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- Herausgeber: Orenda Books
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
On her first shift at an Edinburgh halfway house for violent offenders, a young woman is taken hostage … and that's just the beginning… The twisty, shocking, darkly funny thriller by award-winning author Helen FitzGerald. `A new novel from Helen Fitzgerald is always a major event … magnificent´ Mark Billingham `Outrageous, hilarious and dark as hell – this is Helen FitzGerald on absolute top form´ Doug Johnstone `[Lou] is irresistible and very funny … The set-up is fascinating, the narrative is both fast-moving and convincing´ Literary Review _______ They`re the housemates from Hell… When her disastrous Australian love affair ends, Lou O´Dowd heads to Edinburgh for a fresh start, moving in with her cousin, and preparing for the only job she can find … working at a halfway house for very high-risk offenders. Two killers, a celebrity paedophile and a paranoid coke dealer – all out on parole and all sharing their outwardly elegant Edinburgh townhouse with rookie night-worker Lou… And instead of finding some meaning and purpose to her life, she finds herself trapped in a terrifying game of cat and mouse where she stands to lose everything – including her life. Slick, darkly funny and nerve-janglingly tense, Halfway House is both a breathtaking thriller and an unapologetic reminder never to corner a desperate woman… __________________________ `Tense, claustrophobic and laugh-out-loud funny … an amazingly talented writer´ Michael Wood `A genius combination of horror, humour and humanity´ B M Carroll Praise for Helen FitzGerald **Shortlisted for Theakston Crime Novel of the Year** `Sharp, shocking and savagely funny´ Chris Whitaker `Dark, dark, deliciously dark´ Amanda Jennings `Wickedly funny, breath-stealingly tense and utterly chilling´ Miranda Dickinson `The main character is one of the most extraordinary you`ll meet between the pages of a book´ Ian Rankin `Sublime´ Guardian `A dark, comic masterpiece´ Mark Edwards `Urgent, angry, absolutely terrifying´ Erin Kelly `Tantalisingly powerful´ The Times `The classic thriller gets a hell of a twist´ Heat `FitzGerald writes like a more focused Irvine Welsh or a less misogynist Philip Roth´ Daily Telegraph `Domestic life is rarely served up quite so dark as this´ Sun
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When her disastrous Australian love affair ends, Lou O’Dowd heads to Edinburgh for a fresh start, moving in with her cousin and preparing for the only job she can find … working at a halfway house for very-high-risk offenders.
Two killers, a celebrity paedophile and a paranoid coke dealer – all out on parole and all sharing their outwardly elegant Edinburgh townhouse with rookie night-worker Lou…
And instead of finding some meaning and purpose to her life, she finds herself trapped in a terrifying game of cat and mouse where she stands to lose everything – including her life.
Slick, darkly funny and nerve-janglingly tense, Halfway House is both a breathtaking thriller and an unapologetic reminder never to corner a desperate woman…
HALFWAY HOUSE
HELEN FITZGERALD
For my beautiful mum, Isabel Ann FitzGerald, who gave me a love of language and the confidence to play with it. Miss you, Mum.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
She wasn’t coming over well.
‘Some people have described you as a psychopath,’ the interviewer said.
This woman had been so friendly before the cameras came on (‘How was Tuscany, tell me everything?’) Now, she was a mean girl with an iPad: ‘Hashtag SugarBabyKiller,’ she said. ‘Hashtag Impaler.’
Lou remembered her father’s most recent advice: ‘Only answer direct questions.’ She said nothing but feared her anger was showing. She must not sit so stiffly. She must try to look victim-esque, by being nice, on the inside. She must listen to the mean girl, and then say something to prove she’d listened.
She couldn’t think of a thing to say, probably because she had failed to listen. She would listen now.
But what was the point, trying to be likeable, looking the way she did? She’d bought a new suit for this interview – grey, understated, serious, not attractive or murderous in the least. She’d straightened her hair and pulled it behind her ears. She’d used concealer under her eyes, nothing more. Then someone grabbed her in the green room and dragged her to hair and makeup. She should have stopped them but there were mirrors and lights and bottles and brushes. It was irresistible; a trap.
