Afterlight (20 page)

I met Carter’s gaze without flinching as I described to him the moment I’d stood
on the train tracks inside Eve’s dead memory and witnessed her fear.

‘She’d been running from someone that night,’ I murmured.

Carter went pale. ‘Do you think it was him? O’Loughlin?’

He shivered, rubbing his bare arms and reaching for a packet of smokes and a lighter
on a side table before pulling his hand back when he saw me looking.

‘I don’t have any answers, remember? Only questions,’ I said, jumping as the sound
of arguing voices erupted somewhere at the back of the house. Carter went white as
the volume climbed and I finally worked out from the
hee haw
,
hee haw
of the laughter,
the back and forth, that it was drive-time radio. A couple of comedians, going at
it. Then a silence, just as abrupt.

‘You see?’ Carter hunched over like he was in pain. ‘Now the lights,’ he murmured,
almost absent-mindedly, as the single pendant light in the hallway went on and off,
twice, the rhythm crisp and defined like a kid was playing with the switch.

I was hunching now, too, as I stared up at the three-armed chandelier in the ceiling,
wondering if it was going to go next.

But she was feeling playful. Carter and I almost fell
off our seats as the sewing
machine behind us sewed a phantom seam for a full ten seconds or more, then fell
still and silent.

I found that I was hugging myself so tightly that it hurt.

‘The first week after she disappeared,’ Carter whispered through his fingers, ‘the
lights would flicker, or the radio would go, the TV. I’d be asleep and then
bam
.
Beethoven. Or bible bashers. Ninja steak knives. Just enough to wake me. Just one
thing. Not every night. A reminder, maybe. That she was still around.’ He uncovered
his face. ‘As if I’d ever forget. But I tried to ignore it. It’s not much, but this
is my
house
. It’s all I’ve got. She knows that. Knew. So I refused to look or engage
or believe. Until last night.’ He rubbed at the stubble beneath his jawline with
a rasping sound.

‘I was asleep. I’d done two shows back-to-back. I was exhausted. Even the sound of
a TV firing up on its own wouldn’t have woken me and she knew it. So what does she
do?’

I rocked forward, not wanting to hear, my crossed arms resting across the tops of
my thighs.

‘She
gets into bed with me
,’ he murmured. ‘The way she sometimes did when sleep wouldn’t
come and she wanted to talk, even if I didn’t. It’s her arms I’m feeling around my
waist, her legs sliding through mine, her hair…’ Carter’s eyes were wild. ‘It’s lying
across my pillow, I swear I can
feel it, and I almost run out into the street, screaming.
I actually beg her to show me how I’m supposed to help her. I’m screaming:
What am
I supposed to do?
’

We both leap about a foot into the air as loud warning bells begin to clang outside.

Outside.

At the railway crossing.

Daughtry.

I was so relieved by the sound of the bells, I felt dizzy. Jordan would be here soon.

Without looking at me, Carter suddenly jumped to his feet and snatched up his smokes
and lighter, stuffing them into a back pocket of his jeans. He grabbed a hair band
out of a mess of clips in a tarnished silver bowl on a hallstand by the door and
pulled his huge man-fro into a low bun. It made him look like a sixteen-year-old
girl. A very scared, tall, flat-chested sixteen-year-old girl with the most beautiful
eyes you’d ever see.

‘Uh…’ I said, as I half rose from my sagging armchair and glanced out the front window.
Any minute now, any minute, Jordan, Daughtry, please.

Carter ignored me, shrugging hurriedly into a black hooded parka that had been hanging
on a hook behind the sitting room door. He stuffed his long feet into a pair of flashy
blue and yellow trainers, and the T-shirt from Eve into one of the large outer pockets
of his coat.

Then, without waiting, Carter walked straight out his front door, slamming it behind
him while the bells clanged and clanged incessantly.

What was
I
supposed to do now?

Cursing and calling, ‘Wait!
Wait!
’, I thumbed my phone on and sent Jordan a frantic
text:

On the move
.
Come find me. Hurry.

16

I trailed Carter as he strode down Branxholme Street, his arms wrapped around his
middle, head bowed. He didn’t look back once. I still had my phone in my hand, waiting
for a message from Jordan that wouldn’t come. Carter was moving so quickly that we
soon turned a corner and his house and the railway station were lost to sight.

Carter took a steady downhill path. As we crossed over street after street—the occasional
lonely hoot of a train’s siren sounding in the distance—we didn’t encounter a single
car or pedestrian.

A dog barked as we crossed a narrow stretch of tarred road lined with old timber
houses and then I heard running water. We were in the cool green region of the
map
Jordan and I had pulled up on my computer at home.

A gloomy tangle of willow trees
and prickly pear, and green things I didn’t recognise, choked and twined beside a
fast-flowing body of water. Every inch of me tingled in recognition.

Merri Creek.

It seemed more like a swollen river, the way it rushed and tumbled through the corridor
of trees and low-hanging boughs. Soon, any evidence of human habitation was lost
to sight. We were alone beside the racing water, enclosed in a dark canopy of green.

‘Carter!’ I called, suddenly craving the nearness of another living body. ‘Wait up!’

He didn’t, but slowed down enough for me to almost catch him as he crossed a narrow
wooden foot bridge choked with plastic bottles, a sea of them bobbing against the
footings, white as bones. Inexplicably, there was a large, silver TV sticking out
of the centre of the fast flowing current, its partially snapped-off antennae doing
a lopsided victory sign.

I crossed the slick wooden walkway to the opposite bank. The recent rains had been
heavy, and the choked and swirling water came almost all the way up to the slats.

Carter’s gait was purposeful. I kept pace behind him up the narrow bike trail. From
the bank, I saw a mattress, an armchair, another TV, abandoned in the middle of the
flow.
The temperature seemed to be lowering, the wind rising. If it weren’t for the
asphalt beneath my feet, the hard rubbish in the water, we might have entered a primeval
time.

