by Tony Birch
I kept on running, along the arcade and through the shopping centre. I raced out the other side, across the car park, jumped the wire fence and started following the railway line back to Mary’s place, just like she’d told me to do. By the time I got there my chest was burning. I lay on the landing outside her flat and tried to get my breath back, too tired to move.
I was still there when Gwen arrived in Mary’s car a half-hour later. She grabbed her bag in one hand and dragged Rachel out of the car with the other.
‘Get up, Jesse.’ She whacked me hard in the ribs with the toe of her shoe. ‘We’ve got to split.’
‘Where to?’
‘Dunno yet. I haven’t thought that far ahead, but we can’t stay here. Don’t matter if Mary opens her mouth or not, it won’t be long before they turn this place over. We’re going.’
‘Where is she?’
‘The Jacks got her. They’ll turn up here soon enough. We’re taking Mary’s car.’
‘Won’t she miss it?’
‘Maybe, but I don’t reckon she’ll need it for a while.’
The car, an old Commodore, didn’t have a straight panel on it, it blew black smoke and the tyres were worn smooth as racing slicks. We threw our stuff in the boot, along with a black plastic bag stuffed full of marijuana.
We took the back streets until we reached the entrance to a freeway heading out of the city. Gwen turned onto the freeway, put her nose over the wheel and her foot flat to the floor. She didn’t look back and didn’t think about stopping until we were more than a couple of hours away, when we pulled into a place off the side of the freeway to go to the toilet and get something to eat.
Rachel and me shared a bowl of chips while Gwen went through a tattered notebook she kept in her bag. She flipped through the pages, back and forward a few times, before she found what she was after. She borrowed a pen from a girl behind the counter, wrote an address on her arm and threw the notebook in a bin.
‘Let’s rock ’n’ roll.’
‘But I haven’t finished yet,’ Rachel complained.
‘Yes, you have.’ Gwen could see that Rachel was about to answer her back and waved a finger in her face. ‘Don’t you say a word, girlie. Just do what I say.’
Gwen told us we were going to Adelaide, she had a friend there. I slept some of the way, but kept getting woken up by Rachel whining that she was still hungry and asking Gwen to stop again for food.
Gwen turned the radio up to drown her out, which made it impossible to sleep. I closed my eyes again and thought about how close I’d come to getting caught by the police. If they’d got me I’d have been put in a home for sure, I reckoned. Maybe a place like Jon Dempsey got beaten in. I opened one eye and looked over at Gwen. She was humming along to a tune from the radio and seemed happy enough. If I’d been caught by the coppers back at the shopping centre and got locked up it would have been her fault. Not that she’d care much about what happened to me.
She turned to Rachel. ‘Look, babe. See the lights? That’s Adelaide. We’ll be there soon.’
Gwen hadn’t been to Adelaide before and didn’t know her way around. She stopped at a shop, and came out with some instructions on a bit of paper. They didn’t help much, because pretty soon we were driving around in circles.
‘Where’s this fucken house?’ she moaned.
When she finally located the place she was looking for, a small red brick house with a vacant block of land on either side, she found out that her old friend, some woman she’d worked with years ago, had moved on. The man who opened the door had half a bottle of beer in one hand and was wearing only his underpants. He had so much hair on his body that at first I thought he was covered in dirt.
He looked Gwen up and down, and then smiled at Rachel.
‘Yeah, Ronnie Mac shot through ages ago, but you can stay here if you want. You must be rooted. All that driving.’
Gwen said no thanks and put us back in the car.
She sat in the front and smoked a cigarette as she thought about how much shit we were in. The man in the house opened the curtains and looked out at us a couple of times.
‘What are we going to do?’ I asked.
‘Dunno,’ she snapped. She opened the window and threw out the cigarette butt. ‘Got any bright ideas?’
‘Well . . . we got that plastic bag in the boot.’
She nodded her head a couple of times and smiled at me. ‘Jesse, sometimes you’re a bit of a dill. Then other times you’re a fucken genius.’
