‘I never took you for one of those girls that behave like a slut, Rosie.’
‘I’m not, Kane. I’m really not. And I liked you—’
‘Liked me?’ he broke in. ‘I would have given you everything you wanted. I still can. You don’t know what’s inside me. You all just make up your minds and then you’re done.’
She was silent. Everything she said seemed to stir him up. He drew hard on the bong. ‘We’re going to get back to where we were. We were really good together, Rose. You’ll remember. Tonight’s about you and me.’
She shrank inside her clothes. She saw where he was going. No, she thought. Think, she told herself, ignore the pot. You are not tired. Then she caught it: a smell, a whiff of something new, beyond the grog, the pot, the rotting wood. It was wood smoke, but they weren’t near any houses. You could pick the smell up from a way away if the wind was in the right direction, but no one would light their stove at this time of year, on a night like this. It was a bushfire. He hadn’t noticed it yet, or if he had he didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what it meant for her, except that it was a change, something unpredictable. She said nothing. If there was a fire, where was it? She thought of Tom again: the bottle, the rag, then the baby in her cradle at the hospital, the smell of her when they bathed her. Why didn’t I name you, baby? she thought. You need a name given to you by your mother. But she had to stop; these thoughts would take up too much space in her head, space she needed.
‘I have to get back to the baby,’ she tried again.
‘Stop worrying about the kid and concentrate, Rosie. I’ve been talking to you.’ He put down the bong and took a swig from the Bundy bottle. He held onto it for a moment, wiped his lips with his other hand, then slammed it down clumsily on the floorboards next to him.
She heard a crackle in the trees. He noticed it then, too. He peered groggily into the bush. ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘Let me check it out.’ He was on his feet quickly and moving back towards the stairs. The smell was strong now; you could see smoke on the river, down through the black trees. She couldn’t be sure if she imagined it, but she thought she felt heat, too. The bottle was right there. His back was to her. Now, she told herself. This is all you’re going to get. She edged closer without standing. He took a few more steps down until his head was level with the deck. ‘We’re gonna have to move,’ he called back to her. But she was already behind him, raising the Bundy bottle, heavy with liquid, in a swift action. He turned and his face registered shock briefly before she brought it down on his head. The impact reverberated through her hand and forearm to her elbow, but the bottle didn’t break. He stared at her for a moment, then buckled and began to slip, but he’d grabbed hold of her shirt, and he took her with him down the last few stairs and onto the path where he fell on the ground, pinning her beneath him. She could feel his hot breath on her face. He ripped her shirt away from her, his weight heavy on her tender stomach, her stitches pressing into the dirt beneath them. He began to tug at her pants, his shoulders pinning hers to the ground.
She still had the bottle as well as freedom of movement in her forearms. She smashed it against the wooden step next to her hand. He turned at the shatter of glass and she swung at his back messily, the jagged edge connecting with flesh. He let out a cry, shifting his weight off her to grab hold of the wound. She stared at him, astonished at the chance he’d given her. It was like playing sport at school, at the moment you knew the ball was going through the hoop, or that you were crossing the line first. She saw the details of everything around her in hyper-focus: shards of broken glass next to her head, his face, clenched, furious as he clutched the wound, the black canopy looming above him. This is it. It’s happening, she thought, and hit him across the back of the head with all the force she could muster while lying down. He collapsed on her, his weight crushing the air from her lungs. Her milk wet his shirt, her skin.
Above her, she heard the rush of the wind, the sound of branches exploding. The back of the house had caught. She saw a towel hanging from the railing of the front verandah. She pushed him off her with a sharp groan and ran up a couple of stairs to grab it. Kane was lying still, his mouth slack. She wrapped the towel firmly around his waist and her hand came away sticky with blood. Her eyes were beginning to sting with smoke; she had to move while she could still make out the path. She grabbed his boots and began to drag him down towards the water, away from the burning house. The wind blew gusts of reddish smoke towards her as she struggled with him, the tatters of her shirt falling open. She was sweating and her eyes were streaming from the smoke. She had to keep stopping to wipe moisture from them, and she could feel that she was smearing blood and soot all over herself. She snagged the waistband of his jeans on a mangrove root and stopped for a second, waiting to see if he’d come to. He groaned but remained limp, and she wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved that he was alive, or frightened.
It took her a good ten minutes to heave his body over the bumpy ground in the dark and smoke and heat to where the trees began to clear, close to the water. This is all I can do for you, Kane, she thought. As soon as she’d let go of his feet, she felt the urge to run. The smoke was thick on the path. She ran headlong into a tree and it smacked her squarely on the forehead. Trying to remain calm, she took the path more slowly, her head throbbing. She listened for him as she scrambled down through the mangroves to the water, trying to figure out where they’d left the boat. She couldn’t hear him; she could hear only her breath, and the crackling of the forest. She had moved him, but if he burned she was still responsible. She didn’t slow. She moved steadily down the path, looking for gaps in the smoke until she was there, at the boat. There was enough moon to see by, in the moments when the smoke cleared. She untied the loose knot, unwrapped it from the root. She tried not to think about what would happen to Kane if the fire reached him. She glanced behind her on the path, heaved herself onto the hull, breathing heavily, and pushed herself away with an oar.
