An Isolated Incident, Page 2

  It was nothing really. She’d been at a trivia night with some mates and when they announced the lucky door prizes at the end, her number got called. So she went on up to collect her prize – a basket of chocolate truffles and candied fruit and the like – and this bloke who’d won another one of the prizes started chatting her up. He asked her how she’d get the great big basket of stuff home and she said it was no problem, she had her car with her. He started in on a whole sob story about how he’d walked right across town to be there that night but now he had this great big basket to carry and taxis were so expensive after 10 pm it would take most of his grocery money just to get home. Bella wondered why he’d come to a trivia night so far from home when every pub and community group in town held one seemingly every damn week, but she didn’t say that, she said, ‘Oh, dear’ or something, and went to carry off her loot. He stopped her though, a hand on her arm, and asked her which direction she was heading. She felt a bit scared then, she told me, and so she lied, told him she was going straight to her sister’s place which was around the corner. ‘It’s just I could really do with a lift, at least up the main road,’ he said, still holding her arm. ‘Ah, well, ask around some of the old fellas in there. I’m sure one of them can help you out,’ she said and then – her voice was kind of disbelieving when she told me this bit – then she tried to move away but he moved with her. She had to actually pull her arm away from his.

  When she got to her car she locked all the doors and started crying a little bit. ‘Stupid, I know,’ she told me that night (because although she hadn’t planned to she did as she’d told the man and came straight to my place, round the corner). ‘He was just an awkward bloke, didn’t know how to take a hint and nothing happened, but I just felt so rude and I hate that.’

  I made her a hot choccy and we talked about other things and just when I thought it was all forgotten she said, ‘You know, if it’d been a woman I would’ve offered her a lift no question.’ I think she felt bad about that.

  The older suit asked me if Bella had described the bloke at all, but she hadn’t. The younger one asked me if I thought she’d been upset over nothing and I don’t know why but I wanted to punch him then. No, I do know why. It’s because I had thought she was overreacting and I told her that. Gently, but still. What if she took it to heart? What if the next time she was approached she went against her instincts?

  ‘I mean,’ the young suit went on, ‘from what I hear, you yourself are known as a trusting kind of a woman. When it comes to men, I mean.’

  ‘Alright,’ the older one said.

  I couldn’t speak just then. I couldn’t.

  ‘Alright,’ the older one said again. ‘Thanks for your time, Chris. We’ll keep you updated. And you call me if you think of anything else, yeah?’

  Sally Perkins drove me home, warned me that the story would be all over the news soon.

  ‘I’ll keep the telly off then.’

  ‘If there’s anyone who you think should know . . . I mean, hearing something like this from the news is pretty tough.’

  ‘Her dad. I suppose I should call her dad.’

  ‘The detectives have his details, they’ll get in touch with him. And they’ve been to her work already. But if there are any other friends, distant relatives . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a think. Call around.’

  ‘Journos might try and talk to you. Probably not today. Your names are different, so with any luck it’ll take ’em a while to track you down. Anyway, you don’t have to deal with them, alright? We’ve got people to do that for you.’ Without taking her eyes off the road she pulled a card from somewhere down her right side and passed it to me.

  We drove past the park where I used to take Bella when she was a tiny thing. I’d never take her there now. I mean, I wouldn’t take a little kid there now. The old fort she used to climb on was covered in graffiti and deliberately gouged splinters of sharp wood. The swing where I would sit and watch her disappeared years ago but the frame’s still there, FUCKING CUNTS scrawled up its side, the scrubby grass beneath caked with old chip packets and cigarette butts. I walked past it most afternoons and again late at night, but I never thought about me and Bella there.

  This is my life now, I realised. Just, you know, remembering Bella everywhere she’d ever been and wouldn’t be anymore. I thought how even this weird day, seeing the inside of a morgue and the back of the cop shop, was made even weirder by the fact that Bella would never know about it.

  ‘Chris? This is the one, yeah?’

  We were out the front of my house. It’s one of the neater ones in the street. I keep my lawn mowed and my mailbox cleared and the driveway free from oil splatters. Only Frank on the corner, who trims his lawn with nail scissors and cleans his gutters daily, keeps a neater street front than me.

  ‘Chris?’

  I thanked her for the lift, got out of the car. ‘Take care of yourself,’ I said and she smiled. She wasn’t a pretty girl, but her smile was lovely.

  I did as Sally had said, called a few of Bella’s friends, asked each of them if they’d mind calling some others. It was strange. I thought they’d scream and cry and say, ‘No, it’s not possible,’ but everyone just kind of accepted it. Everyone said sorry to me. Everyone asked what they could do. It was like they were more worried about me than about Bella, which is logical, I know, but also terrible. Maybe I just sounded that bad.

  By late afternoon, my phone was ringing every time I hung up from making a call. The news was out and people wanted to know if it was true and what they could do. I told them it was and that there was nothing.

  Around six, there was a knock on the door and I started shaking all over again. I told myself there was nothing to fear now, the worst had already happened, but my nerves wouldn’t listen. I braced for another blow, opened the door.

