Afterlight (3 page)

I waited tensely, only breathing again when Eve didn’t turn into a shrieking gorgon
with a rotating head. Her expression didn’t even change. She didn’t cause my walls
to weep blood or the curtains to catch on fire or the souls of ten thousand dead
people to rise up through the floorboards and surround me. She just kept on looking.
And waiting.

I flexed a knee experimentally and the sky didn’t fall in, so I rolled over slowly
and sat up, facing her.

‘
I’m. Sorry. I. Don’t. Understand
,’ I said. A little louder and slower this time,
as if Eve were deaf and stupid. I guess I was getting braver.

Then she suddenly pushed the same handful of images at me again. It was like I was
seeing something that was streaming at the wrong speed. And you can’t tell someone
like Eve to
slow down
or
rewind
or
zoom out
. It just doesn’t work like that.

School
,
kid
,
red car
. Over and over, until other details began to fly out at me that
I hadn’t seen because I’d been too freaked-out to concentrate properly.

What school?
A primary school.
Wattle Valley Primary
. See that sign behind the little
kid’s head? That’s what it said.

What time of day was it?
Home time. See how everyone was leaving and getting into
cars and driving away?

The kid?
Piece of piss. He was walking home.
Somebody give me a medal.

The car had me stumped, though. It was an early-model red Ford, with rusting paintwork.
More of a bomb really, with a dog in the back, a kelpie. Couldn’t see who was driving.
Couldn’t see the number plate. Could’ve meant anything. Someone’s dad, someone’s
mum, more info please.

Finally, I shook my head at Eve and told her to stop.

Stop
.

And it did, like she’d opened a window in my head to let the breeze in and the pictures
out.

I shrugged apologetically, hoping she’d take the hint and take a hike. ‘Still don’t
get it,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to find someone else to tell your little story to,
sorry. See ya.’

It was pretty weird, but I was almost comfortable with Eve by this stage. I mean,
we were practically conversing. So I wasn’t expecting what happened next.

Now, the whole time she hadn’t moved a muscle. Not a hair. But when I told her to
go
, when she thought I wasn’t going to
try
any more, that comfortable feeling vanished
like an arctic gale descending because she just pushed the whole show reel—
school,
kid, red car
—at me with the force and speed of a sonic boom and I blacked out.

When I came to, with a feeling like somebody was dancing on my grave, she was gone.
But I’d finally got it. Those things she’d tried to burn into my brain? She wanted
me to
go
there. She wanted me to figure it out. She wanted me to
see
what she’d shown
me with my own eyes.

That night, I don’t think I slept. I kept thinking about Dad and Mum and how they
always believed in stupid, hokey sayings like
Third time’s a charm
.

In my case, it wasn’t a charm. It was a sign. The one I’d been begging for; that
said that maybe they were all right—wherever they were—and they wanted me to know
that.

Eve
was the message. She had to be.

Because this nameless creature—the spit of my mum—shows up in my bedroom, right?
Three times
. Two weeks, roughly, after I’d first caught her face on the telly and
four months, almost, to the day Mum and Dad vanished into the great hereafter on
the spirit of Dad’s Harley.

Maybe they sent Eve because they couldn’t come themselves and she needed help. Dad
had helped plenty of people over the years. Mates who’d lost everything would often
drop in for a night that turned into weeks. Old men without money or family would
often get a free shout, to Gran’s great annoyance.

Something bad had happened to Eve; that much was plain. The fact Eve had found me—
me
,
and not someone else—had to mean something. If I’d been in her position I would’ve
wanted me to help. I was a soft touch; Mum always said so. Strangers came up and
talked to me all the time; I had that kind of face. I couldn’t count how many fallen
little old ladies I’d had to help up at my local shopping centre over the years.
Mum used to shake her head when I told her about the two homeless kids who always
took money off me at the bus stop near the pub. ‘You’re as bad as your father,’ she’d
say. ‘Both of you,
marshmallows
. But’—and her eyes would get this suspicious shine
whenever she told me this —‘any creature comes to you for help, you bloody
help
them
because I was that creature, once…’

She never usually finished that sentence.

If Eve knew I was a soft touch, well, someone who knew me on the other side had to
have primed her with the info, I reasoned.

For them, I would do it for them. Find the school, the kid, the car.

The next day, I almost had a false start. Thinking about it now makes my blood run
cold because anything could’ve
happened. There were two Wattle Valley Primary Schools
in the directory and I just picked the closest one because I was lazy and half convinced
I’d dreamt the whole thing up.

Anyway, it being very much apparent that no hot guy in his right mind was going to
ask me out that Thursday afternoon, or any afternoon for that matter, I stopped in
at the pub and begged a couple of hours off after my double spare. Gran grudgingly
agreed. Dirty Neil was disappointed when I mooched back out the door at 2.06pm,
but I was sick of trying to dodge him as I did the general mop up and heartily sick
of providing eye candy for perverts at no extra charge. And did I tell you that The
Star Hotel specialises in male patrons who can’t aim straight? Doing Eve’s dirty
work had to be a step up from all of that.

I caught a tram that ran through the city, then hopped on another that ran out to
the bayside suburb that hosted the Wattle Valley Primary I’d decided to stake out.

