Brittle Shadows

One foot inside the apartment, the
smell hit her. Sour, like cat pee. Except they didn’t own a cat.

“Sean?” she
called, her voice cracking. She cleared her throat. “Sean, honey, are you
home?” Louder this time.

Not a sound.
Only that putrid smell.

She dumped her
heavy satchel on the floor, kicked the door closed, and surveyed the room.

The late
afternoon sun streamed through the balcony-facing floor-to-ceiling windows.
Long shadows from the life-sized, headless bronze nudes standing sentry sliced
the living area.
The Age
newspaper lay open at the business section in
the middle of the narrow glass-topped dining table, Sean’s mobile phone next to
it. Apart from one of the eight chairs sitting askew from the table, she could
have stepped into the pages of
Home Beautiful
.

She crossed the
carpet toward the short hall that led to the bedrooms and stuck her head into
the apartment’s galley-style kitchen. Tomatoes, red onions and a cling-wrapped
tray of meat – the makings of what looked to be one of her fiancé’s
specialties,
Spanish steak – sat on the
stainless steel drainer next to the sink. Further down the bench, she spotted a
bottle of red wine together with two wine glasses, one of which was already
poured. She sniffed the air and moved on.

Usually wide
open, the door to the guest bedroom was half-closed. Hoping Sean hadn’t offered
a bed to one of his boozy mates, she hesitated for a moment and then gave the
door a sharp shove.

The door swung
in, releasing a rush of sour air. Pinching her nostrils together, she leaned
into the room, ready to beat a hasty retreat if anyone was in there. Her gaze
went first to the queen-sized bed. Although the quilt looked rumpled, the bed
itself didn’t appear to have been slept in.

Breathing out
through her mouth, she glanced across the bedroom to where sunlight, filtered
through the window’s upward angled Venetians, striped the ceiling.

She took
another step into the room and turned around. The leather strap of her handbag
slid from her shoulder. She didn’t try to stop it, couldn’t stop it. Unable to
move, all she could do was gape at the open wardrobe, her eyes bulging almost
as much as the vacant ones staring back at her.

A silent scream
blocked her throat. She couldn’t breathe in; she couldn’t breathe out. Her
lungs wanted to burst. The purple, bloated face of the naked man hanging from
the wardrobe’s steel rail on a belt, his swollen tongue protruding from his
mouth, was almost unrecognizable. Almost.

She stumbled
backwards, snaring her handbag as she landed in a heap next to the bed. She
scrambled in the bottom of her bag, her mobile phone eluding her like wet soap
in the bathtub. When she did manage to get hold of it, she struggled to still
her shaking hands. Her fingers felt fat and clumsy, the buttons on her phone
tinier than she remembered.

“Emergency.
What service do you require? Police, Fire, Ambulance?”

She opened her
mouth to answer, but a magazine page stuck to her leg now had her attention
instead. She peeled it off, dangling the magazine at arm’s length as if it were
a dirty sock. She had never seen anything quite like it. Naked flesh. Entwined
bodies. Explicit sex scenes.

If she had
thought things couldn’t get any worse, she had thought wrong. She shook her
head, unable to come to terms with what she was seeing. Her fiancé, her lover,
her partner was dead; dead and surrounded with hard-core homosexual
pornography.

Jemma Dalton rubbed her bare arms,
wondering what it would take to convince her dour-faced taxi driver to adjust
the air conditioning to something less than Antarctic. Deciding it wasn’t worth
the effort, she settled back in her seat and watched as the scenery rushed
past; there one moment, gone the next. Like the people in her life.

She twisted the
skin on the back of her hand, pinching it between her nails, needing the solace
of physical pain. Anything to fill the void inside her. Losing her big sister –
her only sister – had been devastating enough, but the coroner’s finding of
suicide had pushed her past the pain threshold.

According to
what she had been told, her 35-year-old sister, Tanya Clark, had been so
depressed after the death of her fiancé, Sean Mullins, and the manner in which
he died, that she had taken her own life two months later. Despite there being
no evidence to the contrary, Jemma didn’t want to believe it. Not her sister.

The Melbourne
city skyline loomed in the distance, reminding Jemma of the reason for her
visit. Though Tanya’s body had been flown to Perth and laid to rest beside
their beloved mother, her essence was here; the place she had lived and worked
for all her adult life.

Up ahead, a
monumental yellow beam, cantilevered at a precarious angle, hung out over the
freeway. On the other side, a line of giant, red sticks leaned toward it
creating a portal: Melbourne’s gateway. When they passed through the sound tube
on the other side, a 300-metre long steel ribcage, she knew she wasn’t far from
her destination.

What she hadn’t
counted on was getting caught in the gridlocked inner city traffic. By the time
the taxi arrived outside the property manager’s office, a suited, dark-haired
man was locking up.

She leapt out
of the taxi. “Please wait. I’ll just be a minute.”

From the look on
the driver’s face, she had asked him to cut off his right hand. Double-parked,
he had no choice but to wait. Not if he wanted his fare. Besides, her luggage
was still in the boot.

