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The picture formed as he stood shaking. Sarah and Jasper, their bodies slowly rotting away, abandoned to the earth.
Taking the knife from his belt Chandler drew it across his forearm, deep enough to remove everything from his mind other than pain. Angry, bitter pain. He re-sheathed the knife as the blood trickled off his fingers to the soil. It was early but he was going to head out. No point waiting around.
Packing what he needed with as little noise as possible, he prepared to leave.
A whisper floated across the camp. Mitch.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I can’t . . . I have to go.’ Chandler turned to see his former friend peering up from his own bag, his hair cast this way and that. He looked like a timid teenager again, on one of their outdoor camp-overs.
‘You’ll get lost if you go alone.’
Chandler continued to pack. Mitch might have been right but Chandler didn’t care.
‘What happened to your arm?’
Chandler glanced at the blood dripping from the cut and threw the backpack over his shoulders. ‘Focus,’ he said and got ready to leave.
‘I’m coming with you,’ said Mitch, sliding with ease out of his bag. Like a snake, thought Chandler.
‘This isn’t about getting your name in the papers, Mitch.’
He recognized that his pain was finding voice and trying to hurt those seeking to help. Like the family had done to them all those years ago.
‘I know that. I want to find them too,’ said Mitch.
Chandler stared hard at him.
‘I’m leaving,’ he said.
‘Two minutes.’
Chandler didn’t wait but started off slowly. He wanted to see if Mitch would let him go. If he was still full of bullshit.
With nearly an hour before dawn was scheduled to break it was hard to navigate in the darkness but the early hours’ silence let Chandler hear the footsteps approach from behind, the long, even strides coming up directly behind him, then beside him. Chandler looked over at Mitch. Against all his instincts, he was comforted by his presence.
Traversing a slight incline, their headlamps piercing the indigo of the night soil. Mitch spoke up.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘For shooting Gabriel – Davie – whoever he thought he was now. For coming here and taking over. For not telling you about Teri. For losing contact. For Teri wanting the—’
Chandler interrupted the apology, Mitch’s contrite tone sounding alien. ‘I don’t care about any of that, Mitch. That’s the past.’
They continued in silence, walking until daylight reared up slowly between the trees. Then an unusual sight interrupted the characteristic landscape of trees, rock and dirt, a colour unnatural to the outback. The rusted grey of a group of old shacks gradually emerged from the rising light. They were . . . they could be . . .
Chandler increased his pace. As he stalked closer, struggling to keep his balance, he could see that they were forestry shacks, maybe even military shacks left over from manoeuvres undertaken out here many years ago in preparation for a war that was real or imagined. Four shacks in total. The explosion of hope cramped his stomach. He could see the same hope spread over Mitch’s face.
‘I’ll take the two on the left,’ spluttered Chandler, fighting a mouth that was suddenly as dry as the air he breathed. He started running.
‘Okay, but watch out,’ said Mitch. ‘These have been here a while. Who knows what’s in them.’
Chandler ran over to the first of the sheds, the corrugated iron worn and curled from the summer heat. He touched the door expecting to be burned by it but found an icy coldness. Undoing the bolt lock Chandler held his breath. The door opened with a prescient crack, the hinges rusted and dry, unused in a long while. Pulling harder he wrenched it open, the beam of his head torch filling the small space. He was met by a litter of electronic equipment and machinery from the seventies that had decayed to dust, a bevy of tiny insects scurrying across the floor and table tops to flee the predator invading their home.
No Sarah and Jasper. Hope rushed from his heart and flowed out the soles of his feet to the dirt floor.
But there were three other buildings.
‘Chandler . . .’
Mitch’s voice was unsure, brushed with an urgency that seemed to border on disturbed.
As Chandler exited and sprinted across to him, Mitch stood by the door of a shed, the tin similarly worn and rusted, abandoned for years. His old colleague was shaking and sobbing, his mouth opening but no words issuing forth. Something beyond the reach of words had occurred.
The torchlight that had been directed inside the shed swung around to shine into Chandler’s face, blinding him.
Chandler moved towards the light.
Acknowledgements
I want to first of all thank my mum and dad for instilling a sense of independence and honesty in all of us from an early age and for raising us in a place where imagination and creativity was central to our upbringing. I thank my brothers and their wives for being supportive, smart and inspirational, my good friends Dave, Pete, Simon and Michael for their insight and the laughs and to my wider family for reading and advising on early drafts of this novel, giving helpful advice and, on occasion, not so helpful advice. And I would especially like to thank my wife for she is my compassion, intelligence and fortitude multiplied by a thousand. She has to be given the frequent late nights drafting this manuscript and the subsequent snoring. Mine, I’d like to point out, not hers.
I’d like to thank my agent Marilia Savvides at Peters Fraser and Dunlop for her enthusiasm and hard work in getting this novel all the way from rough draft to finished product and for jumping on board so quickly and with lots of passion. I’d also like to thank the other people who support me at PFD, Laura, Kim, Alexandra, Jonathan, Zoe and Rebecca for their hard work behind the scenes negotiating contracts and looking into tax affairs that I’d run a mile from!
On the editing and publishing side my sincere gratitude goes to everyone at Simon & Schuster UK in getting this manuscript from digital to ink, especially my editor Anne Perry who is always quick with a superb suggestion to a dilemma. A job in crisis resolution awaits if she ever decides to take it. My thanks also go to Kay and her excellent copy-editing, which identified a number of things that had slipped through the net, Justine and Rhiannon for their creative wizardry and Jo for bringing the book through to publication.
I’ll have probably left someone out in this and for that I apologise. This mistake and any other mistakes I might have made in the factual aspects of the novel are my fault and mine alone so let’s hope I have hidden them well. Or got lucky.
I’m not sure how to end this so I’ll just say: Thanks again, everyone!
About the author
James Delargy was born and raised in Northern Ireland but has worked and lived in a number of countries around the world including South Africa, Australia and Scotland. He currently lives in semi-rural England. 55 is his first novel.
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2019
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Copyright © James Delargy 2019
The right of James Delargy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-7752-1
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Austral
ian eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-8464-2
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