An Isolated Incident E-Book

Emily Maguire

• Herausgeber: Lightning Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

SHORTLISTED: Miles Franklin Literary Award SHORTLISTED: Stella Prize SHORTLISTED: Ned Kelly Prize for Best Crime Novel When 25-year-old Bella Michaels is brutally murdered in the small town of Strathdee, the community is stunned and a media storm ensues. Unwillingly thrust into the eye of that storm are Bella's beloved older sister, Chris, a barmaid at the local pub, and May Norman, a young reporter sent to cover the story. Chris's ex-husband, friends and neighbours do their best to support her. But as the days tick by with no arrest, her suspicion of those around her grows. And as May attempts to file daily reports, she finds herself reassessing her own principles. An Isolated Incident is a humane and beautifully observed tale of everyday violence, the media's obsession with the murder of pretty young women and the absence left in the world when someone dies.

Leseprobe

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD

SHORTLISTED FOR THE STELLA PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NED KELLY PRIZE FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL

When 25-year-old Bella Michaels is brutally murdered in the small town of Strathdee, the community is stunned and a media storm ensues. Unwillingly thrust into the eye of that storm are Bella’s beloved older sister, Chris, a barmaid at the local pub, and May Norman, a young reporter sent to cover the story.

Chris’s ex-husband, friends and neighbours do their best to support her. But as the days tick by with no arrest, her suspicion of those around her grows. And as May attempts to fi le daily reports, she finds herself reassessing her own principles.

An Isolated Incident is a humane and beautifully observed tale of everyday violence, the media’s obsession with the murder of pretty young women and the absence left in the world when someone dies.

‘A harrowing, fascinating, compelling work from an accomplished and thoughtful Australian writer’ THE AUSTRALIAN

‘This hugely chilling and evocative story, mixing lyrical language and brutal events, is told with great psychological acuity’ ANITA SETHI

‘A murder mystery that deftly transforms the genre’ STELLA PRIZE JUDGES

First published in Australia by Pan Macmillan in 2016.

Published in 2018

by Lightning Books Ltd

Imprint of EyeStorm Media

312 Uxbridge Road

Rickmansworth

Hertfordshire

WD3 8YL

www.lightning-books.com

ISBN: 9781785630835

Copyright © Emily Maguire 2018

Cover by Ifan Bates

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

To my sisters

Contents

Monday 6 April

Tuesday 7 April

Wednesday 8 April

Thursday 9 April

Friday 10 April

Saturday 11 April

Sunday 12 April

Monday 13 April

Tuesday 14 April

Wednesday 15 April

Thursday 16 April

Friday 17 April

Saturday 18 April

Sunday 19 April

Tuesday 21 April

Wednesday 22 April

Saturday 25 April

Sunday 26 April

Monday 27 April

Tuesday 28 April

Wednesday 29 April

Thursday 30 April

Friday 1 May

Monday 4 May

June

After

Acknowledgments

Monday 6 April

It was the new cop who came to the door, the young fella who’d only been on the job a couple of months. I thought that was a bit rough, sending a boy like him to do a job like that. Later, I found out that he was sent because he’d gone to pieces at the scene. That’s what we all call it now: the scene.

‘Miss Rogers?’ he said, as though he was about to confess to reversing into my fence.

I nodded, waiting for the blow I knew was coming. I knew it was coming because Bella had been gone days and because no cop ever came to anyone’s door to bring them cake or wine.

He rocked on his heels and cleared his throat.

‘You found Bella?’ I said, to give him a way to start. To show him it was OK.

‘Yeah.’ He blinked and I thought, Jesus, he knows her. ‘I mean, there’s been a body found. Matches her description. We need an official ID. Um, need you to come to . . . to do that. To confirm.’

Someone who’s been hit as much as me should’ve known that seeing a blow coming, asking for it even, doesn’t make it hurt any less. Probably hurts more, I reckon, because you’re thinking yeah, yeah, get it over with and you think you already know. So I stood there nodding, thinking how the poor kid knows my sister and what a rough job to give a new fella and then I was shaking so hard it was like a demon had got inside.

The whole way to the hospital I wanted to ask him what had happened. I was hoping she’d been hit by a car or had a brain embolism or something. I wanted to ask those questions I’d asked when Mum died: ‘Was it quick? Did she suffer?’ But I couldn’t speak. Never happened to me before, no matter what drama I’ve been chucked into. But there in that car it was like . . . It was like when you’re so sick with some damn stomach thing that you don’t even want to say ‘no’ to the offer of ice chips to suck, don’t even want to nod, because the tiniest movement will bring the spewing on again. Like that, but I didn’t feel like spewing. I just felt like any sound or movement would start something that would hurt and be impossible to stop.

