The Dead I Know (16 page)

I smiled.

‘Steevie says it’s easy to spot the druggies on the street because they all look like they’re wearing black make-up but they’re not. It’s just their skin rotting from the inside out.’

‘I see,’ I said.

The ads finished and a hypercoloured cartoon screamed into action.

‘How’s Mam?’ Skye asked.

The monkey had the remote again.

‘She’s . . . okay. They’ve put her in Finch Ward. There’s a lock on the door.’

‘Is she crazy?’

‘I don’t know. Are you crazy?’

‘No. Are you?’

I took too long to reply. I should have said NO! with great conviction, but the truth was hanging there. ‘I . . . I don’t know. Some days I think I’m going around the bend.’

Skye twisted her knees to face me. ‘The nightmare?’

‘Everything.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like sleepwalking. Like having the van broken into. Like —’

‘You sleepwalk?’

I nodded. The kettle whistled and I jumped to my feet.

‘Where do you go?’ Skye asked.

I held my finger to my lips and nodded once at her mother.

‘Where do you go?’ she whispered. ‘All over town. Upstairs and downstairs in my nightgown.’

‘Serious?’

I smiled. It was an automatic defence mechanism. Like a moth with owl eyes on its wings or a lizard with a frill. Don’t get too close, kids, if this creature gets alarmed, he
smiles
uncontrollably.

It worked. Skye suddenly lost interest. She bit her nail and watched the cartoon.

I took two cups from Mrs Barton and left, cursing under my breath.

I put a cup on John’s desk.

‘Four-thirty?’ he mouthed.

I nodded.

One day, I thought, when somebody reaches out the way Skye had, I’ll have the guts to take their hand and my world will be a different place. I know it.

29

He rips the bloodied pink sheet off the body on the bed. The woman is naked. Her guts are hanging out. He presses my head down so I am nose to nose with the face on the pillow. Her eyes shift, focus, roll and focus again. She mouths my name. She is my mother.

I was on my back in the dark. I fought for consciousness the way a drowning man fights for air, thrashing with every muscle. Streaks of red, blue and white light. Awake, my arms and feet were pinned by strong hands. I bucked and they shifted but didn’t yield. I screamed in rage against the grip.

‘Steady,’ a voice said. ‘It’s okay. We’re here to help. Can you hear me? Take a breath.’

I blinked and a small crowd of unfamiliar faces appeared above me. In fright, I screamed and thrashed some more, but the grips grew uniformly tighter as I did.

‘Can you hear me?’ the voice asked again.

I felt grass beneath my head. It smelled cool and bruised. How long had I been down here, unconscious? I took a breath and exhaled, commanding my limbs to relax.

‘I can hear you,’ I said.

‘Hey? What was that?’

‘I hear you,’ I said, louder.

‘What’s your name, mate? Can you tell me your name?’

‘Aaron. Aaron Rowe. I live at the caravan park. Can you get off me now?’

The pressure eased but the people holding onto me didn’t let go. They helped me sit up. The man in front of me wore blue surgical gloves. Paramedic. He touched my brow, my cheek. The glove dragged on my stubbly jawline.

‘Where am I?’ I asked.

‘You’re safe,’ the paramedic said. ‘Do you feel any pain?’

I shook my head.

‘We’re going to move you over to the ambulance, Aaron.

That be okay?’

I didn’t answer but they lifted me anyway and pressed me onto a crisp-sheeted gurney. They covered me with a blanket and I realized I was cold. Chilled to the core, again. I shivered.

‘What do you remember about last night, Aaron?’

They weren’t all paramedics – the one who’d asked the question was a policeman.

I took another breath and collected my wits. Wherever I’d been during the dark hours, whatever I’d done, I knew I only had one chance to prove I was lucid and sane. One narrow window.

‘I don’t remember anything at all.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’m a somnambulist.’

‘I see,’ the policeman said. ‘You walk in your sleep?’

I nodded. A paramedic took my blood pressure.

‘And you walked from the caravan park to Keeper’s Point in one night.’

I scanned the moon shadows beyond the lights from the ambulance. ‘Certainly seems that way.’

‘Five kilometres? You walked five kilometres in the dark, while you were asleep?’

‘More common than you might think,’ one of the paramedics said.

The policeman wrote in a notebook. ‘What’s with the screaming then?’

‘Screaming?’

