The Evil Inside (2 page)

The clink of glasses, the faces of friends.

The exhilaration of anticipation.

Mia was leaning against the sink, crying.

Her oldest friend, Jane, had her arms wrapped around her.

‘Oh, I'm such a sook!' Mia laughed, wiping her eyes. ‘I've only had half a glass of champers.'

Jane playfully poked Mia's forehead with her finger. ‘It's the hormones, you idiot!'

She patted Mia's belly. ‘Little Mamma Mia!' Jane assumed an exaggerated Italian accent and refilled her own glass to two-thirds. Then she toasted us both with a big, generous nod.

‘To the future!'

Before we'd fled to Cabrini in the cab that night, I'd called Jane frantically and asked her to get over to our place as soon as she could to take care of Callum. The two of them arrived the following afternoon, just as an orderly was wheeling our new dead baby out of the room on a gurney.

After having been given some time by the staff to ‘say goodbye' to her, our lifeless little girl had just been left lying there by the wall for half an hour, covered by a thin cotton shroud.

‘Bubby' we had nicknamed her during the pregnancy. Our dear departed daughter.

‘Daddy!' Callum rushed past the orderly pushing his stillborn sister and into my arms.

Mia had her eyes closed. ‘Hello, little man,' I whispered, ‘Mummy's just having a rest.' I winked at Jane, who was still standing in the doorway. She smiled back with tears in her eyes, made a coffee-drinking sign and left our family to lick its wounds.

‘It's OK,' Mia murmured. ‘Come over here, darling.' Callum bounded onto the bed and Mia crushed him to her. ‘Oh I've missed you! Were you OK? Were you a good boy for Auntie Jane?'

‘Yep. She made me French toast – all the way from Harris!'

‘Do you mean Paris, darling?' Mia laughed but then winced. She put a hand to her strangely flat stomach.

It was then Callum noticed the little white crib just outside the bathroom.

He jumped off Mia's bed and ran up to it. He stood on his tippy toes, straining to see over the side.

I couldn't move. I couldn't say anything.

Mia put her hands up to her face.

Callum strained harder to get a peek. He put both hands on the side of the crib and tried to hoist himself up. It tipped, hung suspended in the air for one dreadful moment, then toppled to the floor. The coverlet slid off, forming a soft white puddle next to it.

‘Where's Bubby?' he squealed with delight.

‘Oh my God!' Mia wailed.

Callum jumped back and screamed.

But, of course, the little white cot was empty.

One of the first things you notice about New York is the water towers.

Everywhere you look up in Manhattan, you see rusting, rotting, cone-headed water towers pricking the famous skyline. Big ones, small ones, squat ones – like sage old Chinese gentlemen tipping their hats to each other across the rivers and streams of black and white and grey and yellow far below.

Of course, I'm not Chinese. Nor am I American. I'm Australian.

And I'm still not really all that old.

Although some days I feel 500 years old in here.

In my new office.

It's strange to think back on it all these years later: how I got from ‘there' to ‘here'.

Was it fated? Predetermined? Decreed by some horrible higher power with a black, brutal sense of justice? Looking back now, I can see how I might have made other choices, taken a different fork.

But I was that man then. That other whiter, brighter version of me in his safe little office with his safe little life.

If only he'd realized how lucky he really was.

But towards the end of the last century, that other me had found his life repetitive, routed, predictable.

His life had become, well, lifeless.

And then there was the thing with Bubby.

He was only halfway through his life, yet he already felt half-dead.

It was a brand-new century, he figured. So why not a brand-new him?

And so he hauled his little family all the way from the cosy familiarity of Melbourne, Australia, to the scabrous streets of New York City.

To #27 West 72nd Street, Manhattan, to be precise.

*

Our new home, the Hotel Olcott, stood proudly in the heart of the Upper West Side.

I'd always been intrigued by atmospheric old buildings and hotels and, according to my Internet research back in Melbourne, the Olcott had an illustrious, if slightly disquieting, history.

The revered character actor Martin Balsam – who famously falls backwards down the staircase in
Psycho
– had been a former resident. Tiny Tim used to tiptoe through the Olcott lobby; Robert De Niro pulls up outside the hotel in
Taxi Driver
; while Mark David Chapman lived there for a short time, before indulging in his own peculiar form of Beatlemania and shooting John Lennon.

In September 1951, Isidore H. Bander, vice-president of a pharmaceutical company, either fell or jumped to his death from the top of the hotel. His body oozed like a marshmallow out of his grey flannel suit all over the 72nd Street sidewalk. He had told his wife he was going out for a stroll but took an elevator straight up to the roof instead.

Yet the Olcott actually went right back to the late 1920s: a fifteen-storey forest of old dark wood, dim yellow lights, claret-coloured carpets, and elevators that worked only when they felt like it. A bit like the porters: who mooched around the lobby, hiding behind newspapers, surreptitiously smoking and sniggering about the guests. When they were there, that is; the lobby was sometimes as deserted as a graveyard, especially once the desk clerk had decamped for the evening.

