by Neil Grant
Wallace pinches the bridge of his nose. ‘It’s just a boat, Rudra,’ he says, ‘We snagged it with the net. End of.’
Not that easy, Wallace. No way. ‘You said I might know one of those boats better than I think. What did you mean?’
‘Ask your old man.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘It’s just an old boat, Rudra. Stories, that’s all. This place is full of stories.’
‘Why do I feel like you’re keeping something from me?’
‘Hold the net, mate. And stop driving me crazy with your questions.’
Rudra looks out to Paper Tiger and the silhouette of his father. All that blackness, with the sun eating into him like quicksilver.
When they finish, Rudra walks with Wallace and Tangent towards the creek. The morning has collapsed over town like a broken beast. It’s only ten, but it’s already boiling and the cicadas are crazy-making in the trees. As they approach the creek, he notices a dark hump near the gutting table.
When they get close, he sees it is an animal, or what remains of one. Tangent noses the carcass – a mess of peeled-back skin, the sinew on the hind leg exposed like a strip of bark, the black meat already blown with flies, a gaping hole in its belly – guts all stripped out. Eviscerated: Rudra remembers that word, because it sounds like what it is, all full of knife and sharpness.
‘Gotta be a dog,’ Wallace says. ‘A big dog. To do all that damage.’
Rudra tries to shake the dream from the night before but it hangs on to him. The animal is a wallaby, or the remains of one. He helps Wallace drag it towards the creek, him on a leg and Wallace on the tail. Seems wrong to feel its body jarring over every rock and tussock.
‘Help me in the boat with it.’
But Rudra doesn’t want to touch it anymore. It disgusts him, with its craned-back head, kelp trunk tail and glassy eyes.
‘What’s the matter?’ asks Wallace. ‘You know we can’t just leave it here. What’ll the tourists think? Some great dog out there hunting at night? They’ll never get their kids to sleep.’ He pokes the wallaby with his toe. ‘Come on, Rudra, give us a hand. It’s food now, nothing more. Stop thinking and start doing.’
Together, they dump the animal in the boat. ‘You’ll need to come over with me. I can’t lift the bloody thing up the hill on my own.’
They row over in silence. Tangent licks at the carcass. ‘Stop it,’ growls Rudra. ‘You’ll get it soon enough.’
Between them, they carry it up the steps and Wallace drags it to the shed. When he exits, Rudra can see past him to the carcass hanging from a rope in the gloom. ‘It won’t go to waste. Keep Tangent in food for a month,’ says Wallace. ‘But best we keep this from Didima, eh?’
9
ALL TIME IS MARKED FROM SOME significant point. The Buddhists, the Christians and the Muslims all believe they are living in different times. In the long and drifting summer, Rudra begins to mark time from the appearance of his grandmother, as if his life has pivoted on this point and will never be the same.
On day five after Arrival Didima, Maggs turns up unannounced on the Solace doorstep.
‘Sorry about the other day,’ Rudra says.
‘What other day?’
‘After I’d been fishing. The phone call – I was kind of weird.’
‘You’re always weird, mate.’
‘You coming in, or what?’
‘Your dad home?’
‘Nup.’
‘Lead on.’
As they walk down the hall, Maggs stops at the lounge room door.
‘Never been in here.’
‘It’s just a lounge.’
Maggs swings open the door. The room smells of mothballs and damp. There’s an old floral couch with its back to the door, and two overstuffed chairs by the fireplace.
‘I will never understand why this family doesn’t own a TV. Or have internet. You fellas are locked in another time.’
‘TV rots the brain.’
‘Says Cord Solace. It’s like he’s Amish or something. Which is fine if you like that sort of thing. But all that time staring at the walls – kinda creepy, mate.’
‘We do other stuff. Listen to music or the radio. Read books.’
‘Weirdos.’ Maggs grabs a book from beside a chair. ‘I never picked your old man as a reader.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, he doesn’t talk much. People who read – they talk. They use big words. They quote shit all the time. That’s not Cord. Not by a long shot.’
‘I think he uses books as an excuse not to talk. I don’t even know if he reads them.’
