. In everyone. No matter what you put on top of it, no matter how long you starve it or lock it up or deny it. Anger is primal. It's in our DNA.

‘We've got a couple of new members with us tonight,' Megan said as Justin, the group kiss-ass, brought her a paper cup of green tea. Justin had been gay-bashed to within an inch of his life on Mardi Gras night when he was twenty-one. Victims of Crime was his life. ‘This is Aamir and Reema.'

The Muslim couple with their backs to the door nodded. Reema was looking deep into her empty paper cup like she'd found a window out of the room. I was jealous. She adjusted the shoulders of her dress nervously, and her husband sat forward in his seat, a big man, his hands clasped between his knees.

‘Hi, Aamir,' everyone said. ‘Hi, Reema.'

‘Now you don't have to share,' Megan assured them. ‘No one has to share in these groups. Sometimes it can be healing just to listen to the stories from those around us and to recog
nise that the trauma we have experienced in the wake of serious crime is not unique, and neither is the journey to wellness. Sometimes we like to start the meeting with some “triumphs of the week” or with some readings. But it's a pretty fluid structure here.'

‘We don't mind sharing,' Aamir said. He shrugged. The anger tight in his shoulders and jaw. I could see it. Anthony, beside me, could see it. You get to know the look of a man on the edge of punching someone when you're a young cop wandering among groups of homeless in the Cross, Blacktown, Parramatta. Bopping around the clubs on George Street while groups of men hoot and holler at women from cars. It becomes like a flag.

‘Well, good.' Megan smiled. ‘That's great. Like I said, there's no pressure. Some of our members have never shared.' She glanced at me. I felt nauseated. ‘This is a supportive environment where we have attendee-centric mechanisms –'

‘I'll share.' Aamir stood up suddenly. He was even bigger standing. No one bothered telling the huge man that standing wasn't part of the group dynamic, that in fact it intimidated some of the rape survivors. He rubbed his hands up and down the front of his polo shirt, leaving light sweat stains. ‘I'll start by asking if anyone here in the group knows me? If you know my wife?'

I was confused. It was great. I hadn't felt anything but nausea and boredom in all the sessions I'd attended, so this was a novel start to the night. The group members looked at each other. Looked at Aamir. Aamir shrugged again.

‘No? No? You don't know me? You've never seen me before?' Aamir's stark black eyebrows were high on his sweating brow. He did a little half-turn, as though members might recognise
his back, the little tendrils of black hair curling on the nape of his thick neck. His wife wiped her face with her hand. No one spoke. Anthony examined the man's face.

‘I don't think they underst–' Megan chanced.

‘My son Ehan was abducted one hundred and forty-one days ago,' Aamir said. He went to his chair and sat down. ‘One hundred and forty-one days ago two men in a blue car took my eight-year-old son from a bus stop on Prairie Vale Road, Wetherill Park. He has not been seen since.'

He paused. We all waited.

‘You don't know me, or my wife, because there has been little or no coverage of this abduction in the media. We've had one nationally televised press conference and one newspaper feature article. That's it.'

Aamir was a lion wrapped in a man. The woman across the circle from him, who'd been in a bank hold-up and now suffered panic attacks, was cowering in her seat, pulling at her ponytail. Megan opened her mouth to offer something, some condolence, some segue back into the normality of group sharing, but Aamir raged on, a spewing of well-practised words with which he had assaulted anyone who would listen since his son disappeared.

‘If Ehan was a little blond-haired white boy named Ian and we lived in Potts Point, we'd still be all over the national news.'

‘Oh, um.' Megan looked at me for help.

‘We'd have a two hundred thousand dollar reward and Dick Smith flying a fucking banner from a fucking blimp somewhere. But we've had nothing. Two days the phone rang off the hook, and then silence. I forget sometimes that he's gone. Every night at eight o'clock, no matter where I am, no matter
what I'm doing, I think,
It's Ehan's bedtime. I have to go say goodnight.
'

Megan widened her eyes at me.

‘What are you looking at me for?' I said. The sickness swirled in me.

‘Oh, I wasn't.' Megan snapped her head back to Aamir. ‘I wasn't. Sorry, Frank, I was just thinking and you were in my line of sight and –'

‘Are you a journalist?' Aamir turned on me. I didn't know how I'd been brought into the exchange until Megan buried her face in her notebook. The same thing she'd done when I signed on to the group.

‘No,' I said. I looked at Aamir. ‘No, I'm not a journalist. My girlfriend was murdered. I'm the only other person in the group who's here for murder-victim support. That's why she's staring at me. She wants me to say something hopeful to you.'