Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 12, Issue 2 Read online

  Mitchell is one of those guys who was really sweet until high school turned them into total dickheads. A year at uni hasn’t mellowed him any. Right now he’s in a white suit and plumb-red shirt—no tie, ties aren’t cool at the moment—and there’s a cheap cone-shaped party hat flattening his floppy blond fringe to his forehead. He makes a show of looking around him at the people, the flashy clothes, the din. The sequins on the party hat twinkle with the movement. ‘Looks like a New Year’s party in a bar to me. That’s the opposite of private, doncha think, Ollie V?’

  I hate the way he keeps calling me that, like I’m still the girl next door he used to roughhouse with. Like he stayed my friend.

  ‘Move on, Mitchell. Find a different corner to monopolise.’

  ‘What, I can’t say hi to little Asha Park and Dominic and Mabo?’

  ‘Kevin,’ Melbo says quickly, flat and unamused. He’s been Melbo ever since year four when there were already three Kevins in our class and he’d just moved up from Melbourne. It doesn’t stop certain arseholes from calling him other nicknames.

  ‘Oh my god, Mitchell,’ Dom drawls, ‘could you be a bigger fuckwit, I don’t think they can see you from the moon…’

  My attention is all on the brewing sledging match, so it’s Ae-Cha who spots Soph first, heading like a thunderbolt through the crowd. ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘Incoming,’ Melbo mutters to me, sinking even deeper in his seat.

  ‘Mitchell fucking Phillips.’ Sophie’s voice carries over the general noise, and some people turn to see what the ruckus is, just in time to catch a skinny girl with funny hair totally deck some guy.

  There might have been a bit of screaming at this point. And, uh, we’re kicked out of the bar.

  No more Mai Tais.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Soph crows, dancing like a figure-skater down the line of the kerb. Spin, leap, a triple axel that somehow doesn’t break her ankle. ‘I’ve wanted to do that for forever!’

  Melbo oofs as Dom uses him as a vault to slap a street sign with a cry of crossroad! ‘What, get in a bar fight?’

  ‘No, dummy, punch that stupid purity freak in his holier-than-thou mouth. Honestly, such a fucking liar!’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d said two words to each other. Like, ever.’ I keep my tone light and laughing, but something squeezes my voice box anyway.

  ‘Try zero,’ Soph says. ‘That’s the problem.’

  Her gaze catches on mine for a long moment, grin slipping into something else as she stares. Then she glances down at the knuckles of her fist and grimaces. ‘Oh gross. What the hell?’

  She lifts her hand and turns it in the blinking LEDs of a shop display. The dark smear across her skin refracts the light like stars, like a thousand tiny scales, like mica in smooth granite, like—

  ‘Am I bleeding glitter?’

  Soph wipes it with the fingers of her other hand, winces. Gets a sheen of glitter across her fingertips.

  Ae-Cha looks guilty, then embarrassed. ‘So… I maybe used a tub of body glitter to bind the ingredients?’

  ‘You what now?’ Melbo, somewhere between curiosity and disbelief. His mum’s a clever-woman, even teaches comparative lore at uni; if anyone else knows how to mix a spell, it’s him.

  ‘Well I was already using Soph’s makeup and lip gloss to bind the sheet music together. D’you have any idea how hard it is to find some of the stuff in my grandma’s notes?’

  Defensive. Like we’re going to question it, when she made this possible at all.

  Soph wiggles her fingers in front of her, glitter sparkling in the city lights, expression—I don’t know what it is, really. Resigned. It’s been easy for me to forget this isn’t her real body. Maybe she forgot, too.

  Then she grins broad and wicked, and snaps her fingers. A cloud of glitter bursts from them like stage magic. Soph gives a sweeping bow full of dramatic gestures. ‘For my next trick, ladies and gentlemen—’

  Dom chuffs in amusement, but something’s struck me suddenly. It’s not really the right holyday for it, but if Ae-Cha can make a spell from glitter, why not try it? It was New Year’s Day; the symbolism had to count for something.

  ‘Dion,’ I murmur, and clear my throat, raise my voice. ‘What about Jaq Dion? He could—maybe?—’

  I look to the others, the half-grasped thought dying on my tongue, but Ae-Cha’s got a light in her eyes like a Bunsen burner, and Melbo nods once and says yeah, and Dom’s not immediately pointing out the flaws. It gives me the confidence to meet Soph’s eyes.