Maggs shows Rudra the cover of the book he is holding – Man-eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett. ‘This book?’
Rudra shrugs and Maggs drops the book back on the table. He moseys over to the old record player in the corner. ‘This is true vintage.’
‘Don’t touch that.’
‘Must be a hundred years old.’
‘You can’t touch it. It’s not allowed.’
‘So many rules in your house, dude.’
‘It’s my great-grandmother’s – my dad’s gran. I’ve never heard it played.’
‘You guys really are Amish.’
‘Always the low-hanging fruit for you, Maggs.’ If you didn’t have Facebook, you were Amish. If you didn’t have the latest iPhone – Amish. To Rudra it made no geographic sense – the Amish were American. ‘It’s just Cord being Cord. You know how he is.’
‘I do indeed. He’s definitely, definitely Amish. Part Amish, part Taliban. Such a fun guy.’
‘You hungry?’
‘I am hungry, Rudra. Starving. Famished. In need of sustenance.’
They go to the kitchen and sit around the table eating toast and drinking milk.
Rudra says, ‘Remember Mr DeNicola called milk purified blood?’
‘Worst science teacher ever.’
‘Hippy.’
‘That too.’
‘Spoiled milk for everyone. Forever.’
‘It’s only a name.’
‘He also called eggs liquid flesh.’
‘He’s a weird dude.’
Rudra sips his milk gingerly. ‘We pulled something up in the nets the other night,’ he says.
‘Prawns, I hope.’
‘Something stranger.’
‘What was it?’
‘It was like some sort of skull.’
‘A skull? Like a dolphin skull or something?’ Maggs looks up from his milk. ‘Do dolphins even have skulls?’
‘Pretty sure they do, Maggs. But this didn’t look like it came from a dolphin.’
‘Maybe a seal? Seals have skulls, right?’ Maggs struggled with biology. At the end of last year, he’d asked Mr DeNicola whether fish had nipples.
‘It wasn’t a seal.’
‘You still got it?’ says Maggs, leaning forward. ‘Show me.’
‘Cord took it when we were on the boat. He’s hidden it.’ Rudra takes a sip of milk. ‘I had this strange dream too. About some kind of animal, here in Patonga, that didn’t belong here. It was out to kill something.’
Maggs places his hand on Rudra’s shoulder and puts on a look of mock sincerity. ‘Rudra, is it the drugs?’
‘I’m being serious.’
‘You’re being weird.’
‘There was something in that dream, Maggs. Something a bit too real.’
Maggs sculls his milk, brings up a thick burp. ‘Ah, purified blood.’
‘I dream about an animal killing something and the next day,’ continues Rudra, ‘Wallace and I find a dead wallaby by the creek.’
‘Oh-kay then.’ Maggs does crazy eyes. ‘You dream an animal kills something and then that thing dies. You are seriously a god, Rudra.’ He rocks back in his chair and laces his hands behind his head. ‘And I am your best mate. God’s best mate – that’s me. Bet I’ll get free pizza and Kendra Mayhew will want to pash me … finally.’
‘Can you be serious for once in your life?�
��
‘You’re smoking your socks, mate. You can’t dream something and then have it happen. It’s just bloody coincidence.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Definitely,’ says Maggs. ‘But I reckon we need to find that skully thing you pulled up in the nets. That is interesting.’
‘I saw a look on Cord’s face when he saw it. It was like he recognised it.’
‘Bullshit. It came from under the sea. Unless your old man is a fish, it is unlikely that he recognised it.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Imagine how much stuff is under the water of that bay. Your old man just happens to jag something he’s seen before. What are the odds of that?’
‘Slim.’
‘Slim Dusty, Fat Boy Slim, Slim Shady. Between slim and exact zero. There’s no way.’
‘It just looked like it, that’s all. Maybe I was wrong.’
‘You are wrong,’ says Maggs. ‘But I still think we should find the thing. Where would he hide it?’
‘If it’s anywhere in the house, it’ll be in his office.’
‘What’re we waiting for?’
‘It’s locked.’
‘It just so happens, Rudra, my man, that I have been preparing for this very situation.’
‘How so?’