A few minutes later Gwen was handing the hairy man the bag of dope in exchange for some money, which she started counting on the way back to the car.
Rachel sat up. She couldn’t take her eyes off the wad of notes in Gwen’s hand.
‘Did him like a dinner,’ Gwen said, as she revved the engine and drove off.
We tried some motels along a strip next to a beach. Two of them were full and another was closed. Gwen turned into a car park on the beach and got out. She looked up at the sky and then along the beach.
‘How about we sleep under the stars tonight? It’ll be an adventure.’
‘The beach?’ Rachel screamed. ‘I don’t want to sleep on the beach. A killer might come.’
‘You can stay in the car then. Me and Jesse are going to sleep on the sand, aren’t we?’ She nodded to me to follow her. ‘If a killer does turn up, he’ll go for the car first. Happens in the movies all the time. Suit yourself, Rache.’
There were other people on the beach. A group of teenagers sat around a fire, drinking and talking and watching a girl splash in the water. Rachel came running after us and we picked a spot and I built a mound to rest my head on, lay down on the sand and looked up at the night sky and twinkling stars. It would have been beautiful if it weren’t for the trouble we were in. I didn’t know what was going to happen next, but I was sure it would be something bad and felt sick worrying about it.
The next morning I washed my face and hands in the sea. People were out jogging along the beach and walking their dogs. When Gwen and Rachel woke we walked along the beach to a café and ordered breakfast. Gwen picked up a notice advertising ‘fully serviced vans – weekly rates’, got some change from the cashier and made a call at the pay phone by the toilets. She came back to the table and clapped her hands together. ‘I’ve got us a place.’
THREE
Ray Crow stood out front of our van in a pair of black jeans, a dirty white t-shirt, a sweat-stained cowboy hat and a pair of black leather boots with silver buckles that jingled when he took a step. He looked like he’d walked out of cowboy movie. And he was the bad guy.
Gwen was so excited about her new fella she couldn’t keep still. I knew she’d want me to be nice to him but she was wasting her time if she thought I’d suck up to a new boyfriend just to keep her happy. From the second I got in the back seat of Mary’s car I’d thought of nothing but running away for good, even if it meant leaving Rachel. She was always falling behind and never stopped complaining. I felt bad but knew I couldn’t take her with me and look after her properly.
Gwen nudged me in the back, pushed me towards Ray, and ruffled a hand through my hair.
‘Ray. This is my little man, Jesse.’
He looked me up and down, like he would an enemy. ‘Don’t look like a man to me, big or little. How old are you, boy?’
‘He’s thirteen, going on fourteen,’ Gwen answered for me. She was jumpy.
Ray shaped his right hand into a pistol and aimed the trigger finger between my eyes.
‘Bang! Bang! Jesse, hey? Like Jesse James. The outlaw. Are you an outlaw?’
He relaxed his hand and offered it to me. I buried mine under my armpit. He squinted and looked me in the eyes.
‘Where I’m from, not shaking a man’s hand is an insult.’
‘Yeah, well
he’s just a kid,’ Gwen said, moving all over the place, like she had to take a piss.
Ray pushed the brim of his hat back on his head. He was about to say something more when he spotted Rachel standing in the doorway of the van. He smiled at her.
‘Hello, darling.’
‘Honey, come meet a friend of mine,’ Gwen called.
Rachel hopped down from the van and ran and stood in front of Gwen. She put her hands on Rachel’s shoulders.
‘And this is my baby, Rachel.’
‘I’m not a baby,’ Rachel growled. ‘I’m eight.’
Ray touched her cheek with the back of his hand. He left it there while he spoke to her in the quietest voice. ‘Yeah. You’re no baby. And you’re so pretty.’
‘Takes after me,’ Gwen piped up, leaning forward so Ray could get a good look at her face.
It didn’t take much to get her jealous.
‘Maybe,’ Ray answered, without looking at her. He couldn’t take his eyes off Rachel.
