White Knuckle Ride

by Alan Carter

  Harry examined, and Sally listed, the various wounds, mainly teeth-marks and tears. With the sandwich out of the way, Sally hopped off her stool and took some photographs.

  Dr Lewis held the pale arm up, quite gently. ‘Pity about the missing hand; it might have had a wedding finger, something to help us along. No such luck.’

  As far as he could tell, the missing hand, right arm, and legs were probably the work of sharks. Lewis turned his attention to the neck, dragging down the magnifier on its extension arm.

  ‘The neck hasn’t been snapped like you might expect from the wrenching movement of a shark’s jaw. It has been cut, or more likely sawn, perhaps with a chainsaw? A handsaw would be a lot of effort and leave more jagged markings on the bone. Not exactly my specialty but we’ll get it looked at in Perth.’

  Cato certainly agreed with the ‘handsaw effort’ part. Was it only that morning they’d been decapitating a cow in Katanning?

  Lewis continued. ‘So my observant friend, Dr Terhorst, would appear to be on the ball. Speaking of which, I thought he might have been with us tonight?’

  He looked around the room as if Terhorst might have been hiding somewhere.

  Tess looked up from writing her own notes. ‘He was booked to give a talk at the Hopey Wine Club tonight. He gave his apologies, said he’d call you tomorrow.’

  ‘A wine buff too. A man of many talents, our Dr Terhorst,’ Lewis said, a touch insincerely. He made the ‘Y’ incision and opened the body up. Tess went pale. Cato made himself keep watching; it wasn’t his first time, by any means, but it had been a while. Buckley was concentrating on Sally’s calf muscles, oblivious to the carnage on the steel trolley. Lewis lifted the lungs out. Cato could see where the wiry muscularity came from. A few lung lifts every day would keep anyone in good shape.

  ‘The lung contents rule out death by drowning,’ Lewis confirmed.

  He examined them further, probing with his scalpel, humming softly to himself. Cato tried to place the tune: it might have been a bit of Puccini, or Shirley Bassey. Finally Lewis glanced at Cato.

  ‘I would say your friend was definitely dead before he went into the water.’

  Cato and Tess shared a look; it seemed he was going to be around for a while longer. Lewis plucked out and squeezed what appeared to be a blood-soaked semi-deflated balloon into a plastic container. Stomach contents: pretty empty, but there were indications of rice and chicken in there. Blood, skin and tissue samples would be taken for further testing but Cato had seen enough for now. His neck prickled with something approaching excitement.

  ‘Are you saying this is a murder, Dr Lewis?’

  ‘Possibly; that’s your job not mine. There could be any number of reasons for what we see here: accident, panic, cover-up, foul play. Anyway …’ he tapped Flipper’s neck lightly with his scalpel and looked Cato straight in the eye, ‘it’s definitely a bit fishy.’

  (From Prime Cut, a novel, 2011.)

  GOLDIE GOLDBLOOM

  THE ROAD TO KATHERINE

  When I was five, my father dropped me off the second floor balcony of our house in Darlington. Now, I don’t want you to go thinking this is one of those fake-oh made-up stories where Satan is a guy in a turban who has a thing about chopping off ladies’ heads. No mate. This is God’s own truth. Bloody straight up. When Satan appears in this story, he looks a hell of a lot like my dad: a bog-standard ocker in a singlet, with his gut hanging out, and no Y-fronts under his shorts.

  I’ve never been sure if my dad dropped me on purpose. If he said, ‘You’re a hell of a kid, Care,’ before or after he let go of my legs. I can’t tell if he was a total bastard or just a dad who’d been listening to his little girl do a dummy spit for a couple of hours too long, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever really know. Either way, dropping me got Mum’s attention.

  She came blaring out of the house, hurdled the pool and was yanking my arms and legs to see if they hurt before Dad had stopped saying, ‘Why’d she do a stupid thing like that?’

  ‘Pull your finger out,’ Mum called up to him, ‘she’s probably broken.’

  She may have said this because my two front teeth were jutting through my lower lip in a way that looked unnatural.

  ‘Call the doc,’ she yelled, beer-tasting spit spraying my face.

  ‘Why’d she jump?’ he shouted back, with the concerned look of a Saint Bernard.

