And through everything that nature threw at us, Eve remained inviolate: stern, serene, untouched by the elements. Beautiful.
So like my mother that the sight of her was like the feeling of a fishbone caught in the soft tissues of my throat.
‘This will do!’ Carter shouted and his voice bounced off the undercarriage of the giant stone arch, black in the rain. The T-shirt was still wrapped around one fist, wet through now. He looked half-drowned, the curls against his temples lying flat and stringy against his pale skin, thin black streamers washing down from his eyes into his dark stubble.
As we’d backtracked through the downpour, Eve had dissipated before me without warning. So it was just Carter and me now, marooned inside a vast waterfall. Beyond the arch of the bridge, the air sizzled with rain, a wall of grey either side of us that seemed almost solid.
‘At least it’s drier under here,’ Carter said, his words coming back at us in sibilant, echoing waves. ‘Good a place as any.’
I knew that he’d brought us here to say goodbye. And it no longer surprised me that I was here, with him—some guy I barely knew. None of this seemed remotely strange any more. I realised that Eve was as voiceless and helpless as I used to feel, a ghost on the sidelines just wanting someone to notice she was there. When she’d been alive, we would never have had the slightest thing in common. But dead, she and I shared the condition of being cut off from the ordinary flow of life, and I knew I didn’t want to accept that any more. She’d shown me that.
She is You, Eve had told Claudia P. But the words could have been meant for me.
Her gift to me was Jordan, and I meant to grab the lifeline he represented with every ounce of my strength. If the guy ever showed up.
I shivered as Carter bent and hefted up a chunk of fallen rock, wrapping the T-shirt tightly around it before hurling it into the water. He was half laughing, half crying, as the missile flew in an arc through the air, splashing into the water partway to the huge TV someone had drowned at the edge of the arch.
‘You didn’t even get my size right, darling,’ he was sobbing. ‘Typical! RIP, Monny, RIP.’
As he hugged himself, he scanned the apex of the overpass above us. ‘You can go now, you can go, princess, it’s all good,’ he whispered.
I couldn’t help a tear running down my cheek, wondering if this was all it took to set her free. In the end, her unfinished business had been so simple: to find the one person who’d given her shelter when she needed it most to say thank you.
My mobile rang. The sound of it, cleanly echoing, made Carter and me jump. I drew the thing out of my pocket and the screen flashed up the name: Jordan Haig.
Holding up my hand to Carter in apology, I exclaimed, ‘Thank God, J. where have you been?’
The static of a bad line greeted me. ‘Hello?’ I shouted. ‘Hello? We’re at the bridge, the big stone one, on the Merri Creek trail. Jordan? Jordan?’
Still hearing nothing but hissing, I dropped the phone as the world exploded into colours all around me.
I knew I wasn’t dead because my ears were ringing, and through it I could also discern screaming. It couldn’t be coming from me, because I couldn’t get any air into my body. Someone had, at some point, punched me in the head, and now they had me in an excruciating headlock. My face and neck were then forced so hard into the ground that pain exploded in my nose, behind my eyeballs. I could feel gravel and broken glass against my cheek, grass in my mouth, earth.
‘See this coming, Nostradamus?’ someone laughed, and the pressure eased just enough to let me take a single gagging breath before rough hands rolled me over again.
I whooped, soil coating my tongue, as I heard sounds of struggle somewhere to my left. Carter’s cries abruptly stopped.
‘Got the queer?’
Somebody else grunted. ‘Yep.’
The rain beat down as I tried hard to focus my eyes, make sense of what I was looking at. Crouched over me was a rain-drenched stranger with a dark ponytail, huge shoulders and a paunch wearing a tooled leather vest, jeans and weathered Cuban-heeled boots. They were riding boots, I sluggishly realised. Dad had had some, said they were the only thing would give a proper grip, rain or shine.
No guy wore Cuban heels these days, unless they didn’t give two shits what people thought of them, and had the muscle to back it up. Men like my Dad who’d owned a pair until he died. Died with them on.
I furrowed my grazed brow, trying to think, setting off fresh waves of pain in my face.
Reavers. These men were Reavers.
‘O’Loughlin?’ I croaked, trying to reconcile the tall, scowling, overweight figure with the grainy photo I’d seen on the internet of the man still on the run. Could be. Give or take twenty kilograms and a dye job.
‘O’Loughlin’s not far,’ someone laughed. The speaker was standing somewhere over the paunchy guy’s shoulder, far enough back I couldn’t see him. ‘Coppers think he’s reached Queensland by now,’ the voice added. ‘But we know better.’
There was a round of laughter as Ponytail forced my head around, hard. I found myself looking, through watering eyes, at the creek flowing by, around and past the big, black TV buried in the swell, my neck at an impossible angle. Any moment now, I was going to break.
