THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER

by Michael Smith

  Then there were three. Watson took a couple of steps back and looked at Stan. “Stan Maybe you should let him out.”

  Stan looked at George, and noticed he’d retreated so he followed suit. “I’m not letting him out. You let him out.”

  The pair looked over at Lenny. “What the fuck are you doing, Len?”

  Lenny was looking at me. I was looking at Lenny. While I was silently willing his head to explode, he had become quite lost in my hateful gaze. He couldn’t look away. I wouldn’t look away. Maybe it was those schizophrenia pills, but I was quite sure I was getting somewhere until the boot slammed shut and I was cast back into the darkness.

  The nurse on duty at the front desk watched closely as the three former Painters and Dockers dragged a beaten-up junkie through the door. She kept her eye on the shotguns in the men’s hands, and her own hand on the phone below the counter.

  “Are you lost? We don’t have any methadone here.”

  “What about morphine? Do you have any morphine?” Harris peered over the desk to see if the woman was hiding anything back there other than the half-eaten sandwich that their appearance had interrupted.

  She shook her head. “Please tell me how I can help you, because the quicker I do so, the quicker you go on your merry way.”

  “We’re here to see Emily Prince.” Harris smiled sweetly. The smile was hidden behind his eyepatch, his long limp hair hanging over his face, and both fresh and old blood from various wounds he had sustained that day.

  “Visiting time is over. Routine is quite important around here. The old seniles go crazy if their semolina tastes of something, if we start bringing strange men to their room at night… And you are strange men indeed. All hell will break loose.”

  “I’m her nephew,” Harris smiled again. “I’m leaving town tonight, I don’t intend on coming back any time soon, so I really do need to see her.”

  The nurse considered his words. He was full of shit. But she just did not care. It had been a long day. “Of course… I should have guessed by the accent. I’ll take you up. Your…” She paused and looked around the group at Stan, Lenny, and George. “Friends can wait down here.”

  Watson dug the gun further into Harris’ flesh. Harris couldn’t help but give off a low throaty grunt. Harris added, “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. We’re all family.”

  “You’re family?”

  Watson did something quite inexplicable which didn’t help the situation at all, he affected a strange English accent. Not the Brummy accent of Mrs Prince, nor the Manc of James Harris. He went with Cockney, because it was all he could muster. “Sure am guv’nor. Now lead us up the apples and pears so we can have a butcher’s hook at the old lady.”

  The woman looked at Watson. If his accent hadn’t been bad enough, she’d also seen him in the papers.

  “These are my cousins. They’re from…” Harris paused trying to evaluate the source of that strange accent.

  “Facking Landan Tairn,” George stepped in. It was horrendous. His intent was clear, but somehow it was only making his Australian accent more pronounced. He sounded like a crocodile-hunting bushman up in Queensland. Although, to give him his due, his grasp of rhyming slang was surprisingly comprehensive

  Again, the woman was quite sure that these men were not who they said they were. But they had shotguns. Shotguns have a tendency to make the flimsiest of arguments seem more persuasive.

  The nurse wanted to limit her exposure to these hoodlums, but she couldn’t very well leave them roaming the halls of their own accord, and so she led them up the stairs, through the corridor and over to Mrs Emily Prince’s door. Each open doorway they passed was a sorry sight. Lonely old men and women, the hands and minds that had built a nation, left to rot away in the care of strangers.

  “Whatever it is you’re doing, keep it quiet. Make it quick.” With that, she was gone.

  Harris walked into the room and noted the bed was empty. Emily was sitting in that same chair Ronnie had left her in over a year ago. The four men scarcely recognised her. Her body looked ravaged by the passing of time. She had fought her entire life through. Overall, she had won far more than she had lost, but she was, by 1965, in the midst of a battle no human wins.

  “Jesus Christ,” Stan whispered as he lowered his cap in respect. “She used to be a giant.”

  George was less touched by the sight. “Ok. Where’s this fucking treasure?”

