Three rows behind you sits Bronwyn. Twelve months ago she lost her husband and her only child, her son. Her husband took him too far out in the surf one vile, chaotic day at Goolwa and couldn’t get him back in before all the air in his thirteen-year-old lungs had been replaced by salt water. He killed himself three days later. You know nothing of this.
At the terminal, your fellow passengers spill from the train like blood cells, surging through the turnstiles and into the city, transfusing the day.
The connecting bus is late. You wait, urgently, wanting to talk to the girl in the op-shop cardie and bright purple trousers standing beside you. You want to tell her to be careful about who she talks to. But you don’t. How could you?
When the bus comes you sit two rows behind her. At the lights on Pulteney Street an electrician’s van pulls up alongside, large tinted windows running down the side. The photons do their work and the girl in the cardie is cast into the back of the van. She sits just two rows away from you while her doppelganger slouches among cables, ties and rolls of tape.
Last night you found out that your best friend’s daughter has gone missing. The world has changed during the night. You no longer recognise it.
Conditional Release
On his way from Geraldton through clapped-out mulga to the remote gold-mining town of Meekatharra, Dan stopped for morning tea at the welfare office in Mullewa – a converted, asbestos-lined house beside a vacant lot, across the road from the courthouse. ‘Location, location, location,’ he could hear Amanda’s father saying. Sarcasm was one of his ex-father-in-law’s strong points.
He stayed just long enough, over weak Black & Gold tea and homemade Anzac biscuits, to get the impression he was about to slip off the edge of the world. ‘Meeka,’ grunted Trevor, the slack-jowled, sixty-something officer in charge, barely looking up from the daily paper. ‘Watch out for the dogs.’
Trevor’s offsider, Kate, a young social worker from Perth, rolled her eyes. Around her neck she wore a string of beads in various dull shades of ochre. When Dan asked her, she told him they were native seeds, strung together on a cord made from strands of human hair, and he wished he hadn’t. A tiny muscle in the corner of her mouth ticked away and Dan could see she wasn’t happy with where her four years at uni had landed her. ‘Take no notice of Trevor,’ she said. ‘He hates the place.’
Trevor grunted again and turned a page.
‘His son,’ explained Kate, ‘got beaten up there last year.’ She made a face on ‘son’, as if she thought he’d probably deserved it. Dan raised an eyebrow and took a bite of his crumbly biscuit, wishing he was back in his car, alone, with just the sound of the wind rushing by.
‘Ran over someone’s dog,’ she continued.
‘It was an accident,’ said Trevor. ‘But they dragged him out of his car anyway. Beat the shit out of him.’
Cresting the last small hill before Meekatharra, a roadhouse on his right, the streets glary and slick with panes of afternoon light crashing up at him from the wet roads, Dan pumped the brakes, mindful of the road train weighing in behind him. Ninety, eighty, seventy, sixty and he was already well into town and the grill of the road train filled his rear-view mirror. His eyes darted to the road’s edge where children of all hues played in puddles of red. He gripped the steering wheel tightly.
Dan pulled up outside the welfare office, the third last building before the road snaked north out of town. He got out, flexed his head from side to side and breathed in the warm stink of summer rain on red earth. On the other side of the road, bordered on all sides by drab, low scrub, a field of asphalt shone crazily in the dying light, basketball backboards against the pale blue horizon. None of them had rings, let alone nets. It took him a couple of seconds to figure out that the constellations of light on the courts were a galaxy of broken glass.
Up the steps to the office and he was about to knock a second time when the door opened. A man in his late thirties, bearded, stared at him like he was about to start shaking his head to whatever Dan might say.
‘Graham?’ Dan asked. ‘Dan, from the Geraldton office.’ He held out his hand and Graham opened the door a little wider, wiped his hand on his green King Gees and shook Dan’s.
‘Pleased to meet ya,’ he said. ‘Come on in.’
Inside the office he presented Dan with the key to his house and drew a mud map of the town.
‘Looks like it’s right next to the tip,’ said Dan, frowning at the map.
‘Yeah, but it’s alright,’ replied Graham. ‘Nice and quiet out there. Just close yer windows when the southerly blows.’
