Oh Matilda: Who Bloody Killed Her? Chapter 18

Cringes? McCredden’s had a few. Like the time he disgraced himself in front of Ian Thorpe. But this is next level.

 

This is ‘summer reading’ like nothing you’ve read before: a diverse field of writers collaborating on a novel that will captivate you through summer.

Each author had just three days to write their chapter, with complete freedom over story and style; it’s fast, fun and very funny.

Start from the very beginning with Chapter 1 or go to ohmatilda.com.au

Today The Australian’s Indigenous Affairs correspondent Paige Taylor takes up the story with Chapter 18.

By Paige Taylor

McCredden stared at his phone and felt the panic rise. His face was white hot. What was this photo about? And most importantly in his mind, how much trouble was he in?

The man who memorises entire scripts for a living could not recall this at all. It was him in the picture. No doubt. He was smiling a leery smile. His arm was around Matilda Meadows, the young and beautiful actress who had later turned up dead on his lawn clutching a note with the words: “And then there was one”. How much later was now very important.

He studied the photo’s background. It seemed unmistakeable. This was his bungalow. The bungalow where he stood now, shaking. He could see from a slither of window down one side of the picture that it was dark outside. This photo was taken on the only night Matilda spent alive on the island.

My God, he thought as he stared at an image at once familiar and alien. This is quite possibly the last photo ever taken of Matilda. And I am in it. I am in it up to my neck. Matilda and McCredden were each holding a drink he did not remember having.

He was surprised to be so moved by Matilda’s enchanting smile and bright eyes. She looked wholesome. McCredden suddenly felt ashamed of his ill will towards Matilda at the harbourside party in Sydney months ago when she let him know in a few sharp words that she did not think of him as a sexual being. Honestly, he didn’t either after his disastrous attempt in Maya’s bed a few nights earlier.

What McCredden saw now when he looked at Matilda was a young woman whose potential had been snuffed out. He had vaguely known she was one to be wary of. She collected dirt on older men like him and saved it up. Sure, she would have destroyed him if she could. But a lot of people would have. He had some appalling ideas and those were just the ones he’d articulated. He felt sad she never got a full life, or even the chance to change her mind over time about important things.

Then McCredden’s priorities switched back to McCredden. This picture was probably not just in his phone it was very likely also in the cloud or whatever it’s called.

“Think,” he told himself.

McCredden had been blackout drunk only a few times in his life. He had to assume this is the state he was in when he and Matilda took their night-time selfie in his bungalow. He must try to figure out what happened based on anything he could remember from the night before he woke to Matilda’s body just a few metres from where he stood now, her throat cut.

He found a pen and paper and sat down.

The last time McCredden drank so much that his memory failed him was at a party at the Icebergs Dining Room in 2014, when he told Ian Thorpe that he, too, had been a promising swimmer in his youth but gave it away after a severe sunburn. McCredden’s own words had come back to him in a cringe-making flashback days later as he waded into the waves at Freshwater. He briefly wanted to keep swimming towards New Zealand. McCredden’s friends love to tell him – and they have to, because he doesn’t remember – that Australia’s most successful Olympian nodded politely as McCredden then subjected him to a bafflingly-detailed story about his second place at the Metropolitan Catholic Colleges Sports Association’s swimming carnival at North Sydney in 1965. McCredden was 14 at the time.

Thorpe did not mention that at that age he was swimming for Australia at the Pan Pacifics in Japan. His time in the 400m freestyle at that meet in 1997 would have earned him silver in Atlanta. He did this while recovering from an appendix operation.

As McCredden droned on, Thorpe gave him water and drove him home.

Jack Thompson has perfected the Icebergs story into a gentle yarn about Thorpe’s grace in and out of the pool. He tells it around the campfire at the Garma Festival in northeast Arnhem Land every year.

If that was the worst McCredden had done while unable to account for himself it was fine by him. Anyway that was an exceptional day.

A few hours before the party – the birthday of one of those television executives that actors have to keep nice with – he split from his girlfriend in a voluble and frank exchange of ideas that brought his nosiest neighbour to her front porch. To water plants, apparently. The crescendo was McCredden’s partner of five years screaming at him that he was “just another luvvie pretending to have a social conscience when there’s money in it”.

He laughed and called her a parasite bitch as she got into the Audi he had bought her and drove away. He had not seen her since.

He still wishes he had used the word parasitic rather than parasite. The two nouns pushed together had a blunt menace that suited his rage at the time. Yes. Parasite bitch sounded good in the dialogue of that Underbelly series he worked on.

Still, if he had used the adjective parasitic he thinks now that he would have sounded more in control.

McCredden looked again at the camera roll on his phone. There were the photos that Matilda took of him with a dinosaur head filter. He knew what she was doing and he was amused. She thought his ideas about women and the world were from another time. Fair enough.

That was on the seaplane ride to the island. Next on the roll was the mystery photo of the two of them cheek by cheek holding opaque coconut-shaped cups with straws. Last were the photos he had been looking for when he opened the phone. Close ups of his crepy neck.

Yes he had taken some photos of his own neck. He liked to assess its aged condition up close. Nobody tells you this when you buy an iPhone but they are remarkably useful for self examination. Not sure how thin your hair is on top? Hold the phone aloft and take a photo. Concerned about a pimple behind the ear? Use your phone. It’s brilliant, if you are someone who prefers to know.

McCredden thought back to the first night on the island and he wrote down what he had heard from inside his bungalow. Breaking glass, a bullhorn, a party. Then later, right before he drifted off to sleep for what he thought was the last time before morning, he heard a male voice.

This was the sum of his recollection. It wasn’t much. He put down the pen and scanned the room. How did he miss this? On the floorboards, peeking out from the side of the bed he had been sleeping on was a wooden handle. He walked over and picked it up. It was a large, bloodied knife.

“Oh, Matilda,” he said.

Australia’s favourite writers, from Tom Keneally to Trent Dalton, are collaborating on our summer novel. To join the fun, read from the very beginning with Caroline Overington’s Chapter 1 or go to ohmatilda.com.au

Paige Taylor is The Australian’s Indigenous affairs correspondent. She and her two sisters are the product of a goldfields romance between a barmaid and a boilermaker. Paige has been named the West Australian Journalist of the Year three times. She likes fake beer and real champagne.