18
TEDDY
Teddy pulled up to the side of the road at a park not far from Adrian’s house, revelling in the Mercedes: how it smoothed the road ahead, the way it hushed to a stop underneath her when she parked.
Art needed the bathroom, said he’d call Hank on the walk back to the car. He saluted and jogged towards the park’s public toilet building. While she waited for him, Teddy held the palm of her hand out of the window to feel the faint rain on her skin, and checked up on Alice on her tracker. She seemed close to her next destination now; by sunset, hopefully, she’d be back with her little turtledove on the beach. Maybe Cole would just be hanging out with whatever friend they saw next, stoned out of his mind, at the end of a week-long bender. Maybe they’d find him on their next ring around to the hospitals, and he’d have landed there after he’d done something like smack his head on a gym weight, causing him to forget who he was and what year it was and who the prime minister was.
Art came back along the footpath, phone in hand. ‘I left a message with him,’ he told her. ‘We can go get lunch while we wait.’
‘Already?’
He set his eyes on her.
She sighed and said, ‘I mean, where?’
They ended up at some nearby British gastropub sharing a heady, rich Welsh rarebit, and a bucket of perfectly crisp crinkle-cut chips with a smooth, sharp curry sauce. Everything was very dark and moody, and all the bartenders had British Isle accents. Teddy and Art debated whose was fake, or if in fact any of them were real. Teddy bought the round so she could keep Art sober, and he drank his Coke with a sour face but didn’t say a word.
They were nearly done when Art’s phone rang, and he disappeared outside to take it. Teddy sat in the warmth by the nearby fire, getting lost in the flames, thinking dark thoughts: death, cremation. Art came back through the swinging doors, bringing cold air and a broad smile.
‘You won’t believe this,’ he said. ‘It was Hank. And he says Cole’s gone on holiday.’
‘You’re right,’ Teddy said, dipping her fork in the curry sauce. ‘I don’t believe it at all.’
‘He’ll meet us here,’ Art said. ‘He said he’ll be twenty-five minutes. Just enough time to order something else.’
She watched Art stalk through to the kitchen like he lived there, and then return a few minutes later, holding a plate in his hands. Tiny heirloom carrots, doused in something he’d forgotten on the walk from kitchen to table. It didn’t really matter; it felt soft like velvet and deep like the earth all at once, and by the time Hank arrived, she was feeling like maybe she could believe anything after all.
Hank looked a bit older than Cole; Teddy thought that he was maybe mid-twenties. He had a curly blond mop so soft and energised it kept on moving after his head stopped. He was tall, with a slightly airbrushed vibe, and Teddy couldn’t quite get a read on him.
They both shook his hand, and Art stood, saying he’d go order more chips and beer to help them talk.
Teddy turned to Hank and said, ‘So, you’re telling us that Cole isn’t missing, he’s just, like, happily gone?’
‘I didn’t even know anybody was worried until your friend over there called me,’ Hank said. ‘Cole always said he was going to do this.’
‘Do what?’
‘Just go,’ he said.
‘Without telling anybody?’
‘I think that was the point.’
‘Why wouldn’t he want anyone to know? What if they worried?’
‘I think that was the other point too. You’re asking “what if they worried”, but nobody really is, right? Maybe he was trying to shake them up. He didn’t feel like anybody really listened, like they cared about him at all.’
Art returned, handing over Hank’s pint. ‘So where is he?’
‘I don’t know for sure. He was my friend, but …’ Hank shrugged. ‘If he wasn’t going to tell his own mum, he’s sure not going to tell some friend he sees around the fire sometimes.’
‘Then why’d he confide in you?’ Teddy asked.
‘We got drunk one time. You know how some nights you just want to drink more, others you want to go to town on some girl, sometimes you want to get a bit fucked up on other stuff, and sometimes you just want to talk? We both had a talking kind of night at the same time.’
While Teddy and Art listened, making their way through a second batch of perfect fries, Hank’s soft voice – warm like a blanket – told them about that night.
It had been raining all day, but cleared as the sun set. Everyone was at Cooper’s, behind the house he lived in with his parents, in the kind of suburban location outer enough that the property went on forever. There were two fires, and Hank and Cole were trying to get a third one going, but the sticks were damp, and no matter how many chip packets or pieces of Cooper’s old homework they threw in the fire, it wouldn’t catch properly. It smoked pitifully in front of them, so they smoked as well – rollies that Hank usually made people pay for. Today he felt so bad for Cole, kicking into the dust in barely contained rage, that he just handed one over.
‘It wouldn’t have changed anything,’ Cole said.
Hank leaned in. ‘What the fuck you on about?’
‘The fire,’ Cole said. ‘Even if it’d taken, it’d still just be a fire.’
‘Isn’t that the point?’
‘Every week,’ Cole said, his face blurring in the smoke and ash. He picked up a leaf near his shoe and threw it into the fire, where it began to curl. ‘Every week we sit in front of a fire, and what happens?’
‘We get drunk?’
‘And then what?’
‘We drink some more?’
‘And then?’
Hank sighed. ‘We go fuck our girlfriends. Or go home on our own.’
‘And then?’
‘We wake up with a hangover?’
‘And then that’s it,’ Cole said. ‘That’s it.’
Hank said, ‘Yeah. We’re pretty lucky.’
