The Dead I Know (18 page)

‘Aaron?’

I sat up, my heart pitching. The moonlight revealed Skye standing there in her pyjamas.

‘What? What do you want?’

‘Nothing,’ she whispered. ‘I heard you wriggling around.

Having trouble sleeping?’

‘No,’ I hissed. ‘I’m fine. Go back to bed.’

‘Your nightmare really happened, didn’t it? It’s the same every time, I know it.’

I sighed and clicked my lips like Mam in her sleep.

She dragged a blanket from the box at the end of the bed, draped it over her shoulders and settled on the chair in the corner.

‘Go to bed, Skye. If your mother catches you in here you’ll —’

‘Who cares?’

‘
I
care!’ I hissed. ‘I’m enough burden on your parents without keeping you up all night.’

‘My nightmares are almost exactly the same,’ she said aloud.

‘Shhh!’

‘I go into his bedroom and he’s cold. I wake myself trying to wake him up. When I was little I used to run into their room and climb between them. Now I’m okay as long as I can hear them snoring. Hearing my dad trying to sniff his nose inside out puts me back to sleep. You can snore if you want to. I don’t mind. Really.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Go to bed.’

‘You’re not the boss of me. I’m the boss of you, remember?’

Perhaps I could
pretend
I was asleep when I strangled her. I slumped onto my pillow and dragged the duvet over my head but she didn’t leave, just hummed and tapped a foot on the floor.

I rolled onto my back and sighed at the ceiling. With Skye in the chair in the corner, I felt like I was on a psychologist’s couch. A twelve-year-old psychologist.

‘Same room,’ I breathed. ‘Same scene but every time it’s another chapter or a slightly different angle.’

‘I remember that much. And?’ she prompted, barely leaving enough time for a breath.

‘And, yes, I know the room.’

‘And?’

‘And there’s a woman in the bed. She’s not quite dead in the beginning but she’s dying from a bullet wound in her stomach. The man who shot her is standing in the doorway with a gun, smoking.’

‘Oh my God,’ she whispers.

I’m leaking words. I can’t stop.

‘The man is shouting at me but I can’t understand what he’s saying. He drags me by the hair to the pillow and I watch the woman die.’

‘Jesus.’

‘He pushes me to my knees on the floor and points the gun at my head. I close my eyes and I know I’m going to die but I don’t care. The gun goes off.’

She was silent then. Silent except for the little animalbreaths whistling in and out of her nose.

‘When I open my eyes again, the man has blown his own head off.’

Skye held her breath. ‘Is any of it . . . real?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It’s all real. Everything.’

Some sort of emotional depth charge went off in my belly and I howled like a wild dog. Howled until all my air was gone and I was drowning.

Of course it was real. Every little detail. I’d lived it a million times but never told the story. Never packaged it in words and mailed it to the world.

The light flicked on but I couldn’t stop. Skye had disappeared and her father was there, rumple-haired and tying his dressing-gown. He sat on the bed and held my hand.

‘It’s okay, Aaron. Just a dream, mate. Hush!’

‘It wasn’t a dream,’ I bawled. ‘It was never a dream.’

He patted my chest. ‘Shhh.’

I squeezed his fingers and he squeezed back. I felt the blundering intimacy of the moment and tried to pull away.

John held tight. ‘Tell me what happened,’ he whispered.

I sniffed and swallowed, wiped my face on my sleeve. He helped me sit up.

‘Canada. When I was five. My father killed my mother,’ I said, and gagged.

John drew breath, but he held on.

‘He shot her in the guts in her bed.’

John nodded like nothing was new.

‘He made me watch her die and then turned the gun on himself.’

John made a noise, an involuntary whimper.

‘I wish he’d killed me, too.’

‘Hush,’ John said. ‘He didn’t. By some miracle you’re still here. What happened after that?’

I breathed in. I breathed out.

‘Then Mam came and got me. I’ve been with her here ever since and she’s lived with the knowledge that her only son killed his wife and himself. Left her with this . . .
.
broken child. She gave up her life for me. She taught me
everything. Did everything for me. She was a professor at university. She was so smart. It drove her around the bend. I’m the reason she’s in hospital.’

