The Prof hadn’t spoken for a while. I lay quietly on the couch, digesting the upmarket sandwich she had brought – ‘smoked salmon, horseradish and chives, Richard’ – waiting for her to finish writing. Perhaps I dozed off again; I was startled awake by the sound of chair legs scraping my way. Was she going to sit closer? No such luck; a mystery object was set down on the wooden seat with a dull clatter instead.
‘Box of tissues?’ I guessed, although why she might think I was about to burst into tears I had no idea.
‘Ashtray,’ she said.
I chuckled, and patted my pockets. ‘And here I am fresh out of smokes.’
The next sound was less mysterious – the rustle of cellophane – but I was still surprised. ‘Camels I hope, Prof!’
‘They seem to loosen your tongue,’ she said. ‘Not that I approve. Not for a moment.’
I didn’t believe her, especially after I tugged the lighter from my jeans and handed it over. There was a practised deftness in the speed of lighting-up, the short, quick ignition puffs.
‘Misspent youth,’ she read my mind, as the lit cigarette was eased between my lips. It felt as sweet as a kiss; I kissed it back, deeply.
‘Fresh out of T-shirts too?’ she said.
‘I was running late. Sorry. Slept in.’
‘Looks like you slept in it,’ she said, then sniffed the air a little theatrically. ‘Smells like it too.’
I exhaled, smoothly. ‘If there’s a personal freshness problem, why not light up yourself?’
‘I guess I am. Passively.’
The pack and lighter were set down on the chair; her footsteps moved back to the other side of the desk; her chair creaked slightly as it took her weight. Some sort of expensively elegant bentwood thing, I’d long ago decided.
‘I’m glad you chose to come today, Richard. And relieved.’
‘Still worried I might top myself?’
‘If I overreacted yesterday, I’m sorry. But you do seem prone to mood swings at present.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I said, thinking less about yesterday’s sweet-and-sour consultation than the rollercoaster of anger and disappointment I seemed to ride each night.
‘It can be a good sign,’ she said. ‘A sign we’re making progress. You told me things yesterday I hadn’t heard before. But I had a sense you wanted to tell me more.’
‘Tell, or confess?’
‘You did confess. To assaulting a man you arrested. A man who was offering no resistance.’
‘Temporary insanity. His mum did more damage to me with her broomstick.’
‘Which leaves me wondering what your anger was really about. What you were trying not to talk about yesterday.’
I held a lungful of smoke inside, thinking. Cigarettes might loosen my tongue from time to time, but they are just as useful to slow it down.
‘You mentioned you had to prove yourself,’ she prompted, ‘with the bikies.’
‘I crossed the line a few times. Of course.’
‘Serious crimes?’
‘Depends on your definition of serious.’
‘I’m more interested in yours.’
‘You wearing a wire?’ I said, and chuckled. ‘We were a pretty tame outfit. No hard drugs. Girls and weed, mostly.’
‘You sold drugs? Personally?’
‘You’re more worried about me selling drugs than selling girls?’
‘Did your superiors know about either?’
‘In triplicate. No way I’d let them hang me out to dry. There’s a federal exemption for undercover cops. At least with victimless crimes.’
‘You think prostitution is victimless?’
I shifted uncomfortably; the gun was making its presence felt in the small of my back again. The weather was still too hot for a jacket, but my mojo was back. A loose T-shirt was enough camouflage, I’d decided over breakfast.
‘I never met an unhappy hooker, if that’s what you mean,’ I said.
Silence. Then the faint sound of the pen being uncapped.
‘They weren’t street girls,’ I said as she wrote. ‘Part-timers, mostly. Housewives. Students paying their way. No druggies. No maddies.’
More silence, while she absorbed this. Or just took the dictation. ‘You were never involved in anything more serious? No violent crime?’
The gun ground in harder, like a fist. I took in another lungful of smoke, pondering how serious to get. ‘No standover stuff. I … punished the odd bad guy. But only if they deserved it.’
One, in particular, had deserved it – and I wasn’t thinking of the rock spider. A treacherous memory, this. I tried to control the turbulence it stirred inside me, or at least keep it out of my voice.
‘That sounds less like a confession than another boast, Richard.’
‘I don’t regret it, if that’s what you mean.’
‘As a means of proving yourself, or as an end in itself?’
‘Both. It was necessary, yes. Bikie justice. If I hadn’t handed it out, someone else would have.’
Her ears pricked up. ‘It? You’re talking about one case in particular?’
Cornered. I’d blabbed too much already, but couldn’t stop myself. Maybe she was right about the ciggie, also a favourite tool of trade back in Interview Room 1, Angas Street. A lever, a little white crowbar.
‘One especially,’ I said, and the anger began leaking into my words like spittle. ‘One who deserved everything that was coming to him. An eye for a fucking eye.’
