I nodded and followed Goose into the bar.
5
We trailed the bobbing tail-lights of the ute along the highway, then onto a dirt road. The Corolla was my car, but Goose was driving, hunched grimly over the wheel. Dust billowed up around us.
I leaned forward. ‘How far is this place?’
‘Couple of kays, they reckon.’
‘Do we know the way back to the highway?’
Tess turned in her seat. ‘Jesus. Relax, will you.’
The car swerved. There was a soft thump against the undercarriage.
She squealed. ‘A fox. Was that a fox?’
Goose nodded. They dissolved into giggles.
I looked behind us but there was only the pale ribbon of road vanishing into darkness. After fifteen minutes we pulled up at a two-storey weatherboard house with a sagging porch. Wrecked cars huddled on the lawn. Two guys stepped out of the ute, waved for us to follow, then entered the house. Goose cut the engine. A frog gulped somewhere nearby. We tumbled from the car, Goose and Tess now in charge, me scurrying along behind like their little brother.
One of the guys from the ute appeared in the dim hallway and led us through to a kitchen out the back. He was young, rat-faced, with a lick of black hair across his eyes. His gaze lingered on Tess’s tits. ‘Wanna beer or something? A cone? Jimmy’ll be down in a sec.’
But Goose was all business. ‘Jimmy our man, is he?’
Ratface nodded. Another man appeared in the kitchen but I couldn’t tell if he was one of the two from the ute or another guy altogether. He was a big meathead, with hairy forearms. Meathead pulled a beer from the fridge, cracked it, downed several loud mouthfuls and let out an almighty burp. ‘Ah. Good fucking stuff. You want one?’
Tess sighed. ‘Actually, mate, we’re in a hurry. A friend of ours is in hospital and we need to get to her, so –’
‘She your girlfriend?’ Meathead asked Goose.
‘No. She’s with him.’
Meathead looked at me as if he could scarcely believe it, before swivelling his gaze back to Goose. ‘What’s that tatt there, under your sleeve?’
Goose rolled up his shirt to display his forearm, and a mini-skirted nurse brandishing a squirting syringe. Meathead grunted appreciatively and swigged again from his can. He winked at Tess. ‘Got a few of me own, you know. Hidden away. I’ll show you ’em later. Mate.’
Goose checked his watch. ‘Look. Sorry, but we are in kind of a hurry, as we said . . .’
Meathead picked something from his teeth. ‘Okay. What do youse want again?’
‘Just what we talked about at the pub. Is it Jimmy we need to see?’
Meathead stuck out a paw. ‘Nah. Jimmy’s not here. Give me the cash and I’ll run it over to him and pop back with what you need.’
Ratface sucked on his bong with a throaty gurgle.
Goose smiled nervously. ‘Um. Not sure how you do things here, but if I’m gonna hand over eight hundred bucks, I need to see the gear first.’
Meathead drained his beer, crushed the can and dropped it to the floor. ‘Come on, mate. Hand it over.’
My knees began to wobble. We were a long way from anywhere. Nobody even knew we had left Melbourne. And there was no fucking dope.
Ratface put his bong on the table. Goose stood. ‘No, it’s okay. There’s obviously been a misunderstanding or something . . .’
The next bit was a blur. Ratface was on his feet. Meathead shoved Goose back into his chair. Tess protested. Another chair was clattering to the floor and then I was standing, saying something like Watch it or What’s happening? I remember noticing the cold floor through the soles of my shoes and thinking I really needed a new pair. Meathead was poking Goose in the chest and Tess was gesticulating, and it was then I saw someone outside looking in, before realising it was, in fact, my own reflection in the window, hovering like a small, sallow moon in the darkness.
Then Ratface’s little mouth opening and closing, opening and closing. ‘Holy shit. He’s got a gun. Phil, he’s got a fucking gun!’
And he was right; I had the gun in my hand. Everyone stopped. Meathead stepped backwards. ‘Whoa there,’ he said to me. ‘We’re only kidding ya.’ There was a curious pause. ‘Bet you don’t even know how to fire it, do you, mate?’
