Gravity

by Scot Gardner

  Scot Gardner lives with his wife and kids in the foothills of Victoria’s Strzelecki Ranges. He has a weird fascination for the dance hall music of the 1920s, the way snakes gloss after they’ve shed their skin, and telescopes. When he grows up, he’d like to be able to breathe under water.

  Also by Scot Gardner

  One Dead Seagull

  White Ute Dreaming

  Burning Eddy

  The Other Madonna

  The Legend of Kevin the Plumber

  First published 2006 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Scot Gardner 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  cataloguing-in-publication data:

  Gardner, Scot.

  Gravity.

  For young adults.

  ISBN 978 0 33042 198 0.

  ISBN 0 330 42198 0.

  I. Title.

  A823.4

  Typeset in 12/15 pt Minion by Midland Typesetters, Australia.

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group.

  M.C. Escher’s quote © 2006 The M.C. Escher Company-Holland.

  All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  These electronic editions published in 2006 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Gravity

  Scot Gardner

  Adobe eReader format 978-1-74197-183-5

  Microsoft Reader format 978-1-74197-384-6

  Mobipocket format 978-1-74197-585-7

  Online format 978-1-74197-786-8

  Epub format 978-1-74262-543-0

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Scot Gardner

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  For Robyn

  Acknowledgements

  Big thanks to the guides who helped me bring this story out of the wilderness – Julie Crisp and Anna McFarlane. Thanks to my wife, Robyn, for putting up with all the brooding and mania. Thanks to Jim Micah for the sawmill experiences. Thanks to my brothers, Shaun and Liam, for their stories large and small . . . from nuddy-runs to mountain cops. Thanks to Peter Clements for the insights into acquired brain injury. Thanks to Fiona Barry for the skilful ute driving and Pauleigh Gardiner for capturing the cover images. Thanks to Richard Kubisz and Myrine Hawksworth for the Escher quote, the woodwork and the love story.

  What pathetic slaves we turn out to be of gravity’s dominant power over everything on earth

  MC Escher

  One

  Win, lose or draw, there’s always Saturday night.

  It was a shit game. We won, thirty-two to eight, but I played like a dog. It would have been a different result if the boys from Eden Tigers had realised earlier in the game that I was a seriously weak link in the backline. Their two tries were give-aways that I gave away. Their lock mowed me down twice in the last ten minutes of the game. The line was broken and they scored but they couldn’t convert.

  My heart wasn’t in it.

  My heart was nowhere to be found.

  The boys were suitably fired up in the change room. We showered and blasted into the front bar of the Catalpa Arms to wild cheering and whistling. I had a smile on my face but it didn’t go any deeper than my lips. I’d nailed my mid-year exams and it was the first day of the school holidays but that didn’t seem to count. The boys were in fine form but their pissed cheer felt like cold hard rain. I drank rum. I drank a lot of rum but it didn’t seem to warm my bones, so I drank more. Bullant was slumped in one of the couches with his arm over Sandy Willis’s shoulders. Sandy’s smiling cheeks were red and I didn’t want to look at her. I didn’t want to see her small-town ugliness; her eyes cramped around her nose and her old-piano teeth. She was more like one of the blokes than one of the women. It was the lack of choices that allowed Bully to overlook her downy moustache and the aura of unwashed armpit that surrounded her. Bully had found the lack of shame that rides with six beers and if I pressed him, he’d give me his standard response: she was prettier than a sheep.

  And she wasn’t related.

  I didn’t want to be there. I thought about jumping in the ute and driving the two hours home to Splitters Creek, across the border into Victoria. I rested my elbows on the bar and stared at the dregs in my glass. I rubbed my temples and the noise around me got louder. I caught a whiff of the bar mat and I needed to spew. I needed to get all the rum and feelings of stuckness out of my guts. I was wedged in a family that was eating me alive. Stuck at a school I didn’t like, doing my last year of study so that I could fall into a job I loathed in a town I absolutely hated. I shoved my way towards the door. I slapped my hand over my mouth and the crowd who could see me magically parted.

  ‘Adam?’ Bully shouted. I could see him untangling from Sandy and levering himself off the couch. ‘You right, mate?’

  I nodded and my guts heaved. I made it to the footpath before the stuff erupted from between my fingers. Gripping a verandah post, I bent and emptied into the gutter. The pub door swung closed behind me, locking the racket in with it. The main street of Catalpa was empty and I heard my retching bounce off the lonely buildings and rattle into the night.

  Sound burst from the pub door as it opened. Bully was there with his hand on my back. ‘You spewing again, mate? What a waste of good Bundy.’

  I nodded and spat. I wiped my fingers on my jeans. ‘I’m going home.’

  He slapped my shoulder. ‘You’ll be right, mate.’

