by Paula Weston
The Major pours himself a glass of water from the jug by the TV. Doesn’t offer one to Paxton. ‘What changed?’
‘Mike De Marchi was killed in action defending one of our assets in Pakistan. It’s the greatest irony of all: if he were alive, none of this would be a problem. Angela had led protests against us, but she led them against everyone. After her husband died, she put all her energy into attacking our company from every direction. Our government support started to waver. I wanted to ride it out, but Bradford panicked. He thought she must have known about the trial and was going to expose the company. He needed to know if anything had changed with Julianne so he sent that “dipshit”, as you call him, into the school.’
‘You knew about Xavier?’
‘Not until afterwards and I certainly didn’t have a name.’ She uncrosses her knees, crosses them again. ‘Bradford’s paranoia went off the charts after the school incident. He was convinced our company wouldn’t be safe until Julianne was out of the picture, but Dad forbade it.’
‘Did your old man see what she did in that lab?’
Paxton’s eyes widen. ‘You’ve seen the footage?’
The Major weighs up the situation, decides to show his hand. ‘I’ve seen the real thing.’
She stares at him. ‘When?’
‘Julianne took down a six-foot soldier who put a gun to her head on Tuesday night.’
Paxton sits forward. ‘Did she mean to? How did it happen?’
And there’s her hand. The Major smiles. ‘I thought you weren’t interested in Julianne De Marchi.’
‘Of course we’re interested in her. The fact she can generate and conduct electricity without it harming her—we have no idea how that’s even possible. There’s a chance it can be replicated in the lab, but—’ She stops.
‘You knew what she was capable of so why did you agree to let her in the building last week?’
‘I didn’t, that was all Bradford. He wanted to see what Julianne would do under pressure. I had no idea he had a mercenary unit in the building—he didn’t tell me. There was a chance he’d push her too far; that’s why I needed at least one of your soldiers nearby. I didn’t know Bradford wanted her dead.’
‘Then you’re very naive. His bill goes up to the next session of the Senate. Why hasn’t your father stepped in?’
She rubs the corner of her eye, careful not to poke herself with a red fingernail. For a split second he catches a glimpse of, what—it can’t be grief?
‘My father is not well, Major. Bradford’s had control of the board for the last six weeks and I’ll take over next month for eight weeks. After that, Dad will decide who succeeds him as chair.’
The Major grunts. He’d like to waterboard the lot of them. ‘You two are buying military units to pit against each other because you’re fighting for your old man’s approval?’
‘Please don’t compare me to my brother.’ She runs her tongue across her teeth. ‘Regardless of what’s going on between Bradford and me, Julianne De Marchi isn’t safe. Bradford’s destroying all traces of the Afghanistan trials. The servers that were shot up on Wednesday stored the only remaining copies of the early Op Res files. They were never saved to the cloud, which means Julianne and her DNA are the only physical evidence left. Bradford’s not going to stop until she’s gone.’
‘What about Xavier? Is your brother going to put a bullet in him too? He’s seen what Julianne can do.’
‘I don’t know what the deal is between those two and, truly, I don’t care. But I want Julianne safe.’
‘She’s safe where she is.’
‘Major, you do understand that protecting Julianne De Marchi was never in your contract? She’s not part of this operation.’
‘She is if I say so—and nothing in our conversation tonight convinces me otherwise.’
Sweat beads on her top lip. This is not the way she wants this conversation to go. ‘Z12 has identified the boy you sent in on Wednesday. If she’s with him, she won’t be safe for long.’
The Major doesn’t react. Two decades of feigning respect for pin-dick commanding officers has honed his poker face. ‘Who told you it’s Z12?’
‘I’ve followed the money trail, Major. There’s only so much you can hide without a requisition order, especially at board level. I can help you keep her safe.’
She’s been a step ahead of him all this time, playing him for her own ends. But she might not be lying. If she’s right and Z12 has identified Walsh, there’s a shitstorm of trouble headed for the family farm.
Is he prepared to take the risk she’s bluffing?
47
Ryan’s snoring wakes her.