  Harris looked at Emily, who was scanning the street obliviously, “You’re looking at it.”

  George, Lenny, and Stan completely managed to miss the point. They ran their eyes past the old wilting woman, over her, under her, around her. But at no point did those eyes settle upon her.

  “I… I don’t understand.” George stuttered. “Is she sitting on it?”

  “It’s her. You fucking idiot.” Harris was ballsy. There were three shotguns pointed at him, yet still he had the courage to mock the most powerful man in Sydney. “Ron was a strange man. He wasn’t that into money. He liked accumulating it, what it represented. But he saw no point in hoarding it all. You can’t take the zeroes in your bank account with you. He said that to me once. ‘Your house will crumble. Your car will go kaput. The slender neck of your mistress under all of that expensive jewellery will wrinkle and then rot. Because it’s time that’s the most valuable commodity we have to enjoy. So make sure you spend that money and time and leave the world a better place than you found it.’ I never got it back then. I think I do now. Money is paper and metal. It doesn’t mean anything. But the smile of a child as you feed them, as you keep them safe and warm. That’s something. Such a small thing. But it changes the world. It echoes through eternity.”

  “What the fuck, man? Where’s his fucking money?” George raised his gun. The speech was a nice one, but he wasn’t the audience for it.

  “He was broke.” Harris shrugged. “That woman sitting in that chair was everything to him. Because she taught him the value of a smile.”

  “That’s fucking horseshit.”

  The four men spun around to see Tilly Devine and Elsa Markle standing in the doorway, shotguns in hand. The poor duty nurse was standing there with her hands in the air.

  “It’s not horseshit,” Harris spoke definitively, leaving little room for argument.

  “What the fuck are you doing here, Devine?” George had come to a reluctant truce with Tilly over recent months, but few truces stand unshakable in the face of a shotgun stand-off.

  No one, not Harris, Watson, Lenny, Stan, Elsa, nor Tilly noticed the glint in Emily Prince’s eyes. Somewhere in that broken shell of a woman, there lay the spirit of a gladiator. Hearing the name of an old rival had shaken something loose in that batty old tree of hers.

  Tilly strode into the room with her shotgun held high. “My young associate here thinks you’re about to blow Harris to high hell. She wants to be there when you do.”

  “Then what’s with the guns? This is turning into a Texan NRA meeting.” George didn’t know where to point his own weapon. He moved it from Harris, to Devine, to Elsa. And back again.

  “I think you’ll lose your nerve, you big Nancy,” Tilly cackled.

  Harris and Elsa looked towards each other. Time is strange. One year is little to the average adult person. Excluding illness and death, it generally does little to age you, and it’s the cumulation of years that does the work. But Harris and Elsa were junkies, and so a year in their life was a decade or more to a healthier person. She’d lost weight, her skin was dry and irritated, the whites of her eyes were reddening, and that ebony hair had lightened as greys came through. But what really hurt was the confidence and self-assuredness, which had all but drained by ‘65. It pained Harris to look at the destruction he and his horrid drug had caused. “I’m so sorry, Elsa.”

  “It’s too late for that, James. Fucking shoot him, George.”

  George moved his gun back to Harris, who smiled sadly and gave him a gentle nod.

  “What the
fuck are you doing?” George had expected a fight. He had come for a fight. This pathetic show of resignation was taking the lead out of his pencil.

  “Do it,” Harris whispered softly, “I forgive you.”

  “You think I won’t fucking kill you? I’ll shoot you square in the fucking face, you filthy Pom.”

  “I know you will. I have no doubt about that.” Harris placed his forehead to the barrel, “But it’s not me you’ll be killing. It’s the one that oppresses you. It’s your childhood, and it’s the scared little boy inside you. It’s Elsa’s addiction. Devine’s taxman. Lenny’s stupidity. Stan’s…” Harris looked at Stan, “I don’t who or what oppresses you, Stan.”

  “I don’t like Health and Safety Inspectors,” came the reply of an old dock worker.

