To Know My Crime Read online

  ‘Anything wrong?’

  Mai shoots her a rueful smile. Nothing Angela hasn’t heard before. Just another argument with her stepfather about how she’s wasting her time studying dance. How there’s no future in it. Huan wants her to do economics or law or something that will guarantee a well-paid job. If she doesn’t, he says, she’ll regret it. You want to be a carer for the rest of your life? The disdain in his voice said everything, as if looking after another person was the lowest form of work you could do. As if there couldn’t possibly be satisfaction in it. She lost it when he said that. What about Mum? she yelled. She’s a carer. She cares for you and the kids. Is she wasting her life? Mai knew she shouldn’t bring her mother into it but she couldn’t help it. The awful thing was, she wasn’t sure of the answer herself.

  She places the mug of coffee and plate of vanilla wafers within Angela’s reach.

  ‘Just the usual,’ she says brightly, sinking into the chair opposite. Angela knows all about her cold war with her stepfather, how it started the day her mother brought him to a restaurant in Chinatown and announced that this stranger was going to be part of their lives. Huan was an important man back in Singapore and the marriage would be good for Mai and her mother. It would mean having a house instead of their pokey flat; Annabel could stop worrying about bills; there would be money for holidays and clothes. Huan always bought gifts with him, but it made no difference to the way Mai felt. ‘We’ had always meant Mai and Annabel, but now it meant Annabel and Huan, them against her. Mai’s guerrilla tactics and underground resistance went on until she finished school. Once she started at university, she no longer had the energy for domestic revolt, although there were still occasional flare-ups, like today.

  Mai is tempted to give her an update, but resists. ‘You don’t need to hear more moaning.’

  ‘I listen to my patients because they pay me. Talking to you is a pleasure, Mai. Believe me.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t pay me to complain to you!’

  They are drinking their coffee in companionable silence when Angela eyes the photograph of her and her brother with their parents that sits on her desk. It was taken at a lookout high over the bay when Angela was six, Ned four. Ned is slightly blurred because he always found it impossible to keep still. In some ways, not a lot has changed.

  ‘Have you and Ned been out again?’ She says it carelessly, not wanting to pry – or at least not appear to be prying.

  Mai’s face gives nothing away. ‘Just that time a few weeks ago.’

  ‘He’s been sick. Did he tell you?’

  ‘He said something about having a bug. And that he didn’t want to give it to me.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking we should drive around to his place. Make sure he’s all right.’

  ‘I could go if you like.’

  ‘Would you mind?’ She smiles encouragingly. ‘Tell him it was my idea.’

  Angela can’t help feeling pleased. If she can move things along, then why not? She is not above a little matchmaking. She wants, for once, to do something for Ned. It’s obvious he and Mai like each other, and Mai is different. Her brother has had plenty of girlfriends over the years – mostly giggly types who laugh at his jokes and swallow his bullshit. Then he gets impatient with them for being gullible or too accommodating or just too nice. But Mai is someone who is not afraid to speak her mind. Angela hopes Ned can handle it.

  Her tearaway little brother. She still finds it hard to believe that Ned is doing the looking after, keeping things together. She can’t bear to imagine what would have happened if he hadn’t taken charge. For much of that hellish first year, he kept Matthew away from her, found her this flat, organised carers, dealt with the bureaucracy and the insurers, looked after her financial affairs. She used to say the only thing she could rely on him for was to make her laugh. But he has discovered what it means to be steadfast. When her will starts to flag, he won’t let her give up.

  After morning tea, she will see another patient. Two a day is the most she can manage. After that, she will go to the physiotherapist where she will be strapped to a tilt table and be reminded, if only remotely, what it means to stand on her own two feet.

  3.

  First thing each morning, he visits the vegetable plots and fruit trees tucked away at the end of the peninsula. An app on his phone allows him to map their location and record their details. Every time he uses his mobile, he thinks of the absurdity of it, of subsisting on whatever food he can forage or fish while still being able to play with this high-tech device – at least for another few weeks, until his credit runs out.