Gwen had met Ray at a bar in the city, after she’d knocked off work at the nightclub she was at. He stayed in the crowded van with us one night. Rachel and me slept in single beds up one end of the van while he and Gwen shared her bed down the other end. It was used as the table during the day then made up with a rubber mattress and blankets and pillows at night. Sometimes, when Gwen got in late, she didn’t bother fixing the bed and slept on the floor.
Sitting around the wobbly table the next morning, Ray, wearing just his smelly t-shirt and a pair of stained underpants, looked round the van, waved a spoon in the air like a magic wand and said a woman as good-looking as Gwen deserved a lot better than some ‘wooden box wrapped in plastic’.
He tapped Rachel lightly on the end of her nose with the back of the spoon. ‘And you, princess. You deserve a palace.’
Rachel turned red and jumped on her bed.
Ray got dressed, spat in his hands, ran them through his hair and eyed himself in the mirror. He told us to be ready to leave the van ‘for all time’ before he got back later in the day. I was sure he was just another bullshit artist who would get what he wanted from Gwen and then take off and never be seen again.
We packed up and were ready to go, but there was no sign of Ray. Gwen sat on the step of the van, smoking as she waited for him to come back. I lay on one of the bunks and Rachel sat on the other shuffling Gwen’s tarot deck.
‘Pick a card, Jesse.’
‘Leave me alone.’
She stuck the deck under my chin and made me look at it. ‘Go on. Take one and tell me what it means.’
I told her to knock it off but she wouldn’t let up until I picked one. It was a heart with three swords stuck through it. Behind the heart were dark clouds, rain and lightning.
‘What’s it mean, Jesse? Is it a good luck card or bad luck?’
I took a closer look at it. It wasn’t as scary as the card with the ten swords sticking out of the dead soldier, but for anyone who believed in the cards I reckoned it couldn’t be much better.
‘I dunno what it means. Don’t care either.’
‘Have a guess then. Play the game, Jesse.’
‘You really want to know?’ I snatched the card from her and held it up. ‘Okay then. It means that this fella, Ray, is going to murder the three of us. See the three swords? That’s you, Gwen and me. He’s gonna kill us all. You happy now?’
Rachel ripped the card from me and buried it in the deck. ‘Like you said, you don’t know what they mean anyway. I’ll ask Gwen.’
Ray didn’t get back until dark. He said that he’d had some business to take care of. Gwen wanted to know what kind of business.
‘Can’t explain, babe. The details would bore the shit out of you.’
He’d booked us into a motel further along the beachfront from the caravan park. He had a brochure with him, with pictures of a swimming pool, a gym, room service and ‘en suites’. As Gwen looked at the brochure, Ray put an arm around her shoulder, slid his hand down her dress and rubbed her on the back.
‘I got two rooms. One for us and the other for these two.’
She hung her arms around his neck, pushed her body into his and kissed him on the mouth.
The motel had three floors and was square-shaped with a glass roof over the top. The roof was so dirty the light didn’t come through too good. Our rooms were on the top floor and looked down on a swimming pool with banana lounges and fake palm trees around it. From my doorway I could see into the rooms off the balcony across from us. I stood there most mornings to get a good look at what was going on. People came and went and didn’t stay long, mostly young women with older men. It took me about a minute to work out they were prostitutes with their customers. The women were mostly friendly, smiled and said hello when I passed them on the stairs. The men looked the other way or down at their feet.
The rooms had TV with regular channels and cable. The bar fridge was loaded up with beer, chocolate bars and little bottles of spirits, and the beds vibrated when you pushed a button on the side. Ray said we could order anything we wanted just by picking up the phone on the table between our beds and hitting the ‘9’ button. I hit it every chance I got.
The first night at the motel Rachel and me sat up in bed and picked out a horror movie from one of the cable channels. It was rated R but there was no one around to stop us from watching. It was full of teenage kids getting tortured and chopped up by zombies. Rachel missed most of the movie. She was so frightened she stuck her head under the blankets. About halfway through I picked up the phone and ordered Rachel’s favourite, nachos with double sour cream. Ten minutes later a waitress knocked at the door with the order.