Cole had looked at him with dark, empty eyes. ‘Fuck that,’ he said. ‘I’m so sick of this dogshit town.’
‘What, Melbourne?’
Cole shook his head, threw his arms out. ‘Here. You know. These guys.’
‘You including me in this?’
‘You’re listening to me, aren’t you? That makes you different. I know you want to get out too – you said before, you want to move to New Zealand.’
‘Yeah,’ Hank said, hesitant, ‘I mean, I did. Maybe for a summer.’
‘You planning on staying here forever, then?’
‘I dunno, man.’
‘Well, why are you waiting?’
‘Well, I’ve got a girlfriend now, and I’ll get a promotion at work some day soon when that deadbeat fuck in sales retires or dies from alcohol poisoning.’
‘You mean, before you do?’
It was a rare joke from Cole; it was why Hank remembered it.
‘I can stop any time,’ Hank grinned. ‘But not tonight.’ He got two beers out of the cooler next to his chair, cracked one open, and threw the other to Cole.
‘I’m gonna leave,’ Cole said. ‘Nobody would give a shit.’
‘Hey, no,’ Hank said, but he didn’t know what to follow it up with. Cole wasn’t wrong; nobody cared when he didn’t come. He didn’t bring conversation. He brought only a dark cloud.
‘Where would you even go?’ Hank said, eventually.
‘Anywhere. And I wouldn’t tell anyone. I’d just leave. I bet you it’d be weeks before anyone even noticed. My mum would start freaking out that I wasn’t paying rent or something.’
‘Like, would you go camping?’
‘I’d just drive,’ Cole said. ‘And I’d keep driving until it felt right to stop.’
‘What’d make you stop?’
‘What would make you stop?’
Hank paused, finished his beer. Someone at one of the other fires started screaming, but it wasn’t anything to worry about.
‘A beach,’ he said. ‘White sand. Warm weather.’
‘I just want better friends,’ Cole said, and threw the rest of his beer in the fire. The can wasn’t empty, and as it drained, the last of the weak flames died out underneath.
~
‘A week or something later he asked me to lend him some money,’ Hank finished. ‘Said he’d pay it back when he got his first job. There’s this saying, you know, where if you lend someone twenty dollars and you never see them again, it was probably worth it. Hopefully not seeing Cole again is worth two hundred bucks.’
‘When was this?’ Art asked.
‘End of last month, I think? Got into a big fight with my girlfriend about it because we’re trying to save for a house. But I felt for him, you know? Like, he wasn’t happy. If you could buy somebody’s happiness for two hundred dollars, it seems pretty cheap. And that kind of shit comes back to you, I reckon. He makes actual friends in whatever place in Tasmania or the Northern Territory he ends up. Gets a good job in the mines or works as a park ranger all day. One day maybe he gives me two hundred thousand dollars as a thank you.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He hasn’t found a job yet, anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He sent me a text yesterday,’ Hank said. ‘I didn’t even have his number before I gave him the money.’ He got out his phone, looked through it, handed it over.
Art held it out so he and Teddy could read at the same time.
That was it.
Teddy checked the number against the details Choker had given her. The number was the same, and all those visions she had of him dead – in a shallow grave, floating in the ocean, lost in the bush – disintegrated into the image of him driving away in his father’s car to a better life, just like everybody had said he was doing. She sighed with something she supposed was relief.
‘Did he ask you to tell his family what he was planning after he left? Or Streets?’
Hank shook his head. ‘Nah. Nothing.’
‘Would you have told them something if they asked?’
He was quiet for a long time. The fire flickered, and Teddy was suddenly uneasy, too hot in that dark room.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I know you guys are like … not-cops, or something. I don’t want to get in trouble. But can you, like, not attach this back to me? Some of his family seem pretty fucked up, and I don’t want them to come after me for his number or something. If he wants to talk to them, he will.’
Teddy exhaled. ‘Can you call him now? I need to ask about his car.’
He looked nervous. ‘I dunno. I don’t think he’d answer.’
‘It’s all good,’ Art said. ‘Give it a try.’
Hank called Cole’s number. It went straight to a recording, and Teddy leaned forward to leave a message. ‘Cole,’ she said, ‘my name is Teddy Malloy, and I’m a private detective hired to find you. I’m not worried about you anymore, but dude, you need to return your dad’s cash and his car and get one of your own. If you do that, I won’t come find you, all right?’
‘Suitably threatening,’ Art said as Hank hung up.
‘I’m lying anyway,’ she said. ‘If he’s been driving for, what, five days, there’s no way we’re going to track him down by our deadline of tonight.’
‘Ah, the case is closed,’ Art said. ‘And a new day off beckons.’
‘I don’t know if I’ll hear back from him,’ Hank said.
‘If you do, call us,’ Art said, handing over his business card. He didn’t want his to look the same as Alice’s and Teddy’s plain ones; his were navy blue and white, embossed, luxurious. Some real American Psycho shit, Alice had said, to his face.
‘Yeah, no worries,’ Hank said, taking it. ‘I better get back to work.’
They shook hands outside the pub, and Art and Teddy watched him go back to his car.
‘Well,’ Teddy said. She was empty, bereft, less glad than she had thought.
‘What now?’
‘I guess we go see Choker.’