The Broken Ones (5 page)

It was payday, so Oscar found a working ATM watched over by a uniformed security guard who wore a new pistol in a polished leather holster. Oscar keyed in his PIN, did a quick calculation, then emptied all but the fortnightly mortgage repayment from the account.

The traffic was thin, so it took only half an hour to reach his destination. At red lights on the way, he riffled through the banknotes, setting aside enough for gas, food, and the small tips and tiny bribes that kept this new world spinning. He put the remaining cash in a plain envelope.

He pulled into a street lined with bare-limbed liquidambar trees, their twigged fingers poking at the rain. He parked in front of an unremarkable, boxlike house on stilts; the glow from a kerosene lamp warmed one window, but it was not inviting. Oscar left the engine running, went to the mailbox, and slid the envelope in—it made a pitiful slap as it hit the bottom. As he turned, he saw movement in the yellow-lit window. A dark figure stood there looking down at him. Oscar felt his heart beat a bit faster. The figure watched him a moment longer, then slid the curtain shut.

Oscar felt relieved to drive away. As he did every time.

A quarter of an hour later, he stopped the car in front of a metal shutter door that was rusted and covered with graffiti. The garage was at the side of what was once a tapas restaurant but was now—like so many thousands of buildings—a boarded-up shell. Oscar rented the garage from the former restaurateur because his own tiny house a few hundred yards away had no off-street parking. He unlocked and lifted the shutter. The metallic clatter was loud in the empty street, and he looked around to see if the noise had attracted anyone. The street remained still, no movement other than the steady tumble of drops and the slosh of black water in gutters. He drove the car inside, dropped the shutter, and clicked the brass padlock shut. He pulled his hat hard over his head, shoved his hands into his pockets, and strode out onto a footpath that was cracked and overgrown with lush weeds.

The roads were empty of traffic, but not empty of cars: both sides were lined with vehicles, some of them festooned with faded bouquets of parking tickets. Most had smashed windows, a few were no more that burned shells, all of them had been stripped of wheels, seats, mirrors—anything that could be removed in haste and peddled. Sump boxes were cracked open and their oil drained for use in lamps. Driving was a luxury few outside the Heights could afford. Half the cars in the city—half the cars around the world, Oscar supposed—had been dented or crashed on Gray Wednesday. His own car had gained a dent in the front. Oscar drew down another shutter on that memory.

Rain tapped on his hat and waxed jacket. Voices ahead in the dark.

The Church of St. Brigid stood as dark and imposing as a castle, with pointed spires and tall windows as narrow and deep as arrow slits. Those stained-glass windows were now boarded over with warped and spray-painted plyboard. The church grounds commanded a sweeping view: the city’s skyscrapers punched up into the low sky a half mile away, and the surrounding suburbs were a patchwork of blacks and grays, sprinkled with weak yellow stars of kerosene lamps. Once, Oscar had been pleased to live so close to the city; now he felt he was in some kind of shackled dance with it. As he passed a low brick wall, he saw a fire burning inside an old washing-machine tub between the church’s brick buttresses. Flames hissed as drops fell from under the
eaves. The wet air carried the unmistakable, acidic smell of Delete—a cheap hallucinogen made from solvents found in correction fluid and cooked in basement drug labs. The firelight cast tall shadows over the church’s brick flanks, heavily spray-painted with tags, grotesque faces and roughly drawn sex organs. Feet shuffled in the shadows.

“Ciggy, mate?”

Oscar couldn’t tell if the voice was male or female; it was as rough as boot heels on husks. A figure detached from the darkness behind the dancing flames. “Cigarette? Tea? Greek for a tea bag.”

Oscar heard a muffled sound of metal and fabric, something being unzipped. Or unsheathed.

He drew his pistol and held it in clear view.

“ ’Kay, okay.” The shadow retreated.