  Soph smiles, a crooked thing that’s nothing like the showy grin before. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, for my next trick—’ She clicks her fingers, the last of the glitter swirling around her face. ‘—I will cheat death.’

  Imagine dancing to save a life.

  No, imagine dancing to savour life, because the minute you start dancing with that crushing fear in your heart is the minute that sweet eternal beat ebbs away. And this is an evocation for Jaq Dion, lover of drink and dance. Desperate is okay, selfish is not.

  The thrum of New Year’s revelry has made way for the truly dedicated partiers, and we move from club to bar to open-air lightshow listening for an undercurrent that’s more frenzy than frolic. At last we find its epicentre, a harbourside club still packed with dancers determined to wring every drop of the night’s festivities. More and more, people are dropping their glamours and disguises. It’s going on 3am, urban witching hour, and nobody cares. I slide past a school of selkies on the club dancefloor, spot a young bunyip in ironic pinstripes doing tequila shots with a girl in neck-to-knee sequins. Ae-Cha and Dom are grinning sharp canine grins as they twirl some ridiculously retro move. Even Melbo has stretched his big black wings, white pinions flashing lurid pink in the club lights. I glance at Soph, her snakes curling freely, and can’t resist bumping against her in passing, shoulder to shoulder, just to feel the solid weight of her pressing back. She laughs and lands a hip-check that knocks me off-course. This close to the sea I don’t even lose my balance. I change it into a sweeping ballerina turn and catch her in my arms, spinning the both of us round until the sparking undercurrent of magic knots and tangles around us. Nearby dancers lean closer and don’t know why.

  ‘And what’s that move called, Liv? The maelstrom?’ Soph’s smiling, her breath hot on my cheek, chest heaving like she has flesh and blood pulsing instead of body glitter and prayers. Her arms are twined around mine, fingers splayed across my back. Not letting go.

  I can feel a grin stretch my lips, a flush of alcohol and something else heating my face. The magic is tugging at me, a whirlpool with Soph at its core, joining the wild undercurrent we’ve been chasing, and I know it’s going to work, I just know it, and I want the night to stay like this forever. Her alive and embracing me.

  ‘If I do it twice you can name it, Soph.’

  We’ve left the party, still riding the cresting high of the evocation, and found our way through the twisty Dickensian streets of the harbourfront to a tiny playground to wait. The equipment is typical council fare, bright plastic-coated metal and impact foam designed for minimal lawsuits when abused by kids with no sense of self-preservation. It evokes about a zillion childhood memories of similar playgrounds, and it’s entirely possible the place doesn’t strictly exist outside these weirding hours of the night. I don’t care. Soph has commandeered the tiny slide, while me and Dom are trying to use the chain swings without breaking the frame or wrecking our legs on the astroturf with each downward swing.

  I kick out again. ‘D’you think he’ll show?’

  Ae-Cha spins the play-blocks for a new game of noughts-and-crosses. ‘Will he show? We danced our arses off, he’d better.’

  The night air is still summer-thick with heat, just a light breeze from seaward to cut through the humidity, so it’s not the warmth I notice first. My next breath burns through my lungs like overproof rum.

  ‘Children.’

  At first he’s just a honeyed actor’s voice and a darker shadow i
n the curtain-draping roots of a Morton Bay fig beyond the fence, but then he strolls out. Business suit in intricately patterned fabric, and a pair of cheap plastic glasses that flash the year. Even in the poor illumination of the streetlight he’s just a bit too handsome to believe, like his face is as much a put-on as the rest of him. I stop swinging and glance at the others for confirmation, but no one states the obvious: Jaq Dion totally showed up.

  He steps over the low-hanging chain that separates the street from the playground and takes a few leisurely strides forward. ‘Now, who dares summon me?’

  ‘Um,’ I say, because for some reason he looked unswervingly at me. The New Year’s Eve glasses should make him laughable, but my other senses are screaming what my eyes cannot see: Dion is big fucking magic, and I’m no more than a mobile-phone glimmer next to his nuclear radiance.

  ‘Come now,’ he says after a moment, ‘you’ve gone to a lot of trouble for one little gorgon—very creative use of cosmetics, do I sense a touch of foxfire?—but let me guess: you’ve only got till the rosy fingers of dawn claw up from the horizon? Tick tick, little ones. Won’t you tell dear uncle Iacchus your wish?’