We passed lush banks of dandelion, nettles and blackberries gone wild with the rain.
Turning another corner, whole bends of the creek—root and branch—were draped with
shreds and streamers of ghostly bleached plastic that rippled in the wind; the harvest
of a multitude of storm water drains. The sight was both eerie and beautiful.

The path hugging the creek gradually began climbing. I counted two more drowned TVs
far out in the water, each one bigger than the last, analogue victims of the digital
era. The second of these—the size of a small car—was buried at the foot of a huge,
Victorian-era bluestone bridge, just outside the shadow of the giant arch. Carter
and I passed beneath the bridge, and every footstep we took now echoed sharply. It
seemed colder here, and I hurried to get through and out into what light remained.

The path ran steeply upwards after the bridge, spilling into a grassy nature reserve
bordered by playing fields. The trees thinned out, and through the towering pines
and gum trees, I saw that the sky was dark and leaden now, almost a night-time sky,
though my phone told me it was just after 4pm.

Ahead, Carter was standing beside a drinking fountain, lighting the cigarette a
man was holding out to him.
The stranger was stocky, with a broad, tanned face under
a salt-and-pepper crew cut. He had on a shirt and blue jeans, and the kind of beat-up
leather jacket Jordan would wear. Carter and I had inches on him, and I slowed as
I got closer to them, unsure whether they knew each other and I was intruding.

The older guy spotted me hanging back on the footpath. ‘Mind if I smoke?’ he rasped.
‘Dying for a smoke.’

Carter shook his head and lit his own cigarette, continuing to ignore me. While the
older man looked at each of us in turn, Carter finished his first, grinding it out
beneath the toe of his shoe, and started on another.

‘About to bucket down,’ the stranger said, gazing at the sky. ‘Taking your life in
your own hands, son, heading down this path.’

He blew a long stream of smoke at us before grinding out his smoke with one Cuban
heel. With a friendly wave, he strode out towards the row of period, pretty-as-gingerbread
houses bordering the reserve.

When the man was out of earshot, Carter abruptly started talking like he couldn’t
stop—like something inside him had broken.

‘She was high strung, you know? She was running scams, running guys, left, right
and centre. But a great girl, really. Fearless. You felt invincible when you were
with Mon. She was outrageous: bigger, bolder, bustier than
anyone. Into everything:
tabletop, escort work, glamour shots, promotionals. She’d get her clothes off for
the opening of an envelope if there was money in it. She’s always been a night owl,
couldn’t get her out of bed before two in the afternoon, it drove me bananas, but
she was magnetic, you know? You couldn’t look away from her. Even without the ice,
the speed, the crack, she always had tonnes of energy. A real powerhouse…’

His voice broke and trailed away as he nervously lit another ciggie. I found his
rambling description of her hard to reconcile with the sober, black-clad, barefoot
figure with the unbound black hair that haunted me like a snatch of music I couldn’t
name. Eve looked like an unsmiling nun with no shoes.

‘I told her I didn’t want none of that shit at my place—the drugs, the toughs—so
I suppose that’s what she was doing when she wasn’t hiding out from Keith O’Loughlin;
trying to use or score on the sly, meeting up with the man
du jour
. So it’s my fault
she went out there that night, mine…’

He pushed the heel of one trembling hand against his nose and closed his eyes.

Carter’s voice was calmer when he said, ‘You weren’t far wrong when you said she
seemed a bit evil. She’s like a tornado—had a knack of sucking all the air and goodwill
out of a place in seconds flat. When she was good she was
very, very good and when
she was bad? You just got the hell out of there and kept running.’

Carter gave me a tremulous smile, the raw wind buffeting us both as he fumbled the
T-shirt Monica had left him out of a pocket of his parka.

‘We’re never going to know how it ended,’ he said, as the rain began to fall. ‘So
we make our own end, and our own peace. Come on. Before the moisture plays
havoc
with our hair, girlfriend.’

As he finished speaking, I realised Eve was standing behind him. And when she turned,
he turned, too, as if to follow, though it was clear he couldn’t see her. Only me.

It seemed fitting that she was there.

I pulled my hood back up uselessly over my head as the three of us passed back across
the reserve under the tall pines, through the rain.

And through everything that nature threw at us, Eve remained inviolate: stern, serene,
untouched by the elements. Beautiful.

So like my mother that the sight of her was like the feeling of a fishbone caught
in the soft tissues of my throat.

‘This will do!’ Carter shouted and his voice bounced off the undercarriage of the
giant stone arch, black in the
rain. The T-shirt was still wrapped around one fist,
wet through now. He looked half-drowned, the curls against his temples lying flat
and stringy against his pale skin, thin black streamers washing down from his eyes
into his dark stubble.

As we’d backtracked through the downpour, Eve had dissipated before me without warning.
So it was just Carter and me now, marooned inside a vast waterfall. Beyond the arch
of the bridge, the air sizzled with rain, a wall of grey either side of us that seemed
almost solid.

‘At least it’s drier under here,’ Carter said, his words coming back at us in sibilant,
echoing waves. ‘Good a place as any.’

I knew that he’d brought us here to say goodbye. And it no longer surprised me that
I was here, with him—some guy I barely knew. None of this seemed remotely strange
any more. I realised that Eve was as voiceless and helpless as I used to feel, a
ghost on the sidelines just wanting someone to notice she was there. When she’d been
alive, we would never have had the slightest thing in common. But dead, she and I
shared the condition of being cut off from the ordinary flow of life, and I knew
I didn’t want to accept that any more. She’d shown me that.

She is You
, Eve had told Claudia P. But the words could have been meant for me.