Intruder Page 3

  He stiffened. ‘Hercules wasn’t here last night. Edie’s friend just dropped him off. He officially takes up residence today.’

  ‘Not here, he doesn’t.’ I folded my arms across my chest. ‘I don’t want a dog. And even if I did –’ like that was ever going to happen again ‘– I wouldn’t want that one.’

  Jimmy’s jaw tightened. ‘After last night, we’re going to have to make some changes, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘Changes?’ Just the opening I needed. ‘What, like you getting a day job?’

  He frowned and rasped a hand across his stubbly jaw. ‘You know I can’t do that. I’m booked just about every night this week. Things will slow down a bit after New Year, but I can’t pay the mortgage without the extra cash from the gigs.’

  New Year was nearly a week away. After last night, that was too many more nights of being home alone.

  ‘We could move.’

  There. I’d said it. At last.

  His mouth opened, but no words found their way out.

  I plunged into the void. ‘We don’t need a place this big. We could sell it and get something smaller. Then you wouldn’t need to work nights or have a second job.’ Or live next door to that woman.

  ‘Kat, you know I can’t do that.’ His voice sharpened and I steeled myself for what I knew was coming next.

  ‘Your mum loved this place. This is what she wanted for us, for our family.’

  I turned away. I’d heard it all before. The no-go zone that had us trapped; the inescapable past that had dominated the past three years of our lives.

  Mum’s dream: a big house, right next door to her best friend, a pile of kids and a dog.

  She’d managed just the one baby before the cancer, the chemo, the operations, the remissions. The secondary growths, the long-lingering wasting.

  I could barely remember her healthy. I spent most of my childhood next door, seesawing between a rising hope and a sickening fear, while my parents exhausted themselves on a medical treadmill. With each failed treatment the balance shifted. Less hope. More fear.

  I could see her slipping away. The flesh falling away from her bones. But Jimmy refused to see it. When the doctors said they could do nothing more, he said that they didn’t know everything. He moved me into Edwina’s and took my mother away – to clinics and retreats, acupuncture and meditation. Together my parents tried every available type of medicine – eastern, alternative, natural, even faith healing.

  Then, a month before my twelfth birthday, their options ran out. They reached the end of the road. A medical and financial dead end.

  That’s when he brought her home to die.

  When we finally lost Mum, Jimmy clung to her house like it was some happy version of Monster House, harbouring her spirit, keeping her close. He’d failed her once, he wouldn’t fail her again. He would keep their dream alive, whatever the cost.

  Over my dead body.

  He actually said those words when the bank first threatened to foreclose.

  ‘This could turn out to be really good timing for us.’

  Jimmy lifted a foot to rub the hairless underbelly of the fawning creature on the floor. ‘If Herc gets to know us, and feels like we’re part of his pack, he’ll defend our territory as well as Edie’s.’

  ‘Are you kidding? Look at him. He’s not a guard dog’s bum. Even I’m not scared of him!’

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realised they were true. The ludicrous animal was the first dog that hadn’t given me the heebie-jeebies in a long, long time. Normally, this breakthrough would have been a cause for celebration. But not today.

  ‘No-one in their right mind would be scared of that – I mean, just look at him.’

  He was on his back, legs splayed out around him, with gravity doing weird things to the spare rolls of flesh round his fat head.

  ‘All dogs are black at night, Kat. He’ll raise a stink if anyone tries to sneak in. That’s all I care about.’

  ‘What about me? Do you care what I think?’

  He kept massaging the damn dog with his foot, his jaw set in a stubborn line.

  I knew that look. It was the one that swore on the soul of my dead mother. The one that meant he would not back down, no matter what.

  ‘As a matter of fact, Kat, I do.’ A nerve ticked at the corner of his eye as he wiped a line of slobber off his boot and onto the dog’s speckled underside. ‘Edie warned me that you might need time to take to Herc. So Plan B is that you stay with her while I’m at work.’

  ‘With her? Forget it. I’d sooner sleep in the gutter.’