Graham dragged a couple of VBs out of the office fridge in the corner of the room. A couple of beers later, when the conversation had dried up, Dan drove back through town, stopping at the roadhouse to pick up a meal of fish and chips in a cardboard box. Parked outside his new home he killed the engine and sat there in the darkness for longer than he should have, suddenly overwhelmed. Graham had let himself go. Shorts and thongs, a stained T-shirt, matching set of tangled hair and beard. But he looked harmless enough. Perhaps the Geraldton people were wrong.
Dan settled quietly into his government-issue house and the work that went with it. The house was thin-walled, asbestos-roofed and a decade or two older than Dan. He took walks in the mornings to get his bearings, and explored the crosshatching of trails around the town dump. At the end of his first week in Meekatharra he threw away the antidepressants he’d been carting around since Amanda had left him six months earlier. By then he had a fair idea of the work and felt he could rise to meet it.
The town was at crisis point. In the previous twelve months, thirty-two of its children had been sent to juvenile detention centres in Perth, across a weary eight-hundred-kilometre stretch of scrub to the south. Everything from joy riding to robbery with violence.
On the day before he’d been sent to Meeka, Dan had been summonsed to the Regional Director’s office. Patrick sat in a puffed up leather director’s chair, his desk immaculate. ‘The magistrate is pissed off,’ he explained. ‘And Graham’s a fuckwit. We don’t know what he’s doing out there.’ Patrick had taken off his glasses, rubbed his forehead and stared out at the pine trees opposite his office. Dan waited. ‘Your job,’ Patrick continued, ‘will be to find some alternatives for these kids. Community service, probation, conditional release orders.’ He waved his hands as he spoke, as if trying to conjure up the things he was talking of. ‘So the magistrate doesn’t have to keep locking the little darlings up.’
Dan nodded.
‘And keep an eye on Graham, will you? There’s rumours.’ Patrick winced and Dan waited for the gossip, but the older man held it in.
Dan had to escort a young Aboriginal girl to the girls’ prison in Perth. Shania had got two months for stealing a carton of Jim Beam and Cola from the Railway Hotel.
He sat beside her on the plane. She was nearly fifteen, dressed in blue jeans and a yellow top that set off her skin and her gold, streaky, desert-child hair. It was a small jet, a thirty-two-seat Skywest, and the seats were so close their elbows kept touching. She smelt like corn chips. She was shy, so he gave her the book he’d planned to re-read before he remembered, too late, that it ended badly. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Something he’d been dragging around with him from his uni days.
Perth was difficult. On the Saturday morning he found himself at the war memorial overlooking Fremantle, the sun on his back, trying to pick out the limestone villa he’d shared with Amanda. By Sunday afternoon he was glad to be back in Meeka, picking his way through the town dump, looking for old tyres he could take home to grow potatoes in. The light was slanting in from just above the horizon and everything looked softer and prettier, even the piles of rubbish. The drab trees and bushes glowed, each one textured by a thousand tiny shadows.
It was Graham’s idea to introduce Dan to Andrew Fowler and do a handover of his responsibilities at the same time. He pulled up outside the bottle-o on their way out of town.
&
nbsp; ‘Won’t Andrew mind?’ asked Dan. ‘Isn’t he a preacher or something?’
‘Ex-preacher,’ Graham said, winking at him. ‘Fuck no. Likes a beer as much as the next man.’
Fowler’s station ran sheep. By Meekatharra standards it was a small outfit, among low hills and breakaways north of the 180-kilometre-long dirt road that ran east to west from Meekatharra to Wiluna. A series of gates lay between the turn-off and the homestead. After his third gate, Dan kept his seatbelt undone as Graham picked his way carefully along the rutted track.
‘Don’t expect too much,’ said Graham as he eased the Holden up to the fourth gate.
Dan got out, unlatched the gate and dragged it across the track, then dragged it back after the car had moved forward. He climbed back in.
‘He’s a funny bastard.’ Graham wiped the sweat from his brow, transferred it to his shirt.
The track forked and then straightened out, with stockyards to their left and a graveyard of machines on their right. Broken-down, cannibalised tractors and utes and at least half a dozen small trucks, mainly old Bedfords. Most of them looked reasonably intact.
‘Nothing rusts out here,’ said Graham. ‘It’s too dry. Edge of the desert.’ Ahead, Dan could see a low building surrounded by stunted pines. The closer they got to the homestead, the worse it looked.