My friend and fellow Aussie – and new boss-to-be – Anthony Johnson had offered to put us up somewhere swankier, but knowing my fascination for the ‘dark and dingy' as he called it, suggested that the Olcott's quaint, Addams Family-ish charm might be more our speed.

We'd managed to avoid any Y2K airplane malfunctions and had cleared customs without a hiccough. And although we'd left Melbourne on a hot and humid New Year's Eve, due to the sixteen-hour time difference it was still 31 December when we arrived in New York. Only now it was cold and dark and snow was whiting-out the windscreen of our first yellow cab.

We slid into Manhattan across the Queensboro Bridge and arrived at the Olcott just after 10 p.m. The Hispanic porter took us and our slew of suitcases up the service elevator and opened up our room.

#901
.

Nine is my lucky number. At least it used to be.

First up, there was a tiled entrance hall equipped with three coat pegs, a wall phone and a fire extinguisher. Two steps on, the world's smallest kitchenette. Then a general living area with an ugly round, brown kitchen table, which was obviously too big for the kitchen, and a low-slung three-seater couch facing two chunky armchairs. An art deco lamp flickered ghostly behind the TV, another smaller couch sagged under the window, while a waist-high bookcase bulged with careworn
Readers Digest
s and
New Yorker
s, a musty selection of fat eighties airport novels and old Agatha Christies like
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
and
The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side
. Deep-blue faded wallpaper featured flower petal and ivy motifs (or little scowling owl faces, depending on how you looked at them). The bedroom really lived up to its name, jammed with two double beds and not much else.

Callum's favourite bath toys – a one-legged Tarzan and a yellow rubber ducky – would also have to get used to much smaller quarters.

‘Welcome to the Waldorf,' I said.

Callum was clinging like a sleeping monkey around my neck.

Mia tried to be upbeat. ‘We won't be here long. It'll be fine short-term.' She took in the tiny kitchen, absentmindedly rubbing her belly and yawning. ‘Although don't quote me on that.' She walked two steps into the kitchen and opened the three wooden drawers, one by one. They seemed to be empty except for the very last one, from which she extracted a rusty old fork.

‘And we may have to invest in some new cutlery.'

She opened the small metal bin with her toe and ceremoniously dropped the fork into it. I smiled in affirmation.

Moments later, Mia tucked Callum into one of the beds and fell in next to him, still fully clothed.

But I was beyond sleep: it was Friday night, the New Year's Eve of a brand-new century – a brand-new millennium – in New York City. And I didn't have to start work till Monday.

We had a whole weekend to soak up the city and, right now, I felt like a drink. I showered, changed, and rode the elevator back down to the lobby. I asked the desk clerk if there were any decent bars nearby. Sporting a name tag that read ‘Michael' and a tie that had Yosemite Sam blazing guns on it, he looked up from his crossword. ‘Plenty,' he confirmed in broken-nosed Bronxese. ‘But the nearest one is right there,' he pointed with his fountain pen. ‘Through that door. My friend, Enriquo, will look after you.'

Like a magic portal through to Texas, you could walk straight through the Olcott's lobby into the Dallas BBQ Restaurant next door. Happy, hungry faces, tantalizing smells and an excessively moustachioed barman – Enriquo, I presumed, handing me my first Corona and lime and a ‘Happy New Year, amigo!' – provided the perfect antidote to the day I'd spent in the sky.

I slid onto a stool, but then noticed the jukebox. I craved something suitably ‘New York'.

I got up, walked over, dropped my first American quarter into the slot and let Frank Sinatra's ‘One for My Baby' float me off into oblivion.

‘DADDY!!!!'

My jet lag never had a chance.

Callum had decided that it was time for me to wake up, and dive-bombed me a second time. The sun was just peeping in. I peeked through the curtain: early morning, light snow.

‘Aren't you still sleepy, darling?' I whispered hopefully. Unlike Mia and me, Callum had slept most of the way on the LA to New York connecting flight.

‘Let's play!' he squealed again.

‘Ssssh!' I hissed. ‘You'll wake Mummy. Let's go out for a walk and see the snow.'

My son had a mop of blonde hair, which made him look like a little girl when it grew too long. We'd discovered after he was born that his name meant ‘dove'. The origin of Callum's angelic locks remained a mystery, but he'd definitely inherited Mia's eyes: dreamy cornflower blue.

I dressed him in the new winter clothes Mamma Giancarlo, Mia's mother, had given him for Christmas and dropped him into his pushchair. Though I soon learned they were called ‘strollers' over here – which sounded a lot less like hard work.

‘Where are you going?' Mia groaned as I grabbed my gloves out of a drawer.

‘To get you your first New York “corfee”.'

She pulled the bedclothes back over her head. ‘No thanks. I still haven't got the taste back for it.' She yawned as if from underwater. ‘You know, you were babbling in your sleep again last night, Guy.'

‘Declaring my undying love for you, no doubt.'

‘No,' Mia yawned again and leaned up on her elbow. ‘You kept shouting “Stay away! Stay away!” Then you started mumbling something else, though I couldn't understand what you were saying. You were quite agitated. At one point you grabbed hold of one of my fingers and started pulling it, really hard. I had to thump you to make you stop!' She smirked at me.

