An Isolated Incident

  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 than 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 . . . okay.’

  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 okay.’

  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.

  Next was Lisa from across the street. Lisa was in her fifties, an accountant who dressed and spoke like a north coast hippie. She had a daughter Bella’s age and a son a few years younger. When she swept through the front door her green, floor-length skirt got caught on the doorjamb and we both ignored the sound of it ripping as though it was a loud, wet fart. Lisa had brought me a loaf-shaped cake on a glass platter. She placed it in the centre of the kitchen table and then wrapped her scrawny, sun-leathered arms around me, pressing my head down into her shoulder.

  ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she told me when I had freed myself. ‘I called my friend Di – she’s just the calmest person you’ll ever meet and she’s got the gift, you know, like second sight – and I asked her and she told me – listen, I know this sounds far out, Chris, I know that, but she said that people who die violently can have trouble finding peace and so you might –’

  ‘Not now.’ Nate must’ve been listening from the bedroom. From the doorway he filled the kitchen. ‘Chris doesn’t need talk like that right now.’

  Lisa stood, her face flushing pink, her hands fluttering up to the beads looped five or more times around her throat. ‘Nate! Oh, it’s such a relief to see you, to know that Chris isn’t on her own over here.’

  ‘You made this?’ He bent to the cake, sniffed it. ‘Orange?’

  ‘With fruit picked from my tree this morning.’ She returned to my side, patted my hand. ‘And just this once I said to hell with the toxins and put a nice full cup of white sugar in there for you. Situation called for it, I thought.’

  ‘You going to have some?’ Nate asked, but she shook her head.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I think I said.

  ‘Of course, and if you need anything . . .’ She shot a look at Nate, who was busy cutting the cake. ‘Or if you want to talk to Di about –’

  ‘Actually, there is something you could help with. Cops want Chris to speak at a press conference tomorrow and –’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Chris, honey, are you sure you’re up to it?’

  ‘They say it’ll help,’ I told her. ‘People more likely to come forward.’

  ‘It’ll help. And they said she can read from a prepared statement and they’ll deal with questions and all that,’ Nate said. ‘So what would be good is if you could help with writing something, ’cause I don’t have a clue, to be honest. It needs to just say stuff about Bel – personal stuff they said – and just ask for people to tell the police anything they know.’

  ‘Oh, of course. Consider it done.’ She rubbed the top of my arm lightly. ‘I’ll put something together and then you can just make any little changes you like tomorrow before the thing. Does that sound okay?’

  ‘Yeah, appreciate it.’

  ‘You’re a legend, Lis.’

  ‘Alright. I’ll get to it.’ She squeezed my arm and left.

  Soon as she was out of sight Nate shoved a piece of cake in his gob. He chewed, swallowed. ‘It’s good,’ he said, but didn’t try to make me have some, which I appreciated.

  There were a couple of other neighbours after that. I don’t remember the details of their visits, just that from each of them, or at least from the combination of them, came thick waves of warmth and worry and curiosity and a pity so heavy I began
to feel that I was the one who’d been brutalised.

  Then in the early afternoon one of Bella’s co-workers, Vicky, came and I snapped out of it. I’d only met Vicky a couple of times: once at the nursing home when I went to see Bella and once when Bella popped around here on the way to some function, and Vicky sat in my living room and chatted to me about her cat while Bella went through my shoe collection searching for a pair to match her new black-satin capri pants.

  On the day after they found Bella’s body, Vicky sat in my kitchen and told me that when she was sixteen, her nineteen-year-old brother had been stabbed to death after intervening in a street fight down in Melbourne. I don’t think she said it as blunt as that. I don’t remember the words she used, just the change in atmosphere. She didn’t say much else I don’t think. Maybe told me about how missed Bella would be at work. It didn’t matter. Nothing about her mattered except for the fact she was another person who knew what it was like to find themselves in the middle of a true crime book. I could’ve sat and looked at her all day and night – this plain, pale-haired thirty-year-old who had survived that, walked out of those pages, gone on long enough to have become ordinary again.

