Feeding the Demons (6 page)

When she finally went to sleep that night, it was to dream fitfully about her father and the green Ford and two killers who were watching her house.

‘Please come in, Clive,’ Kit said, in a pleasant, neutral voice, standing back to allow him to walk ahead of her down the hallway to the consulting room on the left. While waiting for him, she had opened windows and patted up the cushions and pillows, focusing her mind on her client. Because she worked somatically there was no desk and chair in this office, which troubled many of her clients at the beginning of their work with her. They were used to being safely on the other side of their therapist’s desk, or at least sitting in familiar chairs. Kit’s therapeutic approach, based in bioenergetic analysis, was directed at helping her clients regain the sense of their bodily selves and, eventually, the bliss of being. But at first they sat on the floor with her, with greater or lesser degrees of comfort, depending on their bodily distortions.

Clive Mindell’s wife had left him after twenty-seven years because they’d ‘grown apart’ as he termed it. To his shock, he’d found himself impotent with his new girlfriend. He’d tried Viagra, but had developed severe headaches. ‘I don’t like the idea of sticking needles in my cock’ he’d told her on his last visit and Kit could only agree. He’d heard that somatic work—‘whatever that means’—could help him to ‘perform’. Kit had listened attentively, noting his language.

As he walked, his physical and emotional contradictions seemed even clearer to Kit than they’d been the week before. It was often the case that once she’d discussed her work with Alexander, she found more levels of awareness, more clarity. Watch the look before the cringe, she reminded herself. Clive walked straight into her room and looked around.

‘This place is hard to find. That’s why I’m late. Still no chairs I see?’ he said in his barking voice.

‘Still no chairs,’ she agreed. She sat down on the floor so as to allow him to dominate the space and watched him. From this angle, she could observe Clive’s structure: the puffed-up upper body and neck, all the energy pushing upwards towards the head, neck and chest; his face, too, had a bloated look, as if there was too much pressure pumped up there. In fact, his whole cranium looked distended. She took note again of the small pelvis and underdeveloped thighs and legs, the lack of power and energy in the lower body. Just for a second, she was reminded of a Toby Jug puppet, all huge body and trailing, fabric legs.

Clive was very uneasy, looking around, trying to seem unconcerned. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘here goes.’ He got down clumsily on legs that seemed disconnected from the rest of him. Kit sat nearby, waiting for him to start.

‘My girlfriend has called it off with me,’ he suddenly said. ‘Because I came here. So impotence doesn’t matter now, does it.’ Suddenly it was there again, the cringe, but she was too late, she’d missed the moment just before it.

Kit smiled. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Does it?’

There was a silence. ‘What will you do?’ Kit finally asked.

Clive shrugged. ‘Not sure. Probably focus more on my work. I might take up flying again.’

Kit was beginning to get the story of his childhood. Over the months, she would get the rest, the suffering, the grief that had gone to make up this difficult man; the way he had learned to defend himself from the earliest times, creating this puffed-up structure to hide his vulnerability from the world. Clive leaned closer to her, uncomfortable at their mutual eye levels. ‘I want you to get stuck into me,’ he said. ‘Start the body work. I’m really ready for it.’ There was something like a leer behind his eyes, Kit thought.

‘When your body energy tells me it’s ready for that, I will,’ she said. ‘But not until then.’

‘But I’m telling you,’ he said. ‘You can start now.’

Kit smiled and gently shook her head. ‘I can sense a lot of resistance in your body,’ she said.

He looked bewildered. ‘What do you mean, resistance?’

Kit looked squarely at him. It was not her practice to discuss too much with people who’d lived in their heads all their lives; people who could talk all day about feelings without ever experiencing any. ‘I connect with you at an energy level and I know you are telling me to keep away. I’m respecting that.’

‘What energy? What are you talking about?’

‘Your energy. The part of you that makes you go.’ She smiled again. A child would understand exactly what she meant, she thought, visualising children so filled with fizzing energy that they had to run and yell and spin around for the sheer joy of it. She saw Clive’s bafflement and decided to tell him something of herself. ‘My body was once very tight and narrow,’ she said, and she could see him looking at her and frowning. ‘I used to get terrible headaches, as well.’

‘What happened,’ asked Clive, who had been listening intently, ‘that made things different?’

‘I started doing the sort of therapy that I now offer you,’ she said.

