Chapter 24
“This place is immaculate.” Max is looking around the front garden of the house Alan and his wife, Irene, share with their two daughters. The house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac where an earthen staircase, dug into a gentle slope, weaves down to the front door. The walk to the door takes visitors through well-kept flower beds and bright green grass. Max spots a tiny garden gnome statue and gives a deadpan delivery, “I'm disappointed by the gnome but otherwise, full credit to a job well done.”
Tahlia laughs at her husband. “Why are you a cop when you should be a garden designer?”
“I considered studying landscape architecture.”
“You did not!?” Tahlia laughs.
“I kept it quiet.”
“You're such a dork,” says Tahlia as they arrive at the door.
“And that's why I kept it quiet. I can’t believe you just called me a dork.” Max smiles but pretends to be serious. “Try saying something else. Something meaner.”
“No!” Tahlia says still laughing.
“Go on. You’ve got it in you, I know.”
“Yeah you need to knock on the door now. We've been standing here for long enough.”
“I'm building up to it.” Max points up to part of the eave above the door. “Notice there are no cobwebs? They've really paid attention and…” Max is interrupted when Tahlia knocks. He takes a deep breath.
“Why are you so nervous?” Tahlia asks with a smile.
“I'm not nervous. You are.”
Tahlia smiles. “What's wrong?”
“Nothing. I don't feel well.”
The door opens and Alan's smiling face welcomes them inside where the foyer isn’t as immaculate as the garden but is still nice. “Sorry we're late. This is Tahlia.” Max's relative confidence at work is now betrayed by the nerves he feels behind mixing his work life and private life. But Alan is there to make them comfortable and gives Tahlia a fatherly hug. “Tahlia. Alan. It’s great to finally meet you. I've heard a lot about you. The photo on Max’s desk just isn’t enough though.”
“Thank you. It's good to meet you too.”
Irene appears from another room and even though Max has seen her photo on the desk, here, for the first time, face to face, she looks like a female version of Alan. She also looks younger even though they’re the same age.
Friendly greetings are offered around with a kindly word from Tahlia for the amazing state of the front garden and the overall loveliness of the house before Irene ushers everyone into the dining room; the food is ready.
As their hosts lead them into the next room, Tahlia slaps Max gently on the arm and demands he relax. Max's only response is to shrug to indicate that he'll try.
At the dining table, Tahlia watches Max out of the corner of her eye as he sits nervously beside her with both hands gripping the edge of the table. She smiles to herself. Alan and Irene have gone to the kitchen for the food but the young couple speak in a whisper, “You've worked with him for almost a year.” She says as though he'll be better for hearing it.
“Yes, but this is covering new ground.”
“You've been to lunch together.”
Their hosts return carrying the food and interrupting their conversation. “Sorry to leave you so long,” Irene announces as she places things on the table.
“You sure you don't want help?” Tahlia offers.
“Please darling, not at all, we're fine thank you. We can't have guests waiting on themselves now can we?”
Alan chimes in, “Max you want another beer?”
“Hell yes…” Max feels he may have been a little too eager with his response so he follows it up with a softer, “…please.”
Alan walks out the door he came in but sticks his head back through and says, “Tahlia?” He motions a drinking signal. Tahlia smiles, “No thanks. My water’s fine.”
While Alan is off Irene dishes out the carefully prepared food and takes a seat across from Tahlia who asks, “You have two girls don't you?”
“We do. Twins. Fourteen. Most twins get along. Ours don't, they're always fight…,” Irene's sentence trails off as she looks to Max and realises her faux pas. “I'm so sorry. I wasn't thinking.”
Max puts up a defensive hand and smiles, “Its fine. I’m right there with you.”
Alan returns and sits.
“Well, anyway,” Irene endeavours to move on quickly. “They’re with friends tonight. It wouldn’t be this quiet if they were here believe me. So how long have you been married?”
Max looks to Tahlia to answer. “Ten years. Ten years in a few days actually.”
Irene is genuinely happy for them, “Really? Congratulations. You married young. By some standards.”
Max and Tahlia nod in unison.
“You must want children soon?”
Tahlia nods with whole-hearted agreement but Max speaks up, “We’re putting off having kids. I mean do we really want to bring children into this world? Alan, you hear me? We're on the front line of everything wrong with this world. People don't care anymore. They kill for fun, for hate, or for no reason at all. Think of all the crimes being committed. Children are being hurt and are hurting others. Do I want to send a child out into that kind of world?”
Quietly noticed by Alan and Irene, Tahlia shrinks into her chair a little and looks down at her food. She clearly doesn’t agree. Alan looks back to Max, “That's an incredibly pessimistic world view. How do you get out of bed in the morning?”