The cop, Matt was his name, told me that he knew her from school. ‘She was two years ahead of me, but it’s a small school, ya know?’

I knew. I went there myself. Bella was twelve years younger than me, which made this boy twenty-three – so not a boy at all, technically, but his clenched jaw was dotted with pimples and his hands on the wheel were smooth and unscarred. I asked him if he’d seen her since school and he nodded, smiled like a love-struck dork and said he’d seen her a few times at the nursing home where she worked. ‘We get called there a bit,’ he said and it was clear he never minded being called to that stinking place by my sister who, even in that blue polyester uniform and those clunky white nursing clogs, was the prettiest thing anyone in this hole of a town was ever likely to see.

At school we had an expression: Strathdee-good. It meant that something was tops by Strathdee standards but not much chop compared to anything you’d get outside of here. So if you had a particularly good pie or whatever, you’d say, Man, this is good. Strathdee-good, obviously, but yeah. We did the same thing for people. None of the blokes at our school could compete with boys from Sydney or Melbourne, obviously, but there were a few who were definitely Strathdee-hot and so they were the ones we’d go for.

Bella was, if I’m being honest, Strathdee-pretty. I was always telling her she could be a model if she wanted, and I still think that was true, but it’d be modelling in the Kmart catalogue not Vogue or anything. I’m not putting her down. Like I said, she was the most beautiful thing anyone around here had ever seen in the flesh, but she was five foot nothing in high heels and had a size 10 arse on a size 6 body. Her skin was like fresh milk, and her light blue eyes so goddamn lovely it made me jealous as hell when we were younger. She could’ve done cosmetic ads, for sure, except they’d have had to do something about her hair, which was thick and frizzy and grew out and up instead of down. I used to tease her, saying that she was actually an albino African and that Mum had just adopted her because she felt sorry for this poor kid who all the other Africans thought was a freak. When she was twelve or so she started getting up really early to go through the rigmarole of oiling and flat-ironing her hair before school and then I felt bad for tormenting her. I told her that her hair looked hot, that it was way nicer than my bog-standard mousy-brown mop, but she never believed me.

One good thing about getting older is you make peace with the things you can’t change about yourself. Not that Bella ever got old, but she was always mature for her age. By nineteen or twenty she’d stopped straightening her hair every day and just let it frizz out over her shoulders. She had to tie it back for work, of course, and I loved it like that most of all; the front all smooth and sleek and out the back a giant blonde fuzzball.

I never had to make peace with my hair – it was never my problem. My problem was my tits. I was too young when they sprouted and then they grew so fast. Eleven, twelve, thirteen and becoming used to feeling naked, feeling rude because of the way that boys and men – old men, teacher men, family men, strange men, friendly men – looked at me and found reasons to touch me and press against me and every now and then go for a sneaky grope. It set me apart from the other girls and made their mothers narrow their eyes and suggest I put on a jumper when it wasn’t cold and made the boys my age laugh and call out slut and showusyertits as I walked past. These giant tits that told everybody I was a scrubber and easy and trash.

For the first few years I tried to ignore them. I mean, ignore the effect they had on people. The things themselves I packed into bras which my mum bought grudgingly (I kept outgrowing them and then wearing through the nylon). Once she said, ‘Try and slow down, Chris. I’m not made of money,’ as she tossed a Target bag on the bed, and although I knew she was joking I felt hurt and shamed like there might be some truth in the suggestion that I was growing these things on purpose.

At around fourteen I picked up the idea that I could diet them away, but a smaller arse only made them look more super-sized. I tried to keep them covered, but, you know, a mountain range covered in snow is still a mountain range. Then I gave in. Not to the men who tried to corner me, but to the name-callers and whispers. I pretended to be the thing they all thought I was.

And now, well, now, I wear low-cut tops and bend forward more than I need to if it’s been a slow night for tips and I barely notice when men speak to my chest, women shoot death-stares at it and people of both sexes treat me like I have brain damage. Now, I’ve learnt to live with the fact that most blokes who come home with me will be breast-men and that once in bed they’ll spend more time nuzzling and squeezing than getting busy down below. I spend a lot of money on good bras and keep my thigh muscles strong so I can bounce up and down forever. Give ’em what they want.