  Most of the properties in this secluded hamlet are beach houses, empty during the week and for much of the year. A small but sufficient number, though, have herb and vegetable gardens maintained by local gardeners. Ned has even found some that keep chooks and ducks. He is careful to vary his route so as not to make his inroads too obvious. Has he become a thief? He’s not sure what the word means any more. Like a withdrawing tide, the crash has exposed corporate thievery on a scale that leaves most forms of robbery looking quaint. He likes to think he is merely salvaging what would go to waste.

  The narrow road descends into a gentle, bushy valley where the streets are unmade and sunshine falls in powdered gold through the trees. A flock of squabbling parrots bursts into the sky, shattering the stillness. From the undergrowth, two tawny brown rabbits dash across the road, their white bull’s-eye tails flashing as they bound away. Even if he had a gun, he couldn’t do it. Then he thinks again. Perhaps it depends how hungry you get.

  The houses here are less grand and showy than those on the waterfront, and more inclined to blend in with the surrounding bush. Even so, apart from the occasional Mediterranean-style confection, the most recent houses are variations on the box. Ned did two years of an architecture degree – one of the many courses he’s dropped out of – and there is one thing he has never understood: why Western architecture cares so little for the curve and the dome. What’s wrong with the people who design these houses? he wonders. Can’t they think outside the box? Even the balconies are boxy. Boxes of glass, boxes of rusted metal, boxes of concrete and stone. Eerily like shipping containers.

  He stops out the front of a low-lying stone structure with large front windows and a native garden of grevilleas, bottlebrush and flowering gums, and peers through the front hedge. The curtains are drawn on most of the windows. No car in the driveway, no sign of anyone at home. The houses on either side, too, are unoccupied, as far as he can tell. In fact, the whole cul-de-sac – like much of the neighbourhood – has an air of vacancy, of fallowness. No, neighbourhood is not the word. If this is a neighbourhood, so is a mausoleum or a graveyard. A place full of silence and absence. Street after street of well-furnished houses with marble and steel kitchens and spacious, light-filled living rooms with no one home. There is no neighbourhood here.

  Ned moves quickly down the side of the house to the vegetable garden in the back corner. Although it is the first week of autumn, there are still some late summer vegetables – green beans, lettuce, silverbeet and tomatoes – that won’t be missed. The possums can always be blamed. A wrought-iron cat with glittering eyes watches him, poised to pounce. He grabs a few stalks of basil and parsley from a pot and then moves across the lawn to the fruit trees and plucks half a dozen apples and pears. In return, he takes a trowel from the shed and spends half an hour weeding the vegetable patch and the garden bed that runs alongside the back porch. The owners won’t even notice. He does it for himself. He supposes he could put his labour on a legal footing, find work as a gardener, but this would hardly bring in the kind of money he needs.

  He circles the house, peering in the windows and making note of alarm systems and surveillance cameras, how the doors and windows are secured and what kind of electrical goods, paintings and other valuables the dwelling contains. Over the past two weeks he has created an inventory of the houses and their possessions. His careful documentation has yielded useful ins
ights.

  On the walls of the older houses hang an impressive number of original works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australian art: McCubbins, Streetons, Boyds, Olleys, Nolans. The selling price of just a few of them would cover the money he’s lost, but even if he could find a way of getting his hands on them, he wouldn’t know how to begin to convert the art into cash. And without a car (sold to cover Angela’s mortgage payments), he’d have to make his getaway by bus. Great material for a stand-up routine. If only there was money in that.

  Each time he rings his sister, he vows he will tell her. Tell her that she should never have trusted her idiot brother with her money. And each time he puts it off, hoping that Fraser will magically reappear with what he owes them and put everything right. Ned had prided himself on not caring about money. He wasn’t going to let it rule his life. All those years overseas, travelling until the money ran out, until he was down to his last cents. There was always work to be found if you weren’t too fussy – bartending, labouring, fruit picking. He liked to think he was living lightly, that he was free in a way few people were. No mortgage, no debts, no dependents. He could take off whenever he pleased. And for years, that’s what he did.

