The Love of a Bad Man Read online

Dearest One,

  As I write this, you are smiling at me from across the desk. How that smile warms me! I would like to take your face in my hands and kiss those glistening white teeth, every single one of them. Alas, I must be patient …

  The Mutilated Cutter is the key. I see it now. Perhaps it was your freedom I was thinking of all along, subconsciously, when I wrote it all those months ago?

  You have called my plot ‘ingenious’. Really, darling, you are the genius to have inspired it! Lucinda is your perfect match, the woman you bring out in me when we are together. I see now that I must strive to become her, in life as well as on stage, if I am to be worthy.

  Tell me how, darling. Tell me what I must do and where and to whom. You are my master and I am your loving apprentice. I am willing to submit to your every command.

  How willing, you ask? Well, just look at the photograph I sent you. I suspect you’ve sneaked a peek already, you naughty boy! Come, my precious, you can do more than look.

  The photograph was taken by a friend of mine from art school. As she was binding me to the chair, I imagined that it was you giving me the Strangler treatment, and also that I was you, standing outside my own body and stretching the rope across my neck. Few people understand the psychic intimacy between killer and victim as we do.

  The ropes around my body symbolise that I am bound to you, as a ring binds a wife to her husband. I am bound to you, Ken, till death do us part — though whose death is your decision.

  Yours,

  Veronica

  September 9, 1980

  Darling,

  I am so worked up from our lesson today, I can hardly breathe! How ironic, when it is I who am learning to take breath!

  I have been practicing knots like you told me. My desk is strewn with knotted bits of rope and fabric. Poor Dalí doesn’t know what’s going on! He flew over to inspect and is now treading carefully between the knots. Oh, he knows I’m plotting something!

  I can see the headlines already, declaring your innocence. You will be surprised by how many people are willing to believe you’re innocent, on the basis of your looks. You don’t have the face of a killer, Ken. Not the way Angelo does.

  I wonder what she will look like, our victim? Her face looms in my imagination, but I cannot picture any of the details — the colour of her eyes, the shape of her nose, her lips.

  Your face is all I see.

  Yours,

  Veronica

  September 18, 1980

  Ken,

  I am composing this from my room at the Shangri-La motel. Do you know that ‘Shangri-La’ is what the Tibetan Buddhists call paradise? I doubt there are roaches in paradise, but if I use my imagination, the glow of the lamp against the yellow walls is almost heavenly …

  I have been dirty in this dirty little room. I couldn’t help myself. Not when I think about what I am about to do, how much closer it will bring us. To have your strength; to hold a life in my hands and watch it slip away … Never in my wildest dreams did I think that it would go this far, when I first wrote to you!

  You were so sweet and concerned on the phone today, but you mustn’t worry! Yes, I am doing this for you, but also for my art. I know now that I cannot become a truly great writer until I have experienced what you have experienced. You have helped me to see this.

  Paradise is near, Ken. The bars of your cage are melting away like a mirage and I am standing naked before you. I am ready.

  Yours,

  Veronica

  Cathy

  I’ve always had small hands. The rest of me isn’t very big either, but my hands are almost as small as a kid’s, with spindly white fingers and nails like broken seashells. David likes this about me. That there’s something that hasn’t changed for all these years, even if my face has gotten harder and my lips thinner and my cunt slack from pushing. And he likes seeing me do things with my hands, too, things you wouldn’t expect from looking at something so small and white.

  He’s holding my hand when I wake up in the maternity ward. Last time I saw him, when he showed up in our backyard on Boxing Day, I was seven months pregnant and the hubby was sizzling sausages and the in-laws were all giving us the stink-eye. The time before that, I was loading the car with groceries as the kids played silly buggers in the backseat. The time before that — well, it was so long ago, I can’t see any reason to bring it up.

  ‘Heard you had a boy,’ David says.

  I don’t feel like talking about the new kid any more than I feel like talking about what having him did to me. The doctors call it ‘uterine prolapse’. That’s just stuck-up hospital-speak for things heading south. David has probably seen loads of women since we were together, but I bet none of them ever had their womb slip out of them, red and bulgy as a baboon in heat.