  ‘Do you want your swag?’

  ‘Come on, mate, it’s still early. You’ll be fine in a minute.’

  He stood there patting my back. I straightened and he stepped away.

  ‘See, you’re fine. Come in out of the cold, mate. I’ll get you some
thing to wash your mouth out.’

  I looked at his face. ‘Do you want your swag, or what?’

  He shook his head. ‘Why don’t you have a bit of a kip? You know, rehab. Half an hour and you’ll get your second wind.’

  I took the keys from my pocket.

  ‘How am I supposed to get home?’ Bully said.

  ‘You’ll work it out.’

  ‘What’s the matter, Adam? You’re going all freaky. What’s wrong?’

  A peal of laughter crept through the walls of the pub and the hard ball of indifference in my chest started to soften. ‘I don’t know. I’m just sick of it. Sick of everything.’

  Bully stood there in silence, nodding. In time, he rubbed the stubble on the side of his face. ‘Leave my swag, bro. Just chuck it in Thommo’s ute. I’ll find my own way home.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Nah, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it,’ he said, and crossed his arms. ‘I’ll catch up with you tomorrow. Go.’

  He slapped the cap off my head and it span into the gutter, narrowly missing the freckled puddle of spew. I dived on it and misjudged my step. I stumbled into the middle of the road and Bully chuckled.

  ‘You shouldn’t be fucking walking, let alone driving,’ he said.

  I smiled then, carefully collected my hat and walked beside the pub to where my ute was parked. Thommo’s blue XR8 was parked three doors down and I offloaded Bully’s swag into the back. Well, it looked like Thommo’s ute. He’d work it out.

  I felt a bit wide-eyed on the trip home. With the heater and the lights and the radio on high and the window down, I drove as fast as my rubbery rum-head would let me go.

  I was about thirty k’s from Splitters Creek when I dozed off. The wheels hacked on the gravel at the edge of the road and it woke me. I corrected hard. Too hard. I took out a white post with the back wheel, slammed on the skids and came to a shuddering halt across the middle of the tar. My fingers tingled and I breathed in but I couldn’t breathe out. The air snagged in my throat and my fingers clenched and unclenched on the wheel. The car had stalled and the red lights stared at me from the dash.

  I eventually had to exhale.

  ‘Fuuuuuck.’

  Yeah, I’d survived. If I was asleep before, I was certainly awake after. More awake than I’d ever been. My skin twitched like a rabbit caught in a ferreting net. My heart drummed a pulse into my breath.

  I turned the key and drove off, swearing at myself. Fucken idiot. How did I let myself get so tired and still be driving? Never again. Next time I might not be so lucky. Next time my car could end up bloody and mangled like Simon’s Cortina. There was never going to be a next time.

  But there was.

  The adrenaline hit from my near miss had faded.

  I was three k’s from home when the ute left the road.

  Two

  I woke in the shallow light of dawn on Sunday morning with blood still sticky on my lips. My cap had fallen onto the seat beside me and the P plate was in the foot well. I felt no real pain. My nose had bled and dripped a neat Southern Cross on the front of my shirt. Other than the blood in my mouth and on my shirt, everything in the ute seemed normal. No bones poking out, no mangled steel or little cubes of windscreen. My breath made clouds and the windows were fogged. My back ached. My fingers and toes stung with cold but they were all things that I knew. They were typical Adam-sleeping-in-the-car experiences. It was the angle of the car that concerned me. I was reclined in my seat as though I was an astronaut ready for launch. The headlights – if the battery hadn’t died during the night – seemed to be pointing to the heavens.

  It was then that the realisation of what had happened cut through my foggy thoughts and made my breath ragged. I was obviously alive and for the most part unharmed but somewhere on the drive home from Catalpa, my old ute had had to fend for itself.

  I rubbed a spot on the window and saw pasture rolling away at a dicky angle below me. I undid my seatbelt and pushed at the door. It clunked on the hinge and groaned. It wanted to close and I propped it open with my knee. I fell from the pilot’s position onto my hands and knees in the wet and ice-crusted grass, my shoulder coming to rest against a ring-lock wire fence. The door snibbed above me. I used the fence as a crutch and got to my feet.

  None of the wheels were touching the ground. The ute had left the road on auto-pilot, become airborne off the shoulder and come to rest on top of a stringybark strainer post in the corner of a paddock. In the half-light there was no obvious damage to the fence but the post had busted something and oil had dribbled like black blood over the strainer. The rear end rested on the bumper. The towbar had cut a short furrow in the rough grass of the verge. The surface of the road was two metres higher than where the ute had landed. I couldn’t see the road from where I stood, with my hands on my hips.

  ‘Fuuuuuck.’

