Diamond Eyes (13 page)

‘Major progress is deserving of a
major
reward, though!’

‘Restoration of her personal privileges
is
a major reward. Considering that she’s hurt virtually everyone who’s ever worked with her, it’s a wonder she can even remember what it’s like to have privileges.’

‘She didn’t hurt me deliberately.’

‘Oh, yes, it was an accident. Look, Ben, we can argue in circles all afternoon, but the facts are simple. Mira has been institutionalised since she was twelve years old. That was the last time she cooperated in an IQ test, or any other form of psychoanalysis for that matter, so who knows how clever she really is? She certainly seems to know our strategies even better than we do.’

‘Even if she is still plotting something, surely you must agree that her progress in one day is astounding?’

‘Haven’t I already said as much? I’m also keen to see what she can do in a week.’

‘A
week?’
Ben snapped. ‘Matron, a week for Mira might as well be a year. She’s been working hard all day, expecting to earn her first gate pass
today,
even if it’s too late to use it until tomorrow or the weekend. She couldn’t care less about her personal privileges — she’s used to going without. And if I lose her trust now, who knows if I’ll ever get it back?’

‘If you lose her trust now, you never really had it.’ Sanchez snapped closed the report folder and handed it back to Ben for filing. ‘Come back in a week. If she’s managed to behave the whole time without hurting anyone, I’ll sign a fresh application. If she’s made further progress as well, I might make it for a whole weekend.’

‘Matron,’ he pleaded, ‘surely there must be some way to make it happen sooner?’

‘Certainly! Convince her it’s time to take out those terrible stitches. We’re running out of time before her eyelids heal closed permanently. So I’ve booked her in for tomorrow’s clinic, first thing in the morning — and I’m sure you can imagine how happy she’ll be when she wakes to find that I’ve been forced to exercise my obligation as her legal guardian.’

Ben nodded but left the office fuming. At the end of the hall, he punched the freshly painted wall, leaving a fist-print. In the garden, he swatted petals and thorns from a rose bush as he took a shortcut to the staff car park. Once there, he kicked the tyre of his rusted crimson Camaro — a two-seater ‘69 model, the same car in which his parents, while still sweethearts, had accidentally conceived him. He rested his head against the roof near the driver’s door; the window reflected his mood as well as his image.

Why couldn’t Sanchez see how disastrous this would be? She wasn’t the same Maddy Sanchez he’d worked with years ago on the mainland.

He glanced at the front gate, lamenting the wasted effort in staying back on his own time to argue Mira’s case. But it wasn’t the lost time that really worried him, nor the sense of helplessness that reminded him of six years behind bars. It was Mira, and the only way she could take the news of his broken promise, not tomention the prospect of having her stitches removed forcibly.

Resentment boiled his blood, turning his cheeks red. None of the other staff knew as he did how wretched it felt to be wrongfully imprisoned. Hour by dragging hour, often wishing himself dead. Yet here was a young woman who clearly felt the same — unnecessarily — and now he was restrained for no solid reason from helping her.

An old woman grunted behind him. He turned to see her approach with an armful of wilted flowers, her hair tasselled with twigs and her teeth muddy with chewed leaves, reminding him of a witch from a childhood fairytale. Behind her, he could see the very real mischief she’d been up to: a row of four other staff cars all raggedly decorated with piles of garden debris.

Good for you,
he thought all too bitterly.
Unafraid to express yourself with a little initiative.

She smiled and stepped closer, offering her wilted flowers to him and grunting a wordless request to provide the same service to his car.

‘No, Phoebe,’ he said firmly, but kindly. He ushered her aside before she could stuff a wilted branch under his windowscreen wiper. ‘You shouldn’t make private cars into floats for the festival. The owners need to drive them home tonight.’

She dumped her bundle, screamed, wailed, stamped her feet and tugged at her frazzled grey hair.

‘Yeah, I know. You’re doing time anyway, so what’s the harm in a little crime?’

She screamed louder and curled her fingers into fists, preparing to punch herself.

‘All right! Okay. You can decorate
that
car.’ He pointed to the matron’s neon-pink Volkswagen Beetle. ‘She lives here. But you’d better hurry back to your ward after that, okay? You’ve nearly missed out on your afternoon tea.’

Phoebe stooped to collect her twigs and glanced up at him, grinning broadly, mud and chewed leaves still clinging to her teeth.

‘And stop eating dirt. It’ll ruin your appetite, amongst other things.’

He unlocked his car and climbed in, casting Mira’s file onto the passenger seat. At home, he intended to scour the pages for ideas to help him do or say anything that might alleviate the bad news for Mira so she’d stay cooperative and focused on future progress. But now that he stared at the blank cover of her file, he was stung by a primal urge to help her in a more direct way. There’d often been times in his childhood when his mother had to protect him by drawing a circle around him in the sand and warning him never to cross it. Inside, he’d had all the little luxuries he’d needed to play and build sandcastles, while outside were the bad people and enough ocean to drown him. That brief age of innocence had long evaporated, but could he do the same for Mira now? The trouble was, all Mira’s nemeses were already inside her safe circle.

Hardened and bitter by his own lost years, Ben no longer feared society’s censure as he’d once done — and certainly not if some good might come from defying the rules. Surely after all he’d been through, he was owed one brief digression? And if that digression would almost certainly save Mira from a life sentence that offered even less hope of freedom than his own comparatively brief period of incarceration, then surely it had to be worth it. In barely a few hours, the benefits would greatly outweigh the risks — which would have been nil anyway if the matron hadn’t been so unusuallypigheaded about a gate pass or the availability of a government car to go with it.

And she did say that she’d hired me for being unorthodox and daring.