This was true. I wondered about the safety catch. My teeth ground against each other. There was a flat crack and my hand – the one holding the pistol – jerked and I thought that someone had knocked it, even as Meathead staggered backwards saying, ‘Ah, fuck, you shot me, ya cunt.’
And then Meathead was sprawling against a cupboard with blood oozing between his fat fingers. I don’t quite know where my new-found authority came from but I heard myself tell Goose and Tess to get outside and start the car.
By the time I dived into the passenger seat, Tess was weeping in the back seat. Goose wrestled with the steering wheel. The car skidded and bucked. Someone, perhaps even me, swore. The car stalled. Ratface and Meathead appeared on the porch, waving their arms about and shouting. Goose fiddled with the ignition. A crack. Tess yelped. ‘They’re shooting at us! Fuck. Go.’ Then the car was careening out of the driveway. Another shot. ‘They’re coming after us,’ she said. ‘We’re dead.’
Trees blurred past. Objects reared from the darkness, illuminated momentarily by the approaching headlights before vanishing. A road sign, a wire fence, the bobbing light from a distant farmhouse. Tess was still yelling and I think Goose was as well but the only thing I recall with any clarity was the sense of having been let in on a great and terrible secret. My God, I thought, so that’s what it’s like to shoot someone. And there, in the passenger seat, as we barrelled through the night, I almost laughed.
We sped along dirt roads for what seemed like hours, Goose crunching through the Corolla’s gears and sliding through corners until, miraculously, the lights of the tailing ute vanished. We pressed on – passing no cars, seeing only the glimmering eyes of animals in the night – before coming to rest beside a paddock. Goose cut the engine and we sat there in silence, smoking and chewing our nails.
6
When I woke, my shoulders were crunchy from sleeping against the car door. It was cold. My breath fogged in the weak light. I heard the call of a crow, like the brief cry of a falling infant. Then something more sinister, a clumping about right outside the car. Huge and heavy breathing. Images from the previous night flickered in my mind’s eye and I wondered if I had the heart – or whatever part of me I had used – to shoot someone again.
Tess moved in the back seat. ‘What the fuck is that?’ she hissed.
I reached for the gun and peered cautiously through the fogged glass. Impressionistic splodges of colour, then something much closer, a lumbering darkness, a giant head. Eyes.
Tess laughed. ‘A cow. It’s just a fucking cow.’
I wiped the glass clear with my sleeve. Sure enough, right in front of me – so close that were the window open I would be able to pat the damn thing – was the massive head of a cow, looming with mouthfuls of grass torn from the ground. I laughed with relief.
Tess and I stepped from the car and the cow backed off with a snort. We lit cigarettes and looked around. We had come to rest in a grassy clearing beside a rutted dirt road. There was a farmhouse in the distance and a pretty weatherboard church a few hundred metres away through the trees.
Tess drew hard on her cigarette. ‘What time is it?’
I checked my watch. ‘Nine-thirty.’
I rubbed my freezing hands together. We were stranded God knows where with a gun that, for all I knew, had killed someone. No one becomes a junkie by accident; it takes a certain amount of determination. Sadly, that determination was never quite enough to stop being a junkie, and for years I had been in way over my head. The whole thing was depressing. I blew a smoke ring and watched it unravel as it glided away on the
cold morning air.
Tess pointed at something. ‘Look.’
Beside the church, almost indiscernible among the grey trees, was a crowd of about fifteen people standing in a loose circle. We watched them for a few minutes and then, as if drawn on a current, picked our way across to them through the broken headstones. The cemetery smelled of damp grass. A few of the mourners glanced up at our approach before turning back stoically to the casket in the open grave. The service was coming to an end. The priest was reading something from a Bible. We stopped at the edge of the gathering as it broke apart. Someone was weeping loudly, inconsolably, a terrible sound. Mourners tossed handfuls of dirt and small items into the grave and left in groups of two or three, nodding vaguely to us as they passed.