Jules is curled up beside him, wearing only her undies and the footy jersey. The shed is cold and dark but she can see he’s on his back, one arm across his chest. A sliver of sky is visible through a break in the blinds: the sun’s not far away.
She’s heavy with sleep and a sensation that takes a moment to identify: a lazy contentment. Jules replays the end of the evening again, warms at the memory. She resists the urge to wake Ryan. There’s something she’s ready to do and she’d prefer to be alone. She slips out of bed and rifles through Ryan’s bag, finds a pair of running skins. She puts on a bra under the jersey, and slips into Ryan’s parka and her ankle boots. It’s a ridiculous combination but she’s not planning on being seen.
The sliding door catches in its tracks—Ryan doesn’t stir—and outside the air is dewy and sharp with eucalypt. Faint light stains the horizon, enough to let her find her way past the chooks and towards the shearing shed.
Yesterday, Jules sat on the verandah and watched the sun come up, wrapped in her doona and cradling a cup of tea. The vastness beyond the shearing shed called to her in the half-light, but she didn’t want to face it with an audience. Yesterday, everyone else was up and about at this hour.
Not today. This morning nothing moves: not the trees, not the chooks roosting in the hen house, not even the dogs. The Monaro and Michelle’s ute are back but the house is dark.
Her boots crunch on fallen twigs, loud in the stillness. The closer she gets to the shearing shed, the stronger the smell of sheep shit and lanolin. The shed is elevated and she can see that even the dry grass underneath has been eaten to the ground. The sheep huddle together in the paddock, asleep on their feet.
Jules rounds the corner of the yards and startles at a figure in the dirt.
Ryan’s dad is sitting against a timber support staring out at the paddock. A shotgun sits across his lap.
‘Go back to bed,’ he growls.
His face is puffy and bruised, his top lip split and crusted with blood. Jules glances back at the house, uneasy. Does Michelle know he’s out here? The energy coming from him is erratic, pulsing in fuzzy waves. Is he still drunk?
‘Do you want me to get someone?’
‘No.’ His eyes are fixed on the horizon. The soil in the yard is churned up from a hundred small hooves. Jules glances at the herd in the paddock, the dread building.
‘You’re not going to shoot those sheep, are you?’
He laughs—a horrible sound. ‘Not today.’
Jules takes in his grip on the shotgun, the way he’s slouched in the dirt like he doesn’t care how he’ll get back up, and understanding hits her like a slamming door: he’s watching the sun rise and then he’s going to do something truly awful with that gun.
She needs Ryan but she can’t leave his dad here alone. What if he pulls the trigger as soon as she goes? The charge surges, but it’s useless from this distance and if she handles this badly he might shoot her.
‘Give me the gun.’ The words are hollow. ‘Please.’
He ignores her. She takes a step closer.
‘Mr Walsh…Jamie—’
He lifts the shotgun in her direction. ‘Don’t.’
Jules freezes. It takes a few seconds to drag her eyes from the barrel but when she does, she recognises the grief in his battered face: a desolation that runs dark and d
eep enough to erode his capacity for reason. Jules has seen the shadow of it in her mother.
‘Go.’
She doesn’t move.
‘Go.’ Jamie turns the weapon on himself and wedges the barrel under his jaw.
Oh God, no. He’s going to shoot himself right now if she doesn’t do something. The shotgun bites into Jamie’s stubbled chin.
‘Please don’t do this. They need you.’
A sharp laugh. ‘No they don’t.’
‘They do. You’re their dad.’
‘They’ll survive. You did.’
Jules falters. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
The change in her voice snags him and bloodshot eyes meet hers.
‘I miss my dad every day. Every day.’ She taps her fingers over her heart. ‘I lie to myself that I’m doing okay, that he’s still with me. But he’s not here. I can’t talk to him or hug him or laugh with him. I can’t miss him the way you miss someone when you know they’re coming back.’ The yard blurs and she blinks her eyes clear. ‘I keep expecting him to walk around a corner or lean in my bedroom doorway but he’s never coming back. That’s what you want to give Michelle and your sons? A life of misery and resentment? If you do this they’ll never get over it.’