‘Just for the cameras,’ they’d said, glossing and curling her hair, piling on eyebrows and lashes and lips – and, ta-da, she was Lou the Impaler, Hashtag LusciousLou, Hashtag YesPleaseLouise. Hashtag…
‘A master manipulator, a cold-blooded killer,’ the mean girl said.
There was a dead man in her head now, skewered. She needed to firm up her face, which should be sad, and sorry. She needed to focus, for Sixty Minutes. She must loosen her neck and shoulders and she must listen to the mean girl.
She’d asked her a question – at last – but Lou hadn’t heard it. It was probably something about the murder: Where did she learn how to do that?! Or it might have been about being cast out into the sugar-baby badlands. People loved hearing about all that. Or maybe the mean girl had just asked about Edinburgh, where it all began, or at least where it all began again. That sinister word: Edinburgh. She focused – and the interviewer repeated it. Edinburgh: the most beautiful city in the world, the city she had chosen as hers.
CHAPTER ONE
Two Months Earlier
Lou was going to remember people’s birthdays. She was going to fall in love enough to share a bed. There’d be no need to cry or to lie for the new Lou, skipping across the grass in The Meadows, taking in a show, posing at the castle, as she no doubt would do. She imagined herself each night before falling asleep: linking hands with two great friends at Hogmanay, part of a huge circle of beaming Scots – May auld acquaintance be forgot – moving in and out, the circle as one, voices as one, in and out, faster, faster, auld. lang. syne. One time – honestly, it happened twice – she had a tartan orgasm.
She was already transforming into her new self. The old Lou would never have gone for a job like the one she was about to interview for. With two minutes to go, Lou closed the blinds to shut out the every-city night-lights of Melbourne. She styled a slapdash ponytail, took a seat, and opened the link. She was the first on screen, so she froze, maintained her pose. She must not loosen the thong sawing away at her crack, she must not scratch the pubes that were growing back. In the last two weeks she’d applied for every lowly admin and retail job in and around Edinburgh. No luck so far – seventeen rejections, twenty-four ghostings. Catering and hospitality were out – she’d had enough of smiling at rich people. In despair, she had widened the search to include the care sector, and: bingo! An interview. It sounded exciting, it was in the centre of the most beautiful city in the world, and it was only three night shifts a week. Four days adventuring, every single week. Farewell unhappy idiot Lou and all the people she knew. She would get this job. And she would never – ow, god, she wriggled – ever, wear a thong again.
A skinny, spiky redhead – Polly, seventy-ish – appeared on screen, sipping her coffee. ‘Hello,’ she said, no smile. ‘Just waiting on David, won’t be long.’
It was morning on the other side of the world, in that fairy-tale land as far away as you could get. Imagine, she’d be jetlagged soon. ‘I’m so jetlagged,’ she would say as she sipped a pint of ale with an unforgettable friend in an ancient pub.
Polly coughed. She must be a smoker, nearer fifty than seventy.
Lou could hear a man’s voice in the background:
‘Morning!’ the man said.
Polly’s face got nicer as she turned her head. ‘Hey, pal, just doing interviews,’ she said.
‘Oops, so sorry,’ said the voice off screen. ‘I’ll pop the kettle on, and I’m closing the door behind me.’
‘Cheers, pal,’ said Polly, her face pinched once more. She was reading something that disgusted her then looking up at Lou without changing her face. There was an old calendar on the flaky wall behind her. 2019.
‘Hello.’ David had a Mallen streak, a lopsided head, cool jacket, no tie. There were bookshelves in his background – Social Work Practice in the Criminal Justice System, Scottish Criminal Law Essentials; Race, Gender and—
She had read enough.
‘You must be Lou. How are you doing?’
‘Good, thanks.’ She must find cleverer things to say.
‘Nice to meet you,’ he said. ‘I’m David Wallace, general manager and this is Polly Grange, project manager of SASOL.’
This stood for Supported Accommodation Services for Offenders, Lothian. Lou did not expect it to be pronounced ‘sarsehole’. She bit her lip.
