My Brother's Keeper - By Donna Malane Page 0,22

a parachute landing. Mud billows up with a whoosh and settles on the window. Pretty soon all the windows will be covered with it. The door won’t open. I push harder but the weight of the water pushes back. Outside the car everything is soupy but the liquid that dribbles from the tops of the windows is clear. The river bubbles up through the floor. Already my ankles look wobbly and enormous.

Falcon’s screams are right in my ear. He bashes my head with his fists. He’s only little but it hurts. A distorted face appears at the windscreen. A hand brushes away the mud, left, right, left. I try to tell Falcon we’re saved but no words come out. It’s Karen. Her hand is a windscreen wiper. Or maybe she’s waving goodbye. I point to the door and make pulling gestures, but she just looks at me. The car tilts as if hit by a big underwater tsunami. Falcon’s hot face is on my neck. He’s yelling at me.

‘Stop.’ He’s yelling. ‘Stop!’

‘Stop!’ I bolt awake. I’m on the bedroom floor, face down, cheek pressed into the carpet. ‘Stop!’

A man is on top of me, pinning me down. I’m completely naked. His hand is pressed hard on the back of my head, forcing my face into the carpet. His other hand has pinned my wrist to the floor. He is straddled over my arse, knees pressed painfully into my ribcage. His hot face pressed against the back of my head.

‘Stop! Just stop!’

Breathing hard, he gives my cheek a good shove into the carpet for emphasis. Memory and consciousness stutter back. I’m in Auckland. I’m not trapped in a car. I’m not underwater. I stop struggling. Immediately his weight lifts as he scoots backwards off me.

‘What the fuck!’ In the darkened room, he isn’t much more than a shadow crouched against the far wall, the king-size bed angled between us. The slatted streetlight illuminates his palms, held up in a placatory gesture. There’s a raw patch on the back of my head. My cheek burns.

‘Did you hit me?’ My voice is slurred. I sound drugged. I’m still surfacing.

‘I didn’t hit you,’ he said. ‘I tried to wake you. You just flew at me like a madwoman. Are you nuts or what? You attacked me! Fuck!’

‘Fook.’ A faint Irish lilt. My world returned to normal. Normal, that is, apart from discovering myself naked on the floor with a complete stranger who has just attacked me, or me him — whatever. Given the circumstances, it seemed appropriate to go on the aggressive.

‘Who the hell are you?’

‘I’m turning the light on, alright?’

‘Fine,’ I said.

He waited, hands up in surrender, until I’d covered myself with the bed sheet. My cheek smarted. My neck was bruised. My pride wasn’t in such good shape either.

Dark-haired, early thirties, ripped shirt — not in a designer way, more in a ‘I’ve just been attacked’ kind of way — one eyelid red and swelling. That would be the eye-gouging. Four distinct finger marks bloomed on his neck; they would go through the full autumn colour range over the next week. Eye-gouging and cheek-raking were techniques I learnt in women’s self-defence classes years earlier. They served the dual purpose of effectively fighting off an intruder and leaving visible wounds to help with identification later. I’d send the self-defence girls an email in the morning. Tell them how well it worked out. But this was no normal intruder. If there is such a thing.

‘I’m going downstairs to the kitchen now,’ he said, loud and slow, like he was talking to a dangerous inmate. ‘I’m going to put some ice on this so I won’t have to explain to everyone that a madwoman tried to kill me.’ The self-righteous type. All drama, he backed out of the doorway, his hands up in surrender mode. I needed ice, too, for the carpet burn. Grumpily, I pulled on sweat pants. He was muttering as he went down the stairs. ‘Unless, of course, you’d rather go straight into round two. What’ll it be this time? Knives? Nunchucks? Pistols at dawn?’

Ha ha. Funny guy. A bra seemed unnecessarily prudish given the naked tussle we’d just engaged in. I yanked a T-shirt over my head.

‘Come on down,’ he called. I heard the clatter of ice being dropped into glasses. ‘Maybe we can try “Pleased to meet you” as an alternative introductory technique this time.’

I didn’t need introductions. I’d already figured out who he was: the good-looker from the photo