by Gilling, Tom
Nick stood there dripping on the floorboards, unable to move. He was alone in the house. Sally and Jess had gone into the city to buy shoes. Sally had seemed anxious not to be in the house with him. She had shut the door without saying goodbye. Nick tied the towel around his waist and sat down on the bed.
Poor Danny. Poor stupid wretched Danny. Nick remembered the way he’d kept rubbing his wrists in the car, like someone worrying at a stain that wouldn’t go away. Danny wasn’t clean. Danny would never be clean.
A semi downshifted before the traffic lights at Broadway. Nick listened to the gurgle of the diesel engine as the driver worked his way methodically through the gears. Danny’s death had left him with only two options: to stick with his story or retract it and face the consequences. Only it wasn’t his story. It never had been his story. It had been written for him by Roy Bellamy: all he’d had to do was learn his lines. No, the story had been Danny’s all along but now Danny was dead. He was up to his neck in trouble but there was a way out if only he could find it. There was always a way out: proof of that simple truth turned up every day in the crowded columns of the Daily Star.
What he needed now was time. This wasn’t a problem that would go away in a day or a week. Danny Grogan was dead and what happened next was up to Nick. He could wait for the police and Michael Flynn to burst through the door waving their warrants and notebooks, or he could disappear while he still had the chance. He looked at his watch. Sally and Jess would be back by eleven. He had fifty-three minutes to make up his mind.
His ten-year-old Toyota Camry was parked in Abercrombie Street, close to the corner with Cleveland Street. Nick stared at a picture of a well-dressed, middle-aged Caucasian man which someone had taped to a lamppost. The man was smiling at the person taking the picture. (Why did missing men always smile?) There was a black-and-white dog in the background. In heavy type—like a front-page headline in the Daily Star—were the words HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? followed by a mobile phone number. In their eagerness to publicise his disappearance, the missing man’s family had somehow forgotten to give his name.
Pictures like it were sent to the Daily Star at a rate of one or two a week—often double that in summer. Sometimes they found their way into the paper, squeezed into an uncommercial gap between display advertisements or buried among the classifieds on a Saturday. Most, however, were simply filed away in the photographic library in cardboard document boxes marked ‘Missing’.
Nick studied the pixelated photograph. Had it been taken by his wife? A friend? A stranger? What could you tell from a photograph anyway? The man was smiling. Maybe he was happy then—or maybe he was just pretending for the sake of the photographer. The picture might have been years old. Lives changed but a photograph was fixed forever. Nick stared at the smiling man and wondered if he would ever be found.
Nick opened the door and watched the greyhound screw itself into the back seat. He’d intended to leave it behind but the dog seemed to know exactly what was in Nick’s mind, and wouldn’t let him out of its sight. Nick, too, knew that within twenty-four hours of his going, Sally would be on the phone to the South Sydney council dog catcher. If Nick vanished, the animal was going to vanish with him.
North or south? Nick’s instinct was to disappear among the hordes moving up the coast to Queensland. It was like a mass internal migration, from the rust belt to the sun belt. And yet it was the south that had always appealed to him: the long pristine beaches of the south coast, the grey forests, the temperamental summers and cold winters. Jervis Bay, Lake Conjola, Bermagui, Merimbula, Eden—he remembered visiting those places as a child, dragging his parents’ old wooden caravan from camp site to camp site until it literally fell apart on a dirt road in Ben Boyd national park.
He turned the key in the ignition, put the Camry into gear and drove to the corner of Broadway, waiting for the traffic lights to change. On the passenger seat beside him was a green nylon sportsbag filled with clothes. He realised he’d left behind an almost new pair of Reebok trainers. It was too late to go back for them now.
At a Caltex service station on the Princes Highway he stopped to check the tyres and clean the windscreen and fill up with petrol. Twenty minutes later the sight of a police patrol car in his rear-view mirror tightened his knuckles around the steering wheel. Between the shock of Danny’s death and the excitement of leaving he’d almost forgotten Flynn. Whatever Flynn knew— or thought he knew—he’d jumped the gun by telling Nick and had given him a precious few hours’ head start. Sally would think he’d just taken the dog for a walk. It would be mid-afternoon before she began to wonder.