I found Callum's blue woollen hat and put it on his head. ‘See ya later. I'll bring back the papers.'

Mia rolled over again. ‘Hey – can you also get me some more sleeping tablets from a pharmacy? Dr Hill gave me a script that I can use over here. It's over there in my handbag.'

‘
Dis bag here, lady
?' I said, in my best New York cop accent.

She folded back the bedclothes and nodded. Mia slept a lot these days, except on planes. Her eyes were red and puffy. I had a vague memory of her crying in the middle of the night through my beer-soaked dreams.

‘You OK, honey?'

‘Just a bit jet-lagged, I think.' She popped two blue pills out of the blister pack by the bed and reached for her water. ‘I'll try to grab another hour now.'

Light was spilling like honey over the frosted hemline of Central Park.

I pushed Callum's stroller down to two-wheel drive to make it easier to plough through the snow on the pavement, his little legs kicking excitedly in the snap-frozen air.

After one hundred mushy metres, we finally made it to the corner. I got a shock when I looked up, even though I already knew from my Melbourne research what I would find here at the corner of 72nd and Central Park West.

There it stood in all its dark, gothic glory:
₁
W
₇₂
– the Dakota.

Looking every bit as ominous as its haunted-house reputation, the filigreed wrought-iron gate and carved reliefs were straight out of Poe – or Transylvania itself. So too were the high gables, pitched roofs and wide porte-cochère entrance for horse-drawn carriages of yesteryear. Gargoyles glared from the stone block walls, low enough for Callum to reach out and touch – although he quickly changed his mind once he got up closer to them. A glowering Indian warrior kept lookout atop the central gable.

A charnel house in popular culture, up close and in real life the Dakota seemed equally foreboding.

I shivered.

We pulled up outside the guardhouse. Right there, just a few feet back under the archway, was the exact spot where John Lennon had been shot. I recalled that famous photo that Annie Leibovitz had taken of John just hours before he died: he was curled up naked in the foetal position with his arms around his beloved Yoko – or ‘Mother' as he used to call her.

Inside the wooden sentry box, a fat face under a blue cap was scanning the
New York Post
and chewing a pencil. A
LL VISITORS MUST BE ACCOMPANIED
read the sign on the low chain slung across the entrance. I also remembered reading somewhere that Mark David Chapman, Lennon's chubby assassin, had actually patted five-year-old Sean Lennon's head and told him not to catch cold just a few hours before he murdered his father.

A Japanese tourist wearing a ridiculous golf hat and a serious-looking camera snapped a photo of Callum and me in front of the box, just before an evil-smelling bag lady with big dark glasses cursed at me as she almost ran her home over my foot. We were already being introduced to the city's manifold charms.

My stomach was no longer jet-lagged, so we squelched into a gleaming new Starbucks on the corner of Columbus and 73rd. I ordered a medium latte, a chocolate chip cookie for Callum, and waded into the first
New York Times
of the new millennium.

Callum, meanwhile, drew a little smiley face with his floury forefinger on the window pane.

‘Look, Daddy,' he smiled. ‘I drawed Bubby!'

The rest of the weekend was as special and as memorable as any first weekend in New York could possibly be, ticking off virtually every tourist cliché. We clip-clopped round the Park behind a fairy-tale white horse, checked out the park's little zoo and carousel, and sat Callum astride the burnished back of Balto, hero husky to the sick children of Alaska. Mia ogled the art at the Met while Callum and I threw snowballs on the steps outside. We visited the Warner Brothers Movie Store where a giant talking Tweety told Callum that he had indeed just seen a ‘puddy tat'.

At Anthony's insistence, I took a chopper flight over the city, scooting between the skyscrapers then swooping low over the park and the East River like a hornet headed for the Hamptons. The people below looked like tiny figurines in an elaborate toy kingdom.

We rode the Staten Island Ferry and marvelled at the ‘Big Green Lady' of Liberty standing on top of the water. We bought me some new 5
^th
Avenue winter clothes and shoes. We feasted on pastries at the famous Muffins Cafe on Columbus, Callum rebranding their mouth-watering wares as ‘nuffins'. Callum and I rode up and down the Olcott elevator, and he delighted in yelling out ‘L for Lobby!' every time we reached the ground floor.

I snapped two whole rolls of film. And we walked – God did we walk, block after block after block.

It was good to start leaving our miserable Melbourne selves behind.

‘So waddya think?' I asked Mia on the Sunday night. Callum had already fallen asleep in front of
Scooby Doo
.

My wife was beautiful. Not beautiful like a magazine model, but in a natural, soulful way. Her southern Italian features were more deliberate than delicate. She had a cute snub nose and thick black eyebrows that she plucked loudly and religiously. Her lips were full and heart-shaped and her teeth were soap opera white. She had a killer smile. But it was those eyes that I'd really fallen for. The lashes were unnaturally long and her irises were the most heartbreaking hue of blue, dramatically offset by her luminous olive skin.