  I grabbed my hair and wished I wasn’t me. I had swerved to avoid a wombat, that’s what I’d tell them. No, a wallaby. There was something wrong with the steering and I swerved to miss a wallaby and lost control. I huffed into my hand and tried to sniff my breath. It was vomit-sour and I could still smell grog. Rum-loaded Coke.

  I heard a pinging diesel engine at a distance. I held my breath and could hear it getting closer. I knew I’d have to get my story straight in my head or I’d be rooted. Wallaby. What about skid marks? If I’d swerved to miss a wallaby there’d be skid marks on the road. I ran up the verge and I knew where I was. Bullant and I had jogged past there on a hundred Sunday training runs. My ute was parked on Kent’s fence-post. I’d left the road on probably the straightest section between Catalpa and Splitters Creek. There were no skid marks and there was nowhere for a wallaby to hide. I could see a patch of scrub a few k’s closer to town but where I’d stacked there was no cover. Wallabys stay close to the scrub.

  I could see the tractor crawling up the valley below me. A green and gold John Deere with a bucket on the front and a plastic roof attached to the roll bars. It was Chris Kent’s tractor and he was hugging the fence that came to a corner underneath my ute.

  I checked my clothes then felt the crusty blood in the stubble on my top lip. I’d go for the sympathy vote. I jogged down the hill to the ute, rested a hand on the fence as if to steady myself and rubbed my forehead. I kept rubbing my head until Chris Kent arrived and parked the tractor. The hand brake rasped. He left the engine idling, skipped down from the cab and across to where I stood.

  ‘G’day, Adam, you right mate? What happened? You okay?’

  ‘I . . . it was . . .’ I puffed. The diesel exhaust turned my breath into clouds.

  ‘Do you want me to ring your dad? Do you need an ambulance?’

  ‘No! No, it’s fine. I’m fine. I must have got a blood nose when I was knocked out but I’m fine now.’

  He nodded and looked at the ute. ‘Nice parking. What happened?’

  ‘It was . . . it . . . a fucken wombat ran out onto the road. I tried to miss it and . . . I don’t know . . . maybe there was something wrong with the steering. I tried to correct, started skidding and left the road. That’s all I remember.’

  Chris had his hands on his hips. He looked me up and down. ‘Wombat? Jeez, you were unlucky, mate. Haven’t seen a wombat here for years.’

  A nervous laugh tumbled from my lips before I had a chance to censor it. ‘Yeah, that would be right.’

  ‘My boys used them for target practice. Shot hundreds of the bastards. I suppose it was only a matter of time before they moved back in again.’

  ‘Yeah, bastards.’

  Chris crouched and looked at the underneath of the ute. ‘Post has sheared the sump plug off. You were bloody lucky. You won’t be driving it, though. Do you want to do any work on it while it’s up on the post? I can give you a hand to get it down if you like.’

  I laughed, but Chris didn’t smile. He’d probably used a strainer post as a hoist before. Sometimes, in Splitters Creek, you have to improvise.

  ‘I probably should have
a go at getting it down before it falls down,’ I said.

  Chris pushed on the door. The ute was rock steady.

  ‘I reckon, if I bring the loader up here, I’ll be able to slip a chain through the chassis and make it safe so we can undo the fence wire. We take one of those cross braces out and I’ll probably be able to lower it beside the post. I’ve got a long chain there. Probably drag it up onto the road for you if you want. What do you reckon?’

  What did I reckon? Chris Kent gave me the impression that he could get the car on the road again with a length of baling twine and a piece of chewing gum. ‘Sounds like a plan,’ I said.

  I climbed under the ute. I undid the wire. I ripped out the cross brace. Kent sat in the tractor and eventually shunted the ute to the side and lowered its wheels onto the ground. He unhitched the chain and took off through the paddock on the tractor. He dragged a metal gate open and drove onto the road. I was elbow-deep in the wet grass, looping Chris’s long chain onto the tow ball, when I heard a car crunch onto the roadside behind me.

  Cappo. Cappo in the big police four-wheel drive.

  I dropped the chain and cracked my knuckles on the bumper.

  Cappo got out of the car. He just looked like normal old Cappo for a minute. His uniform looked like any old work shirt from where I was. As he stepped past the bull bar on the patrol car and slipped his wide-brimmed hat on, I knew I was in deep shit.

  ‘G’day, Adam,’ he said. His tone was friendly but I knew I was fucked. ‘Do you want a hand, mate?’

  ‘Yeah, nah. It’s fine, Cappo,’ I said. I picked up the chain and dropped it on my foot. It hurt like hell but I didn’t make a sound.

  Cappo kept coming.

  I busied myself with the chain and almost crawled right under the ute, trying to hide my rum-breath.

  Cappo crouched beside me. I smiled but he was looking at the chain. ‘Give us a go. I’ll show you a trick,’ he said.