The ugly southern suburbs rolled away behind him. Nick found his gaze drawn to the newspaper posters outside railway stations and on the walls of newsagents’ shops. Of course there was no mention of Danny. Dying in the small hours was Danny’s final revenge on the Daily Star, ensuring it was twenty-four hours late with the news.
It was a few minutes after midday. The morning news conference would have just started. Les Perger would probably give up half tomorrow’s paper to documenting the dissolute life and squalid death of Danny Grogan. Most of it would be rehashed from the files. No doubt the picture editor would stake out the mansion in Vaucluse, hoping for a photograph of the grieving mother. Ken Horswill, commercial talkback host and conscience of the Star, would deliver a thousand ghosted words on the wasted life of a spoilt rich boy.
Nick’s name was certain to come up at the news conference. Maybe this would have been his chance to redeem himself with a heart-wrenching yarn on the Danny Grogan he knew. But how would it end—with Danny shooting up in a toilet cubicle in Central Local Court? Or sitting in a rental car while he confessed to sleeping with a fourteen-year-old junkie? No, Danny might be dead but there was still something Nick could offer him: silence.
Within a few hours Jerry Whistler would know he wasn’t coming to work. Jerry would ring Sally and Sally would tell him…what? That Nick had disappeared and taken the dog?
His mobile started ringing. The caller ID was an extension at the Daily Star. Nick let it ring out. He stopped at Kiama and bought a couple of bottles of water and something to eat. He walked up the hill and stood for a few minutes among a Japanese coach party watching geysers of water erupting from the blowhole.
A green sign pointed to Seven Mile Beach. Nick had been there once with Danny and a friend of Danny’s whose name he couldn’t remember: three eighteen-year-olds and a bong flying down the Princes Highway on a Friday night in a Range Rover that Danny claimed to have ‘borrowed’ for the weekend. The three of them had slept on the beach and when Nick woke up cold and stiff and with his hair full of sand he noticed Danny standing in the dunes watching a humpback whale. He stayed there all morning, unable to drag himself away.
Nick turned off the highway and followed a winding road through flat woodland to the coast.
The small gravel carpark was deserted except for a white Valiant panel van. Wooden planking ran over the dunes, which had been fenced for plant regeneration. In the distance he saw a shape that looked like a person—probably the driver of the white panel van—sitting in the dunes. Nick walked down to the firm wet sand while the dog ran ahead, scampering into the waves and retreating before the tumbling surf. Then Nick turned, walking away from the figure in the dunes.
The weather was less benign than it had been that morning. The sky out to sea was a forbidding grey, with cooling towers of cloud piled up on the horizon. A blustery wind blew veils of spray off the crests of the waves. After an hour Nick turned back. The beach felt deserted, seven miles of sand with nobody’s footprints but his own. As he neared the spot where he’d parked his car he looked for the figure in the dunes but whoever it was had moved or gone. He climbed the planking and stood on the dune, gazing at the grey sea, half imagining that if he stood there long enough he might catch sight of Danny’s whale.
He lit a cigarette and sat in his car with the door open while the dog explored the bushes. After he’d smo
ked his cigarette he took a swig of bottled water and turned to look at the white panel van. A tatty net curtain had been part-drawn across the rear window. Nick wondered if someone was sleeping inside. He screwed the lid back on the bottle and switched on the car radio and sat for a while thinking.
After a few minutes he stood up and walked across the carpark. The panel van was parked facing the sea. It couldn’t have been there long or else the windscreen would have been encrusted with salt spray. Slowly, he walked around it. He could see now that there was nobody inside. The tailgate wasn’t properly fastened. Through the net curtain he could see a rolled-up mattress, a pair of old trainers and some boxes of supermarket groceries—as if the owner was preparing to go on a trip. Nick lifted the tailgate. The air inside the car smelt of dope. A bong was resting against the wheel arch.
