I heard more muttering in the background; the opening and slamming of car doors. ‘I’ve had to send the girl to the local hospital with one of the paintball techs, for god’s sake. I’m taking Chris home and leaving the rest of the kids there.’
‘Is that a good idea?’
‘They’ve all paid for their tickets, Evan.’
‘But if another one of them gets hurt and you’re not there—’
Delle started roasting me, worse than she had thus far, using the last of her furious energy to get out some language I usually only heard around the police station locker rooms, and some I’d never heard before at all. As was her usual mode of operation, she was soon quiet and I felt safe putting the phone back to my ear.
‘Why did it have to be us?’ She sighed. ‘As if people don’t talk about us enough already.’
RUSSELL
Five years ago, when Bridie was thirteen, I came home from work and told her mother I was gay. The words had eased out carefully a bunch of times in my fantasies; while we lay together in bed, or sat at a civilised dinner for two, or stood on a clifftop, swept by the winds of change, poetically positioned at the end of the land and the end of what we had known our marriage to be.
In reality, Georgia was in the shower when I told her. I stood beyond the steamy glass, having walked right in and started speaking without the ability to wait a few seconds for her to get out and dry herself. I’d waited years to find the courage. And the courage was suddenly there. I didn’t think about the fact that my wife was coming down after a monstrous twelve-hour shift working in sex crimes, standing on one foot, her other foot braced against the tiles, a razor in her hand. I didn’t think about the fact that my daughter was right in the middle of the most psychologically impactful years of her childhood. I just walked into the house, dumped my bag, went into the bathroom and ended it all.
There was a lot of yelling and screaming. I took the waves of confusion and humiliation and rage from Georgia right in the chest, eyes open, a man standing in a furious ocean, refusing to bend to the tide. Her surprise, her initial insistence that this was just a midlife crisis, was something I saw coming. Because I’d never given her or anyone even the most minuscule clue that I liked men. My eyes didn’t linger on attractive guys I saw in the street or atwork or in movies. I didn’t have any gay friends. I didn’t treat myself to guy-on-guy porn, the kind that might be discovered in a secret folder on the family computer when Georgia was trying to solve a technical problem. My father had raised me as a fighter, a beer drinker, a sports fan, a man who tinkered with cars and knew his way around a gun and a drill and a barbecue. Someone who climbed ladders and killed big spiders and built things and got excited about loud engines and knew all the words to ‘Working Class Man’. I didn’t keep my nails nice. I knew nothing about fashion. I hadn’t cried in my entire adult life. If these clichéd and stereotyped ‘clues’ to my sexuality weren’t enough to sucker Georgia in, I’d also provided her with a storybook romance to solidify her as my ‘beard’.
We’d met on the job. Both posted to Newtown after a sudden swell of new drugs in the artsy and alternative suburb had made an overworked area command call for help from surrounding stations. It had been a temporary crisis assignment. Officers crammed in. Sharing desks. Rubbing shoulders. I fell in love with her, wooed her, dated her and married her. If she walked by me naked, I slapped her arse. If she came out of the bathroom wearing new lingerie, I groaned hungrily. I made love to her like I meant it, because I did mean it. I loved her, and I was attracted to her body because that was the body of Georgia, my wife, my best friend. I listened to her and provided for her, gave her every indication possible that this was a relationship that made me happy and that I yearned for nothing else. When we decided to have a child, I wholeheartedly embraced life as a heterosexual married man with a kid. I intended to live that way until I died. I was outlasting and denying the thing inside me that stirred and twisted and demanded to be known. I was winning against it.
Until suddenly I wasn’t.
The little voice inside me, the one that had been whispering insistently since I was a pre-teen, started talking gently, and then at full volume. By the time I began to have fantasies about telling Georgia that I wanted to be with men, that voice was a full-bore screaming in my ears. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t getthrough a phone call. I went to a GP, who suggested I go on antidepressants, which I refused to because macho idiots didn’t do that. It wasn’t the desire to live life as a gay man that was driving me crazy. It was the lying. I was lying to Georgia and Bridie, even when I was saying nothing to them at all. I was lying just by being there.
I tried to tell Georgia on that terrible night that I’d never so much as spoken to a man with sexual intentions. There’d been no emotional affairs, no flirting, no meet-ups, no texting, no cheeky blowjobs in a dark car park somewhere, no secret relationships. But she accused me of all of those things, and worse, stood holding her phone in her shaking hand, howling at me, wanting to know if she should book herself in to be tested for STDs. She asked me if I’d ever loved her at all, and I told her that I always had, that I did still. But I couldn’t explain how that was possibleat the same timeas it was possible that I was really someone else entirely to the man she’d known me to be for almost two decades. My inability to explain myself drove her mad. I could explain why there’d never been space in my childhood to come out. I couldn’t explain why, after I’d left home, I’d never made that space for myself. Why continuing to swallow down my true sexuality became so vital to my survival. Georgia said a lot of mean shit that night, and she deserved to. But Bridie didn’t deserve to sit cowering in her room, listening to it all. That was my fault. I should have picked a better time. I should have sent her to stay at a friend’s place. I should have done so many things.
