At the post office there was only one clerk and a line almost out the door. Alison had come early—it was barely ten—thinking most people would swing by around lunchtime. In the line she busied herself reading the paper and tried not to open herself up to conversations. The queue moved gratingly slowly, and she tapped her foot on the carpet as she stood there, trying not to lose patience. When she got to the front she recognized the man behind the counter, chewing the side of his cheek and leaning heavily on the laminated wood.
“Hey, Tom. Jim said you guys have my mail.”
“Alison, heard a lot about you these past couple of weeks. How’s things?”
“You know everything you hear is true. Or none of it.”
He smiled and shook his head. “Hang on and I’ll check out the back.” He hustled away. While Alison waited, she picked the film of dirt from under her nails, looked around behind the counter, tried to see where Tom was out the back through the glass panels in the wall. Eventually he reappeared, carrying a stack of envelopes and a mailer, the kind lined with Bubble Wrap. Alison was surprised to see it. She couldn’t remember ordering anything in the last few weeks, and it wasn’t usual for her to get packages. He dumped the mail on the countertop.
“Here you go.”
“Thanks so much, see you later.” She stuffed the mail into her bag and left the post office. Stopped in at the bakery to grab a pastie and then took everything back to her car. Parked in the shade on Main Street, Alison was tempted to open the package immediately. She looked around, worried that maybe Gil was nearby, waiting to wrench open the door and pull her out into the street. It was fine. She was fine. The package had no return address. The postmark was from Wangaratta; the postmark was from the day before the fire. Alison looked at it. She didn’t know anyone in Wangaratta. The day before the fire. The day before the fire. Fuck. She ripped the mailer open. A folded piece of stiff paper, and two USB sticks, each with masking tape on one side, the contents recorded in fat marker. One said “Simone” and the other “Alison.” Alison sucked air through her teeth as she inhaled. Unfolded the paper.
Dear Alison,
Hopefully, when you get this you’ll already know what it’s about. I think he’s following me, and I can’t risk him finding me and taking it back, so I’ve mailed this to you. Make sure you watch yours, all of them. I should be there tomorrow, but if you never see me, please know it’s Gil’s fault that I’m gone, and this is the reason why.
Looking forward to meeting you,
Simone Arnold
This was it. What Gil was looking for. The thing that had cost Simone her life. Alison couldn’t breathe. She needed to get home. She needed to put the USB drives in her laptop and see what was on them. Put the key in the ignition. Turn the key. Foot on the brake. Drop the hand brake and flick on the indicator. Shift the stick into drive. Check the mirrors. Turn the wheel and feel the tires shift in the loose gravel. Foot off the brake; foot on the accelerator. Pull out. Down the street. Round the roundabout. Turn toward Sal’s, not Billy’s. On the highway, just for a bit, not even a full click. Turn again, into the drive. Foot on the brake. Shift the gear into park. Lift up the hand brake. Foot off the pedal. Pull out the keys. Open the door. Get out of the car and reach over to the passenger seat; gather up the bag. Take all the mail inside. At the door, fumble a minute trying to find the keys among the sharp envelope edges. Hear something unexpected.
“Hi, Ally. Long time no see.” The voice was the same. Smooth, a little syrupy, hypnotic and sweet and deep and mesmerizing. The face was the same too. Angles and stubble and those baby blues. Michael Gilbert Watson. In a singlet and a pair of jeans that looked as if they hadn’t been washed for god knows how long. Alison felt the skin on her arms rise and fall, the hairs on end. Her scalp tingled and itched. She held her bag a little closer to her side and gulped back her fear. What the fuck was he doing? He was either stupid or reckless, or both.
“Gil.”
“So, where’s me tapes?”
Alison tried to keep calm. Laughed, even though it made no sense to laugh. “If I wanted to give them to you I would.”
There wasn’t any warning before he grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her into the wall, hitting her head against the weatherboard and slightly dazing her. He leaned his forearm across her neck, pressed into her windpipe, moved his face to within a centimeter of hers.
“Give them to me, you stupid fucking bitch.”
