The Shining Girls

After three hours of questioning, Sebastian, Julia’s boyfriend of six weeks, has his alibi corroborated by independent witnesses and the grease-stains on his shorts. He was tinkering with the 1974 Indian motorbike he’d been restoring, the garage door open, in full view of the street. Moved by the experience, he takes Julia’s death as a sign that he has been wasting his life studying business science. He joins the anti-apartheid student movement, has sex with anti-apartheid girls. His tragic past clings to him like pheromones that women find impossible to resist. It even has a theme song: Janis Joplin’s ‘Get It While You Can’.

Her best friend lies awake at night feeling guilty because, even through her shock and grief, she has worked out that the statistical significance of Julia’s murder is that she is 88 per cent less likely to be murdered herself.

In another part of town, an eleven-year-old girl who has only read about the case, only ever seen Julia’s valedictorian photograph from her school yearbook, takes out the pain of it – and life in general – very precisely with a boxcutter on the tender skin inside her upper arm, above the line of her T-shirt sleeves, where the cuts will not be seen.

And five years later, it will be Kirby’s turn.

Harper

24 November 1931

He sleeps in the spare room, with the door closed tight against the objects, but they burrow their way into his brain, insistent as flea bites. After what seems like days of fractured fever dreams, he hauls himself out of bed and manages to limp down the stairs.

His head feels as thick as bread soaked in turpentine. The voice is gone, subsumed in that moment of searing clarity. The totems reach out to snag him as he limps past the Room. Not yet, he thinks. He knows what has to be done, but right now his stomach is clenching around the emptiness inside.

The sleek Frigidaire is empty, apart from a bottle of French champagne and a tomato that is slowly going to mulch, just like the body in the hall. It’s turned greenish with the first hints of a high, rotten smell. But the limbs that were stiff as wood two days ago have softened and gone limp. It makes it easier to shift the corpse over to get at the turkey. He doesn’t even have to break any fingers to pry it loose from the dead man’s grip.

He washes the scab of blood off the bird with soap. Then he boils it up with two old potatoes that he finds in a drawer in the kitchen. Mr Bartek obviously did not have a wife.

The only record he can find is the one that is already on the gramophone, so he winds it up and starts it playing the same set of showtunes to keep him company. He eats ravenously, sitting in front of the fire, forgoing cutlery to tear chunks of meat off with his hands. He washes it down with whiskey, filling the tumbler to the brim, not bothering with ice. He is warm and there is food in his gut and the pleasant fuzz of liquor in his head and the gaudy music seems to quiet the objects.

When the crystal decanter is empty, he goes to fetch the champagne and swigs it straight from the bottle, until that’s gone too. He sits sullenly drunk, the picked-apart husk of the bird tossed on the floor beside him, ignoring the ticking of the gramophone, the needle scratching uselessly without a groove, until the urge to take a piss forces him, reluctantly, to get up.

He staggers against the couch on his way to the commode and the clawed feet scrape across the floorboards and catch on the carpet, revealing a corner of battered blue luggage tucked underneath the couch.

He leans down on the armrest and hooks the suitcase out by the handle, trying to haul it up onto the cushions to get a better look. But between the booze and his greasy fingers, it slips and the cheap catch snaps apart, disgorging the contents onto the floor: bundles of money, a scattering of yellow and red Bakelite betting chips and a black ledger, bristling with colored papers.

Harper swears and drops to his knees, his first instinct being to shovel it back in. The bundles are thick as decks of cards: $5, $10, $20, $100 banknotes, bound up with rubber bands, and a set of five $5,000 bills, tucked down the side of the torn lining of the suitcase. It’s more money than he’s ever seen. No wonder someone bashed Bartek’s brains out. But then why didn’t they search for this? Even through the blur of alcohol, he knows this doesn’t make sense.

He examines the banknotes more carefully. They’re arranged by denomination, but separated into variations, all subtly different. It’s the size, he reckons, fingering them. The paper, the color of the print, tiny shifts in the arrangement of the images and the wording about legal tender. It takes him a while to figure out the most peculiar thing. The dates of issue are wrong. Like the view outside the window, he thinks and immediately tries to un-think it. Perhaps this Bartek was a forger, he rationalizes. Or a prop-maker for the theater.

