by Carmody, Sam
He found a satellite image of central Western Australia. Hovered over Stark. Scanned the coast as if he might see a figure walking on some remote beach. Knew it was pointless, but he kept looking anyway.
Out the study window was the fading night. The suburb emerging in colourless, cubist forms. Huge windows opaque in the low light. He heard the flickering of sprinklers, watched them misting over lawns as flat as carpet. At the end of Eileen Street the sea off Cottesloe was still and grey. He saw the weakening flash of the one-mile reef markers. The tourist island beyond them, a thin line on the horizon.
He heard his alarm go down the hallway in his bedroom. Six am. The dairy shift at the supermarket started in an hour. Paul turned back to the screen and the pixelated coast of Stark, the dark ocean to the west and the brownish desert stretching endlessly east and out of view. He switched the computer off.
The President said to me that a man knows most about himself when he’s got his eye through the scope of his rifle. Glassing over the torso of another man at nine hundred metres. The world all distant and shimmering and silent. That’s when he learns the things about himself that he is connected to. The things he can live with. The President said he learnt all of his lessons through the scope of a Parker-Hale .308 in Vietnam. And I imagine that big sweating face of his against the stock. Sprawled out with his balls steeped in the jungle mud and his cheeks rippling with each gunshot and I see him learning and I often wonder what. But I don’t doubt that he did learn something. You don’t become the president of anything without some sort of education. The President said it’s a fact this country was born in battle and it’s not the first time I’ve heard that, but no one could tell a war story like him. All wide-eyed fishermen and farm fellas stumbling seasick over tidal flats into Turkish rifle fire. Wading through bloodied trenches in French wheat fields. And I wonder what sort of country is born in all that and I wonder the effect it has on fellas. If it explains anything about the way they are. The things they say and the things they don’t. The sounds that come out of them when they sleep. Cos I’ve held a gun in my hands and I’ve just shot a man dead. I don’t know what all of this has done to me or what I have learnt and it’s probably for someone else to judge. So I’ll tell you all this from the beginning. The way we came through the heart of everything. Tell you how it got here.
Victim or criminal
THE POLICE FILED THE MISSING PERSON’S report a week after the officer came to the house. It didn’t make the television news but Paul found a piece in The West Australian, a photo and article taken word for word from the press release. The local newspaper also ran an article, again with the same text but this time with a headline in bold type. COTTESLOE MAN MISSING. The word ‘man’ felt off. Every time it was used, by the police or in the news, it felt like they were getting something wrong, talking about the wrong person. Paul always saw Elliot as older but ‘man’ seemed inaccurate for a twenty-year-old. It was as if they were all missing an important point, getting further from the truth of what might have happened to him, or that they were never close.
A letter arrived to inform them that Elliot’s profile had been uploaded on to the national Missing Persons website, and Paul began to visit the site often. He stared at Elliot’s face amid the collection of profile photographs as odd and unrelated as the items that wash up in a storm. Old photographs and new ones. Elderly faces and then younger ones like his brother’s. The faces of children. There were photos that had been taken by family or friends, faces smiling warmly back at the camera, children laughing. Others looked like driver’s licence photographs, or police mug shots, the expressions in them steely or panicked, as though the person was already lost or in danger, like they could see their future coming.
Elliot’s expression in his photograph was typical of him. Smiling politely but as though he was bracing himself, holding out for the camera to leave him. His smile was tight, fading before it had even started. His brow furrowed. Paul knew that the photographer, most likely his mother, would have been laughing while the picture was taken, the laugh of someone revelling in stealing something. Everyone in the room would have enjoyed his discomfort.
When he clicked on Elliot’s name a new page opened with a larger photograph of his brother and a short statement.
Elliot Darling. 20. Perth, Western Australia. Mr Darling last seen driving north of Stark, Western Australia, Wednesday, 17 August.
He read those nineteen words over and over, as if staring hard enough at them might jar some secret loose. He was struck by the economy of them, the things they didn’t say. On other profiles of missing people, those of young women and children, that short description would conclude with a muted statement that implied the worst. Concerns are held for Ms Robert’s safety. But his brother’s profile didn’t say this. Why weren’t concerns held for him too? The officer who filed the report, or the administrative employee who added his profile to the database, where did they imagine Elliot might be?
In the first month, relatives and family friends visited the house. Paul would sit on the lounge and listen to them wade through conversations with his parents, as if in an interview. He had listened to Brian Guff, an elderly neighbour, assure his father that the coppers are right, the boy will be fine.
Father Walsh from the local parish came and spoke to them, invited by their grandmother. The old priest looked pale and shrunken sitting on the electric leather recliner in their living room, his skin grey, eyes dull. Father Walsh told him that if Elliot was lost it was Christ who would find him. If the Bible was about anything, the old priest explained, it was about the lost being found. Jesus, Jonah, Lazarus, they were all thrust into the dark, he said, cast into a desert or the belly of a whale or even to death itself, and then were saved, returned into light. A Catholic must have belief in life after death, Father Walsh said. Of being lost and then found.
