Shooting in the Dark

pushed back into a corner of an ancient sofa, half-buried by several hundred colour photographs and posters of Brad Pitt in various stages of undress. ‘This’s JD Pears,’ Clive said. ‘He’s found your bike.’
    Christine Moxey was maybe fifteen years old. She wore white pancake make-up with a landslide of eye-shadow and mascara. Her lips were glossed with a dark purple sheen. Large black plastic hoops dangled from her ears. In spite of the icy wind she had apparently been out without a coat, wearing only a skimpy sleeveless blouse and a miniskirt. The blouse was too short to reach the waist of the skirt, and left a band of pimply flesh adorned with a navel ring.
    ‘Have you brought it back?’ she asked.
    ‘The bike? I haven’t actually found it,’ JD said. ‘That’s a misunderstanding. I wanted to talk to you about it.’
    Christine looked at Clive and did a double-take. Her imagination couldn’t crack the code. ‘D’you want a cup of tea?’ she asked.
    ‘Yeah, sounds good.’
    ‘How d’you take it? Builders or lesbians?’
    JD didn’t blink. ‘Bit of a mix,’ he said. He watched her fill the kettle and put four spoons of tea into the pot. It wasn’t just that she was young, there was a subtext to her phraseology that had been developed through generations of psychological layering. Most of the young men you meet, he thought, they want to get you into bed. But he wanted to get her down on a page.
    ‘I work for a private detective agency,’ JD said. ‘We’re investigating a break-in that took place about the time your bike was stolen. We wondered if you saw who took it.’
    ‘What’ve you got all these pictures out for, Clive?’ She brushed some of the cheesecake posters aside and sat down next to JD. ‘I’m sure the detective isn’t interested in Brad Pitt.’
    It was a question. JD and Clive looked at each other, and each of them waited for the other to answer.
    ‘You can find guys as good-looking as him on the street,’ Christine said. ‘People think he’s the best because of all the exposure he gets. It’s the same with pop music, the promoters think they know their audience, and what they think is what we get.’
    ‘That’s all true,’ Clive said. ‘Except Brad is the goods.’ He looked from Christine to JD. ‘I was educating him. He doesn’t do movies.’
    ‘It’s all right,’ JD said. ‘I’ve been learning.’
    ‘You’ve heard of bird-watchers?’ Christine said. ‘Clive’s a Brad Pitt watcher. He knows everything about him, every move he’s ever made. Mum said he’s got so much Brad Pitt in his eye that he’s blind to everything else.’ Clive smiled modestly. ‘I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of things about Brad that I don’t know.’
    ‘Mum said...’
    Clive’s complexion changed. ‘That’s twice. Don’t mention that woman’s name in this house,’ he said.
    ‘If you’d’ve been half as concerned about her as you are with Brad Pitt, she’d still be here,’ Christine said.
    Clive raised his voice. ‘She was bloody sex mad.’
    JD coughed. He asked: ‘Are you brother and sister?’ Christine crossed the room and took Clive’s arm. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Clive’s my stepfather. Or he would be if he’d married my mother before she ran off with his mate, Eddie, the Australian sheep-shagger.’
    ‘This is beginning to get complicated,’ JD said. He wanted to know the details, though. You can’t be a writer if you don’t follow up on the leads. There was a human situation here, something he could turn into metaphor.
    ‘It was an everyday story of love and lust on the Bishopthorpe Road,’ Christine said. ‘The winners hitched up together and split, carved out a life for themselves in New South Wales. And me and Clive were the ones left behind to lick each other’s wounds.’
    ‘It was the least I could do,’ Clive explained. He didn’t say it, but you could see it there in his eyes: faced with the same situation, it’s exactly what Brad would have done.
    They fell silent, contemplating an ocean of submerged feelings; reefs of only half-glimpsed crustacean life forms. They need diving-gear, JD thought, something to enable them to get a clear view of their situation. There was colour there, somewhere, colour and movement and possibilities that were obliterated from the vantage point they were allowing themselves.
    ‘So what do you want to know?’ Christine asked.
    JD was intrigued by the idea of the Australian sheep-shagger,