by Steven Lang
The windows were all misted up with the heater, but it was warm. Kelvin stepped out to release the hubs. It was still raining and he started to rub down the outside with his bare hand. Clods of clay were gathered in the wheel arches, sprays of the stuff across the mudguards. He stuck his head in the door. ‘What are we going to do about this truck?’
‘Well we’re not taking it to a fucking car wash, that’s for sure,’ Andy said, and laughed, and then they all started laughing though it wasn’t funny, Kelvin standing in the doorway, still in the rain, the other two in the damp musty filthy cabin.
When they were moving again Andy dug in his tobacco pouch. ‘I reckon it must be time, gentlemen, for a celebratory number.’
‘I thought we were fucked down there,’ Jim said. ‘I thought we were completely fucked.’
‘You weren’t on your Pat Malone,’ Andy said.
He lit the joint and passed it along, without holding on for his customary age. Even Kelvin took a drag. He figured it couldn’t hurt at this point even though it wasn’t over yet, there was still the drive down the forest road, the twenty-five kilometres of highway, the town itself.
‘You know,’ Jim said. ‘We could just tell them.’
‘We could tell who?’ Andy said.
‘The loggers. We could warn them. We could call from a phone booth, anonymously, and tell them we’ve contaminated a whole heap of fuel. We wouldn’t need to say where. It’d be just as effective, it’d stop work all over the coast – ’
‘But it wouldn’t fuck up their machines,’ Andy said.
‘Exactly. The point is we want to stop them doing what they’re doing, we’re not trying to hurt – ’
‘Are you getting cold feet Jimbo?’ Andy said.
Sometimes he had an ugly way of speaking to people.
‘It’s just the loggers are going to be pissed off, aren’t they? I mean if they found out, if they even thought they knew who was responsible, they wouldn’t go to the cops, would they? They’d just come after you.They’d break your legs, or worse.’
‘That’s why you got to keep your mouth shut Jimbo,’ Andy said. ‘So’s no one does find out. No one finds out nothing about nothing, no one talks to no one, nobody claims responsibility, there’s no fucking leads anywhere, that’s why we’ve gone to all this trouble. I like my fucking legs.’
‘When I was up on the dozer – ’ Jim said.
‘What the fuck were you doing up on the dozer?’ Andy said.
‘I was having a look. I’ve never been on one before. I thought I’d take a look.While I was up there I thought, I don’t know. I thought how insignificant it is what we’re doing, in the big picture, you know. I mean, we think it’s a big deal, but it’s not. It’s not going to stop anything. It’s just going to piss people off.’
‘Shut up Jim,’ Kelvin said. ‘Just shut the fuck up.’
They drove in silence, the dope making their thoughts palpable, clouds of ill colour heavy in the cabin’s dank air. Andy was glad it was Kelvin who’d shut Jim up. Despite himself he liked the boy. Even if he was giving it to that bitch Jessica. It was almost a shame, he thought, to fuck him up so badly.
They dropped Jim off at the panel van, leaving him to take the drums to the tip while they put the Toyota back, however useless that was now.
It was later than they wanted it to be when they passed through town. If it wasn’t for the rain, now a drizzle, there would have been the beginnings of light. Perhaps that was why no one was about. Also it was Sunday morning, the morning after Saturday night in a logging and fishing town. Kelvin backed the truck in again across the little trees.
‘If they’ve got several drivers for each truck maybe they’ll blame each other for the mess,’ Kelvin said.
‘Whatever you like to think,’ Andy said. ‘But I’ll tell you this, it’ll exercise their little minds.’
He got down under the dash and pushed the wires back up, wiped off the surfaces. Kelvin did his best to repair the damage to the seedlings.Then they stood together under the building’s eaves, waiting. The Toyota dripped mud onto the tar. A big lump of clay fell off behind one of the back wheels and started to dissolve. Kelvin had started shaking again. Andy held onto his arm for a moment.