Ten metres out she told herself to breathe more slowly. The smoke was hurting her lungs, stinging her eyes. She pulled at the motor. It started first time. She looked up at the moon and saw its grey shadows, its pale yellow light above the smoke. The fire was burning in a swath from over the ridge and down towards the shack in the bush. Fear squeezed her ribs. She had time to let the thought fill her head now. Where is it coming from?
Chapter 22
The smoke was thick on the river and night had fallen. Danny pushed the boat slowly through the murk, holding himself back from opening her up, taking his chances. He’d fulfilled all the tasks that required no particularly difficult decisions. He had left the baby with Maggie, whose neighbour had a new baby of her own and had promised to make her up some formula and find some spare nappies. Maggie had called the police, then made the baby a little crib on the living-room floor from cushions and blankets, and he’d left Maggie and her kids sitting around her, watching her sleep. He had called Alf and told him that he needed to keep the boat for the night. Now he was just creeping through the gloom, headlights on, looking for a sign. It had to be Kane. He had no idea where he’d take her, but Kane had a boat, not a car, and so did Danny. This was all he could do. He’d been looking for an hour; had been peering into nothing, his blood alive, his skin layered with soot and sweat. Now he kept close to the foreshore, hoping for Kane’s little dinghy to emerge from the fog. It was so thick he could have passed right by them a dozen times, though.
He was practically idling as he crept along the shore not a hundred metres from her house, the fire blazing above him in the bush. Just audible above the sound of his own boat, he picked up the whine of another motor. It disappeared for several seconds. Perhaps he’d imagined it. He killed his own motor and picked it up again, a high, whiny roar, a sick engine pushed too hard. Then there she was in his headlights, hair wild and something wrong with her clothes, a ragged, unhinged figure in the ghostly smoke. He waited for her to draw alongside. Her face was filthy with something dark a
nd smeared. No sign of Kane. He reached down for the dinghy, pulled it close. He took her hand and pulled her up, her hair brushing his arm. It was blood on her face, and soot. As he pulled her onto the running board her shirt fell open for a moment. It was ripped. She didn’t look at him. He smelled milk, blood, burned trees. ‘Rose,’ he said quietly. ‘What did he do?’
‘It’s OK. I’m OK. Nothing, in the end.’ He grabbed the rope from Kane’s dinghy, threaded it through the railing on his own, tied it off. He considered for a moment setting it adrift, but decided it might be better if the cops didn’t find it yet, just in case.
‘Where is he? How’d you get away?’
She gestured behind her with her head, into the smoke. ‘There was a bottle. I cut him. Do you know where the baby is? Did you take her from the house?’
‘Maggie’s got her. They got some formula for her. She’s OK. Actually, Tom found her. It’s his place that started the fire.’
‘His place started the fire?’
Danny said nothing, but sat her down and wrapped a blanket around her. His fingers touched her neck. She held his eye. ‘Do you want to go straight to the police?’ he asked her. ‘Or to the baby?’
‘We should tell the police where he is. With the fire. And he’s injured. He was bleeding.’
‘Maybe. If you can find him again.’
‘I can find him. I dragged him down to the water.’
‘You could just—tell me where he is.’
‘Why?’
‘Because then you wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore.’
The water taxi bobbed on the water. There was heavy traffic around her place, fire barges, police boats, Water-ways. They’d drifted around the point, and she could see the dense smoke, the lights from the boats. Her house was obscured.
‘No one knows him here. No one’ll miss him when he’s gone,’ he said.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘We’ll just make sure he doesn’t come back here. Ever.’ He looked at her. ‘Are you sure he didn’t touch you? Do you want me to find someone for you to talk to? I can take you to the police, if you want me to. If that’s how you want to do it.’
‘No, really. I got away in time.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Can I trust you? Can I trust your friends?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t want him on my conscience.’
He took a thin bunch of her hair in his palm, rubbed his dirty thumb along the silky shaft. He looked at her face in the dim light of the cabin. They were drifting close to the fire, up on the ridge; the smoke had cleared for a moment and it burned wide and red in the dark. Her face glowed with its strange light. ‘It’s got to be tonight. Maggie’s called the police. They’re looking for him.’
Chapter 23
The smoke had mostly cleared now and the moon hung high and bright. There were three of them in dark clothes, creeping along the shore in Tom’s barge with no lights. Danny wore a dark green beanie; sweat prickled in his hair. Alf handled the boat silently, his face blank, massive. Rob sat on the aluminium bench opposite, while Danny gave Alf directions as clearly as he could based on what Rose had told him.
Danny peered into the dark knotted bush, looking for the straight lines of the roof she’d talked about. The roof might have collapsed altogether in the fire; it had blown back on itself now and was burning more steadily back up on the ridge. We must be close, he thought. Perhaps Kane was dead. Perhaps he was gone. Danny’s breathing was steady and slow, his body alert to the sounds of the bush burning above them, the smell of the river.