  “Fair enough. I’m not going to stop you, George. Just today I found a semblance of peace. I came across a man who had haunted me my entire life. From Sunday School, to the blood-soaked Egyptian desert. From Lower Saxony, to my old bedsit. I killed that ghost. I’m at peace. And if my death means you all can live. Well that’s fine.”

  “You’re not Jesus, James.”

  “No. I’m a bad man who wasted his life. Do it George. Do it for the little boy. The one the older lads called Gorgeous as you felt their hot breath on your neck.”

  Frustration had built in George. This, to his mind, was going to be like one of those Westerns. He, the big bad antagonist, would storm in, take the cash and kill the man who had been a thorn in his side for so long. But as he stood there, surrounded by a chorus of shotguns, he didn’t feel big. He didn’t feel bad. He felt vulnerable.

  “Go on , George. Do him,” Lenny grunted.

  “You fucking wimp.” Devine cackled her piggish cackle.

  As tears streamed down his face, George tightened his grip on the shotgun. He steadied his breathing and pulled the trigger.

  But Harris’ speech had worked on one person. Elsa saw in Harris a marked improvement from the man she had once known. He may have lost an eye. His beard may have looked like something biblical. And his body may have grown quite weak. But in his mind, there was a compassion and understanding that was quite endearing. A characteristic all too uncommon amongst their circle. A characteristic, let loose in the world, that could do some good. And so, she charged forward and grabbed the barrel of George’s trigger as he pulled the trigger.

  The slug fired straight into the wall above Harris’ shoulder. The room fell into silence.

  “North of Bayswater is mine, Devine you bitch.” The group looked amongst each other, trying understand where that voice had come from. It wasn’t any of them. All eyes fell on Tilly as a gun shot rang out. She flew backwards into the wall, letting off a shot of her own as she did. Her shot hit Lenny straight in the chest. He was dead before he hit the floor. But the impact of his gun landing set off a shot of its own. That shot tore through the bottom of George’s jaw, exiting the side of his mouth and taking with it bits of teeth, tongue and jawbone.

  Harris, Elsa and Stan looked down at Emily Prince, the author of that particular calamity, as she pushed the still smoking revolver back down the side of her armchair. Stan checked Lenny. He was fucking dead, with a gaping hole in his head. George, on the other hand, was alive and in agony. So Stan picked up his disfigured friend and scarpered.

  Harris reached down under the bed and pulled out a suitcase. He handed it to a stunned Markle, who looked at him with no grasp of what had happened or was happening.

  “There’s a million dollars in that suitcase. Get out of here. Get clean. Make something of yourself. You’re too good for this life. You always were.” Harris thrust a lingering kiss on Elsa’s lips one last time. For a moment, the pair of them were their glorious old selves. Him, fit, strong, capable and handsome; her, the earthly embodiment of Aphrodite’s beauty and wit.

  Markle watched Harris run from the room, still in handcuffs, and she whispered softly, “Come with me.”

  But he was gone. Out the door. Down the stairs. The bottom of those big feet of his barely hit the ground until he was halfway down the street. Such was his rush to disappear himself, he ran straight past the damn car in which I was imprisoned. He could have spared me a good deal of embarrassment by letting me out before I’d resorted to soiling myself. But he didn’t.

  I lay there in the sweaty, airless darkness pondering a change in lifestyle. By 1965 it was beginning to feel like crime was no longer the path of least resistance. In the years to come, we would see a cataclysmic shift in how things were done. It was the end of the little guy, the sole trader. The corporations took over. No matter how big, insane and scary we were, common criminals met their demise. No matter how scarred our knuckles were, how many ships we’d sank to the bottom of Sydney harbour… We were quite done. The respectable visage of lawlessness and cruelty was forming. God bless the capitalist west.

  Once more you ask, as you did at the start, if this strange sort of fellow is trapped in the boot of a car, how the hell does he know what’s going on outside?

