From the passenger seat the yellow sodium street lights fly by leaving a blue streak in the corner of the eye. It’s almost 9.00pm on a Friday night and the old car is doing 90 in a 50 zone. The streets are empty. Two generations of smart people have left and the city of the plain is running down like an old windup monkey. Mongy is stoned in the back seat next to Gloria Estefan and he wants to know why 7.00 o’clock is 7.00 o’clock and why red is called ‘red’. Reckons the city with its straight line roads intersecting at exactly 90 degrees, is like the plant, Titan arum. It looks pretty but when it opens, smells like unwashed male genitalia.

People who invested here, who bought houses and have dinner parties, who get drunk and sleep with each other’s wives and girlfriends, take offence when you put the city of the plain down. They don’t like strangers mentioning the shrinking gene pool or the closeness of the eyes. You’ll join the punch-in-the-face club. If you’re a local, they’ll ask, ‘what are ya?’ As if you’re a deep space virus or a prole from the once industrial western suburbs.

The City of Churches was founded by freemen who embraced the protestant God, the seizure of land and the extermination of the Aboriginals, although not necessarily in that order. On any day, the bells ring to signify a wedding, a communion or the death of a statesman. Stateswomen didn’t die as there were none. The city boasted a church on every block, which attracted the grey-haired matrons from the eastern suburbs to bend the knee in thanks for inheritances. The bonnets of the Rolls Royce’s and new Mercs were convenient benches for the moth-eaten poor to rest their threadbare arses after some fine dining at the soup kitchen.

On Saturday one can hear the roar of the crowd from the oval. It’s old scoreboard looked down on the people and saw that it was good. Cricket attracted tens of thousands of people and on hot days, when ball met bat and the sound echoed across the grass, people gathered with their drinks under the giant Morton Bay fig trees and woofed down pies and pasties, while the younger members ate Japanese food, which was not popular amongst the older men who remembered Sandakan and the Burma railway.

We call ourselves the Rincons after a line in a Beach Boys song. We didn’t know Rincon was a beach in California. We just liked the name. It’s a we game play before taxes, jobs and mortgages wrap their bony fingers around our throats. It has many names: Tag, Wide, Ringolevio. We call it Murder.

Red cotton is tied in a reef knot around the left wrist of each player. For a week it’s Rincon versus Rincon across the city as you try to cut or rip the cotton off their wrist. At the end of the week, those not ‘killed’ – the red cotton virgins – meet for the decider in Tusmore Park. It’s a chance to vent pent-up teenage violence on one’s friends.

The park has a creek with a small bridge, and a large wading pool, where during the day, the rich kids sail their model yachts until daddy buys them the real thing. At exactly 9.30pm in summer, with the heat of the day evaporating, three red spotlights hit a giant white angel in the centre of the park. It’s wings look like a tetradactyl. Everyone calls it The Dutkiewicz. No one knows why. After a hot day, about 10.00pm, the night air rich with the medicant scent of eucalyptus, the gully winds start to blow and the gum tree boughs creek and moan.

Tory catches the bus from outside Crazy Horse, one of five strip joints in Myra Hindley street. Who would have thought one of the great American Indian warriors would be named after a cheap tits and bum dive? Hoka hey. ‘She works hard for the money’, bleeds out of the street PA but it’s too early for punters. Yiro and hot chip wrappers eddy over the drains. Tory’s a year out of school and lives south amongst a sea of single mothers, crackheads and small time hoods. Her bedroom wall is plastered with anatomical maps of the human body. She’s 17 and deep into biology and chemistry. Knows the main arteries of the body and heart, liver and kidneys. She wants a job but hairdressing and buffing nails won’t cut it. She’s friends with Callum and Mongy, as far as boys and girls can be friends. The boys are underaged drivers who’ll be late as usual. She plays with her phone as an old drunk with an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth wants to know if she takes it up the arse.

Tory’s smart and knows she’s smart, which makes her lonely. She makes up for her insecurity with a bristling over-confidence. She wants to study medicine and be a surgeon. Mongy told her he wants a fucking house on the fucking Costa Brava but that ain’t going to happen either. Tory’s almost pretty with long black unruly hair which splits and flies away. Not a girly girl. Her dark green eyes are framed by high cheek bones covered in a light olive complexion with freckles around the nose. Her mother reckons there was a Greek in the cupboard some generations back.