‘As you’ll know from the job description, SASOL is a five-bed unit for very-high-risk offenders.’
She hadn’t noticed the word ‘very’ in the advertisement. By accident, she might be about to get an important job, a meaningful job, an exciting job – not with bad boys, but with ‘very’ bad boys. She had tingles.
‘It’s not like other services,’ David said. ‘There are only three in the country: us; our women’s unit nearby; and another non-profit up north. This job is at the men’s unit, doing three night shifts a week. The residents in the unit have served more than four years in prison and have been released on licence with a condition of residence for twelve months. Most are MAPPA level two or three.’
She would have to look that up.
‘And all have stringent licence conditions such as MFMC and DASS …’
And that and that.
‘…a 10pm to 7am curfew, as well as various additional restrictions regarding internet use, employment, leisure activities, contact with family members, etcetera.The role of the night-care worker is to ensure that SASOL is a safe place for all residents, to offer support and advice in relation to any risks and needs, to promote rehabilitation, to keep records, do handover meetings with day staff and to respond to any incidents. How this goes is I’m going toask you three questions, then Polly is going to ask you three questions. It should take fifteen minutes. My first question relates to values.’
This all felt very giggly; took her back to parent-teacher meetings – Lou against all the adults, all the adults against Lou; every teacher wondering the same thing: How can Lou be so unhappy and disruptive when her mother is so dedicated and loving, and when her father is hilarious and a spunk?
‘Your reference from the café was very good,’ David said. ‘No problems there. But the second reference has raised some concerns.’
Oh dear.
‘“To whom it may concern.”’ David put on his glasses and cleared his throat. ‘“We are managing partners of Genova’s Limited, a property group that manages apartment complexes and budget hotels, all of which are located in the Melbourne metropolitan area. We are writing to confirm that Miss Louise O’Dowd worked for the company for two years. Her position was project worker at North Melbourne House, a hundred-bed homeless hostel. Her main duty was to deep-clean rooms that had been soiled by overdoses, violent incidents and suicide attempts. She also dealt with the challenging behaviour of very-high-risk criminals. Miss O’Dowd proved herself to be strong of stomach and we have no hesitation recommending her for demeaning care tasks in a dangerous setting.
‘“Frieda and Alan Bainbridge.”’
Alan Bainbridge was Lou’s boyfriend – till she found out he was married. Then he was her sugar daddy – till his wife found out. Lou had accepted that it was over and that there would be no contact. She was excellent at closure – a little too good some might say. She certainly wasn’t stalkerish. All she did was send one teensy text. She was moving to the UK. She wanted to do office work. She needed to fill in the two-year gap in her CV. He employed hundreds of people. Could he please give her a reference?
One hour later, the above appeared in Lou’s Gmail – not from Alan, but from his wife, the formidable Frieda.
David, SASOL’s general manager, took off his glasses and had a sip of water. ‘Is this for real, or does your old employer have difficulty with English?’
‘Polish is Frieda’s first language. She must have written it.’
‘Why did she describe working with the homeless as demeaning? How do you feel about this kind of work?’
Lou had an answer for this. ‘The Bainbridges are money-makers,’ she said, ‘that’s all they see. They’re rich because money matters to them more than compassion. My values are very different. Working with the homeless, as with ex-offenders, is a privilege.’
David and Polly clearly liked what she was saying. She could relax, let the rest of the interview flow.
Conflict resolution?
Easy. She thought about how she felt at the last meal she had with her parents, how she lowered her voice till her dad did too and how she breathed in and out for a while instead of stabbing her mother with a fork.
Building relationships?
A cinch. Lou was an army brat, made friends more quickly than cups of tea. (She didn’t add that she was even better at discarding them.)
How about ethical dilemmas?
Bring’em on. Lou’s only work experience, apart from the café, was as a sugar baby. She was one big walking, fucking ethical dilemma. Who was she to judge bad boys when she was a bad girl? She didn’t tell them any of this, of course, but she did say all the right things.
