Kala and Mandu began talking and gesturing as they retold the story of the boy’s disappearance, as they did Charlie translated.
“The yara-ma-yha-who was here in the lowest branches. Jarrah was here. Digging.”
“What was he digging for?” Lescott asked.
“Witchetty grubs. There was a fire here last year. Scared away a lot of the kangaroos and wallabies. Grubs have been a big part of our diet since.”
“Red thing dropped out of the tree, grabbed Jarrah, ran that way.” Kala pointed to the side of the tree that lay in the opposite direction of the camp, back towards the town. Mandu nodded in agreement.
“And where were you?”
“Kala and Mandu were at that tree over there.” Charlie, Mandu and Kala pointed in unison to a tree thirty or forty metres away. But then Mandu said something else. Something Charlie didn’t translate. Lescott couldn’t understand any of the words except one. “Charlie.”
Back at the campfire, Harris was hearing another side of the story. A side Charlie was uncomfortable telling. “Charlie had been in town that day. You know what they call him in town, don’t you?” Mowan asked.
“Charlie Tiddalik?”
The words brought the unmistakable pain of shame and guilt to Mowan’s face. “He’d been drinking. Now Charlie never was much of a hunter. Because he didn’t grow up here with the community.”
“Where did he grow up?” Harris asked.
“Somewhere else,” Mowan wasn’t about to get into that. “So it’s never been his responsibility to hunt. Instead, he forages. Well, he watches over the children as they forage. That day, he was drunk. He fell asleep under the shade of a tree. He never saw the boy being snatched. He didn’t know until it was too late. The man was gone. The boy was gone.”
“Fuck.” Harris rubbed at his brow. No wonder there was so much pain around the disappearance. No wonder Charlie felt so compelled to make it right. “Sorry, excuse my language.”
“No. Fuck is right. It’s tragic. And that’s why he keeps going back to this yara-ma-yha-who story. He convinced the children that’s what they saw. Because he can’t live with the fact it was a man. He can’t live with the fact he could have stopped it, if he hadn’t been drinking. This holding onto hope… It’s just staring into the sun so he can’t see the shadows around him.”
Lescott inspected the tree, it was dripping with blood red sap. It oozed with the stuff from somewhere in the branches. The tree was sporting a wound “Help me up here Charlie.”
Charlie entwined his hands and offered Lescott a boost. In exactly the same manner that Lescott and his friends had done as children. Lescott smiled. You can put humans in different environments with different needs, but they will approach life and its many challenges in exactly the same way. Beneath the skin we live in, there’s really not a great deal of difference.
Once Lescott had climbed onto the branch he steadied himself and began inspecting the trunk. After a moment he found the source of the maroon discharge. Someone had carved into the tree trunk. Lescott had to pick into the bloody discharge that had set there to reveal the artist’s etching. When he did, he gasped.
In blood, I shall bathe;
In fire, they shall be cleansed.
Upon death, we shall be reborn.
Lescott’s position in the tree was anything but tenable. The branches were young and weak, the pouring sap was making the trunk slippery. It seemed to Lescott, whoever had spent time hiding in that tree, must have been small in stature. The branches could barely hold Lescott’s weight after a moment or two. Given the pair of binoculars hanging off a nearby branch, Lescott assumed the kidnapper had spent a good deal of time lying in wait.
He needed to work quickly, and so he did. Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out his notepad and ripped a page from it. Placing the page flat across the etching, he ran the long surface of his pencil across it. A childhood spent making leaf rubbings in the rain forest was paying off.
“Anything up there?” Charlie asked when Lescott hit the deck.
“Not a thing.” Lescott lied as he knelt down and grabbed a handful of the fine red dirt upon the floor. At the base of the tree, it had mixed with the pooling sap and turned into a paste. Lescott wondered what animal or spirit, during those prehistoric days of dreaming, had spilled its blood in the bloodwood and onto the dirt to make it quite so sinister a setting, and quite so vividly bloody. Lescott rubbed a little of the dirty paste onto his forearm. It stuck and dried instantly as a rudimentary kind of war paint. “Painted red…”
Kala, Mandu and Charlie watched and waited.
“And when he’d dropped out of the tree and snatched the boy up? What then?”
“Earth swallowed them whole.” Charlie translated Mandu’s recollection. “Then, seconds later, the ground began to growl.”
Lescott was careful to be respectful of their take on the events. It seemed quite improbable, but he wasn’t about to say that out loud. “Where?”
When they pointed off into the distance, Lescott began trudging in that direction. After fifty metres or so he’d found what he was looking for. It wasn’t a hole in the ground in which the kidnapper and his victim had vanished, it certainly wasn’t a lair in a cave in which he would find the boy waiting for rescue. The ground there was seldom disturbed, so though a month or more had passed, he was able to follow a set of small footprints up the hill. The footprints, which looked no larger than that of a child, were accompanied by the trail of something dragged alongside their owner. At the crest of the dune, the footprints morphed into a snake-like sliver. Given the undulating nature of the geography, the very thing the Anangu had used to hide their encampment from outsiders, it would have appeared the maleficence was swallowed by the ground.