Graham parked in front of the building and honked his horn. Silence. After a minute or so, Graham popped the boot of the car and came back with two stubbies of VB. He was on his third stubbie when Andrew pulled up on a quad bike in a cloud of dust, an Aboriginal boy of maybe twelve or thirteen holding on behind him. Graham got out of the car, shook Andrew’s hand, and introduced him to Dan.
‘He’s gonna be looking after you from now on,’ said Graham to Andrew. ‘They’ve given me the arse.’ He burped loudly on ‘arse’.
Andrew was a big, wild-eyed man, his thick black hair and beard covered in fine red dust. There was a stiffness about him like something inside him had died. He led the men through the house, the walls grim with dust and the sweat of jackaroos. The floor crunched under Dan as he followed Graham, the carton on his shoulder.
On the back veranda, Graham sat the carton on an overturned washing machine. Andrew wrestled a nest of chairs apart and placed three of them around a hole that had been smashed into the middle of the concrete slab. It had a ring of blackened stones around it and held the remains of a fire. Twenty metres away, the scrub reasserted itself in a dense tangle of bush and grass. It looked snaky and dangerous to Dan.
Dan took it all in. This was it. The only station in the district that Graham had recruited to take in impressionable young offenders on conditional release as an alternative to jail. Were all the stations like this?
‘Where you from?’ asked Andrew, twisting the lid off a stubbie.
‘Perth,’ said Dan.
‘University?’
‘Yep,’ said Dan. ‘I did English and History but found out I didn’t want to teach.’ He was trying to be expansive. ‘I got sick of Perth,’ knowing, as he said it, the truth was he’d got sick of himself.
Graham asked Andrew about the season he was having and the two of them talked for a while as if Dan wasn’t there. Whenever Dan tried to join in, Andrew became monosyllabic and guarded. The scrub in front of him was all-of-a-piece and hard to look at.
Four beers later they left Andrew on the back veranda. Dan shook hands with the ex-preacher but he didn’t rise from his chair.
‘See you in a month or two,’ said Dan.
‘Yep,’ said Andrew.
Dan took a call from Patrick the next morning.
‘How’d it go?’ asked Patrick.
‘It’s a shocker,’ said Dan, turning the overhead fan onto ‘High’ and keeping his voice low in case Graham could hear. ‘I wouldn’t send a sick dog out there.’
There was a few seconds of silence from the Geraldton end. ‘That good, eh?’ said Patrick at last. Then, ‘Shit. What are we going to do about it?’
Dan told Patrick of the promising leads he’d had in the last week or so. A sheep station to the west of town, owned by a local Aboriginal man. An emu farm near Wiluna. Both had wanted to know more about conditional release and the subsidies that went with each child placed.
‘Check ’em out,’ said Patrick, ‘and get back to me as soon as you can. We’ve gotta get moving on this before it all blows up.’
‘Okay,’ said Dan, and waited. He knew what Patrick really wanted. Some evidence to go with the rumours he’d heard himself from one of the police constables – that Graham was rooting some of his welfare clients in exchange for food vouchers, care of the department.
‘Anything else?’ asked Patrick.
Dan stared at the fan. He had a sudden image of Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now, wired and sleepless on a ruined bed. ‘Nothing yet,’ he said.
‘Hmm.’ Patrick wasn’t convinced. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I need you to do something for me …’
Dan settled into a workable rhythm of keeping mainly to himself during the week and getting shit-faced at any or all of the town’s three pubs on Friday and Saturday nights. Sunday mornings he pottered around his yard, watering his potatoes and the tomatoes he’d planted near the septic tank. Light outdoor work helped ease the sense of remorse that would otherwise follow the drinking sessions.
During the week he concentrated on juvenile justice, attending magistrate’s court twice a week in Meekatharra. He’d get the charge sheet the afternoon before and drive around town, interviewing the parents, uncles and aunts of the children due in court the next morning, working out the possibilities of fines, good behaviour bonds, probation and community service.
He got to know Shania’s family well. Her older sister, Cassie, a slim, handsome girl in her early twenties, was trying to control her five younger siblings, their mother recently dead and their father, a whitefella, on the grog in Port Hedland.