His street was steep, and he walked slowly so as not to slip on wet leaves that would never be swept. Houses were dark and close together. His own was a slim, pretty timber worker’s cottage that sat expectantly on a skirt of white battens, as if tonight might be the night Oscar would finally clean and paint her. He unlocked the front door and was about to call out that he was home, and felt foolish. Old habits. His keys slipped from his grasp and hit the wood floor with a clatter. As he bent to retrieve them, a dark shadow slipped silently behind him, shoving against his calves and tripping his feet. His mind yelled in a sudden panic—he put out one hand to stop himself from falling and his other arm fumbled for his gun. The shadow then did a loop and came back to rub itself against his arms and legs. It let out a gravelly mew.

“Sissy.” Oscar got up, the pain in his knees making him feel old. “Idiot.”

The cat looked at him archly, as if to say, “Idiot? Who was the one who fell down?” His purr sent deep vibrations up Oscar’s legs for a moment, then the cat sauntered with a strange, crablike gait into the dark kitchen. A less milquetoasty cat was difficult to imagine: Sisyphus was unnaturally large, and his coat was a battleground of ashy-gray fur and hairless patches of scarred skin. One ear was ripped at its edges, the other was half gone, and he walked as if his spine had been permanently redirected. He checked his food bowl and let out a disappointed growl. Oscar took off his coat and lit the hurricane lamp; the cat’s pupils became large orange orbs.

Oscar squatted on the tiled hearth in front of the fireplace, slipped
his fingers into two almost invisible holes, and pulled out the false brick panel. Behind were three shelves: on the bottommost were two boxes of cat food. It seemed no time since there had been dozens, bought before the big supermarket on LaTrobe Terrace went out of business. That was nearly two years ago. When these biscuits ran out, Sissy would have to start eating leftovers.

While he squatted, Oscar took quick inventory of the other two shelves. A depleting carton of condom boxes, a few blister packs of genuine Viagra tablets, three cardboard boxes of tea bags in sealed sachets, several cartons of foul-smelling Jilu cigarettes, and one of infinitely more valuable Camels. With the global labor shortage, anything made, picked, tapped, or sorted by hand had become horrendously expensive. Beneath the smokes, some bars of French soap, 9-mm. cartridges, and one and a half cartons of LP propane canisters. Behind those, his real treasures: salt, pepper, paprika, olive oil, and a bottle of French Bordeaux that he was saving for an occasion that warranted French Bordeaux. He closed the cache and filled Sissy’s bowl. The cat wolfed his food.

Oscar set a saucepan of water on the gas ring, and it began to tick as it heated. He opened the kitchen window. Rain dripped steadily from the awning above the window like strings of dirty glass beads. Somewhere out in the night, a fusillade of gunshots rolled off the wind. A few moments later, a single shot, then silence. Closer, two doors down, a small weasel-headed dog named either Terry or Derek yapped for the ten thousandth time, and a deep-voiced woman yelled for Terry/Derek to shut the Christless fuck up. Oscar filled a glass with water and poured it onto the soil of the potted oregano on the windowsill he was trying to coax back to life after a fortnight of leaden, leaking skies. Below, in the yard, the rain tutted in the leaves of his lime and lemon trees, and a cold breeze ruffled the stands of rosemary and basil and the overgrown patch of lawn grass. The world turned from black to silver for a moment as lightning, getting closer, stabbed at the TV towers on the hunch of hills to the west. A moment later came a rumble of thunder.

Oscar checked the water and stripped off his damp clothes, shivering. The fingers of cold air on his skin raised goose bumps, and forgotten blood stirred in his groin. It was just neglect, he knew; like the
house, the organs were waiting impatiently for attention. Two fumbling affairs since the divorce, both mercifully brief and both truncated by sensible women who saw past whatever little rough charm he had left into an empty future. He felt idiotic and desperate. He searched the dark houses surrounding in the vain hope that a window would illuminate for him, revealing a shapely silhouette.

Knowing he shouldn’t, Oscar pulled open the kitchen drawer and found the piece of paper he’d tried a hundred times to throw away. Sissy watched from the floor, and his eyes narrowed as if in disapproval. Oscar found a phone with signal and dialed.

A click as the phone was answered.