‘Before you go any further,’ she interrupted, ‘despite what I said yesterday, there are exceptions to medical confidentiality. Mandatory reporting for major crimes is one.’
‘Be my guest. The Commissioner would give me another fucking medal. Did the cops’ work for them.’ The dam was beginning to crack inside me; how had I got there so quickly? I took another deep inhalation to slow the leaks. ‘Sure you don’t want a smoke, Prof?’
My turn to read her mind: she was already on her feet walking my way. More cellophane rustling, more deft lighting-up sounds, but this time the ashtray was set down on the floor and her backside on the chair.
‘Why does he mean so much to you?’ she said, exhaling. ‘This particular – bad guy.’
How much to tell her? ‘He attacked one of my girls,’ I said, then hid in another cloud of smoke. Even that hesitant ‘attacked’ was saying too much. Widening the crack.
‘Your girls?’
‘You keep nitpicking the little words.’
‘The little words usually have the largest meanings. Why “yours”?’
I shrugged, nonchalantly. ‘Because I was running the girls. It’s no big deal. We – the Club – had a city knock-shop. Off Light Square.’
‘A knock-shop meaning a brothel?’
‘Cathouse. Bordello. House of ill repute. Take your pick. Since words mean so much to you.’
‘Here’s another then: what did “running” mean exactly?’
‘Not what you might think. Not what I thought. Sounded like a dream job, but I found myself stuck behind a computer again. Nice irony. I went undercover looking for excitement, and ended up staring at spreadsheets in the back office of a brothel.’
‘You topped the bikies’ entrance exam too?’
A joke! I would have chuckled even if it wasn’t funny.
‘Turned out I was good at it. Middle management. The day-sheets, the rosters. The books. Both sets.’ A small laugh this time, another puff. If I stuck to the boring details, I might get through. ‘I put all the girls on part-time permanent, paid their workers comp, their super. Overtime. Medical insurance. Top tables, gold extras. Physios, chiropractors. Sex workers get a lot of muscle strains, Prof. Like dancers.’
I sensed her lean closer, hooked again on the exotica. Or was it the nicotine? Whichever, all trace of disapproval had gone.
‘I taught them first aid. CPR.’
Concern in her voice: ‘In case they got beaten up by clients?’
‘Mostly it was the clients who were in harm’s way. Over-excitement. Strain on the ticker.’
I chuckled again, beginning to relax. The dam wall seemed to be holding, the pressure receding as we smoked together.
‘I set up the webpages too. Designed the layouts. Wrote the blurbs. Photographed the girls.’
‘Naked?’
‘Their choice. Suggestive, topless, full frontal. Lingerie. Bikini. Arse-first. But not their faces. Mostly.’
‘Headless women,’ she said. ‘Every man’s fantasy.’
‘Their choice, remember. Not mine. Like I said, I had housewives on the books. Young mothers. Uni students. Once your face is online it’s online forever. Better just your boobs.’
‘The other body parts don’t count?’ she said, the disapproval back in her voice. ‘The other cuts of meat.’
‘I made up little stories about them all,’ I continued, trying to get things back on track. ‘Likes, dislikes. Bios. Star signs. The more exotic the better.’
‘I imagine you were good at that.’
‘Scratch a cop and you find a frustrated poet,’ I quoted Terry.
Silence. She lit up another two cigarettes, passed mine over.
‘What was her name?’ she said, eventually. ‘The girl who got attacked? Your girl?’
Another of those little words, my word, a word from my mouth, working away at the dam-crack like a different kind of crowbar.
‘Trixie,’ I said. ‘Trixie Rose.’
A snort. ‘I’ve never met anyone called Trixie in my life.’
‘A stage name,’ I told her. ‘I made those up too. Gave them to all the girls. Porn names, in the trade.’
‘It sounds rather demeaning. Like you were naming horses.’
‘I used a formula,’ I defended myself. ‘It never fails.’
She was all ears again, waiting, her disapproval back on hold.
‘The name of your first pet,’ I said. ‘Then the name of the street you grew up in.’
Silence while she worked out her own porn name, something else that never fails.
‘Well?’ I prompted.
‘Well what?’
‘Don’t even try, Prof.’
‘I grew up on Forest Street,’ she said, reluctantly.
‘And the pet? Your first pet?’
Her own dam broke in a splutter of words and laughter. ‘Fluffy,’ she said, ‘Fluffy Forest.’
‘Professor Fluffy Forest,’ I said, and we laughed together for a time.
‘Preposterous,’ she eventually murmured, and eased herself off the couch. I thought I was home free, the finishing bell no more than a few minutes away, until she sat down on the hard chair again. ‘Your girl was attacked by a patron?’