  ‘Well, that’s not a choice. It’s either put up with Herc here or stay with Edie next door. You choose.’

  ‘No, that’s not a choice. It’s like asking if I’d rather be eaten by maggots or rats –’

  ‘FOR PETE’S SAKE, KAT, I AM NOT ARGUING ABOUT THIS!’ He drew in a shaky breath and lowered his voice to a tight-lipped growl. ‘If some gutless wonder is out there prowling our neighbourhood, trying every door till he finds one that’s open –’

  That really lit my fuse. ‘Stop trying to make out he was some random. He knew you were at work. He’s probably one of your creepy bar-fly mates, someone who knows the Fabulous Baker Boy is never home.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Kat. You know I don’t have any choice.’

  ‘So I don’t get a choice either? Is that fair?’ I jumped off the bench, startling the dog, and stormed out of the kitchen and down the stairs leading off our back deck.

  Claws clickety-clacked on the treads behind me. I picked up the pace, but the dog skittered past me, tongue flapping, as I reached the bottom of the steps.

  The paved patio area ended in a retaining wall that dropped down a metre or more to our sloping backyard. The dog ran along the very edge of the pavers, bounding straight for the rosebushes that marked the boundary between our property and the evil witch’s next door.

  He glanced back at me, his misshapen face split in a huge grin. There was something about his innocent abandon, his untrammelled joy in the day, that jolted my heart with a sudden sensation of loss. How long had it been since I’d felt that free?

  A tiny yellow butterfly flitted past his nose, and his ugly mug swung after it like a heat-seeking missile. His body and legs scrambled in an untidy turn at the edge of the retaining wall, his leap turning into a top-heavy dive that I knew would end badly – neck-scrunchingly, spine-jarringly badly.

  I lunged forward, trying to save him. But I was too late.

  He landed head first in Jimmy’s herb garden, his neck twisted at a sickening angle, his body crumpled and twitching on top of it.

  Five

  For a horrifying moment, I thought the dog had broken his neck.

  I jumped down after him, cursing as my ankle jarred on the hard-packed ground. But then he got his feet back under him and sat up, shaking himself off.

  ‘For crying out loud, I thought you were dead!’

  He turned his village-idiot smile my way and, completely unperturbed, trotted off to snap at flies in the backyard.

  Stupid dog.

  I slumped on the edge of the retaining wall, the after-effects of fear and adrenalin leaving me frazzled. I didn’t need any of this. Upstairs, there was Jimmy to deal with. Downstairs, the dirty smears of fingerprinting powder from last night. Out here, the dog. I was cornered, whichever way I turned.

  My fingers worried at the knotty scar along my jawline. A daily reminder of why Kat and dogs don’t mix.

  Touching the lumpy flesh was like hitting the play button on a third-rate slasher flick: a dark street, a motherless kid – me – filling another long empty evening with the excuse of an ice-cream from the nearby all-night servo. Walking back home, preoccupied with a rapidly melting caramel Paddle Pop. Not seeing the dog until it was in my face, at my throat . .
.

  Screaming.

  Blood. Bright red under the streetlight. Pulsing from my chin. Covering my hands, running down my wrists, dripping from my forearms.

  The dog, black and hysterical, lunging and barking while I shrieked and shook, scarlet spots splattering my clothes.

  A man, flushed and angry, tugging at its collar. Yelling, the same thing, over and over: Shut up, for God’s sake, shut up, you’re scaring my dog!

  A late-night jogger pushing him away, ripping off a fluorescent singlet to staunch the flow of blood from my chin. Holding me hard against a chest slick with sweat, rank with man-odour. His breath hot and heaving. A fist of slippery nylon cupped around my chin. His heart hammering against my jaw bone. It’s okay, don’t cry, you’ll be fine . . .

  Some random calling an ambulance; someone else, the police . . .

  Sirens. Flashing lights. The dog owner not backing down: He was just after her ice-cream . . . The teeth slashing at my face somehow my fault: He nipped her by accident when she pulled it away . . .

