by Iain Ryan
“This is Melbourne weather,” said Harris.
“Must have brought it with him,” said Tony, planting himself in one of the chairs.
“It’s a woman,” said Dev. “She’s a cop. Old Bill’s replacement, apparently. It’s been a while.”
“Jesus,” said Tony. “You know about this?”
Harris shrugged.
They plugged in the urn and opened the biscuits. Then the three of them waited in the empty club while the storm raged outside.
It was a slow meeting. They started the preamble with Peter Simmons, a gardener at the Chateau Agri, and Noel Chandler, an estate agent from Arthurton. All of them had been sober for years. In fact, Noel had made the trek up in the rain to celebrate his sixth anniversary.
“It’s been a good spell,” he said. “I take the good with the bad. We all do, I guess. But it’s been good. It’s boring but you know, we all…”
As Noel droned on, Harris noticed a figure out on the deck, a silhouette pacing in the rain.
“…and there’s days where I still miss it,” Noel said. “I mean, what the hell? Six years later, and I still get a taste for it watching someone mix a bloody cocktail on the TV…”
Harris watched the figure walk the length of the building around to the side door. That door was opened, the downpour loud for a moment.
“…and it’s mostly pretty easy these days, but some days, gee, I dunno. I feel like my worst days, which aren’t very often admittedly, but I feel like they’re worse than ever. What gets me sometimes is that it’s all much of a muchness if I think about it too much, it’s…”
Harris watched as the woman approached the circle. She stood a few metres back, waiting through a couple of seconds of Noel’s story before deciding to sit. She was dressed entirely in black, an oversized sweater over dark denim and black elastic-sided boots. She was deathly pale, wet to the bone, her skin and hair bleached white. Harris kept himself to quick glances, but he could see that the woman had the fear. It was in her hands. She kept cupping and turning them in her lap.
“…and I guess that’s it,” said Noel. “That’s the end. Six years.”
They all waited for Dev to say something. Instead, he stared into space for a long moment before saying, “Argh, thank you Noel. You need to help your body through those low points, I guess. Your body wants to act, so you should let it act. Go for a walk. Go to the gym. Go swimming. Try a shower. You should meditate. Or something like meditation, something transportive. We always forget that our minds and our willpower are only a part of our sobriety. They’re not the whole. If your body craves transgression, transgress a little and save yourself a fall. Just steer it somewhere safe, somewhere productive.”
“Is that it?” said Tony. He was chairing the meeting.
Dev nodded.
Tony looked directly at the woman and said, “Does anyone else want to share something?”
She stared into her hands.
No one spoke.
She was supposed to talk, but she didn’t strike Harris as someone who’d spent a lot of time in meetings like this.
Tony leaned forward. “Well, Noel, in light of today’s milestone, do you want to chair the next one?”
“I’m away,” Noel said. “I’ve got this court thing.”
“How about you, Peter?”
Peter Simmons had not said a word all night. He nodded.
“Okay, then let’s get out of here,” said Tony.
They all stood up, except the woman. It was only as they started the prayer that she seemed to notice things had changed. The courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. A disjointed type of unison, all behind Dev’s voice. When it was done, Harris went to the kitchen and watched things finish up from in there. Noel helped himself to the biscuits. Tony bummed a smoke. The new woman sat with Dev. She unfolded papers from her pocket and had him sign the lot. As soon as it was done, she walked.
Harris stood on the rug in the living room. He had a house up in the hills, had done for years. He was one of the few who lived up there. Most of the places were empty. He liked that. At fifty-five, Harris knew he needed this house. He needed the quiet, especially now. It gave him a sense of things. When he kept a quiet home, he could spot disruption a long way off. He could feel it like a change in temperature. He knew what came with that change.
Ghosts.
The woman from the meeting was a bad omen. She felt familiar. This had all happened before.
He called Dev. It was late but the man answered.
“I’ve got a bad feeling,” Harris said.
“Already? And it’s been quiet lately, since Bill.”
“That’s why I’m worried.”
“You can’t change the future, Jim.”
“I know.”
“But you’re feeling something, right? You did seem a bit off tonight.”
“I was,” said Harris. “This fucking weather. They sometimes come in the cold for no reason. And now this woman, I…”
“Have you meditated?”
“That’s your answer to everything.”
“Have you?”
“No.” Harris sat down and crossed his legs. “I’ll do it,” he said.
“And?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s only one person who has all the answers, Jim, and they’re not on the island. They’re not anywhere. So you, the best you can do is deal with what you have in front of you. Remember that, okay? Bad feeling or not, a lot of this is none of your business.”
He was talking about God. This was Dev’s way of dealing with things. He blamed a higher power.
Harris put down the phone.
He shut the lights off.
He prayed to anyone who’d listen.
Be in the space.
Scan down through the body.
Find the centre.
Harris disappeared into himself.
5
Friday, July 2 to Thursday, July 15, 2004
On the drive back from the meeting, Laura Romano passed a dozen bars. She stopped at two without a drink, unable to work out the local currency. At the third, a pub on Point Hallahan, she held up a twenty-dollar note and said, “Please tell me you’ll take my money.”