He glares at her, his jaw working and his finger too close to the trigger.
‘My only consolation is knowing my dad would have never left us by choice. He went down fighting.’ Her voice breaks on the last sentence.
‘I don’t have any fight left.’
‘You do. I saw it last night. So did your boys.’
His nostrils flare and his mouth tugs down, wrestling with her words.
‘Ryan loves you. You don’t get that angry with someone you don’t care about. Trust me, I know.’
His face scrunches and his eyes well. A tear rolls down his swollen cheek and drips onto the barrel. ‘Ah, fuck.’ He lets out an anguished sob and lowers the shotgun.
Jules whimpers with relief. She sinks to the dirt with him. A hundred metres away, his family sleeps on.
‘Six generations on this land,’ he rasps. ‘And when that legislation goes through, the government’s going to take it from me and sell it to Pax Fed.’ The shotgun rests on his lap, his finger clear of the trigger. He sniffs and stares out at the horizon. ‘I shot and burned a hundred and twenty-two sheep last month. I couldn’t feed them and I couldn’t sell them, not even for pet food. The government’s taken our dam water but won’t give us access to the new pipeline. The banks won’t loan us money between harvests because Pax Fed tells ’em our farming practices aren’t financially feasible.’
Jules wipes her cheek on the sleeve of Ryan’s parka. ‘Why don’t you grow what they want?’
He shakes his head, as much to himself as to her.
‘How much of our grain and meat do you think’ll make it to Third World countries? It’ll go to the highest bidder.’
He sounds like Angie and for a second Jules misses her mum so much her heart hurts. Impulsive, ball-breaking Angie, who Jules hopes will always be too angry at the world to ever let it defeat her.
A white cocky screeches from a tree along the road and Jamie closes his eyes. The bleakness is getting a grip again. His energy is less erratic, but hazy enough to be unpredictable.
Jules crawls forward.
‘How about you give me the gun?’
48
Ryan hears the shot from the bathroom.
It sounds like a .22 rifle, not a military weapon, but that does nothing to calm his panic. Where is Jules? He cuts short his piss and jams on jeans, jumper and boots. Grabs his service pistol from his duffel bag.
The shot came from the sheds, he knows that much.
He sneaks a quick look between the blinds—the driveway is clear—and slips outside. The chances of a mercenary firing a .22 are slim, but he uses the cars as cover as he makes his way through the yard, listening for movement before he runs into the open.
When he hears a voice it’s closer than he expects. He can make out enough to know it’s Jules and that she’s upset. Ryan sprints around the side of the shearing shed—
—and pulls up short, confused.
Jules is standing with his dad’s shotgun, chamber open and barrel pointed to the ground, her face streaked with tears; his old man is propped against a bearer post with his head in his hands.
‘What the…?’ But he understands quicker than he’d like.
Shock paralyses him for a full three seconds before a far stronger emotion hits. ‘You were going to top yourself and you were going to do it here so Mum could find you? Or Tommy? You selfish, useless—’
‘Ryan.’ Jules steps in front of him, forcing him to look at her. ‘Give him a minute.’
Ryan vaguely registers that Jules is wearing high-heeled boots in the shearing yard. Blood thunders through him. What if he’d found his dad collapsed on the ground with his brains sprayed up the side of the shed? The thought of it makes his gut lurch and he stumbles away from Jules to dry heave. He stays hunched over after the spasms stop, holding his weight on his knees.
‘I let off the shot. I needed you and I didn’t want to leave him alone.’ Jules stays back, giving him space.
‘Did you shock him?’
‘No, we talked.’
Ryan lifts a hand to wipe spittle from his chin and finds he’s trembling. The reality is pressing in: his dad was going to kill himself. Might in fact be dead now if Jules had stayed in bed.
‘Bloody hell, Dad.’ His voice breaks. ‘What were you thinking?’
The house door slams and two sets of feet pound their way down the driveway.