He turns to the colored papers. Betting slips. With dates that skip around from 1929 to 1952. Arlington Racetrack. Hawthorne. Lincoln Fields. Washington Park. Every one a winner. Nothing too outrageous – score too big, too often, and you draw the wrong kind of attention, Harper reckons, especially in Capone’s city.

Each slip has an accompanying entry in the black accounts ledger, the amount and date and source printed in block capitals in a neat hand. All of them are listed as profits, $50 here, $1,200 there. Except one. An address. The house number, 1818, set against a figure written in red: $600. He hunts through the ledger for the corresponding document. The deed of ownership for the House. It is registered to Bartek Krol. April 5, 1930.

Harper sits back on his heels, flicking his thumb over the edge of a bundle of tens. Perhaps he is the madman. Either way, he has found something remarkable. It explains why Mr Bartek was too busy to get real groceries. Too bad his winning streak was cut short. Lucky for Harper. He’s a gambling man himself.

He glances across at the mess in the hallway. He will have to do something about it before it turns to mush. When he returns. It’s an itch, to get outside. To see if he’s right.

He dresses in the clothes he finds hanging in the wardrobe. A pair of black shoes. Workman’s denim. A button-up shirt. Exactly his size. He glances at the wall of objects again, to make sure. The air around the plastic horse seems to twitch and shiver. One of the girl’s names reads more clearly than the rest. Practically glowing. She’ll be waiting for him. Out there.

Downstairs, he stands by the front door, flicking out his right hand with nerves, like a boxer warming up to throw a punch. He has the object in mind. He has triple-checked that he has the key in his pocket. He is ready now, he thinks. He thinks he knows how it works. He will be like Mr Bartek. Conservative. Wily. He won’t go too far.

He lunges for the handle. The door swings open on to a flash of light, sharp as a firecracker in a dark cellar, ripping through the guts of a cat.

And Harper steps in to sometime else.

Kirby

3 January 1992

‘You should get another dog,’ her mother says, sitting on the wall looking out at Lake Michigan and the frosted beach. Her breath condenses in the air in front of her like cartoon speech bubbles. They predicted more snow on the weather report, but the sky isn’t playing.

‘Nah,’ Kirby says, lightly. ‘What’d a dog ever do for me anyway?’ She is idly picking up twigs and breaking them into smaller and smaller pieces until they won’t break any more. Nothing is infinitely reducible. You can split an atom but you can’t vaporize it. Stuff sticks around. It clings to you, even when it’s broken. Like Humpty Dumpty. At some point you have to pick up the pieces. Or walk away. Don’t look back. Fuck the king’s horses.

‘Oh, honey.’ It’s the sigh in Rachel’s voice that she can’t stand and it provokes her to push it further, always further.

‘Hairy, smelly, constantly jumping up to lick your face. Gross!’ Kirby pulls a face. They always end up stuck in the same old loop. Contemptuously familiar, but also comforting in its way.

She tried running for a while, after it happened. Dumped her studies – even though they offered her a sympathetic leave of absence – sold her car, packed up and went. Didn’t get very far. Although California felt as strange and foreign as Japan. Like something out of a TV show, but with the laugh track out of sync. Or she was; too dark and fucked up for San Diego and not fucked up enough, or in the wrong ways, for LA. She should have been tragically brittle, not broken. You have to do the cutting yourself, to let out the pain inside. Getting someone else to slice you up is cheating.

She should have kept moving, gone to Seattle or New York. But she ended up back where she started. Maybe it was all that moving when she was a kid. Maybe family exerts a gravitational pull. Maybe she just needed to return to the scene of the crime.

There was a fluster of attention around the attack. The hospital staff didn’t know where to put all the flowers she received, some of them from total strangers. Although half of those were condolence bouquets. No one expected her to pull through and the newspapers got it wrong.

The first five weeks after were full of rush and people desperate to do things for her. But flowers wilt and so do attention spans. She was moved out of intensive care. Then she was discharged. People got on with their lives and she was expected to do the same, never mind that she couldn’t roll over in bed without waking up from the jagged spike of pain. Or she’d be paralyzed with agony, terrified that she’d torn something when the painkillers suddenly wore off as she was reaching for the shampoo.