Over a cup of tea on her dusty front veranda, the mullock heaps of the open-cut gold mine rearing up two hundred metres away, they talked about Shania’s impending return from the girls’ prison in Perth. Cassie wanted her to finish high school. When they’d finished talking, Dan got up. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’ll give it a go. Have a think about what she might need and let me know.’
Later that week, Cassie came to the welfare office and asked to see Dan. He let her in and closed the door, the smell of soap and banana trailing behind her. She had a list for Dan. Three high school textbooks, two school uniforms, pens, notebooks and a school bag.
‘Okay,’ said Dan. ‘We can probably put all this on a voucher.’
As he began writing it out he stole a look at Cassie. She was looking at her hands clasped together between her legs, her wrists riding on the taut red hem of her skirt. She looked up and Dan looked away, signed the order and gently tore it from the book.
‘Going to the Commie tonight?’ Dan asked and then immediately wished he hadn’t. There was something wrong here – the voucher, Cassie, him. He passed her the voucher and she gave a little smile and a nod and got up to leave, straightening her skirt as she did so.
‘Might see you there,’ Dan said, casually, and let her out. He closed the door and stood there, breathing in deeply as the soap and banana smell faded.
That night he started at the Railway Hotel, playing pool and drinking Swan Draught with a couple of dusty miners. Graham stuck his head in at sundown and looked around. Dan waved him over and bought him a drink.
‘Andrew’s coming in tonight,’ said Graham, opening a packet of chips. ‘Staying at my place.’
Dan nodded, remembering Patrick’s request.
‘So how you findin’ Meeka?’ asked Graham, offering Dan a chip.
‘It’s alright,’ said Dan.
‘You wanna watch out for those dickheads in Geraldton,’ said Graham. ‘Stitch you up if you give ’em half a chance.’ Graham took a long swig of his beer and burped. ‘They’ve forgotten what it’s like out here. Things don’t
work the same.’
Dan nodded.
‘Rule number one,’ said Graham, dismounting from his stool. ‘Make sure you cover your own arse.’ He downed his beer and jerked his head towards the west side of town. ‘Better go see what’s happened to that prick Andrew.’
Later, at the Commercial Hotel, Dan bought Cassie a Bundy and coke and stood beside her for a while as they watched a one-dayer on the hotel plasma. The pub was packed and Dan had to put his mouth close to Cassie’s ear to make himself heard. Once or twice his arm brushed against hers and his four or five beers made him feel generous and forgiving, even towards himself.
Across the room, he caught occasional glances of Graham and Andrew sitting at a small table in the corner with some Aboriginal girls. The ex-preacher was laughing, his hair combed and curling up at his shoulder.
As Dan was buying another round of drinks, Andrew joined him.
‘Good to see you here,’ said Andrew. ‘Why don’t you come over?’ He jerked his head towards the back of the room.
‘I will,’ said Dan, collecting his drinks. He returned to Cassie and stood beside her as Ponting pirouetted and struck the ball to deep square leg. One of Cassie’s cousins, a stocky young jackaroo, flashed Dan a smile, took Cassie’s hand and began dragging her away.
‘Thanks,’ she said to Dan over her shoulder and mimed a swimming stroke with her free hand, as if trying to escape her cousin’s grasp and return to him. Dan felt a sudden pang of hopefulness and then she was gone.
He watched the end of the over and then moved through the crowd to Andrew and Graham’s table, feeling pissed now. The three girls were all about nineteen or twenty. Dan had seen each of them in the office at one time or another.
‘Your shout,’ said Andrew, so Dan went back to the bar and returned with a jug. He surrendered to drunkenness and let it take him to a place where everything he heard was amusing and everything he said was funny and the girls were laughing along with him. Graham leant over and asked him, quietly, if he wanted to come back to his house with them and the girls, but Dan put his hand up in apologetic refusal and shook his head. He kept drinking and then he was outside with Graham, sharing a rollie, enjoying the unfamiliar taste of tobacco, and Graham was even more drunk than he was, trying to tell him he should stop being a ‘floater’ and ‘commit’ to the town. ‘You’ll be happier when you do,’ said Graham, staggering slightly as he flicked the butt onto the street.
The Colour of Kerosene and Other Stories Page 6