  The unanswerable questions.

  What do you mean there’s no-one at home?

  Where’s your mum?

  I couldn’t tell them; it had only been a month. But the most awful of them all –

  Why isn’t your dad answering his goddamn mobile phone?

  I was twelve years old by then, but little. I could pass for nine or ten under bad lighting and, let’s face it, they were seeing me in the worst possible light – alone, hysterical and bleeding on a grubby gutter, one block from the pub.

  The police didn’t like what they saw.

  The ambulance men didn’t like it either: white bone exposed, a bloody flap of skin hanging loose from my chin.

  At the hospital, a lanky young doctor stitched it back on while a calm-eyed nurse wiped away the snot and tears accompanying each stab and tug of the needle. When they asked if there was anyone else they could call, Edwina’s name blinked like a red light in my mind. But I stubbornly shook my head. Not her. Not ever again. The only person I wanted was Jimmy.

  By the time he finally answered his phone, they had called in a social worker. She had a netball-team moustache – seven a side – that sprang to attention when she pursed her lips. Not one bit impressed with Jimmy’s late arrival in rock-star black, or his white-faced claim that I was normally fine on my own.

  Her netball team bristled at the ‘appropriateness’ of leaving a twelve-year-old unsupervised at night. She scared the hell out of me and must have made an impression on him too, because the next thing I knew he’d quit working nights.

  Jimmy tossed in the gigs, and talked Crusty’s into giving him a day shift. Happy to help, they said – and gave him a generous pay cut to go with it.

  I didn’t care; I had him home every night. Curled up on the couch, watching endless repeats of The Simpsons. Rejecting any song old enough to give him a competitive edge on SingStar. Crushing him in backgammon. Teaching him Patience.

  Then The Letter arrived. The one from The Bank. The one that threatened to sell us up . . . and he’d caved.

  ‘They’re not taking our house,’ he swore, the twitching muscle at the corner of his eye at odds with the grim stubbornness etched into the rest of his face.

  ‘Over my dead body.’

  He begged, cajoled and clawed his way back into the local music scene. Making sure that everyone knew he had returned. ‘Any night’, he would say, dropping in with his pastries, mini almond-paste croissants and syrupy cinnamon scrolls. ‘Every night, if you want.’

  There might be a lot more piano players than there were bars and clubs in a city the size of Brisbane, but there was only one Fabulous Baker Boy.

  Jimmy won over hard-eyed bar and band managers with his secret weapons, boxed and delivered, still warm, to their homes and offices. Within weeks, it was like he had never left the scene. Then Crusty’s offered him more money to kickstart the early shift and fill the shelves for the breakfast rush hour . . .

  The social worker had either lost interest or moved on. We never heard from her again.

  When the next crash came, there had been no-one there to break our fall.

  A yelp from the side of the yard snapped me back to the present.

  The idiot dog had charged into the tall and thorny rosebushes. Now he was backing out, stiff-legged and aggrieved. Cocking his head at the bushes – unsure why they had let him through on the way in, and then bitten him on the return journey.

  White roses for loyalty, for a love stronger than death.

  My parents had planted them when they first bought the house – before I was born, before I was even thought of. They marked the dividing line between our yard and the evil witch’s next door. In my mind, they formed a dense barrier, knotted and gnarled, thick with razor-sharp thorns, to keep her out. In reality, they couldn’t even keep out her flea-bitten dog.

  They hadn’t ever kept Marco out either.

  A traitorous memory floated free. From a time when Mum’s shining blonde hair hung in a thick choppy bob around her freckled cheeks. Her hands, cupping my chin, were still strong and sure. She was sitting on my bed, kissing me goodnight, with Marco’s intelligent beagle face hanging over her shoulder. Smiling, as she lowered her lips to mine, and then laughing as Marco dived in first, beating her in for the kiss. When he curled up beside me, she didn’t have the heart to put him out. The first of countless nights he’d slept in my bed.