  Nate. Love of my life, smasher of my heart. There he stood, my mighty tree of a man with tears splashing down into his bushranger beard.

  ‘Babe,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Oh, babe.’ His body surged forward. He wrapped his giant arms around me, squeezed all the shaking out. He carried me inside and put me down on the kitchen chair. Knelt at my feet and hugged me some more, rubbing his wet, scratchy face against my neck.

  ‘Heard it on the midday news, no details, just a woman found near Strathdee. Then next update they said an aged-care assistant. Tried to call you, but couldn’t get through. Then the next update had the name. I had to call base, get ’em to send a relief driver. Caught a cab back to my car and drove straight down.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You should’ve called me.’

  ‘I was going to. Everyone’s been calling me.’ As if to prove it, the phone started ringing again.

  ‘Oh, babe.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Poor Bella. That poor little thing.’

  And I lost it then, because no one had said that. Not anyone.

  I’d met Nate at the pub, of course. Where else would I ever meet anyone? I was twenty-five and never short of offers but I was getting tired of it all. I’d been thinking that it might be nice to get serious with someone, set up home, maybe even have a baby. Most of the girls I’d gone to school with had a few kids by then and, though I wasn’t jealous of their lives, I was starting to feel a tug deep inside when I’d see them in the main street with a pastel bundle strapped to their chest, a curly-haired munchkin clinging to their hand.

  So, I was in a suggestible state you might say, but honestly I know I would’ve fallen for Nate even if I was married to Prince Harry and had a pair of ginger twins cooking in my oven. I would’ve fallen for Nate no matter what.

  This was before the bypass went in, when Strathdee was still the main truck-stop town on the road from Sydney to Melbourne. So I was used to serving blokes who looked like they could lift their rigs w
ith one hand, but I’d never thought of the place as small until Nate walked in. Right away it was like there wasn’t enough room for anyone else. All those other boofheads, they were pushed to the corners, and even though I was back in the kitchen looking out through the little service window, I felt he was pressing right up against me. It was like the mass of him had shoved out whatever air we had in there, because I suddenly couldn’t breathe real well.

  He ordered a burger and chips and an orange juice. I’d never seen a man order an orange juice. Not sure I’ve ever seen anyone order an orange juice without vodka in it. But it’s not like Old Grey behind the bar, or anyone else for that matter, was going to have a go at this mountain for being soft. Jesus.

  When I called his number and he came and got his burger my dirty mind wondered if those giant paws might actually be able to cover my tits and I shivered all over and was sure he knew what I was thinking.

  I hung back and watched as he rammed a handful of chips into his gob and then licked his lips. It was indecent, that wet pink tongue peeking out from these thick red lips hiding in that tangle of black beard.

  Just as well I got called back to cook some steaks before he started on his burger because I might have gone ahead and wet myself if I’d seen how wide that mouth could open just then.

  As it happened he left after his burger and the pub filled back up with air and space and I settled down, even had a little laugh at myself for getting so worked up over a juice-drinking ape-man.

  And then the next week he came back and it was just the same: the walls closing in, my mind full of filthy thoughts about his hands and mouth. But this time he stayed by the service window and talked to me between orders. God knows what I said to him. When I look back I imagine a hot mist of desperation spraying from my mouth every time I opened it. But I guess that was just what he was looking for, because he offered me a lift home and had my knickers off and my knockers bouncing before the windscreen of his coach was even half fogged over.

  Nate had been a truckie once, but by the time I met him he was driving tourist buses up and down the east coast. Most of the passengers were oldies wanting to see the country but too scared or frail to brave the distances on their own. Nate was like the cheeky but dependable grandson they all wished for. And for his part he got to be on the road but without the pressure that turned so many truckies into pill heads. ‘Australia at a leisurely pace’ was the catchphrase of the mob he worked for.

  Once him and me hooked up, though, he gave away the long-haul route and picked up the day-trip run from here to the small towns further west. I didn’t ask him to. He wanted to be home with me every night. Incredible. Man like him, girl like me . . . I knew how lucky I was, believe me. Didn’t stop me from fucking everything up though.

  But I mustn’t have burnt every last bit of his love for me to the ground, because here he was in my kitchen taking care of me like the last decade had never happened. He checked that I’d made all the calls I needed to then turned my phone off. He made me a cheese sandwich, which I ate almost half of, and a cup of tea, which I drank. Then he dosed me with what he called ‘ten-hour guarantees’. I told him I could never imagine sleeping again but I let him put me to bed anyway. He got in beside me and there was no need to talk about that. I backed up into his plank of a chest and he pulled me in with those enormous arms and I sank into sleep like it was five years ago and there was nothing to worry about except whether he’d still be here in the morning.

  Tuesday, 7 April

  AustraliaToday.com

  ‘Beautiful Bella’ viciously mauled

  May Norman

  7 April 2015

  A ‘terribly mauled’ body found yesterday by a traveller taking a roadside cigarette break has been identified as that of Bella Michaels, a 25-year-old aged-care worker from Strathdee, in south-western New South Wales. Ms Michaels had been missing for a little over two days when emergency services received a call from a distressed Melbourne man reporting his gruesome find.