I didn’t choose to have an enormous rack, but you have to accept the things you cannot change, don’t you? So I do. I accept that having big boobs makes me a popular barmaid and an excellent root. Not excellent-excellent probably, but Strathdee-excellent for sure.

I’ve gone off the track. I do that. I have to, you know? This track is not an easy one to trudge down.

It was a quick drive. I mean, there’s no such thing as a long drive in this town – you can go from highway exit to highway on-ramp in the time it takes to drink a large takeaway coffee – but the drive from my place to Bella’s body seemed supernaturally fast. As we pulled out from my driveway I noticed that there was yet another stripped-down car on Carrie’s lawn, making it four in total. Then suddenly we were at the three-churches intersection downtown and a second later we were swinging into the staff car park behind the hospital.

Matt led me through a door I’d never noticed and into an elevator which seemed to take about as long as the drive had. When the doors opened there was another cop looking right at us. Senior Constable Tomas Riley, I knew, because he spent almost as much time at the pub where I worked as I did. He told me he was sorry to see me under these circumstances. He walked me and Matt through to a reception area where he said something I didn’t follow to a woman behind a desk. The woman asked me for ID and I was confused for a minute, started to say I hadn’t done it yet, the ID-ing.

‘No, no,’ Riley said. ‘Do you have some identification? A driver’s licence?’

‘I don’t drive,’ I told him, rifling in my bag for my wallet. ‘I’ve got Medicare. Bank cards. Responsible Service of Alcohol.’ I piled all the plastic onto the counter. The woman smiled and grabbed up a couple, scanned them through a machine, handed them back. She printed a form and passed it to Riley, who signed it and then touched my arm and led me down another hallway.

My skin tingled as the air-con dried my sweat. I hadn’t known I was sweaty until then. I don’t think it was even hot that day. It was grey out, I remember that much, but we do get those grey days so humid you can hardly bear to wear a stitch, don’t we? It might have been like that. I don’t know. I just know that walking down those empty blue hallways with a cop on either side, my skin started to cool and dry. I did a fake stretch and had a quick sniff under the arm. No BO that I could detect, so that was something.

‘Rogers your married name?’ Riley asked me, but in a making-conversation way, not jotting it down in his notepad or anything like that.

‘No.’

‘Oh. Your sister –’

‘Bella has a different dad.’

Bella’s father was a real classy bloke, which is how come she had such a pretty name. Me, I was named by our mother who was not of the soundest mind at the time, given how she was eighteen years old and newly delivered of a giant baby whose dad she’d not seen since he fled to Tassie on hearing he’d knocked up the checkout chick he’d been rooting behind his wife’s back. Mum was pissed off she couldn’t give me his surname so she gave me his first – Chris. When I was younger I pretended it was short for Christina, but now I don’t bother. Just Chris, that’s all.

We stopped outside a set of dull silver doors. ‘Chris, have you ever viewed a body before?’

I shook my head. He said some stuff I don’t remember. I couldn’t listen. I was suddenly sure that the dead girl through those doors wasn’t Bella. I was sure. I started practising in my head how to sound sad and sorry for whoever she was even though I was lit up with joy because she wasn’t mine.

‘Are you ready?’

I nodded. It’d all be over soon and I’d be back on my way home, trying her mobile again, leaving her another annoyed message about driving us all nuts with worry.

Funny thing is that even when they pulled the sheet back I thought for a minute it wasn’t her. I thought, Jesus, what has happened to this poor kid, this poor girl, someone’s darling girl, how do you do that to someone, someone’s precious beautiful girl, this poor little thing with hair just like Bella’s.

And I didn’t think of this right away, but later I realised how lucky it’d been I couldn’t speak on the car trip. Can you imagine if I’d asked that poor young cop whether Bella had suffered? I mean, Jesus. Can you imagine?

Matt drove me from the hospital to the police station back in the centre of town. He didn’t try to make conversation, just told me there were tissues in the glove compartment and asked a few times if I wanted to stop and get a cup of tea or something.

I didn’t cry or feel anger or anything, but I shook and shook so much that it made me giggle, which made Matt look at me like I’d screamed. Honestly, it was like I was on one of those vibrating chairs in the shopping centre. Like I was a vibrating chair.

At the station they offered me tea again. I said no and let them lead me to a room with a white formica table and a couple of sweaty vinyl seats. Riley was there, along with two men in suits; detectives from Wagga, they said. They wanted to know when I’d last seen Bella. I had to think a minute and then it took me another minute before I could say it.