  He might have kept living like that if Angie hadn’t needed him so badly. But what did he know about looking after money? That’s why Fraser, a financial whizz with an MBA, seemed the obvious choice. Ned had known him since they were teenagers. Fraser would know how to invest Angie’s money, how to keep it safe. He was the kind of person for whom nothing ever went wrong.

  He remembers the first time Fraser told him about the portfolio he had compiled for them. Portfolio! Ned still finds it hard to believe. They’d never had money before and what they’d inherited from the sale of their mother’s house, the house they grew up in, was not much in the scale of things. Enough, though, that it needed care in order to make it last. Enough for a deposit on a flat for Angela. Ned got by on the dividends of his share of the investment, supplemented by casual gardening jobs while he looked after Angela’s affairs and decided what to do with his life. Fraser had explained the basics: equities, margin calls, derivatives, hedging, market capitalisation. At the time, Ned thought he understood. Fraser had a way of making it sound simple and logical, something that even Ned could wrap his brain around.

  And he did try, for a while, to keep up. But whenever he opened the financial pages with their columns of fine-print numbers, everything seemed to blur. He couldn’t concentrate. He’d flick over to sport with every intention of going back to business once he’d caught up on the cricket or the tennis or the latest on the Saints. When it looked like the Saints might have a real chance of winning the premiership for the first time in fifty years, all other news got shoved aside. He convinced himself that if his team was victorious everything else would fall into place. After their thrashing in the preliminary final, Ned went into denial, avoiding the papers, the internet, the radio. Even the TV. But as the weeks went by, it got harder to look the other way. Then Fraser stopped returning his calls and replying to texts and Ned couldn’t keep pretending that nothing was wrong.

  Angela had never trusted Fraser – another reason Ned dreads telling her. You did what? he can hear her demanding. To Fraser. Of all people. Their entire savings. It looks like lunacy now but back then you were just plain stupid if you didn’t get into the market. Lotto was for losers. The wise left it to experts, to the people who knew.

  Before he met Fraser, Ned had never known anyone like the Wainwrights. Every summer, Ned, Angela and their parents spent two weeks in a rented fibro shack on a bare grass block surrounded by ti-trees. The linoleum on the floor was cracked, the flywire screens torn, and the beds creaked and sagged. But that was what a holiday house was. It didn’t matter if you walked sand inside or sat down on the couch in wet bathers. All the families he knew stayed in houses like it, or in caravans, or camped. No one could afford anything fancier. It never occurred to him to want anything more.

  Once a year the whole family would catch the ferry across the bay to have a picnic on the other side, and on the way they would see the houses of the rich on the waterfront. Ned had never given them a second thought until the summer he turned fifteen. Sick of fishing from the pier where the water was churned every half hour by the ferries, he went looking for a spot away from the crowds. On the far side of the rocky headland at the end of the front beach, he found a series of inlets and jetty after jetty, like gigantic centipedes stalking out over the water, each of them with its own rickety-looking stairway that lurched up the cliff.

  For Ned, jetties held a kind of magic. He supposed it was the way they allowed you to walk on (or at least over) water, tremoring with possibility; the way they seemed to be going somewhere. They gave him that feeling even when he was dangling his legs over the edge and doing bugger all. You might catch a fish. A boat might arrive. A submarine might surface. You never knew.

  The tide was low, so he needed a jetty that went out deep. Around the next headland, he found what he was looking for. Ignoring the sign saying Private, he strolled down the long wooden walkway. After preparing his line, he weighed the rod in his hands and cast it as far as he could and watched with satisfaction as the line flew through the air. It always amazed him that he could do it so effortlessly, so gracefully, when he was so uncoordinated at everything else. Most of the time this didn’t bother him; he was happy to play the class clown, to be the one who made the loudest smack with a belly-whacker or the biggest splash with a bomb. But when he saw his line describe a perfect arc, he couldn’t help wishing for a body that moved with the same kind of ease and grace.

