Two Man Station

by Lisa Henry

  Gio snorted and turned away from the window. He dragged his hand through his hair and shook his head at his own paranoia. Sergeant Quinn had been nothing but decent to him. The problem was, he could say exactly the same thing about his colleagues down the Coast, right? Up until the moment they weren’t decent anymore.

  “Dog.”

  And why the hell would Gio think that it’d take a country copper to try to flog the shit out of him?

  He clenched his shaking hands into fists.

  It hadn’t been a country copper last time, had it?

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. From outside he heard the crack of the cricket ball against the bat again, and then Taylor’s cheer, and Sergeant Quinn’s laugh, and the screech of the cockatoos in the rain tree down the back. Somehow though, he could still hear Coop’s voice loudest of all:

  “What the fuck, Gio? Why would you do that to Pete?”

  The look of betrayal had stung just as much as Coop’s words, and in that moment Gio had known there was not a single fucking thing he could say to make Coop or any of the others understand. He’d thought they were his friends, but they were Pete’s friends first, and they wouldn’t . . . they wouldn’t hear what Gio had to say. Not when they’d already decided who to blame. There had been nothing Gio could say, and then, after that, there had been no opportunity to say it anyway. Nobody talked to him after that. They’d frozen him out. Then they’d turned on him, and now here he was.

  Sergeant Quinn had been nothing but decent to him, but that could change in a heartbeat. Gio didn’t have friends anymore, and he sure as hell didn’t have crushes.

  That shouldn’t have been so fucking hard to remember.

  “Why would you do that?”

  Gio took another stubbie from the fridge and headed for his bedroom, where he could close the door, crank up the rattling air-conditioning, and drown out the sounds of Sergeant Quinn and Taylor laughing outside.

  Gio seemed to pick things up pretty quickly: the names of the streets, businesses, and the landmarks around town. The property names outside of town still eluded him, but Jason saw him checking the maps at the station sometimes to at least try to place the larger properties. On a rare Monday day shift they were rostered together, Jason decided that now was as good a time as any to do a proper tour of the division.

  “Weapons’ audits,” he explained. “Figured we’d do the rounds. Take you out to a few of the properties, and maybe the mine as well.”

  A few of the properties. That was no exaggeration. Most of the cattle properties were so vast they wouldn’t be able to cover more than a few in an eight-hour shift. Jason phoned the owners first, not just to make sure they knew he and Gio were coming out so it wasn’t a wasted trip, but also to check if there was anything the residents wanted brought out from town.

  “You like scones, right?” he asked Gio when they were finally loaded up and ready to go.

  Gio gave him a sideways look, and Jason laughed. There was no way they’d be allowed to leave any of these stations without being fattened up like poddy calves, and Gio was about to learn that. They’d probably come home stacked up with leftovers as well.

  The tyres flung up waves of red dust as they headed north out of town. It billowed behind them, a plume, and then settled over the road again like a shroud.

  Weapons’ audits were a pain in the arse—and it wasn’t like anyone was going to fail them, since Jason always gave them fair warning he was coming—but they needed to be done all the same. In the city, it might be possible to knock over fifteen or so on a dedicated shift. Here they’d be lucky if they managed five or six, but there were worse things than being paid to drive all over the division for a day.

  Jason hadn’t grown up in country like this, full of red dirt and spinifex, but it was home now. He’d been born in Cairns—mud flats and mangroves—and gone to university in Townsville where he’d met Alana. They’d got serious quickly. They’d moved in together by graduation. Jason had worked at Coles for a year after graduating, supporting Alana while she’d struggled through her first year of kindergarten teaching, and she’d supported him in turn when he’d applied to the academy. They’d got married the same week Jason had been sworn in as a police officer. Instead of a honeymoon, they’d packed up and driven to Mount Isa, neither of them with any idea what to expect. They’d figured they would go where their jobs took them and end up on the coast again one day. They’d only made it as far as Richmond.

  Jason glanced at his wedding ring as he drove. He’d never taken it off. It had never occurred to him to do so, apart from a panicked moment a few days after Alana died when he’d suddenly been overwhelmed by the fact that he was no longer married. That she was gone and he’d never see her again. Worst of all had been how he’d kept having to explain it to Taylor, who’d been too little to really understand.

