4

We opened the first box on the concrete marina between two police buses, protected from the media by more blue plastic tarps. Everyone was pretty sure what we were going to find, but rather than driving people away it sucked them in, a macabre freak show. Eden and I crowded around the box with the area chief and a forensic specialist while the nobodies of the investigation whispered and shushed each other. The sun beat in on the side of the tarps, illuminating the shadows of dozens of bodies.

The forensic guy knelt down and wedged a chisel under the rusted lock of the toolbox, prying it open gently. Eden stood over him with her arms folded. She took off her sunglasses and her dark eyes examined the careful process, her head tilted slightly as though she could already smell the terrible stench that would erupt when the sludge seals were broken.

I saw the face first. The girl hadn’t been cut up to fit into the box, as we found later that many others had. She was curled in a fetal position with her hands and feet tucked under her body, her torso a perfect fit for the confines of her coffin. Her face was pressed into the dark corner, her nose a little lifted and her milky eyes wide open. She was fresh. Around a week dead by my guess. Tiny life-forms panicked and streaked over the surface of the water in the box, taking shelter in the folds of her body. The girl’s long blond hair was tangled around her throat, swirling like seaweed in the disturbed water. There were wounds on her, deep grooves in her lower back, but the inside of the box was dark and I couldn’t see them properly at my angle. Her thin bony back was milk white, blotched here and there by the draining of blood and fluids. It was as though she had curled up in there to hide and someone had sunk her to the bottom of the ocean.

I looked at Eden. There was no emotion in her face. She stared down at the girl as though she were reading the fine print on a contract, attentive but distant. The area chief covered his mouth and nose with his hand against the smell.

“What is she?” I asked the forensic guy. “Sixteen?”

“Eleven. Twelve.”

I chewed my lip. When no one spoke, I shrugged and said what everyone was probably thinking.

“She’s pretty fresh. Probably that missing girl.”

“Shut it up,” Eden ordered, turning and pulling away a corner of the tarp where men and women scrambled back to let her through.

 

 

Most people hate the smell of mice. Jason had never understood that. There was something earthy and wet and warm about the smell of rodents, something natural that defied the sterility of the modern home. It brought him back to his childhood, to the caverns and tunnels and alleyways made by the beams beneath the house. He would crawl in there and dig treasures into the dirt, peer through the floorboards, listen to conversations. There were mice and rats under the house, nestled into crevices and squeezed into dugouts, small cities of rolled and coiled newspaper and dried grass. Jason liked to watch their little families, the licking and stroking and picking they imposed on each other, the silent ease with which they decided to sleep or play or fight. Things were not like that in his family. There was only noise and pain, locked doors and crying in the night. The mice didn’t care if he picked his nails, if he couldn’t recite his multiplication tables, whether his shirt was ironed or his face clean. The mice couldn’t hurt him. The mice couldn’t call him names. He envied their uncomplicated lives.

Jason was fascinated by the things that humans shared with the animals and the things they tried to leave behind. Bonds really puzzled him. Curled in his bare immaculate room, reading silently beneath the blankets by the light of a small flashlight, he had read that brolgas—those lanky, dancing, stony-colored birds that strolled the lake near his home—found a partner to breed with and stayed with that mate for life, no matter what. Imagine that. Jason had set out the next weekend on his lone wanderings to find a brolga and see this incredible natural magic in action. On the way he encountered some of his schoolmates—cruel, freckled, sun-bleached kids who threw pencils at him in class and made fun of the way his mother cut his hair. They were huddled in a group skipping rocks by the edge of the lake. When they set upon him, sneering and laughing and pointing and interrogating him about his purpose, he explained what he knew about the brolga and that he planned to catch one alive. All day under the wicked sun he labored to catch one of the swift, graceful, wide-winged birds. He used every conceivable trick he could think of—creeping, swimming, snaring, baiting, trying to strike them down with rocks. The schoolkids had hounded him like a rabble of street dogs, yabbering and rolling and barking laughter every time he failed. When Jason finally got hold of a bird and its mate had rushed out of the water, squawking and honking and flapping its wings in fury, the children had fallen silent, awed, and Jason had laughed, victorious. He’d teased the angry bird by wringing his partner’s neck, slowly, gently, scattering the feathers in the wind. The male bird filled the air with its noise. Jason turned to his schoolmates and grinned, showing them the limp bird.