The wound got infected. She had to go back in for another three weeks. Her stomach bulged, like she was going to give birth to an alien. ‘Chestburster got lost,’ she joked to the doctor, the newest in a series of specialists. ‘Like in that movie, Alien?’ No one got her jokes.

Along the way, she misplaced her friends. The old ones didn’t know what to say. Whole relationships fell into the fissures of awkward silence. If the horror show of her injuries didn’t stun them into silence, then she could always talk about the complications from the fecal matter that leaked into her intestinal cavity. It shouldn’t have surprised her, the way conversations veered away. People changed the subject, played down their curiosity, thinking they were doing the right thing, when actually what she needed more than anything was to talk. To spill her guts, as it were.

The new friends were tourists, come to gawk. It was careless, she knows, but oh so horribly easy to let things slip. Sometimes all it took was not returning a phone call. With the more persistent ones, she had to stand them up, repeatedly. They would be baffled, angry, hurt. Some left shouty messages, or worse, sad ones, on her answering machine. Eventually she just unplugged it and threw it away. She suspects it was a relief for them in the end. Being her friend was like going to a tropical island for a little fun in the sun, only to be kidnapped by terrorists. Which was something real that she saw a news piece about. She reads a lot about trauma. Survivor’s stories.

Kirby was doing her friends a favor. Sometimes she wishes she had the same options on an exit plan. But she’s stuck in here, a hostage in her head. Can you give yourself Stockholm Syndrome?

‘So how about it, Mom?’ The ice on the lake shifts and cracks musically like windchimes made of broken glass.

‘Oh, honey.’

‘I can pay you back in ten months, max. I figured out a schedule.’

She reaches into her backpack for the folder. She worked up the spreadsheet at a copy shop, in color and with a fancy font that looks like script. Her mother is a designer, after all. Rachel gives it due diligence, reading carefully down the rows as if she’s examining an art portfolio instead of a budget proposal.

‘I’ve paid off most of my credit card from traveling. I’m down to a hundred and fifty a month plus one thousand dollars on my student loan, so it’s totally do-able.’ Her school did not give her a sympathetic leave of absence on her debt. She’s babbling, but she can’t stand the tension. ‘And it’s not that much, really, for a private investigator.’ Normally $75 an hour, but he said he would do it for $300 a day, $1,200 a week. Four grand for the month. She’s budgeted for three months, although the PI says he’ll be able to tell her whether it’s worth pursuing after one. A small price to pay for knowing. For finding the fucker. Especially now that the cops have stopped talking to her. Because apparently it’s not healthy or helpful to take too much interest in your own case.

‘It’s very interesting,’ Rachel says politely as she closes it up and tries to hand it back. But Kirby won’t take it. Her hands are too busy, breaking up sticks. Snap. Her mother sets the folder down on the wall between them. The snow immediately starts soaking into the cardboard.

‘The damp in the house is getting worse,’ Rachel says, closing the subject.

‘That’s your landlord’s problem, Mom.’

‘You know what Buchanan is like,’ she laughs, wryly. ‘He wouldn’t come out if the house was falling down.’

‘Maybe you should try knocking out some walls and see.’ Kirby can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. It’s an internal barometer of putting up with her mother’s crap.

‘And I’m moving my studio space to the kitchen. There’s more light there. I find I need more light these days. Do you think I have Robles’ disease?’

‘I told you to get rid of that medical book. You can’t self-diagnose, Mom.’

‘It seems unlikely. It’s not like I’ve come in to contact with river parasites. It could be Fuchs’ dystrophy, I suppose.’

‘Or you’re just getting older and you need to deal with it,’ Kirby snaps. But her mother looks so sad and lost that she relents. ‘I could come and help you move it. We could go through the basement, find things to sell. I bet some of that stuff is worth a fortune. That old printmaking kit must be worth two thousand dollars on its own. You’d probably make a heap of cash.

‘You could take a couple of months off. Finally finish Dead Duck.’ Her mom’s work-in-progress is, morbidly, a story of an adventurous duckling who travels the world asking dead things how they came to be dead. Actual sample:

– And how did you die, Mr Coyote?

