Girl Defective (11 page)

That night, I stayed up late listening to records and sorting my box of beautiful people. I tried not to feel pathetic as I did this. I smoothed out my Nancy doll and teamed her up with a hot guy who could have been Otis if his hair was longer. I found a Luke-a-like with soft hair and spectacles and a pixie-faced starlet who could have been me if I succumbed to surgery. I took
the picture of Mia out of my wallet and invited her to the party, moving us around into different configurations. We were a gang of great friends. We laughed at each other's jokes. We knew each other's secrets. We were young and hot, and no grandstanding grown-ups were going to tell us what to do.

At one a.m. I went up to the roof. I sunk homebrew and peered over the palm trees and clouds and shingles. The sky was infinite and starry, and I felt like I was in a movie. I played Them doing “Gloria.” The world was all black heat and a badass riff. Nancy's stories roiled inside my head: bikers and club kids and vampires and red lipstick and visible tan lines and five-o'clock shadows and surprise couplings on fire exits.

Out there Luke was pasting up pictures of his sister, and bad things were happening to young girls.

Out there there were no rules, and Nancy was doing more than I could dream of.

Profile:
Luke Casey

New Operative, Bill's Wishing Well—Effective December 6

Date:
Sunday, December 7

Agent:
Seagull Martin

The subject says he doesn't know his height, but I would pick him at six feet. He is Caucasian, has dark hair that could use a cut, and wears square, black-rimmed glasses. A casual dresser, he was born and educated in Adelaide, the city of churches and serial killers. When he was little, he wanted to be a firefighter. His worst memory of primary school is being forced to fight a kid he knew he couldn't beat. He couldn't ask his dad about fighting because his dad is a minister and doesn't believe in violence, so he would sneak into movies in Chinatown to study chops. But when he tried to use said chops on the kid, he found they didn't work, and he ended up with a shiner so big, he had to look at everything sideways. He is in favor
of
Monkey
. In high school the subject enjoyed art and English. He has been studying graphic design, but he decided he wanted to do something radical and so came here. He wears a size-thirteen shoe and a leather wristband. He is a smoker and does not believe in the afterlife. He is scared of heights and seaweed. When I asked him what his greatest regret was, he looked blank—and refused to answer. His favorite food is sausages and mash, but he won't eat kidneys. He suffers from insomnia, wears SPF 30 every day. He likes St. Kilda because the sky seems bigger here. Says he looks at the sky and imagines it as a hemisphere floating in some unrecognizable space, encased in a bubble. His best spy trait is that he works well alone. His role model is Steve McQueen in
The Great Escape
. He has no plans for Christmas.

ACTION

Recommend we invite the subject to Christmas lunch.

T
HERE'S THIS EPISODE OF
The Twilight Zone
that never failed to remind me of Gully. It's about a six-year-old boy with godlike powers. He can read minds and control the weather, and if he doesn't like someone, he simply wishes them away to a mysterious cornfield. Everyone is scared of him—even his parents—they're careful to tell him only good things, but in the end the community cracks under pressure. I'm not saying Dad and I were scared of Gully—he didn't have magic powers—but he didn't hear “no” very often.

Monday after school he was waiting at the gate with his snout on, drinking coffee as all real detectives do. When he saw me, he hiked his eyebrows and chucked the dregs, tough-guy style, before placing his mug gently on the grass. He
chh
ed his fist and gave me the specs. “Date: Monday, December eighth. Time: 1535 hours. Location: Mercer High School front entrance. Operation Council Jeep Discovery preparing now.”

I started laughing. Sometimes Gully was good value—and it had been a dull, dull day. I'd been preparing
for Quinn, making assumptions. I'd even worn the bead necklace, which earned me more than the usual weird looks. At lunchtime I was at the library computer, ready, but she never showed. I didn't expect her absence to make me feel so hollow.

The afternoon was neon-bright. Gully swing-walked and issued directives.

“As per my memo, we go to the council and get the names of all the people who have registered white Jeeps in St. Kilda.”

“Gully, there's no way they'll tell you.”

“Oh yeah? What if I show them . . . this?” He flashed a detective badge. It was paper, painstakingly traced. Just looking at it made my hand cramp.

“Come on!” he yelled.

A feeling came over me—something like surrendering the remote control. I thought of Dad. I would follow Gully on all his ridiculous schemes. This was my penance.

And so we trooped on down to the town hall. We took a number and planted ourselves on the plaid chairs for forty minutes. I didn't even try to convince Gully to take his mask off. When we were called, he lurched into the booth, his eyes like flints, his snout close to making contact. The anemic-looking clerk couldn't hide his irritation. He was lucky there was a pane of plexiglass between us.

“You want me to give you the addresses of people
with white Jeeps registered in the Port Phillip ordinance? Impossible. There are privacy laws.”

Gully rocked back and forth. He flicked his snout with his little finger and wrote something in the sky. “So, is it classified information?”

“It is,” the clerk replied with a sarcastic smile.

Gully wavered. He didn't seem to know what to do next. I imagined in his mind this was as far as his fantasy went, this asking of the question. He skywrote a little faster and started to hum. The clerk was getting crabby and that made me crabby. That made me want to stand there until sundown. And then I saw Ray, rolling in with files in hand. His work clothes made him look like an extra from a 1970s documentary about white-collar criminals. He had flapped his tie over his shoulder, and one of his shirt buttons was missing; white orca flesh glinted underneath.

I banged my palm on the glass. “RAY!”

The crabby clerk rose from his chair. “Excuse
me
!”

