‘Darren, please, I feel carsick.’
His knees jiggled, as if he didn’t know what to do with the information.
‘Can I sit up?’
She sat up. He didn’t stop her. Without meaning to, she began to cry, and soon couldn’t stop the tears.
‘ Shut up,’ he screamed.
‘I can’t.’
‘I can’t stand it! Shut the fuck up!’
She wept and he punched her ineffectually, his attention veering from her to the road and back again. By now they were heading north towards Dandenong. Or the ranges or even as far as New South Wales or Queensland…
‘Darren, please, you might accidentally stab me.’
He turned his rage on her. ‘How the fuck do you know my name? I don’t know you.’
‘You’re Mandy’s cousin, right?’
He didn’t reply.
Tina said, ‘Mandy and me went to Cranbourne High together. You remember. We met at her twenty-first.’ She sighed, sat back, her head resting on the padded support, said softly, ‘That was a great party.’
It had the effect of mollifying him. ‘You were the chick did the pole dance routine with a broomstick.’
Another chick, actually, and as twenty-first birthday parties go, it had been fairly dull. ‘You’ve got a good memory,’ she said warmly.
Get him talking. Take his mind off the knife and her vulnerable stomach. He took his knife hand off the wheel, stuck the blade tip between his teeth and made a flicking motion. She closed her eyes.
He made an unaccountable stop soon after that, pulling into a recessed farm gateway, darkness all around them, a wispy moon above. Took out a mobile phone and pressed speed dial.
‘Hi, it’s me, you got any gear?’
Oh, great, he was chasing. Tina edged her hand towards the door handle-and the knife tip was at her throat a millisecond later.
He was able to do that and simultaneously explode into the mouthpiece of his phone: ‘I fucking do not…I fucking paid you…I did so…mate, you can’t do this to me.’
Then silence as he jerked the phone away from his ear and stared at it in astonishment. ‘The prick hung up on me.’
‘Please, Darren, let me go home.’
He turned to her, still astonished, as if wondering who she was and what he was doing with her in the middle of nowhere. Then his face cleared and the animal cunning was there again. ‘You got any gear on you?’
‘Me? No.’
‘Gis your fucken bag.’
He grabbed it, rested it between the seats and started rummaging. Her tampons flew into the footwell, a packet of tissues, electricity bill-please, God, don’t let him check the address-and her hairbrush. Now the wallet, which he hunted through, pocketing the $45 that had to last her until payday on Friday, tipping the coins from the little zippered compartment into his palm, shoving them into the pocket along with the paper money.
How much stuff would her $45 buy him? He wouldn’t be fussy, probably. Dope, ice, whatever was going.
He got out his phone again and pressed buttons and stared, aghast, as it beeped. ‘Low battery? I don’t believe it.’ He swung his head close to hers and the stench was stupefying. ‘Gis your phone.’
It was in the cardigan pocket. ‘I don’t have it on me, I dropped it in the toilet this morning.’
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
They sat there and she understood that he would want to cure his misery with her pretty soon, in the only way he knew how, so she said, in a conversational voice, ‘Mandy told me you were her favourite of all her cousins.’
He muttered. What, she didn’t know.
‘She said you’d had a hard life.’
Mandy hadn’t said anything of the kind about her loser cousin, but he acknowledged it with a nod, saying, ‘That’s one way of putting it.’
‘Is that Mandy’s uniform, Darren? She told me she was going to join the police when I saw her at Christmas.’
Fill the air with comforting nonsense, Tina, she told herself. Remind him he was human.
Another mutter, but his knee was bobbing again. ‘What do you need, Darren? I could get something from the drugs cabinet at work.’
Get him back to town where there were lights and people instead of this blanketing night.
‘What I want,’ he said, ‘is for you to shut the fuck up.’
‘Sure, sorry.’
He was looking at her breasts and she didn’t want that. ‘Remember you have to start off in second gear, plenty of revs.’
‘Put the back of your seat down.’
‘Pardon?’
‘You know, recline it.’
‘Darren, you don’t…’
The knife nicked her neck, quick as a flash, and first came the wetness, then the stinging pain.
‘ Do it.’
‘Okay, okay.’
On her back now, knees locked together, arms rigidly at her sides. He tugged at the edge of her skirt, which she’d trapped under her thighs. ‘What have we here?’ he said roguishly as he pushed the hem up to her waist. She shuddered as fear and coldness crept through her.
‘Darren, don’t, what would Mandy say?’
She was expecting him to explode. Instead, he seemed fascinated by her crotch. He poked at her mound experimentally through the miserable cotton. ‘I want to see your sweet cunty.’
She’d never heard it called that before. ‘I’m embarrassed.’
‘Don’t be,’ he said gallantly. ‘I bet you’re beautiful down there.’
Amazing. Suddenly he thinks we’re on a date? ‘Please, Darren.’
‘Do you shave? Tell me you shave.’ His voice was wobbly with it.
‘Darren, I feel…it’s my period.’
