Bad Things

She nodded slowly, and walked back inside.

* * *

Midway through the day, the guy from the kitchen brought out a plate of food. I hadn't asked for this, or expected it. It was very good, too, a selection of handmade empanada-style things filled with spicy shrimp and fish.

‘That was great,’ I said, when he came back for the plate. ‘You should get Ted to put those on the menu.’

The cook smiled, shrugged, and I guess I knew what he meant. I stuck out my hand. ‘John,’ I said.

He shook it. ‘Eduardo.’

‘Got the dough ready for the young maestro yet?’

He laughed, and went back inside.

It took over six hours, but eventually everything was done. By four o'clock I'd replaced the frames on inner and outer doors, and fixed the other damage. Becki had the register back up and running, something I was surprised she was capable of doing. Her entire demeanour during the day had been something of an eye-opener. I hadn't figured her for capable and businesslike. The guys in back had meanwhile returned the kitchen to its spotless and socked-away state.

Ted came on an inspection tour, pronounced it good, grabbed a couple of handfuls of beers and took them out on deck. We all sat together, Ted, Becki and me with the guys out of the kitchen – and Mazy too, when she wandered in as if fresh out of some flower-scented fairy realm – and drank slowly in the sun, which wasn't very warm, but still pleasant. Fairly soon Ted got his head around the fact that though more than one of the cooks was called Eduardo, none was actually called Raul.

After a while Becki got up and went and fetched some more beers. She dispersed them around the crew and then offered one to me. I looked at my watch, realized it was coming up on five. I'd been working in direct sunlight half the day and my shirt was sticking to my back.

‘I need to get back to my place to change,’ I said. ‘Pretty soon, in fact.’

‘I'll give you a ride,’ she said, as I stood up.

‘This is good of you,’ I said, as we walked together to her car. She didn't say anything.

She waited out on deck while I took a shower. As I came out into the living room, I saw she'd taken a beer from my fridge and was sitting drinking it, looking out to sea. I sat in the other chair.

‘Going to have to head back soon,’ I said.

She nodded, looking down at her hands. I offered her a cigarette, which she took, and we lit up and sat smoking in silence for a moment.

‘How much trouble is he in?’ I asked, eventually.

She glanced up. The skin around her eyes looked tight. ‘How did you know?’

‘Why steal a battered juicer and leave a computer? The mess in the kitchen was overdone, and the cash drawer looked like it was attacked by a chimp. No one came there last night looking for money. So where was it? In the locker room?’

She nodded.

‘Dope, or powder?’

‘Not dope.’

‘How much?’

‘About ten thousand dollars' worth.’ Her voice was very quiet.

‘Jesus, Becki. How stupid do you have to be, to stash that much cocaine in your father's restaurant?’

‘I didn't know it was there,’ she said, angrily. ‘This is Kyle's fucking thing.’

‘Kyle? How did he even get that much capital? Please don't tell me you gave it to him.’

‘He got a loan. From … some guys he knows.’

It was all I could do not to laugh. ‘Oh, smart move. So now he's royally fucked, owing not just the back end of drugs he no longer has to sell, but the money he used to buy them in the first place. Perfect.’

‘That about covers it.’ She breathed out heavily, drained the rest of her beer in one swallow. ‘And if you're thinking of getting heavy about drugs, I don't need to hear it.’

‘No, drugs are way cool,’ I said. ‘Moral imbeciles making fortunes from fucking up other people's lives, staying out of sight while wannabes like your idiot boyfriend take all the risks.’

‘Better get you back. Going to be a busy night.’

‘Take it I'm going to be on pizzas?’

She smiled briefly, crooked and sad, and I realized how much I liked her, and also how close she was to seeing her life veer down a bad track into the woods. ‘I'm not sure where he even is right now.’

We stood together.

‘And you can't just walk away from this?’

‘I love him,’ she said, in the way only twenty year olds can.

She drove me back to the restaurant, letting me out at the top of the access road.

‘Go find him,’ I said. ‘Get the names of anyone he might have told where he stashed his gear.’

She looked up at me. ‘And then?’

‘And then,’ I said. I tapped the car twice with the flat of my hand, and she drove away.

The front door to the restaurant was open, other front-of-house staff busily arranging chairs out on deck, but I walked around the other way and went in through the portal I'd spent most of the day replacing. I reached out as I walked through, and gave it a shove. It felt very firm.

There's something good about having rebuilt a door. It makes you feel like you've done something. It makes you believe things are fixable, even when you know that generally they are not.

Chapter 4 (#u19b0b265-81c9-5c54-a1ba-67e1bf1bf5f2)

What can you do, when things start to fall apart? Let us count the ways …

Not panic, of course, that's the main thing. Once you start, it's impossible to stop. Panic is immune to debate, to analysis, to earnest and cognitively therapeutic bullet points. Panic isn't listening. Panic has no ears, only a voice. Panic is wildfire in the soul, vaulting the narrow paths of reason in search of fresh wood and brush on the other side, borne into every corner of the mind by the winds of anxiety.

Carol wasn't even sure when it had started, or why. The last couple of months had been good. For the first time she'd started to feel settled. The apartment began to feel like a home. She got a part-time job helping at the library under the dread Miss Williams, tidying chairs and putting up posters and helping organize reading groups. Work more suited to some game oldster or slack-jawed teen, admittedly, but gainful employment all the same. She walked to the library and back and yet still managed to put on a few pounds, having regained something of an appetite. She made acquaintances, even put tentative emotional down-payments on a couple of potential friends, and generally quit acting like someone in a Witness Protection Program.

Sometimes, she even just… forgot. That had been best of all, the times when she suddenly remembered – because it proved there had been a period, however short, when she had not.

At some point in the last few days this had started to change. She woke feeling as if she had sunk a couple of inches into the bed overnight. Instead of vigorously soaping herself in the shower she stood bowed under the water, noticing flecks of mildew between a pair of tiles and wondering how she could have missed them before, and if she'd get around to doing something about it – or if it would just get worse and worse until she was the kind of woman who had grubby tiles and nothing could be done about that or the state of the yard or her clothes or hair. Chaos stalks us all, gaining entrance through cracks in trivial maintenance, the things left undone. As soon as you realize how much there is to do to keep presenting a front, it becomes horribly easy to stop believing, and start counting again instead.