Paul had watched his grandmother cry and had seen his mother’s face hardening at the sound of it. He charted that anger in her face, how it grew like bad weather, settling in. His mother’s eyes had become permanently widened, alert. She had the look of a cat in a moving car, simultaneously vulnerable and dangerous. And it warded people off. They stopped visiting, and before a month was out the only people who called were telemarketers.
Where his mother had hardened, his father just stayed the same as he had always been. He rarely spoke about Elliot, and when he did it seemed forced, as if he understood he needed to make some contribution to the topic. It was the tone that someone used when musing on some minor complication, as if he were talking about the printer in his study running out of ink.
Paul often had the feeling he had just missed his brother, as if Elliot had been sitting in the same train car or walking along the same footpath, or had been in the same store, but moments before. Elliot felt close and far away. Alive and dead. Paul knew his mother lived with the same sensation. He could see it in her face when in the shops with her or when they were driving on the freeway together.
At night the three of them would sit around the dinner table in silence, which was not so strange. They had never been big talkers, and Elliot hadn’t eaten with them for years. He was away so often. Even when he was home he would choose to stay in his room. After a day of people asking after Elliot, wanting to hear about the latest sighting or theory, there was relief in not talking. He understood that. Still, there were things Paul wanted to ask his parents. There was so much to say. But even if he had the words he knew his father wouldn’t have wanted to hear them. It was just the way he was. Maybe it was the way he was, too.
Only once or twice did Paul have the feeling that he had actually seen his brother, and it was never a person who caused the confusion, but the car they were driving. He became aware of just how many four-wheel drives of the same make and model as his brother’s were on the road. There were ’94 Pajeros everywhere. Wherever he went, he was searching for that car, searching for Elliot.
They were surrounded by him and without him
. They lived with a ghost, and people began to treat them warily. At the supermarket Paul gained a temporary celebrity. At the checkout children frowned at him and their parents shuffled them through, like he carried a contagion.
But missing was different to ill. It was different to having cancer, or to being killed in a car accident. There was a kind of queerness to it, he understood that. It was odd. Sordid. One afternoon, Bec called him out to the delivery yard and told him she was there to help. She knew what it was like to be alone, her husband away on the mines. Even with the sun blanching her glasses he could see her glancing at his crotch as she told him this.
He understood how others felt; he found himself making the same sort of judgements when he looked at the faces on the Missing Persons site. Who disappears? It seemed voluntary; or, if something bad had happened, it was as if the person in the photograph had in some way contributed to it. They had chosen to go off the map.
At the beginning of November, after a second month had passed, Paul decided to leave. He could get a job in Stark on the cray boat with his older cousin Jake, his mother’s sister’s son, in the family business, just as Elliot had done.
He expected some resistance from his parents. He thought it might come off as perverse, like he was ghosting Elliot, treading over the same ground. If he was honest with himself, it was precisely what he was doing. Stark was Elliot’s. It was where his girlfriend, Tess, lived. Where he had lived a whole life that Paul knew nothing about; a life that Elliot had been careful not to share. When Paul thought about Stark he had the same precarious feeling as he did when he would sneak into Elliot’s bedroom and rummage through his things. A hollowing excitement, like digging around on the internet. The fear of what you might find, the seductive dread of finding more than you might have been searching for.
But what about his parents? How could he leave them? Yet when he told them his intentions, they seemed strangely resigned. His father just nodded obediently and his mother, if anything, thought it would be good for him to leave, to get away from everything. She would arrange for Aunty Ruth to drive down to collect him.
She had said that if there was anything she could do to help I only had to ask, his mother told him one bright afternoon in the backyard while washing the dog, strong wind in her curled dark hair, crouched with a hose to the terrier with one hand in its collar.
I can take the bus, Paul replied.
I’m not putting you on the bus.
You don’t need to put me on anything. I’m buying my own ticket.
Ringo trembled under the hose, legs braced as if the ground was moving.
My sister wants to help.
Aunty Ruth hates me.
She’s been through a bit, Paul. With Jake. And now your brother.
I’d rather walk.
Well, it’d take you three weeks and you’d probably die.
I’d rather die.
Don’t be stagey, Paul.
The dog looked slowly up at him when the hose reached the top of its head, gave Paul an assaulted expression.
Six hours shooting the breeze with Ruth? I would rather die, Mum.
His mother looked up at him once, grimacing with the sun in her eyes. She wiped soap-foam from her cheek with the back of her hand. Just let your aunty help, she said. I’ll call this evening.
The dairy manager, Trev, asked Paul on his last shift at the supermarket if Elliot did drugs. Trev cackled with Bec in the storeroom at the idea of Elliot swallowing condoms of ice, and the two of them mused out loud on how stomach acids might cause one to burst. If it would hurt to die that way or if it would feel good. Like being strapped to a rocket. An awesome, overheated trajectory towards death.