‘We got a call from one of the locals. That’s why we’re here. Scared the life out of her. She thought you’d gone over the edge.’

I remembered Amanda Creen. The coroner said she’d suicided, but she might have stepped over the rail in her sleep.

‘I . . . don’t . . . Sometimes I have nightmares.’

‘Sleepwalking
and
nightmares.’

‘Often go hand in hand,’ the paramedic explained. ‘Perhaps we’d better take you in to the hospital and get one of the doctors to have a look at you, hey?’

‘No,’ I snapped. ‘I’m fine. I have to work today.’

‘Where’s work?’ the policeman asked.

‘John Barton’s.’

‘Ha! I knew I’d seen you before. You’re John’s new lad. You were helping us out on the highway. Picking up pieces.’

I nodded enthusiastically, but I didn’t remember the face. For a moment, they all stopped what they were doing and stared.

I’d played my get-out-of-hospital-and-jail-free card without knowing. Somehow, working for John Barton, working with the dead and picking up the pieces allowed me an abnormal range of ‘normal’. Somehow, working for John justified my screaming somnambulism.

‘You’ll live,’ declared the paramedic, with a smile. ‘I’d recommend making an appointment with your GP about the sleepwalking.’

I sat up on the trolley and flipped the blanket aside. ‘Sorry for any inconvenience. I hope I haven’t caused too much trouble.’

A pause in the conversation allowed us all to hear a wave rush into the rocks below the point.

‘Not at all,’ the policeman said. ‘I’ll give you a ride back to town when the boys have finished with you.’

The paramedic who’d taken my blood pressure jabbed a finger into my shoulder. ‘See your doctor.’

I said I would.

The policeman led me by the elbow to the patrol car.

‘I used to sleepwalk,’ he whispered. ‘When I was a kid. My mum pinned a bell to my pyjamas.’

‘Really? Did it wake you?’

He shook his head, laughed a little. ‘It would wake Mum though, and she’d stop me from hurting myself or wandering off into the night. Apparently, I made it out the door one time. Nothing like this though. You’re an Olympic champion compared to me, Aaron.’

30

I
ARRIVED AT WORK
just as John was opening the doors for business.

‘Morning,’ he sang, and ran for his office.

I could hear the phone ringing.

I headed for the coolroom.

‘Yes, of course,’ I heard John say. ‘It is an absolute tragedy.’

A long silence followed.

There were no new bodies in the mortuary.

‘Mr Campbell?’ John finally said, his voice croaky and restrained. ‘Mr Campbell, are you still there?’

My ears pricked up and I held my breath.

‘No, don’t apologize. Just take a moment. I can wait for you if you like or would you rather I called again . . . Of course. Hartford Street. Number 16. We’ll be there within the hour. Not at all. Thank you, sir.’

He hung up and exhaled loudly. I propped on his doorjamb, arms crossed on my chest.

John was leaning back on his chair with hands clasped behind his head, lips tight. He stared at me for so long he could have taken an olden-days photograph. In time, he said, ‘You may want to sit this one out.’

I prickled at the implication. I’d wrestled back the tears and sat through harrowing services. I’d collected heads and smelled the decay. I’d—

‘Child,’ he whispered.

I swallowed hard. It made a noise.

‘Five years old. He went missing yesterday afternoon.

They found him in their water tank.’

‘I’ll be okay,’ I said.

John stared.

I held his gaze. I didn’t blink but something inside my head was over-tight. Something was stretched to the point of irreparable damage and I wanted to bounce on it until it broke. Maybe that’s what had happened to Mam? Maybe the rubber band that powered her memory had snapped? Bring the child. Bring the death. Break the band. Bring the oblivion.

Sixteen Hartford Street sparkled. Fresh paint, flowers in bloom. The sadness, like the death, was so new that there was no sign of decay. The ambulance was there. The paramedic recognized me, acknowledged me with a discreet nod. A small crowd of voyeurs stood on the street. We transferred the small, blanket-wrapped body from their gurney to ours, and left the scene without saying a word.

*

His eyes and skin were the palest blue. His long eyelashes had stuck together with water or tears as if he wore mascara. His lips were closed. His midnight hair hung curled and damp into his collar, a month late for a haircut. His child’s fingers curled weightless around nothing. His feet were bare.