“No, ‘cause I'm one of the good guys. I'm one of the few trying to help make things better. There aren't many of us.”
“There's a lot of love in the world though,” Irene counters.
“I'm not sure that's enough anymore.”
“If you had children you'd think it was enough,” says Irene.
As both couples sat at the dining table and juggled the uncomfortable subject of parenting with eating, neither pair was aware, nor should they have been, of the vehicle parked outside, across the road. The occupant sits patiently as he watches the house. He's prepared to sit there for hours. Just to watch and imagine what they're doing inside and what they're talking about.
An hour or so later Max isn't nervous about meeting with his work colleague at his home anymore and he listens to Alan's adventures from his early years as a uniformed officer. Alan is in the middle of a tale, which may or may not contain exaggerations for the sake of entertainment, and Max announces his shock that Alan never told him this particular story before.
Alan interrupts himself to ask of Max, “Did I never tell you this?”
“No!” says an exasperated Max. “This should have been a first day story!”
“Well I’m walking through this sewer drain, not thinking anything about it other than the smell, not hearing the guy come up behind me, until he slips on - I don’t know what, and stabs himself with this thing that looks like a machete! I swear he was about to cut my head off.”
Max moves from his forward-leaning, elbows on the table, tell-me-more pose, to leaning back as though resting after a jog around the block. “So how badly was he hurt?”
“I did first aid and all that but he lost a few litres of blood by the time the ambulance got there.”
Max can hardly hide his amazement, “Wow, I don't think I'd have bothered with first aid.”
“Don't get me wrong, I let him bleed for a little bit.”
Irene adds, “He waited five minutes before giving first aid.”
Alan defends himself, “To my credit though, he was fine-ish until he pulled the blade out himself. That's when he really started to bleed. But hey, he tried to kill me and he would have if he didn't slip.”
“I'm glad he didn't baby.” Irene pats Alan on the arm.
“I spent years in uniform and never had anything like that,” says Max, still amazed at the story.
“I'm glad,” responds Tahlia.
“This is what I’m saying,” says Alan. “There will always be someone who needs to
be arrested.” He gently holds his wife's hand and they look lovingly at each other. “There will always be someone who needs to be loved. You can put the whole world in prison but if you don’t come home to a good woman then it’s all for nothing.”
Max replies - tongue firmly in cheek, “I think I read that in a self-help book once.”
The food has been consumed. The coffees have ended the formal part of the evening and the hosts feel the need for something new to stimulate conversation. Irene and Tahlia move to sit in the lounge room and Alan takes Max to where they find themselves now.
Alan's man-cave.
It’s in what used to be one bay of a three car garage, now with a bar at one end, and everything centred around the massive pool table which encourages the eye towards the projector screen against the far wall. Real estate across the four walls is at a premium with most of the space given up to sports memorabilia, signed pictures, framed jerseys and shelving holding up little knick-knacks of sporting relevance.
Max gives Alan the reaction he expects from all who enter his man-cave, “Wow.”
Alan smiles and says, “I know.”
Max moves through the room at a respectful saunter as he slowly scans the different items hanging from the walls. Alan stands back, letting his friend move slowly along.
Max moves on to a series of jerseys from different sporting codes. Looking back at Alan's grin for the first time, “Did you get all these signed yourself?”
Alan stops smiling, “Um, no. I bought them.”
“That's still cool, I guess.” Max goes back to scanning the walls. “I wish I had a room like this.”
Alan says matter-of-factly, “Every man needs one.”
“We live in a two bedroom apartment. Tahlia uses the spare as an office.”
The pool table is always set and ready to be used so Alan grabs two beers from the bar fridge and passes Max one along with a pool cue. “Your break.”
Max smashes the white ball as hard as he can and achieves a random scattering. Despite Alan having had the table for a few years he's still not very good which makes them as bad as each other. So the game is slow and just a frame for their conversation.
Alan forgoes eye contact as he focuses on the game, “Forgive my lack of a segue but what I was getting at before was that I’ve gone through exactly what you’re experiencing. With your marriage, that is. It almost cost me my marriage.”
Max can almost be heard to sigh, “It's not as simple as...”
“No, it really is,” interrupts Alan. “See, Irene and I got married young. Not too young for that time, I guess. We put off having kids because I knew I was working my way up the ladder, you know how it is. I had my goal in mind and I didn't want anything, not even children, getting in the way of that. Irene wouldn't listen to that so I appealed to the emotional, albeit vague, excuse of, ‘is this a world to bring innocent lives into?’ The world is so evil and there's no guarantee of safety or that they'll grow up well. All of that. Right on cue I got detective and spent eighty hours a week at the office. Worked weekends as well. No one else did but I was getting convictions and more importantly, praise. But guess what?” Max shrugs as he hits a wayward ball and sinks the white. Alan retrieves the ball from the pocket and resets it for his shot. “There was always another crime. I couldn’t work hard enough or fast enough. Guess where I started as detective?”