  ‘What are you doin’ here?’ I ask, my voice still thick from the anaesthetic.

  David wipes his nose, taps his feet, turns his head to watch a nurse pass in the hall. He always did have trouble staying still. His fingers lick at mine like flames. Old flames.

  ‘Cath. My life’s nothin’ without ya.’

  I know it’s David’s house as soon as I see it. The shittiest place on the street, it’s got this peeling white paint-job and broken orange roof tiles. Weeds cracking out of the path to the front door and about a half-dozen car bodies in the driveway.

  My lips are thin, but I’m wearing lippie. I’m still a walking dairy, but I’ve got on my best blouse, with the big gold buttons and scratchy lace collar. It’s only four weeks since the new baby came, but Mack’s been out of work so long, he was chuffed when I said I was going back to the typing pool this morning. It’ll be dinnertime before he starts worrying.

  As I get closer, these dogs start up, big ones by the sound of them. David’s always had dogs. Even when his olds could barely afford to put food on the table, there’d be dogs licking their dirty dishes, sniffing in their rubbish. I step onto the porch and rattle the screen door, and they go berserk, pushing their long snouts against it and scratching with their claws. Then I hear David swearing at them in the hallway. I see his outline in a white singlet, and he’s kicking the dogs out of the way and holding the door open for me. His eyes go to my purse.

  ‘Didn’t bring much, did ya?’

  David was a scrawny kid but stronger than he looked. I saw it every time he climbed in and out of windows as I stood watch, or broke into cars and fiddled with the wires. He could climb onto any roof, squeeze into any space. He could blow shit up and get any car started. People always said he was dumb because of his emotional problems and the way he could never sit still, but I knew just from watching him that his mind worked quicker than anyone else’s.

  No one ever said my mind was quick, but they did say I was too clever to waste my life with the likes of David Birnie. As opposed to Mack, who — even though he was dumber than dog shit — never broke the law.

  The sun is lower on the wall than when David let me in. I’ve got the sheets pulled up past my tits. He kneels across from me in the buff, rolling us a ciggie. He looks so good to me, it’s hard to keep from staring at the little trail of hairs on his flat belly, his sleepy, dangling dick.

  ‘… ’Member that night at the drive-in? Livin’ Dead?’ The paper sizzles as David runs his tongue across it. ‘Still got the scar from that bloody fence. Hang on.’

  He puts the cig in his mouth and shows me the white shimmer between his ribs. I touch a finger to it. Bungled robbery. Our last night together.

  ‘This one’s from when I was a truckie. Banged my knee on the loading dock. And this —’ he lifts a bit of brown hair near the front of his head ‘— Barge in Bunbury. Drum fell on my head.’

  His skin ripples over his chest bones as he gropes for the lighter. If he was anything like Mack, he’d be snoring by now. He catches the cig with a jump of flame.

  ‘Had thi
s panel van. Yellow.’

  He looks thoughtful. I wait for more, but he just takes a drag then passes it to me. A moment later he rubs his hands together and jumps up from the bed to peer through the blinds. ‘Fucken dead out there.’

  I don’t have to look at a clock to know what time of afternoon it is. The kids will be home from school in about an hour. Milo and milk arrowroot biscuits. Skippy and Ossie Ostrich.

  ‘Dealer’s s’posed to bring a coupla eight balls this arvo.’ David flicks down the blind and flashes me a grin. ‘We ever snort together?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘You’ll love it. Keep us going all night.’

  If anything can help us make up for lost time, I’m all for it. I take the smoke deep into my lungs. Then I run my hands over the space beside me. Funny thing, we never got to do it in a bed until today.

  It only takes Mack two days to track me down. He comes in the evening, when the clouds are all red and the sun burning orange like a sucked cigarette. David answers the door.

  ‘It’s for you, Cath,’ he shouts over the noise of the dogs and game-show buzzers.