John didn’t look at the child – he looked at me. He must have heard my breathing fail, sensed my rubber band snap. I felt it go. The still boy on the bench reached way into my past and undid the tightest knot.

John Barton, to his credit, didn’t try to stop me and didn’t say a word as I left. Well, if he did, I didn’t hear him. Somehow, I made my way home and into the van. Still in my shoes and tie, I drew Mam’s duvet and my knees to my chin and huddled into the corner of her bed.

I’d never been so hungry for sleep in my life but memories wheeled around in my brain without any form or reason. The monkey had
my
remote. Voices sliced through the caravan walls in fits, blistering with anger or fear, I couldn’t tell which.

The voices weren’t inside my head. They were from van
57
.

The voices poked me like sharp icicles until I had to cover my head but the duvet didn’t keep them out. I felt wired, adrenaline bubbling in my veins like a zillion coffees. One thought found purchase. It kept playing over and over in my head – I imagined the boy in the tank, the moments before his surrender. I imagined the noises from van 57 were his screams. The sounds were trapped in the
tank with him. His fingers pawed at the wet plastic but could find no hold.

I’m the drowning boy. I’ve been drowning for years.

31

I can hear his voice now but I don’t understand the words. My mother’s eyes are closed and I envy her death. He shoves me to the floor and sits heavily in a blood-spattered velvet armchair in front of me. Is it blue or black? He levels the shotgun at my head. I close my eyes and the fear is gone. It leaves like a sigh and I am free. The shell explodes and I feel it. I hear it with the soles of my feet and the pit of my belly.

Upside down with the taste of blood. I righted myself in a panic and saw the insides of the van glowing under moonlight. Mam’s duvet was on the floor beside me. My lips were sticky, my work shirt stained and damp.

There was movement in the annex and I spun to see a figure silhouetted in the doorway, moonlight filtering green around him. A stocky form, a man, fat shadow in his hands, his head a smooth dome. As he ripped the
sliding door open and ran, I saw that the shadow was a gun. Outside, the moon was so bright that I saw his eyes glint as he flicked a glance over his shoulder. I saw swirled patterns of tattoo ink on the pale skin of his head.

I stepped to the sliding door and watched the figure running in a crouch towards the road. Lights flicked on in van 57 and the air instantly split with a scream of absolute horror. It tore through me like the sound of fingernails on a blackboard. I ran.

The scream had come from Candy. She was naked, on her knees on the floor of their annex, her saggy breasts covered in her son’s blood. Westy’s head, cradled in her lap, was the wrong shape. Part of it had been blown away. Candy patted his cheek with a shaking hand and called his name.

‘Somebody help me!’ she screamed, toothless, at the ceiling.

Through her tears, she saw me in the doorway.

‘No!’ she bawled. She hugged her son’s head tighter. ‘Get away from me!’

I heard footsteps on the gravel and with a flash of insight, ran for the phone.

‘Hey!’ shouted a man. ‘Stop!’

I glanced over my shoulder, saw the shadow of the man who’d called, and ran harder. I could explain –

My head exploded – all strobe lights and pain – and I fell to the ground. Instantly, a heavy knee was in my back and my lips dragged on the gravel.

‘I might have known,’ Tony Long growled. He grabbed my arms and pinned them up behind my back. ‘Nerida! Nerida? Call the cops. I knew this was going to happen. Just bloody
knew
it.’

The pain radiated from my right cheek. I squirmed enough to realize I could flip Tony Long off my back, but there were people in dressing-gowns everywhere. I didn’t know so many slippers lived in the park. From where my head was pinned, I could see them filing to the door of Westy’s van, following the grief-stricken howling of his mother to its source. They variously swore and covered their mouths at what they saw. Some watched from a safe distance. Nobody went inside.

Slippers scurried on the gravel. ‘The police are on their way.’

‘Thank God for that,’ Tony Long said. ‘Don’t go over there, love. Don’t.’

‘Why not?’ Nerida Long said, scuffing past my face and heading for the light of the annex.

I watched her face contort. I watched her squeal. I watched her turn away and vomit on the grass.

Come on, Nerida, I thought, show a bit of stomach.

The police arrived. Tony Long shifted his weight and grabbed my hair.

‘This is the bloke,’ he yelled. ‘Got him. He was making a run for it. Got him.’

He swapped knees and ground my face into the path in some sort of feeble victory dance.