  ‘To stay,’ Soph says from her perch on the kiddie slide. ‘I want to stay.’ Her knees are up around her ears; for the first time tonight, she looks awkward. Out of place. Her snakes coil defensively, a dozen pairs of shiny black eyes fixed on Dion.

  He tucks his chin down, looks up at her through his lashes. ‘You’ve already pulled yourself out of the underworld, my dear—you already have one chance. Most don’t even get that.’

  ‘But you could bring her back!’ Melbo says, voice cracking. Almost instinctively, we’ve all drawn around Soph. Her fingers are gripping the plastic rim of the slide near my shoulder. I edge my hand next to hers, barely brushing her knuckles.

  ‘Please.’ The word is thick in my throat.

  Dion turns a slow arc on one heel, gaze raking across the group like the spitting heat of sparklers, there and gone.

  ‘No,’ he drawls at last, ‘you caught my curiosity, but it’s a little early in the year for resurrections. Especially for just another little tragedy—do you think there’s a soul who’s touched this green earth without wanting what you ask? Enjoy the rest of your night.’

  And Jaq Dion turns away with a wave of his stupid perfect hand.

  Little tragedy, he said, like Soph should just shrug and laugh it off.

  ‘So what,’ I snarl, ‘we need an original prayer?’ I shove my hair out of my eyes with shaking fingers, the better to glare at his retreating back. ‘It’s a simple enough wish!’

  At the fence, Dion pauses with all the loaded stillness of a guillotine blade. Then he turns back, taking the silly flashing neon glasses off with exaggerated care before letting them drop from his fingers. They clatter on the playground rubber, loud in the sudden silence.

  Soph and Ae-Cha and Dom and Melbo have my back, I know it, but I daren’t take my eyes off the approaching figure. He stops too close, all sweet cinnamon and radiant body heat as he leans in. Too late, I remember the old tales of bitter retributions Dion exacted on those who wronged him.

  ‘You’re a tiny local water-nymph,’ he says, teeth clipping every word, ‘but even your most stagnant backwater puddle-sprite knows better than to test me.’

  ‘But can you do it,’ I manage, alcohol fumes stinging in my sinuses, ‘or not?’

  ‘Of course I can do it, I came back from nothing but my bloody heart, I can bring back a headless serpent-child—’

  ‘Alive and whole?’

  ‘Like she’d never di—oh, you are cheeky.’ He holds my gaze for a long, considering moment, like he’s trying to peer through my pupils to read the secret scrawl of my brain. ‘But I’m a big fan of revelation—in vino and all that.’ He steps back, points a finger at Soph. ‘Find your head, tell it the reason you’re still here, and in three days you’ll get your wish. I’m astonished the one who killed you managed to cut it off in the first place—I didn’t think kids these days had the stomach for it.’

  ‘I wasn’t murdered,’ Soph says, startled. ‘It was a car crash.’

  The look Dion shoots her is one of exquisite boredom. ‘If you say. Perhaps gorgons die easier these days. Regardless, you should go. Reclaim your head. Enjoy yourself!’ He raises one arm as if to toast the night, and I can almost see the glint of a bottle in his fist, almost hear the liquor slosh. He grins broadly, face a mask of innocuous perfection once more, and spreads his arms wide. ‘And now, adieu. There’s still a few hours left here of the night, and chains to be rattled.’

  Soph grimaces at his retreating back. ‘That’s me, the unquiet spirit.’

  He’s among the draping roots of the fig tree, but he pauses a moment on the edge of its deepest shadows. ‘Yes, something has held you here.’ In the uncertain light, I can’t tell if Dion’s expression is soft or shrewd, but I’d swear on Soph’s grave that he looks at me and sees. ‘But I think you guessed that, my dear.’

  And then he is gone.

  I hold myself completely still, guilt and shame and fear fizzing through my blood. I’ve been so busy working out how to bring Soph back that I haven’t really looked too hard at the why. Why Soph might not be resting in peace.

  I don’t want to let her go.

  How self-centred can you get, right?

