Free Eden by Candice Fox Page A

Everything about him suggested dark hair and wet skin, spent bodily needs and unwashed crevices. His saggy upper lip stretched as she made eye contact and he lifted and adjusted a sweat-stained cap on his head.
    “What’s this? A visitor?”
    “Jackie?”
    “Who’s asking?”
    “I’m Eadie.” Eadie shifted her weight from one foot to the other, scratched her scalp. “Some guys sent me down here looking for you?”
    “You found me,” Jackie said. “You must be after a bed.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, baby, this ain’t no fucking hotel.”
    Everyone in the room laughed. The impression was alarming. Nine or ten sets of almost identical hacking laughter, forced laughter, going off like two-stroke motors all around her. Eadie held her ground. The laughter drained away and Jackie began again, relishing, it seemed, every minute chuckle. Eadie got the impression that people around here laughed at Jackie’s jokes a lot.
    “All right, everybody get out.”
    They left, one by one, uncurling themselves, rolling, sliding, extracting limbs that had been wedged between milk crates, out from under shelves, from between the limbs of others. Eadie stood aside and watched them go. On their way out, one of the sexless twins stopped and stared and licked his or her teeth as he or she looked over Eadie’s backpack, even reaching out once and grabbing the bag and shaking it to hear if it rattled. They all smelled. Soap and water couldn’t combat the endless stink of their lives—sheets that never saw a washing machine, animals that left their smells on couches and pillows, sex that was had haphazardly up against things, the reek ignored, blended in, absorbed. Eadie thought she was alone with Jackie until a tiny voice called from the dark beside his recliner and she saw the shape of a young girl sitting there.
    “You’re pretty, aye,” the girl said. Eadie followed the words with the exact same thought about the girl, so for a moment she felt as though her thoughts had been laid bare. The girl was swimming somewhere in that glorious period between puberty and late teens, everything about her milky and soft, with an impish pointy nose that she probably hated and elf ears that curved forward a little too much, the big round eyes of a newborn rabbit. She was wearing what looked like a cotton shift in royal blue, braless and pantyless, flushed from the heat.
    “Thanks.” Eadie cleared her throat.
    “Siddown,” Jackie said. Eadie shifted some sheets and pillows aside and sat on the couch where the twins had been. It was damp. “How’d you hear about this place?”
    “I been staying with some girls I know in Wauchope. I was in Cronulla before that with my husband. I’m just trying to get away for a bit, maybe get some money behind me before going up north. I’m kind of... laying low, you know?”
    “Laying low? From him?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Punched on, were ya?”
    “Little bit.”
    “Got any sprogs?”
    “Nup.”
    “Lucky.”
    “Yeah.”
    Jackie sucked in that flappy lip and chewed it, let his eyes wander until they settled on her breasts. Eadie scratched her upper arm, covering them, then let her arm fall.
    “Well, look, it’s pretty crowded round here right now.”
    “Aww please, Jackie, let her stay,” the girl whined. The small man reached out and shoved her head the way a man might shove away a dog.
    “No one fucken asked you.”
    “I’m a hard worker. I’ve done some track work in the city. I’m best with horses but I can do other things. I learn fast.”
    “Most of the girls here don’t work that way,” Jackie said.
    Eadie could feel Frank watching, his presence in the room like a heat hanging about her shoulders and the back of her neck. She reached up and fondled the pendant camera, remembered what it was, and dropped it.
    “My girlfriends told me sometimes you make an exception.”
    “Hey,” Jackie laughed, throwing open his hands. “Doesn’t bother me how you make your living. But you decide