Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  ‘Doctor Lasker,’ Nick said.

  ‘That’s right,’ the man said. As if his arrival was unexpected, or forgotten. As if calls hadn’t been made. ‘Come this way.’

  It was a standard issue building. The sort of thing put together by a church group, or a school, for kids’ camps. Almost everyone’s childhood affected at one time or another, for good or ill, by this architecture and what occurs within it. Weatherboard and fibro. Timber floors. Unrendered besser-block toilets off to the side.

  He followed the man through a corridor to a back door and out across dusty grass to a squat annexe. Another light burning outside two rooms. The infirmary. Opening the door and flicking the switch, lighting up a shadeless bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  The room lined with pine boards. A cement floor. Two steel-frame beds, one with its mattress rolled up, striped ticking bare to the world. On the other a figure, curled with his back to the room.

  ‘Doctor’s here,’ the man said. ‘Sit up now.’

  Nick going around him to perch on the edge of the bed.

  ‘He’s right where he is,’ Nick said.

  The boy somehow larger than he’d imagined, almost a man, a strong pale calf extending out from under the blanket, good muscle tone, the foot still in its vast elaborately stitched running shoe.

  ‘You’re Cooper, is that right?’ he said. The young man was shivering. He asked him if he was cold. Asked if he could roll over.

  Cooper turned towards him, making what was possibly an exaggerated gasp of pain as he did so. The soldier-type produced a small noise; a critical click of the tongue. Nick glanced back at him. At other times, in other places, the intimidation might have been sustained, if only by the man’s size, the fit force of him, his surly silence and the unidentifiable tattoo along his forearm, but in this little room, in the middle of the night, Nick was too stupid and too angry for that. The man averted his eyes. A small victory. He went back to the boy. Swelling along one side of his face and around the mouth where there was a break in the lip, the skin split above the eye. Red-blond hair that needed a cut, the first growth of a beard on his cheeks, freckles. A line of blood had run down the side of his face, onto his neck and gathered in the cloth of his t-shirt. He was holding his right wrist with his left hand. There was a contusion on his forearm which suggested a possible break beneath the surface, perhaps only a crack. The sort of injury made by someone raising their arm to avoid a blow. The sort of injury received when a raised arm is hit with something blunt. Further examination revealing bruising to the ribs; signs of having been kicked in the stomach and back, on the legs. The marks received by someone who had contracted themselves into a foetal position.

  He took the boy’s vitals. Stable. He wanted to check for evidence of rape. He turned to the man behind him.

  ‘You can leave now,’ he said.

  The man stayed where he was. Arms crossed over his chest.

  ‘I’d like you to go out of the room,’ he said. ‘And close the door behind you.’

  ‘You have no authority here,’ the man said.

  Nick looked at the boy. Lying on his back, watching. Frightened. Nick turned back to the man. He wasn’t good at conflict. Could be struck dumb by fear at its possibility. Avoided it at all costs.

  ‘When I’m finished here I’m going to take this boy back to Winderran,’ he said. ‘To the hospital. It looks to me as though there’s a green fracture in his right ulna. Right now I’m going to check for evidence of sexual abuse. When I’m done I’m going to want to know what happened here. I’m going to want to know your name, the name of your organisation, the time this happened, who was involved and all the rest of it, and you’re going to tell me. You are going to cooperate with me in every way you can because you are in a shitload of trouble. You are so out of your depth in shit that you don’t even know you’re in it. D’you understand?’

  ‘You don’t scare me,’ the man said.

  Nick stood up. The two of them contained in the little wooden box. Unpainted pine boards on the ceiling as well as the walls. They were about the same height. The man had perhaps ten kilos on him. All of it muscle. As soon as he stood Nick realised his mistake, that this was the sort of man who would use violence without asking questions. But Nick was a doctor and he’d come to understand during his years in ER that there was power in that, too. Not much, but perhaps enough.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘You go back over to wherever you were when I arrived and call up whoever it is that does scare you.’ The words coming thick on his tongue, clumsy, betraying him. ‘Ask them what you ought to do right now. Okay? Ask them if you should help me or not.’

  They stayed like that for a few seconds. Like children daring to stare. Then the man turned and left the room.

  Nick turned back to the boy.

  ‘I want to examine you,’ he said, the adrenaline high in his system.

  The boy just looked at him.

  ‘I want you to take down your trousers and I want you to roll over on your belly.’

  The boy thought about it for a minute, then indicated he would do his best but that he couldn’t let go of his arm. The mysterious power of the doctor clearly holding for a few moments more. The boy’s pale freckled lower back and buttocks had their share of bruising. He checked the boy’s anus. No apparent damage. He was familiar with the effects of rape, was grateful for their absence.

  ‘Are you in pain?’ he asked.

  The boy nodded.

  ‘Your arm?’

  ‘Everywhere,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll give you a shot of something now. I don’t want you taking anything by mouth in case we have to operate. Do you suffer from asthma?’

  ‘No.’ The boy awkwardly pulling up his trousers using only one arm.