  I’m dragged out of my self-pity by Soph herself as she pushes off and slips abruptly to the bottom of the slide. She remains there a moment, face hidden by a protective coil of snakes, until her sobbing indrawn breath breaks the silence. The others gather round quick with murmurs of shit and you alright? Ae-Cha kneels down to hug her. I rest a comforting hand on Soph’s shoulder and feel like the worst friend ever.

  At last Soph wipes her eyes and looks up. Her cheeks shimmer in the streetlight, and I realise she’s been crying glitter.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m okay. Shit.’ She rubs her eyes again, smearing mascara and glitter. ‘Murdered. Guess you never really know anyone.’ She levers herself up and looks around the group, her gaze finally settling on me. ‘Well. Time to go find the murderous little fuck and pray he’s gone all Hamlet with my head.’

  Dom, thank god, asks the question. ‘So who?—’

  ‘Who else?’ she shrugs, angry. ‘Lachlan. Fuck, and I kinda liked him, too.’

  Lachlan. I’d blamed him bitterly in the first few weeks, when the ragged edges of my grief snagged on the smallest things. He’d been at the wheel, he’d worn a seatbelt, he’d lived when Soph had not. But then Lachlan’s mother had died of cancer, and the raw, unthinking fury had given way to a kind of distant camaraderie in loss. Accidents happened, life was unfair, and everyone had their own plate of hurt to get through. It wasn’t like he’d set out to kill Soph.

  Only, apparently he had.

  My heart and head are in turmoil as I start composing a text for my contact list, thoughts cycling frantic as the pulse in my chest. Time is ticking, and we need to find one drunken raver in the city’s biggest not-quite-morning-after.

  Ae-Cha is talking hunting spells with Melbo, while Dom has taken to the social media streams with a frenzy, putting the word out, asking friends of friends if they know where their old schoolmate is tonight, urgent, bit of an emergency…

  Soph is swaying gently like a cobra, staring unblinking at the skyline as if she can divine the direction through sheer force of will. Or—no, that’s east. Maybe she’s just straining to see the fading night against the constant blush of light pollution.

  I press send, scroll through the list for anyone I missed, and pause at Mitch. I’d forgotten to delete Mitchell Phillips from my phone when he deleted me from his social circle, and unlike Lachlan he’d probably kept his number.

  But would he even pick up?

  I glance back at my friends, each trying in their own way to solve this thing. A handful of people have replied to my questions, some apologetic, some annoyed, all negative. Frankly, it’s well past polite texting time, even on New Year�
�s.

  Dom lifts his head, eyes still fixed on the text zipping past under his fingers. ‘Lachlan was definitely in the CBD, there’s a photo on Samir’s wall from the 9pm fireworks. No idea where he went after, sorry.’

  Melbo shakes his head apologetically. ‘Not getting anything useful.’

  Ae-Cha nods and shrugs. ‘The harbour is a crappy place to scry at the best of times. We don’t even have something he owns.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ rasps Soph. She curls away abruptly from the horizon vigil, like it burns her. Turns back to the loose circle. ‘Should have known better than to trust a god for fair play.’

  The worst part is, she doesn’t scream or cry or do anything but stand there staring at her shoes with a bleak expression and a tiny furrow between her eyebrows.

  Before I can second-guess myself, I dial Mitchell. I have to turn my back on everyone—I can’t look at Soph and concentrate. The phone rings and rings, an endless yelping cry waiting to be answered. Dreading the answer, too. I’ve always been kind of terrible at standing up for myself.

  He answers with a groggy yeah?, and for a moment I freeze. ‘Hello?’ he says into the silence, voice sharpening. ‘Ollie V?’

  He’s still got my number. I don’t know what to do with that information.

  ‘Sorry to call so late.’ I feel a lurch of panic as the carefully unassailable and persuasive phrases I’d planned fall out of my head. ‘Do you know where Lachlan is tonight? It’s an emergency.’

  There’s the clink of glasses knocking together, but the silence on his end is otherwise absolute. No barroom murmur, no sounds of the street. ‘It’s Sophie, isn’t it? Look, I know it seems like fun but the dead can get hung up on really petty shit, you shouldn’t indulge them…’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘no, listen. Mitchell. Lachlan killed her.’

  Another pause, then ‘Ollie…’ soft in my ear. Not this again.

  ‘Like, deliberately, Mitch. And he took Soph’s head.’

  ‘Ah, geez,’ he says, ‘fuck. You’re serious?’