She had drilled a hole in the base of her well-worn Doc Marten boots, and secreted a 15 centimetre shank. In a hall of fame Murder move, she tracked down Jason Not-so-Smart at the dentist. Little Jason was six foot in the imperial and needed two seats on the bus. He’s sitting in the chair with his mouth open staring up at the giraffe and elephant mobile on the ceiling. The giraffe turns left, the giraffe turns right. The dentist and nurse have their backs turned when Tory, dressed as a nurse, sneaks in, takes the shank from her boot, and cuts the red cotton from Jason’s wrist as the mouth saliva suction gear sucks and slurps. She replaces the shank and sneaks out on cat paws with the cotton. Totally painless except for Jason who realised that night he was dead.

Where grace flourishes, evil must flourish but more so. The Murdoch media was in a slather over an extraordinary number of sex murders of girls and boys. Seven girls were snatched off the street, driven yonks north of the city, raped, strangled and buried in shallow graves. The boys were driven in to the dark hills – which made Tolkien’s Mordor look like Disneyland – their penises surgically removed and stitched in to their mouths. Murdoch beat the stories so hard, tourists fled and young people packed their bags. The murder of the innocents was a silence breaker at landed-gentry dinner parties before the talk turned to spinnakers for the 45-footer, holidays in Milan for the fashion shows and that cosy shack south of Paris.

Pretty Angie, 27, a former prefect at Methodist Ladies College – married to Steve, a barrister – over-shared at the ladies lunch for MND, MS or Spina Bifida, that something squirmed in her waters about the murders. Something NQR. Something a bit off. The table fell silent when she flagged a move east might be the go, with a harbour view, a berth for Steve’s yacht and there were awfully good schools over there. Unknowingly she had watered the seed in the mind of every other woman at the table, who’d been thinking the same thing and hated her for saying it. Angie ate her prawn roulade and threw back another glass of Shaw and Smith. Sacrifices would have to be made. David Horne-Pilkington, the Hackney College school captain, had been servicing her most Friday lunchtimes on the maid’s day off. For one so young, he was a master of cunnilingus and the thought of it made her squirm. The room filled with the swell of clinking glass and bleating sheep.

Callum, Mongy, Cody and Gloria Estefan, park the car two streets back and leg it. Gloria hates Gloria Estefan’s music, which is why she’s called Gloria Estefan. When she’s at the pub, the boys slot $20.00 in to the juke box and play her greatest hits. Gloria’s not playing Murder. She was killed by Mongy. She can’t believe a boy with balls the size of capers, could creep up behind her, rip the cotton from her wrist, as she was walked out of Vinnies with a birthday present for her mum. There’s Mongy, smiling his shit-eating ‘gotcha’ grin, dangling her life in his grubby nose-picking fingers.

They walk down streets lined with high green hedges. In a large corner house, private school kids in white chinos, quality shirts and RM Williams boots are yelling and chugging back Dad’s beer. The girls are necking leg-opener coolers and Pink Floyd’s playing Money with it’s weird timing change and ‘don’t give me any of that do-goody good bullshit…’ the scent of Lynx, BBQ fat and vomit wafts through the evening air. These kids will soon embrace alternative music as ballast for a light weight character. Their parents hate new money. Jesus isn’t invited because his dad is a carpenter. Drives a sports ute called ‘Donkey’ Only two minutes to the park. Late as usual.

Tory gets off her seat and with an open hand, clocks the old alco on the temple with an open hand and he slides slowly almost gracefully, to the bus floor. The door opens with a hiss and there’s Dino’s pizza bar and grill, the expensive bookshop and the rich bitch dress shop with clothes made by kids in Pakistan. The game starts as soon as you step on to the park. There are no ‘hi, how are ya’s? How’s ya Mum’s black eye?’ It’s not a fucking Rotary Club or a group of elvish children tripping like Wendy through a bluebell glade.