  When he got bored with holding the rod, Ned jammed the handle into the gap between the wooden boards. Luckily there were other distractions – cormorants diving like heat-seeking missiles, seagulls hovering hopefully and bickering, the odd stingray furtively crossing the sea floor. He took off his T-shirt and sat in the full glare of the early afternoon sun until the skin on his shoulders and back started to prickle and turn pink. He was thinking about going for a swim when he felt vibrations travelling up the jetty behind him. Something blocked out the sun. He turned to see a boy about his age, with silky blond hair, wearing a baby blue polo shirt and crisp white shorts.

  The boy stood with his hands on his hips, as if waiting for an explanation.

  ‘That’s perfect,’ Ned said with deliberate nonchalance. ‘Don’t move.’

  The boy stared at Ned – a scrawny kid with a mohawk and multiple piercings. ‘What?’

  Ned couldn’t resist. Everything about the neatly dressed boy screamed money. ‘The shade, old chap. Fuckin’ hot day, eh?’

  Much as Ned tried to sound tough he couldn’t quite manage it. Probably because he could never take anything seriously enough. He’d only joined the gang of punks in his town because his best mate had, which was why he was wearing these clodhopper shoes on such a hot day. But he knew he wasn’t really one of them. The others in the gang got their kicks from scaring the shit out of people. All Ned had ever wanted to do was make people laugh.

  He waited for a reaction, to be told where to go. So what if he was? There were plenty of other jetties around.

  They boy sat down on the jetty next to him. ‘Caught anything?’

  Ned looked at him sidelong and elbowed the empty bucket. ‘Aren’t you going to tell me to rack off?’

  ‘I’m Tarquin, by the way.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘My friends call me Fraser, though. It’s my middle name. What’s yours?’

  ‘Ned.’

  ‘Well, Ned Kelly, you won’t find anything here. It’s empty as Texas. You need to go out deeper. If you’re serious, we could take my Dad’s motorboat.’ He pointed to a sleek-looking machine with a blue awning anchored just offshore.

  Ned eyed him warily. ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘For the hell of it. You ever waterskied?’

  Now that was something Ned had always wanted to do. To go scream
ing across the water like Jesus on speed, spray shooting up behind you as you carved a path through the deep, dark blue. He could see himself holding on with one hand, a cigarette in the other, cool as you like. He had no idea why this Fraser, who was obviously loaded, was being so friendly, but what did it matter? You had to seize your chances when they came along.

  Each summer after that, during his final years at school, Ned would hang out with Fraser, go fishing or try out the latest fad in water sports – kite-surfing, wake-boarding, jet-skiing. Whatever was in, Fraser had one. In the evenings, they would retreat to the boatshed and smoke dope and drink Johnny Walker and rave while staring up at the stars. Ned remembers the faintly motorised call of the gannets returning to nest on their man-made reef near the mouth of the bay. Life had never been better. Fraser used to call it his ‘little getaway’ from his parents in the family house on the cliff top: a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old, double-storey limestone mansion called the Anchorage, that reminded Ned of those historic houses you visited on school excursions. Although it looked like the kind of place that had been theirs for generations, the Wainwrights had got it cheap, when a rich, old family went broke back in the 1970s.

  The first and only time Ned met Fraser’s father, it was obvious why Fraser had befriended him. Ned was just the kind of kid Fraser’s father would hate. And his father didn’t disappoint. When Ned stretched out his hand in greeting, Mr Wainwright took it as if it was something slimy his son had brought back from a rock pool. Ned couldn’t figure out the feud between Fraser and his father, but the bitterness of it left him feeling that his parents weren’t so bad after all.

  When they finished school, Fraser went off to study at the London School of Economics and Ned began dropping out of a long line of courses, from architecture to marine biology, while trying his hand at stand-up comedy. His dream had always been a simple one: to make a room full of people honk like a donkey or snort like a pig. An experience that tended to make most people feel rather good. And he had a talent for it. But a career as a comedian was not sustainable, even for someone with Ned’s minimal needs, and he had to content himself with the occasional gig and getting a laugh out of his friends and not thinking about what lay ahead. He became a professional backpacker, a lifestyle for which he was perfectly suited. When he got bored with whatever short-term job he was doing, he tossed it in and moved on. There was always a new country to explore, always more fun to be had somewhere else.