Funkytown by Paul Kennedy

Author:Paul Kennedy [Kennedy, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Published by Affirm Press in 2021
Published: 2021-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

24

The Killer Returns

It was six o’clock on a bone-cold Thursday night in July. The streetlights had just blinked on. A train arrived at Seaford station, making the usual racket, loud enough to mute the dinging of boom gates at the crossing. The carriages slowed and jolted to a stop. The train exhaled dozens of city workers onto the platform. Most of them headed for parked cars. Headlights flared and engines revved but soon the taillights shrank into side streets and up towards the highway. The train moved on, bound for Kananook then Frankston, the end of the line.

Only a few of the commuters lived close enough to the station that they might choose to walk home. One of them was a woman in her forties, a bank clerk. She had long, dark hair and olive skin. It was only a five-minute walk to her house. Then she’d be out of the cold. She knew her son was waiting for her and they would soon be eating dinner together in their small dining room.

The woman crossed the road at the traffic lights and headed north along Railway Parade thinking she was alone. She went past the deserted Uniting Church, where my brother and I had once gone to Sunday school. The A-framed building had since been overgrown by bushes. There was a small sign with a picture of a red dove above a white cross, without which you wouldn’t know it as a place of worship.

The woman followed the footpath beneath the low-slung power lines and wooden light poles, her shadow lengthening and shortening with each step. To her right were the orange-brick social rooms of the local soccer club, beside vast, vacuous playing fields, and three long car parks flecked with the glass of smashed beer bottles. On the other side of the road was a wall of tea-tree, roots like the gnarled fingers of old men, reaching into the gutter. On the other side of the tea-tree, between the road and Kananook Creek, was an abandoned railway building we all knew was used by drug addicts and the homeless.

All suburbs have pockets of isolation. This was one of ours. The woman was a couple of minutes from home when she drew level with a block of public toilets, under a large oak tree. I liked the seasonal grandeur of our suburb’s oaks. In spring and summer, the breeze shook their leaves and made the sound of a healthy river. But on wintry nights like this, with the branches stripped bare, they were ominous.

Near the toilets, a man in an Adidas baseball cap was waiting, unseen. He carried a home-made knife and a fake gun. He started following the woman. She saw him about twenty metres away. She kept going, pretending not to be alarmed. Behind them, another train arrived, another flurry of traffic came and went. The man closed in. He grabbed the woman and tried to drag her back to the toilet block. She shrieked, resisting with all her strength.

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