‘You done good,’ he said. ‘We’re almost there. Don’t fucking lose it now. See, here comes Jim.We’re fucking out of here.’
twenty
He couldn’t sleep. He’d come back to her house and to Suzy, so pleased to see him in the early morning, crazy with happiness at his safe return. He’d lit the stove and made coffee and washed and put his clothes to soak and by that time his exhaustion had transformed itself into a frenetic restlessness of both body and mind. He was in her house with her dog amid her things, the boxes of papers in her office, the books, her kitchen with its graters and grinders and sieves and strainers, her stack of mismatched china, each plate and cup and saucer individually chosen from op shops and markets across the country, Jessica the collector of things, postcards tacked onto the walls, the pantry door a collage of photographs of people that, generally speaking, he did not know, had never seen, and he distracted himself by examining them, this pictorial of her, the snapshots of her and her women friends in ones and twos and threes, smiling out at the camera, arms around each other, testifying to good times having been had somewhere that he was not. He searched through them for evidence of the person he knew, the thoughtful, serious, sensitive, singular, intimate woman, the one whose face was so close to his in the bed that he could hardly focus on it, but he could find little in the photographs to suggest her, and in his beyond-exhaustion state he found himself condemning her for a shallowness of existence. There was probably a record of similar moments in his life captured on film, but not by him, and he had never gathered them together, never stuck them all higgledy-piggledy to a door in his house, and the point was she had, and this need of hers to have and to hold both attracted and repelled him; it seemed to demonstrate, for a start, an undue concentration on the material side of life, a personality controlled at least in part by things, as if objects or the possession of objects granted the owner some status and he, being the owner of nothing, had therefore no right to anything, especially her. There was one picture, a photograph of her in some cold place, with pale skin, red cheeks, the colours darker and richer, just Jessica alone, a lichen-covered wall as background, looking out at the camera with an expression suggesting sadness or isolation, he couldn’t put a single name to it, fragility perhaps. In this photograph she was beautiful. He wanted her to be looking at him like that, he wanted to be the one behind the camera, the one who could take her in his arms and make it all right, because, if for no other reason, he would be able to do that, because he knew those feelings, knew that place. He took the photo off the door, its corners pierced by drawing pins, its back mysteriously empty of attribution, and slipped it between the pages of the novel he’d borrowed from her bookshelf.
Eventually, of course, he slept, sleeping through the afternoon and into the night, waking in the small hours, peeing, and then sleeping again until dawn. Monday. At certain logging dumps off in the bush, he thought, men would be turning up for work, refuelling their machines for another day, all trace of his presence washed away by the rain.
The air was sparkling clear. He took Suzy for a walk over to Jim’s, the dog running ahead and back, circling wide, using him as a centre to return to, an independent force which had yet adopted him with extraordinary trust, another aspect of Jessica he had borrowed.
Jim was in bed. His filthy clothes, contrary to every agreement and every ounce of common sense, were in a damp pile beside the cold fire.
‘I’m sick, man,’ he said, ‘sick as a dog.’
‘You haven’t washed your clothes,’ Kelvin said.
‘I know, man, I’m too fucked to move. I’ve got the flu, shit running down the back of my throat, fever, headaches, the whole shebang.’
He looked the part. The shack, too, was a mess, made worse b
y the dead fire. Kelvin went outside and found kindling, split a log, built a fire, swung the kettle over it. Suzy came in, tail between her legs, slinking, and lay down in front of it, ears back, looking at him out of the corner of her eyes, waiting to be told to shift. He picked up the putrid bundle of clothes, boots and all, and dumped them in a pair of concrete tubs outside and left the tap running even if it was tank water, poking them with a stick from time to time, more out of self-preservation than any sense of neighbourliness.
Jim manoeuvred himself off the bed, which for some reason was suspended on ropes from the ceiling.
‘Bastard of a thing to be sick in,’ he said. ‘Starts rocking every time you roll over.’
He staggered outside wearing only a ragged grey T-shirt, his skinny legs and pale arse darkly hairy, his face swollen, peeing only a yard from the door. The very air around him infectious. Kelvin made him tea and a piece of toast.
‘Thanks, man, I mean it, thanks, I need this and I couldn’t make it out to the wood heap. My head’s pounding. When I stand up it’s excruciating.’
‘Have you taken anything?’
‘Like what?’
‘Panadol, aspirin, I don’t know, what have you got?’