‘Hang on a minute,’ John said. ‘She’s sick, Aaron, but you can’t blame yourself for that. Nothing you did or didn’t do contributed to Mam’s illness. Do you hear me?’

I wiped my eyes.

‘Hear me?’ he said again.

‘Yes, I hear you.’

‘Now, I have a confession to make to you. I knew Mam’s story through a mutual friend and I made the connection after I hired you.’

I stiffened. The running man who found me on the beach. The paramedic guy from the university, I was sure of it. Suddenly his kindness seemed contrived. Suddenly John was a do-gooder and I was his latest case. ‘I don’t need your sympathy. I don’t need anybody’s sympathy.’

‘Stop it!’ he growled. He pushed at my chest. I struggled to get free but he pinned me to the headboard. His strength surprised me.

He watched my eyes until I stopped fighting.

‘I lost a son,’ he said.

I blinked.

‘Died from a brain tumour. Went to sleep and didn’t wake up eight years ago. Skye found him. She was shaking him and peeling back his eyelids when I came in.’

‘I’m sorry,’

I said. ‘I don’t want you to be sorry,’ he said. ‘All I wanted to say was that death is never going to go away. We deal with it the best way we can. We deal with it and we get on with living. Me, I started a business and surrounded
myself with the dead and the grieving. I’m not sure it was entirely the healthiest way to deal with it, but here I am. I love what I do.’

That much was obvious. I felt a moment’s envy for his courage. His son had died and he’d turned it into a career. A strong, successful, healthy career. To some it might seem morbid but to me he was being brave. I wished that courage came in pill form – then I’d live out Skye’s fantasy and become a drug addict.

I’d stopped crying. I filled my lungs, and corners of my being that hadn’t tasted air in a decade were refreshed. My history was essentially the same but something felt different.

John tousled my hair. ‘Sleep. There’s work to do in the morning.’

For the first time in a very long while, I did.

34

There’s banging at the door. I can hear a man shouting, a bump and a crunch and then the man is wide-eyed in front of me. He’s a policeman with his hat in his hand. He looks at the bodies of my mother and my father and hurries away to vomit in the other room. When he returns, he kneels before me with his big warm hand on my shoulder.

‘What’s your name, little man?’ he asks, his voice tremulous. ‘Aaron David Rowe,’ I say.

He wipes my brow with his fingers. ‘Well, Aaron, how would you like to come with me?’

His paw swallows mine and he leads me into the hall. There are people looking at us from the cracks of doors. Their faces shout fear but nobody says a thing. The doors close like clams as we pass.

*

I woke when Mrs Barton slid the curtains open.

‘Afternoon, Aaron. Hope this isn’t going to be a regular matinee show because I will tire of it very quickly.’

I rubbed my eyes. ‘Sorry. First and last time,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘You may want to get dressed. You have visitors of the official kind.’

Panicking, I dragged tracksuit pants over my boxer shorts and patted my hair flat.

Constable Nadine Price and the other woman who’d helped me home from the café – Kim – sat in the lounge. Their teacups and cake plates were half empty. They stood when I entered.

‘Hi Aaron,’ Constable Nadine Price said.

I mumbled hello.

‘No need to be scared, mate,’ Constable Kim said. ‘This is just an informal little chat.’

‘Sit down, Aaron, for goodness sake,’ Mrs Barton said. ‘They’ve been fed, they won’t eat you.’

I took a seat and Mrs Barton poured me a cup of tea and put a slice of sponge onto a plate. Cake for breakfast? The day was about to get stranger.

‘Now, could you tell us what happened at the caravan park the other day?’

‘I should go,’ Mrs Barton said.

‘Please stay,’ I said. ‘If it’s okay with . . .’

‘Of course,’ Constable Nadine Price said. ‘Be aware, Aaron, that we’ll take note of what you say and we might use it in court.’

I thought about that for a few long seconds. They knew about my sleepwalking – had seen it first-hand. I told them my version of events and they didn’t interrupt. Just the
facts. They didn’t put me in cuffs when I was done but they kept asking questions.

‘So you have no memory of what happens when you sleepwalk?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘So you could have had a hand in the murder of Dale West and not remember it?’

Mrs Barton squirmed in her seat.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I could have.’

‘Tell us more about the man you saw in the annex of your van when you woke up.’