‘It’s all a bit vague though, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘This energy business.’

‘If you don’t eat and drink you have no energy and you die,’ said Kit matter-of-factly. ‘The nutrients move around in the blood. That’s energy. There’s nothing magic or mystical about it.’

Clive looked past her out the window. He seemed to be deep in thought. ‘A woman was murdered at Maroubra,’ he suddenly said after a short pause and without looking at her. ‘Did you hear about it?’

Kit looked at him closely. ‘I wonder why you mention her now,’ she said, because the remark seemed almost like a warning.

Clive turned to look at her. ‘I was looking out the window,’ he said, ‘and I read where she’d left the window open a little bit. Your opened window reminded me.’

Kit considered the plausible connection. ‘Are you wondering,’ she asked him, ‘whether if you open up a little bit of your “window”—start to feel a little bit—I might come in and kill you?’

Clive stared at her and there was a long silence. ‘When my wife left me,’ he said finally, still avoiding her eyes, ‘she took her Burmese cat with her. Shortly after that, I saw a similar cat lying on the lawn of a house where I was parking the car. I got a sort of pain in my chest.’ There was an even longer silence and Clive became increasingly uneasy. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he finally said. ‘Some of the things you’ve said don’t make sense to me. But some of it—I don’t know—seems to be quite sensible.’

Kit picked up an exercise book and a pencil. ‘I’d like you to tell me what you expect from this work you’re paying for. What relationships create difficulties for you. What areas you would like to see improved in your life.’ As she waited for him to speak, she noticed the gathering energy in his brows and eyes, the movement in his face that accompanied his barking laugh.

‘I would like to kill my mother,’ he said. ‘That would improve our relationship out of sight.’ But he cringed away from her as he spoke, as if he believed she might strike him. When she didn’t react, Clive continued.

‘What I’d really like is a woman who didn’t speak or move. Just someone who would lie there.’ He looked away as he spoke the next words. ‘Then I’d be able to get hard. I’d like to undress her, piece by piece, taking off her blouse and skirt, then her stockings and shoes, and then her panties and bra. Nice and neat, in order. Then I’d like to just lie there with her, neither of us saying a word or touching. Just thinking about this is making me hard.’ He looked at her, wondering if he’d gone too far, wondering if this degree of honesty was permissible. It appeared that it was and he relaxed as he noticed Kit’s unruffled demeanour.

Kit checked her watch and nodded. ‘Sex is safe in the mind,’ she said to him. ‘It’s very easy to get aroused by our own images.’

‘Real women are dangerous,’ said Clive. ‘It’s much safer and easier to have sex by yourself.’

Kit looked at him in wonder. It never failed to amaze her, the speed with which some clients started to see their fear and its defences. Clive was moving fast.

‘Some women
are
deadly,’ she agreed. ‘Some women do kill their men. They kill them emotionally with their negativity and criticism. Their chronic hostility. Sometimes they kill them in reality, too.’

‘And sometimes men kill women,’ he grinned. ‘I don’t know what the statistics would be, but lots more men kill women than the other way round.’ He seemed extremely pleased with the fact.

‘Oh yes,’ said Kit. ‘Lots more.’ It took all her professionalism to keep a light and neutral voice, to keep her father out of the therapy room. One day, said a small voice in her mind, you are going to have to deal with him. And the sooner the better. Clive slyly looked at her face, to see how she might take what he was going to say. ‘I could go to a prostitute,’ he said. ‘Get her to do what I want. All I’d have to do is give her money and she’d lie there still as a corpse. She would have to do what I told her because I’d pay for it.’

‘You could do that,’ said Kit. ‘Like you say, all it would take is money.’

Clive looked around the room and saw the photograph of Will on the mantelpiece. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

‘My son,’ she said.

Clive looked at her and then back at the photograph again, comparing them. ‘He looks like you,’ he said. Then he seemed to be deep in thought. ‘That woman who was killed at Maroubra,’ he continued and for a second Kit didn’t understand to whom he was referring, ‘she looked a bit like you, I thought.’ Kit nodded non-committally, noting how he’d moved from his mother, to someone looking like her, to a murdered woman, and wondering whether this was just transference hostility or something more. ‘The newspaper said the killer had done something with her clothes. I wonder what that means.’ He was watching her closely and Kit felt uneasy.