An elderly woman was the last to leave. She approached us and placed her hands on Tess’s shoulders. The woman was short, powdery. ‘It’s all right, love,’ she was saying. ‘She was ready to go. She was in so much pain. It’s better that way. I know it’s hard, but do you know what?’
It was only then I realised that it was Tess who was weeping so loudly. Her shoulders were convulsing and her face was furrowed and wet. She was nodding and trying to say something but the only sounds she made were inarticulate sobs of grief.
‘You were her favourite,’ the old woman went on. ‘Her absolute favourite. She talked about you all the time. Goodbye, dear.’
Before leaving, the woman looked at me with a gaze that was like a spotlight across my frozen cheeks. She gave my upper arm a quick squeeze. Then we were alone, except for the sexton waiting a respectful distance away.
Tess continued to weep for several more minutes before she composed herself and kneeled at the edge of the grave. Cold in my denim jacket, I waited, wiggling my toes for warmth. The polished coffin lid was spattered with clods of earth and photographs, a book of poetry and an old hat. Weird to think that someone was inside that box. A dead person. A sob caught in my throat. My face tightened.
After a while, I kneeled beside Tess on the muddy ground. Uncertainly I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer to me. She didn’t resist. ‘I’m really sorry about Maggie.’
She unwound the scarf – the one Maggie had given her – from her neck and considered it for a few seconds before tossing it into the grave. I checked the gravedigger wasn’t looking, took the gun from my jacket pocket, wiped it on my jeans and allowed it to fall into the hole.
Tess sniffed. ‘What the hell were you thinking? Where did you even get that fucking thing? Do you think that guy died?’
I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about anything. We kneeled in silence for several more minutes before standing and walking back to the car. Goose was still asleep inside.
‘Where the hell are we?’ Tess asked.
‘God knows.’
She sniffled and looked at me with red eyes. ‘We’ll never make it now, will we?’
‘No.’
‘We really fucked up, didn’t we?’
‘Yep.’
‘Got a smoke?’
I shook one loose from the packet and lit it for her.
‘Any idea how to get back?’ she asked.
‘None at all.’
And we stood there for some time, it might have been years, trying to decide what to do as the sun rose behind the trees.
The Other Side of Silence
I’ll admit that I wanted him dead and would gladly have done it myself, given the opportunity. Sometimes I wonder about the days before fingerprinting, before CCTV, forensic analysis and Google Earth; how easy it would have been to do away with someone.
In the modern, friendly courtroom, where the sentence was handed down (a mere two years! On a prison farm!) it felt as if the entire world were a poorly constructed jalopy that had lost a wheel, only to continue careering down the asphalt, chunking up sparks as it went. After sentencing, the judge, a chap called Roger Hilliard, a fellow I actually knew of through friends of friends, plumped his papers and swept from the courtroom, steadfastly refusing to meet my eye. Well might he have been ashamed at his part in a system that had so obviously failed to punish adequately the man who killed my daughter.
Meanwhile, the dolt in question exhaled noisily like the pig he was, turned to his dumpy wife and smiled a tight smile of Oh well, honey, it could have been worse, while she dabbed at her mascara. They referred to the crime as an accident, which was true technically, but, let’s face it, nobody forced the man to drink twenty glasses of beer, jump in his ute and speed through the first red light he encountered. Nobody had a gun to his head.
Marie and I had struggled to have a child at all and, as a result, Carol had been much hoped for, much loved and occasionally much spoilt. It is true that parenthood erases utterly the life you lived before, but even after the child has departed, it is impossible to return to the things that might otherwise have occupied your time. The massive space that develops in one’s heart to accommodate a child does not, womblike, shrink, after the child is gone. For a long time, both Marie and I woke early in the morning and wondered what to do with ourselves. What we did before Carol came along had, in the early days of parenthood, been the question we asked ourselves. Now the question was: what could we do now she had gone?