  A soft nose nuzzled the side of my knee. In exactly the same spot where Marco used to kiss me.

  Hercules cocked his head, innocent enquiry in his warm brown eyes. Tail thumping out a steady beat behind him. Then he circled round and plonked himself on the ground in front of me. Grinning, like we were old friends.

  His innocence helped me make up my mind. Back when my mum was dying, I hadn’t had a choice. There was nowhere else to go, no-one else who would take me. I was older now, fifteen in a few weeks, and no-one could force me back into that corner.

  Know your enemy.

  Some lines were too dangerous to be crossed. Last night had changed nothing.

  Jimmy could stick his Plan B. I wasn’t going to spend a single night under her roof. Not even if the only alternative was to hole up at home with a dog that tripped over his own jaw and trailed twin ropes of drool when he ran.

  As though sensing my thoughts, the dog pricked up his ears and raised an eyebrow, his stumpy tail picking up the tempo and swishing like a windscreen wiper in a downpour.

  Jimmy believed that even the mangiest dog had a code. I hoped he was right, and that, unlike the woman next door, it wouldn’t betray those closest to it.

  This time I had a choice.

  I would choose Hercules, the universe’s most unsightly specimen of dogkind, rather than take any favours from the woman who had betrayed my mother.

  Six

  A gazillion flies buzzed hungrily around the coriander.

  The dog had fouled Jimmy’s herb garden, then scuttled off into the shade. Sniffing, piddling and launching himself into the occasional graceless cartwheel as he snapped at insects.

  ‘He did it on purpose,’ I told Jimmy when he came down with a plastic bag. ‘When I told him he could stay.’

  Jimmy took a steadying breath and approached the coriander with the extreme caution of a bomb-disposal expert.

  ‘Careful,’ I warned. ‘If it explodes, it might decrapitate you.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can do this,’ he muttered, stretching out a plastic-covered hand, his body angled awkwardly away from the smell. He inched closer, but as soon as he got within grabbing distance, he started dry-retching helplessly. After the third attempt, he slipped his hand out of the bag and backed off, collapsing on the retaining wall, ashen-faced.

  ‘Sorry, Kat. I can’t do it.’

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t do i
t? You have to do it.’

  He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t even do your nappies when you were a baby. Your mum had to do them.’ He tried to pass me the plastic bag.

  ‘You’re kidding me.’ This was moving way too fast. Half an hour ago, I wouldn’t have come within spitting distance of the dog; now Jimmy expected me to deal with its by-products. ‘Uh uh, no way. Forget it.’

  ‘We can’t just leave it there. In this heat, it’ll stink out our whole yard.’ He waved his hand at the swarm of flies. ‘It’s summer. We’ll get blowflies and be maggot-ridden before we know it.’

  ‘Then get Next Door to pick it up. It’s her dog.’

  ‘Edie’s doing us a favour by letting us share Hercules,’ he snapped. ‘And she has to clean up her own backyard. We can’t ask her to do ours as well.’

  ‘Fine.’ I folded my arms. Clearly Jimmy wasn’t in the mood for assistance. ‘Then you do it.’

  That’s when he lost it. ‘I just told you, I can’t! And if you don’t want anything to do with the flaming dog, then fine, we’ll just have to go with Plan B. You can spend your nights at Edie’s.’

  I glared at him. ‘Like that’s going to happen.’

  ‘It’s that or the dog. Take your pick.’ He held out the bag.

  We glowered at each other for a good ten seconds. I hardened my heart against the tic twitching at the corner of his eye, but then the faint tremor in his outstretched hand defeated me.

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud.’ I snatched the bag off him and stomped over to the coriander. ‘Talk about a freaking wuss.’

  I took a deep breath. Don’t think about it too much, just do it real quick, and it won’t be that bad. Like ripping off a bandaid. But even with the plastic covering my hand, I couldn’t contain the wave of revulsion that rippled through me. If that was body temperature, the damn dog had a fever.