The barman nodded.
“Whiskey, neat,” she said. “Something halfway decent.”
He took a bottle down from the shelf and said, “On ice?”
“Yeah. Okay, make it a double.”
He took her cash and placed it in a small tin by the register. He placed the change down on the bar beside her.
“New in town?”
“Yeah, and thirsty. Had to dry out for a stretch but…” Romano could feel herself talking fast. She took a breath. “What is this money card thing everyone’s chasing? The Dry?”
“Dree,” said the barman. He took a bronze plastic card from his apron and held it up. “Slang, it means Drinks Card. You’ll need one over here. They sell them everywhere. You can buy anything with one.”
“Can you sell me one?”
“Everywhere but here.”
“What’s the exchange like?”
“Not bad.”
“And everyone has one?”
“Everyone.”
“Okay, then.”
Romano took her drink out to the beer garden. The pub sat on a jutting point of the coast, a stone’s throw from the ocean. It hovered over the island’s gaudy high street, a mess of casinos, hotels, nightclubs and titty bars lighting up the streetscaping as bright as day. They called it The Strip, apparently. She sat there and watched rain piss down into it.
After a time, she took the court orders from her pocket and unfolded them. The AA meeting was weird, weirder than expected. She played it loose, offering the Indian hippie in charge five hundred to sign all the forms at once. He did it but it was no big win. He handed her the money back and said, “Paper doesn’t mean a thing to anyone over here. Don’t come back to the circle until you�
�re ready.” He looked right at her as he handed back the forms, drawing it out. “Some people are never ready.”
She drank to that and went back to the bar for another. The barmen poured. The pub was almost empty: a woman sweated the nags down one end of the room, a group of middle-aged men sat around a table in the other corner looking on. Most of the men looked pretty rough. A jukebox played. The place smelled like the eighties, like secondhand smoke and motel air-freshener.
Romano leaned across the bar. “Can you sell me a traveller?”
“There’s no rules,” he said.
“Except for the drinks card nonsense.”
“Actually there are rules…but not about booze. What do you want? Do you want it in a bag?”
“Wine. Something dry. And forget the bag.”
She took the bottle back to the hotel. The department sprang for a relocation. She was waiting on the house that came with the job. One of the local boys laid it out on the phone the day previous: “It’s going to be a week or two, because the last guy shot himself and his family still haven’t come across to pick his shit up. It’s been bloody months. We’re about to put it in the trash.”
She’d be meeting this bright spark in the morning.
That was tomorrow’s problem.
Romano poured the wine.
Turnell Island Police Station sat in a small residential cluster about five kilometres south of The Strip. Back from the road and sheltered by a hedge of bushland, the suburb was flat and low, like a basin cut into the scrub. At its centre was the station itself. It was unlike any Romano had seen before. The station house comprised a set of old sandstone buildings, all stark windowless things with flat walls like monoliths. From the street, it had a primitive feel to it, like some holdover from the colonies, or a leper hospice. She pushed down a shudder and walked the short stair to the buzzer.
A small intercom speaker crackled.
“It’s open,” said a voice.
She went in. The first room was a dark stone chamber with a high ceiling. A bench topped with a clear Perspex barrier sealed off the far side of the chamber and behind it, sitting under two dim desk lamps, was a pair of uniformed policemen. They had a television on the desk. The light flickered over their faces.
“I’m the new appointment. Laura Romano. Anyone expecting me?”
They stared up at her. One looked taller and softer, with sandy hair and a thick moustache of the same colour. His badge read Chandler. The other looked like a squat bodybuilder, arms bulging out of his uniform sleeves. He was O’Conner. She remembered that name; O’Conner was the cop from the phone.
The last guy shot himself.
O’Conner spoke first. “Romano? What’s that, Italian?”
“Something like that,” she said.
“The whole house has been anticipating your arrival. The whole service, both of us even, have been real, real excited,” said the other one.
They sat there and smirked.
“That’s ah…You going to let me in or what?”
Chandler sighed. “Step round to your left there.” A door opened into a small antechamber. Chandler pushed out his huge hand, introducing himself as a Senior Constable. “I’ll give you the tour if you want?”
“Lead the way.”
As they passed, Romano stopped at the counter room where the other one still sat.
“I’m Denny,” he said. “Welcome to the end of the line, baby.”
“Thanks.”
Chandler pushed open a wide timber door and they stepped out into a courtyard. A sheltered corridor lined four walls, surrounding a neat green lawn.
“Jeez, it’s still coming down, aye,” said Chandler, putting a hand out to catch the rain. “Been wet lately. Doesn’t usually do this. Where you from?”
“Melbourne.”
“Never liked the place. Too cold,” said Chandler. “Now, see this, this is all us. It’s an old convict goal house. This is where the boys did their exercise back in the day.” He waved a hand across the yard. “Now we’re stuck here.” Chandler continued on around the interior corridor, talking her through the building’s history, its ghosts, the prisoners executed out back, and so on, before moving along to a long building abutting the whole left side of the property. They went in. The interior of the building had been gutted and was lined with case files. “This is where the bodies are buried.”