  Before I get to the screen door, I can see Mack’s holding the new baby. It’s a cheap trick. From the way he’s gawking at the dogs, I bet he regrets it too. I stand next to David and Mack’s face goes all saggy and wet-eyed.

  ‘Caffy. Come home.’

  I don’t say anything. He says it again.

  ‘You gotta come home, Caffy. You had your fun. We miss ya.’

  Mack’s got a lisp. I notice it most when he’s snivelling. He bounces the baby a bit. The dogs keeps growling. It’s funny it isn’t even crying when Mack is.

  ‘Come outside. We’re all waitin’.’

  He waves his fat arm and I see them sitting in the car, the whole mob in their dirty polos and green check school dresses. So bloody plain and freckle-faced I can’t stand to look at them.

  ‘We don’t care what you’ve done. We love ya. I love ya …’

  I won’t say it doesn’t feel good to be standing between two men and hearing that. Even if David prefers to keep his mouth shut. Mack wipes his face with his hand — the one with the stump for a middle finger. Mack was a carpenter before he did his back in and gained all that weight.

  ‘You can’t leave us for him, Caffy. He’s no good for ya. He doesn’t care what’s good for ya. Never has —’

  It’s as much a shock to me as to Mack when I slam my hand on the screen door and start screaming at him through the checked wire: you don’t know what’s good for me, rack off, get outta my life. Unless you count childbirth, I don’t reckon I’ve screamed so hard since the coppers tore me and David apart all those years ago, chucked us in separate cells. When I’m done yelling, my throat hurts and the baby’s crying as much as Mack.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ David tells him, friendly like on Boxing Day. ‘The heart wants what the heart wants.’

  I’m still fuming after David chains shut the front door and sits me back in front of the TV. He looks at my hand where I hit it against the screen, the palm bleeding, patterned with tiny squares. He gives it little kisses. He kisses my hot face, my eyelids, my neck, and it feels sweet.

  That same night I tell David, married or not, I want to live under his name.

  Since I’ve started staying up nights with David, I don’t like the way the world looks during the day. Blue sky. Orange roofs. Green grass. Everything too big and too bright.

  He’s always up about six hours before me. Sometimes he steals a quick root without even bothering to wake me. One in the morning. One straight after work. Two before bed, at least. There are days when everything down there feels like sandpaper and my piss burns like acid, but at least I don’t have to worry about getting pregnant anymore.

  David tells me he wanks on his work breaks, too.

  ‘If I don’t, I wanna throw spanners, fight the other blokes. Y’know?’

  I remember how he used to get when we couldn’t meet up. He’d do stuff like dislocate his shoulder trying to get out of juvie or smash up the windows of my house. And that was before we were even old enough to be doing it.

  I like to watch the soaps first thing in the day, those rich Yanks losing their memories and kissing their siblings. Sometimes I fall asleep on the couch after the soaps. One time, I nod off with a ciggie in my hand and wake to the carpet burning. David yells his head off when he sees it, but it’s not long before we’re lying in the ashes giggling like kids.

  I hardly ever go with David when he walks the dogs in the evenings. The times I do, though, I see the way he checks out the women jogging and pushing prams, the bunch of uni students who live down the street and are always outside showing off. I see him looking at those students through the blinds in the bedroom, too. Without thinking about it, I get on my knees and start touching him until he rolls my head and groans, ‘Shittt, Cath.’ And I know things will be sweet, as long as I’m giving him what he needs.

  Every other Saturday night, David goes out without me. He showers and makes himself look spunky, with a collared shirt open to his chest and lots of body spray. He takes the coke with him.

  I wait in front of the TV, smoking ciggie after ciggie and watching stupid prime-time movies. It’s times like these I wonder if the years have changed him for the worse, gotten him too used to fucking around. I wonder about the kids, too: mine and Mack’s, but also that one of David’s they made me give up when I was sixteen, the ones that might’ve been. Then my eyes start to hurt, and the TV gets fuzzy. I doze off to newscasts and wake up to sci-fis or slashers from when we were young. Or to David.