‘I’ll just ride it out,’ he said. ‘I’m not into drugs.’
He crawled back into bed.
A sudden thought crossed Kelvin’s mind.‘Where’s that wrench?’
Jim looked, if possible, more sheepish. ‘It’s safe.’
‘Where?’
‘I tell you, I’ve put it somewhere safe.’
‘Where?’
Jim put his hand under the covers.
‘Jesus Christ, Jim, you’ll get us fucking killed.’
He went over and took the thing, the steel unpleasantly warm from its time between the sheets. ‘You fucking love the thing, don’t you?’
‘I don’t, it was just …’
Kelvin examined it. A formidable tool. Like someone had simply scaled up one of the little ones but better, all the tolerances exact, the worm screw tight but easy to turn. Needing two hands to lift. He took it back to his chair and laid it across the arms in front of him.
‘When I’m finished I’ll bury it,’ he said.
‘It’ll rust.’
‘Give me a bit of oil, an old towel and a plastic bag and I’ll take care of it.’
Jim sitting up in the bed, the cup of tea in both hands. ‘It doesn’t matter anyway. I’ll take it with me, leave no trace.’
‘Where you going?’
‘Melbourne, stay with my parents for a while.’
‘Right.’
The silence summoned up by this statement lying between the two men. An explanation was required, but it wasn’t clear if Jim would care to give it, didn’t want to submit his reasons to scrutiny.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said.
‘And?’
‘I thought I might quit the Farm. Maybe I’ll go back to uni, finish my degree.’
‘Saturday night really put the wind up you, eh?’
‘It’s been on my mind,’ waving away the suggestion. ‘The other night was like, just a catalyst. I’m not doing anything here, I haven’t been doing anything for months.’ Looking at Kelvin, his nose blocked, his eyes red. ‘I don’t reckon we did the right thing.’
Kelvin sat with his hand on the wrench in front of him, working the worm screw to make the jaws open and close. The fire could have done with more wood but he’d have needed to move the wrench to get up and fix it. Suzy checked him with one eye and then hunched herself into a tighter ball. Kelvin had no reservations about what they’d done. This in itself, was remarkable. For once he was convinced of the rightness of his actions.
What interested him more was Jim’s mooted departure. In the last month he’d spoken three or four times about his feeling for place, going on about how this land was his land in almost an Aboriginal sense, how it had spoken to him so strongly when he first came there, like it was where he had been meant to live. Apparently it had just been more bullshit.
‘What’s your problem?’
Jim was having trouble saying it, either he didn’t have the words, or else he was embarrassed.
‘You frightened?’
Jim looked away, talking to the wall. ‘I’m lying in bed here thinking they’re going to come and get me. I’m listening for every noise, I’ve got a fever and in my dreams there’s fucking murder and mayhem.’
For a moment Kelvin felt it too. He stood up and shook himself off, like a dog after a swim.
‘You haven’t even washed the clay off your clothes,’ he said. ‘You’ve got the only piece of evidence linking us with what’s happening right now, right this moment off in the bush, and you’ve got it in the bed with you.’
‘I know, man, I know.’
‘Listen, once we’re rid of this thing there’s nothing to connect us with what happened, no witnesses, no fingerprints, no criminal records, we were at the main house all evening, everyone saw us there.The kind of thing that’s going to get us busted is if you do something stupid, like run off. Aren’t you supposed to be at work this week?’
‘I couldn’t work,’ Jim said.
‘Not today, but tomorrow, or the next day.You’ve got to act normal.’
‘If I wasn’t so sick I’d have left already.’
Kelvin thought about it. He had liked this man, really liked him, but everything he was saying offended him. Perhaps Jim was best out of the way. If he was that scared, then he was a liability.
Kelvin should have been working himself, but he didn’t feel up to Carl just then. Later, maybe. He buried the wrench in Jim’s pathetic little vegie garden and ambled down the valley to Andy’s, to see if either of the same bugs had struck him. An hour earlier he had been feeling fine. The air was still pristine, with a coolness to it, as if the season was about to change; the colours were still vivid and bright, sharp-edged, but now he was blind to them. He’d caught some of the bastard’s unease. What he wanted was to speak to Jessica. He couldn’t see himself surviving another week without talking to her.
