Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(62)

Beside the couch on the floor the infant reclined in a fluffy pale-blue bouncer. Now and then Jed extended his leg and pushed on the bouncer with his big, bare toe, causing the baby to bob gently up and down. The man seemed mildly irritated by my presence, but not curious. I might have stood there an hour without either of us uttering a word.

I didn’t fully understand the ease I felt around this man, but I knew then that unconsciously I’d been planning to flee here the moment Glen started attacking me. What was it about this man and this place that compelled me?

‘You’re a strange one, you,’ Jed said after a time.

‘I get the feeling you might be the same.’

I looked at the infant in the bouncer. An awkward, gummy smile playing about perfect lips he couldn’t yet control.

‘Can I?’ I asked. Jed said nothing. I extracted the child carefully from his bouncer. He was heavier and warmer than I’d imagined. The baby swiped at my chin, my lips. I kissed his fingers.

‘His mother is my niece,’ Jed said eventually, glancing at the child’s chubby hand encircling my finger. ‘I don’t know her that well. Or I didn’t. Her parents died some years back, and I never was real good at keeping in touch. She wrote me a couple of months ago. Couldn’t call me. I don’t have a phone.’

Jed left the construction of the mobile and sat back on the couch, rested a bare foot on his knee.

‘She grew up over Bandelong way. Even harsher than this, Bandelong. So when she got to the city she was real surprised, and so was everybody else, to tell you the truth. She did her degree, did the extra bits and pieces that come afterwards, whatever they are. And then, to top it all off, she got accepted into this … this extra-special legal program. Always wanted to be a lawyer, and this program, she says … There are something like three people in the whole country who get in. Well, she got in. First blackfella in the history of the world to get in. Kind of thing that usually goes to white boys from private schools on the Sydney Harbour there. The other two candidates were just that. They were pretty upset that they were up against her for the position that you get at the end of it. The … partnership, or whatever.’

The child had gone to sleep in my arms. Wisps of his soft black hair, finer than cotton, shifted in the breeze from the window.

‘Same morning my niece was due to go in and sign her big important contract, she finds out about this one.’ He nodded at the baby in my arms. ‘Everybody has a good laugh at her then. The two other candidates, they reckon they’re shoo-ins for the partnership at the end of the four-year program. One of the big lawyer types running the thing, he wants her chucked out of the program straightaway unless she gets an abortion. So she writes me asking what she should do. I’m about the last bit of family she’s got. And she doesn’t know me from a bar of soap. But she needs to talk to someone.’

‘What did you say?’ I asked.

‘ I told her to do the program. And I told her to have the baby. I’d take him until she was through with it, until she found her feet. And if she never found her feet, well, that was OK. I figured if she’d dropped out, she’d have been all broken up about it. If she’d had an abortion, she’d have been broken up about that, too. This was the only way I could think of that she could get out of it without tearing herself in half.’

The infant grizzled. I lifted him higher against my chest and patted his nappy-covered backside. Put my cheek on his head.

‘It’s not the best place in the world,’ Jed said, looking at the walls, still stained from years of neglect, the blazing desert sun rolling by the windows. ‘But it’s a solution to a problem.’

Jed stood. I guessed it was the signal for me to go. I didn’t seem capable, at first, of giving the child back. Some ludicrous part of me saw this place as a solution to my problem. To every problem.

I handed back the child. He held the tiny boy and looked at my eyes. Seemed to know I wanted to stay. Here was a safe place, deliberately constructed on the edge of nowhere, too far into the wild for problems to reach. The kind of place they sang about in sad songs. All the hurt, all the badness, all the worry a person had could be sent here to be swallowed up by this man.

I felt the cruel sense that I belonged here tugging at my chest, even as I headed for the door.





Chapter 96


IT HAD ALL happened so quickly. Love stories were like that, so Regan had heard. He’d got chatting to the teenage Sam Blue at the Christmas party and discovered the gangly, shy, black-haired boy was living with a family in Panania, not far from where Regan was in Picnic Point. Their foster parents knew each other. Sam had only just arrived, having been separated from his sister after their last placement fell through. The boy missed her. Regan had listened, marvelling quietly at his gentle voice.

There was no way Regan could have told Sam what he felt back then. The obsessive thoughts, the dreams about Sam. He wondered if his friend ever suspected. It was a struggle to stop himself from bringing Sam gifts at the house in Panania, turning up too often, staying too late to talk and giggle in the small blue room his foster parents had put him in. Everything Sam said stuck with Regan. He’d shown Regan a picture of a red racer bike in a catalogue, and Regan had begun to see red bikes everywhere deliciously displayed on street corners and in bike racks, unlocked. Regan closed his eyes sometimes and thought about what Sam would say if he brought him one of those racers. Imagined him in awe, crying with gratitude, throwing his arms around Regan, the press of his thin, hard body against his own. Bliss. But it was far too risky. Their bond was one perfect thing he wasn’t going to ruin. It was pure, untouchable, beautiful.