‘Still good for something, those TVs,’ the speaker said conversationally. ‘All the locals dump their unwanted shit here, so we followed suit.’
Horror engulfed me. ‘What did you do to Eve?’ I gagged, already knowing the answer.
‘Who?’ said Ponytail sharply, looking over his shoulder and shrugging in the direction of his unseen companions.
‘Monica, I mean,’ I coughed. ‘Monica Cybo.’
‘Now this is the problem in a nutshell,’ snarled the man I couldn’t see. ‘Everybody here knows far too much for my liking.’
I knew I was going to die. Some part of me prayed I’d be back at school on Monday morning like none of this had ever happened; back learning the rules from the ground up—the nice girl who was good for a laugh, the chick who could take a joke, who was always a good sport but nobody’s bestie—back to watching Jordan Haig from a distance and wondering what he was thinking, whether he ever even thought about me for a nanosecond. But I’m a realist, and even as my eyes continued to probe for a way out, I knew it was out of my hands and only blind luck would save me now.
As if to crush even that thought, the man I couldn’t see said calmly, ‘I did unto Mon what I did to Curtis Fallon, Bony Lincoln and a list of others too long to mention—killed them the same way I had someone take out your fucking woman-stealing prick of a father. Patience has its own rewards. Always get what you want, in the end.’
I began to tremble uncontrollably as the implacable voice added, ‘The irony is you coulda been my kid if your slut of a mum hadn’t run off with my right-hand man.’
I knew who he was. What had Mum said? No man ever left the Reavers, the brotherhood you took to your grave. Eve and the other woman, Nadja, were just replacements, look-alikes, warm bodies, for the one that got away from him years ago.
I began to moan—long and low like a dying animal—and the three men standing around me laughed and let me go on making that
awful noise because it was the last sound I was ever going to make.
Until the temperature abruptly dropped, and all the noise in me was cut off.
Suddenly, the air was like broken glass, stabbing into my throat, my lungs. It hurt to breathe. The air on my skin, it all hurt.
Everyone felt it. I knew it by the way Ponytail shivered and whined, distracted, ‘Boss, do we do it here? It’s cold.’
The rain was almost deafening, but it wasn’t the rain making the big man uneasy, it was the sudden and pervasive smell of violets. Like someone had just dropped and busted a big bottle of perfume, the smell rising all around us, staining everything.
My wildcard. My beautiful, vengeful siren.
Ponytail shook me. ‘What’s the idea?’ he snarled. I shook my head, pointing weakly over his shoulder and heard collective gasping.
It was like the first time I ever saw her.
Eve was silent and resolute, her entire body limned in a soft silver beneath the shadowy arch, looking as real as you or me. But this time, her focus was elsewhere. Her eyes were fixed on that big, black TV sticking up out of the water at a crazy angle, a good three-quarters submerged.
Ponytail scrambled away so quickly he fell over me with a crunch and kept right on scrambling.
‘Boss?’ the other man standing over Carter quavered. I could hear the creak and scuff of leather as he edged away, towards the curtain of rain on the far side of the bridge.
The man the others called Boss moved forward, and I saw that it was the smoker from the park. O’Loughlin looked nothing like his photo.
As O’Loughlin stared at Eve’s advancing figure his eyes were almost bugging out of his pale, strained face, but his voice was all controlled venom. ‘Once a bitch, always a bitch,’ he breathed. ‘I’ll put you down again if I have to, you dog…’
I didn’t catch what happened next because this was blind luck happening right here, and if I could get across the water to the path on the other side of the creek, there would be houses, people who could help me.
I rolled onto my stomach and slithered down the embankment towards the creek bed as O’Loughlin screamed at his men, ‘Get her!’
17
But Eve was repaying me in kind for all the things she’d made me do; all the loose ends I’d tied up on her behalf. I’d been faithful, I’d shown compassion, and now she brought the raw wind with her, the storm.
O’Loughlin, I thought I heard her shriek, the wind her voice. O’Lough-liiiiiiin.
Spooked, I tumbled headlong down the rocky embankment. All I could hear was the sound of men screaming, and the rain.
I plunged into the icy water, gasping as it quickly rose above my knees. Half-blind in the darkness beneath the arch, I moved in the direction of the abandoned TV parting the current, intending to skirt around it. The walking track on the opposite bank terminated just beyond the TV. If I followed the path back, and cut through the scrub on that side, it wouldn’t be long before I hit houses.
Behind me, I heard the thrash and roar of an angry man entering the water and I scrambled out of the shadow of the bridge into the grey open air. The rain struck me like bullets and my hair was soon plastered to my skull, run-off streaming straight into my eyes. I was so stiff, so cold, that only fear kept me going.
The water now rose up beyond my hips, then my waist, as I passed to the left of the TV, giving it a wide berth. Suddenly, pain struck through my right shoulder blade and I lost my footing and went down, flailing, drinking water.
