Chapter 11

The face I saw was about my age or a little older. Mel turned and saw me coming and said, "There's dad now. I'll see ya later!" Just for the time being I will ignore the dad bit, but I must admit I like her calling me that. I think I earned the title with her and more importantly, she believed I earned the title. However this went by the wayside due to the man standing in the doorway and I sighting each other. He was short for an adult male, probably five six or seven, due to poor nutrition in his formative years no doubt. His hair was pure white, his cheeks deeply lined and pitted with acne scarring. He was well dressed, almost elegant which looked totally out of place on the person I remembered. His face had also just turned a pasty grey shade, the moment he saw me.

I could feel my face freezing into a rictus of a smile, which I was unable to control. My hands were shaking, my vision went yellow. Ten minuted later everything felt back to normal, I don't remember the ten minutes but I was seated on the floor, my knees felt like jelly, he was not in sight and Gail was saying, "Well that's one way of making someone feel unwanted but don't you feel that chasing him out of the house then throwing a rock after his car may have been a little extreme. I don't know what the neighbours wil..."

"Gail can you see if I can have a drink of water please? I don't think I will be able to stand. Thank you darling. There maybe a water bottle in the boot of my car." She handled that well I think. It was a situation, which would have been more than a little unusual, maybe even shocking. She filled the bottle from a tap a lot quicker than I might have in a similar situation and I squirted the water not just in my mouth but also all over my head and face.

"Do you want to tell me about it?"

"Help me up please. Thank you. Girls!" I shouted, "we're going for a walk by the water!" Luckily the kids hadn't seen anything unusual, off into there own world of discovery and making dibs on the bedrooms. "Lets go for a walk, shall we? I think I need to talk."

There was a small cool breeze wafting off the water. It might have been pleasant but I just felt numb. All the pleasure had just gone from my day and off the house I'd just bought. The water must be on tide change because there was clouds of sand swirling in small whirlpools and eddies all around the little rock island and there didn't seem to be any special direction for the water to run. I knew exactly how it felt, do I run or do I stay? Do I run away or do I face whatever is going to happen and... cope. I'm good at coping, if coping was an art I'd be a Dobell art prizewinner. It might be a good idea to give my beauty, my love, a rational explanation and see if this facing things, for better or worse has got a written guarantee. Will she stick with me through something... unpalatable?

"What did I do?"

"Well you should know because you did it."

"Honey, just tell me!"

"You tried to kick the man in the head, you missed but not by much. Then you started to use some kind of karate stuff on him. He ducked all that and took the safest route out and ran like hell. He never said a word just ran like hell. You chased him and he mustn't have your arthritis or something because he could really move. You picked up a rock and threw it at his car as he drove off, and a damned fine shot it was too. Hit right in the middle of his rear window. You ran back inside the house looking for all the world like you'd seen a ghost, you were shaking and looking everywhere at once then you collapsed against the lounge room wall and dropped to the floor. It looked like you were having some kind of fit or something."

"Yeah, or something is closer to the truth. And he should have been a ghost. I'd swear on my baby's head that man is dead. I killed him forty two years ago."

"Oh. He was looking quite fit for a dead man. Why would you have killed him, or any man?"

"Haaah yes, you only think you've got skeletons in your closet. Before I get into this thing I'd like to just say just one thing first. I love you, and no matter what I tell you from now on I will still love you. I just hope you still love me." There was a green painted bench cemented into the ground behind the huge boulders lining the shore for erosion prevention. We sat, this is not going to be easy and it may just defy credibility a little. "I ran away from home when I was twelve years old. Whether for valid or invalid reasons I couldn't really say even now. I tried to get by around Sydney at first, but even in the late fifties the only way a street kid like myself could make some money was having sex with old fat men in park toilets. I wasn't against any of that, I was too young to have any moral feelings one way or another, but it made me feel, dirty. To get away I hitch hiked to Brisbane thinking things would be better there, I have no idea why I'd think that but that's where I went anyway. It was easy in those days to hitch rides, people weren't as afraid of mass murders and rapists and such."

"Anyway it took me about four days one way or another to get there and I still had to give one fat man head so he'd let me out of his car. I was scared shitless. I now think I'm lucky that's all that happened. I got to Brisbane thinking it would be a lot warmer than Sydney and that I could sleep in the parks and food would be easier to come by. You know, tropical fruits growing on the side of the road etc. Boy was I naïve! You can die of starvation with misconceptions like that. I wasn't even thirteen by then and with a strong possibility of never attaining that as well. I bummed around Brisbane, got some casual work in places like the Golden Circle factory and the tanneries washing blood away amongst other things. I washed cars in car lots got short term work in factories, work was more available in those days if you weren't too fussy."

"One day someone offered me a job cleaning dance clubs after hours. I took it like a flash, the money was good, comparatively anyway. By the time I turned thirteen I was cleaning two or three clubs. But the money ran out when we were undercut on the franchise. Someone said if I sold drugs the money was pretty good and I knew lots of sellers and addicts so I got really deep into that. But it seems I have a problem that I didn't know about until I experienced it. I have dual personalities. When I become very angry, or very drunk or stoned on shit, or anything that puts me under high pressure, I change. The other me is not like the me you know at all. That me kills things, very efficiently for fun and profit. And when all the messy business is out of the way I change back, pass out or whatever and don't remember a thing about it. I was selling heroin, making lots of dosh too. Late one night I was attacked by someone who belonged to a gang, I was on his turf it seems. The next thing I know I was sitting beside what was left of his body. There was blood everywhere, which matched in well with my vomit, which also became everywhere.