‘You have a rich inner world, Alice. Populated with people and places that suit your liking.’
What he meant was this: we all exist in our own little worlds, our own private universes. We don’t have to see a person in the flesh to think about them; it’s enough that they’re there in our heads, which is where we do most of our looking, anyway. It doesn’t therefore matter if I’m aware. What matters is that the original members of Death Club can now see Ruby, even when they close their eyes. I just need to show them what’s already there.
Of course, there are limitations. I can’t, for example, make Josh think about Ruby while he’s brushing his teeth or talking on the phone, but I can help turn his head when he passes the proliferation of Australian coffee houses near his workplace, or encourage him to pause over an Aussie Rules football game when he’s flicking through sports channels late at night. Songs on the radio make it even easier. AC/DC. INXS. He hums along to his favourite bands from Down Under, and his mind wanders to Ruby on its own from there. My work is basically done.
Lennie, by contrast, doesn’t take much work at all. That’s mostly because she falls in love with people on the spot. Not romantic love, exactly, but something similar, a kind of euphoric curiosity that propels her to unravel the mysteries of a person, get to know who they really are. She had been right about Ruby’s acute loneliness, the night she watched her from across the room at the group therapy session. And right, too, that loneliness, like any kind of suffering, cloaks a person, hides their endearing quirks and funny stories and good intentions. There’s always someone super interesting under that cloak, Lennie is sure of it, and she’s determined to help Ruby shed her layers. Knowing, without any help from me, that something happened before Ruby found a dead body, that her tangible grief owes itself to more than the death of an unnamed girl.
Essentially, they have positioned themselves perfectly. Taken their individual stories and found a way to place Ruby at the centre of them, a new glue to hold Death Club together. This is exactly what I wanted, a bind to ensure they keep meeting, keep talking, keep asking and answering their questions, so that, eventually, those questions lead back to me. The real me, not Riverside Jane, interesting as she might be, but the girl who was going to live more than seventy-nine years. Until a man took all those years away.
Is our death fated? Do we have a pre-destined, inescapable end, or is it all just arbitrary?
This is the question they ask tonight at Patsy’s, as pasta is twirled around forks, the red sauce from Lennie’s Bolognese staining the crisp white tablecloth between them.
How I might ask it: Was he always going to kill me?
Sue, the first at the table to speak, is emphatic.
‘I’ve always thought that fate is simply a construct designed to help us make sense of things after they’ve happened. It’s how we survive the random after-effects of living.’
‘My parents have God for that,’ Lennie says. ‘“The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord”， isn’t that the saying? Either way, they seem pretty sure he’s the one calling the shots.’
‘I prefer to put my faith in the Moirai,’ Josh responds, flashing white teeth in a sardonic grin. ‘Three old women weaving our fate, spinning, measuring, cutting. Life hanging by a thread. Much more evocative than some old guy who is or isn’t his own son pulling the strings.’
Lennie returns Josh’s grin.
‘Alas, a lifetime of Catholic education makes it hard for me to shake that old guy off completely. Still, I can’t say for sure what I think about the idea of having a specific kind of death sitting out there, waiting for me. It’s not the most comforting notion.’
‘Maybe it could be,’ Ruby offers. ‘Maybe if we knew when we were going to die, and how’—but she stops, as the memory of my battered body comes back to her, clear as a picture. ‘Never mind, I don’t know where I was going with that. Imagine if Jane had known, that morning …’
‘Did he, then?’ Lennie asks, biting her lip, as if unsure of asking her own question. ‘The guy who murdered Jane. Do you think he set out that morning to kill her?’
（Waves crash. Water drums in my ears. I know I could help answer this one, if I really wanted to. I am there, in his universe, too.）
‘From what I’ve read, it seems more like a crime of opportunity,’ Josh answers, as Ruby goes pale. ‘A case of wrong place, wrong time for the poor kid. Some asshole saw a chance to play God, and he took it. Not so much destiny as delusions of grandeur, then. Let’s just hope—or pray, Lennie—that he made enough mistakes for the police to catch up with him, eventually. Although something like forty per cent of murders go unsolved, so—’