I felt a big hand grip me by the back of the neck. I was dragged face-first through the swell. The fist yanked me upwards like baggage.
As I coughed and gagged for air, O’Loughlin snarled into the side of my face, ‘What Monica failed to understand, is that your kind are made to be thrown away. You, Mon, Joss, Angel—only exist because we permit it.’
He pushed me under again, dragging me beneath the surface of the murky water until my face was inches away from the slime lying along the bottom of the creek.
I caught a glimpse of a bright-blue tarp buried in the silt, flattened beneath the edge of the abandoned TV.
O’Loughlin held me down, thrashing and foaming, beginning to see rainbows, at the very limits of my endurance.
Suddenly, he pushed me face-first into the mud, like it was a taster of things to come, and I expelled what little air I had left in my lungs. The creek bed yielded, the mud clinging to every contour of my face, and my frantic movements only exposed more of the cylindrical, tarpaulin-wrapped thing jammed into the filth. I cried out, as I realised what it was, dirt and rot and water streaming into my mouth, drinking it in.
It was what remained. What Eve had really wanted Jordan and me to find.
O’Loughlin abruptly let go, and I clawed my way to the surface, spitting and hacking, lashing out at him, even though I was blind.
He cuffed me in the face and I fell, the back of my head slamming into the edge of the TV screen. The world threatened to go black. O’Loughlin knotted one of his fists into the thick fabric around my waist to keep me from sliding further into the water, while his other hand disturbed the depths around us, looking for something.
‘Mon’s trouble was that she overestimated her importance,’ he shouted through the beating rain. ‘She demanded I choose, and when I wouldn’t, she started offering herself around.’
I could hear his disbelief.
‘No one leaves me. No one.’ He bent lower in the water, grunting. ‘She brought it all on herself. Just as your Dad did, and Angel.’
O’Loughlin squatted suddenly, yanking something out of the murk, his face red and straining with effort. In his hand was a rusty spade, encrusted with mud from the creek bed.
He hooked the handle of the spade over one of the broken TV antennae and turned me roughly so my face was pressed into the top of the set. He pulled my head back by the hair, wedging my body tight against the screen with the weight of his own body. I felt his hips grind into me from behind and felt a visceral fear.
‘Like that, do you? Your mum did.’
His laughter was hateful and I caught the silver glisten of a knife blade from the corner of one straining eye, my throat curved back, taut and exposed. The spade, hooked alongside me, stank.
‘The rain will wash it all away,’ he said kindly. ‘And you’ll be mud. Just like all of them.’
There was a roaring darkness inside my head as I waited for the final blow, too weak to do more than hang there in his grip, drawing one rasping breath after another.
I was on the verge of closing my eyes, when there was a shiver in the air. Before me, the grey twilight, the rain, seemed to tease apart.
Just the faintest gap in reality, unfurling so quickly—along the vertical, then the horizontal—that a field of waving grass flashed into existence, rising in the distance into gentle, undulating hills. Wildflowers blanketed the green-gold grass to the horizon, and the sky was violet, rainless, filled with scudding white clouds.
A vision, maybe. My last.
‘So beautiful,’ I murmured aloud, greedy for that place, that peace, and O’Loughlin shook me. ‘Whaddaya on about?’ he grunted.
I struggled fitfully, wanting O’Loughlin’s attention fixed solely on me. It was no place for someone like him. I didn’t want him to see it. He didn’t deserve that.
I kicked out, suddenly, and he was caught by surprise. I slid down lower, into the water. O’Loughlin was forced to bend and haul me up, grunting. It would even be okay—this stupid, unpoetic ending, I told myself—if I could just wake there, walk beneath that violet sky.
The breach was so close now. Just a surge through the water, and I’d be there. I’d be through.
It might as well have been miles. O’Loughlin re-positioned me belly-down against the TV, digging the knife tip into the left side of my throat as he hissed into my ear, ‘Say hello to Joss and Angel for me.’
Two skies, one inside the other. Maybe they’d be waiting, Joss and Angel, just over the rise.
Take me there, I begged silently.
As if my words had called them to me, over a distant hill inside that impossible hallucination, two figures came running. Tiny as insects.
I frowned, trying to make them out, as O’Loughlin pulled my head back by the hair.
At the sight of me, the two runners seemed to pick up speed, the one in the lead raising his hand and giving a ringing, warning shout that echoed down the mystical valley before me, causing even O’Loughlin to raise his head and look.
Straight into the gap.
Mouth gaping, he rasped, ‘What—’ His hold on me slackened in surprise.
The fracture was now wide enough, real enough, to step through. Grasping one of the TV’s antennae for support, I began inching away from O’Loughlin around the side of the drowned machine.
My lips were moving with effort, though no sound came. I knew for a fact that if I could make it to the gap, O’Loughlin would never be able to touch me again.