The session finished shortly afterwards, and she walked with him to the front door to say goodbye. As he turned away from her, he missed his balance on the step from the hall to the verandah.

‘Be careful as you go,’ Kit told him. ‘Sometimes, even talking about these things stirs up body energies and you might become a little unbalanced.’ He looked at her closely and she couldn’t read his expression at all. As she closed the door behind him prior to writing up her notes on the session, she realised she had still failed to notice the movement before the cringe.

Gemma couldn’t get Imelda Moresby out of her mind. Although, in the clear light of day in the comfort and security of her pale blue office, the woman’s words of the night before seemed contrived and portentous. But they kept coming back. She looked up the number of the church at Lindfield and left her phone number and a message asking Mrs Moresby to call her.

After several more calls and trying to do estimates on a couple of surveillance jobs, she realised that the gnawing feeling in her stomach was not only unease. She was hungry and she made herself a chicken salad. Taxi drove her crazy getting between her legs and winding around her as she carried the plate and a glass of wine out to the deck. The sea and the sky were settling into night, with only a luminous horizon line dividing the darker Pacific from the evening sky. Taxi jumped up onto the table and the wine glass would have toppled to the ground had not Gemma grabbed it. She smacked him and he yeowed, skidding away into the lounge room to sit with his back to her, involving himself with compulsive washing. ‘Oh come here,’ she finally called to him, but he sat resolutely lashing his tail from side to side, ignoring her. She was drinking coffee and watching the first stars come out before she and Taxi became reconciled. She snuggled him into her neck and shoulder, listening to his astonishing purr.

She remembered she hadn’t checked her mailbox and went outside into the cool night with her key. There were two envelopes, one with unfamiliar handwriting and one telephone bill. She made her way inside, locking the door securely behind her, placed the envelope on the table and opened it carefully. It contained a covering note from Philip Hawker and, under that, her father’s original handwritten statement. Slowly, Gemma unfolded the page and a half of yellowing, faint-lined paper. Automatically, Gemma started to read but her breath caught in her throat, and she stood still a moment, shocked. She took the papers over to her desk, switched the reading light on and went to sit down. Aware of the pounding of her heart, she decided to pour herself a strong brandy first. Her fingers shaking, she picked up the yellowing sheets.

‘Statement made by Dr Archie Chisholm, September 17th, 1967, about the events of this evening. I want to write it out now while things are fresh in my memory,’ she read.

At about two-thirty, I rang Marianne to see if she wanted to go to the dinner that night at the university. She told me she didn’t want to go to the dinner, because she is being treated for depression. I said that was fine with me. We did not argue. I saw four more of my patients, went to the bank but because there was a long queue, did not get money out then. Made a brief house call to a patient. After that, I left and drove straight to the house. Marianne was in bed and the girls were in their room. I went upstairs to get ready for the dinner. There was no food for the girls so I drove to the corner shop and got some eggs and made scrambled eggs for them. Then I got dressed to go out to the dinner and left the house at about seven-thirty. Marianne was up. I stayed at the dinner until about ten-thirty and drove to the house, arriving there at eleven o’clock. I parked my car and went inside. I went into the dining room and found Marianne lying in the corner near the french doors, which were open. She had severe head injuries and had lost a lot of blood. There was a faint, stringy pulse. I rang Emergency and waited for the ambulance to arrive. They said they would contact the police. I cradled Marianne in my arms and she coughed blood onto me. She was not conscious. Gemma came in and I told her your mother is hurt and to go next door and tell Mrs Moresby to come over. I went with Marianne in the ambulance and stayed until the surgeon came out and said my wife had died. I came home and Mrs Moresby is here staying the night with us. The police have just been and taken my clothes. I don’t know anyone who would want to kill my wife and that is what I told them.

Underneath was her father’s signature, long and lean, with the ‘A’ and the ‘C’ scrawled far too large. Gemma put the papers down and stood up, shaken. Then she had to sit down again, because she thought she’d fall over if she didn’t. Suddenly, transported by her father’s bald words, she was back there. The memory came from such a distance, it was like looking the wrong way through a telescope and the events of that night had a hectic, theatrical light around them, as if they’d taken place in a studio, where dark shadows lay beyond stark lighting in a setting that had been contrived to shock. She saw again, this time from her father’s point of view, the little five-year-old in the nightie, standing on the bottom step of the curved staircase at their old house. She thought of Mrs Moresby’s peculiar words of the night before and felt tears welling up in her which she bit back harshly. She remembered going into Kit’s room that night and creeping into bed with her. Then there seemed to be a long gap in her memory before the days of the boarding school and the long summer holidays at Aunt Merle’s place at Darling Point, where they pretty well pleased themselves from morning to night, down by the seaweed-filled tidal pool formed by a sandstone wall enclosing a tiny part of the Harbour. Gemma switched the light out in her office and went into the bathroom, where she cleaned her teeth while her heart raced.

