Christian White - The Nowhere Child

She picked up her backpack, clomped across the kitchen in her dirty Chuck Taylors and disappeared out the door.

‘Some back-up would have been nice,’ Molly said to Jack.

‘I thought you handled it pretty well.’ He put an arm around her shoulders and tried to ignore the way she stiffened under his touch.

‘I worry about her, Jack.’

‘She’s not a lost soul just yet,’ he said. ‘Just a little lost. Remember what you were like at her age? Besides, I won’t be the favourite for long. I read somewhere that when girls hit puberty something is triggered inside their brain and they’re reprogrammed to hate the smell of their father. They say it’s an evolutionary thing. To prevent incest.’

Molly’s face turned sour. ‘Just one more reason not to believe in evolution.’

Sammy yanked on one of Jack’s pant legs. She had waddled into the kitchen, dragging a stuffed gorilla behind her. ‘Dada,’ she said. ‘Incest?’

Molly laughed. It felt good to hear her laugh. ‘Good luck with that one. I have to check up on Stu.’

When Molly left the kitchen, Jack hoisted his little girl into his arms and drew her tight toward his face. His whiskers and hot breath made her giggle and squirm. She smelled like fresh talcum powder.

‘Incest?’ Sammy said again.

‘ Insects ,’ Jack said. ‘You know, like ants and beetles.’

Went Drugs, the family business, was situated on the corner of Main Street and Barkly, in the middle of Manson’s shopping district. The store also provided a shortcut between a large parking lot and Main Street, which meant plenty of foot traffic. People always got sick and business was always good.

When Jack arrived, Deborah Shoshlefski was bagging up a customer’s order at the front counter. Deborah was the youngest and most reliable of Jack’s shop assistants, a dowdy girl with wide-set eyes that made her seem perpetually surprised.

‘Morning, boss. There’s a load of scripts need filling. They’re on your spike.’

‘Thanks, Debbie.’

She rolled her eyes, laughing, and told her customer, ‘He knows I hate it when people call me Debbie, so he calls me Debbie every chance he gets.’

Jack smiled politely at the woman as he slipped behind the counter. He barely had time to button on his white tunic before a skeletal hand reached over the counter and grabbed his forearm.

‘My joints are hurting something awful, Jack,’ an old voice wheezed. Graham Kasey had lived in Manson forever and had seemed ancient even when Jack was a boy. He spoke through loose false teeth in that old-timer death-gurgle that Jack’s grandfather had taken on in his final years. ‘My bones feel like they’re punishing me for something I can’t remember. None of the stuff you keep on the shelf is working for me, Jack. Give me something harder than this pussy shit.’ He held up an empty packet of Pain-Away, an extra-strength heat rub designed for superficial pain relief.

‘Have you seen a doctor, Graham?’

‘You expect me to drive all the way to Coleman just so Dr Arter can send me back here with a scrap of paper? Come on, Jack. I know you got what I need.’

‘I’m not a drug dealer. And who says you have to go all the way to Coleman? We’ve got Dr Redmond right here in Manson.’

‘Redmond and I don’t see eye to eye.’

Jack threw a subtle wink at Deborah, who chortled in return. Graham Kasey was the sort who would rather drive twenty miles to Coleman in his gas-guzzling old Statesman than have Dr Redmond – who was both black and a woman – give him a prescription.

‘Sorry, Graham. I don’t write the scripts. I just fill ’em.’

In the whole time they had been talking, Graham hadn’t let go of Jack’s arm. His fingers were cold and bony, reminding Jack of dead white caterpillars. ‘Don’t you know you’re s’posed to respect your elders?’

‘It’s illegal.’

‘Oh, illegal my ear. I know how it works, Jack. You can write off anything you keep behind your little counter there. Things get lost all the time. They go missing or get chewed up by rats or they expire.’

‘And how might you know that?’

‘Well, let’s just say it wasn’t so damn uptight round here when Sandy ran things.’

At hearing his mother’s name, Jack felt hot energy rise in the back of his neck. Went Drugs was opened two years before Jack was born, as the sign above the door – WENT DRUGS EST. 1949 – reminded him daily. He had bought into it fair and square just four years out of college, but it never really felt wholly his.

It didn’t help that his mother – a druggist too and technically retired – popped in every other week under the pretence of picking up a bottle of Aspirin or a jumbo-sized pack of toilet paper, only to wander the aisles saying things like, ‘Oh, why did you put the antihistamines here ?’ One time she even ran her index finger along the rear shelf to check for dust, like an uptight British nanny.

Graham might have seen a little too much fire in Jack’s eyes because he softened and finally released Jack’s arm. There were pale marks in the skin where his fingers had been. ‘Ah, hell. I’ll just take another pack of this pussy shit.’

Jack flashed a smile and clapped a hand against Graham’s shoulder. He could have sworn he saw dust rise off the old coot’s blazer.

‘You heard the man, Debbie,’ Jack said. ‘One pack of pussy shit for Mr Kasey here. Bag it up.’

‘Right away, boss.’

Jack went back to his station to fill some scripts but couldn’t quite relax. Graham Kasey had picked at an old scab and now he was irritated.

A grown man with mommy issues, he thought. Talk about cliché.

It’s not cliché, he heard his daughter say. It’s a classic.

Jack tried to focus on work, but as he pulled the first script from the spike, he nearly tore it in half. Luckily the important parts were still readable: Andrea Albee, fluoxetine, maintenance dose .

He took a small plastic cup and wandered among the towering pill shelves out back, then returned to his desk with Andrea Albee’s Prozac and powered up the fat computer on his desk. It buzzed and struggled. A few minutes later a black screen appeared with a green directory. He found fluoxetine on the database and hit the PRINT SIDE EFFECTS button for the side of the bottle.

The printer shook and screamed as the list emerged. Hives, restlessness, chills, fever, drowsiness, irregular heartbeat, convulsions, dry skin, dry mouth. Just how sad was this Andrea Albee anyway? Was turning her brain numb – and that’s exactly what she was doing: contrary to popular opinion, Prozac didn’t make you feel happy or right – truly worth the side effects?

Deborah poked her head into his station. ‘Phone call for you, boss. Wanna take it in here?’

‘Thanks, Deborah.’

Her eyes grew even wider than usual. ‘You didn’t call me Debbie!’

Jack flashed the same smile he’d given Graham Kasey, and Deborah connected the call to the phone on his desk.

‘Jack Went speaking.’

‘Hi, Jack.’ He recognised the voice right away. ‘Free for lunch?’

At two pm, Jack pulled in to the parking lot at the east end of Lake Merri and stood waiting against his red Buick Reatta convertible – a car Emma lovingly referred to as his mid-life-crisis-mobile. The lot was hidden from the highway by a quarter-mile of shaggy bushland. It was almost always empty, even at this time of year when the spring weather started to bring people back to the water.

Travis Eckles arrived ten minutes later in his industrial cleaning work van. He got out of the van in a pair of baggy white coveralls and checked his windblown hair in the windscreen reflection. He had a nasty-looking black eye.