I line all the unbroken biscuits from the packet along the bench. ‘Mmmm.’ I pop the first one in my trap, planning to eat them one by one until she leaves me alone.
‘Stay home with me.’
‘No.’
Liv gets down on her hands and knees and clutches my ankles. She looks up with her puppy-dog eyes. I can see she’s got a brand new tattoo on her forearm, shiny and furious-red, plastered with greasy lotion.
‘Pleeeeeaaassse, stay home. Pleeeaaasse.’
I look down at my sister and try to feel nothing. I can feel nothing about most things, but not Liv, unfortunately. A diversion is what’s needed.
‘Is that a hickey?’
I point to the red blotch next to the flower tattooed on her neck.
‘Yes. I have several, if you want to see them.’ Liv lifts her t-shirt. A black sports crop flattens her boobs.
‘You’re such a slut, Liv. Do you even know who gave that to you?’
Liv works at a bar in the city, and as far as I can tell, between the customers and the hornbag staff, it’s a good place for finding hookups.
‘That’s the little underage pot calling the consenting adult kettle black, isn’t it, Tal?’
I narrow my eyes, but my traitorous mouth turns up at the corners. Liv tugs on my bunched-down school socks, tugs on the invisible strings between us. She’s good at reeling me in when she wants to.
‘I miss you, Tal,’ she says and there’s no way you can doubt her sincerity. ‘I want to know if you’re okay.’
I play it like a soap opera, tossing my hair about, because all the world’s a stage et cetera. I’ve been acting for my life ever since Yin was taken.
‘I take pity on you, my sister. I will stay home.’
After Liv has tortured me with me one of her favourite Japanese horror movies I torture her with episode six of Devil Creek. Even though I’m pretty sure I hate the show, I have secretly watched two more episodes on my own, breaking a sacred promise to only watch it with my friends.
We fall quiet as the opening credits start.
A beautiful pale redhead in a nightie runs through the bush barefoot; everything around her blurred and streaky. The soundtrack is composed of ragged breathing and a pulsing drumbeat.
‘Nope, no, no way, we’re not doing this.’ Liv tries to pause the computer and I grab her hand.
‘Don’t be silly, I’ve already watched half the season, it’s fine.’
Two detectives, a man and a woman, stand by their car in the early hours of the morning, eating sausage rolls. Senior Detective Hillary Burns wears a woollen jumper, a no-nonsense parka, and has unbrushed hair and no makeup. By contrast, Senior Detective Pokerface McUptight is in an immaculate grey suit. He crumples his sausage roll packet and wipes his mouth.
‘You’ve got sauce on your face,’ he tells the woman, but she gives no fucks because all she cares about are the victims and she’s crushing patriarchal standards on a daily basis.
Together they cross the car park and head up the stairs of the huge glass-and-concrete building. McUptight, real name McManus—way too close to anus—tries to wave her through the door first but Burns won’t have a bar of it.
You’d think that the makers of Devil Creek would run out of reasons to show Emily Blake’s corpse, but you would be wrong. They keep sliding her out of her drawer in the morgue to do different things to her body or pan the camera over it one more time. When they’re not showing the body, the police detectives are flapping the crime scene photos of her wounded, half-naked corpse in front of every single person they interview, trying to shock them into a reaction.
This episode, the quirky forensic pathologist with purple hair is fizzed-up over something she’s pulled out from underneath Emily Blake’s toenails and also what she describes as ‘tiny ritualised marks’ she’s found on the body. She says her ‘intuition’ tells her that the murderer is someone very close to the young woman, which is a weird thing for a scientist to say.
‘I don’t think Yin knew the person who took her,’ I say without taking my eyes off the screen. ‘I don’t think it’s anyone we know.’
‘Me neither,’ says Liv.
When the pathologist folds down the sheet covering Emily, Liv shuts the lid of the laptop completely, with a snap. ‘I don’t care if you can take this, I can’t.’
‘Don’t you know it’s make believe?’ I ask her, but she won’t be moved.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she asks, but she already knows I don’t.
Liv squishes into bed with me and won’t leave me alone. She makes me draw on her back with a finger, as if we’re still little kids. I hold one of Mum’s old orange paperbacks in my free hand, trying to read and draw at the same time. Liv’s back ribs poke through her pyjama top.
‘You reading that for school?’ Liv throws her head backwards. You can still see the puckered scar at her hairline, from when a German shepherd bit into her ten-year-old head.
I grunt. I can read and back-scratch at the same time, no problem, but talking is too much.
Half of me is in my lamplit bedroom, but the rest of me is hanging out in the English countryside with this posh family called the Mitfords who have a bazillion daughters, each of them more bizarre than the last. Every time my finger stops, my sister twitches to remind me to keep drawing.
‘Tal, you know I’m always here to help you,’ Liv says, out of nowhere. She flips over to face me. ‘I’m crap at keeping in touch, I know, but if you ever want to come over to my flat and hang, or just talk. You can call me any time of night, for any reason. I know what Mum and Dad are like.’
I close the book. Liv’s face is currently twenty centimetres away from mine.
‘I’m okay,’