  ‘The gentleman stopped at an expanse of grass and scrub just past the Strathdee exit heading south. His intention was to stretch his legs and have a cigarette while his kids were sleeping in the car. It’s a lucky thing they didn’t wake up and decide to come look for Daddy,’ a police spokesman said this morning.

  Local police arrived at the scene to find a body which an officer who had known Ms Michaels recognised as hers. Official identification was later made by Ms Michaels’ sister.

  Police are so far declining to reveal how Ms Michaels died or whether she had been sexually assaulted, but unconfirmed reports from those on the scene suggest she was, in the words of the man who found the body, ‘terribly mauled’. Detective Sergeant John Brandis, who is leading the investigation, would not comment on whether this mauling may have occurred after death, but locals point to the presence of many wild dogs and cats in the area and the fact that the body may have been out in the open since Friday night.

  Ms Michaels was last seen leaving Strathdee Haven, the nursing home where she worked, just after 5 pm on Friday. Her car was parked less than a three-minute walk away, but she never reached it. Staff and residents at Strathdee Haven are ‘in shock, just absolutely stunned’, according to manager Cathryn Charles. ‘She was an essential part of the team here, always going above and beyond and always with a smile on her face. It beggars belief that this could’ve happened to her, and right here on our doorstep it seems.’

  Det. Brandis said that so far door-to-door interviewing in the area Ms Michaels disappeared from has turned up nothing, but that the canvassing will continue. ‘It was a very short walk, in daylight, along a quiet residential street. If there was a struggle or commotion of any kind, someone must have seen or heard it.’

  Police are also appealing for motorists who may have noticed stopped vehicles or any suspicious behaviour on the Hume Highway between Gundagai and Holbrook between 6 pm Friday and 6 am Saturday to contact the Strathdee police or Crime Stoppers.

  I didn’t sleep the promised ten hours but I slept almost seven, which was a damn near-miracle given the circumstances. As soon as I was conscious I was thinking about Bella and what they’d done to her. Yeah, they. It was never a question to me. Not after I’d seen her, you know?

  When my mum died it took months before I woke up knowing she was dead. Every morning there’d be this sweet, sleepy moment in which the world was as it always had been before the truth crashed in. It was like that after Nate left me, too. I’d wake up and for a second be sure he was beside me. But that didn’t happen with Bella. I woke and straight away I saw her face as it’d been in the morgue.

  (The first time I ever saw Bella’s face I told Mum it looked like she’d been bashed because her skull was all lopsided and she had scratches on one cheek and there were patches of blue over her weird little bald brows. Mum laughed and said that being born is the roughest thing most of us’ll ever go through.)

  I dragged myself out to the kitchen. Nate was at the table drinking coffee, reading from the screen of his phone. He flicked it off, shoved it into the front pocket of his jeans, came and kissed the top of my head, cradled me like that for a long, lovely moment. Without asking whether I wanted it, he went ahead and made me coffee and it was exactly the right temperature, exactly the right milky sweetness.

  He waited until I’d drunk about half and then covered my hands with his. ‘So, what’s the story? What have the cops said?’

  His hands seemed to muffle the grief and horror a little. I felt like the weight of them on mine would stop that terrible shaking demon from taking me over again.

  ‘She left work on Friday a bit after five. Said bye to everyone inside and off she went, just like normal. Three hours later a nurse arriving for her shift noticed Bella’s car on the street. She thought it was weird and tried to call her, got no answer. On her break, around eleven, the nurse went to her own car to grab something and saw Bella’s wa
s still there. She tried her again and had such a bad feeling about her not answering that she looked up Bella’s emergency contact, me, and called to see if everything was okay. I was at work and then didn’t bother checking my messages before I crashed out – and – and –’

  ‘Hey, hey.’ Nate stroked his thumb over my hand. ‘Breathe, babe. Come on, big breaths. Good girl, that’s it.’

  ‘So I never got the message until the morning. There was another one by then – from her boss – Bel hadn’t show up for work. I went round to her place, but there was no answer. I called the police. They said wait. I waited. I kept calling her all day. Called her friends. At the end of the day I called the police again. They filed a report. Told me she’d probably turn up, red-faced about causing all this trouble when she’d just gone off for a weekend with her fella.’

  ‘Who’s her fella?’ Nate asked and it was only a split-second but I saw it, the violence. It was good to be reminded. I took my hands out from under his. I did it casually, picked up my coffee cup and took a sip and left my hands wrapped around its hard warmth.

  ‘She doesn’t have one. They just assumed. Talked about her like she’s some other girl. Some idiot who takes off from work without telling anyone. As if she would.’

  ‘World’s youngest grandma,’ he said, smiling.

  We used to call her that, me and Nate, back when we’d get pissed and make messes and she would bustle in, clean up and lecture us about responsibility.