She’s standing on the rise under a gum tree with the road behind her. It takes a few seconds to get her eyes tuned into the visual purple. In the distance, she can just make out Mongy and Callum walking through the gate under the street light. Gloria Estefan is lagging behind and waves at her. Two shadows move quickly past the lake. The game has begun. High in a gum tree a crow craws. Late for crows. Tory’s plan is to hide and let the others kill themselves and then take on the winner. She moves into the dark.

With half a bottle of gin on an empty stomach, Angie’s in a hurry to meet the girls at The Feathered Nest Hotel. Joan wants to move to Melbourne and take the kids. She’s can’t take it anymore. Pussy’s bow. Her real estate husband Brian, with a beer belly at 35, is boring as batshit. Just wants to watch footy and go to the pub. Sure they live in a fabulous five bedroom house surrounded by forest with a tennis court. Sure they have a Japanese garden and a babbling brook but by 12.00 noon, after she has watched the maid clean the house, been to the gym, done yoga and had coffee with the girls, she’s drowning in grey holes. The house is a tomb. She’s hyperventilating with anxiety as she washes down two mother’s little helpers.

Angie has one eye on the road and is fumbling for a cigarette, which she shouldn’t have but the alcohol, Joan’s drama and the warm night, has created a carefree frisson and lowered her will power. She thinks of David and his tongue, swerved to miss a possum, as the faint smell of mackerel fills the BMW. Steve must have been to the fish market. A man’s dragging a girl by her hair from the park. A white cloth over her face. There’s an old battered white Valiant parked with its lights off the in parking lane. She’s wearing black jeans and Doc Marten boots and she’s kicking, kicking, kicking. He’s maybe 40. Muscular. Works out. No time to get involved in a domestic. She puts the foot down and takes the roundabout at 60. Joan needs her and by God, she’ll hang on every word.

Callum parts from the others in silence and makes his way in a Groucho Marx crouch to the scout hall. Someone is smoking clove cigarettes. Heavy footsteps pound from the wading pool, coming directly at him. In the half moon light a combat jacket carrying a baseball bat swings at his head and the swoosh clears his nose by an inch. Callum delivers a swift kick in the balls and then it’s wresting on the ground.

There has to be an easier way to meet boys, Gloria Estefan reckons. She sits in the hollow of a dead gum tree as a possum on a branch above her takes a piss. A cramp bites her guts. The macaroni and cheese her Mum made for tea was slathered in a sherry sauce. Her Christmas brandy snaps had more brandy than snap and her beer battered fish swam in Coopers Ale. Her mum had moved from a housewife, full of vim and vigour, to a three bottle a day barely functioning wino, who sought out noonday company of other female winos and criticised women who couldn’t hold their drinks.

Under the streetlights a man is bundling something in to the passenger well of a white car as a slingshot marble crashes into the bark above Gloria’s head. She makes her way back to the angel.

Mongy sprints after a kid dressed in combat pants and a purple t-shirt, rugby tackles him and cops an eye watering punch on the nose. He’s blind for a second and as he lifts his hands to say oh fuck me nose, gets a kick in the balls. A professional.

By the seesaw Callum is swinging a young hippy by his pony tail. No brotherhood of man. No crystal visions. As he lets go, he slams his right foot down on the young guy’s ACL. He’ll never walk alone. He’ll always walk with a limp. As the hippy drops, Callum rips the red cotton from his wrist and disappears into the night.

Mongy is in trouble and knows he’s in trouble. Purple t-shirt has played the game before. Fit, lethal and could go 15 rounds. Resolute and unforgiving. Mongy can’t run away. Can’t get a breath. It will end on this tiny grassy knoll under the great Southern Cross, his own personal Golgotha, as he pulls one last desperate ploy and lures Mr Invincible into a Dada black hole with a chorus of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, with a “Last night I heard my mama singing a song, Ooh we, chirpy, chirpy, cheep, cheep…” His assailant, hungry for the red cotton, backs away just long enough for Mongy to let fly with a fist-turning punch to the solar plexus and as purple t-shirt folds, feels a tug on his left wrist.

