“We dispose of it.”
“I’m not chopping it up!”
“If they find his body it’s murder, at best manslaughter. If they don’t find a body it’s a missing person. Big difference in priority.” She bent over Kenny and patted his trouser pockets, retrieved his iPhone, checked a message on the display, then snapped his SIM card in half. Poor Kenny, he was out celebrating a house sale. Who would feed his dog?
“Wait here,” she said.
“Where you going?” Lockie called after her. “Jazz...”
One thing her father had taught her was to never panic when you are in a fight; keep calm and wait for your moment. When she was twelve years of age, he took her to the gym in Erskineville, put her in with a fierce girl with cornrows who tried to knock her head off, but she did exactly what her dad had taught her, slipping and countering, sliding her feet in and out of trouble, moving her head and rolling her shoulders until that big islander girl had punched herself out. Her dad and his boxing mates cheered her on from the ropes. He never encouraged her education, never took her anywhere that didn’t involve his drinking, but she’d learned how to weather life’s blows from him.
She pulled the cemetery gate shut and walked down Church Street, flying foxes squabbling overhead, then turned onto King, pushing between crowds of diners and drinkers. She dumped the phone and the SIM card into an overflowing bin, making sure the bouncer obscured her from the hotel’s CCTV cameras. Cockroaches scuttled past her feet on the greasy pavement. After the council trucks rolled through in the early hours of the morning, there would be no sign of Kenny or his phone. She went home and found Nan asleep in front of the TV. She grabbed a short-handled spade from the old brick shed under the mango tree and rolled it up in her yoga mat. At the churchyard she pushed softly on the iron gate and crept up on Lockie, who was sitting on the edge of a tombstone, hands covering his face. The enormity of what he had done had paralyzed him into inaction.
Jazz unrolled her yoga mat. He blinked at her with self-pity then followed her cautiously along the west wall until she stopped between two gravesites overgrown with weeds and tall grass. A horizontal slab covered one of the graves, the engraved names erased by the elements. Jazz worked her spade in under one corner of the slab but couldn’t shift it. She heard the woo-hoo of a powerful owl. She looked around and tried again. What panicked her most was that underage drinkers would discover them.
Lockie removed his polo and, grunting, lifted the slab off with a pop like a tight lid coming off a jar. Underneath was a deep sunken hole where the rain had got in, giving off an earthy smell of rot. How many bodies were interred below, Jazz didn’t know; she hoped poor Kenny wouldn’t mind spending eternity on top of strangers. Together, they dragged his body over by his legs and rolled him into the hole and covered him with a layer of dirt and then maneuvered the stone slab carefully back over the top. Volunteers from the church often tidied up these neglected gravesites, but you couldn’t tell the slab had been disturbed. It was airtight and partly hidden under the Chinese elms. No one was going to bother around in there.
She dropped a branch and sprinkled leaves over the adjoining grave and rolled the spade up in her yoga mat and gave it to Lockie, who looked at her strangely, as if she had done this type of thing before.
On the way out she showed him where she had scattered her mum’s and dad’s ashes at opposite ends of the churchyard so they wouldn’t argue with each other. St. Stephen’s was her favorite parish church in the world and the only one she’d ever been inside of. Years ago, her nan knew everyone on this street, families who had lived in the same houses for generations, but that sense of community was gone. People had to look after themselves these days. She secured the heavy padlock on the iron gates and slipped her arm around Lockie’s waist. She had never known him to be so quiet. Maybe this could work out between them. She could use those gym muscles. She asked him if he would do her a big favor: “Help me carry Nan to bed?”
Without hesitation he said yes.
“I couldn’t stick Nan in a nursing home,” she told him. “We need to look after her properly...”
The word we didn’t seem to faze him. Since her father had died, she had wanted a man she could rely on, someone she could trust. That’s what a real relationship was. Of course, he would need to make adjustments. She thought of his smooth, hairless chest shining under the moonlight. Her girlfriends were right. She had snared the man of her dreams: tall, strong, handsome, with rich parents. Mr. Perfect.
In the Dunes
by Eleanor Limprecht
Maroubra
The week before council collection the footpaths are stacked with people’s unwanted stuff. Snapped surfboards, plastic baby walkers, stained office chairs, and dinette sets from the eighties. Rusted-out bicycles, suitcases with broken zippers, cracked terra-cotta pots, box set televisions, and weight benches spilling foam. Alf does the drive round in his dual-fuel Falcon Ute with Marnie sitting shotgun. He keeps the engine running since the Falcon can be finicky about starting.
Marnie slides out and checks the gear over while he idles beside the curb. She knows the drill by now. Does the chair have a broken leg? Has the cord been chewed by a rat while it moldered in the garage for twenty years? Seriously, though, you wouldn’t believe what people give away. Just because two-thirds of it is crap doesn’t mean that there aren’t some genuine treasures in the remaining third.
Marnie doesn’t jump at the chance to come along these days but she still does if he insists. She sits sullen and silent beside him. Used to be it was like an adventure together, a treasure hunt, some of their best times. It’s harder and harder to know what’s going on in that head of hers now. She fixes dinner like her mum used to, puts the laundry on, and sometimes even watches the telly with him, but most of the time she’s either in her room with the door shut or present but not, looking at her phone, sending messages to the friends he’s never met since she doesn’t bring them home.
Tonight they find a bedside table with all the drawers working, a set of barbecue tongs which look like they’ve never been used, an old dog house which he’ll fix up and sell on Gumtree, and half a dozen romance novels which Marnie shoves beneath her seat. He’d have thought at fourteen she’s too young to be reading that rubbish, but he keeps his mouth shut. Since her mum died two years ago — just after Marnie got her period — he’s realized that trying to talk about those things, female things, just makes it worse. Makes her face get all splotchy, her eyes squeeze shut, and the rolls of fat around her middle shake as she cries without making a sound. She needs a mum for these things, but what’s Alf to do? Not as though he can just put an ad on Gumtree for one. And the rest of the family — his and Em’s — are back in the UK. No aunties to take the girl aside and show her how to shave her legs, how to cross them when she’s wearing a skirt or dress.
It doesn’t help, Alf thinks, driving down to Marine Parade from Lurline Bay, past the huge boxy houses with tinted windows, landscaped gardens, and backyard pools, it doesn’t help that Em and he always kept to themselves. Ever since they’d moved into their flat overlooking the rifle range and the headland at South Maroubra, they’d agreed: there’s no problem worth burdening strangers with. They kept Em’s illness quiet, the years of dialysis treatments, the long absences from work which caused him to eventually lose the council job. Ten years he drove the street sweeper. Well too. Never a gutter left clogged with wet leaves. He still finds himself angling his Ute toward curbs, hugging the very edge of the road.