  “I want Mummy! I want Mummy!”

  Screaming it and thrashing in Jason’s hold like Jason had been somehow withholding her from him. Like Jason was someone he could blame for this. Because up until that moment, Daddy had been the guy who could fix anything, right? He could repair busted toys, he could put Band-Aids on skinned knees, and he could even check under the bed for monsters, but he hadn’t been able to fix this. He hadn’t been able to bring Mummy back. Some days Jason wondered if that was the sort of loss of faith a kid could just bounce back from. It had to leave a scar, didn’t it? Something that big. He looked at Taylor sometimes and worried he was damaged in places Jason couldn’t see.

  God knew Jason was. The ache in his chest when he thought of Alana, when he thought of Taylor growing up without her . . . that ache had never gone away.

  Jason tightened his grip on the steering wheel and glanced over at Gio. Gio had his iPad out, checking the rego of the ute travelling in front of them. Well, it was probably the station iPad. Jason rarely used it, but Gio was from the Coast, where they were used to getting all the latest technology rolled out first. Jason was resisting using QLiTE until Comms started sending him jobs through the app. He was lucky to get two or three jobs dispatched to him via radio on a busy shift anyway. QLiTE wasn’t going to streamline anything for him, or cut down on his already infrequent radio traffic. He’d still get most of his jobs the old-fashioned way: by people phoning the station directly, or turning up on his doorstep.

  Gio slid the iPad back into the console between their seats. “There’s not really much traffic to check out here.”

  “Not a lot,” Jason agreed. “Bit different than on the Gold Coast, right?”

  “Yeah.” Gio’s mouth twitched in a brief smile. “You ever worked down there?”

  “Not my speed,” Jason said. “I went to the academy in Townsville, did my first year in Mount Isa, then went down to Clermont, then here.”

  “You’ve been here a while?”

  “Taylor was born here.” Alana died here. “It’s home.”

  Gio didn’t seem to have anything to say to that. He avoided Jason’s gaze and stared out at the flat, straight highway that cut through the red dirt and the spinifex.

  It was home.

  Eucalypts, thin bunches of leaves hanging, seemed to wilt in the heat. Brown and gold clumps of grass dotted the sides of the highway, dry as kindling. When the rains came, the plains would be flooded and vibrant green with new life once the water receded, but for now the land was parched.

  The narrow highway north of town was two lanes, with hardly any shoulder at all. The edges of the bitumen just dropped sharply off into the dirt. On the rare occasions they met traffic coming the other way Jason hugged the left side of the road tightly. About half an hour out of town, an approaching road train drove a dust storm ahead of it, and Jason slowed to a crawl. Even then it almost shook the police LandCruiser off the road.

  “Do you get a lot of accidents out here?” Gio asked, reaching for the handle above his seat.

  “A few,” Jason said, accelerating once the road train was behind them. “Tourists, mostly
, who don’t know how to drive for the conditions. Our roads are shit, and some of them are used to driving on the autobahn.”

  They bounced over a pothole, and everything in the back seat shifted.

  Jason watched the odometer click over, and tried to remember if getting to know his previous partners had been punctuated by as many awkward silences. The only time Gio had seemed to loosen up a little was when they’d been about to go in and face the taipan in Jim Brown’s bedroom. And no way in hell did Jason want to have to do something like that every shift just to bond with his new senior constable. Some things really weren’t worth dying for.

  “So what about you?” he asked as they passed a weather-beaten sign marking the turnoff to Hidden Creek. “You ever worked outside the southeast corner?”

  Gio shook his head. “Academy at Oxley, then the Coast. This . . .” He released the handle above the door to drag his fingers through his dark curls. “This was never in the plan.”

  “Plans are overrated.” Jason shrugged.

  Gio didn’t look convinced.