Dodging a group
of Asian tourists taking photographs, she raced across the footpath. If she
couldn’t persuade the man in the suit to open up again, she would have to fork
out for a hotel. That or sleep on the street.

Profuse
apologies and some fast-talking had the desired result. A few minutes later,
she had the key to her sister’s rented apartment and a swipe card to access the
building.

The taxi driver
paid, her luggage unloaded, she set off.

Her mobile
phone rang while she was humping her cases along the footpath. She ignored it,
more intent on escaping the heat, traffic fumes and noise. She pushed on,
perspiration matting her fringe to her forehead. Not much further…

Number 299. She
shouldered through the thick glass entrance door, shoving her luggage ahead of
her into the airlock separating the street from the building’s lobby. She
paused for breath. Nearly there.

She swiped her
security card, unlocking the next set of glass doors. The cool, marble-tiled
lobby was empty and still, the only sound the echo of her own sigh. No airplane
hum. No traffic drone. No clanging trams. No ringing mobile phones.

A bank of
brushed-steel fronted mailboxes occupied the wall to her left. To her right
hung a mural-sized Aboriginal painting made up of thousands of white dots on a
black background.

She heard a
swish and looked around to see the doors of one of the two lifts part. A tall,
angular-faced, brunette strode out toward the glass doors, her imaginary blinkers
preventing even a cursory glance in Jemma’s direction.

Jemma hauled
her luggage into the vacated lift and pushed the button for the sixth floor.
Seconds later, the doors opened. She stepped out, looking up and down the
carpeted, windowless corridor for numbers.

Two doors down
on her right she found apartment 367. Her mobile rang again just as she was
inserting the key into the lock. She gritted her teeth and turned the key.
Couldn’t he take a hint? She wasn’t ready to talk. Not yet.

A wall of hot,
stuffy air hit her as she pushed the door in. The open-plan apartment was
smaller and less grand than the one Tanya had lived in with her fiancé before
he had hung himself. But compared to Jemma’s one-bedroom ground floor unit in
Perth, it was palatial.

She found the
switch for the air conditioner on the wall to her left and flicked it on. Then,
leaving her luggage at the door, she began to explore the apartment.

A black leather
modular lounge suite, positioned to take advantage of the city views, dominated
the off-white living room. Recessed in the wall, the entertainment unit, though
large, was unobtrusive. The quirky, free-standing pewter and colored glass
uplight in the corner provided both art and function.

The off-white
theme carried through to the compact, internal kitchen, the laundry at the end
more a cupboard than a room. She continued on, past a gleaming white-tiled
bathroom, the towel rails bare.

Opposite it, on
the other side of the hallway, a room she had hoped was the guest bedroom would
have been a squeeze even for a single bed. Instead, Tanya had converted it to
an office. A high-backed, leather CEO-style chair sat alone in the middle of
the room, the butcher-block table pushed hard up under the window. A collection
of large moving boxes was stacked against the adjacent wall.

Jemma’s pulse
quickened as she approached the open doorway at the far end of the hallway. She
faltered, wondering if coming in person had been the wisest decision, after
all. It wasn’t too late. She could still turn around and leave.

She took a
couple of fortifying breaths and crossed the threshold into the master bedroom.
A faint antiseptic smell hung in the air. Her shoulders slumped. All bedding
including the pillows had been stripped from the queen-sized bed, leaving just
the bare mattress. The bedside tables held no personal items, only a fine layer
of dust. Except for the cubist-style painting of two dragonflies above the
bedhead, all trace of her sister had been wiped from the room. Life and death.

What had she
expected? Some sort of shrine? A snapshot of Tanya’s life imprinted in time? An
explanation? What? Shaking her head, she backed out.

Her mobile
phone rang, reverberating through the apartment. She rushed to silence it.

Ross. She
couldn’t avoid him forever. With a sigh, she pressed the answer button, but
then didn’t know what to say.

“Jemma? Can you
hear me, Jem?”

“Loud and
clear.” She closed her eyes, wishing she couldn’t.

“Why haven’t
you been returning any of my phone calls?”

She cupped her
hands over the phone, somehow reluctant to disturb the sanctity of her sister’s
space. “I thought we had said all there was to say.”

“Where are you?
I called around to your place, but you weren’t there. You weren’t at work
either. Is everything okay?”

No, it wasn’t
bloody okay, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. Ross Gibson, her so-called
boyfriend, hadn’t given her a second thought when he had jacked in his Perth
job to join the exodus of workers some 1600 kilometers north to the mines.
“Please don’t do this, Ross. Not now.”

“Don’t do what?
We can work this out. I know we can. Hey, I’m sure there’s openings up here for
IT people, too. Do you want—”

“Stop. Please.”
It wasn’t so much that she hadn’t wanted to live in the middle of nowhere; it
was that she hadn’t been consulted. Her priorities were different now. Her life
was different. “You made your decision.”

“For us. For
our future—” He broke off. “Hey, what’s all the racket? Where are you?”

While they had
been talking, Jemma had unbolted the glass sliding door and walked out onto the
shallow balcony. The sound of sirens filled the air, the surrounding high-rise
apartments and office buildings tunneling their wails. She waited a moment for
it to abate. “New York.”