Alison couldn’t move, could barely whisper with the pressure on her neck. She tried to gulp enough air to sustain herself and struggled hard against his grasp. Finally, her knee connected with his crotch and he recoiled from her in agony. Alison fell to her knees and started to scream. The loudest, most piercing screams she could muster. Something inside her snapped. One by one, neighbors started opening their doors. Soon enough Sal was there, on the front veranda, the secateurs in her hand, the dirt on her beige gardening shorts, the flush on her cheeks, and the stride of her gait propelling her forward. It took Gil too long to gather his wits after the kick to the groin. He was on the ground. Sal kicked him in the stomach, and then the nuts, and poked the secateurs into his shoulder, lightly but with menace on her face. He looked from Sal to Alison to the secateurs and got up as fast as he could. Scrambled backward onto the grass of the front lawn and rushed away before Alison could properly process what was going on.
“Chickenshit!” Sal yelled after him as he ran to a beat-up Ford Falcon and swung behind the wheel. The sound of his retreat was matched by the smell of the rubber that burned as his wheels turned too fast on the road, their bald treads taking another hit as he peeled out of there as fast as he could.
“Bullies. Never met an equal contest they couldn’t run from.” Sal knelt down and put her hands on Alison’s shoulders, gently, where Gil had grasped her so firmly. Alison flinched, and Sal moved a hand to her cheek, rested it there, tried to get Alison to stand up, but her legs felt like jelly. Her whole body felt like jelly. She breathed in. Breathed in again. Thought about the way that ash is a good source of potassium in gardens. Slowly moved upward until she was standing, acutely aware of the bag still clutched close, held tight even as Gil clawed at her. Still there. She was still there. The bag was still there. Alison propelled herself back into the house; she wasn’t actually sure how. She found a way to get from the veranda into the hall and then into her room. She was aware of Sal following her. She didn’t care. Didn’t hear the questions Sal was asking or feel her hand on the skin of her arm.
Alison’s laptop was charging on the floor, the cord plugged into an outlet next to the bedside table. She sat on the floor, back against the bed, and pulled the laptop toward her, opened it. Logged in. Rooted around in her bag for the USB drives, found the one with her name on it, and pushed it into the socket. A little icon appeared on the screen. Alison. Alison clicked on it. The drive contained only one folder. It was named surveillance and inside was a series of .avi files, each differentiated solely by a date. The oldest one, 03112014, made Alison gag before she even double-clicked. November 3, 2014. Gil’s birthday. Her blood froze. That was the day it all began. She’d never been able to forget the first time. There were at least thirty files on the drive. Were they all like that day? She tried to swallow, but she couldn’t. She clicked the birthday file, waited for it to load, was only mildly aware of Sal settling next to her on the floor.
The video was so detailed, high-resolution, high-definition, whatever the fuck it was called. Black-and-white surveillance, and Alison couldn’t parse how such a thing existed. How was there a record of this moment beyond the one in her own head? There wasn’t any sound. Just vision. Her, in the apartment she’d shared with Gil. Him on top of her. Holding her down. That look on her face—Alison didn’t recognize herself. Like she wasn’t even really there.
“Alison. What is this?”
“It’s Gil. It’s the first time he hurt me.” The words echoed in the space inside her head, inside her chest.
“I don’t understand.” Alison took a deep breath and told Sal the truth about the man she’d lived with in Cairns. The ways he’d hurt her. “That was him on the veranda?”
“That was him.”
“I’ll bloody kill him.”
“Sal, it’s OK. This is more than enough.”
“What do you mean?”
Alison didn’t reply. She stared at the screen, logging the dates that came with the files and trying to piece it all together in her mind. Gil always wanted them to fuck on the bed. He wasn’t one for a quickie on the couch or a little bit of risk in the slippery shower. He liked a bed, said that was where he had his “full range of motion.” After that day when he’d forced it for the first time—if she was being honest, after that day she hadn’t really ever had sex with Gil again. Not voluntarily, not without a little bit of fear in every touch and movement. But it hadn’t been until right now, this moment, looking into her own lifeless eyes as they fixed on the ceiling, that she fully realized the truth. She couldn’t decide what was worse: the actual physical violence, and the way that it lingered on her skin every time another person touched her, or the way she couldn’t think about trusting anyone else ever again.
The fire had made her forget for a minute, given her something else to focus on, stripped her back to rawest nerves. A dangerous, terrifying circuit breaker that had shaken her up and pulled her out and then plunged her right back in there, in this terror, with the arrival of Simone.
Simone. How did she get these files? Were they all like this one? Gil must have put a camera in the bedroom so he could film them having sex. Had he still had access to it after she kicked him out? Her skin crawled. What was on the other USB? More of this? Alison ejected the first one, found the second one in her bag, and waited for its contents to load on the screen.