  He left him to it, dug around in his bag for a shot of morphine. Struggled to get the needle to line up with the top of the bottle. Noting how shaken he was by the confrontation. Doing his best to cover such obvious examples of his condition from the boy. Giving it to him in the shoulder, trying to press the plunger in slowly.

  ‘I’m going to get my car,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring it over here. Will you be able to walk?’

  Cooper mumbled something. Visibly relaxing as the drug hit his system.

  Nick went to the car, going around the back of the other building. He sat in the driver’s seat, the door closed, his hands on the wheel. Inside the cabin he felt safe. He wanted to stay there. He wanted to lock the doors and drive away. To never have visited this place. The uniform silence within the car, its false sense of security threatening to undo him. He started the motor and drove over to the infirmary and parked again, opened the passenger door, tilted back the seat. He looked around the camp. The bunkhouses sitting in their forest clearing. Nobody else appeared to be awake. Were there other boys in those buildings? Were they asleep? Had they been training so hard all day, running through the forest, doing rope courses, that now they could sleep through anything? Sleep through a doctor coming to collect the boy they’d beaten up?

  Inside the infirmary Cooper was sitting up.

  Between them they managed to get him to the car. Nick went back for the blanket and wrapped it around the boy. Closed the doors and walked over to the office. He didn’t want to. He’d lost all stomach for a fight.

  The man was already at the door. ‘He wants to talk to you,’ he said.

  He showed Nick into his office, with perhaps the smallest amount of deference. A bare, functional sort of room. Rosters on a whiteboard, a desktop computer, a national park poster with a faded picture of a waterfall. An old-style telephone off the hook. He picked it up, said his name.

  ‘Ah, Doctor,’ the voice said, ‘it appears I’m in your debt.’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ Nick said. ‘But right now that’s not the issue. I have your son in my car.’

  ‘You are perhaps a little confused. My name is Aldous Bain, you’ve quite possibly heard of me.’

  ‘Evidently.’ There see
med to be no point, or advantage, in saying they’d met. ‘Why am I talking to you?’

  ‘Mr Mayska is a good friend of mine. Cooper is his son. In this situation I am charged with looking after him.’

  ‘Well,’ Nick said, ‘Mr Mayska’s son appears to have been beaten up by persons unknown.’ Unsure where such language came from. Police procedurals? Persons unknown? He’d never said such a thing in his life. The other man standing in the doorway, back in his former position with arms crossed. Listening hard, though. Visibly stiffening when he said Mayska’s name. In the better light of the office he could see that the tattoo gave the appearance of having been altered at some point, its present incarnation bearing a Celtic Christian theme. ‘I’m going to take him to the hospital which is where he should have been hours ago. I’m going to run some tests to see how badly he’s been injured.’

  ‘Thank you. I appreciate it. I understand our mutual friend has spoken to you about how sensitive this all is …’

  ‘I’m a doctor, Mr Bain. I have responsibilities …’

  ‘I know you do, and, indeed, so do I, but as I said, I’m deeply grateful to you for looking after this boy. Mr Mayska will be flying up to the Sunshine Coast at first light. He should be in Winderran by mid-morning, perhaps earlier. I would be further grateful though if you could just leave things at the camp. I believe Cooper’s injuries come from a, how can I say, unfortunate hazing from his camp mates …’

  ‘Mr Bain, Cooper has, quite possibly, got several broken bones. He has widespread bruising. I’m not sure if there are internal injuries.’ This was overstating the case, but he wanted it to sound as bad as possible, immediately regretting the impulse. Bain wasn’t the thug by the door and any exaggeration might be held against him later. ‘I would hardly describe what has happened as hazing. He’s been beaten up, plain and simple.’

  ‘I see. Yes. But the people responsible will be held accountable. I can assure you of that. You do not need to involve yourself in that side of things. Please, I’m asking you, look after the boy and leave the rest to me. I am far from a forgiving man when it comes to these sorts of things. On the other hand I do not forget those who help.’

  This was quite the most bizarre phone call Nick had ever been part of. He put the handset back in its cradle. Several quips coming to mind that he might offer the man at the door. On balance he preferred to keep them to himself. He went past him, down the steps to the car.

  Cooper slept, curled beneath his blanket. Nick was glad that he didn’t have to talk; glad, too, that the boy wasn’t watching because he wasn’t driving well, going too fast, unable to help himself now that he was out of the place, as if it was only then that he’d come to understand how close the brute had been to injuring him. Muscular Christianity. Suffering from shock, he supposed, cornering hard.

  He’d seen Aldous Bain talking about his pet project on Q&A. Although why the Opposition should have thought having him in front of the camera was an advert for anything was beyond comprehension, especially in a debate with the slightly sexy government minister – the feisty, articulate one with the Eastern European name.

  Bain had been promoting his party’s policy for a kind of National Service, based around repairing the landscape. ‘In our urban-based culture young people have no connection to this great continent or, indeed, to our society. What we propose will give them a sense of the land they live in while at the same time addressing the real environmental problems we face. Problems with things like erosion, with damaged rivers. At the same time we take direct action against carbon in our atmosphere by sequestration.’

  ‘I thought your side didn’t believe in climate change,’ the feisty one had said, interrupting.