The headache from the home-made chloroform throbs. The passenger seat footwell smells of cats. She hates cats. Tory’s wrists are bound in front of her with a plastic tie. It’s an old Valiant with the push button torque-flight gear system. The horizontal bars of the orange street lights flash across the face of a large middle aged man with a black moustache more suited to fast bowlers, a red check shirt and denim jeans cut off at the knees. His thighs and upper chest have pumped serious iron with hands the size of baseball gloves. Bare feet and above the left ankle, a tattoo of Casper the Friendly Ghost wearing red devil horns. She feels the car is heading up Main North Road to the scrub, rich in shallow graves. On the rubber mat in front of her, there’s a young girl’s hair clip, a fairy holding a bowl of water up to the moon.

“Hey, fuck face. You can’t be serious…”

The heel of a large dirty foot rams into her forehead before she can raise her hands. Terror throttles her throat. Can’t breathe. Can’t think. It’s demons under the bed. No one saw her bundled in to the car and even if they did, they wouldn’t report it. Not in the City of Churches. Remember to breathe. Moustache turns on the radio, it’s just off station with someone hissing about radar love. The frequency of the street lights gets less and less. Good bye suburbs.

Moustache’s face is pocked and pitted like moon craters. Pimples as a kid. Don’t pick your face, you little shit, his mother yelled. He’d pop ‘em in front of the mirror. Little fat volcanoes. There he is at age 12 stuck in the school retard class. Shunned by the cool gang and rejected by the girls. They laugh, point and call him Puss in Bata Scouts. He trudges home with his backpack of unread books and uneaten banana and honey sandwiches, plotting revenge. His mind wanders up their thighs and down their blouses. He filters hardcore porn in his bedroom like whales sift krill. A time will come he stews, a fucking time will come.

Jesus, focus. Count primes: one, three, five, seven, eleven. Fuck it. On TV someone always comes to the rescue. The sound of cavalry. Bugles. Think. African nations with red in their flag: South Africa, Angola, Ghana? Of course Ghana, Congo. Oh Christ. How long to live? 15 minutes? Twenty? An hour? Maybe less. Extinction events: Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous – weren’t there five… Shit. Extinction events. Extinction events.

She closes her eyes and hears the front left tyre humm over the bitumen. A pothole breaks the rhythm and picks it up again, a little faster. Her breath is shallow at first and slowly becomes easier. There are only two ways. If he gets out, comes around to the passenger side, he’ll haul her out back first. He knows about the begging, pleading, the last minute deals, clutching at straws. No chance. But if he stays in the driver’s seat and hauls her up onto the seat, there’s a chance. A slim one.

The dead are hanging around the Dutkiewicz angel. Callum and Cody are the last one’s standing. They’re on a little bridge, over a tiny creek filled with water cress, perfect for trolls. In every group there’s a quiet one. Always watching. Cody’s passion is sea birds. Most weekends he’s down the coast with his camera and telephoto lens. Not a drinker. Not a party animal. Girls think he’s cute with his short blonde hair and button nose but he’s hard to get to know. Not much to say. Cody was the last Murder player standing the year before. Got some voodoo Judo moves. The halfmoon light falls on the stream, turning it silver and then onyx. Callum won’t get too close or he’ll be dead.

The green dash light goes off and Moustache turns on the cabin light. The engine motor cools with a tink, tink, tink. He opens the glove box above her head and pulls out a fish filleting knife. He opens the car door then stops. Looks in the rear vision mirror, closes the door, pulls down his shorts, and grabs her hair and pulls her up on to the passenger seat. They’re on a dirt track in the middle of a clearing surrounded by scrub. This is where he buries the bodies. On the back seat is a box of five grey kittens about six weeks old.

“Time to go to work,” he says.

His cock is hard with a small circumcision scar below the tip. He puts the tip of the knife to her throat and then points it at his groin. She lifts her feet from the passenger well and tucks them under her. There’s a packet of Viagra in the glovebox.

“Trouble getting it up?” she says.

“Get on with it”

She tucks her hair behind her ears.

“Dry mouth. Got any water?”