‘Wednesday night. She dropped into the pub –’

‘The pub where you work?’

‘Yeah, the Royal. She dropped by as we were closing. She’d worked late to cover for a sick colleague and since she knew I was due to finish soon she thought she’d swing by and offer to drive me home, maybe have a hot choccy and a catch-up before bed.’

‘And how late did she stay at your house?’

‘She didn’t . . . I told her I had to stay back and do some admin stuff. Said we’d catch up on the weekend.’

‘Alright, Chris. Take some deep breaths. I’m sorry but we need to get a bit more information from you before we take you home. Deep breaths, that’s the girl.’

They asked me a bunch of stuff they could’ve found out from the phone book and then some stuff about my family, Bella’s family. They wanted to know about the men in Bella’s life, but there weren’t any. I mean, there were the men who worked at the nursing home with her and there was her seventy-eight-year-old neighbour whose dog she walked and there was her dad, who she’d not seen since she was twenty, but who she exchanged emails with every so often. But no boyfriend, not for a while now.

‘Girlfriend, then?’ one of the men in suits asked.

‘She’s not a lezzo if that’s what you’re asking. She’s got women friends, of course. The girls at work for a start. There’s a group of them who go out together when their off-shifts match up. And she still keeps in touch with a few mates from school.’

‘All women?’

‘I suppose.’

‘She didn’t like men?’

‘Bella liked everyone. It’s just that she didn’t trust men very much. They had to prove themselves first, you know.’

‘Why d’you reckon she didn’t trust them?’

‘Because she knew what they were capable of,’ I said, and then one of the suits said I needed a break.

You know, I’ve often been told I’m too trusting, too generous, too open. I used to think these were compliments, but recently I’ve come to realise that they are not. They say ‘trusting’ and mean ‘stupid’, ‘generous’ and mean ‘easy’, ‘open’ and mean ‘shameless’. All of those things are true and not true. It depends who you ask, doesn’t it? Ask old Bert at the pub if I’m easy or generous or any of that and he’ll say no. He’ll say, ‘The little bitch slaps me hand if it so much as brushes against her.’ Ask my ex, Nate. He’ll tell you a different side.

Look, what I’m saying is, sometimes I am trusting and generous and open and stupid and easy and shameless. What I’m saying is, who isn’t?

Bella. Bella wasn’t. She was older than me from the time she turned thirteen. I don’t know what happened to her then, maybe nothing important, but I remember she changed. She stopped being a kid and started being a proper adult. She’d come around to my place after school, find me still in bed, usually hungover as hell. She’d haul me up, make me coffee and eggs, give me an ear-bashing. At sixteen she moved in with me on account of a personality clash with Mum’s new boyfriend. I used to complain about what an anal, nagging little cow she was, but when she turned eighteen and took off on her own I missed her like you wouldn’t believe.

Sally Perkins, whose dad sat in the pub and drank himself almost into a coma the day his little girl graduated from the police academy, brought me some unasked-for tea and a couple of sugary biscuits. The suits watched me not drinking or eating for a few minutes and then asked if I was right to continue. I said yes, because while I’d been sitting looking at the tea I’d remembered this one man Bella’d mentioned a couple of weeks ago. It was my night off and I was about to get to bed when she turned up. After eleven it was. Unusual for her to come over that late and without texting first to see if I was home and awake. I opened the door and there she was, eyes all shiny. I thought maybe one of her favourites at the home had passed on – they’re not meant to take it personally, but that was Bella for you. Then I saw she was dolled up, cute little heeled boots and a bit of eyeliner and that, and I rushed her inside, feeling a bit worried about what might have happened.

It was nothing really. She’d been at a trivia night with some mates and when they announced the lucky door prizes at the end, her number got called. So she went on up to collect her prize – a basket of chocolate truffles and candied fruit and the like – and this bloke who’d won another one of the prizes started chatting her up. He asked her how she’d get the great big basket of stuff home and she said it was no problem, she had her car with her. He started in on a whole sob story about how he’d walked right across town to be there that night but now he had this great big basket to carry and taxis were so expensive after 10pm it would take most of his grocery money just to get home. Bella wondered why he’d come to a trivia night so far from home when every pub and community group in town held one seemingly every damn week, but she didn’t say that, she said, ‘Oh, dear’ or something, and went to carry off her loot. He stopped her though, a hand on her arm, and asked her which direction she was heading. She felt a bit scared then, she told me, and so she lied, told him she was going straight to her sister’s place which was around the corner. ‘It’s just I could really do with a lift, at least up the main road,’ he said, still holding her arm. ‘Ah, well, ask around some of the old fellas in there. I’m sure one of them can help you out,’ she said and then – her voice was kind of disbelieving when she told me this bit – then she tried to move away but he moved with her. She had to actually pull her arm away from his.