She checked the back door thoroughly after she’d locked herself in for the night and went around to the other doors, the deck, the entrance hall, making sure they were secured. She couldn’t get Imelda Moresby’s oracle out of her head—the word ‘evil’ seemed to have a power and an energy that ensured it remained shining darkly in her mind. Fear was building up in her. She restlessly checked every room, then switched the alarm system on and was comforted by the panel near the door with its winking lights, which could only be disarmed by the key that lay safely in her wallet. She put the video on top of the television set and poured herself a whisky and milk nightcap while she prepared for her shower. She wished she could ring Kit and talk over the Imelda Moresby perplex, but she realised she couldn’t and felt unreasonably angry with her sister. Taxi followed her around, meeowing loudly, tail straight up, his funny spare tyre under his belly wobbling as he trotted, continuing after her right into the bathroom, jumping up on top of the toilet seat to sit there as she showered, washing his face and licking his jaws widely. He seemed to like the steam on his fur and tongue.

After the shower, she slipped into an old tracksuit because it was a cold night despite the warm October day and got into bed. She put the light out and lay there a while before finally going to sleep.

•

Something woke her with a start—she couldn’t tell how much later—a familiar sound. Gemma felt the fire and ice surge of adrenalin. She lay, stiff with attention, straining her ears for the sound again. It was impossible that anyone could be in her place. No one could get in here, not past delicate sensors that detected body heat and microwaves that reacted to the movements of molecules. If an intruder had a body or made a movement, her system would pick him up and scream in warning. Perhaps Taxi had jumped up on a counter in the kitchen and knocked something onto the floor. But then she felt the heavy warm lump of him at the end of her bed. He was here with her.

She lay, frozen, thinking of the knife slashes in her clothes. Then, very slowly and without sound, she slid open the bottom draw of the bedside table and groped around until she found what she was looking for. Her fingers closed around it, and gently she lifted the weight of the short-barrelled revolver onto the bed. Another sound and her fingers flew to find the cartridges. She grabbed two, slid into a crouch on the floor, broke the gun open, sliding the smooth weights into their cylinders. Gemma wormed her way across the floor, moving to crouch against the wall, just behind her bedroom door.

A man’s tread, careful, steady, unhurried. He’d read her address from her bag that night at the motel; he’d somehow, impossibly, got into her house. She couldn’t believe this was happening. He was coming towards the bedroom, she could hear the soft sound of his footfall on the parquetry. The knife slashes in her clothes sprang to her mind, but this time, like the woman at Maroubra, she was in the clothes and the great, raking wounds were in her own flesh. She squinted through the crack in the door, momentarily catching a glimpse of the figure blocking the light from the night sea. Stringy hair hanging down; the soft clank of metal, maybe chains. She smelt body odour and fuel, the stink of the internal combustion engine. Gemma was rigid. She dared not breathe in case she sobbed in fear. In a second he’d be turning into her room. As he pushed the door to her bedroom open, she suddenly inhaled and sprang out, facing him square, the gun ahead of her in the firing position.

‘Stop right there!’ she screamed. ‘Stop right there or I’ll shoot.’

Her heart pounded in her ears. The intruder froze, backlit by the faint light from the deck.

Then he spoke. ‘Jesus! Gemma! It’s me.’

‘Stevie?’

Gemma lowered the gun. Steve switched the light on. He was wearing the long hair, beard and dirty leathers of an outlaw bikie and his shocked eyes stared out of a face that she took a moment to recognise as Steve’s.

‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ he said.

‘I almost shot you,’ she yelled over him. Now anger rushed into the vacuum left by the withdrawal of fear and shock. Gemma was shaking all over. ‘You bastard, Steve. I thought you were someone else. Don’t ever do that again.’

He stood there, the colour returning to his face. ‘Can I move now?’ he asked.

‘How did you get in?’