Callum and Cody dance around each other on the bridge, looking for advantage in the dark. Looking for a quick kick to the balls or fork fingers in the eyes. Boxers on speed dancing around the ring. Clockwise then counter. A feint here. A jab there. They can hear the water purling below them. Directly above them Mars shines its red eye on them. Twinkle. The scent of gum and pine then Cody pulls a roundhouse kick which clocks Callum on the chin and he falls against flimsy bridge railings. Pine shoddily nailed and glued together by bored council workers. Cody presses his fingers hard against Callum’s adam’s apple. Ten seconds of that and you hear pinging in your head as the brain screams for oxygen. Callum is leaning back over the railing looking up like a man seeing if there’s anything on his roof. Cody is on him, pressing his thumbs harder into his throat. Only a matter of time. It’s one for the money and two for the show. Cody has a forefinger under the red cotton on Callum’s wrist as the flimsy railing gives way and Callum manages, as he falls backwards, to snag Cody’s cotton and they tumble through space, not like angels expelled from heaven but like awkward teenage thugs denied their rightful prize, screaming to land heavily in the brook. They crawl like otters up the bank and look at their wrists. Two pieces of red cotton float downstream. They’re dead.

Moustache turns slightly away from her to retrieve a water bottle from the driver’s side door. There’s the tink, tink, tink of the motor as the radio hisses softly with static and kittens mewing as she pulls the shank from her boot and drives it hard into his heart. He drops the knife, turns in his seat and looks down at the shank sunk deep into his chest, the blood soaking his western shirt and running down onto the seat. Confusion runs over his face as if and he’s standing on a stage in front of his demons and he has forgotten his lines. His mouth opening and closing like a fish. Tory sits back against the passenger car door and looks at him. She’s never seen a man die before. The shank is moving up and down with every shallow breath he takes. She pulls the shank out of the haemorrhaging left ventricle, picks up the hair clip and presses it into his hand.

“Something to remember them by”

She gets out of the car and takes three deep breathes. Remember of breath. It’s scrub land. Shitty stunted trees and bushes. A light breeze picking up from the west. Good. That will cover the footprints. The stars tell her she’s maybe 15 or 20 kilometres off the highway. They were on the dirt road for a while. She puts the shank back into her boot and looks at the kittens on the back seat. Why would this fucker have a box of kittens? A present for a young daughter? Maybe to gut them with the filleting knife and watch them die. Must be about 1.00am, maybe later. There’s a BP servo somewhere ahead where the Melbourne Greyhound bus pulls in about 5.00am so people can get off, eat deep fried shit and have a piss. Been there. Done that. The bus driver never checks tickets. He’s as knackered as everyone else.

Moustache is turning a whiter shade of pale. She knows exactly what is happening to him. The brain is sending out distress messages to the heart, saying beat harder you fucking cunt, we’ve got lobes melting down through lack of oxygen. But his heart is saying fuck you, we’ve got major problems. We’re about to arrest. You’re on your own. Moustache is staring straight ahead. What’s he thinking? Maybe he’s climbing a poplar tree and he’s five years old and his grandma is standing below and has made him cupcakes. Maybe he’s thinking about the first time he kissed little Trudy Spencer behind her parent’s garage. Her eyes closed tight.

Tory rubs the plastic tie against the sharp underside of the front fender until it breaks and puts it in her pocket. No evidence. She pulls a tissue out of her back pocket and uses it to ferret around the glovebox. Behind the Viagra there’s $50,000 in unmarked and non-sequential notes, wrapped tightly in cellophane. Used cash. Drug money. She takes the money, opens the passenger door, rams the cash between her legs and walks back to the front of the car. The air is cool with a hint of sage. Moustache is staring out of the windscreen like he’s at a drive in. Venus is high in the western sky. No one knows why. She starts walking.

The Greyhound pulls in as Tory buys hot chips, drowns them in salt and vinegar and nicks a Coke and a Cherry Ripe. She climbs on board the bus like she owns it and makes for the back seat to lie down. Egg fart fills the air. A boy a couple of years older than her, moves his rucksack so she can lie down. Says he’s moving to the City of Churches to make a new start. All sorts of weirdo shit happened to him in Sydney. Crazy shit. The door hisses closed and the bus pulls on to the highway and heads south. Tory leans against the window and watches as they pass through small shanty towns blasted by poverty and despair. Angry men, broken women and vice a vera. Too early for people. Her mind plays new futures in her head, like an old fashioned slide projector. Her passport is in her bedside table. She pulls her hair back and the red cotton tie falls over her watch. Another two hours to the City of Churches.