There it was—the corner of the deck, the tin roof in the moonlight. Danny tapped Alf on the shoulder and pointed into the trees. Alf switched off the engine, and Rob and Danny manoeuvred the boat into the shallows, using the oars as punts. They crept up the path in single file: Danny, Alf then Rob. He could see the house above them; it was partly burned out. They must be almost where she had left him by now. He slowed, then stopped. He was there, lying among the mangroves. He looked as if he’d fallen from a tree, his limbs at awkward angles. He was soaking wet, and he wondered if the river had somehow risen over him, lapping with the tide perhaps, but they were a good couple of metres above the river and the water was still. Then he realised the trees were glistening and there was water dripping from the leaves above. A fire helicopter had dumped water here. That was why the house was still at least partly standing. Even the water hadn’t woken him. Danny thought: he’s dead; she’s killed him. But then the body groaned, and Danny stiffened.
Danny took a thick loop of rope from his shoulder and crouched by Kane’s head. Alf took the feet. They tied his hands and feet up quickly, while he lay prone. He could have been asleep. Rob drew a roll of gaffer tape from his small backpack and ripped it open with a sound like metal tearing. Kane opened his eyes, took in the dark figures, his bound limbs, and screamed briefly before Rob brought a length of tape down over his mouth and the scream was muffled to a moan. Then it was all in the eyes. They were round in the dark, watering.
Danny put his hands under the armpits and Rob took the feet while Alf led the way back down the path to the barge. Danny heard helicopters above, dousing the last of the flames on the cliff with their enormous buckets. As they reached the end of the path, they caught a clear view as the whirling blades made a huge round dent in the water—a liquid crop circle. They hung back in the trees and watched the water bucket down into the creek. When the helicopter had risen and departed, they threw Kane in the boat and climbed in after him.
Alf started the motor while Danny untied. Kane had grown quiet, and watched them, Danny in particular, with large, rheumy eyes. ‘What do we do with him, Alf?’ Rob said.
Alf turned slightly. ‘We dump him in the river, just like the old days. But first we have a bit of fun.’
‘Well, I don’t need to be home for a while,’ Rob said. ‘Wife’s away with the kids. Got all night for an adventure. How about you, Dan?’
Danny said nothing, looked out into the blackness beyond the boat, wondered what was about to happen; knew that, whatever it was, he couldn’t stop it.
As they rounded the point, he watched the mopping up over at the beach. You couldn’t see the houses from this distance, only the lights on in some of them, but there was the fire barge, the helicopters overhead, the occasional shout just audible over their blades. They watched in silence as they made their way through the middle of the channel, past the island, towards the ocean. Kane tried to cry out from beneath the tape, but with the noise of the barge and the helicopters you couldn’t hear much.
‘Keep it down, kid,’ Alf said.
Rob laughed. ‘Who’s gonna hear him, with all that going on?’
The swell increased as they left the wide basin containing the island and the beach. Alf picked up speed, and soon it was too loud for anyone to speak. You could smell the sea, feel its waves surging into the land, a black line on the horizon. They began to lose contact with the water as they sped over bumps, and Kane’s body jumped and fell with each surge, letting out a brief moan on impact. Danny gripped the railing and sucked in the clean salty air beyond the smoke-filled basin of the river. His scalp prickled and he forgot briefly what he was doing here, about the body jumping and rolling at his feet.
Ahead of them, the rocky island loomed, black, silent. No lights, no houses. They passed an open bay; at its farthest end was the village Danny had walked to after he’d gone overboard on his father’s fishing boat. The swell grew bigger, and Alf hunkered over the wheel, watching the shape of the oncoming waves so he could hit them square. Danny grasped the handles now with both hands, while Kane banged about in the bottom of the boat, his hard, sinewy body knocking against their feet and knees.
Alf turned on his high beams. The island loomed over them, a wall of rock. We’re going to smash into it, Danny thought, staring at the face of stone glinting amid the gnarled scrub. But then the boat was in a tiny sandy bay, and they were ashore, the barge steady
, the world righting itself.
Danny and Rob jumped down onto the little beach and dragged the boat up. Then they climbed back in and took opposite ends of Kane. ‘What do you want to do with him, Dan?’ Rob said.
‘Put him down.’ They dumped him on the sand and stood around him. He was moaning, his eyes bulging, staring at Danny. Danny felt the man’s panic scrambling about his own body like confused blood. ‘Check his cut,’ Danny said.
Rob turned him over with his boot and shone a torch on his back. The towel Rose had tied around him was still there, dark at his hip. Danny peeled it away. The wound was wet and dark, but had stopped bleeding. He pushed him onto his side, took his fishing knife from his pocket with one hand and ripped the tape from Kane’s mouth with the other. The skin stuck, his lips turning white as it pulled away. Danny brought the knife down to Kane’s wrists. Kane stared at it as Danny cut the ropes away from his hands, then his feet.
‘Stand up,’ Danny said. Kane scrambled to his feet quickly, eyeing the knife. Danny handed it to Rob, and nodded back towards the boat. Rob put the torch on a rock, making a little pool of light that illuminated Danny and Kane to their waists, and he and Alf disappeared into the darkness.
The River Baptists Page 21
