Tony Barisi stood on his balcony finishing a Dunhill Superior Mild, watching sheets of rain blow like impossibly tall sails across the half-lit office buildings of the city across the river.
He stubbed the smoke out and dropped it in a cast bronze vessel filled with damp sand held between the paws of a sculpted Asiatic lion. Tony didn’t feel fifty-one. Tonight he felt thirty-one! Fuck it, twenty-one! He didn’t want to sleep, because sleep would hasten the rising of tomorrow’s sun, and he didn’t want to miss a minute, not now. Business was beautiful. The city was beautiful. Life was beautiful. He turned to the tall, frameless glass door and went back into his penthouse.
The boy was asleep on the couch. Tony smiled. He was a gorgeous one, Dan: just gone thirty but tight and tough as a teenager. And he was different. Dan had stayed with Tony right through the court case, even when everyone — Tony’s solicitor included — was sure that all was lost. Dan was the only one who knew — knew! — they’d settle out of court. And he was right. Dan’s confidence was infectious and Tony loved him for it.
Loved him.
Admitting that sent a thrill into his stomach. He smiled, watching Dan sleep. Yes, it was love. And being in love was divine. Dan was a keeper. Tony watched his lover slumbering where he’d drifted off after their many celebratory drinks, and decided not to wake him. He padded silently to the bedroom.
As he undressed, a delicious weariness crept over him and the bed suddenly looked inviting. Screw it, I won’t even clean my teeth. Sleep when you’re tired, eat when you’re hungry; the rest of the time was for hard work and hard play. He stripped off his boxer shorts and pulled back the covers to curl onto the delicious four-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets.
Life was beautiful. Life was perfect.
Tick, ticketty-tack-tacktacktack. .
Tony sat up.
The echoing sound had come from the ensuite bathroom. Something had fallen into the sink. He felt his face grow hot. That was a seven-thousand-dollar Villeroy amp; Boch vanity — the thought of some badly installed light globe chipping the enamel made him instantly angry. He threw back the covers and stomped naked through the walk-in robe, past his bespoke suits and shoes, Zegna ties and Duarte jeans, into the ensuite.
The bathroom was as wide as a garage, tiled in icy white with a cathedral ceiling that had made Dan gasp (a delightfully erotic sound) when Tony first showed it to him. One wall was a single pane of one-way glass, affording an unimpeded view of the city and allowing the glow of its buildings’ lights to illuminate the room. A set of three large hopper windows rose above the wide white vanity: the first was head height, the second rose to three metres off the floor, the third rose to the ceiling five metres up. These huge windows were usually kept closed — it could blow a gale here on the apartment building’s top floor, and even up this high the noise of human traffic on the boulevard below could be disturbing. But he’d left the middle hopper open a crack, and something dark was hunched on top of the pane. A bird? A mouse?
Tony crept closer, wondering what he could use to shoo away the pest. And then he stopped. His stomach gave a slow gurgle as if suddenly filled with spoiled milk.
The creature perched on the middle window frame was a spider. One as big as the barking spiders that used to crawl the sides of his father’s tractor shed in Innisfail. Motherfucker. Tony was just about to creep backwards, to run to the kitchen and get the insect spray, when he noticed. .
It’s holding something.
The creature held in its jaws — fangs? mouth? — a tiny white pebble. As he watched, the spider carefully balanced itself, took a sly half-step forward and dropped the pebble.
It fell through the air and landed neatly — tick, tack, tacktacktack — in the vanity basin.
Tony stared with wide eyes. Then something even more incredible happened. The spider threw itself into space and fell away. Just a moment later, another spider of the same size but of a different genus stepped delicately from the side of the building onto the middle pane. It, too, held a white pebble, and carried it to the centre of the pane. Then it stopped, motionless and waiting.
Waiting for me.
Tony took a reluctant step forward, his eyes locked on the spider. And another, until he was standing at the vanity, staring up at it.
The creature leaned forward and dropped its hard little parcel.
Tony caught the stone, and watched the spider throw itself backwards, slide down the glass and fall away into darkness.
No others came to take its place.
He was about to call out to Dan, but glanced down at the pebble in his palm. There were two others like it in the basin. The stones were the size of large ball bearings, smooth and white and slightly ovoid, like tiny eyeballs. The one in his palm was translucent, like quartz, and cold. On its flattest part a mark was scratched. It was a line with two angled hooks, one each end:
The mark had been stained with something rusty red.
Tony looked into the basin. The other two stones bore the same symbol. There was something about it. Something sad. Something depressing. Something familiar.
Papa’s cheek. The mark looks just like the deep lines in my father’s cheek. The lines that grew deep as chasms as he got sicker and sicker. .
A wave of unhappy nostalgia flowed over Tony like a noxious wind. He recalled his father lying in the hospital bed, his cheeks bristled white and deeply furrowed, panting like a dog. And his eyes, Papa’s blue eyes. Papa’s body was thin and dying, lungs wasted with emphysema, but his eyes were blue as flames. His glands were swollen and his voice was reed thin, but not so thin as to hide the hate as he whispered to Tony in a voice dry as cane stubble, ‘Finocchio.’
Tony leaned on the vanity and looked into the mirror. That’s me, he thought. That’s me. A big, fat-bellied faggot.