A victim or a criminal. Elliot was one or the other, and both titles had darkness about them. He could sense it in the way customers looked at him. Amused more than sympathetic. Disdainful, even. A young man twenty years old. He doesn’t get killed, he gets himself killed. He lingers too long around danger, the wrong crowd. Everyone was thinking it.
Or perhaps no one thought that. Perhaps they were his thoughts.
The President is asleep when one of the general’s phones sets off. Organised Crime Squad hit the North Bondi mansion four suburbs away from our hideout. Not ten kilometres up the coast. Two men shot and one more who gets on the phone gutshot and groaning but spits the words out before the phone is taken off him.
When I take off up the floating staircase and wake the President he doesn’t look surprised that his men have been killed or taken or that we have to go. Like he knew it would work out this way.
So we strip the old townhouse in Maroubra in the hours before midnight. Four of us. Me. The President. The two old generals. I load the dirt bikes with auxiliary fuel tanks. Pack the rifle and ammo in the cricket bag.
The generals douse the floorboards and the attic space with petrol while the President and I wait a few streets away with the bikes. Can see the glowing heat in the dark and the smoke. In seconds the fire climbs up off the roof into the jacarandas, flames jumping in the storm-wind. We set off quiet into the freezing night and don’t hear sirens. In hours Sydney will be loud with them.
I’d always figured it weird for a bikie group to own a mansion perched on the cliffs over the Pacific. All marine-grade steel and huge windows sparkling each day under the sun like a disco ball. But I see as we weave through the narrow streets and when I look at the President riding with his eyes on the road and not once looking back that the mansion in Bondi was a decoy. A big-arsed Trojan beast that the cops would sniff out first and trip the alarm. It’s obvious then.
We stay off Parramatta Road as we go west through the city, suburb by suburb. Surry Hills and Camperdown. Homebush.
I wonder what the President is thinking. He doesn’t say a word, but I’m sure at each corner we’ll see flashing lights or receive bullets out of the roadside dark and I’ve no doubt the President is thinking about ambushes too. From the police or anyone else. But there is no ambush or roadblock and no sniper fire and by the time we reach Kurrajong and the foot of the mountains it’s almost light.
A spectator enthralled
FROM THE ROADHOUSE WINDOWS PAUL could see the long, crawling line of vehicles. Surfboards on car roofs. Camper trailers. A Greyhound coach sat heavy on its wheels, inching forward in awkward, convulsive movements. He could make out the faces, their listless expressions within each window frame of the bus, a wall of tortured portraits. Paul and his aunty had been going along like that for almost an hour, the traffic slowed by the unknown trouble ahead, before they pulled into the servo south of Dongara. Ruth said she needed to take a piss. Paul was grateful to get out of the car. It had been a long drive.
A man and his daughter stood at the counter in front of him. The girl swivelled impatiently on her ankles, one hand behind her father’s knee, forehead creased. The man swung a thick arm around his back and fished in his shorts pocket while the other balanced Kit Kats and iced-coffee cartons on the ledge of his stomach. A wiry man with neat grey hair stood straight-backed at the till. He was staring out at the traffic.
Crash? the customer asked, bending his knees as he lowered his bounty onto the counter.
Head on, the older man said.
That’s the diesel too, the customer said.
The girl glared at Paul. She had a pink, shining stain around her lips and on her cheeks and he could smell the cloying scent of sugar and saliva.
Had some people stop in here a moment ago, the man at the till said. They came from the other way, seen the thing not long after it happened. Was a mess, they reckon.
Fatal? the customer wanted to know, plucking two straws from a container on the counter.
The man serving him nodded.
Jesus, he replied.
Paul followed the older man’s eyes to the bend where the road disappeared, hidden behind eucalypts and peppermint trees.
Might as well get a bite, Ruth huffed from behind him. She squinted into the hot light of the food
cabinet. Be a bloody age till I’m getting home, she said.
They sat in the old LandCruiser with the windows down, the car stationary, listening to the single station Paul could find on the radio. The late-afternoon sun was hot on his legs. Ruth let out a sigh, pushing back into her seat, straightening her fleshy arms on the steering wheel. She smelt of chicken salt and cheese sausage.
Be good for you, this, Ruth said. Get you out of the house, give your parents some space. You’ll do some real work, too. Might harden you up a bit.
Paul didn’t say anything. Up the road a man emerged from the rear door of a van, rested his beer bottle on the bitumen and hurried, barefoot, into the low grass by the roadside. He squared his hips towards a tree, arching his back and looking skywards in the typical reverie. Paul watched him grin and lift a middle finger back towards the van.
You know, you’re damn lucky Jake took you on, Ruth continued. It’s been a shocker season. Stormy as shit and he’s bringing back fuck-all. If it wasn’t for this business with your brother he’d only take one deckhand out with him. Ruth turned to face Paul as if to ensure he was listening. Better pull your fucking weight, she said.
