Sydney Noir Read online

  It isn’t until the news that night that he hears what the sirens were all about. They found a newborn buried in the South Maroubra dunes, just fifty meters from the South Maroubra surf club, scrub on both sides. A little corpse in a shallow grave. It’s awful, it is. Some nippers found it during races on the beach. They’d not made the final round and were digging while they waited for the faster kids to finish running. Little fellas, not older than six or seven. Their parents thought it must be something else—a big fish, maybe, an old doll—but the kids were sure of it. Then it was police up and down the beach, the south end taped off, autopsy kits beneath a police tent underneath the beating sun. There’s a press conference with the police superintendent, who tells a pack of journos that homicide detectives are helping local police with their investigations.

  Marnie is in her room and he knocks on the door, “C’mere, love, have a look at this,” but he just hears some muffled words and then a sharp—“I’m on the phone!”

  She’s been off sick all week, gastro, running back and forth to the loo. The only time she’s been out was to go to the chemist and Alf didn’t realize she was gone until she came home, wearing a big puffer jacket in spite of the heat, a white paper bag clutched under her arm. He got upset, saying she ought to have let him go for her, but she just said, “It’s embarrassing, Dad,” and slammed the door to her room. She hasn’t been eating, so he’s scavenged around: biscuits and cheese, frozen pizza. They’re interviewing the nippers’ parents now on the telly. Parents who during normal Sunday mornings have no greater dilemma than what coffee to order and whether or not they’ll jump in the surf themselves.

  “Who could do this?” the mum on telly says, her eyes hidden behind those big round sunglasses all the young women now wear. “What kind of woman would do this to her baby?”

  Her voice breaks in the way that reporters love, and they flick back to the studio, where the regular anchor is sitting at the desk with his most serious expression, shaking his head. “And now over to Dan for the weather.”

  “Awful,” Alf mutters, “just down the road.” He gets up to grab a beer from the fridge. The fruit and veg he bought at the beginning of the week are wilting in the crisper. There is a dark shape in the doorway at the edge of his vision, gone before he can turn toward it.

  “Marnie?” he calls. Now the soft click of her shutting the door to her room. It’s no good. She didn’t used to hide in her room all the time. Even if she is sick, she must need something. He knocks at the door.

  “Can I get you a lemonade?”

  “I’m fine, Dad. Go away.”

  He knocks again.

  The door opens a crack, her face swollen and red with fury. The rest of her, though—there’s not as much of it.

  “What?”

  “I’ll take you to the doctor, love. Look at you—you’ve lost weight.”

  “No, Dad!”

  He’s surprised how she reacts. Marnie loved the doctor as a girl. When Em got sick she went along to every appointment, stroking the glossy magazine covers in the waiting rooms, keeping copies of the scripts and receipts in a neat folder. Sometimes she went in his place, missing school to accompany her mum. Em seemed to sense how Alf hated the hospital. He felt like the walls were closing in on him, bright white above hard clicky floors. Like the words the doctors used were sharp little barbs placed to puncture his veneer as a husband, as a father. To peel it back, exposing the failure he really was beneath.

  “I’m feeling better.”

  “At least let me in.”

  She looks behind her, then steps aside, gripping her phone in her hand. There are piles of clothes everywhere, small mountains of fabric piled against the blue walls. There’s a poster of an airbrushed boy band above a corkboard of photos, mostly of her and Em. Crumpled tissues like small squashed flowers. The room smells sour, like unwashed flesh.

  “At least open a window. C’mon, love.”

  She does. She has lost weight; he can’t help but be relieved to see it. But she looks pale. He sits at the edge of her bed.

  “What can I do, Marnie?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m yer dad. What can I fix for you?”

  “I’m fine,” she says, but she clearly isn’t, because her chin quivers. Tears have already started streaming down her face, and she wipes at them with a dirty fist. “I’m fine.”

  And then she tells him.