  ‘He dropped you,’ she hissed at me. ‘He dropped you. He dropped you. Whatever he says, remember: he dropped you.’

  I used to have these wicked dreams about falling.

  In one version, I’d be wearing me dad’s army coat, a scratchy greygreen thing with live bullets rattling round in the pockets, and as I jumped, the coat ballooned out like an umbrella opening — phwoop — and I’d float gently down like Mary Bloody Poppins. In another version, I was a Great White, swimming in a hot blue sea, and I rocked up to take a munch outta this dirty old man with mould growing down his back, only the fella turns into the bit of backyard I buried me head in and I’ve got double gees, the world’s worst prickers, stuck right between me teeth. But the dream I’d wake up from, ice water in me veins and the echoes of screams still bouncing round the room, was the one where Dad was yelling at me not to be a sook. He had his paws around me ankles and he was shaking me over the railing like a bit of shark bait, waggling me around so the twin streamers of snot running out me conk don’t end up on his person and he’s saying he’ll educate me not to be afraid of heights, he doesn’t want any kids of his to be bloody pansies, and right then my hand almost touches him but instead grabs the railing, and a great string of me snot splats on his leg and he gets a sick look on his face that I just see out the corner of me eye as I feel his hands opening and myself hitting the edge of the concrete balcony with the side of me head, but I’m not stopping. Oh no. Not stopping there.

  You’d think watching your kid take a dive off a balcony at an early age would be the kind of thing that permanently turns a man off his drink, but it was water off a duck’s back with me dad. When he didn’t make it home, Mum took me down to the pub and sent me in. She herself chatted with the other wifies out on the kerb. If he was blotto, he stood me up on the bar and called for bids. ‘This kid’s tough as nails. Jumped off the second floor balcony and bounced. What’ll you give me for her?’ he’d say, turning me around and punching my arms. The blokes at the bar reached out and pinched me bum, squeezed me muscles and handed me half-sucked butterscotch lollies covered in fluff from their pockets. ‘Slave for a day?’ they asked. ‘Give youse a quid.’ Me dad would snatch me off the bar, complaining, ‘Bloody cheapskates. Mob of larrikins. This girl’s a flamin’ miracle. Not a mark on her. Catholic yahoos in Rome are lookin’ into it. Yer can’t buy something like that for a quid.’ I hated the way me dad turned me around just as he said, ‘Not a mark on her,’ so that the jagged scar over me lip didn’t show and I hated that bar and them stained-glass windows like it was a holy place, a place where you could get your sins forgiven or at least forgotten, the bartender the priest at the altar, mixing the holy spirits, and the chiming of the pint glasses the mystery, the church bells, the transformation, God help us.

  I would have settled for a dad who held my hand and skipped on the way home, clicking his heels in mid-air and singing Monty Python tunes in a voice as milky and demanding as a calf’s. He did all that, but the words he sang were the names of places he loved, those tin shanties beside rivers of red dirt, giant tingle trees’ warm black boles filled with duff and ants and the smell of the sky, hot silver sea boiling over on a beach hidden inside the very land itself: Dumbleyung, Kojonup, Dalwallinu, Cascade, Bungle Bungle, Butty Head, Coal Miners Bay, Thirsty Point, Tittybong, Goomalling, Wave Rock, the Houtman Abrolhos; all stuff to serenade his little girl with on the way home from the pub, unaccompanied by banjo or bagpipes or anything but the snorts of his wife and his own tapping Blunnies. I would have written him off but he was too bloody likeable.

  And there came a day when M
um and Dad were having a booze-up with the relatives and they — being more than half-pissed — thought it would be educational to take us kids around Australia. Of course, my dad was big on anything educational although he hadn’t learned a whole lot from the last time he thought he’d teach me something. We — the kids who needed educating — were out on the balcony in our underpants and singlets, lolling about under the mosquito nets, sweating and playing Cheat by flashlight. What we thought was educational was turning leeches inside out down by the creek out the back of our place, and lining them up like burnt-out grey matches on the stones that edged the water. Or pinning beetles down over bull ant nests. Cripes, you could learn a lot from the way them buggers fought to stay alive.

  But the grownups thought we were stunned mullets, stupid as all get-out, and that it would take a fair bit of educating to make us solid citizens, so, bright and early they loaded up the trucks and turfed us in the back. By us, I mean me and me brothers, Fred and Bill, and me half-arsed cousins, Chaz, Baz, and Flox.