Or she thought she did. She might have said all the wrong things. She tossed and turned till 7am, when a message pinged in from Polly: Congratulations. We were very impressed by your work experience and your enthusiasm.
Lou pounced from the bed. She had a proper job. In a faraway land. ‘Alexa, play The Proclaimers’. She danced for an hour. She was on her way from misery to happiness. She was the sparkly new employable Lou.
Fuck you, Frieda.
She had no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up, but maybe this was it. Not this job, necessarily, but in the same field. This was her way into criminal justice. Criminal. Justice. She would stop people doing bad things. She would help people find good things about themselves. She would find herself, grow up. Nah, delete that one. She was going on an adventure. She did not have to grow up. She was only twenty-three, for fuck’s sake.
Lou spent the following week throwing things out, giving things away, cleaning, and ironing labels (LOU O’DOWD) onto every single item of her clothing, even her pants, a habit her father encouraged before a move. When she had finally finished packing, she popped her last bottle of Alan-bought champagne and danced around her bright-white and empty love nest. Goodbye Alan, goodbye Frieda, Jane from swimming, Billy the bike-maintenance guy. Lou was here 2023, she scratched under the breakfast bar. She then checked that all the rooms were clean and empty, that she had her passport, her ticket, phone, chargers, cabin bag, suitcase, etcetera. She stood on the balcony one last time, bubbly in hand, the city skyline behind her, and posted a selfie on Instagram:
Here’s looking up your kilt, I’m off to Edinburgh,
Lou.
CHAPTER TWO
Lou could do with a barley sugar. Must be all the excitement. Nothing to do with entering international arrivals alone, finding the check-in gate alone, walking towards the mile-long queue, alone.
She scoured the huge hall for her mum, who was always there to see her off, no matter where she was going. She looked for her dad, usually holding the makings of a picnic. No sign. Her parents had not come to surprise her. She had lost them too. No wonder, after that terrible dinner in Port Melbourne. Two years ago, it was.
They had arrived in Melbourne frazzled, which was no surprise – it was her mother’s job to navigate, even though she never showed any interest in where she was supposed to be going next. She was a ‘present’ person. A little bit away with the fairies. Not someone who should be given the task of chief navigational officer, especially when they didn’t have satnav in the car.
‘There are no signals on a battlefield,’ her father always said.
Lou wasn’t sure this sounded true. Also, her father had never been on a battlefield. What was true was that both parents disliked the internet. They preferred music, dancing, an hour a week of live television, gardening, going for long hikes, the smell of a good hardback, home-made sourdough, the feel of a Melways map and bucketloads of stress.
Lou’s mum always took on the navigation task as best and as calmly as she could, unfolding unwieldy servo maps that crackled and creased and objected if a window was opened. With her glasses on, a barley sugar in her mouth, she would really try to understand what she was looking at, and if it was the right thing to be looking at, her heart racing harder the harder she stared. Her husband, watching the panic literally unfold, dealt with the situation by yelling:‘LEFT OR RIGHT?’ He would decide on right, or left, even though she had not answered him. He would curse at left-hand lanes that disappeared and at unreadable signs and at crazy drivers, her poor mum quivering, glasses now a foggy inch from the map.
There were a lot of car rules: no music unless there was a straight stretch of at least half an hour, no eating, and no unscheduled stopping, ever, no matter what. You meant to go to Perth and you’re in Brisbane? No worries, just keep on Highway 1, maybe yell more loudly, but don’t stop. Do the big lap. Lou wondered if all the vans circumnavigating Australia were lost men refusing to stop.
On the many lengthy journeys she’d gone on as a child, from this aunt to that, from this base to that, Lou would always be perched in the middle of the backseat, on high alert to offer the driver bottled water and a barley sugar. She would rest one hand on her mother’s shoulder. Occasionally, her mum would reach back and touch her fingers, tap, tap, tap, as if to say: I love you, and I’m okay, I might even know where we are.
But she didn’t look okay when she arrived in Port Melbourne two years ago. Eighteen hours as navigator had made her pale. A huge map followed her out of the car. Lou’s dad chased it, grabbed it, wiped the rain from it, and folded it in three perfect steps.