Lescott followed the trail down the dune to the bottom where he found a clump of spinifex grass that had been disturbed. Its spikes had caught hold of something that looked like linen, perhaps from a pair of trousers. They had broken skin. For it was there that a trail of blood began as the footprints reappeared. A speckled trail of hurt that Lescott followed to the roadside. There, in that desolated spot he found a pool of dried blood which had come from a second source, other than the spinifex wound. There was too much blood. This was from a heavy blow to a head, or indeed a stab wound. There were tire tracks. A car had pulled out quickly, perhaps explaining the growling sound from the earth. The tracks led back to Alice Springs.
He trudged back up the dune with a heavy heart. The amount of blood in that pool suggested that the owner of that wound would not have survived without medical attention. Back in town he would call the local doctors and see whether they’d treated such a wound in recent times. But he didn’t like his chances. He didn’t like the boy’s chances.
As he reached the panoramic vista at the top of the dune, a cold sweat came over him and a sickness rose up from the pit of his stomach. It could have been the heat stroke or dehydration, or maybe just the work of a vivid imagination, or perhaps it was the land speaking to him; but he could see it all. The warm white light of day subsided as the cold blue light of dusk crept across the endless landscape.
Kala, Mandu and Charlie were nowhere to be seen. Lescott was alone in that otherworldly landscape, save for the small stumpy man with short limbs, bathing in dirt beneath the bloodwood tree. Once he was done covering himself in that paint, he clambered up the tree trunk and into low branches where he lay in wait.
After a moment or so, a small child gleefully ran over to the base of the tree and began to dig within its roots. This child was Jarrah. He had no idea that a malevolent red shadow lingered above him. Until it was too late. The small red being dropped from the branches and landed on the boy, who was rendered immediately unconscious.
This red shadow that took on no discernible form dragged the boy from under the shade of the bloodwood and up the dune. Behind the struggle, Kala and Mandu cried out for help. No assistance was forthcoming. The shadow dragged the boy to the peak of the
dune, and scuttled past Lescott, who could but watch as the pair slid down the dune and landed in the spinifex grass below.
The wound the crash landing caused was painful and sent the shadow rolling in the dirt, writhing in pain. The boy began to come to. A further struggle ensued. This time it was desperate. The boy fought quite heroically but he was outmatched by this manifestation of all that is wrong in man. The struggle ceased at the parked car, where the shadow slammed the boy head first into the body work, and the young innocent’s head split open. The shadow waited a moment. Gathering its breath and taking a moment to compose itself. Then it bundled the boy into the boot of the car. And drove off towards Alice Springs.
Lescott watched as the car headed back to the town.
Chapter 45
Mowan watched Harris closely. The Englishman was on edge. He kept peering through the trees as though this was all one big trap. “They’re not coming back,” Mowan said.
“Who?” Harris asked as he straightened up to bluff self-confidence.
“The men from your last visit. They’ve gone. They won’t come back.”
“Where did they go?”
“Back to our lands. This is good country. But it’s not our country. We have no sense of belonging here. Our Tjukurpa is based on the land around the rock. We have no connection here… Maybe one day, I too will go back.” Mowan’s speech was strained. He’d been coughing ever since Harris had sat down by the fire with him. This time he entered a fit of coughing which resulted in specks of blood flying onto the hand he used to cover his mouth. “Maybe not.”
“Can we give you a lift into town? You can see someone. These doctors have cures for all sorts nowadays.”
“There’s no cure for time.” Mowan dabbed at his lips to cleanse them of blood.
“Have you been to the rock recently?” Harris asked, fearing the answer.
Mowan read his face. “Yes. Some years after the piranpa had chased us from our lands with guns. Some years ago, now. It frightened me. I saw the guides tossing water on ancient cave paintings to help them photograph better. Knowledge passed down through the generations, washed away for a photograph.
“Mutitjulu, the waterhole from which it is said the rainbow serpent, the creator of a great many things in our world, sprang forth… It’s turned toxic from discarded batteries… and camera film… and urine. I saw men at the sacred sites of women and women at the sacred sites of men. I saw piranpa scurrying across the rock as ants on jam.
And as they left, they lined up to buy a dot painting, to hang on their wall, so that they might better remember the time they desecrated our consecrated ground.
This place, from coast to coast, was home to a colourful variety of nations of languages and cultures. Our people were builders, explorers, farmers and navigators. We hunted. We gathered. We fished. We told stories that made sense of the land and the skies, the flora and the fauna. Now we’ve been reduced to mystical primitives who drink, commit petty crime and create dot paintings for your amusement. We’ve been reduced to one black nation in the eyes of the white man. I guess it’s easier on the conscience to wipe out one nation rather than many.
“Charlie… He’s one of the best examples of this cultural eradication. He doesn’t belong here. He doesn’t belong in the shadow of the rock either. He didn’t grow up with it. His mother was a piranpa. She had sex for money. His old fella was my brother and he was a bit of a hellraiser. We both were back in the day. One day he had some coins in his pocket and a hunger in his loins. Months later the white lady’s husband saw a black baby. He killed Charlie’s old fella dead. The boy grew up in an orphanage in Darwin.” There was a good deal of regret in Mowan’s words. He was heartbroken by the whole thing. No doubt he felt some guilt for his behaviour as a younger man, and the consequences he was now living with. “He’s stranded between two worlds. Too modern to fit in here, too black to be accepted by Australia.”