It felt like it was about ten degrees outside, so you can imagine my gratitude when
I got there. It was 3.17 by the time I took up my position under an extensively shat-upon
tree, and at precisely 3.23 the front doors exploded outwards as little kids of every
size and description flooded onto the pavement in front of me, all in identical navy
caps, navy shorts and powder-blue sweatshirts. Finding a little kid who looked like
the blond kid in Eve’s—and I say
that loosely—
instructions
would be a big ask, I
thought, as I started scanning every face that came through the gates. Figuring out
what to do with him once I found him, though, would be even harder. What was I even
doing
here?

In the end, it wasn’t me that found him; it was the driver of the red car. I’d totally
forgotten about it. Some detective I’d make. By 3.32, I was angry with myself, furious
at Eve, and ready to throw in the towel and head home when I saw a red car do a slow
U-turn through a sea of double-parked cars and start wobbling up the street away
from me. It stood out a mile among the shiny 4WDs and late-model family wagons. In
case it was important, I wrote the number plate down on the back of my hand with
a felt tip I had in my pocket. Scared enough of pissing Eve off that I wanted to
get it right first go, so that I could report back properly later. Not that I was
sure she’d be listening. Or that she’d even be there to tell.

So the car wasn’t hard to spot, was it? And about five minutes later, I saw this
boy up ahead, getting smaller all the time. He was tiny anyway, and he had his head
down, and he was walking, and it made my skin come out in goosebumps because it was
the kid
, the one Eve had burned into the back of my eyes. Not sure if I should approach
him directly, I followed him and the car for two
more blocks, at a distance, until
they both turned into a side street and I lost sight of them. I began to run, skidding
as I rounded the corner and saw the boy leaning against the front passenger door
of the red car, talking to the men inside. He was smiling and nodding, the dog hanging
out the back window, all friendly. Suddenly, there was his little hand on the door,
his school bag already inside. And my first thought was:
What does Eve want me to
do now
?

Now, I’ve never claimed to possess any sixth sense, or second sight. But, oh boy,
did I know a pervert when I saw one. They came into our place all the time—hey, we
even had one of our own practically living-in—so I knew, without having to examine
the feeling very closely, that it was really important to keep the little kid out
of the car. He just
couldn’t
get in.

So I shouted, ‘Oi! Oi,
you
, kid!’

And the kid turned, his leg already halfway through the open back door, the dog pushing
its snout back out at the noise, baring its teeth, ready to give it to me. I frantically
fished for something to say next, the two men in front simultaneously shooting me
murderous greasies and urging the boy to get in, get in quickly, shut the door, there’s
no time to waste. The boy turned back, his head already in, then his shoulders. He
didn’t know me and he trusted them. What did they
say
to him? They had a dog. I
had
to get his attention.

‘Kid! Kid! You dropped something back there!’ I screamed, pointing over my shoulder.
‘If you lose it, your mum’s going to kill you!’

That made the boy hesitate. She-who-must-be-obeyed loomed large in everyone’s life,
especially a little kid’s. He was so small he’d probably only just stopped wetting
his bed and still had his dinner cut up for him at night.

The boy stepped back and turned towards me again, and that’s when I yelled out, ‘You’re
gone! You’re history! We’re onto you!’ to the two pervs in the red car, and they
gunned it out of there, the kid’s bag still inside, the door swinging open, the dog
doing 360s in the back seat, as they turned the corner on two wheels, practically.
The boy flew backwards on his bum onto the road and burst into tears.

It had all happened so
fast
.

The little guy cried all the way home and wouldn’t hold my hand properly the entire
time, because I’d lied and the nice men still had his schoolbag and his mum
really
was going to kill him now. Only she didn’t, because once she got home and I explained
why I was sitting on her front doorstep with her weeping, angry child, she cried
too, and gripped my fingers so hard in gratitude they almost fell off.

While the kid watched afternoon TV with a plate of chocolate biscuits piled high
in front of him, we even rang
Crime Stoppers together with the details I’d written
on the back of my hand. Then she made me a cup of tea I couldn’t drink because my
pounding heart was still lodged somewhere in my throat.

As I jumped back on the tram afterwards, I found myself thinking I couldn’t wait
to tell Eve what had happened, which is as twisted as it sounds.

3

When Eve didn’t return that night, I thought she was gone for good and chalked it
down to a restless spirit with one more good deed to do before she departed for the
ever after. The thing, I reasoned, was done and dusted. And it felt good, that I’d
been able to help.

How wrong was I?

Two nights later, when the pub was finally quiet (if you ignored the jukebox machine
on the landing doing its flashy, sorting,
winky winky
thing every half hour, and
the occasional noises the building made that sometimes sounded like random gunshot),
Eve came again.

I was a heavy sleeper once I got going—you’d need to drive a prime mover through
my bedroom to wake me
once I was sound asleep—but, suddenly, I was completely and
totally in the present and she was bending over me again, in the pitch dark of my
upstairs bedroom, outlined faintly in silver. Her long hair hanging loose and smooth.
All in black as usual, bare arms, bare feet. Eerie-beautiful.