  ‘What we don’t believe in is a big new tax,’ Bain answered. ‘Listen, political differences aside,’ saying this as if he were the rational one, patiently tolerating the interruptions of an hysterical woman, ‘over the last few decades in Australia we’ve created a society which expects the State to offer a safety net. That’s fair enough, but it’s also a society which doesn’t seem to think it has the right to ask for anything back. What we believe is that in any social contract there should be expectations on both sides. We are not frightened of having a debate about these things. About what that might mean. Of whether or not we are prepared to ask something of our young, not for their whole lives, just for eighteen months, asking them to give back to the country which, in turn, has given them life. And I know what the Honourable Member is going to say, that this is thinly veiled nationalism and that nationalism is dangerous. But that’s only if you make it against something, against some other country or people, this is a nationalism towards a sense of ourselves as worthy of value; it is a nationalism that calls on the children of all those races who have come to live here, the British, the Irish, the Italians and the Greeks, the Vietnamese and Sri Lankans, the Afghans and Sudanese, the Lebanese and Chinese, to put aside our differences and work together for the greater good. Other countries do it, why shouldn’t we?’

  Aldous smarming his way into the camera, pouring himself into Nick’s living room.

  Cooper’s eyes were open. He was staring up at the roof of the car in his thick black t-shirt with its inscrutable tech joke on the front:

  Not speaking. The kind of soft unformed boy who provokes an irrational urge in adult males to toughen him up. Nick had, before now, felt the same thing about his own son. There had been an awful moment of cognitive dissonance watching Q&A when he’d found himself agreeing with Bain. At least about giving back. Grateful to the feisty one for her put-down about it all being a smokescreen to avoid making the people who were actually producing the pollution pay. A sop to the Right wing of the party.

  There had been times when Nick had looked at Josh and thought him too soft for the world, that his formlessness was an affront to life; asking for trouble. It was, in some unexplained way, his responsibility as a father to harden him up. For his own protection. To teach him the fortitude that comes out of difficulty, to mitigate that unstinting and often demeaning love – demeaning because it demanded nothing in return – that his mother offered. Unconditional. The love we all crave. Except that love is conditional. It requires all sorts of things: he couldn’t think what they were right then; respect, he supposed, but also empathy, understanding, loyalty, duty. Really? In truth he had no idea, his own record of love hardly inspiring on any front. Only that what had happened in the camp was the logical conclusion to this sort of thinking. Work will make you strong.

  There being one other matter: Cooper was gay. Nick would have bet the house on it. And if he had picked up on that, the other kids would have, too. They wouldn’t have been able to avoid going for him, never mind the billionaire bit (unlikely though it was the other boys were privy to that). And fuckalugs back there wouldn’t have stood in their way.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ The drug slurring his words.

  No point in trying to talk. And yet the urge for Nick to disassociate himself from what had happened back at the camp was overwhelming. To convince the boy that he had had no part in it, had been co-opted into the situation, his only role to get him out of there.

  At the little town in the valley Nick called ahead. A nurse he didn’t know answered. He told her who he was and that he’d be bringing in a young man.

  ‘Is there anything else going on?’

  ‘All quiet here.’

  The car’s speakers exaggerating a foreign quality in the woman’s voice, vaguely reminiscent of Greloed, evoking one of those small but disabling spikes of yearning for her which had, gratefully, been diminishing these last weeks.

  As they left the small town, the road straightening for a moment so that he could put his foot down in relative safety at last, he had to repress the familiar quickening in his blood raised by this brief exchange. The expectation. Repressing it because it was as unfounded as it was inappropriate. Because, apart from any other consideration, sh
e, the person on the other end of that phone conversation, about whom he knew nothing whatsoever, was a nurse, and he wasn’t going there again, had well and truly exhausted that particular cliché.

  The road starting its climb onto the Range. Slowing, driving more carefully now. Calming himself. The problem was that it didn’t seem to matter how many affairs he’d had he never seemed to learn: in every room he entered, every hospital, lecture theatre, office, aeroplane; every elevator, shop, bar, and, it seemed, now, every telephone conversation, he had one eye out, noting, watching, searching for the possibility of connection with the same insatiable curiosity, the same apparently infinite capacity for engagement. He saw it in himself, noted it, regretted it, but remained under its sway. Slightly more suspicious than usual of it right then because it had been three months since he’d slept with anyone – something of a euphemism this last, because Greloed and he had hardly ever shared a bed – and he was finding this lack difficult, never mind that it was deliberate, a conscious if hopeless attempt to face up to his history.

  It started to rain about ten minutes out of town. He glanced at Cooper. As weird a name as Greloed in its own way. His head resting on the seat, turned towards him. Eyes open.

  ‘Thank you for getting me out of there,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome. They treated you kind of rough, eh?’

  ‘Pretty much. I’m not the type.’

  ‘What type is that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Who thinks sport’s good for the soul. Who expresses unquestioning loyalty to an idea.’

  ‘Uh-huh. So what type are you?’

  Cooper managing a small smile in the reflected glow of the dash. ‘Oh, you know. Subversive. Disruptive. The kind who likes books and gaming and the internet.’

  ‘I have a son who’s like that. A bit younger than you.’