Freddie watched them crossing the small lawn from the broad bough of a tree, like a leopard watching prey graze and walk away.

He was full. He’d fed upon the echoes of their conversation a dozen times in the last fortnight, each day with the echoes growing softer amidst the rage of others. Until today. Psst! They broke the soft end of the sound barrier.

Now, as Ben and Mira finally claimed their garden stage, Freddie had to read their silent words from their lips.

A glutton for punishment, watching them filled him with such dread and fear, he felt ill. He tried to console himself that he might be wrong, that Fate might yet deal a twist that would issue a fresh scream of repercussions. Reassuring too was the fact that he’d already managed to nudge the future in a fresh direction by stitching Mira’s eyelids closed.

Abduction was also a big deal, especially for an excon who’d managed to secure himself a decent job, and yet Ben had felt pressured into it on his first day with Mira. To him, keeping his promise was worth the risk of losing his job.

So Freddie stayed silent in his tree, watching Ben fold her gently into the boot of his car; the leopard sheathing his claws and gnawing at bark. Too easy it would have been to shout an alarm. And perhaps he should have. Mira would never be safe on the mainland once her secret was out, but at this particular branch in time, Freddie was the only other person in the world who could have guessed it. Mira didn’t yetunderstand it herself. How cruel would he have been, though, to stop them now and rob her of one perfect moment of bliss?

He watched their car until it disappeared over the bridge, then slinked down from his tree, seeking solace again in the dungeons. And along the way, he pegged a few stones at seagulls.

Poetry is nearer to vital
truth than history

Plato

B
en noticed a motorcycle cop ahead of him, on the mainland side of the bridge, right where he’d planned to stop and let Mira out to sit in the front.

The cop was taking a break in the shade of a palm tree, conducting surveillance on a group of bikini-clad jet skiers who were pestering a flotilla of small fishing craft.

As Ben’s car exited the bridge, the cop’s helmet turned as if watching him. Ben checked his rear-view mirror, alarmed to see the cop pull onto the road behind him and accelerate to keep pace.

How could he know?

Mira had only just finished her afternoon tea of cake and juice, and had been quietly reading Braille poetry in her room when Ben had returned for her. They had a three-hour window until anyone was due to check in on her or deliver her hot evening meal at six. She’d been so keen to avoid another run-in with the Napoleonic guard at the gate that she’d insisted on riding in the boot, even though Ben had managed to swipe a blank day pass from the unguarded receptionist’s desk and fill it out with a scrawl that approximated the matron’s — except for the signature, which was little more than a swirl.

He double-checked his speed and began to sweat as the cop followed him through two roundabouts to the edge of the small fishing settlement, where ramshackle housing gave way to swampy farmland. Turning right onto a narrower road, Ben took a shortcut through cane fields to the freeway, but the cop followed, flashing his lights as a signal for Ben to pull over.

Heart pounding, he obeyed, keeping both hands on the wheel where the cop could see them. The guy was built like an armoured truck and Ben had no desire to upset him.

‘Nice wheels!’ he said. ‘Where did you steal them?’

‘The car’s mine,’ Ben replied flatly. ‘I salvaged it.’
From the floor of the bay,
he didn’t add; after his mother had driven it down a boat ramp in a drunken attempt at joining his father in the afterlife.

‘No kidding? Driver’s licence and registration papers?’

Ben sighed and retrieved them from the glove compartment.

‘How fast can she go?’ The cop leaned in for a closer look at the battered old dashboard.

‘No faster than the speed limit, Officer.’ Ben forced a smile and handed over the documents. ‘Unless I missed a sign back there?’

‘If you did, I did. I just spotted you as a likely candidate for a random licence check.’ The cop glanced from the photo ID to Ben’s face, with his new goatee making him look quite different, and down to his name. ‘You’re Bennet
Chiron?
Any relation to Mellow?’

‘She’s my mother. Why?’

The cop shrugged. ‘Used to know her in high school.’ He looked flustered as he flipped awkwardly through the papers until he found Ben’s home address on North Stradbroke Island. ‘You still live on Straddy?’

Ben nodded.

‘Must be expensive driving this baby back and forth across the bay, hey? You don’t leave her unattended on the mainland, do you?’

‘My dad left us a small share in the ferries, which makes it free every day except weekends. Look, I don’t want to sound rude or anything, but can I go if there’s nothing wrong? A friend of mine is expecting me to take her out soon.’

‘Hot date, hey?’

Ben nodded again. ‘She’s probably very hot by now.’

The cop tossed Ben’s licence and proof-of-ownership papers back at him. ‘Sure, buddy.’ He patted the roof. ‘Tell your mum I said hi, okay? The name’s Pete Innes-Grady. Got that?’

‘Sure do.’
Hard to forget a cop with those initials.

Ben veered back onto the road, taking care not to accelerate too swiftly until he’d lost sight of the cop in his rear-vision mirror. After suburbia faded into cane fields, he turned sharply into the driveway of an environmental school at Jacobs Well. The gates closed as a bus left to return noisy students to their normal schools in time for 3 pm, leaving nobody around except a short dark-haired woman with a large python draped casually around her neck. Ben waited for her to walk from one building to another, then he scrambled out to the boot.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said, frantically helping Mira until her legs steadied. ‘I hate cops and I often think they can smell it.’

Mira placed her hand on the roof of the Camaro and allowed Ben to steer her towards the passenger door. ‘Red cars look faster than others, don’t they?’

‘I guess so.’

He helped her to fasten her safety belt and was climbing back into the driver’s seat when he realised the significance of what she’d said. ‘How do you know my car’s red?’

Mira placed a finger over her lips and made a shushing sound. ‘I’m not allowed to talk about that.’