Gwen and Ray had been out drinking and got in late, long after the movie was over and I’d turned off the TV, covered Rachel with a blanket and put out the lights. The wall between the two rooms was as thin as paper and they kept me awake most of the night partying. I could tell by the sound of her voice, she was just about singing, that she was pretty drunk. I could also hear the clinking of glasses, music playing on the radio, and Ray screaming ‘trick or treat, baby, trick or treat?’ about every five minutes, like it was Halloween.
The next morning a garbage truck picking up rubbish in the car park out back of the motel woke me. Rachel was dead to the world. I got out of bed and put my ear to the wall. It was quiet next door. I picked up my jeans and t-shirt from the floor, and went onto the balcony. Down in the swimming pool one of the banana lounges was at the bottom of the deep end. Some fella carrying a bamboo pole was balancing himself on the edge of the pool and trying to fish the chair out. He had no hope of hooking a catch.
He noticed me looking and called out, ‘Hey, kid. Come down here and give us a hand.’
‘What for?’ I called back.
‘Get your arse down here and I’ll tell you.’
He was old, maybe fifty or more. His gut sat over the top of his work pants and he was sweating and puffing like he’d run around the block at full speed and followed up with fifty push-ups.
‘Will you fucken look at that?’ he hissed, as he speared the pole into the pool, trying to stick the chair. ‘The drunken cunts do this every weekend. Throw the furniture in the pool. They piss in it. Use it for a fucken ashtray. See those long necks on the bottom. I’ll never get them out. Can’t swim to save myself. Last week it was one of the palm trees. Cunts.’
He pulled out his wallet and showed me a five-dollar note. ‘What do they call you?’
‘Jesse.’
‘Jesse, how do ya feel about ripping those jeans off, jumping in the pool and dragging that chair out for me? And then maybe you could duck-dive for the bottles. I’ve got to clean this shit up before the boss lobs for the morning shift. I’ve been going all night and I’m fucked. I was just about to knock off when I spotted the wreckage.’
/> He spat into the pool.
‘I can get you a fresh towel from the shower room to dry yourself off.’
The wallet was full of notes. I looked up to the third floor balcony.
‘I’ll get in trouble if my mum or dad catch me in the pool. And my dad wakes up early.’ I coughed a couple of times. ‘And I’ve got a cold. I’ve had it all week. Mum says I can’t go for a swim until I’m better. And anyway, like you said, it’s been pissed in. Maybe it’s not safe.’
He spat again.
‘Well I’m fucked then. I’ll never get out of here.’
‘I’ll do it for ten dollars.’
‘You trying to con me, kid? Well, don’t. I been around.’
I’d already taken my t-shirt off. ‘I’m not trying anything. If you don’t want me to do it . . .’
‘You’re an up-and-coming conman, for sure. But I got no choice. You’ve got a deal.’ He offered his hand. ‘Cyril.’
The water was warm. I waded across to the banana lounge and dragged it to the edge of the pool. Cyril lifted it out.
‘Good job, kid. Now the bottles.’
I dived for the empty beer bottles. I stuck one in my underpants and grabbed the other two, one in each hand. I surfaced and handed them to Cyril. As I got out of the pool one of the doors to a room above us slammed shut. I looked up and spotted a short, baldy man in a dark suit. He walked as quickly as he could without running, along the balcony towards the fire exit. Cyril nodded.
‘See that?’
‘See what?’
‘The old boy. He’s a minister at the church down the road. Comes in every week, same time, early in the morning when he thinks no one’s watching, books the same room. Under the name of Mr Bell. A little while after, one of the working girls turns up. Same girl every week. Waltzing Matilda, she goes by. Wears an akubra hat, I fucken swear.’
He laughed so much he had to wait a bit until he could go on with the story. ‘One of the housemaids, Beryl, she tells me that after he’s left of a morning and she goes in to clean the room, nothing’s been touched. Not the bed. The bar. Nothing. Except . . .’ He looked over his shoulder, like someone might be listening. ‘Except, just at the end of the bed there’s this sunken bit where he’s sat his arse.’ He lifted his eyebrows. ‘And you know what that means, my friend?’