They were to stay overnight in Lou’s apartment, then head off to Uncle Fred’s birthday party the following morning. It was a terrible mistake. Her dad was tired and anxious and got grumpy because the food took ages. (Ring the restaurant. Ring them again!Cancel the order. One star. No stars.) He had never been violent, but his yelling had always scared her, and she was no longer as used to it as she had been. As they plated the noodles, she decided to ask her dad if he might consider going to the doctor about his anger issues and his OCD.
‘What are you saying, that I’m crazy?’ he’d said.
Crazy was not allowed, or even talked about, in the army/O’Dowd family. He laughed at the impossibility of it. Him, crazy, when he’d driven all that way and paid a fortune for food that took two hours to arrive. He was not barking mad. He was right to be mad. And after all that they had given him the wrong noodles. Arseholes.
‘You ever heard the saying: “If you keep meeting arseholes, chances are, you’re the arsehole?”’Lou said.
He had not heard it and it was not the case. He met arseholes all day every day, sometimes the same ones, over and over.
This seemed very unlucky. And such a shame. A bit of Zoloft might have worked a treat for her dad, she reckoned, plus some counselling to undo all those military knots of his. She knew he was nice underneath. She’d experienced it as a kid: those father-daughter camping trips to Wilpena Pound; fishing on the Murray; hiking in the high country; building fires on Lake Eildon; falling asleep under the southern stars, survivors, together.
Her dad had stopped yelling about the noodles and was now eating them.
‘I adore this place,’ her mother said, sipping a glass of red on the balcony. ‘But how can you afford it on your wages?’
‘Thanks.’ Lou did not want to answer the second question.
‘You are still working at the café?’ her dad said. He’d been nagging her for three years to get some direction; even offered to pay her fees if she enrolled to learn something useful.
‘Yes,’ she lied.
‘Part time?’
‘It varies.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are the wages good in sandwiches?’
‘No.’
‘You’re twenty,’ he said, preparing another mouthful of the wrong noodles.
‘Twenty-one,’ Lou said, annoyed enough to add: ‘Actually my boyfriend pays for this flat.’
She had just estranged herself from her semi-Catholic, super-pious parents and she knew it. Fuck them.
‘You’ve got a boyfriend? Where is he? So this is for the two of you?’ Her mum gave her dad a look: See, told you it’d all turn out all right.
‘He’s married,’ Lou said. ‘I only have to see him twice a week.’ Okay, so now it was definitely over. She would not be speaking to her parents again.
Her mother spewed out some red wine.
Her father turned as red as the Malbec, fist tightening around his glass.‘So you’re a mistress.’ Voice getting louder, almost yelling now. ‘Is that what we say? Is that what we’re supposed to tell people?’
Lou didn’t care anymore. ‘Tell them a man pays for my services, like you pay for mum’s, tell them I’m a whore.’
Lou didn’t go to Uncle Fred’s the following day. She stopped going to family gatherings altogether. She made excuses at Christmas and at Easter and on birthdays. She didn’t listen to her mother’s voicemails and did not respond to her ‘come home’ texts. She talked to her new friends – she couldn’t remember who – about how she’d gone no-contact because she’d finally realised that her father was a tyrant and that her mother was an idiot. ‘I’m an orphan,’ she said to a fabulous new friend in a Fitzroy bar one night. ‘Why shouldn’t I have a Daddy Warbucks?’
‘Lou! Lou, here, it’s me.’
It was her mum, in the check-in queue. Her silver hair was fabulous, but she looked about twenty years older than she did two years ago. ‘Oh my god, Mum!’ She had come to see her little girl off. She had come to surprise her after all.
‘I’ve saved a spot for you. Come up here. Can you let my daughter through, please? Thank you. Can you move aside, please? Thank you.’
‘Seriously?’ said a young mother. Lou had just pushed past her toddler and made him cry.
‘Sorry,’ Lou said. She ducked under the barrier and rolled her purple glitter suitcase (with the word JUICY written on it) all the way to her mum, ducking back underneath the barrier again and hugging her.
