Moss - Dead Man Switch

CONTENTS

For Oma and Opa

CONTENTS

The night was starless pitch, enveloping him as in the feathered wings of a giant black raven.

Everything ached: his body, his head, the stifling darkness itself, and that darkness was spinning off-kilter, moving unpredictably and leaving him nauseous. His eyes felt warm and wet, and he opened them, strained them wide, but still he could not see. Not a fighter by nature, his survival instincts had nonetheless been awakened and the boy struck out once, twice hitting nothing but air. Sharp blows came back out of that unpredictable, impenetrable inky blanket, returning his unsuccessful strikes with hard and unforgiving ones. Pain shot through him again in white-hot flashes his cheekbone, his ribs, his gut and then the blows stopped. He curled into a ball once more, protecting his head, and he breathed uneasily, his ears ringing. His face felt hot. Something warm and salty dripped into his mouth.

Barely past his seventeenth birthday, hed already travelled across the seas, seen injustice and violence, but he had never been so scared in his life as he was in that moment, there in the darkness, huddled and blind. Yes, he was scared. Scared as a fly in a web. If it was shameful to feel scared hed have to think on that another time if there was anything after this, any time to come at all. For now there was only room for one emotion.

Fear.

Didnt nobody tell you about curiosity and the cat? came a voice, and then the earth was moving beneath him; he was pulled by his arms, the ground scraping against his face, his shoulder. He was lifted into the air like a rag doll and dropped. The ground beneath him gave and swayed. It was not ground; it was wool. A blanket. It smelled horribly of damp and carried the metallic tang of blood.

He tried again to speak. But

Another blow. Somewhere in the close distance, just beyond the ringing in his ears, he heard a boot close and an engine start. The dark black bird of oblivion reached for him again and he was gone.

Billie Walker was right back in the moment.

The sun was warming her face, a world of abstract technicolour behind her eyes as she closed her lids against a brief gust of wind, turning the corner on Stephansplatz. Each detail was so clear, so present, even now. There was the smell of something baked in the air. A shops delicious daily offerings of Sachertorte and Apfelstrudel. Shed laughed at something Jack had said. She could feel his large, reassuring hand in hers as they walked, their world a bubble of new love and the excitement of foreign soil and the thrill of a story. No caution. No fear. Their leather shoes clicked on the cobblestones and she could hear voices beyond the corner, then a shouting that pulled her from her reverie. Her reporters notepad was in her hand in an instant, and she broke from Jack and looked down to catch the pencil that was slipping.

When she looked up, she saw it. She stopped in her tracks as Jack already had. The world came rushing in, shattering the illusion of safety. A dozen women were on their knees in the large square, surrounded by men in uniform. They were weeping quietly as their heads were shaved. She saw blood and hair, naked skin and tears. A man was in his underthings on the street beside them, cowering, his back bloodied, his beard shaved, his yarmulke crushed on the ground beside him. A crowd watched. Some of them were shouting, their fists raised. Billie couldnt hear what they were saying through the sound of the blood pumping in her ears. Just as the urge to run forward and intervene struck her, one of the storm-troopers turned, caught her eye. She looked away in an instant, as if the gaze would burn her.

She closed her eyes.

What they saw in Vienna was always there, just waiting for her lids to close. One day in 1938 shed opened her eyes to find it, and now it was there each time she closed them a kind of reversal. Why those memories? Why that weekend? It was all wrapped up in Jack, in the war, in everything she had to somehow leave behind now, everything that her head told her was over, but her heart still clung to.

Billie shook herself gently and gathered up her things. There was no sense in lingering on memories, even if they wouldnt let her go just yet. She wasnt in Europe anymore. She was back in Australia. It was 1946, a new world, and she had to make a new life in it. She had to, and she would. The tram was slowing, pulling up next to Central. She removed a small gilded compact and lipstick from her handbag and reapplied a touch of Tussys Fighting Red. This was her stop. It was time to rise.

Morning, John, Billie called as she strode into the foyer of Daking House, moving swiftly on long, graceful legs, yet as quietly as a cat, her crepe-soled oxfords making only the softest sound on the hardwood floor. It was to here that she took the tram most days of the week, for this was where she rented an office.

On hearing Billies voice the lift attendant stood to attention, roused by the presence of his oft-claimed favourite customer in the building. There was no reason to disbelieve him on that score. When Billie arrived in the morning it was always past ten, well after the delivery boys had stocked the ground-floor shops and left again in their trucks, and the silver-haired businessmen had moved through the lobby and disappeared into their various offices, frowning and shuffling, plenty of them already stinking of cigars by nine. Billie never shuffled. She preferred the smell of French perfume to cigar smoke, and if she knew anything about reading the body language of quiet men, the lift attendant did too. Other tenants like the Roberts Dancing School, the Sydney Single Tax Club, the United Jewish Overseas Relief Fund, the players who frequented the billiards room downstairs and the like, well, they came and went at odd hours, a bit like Billie often did, but the accountants and legal types and those men from the New South Wales Kennel Control Board kept strict schedules and at this hour were hunched at their desks in their professional chambers, applying themselves to the type of work that was simply not in her blood. Few clients in her trade could be expected to knock at 9 am. Midnight, however well that was not entirely unheard of. Her trade might have a mixed reputation, but the ways of the world demanded it. As did her purse.

Good morning, Ms Walker... Always a pleasure, the lift operator said.

When hed started at the building in August, replacing a kind-faced, grey-haired woman who had held the position during the war years, this new lift operator had insisted that she call him by his first name, John. But just what to call Billie was no small question these days. Those in his line of work customarily used formal titles and, new to his job, John Wilson was reluctant to accept her invitation to refer to her simply as Billie, as the previous attendant had come to. Not just yet, anyway. But every time someone referred to Billie as Mrs it reminded her of the uncertainty of her personal life. It reminded her of loss and set her on edge. Miss wasnt quite right either, she felt, and she could hardly be called that after all that had gone on in the past few years, including a wartime wedding, albeit a makeshift one with no ring and few witnesses. In the end she had requested Ms, the term sitting better. It had its roots in the old titles, as Billie understood it, and was coined at the turn of the century as a more neutral honorific for women, but was little used. She had seen it mentioned in a