  It’s simple. I am more than just one man. Sometimes I’m the drug dealer on the street, other times I’m the junkie in their tenement room clinging onto life with limp fingers, more often than not I’m the nasty medicine running through their veins. I am the wandering hand grasping into your pocket, the semen stain on your laddered tights, and the trickle of piss running down your leg after a few too many. I am the voice of the voiceless; the poor and the downtrodden. I am the spirit of the place at the time. I believe the educated types with too much time on their hands, they call me an allegory.

  Between Heaven, Hell, and Darlinghurst: An Encore.

  There were very few benefits to living at 103b Brewery Lane, that Darlinghurst shithole Harris had once called home. It was damp, mouldy, and the people Charlie counted as neighbours were off their fucking rockers.

  That said, its location was quite useful and Harris’ abandoned collection of books was quite spectacular. For months, Charlie had been teaching himself to read by pondering over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. He understood little at first, but as time went on and his burgeoning vocabulary grew, he came to understand more and more. Nothing in those books fazed the young Indigenous lad. Not the ponderings of Plato nor Poe. It was only after he heard the tapping of someone gently rapping at his hovel door that he struggled with a text. Answering the door, he looked up and down the corridor. It was empty, save for a cardboard box lying at his feet.

  Dear Charlie,

  I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. After everything that happened, I needed to get away. I trust you understand.

  I came to Australia in an effort to find a better version of myself. Little did I know, the demons that haunted me at home were waiting for me here in the red dirt. I became the very person I had run away from. I think that’s what I have learned from all of this. Cruelty just creates more cruelty. Apathy more apathy. Anger more anger. It takes an individual to realise this, and rise above what was done unto them to break the cycle.

  I think, after two decades, I have finally ridded myself of them. But in doing so, I have taken a solemn oath with myself not to return to the grubbiness of city life. To live in that place is to be lonely. Looking back at my years in Darlinghurst, it seems like the experience of a man stranded on a life raft at sea, dying of thirst. Everywhere I looked, I saw a cool drink of water to soothe me. And how I drank. And drank. And drank. But with each mouthful my thirst grew. Until there was nothing left in me, nothing of the child that had been. Just a ravenous thirst that did no one, myself included, any good.

  I would like to thank you for the help you afforded DI Lescott and I. But to thank you would be to take responsibility for the problem, and credit for the solution. That simply wouldn’t be right. The problem, I fear, is far larger than we had ever realised. We barely scratched at its surface. The solution will be far more complicated than the events of that day in the Blue Mountains. It is down to each of us, to look i
nside ourselves, to look inside our brothers and sisters of all races, and to see that which unites us, not that that divides us.

  Lescott and I often spoke of finishing the story this country had been writing since 1788. We did what we could, but it will take better men than he or I to give the third and final act the finish it deserves.

  I will tell you, with no sense of hesitation, that you are a good man, Charlie. You are capable of great things. But this world we have been constructing for hundreds of years, it will get in your way. You will be disadvantaged, without a doubt, and to say otherwise would be a hollow lie. The pigment found in your skin will terrify some. For others, the fact that you’re a black fella with a little white fella will represent everything that is wrong with this world. To be blunt, fuck these people. Their time has been and gone. You are the future.

  Though you have entered a fresh new frontier in the city, stay true to your roots. Remember Mowan and his wisdom, and keep your love for the land. It is amongst the greatest of treasures in this short life of ours.

  As such, should you need me you’ll find me sitting beneath a tree somewhere. Red dirt under me, blue sky above. With birdsong and running water filling my ears. Because that’s what life is. That’s what existence is.

  Your friend always,

  John Hemmingway

  PS. Inside the box is an opal I found in another lifetime. Given what I was doing when I came across it (burying a dead rapist), I don’t feel I deserve it. Look at it a while. There is an entire universe of possibilities inside the shimmering of the stone that I have come to know as ‘The Devil in the Red Dirt’. Pick one. And live it.

  Having read the note, and spent a moment staring into the spectacular depths of the rock, Charlie just couldn’t help but wonder to himself, “Who the fuck is John Hemmingway and why the fuck is he sending me a dusty old rock?”