When she got to her car she locked all the doors and started crying a little bit. ‘Stupid, I know,’ she told me that night (because although she hadn’t planned to, she did as she’d told the man and came straight to my place, round the corner). ‘He was just an awkward bloke, didn’t know how to take a hint and nothing happened, but I just felt so rude and I hate that.’

I made her a hot choccy and we talked about other things and just when I thought it was all forgotten she said, ‘You know, if it’d been a woman I would’ve offered her a lift no question.’ I think she felt bad about that.

The older suit asked me if Bella had described the bloke at all, but she hadn’t. The younger one asked me if I thought she’d been upset over nothing and I don’t know why but I wanted to punch him then. No, I do know why. It’s because I had thought she was overreacting and I told her that. Gently, but still. What if she took it to heart? What if the next time she was approached she went against her instincts?

‘I mean,’ the young suit went on, ‘from what I hear, you yourself are known as a trusting kind of a woman. When it comes to men, I mean.’

‘Alright,’ the older one said.

I couldn’t speak just then. I couldn’t.

‘Alright,’ the older one said again. ‘Thanks for your time, Chris. We’ll keep you updated. And you call me if you think of anything else, yeah?’

Sally Perkins drove me home, warned me that the story would be all over the news soon.

‘I’ll keep the telly off then.’

‘If there’s anyone who you think should know . . . I mean, hearing something like this from the news is pretty tough.’

‘Her dad. I suppose I should call her dad.’

‘The detectives have his details, they’ll get in touch with him. And they’ve been to her work already. But if there are any other friends, distant relatives . . .’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a think. Call around.’

‘Journos might try and talk to you. Probably not today. Your names are different, so with any luck it’ll take ’em a while to track you down. Anyway, you don’t have to deal with them, alright? We’ve got people to do that for you.’ Without taking her eyes off the road she pulled a card from somewhere down her right side and passed it to me.

We drove past the park where I used to take Bella when she was a tiny thing. I’d never take her there now. I mean, I wouldn’t take a little kid there now. The old fort she used to climb on was covered in graffiti and deliberately gouged splinters of sharp wood. The swing where I would sit and watch her disappeared years ago but the frame’s still there, FUCKING CUNTS scrawled up its side, the scrubby grass beneath caked with old chip packets and cigarette butts. I walked past it most afternoons and again late at night, but I never thought about me and Bella there.

This is my life now, I realised. Just, you know, remembering Bella everywhere she’d ever been and wouldn’t be any more. I thought how even this weird day, seeing the inside of a morgue and the back of the cop shop, was made even weirder by the fact that Bella would never know about it.

‘Chris? This is the one, yeah?’

We were out the front of my house. It’s one of the neater ones in the street. I keep my lawn mowed and my mailbox cleared and the driveway free from oil splatters. Only Frank on the corner, who trims his lawn with nail scissors and cleans his gutters daily, keeps a neater street front than me.

‘Chris?’

I thanked her for the lift, got out of the car. ‘Take care of yourself,’ I said and she smiled. She wasn’t a pretty girl, but her smile was lovely.

I did as Sally had said, called a few of Bella’s friends, asked each of them if they’d mind calling some others. It was strange. I thought they’d scream and cry and say, ‘No, it’s not possible,’ but everyone just kind of accepted it. Everyone said sorry to me. Everyone asked what they could do. It was like they were more worried about me than about Bella, which is logical, I know, but also terrible. Maybe I just sounded that bad.

By late afternoon, my phone was ringing every time I hung up from making a call. The news was out and people wanted to know if it was true and what they could do. I told them it was and that there was nothing.

Around six, there was a knock on the door and I started shaking all over again. I told myself there was nothing to fear now, the worst had already happened, but my nerves wouldn’t listen. I braced for another blow, opened the door.

Nate. Love of my life, smasher of my heart. There he stood, my mighty tree of a man, with tears splashing down into his bushranger beard.

‘Babe,’ he said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh, babe.’ His body surged forward. He wrapped his giant arms around me, squeezed all the shaking out. He carried me inside and put me down on the kitchen chair. Knelt at my feet and hugged me some more, rubbing his wet, scratchy face against my neck.