‘Oh darling,’ her mum said, a few times. She was dressed in her usual colourful comfort: soft pinks, flowing scarves, layers of lovely. She had a package and a beaming smile. ‘Your dad and I are neck and neck,’ she said, pointing to the queue adjacent.
‘Hey Lou!’ her father waved. He was directly opposite, in the other huge queue for Glasgow. ‘Don’t get too comfy,’ he yelled (so loudly). ‘I’m still betting on my queue. See that couple third from the front? They only have cabin bags, see.’
‘Shh.’ Her mother seemed to be on the lookout for the police or worse. The bubble-wrapped package in her hand was getting more suspicious by the minute.
‘Those three,’ her father said, ‘see, with the thingy.’ He pointed to his head.
‘Shh,’ Lou’s mum said.
Her dad turned it down about half a notch. ‘They only have five bags. UK passports, far as I can see.’
Oh god, he had to be shut up. Lou gave her dad the thumbs-up and spoke to her mum in a whisper. ‘You drove all the way down?’
‘Only from Hall’s Gap. We’ve been camping.’ Her mum was getting tearful, hugging a lot. ‘I’ve missed you so much. I’m so happy to see you. I’m excited for you. Really proud.’
‘I bet Dad’s relieved I’ve got a proper job?’ Lou said.
‘Yes, we’re both proud of you for that, and for being brave, aiming for better. He was not a good deal, that Alan Bainbridge. You can do better than that.’
Lou was getting tearful too, when her father yelled from his stagnant queue: ‘The jam!’
‘Oh yeah, I made you some apricot jam.’ Lou’s mum held out the large bubble-wrapped package she’d been clutching all this time. ‘Have you got room?’
‘Um.’ No, Lou did not have room. ‘Ah, let me see.’ She knelt down and unzipped her suitcase, almost hitting a passenger’s foot as it flipped open. Everyone around her shuffled to make space. The unzipped suitcase was making everything seem out of control. Lou pretended to look for space for the world’s largest jar of apricot jam. ‘I could swap it for the leather jacket?’ Lou could not believe she’d said this. The jacket was Versace and went with everything.
‘No, I’ll just send this on in the post,’ her mum said.
Lou was about to zip her case again.
‘Or the jacket,’ said her mum. ‘It weighs less.’
It’d probably only take a week for a package to arrive. Lou could wait a week for the jacket.
Or for the jam.
‘Girls!’ It was her dad. ‘Check it out,’ he said. ‘Told ya – check it out.’ His queue was moving. He was already two places ahead. He moved forward another foot. ‘Girls! Get here, come, come …’
Lou zipped her case as fast as she could. She and her mum ducked under the barrier and moved over to his queue, which kept moving all the way to the desk.
After scanning her boarding pass, Lou turned to wave goodbye. Her father had put his arm around her mother.
Her mother was now clutching the Versace leather jacket.
CHAPTER THREE
There was a party in the bulkheads. Naomi was heading to Dubai to make lots of money. Tahida and her mates were off to Greece. Gregor was going to Glasgow for his dad’s funeral. He was assertive about ordering drinks, Gregor:
‘You have to beg,’ he said. ‘Not like in the good old days of the Aeroflot milk run. Made some good mates on those flights: chain-smoked in the aisles, stuffed our faces, booze just kept on coming.’
The steward, face like fizz, handed Gregor another two G & Ts.
‘We’ll be needing another in twenty minutes,’ he said, then cheered the late, great John Stewart McAveney. ‘God rest his soul of gold. To my dad, a steadfast, loving father; a kind, generous husband; and a fucking great drinker.’
(Too great. It was his liver.)
Lou was on fire for the last few hours of the flight. Everything she said was clever and hilarious, like that story she told about that – what was it again? – Naomi peed and it went through to the seat. She had to borrow Lou’s spare undies. Thanks to many tips from her father, she always packed an appropriate and perfect day bag.
‘Lou O’Dowd,’ Naomi had said, holding her stomach with one hand, Lou’s labelled Cat Woman pants with the other. They were her favourites since going thong tee-total. ‘Who the fuck’s gonna steal these?’ she asked, still laughing.