Simone popped up, double the number of files the Alison drive contained. She forced herself to click on one. A different room. She didn’t recognize it. But she did recognize the look on Simone’s face as he pushed her onto the bed and pinned her down. Still, it dawned on her that if she didn’t know the truth, the actions in the video she was watching might appear to be consensual. Simone wasn’t fighting him. She wasn’t engaging, but she wasn’t fighting. She switched it off. Downloaded the whole drive onto her computer and opened her email.
This wasn’t something she knew how to handle, and she didn’t trust Billy to keep it to himself. She needed someone who knew the law. She thought of Christine. If Simone had taken these videos, stolen them from Gil, then she must have wanted to use them to put him in jail. That had to be the reason she was coming to Alison. If the two of them had worked together, the videos and their stories might have been enough. Now she thought she finally knew what Simone had been doing, why she was heading for her in the first place.
“Alison, are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Sal sounded exasperated, her voice higher and tighter than usual. Alison studied her face. Sal’s eyes were narrowed and red; she was flushed, a little splotchy.
“Sal, don’t cry, I’m OK.” Alison reached out a hand to squeeze her arm, comfort her.
“I’m sorry, love, I keep thinking about your mum and how she used to say how happy you were and what a nice man you’d found up in Cairns. She’d be devastated if she knew the truth.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell her, or you. Come on, it’s all right. I’m OK, really.”
“I’m not the only one crying, you know.” As she spoke Sal sniffed, raised her finger, and wiped a tear from Alison’s face.
“I gotta make a call. Can I have some privacy?”
“You calling the police about that man?”
“No. Actually, Sal, can we keep that between us for a little bit? I promise I’ll tell them he was here, but I just want a little time first, try and figure out what’s going on. Why Simone wanted me to have this.”
“I don’t know, Alison.”
“Please, Sal, just a few hours even.”
“All right, but if I see him again, police are my first call.”
“Deal.”
Sal looked uncertain, but she got up off the floor and leaned down and squeezed Alison’s shoulder, then walked slowly out of the room. “I’ll put the kettle on, think a cup of tea could do us both some good.”
“Sure, Sal, thank you.”
Alone, Alison put the first USB drive back in and looked over the file names again. There were a handful of dates that matched up with her relationship with Gil. Each one recorded an encounter that wasn’t really consensual. Some of them involved a level of force Alison had blocked out. She didn’t watch them all the way through; some she skipped altogether. She couldn’t make sense of this new evidence of how their relationship had really been. She copied all the files. Her phone was heavy in her hand as she scrolled through the contacts, found Luca, and dialed. It rang once, twice, three times, four . . . and then as it stretched out into its seventh ring she began to deflate. When he answered it took her by surprise.
“Alison, tell me what’s been happening.” He was eager to help.
It reassured her. She explained that she needed to talk to Christine, but Luca got annoyed when she wouldn’t give him details. The intimacy of the violence made her want to hold it close and not allow it to infuse all her relationships. Christine knew about this stuff. She dealt with it at work. Alison didn’t want Luca to look at her the way Billy had when he’d found out the truth about Gil, or to squeeze her arm the way Sal had after watching the tape. She wanted a piece of herself, her old self, to remain forever untainted by the reality of her new self. Eventually Luca caved and gave Alison Christine’s number. She said good-bye and promised to come visit again when all of it was sorted out. Hung up and dialed Christine.
She answered on the first ring.
“Christine. It’s Alison King. Luca gave me your number.” There was a long pause.
“Alison, how are you?”
“Do you have time to talk? I need your legal opinion on something.”
“Of course. What is it?”
“Promise you will keep this between us?”
“Well, that depends; there are certain things I’m obligated to report by law, but if you’re not planning to commit any crimes, sure.”
“I know what tapes Simone had. She sent them to me.”
“Shit. OK. What are they?”
“They’re recordings. Of Gil and me, and Gil and Simone. In our bedrooms. Like, secret recordings. All the ones she has—well, the ones I’ve looked at, anyway—are . . . violent.”
“Recordings of him assaulting you? In your bedroom?”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence. “Sexual assault, Alison?”
“Yes.”
“I see. And her too?”
“Yes. I didn’t really watch hers. I watched a little bit of one, but it seemed too private.”
“Is he using obvious force?”
“I don’t know how to quantify it. I know from the look on my face that I didn’t want to . . . and the one I watched of Simone, she has the same eyes. Some of my ones have him hitting me or choking me, but there’s no sound.” The conversation was so straightforward, it seemed easy to remove herself from it.