‘Heard it on the midday news, no details, just a woman found near Strathdee. Then next update they said an aged-care assistant. Tried to call you, but couldn’t get through. Then the next update had the name. I had to call base, get ’em to send a relief driver. Caught a cab back to my car and drove straight down.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You should’ve called me.’

‘I was going to. Everyone’s been calling me.’ As if to prove it, the phone started ringing again.

‘Oh, babe.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Poor Bella. That poor little thing.’

And I lost it then, because no one had said that. Not anyone.

I’d met Nate at the pub, of course. Where else would I ever meet anyone? I was twenty-five and never short of offers but I was getting tired of it all. I’d been thinking that it might be nice to get serious with someone, set up home, maybe even have a baby. Most of the girls I’d gone to school with had a few kids by then and, though I wasn’t jealous of their lives, I was starting to feel a tug deep inside when I’d see them in the main street with a pastel bundle strapped to their chest, a curly-haired munchkin clinging to their hand.

So, I was in a suggestible state you might say, but honestly I know I would’ve fallen for Nate even if I was married to Prince Harry and had a pair of ginger twins cooking in my oven. I would’ve fallen for Nate no matter what.

This was before the bypass went in, when Strathdee was still the main truck-stop town on the road from Sydney to Melbourne. So I was used to serving blokes who looked like they could lift their rigs with one hand, but I’d never thought of the place as small until Nate walked in. Right away it was like there wasn’t enough room for anyone else. All those other boofheads, they were pushed to the corners, and even though I was back in the kitchen looking out through the little service window, I felt he was pressing right up against me. It was like the mass of him had shoved out whatever air we had in there, because I suddenly couldn’t breathe real well.

He ordered a burger and chips and an orange juice. I’d never seen a man order an orange juice. Not sure I’ve ever seen anyone order an orange juice without vodka in it. But it’s not like Old Grey behind the bar, or anyone else for that matter, was going to have a go at this mountain for being soft. Jesus.

When I called his number and he came and got his burger my dirty mind wondered if those giant paws might actually be able to cover my tits and I shivered all over and was sure he knew what I was thinking.

I hung back and watched as he rammed a handful of chips into his gob and then licked his lips. It was indecent, that wet pink tongue peeking out from these thick red lips hiding in that tangle of black beard.

Just as well I got called back to cook some steaks before he started on his burger because I might have gone ahead and wet myself if I’d seen how wide that mouth could open just then.

As it happened he left after his burger and the pub filled back up with air and space and I settled down, even had a little laugh at myself for getting so worked up over a juice-drinking ape-man.

And then the next week he came back and it was just the same: the walls closing in, my mind full of filthy thoughts about his hands and mouth. But this time he stayed by the service window and talked to me between orders. God knows what I said to him. When I look back I imagine a hot mist of desperation spraying from my mouth every time I opened it. But I guess that was just what he was looking for, because he offered me a lift home and had my knickers off and my knockers bouncing before the windscreen of his coach was even half fogged-over.

Nate had been a truckie once, but by the time I met him he was driving tourist buses up and down the east coast. Most of the passengers were oldies wanting to see the country but too scared or frail to brave the distances on their own. Nate was like the cheeky but dependable grandson they all wished for. And for his part he got to be on the road but without the pressure that turned so many truckies into pill heads. ‘Australia at a leisurely pace’ was the catchphrase of the mob he worked for.

Once him and me hooked up, though, he gave away the long-haul route and picked up the day-trip run from here to the small towns further west. I didn’t ask him to. He wanted to be home with me every night. Incredible. Man like him, girl like me . . . I knew how lucky I was, believe me. Didn’t stop me from fucking everything up though.

But I mustn’t have burnt every last bit of his love for me to the ground, because here he was in my kitchen taking care of me like the last decade had never happened. He checked that I’d made all the calls I needed to then turned my phone off. He made me a cheese sandwich, which I ate almost half of, and a cup of tea, which I drank. Then he dosed me with what he called ‘ten-hour guarantees’. I told him I could never imagine sleeping again but I let him put me to bed anyway. He got in beside me and there was no need to talk about that. I backed up into his plank of a chest and he pulled me in with those enormous arms and I sank into sleep like it was five years ago and there was nothing to worry about except whether he’d still be here in the morning.

Tuesday 7 April

AustraliaToday.com

‘Beautiful Bella’ viciously mauled

May Norman

7 April, 2015

A ‘terribly mauled’ body found yesterday by a traveller taking a roadside cigarette break has been identified as that of Bella Michaels, a 25-year-old aged-care worker from Strathdee, in south-western New South Wales. Ms Michaels had been missing for almost 48 hours when emergency services received a call from a distressed Melbourne man reporting his gruesome find.