He recoiled as if he’d touched something unclean. The stickiness and the smell and the staining. She could see it all in his face. What sort of experience did a man like him have, come to that?
‘Can’t stay here,’ he muttered.
He jerked her skirt down and shot off down the road, managing the second gear start perfectly. He’s taking me somewhere to finish me off, she thought.
But all he did was drive and talk to himself. Up to Dandenong they went, over to Berwick, back down through Cranbourne, across to Frankston, and he didn’t shut up once through the long hours. It was winding-down-from-a-high talk, and made little sense to her. She would have signalled to other drivers, or pedestrians, if there’d been any, or if he’d drawn close enough to them, or if he hadn’t deliberately kept to back roads and slow lanes, away from civilisation.
The night unfolded, a criss-crossing of the Peninsula, Tina feeling sleepy and acidic, until, in the queer light of dawn, they found themselves on the freeway, heading south. At this hour it was a broad, empty ribbon striping the hillside folds, with very little traffic. Then, somewhere inland of Mount Martha Cove, they spotted a highway patrol car in the act of pulling over a hotted-up Subaru. ‘Losers!’ shouted Darren, full of glee, and Tina Knorr reached across and heaved on the Barina’s cracked steering wheel. The little car tipped gamely on two wheels, then recovered and ploughed towards the police car until the chequerboard pattern painted along the flank was all that Tina could see.
34
During the passing of the days, Grace had walked the beach at Breamlea and argued with herself. The tides and the wind raced, dog walkers nodded hello, gulls slid through the layers of salty air, and Grace argued that she should never break her cardinal rule. Don’t rob the Niekirks, she told herself. Too close to home.
In counterargument she pointed out that a one-off robbery would be okay since she wasn’t known in Victoria, and the local cops had no MO to compare. Besides, the house behind the cypress hedge was tucked out of sight, the security could be bypassed, and her VineTrust safe-deposit box was close by. And it was clear, according to Google Earth, that plenty of escape routes were open to her. And the clincher? It was personal. In robbing the Niekirks she’d be righting an old wrong.
And then Grace would finish her walk, return home, and log in to online poker and lose money.
By Tuesday, she was running out of time. A week’s holiday in Sydney, Mara Niekirk had said. What if they came home early?
So after breakfast she caught a bus to Geelong and hired an eight-year-old Camry from WreckRent, 95,000 km on the clock but V6 power and the gearbox still tight. Fitting it with false plates, she caught the Queenscliff ferry and was on the Peninsula by noon, wearing a charcoal grey pencil skirt and plain white blouse.
The Niekirks’ alarm system was a Messer. Grace headed up the freeway to Mornington, a new industrial estate outside the town, where there was a Messer agency in a security installation firm. Using a clipped, professional woman’s voice, she said, ‘My mother has a Messer system in her house, and I was thinking I might get one installed, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of her owner’s manual.’
The salesman drank her in. She knew he would. He actually rubbed his hands together. ‘We have a good deal on Messer at the moment.’
‘Yes, but that’s no good to me if I can’t understand the technology. Can you explain it?’
‘Sure can,’ the salesman said.
He dug out a few catalogues, called in an installer, and together they told her how the system worked. Grace nodded in all of the right places, but with an overlay of doubt. They tried harder. Her doubts receded. Another doubt, another reassurance…
Finally she reached a decision, blessing them with a smile. And when she offered to pay a deposit of $100, any reservations they had flew right out the window.
‘All righty. Address?’
Grace was a mite embarrassed. ‘I’ve bid on two townhouses on the Esplanade,’ she said, ‘I won’t hear until the weekend which one’s mine. When I find out, I’ll call with the address and arrange access for you.’
That was fine with them, and she drove out of the industrial estate and up to Frankston. When she failed to contact them again, they wouldn’t follow up very strenuously: after all, they were $100 ahead on the deal.
From Frankston she headed north-east to Dandenong, buying a can of insulation foam in a hardware store. Then out to a chain motel on the Princes Highway in Berwick. The remainder of the afternoon stretched ahead. She ate sparingly but kept hydrated and filled in the hours with a walk, junk TV and a booklet of Sudoku puzzles. She wondered how many more times she’d find herself in a nondescript motel room like this one. It seemed to her that rooms like this had become a big part of her life, a living-from-day-to-day life, with one sad, simple goal, to stay one step ahead of Ian Galt.
Once upon a time she’d dismissed the aims and achievements of ordinary people. It wasn’t that she’d thought herself extraordinary. A family, a home, a job, holidays, a circle of friends and someone to love and be loved by-they were extraordinary. They weren’t the kinds of things she’d be allowed to have.
But now…
She blamed the icon for unsettling her. The icon gave her hope, and she wasn’t sure she wanted that.
By late evening she was scouting around in Lowther, a little town outside Waterloo and only three kilometres across country from the property known as ‘Lindisfarne’. She made a trial run, on foot, in the moonlight, then drove back to her anonymous motel.