Andy’s tent was on the east side of a small clearing about a hundred metres from the creek. Not so many years before the clearing would have been larger but wattle regrowth had crept in from the edges and now barely more than the damp ground was vacant. Even this had been colonised by lomandra and reeds. The tent was on higher ground, up amongst the trees, more a shack than a tent, having a raised floor and half-walls of timber, as well as a rough stone fireplace, a roof made out of ex-army canvas. The blue panel van was nowhere to be seen, but there was the faintest wisp of smoke coming from the chimney. A small deck had been attached at one end, up a couple of steps. Whoever had built it, and it hadn’t been Andy, must have had a small child because a rail had been constructed around it using the sides of a couple of playpens. It reminded him of the little veranda on the end of the train from Alice Springs to Port Augusta, which, in turn, brought up Yvette, who he hadn’t thought about for weeks.Yvette, Alice, the journey to Shelley. Another lifetime.
Kelvin called out but there was no reply. He stepped up.The canvas end flaps were pinned open but even then the inside was dark. He called again, stuck his head in, but no one was home. The place, particularly after the mess at Jim’s, was surprisingly sparse and clean, almost, he thought, austere, not what he’d imagined at all. There were a couple of old chairs, one with a crocheted blanket over the back, a double bed, a rudimentary kitchen, a guitar leaning against the bench, some embers glowing in the fireplace. Listening carefully for motor noise he went in. On the table was a pile of books:Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision, a paperback entitled Longinus: The Spear of Destiny, something on the Knights Templar, and another one called Leviathan, the kinds of books, he could hear Slattery’s voice say, whose authors seek to save their readers the trouble of highlighting or underlining passages by doing it for them, putting every second or third sentence, sometimes whole paragraphs, into capitals or italics.
>
The other night, on the way into Eden, while Jim was sleeping, Andy had got into one of his raves, sitting behind the wheel spinning a convoluted story about the true rulers of the world, the secret ones, and the secret societies they had belonged to in previous centuries and their present incarnation as executives of multinational corporations.
‘There’s evil in the world, man,’ he’d said.‘Don’t be mistaken. Just remember this: everyone’s corruptible when it comes down to it, and these guys, these CEOs, are offered wealth beyond imagination, fabulous wealth, the opportunity to have and to do anything they want with impunity. All they have to do is its bidding.’
Kelvin had had no way of knowing how much of what Andy had said was fantasy or otherwise. In the dark cabin of the panel van, setting out to destroy huge machines with sugar bought in the supermarket in Bega – like soldiers of some modern Resistance – the stories had had a certain power, Andy himself had had a certain power, as if rather than possessing secret knowledge the secrets had possessed him and were using him to reel off the lists of names and dates of arcane and obscure events that somehow tied in with known facts of history. Now, faced with this pile of books, Kelvin felt freed from the spell.They were cheap paperbacks whose garish covers showed flaming swastikas, a pyramid with an eye in the middle; they were airport trash. He tried to memorise the titles, he’d ask Carl. Carl would know.
Suzy came bounding up onto the deck, looking for him. Together they headed back up the hill.
When he pulled up at Jessica’s phone box in Coalwater the panel van was already there. Andy was in the booth and Kelvin went forward to greet him, tapping on the glass and smiling at this coincidence. Andy pushed open the door, his hand over the mouthpiece.
‘What the fuck do you want?’ he said.
Kelvin stepped back. ‘I was just saying hello.’
‘I’m on the phone, man, can’t you see?’ closing the door.
Kelvin stood where he was, shocked into inaction. Andy held the mouthpiece against his chest and glowered at him from inside the glass, waving him away. He went back to the car and leaned against the door, offended, hurt even, but at the same time struck by the memory of where he’d seen Andy before, before they were introduced at the main house. It had been at the Australasia, that first night in Eden. Andy had been the man talking on the phone in the lobby who had so resented his presence. Try as he might Kelvin couldn’t give any significance to this sudden knowledge and yet it felt important. He was no longer sure what he was doing in Coalwater, at midday on a Monday. The chance of Jessica being near the phone was so slim.