‘The gentleman stopped at an expanse of grass and scrub just past the Strathdee exit heading south. His intention was to stretch his legs and have a cigarette while his kids were sleeping in the car. It’s a lucky thing they didn’t wake up and decide to come look for Daddy,’ a police spokesman said this morning.

Local police arrived at the scene to find a body which an officer who had known Ms Michaels recognised as her’s. Official identification was later made by Ms Michaels’ sister.

Police are so far declining to reveal how Ms Michaels died or whether she had been sexually assaulted, but unconfirmed reports from those on the scene suggest she was, in the words of the man who found the body, ‘terribly mauled’. Detective Sergeant John Brandis, who is leading the investigation, would not comment on whether this mauling may have occurred after death, but locals point to the presence of many wild dogs and cats in the area and the fact that the body may have been out in the open since Friday night.

Ms Michaels was last seen leaving Strathdee Haven, the nursing home where she worked, just after 5pm on Friday. Her car was parked less than a three-minute walk away, but she never reached it. Staff and residents at Strathdee Haven are ‘in shock, just absolutely stunned’, according to manager Cathryn Charles. ‘She was an essential part of the team here, always going above and beyond and always with a smile on her face. It beggars belief that this could’ve happened to her, and right here on our doorstep it seems.’

Det. Brandis said that so far door-to-door interviewing in the area Ms Michaels disappeared from has turned up nothing, but that the canvassing will continue. ‘It was a very short walk, in daylight, along a quiet residential street. If there was a struggle or commotion of any kind, someone must have seen or heard it.’

Police are also appealing for motorists who may have noticed stopped vehicles or any suspicious behaviour between Gundagai and Holbrook on the Hume Highway between 6pm Friday and 6am Saturday to contact the Strathdee police or Crime Stoppers.

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I didn’t sleep the promised ten hours but I slept almost seven, which was a damn near-miracle given the circumstances. As soon as I was conscious I was thinking about Bella and what they’d done to her. Yeah, they. It was never a question to me. Not after I’d seen her, you know?

When my mum died it took months before I woke up knowing she was dead. Every morning there’d be this sweet, sleepy moment in which the world was as it always had been before the truth crashed in. It was like that after Nate left me, too. I’d wake up and for a second be sure he was beside me. But that didn’t happen with Bella. I woke and straight away I saw her face as it’d been in the morgue.

(The first time I ever saw Bella’s face I told Mum it looked like she’d been bashed because her skull was all lopsided and she had scratches on one cheek and there were patches of blue over her weird little bald brows. Mum laughed and said that being born is the roughest thing most of us’ll ever go through.)

I dragged myself out to the kitchen. Nate was at the table drinking coffee, reading from the screen of his phone. He flicked it off, shoved it into the front pocket of his jeans, came and kissed the top of my head, cradled me like that for a long, lovely moment. Without asking whether I wanted it he went ahead and made me coffee and it was exactly the right temperature, exactly the right milky sweetness.

He waited until I’d drunk about half and then covered my hands with his. ‘So, what’s the story? What have the cops said?’

His hands seemed to muffle the grief and horror a little. I felt like the weight of them on mine would stop that terrible shaking demon from taking me over again.

‘She left work on Friday a bit after five. Said bye to everyone inside and off she went, just like normal. Three hours later a nurse arriving for her shift noticed Bella’s car on the street. She thought it was weird and tried to call her, got no answer. On her break, around eleven, the nurse went to her own car to grab something and saw Bella’s was still there. She tried her again and had such a bad feeling about her not answering that she looked up Bella’s emergency contact, me, and called to see if everything was OK. I was at work and then didn’t bother checking my messages before I crashed out – and – and – ’

‘Hey, hey.’ Nate stroked his thumb over my hand. ‘Breathe, babe. Come on, big breaths. Good girl, that’s it.’

‘So I never got the message until the morning. There was another one by then – from her boss – Bel hadn’t shown up for work. I went round to her place, but there was no answer. I called the police. They said wait. I waited. I kept calling her all day. Called her friends. At the end of the day I called the police again. They filed a report. Told me she’d probably turn up, red-faced about causing all this trouble when she’d just gone off for a weekend with her fella.’

‘Who’s her fella?’ Nate asked and it was only a split-second but I saw it, the violence. It was good to be reminded. I took my hands out from under his. I did it casually, picked up my coffee cup and took a sip and left my hands wrapped around its hard warmth.