‘You,’ Lou said, helping Naomi (plus wet patch) into the toilet.
Half an hour after landing in Dubai, she hugged her friends goodbye. They would connect online, keep in touch, never forget, they were the bulkhead crew, etcetera.
She needed sunglasses in Dubai’s glaring gold transit terminal. Lou took them off to wash her face and brush her teeth in the ladies, then hovered around the comfy loungers until one became free. She needed painkillers. She needed food. She would drink nothing and eat everything on the next leg.
Gregor, greyer and fatter and less fabulous than she remembered, was in the seat behind her when she boarded the Glasgow flight. ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.
‘Am I?’ She hadn’t noticed. How embarrassing.
‘Only way to deal with this is to keep going,’ he said, demanding a pre-take-off round.
Lou took one sip, closed her eyes, and didn’t wake till they landed in Glasgow. She’d missed all the meals; had never felt so ill.
At baggage reclaim, she told Gregor she’d love to visit him in ‘the real Scotland’, and maybe one day she would. He had a cabin on Loch Lomond, beautiful and secluded, perfect place to bury a body. Phew, that was her suitcase. She hugged her Glaswegian friend goodbye, made the usual promises, and headed out into the crisp, scentless Scottish air.
Someone was pricking her with a pin, she was shrivelling – she woke, it was the sound of the bus door opening. Lou had arrived in the most beautiful city in the world, although so far all she could see were buses … and Becks, at the exit, struggling to hold an enormous banner with THE MAD KANGAROO painted on it in thick purple.
Lou had spotted her little cousin’s Edinburgh Festival posts on TikTok. They’d not spoken for two years, so as an olive branch (that might yield gold), Lou liked a few pictures, then messaged:Hey Becks, loving your life! It’s over with Alan btw. I’m coming to the UK … would love to see your play, it looks amazing. Send the link? x
There she was in the bus terminal: Uncle Fred’s baby girl, little Becks. Little Becks who could read at three and play the piano (badly and often) at seven and perform sonnets before important audiences at twelve and write boring, self-important shit at fourteen and keep doing it. She was looking so like her dad.
Uncle Fred and Lou’s dad were mischievous when they were little – ran away from home on a makeshift raft one time, wandered off and got lost in the bush on a camping trip. There were a lot of stories, which were repeated by either one or the other of the brothers at each meeting. Lou was surprised she’d forgotten all but two of these tales. The brothers drifted apart when they became men – Fred increasingly suburban, corporate and jovial; her father stiff from army rules, which suited his temperament and which he applied to family life. Despite their growing differences, Lou and Becks continued to be thrown together for Christmas, Easter, special birthdays, weddings and, of course, the annual O’Dowd family picnic.
Becks was irritating as a child, but she became infuriating as a teenager. She started calling Lou ‘The Mad Kangaroo’, for example. Lou didn’t know why and wished she would stop. At family gatherings, like at the last picnic in Nagambie, she always sat too close to Lou, talked for hours about literature and art, or whatever pretentiousness she’d learned about recently. Her face was only ever an inch away. If Lou moved back, she moved too. She ate what Lou ate, wore what she wore (or tried). She followed her around and asked question after question. (‘Would a denim jacket like that suit me do you think? Can I try it on?’) Even with hormones raging, she was full of excitement and optimism; brimming with the kind of fun ideas that bored and exhausted Lou – Race you round the lake? Want to row out to the middle and dive off? Let’s meet up when you’re in Melbourne and go shopping – girls’ day! Next picnic let’s both bring our own baking. I’m having a party! Wanna go see Les Mis?