Ray shambled over, pacified the clerk. He appeared baffled by Gully's snout; I guess it was seeing us out of context, but then he clicked his fingers.

“Nancy's friend, right?”

“Sky. Hey, can you help us?”

Gully got to ask his question all over again. Ray wheezed and listened. His forehead was sweaty. He patted it with a handkerchief. Then he winked.

“You kids go wait for me out front.”

I parked on the stone steps and stared out at the street. Gully was flapping like crazy and making groaning noises, competing with the peak-hour traffic.

Ray surfaced, a blobby mirage. He pulled a rolled-up piece of paper from his slacks. Gully wanted it but looked well aware that the paper had been nestled near Ray's tackle. Curiosity won. He grasped for it, but Ray held on. “Tell no one.”

Gully nodded solemnly.

Ray couldn't be serious. He had to be messing with us. As if he would risk his job for a boy in a pig snout. But then he turned to me and his eyes were greedy. He took my hand in his clammy meat hook.

“Does Nancy talk about me?” He pressed my hand and let out a little puffing sigh. “What I mean is, does she like me?”

I felt slightly sick, and I also felt like laughing. I managed to hold it in. I looked him in the eye. “Sure. She likes you.”

Ray dropped my hand and hugged himself. Another button threatened to pop. “She's got that classic beauty. Like Rita Hayworth.” His face shifted, a subtle tell I couldn't decipher. Gully would have known what it meant, but Gully had taken his intel behind a tree and was reading it covertly.

“Do you know where she is?” Ray asked.

“I saw her Saturday.”

“You're doing better than me, then.”

He puffed again. Looked back at the glass door. But he didn't leave. He took some gum out of his pocket and offered me a stick. I shook my head. And then it was like I'd caught Gully's disease. The question came out. Boom. Like that.

“How did you know Mia Casey?”

It would have been better if Ray had looked taken aback. I didn't believe his sorrowful expression or his answer. “A fallen robin. I only met her in passing.”

I wanted to ask him about the party girl thing. Instead this came out: “How long has Nancy lived with you?”

Ray's eyes searched the sky. “Five months?”

“She ever tell you where she's from?”

“I never asked. This is St. Kilda. Everyone's from somewhere else.”

“I'm not.”

Ray laughed. “Honey, you're from another time.”

I looked down at my school dress and the palms of my hands. I wanted a fast retort, but I wasn't even sure if he was insulting me.

“Etymology,” Ray said, propping his finger like a professor. “There's another St. Kilda in the Hebrides. You can only get there by boat. It's uninhabited now, but people lived there right up until the late 1800s. They spoke old Norse mixed with Gaelic, and lived off vegetables and traded the oil from the seabirds that gathered on their crazy rocks. But they were doomed. Ask me why.”

“Why?” I asked dutifully.

“The Industrial Age killed them. They were murdered by progress. The last St. Kildans had to be evacuated. A handful came to Melbourne and found their way here . . . at least that's what they say.” Ray smiled. “To be a true St. Kildan, you have to admit to isolation, to weirdness, to loser-dom.”

Seconds and trams and cars passed. The world was turning on a spit, and I still couldn't tell if Ray was insulting me.

“Well,” I said. “Thanks for helping my brother.”

“You can pay me back in sexual favors.”

“I'm fifteen, Ray.”

He pinched my shoulder. “You girls are so touchy.”

G
ULLY AND I REACHED
the shop just after five. Luke had already left, and Drago had dropped off the CCTV unit. It wasn't quite the high-tech security camera of Gully's dreams, but he was still excited. He speed-read the manual and made the Weird Sisters pretend to steal something so he could see how it looked. Dad had set up a screener out in the back. I sat with Gully for a preview. The camera swapped between shop and street view: we saw the plane tree, occasional cars, then customers doing the usual wander around the blue haze, picking noses, dropping food. When I came back out, Dad winked at me, because I was moody and he was trying to cheer me up, and because when Gully was firing on all cylinders, he could be brilliant or a complete shit and in this case it was the former.

“What do you think of the new technology?” he said.

“I think Gully's going to get square eyes.”

As I said it, an idea sparked.

That night I was the one staying late in the shop. I rewound the tape to the start and watched Luke Casey on fast-forward. The video camera was old, but
it had an impressive zoom function. I could see Luke up close, his default half smile, those eyes with lashes sooty as a soft toy's. I watched him arrive and have a cup of tea. I watched him listening to Dad, patiently, for hours. He was overly solicitous with the customers. He looked them in the eye and gave them smiles and paper sacks. Sometimes he'd stop and stare at a far-off point. I fancied he was looking at the poster of Mia. Luke went out for a cigarette at eleven, one, and three. He drank four cups of tea. His muscular twitch was on the wane, but in its place were new tells. He had a habit of brushing his hair back from his eyes if Dad was going on for too long, and he worried that leather wristband all the time except when he took it off to clean vinyl.

I knew what I was doing was creepy. I told myself I was assessing Luke critically, as a favor for Dad, a productivity review. Luke really wasn't record shop material. He held records like they were frisbees. When he cleaned vinyl, his cloth was too damp, so he left streaks. I watched him work and I stockpiled his fails, and during a lull I texted Nancy.

Guess who I'm watching on CCTV?

Miraculously, she texted back.
Who?

Luke Casey!

Seconds later my phone rang.

“Perve!” Nancy brayed. “How's he looking?”

“Tragi-hot.”

“What else?” Nancy's voice sounded faraway, like she was talking in a cave.

“I saw Ray today. He asked about you.”

“I'm in the shit because I haven't been home.”

“Why should he care?”

“Because he's pissy, and he can't boil an egg.”