“I see. All right. Can you send me the tapes? I can take a look and see if there is enough on there that a prosecutor might act.”
“You think we could put him in jail?”
“I think at the very least police would want to use these tapes to help them build any case they might have against him for Simone’s death. As for anything beyond that, that’s up to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’d have to press charges in Queensland, and you’d have to testify against him in court, and any criminal culpability would be restricted to the assaults on you. Simone’s not able to press charges or testify.”
Alison didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what any of this meant. Everything she’d assumed about Simone’s motives seemed less clear. What had she been planning? Was there another solution? What was it Simone’s parents had said? That she’d called them and said she had a way to get him out of her life forever. Jail wasn’t forever.
“How long would he go to jail?”
“Well, you get a couple of rape charges to stick, you could put him away for a good amount of time, but it’s fraught, honestly. Get the wrong judge and he’d be out in a few years.”
“Best case?”
“Best case . . . fifteen years cumulative probably.”
“Worst case?”
“Good behavior bond.”
“No jail?”
“It’s unlikely, but not impossible. Prior relationship, no contemporaneous complaints to police, no physical evidence of assault, no audio on the videos to provide context, prove aggressive talk, record any threats he might have made. A sympathetic judge, a good lawyer, there’s a chance he walks out of court.”
“But what about Simone’s police report? I know she went to the police about him.”
“Good lawyer gets that excluded. Prejudicial.”
“So I’ve got nothing, then.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying you don’t have any guarantees, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.”
“OK. I tried to email you the files, but they’re too large. I don’t fucking trust the cloud. I’ll send you a copy in the post today. You really think even with this he could walk away?”
“When I was in law school, I did some work for a barrister. He was representing a man who had drugged and raped dozens of strangers, women he’d convinced would be safe getting a lift home and a cup of tea, who he then took advantage of. He filmed it too. My job was to watch the tapes. Look for any signs that the women were complicit, that they were into it. So that questions could be raised about the rapes, doubt seeded in the minds of the jury members at trial. This was a man who had drugged strangers. Gil was your boyfriend. The law is flawed. The system sucks. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, but you should be prepared for anything to happen.”
“What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“The guy you were defending?”
“He took a plea. Twenty years. His crimes were clear and there were many of them.” A pause. “Unfortunately, even though it’s terrible, this isn’t that clear-cut.”
“I get it. OK. I’m gonna send you these tapes.”
“Take care, Alison, and don’t do anything stupid. This guy sounds like a real piece of work.”
“Bye, Christine. Thanks.”
She made sure she had copies of all the files on her laptop; then she went into Sal’s study and rooted around in the desk drawer. Found a USB drive tucked up the back. Took it to her room and made a copy of everything. Then she tucked Simone’s USB drive into her pillowcase and put the other original one in her bra. As Alison was closing her laptop, Sal reappeared with two cups of tea.
“Here you go, love.” She pushed the cup into Alison’s hand and Alison looked at it, looked at Sal, saw the anxiety in her eyes.
“It’s OK, Sal. I’m OK. Actually, I feel better than I have since the fire.” It was true. For the first time in almost two weeks she hadn’t spent a second thinking about the flames or the smell or the way the trees had burst and blistered and popped and catapulted the front toward her. She gulped her tea. Felt it burn all the way down her throat and sit warm in her empty stomach.
“Your mum would have done anything for you, you know.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do. She loved you so much. Wanted you so much. But you only cared about your dad. You broke her heart every single day and she just kept loving you.”
“That’s not true. Dad just understood me better.”
“Kids think they know everything. You’re more like her than you realize. She wasn’t going to tell you about the affair, said she didn’t want to taint your relationship with your dad, but I made her call you, because she needed you.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I know. Kids don’t know anything about their parents. They rarely pay attention.” Sal reached out and squeezed Alison’s hand. Tried to smile at her.
“Your kids love you very much, Sal.”
“That they do. Doesn’t mean they ever listen to me.”
“Pat’s right about the conditions up here. They aren’t good, and this isn’t going to be the last fire you have to deal with if you stay.”
“Geoff and I met at university. He was in my Australian literature class. We had tutorials on Thursdays that finished at four. Afterward we’d all go to this pasta place on Lygon Street and order these big plates of cheap spaghetti and argue about just how bad we thought Malcolm Fraser was.
