Chapter 2 Close of File

Jimmy

August

The window shuts at 11:59 p.m., and at 12:04 I'm on the stairs of a glass tower in Main Beach with a mask in my bag and her key in my glove.

We don't go back up. We never go back up.

Ricky's waiting in the Hilux at the kerb with the engine off and the windows down, one foot on the dash. He doesn't say anything when I get in. That's how I know it was a good one. When it's a bad one he talks the whole way home.

Nobody talks till Nerang Street. Then he puts his head back on the rest and says, "She laughed."

"I know. I was there."

"No, mate. At the end. When you said the word in her ear, the last time, to close it. She laughed. Like you'd told her a joke."

I let it go. It's 12 minutes past midnight and I've been North for 96 hours, and it takes a while to come out of him. It always does. You don't take a mask off and walk out of it. You walk out of it slowly, the way you'd walk out of the surf, and the drag keeps pulling at your legs.

Next morning the back room smells like the shredder.

Knowles Security is a unit off a service road in Bundall, between a tile wholesaler and a place that fixes jet skis. Out the front there's my licence on the wall, a coffee machine, and a filing tray of quotes for blokes who want a man on the door at their daughter's eighteenth. Out the back, the part that isn't Knowles business at all, there's a desk, a locked cabinet, a whiteboard turned to face the wall, a year planner, and a shredder that jams if you feed it more than 6 pages.

Her file is 5 pages. I feed it in 2 at a time.

The case is open on the desk. 3 foam shapes inside. Mine goes back in first, the matte black with the thin gold line round the edge. Ricky's bone-white one beside it, wiped down with the spray. The third slot's empty this time. Hank didn't wear his.

Hank's on the floor with his back against the wall, the way he always sits in here, because the chairs are made for smaller men. He wasn't in the room for this one. He was in the building for it, though, a week out. Walked it top to bottom, found the gap in the car park she'd never noticed in 2 years of living there, and drew it on the whiteboard for me like a child would draw a house.

He's been doing this 6 years. 4 of them with us, since the 3 of us came out of the army and Dad's company took us on. He's never once needed to be in the room to have done the work.

"Key's back," he says.

"Where?"

"Her letterbox. Envelope. No writing."

"Good."

That's the whole debrief from Hank. It's enough.

Ricky comes in at 10 with 3 coffees and plaster dust on his shins from a job he's already done this morning, because Ricky can't sit still after a window. He puts mine on the desk and drops into the chair backwards.

"She wanted the thing," he says.

"I know."

"Third night. She asked for it. She asked, Jim, out loud, in the middle of—"

"She didn't tick it."

"I know she didn't tick it."

"Then she didn't ask for it." I turn the whiteboard round, look at it, rub it clean with the side of my fist. Her rules come off in grey streaks. LIME = KITCHEN. HIP OK. NO NECK. "She asked for it at 11 at night with 3 orgasms in her. She didn't ask for it at 2 in the afternoon at a desk with a clear head. That's the one we listen to."

"She was furious."

"She was meant to be."

Ricky grins into his coffee. "She loved it."

"I know."

I don't tell him the rest. That she tested the word on the first day. Not because she needed it. Because she wanted to know if it worked. I was the one with my hand on her. I stopped so fast she made a sound like she'd missed a step in the dark. Then she lay there and breathed and said keep going, and we did, and she never said it again.

That's the whole thing. Not the masks. Not the hunt. A word that works every time you say it. Everything else is built on that.

At 4, her last message comes through the site.

Guests can write to us after. Most don't. The ones who do, it's usually 2 lines. Thank you. Sometimes I can't stop shaking. Hers is 3 lines.

I have a bruise on my hip and I keep pressing it. Thank you for not giving me the thing I didn't tick. If I ever knew someone who'd actually fill the form in properly, the way it's meant to be filled in, could I pass it on?

I read it twice. Then I go into the back end and do what the site lets me do once per guest. I make a code. 6 numbers. It goes to her and nowhere else, and it'll open the front page for whoever she gives it to.

Ricky reads it over my shoulder.

"Properly," he says. "That's a high bar."

"It's the only bar."

"Nobody fills it in properly. You say it every week. 3 boxes and a surprise me lol."

"Then the code never gets used."

That's what happens to most of them. A guest walks out of a window lit up like a Christmas tree and swears she knows the perfect person. Then Monday comes and she goes back to work, and the perfect person turns out to be her sister-in-law, and the code sits in a drawer somewhere until it's a scrap of paper nobody remembers.

I send it anyway.

Hank gets up off the floor. He picks up the case with the 2 masks in it and slides it onto the top shelf of the cabinet, where it lives, and turns the key.

"Done," he says.

I pencil nothing into next month yet. The planner's mostly empty squares through to Christmas, with the odd single dot. We say no to 9 forms in 10. Nobody pays us a cent beyond the kit and the bond, and nobody has to. 4 days is a different thing again. It costs. You have to stay inside someone else's head for 96 hours and not come up for air.

I look at the empty squares anyway.

Window shuts. File closes. We go. I say it in my head, once, the way I do at the end of every window. I've never had to say it twice.

Somewhere in Main Beach a woman is pressing her thumb into a bruise on her hip, typing 6 numbers into her phone, wondering who she knows that's honest enough.

Most of them never use it.

I lock the cabinet and go home.