The news ripped through Georgia’s family and friends like a chainsaw over the next twenty-four hours, and then it cut through into mine. I wasn’t answering my phone. I was just sitting in the house, knee-deep in the ashes of my marriage, trying to be there to answer Georgia’s questions, wanting to be there for Bridie if she ever came out of her bedroom again. My father turned up and knocked on the door with a thin veil of shock hanging over his smugness. Things had been steadily deteriorating between the old man and me since Georgia got pregnant, so we were thirteen or fourteen years into what I’d hoped would one day be a peaceful-enough estrangement. I had never taken Georgia or Bridie to thefarm in all that time. I didn’t answer his calls. My texts were brief, and I never initiated a conversation. I didn’t invite him in on that day, instead standing blocking the door, exhausted and twitchy after a night listening to Georgia crying and feeling like I’d just slaughtered something beautiful and worthwhile. My father wanted to know if it was true. When I told him it was, he smirked and shook his head. I heard a floorboard creak behind me, turned and saw Bridie step out, wanting to know if her mother was back from her sister’s place, I supposed. Bridie and my father locked eyes. Arthur’s pupils were huge and depthless.
‘Well, kid, now you know.’ The old man shrugged, raised his voice so that it travelled down the hall. ‘He doesn’t love you. Not as much as he loves a cock in his—’
My father didn’t get to finish his sentence. I had punched him as hard as I could in the face, the blow driven from my shoulder and hip, the kind of punch not meant to warn or to teach, but to kill. Arthur flopped like a ragdoll onto my verandah, and Bridie’s door slammed as she fled back into her room.
I’d gone inside my house, leaving my shocked neighbours to call an ambulance for my father. I’d called my brother to tell him where to find the old man. At Evan’s horror that I’d knocked the old man out, and his suggestions that maybe I shouldn’t have done that, I exploded with all the fury at myself that I had left. Evan told me Arthur was still unconscious in the hospital with a fractured skull and a broken jaw. I told Evan that I hoped Arthur died, and if Evan could sympathise at all with the guy after what he’d said to my child, I never wanted to see my brother again.
I told Dodge I’d meet him on a street corner in Wisemans and walked down the hill, thinking about those times, when my child stopped looking me in the eye. Taking out the picture of her again with the lizard and putting her warm, light-filled face and eyes next to the image of the corpse of Chloe Lutz in my mind only added rocks into the pockets of the heavy coat of anger I was wearing. I got myself a takeaway coffee and deliberately didn’t get Dodge one. On the drive back, I took and made one phone call after another so that we didn’t have time for chitchat, getting moreupdates from the team on Chloe’s apartment and the officers holed up in a room in Maroubra making calls to her student friends, her past work colleagues, anyone who knew her. Dodge parked us at the crime scene, by Chloe’s car, which had been forensic-wrapped and covered with a tarp, and was being loaded onto a trailer. Someone had put up a marquee and dragged two picnic tables together, and I recognised a couple of Dodge’s people there poring over a laptop. There was an urn, coffee and trays of snacks dotted around. I ended a call and was going to head there to make myself another coffee when my phone rang again. A number I didn’t recognise. I stepped away from Dodge.
‘Yeah?’
‘Is that …’ The voice on the line was hoarse. Heavy. ‘I’m looking for Detective Inspector Gunther Powder.’
‘Speaking.’
‘This is Larry Lutz.’
I’d known it was Chloe’s father, just from the gravel in his throat. The unmistakable raggedness and flatness of voice that comes from losing a child. Many times across my career I’d spoken to these ghosts of people, parents trying to move and speak and breathe in a world irreparably shattered. There’s a slowness to them. A shell-shocked lag, like they’re waiting for the ground to stop shaking and don’t know yet that it never will. I put a hand in my pocket and looked at the river beyond the trees. ‘I am so sorry about what’s happened, Mr Lutz.’
There was a long silence. Then he cleared his throat wetly and said, ‘Right.’
‘What do you want to know?’ I asked. ‘What could I tell you right now that would bring you the most comfort, do you think?’
‘Uhhh, well, I don’t know exactly.’ Larry cleared his throat again. His voice trembled. ‘Me and the wife, we’re sort of … trying to decide whether we want to … you know … leap in to help you guys or just … just … just try to get our heads around the idea that she’s really gone.’
‘Okay.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘Yes, I have. And I’ve seen the crime scene.’