Steve held up a key. ‘Where did you get that?’ she asked.

‘For Chrissake. You gave it to me last year. I fed Taxi, remember? In fact you gave me two, because the first one didn’t always work.’

Gemma felt the anger drain out of her. She limped back to the bed, laid the gun down and sat there, feeling desolate. She’d completely forgotten he had those keys and she couldn’t tell Steve about the night before last. He stood there, unsure of what to do next. ‘What time is it?’ she said.

‘Twenty past one. I was going to sing “Happy birthday to you”.’

‘It’s not tomorrow, I mean today. It’s not till next week.’

‘Forget it. I’m sorry I frightened you. It wasn’t a good idea.’

Because he was a good street cop, very sensitive to moods and currents between people, Steve immediately sensed the secret in her. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

Gemma shook her head. ‘Nothing. I’ve had a long day. I’m jumpy, that’s all.’

‘Are you? Maybe I should go.’

Gemma went into her office, switched on the light, picked up her father’s statement, and brought it out to show Steve. He read it, occasionally looking up at her, then turning his attention back to the handwritten document. He frowned. ‘Funny thing to do,’ he said. ‘With your wife just dead.’

Gemma stared. ‘I suppose,’ she said. ‘But he was used to writing up notes.’

Steve put the papers down. ‘Like she was a case, or something?’ He looked up at her. ‘Anyway, obviously they didn’t believe him.’ He went to her but she didn’t want him to touch her; anger, confusion and relief all combined to make her just want to be still and quiet for a while. I need space, she thought.

‘Where did you get this from?’ he asked, indicating the written statement.

‘Retired cop. Philip Hawker. It was his biggest case, I get the feeling.’

‘I’ve heard of him,’ said Steve. ‘One of the old dinosaurs.’

‘Come and I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ she said in an effort to redeem the situation as she turned away from him. ‘Don’t go. I’ll be okay in a moment.’ She put her arm around him and they walked into the kitchen together. Taxi walked in, and Steve made a half-hearted hiss at him. Taxi took no notice and went to his dish, licking at the last morsel of fish dinner.

‘I want a second opinion.’

‘What do you mean?’ Steve asked.

She turned from putting the kettle on, her eyes alive. ‘There’s a bloodstain expert in town. Dr Zelda Fireball or something. I’m chasing up the original police brief. I’m going to get her to look at the photographs.’

Steve looked interested. ‘It’s a good idea,’ he said. ‘There’s been a lot of new stuff around physical evidence in the last little while.’ He paused. ‘And it’ll put your mind at rest.’

‘One way or the other,’ she said.

‘That’s what I meant,’ Steve said quickly.

‘What happened to your case?’ she asked him as they had coffee and bread and honey. It was too cold to sit out on the deck and the nor’easter buffeted the sliding doors as they sat at the dining table.

‘I had to get out early,’ he told her. ‘One of them was very suspicious of me. I got the feeling he might have been in the job once.’

‘A cop?’

Steve shrugged. ‘Maybe not police. Maybe military. Maybe what you do. He had some fancy equipment. Anyway, I got a stack of evidence on them. They were making amphetamines in an old farmhouse. The drug squad busted them this morning. Seven arrests including me until I managed to get someone to contact the boss. So I came straight here. I’ve been riding for hours. Wanted to see you. Give you this.’

He passed a little package to her, and Gemma smiled with pleasure. Her pulse rate had dropped and was almost normal again. ‘I’m not going to open it now,’ she said, putting it on the dining room table next to the heavy silver vase. ‘I’ll wait till the proper day. God, you look shocking.’

‘I’ve been riding with the Outlaw Raiders of the Southern Cross,’ he replied, sounding hurt. ‘I’m
supposed
to look shocking.’

She looked at him, his craggy face, older than it should have been at thirty-nine, the deep furrows from nose to mouth. But his lips hadn’t hardened into narrow lines like so many men’s, she thought. ‘What a birthday surprise!’ she suddenly laughed out loud. And he joined in, eyes crinkling, head thrown back. ‘Me in a body bag. You up on a manslaughter charge.’ Gemma laughed till tears ran down her face, and she couldn’t breathe. ‘Oh,’ she said, when she finally regained her breath, ‘you’ve gotta laugh.’ She lifted a piece of bread and honey to her mouth but put it down again, suddenly having no appetite.