“One day halfway through the semester he slipped me a note as class was wrapping up. It said, ‘Can I take you out just us today?’ and he took me to this place on Elgin Street with Middle Eastern food—I’d never had falafel before, imagine that—and we talked and talked and talked and when we left the restaurant we kept on talking, we just walked around for hours into the middle of the night.
“We got married six months later. Even though my friends said I was too young and marriage was slavery and I was buying into the patriarchy and we’d regret it. I took his name, which caused a huge fight between me and my younger sister, who thought I was selling myself. It was 1978. A lot of our friends were communists. Some of them even refused to come to the wedding.
“But our vows, we wrote them ourselves, which wasn’t that common then. I said, ‘I promise to always support you. To always listen to you, even when you make me mad or aren’t being reasonable. I promise to love you, and honor you, and never to pander to you. I promise that I will never leave you, to talk to you until my dying day. I promise that we will always be a team.’
“I made a vow. My friends thought I was stupid then, my children think I am stupid now, but Geoff and I built our lives here. We had our children here. We raised our family here. We fought, and we made up, and we grew together here. I want to be able to keep my promise to him. I want to talk to him every day until the day I die. I’m not leaving.”
Sal squeezed Alison’s hand again, and reached up to her face with her free hand and wiped the tears from her own cheeks, and then from Alison’s. “This world has really done a number on you, hasn’t it, kiddo? First your parents and then this fire, and this . . . this man.”
“Yeah. The last few years haven’t been ideal.”
“Why didn’t you talk to me?”
Alison took a deep breath. She’d dodged this conversation long enough. She couldn’t hide from it anymore. “I didn’t talk to anyone. You know, you read the articles—the ones about women who are killed by their partner. Set on fire, or beaten until they can’t breathe, or that fucking horrific case in Brisbane—remember? It was all over the news. The woman found in the stockpot. I mean, you hear the stories, and you think, no way. I’d never. If he hit me, I’d walk. But then . . .” She trailed off, thinking about Gil. How his smile became like a drug she wanted so desperately to taste. How isolated she’d become, how embarrassed and foolish she’d felt.
“But then?” Sal wasn’t pushing now.
“But then it happens, and it takes your breath away, and suddenly, somehow, it’s your fault, not his. And you’d do anything to make it up to him. And it somehow never occurs to you that you’re not special. You’re like the woman on fire, the woman at the bottom of the stairs. The woman in the pot—except you’re still alive, and aren’t you lucky he’s kind?”
“Jesus Christ.” Sal reached out and cupped Alison’s face with her hand. Sal’s skin was soft and smooth like fine tissue paper, and her palm was warm. She swiped at the tear steadily working its way down Alison’s cheek.
“The fire, when it was coming—I don’t know how to— When it turned, when it moved away and it didn’t take me—it felt like every time he didn’t kill me.” Alison hadn’t said that before, and she already felt ashamed she finally had.
Sal shuddered. “Why did you stay?”
Alison shook her head, let a little laugh escape, a weird, strangled one. “I think it’s easier to explain why I left. Mum and Dad died, and I’d kicked Gil out for cheating on me a couple of weeks before. I hadn’t seen him, but I felt, always, like I might. Like he would come round and refuse to leave, and then what would I do? He knew I grew up in Victoria, he knew my parents’ names, but I didn’t think he knew their address, or even the town. When I got here, I hadn’t felt that safe in years. So even though I was deeply miserable, I stayed. Safety felt more important than anything else. And then, suddenly, it had been two years. Two whole years and he hadn’t even tried to find me.”
“That’s a good thing, love.”
Alison shook her head. “No, it’s a cowardly thing. I knew. I knew who he was. What he did to me. What he did to women. And I knew he was seeing someone else.”
“That’s not your responsibility, kiddo.”
“You know what, Sal? I know. And I’m also sick of hearing it, or saying it to myself. Maybe I never admitted this, even to myself. But I think that’s why I went to Cairns, why I tried to figure out who Simone was, what she wanted from me. Something deep in the pit of my soul—in my guts—I fucking knew. I knew it was him, and that it was my fault.”
Sal pulled Alison’s face to hers, so they were staring into each other’s eyes from inches apart. She looked furious, the sea in a storm written all across her face. “This is not on you; this is never going to be your fault. It is him. It is that coward who did this to you, and to Simone, and it’s not your fault.”
Alison wanted to believe her. She just had no idea how to.