Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

As he showered, he chewed and took a half-mouthful of water, swallowing the bitter soup. His eyes slid down to his right foot and the scar: a faint line of pale skin where his sixth toe had been removed.

From his first job out of college — dish pig at the Kookaburra Grill — he’d saved every spare cent towards the elective surgery, and a lucky commission to design a logo for a new chain of wheel alignment garages topped his war chest to the required three thousand dollars. He booked himself in for the day op, had the offending appendage removed, spent a week recovering, then went out to the Lord Regent Hotel to find a girl to lose his virginity to, choosing the soon-to-be-unsatisfied Pauline McCleary. But every time he’d showered or bathed in the seventeen years since, his eyes had been drawn to his right foot, just to confirm that the horrid deformity hadn’t grown slyly back.

As he looked at the jagged white line, into his mind sprang the image of pale scars in dark wood: the marking scratched with a blade into the stock of Gavin’s rifle. Why had he hidden it from Suzette? And why hadn’t he told her that same mark on the health food store door had been the very one on the dumb, round woven head of the dead bird? Something had stopped him. Now, under the steaming water with the aspirin starting to work, he realised why. She has children . Telling Suzette might somehow bring the danger latent in the mark closer to Nelson and Quincy.

Nicholas turned off the taps.

Now he had a piece of new information that he’d exhumed from his father’s musty suitcases in the garage. He’d come into the house ready to tell Suzette about the child who went missing in 1964, but now he was glad she was out.

Don’t tell her. Keep her ignorant. Keep her safe and send her home .

As he dried himself, his head began to throb again. Missing children. Dead children. Confessing murderers. Dead murderers. A strange mark. A strange message. He touched the bird, but it should have been you.

By the time he’d dressed, Nicholas had a plan.

He would find out when Gavin Boye was to be buried.

Suzette waved down a young waiter with a very nice bum and ordered a third long black with hot skim milk on the side.

A notepad with a page full of newly written notes was open in front of her, and a small pile of stapled cost projection reports, their margins crammed with her comments, all of which were now lined through. With one hand she flipped icons on the laptop screen, shrinking her address book, restoring her mailbox, opening an accounts summary spreadsheet, highlighting days in her diary. In her other hand was her mobile phone; on the other end was Ola, her PA, a blocky and unattractive girl with a voice that was as lovely as her face was not. It was Ola’s good phone manner and skill at mail merging that got her the job.

Suzette was pleased. In the last hour and a half she’d concluded most of a day’s business, and with the strong coffees removed most traces of her mother’s awful porridge from her tongue. She asked Ola to send out a tender to a few architect firms, and confirmed she’d be back in Sydney in a day or two. Then she rang home. Bryan answered.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello yourself. What happened to “Hello beautiful wife, I miss you and can’t bear another hour without you”?’

‘Oh, hey gorgeous! Uh, yeah. . the caller ID is. . down.’

Suzette frowned. ‘Down?’

‘Nelson found my screwdriver set and did a bit of exploratory surgery on the handset. This is an old phone I found downstairs. I think it may have been used to convey the terms for the Treaty of Versailles. It’s got a spinny thingy.’

‘Rotary dial?’

‘I think you’ll find in telecommunications circles it’s called a “spinny thingy”.’

‘Okay, Captain Hilarious. Why isn’t Nelson at school?’

Her husband chuckled. He sounded much more than a thousand kilometres away. ‘You won’t like this.’

‘Try me.’

‘He didn’t want to go.’

Suzette took a breath and told herself not to get snarky.

‘Didn’t want to go. Did he have a good reason?’

‘He said he doesn’t like his teacher because she isn’t nice to her husband.’

‘Not nice. . to her. . what? I don’t get it.’

‘Nels said she was married to her husband but kisses another man.’

Suzette’s new coffee arrived, and she tried not to watch the taut young waiter saunter away. ‘I still don’t understand. Did he see her kissing another teacher?’

‘No.’

‘Then how-’

She suddenly understood. Nelson just knew .

‘Aaah.’

‘Yep,’ agreed Bryan.

Inklings. Feelings. Nelson had them. Quincy didn’t. Was Nelson’s prescience as strong as Nicholas’s? She didn’t know. It was only in the last two days that she’d begun to realise how sensitive Nicholas was to things unseen. What was it in her family’s blood that gave its men this odd sensitivity? Would Nelson turn out like Nicholas? She shivered at the prospect, then frowned at herself for being so uncharitable.

‘He’s napping now,’ explained Bryan. ‘I guess gutting a two-hundred-dollar phone takes it out of a bloke. Maybe call later, explain to him some stuff about women and kissing and misplaced love and all that stuff I don’t understand because I’m married to the woman of my dreams?’

‘You’ll go far, charmer. I’ll ring and tell him he’s going to school or going to sea.’

Brian laughed. ‘How’s Nicholas?’

‘He’s. . I honestly don’t know. Sick, Mum said.’

‘Hm. And you?’

She could hear the caring gravity in his voice. She knew what he meant. She’d seen a man dead on the front porch of her childhood home. God, was that only yesterday? The image of Gavin’s broken teeth in his shattered jaw leapt again into the front of her mind and her stomach tightened.

‘I’m okay.’

‘Okay. Call later. Come home soon.’

They said their goodbyes, and then Suzette was staring at the cooling coffee with the disconnected phone on her lap. The thought of Gavin Boye crumpled on the porch stole all the joy out of her conversation with Bryan. Why had he killed himself? There were a thousand possible reasons, from tax fraud to child porn and everything in between. But why had he shot himself in front of Nicholas?

Tristram. Tristram was the link. She was sure of it.

She sipped her coffee and started to put away her paperwork. At the bottom of the pile was the small notepad she always carried with her. This was the last job she’d left for herself. Two nights ago, she’d been excited about this, but now, for some reason, it was a task she felt like avoiding. She flipped open the pad. Drawn there was the strange mark she’d copied from the doorway of Plough amp; Vine Health Foods. Quill’s shop , she thought.

She clicked open her internet browser and typed: ‘runes’. She started to hunt.

Nicholas couldn’t help but admire the clerk at the convenience store. The young Filipino man managed to scan, bag and total Nicholas’s purchase of milk, bread, peanut paste, toiletries and a newspaper without once looking up from the swimsuit pictorial in the men’s magazine he held between his face and Nicholas’s.

Nicholas carried the bags out into the angled afternoon light. The pearly clouds had cleared and faintly warm sunlight fell softly between the leaves of jacaranda and satinwood trees. In sober daylight, the Myrtle Street shops held no menace and the nostalgia he’d expected here with Suzette two evenings ago finally arrived — the excitement of what sweet treasures would be in forty cents’ worth of mixed lollies (Cobbers? Freckles? Milk bottles? Mint leaves?) or how many pecans Mrs Ferguson would sell him for a dodecagon fifty-cent piece, or the tactile pleasure of stroking a burnished silver chrysalis found in the oleander bushes out front, now gone and replaced with topiary trees.