‘Oh, Jesus! Bridie!’
‘We’ll get there. Careful of the corner. Careful-careful-careful-care—’
I took the corner too fast, skidded on the road in the Hilux, fishtailed so hard I hit my head on the window beside me. I recovered and approached the straight in the road leading to where my daughter’s car had left the asphalt at drag-racing speed. There was a car in the road already, at ninety-degrees to the guardrail. An old Falcon, the airbag deployed. No sign of the driver. I didn’t even park the Hilux. Just got to the scene and leapt out. I heard Dodge yell with surprise, struggling to pull the handbrake up as I rantowards the edge of the road, sprinting down the incline, my stride leaping blocks of sandstone and fallen logs, following the path of broken bushes and trees. I hit the water at full pelt, my pace finally slowing, the brown muck and mud and water embracing me with open arms. There was already a guy in the water, the Falcon driver, I assumed, wading out, wearing a hoodie and cap. I ignored him, shoved past and dove in, heading for the rows of bubbles making a slow march across the gently moving tide.
The water was cold, the colour and opacity of milky tea. I dove down and reached out, scooped mud with my hands, no idea how far down I was. The water got black so quickly. Maybe two metres from the surface. I came back up, guessing the car must be further out, my gasps for air punctuated by a panicked whimpering I was unfamiliar with, the sound of a desperate father, the cries of an animal. I shouted for her. Tried to gauge where the car went in and which way the tide was pulling me. I turned, tried to see the bubbles again. I went down. Pulled myself towards the bottom. Gripped dirt and weeds. Came up. Went down.
I was on my fifth trip back from the bottom of the river, rising through the darkness, when I copped a blow to the face. The distinctly curved, rubbery heel of a shoe. Bridie must have been just ahead of me, on her way to the surface as well, when she kicked down and got me right beside the nose. I pulled upwards, kicked hard, burst to the surface of the water right beside her, at the same time. She came up screaming, grabbing me by the shoulders, her hair plastered over her face and her thin arms swinging around my neck.
‘Dad! Dad!’
‘Oh my god! My baby!’ I raked her hair back, held her face, our legs tangling as we fought to stay above water. ‘Baby! Baby! Baby!’
‘I’m okay!’ She coughed up a mouthful of water, drew a shuddering breath. ‘I’m okay!’
We were crying. For a few precious, horrifying, exhilarating seconds we swam together and held each other, and I cried for how close I’d come to the nightmare of all nightmares. Then Bridie said,‘Just a sec!’ and slipped from my arms and was gone. She didn’t wait for me to say anything. She just went.
I grabbed at the water and turned and twisted around, shuddering gulps of horror coming out of me. Screaming her name. I heard my voice ripple off the steep forest walls. She didn’t answer, and I wondered whether in a terrified dream I’d imagined holding her in my arms at all. The world careened around me. I took a deep breath and prepared to go back down.
She appeared again, a few metres away, blowing out air and gripping a soaked knitted bundle high above her head with one arm as she swam towards me with the other.
‘You went back for the—’ I breathed. The fury took me quickly, my words thickening to a growl. ‘Bridie!Bridie!You went back for thefucking possum!? Are you out of your mind!?’
She didn’t answer. I didn’t realise Dodge was in the water too until he popped up beside me. He saw Bridie and me and started turning back towards the shore. ‘Oh, hell. That was close. Is she okay?’
I didn’t know if Bridie was okay or not. She got to the shore, sat heavily on her butt on the sand and began frantically unpeeling the knitted bundle. She pulled a sopping handful of blackened fur from the bundle and examined it closely, patting back spikes of matted hair from a tiny face. Meanwhile blood was pouring down her face in dark rivulets from a cut in her hairline. She didn’t even seem to notice.
‘She’s okay,’ Bridie reported, holding the little struggling animal to her chest. Heaving a sigh of relief. ‘She’s still breathing.’
I knelt before my child and looked at the gash in her head. There were cuts all over her arms and chest. Safety-glass rash. Her total and utter lack of concern for anything other than the infant possum made me wonder if she was concussed. Dodge hobbled towards me and sat down, handed me a cloth handkerchief, offered from his pocket and soaking wet, and I pressed it against the cut in Bridie’s head. I could see more cars up on the road. Bystanders stopping. The guy in the hoody had disappeared. ‘Birds, what happened?’
‘It was Uncle Evan,’ Bridie said.
EVAN
It was over. Darkness was approaching. I walked the edge of the river, leaving footprints in the sand, mentally envisioning my death. Seeing myself twisting and writhing in the pits of hell.
Burn, burn, burn.
I wasn’t entirely sure if it was pure fantasy, panic, or exhaustion-induced delirium. But some part of me remembered Bridie turning towards me at the last second before impact, her hands on the steering wheel and her eyes wide, and I thought I saw recognition in her face. If Bridie had indeed seen me, recognised my face under the ball cap, it didn’t matter. Any of it. Dad’s DNA. Chloe’s murder. The old cases, those women, the women and girls whose pieces of jewellery I had found at Dad’s house. The CCTV didn’t matter. Chris being at the pub didn’t matter. If Bridie had seen me, then Russell would know I had been the one to harm his child, intentionally or not.
And Russell would kill me.
It was over. But that didn’t mean I was going to go out on my knees. I was going to give it everything I had, if only to spare Russell having to deliver the deadly blow. I’d run. Because I was a coward, and cowards always ran, and there was something wholesome-sounding about being shot in a hotel room somewhere, thousands of miles from here, by some random outback cop while I tried to cross the country and get away from what I’d done. Something romantic.
I had turned away from the river and was pushing through reeds towards the mudflats bordering a wide, grassy field when I saw the reptile lying like a shiny black stick across my path. I looked down and spotted the animal mid-step, too late to adjust my stance. I stepped on the snake, yelped in shock, tried to tip backwards before my whole weight came down on the creature. I slid in the mud, toppled backwards instead and fell on my butt.
The snake made an imprint in the soft earth. A belly, ridged and curved. It darted forward, shocked by being stepped on, trying to escape, found itself blocked by a lump of sandstone, turned back and found itself hedged in by my leg. I tried to scramble backwards. Put my hand down. The snake struck at my wrist. Just one bite, swift, fleeting, hardly leaving a mark. The impact was barely more painful than a pinch.
The snake made a getaway up over my lap and into the long grass, gone without making a sound.
I lay back and gripped my wrist, my head in the mud, the wild blue sky beyond the trees above me starting to twist and shimmer as my raging heartbeat coursed blood through my veins, carrying the venom along, a sweeping river. I looked at the site of the bite. There wasn’t even any blood. Just two holes, slowly darkening lumps, at the wrist joint.
I got up and went on, moving more slowly through the reeds.
RUSSELL
As a cop, you spend a lot of time in emergency rooms. Basically your first two years are spent there, getting statements off assault victims, chasing up the fate of car crash victims, delivering wild, thrashing, often naked junkies there to be strapped down and sedated. It was odd to be sitting beside Bridie’s bed in plain, wet clothes, listening to the stories of the patients around me with no investment in their circumstances, no need to catalogue the facts. The bed to our right contained a woman whose partner had broken her nose during a game of pickleball, whatever that was. The partner was deeply, loudly, apologetic. To the left of us, an older woman was sleeping, having been brought in with chest pains, and her husband was reading a newspaper and eating Twisties. Something mysterious had happened to a guy across the room from us, who was unconscious and swaddled in bandages and whose feet were smeared with blue paint.