‘Jamie! Jamie!’ Ryan’s mum rounds the corner at full pelt, not stopping until she skids to her knees by his dad. ‘You bastard.’ She’s pushing him in the chest, her voice hoarse. A piece of paper crushed in her fist. ‘You bastard.’ She shakes it in front of him but he can’t see because his hands are clamped over his face. ‘This is all you’ve got to say to me?’
Tommy crouches inside the yard. He seeks out Ryan, bereft. The dogs have come with them and they stick close to Tommy, bellies on the ground and tails wagging nervously.
Ryan’s mum has fistfuls of their dad’s shirt. She’s shaking him and sobbing, and Ryan can see how broken she is. That she’s been broken for a while watching her husband come apart.
‘Ah, Jamie…’ She wraps her arms around him and pulls him to her. His dad resists at first but then he drops his hands and holds her tight, burying his face in her neck. His whole body heaves.
Ryan kneels in the dirt and drops the handgun. It’s like someone’s punched through his rib cage and ripped out his heart with rough hands. Yesterday means something else now. This is why his dad worked so hard: it’s been in the back of his mind for a while. All the sledging last night, the punch-up with Keith McKenzie, it pushed him over the edge.
Jules lays a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. He’s not sure how long they stay like that: him with Jules, Tommy with the dogs, and his mum and dad clinging to each other. Eventually the sun breaks the horizon.
‘We should get them inside and make a cup of tea,’ Jules says quietly.
‘Tea’s not going to fix this.’
She squeezes his shoulder. ‘It won’t hurt.’
Ryan leaves Jules to offload her charge into a star picket while he detours to the shed to put away the guns. He sees the notification as soon as he picks up the phone: a missed call from the Major. He shoves the phone in his back pocket and heads to the house.
His dad wants to kill himself. He can’t deal with the Major right now.
49
‘You should call him.’
‘I will after breakfast.’
As much as she wants to know why the Major’s making contact, Jules doesn’t push Ryan. She’s cooking scrambled eggs, concentrating so they don’t stick to the pan. The urgency of the current has eased, leaving her drained and exhausted and ready to fall back into bed.
&n
bsp; Ryan pops the toaster and tosses the hot slices from hand to hand. He drops them on the breadboard and wipes his palms on his jeans. On the other side of the bench, Tommy digs a knife into the butter.
‘I wish I could hear what they’re talking about,’ Tommy says in a voice Jules barely recognises. His eyes are red and his cheeks blotchy.
Michelle and Jamie are on the back verandah on their second round of tea. Jules can mostly make out Michelle’s voice—angry, anguished—and every now and then Jamie says something too low to hear. At least they’re talking.
Ryan rests his hands on the benchtop. His knuckles are grazed from brawling, and his eye a plump purple mess.
‘Hey…’ She touches his shoulder.
He stares out the window, breathing hard and trying not to be swamped.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Jules says quietly.
Ryan swallows hard, and then he hangs his head and lets out a strangled sob. Tommy flinches. Ryan clamps a hand over his mouth so the next one doesn’t carry to the verandah. His grief fills the kitchen and Jules absorbs it with him. Tommy watches his big brother buckle, his own face twisting and ticking. Ryan weathers the onslaught and then lets out a shuddering sigh. When he finally lifts his face, there’s no effort to mask the hurt.
‘He thought I was ashamed of him,’ he says to Tommy and wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.
‘What did you say to that?’
‘I told him he’s a stubborn prick.’
Jules switches off the gas and brings the pan to the bench. ‘Your dad thinks you’ve lost faith in him. If you show him that’s not true he’ll keep it together.’
Ryan tears off a piece of paper towel and blows his nose into it. Tommy shakes his head. He wants to believe it but he’s scared to hope.
They all eat together on the verandah, faces turned to the newly risen sun. Out in the paddock the sheep make their way to the trough in a haphazard line, dust drifting up behind them. Michelle is washed out and tear-streaked, eating one-handed because she won’t let go of Jamie. He’s doing the same, fingers laced through hers, hanging on with a fierceness that breaks Jules’ heart.