‘Two words – lock picking and YouTube.’
‘That’s three words. And what if Cord comes home?’
‘That’s what’s wrong with you, Rudra – too much of the what-ifs.’ Maggs stands up and brushes the crumbs from his shorts. ‘Has Nayna got hairclips?’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘Let’s get busy then.’
Rudra retrieves two bobby pins from his mum’s dressing table. Maggs peels the plastic coating from one with his teeth and bends one of the arms to ninety degrees. He puts a little kink in the peeled arm. He bends the head of the other pin up, inserting it deep into the lock and holding it with a little pressure. Slowly, he slides the peeled pin on top, jiggling the bottom one as he goes. Rudra holds his breath. At any minute, Cord could arrive home.
‘Can you make it any quicker?’ he says.
Maggs doesn’t even look at him. ‘It’s not that simple,’ he says. ‘Not like in the movies. You gotta picture what’s happening inside. Each little pin being pushed up so the barrel can eventually turn. And … ’ There is a satisfying click. ‘The lock is open.’ He turns the handle and the door creaks ajar.
The study is dark, with a shaft of sunlight spearing the dusty air. Cord never opens the curtains in here. The outside world is not permitted. Rudra only remembers being in here a handful of times – mostly when he was younger. Once without Cord’s permission. Only once.
He flicks on the light, feeling the fear gnaw in his belly. The room is roughly square with Cord’s cheap old desk at one end. On the far wall, bookshelves rise from floor to ceiling, crammed with non-fiction – shipping charts, Knots and Splices, Birds of the East Coast, diesel engine manuals, logbooks. The top shelf is a graveyard of peeling spines and strange titles, hunting books similar to the one that Maggs picked up in the lounge room.
On the left wall there is a single photo. An old black-and-white image, speckled with time. A fringe of jungle, a dirt path worn shiny, a brick temple in the background. Two men with waxed moustaches and starched shirts. Gun barrel straight. Eyes in the middle distance. A man in a turban with a dense thicket of a beard. And, at their feet, something mauled with age, bleeding silver bromide, torn up from the photo’s edge to beneath their boots.
‘Come on,’ says Maggs. ‘We haven’t got all day.’
They cross the floor to a symphony of creaking floorboards. The old house is built on sand, and white ants work day and night at the stumps. It amazes Rudra that termites will eat and eat until they sense the light pulsing through the veneer they have created. Then they will stop. And what amazes him more is how a windowsill or doorjamb can look like solid wood, yet he can push his finger right into it.
Sometimes too, the bearers come adrift. Then the whole place floats for a season, the floor spongy, the house springing like a boat at anchor, until the re-blockers arrive to set things right.
Rudra opens the top drawer of the desk and finds the key to a filing cabinet. The door opens, releasing an angry swarm of manila folders. Rudra slides in his arm and feels around. Nothing. Meanwhile, Maggs rifles through the desk drawers like a professional. He pulls out an old pistol, points it at the bookshelf and pulls the trigger. Click. A blue flame appears at the tip of the barrel.
‘A cigarette lighter,’ he says. ‘Your old man got a licence for this?’
Maggs slides it back into the drawer, picks up a battered old Akubra from a chair and slips it on his head. ‘We need to think like Cord. Where would he hide things?’ He walks to the window and, twitching the curtain open, peers outside. ‘Hey, imagine he came home right now and found us going through his stuff. That’d be an amazing what-if for you, Rudra.’ Maggs lets the curtain fall back into place and moves back towards the desk. He stops abruptly, cocking his head on one side. ‘Hear that?’
‘What?’
‘Listen.’ Maggs steps back towards the window.
‘What?’
Maggs springs off his left foot and a floorboard rattles back into place. ‘That.’ He grins like a fool. ‘Hear it?’ He demonstrates again and the floorboard rattles. ‘Get that letter opener.’ He begins rolling the rug back from the window.
Rudra passes him the letter opener and, working it under one of the boards, Maggs prises the board up. The next one comes up too, releasing cool, slightly fetid air. With the torch on his mobile, he drenches the cavity in light. The beam comes to rest on a large rectangular steel box with a handle on each short side. He hands Rudra the phone and manoeuvres the box from its hiding place.