  Right off, I started whingeing that I wanted breakfast and me dad came back and started laying about with his belt. It was hard not to laugh, he was that predictable. The mums went in one ute, and the dads went in the other truck and there was a mad scramble when us kids realised this, all scrambling for the ute where the mums were because they had the fizzy drinks.

  Dad had rigged up a tarp from each roll bar to the tailgates of the utes, half a tent where we could sleep or talk or play cards, no worries about getting sunbit. I sat on the round dooverlackie over the tyres. I was royalty. Me brother Fred lounged against the tailgate, which was typically lacklustre of him, because the latch was stuffed and it snapped open on the bumps and a year ago he’d done a belly flop onto the bitumen. Ended up with a broken collarbone. Dad knocked him around a fair bit, called him a daggy little queen, and hauled him off to shoot twenty-eights and kangaroos, without getting Fred to say more than, ‘Lotta blood in them parrots, i’nt there?’ Dad fair wet himself when he found out Fred had a stamp collection. A stamp collection, for God’s sake. Fred may as well have painted a target on hisself.

  Chaz was older than me, but she was albino and had glasses and a face like a festered pickle. Baz was a boy, a point he didn’t hesitate to prove, although he didn’t have all that much proof at the time. Little bugger couldn’t have pulled a greasy stick out of a dead dog’s bum. He was a prawn. Honest. And Flox was the only living brain donor in our neck of the woods. So I was the boss cocky amongst the cousins and the best at Cheat and the best at Liar and the best at Greed and everyone had to give me all their green snakes when the mums stopped at the Billabong Roadhouse and bought us lollies. The dads stopped too but they didn’t buy any lollies. They were strict beer boozers.

  It was at Billabong that I started thinking it would be ace if I could get half the kids over in the back of the dads’ ute, because then I could stretch out, maybe even take a kip in one of the sleeping bags and, since we’d gotten up at four, this seemed like an excellent plan. I went to me mum and whined that Flox smelled like wee and so did Fred, and Chaz was too yucky to look at, with her specs and red eyes and ghost skin, and I wanted them all out. It would be better anyway because then the mums wouldn’t have to watch as many anklebiters. Her eyes lit up at that, and I knew that the dads were about to become the proud new owners of a litter of mongrel puppies. She might not have been so keen on the idea if she’d seen Dad stuffing a carton of Swan Lager down next to his seat.

  So I suppose it was really me own stupid fault what happened next.

  It was hot as blazes and all you could see of the educational bloody bush was an orange-red blur whipping by in the triangles at the sides of the tarp. The wind came dry and mentholated, full of bushflies and the screams of cockatoos and the feathers of the twenty-eights that’d smashed on the roo bar. A hessian bag full of water hung at the tailgate and squelched as it slopped around like me dad’s own belly. We’d been told that the wind cooled the water, which was bogus — it tasted like muddy tea — and we spent a lot of time spitting it at each other through our front teeth, which was fairly amusing, and then, when there was none left, drumming on the cab window, yowling about being thirsty.

  ‘Me tongue’s stuck to the roof of me bleedin’ mouf.’

  ‘I’m as dry as a dead dingo’s donger.’

  But the mums didn’t pull over until Baz howled, ‘I gotta poo. Mum! It’s coming out in me daks! Mum!’

  We’d just blown past the Nanuturra Roadhouse, not stopping, mainly because of the crabs Dad had picked up there a couple of years back. Mum says they weren’t the edible kind, which makes sense, that far from the ocean. So Baz got pretty stinky before we pulled in at the Nerren Nerren water tanks. The station owners still hadn’t twigged that tourists and truckies regularly helped themselves to their water. This far north, water was gold, diamonds and tiger meat.

  Mum chucked a roll of toilet paper under the tarp, took a peek at the flyfest on Baz, and told us to get going. She told Baz to make sure to polish his date till it shone. I smacked aside the other contenders, grabbed the bum hankies and took off into the bush. It was a bloody hot day, the sky gone runny near the horizon. A goanna toasted himself over the sizzling red sand, his tongue moving slowly in and out of his mouth like a shellacked earthworm and smoke curling off his hide. Flies fell out of the sky and lay buzzing on the ground with heatstroke. I crawled under a bit of scrub and listened to the others spazzing about the lack of toilet paper. Baz, particularly, was doing a nutter. I kid you not. It was excellent, from my point of view, and I was a happy little Vegemite until I heard the utes start up.