Max shrugs.
“Asian crime gangs. That was a long time ago. Do we still have Asian crime gangs?”
Max nods.
“Do we still have gangs from every race and every conceivable collection of people?”
Max nods again.
“And we always will. But the way you’re going you won’t always have your wife.”
Max doesn't respond.
“And because of all that I almost lost Irene. It wasn’t till she walked out the door that I started paying attention. I once worked for just over a year on a case only to see the judge dismiss it due to a technicality. Someone else's error, not mine. All my hard work down the drain and it was years before most of that gang was cornered again. What I felt then was nothing compared to the panic I felt when I realised Irene left me.” Alan gives Max a moment to absorb what he said. “The best lesson you can learn is from someone else's mistake.”
The lounge room is one clean away from sterile with furnishings straight out of the eighties. Even the decades-old wallpaper would scare the casual visitor and were it not for the LCD TV and Blu-ray player one would feel like they've travelled back in time. Irene sits in her usual spot on a single seater recliner, which happens to not be the three seater couch directly in front of the TV – the three seater is where the twins sit - the parents are relegated to the side chairs. There’s another single seater for Alan. Tahlia sits comfortably on the three seater, blissfully unaware of the significance of her location compared to her hostess’s.
Their own conversation parallels Alan and Max's with the older couples’ past guiding them to the same point in their story. Irene continues, “Back then I was too scared to approach him about it. Not that he was home to listen anyway. And even when we was home he wasn’t strictly home. Leaving was the hardest thing I had ever done but it was the only way I could let him know.”
Tahlia is probably showing more interest than she means to, “Would you really have ended it? If he didn't chase you?”
Irene nods but not with any sense of pride, “I think so. I was ready to refuse to settle for a loveless marriage. If he didn’t chase me I don’t think I’d have come back. He did though so I guess I didn’t really have to decide.”
“Things changed?”
Irene nods with a smile. “Everything changed.”
“Any regrets?”
“I only regret that we didn’t have the twins till I was in my forties. We love them but being pregnant at that age almost killed me, and them.”
“They weren't planned, of course?”
“Oh, not at all. We put off having them for so long that once we started considering it, we thought it was too late. And I think we were trying in spirit only, neither of us believed anything would happen, but we were really enjoying pretending we were newlyweds again.”
Irene stands and asks Tahlia to follow her.
The point where the kitchen turns into the hallway, leading to the bedrooms, is also where Irene's own home-office is located. With a small and excited twirl, she introduces Tahlia to her home art gallery. All pieces are lovingly and meticulously painted by Irene herself. Tahlia is genuinely impressed and takes a moment at each painting to study the details as Irene talks about what inspired her to paint each one and how she went about it.
“You've painted a lot,” is Tahlia's first real sentence since entering the room.
“And this is just a small number, I've sold most of what I've painted and have done a lot of commissions.” Irene beams with pride.
“I'm trying to get children's books published,” adds Tahlia.
“That's great. How's it going?”
“Not so good. I wasted a meeting with a publisher a few days ago because I forgot my phone. I was already late and by the time I went back for it there was no way I’d have gotten there in time. I’ll hopefully get another chance but… I don’t know.”
Back in the man-cave, Alan found the right time to move from beer to Scotch and retrieves the bottle from behind the bar before pouring a small amount each for the two of them. Max grabs the glass Alan offers him and smells the brown liquid before grabbing the bottle for a closer look.
Alan says, “Get the taste of beer out of your mouth because I don’t want it spoiling the scotch experience. You are a Scotch drinker?”
“I was. I had a run in with three quarters of a bottle when I was in my teens, the bottle won. I haven’t really had much since.”
“Well this is a five hundred dollar bottle so you should be OK.”
“Why do you have a five hundred dollar bottle of Scotch?”
“I di
dn't buy it. Irene’s brother gave it to me. It was just a random gift but he's the CEO of an IT firm so he can afford it and I'm not going to question.”
“You should milk him for more.”
Alan laughs.
“I wish my brother had something to offer.”
“How's the family with all the stuff? I understand they didn’t take being questioned very well.”
Max shrugs, “Mum collapsed that afternoon, she was in hospital being monitored, something about her heart; still, you know, it was just for the night. She was just overwhelmed. I’m sure it’s not easy accepting one of your children is a serial killer. My sister is coping, kind of. But she wasn't particularly close to Heath so I think it’s more humiliation than anything else.”
“No doubt. The humiliation of being told one of your family is a serial killer is probably only out-weighed by the pain of being told one of your children was killed by a serial killer.”
Max becomes reflective in his response, “No doubt.”