Nick closed the tailgate again. He walked back to the dunes and looked up and down the beach. He couldn’t see a soul. Then he returned to the panel van and opened the driver’s door. The key was still in the ignition. He walked around to the other side and popped open the glove box. Inside was a black rubber-handled torch; a pouch of loose tobacco and a couple of plastic lighters; a scuffed leather wallet; some cheap sunglasses and a handful of ATM and credit card receipts.
What sort of person, Nick asked himself, left his wallet and ignition key in an unlocked car?
Twelve years on the Star had given him an instinct for the irrational, the unfinished, the absurd. Broadsheets like the Herald believed in neat endings. But the tabloids knew that stories often stopped, or faded away, or turned back on themselves, and that the most interesting followed only their own skewed logic.
Years ago someone had left a yellow briefcase full of money beneath a desk in the reading room of the State Library. In those days there were no security cameras and neither the guard at the door nor any of the librarians nor anyone who’d visited the library that day could remember seeing anyone carrying a yellow briefcase. The publicity brought out several claimants but none of them could prove the case was theirs and the money was probably still gathering interest in some obscure government account.
Over the years Nick had often thought about the vanished owner of that yellow briefcase. He thought of him now as he took the leather wallet out of the glove box and opened it.
The wallet contained seventy dollars in cash, a Westpac VISA card and ATM card, and a New South Wales driver’s licence. The driver’s name was Kevin Michael Chambers of Prospect Road, Canley Vale, in Sydney’s western suburbs. According to his date of birth Chambers was a year and a half older than Nick.
The licence was four years old. At a careless glance the photograph bore a vague resemblance to pictures of Nick taken a few years ago, before his hair started to thin. He and Kevin Chambers had the same colour hair—a sort of dirty straw blond—and similarly oval faces, both clean-shaven. The likeness was subliminal rather than overwhelming but in a strange way that made it all the more plausible. After all, Nick had official photographs of himself that didn’t look anything like him: the photograph in his own passport, for example. And a careless glance was all that most people gave to the small photographs pushed across the counter for verification.
He put the licence back in the leather wallet and lit a cigarette. What if he were to swap vehicles? A couple of times on the highway north of Kiama he’d had the sensation of being followed. But it was never more than a sensation and when he’d pulled over and waited for the traffic to pass he’d realised he was just imagining it. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t be long before the police started looking for his red Camry. The Camry was worth at least twice what anyone would give Chambers for his beaten-up panel van.
It was impulse rather than calculation. If he’d thought about it for another five minutes, another two minutes, another two seconds, perhaps he would have decided against it. Impulse had warned him against taking Harry Grogan’s money and he’d ignored it—and found himself set up for a fatal hit-and-run. Maybe it was time to act on impulse.
He opened the tailgate and transferred a couple of boxes to the boot of his Camry. As he walked back with the third the bottom collapsed. Tins of tuna and baked beans and bags of rice and dried pasta tumbled out. An exploding jar splattered the legs of his jeans with pasta sauce. Jagged shards of glass lay all over the gravel. Nick grabbed the shoes and the bong and the rolled-up mattress from the back of the panel van and slammed the tailgate on a carton of fruit and vegetables. Then he took two hundred dollars out of his wallet and stuffed it in the Camry’s glove box.
He sat behind the steering wheel of the white panel van and turned the key in the ignition. The engine started straight away. Nick watched the fuel gauge needle creep towards full. A butt in the ashtray reminded him that he’d run out of cigarettes. Leaving the engine running, he walked across the gravel and fetched the bag containing his clothes. The dog seemed to sense what was happening. It trotted after him and, when Nick opened the tailgate, the animal leapt in.
Nick spent a minute searching for gears on the unfamiliar shift. He revved the four-litre V8, then put the stick into gear and reversed out of the carpark.
A vehicle like this, Nick thought, was liable to be recognised, so he by-passed the few shabby motels in Shoalhaven Heads and headed instead for Ulladulla, searching his mirror all the way.