  Around eight, a couple of hours after the last guest had left, I started crying and couldn’t stop. Nate rubbed my back for a while and then he gave me a couple of the pills that’d worked so well the night before and tucked me into bed.

  Next thing I knew I was dying. That’s the only way I can say it: I woke up and I was dying. It was pitch black – blacker than I’ve ever known night to be – and there was something on my chest crushing the life out of me. My arms and legs wouldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. It was like my body was dead already, just waiting for my mind to catch up.

  I don’t know how long it lasted, but I know when it stopped because I could see the green fluoro 4.42 and hear Nate’s gurgling snore and feel that my skin was wet. I rolled over, locking Nate down beneath my arm and leg. I forced my breath into the rhythm of his. I slept and woke and slept like that until daylight.

  Wednesday, 8 April

  ‘Thank fuck for that,’ May muttered, spotting the Strathdee exit sign. Her body and head had ached even before the five hours on the road. Three nights of sobbing instead of sleeping will do that to you. And then the torture of the drive: nothing to see but endless grass, sometimes with cows or horses scattered over it, road trains alternately tailgating and slowing to under forty kilometres per hour, and all of it in her shitty twenty-year-old Hyundai that revved out and shook whenever she went over a hundred.

  Her motel, the cheaper of the two options in Strathdee, was less than a minute’s drive into town. The ‘Air-con, FOXSports, Tea & Coffee, Inspection Welcome’ sign was draped with black crepe paper. May checked in, used the toilet, put the kettle on and then listened for the twentieth time to Craig’s voicemail and almost, almost deleted it this time. ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,’ she said to him and herself and the slow-boiling piece of shit plastic kettle. She started to dial into her message bank again, but the kettle clicked off and saved her. She dumped four of the hotel’s coffee sachets in her travel mug, filled it with water and headed back to the car.

  She drove past a pub whose car park was a quarter full despite it being not yet 11 am, a car rental office, a service station with a single fuel pump. Next to the service station was a preschool and across the road Strathdee Medical Centre. From there both sides of the road were lined with fibro houses with front yards twice the size of May’s Sydney terrace house. As she got closer to the centre of town, every third, then second house was brick, then she clunked over a railway crossing, noted the sign indicating the police station was one left and one right turn away, drove past a takeaway chicken shop and a Salvation Army store and was abruptly in the town centre.

  It was like the centre of every Australian country town she’d ever visited. An immaculate park with drought-defying green grass and seasonally impossible purple and yellow pansies peeking from the edges of the winding cobblestone path leading to a war memorial cenotaph in the centre. Across the road a TAB, a small pub advertising ‘Counter Meals, KENO and Historic Murals’, a Chinese restaurant, a ye olde tea shop attached to the Strathdee Local History Museum, a bakery and a newsagency. There was no one on the footpath except a water-delivery man in tight shorts and sweat-soaked t-shirt backing into an unmarked shopfront and a teenage girl pushing a double stroller past the TAB.

  Although she had a green light, she stopped briefly at the intersection. There were no other vehicles in sight, only the spires of three churches, a Woolworths sign with an arrow pointing left, a sign directing travellers to the Happy Stay Inn (the motel too expensive for May’s tight-arse employer) and, already, the sign pointing the way to the exit onto the road to Melbourne.

  After a few minutes on the highway heading south, a flash of unnaturally bright colours to the left caught her eye. She pulled to the side, checked for traffic behind her and reversed back to the bursts of pink and yellow. Surprising that there was no other media there, given the police press conference wasn’t until one. Possible that no one outside of the region was bothering with anything other than phoners. That’s all she’d be doing if her unprecedented disaster of a love-life hadn’t prompted her to insist on driving down to this fly-shit-speck of a town to report first-hand on the story. The fact her own hastily written, phone-researched piece on the body’s discovery had been the site’s most shared that day made it an easy sell.

  But that meant, of course, that the competition’s stories on the body were probably just as popular and that they, too, had sent their best crime reporters/most-desperate-to-get-out-of-town fuck-ups to get on-the-ground colour. In which case, the lack of media at the body-dump site meant that they’d been and gone and were now back in town talking to – and alienating for all future reporters – the dead woman’s family and friends, in which case, shit.