  ‘Oi!’ I yelled, standing up, but the flippin’ tank stand was in between me and the utes and they couldn’t see me.

  ‘Hang on!’

  No one looked my way. Under the tarps, the ferals tumbled and screamed and threw cards at one another: the ace of clubs cartwheeled out and snagged on a grevillea. The utes skidded onto the track and a curtain of red dust rose behind them. I heard Dad’s faint shout over the tin bucket clanking of the engines, ‘Shut your gobs, youse lot!’ The utes didn’t stop.

  I ran into the middle of the corrugated road, staring at the stakes that marked every half-mile in a straight line off to forever, and at the cloud that followed the utes and my family.

  Every year, tourists die on this road. They’d be found a couple of miles from their cars, legs swollen from the lack of water, their pelts hanging in tattered red strips and they’d be eyeless. Parrots love eyes. We always carried extra jerry cans of water and petrol because the distance between roadhouses was just a bit more than one tank of juice could take you. There weren’t any signs warning you about this all-important fact. The locals barely cracked a smile when foreigners in Range Rovers said to fill ’er up. Later, they’d mention that another one of those slack Pommies had carked it on up the road to Katherine, silly buggers, and no one would be surprised. No one would laugh, but they’d want to. By God, they’d want to.

  I walked back to the tank stand and drank tinny yellow bore water straight from the tap before counting geckoes and termite castles and how many handfuls of the hot red dirt it took to cover my leg. Even though things were moving in there — slick, slick, slick — I buried my other leg, and then my belly, my bum and one arm. At least it kept the sun off. The stinky socks were blooming, so I picked one and, holding my nose, ate it. A snakeessed across the road and tasted the damp earth under the tap. It was a king brown. They have huge black eyes and a splotch of black on their heads and my dad told me they are twelve times more poisonous than a cobra: if a king brown chomps your ankle, within five minutes you start vomiting green stuff, your gums turn purple and your heart explodes. Nice. The males are so crazy they’ll hump she-snakes that were squished on the road days before.

  The king brown looked in my direction and stuck out its tongue to taste the smell that was rolling off me. I saw a man like that once, in the Freo Markets; his tongue was split in two, and he c
ould make each side move by itself. It gave me bad dreams. I wasn’t afraid of the king brown though, because it wouldn’t bother me unless I stepped on its tail, or ate its babies, or tried to bash in its head.

  I thought that Mum and Dad would get to Carnarvon and figure out they’d left me back the track a-ways. Mum would say it was Dad who’d left me behind. Dad would say she was a dog’s breakfast, and besides, she’s the mum, the one who is supposed to count the kids and wipe their bums and such. Mum would tell the cops and Dad would tell the whole story down at the local pub while they waited for a truckie to bring me in. That’s what I thought would happen.

  Now, if I was telling you a made-up story, this is where the little lost princess would be rescued by the handsome sultan. But since I’m telling you God’s own truth, I have to say that I was knackered and I fell asleep and while I was sleeping, a man driving a cement mixer pulled in to fill his water bottles with stolen water, and I woke up because I heard him calling, ‘Is anyone here?’

  Who he thought was hanging out at these godforsaken water tanks, I don’t know. But deadset, that’s what he was saying, so I stood up and said, ‘Yeah. Me.’

  ‘Shite, girlie. What you doing out here, all by yourself?’ he said, scratching his armpits, right and left, with a sound like sandpaper on a block of wood. He was dressed like my dad — singlet, shorts and desert boots — but, unlike Dad, who was stunted and hairy, this bloke was tall and bald, much older, and his clothes didn’t have things growing on them. He had two tiny gold hoops in one ear like Sinbad.

  ‘Me mum and dad forgot me here, I reckon.’

  ‘Bloody sods. When did that happen?’

  ‘Lunchtime about,’ I said, but I was already cheesed with him for calling Mum and Dad names.

  The sun lay squashed near the edge of the sky and the man — Scurry, he was called — offered me a cold sausage with creamy grease on its side and a bite missing.