An Isolated Incident Read Online Free PDF Page A

these people coming around. Listen to all the sweet things they’re saying about you . I remember saying to Nate that I hope she knew how many people thought she was the shit.
    First was my neighbour on the right, Carrie Smith. Carrie was my age, and a grandmother twice over already. She’d had her eldest, Emma, at sixteen and Emma had her first at fifteen and her second a few months ago. The kids and grandkids and various partners and friends lived with Carrie sometimes and sometimes not. Hers was like a different house from week to week. One week there’d be plastic scooters in the drive and blinding-white nappies flapping on the line and alternating baby cries and toddler giggles from inside, the next, red-eyed slurry teenagers slumped under a smoke haze, hip-hop blasting from stereos of cars parked but never turned off.
    Carrie asked how I was and I said I was fine, and then she made tea and showed me pictures of her grandkids on her phone and asked if she could smoke inside and asked if I needed anything and asked if that was Nate’s car parked out front and asked, oh, I don’t know, a bunch of things that had nothing to do with why she was fussing around my kitchen at nine on a Tuesday morning instead of down at the club flushing her pension down the pokies as usual.
    Next was Lisa from across the street. Lisa was in her fifties, an accountant who dressed and spoke like a north coast hippie. She had a daughter Bella’s age and a son a few years younger. When she swept through the front door her green, floor-length skirt got caught on the doorjamb and we both ignored the sound of it ripping as though it was a loud, wet fart. Lisa had brought me a loaf-shaped cake on a glass platter. She placed it in the centre of the kitchen table and then wrapped her scrawny, sun-leathered arms around me, pressing my head down into her shoulder.
    â€˜I didn’t know what to do,’ she told me when I had freed myself. ‘I called my friend Di – she’s just the calmest person you’ll ever meet and she’s got the gift, you know, like second sight – and I asked her and she told me – listen, I know this sounds far out, Chris, I know that, but she said that people who die violently can have trouble finding peace and so you might –’
    â€˜Not now.’ Nate must’ve been listening from the bedroom. From the doorway he filled the kitchen. ‘Chris doesn’t need talk like that right now.’
    Lisa stood, her face flushing pink, her hands fluttering up to the beads looped five or more times around her throat. ‘Nate! Oh, it’s such a relief to see you, to know that Chris isn’t on her own over here.’
    â€˜You made this?’ He bent to the cake, sniffed it. ‘Orange?’
    â€˜With fruit picked from my tree this morning.’ She returned to my side, patted my hand. ‘And just this once I said to hell with the toxins and put a nice full cup of white sugar in there for you. Situation called for it, I thought.’
    â€˜You going to have some?’ Nate asked, but she shook her head.
    â€˜I’ll leave you to it.’
    â€˜Thank you,’ I think I said.
    â€˜Of course, and if you need anything . . .’ She shot a look at Nate, who was busy cutting the cake. ‘Or if you want to talk to Di about –’
    â€˜Actually, there is something you could help with. Cops want Chris to speak at a press conference tomorrow and –’
    â€˜Oh, I don’t know. Chris, honey, are you sure you’re up to it?’
    â€˜They say it’ll help,’ I told her. ‘People more likely to come forward.’
    â€˜It’ll help. And they said she can read from a prepared statement and they’ll deal with questions and all that,’ Nate said. ‘So what would be good is if you could help with writing something, ’cause I don’t have a clue, to be honest. It needs to just say stuff about