“Hello?” She sounded tired. “Hello?”

In the background, Oscar heard a man’s voice. Then crying. An infant: a hungry newborn.

“Hello?” Sabine repeated. Her voice changed—quieter, harder. “Hello?”

He hung up. His penis had lulled to a sleeping pendulum. The first year, there had been reasons to call Sabine—the separation, the divorce, division of assets. The second year, fewer excuses, the odd checks to see if the other was attending a mutual friend’s party and to negotiate around awkward meetings. After her remarriage, there had been no cause to call. They’d loved each other once, then their marriage became a bicycle pedaled on one side only—still a bicycle, but dangerous. Finally, the acknowledgment that they had to get off before they both crashed. He’d bought out her half of the mortgage and kept the house. Why had he fought so hard for it? The house was a museum from which all valuable exhibits had been removed, a leaky-roofed symbol of the foolish hope that things could be reversed, that time could go backward, that accidents could be undone.

Sissy startled Oscar, jumping onto the kitchen bench, to the windowsill, and out into the night. The water was boiling now. Down the street, Terry/Derek barked again. Oscar yelled, “Keep your bloody dog quiet!”

Lightning split the sky again, turning night briefly to ghost-white day. Below, under the bare persimmon tree, stood the boy. His pale triangular face stared up at Oscar, as it had for the past three years. On Gray Wednesday, everyone on earth suddenly found himself with a
ghost at his side. Many people became haunted by someone they knew: a dead father, a dead grandmother, a creditor, a friend, an enemy. Neve got her mother. Mrs. Tambassis got a lecherous uncle. Sabine got her baby sister, dead thirty years; Jon got a cousin killed by meningitis. Oscar was haunted by a stranger: this boy he didn’t recognize. Under the black, skeletal branches, rain passed through the dead boy as if he were smoke. The boy shuffled shyly, as if unwilling to advance or unable to retreat. After a moment, he tentatively raised a hand as if in greeting.

Lightning flashed again, and Oscar could see the pits where the boy’s eyes should be—like finger holes poked into wet, dark sand. Lidless and shifting and worming.

“Go to hell,” Oscar whispered.

The boy’s hand wavered.

“Go to hell,” Oscar repeated, and closed the window. He pulled down the shade and took his bathwater off the stove.

Chapter
2

Three years earlier

S
abine was blocking the hallway.

“Tell me you’re not serious,” she said.

In his mind, Oscar was already sliding past her, out to the car, racing along city streets to the alley.

“Yeah, I am,” he said, gently taking her forearm. “I have to go. We can talk later—”

She slapped his hand away, and he blinked. She’d never hit him before. It was like reaching into a box of cereal and pulling out a wasp. Her usually pretty face was pulled as tight as a balloon over a fist.

“You want me to cancel the weekend,” she said. The word “cancel” made her snarl.

“I have to go, Sab.”

“No!” She slammed her hand against the wall, and the prints hanging there rattled in their frames. “You
always
have to go. You
always
have something.”

He didn’t have time for this. He took hold of her arm again. “Jon’s waiting for me.”

“
I’m
waiting for you!” She grabbed his arm hard and rose on her toes, yelling into his face, “I’m
always
waiting! Waiting for this shift to end so we can eat a cold dinner, or that surveillance to end so we can have a civilized fucking Saturday together, or some other fucking investigation to finish so we can have a holiday!”

Sabine was the chief financial officer of a charitable trust whose board included some of the state’s most notorious prima donnas—a former Olympian, a dance doyen, a Man Booker winner, several media-hungry entrepreneurs. She had to deal weekly with their fits of pique and bizarre demands, yet Oscar had never heard her lose her
temper. Nothing like this. “It’s one weekend, Sab. We’re just postponing.”

“It’s ‘tomorrow syndrome,’ Oscar. It never comes! This weekend was the one we postponed a month ago—and that one was postponed from fucking April!” She spat the last word out.

He knew she was right, but it didn’t stop the burners under the nasty brew in his gut turning up to full.