He ran his fingers over his scalp. The hair was thin. When had it been thick? Before the divorce. ‘You’re going to look after Gabrielle,’ Karan had said. Gabrielle. Oh, the poor kid. Did her classmates know she had a big fat wog faggot for a father? His face grew warm. Of course they knew. Kids found out everything. Did Gab ask for that? For a father who liked the feel of cock in his arse? And what was her reward for the schoolyard taunts? He’d nearly lost it all — a hair’s breadth from bankruptcy.
Tony’s heart started thumping. I could lose it all again! He was one signature away from committing everything to the Tallong block development. What a fool!
He hurried to the bedroom, picked up the phone and dialled.
‘Hello?’ The woman’s voice on the other end was sleep-fuddled.
‘Ellen, it’s Tony.’
‘Mr Barisi? It’s. . is there something-’
‘Stop the Tallong development. First thing in the morning. Ring Koopers and tell them it’s off. I’m not ratifying.’
‘Mr Barisi, are you-’
‘It’s off.’
Tony disconnected. He dropped the phone. What a waste. He could hear Ellen’s disgust, having to talk to such a filthy, pathetic finocchio. Tears welled in his eyes. What did he really own? A mountain of debt, a fag brothel of an apartment with a filthy little fuck monkey faggot asleep on his couch dribbling cum out of his dirty faggot arse.
‘Oh, God!’ he whispered. Papa was right. So right. He wasn’t fit to live.
Not fit to live.
The thought struck into him with the brightness of steel on steel.
He sat up. Of course. The realisation glowed like a spotlight in an auditorium: Gabrielle was beneficiary.
He walked stiffly to the bathroom and climbed up onto the vanity. The bottom hopper was easy to swing wide. Cold wind flooded through the room. Cold and sharp and cleansing.
‘Yes,’ he whispered.
He slid his legs out the window, then pushed himself out.
The thought in his head just before his skull split open like a dropped melon was of kissing his father’s craggy dead cheek.
Just as passers-by were running to the shattered body of Tony Barisi, Sergeant Peter Lam was returning to the station’s front desk, ripping off the top of a sugar sachet with his teeth and pouring it into his coffee mug that read ‘de’caf [dee-kaf] — noun useless brown warm water’. It was a quiet night. Two calls about some V8 thumping around the side streets doing donuts: he’d sent Erica and Mick to have a look. One call from Crazy Joan, who rang every night; this time she was complaining about an ad on TV she said was clearly made by the Mormons and must come off the air. Other than that, a lovely, quiet night. Then, movement in the CCTV monitor above the desk. A sedan was pulling into the front car park. It was commonplace for people to come in at all hours with queries about licence renewals, barking dogs, cars broken into.
Sergeant Lam sipped his coffee. A bit hot. He watched a man get out of the driver’s side. He moved slow and easy, no signs of drunkenness. Lam relaxed just a little. Then he stiffened, suddenly alert.
The man went to the boot of his car, opened it.
Lam placed down his coffee. The guy could have anything in there: a cat he’d hit on the road, a box of God-knows-what that someone dumped on his footpath. . The big worry was the folk who’d received speeding tickets that day and decided to try for some payback with a tyre iron. Lam’s hand inched closer to the desk radio; Erica and Mick might need to come back in a hurry.
Then the guy in the car park straightened his back and turned towards the surveillance camera. In his arms was the limp body of a naked child.
‘Oh, fuck,’ whispered Lam. One hand grabbed the radio handset; his other slipped down to release the clip holding in his Glock.
The man outside — who would later be identified as a Miles Kindste from the neighbouring suburb of Tallong — placed the dead girl at his feet, reached into his pocket and produced a Stanley knife. Without a pause, he flicked out the blade and drew it across his own throat. He sat himself down to die.
The phosphorescent hands of Nicholas’s watch glowed eldritch green. Nearly two thirty in the morning.
He sat in an armchair that had seemed huge when he was a boy, but now was small and uncomfortable. After the first few hours, he’d realised that moving didn’t help, and so stayed as still as he could, trying to will himself to numbness.
Through the window over the bed where Laine slept, he’d watched the rain grow softer as hours passed, until it finally ceased an hour ago. The clouds were lit faintly from below by the orange tungsten glow of the sprawling city. Gradually, those clouds parted and dissipated like smoke. Stars winked faintly. Just ten minutes ago, the fingernail crescent of the moon had begun falling with aching slowness beyond the silhouetted leaves of the camphor laurel tree outside the window to light the figure on the bed a ghostly silver.
Laine shifted again. Around midnight, her finger had twitched. By one, she was moving her feet in her sleep. Now she was rolling over, pulling the blanket up around her chin. She opened her eyes. Nicholas was again struck by their colour: a slate that was almost black in this half-light. He’d never seen eyes that colour — smoky and sombre as storm clouds.
‘We’re at my house,’ he said. ‘We’re okay.’
She nodded, closed her eyes, and fell instantly back to sleep.
He watched her for a long while. He reluctantly turned his eyes back to the moon.
He couldn’t remember the colour of Cate’s eyes. He was sure they were blue. Or were they hazel? Now he imagined them grey.