Chapter 46
There was a strange atmosphere in Darlinghurst on the day of the funeral. The place, down to the very bricks and grouting, was quite solemn. Women wore black; men wore their best suits and new ties. Everyone practiced their best crocodile tears that day. The pubs would be full of people jostling over ownership of memories of Prince. Though few ever really knew the man.
In those times of excess, never was our culture more evident than on the day of a funeral and wake. Drink would flow, snow would fall, windows would smash, and the well-behaved types of the city would go into hiding. Fearful shopkeepers boarded their businesses for fear of looting; some left town altogether. The more cunning cohort amongst local business owners joined in with the spirit of the event, stocking up on moody grog to sell to mourners on the cobbles. It was to be the party of the century. The city would congregate upon those streets to celebrate the area’s most famous son.
I returned from my brief jaunt to Melbourne that day. No sooner had I entered Darlinghurst when I witnessed a man being gutshot in a back alley. When I went to his aid, I noticed he spoke with a Queensland accent. So, I rifled through his pockets and went on my merry way.
Something was in the air. Trouble was brewing. There were faces on the street that simply didn’t belong. Faces from across the country, known for their criminal enterprise. They were not there to celebrate Prince’s life. Rather to celebrate his death. The nation’s criminal elite would break bread and discuss the future of unlawful enterprise in Sydney. Dignitaries from Australia’s many organised crime groups were to meet upon the floor of the restaurant of the Kelly Hotel. My invite must have been lost in the post.
Having been turned away at the door, I made myself comfortable on top of a dustbin in the alley around the corner from the grand entrance to the building. From that sad spot amongst the refuse, I watched as criminal royalty from around Australia poured out of town cars, before striding straight past security and into the foyer of the hotel.
I witnessed Matilda Devine and Elsa Markle float through, I couldn’t say I enjoyed that. Matilda and I had never seen eye to eye. Their influence, it seemed, had been growing in my absence. Paulie Zambrotta and his olive oil cohort from Melbourne entered with a swagger. Mick Calyute, Darwin’s Aboriginal criminal king spat upon the floor as he noted the opulence of marble steps. He’d built a criminal career beating and extorting his way through Darwin’s shipyards. He was likely the hardest man in attendance. When a Western Australia kingpin I didn’t recognise entered the hotel, I sold his second in command a dozen bags of cocaine. When members of Gippsland’s River Rat biker gang shook hands with William Arthur Mason, Queensland’s white supremacist boss, I hid behind a dumpster. If there are three things I dislike in this world, it’s racists, bikers, and dog-owners who speak as though their pet is their child.
Finally, “Gorgeous” George Watson turned up. When he did, he might as well have been ready to walk straight into Rome in a pair of shiny red shoes. He was wearing an almost fluorescent white three-piece suit. I’m not quite sure what the message he was trying to send there was, maybe he was declaring himself angelic, or exclaiming that dirt couldn’t stick to him. Either way, it was failing. He looked more like he had just graduated from clown college. The little try-hard sauntered into what he perceived to be his coronation, ready to shake hands with his court. He shined the sovereigns upon his little fingers in anticipation of the kisses he would be showered in. Though he wore a cloak of confidence, stress was getting to him and there was no hiding it. The bright fire in his pale blue eyes had dimmed somewhat. His salt and pepper hair was more the latter than the former. It doesn’t take long to age a man.
When the extravagant entrances were done with, I stacked several discarded pallets on top of each other so that I might spy on the proceeding from a wobbly perch. Presumably my building blocks had recently been scrapped by a local fishmonger, the stench was something putrid. I would smell of old barramundi for weeks to come. From my fishy vantage point, I saw as the criminal royalty began their discourse. It kicked off much in t
he same way corporate meetings on the other side of the law kick off. Small talk, pleasantries, sycophancy, a platter of assorted pastries, and one Aboriginal crime boss from Darwin silently wishing death upon his enemies.
Then Watson took to the floor. It was quite impressive. He’d arranged for an overhead projector to be brought in, and he ran the group through his plans to modernise criminality in Sydney. I don’t know where any of that came from. It seemed he’d quietly been expanding his horizons. He even quoted Sun Tzu at one point by saying… “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.”
Now when he said chaos, I think he was referring to the void left behind upon Ronnie Prince’s demise. Opportunity, as far as I could tell, was the chance to come together under a new and modern criminal figurehead who would supposedly bring forth a new age of prosperity for all. But now sooner had his words left his lips than they took on a new meaning altogether.
Watson paused his well-rehearsed spiel when he saw every male face in the room light up in shock. Even Calyute unfurrowed his brow as his jaw hit the grand table in front of him. The only faces that gave their owners away, were the expectant faces of Tilly and Elsa. Watson stumbled on his words. What was it he had just said to so quickly lose the room? He turned to see Lenny pressing the clicker for the projector in a furious panic. Somehow, someone had tampered with the presentation.
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