An Isolated Incident Read Online Free PDF

Bel – personal stuff they said – and just ask for people to tell the police anything they know.’
    â€˜Oh, of course. Consider it done.’ She rubbed the top of my arm lightly. ‘I’ll put something together and then you can just make any little changes you like tomorrow before the thing. Does that sound okay?’
    â€˜Yeah, appreciate it.’
    â€˜You’re a legend, Lis.’
    â€˜Alright. I’ll get to it.’ She squeezed my arm and left.
    Soon as she was out of sight Nate shoved a piece of cake in his gob. He chewed, swallowed. ‘It’s good,’ he said, but didn’t try to make me have some, which I appreciated.
    There were a couple of other neighbours after that. I don’t remember the details of their visits, just that from each of them, or at least from the combination of them, came thick waves of warmth and worry and curiosity and a pity so heavy I began to feel that I was the one who’d been brutalised.
    Then in the early afternoon one of Bella’s co-workers, Vicky, came and I snapped out of it. I’d only met Vicky a couple of times: once at the nursing home when I went to see Bella and once when Bella popped around here on the way to some function, and Vicky sat in my living room and chatted to me about her cat while Bella went through my shoe collection searching for a pair to match her new black-satin capri pants.
    On the day after they found Bella’s body, Vicky sat in my kitchen and told me that when she was sixteen, her nineteen-year-old brother had been stabbed to death after intervening in a street fight down in Melbourne. I don’t think she said it as blunt as that. I don’t remember the words she used, just the change in atmosphere. She didn’t say much else I don’t think. Maybe told me about how missed Bella would be at work. It didn’t matter. Nothing about her mattered except for the fact she was another person who knew what it was like to find themselves in the middle of a true crime book. I could’ve sat and looked at her all day and night – this plain, pale-haired thirty-year-old who had survived that, walked out of those pages, gone on long enough to have become ordinary again.
    Around eight, a couple of hours after the last guest had left, I started crying and couldn’t stop. Nate rubbed my back for a while and then he gave me a couple of the pills that’d worked so well the night before and tucked me into bed.
    Next thing I knew I was dying. That’s the only way I can say it: I woke up and I was dying. It was pitch black – blacker than I’ve ever known night to be – and there was something on my chest crushing the life out of me. My arms and legs wouldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. It was like my body was dead already, just waiting for my mind to catch up.
    I don’t know how long it lasted, but I know when it stopped because I could see the green fluoro 4.42 and hear Nate’s gurgling snore and feel that my skin was wet. I rolled over, locking Nate down beneath my arm and leg. I forced my breath into the rhythm of his. I slept and woke and slept like that until daylight.

Wednesday, 8 April

    â€˜Thank fuck for that,’ May muttered, spotting the Strathdee exit sign. Her body and head had ached even before the five hours on the road. Three nights of sobbing instead of sleeping will do that to you. And then the torture of the drive: nothing to see butendless grass, sometimes with cows or horses scattered over it, road trains alternately tailgating and slowing to under forty kilometres per hour, and all of it in her shitty twenty-year-old Hyundai that revved out and shook whenever she went over a hundred.
    Her motel, the cheaper of the two options in Strathdee, was less than a minute’s drive into town. The ‘Air-con, FOXSports, Tea & Coffee, Inspection Welcome’ sign was draped with black crepe paper. May checked in, used the toilet,