I felt Carol’s loss deeply but it was Marie who mourned for her most elaborately. She visited her grave regularly, often alone, and hoarded her personal items for longer than was necessary. They had been the closest mother and daughter I had ever had the pleasure of knowing, distinguishable from a distance by their manner of walking arm in arm in a clumsy but touching pas de deux. Marie moved a framed photo, in which Carol was at her most beautiful and most assured, to different locations throughout the apartment – now on the bedside table, now the bookcase, now the kitchen bench – as if she might give our beloved daughter animation. More than once she dialled Carol’s number for a chat, only to realise, with a horror that never really dims over time, that she was calling a number now registered to a complete stranger. I’d have done anything to ease her pain and it is no exaggeration to say that I gladly would have swapped places with Carol – stepped off that kerb into the path of the speeding truck – if it meant that she could have lived her life through to its natural conclusion. Grief is not one of life’s human journeys, as those saccharine New Age mystics might tell you, nor is it a destination; rather, grief is an entire continent, apparently endless, with its very own topography and foreign tongue, a nation in which one loses one’s passport and papers and must spend the foreseeable future.
After the hullabaloo diminished, Marie and I resolved to take a few weeks away from our interfering families and the inevitable follow-ups from the press. On a whim we decided to revisit the coastal town of Mallacoota, where we had spent two weeks thirty years earlier, before Carol was born. It was a place we remembered with great affection, a place where our sorrows might even be unknown to the general public and thus more easily forgotten. It was a simple and isolated place. There was a time when, having been elevated to such lofty heights in our personal history, Mallacoota was used as a sort of touchstone when we assessed the worth of other destinations. We would shake our heads and say – laughingly, but also with complete sincerity – things like: ‘The Dalmatian Coast was nice, but it was no Mallacoota.’
In this way, the humble Victorian seaside town assumed an iconic status and I suppose that was part of the appeal of revisiting: the hope that, after all the tragedy of the past few months, the solitude and peace might offer us solace, rejuvenation, a chance to set the world to rights. And so it did, but in the most peculiar of ways. Revenge, I discovered, is merely the wish that a particular person not experience the life denied someone you have lost.
We arrived at night, as we had thirty years ago, located the house we had reserved several days before and received our instructions from our landlady, a gnome of a woman wit
h energetic eyebrows that tumbled across her forehead like a pair of gymnasts. She activated the utilities, explained the neighbourhood and showed us how to work the automatic garage door. Before she departed, she left a photocopied sheet with a map and a list of names and phone numbers for various services we might require in the township: boat hire; takeaway food; massage and so forth. She assured us we would be undisturbed and urged us to call her should we require anything at all.
The house itself was large and comfortable, almost as tastefully appointed as our own apartment. We unpacked our supplies, and it wasn’t long before we were nestled on the couch with a fire blazing in the hearth and glasses of red wine cradled in our hands. The silence was deep and tranquil, interrupted only by the occasional crackle and pop from a burning log or the call of a bird in the night.
That night we lay in the unfamiliar bed under heavy blankets and stared into the darkness, into the past and into the future, such as it was. I wondered what the man who killed our daughter was doing and hoped that, at that precise moment, 3.15 am, he was being abused in some dreadful fashion by a prison lunatic.
Over the week we began to recover a little of our former selves. We both knew it would be a long haul, but at least there were the beginnings of adjustment. We would rise early to eat toast spread with local marmalade on the sunny lawn, overlooking one of the series of lakes fed by the nearby ocean. Contemplatively, we watched boats tacking back and forth in the late afternoon breeze. Arm in arm we walked the pier to inspect the catch of the men and boys fishing there. Marie, with her binoculars always to hand, sought out birds, checking them against a book bought especially for the purpose of identification. At night we watched DVDs or read quietly, rising now and then to prod the fire or refill our wine glasses. The view of the horizon and the nippy sea air, carrying on it the scent of distant places, combined to make us feel more positive, more hopeful. Even Marie seemed to display flashes of her former self.
There was, it was true, an occasional melancholy that settled upon us when we were reminded of Carol’s absence – often by the most obscure object, a TV show, say, that we knew she would have enjoyed, or a jumper in a local shop she might have liked – but these episodes became more manageable, almost companionable, like adjusting warily to the presence of a stranger.
A Lovely and Terrible Thing Page 7