– Well, Duck, I was hit by a truck.

I wasn’t looking when I crossed the street

Now I’m a snack for hungry crows to eat.

It’s too bad. I’m so sad.

But I’m glad for what I had.

It always ends the same way. Every animal dies in a different gruesome way but has the same answer, until Duck himself dies and reflects that he too is sad, but glad for what he had. It’s the kind of dark pseudo-philosophical whimsy that would probably do very well in children’s publishing. Like that bullshit book about the tree that self-sacrifices and self-sacrifices until it’s so much graffiti-ed rotting wood on a park bench. Kirby always hated that story.

This has nothing to do with what happened to her, according to Rachel. It’s about America and how everyone thinks that death is something you have to fight, which is weird for a Christian country that believes in an afterlife.

She’s just trying to show that it’s a normal process. No matter how you go, the end result is always the same.

That’s what she says. But she started it when Kirby was still in ICU. And then ripped it all up, pages and pages of adorably grisly illustrations, and started again. Over and over with these stories of the cute dead animals, but never finishing it. It’s not like a kid’s picture book even needs to be very long.

‘I take it that’s a no, then?’

‘I just don’t think it’s the best use of your time, honey,’ Rachel pats her hand. ‘Life is for living. Do something useful. Go back to college.’

‘Sure. That’s useful.’

‘Besides,’ Rachel says, her gaze dreamy, looking over the lake. ‘I don’t have the money.’

It’s impossible to push her mother away, Kirby thinks, letting the crumble of sticks fall from her numbed fingers onto the snow. Her default state of being is absent.

Mal

29 April 1988

Malcolm spots the white boy straight away. Not that a lack of melanin is wholly unusual round these parts. Usually they driving, the car barely pausing long enough to make their score. But you get your walk-ups too, from the far-gone fiends with their yellow eyes and chicken skin and hands shaking like old folk through to miss lady lawyer in her expensive suit, coming up from downtown to wait patient with the rest of them every Tuesday and, lately, Saturdays too. The street’s egalitarian that way. But they don’t tend to hang around after.

This man just standing there, right on the steps of them abandoned tenements, looking about like he owns the joint. Maybe he does. Rumors going round that they aiming to gentrify Cabrini, but you’d have to be one crazy motherfucker to try that shit out in Englewood with these rundown shitholes.

Mal doesn’t know why they even bother boarding them up no more. They all been long stripped of any pipe or brass handles or other Victorian whatnot. Broken windows, rotten floors, and whole generations of rat families living on top of each other; granny and gramps and mammy and pappy and baby-boo rat. So only the really hard-up tweakers would try their luck using ’em as a shooting gallery. Those places a wreck. And in this neighborhood, that’s saying something.

Not a realtor, he figures, watching as the man steps down onto the cracked concrete, his shoes scuffing the faded hopscotch grid. Mal has already had his hit, the dope sitting in his guts, slowly turning them to cement. It takes the teeth off his day, so he’s got all the time in the whole world to watch some white man acting weird.

The cracker crosses the lot, skirting the wreck of an old couch, walking under the rusting pole that used to have a basketball hoop attached ’til kids yanked it down. Self-sabotage, that’s what that is. Fucking your own shit up.

Not police neither, way he’s dressed. Which is badly, in floppy dark-brown pants and an old-fashioned sports coat. That crutch under his arm speaks to a sure sign of someone who has gone spiked up in the wrong place and done themselves some damage. Must have traded his hospital cane to the pawn shops already to have ended up with that clunky old thing. Or maybe he didn’t go to hospital at all ’cos he got something to hide. There’s something wack about him.

He’s interesting. A prospect, even. Could be the guy’s hiding out. Ex-mob. Hell, ex-wife! Good place for it. Could be he’s got some cash stashed in one of those old rat nests. Mal peers at the row houses, speculating. He could sniff around while the white boy’s out about his business. Alleviate him of any valuables that might be troubling him. No one the wiser. Probably doing him a favor.