Glancing at the ashtray reminded him that he was dying for a cigarette. He was dying for the cigarette he’d been dying for since he left Seven Mile Beach. It was just after 7 p.m. He stopped at a service station on the outskirts of Nowra and bought a packet of Winfields and a bottle of Coca-Cola and a shapeless, formless pie from the hot counter. He ate the pie and drank the coke. Then he stripped the cellophane wrapper from the packet of Winfields and took a cigarette and put it between his lips. Then he stopped. Kevin Chambers’ leather wallet was sitting on the carpet beneath the glove box. He hadn’t meant to take it but there it was. He picked it up. He lit his cigarette. It was too late to give the wallet back, even if he’d wanted to. He took out the driver’s licence and studied the photograph. The resemblance was unmistakable. Was it possible he’d kept the wallet deliberately, knowing it would be useful to him? As a court reporter he’d heard cases defended on the grounds of unconscious rather than deliberate intention. Psychoanalysis recognised the possibility of unconscious intention even if the law didn’t. Nick finished his cigarette, got out of the car and walked back to the shop. He thought of that morning in Hyde Park with Jess, when he’d pretended to be an expert on household cleaning products. The man with the questionnaire had bought every word of it. He was probably no more credulous than anyone else. People expected you to be who you said you were. It was one of the frailties of human nature. Or one of the virtues. The automatic door slid open. Somehow Nick knew that what happened in the next few minutes was going to change his life.
The bill for a box of black hair dye and a packet of disposable razors came to $22.74. Nick pushed Kevin Chambers’ VISA card across the counter. He hadn’t even had the chance to practise Chambers’ signature, although a child could have copied the illegible scribble on the card. The acne-scarred shop assistant picked up the card. ‘Cheque, savings or credit?’
‘Credit,’ said Nick.
The assistant hit a key on his touch-screen and swiped the card and slapped a cheap biro on the counter.
Nick picked up the pen. His heart raced as he dashed off the oversized ‘C’ followed by a horizontal slash that was supposed to represent the word ‘Chambers’.
The assistant didn’t even glance at the signature on the card, as Nick had somehow known he wouldn’t.
Nick put the card back in the wallet and turned to leave.
‘Don’t you want this?’ the boy asked.
Nick saw the hair dye and razors sitting on the counter.
The sly expression on the assistant’s face made Nick think that he was going to ask for another look at the VISA card. Nick glanced at the fuzzy black-and-white image on the miniature closed cir
cuit TV screen behind the counter—and for a moment had the unnerving feeling that the indistinct figure wasn’t him at all, but Kevin Chambers.
As Nick drove south the weather became worse. The driver’s door leaked. One of the windscreen wipers had lost its rubber. Twice he had to pull over until the rain eased.
He reached Ulladulla just after nine and decided to stop for the night. A few streets back from the harbour was a white-brick motel called The Willows. According to the flickering sign outside, the motel had rooms for fifty-five dollars. Two rows of units faced each other across a tarmac parking area bordered by straggly bottlebrush. There wasn’t a willow in sight.
Nick parked the panel van and got out, leaving the dog frowning at him through the windscreen. There was some wasteland behind the motel. From the carpark it looked possible to drive straight across the wasteland onto a road that linked up with the highway. That was information worth knowing, if by any chance he had to leave in a hurry.
It took the proprietor a couple of minutes to respond to the bell. He was a man in his sixties, in green tracksuit pants and slippers and dressing gown. He emerged from his office yawning and rubbing his eyes. Frowning through a pair of half-moon spectacles, he looked Nick up and down. ‘Where are you heading?’
‘Sydney,’ Nick answered.
‘Yeah?’ He squinted past Nick at the white panel van. ‘Which one’s yours then?’
‘The panel van.’
‘You’ll be after a double then.’
‘Sure. Why not?’
‘Just the two of you is it?’
Nick didn’t see that it was any of his business to correct the proprietor’s mistake. On the contrary, he was happy to give the impression that he had company. If anyone was looking for Nick Carmody tonight they would expect him to be travelling alone.