Romano scanned labels: old homicides, financial investigations, fraud cases, a huge collection of vice records, most of it dating back to the seventies and eighties. Pre-Fitzgerald.
“If we’re talking official duties, this is where Denny and I are supposed to spend most of our time. But keeping this garbage in order, it’s a waste of time.”
“Are they digitising it?”
“Christ, no. No one wants this going anywhere. This is over here so none of that happens.” Chandler took her out to an adjoining building, a small chamber divided by glass partitions into five discrete offices. “This is us,” he said. “Though Denny and I don’t spend much time out here either. That’s you.” He opened the door of one of the offices. She had a desk and a chair. No phone. No computer. Years of dust covered every surface. “Computer’s on order,” he said. “Should be here in a few weeks.”
“Why are you and Denny on counter duty?”
Chandler laughed. “Look around.” He walked down the building and out another door, back into the courtyard. “Now, the holding cells, booking, and evidence are all out there, through that corridor down back, behind us. There’s no one out there at the moment. And over there”—he pointed at the rear of the building that housed the reception—“Actually, you should come and put your head in here. You don’t need to worry about any of these guys, but it’s good to see for yourself.”
Chandler took a thin passage off the courtyard to a closed fire door. Once there, he knocked loudly, then stepped inside. At the front of the room there were two open plan areas: a set of lounges with a widescreen television on one side, a full kitchen on the other. Three uniformed officers, all men, sat at a small kitchen table playing cards.
“Who’s this, then?” said one of the men, more interested in his hand.
“Old Bill’s replacement,” said Chandler.
“Christ,” said one of them. “’bout bloody time.”
A man across from him looked at Romano. “You play bridge?”
“No,” she said.
He turned back to their game.
Chandler started off down the room and she followed. Behind the kitchen was a briefing room lined with desks and chairs. “We have to supply them with a desk, apparently,” said Chandler. “But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a DPU bloke use one. That’s all they do, play cards. They’re all even more pissed off now because Old Bill used take his lunch with them.”
Chandler finished the tour where they started, looking at the drizzle and the courtyard. He took a tin of tobacco from his pocket and started rolling a smoke. Romano offered him one from her pack. He refused.
“So what’s a DPU then?” she said.
“Displaced Person’s Unit. You don’t have one down south? Okay. It used to be on the mainland up here. It’s where they used to send you if you refused a transfer or if they shut something down. Or if you fucked something up. It’s where you went for a few weeks till they found you a new job.”
They put Romano on sick leave. She’d spent months at home, waiting for the phone to ring. “And now the DPU’s here?”
“That’s right. Now it’s just the dead wood. Those blokes aren’t going anywhere. They’re sitting in there till retirement, the poor bastards.” Chandler finished rolling his smoke and lit up. “Not that I have it much better.”
“Is anyone out on patrol?”
He shook his head. “We don’t go out into the jungle unless something big happens.”
“Who’s handling the routine stuff? I thought the drunk tank would be full twenty-four seven.”
“Hotel security and contractor
s look after most of it. The rest just sorts itself out.”
“Sorts itself…and this is how the other guy ran things?”
Chandler looked over at her. “That’s right. This is how we run things. The mainland doesn’t give a flying fuck about any of it. We don’t exist, as far as they’re concerned. Tunnel Island is its own thing. You, Denny, me, those old diggers inside, Old Bill, we’re just…” He coughed, a hoarse sickly sound in his chest. “Christ, there’s a bug going round. Been on the verge of getting it all winter. What was I saying?”
“The mainland brass.”
“They don’t care. It doesn’t fucking matter to them,” said Chandler as he sucked in another lungful. “It doesn’t. You’re on the other side of the tunnel now. If you haven’t worked that out yet, you soon will. You’ve sorta been put out to pasture. My advice is to find yourself a hobby. That’s it.” He flicked his smoke and started back towards reception. “That’s the tour,” he called back, without breaking stride.
Romano lingered. The rain started to come down harder. She lit a fresh cigarette off the last and waited for something to happen. When it didn’t, she made her way back to her new office and started cleaning.
For a week, Romano didn’t do much more than get her affairs in order. She ordered mail redirection and spoke to a removalist in Melbourne. She picked up the keys to her new house and looked it over: a small whiteboard bungalow in a neighbourhood ten minutes’ drive from the station house. The place was set back two streets from a still water bay. She could see the water from the gate. There were no signs of the previous tenant inside. He hadn’t blasted a hole in the wall topping himself. She could find no new plasterwork or stains in the flooring. In fact, the place was now completely empty.
Romano booked another hotel until her furniture arrived. On Chandler’s advice, she rented a car and drove to the mainland, down through the tunnel under the bay, and visited an IKEA in Brisbane, arranging delivery with one of the few freight companies who came across. By the Friday of her second week, she had most of it squared away. So much so that she planted herself beside Denny at the front desk and watched the midday movie. They were halfway through it when the call came in from the head office.