  Baxter Mine was a little over two hundred kilometres from town. About three hours because of the condition of the roads. The mine, Jason told Gio as they approached, didn’t have much to do with the town. Their workers weren’t locals: they were from Townsville and Mackay, mostly, FIFO —fly in, fly out. The mine had its own runway. Apart from attending the occasional industrial accident or dispute between workers that mine security couldn’t sort out, Jason didn’t head to the mine often, but it was still a part of his more than 60,000-square-kilometre beat. The number did absolutely nothing to communicate the vastness of the division. That could only be learned by hours in the car, watching the dust paint a sunset vivid red, or the first stars come out in a sky that never ended.

  Baxter was an open-cut gold mine, a gaping wound on the surface of the earth. Trucks inched up and down the steep inclines carved into the sides. Jason and Gio didn’t make it as far as the actual mine today. Instead they looked at the framed pictures of it hanging on the walls of the administration building. The air conditioner hummed and buzzed. Condensation fogged up the windows. Jason’s sweat chilled as the woman behind the desk made a call for someone to come and meet them. It was a few minutes before a guy appeared.

  “John, right?” he asked. The guy was too clean to be anything but management. Shoes too shiny.

  “Jason,” Jason corrected him. “And this is Gio. He’s new. I’m showing him around.”

  “Hi.” The guy was young, with reddish hair and a smattering of freckles across his nose. He had a firm handshake and a gaze that lingered on Gio. Curious, maybe. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and Jason didn’t really want to analyse the reasons why he’d noticed that, but it had something to do with the way the guy was still looking at Gio. “I’m Richard. Richard Hanna. Operations manager.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Gio said, and flashed him a smile that was brighter than any Jason had seen. Faking it to appear friendly, or was that what his smiles were like when he wasn’t stuck in a car with his boss? Another thing that Jason didn’t need to analyse.

  “You too,” Richard said, leaning in a little closer towards Gio. “Do you want a tea or a coffee? Or something cold? It’s another stinker out there.”

  “Thanks,” Gio said, and his left cheek puckered with a dimple when his smile widened.

  Was this flirting? And Jesus, was Jason so out of practice that he didn’t even recognise it anymore? He was thirty-eight, not dead, but right now he felt exactly as old as Taylor had thought he was the day Taylor had discovered Jason had grown up without the internet. And mobile phones.

  They drank their coffee in a small meal room past the main offices. There was a TV on the wall, and a stack of newspapers on the large laminate table. There was an open packet of Arnott’s Family Assorted biscuits on the table. The packet had been looted, with only Scotch Fingers left behind.

  Richard regarded the packet dubiously. “I think we’ve got, ah, some cake somewhere.”

  “I’m good, thanks,” Gio said.

  “Gotta stay in shape in your work, I s’pose,” Richard said, and looked Gio up and down. “Not that you need to worry about that.”

  Gio’s dimple appeared again.

  Jason raised his eyebrows. That was definitely flirting. Pretty shithouse flirting, but flirting all the same.

  The phone in his pocket began to buzz, and he turned away from them.

  “Excuse me,” he said, digging the phone out and stepping out into the corridor. It was a local number, but not one he had in his contacts. It was his personal mobile, and a few people around town had the number, but most work-related calls came through on the station mobile. He also had a satellite phone in the car. For a kid who’d grown up without a mobile, he had them coming out of his arse now, didn’t he? He accepted the call. “Hello?”

  “This is Leanne Fisher. I’m calling from the school. Is this Taylor’s dad?”

  “Yeah.” Two hundred kilometres and three hours from town, Jason’s blood ran cold. “What’s happened? Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine,” Sandra said when they made it back to town at last, and to the station. “He’s in your office, reading.”

  He wasn’t. When Jason found Taylor, he was curled up on the narrow bench in the holding cell, a blanket pulled around him and Jason’s spare jacket bundled under his head for a pillow. He looked so small. Jason crouched down beside him and put a hand on his hot forehead. Smoothed his damp hair back.

  Taylor snuffled awake. “Dad?”

  “How you feeling, mate?”

  Taylor wrinkled his nose and stretched. He was wearing a different shirt than the one Jason had sent him off to school in. This one was faded to almost pink, and at least two sizes too big. “I projectile vomited all over my desk. And all over Cassidy. She won’t want to sit next to me anymore. It was really gross, Dad.”