Apart from her leech of a little cousin, Lou loved the annual family picnic in Nagambie. She had so many cool older cousins, all with a happier O’Dowd for a dad. They were kind to each other and intriguing. Some were from the eastern suburbs and went clubbing in the city, some were country bogans who could water-ski and fish (like Lou), some were doctors who knew about wine, and some were twins (well, two were). Lou wished she saw them for more than five hours a year and that she was allowed to do the things they did and eat the food they ate. The aunts always brought baskets filled with fairy cakes with real cream, fairy bread with real butter, pavlova with crushed-up peppermint crisp on top, homemade toffee – some chewy, some hard, some light, some dark – chocolate ripple cake, zucchini bread with walnuts. No-one bothered with savouries, except for Aunty Shirl, who brought the home-made sausage rolls. Lou always ate as much as she could stomach, careful her dad didn’t see because almost everyone on his side of the family died of heart attacks in their sixties.
Lou’s relationship with Becks was limited to family gatherings until they both moved to the same area as young adults. Lou, twenty-one, was in her glamorous love nest in Port Melbourne. Becks, nineteen, was in a shared flat in the neighbouring South Melbourne. They started going for morning beach swims together – once a week at first, then Becks suggested twice, then Becks suggested three times. They started having lunch occasionally. They began texting, chatting each day, telling each other secrets. It was the kind of buzzy chemistry Lou was used to with a bright new friendship: there was nothing more wonderful than connecting with someone whose stories you didn’t know yet, who’s never heard yours.
She’d never thought of Becks as a potential friend. She didn’t think cousins qualified, especially grating little ones. They’d never pricked fingers and merged blood, or buried a precious box of memories to dig up at the age of fifty. But before she knew it, Becks was her new best friend.
She lied about Alan at first; told Becks he was her boyfriend and that they lived together. She must have known Becks would disapprove and was having too much fun to spoil the mood. The cousins got drunk at bars, had movie-and-munchie nights at Becks’s flat, spent afternoons baking family recipes, evenings stuffing their faces with cakes and biccies. They went for swims, walks. They stayed up all night talking about their families and what they wanted to achieve. Becks wanted her play to do well, and also an Oscar, plus world peace. Lou wanted to go to Costa Rica and live in a cabin with a pool in the jungle and spear fish in the ocean for her breakfast. Costa Rica Lou was going to smile all the time, even in her sleep.
One day, sick of hanging at Becks’s grotty bohemian flat, Lou decided to fess up. They’d be much more comfortable at her clean, gorgeous apartment. She gathered the courage after a swim. ‘Alan doesn’t live with me. He’s married.’
Becks looked shocked; disappointed in her hero cousin. ‘As long as you’re happy. Are you happy?’
‘Absolutely.’ Lou was sick of people asking her that.
Becks came over to the penthouse for brunch the following morning with a bundle of prospectuses and the contact details for Jane at the Night Theatre. ‘She’s looking for someone at the box office,’ Becks said.
‘I’m not looking for work,’ Lou said, trying to remain calm with this self-righteous, entitled, pain-in-the-arse kid. She’d had the argument so many times, mostly with herself. She could work at the café and get two other similar jobs. If she worked ninety hours a week, she could live like all the respectable people – there were so many of them – with their rental agreements and their car loans and bills and kids and horrible holidays. She could go back to school and try to get into nursing, like Jane from swimming, who paid off a credit card recently by selling her soiled undies online (picture of her dressed in her nurse’s uniform – date stamped, undies partly visible – included in the price). Or she could study, study, study, enough to be a teacher, like the couple she lived with in Brisbane. After the studying, she could work one hundred hours plus a week, and be constantly on the brink of divorce, murder and/or suicide.
‘You don’t want a career?’ said Becks.
Like her dad’s? A trained, dedicated soldier hanging around, waiting for a fight; like a doctor waiting for a patient. For decades. No wonder he was angry.
Or she could get a career in finance, like Sharon Henderson had, which came as a big surprise to everyone in the Puckapunyal and Seymour area. (Sharon had kept all non-breast-related talent very well hidden.) Good on Sharon for getting a career, making a fortune, losing it, and killing herself. (Poor Sharon.)
Lou didn’t know anyone with a ‘career’ who was happy, but she didn’t want to say that. Instead, she made something up. ‘I was thinking of being a personal trainer.’
Over the next few days, Becks checked in regularly – Have you ended it yet? Did you send in that application? What about this course? Have you done it, have you done it?
