The Killing Hour

I open the curtains and windows in the lounge. Hot air moves out and warm air blows in. I grab a Coke from the fridge and settle down in front of the TV. I grab the remote but don’t push any buttons. I take some sips from my drink. A few minutes slide by where I stare at the blank tube and the blurry reflection of my lounge it provides. Finally I push the power button.

The TV blinks and two-dimensional life appears. It would be easier if all life were that way. The news has already started and the deaths are the lead story. The reporters and presenters are good-looking people full of smiles and bad news. I wonder if their salaries are on a sliding scale – the bigger the tragedy the more they make. They use phrases like ‘mega-murder’ because they lack the real vocabulary to sensationalise human tragedy. I wonder what words they’d use had they been with me last night. They’re talking about a community in shock. Not just one homicide but two – the god-loving tax-paying citizens are getting their money’s worth. Senseless crimes, they say. A brutal frenzy, they say. Just how brutal they can’t say, but they like to guess. No motive, no clues, no leads. It’s their favourite kind of story. They say ‘ritualistic killings’ so often it’s easy to imagine some soap company sponsoring them to do so, because nothing cleans up a satanic massacre like their product. They quote an ‘inside source’ on information they can’t confirm.

I’m given the chance to learn what I couldn’t last night as photographs from Kathy’s and Luciana’s lives flash across the screen. The reporter lists their personal achievements and ambitions. Family members and friends come on and share their anecdotes and pain. It’s a smorgasbord of details I’d know had I kept them alive. Soon I’ll be on the TV too. They’ll thrust a microphone in my face looking for a sound bite. They’ll ask the same questions the ghosts are asking – why?

I head to my bedroom and get dressed. I grab the bloody shorts from the floor and throw them in the laundry. I drag an aging suitcase from the bottom of my wardrobe and dump it on my bed. I need to get out of the city. Preferably out of the country. Just pack my bag and go. It means leaving my friends and my job and my mortgage behind but it beats rotting in jail. It takes me only seconds to figure this out but fifteen minutes to pack.

An awareness of myself is slowly returning, and with it, some hunger. From the moment I woke I’ve felt as though a stranger is living in my body. I go through the motions of making sandwiches. I look at them for a bit, wondering what the hell I’m doing. Then I eat them. They taste like ash. So does the orange juice I chase them with.

I back out of the driveway. It’s nearly seven o’clock and the evening is still light. The air is warm and sticky and smells like freshly mown lawn. The sun glinting off the windows of the homes in my street looks like fire. It shines on the polished surface of a nearby car and straight into my eyes. A young boy with a baseball cap pulled on backwards is biking along the footpath stuffing letterboxes with leaflets that might be advertisements for toasters or pleas for help to find his puppy. A few doors down an elderly woman is on her knees pulling weeds from her garden. She waves at me. I wave back, but the gesture feels hollow. She wouldn’t be waving if she realised that the Charlie Feldman she thought she knew is skipping the country. The woman goes back to her weeds. The boy puts a leaflet in my letterbox and moves on to the next. I drive down my street and watch them both get smaller in my mirror.

A few minutes later I drive past the paddock where the early hours of Monday introduced me to this world, the Real World, where old women with green fingers don’t exist, where no children play, where fresh pies don’t sit on the windowsills of happy-go-lucky life. Jesus, I don’t even know what life’s about any more. It certainly isn’t about routine; it isn’t about paying your mortgage and buying groceries; it isn’t about singing happy birthday, licking stamps and changing flat tyres. I used to think it was. I used to think there was justice in this world, balance, but all life is about is living and dying. You want to think it’s about living, about surviving, but no matter how hard you try it gets to be about dying.

As I look out at the long grass and trees, the soil and scrub, it seems obvious that it takes only a couple of shovelfuls of dirt to form a shallow grave. There could be a dozen people out there in the ground, lost loves, lost lives, just lost. The trees at the far end look nowhere near as imposing as they did in the early hours of the morning. The killing hour is over, that’s why. There are no police cars, no tape cordoning off the scene, no clatter and squawking of a dozen radios. There are only ghosts. They stand in the long grass, wanting to pull me back in. They are calling to me, accusing me. They want to touch me, to hold me and never let go.

Shivering, I turn onto the motorway.

The Real World isn’t about destiny and it certainly isn’t about luck. If it is, Luciana and Kathy ran out of theirs around the same time I ran out of mine. I push my foot down, not caring about the speed limit. Before I can escape I have one more thing I need to take care of – one more woman I need to see.





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