  May slung her camera over her neck, grabbed her notebook and strode out towards the shrine she’d seen from the road.

  A secluded field, she wrote. No. It was neither a field, nor particularly secluded. Cars zipped by at the rate of ten to twelve a minute. There was no fence, just a gappy line of ghost gums close to the road and then patchy grass and the odd spindly tree for seventy metres or so, before another line of gums battled against being absorbed by fair-dinkum, deep and dark outback bushland. She made a note to ask why the killer hadn’t dragged the body that little bit further and dumped it in there, where it likely would’ve turned to compost undisturbed, rather than leave it out here in this . . . low-key picnic spot for travellers on the road from –

  No, not a picnic spot, though a faded family-size KFC bucket and a Fanta can stomped into the grass suggested it was sometimes used as such. But no flaking wooden table or coin-operated barbecue plate or grimy toilet block. Not even a single blanket-sized patch of ground uncorrupted by weeds or rocky dirt or disconnected tree roots rising up like mummified knees.

  A football-field sized expanse of grass and dirt, not so much hidden from the road as revealed in snatches. Snatches? Christ . . . revealed in strips. That was worse. She was so off her game. Fucking fuck fuck fuck fucking Craig. Fuck.

  May shoved the notebook into her bag and raised her camera. At the spot where, as far as she could work out from police reports, the body had been found she took care to take shots from every possible angle and distance, stopping every minute or so to wipe the sweat off her face and camera lens. The sun was relentless, the air unmoving. The grass – the exact type of which she’d have to look up later (Craig would know what kind, the nerdy fucker) – brushed her ankles and deposited straw-coloured seeds on the uncovered tops of her feet. Her mouth felt gritty with dirt.

  The shrine that had caught her attention from the road had been erected not at the place the body was found, but a few metres away against one of the anorexic, anaemic trees between the road line and the bush. Flowers – five bouquets of t
he type bought from a roadside stall, two flash-looking florist arrangements in ribboned boxes, fourteen scattered single blooms which may recently have been bound by the pink ribbon flipping its way towards the road. A pot plant, wilting. A smiley-face helium balloon on a stick, lodged in a child’s pale green sippy cup. A larger balloon, screaming I MISS YOU!!! tied around the trunk. RIP BELLA on pink card in a foggy plastic sleeve. Five candles, two of them never lit, one of them with BELLA carved crudely into its white wax. Two small teddy bears, a plush bunny, a sequinned butterfly pinned to a ribbon tied to a branch. BELLA MICHAELS 1990–2015 GOODBYE ANGEL etched into the tree, shallow enough that the tree would slough it off before long. YOU WILL BURN IN HELL MURDEROUS FUCKERS WHO DID THIS TO AN ANGEL ON EARTH written on the trunk in what appeared to be liquid paper. Beneath it, in green paint: unless i find you first then youll burn rite here scum. It’d been twelve hours since police had reopened the site to the public.

  She should’ve been here last night, instead of flopping around on her bed sobbing like a heartbroken teenager. Might’ve got pics of some kind of impromptu vigil and interviews with local mourners instead of a snot-streaked pillow and tissue-chafed nose. Fuck.

  The hotel bed – a double but smaller than any she’d slept in since childhood – flashed in her mind. The thought of spending another night weeping, this time in that grim little room with the bar fridge clicking on and off and the air-con thrumming and the cheap pillowcase scratching her already chafed nose caused a flutter of panic in her chest. She could drop into the medical centre she’d noticed on her way through town, get a script for some sleeping pills like the ones her mother had depended on during that terrible year when May’s father left and her grandmother died and the house was sold from under them. May couldn’t remember the name of those pills but she had never forgotten the way her mum went from being there to not, fifteen minutes after taking them. No gentle drifting off, eyes fluttering, pauses between words growing longer and longer. It was a split-second, impossible to see coming. Awake, then gone. It had infuriated May to have her mother check out so purposefully and completely. What if I need to ask you something? What if something goes wrong? she would say whenever she caught her mother slipping the pill down her throat. It can wait. You’ll cope, her mum would say then tuck herself in bed and wait for oblivion.