  ‘Shoulda seen me with this chick,’ he shakes me awake to brag, stinking of sweat instead of cologne now. ‘Two hours, no shittin’ ya. She was cryin’ by the end.’

  If it’s not that, it’s voices in the hall that wake me. He takes them to the spare room on the other side of the house. If I’m in the mood, I get off the couch to see what he’s picked up — always someone too young or too old, desperate and drunk or coked to the eyeballs.

  One time, it’s a blonde chick with a bloated belly. She’s already passed out on the bed when I get to the doorway. He stands over her, dick in hand.

  ‘What d’ya think?’ He grins at me.

  ‘She looks preggers.’

  ‘Her tits are good, but.’ David touches them. ‘You like her tits?’

  I climb onto the mattress. I circle her tits lightly. They feel like poached eggs gone cold, but the nipples are warm and firm.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘They’re alright.’

  We start going out for drives on weeknights. Both of us miss the days of stealing cars. We don’t say it, but the memories are there every time we go out in David’s red Sigma. Doing eighty, we take Stirling Highway across the river, past the old factory buildings and flat ground that hasn’t changed in twenty years. Dingo Flour Mill. Train tracks. Powerlines. Nothing growing but wild oats and bindi grass.

  I drink rum and colas in the passenger seat and pass them to David at the lights. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost believe no time has gone by since we last did this. But when I look in the mirror, there are lines around my eyes, and the music on the radio is different — sexy, jangly new stuff like The Bangles and Bananarama.

  ‘Look at that one,’ David says every time we see a young thing sticking her thumb out or waiting alone at a bus stop. ‘Ask if she wants a lift.’

  I do. Smile, wave, say hi in a cute way. I’ve got a squeaky little voice and am old enough to remind them of their mums. It’s easy.

  Once they’ve slid into the backseat, David does most of the talking.

  ‘Orright back there? Not too cold? Wanna smoke?’ His eyes flick to their faces in the rearview, narrow and bloodshot. ‘How ’bout the radio? Loud enough? Like the song?’

  He’s got a trick of turning up the volume so the chicks have
to lean forward to make themselves heard. Tits squeezed together. Faces just inches away. If they looked properly, they’d see him getting hard. But they don’t even think of it.

  David always has something to say once they’re out of the car. Sometimes about their bodies, sometimes about what they’re wearing, sometimes about what he’d like to do to them.

  ‘Coulda driven to the bush and raped her, easy.’ He smiles. ‘I got a shovel in the boot.’

  I know they’re more than jokes, that it turns him on to talk like this. It turns me on, too, hearing how all those others are just garbage to him, how they can’t touch this thing between us that goes back to when we were twelve and feels stronger than concrete. But it’s not till he brings up his old panel van again that I get that it’s more than just talk.

  ‘Yellow van. Used to drive it around down south. Y’know, quiet places …’

  ‘Lotsa space in the back. Fit a mattress, all my tools …’

  ‘Picked up this one chick. Netball skirt. She was out late, askin’ for it …’

  ‘Easy as. No one found the cunt. Hid her good.’

  I don’t pay much attention to the old car parts David brings home from work. Mostly they just sit in the driveway getting rusty and keeping the place ugly. Even when he spends the weekend working on them, I’m not interested. I bring him sandwiches cut in triangles, and hang around to smell the chemicals and watch the muscles in his skinny arms as he pumps and polishes. Then I go back inside to smoke or sleep in front of the TV.

  ‘Fixed up these tires,’ he tells me one afternoon, coming into the bedroom and getting his grimy gear off. ‘Can probably get a bit for them.’

  I don’t hear anything else about the tires for a couple of weeks. We keep going out for drives, making it seem more real by keeping a knife in the glove box. David wants me near the knife so I can keep it in mind, get used to the idea of holding it, of using it. It’s up to me to let him know when I’m ready.

  While he’s chatting up the chicks, I open up the glove box and peek inside. I imagine grabbing the knife and turning around. But I always end up closing the box, and they keep getting where they need to go safely. After dropping off five of them in a row one night, David cracks the shits. ‘Feel like a bloody taxi driver,’ he spits.