“See?” he said. “They love each other. Animals can love each other too.”

Sometimes the animals he hunted and trapped and played with in the wild weren’t enough. Jason liked to have animals in his life. His ever-expanding collection of beetles, lizards, snakes, his encouragement of stray cats and dogs, got him beaten and locked up and starved plenty of times but the impulse never completely died. The animals didn’t want anything from Jason other than food, affection, warmth. He loved their stupidity, their simplistic natures. Make a dog your own, secure its loyalty, and you can beat that dog within an inch of death and it will return to you, love you, guard you. Jason knew that. He admired loyalty. It reminded him of the brolgas. Jason was fascinated by the intersection between wild and dependent things, becoming a slave of one creature to another. The unnaturalness of it. Much of life was like that. He wanted to scratch, to bite, to fight, to crawl away into tight holes and forget the world outside. Instead he was a loyal dog, a beaten yet obedient creature, an enemy to his own instincts. A mouse living in a tank instead of a hole.

The small dark apartment in Chatswood wasn’t right for anything larger than a tank of mice but the adult Jason didn’t mind. He sat by the tank in the mornings and watched them going about their business—digging or sleeping, running madly on the little plastic wheel.

When he put his finger into the tank one of them rushed forward and gripped on, hoisting its warm velvet-soft body up onto his hand. Trusting. He sat in the light from the venetian blinds, cracked open just enough to allow some view of the outside world, and ran the mouse over his hands, smiling at its frantic dash from one palm to another, over and over, never recognizing where it had been, no care for where it was going. People were inexplicably like mice. Panicky, wide-eyed, utterly at the will of a callous, fleshy-palmed god.

Jason put the mouse on the table and watched it sniff and scurry around the objects lying there, the scalpels of various sizes lined up in foam trays, the glass bottles and packets of paper towels, the rolled bandages and coils of medical wire. The mouse stopped and munched on the edge of a stack of papers littered with names, ages, birthdates, blood types, addresses. Beginning at the corner of the page, it tore tiny strips off with its pink paws.

Taking a scalpel from the tray, Jason pinched the mouse’s ear between his thumb and forefinger gently, feeling its impossible thinness and softness, his most careful touch surrendering the creature’s entire head to his will. A whisper of flesh. He looked at the scalpel, considered, then gave the ear a wag. He let the mouse go, stroking its curved spine with the flat of the blade. Ticcing, twitching, jittering life beneath the fur. Jason lifted the scalpel, let it dangle, point down, before releasing it. The point of the scalpel dug into the table a few centimeters from the mouse’s right front paw. The animal was unfazed. Jason pried the instrument from the wood, lifted it again, higher this time, and aimed better. The scalpel chunked into the wood, just missing the mouse’s nose.

The television, barely audible, caught his attention. On the screen police officers were swarming on a pier like ants, crawling over it, meeting each other, gnashing pincers and pawing, all in black. In one sequence a young man was being ushered unwillingly into a van. Jason had encountered him in the early hours of that morning, a man he had been certain he would never see again. More panning shots of the crowded marina and then one of a steel toolbox. Jason felt fury and pride tingle in him briefly before the familiar calm smothered the emotions. He sucked air between his teeth.

When the story ended he looked back at the creature on the table, carefully cleaning its whiskers by his hand. Careless, brainless thing. Jason lifted the scalpel at a full arm’s height, squinted, let it settle in his fingers for a long moment before letting it go.