  Everywhere they keep asking for the mum to turn herself in. “We’re here to help. You need our help.” But it’s too late for their help now.

  The help would have been good before, she says, when it started. When she bled through her sports uniform at age twelve, and the whole class laughed, and the gym teacher just told her she should look after herself better. Who was there to show her how? When the boys said she was too fat to fuck, and she proved them wrong the only way she knew.

  Brayden didn’t talk to her at school, but he texted. He liked green jelly frogs, he was always eating them at the bus stop. When they snuck into the rifle range after dark, he held back the wire-cut fence so it didn’t scrape her bare legs. When they spread out her jumper to lie on, he said the rustling sounds were rabbits. Not snakes.

  The birth is still a blur. The pain that started mild kept on building through the night until it was so bad she was sure she’d die, she’d be torn in two. Then it finally came, the gory mess of it, like someone bled to death in her sheets. The second lot of cramps and the sloppy hunk of meat which came at the end of the cord. The fucking bread knife, would you believe, to cut the blue of the cord, stumbling to the kitchen all torn and bloody holding the hot little slippery thing in her arms. The crying that wouldn’t quit. She had to fix it. No one could know. Wrapped it tight, stopped the noise, covered it until it stopped. No one could see. She’d take it away. Cover it up. Hide it somewhere. No one would know. The beach just there. Afterward she found herself stuffing her bedsheets into a bin liner. Was it even her? Shoving the bag into the red-lidded rubbish bin. She put fresh linen on the bed, scrubbed the lino where she’d dripped on the kitchen floor.

  Did she feel anything?

  Dizzy. Sand in her nails, all week finding grains of it in her hair. Cramps which left blood in her underpants, so much blood. She was scared to buy the maternity pads so she bought regular and wore them two at a time. Tits hard and hot and sore.

  Alf says, “I wish you’d told me.”

  “Will the police come get me?”

  “If they do, we’ll deal with it. I’ll be right here.” He puts his hand awkwardly on her shoulder, which is still shaking. She half leans into him. She will live with this—the knowledge of it—always.

  * * *

  That night he dreams of his wife, her body washed up on the sand. Marnie clawing the bloated corpse. He wakes up, shorts wet from sweat. He thinks about the call he would need to make. The words he would have to say. He holds his hands over his face and weeps like he didn’t when Em died.

  * * *

  Alf sees on the news that a local woman, a mother of three, has unofficially adopted the dead baby, named her Lily Grace and given her a burial in a local cemetery. The real mother has failed to come forward, despite repeated requests and investigations. There have been many leads but all have come up empty. This other woman organized a memorial service where they released butterflies from a cage, carried pink balloons, and suspended the tiny white coffin into the grave on pink satin ribbons. Inside the coffin, the reporter says, the infant’s body is flanked by a teddy bear, dressed in a gown made from a gently used wedding dress. This other woman is interviewed, wearing black, saying, “I wanted to do something for the girl.” For a minute Alf wonders which girl she means. He turns the telly off. It’s time he stopped watching the news.

  There are nights where the surf is louder than others, crashing so close it sounds like it’s hitting the building they live in, as if it might pound down their door, pool beneath their beds, carry them away.

  Ther
e are nights when cats yowl in the streets, fighting, mating, their cries like those of human babies.

  Those are the nights he wakes in terror. Opens the door to her room. Marnie sleeps—almost peacefully—in the glow of the streetlamp. He pulls the curtain shut.

  There is no baby. Never was.

  IN THE COURT OF THE LION KING

  by Mark Dapin

  La Perouse

  I was two-out in a one-man cell in the hospital wing at Long Bay, sharing a shitter with Roman Vasari, the only other innocent bloke in the place. It was a greasy Monday in December and I was awaiting trial for the murder of my best mate Jamie—who, as far as I knew, wasn’t even dead. An angry screw escorted me to the door of the cell where the Lion King lay in his underpants, too fat to stand. The Lion King pretended he hadn’t seen me and he pulled at his cock, then he looked up and asked, “Do you know who I am?”