Textbook interrogation technique: soften me up with cigarettes and jokes, then the sucker-punch where it hurts. My girl? It was hard to own the word. It was also impossible not to, not least because she’d been under my protection. I had been responsible. I would always be responsible.
‘He wasn’t a client,’ I said.
She waited for more before prompting: ‘A club member?’
How much to tell? A slow drip-feed till the end of the round? ‘One of the young tearaways. Clueless, so they made him night manager. Which meant the muscle. Which mostly meant pouring drinks for the customers.’ Perhaps I could filibuster my way through to the bell. ‘Glorified bouncer. I remember one night–’
‘Let’s stick to the night in question, Richard.’
Inhalation, slow exhalation. ‘Things had gone quiet. I’d sent the other girls home. Got to work on some maintenance. Round midnight I walked down to the Hindley IGA for some superglue. Wood veneer on the bar was lifting.’
Again she cut me short: ‘I think we can dispense with the details.’
‘If you insist. I left him in charge. Trixie rang me a few minutes later. He was getting frisky. Wanted a freebie. Of course she said no.’
‘Of course?’
I bristled. ‘She was a student paying her way through uni. A part-timer. Not the town bike.’
‘Sorry,’ she said, although her tone didn’t sound sorry. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest …’
‘And you call me demeaning?’
Silence. I sensed her surprise at the feeling in my voice. It had burst out of me, helplessly, but had it revealed too much? It revealed something to me: even now, I wouldn’t hear a word against Trixie.
‘Point taken,’ she said eventually. ‘It was a thoughtless thing to say. Can we get back to the story?’
A deep breath; a calming smoke-ring. ‘She sounded worried. He’d smoked a couple of pipes and was getting out of hand.’
‘Pipes of?’
‘Ice.’
‘I thought you said no hard drugs.’
‘Officially, yes. I’d caught him with an eight-ball in the bar before. Selling on the side. But a club is a broad church. There were tensions between the old guard and the young bloods. No way I wanted to get caught up in that. So I turned a blind eye. So to speak.’ I sucked in a lungful of my own preferred drug. ‘And the clients lapped it up. Helped them get it up.’
I tried a chuckle, but she wasn’t interested. ‘You went straight back to the brothel? When she rang?’
I flinched, literally. Her words struck me like a handful of gravel.
‘You ever want a mid-life career change,’ I said, lamely, ‘you could walk into a job at Angas Street.’
Why had I started this conversation? Still trying to impress her? To take her on another walk on the wild side? Whichever, here I was cornered again.
‘You didn’t go straight back?’
‘I stopped for a yiros,’ I said, then fell silent, letting the words sink in – into my head as much as hers. If I deserved a stoning, I might as well stone myself.
Her fingers rescued the butt from mine. ‘You’re burning yourself again.’
She sat on the couch, thigh against thigh. Unable to speak, I averted my face in case it was speaking for me. I wanted to be out of there, now.
Miraculously, her alarm bleeped. I fumbled about for my stick, but the Professor’s hand was on my arm, restraining me.
‘Time’s up,’ I said, finding my voice.
‘No hurry, Richard. None at all. I’d like you to stay. Please.’
I didn’t seem to have a choice; her hand was on my chest now, gently easing me back.
‘The yiros,’ she prompted.
‘It was for her,’ I managed to get out. Little words again, the last one less a stone than a fishbone, sticking in my throat.
The Camel pack rustled; she lit another two. I sought refuge in mine while she smoked her own, patiently waiting.
Was it was best just to get it over with, get it out, like a dental extraction? I took a last, deep lungful of smoke and held it inside until I couldn’t.
‘I was still in the queue when she rang again. This time she was terrified. She’d locked herself in the downstairs loo. I could hear him banging on the door.’
A sharp intake of breath from her; another slow intake of smoke from me. If only someone would start banging on our door.
‘You rang the police?’
‘I was the police. And I’d left her alone. With him.’
‘This time you went back?’
‘Of course I went back!’ I snapped, taking an offence I had no right to. ‘Sprinted back. No sign of them downstairs. The loo was empty. The door knocked off its hinges with a fire extinguisher.’
I barely registered her gasp; all I knew was the redness of the extinguisher on the white-tiled floor, vivid in my mind’s eye.
‘Blood on the floor too,’ I said, then added, looking for a way out, ‘You sure you want to hear this?’
‘I’m a doctor,’ she reminded me. ‘I’m not made of china.’
‘And I’m a cop. But I’ve no fucking idea what I’m made of anymore.’
The honesty of this seemed to silence her, and allow me some breathing space – but I no longer needed it.
‘No sound anywhere. No clients. I ran upstairs, shouting her name. Still no answer. I went from room to room. I finally found her in the Jungle Room. Found both of them.’