But looking at the houses, trying to figure which one he mighta stepped out of, makes Mal feel strange. Could be the heat rising off the asphalt giving everything the shimmers. Not quite the shakes, but close. He should have known better than to buy product off Toneel Roberts. That boy been dipping, for sure, which means he been cutting too. Mal’s stomach cramps like someone’s got their hand right up in there. A little reminder that he hasn’t eaten in fourteen hours and an indication, oh yes, that the dope’s been cut. Meantime, Mr Prospect is heading down the street, smiling and waving away the corner kids shouting out to him. He gives it up for a bad idea. Least for the time being. Better to wait ’til the white boy comes back and he can check it out properly. Right now, nature calling.

He catches up with him a couple of blocks down. Luck plain and simple. Although it helps that the guy is staring at the TV in the window of the drug store, so hypnotized that Mal is worried he had a seizure or something. Not even aware he’s obstructing people’s way. Maybe it’s some big news. World war fucking three broke out. He sidles up to see, innocent as you please.

But Mr Prospect is watching commercials. One after the other. Creamette’s pasta sauce. Oil of Olay. Michael Jordan eating Wheaties. Like he’s never seen someone eating Wheaties before.

‘You okay, man?’ he says, not willing to lose sight of him again, but not quite steeled up enough to tap him on the shoulder. The guy turns with such a ferocious smile that Mal almost loses his nerve.

‘This is amazing,’ the guy says.

‘Shit, man, you should try Cheerios. But you blocking traffic. Make some room for the people, you know?’ He gently guides him out of the way of a kid on rollerblades barreling down on them. His man stares after him.

‘Dreads on a white boy,’ he agrees, or he thinks he does. ‘Just can’t do it. How’s about that one?’ He pretends to nudge him with his elbow, not making actual contact, to indicate the girl with tits that God himself must have sent down from on high, barging up against each other under her tank top. But the guy barely looks at her.

Mal senses he’s losing him. ‘Not your type, huh? That’s all right, man.’ And then, because the jonesing is already beginning to gnaw at him: ‘Say, you got a dollar to spare?’

The guy seems to see him for the first time. Not like the normal white-man-glance-you-over neither. Like he gets him right to his core. ‘Sure,’ he says and reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket to pull out a bundle of banknotes held together with a rubber band. He peels one off and hands it over, watching him with the intensity of some rookie trying to pass off baking soda as the real thing, putting Mal on his guard even before he looks at the note.

‘You fuckin’ kidding me?’ he scowls at the $5,000 bill. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ He has his doubts now about this whole damn enterprise. Cracker is crazy.

‘Is this better?’ he says, and flicks through the bills to hand him a C-note, looking for his reaction. Mal is tempted not to give him the satisfaction, but hell, who to say he won’t give him another if he gets what he’s looking for. Whatever that is.

‘Oh yeah, this’ll do fine.’

‘Is the Hooverville still down by Grant Park?’

‘I don’t even know what you talking about, man. But give me another one of those and I’ll walk you up and down the whole park ’til we find it.’

‘Just tell me how to get there.’

‘Hop on the green line. Take you all the way downtown,’ he says, pointing to the El tracks visible between the buildings.

‘You’ve been a great help,’ the man says. To Mal’s dismay, he tucks the bundle back into his jacket and starts limping away.

‘Hey now, wait up.’ He breaks into a little jog to catch up with him. ‘You from out of town, right? I can be your tour guide. Show you the sights. Get you some pussy. Whatever flavor you like, man. Look out for you, know what I’m saying?’

The guy turns to him, all friendly, like he’s giving him the weather report. ‘Leave off, friend, or I’ll gut you here in the street.’

Not ghetto bluster. Matter of fact. Like tying your shoelaces. Mal stops dead and lets him go. Doesn’t fucking care no more. Crazy cracker. Better off not getting involved.

He watches Mr Prospect limping down the street and shakes his head at the ridiculous fake bill. He’ll keep it as a memento. And maybe he’ll go back to those broke-down houses to have a poke around, while the guy’s gone. His stomach clenches at the thought. Or maybe not. Not while he’s still flush. He’ll treat himself. Blue caps. No more of Toneel’s inferior shit. He might even buy for his boy, Raddison, if he sees him. Why not? He’s feeling generous. He’ll make it last.