I described his silhouette and the small details the moonlight had revealed – the bald head and tattoos. The gun.

Constable Kim spread out a sheaf of mug shots on the coffee table. ‘Is he there anywhere?’

Third from the left. Spirals on the top of his head.

The two constables smiled.

‘I think we’re about done for today, Aaron. Thank you for your time.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘What happens now?’

‘Well,’ Constable Nadine Price said. ‘We may need you to stand up in court and identify the man you saw in your van so don’t go on any overseas trips without letting us know.’

‘I don’t have to go to jail?’

She smiled, kindly. ‘Probably not.’

Constable Kim stood and collected her hat. ‘Forensics say the blood on your tie was yours and yours only. There were two other people who saw Mr Gwynne at the van arguing with Mr West and when we paid Mr Gwynne a
visit later that morning there was a shotgun in the boot of his car.’

‘Not exactly a criminal mastermind,’ Constable Nadine Price said.

‘And not the sort of fellow you want to owe money to,’ Constable Kim added. ‘Twenty-five thousand dollars, so they say.’

Westy had been in deep.

35

I
SAT WITH THE
B
ARTONS
around the television on Saturday night, watching
The Simpsons
, feeling like a spare wheel, and trying not to laugh too loud. I made a cup of tea for Mrs Barton. I made a hot chocolate for Skye – with one white marshmallow.

‘Thank you, Robot,’ she whispered.

‘My absolute pleasure,’ I whispered back.

She looked at me strangely.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘Hot chocolate not perfect?’

‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have to think up a new nickname for you.’

‘Oh?’

‘You don’t sound like a robot any more,’ she said, with a grin.

*

John Barton was on his second beer – his limit, he said, because he’s always on call – and made a confession.

‘Remember that song, by Queen? “Another One Bites the Dust?”’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Sometimes, when the phone rings and they tell me the sad news, I hear that song in my head. Bamp bamp bamp bamp, another one bites the dust.’

‘John Kevin Barton!’ his wife scolded. ‘You are a disgrace! Don’t tell the boy that!’

‘Bamp bamp bamp bamp . . . ouch!’

Mrs Barton slapped him. It would have seemed violent if you couldn’t see her smile.

I guess we deal with it the best way we can.

I lay awake for a full minute that night before I nodded off. I slept like a tree, without a dream. I woke with a dribble patch on my pillowcase and looked at it with a certain sense of pride. I’d barely moved.

Was it really that simple? Were my night-time horrors so easily tamed? I knew the dream was real; the five-year-old me had been living it forever. It had shaped and coloured my world and would continue to do so as long as I lived, but it was no longer driving the bus. And my sleepwalking? If it happened again, I’d see a doctor. It was possible, I thought, that I’d been running from the dream all along.

At eleven o’clock that morning, someone from the hospital called and said they had a pick-up.

My heart pounded in my throat as I eavesdropped.

‘Well, Aaron. Time to earn your keep,’ John said.

We were in the van with the garage door opening when John patted my hand.

‘Mam’s fine,’ he said. ‘But you can visit her while I do the paperwork if you like.’

The nurse on duty in Finch Ward let me through the locked door and walked me to Mam’s room.

Mam was tucked in her bed, apparently asleep. I planted a kiss on her slack cheek.

Her eyes snapped open and she beamed a smile that made me laugh out loud.

She opened her arms to me. ‘Here he is!’

I took her hug for all it was worth.

36

A
T FOUR FORTY-FIVE
on Monday afternoon, I walked from the licence testing office with a piece of yellow paper held triumphantly above my head. John stood beside the silver Mercedes and clapped. He shook my hand and patted my back. There were learner plates already in place – front and rear. He opened the driver’s door and ushered me inside.

‘I’m not sure I’m ready for—’

‘No time like the present,’ he said. ‘Take it easy. You’ll be fine.’

I sat and checked the mirrors. I saw Skye in the back seat, stern-faced.

‘Should I be wearing a helmet?’ she asked.

I snorted.

‘Dad, are there airbags in the back here?’ she yelled. ‘I want an airbag!’

‘Hush, child,’ John said, as he sat. ‘Put your head between your knees. Hold tight. You’ll be okay.’

He looked across at me and smiled. ‘Home, James.’ I nodded, and started the car.

We’d all be okay.