One last pull on the fag-end. I’d spoken of that night to no one but Willow before, and with good reason. To speak of it was to remember it. Worse, to relive it. To see it, as I saw it clearly now.
She took the butt from my fingers, crushed it out, and lit up another. ‘I’ve treated police officers before,’ she said, her tone as gentle as the placement of the cigarette between my lips. ‘I understand how hard it is to talk about these things. Things no one should have to see.’
That wasn’t it at all, I wanted to say. I’d seen plenty of those things. Things in head-ons on country roads, things in burnt-out houses, things in shallow bush graves. Things in mortuaries. Things in stainless steel bowls. I’d seen as many horrors as a fucked-up world could throw at me, and then some. Smelt them just as often, their stink in my nostrils for days afterwards.
But they never came back to haunt me later.
‘There was a tiger-skin rug on the floor,’ I remembered, and was struck dumb again by the stark visual power of this detail. Perhaps I could get through this by focusing on the details.
The Professor sounded puzzled: ‘She was on a tiger-skin rug?’
‘The Jungle Room, remember? She was lying facedown. He was on his knees. Fucking her doggie fashion.’ If I couldn’t look away myself, perhaps I could still shock her into looking away. ‘Thing is, she was all floppy. And not making a sound. None at all. You pay for sex, you pay for noise, Prof. It’s part of …’
‘She was dead?’
‘Out cold. But I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know what to think. I couldn’t figure it out.’
‘You stood there and watched?’
‘I grabbed him by the hair and threw him across the room.’
But, yes, then watched. ‘First Responder Protocols,’ I said. ‘Step One: Threat Suppression. Then take a moment to check for hazards.’
She might have been convinced, but I wasn’t. The only hazard was slumped against the wall, holding his head and groaning – ‘What ya do that for? Couldn’t wait ya fucking turn?’ And still I stood there, helpless.
‘Step Two, Haemorrhage Control,’ I said, desperate to persuade myself now.
Was I too late? Was he fucking a dead woman? Her head was twisted sideways, the eyes in her bloodied face as vacant as the glassy eyes of the tiger. She might have been a trophy herself, a rug of human flesh. None of these confused thoughts making sense. The tiger’s snout also weirdly bloodied. Had the big cat killed her?
‘Dunno what all the fuss is about anyway. Just lies there. Worst fuck I ever had.’
His voice getting closer, a living predator crawling back towards its victim on all fours.
‘You want to jump the queue, brother? I’ll take one end, you take the other.’
I unfroze, roused by those automatic protocols. They, at least, still made sense. Back to Step One: Remove all Hazards. I lashed out with my boot; connected with the side of his chest.
He was so wasted he hardly felt it. ‘What the fuck’s that for?’ he wheezed, winded. ‘You want her, dickhead, you can fucken have her.’
I kicked him in the head, hard, and he grunted and rolled away, belly-up, and said nothing more.
‘You killed him?’ a voice arrived from the present, close-by.
I thought I had, when – as if by some trade-off of souls, one life for another – she coughed. And the autopilot resuscitation routines finally took over, and I dropped to my knees at her side.
Step Three: Response. ‘Can you hear me, sweetheart?’
No answer. Step Four: Airway. I rolled her onto her side, checked her breathing: regular.
Step Five: Pulse. I pressed two fingers to her neck: strong.
She coughed again; whimpered. A fresh runnel of blood from her damaged nose. Her eyes half-opened. Her beautiful eyes. ‘Rick?’
‘I’m here, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘You’re safe.’
‘She survived?’ The other woman’s voice again, the Professor. The confessor today, sitting hip-to-hip on a couch with me, her hand gripping my knee as if to keep me with her in the present.
‘Fractured nose,’ I said, with one foot still in the past. And both eyes: definitely both eyes. ‘The fire extinguisher, probably. That was the last thing she could remember later.’
‘And – him?’
This was as strange and vivid as anything in my head: a predator sprawled motionless on its back, limbs spread, a pair of jeans around its hind-ankles, an ice-fuelled cock jutting up, half-stiff, like a single curved claw.
I should have killed him when I had the chance, I wanted to shout. I wish I’d killed him. I should have ripped his cock off and shoved it down his throat. I should have ripped his heart out.
But those words, any words, large or small, weren’t even close. I shook off her hand, sat up, leant forward, and vomited onto the floor, explosively.
‘It’s okay, Richard. I’ll clean it up. Richard! Don’t move! Please! Watch where you put your feet! Where are you going? You’ve stepped in it. Come back. We still have things to talk about.’
Actually, not. Everything I needed to say, everything I wanted to say, was lying in a puddle under the couch.
‘I’ll ring later,’ she called after me. ‘To check on you. And I can see you again tomorrow. Same time. Please.’