‘She doesn’t have one. They just assumed. Talked about her like she’s some other girl. Some idiot who takes off from work without telling anyone. As if she would.’

‘World’s youngest grandma,’ he said, smiling.

We used to call her that, me and Nate, back when we’d get pissed and make messes and she would bustle in, clean up and lecture us about responsibility.

Nate touched my hand. ‘And then what?’

‘Then yesterday morning there was a cop at my door . . . They said she’d probably been out there since Friday night. It rained so much over the weekend. Nobody stopping by the roadside for a piss or a picnic.’

Nate sucked in his breath. I knew he was imagining her, lying out in the rain, knew he was worrying about how cold and scared she must’ve been and then remembering she wasn’t feeling anything by then. The quick double-punch of horror and gratitude.

‘Do you know how . . . On the news they said she was . . .’ He held out his hands, helpless.

I told him what the police had told me. I didn’t spare him any details, because they had not spared me and I suppose I wanted to share the pain of it. But now, well, I am reluctant to repeat it, to tell you the truth. Bad enough to have heard it all from my own mouth that morning. Bad enough that I saw what they left behind, and heard what the coroner made of that mess. Bad enough to glimpse the newspaper headlines as I rush through the shopping centre on my way to the supermarket. Bad enough to guess at what the blokes in the pub are whispering in between saying, so loudly, ‘How you doing, love?’ Bad enough that when I try to sleep the images come so hard and fast they feel like memories. Bad enough I can’t go a night without dreaming some of it, all of it, the things being done to her and the men doing it almost almost almost showing their faces so that I hope for these horror shows to come again because this time I might catch a glimpse, see whose fists and cocks and knees and forearms they are. Worse, worse, worse than bad, the goddamn vivid guesswork of my mind, which has spent too many hours watching crime shows, too many nights reading true-crime stories. Bad enough I must see inside my own mind flashes of suffering that look like fucking NCIS, sound like Underbelly, feel like a boot coming down on my chest. And if that sounds good to you then go ahead and read the goddamn coroner’s report and look up those obscene photos for yourself. I’m not your pornographer.

Nate was still and silent through the worst of it, but when I told him the police had no suspects, he cracked his knuckles, clicked his neck back and forward. ‘Hope I find those fuckers first,’ he said. ‘Gunna do worse to them then they did to her.’

‘Please don’t.’

He cracked his knuckles again. ‘You think they deserve to live?’

‘I think I deserve not to have a husband in jail for murder.’

He looked at me then, properly. ‘Babe,’ he said, ‘I’m not your husband.’

‘You know what I mean,’ I said. ‘You know I need you to be . . . OK.’

He looked at me for a long time. I don’t know if he was thinking of the past, or of Bella, or of his woman up in Sydney. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m OK.’

There were a lot of visitors that first day. First full day I knew she was dead. Each sat at the kitchen table with me, looking out the window to the driveway, saying goodbye and take care and call if you need as the next car pulled up. I don’t think they’d coordinated it or anything; it just happened that way. It shocked me a bit, how many people came. Nowadays I have to think of it more darkly. I have to think that half of them were rubbernecking or trying to get in on the tragedy. Weird how many people do that. Makes me sick that I know about it, that looking back I have to assume that’s what was going on. But at the time what I kept thinking was, Miss Popularity, aren’t you, Bella! Look at all these people coming around. Listen to all the sweet things they’re saying about you. I remember saying to Nate that I hope she knew how many people thought she was the shit.

First was my neighbour on the right, Carrie Smith. Carrie was my age, and a grandmother twice over already. She’d had her eldest, Emma, at sixteen and Emma had her first at fifteen and her second a few months ago. The kids and grandkids and various partners and friends lived with Carrie sometimes and sometimes not. Hers was like a different house from week to week. One week there’d be plastic scooters in the drive and blinding-white nappies flapping on the line and alternating baby cries and toddler giggles from inside, the next, red-eyed slurry teenagers slumped under a smoke haze, hip-hop blasting from stereos of cars parked but never turned off.

Carrie asked how I was and I said I was fine, and then she made tea and showed me pictures of her grandkids on her phone and asked if she could smoke inside and asked if I needed anything and asked if that was Nate’s car parked out front and asked, oh, I don’t know, a bunch of things that had nothing to do with why she was fussing around my kitchen at nine on a Tuesday morning instead of down at the club flushing her pension down the pokies as usual.