White Crocodile by K.T. Medina Page A

swung shut, and she was alone. The recollection couldn’t be real. She hadn’t even been two. And that wasn’t the way memory worked anyway – it wasn’t a series of little films you might record on your smartphone, available to reassemble any time you wanted to view them. And yet sometimes these images were so clear she could almost reach out and touch them: feel the material of her mother’s cotton dress slipping through her fingers, the lift of the wind as the door opened, the scent of cut grass on the suburban spring air. At other times that image – the leaving – was so blurred as to be unrecognisable. Just abandonment, followed by an endless stream of faceless nannies, by long-forgotten friends’ houses at Easter and Christmas when her father was away on his tours of duty. And sometimes her mind, her memory of that phase of her life was just a blank. As if she was looking through a camera lens with the shutter still on.
    Her father never said the words, but Tess could see it in his face, when she caught him standing in the hallway, looking around him as if searching for something he had misplaced. She knew that, even now, her father was waiting, stuck in limbo. Tess didn’t know how much he needed from her – what compensation he wanted from her for being the one who had driven his wife away with her baby neediness, her ceaseless demands for time and attention. Now and then, in spite of the carapace of toughness she had built around herself, she found herself almost crippled by loneliness.
    The diesel rumble of MacSween’s approaching engine cut through the dawn silence. Taking a last sip of coffee, she tossed the remainder over the balcony railing just as he hit the horn, a short businesslike blast. But her hand must have been damp because the handle of the mug slipped through her fingers and she watched it cartwheel away from her. It hit the grass below with a dull thud, cartwheeled again, once, before landing in two pieces.
    Another blast of the horn. She turned from the balcony, pulling the glass doors closed behind her.
     
    *
     
    Alex’s eyes flicked open, and for a moment he couldn’t work out where he was. Groaning, he pushed himself upright. The back seat of the Land Cruiser. Last night. It was all coming back to him.
    He had been drinking Johnnie Walker in a vain attempt to anaesthetise himself to sleep. Around midnight, he’d been dozing on the sofa in his living room when he had been jolted awake by a memory.
    Luke, drunk, out of control. Johnny, laughing and laughing.
    He’d sat up, his gaze finding the bookshelf in the corner of the room where a miscellany of objects from the course of his life mixed with the books; searching out the darkness at the back of the middle shelf and the flat piece of wood hidden there. Looking at it, he remembered Johnny’s voice: Fuck off back to the Land Cruiser then, Alex, and try not to be such a miserable bastard in future. We’re only having a laugh. The line of mine tape had just been visible in the darkness, stirring slightly. He had heard the rush of the evening breeze over the ruined paddy fields and through the tangled elephant grass behind, a sense of invisible distance, of being on the edge of something. Like an abyss.
    Johnny was standing in front of the mine tape – on safe ground. He was jiggling from foot to foot, wired, because he loved this kind of thing. Loved jokes. He was holding a black sign in his hand, held away from his body because the paint on it was still wet. The ends of his fingers were tinged in black and white where he had held the paintbrushes. Luke was standing next to Johnny, his shirt off, laughing. He had a hammer and some nails in one hand and a can of beer in the other. He was drunk by then, very drunk. The only one of them who was. It had briefly occurred to Alex that Luke was acting out of character: he was usually so ordered, so controlled, like an over-wound clockwork toy. Alex had worked with him for a couple of