Once it is sitting on the floor, he says to Rudra, ‘You should do the honours.’
Taking a deep breath, Rudra flips the catch and opens the box. At one end there are a pile of envelopes – twenty, maybe more. He pulls them out and hands one to Maggs. ‘They’re all addressed to Mum,’ says Rudra. ‘From India.’
‘And they’re unopened,’ says Maggs, flipping an envelope over to show him. Rudra catches the neatly printed name Prinika Thakur. His didima.
‘Let’s put them back.’
‘You don’t think this is weird?’
‘Course it’s weird,’ says Rudra. ‘But it’s not what we came for.’
He places the letters back in the box and removes a cloth-wrapped bundle. Placing it carefully on the floor, he peels it like an orange.
‘What is it?’ asks Maggs.
Rudra runs his hands over it, feeling its cold, damp surface. He picks it up and holds it to the light. They are both silent. He slips his fingers into the two round holes and then into the vee-shaped hole below.
The front door rattles open, creaks on its hinge and then slams shut. An echo of fear reverberates inside Rudra. Quickly, he rewraps the object. ‘Hold the door,’ he hisses at Maggs, ‘Don’t let him in.’ But what good could it do?
Maggs is too slow off the mark, anyway. Suddenly, Cord Solace is looming over them.
‘I didn’t,’ says Rudra.
Cord grits his teeth, his jaw muscles bulging. He begins to shake; earthquake anger – magnitude nine on the Fark! Scale. Maybe the pictures on the walls are rattling, or maybe it is Rudra’s heart. Maybe the grey men in the photo are bleeding from their eyes. Maybe the day is darkening and the sky is falling.
His dad lunges towards him and, as he does, Rudra dodges. Cord Solace is a big man and he drops heavy. When he smacks the floor, Rudra is up and over him and through the door and along the hall and out the front with Maggs beside him, running as they never have, splitting at the roundabout, Maggs heading towards the creek and Rudra towards the bay, with the bundle of whatever under one arm. His dad comes after him like a hurricane, his footfalls thundering over tar and dirt. Rudra makes for the pier, the sea turfing white arrows from the tops of wav
es. The wind and the cries of gulls and the pelicans with their backs to it all. The kite screaming from the pines.
Leaping into their tender, he lobs the object into the bow. He grabs the outboard’s ripcord and yanks. The motor splutters. His dad is on the pier now, roaring at him. Rudra pulls again. The motor refuses. He sees his mum now, come from nowhere, running, her hair flying behind her like a veil. His dad is four metres away. Rudra pulls again. The motor fires and catches, blurts out a cloud of blue smoke. He casts off and slams the outboard into reverse, pulls the boat round in a sweeping arc, straightens up and puts her in forward.
His wake throws a broad silver path from the pier. There are his mum and dad – her grabbing his elbow and him throwing her off. And, strangely, it reminds him of the photo on Wallace’s wall, when he was eight. When he could tame those seagulls. When he was too young to see the cracks and chasms that must have been there even then.
The crossing is rough, but he knows the place he will be safe from his father’s rage. Knows that Cord will drive along the coast expecting him to make landfall. He will never expect this courage from his son.
Lion Island – its back turned to him, ignoring his flight. He knows penguins nest out there and off the southern tip – a feeding ground for sharks. The boat skips over the water and he can smell a storm coming, the waves crowding together. The boat starts to leap and the motor leaves the sea screaming; then the hull makes contact with a sickening thud and lurches on like a drunk. There is nothing graceful about this crossing.
In the bow of the boat, nestled between the clamour of cold chain, is the object. Irrationally, he allows himself some what-ifs. What if this thing pulls him to the bottom? What if that is its purpose? What if it has been waiting for him, under all that water, all along? Crazy-talk, Maggs would honk. You and your what-ifs, you little weirdo.
The island seems close. The waves are battering the north point, ripping into the little beach that is the only place for him to land. He knows there is a channel in the rocks, he’s seen it from the water, and he also knows he needs to hit straight on to avoid tearing the boat apart like a tin can.