  “You’re the Lion King of La Perouse,” I said.

  His cellie handed him a chicken leg. The Lion King accepted it with his cock hand.

  “Where are you from, eh?” he asked me.

  “I grew up in WA,” I said.

  He nodded, as if he had known. Or as if he had known I’d say that. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I sent for you,” he said to me, “because I heard there was a white man called Chevy in a cell with Vasari. You’re as white as fucking pavlova, but your cell plate says, Chevapravatdumrong. How does a pavlova get a name like that?”

  “My dad’s Laotian,” I told him.

  He laughed, as if I’d said he was a Martian. “And what the fuck is a Laotian?”

  “Laos is a country next to Vietnam,” I said.

  “I know where Laos is, you stupid cunt.” The Lion King picked shreds of chicken from between his teeth. He scratched around in his pants. “So you’re not white?” he said, eventually.

  I shook my head.

  “And you’re not yellow?”

  I dropped my eyes.

  “And Blind Freddy can see you’re not fucking black,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Do you know what that makes you?”

  I shrugged.

  “Dead,” he said.

  * * *

  Jessica Solomon wore a snug skirt and a weightless blouse. We sat across an empty table, players without a game. She told me it wasn’t looking good for me but everything was going to be alright. I was in no mood to embrace the contradiction.

  She asked about the Vientiane project. I said it had been going well until I had found myself in my present difficulties. I actually used those words—“present difficulties.”

  I should have been in Laos that morning, drinking strong, syrupy coffee, inspecting the site. “Zero environmental impact,” I told my lawyer, as if that might impress her.

  The government had approved the plans, and I had a business-class ticket to Vientiane via Ho Chi Minh City, but my reservation was on hold until the police realized I hadn’t killed my best friend. I had been refused bail since the cops knew about Vientiane and suspected I might have a second passport. They were holding me because they were certain that Jamie was dead, though they couldn’t locate the body.

  “They think it was gay panic,” she said.

  I laughed. Jamie was the best man I knew. I would have been proud to believe he wanted me.

  “The Lion King wants two hundred bucks a week,” I said. “It has to be paid to an electrician in Tempe—he said you’d know him.”

  Jesse nodded. “I can do that for you,” she said. “But don’t trust the Lion King. He’ll only protect you from himself, and he’ll probably have you bashed anyway.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “Control.”

  I knew I was never going to last in jail.

  * * *

  I watched Vasari draw a comic strip in his spiral-bound sketchbook. He said he was making a graphic novel about prison life. He pronounced the p in graphic, as if he had read the word but never heard it spoken.

  He showed me the opening pages of his story: a young Vasari, with a flick of black hair and a square jaw, was loaded up with home bake by cops who couldn’t get him on a breaking-

  and-entering blue.

  He asked to see one of my drawings. I told him to look out from the hill around Area One to Military Road, where Port Botany Towers rose from the docks like twin Ts joined at the ascenders. The bridge between the towers was a terraced garden. We won every award in the industry for Port Botany Towers.

  “The Lion King doesn’t like that building,” said Vasari.

  He rubbed the ledge of his nose.

  “Everyone’s a classicist,” I said, “when it comes to architecture.”

  Vasari farted like a foghorn, to show what he thought of the Western aesthetic tradition.

  * * *

  As a remand prisoner I didn’t have to work, but I volunteered as a porter in the hospital. The ward was choked with bed blockers stealing nurses’ time from dying men. I sat with the vanishing and held their hands, then carted bags of wet test tubes, jars, and needles to the incinerator, wearing gloves that gave me bear’s paws.

  One of my patients was Vietnamese. He said he’d never met a man with a face like mine and a name like Chevapravatdumrong, but that when he looked closely, he could see parched rice fields in my eyes. He warned me the other Viets were coming for me. They thought I was trying to pass as a skip. They would take those eyes from me. He said I would have to pay two hundred dollars a week to the 5T. I said I needed the money for my defense. He laughed and said, “You’ve got that right.”

