“Fuck,” I said. I knelt by him and put my fingers to his wrist, his throat. Nothing. His skin felt warm.
“Fuck,” Skye said, in a mumbled echo.
His head lolled when I pressed his throat again, and this time I felt it, a feeble beat. I pulled out my phone. No signal. “Is there a landline?” I asked her.
She sighed. “Somewhere.”
I saw a telephone on a table, a plastic handset with a tangled curly cord, and dialed, and gave the information. An ambulance would be with us shortly, I was told. I looked through the cabinets in the bathroom, the stinking darkroom and the untidy bookshelves, to see if there was any Naloxone. There wasn’t. Skye hadn’t moved from her chair. I found her clothes behind a sofa and brought them to her. She held them limply.
I checked March again, tried to pull him upright, and managed to get his head elevated on a couple of cushions. His chest rose and fell with shallow breaths, ribs visible through his thin shirt. I didn’t want to look at him.
He wasn’t dead. I repeated that to myself, fought to stave off the panic. Part of me was back in a Hoxton bedroom, frantic, hopeless; time was a plastic spool of film and sound that stuttered and spun like a trap. I tried to close it off, focused on examining the camera while Skye started to dress. It was a beautiful machine, a Canon with a lens that would have cost as much as a first-class ticket to London. It held old-fashioned film, no digital screen to scroll back through. I opened the camera and pulled out the film. There were a few other rolls on the table and I pocketed them. Skye was still struggling to get her T-shirt over her head. I went over to a bookcase with a shelf of photo albums and pulled them out, looked through until I came to one filled with pictures of her and other girls. Not Virginia. I saw enough before I closed it to see that they were not all recent; some of Skye were a couple of years old at least. Beautifully composed, printed on quality paper, artful and obscene and poisonous. I pulled out another album. More girls, older-looking prints. I fought the urge to tear them all to shreds. I left the album open on the coffee table for the medics, and held on to the one with pictures of Skye. It felt like a futile gesture. There was probably a computer somewhere with a whole vault of digital versions of the images.
I found the keys to the Mercedes in Skye’s miniature leather backpack, in among cigarettes, sticky pots of lip gloss, gum, and coins. A siren sounded in the distance. There seemed to be little point waiting and I badly wanted to be somewhere else.
“Let’s go,” I said. She stood up and pulled her shirt down to her waist. Her hips were narrow as a boy’s. “Put on your skirt.” I looked away. She glanced at March for the first time and blinked. He was still breathing. “The ambulance is on the way,” I said.
“Why?” she asked. She reached for a clear flat plastic bag of tablets, little white oblongs, on the coffee table near an ashtray.
“Leave it,” I told her, but she held on to it and I didn’t feel like arguing.
The sirens were properly loud, just blocks away, by the time we reached the Mercedes. I opened the passenger door for Skye but she ignored me and slumped into the back. I sat behind the wheel and turned the key. The engine kicked into life with a deep grumble. I remembered the feel of the hand brake, and had a sudden memory of Virginia in the driver’s seat, her hands on the wheel, the loose elegance of her slim wrists. The gears creaked.
The weather had changed; storm clouds turned the light dim and green, and rain spattered the car roof. A pair of white cockatoos swooped onto the telegraph pole at the end of the block, screaming in outrage.
“Home, James,” Skye said, and laid herself down on the backseat. I couldn’t tell whether she understood what she had witnessed, or if she didn’t care.
“Put your seat belt on,” I said.
“Fuck you, Rob,” she mumbled. The earrings made a little thump as she dropped them onto the floor.
Maureen opened the door when I rang the bell. I had the album under one arm, Skye’s backpack over my shoulder, Skye leaning on my other arm. “I found her at Derek March’s studio,” I told Maureen.
“Okay, come in,” she said after a long pause. “Virginia isn’t home.”
Skye let go of me and headed toward the bathroom.
Maureen poured herself a glass of wine in the kitchen, but didn’t offer me anything. “Thank you, Rob. It’s such a problem, with Skye. Chemicals,” she said disapprovingly, as though Skye had been shooting up bleach. “It’s out of control,” she complained, but she didn’t sound convincing. “I’ve tried to tell Fred.” I wondered if she hadn’t heard what I’d said. She turned away, putting the bottle back in the fridge.
“She was at March’s studio,” I repeated, and put the album on the kitchen counter. I thought about how to tell her about what I had seen. And then I saw the way she was looking at the album, and the way she looked back at me. There was anxiety in her face, but it wasn’t for Skye. I had the feeling that the contents of the album would not be a surprise to her. I remembered Virginia’s stories, of being taken to the studio by Maureen with Skye, being left to play with the pottery wheel in the courtyard while the adults stayed inside.
“He overdosed,” I said. “We left before the ambulance got there.”
“The ambulance?” she asked, frowning. She felt for her necklace, a string of chunky, colorful beads.
“He’ll be okay.”
“But you said an ambulance? What happened?”
I tried to sound confused and stupid to deflect her questions, my patience suddenly gone. “I don’t know where they would have taken him,” I told her. “The Balmain Hospital? I don’t know. Sorry.”
She looked weary and disappointed in me. I imagined that Skye was familiar with this look; Virginia and Fred too. I didn’t believe that she was ignorant of any of it: the drugs, the photographs. She took a packet of cigarettes from a high corner shelf — a halfhearted hiding place — and lit one. Skye shuffled out of the bathroom toward the lounge and the bleep of the television being turned on reached us a few seconds later.
The pathway was slippery with rain as I made my way to the street, but the storm had passed; already there was a patch of hollow blue sky over the bridge. I walked the meandering blocks to Darling Street and down to the water to wait for a ferry.
Virginia called me later that night. I had drunk with dedicated speed at the first place I found at the quay, a cramped pub in the Rocks full of American tourists, but it didn’t blunt anything as much as I wanted it to and I left when the karaoke started. Virginia thanked me, demure and sincere sounding. Maureen hadn’t told her about the photos, it turned out, and she was quietly furious when I explained. She remembered a session Skye had done for March the previous year, but thought that had been the last time, and it had seemed to be above board, something for his new series.
“I took the film,” I said.
“It will be on his computer, though, or someone’s computer,” she said.
“I know.” It was probably just a matter of time before the photographs showed up online, if they weren’t there already. I was in no hurry to find out. “I have your car keys,” I told her. I had found them in my pocket when I reached for my own door key.
Virginia made an impatient noise. “I can’t believe she took the car again.” There was a big age gap between them, ten years, enough to make the sibling relationship tenuous, but Virginia’s exasperation somehow seemed entirely belonging to a sister. She downplayed her protective instincts, as though they were an embarrassment, and irritation was one of her covers.
I couldn’t tell if our stalled exchange was one of intimacy or estrangement. I set the canisters on the kitchen counter and pulled out the rolls of film, flimsy ribbons that turned dead brown in the light.