  A nurse perfumed with iodine advised me to go into protection.

  “But I’m not a rock spider,” I said. “I’m not even guilty.”

  The men with HIV divided themselves into needle- sharers and cock-sharers. They said their disease was no longer a death sentence; it had been commuted to life. I wheeled their waste to the basement. I practiced deep breathing to try to keep calm, but panic chased the breath out of my lungs. I vomited in my cell, and my fingers shook as I tried to clean myself up.

  * * *

  The Lion King’s cellie sat beside the Lion King’s bunk, rolling White Ox tobacco. When he finished making a cigarette he placed it between the Lion King’s lips and lit it for him. Smoking was banned in jail, but the Lion King had earned unofficial privileges in unofficial ways.

  “I hear you’re an architect,” he said. “What does an architect do? Take it up the arc?”

  I blinked smoke from my eye.

  “A bent fucking bird tells me you designed Port Botany Towers. I hate that cock-sore. What’s it supposed to be, anyway?”

  “It’s a landmark symbol of the regeneration of a dockside suburb,” I told him, reading the brief from memory.

  “It’s my fucking suburb,” said the Lion King. “I grew up five minutes from this fucking jail. And do you know what your building looks like to me?”

  “Most people say it reminds them of a Japanese gate.”

  “I couldn’t give a fat-arsed fuck,” he said. “To me, it’s two Ts, and those two Ts stand for Trent Taylor and the Tasman Tigers.”

  I didn’t know what he expected me to say.

  “Every fucking morning,” he continued, “when I went out on a work party, I used to see your fucking Trent Taylor Tasman Tigers Tower and think to myself, I’d like to get my hands on the cunt that built that, because I’ve got a strong fucking feeling that he put it there just to piss me off. In the end, I stopped going out on work parties, because I couldn’t bear to look at the fucking thing.” He patted his hairy stomach. “That’s when I started putting on weight. No fucking exercise except this—” He pulled vigorously on his cock. “I knocked Trent Taylor. Did you know that?”

  I told him I didn’t.

  “So why do you think I’m in here? Because I like the smell?”

  “You were president of the La Perouse Lions,” I said, “at the Moorebank massacre.”

  “Fucking oath I was,
” said the Lion King. “And I knocked President Trent fucking Taylor, because the dog deserved to die.” He turned to his cellie. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Fucking oath it is,” said his cellie.

  “What’re you in here for?” the Lion King suddenly asked me.

  “Murder.”

  “No, what’re you in here for?”

  “I got arrested,” I said, “and refused bail.”

  The Lion King looked at me, disgusted. “Do you know how many blokes I’ve knocked?”

  I couldn’t tell whether he wanted me to guess low or high.

  “Five,” I said. “Something like that.”

  “Six. Three at Moorebank, outside the pub, and three Tigers who came in here after me, looking to get square for their brothers.”

  Again, I didn’t know how he expected me to react.

  “And now the Tasman Tigers are extinct,” he said, and smiled nicotine-piss, spider-cracked teeth. “What’re you in here for?” he asked me again.

  * * *

  A new Viet arrived on remand. He followed me around for days but seemed reluctant to approach. I guess he was scared, because it was a frightening thing to have to do. When he finally cornered me, he was apologetic, although he needed me to know that this was all my own fault. If I had cooperated, I would have been fine.

  He was searching for the strength to stab me.

  “Why don’t you just tell them you couldn’t find me?” I said.

  “Because you’re a fucking traitor.” His voice was high and glassy.

  “And who have I betrayed?” I asked.

  “Listen to you,” he said. “Talking like a fucking . . . architect.”

  I had never been to another place where it was a joke to be an architect.

  He was bigger than me, but not by much. He wanted me to say something else so that he could get angry.

  “Go back to your cell,” I said.