  “I thought you sat next to Kane.” Kane was Taylor’s best friend.

  “Cassidy sits on my other side.” Taylor worried his lower lip with his teeth. “I probably should have thrown up on Kane instead.”

  “Probably.” Jason fought a smile as he stroked Taylor’s hair. “Do you feel better now?”

  “Sandra took me to the doctor. I have a stomach bug.” Taylor brightened. “Can I stay home from school tomorrow and watch TV?”

  “We’ll see how you feel in the morning,” Jason said, but it was probably a given. He was supposed to be working again, but he’d take a day’s leave. “Come on, mate. Let’s get you home.”

  Jason avoided Sandra’s gaze as he ushered Taylor out of the station. There’d be nothing in it he didn’t already know.

  Taylor grumbled about his sore stomach as they walked home.

  When they got there, Jason put Taylor in a lukewarm bath and then headed down the back stairs and underneath the house. He very carefully untied the garbage bag the school had sent home with Taylor. Taylor’s shirt was a stinking vomit-filled mess, and Jason held his breath while he dug it out of the bag, then retied the bag quickly and tossed it in the bin. He rinsed the shirt out under the tap in the laundry sink, then threw it into the washing machine.

  When he got upstairs again, Taylor had left a trail of wet footprints from the bathroom to his bedroom. He was lying facedown on his bed wearing only a pair of dinosaur underpants.

  “Taylor. You’re not sleeping like that. Get into bed properly.”

  Taylor rolled onto his back and whined. “But, Daaad!” A wavering trill that would make an opera singer proud. “It’s not even dark yet!”

  Jason snorted. The kid who was so wrung out he’d face-planted on his bed thought he was staying up until his usual bedtime, did he? Right. “Get under the sheets. You don’t have to go to sleep. You can read, or you can play Minecraft, and I’ll make you some toast and Vegemite, okay? You should be able to keep that down.”

  “Okay. And a bucket, just in case?”

  “Good thinking.” Jason helped Ta
ylor tug his sheets up, and then headed for the kitchen to put some toast on.

  He loved his town and he loved his job, but Jesus, it wasn’t fair on Taylor. It wasn’t fair on Sandra, either, was it? Jason should have been the one to pick his sick son up from school and take him to the doctor, not Sandra. Jason had always told himself he was managing, but how much of that was bullshit? Because now that Dan and Gabby had left, he was seeing, for the first time, exactly how much he’d relied on them, particularly on Gabby. How many times had he collected Taylor from Dan and Gabby’s house after a late shift, and carried him, still sleeping, across the scrubby yard between their houses? And how many times had he been called out in the middle of the night, and led a yawning, snuffling Taylor over to Dan and Gabby’s house so that he didn’t have to leave him alone? How many times had he and Dan arrived home from some shitty all-nighter of a job to find Taylor talking Gabby’s ear off while they ate breakfast together? Jason had never actually been a single parent, had he? Not with Dan and Gabby right next door.

  From the moment Dan put in his transfer to Cairns, Jason should have been looking for proper childcare for Taylor. As much as he tried to juggle between after-school care, between Kane’s parents and Sandra, and letting Taylor hang out at the station, there were always going to be gaps. And it really wasn’t fair to expect Sandra to step up every time, like she had today.

  It wasn’t fair on Taylor either.

  Jason needed to sort out something permanent.

  Like a nanny?

  That sounded . . . expensive. And it wasn’t as though Taylor needed round-the-clock childcare. He just needed there to be someone at home when Jason couldn’t be there for him because of his job. The options in Richmond were hardly great, though. Ideally, Jason wanted someone who could watch Taylor at the house, but Richmond was not an environment rich with reliable people seeking housing options. Jason had lived in towns before where kids from rural properties lived in town during the week for school, rather than commute several hours a day for school, but Richmond State School only went as high as year ten. Kids went to boarding school after that, most to Charters Towers but some farther afield. Otherwise, a high school senior would have been ideal. It would be difficult to find someone other than a student who didn’t already have their own family responsibilities, and it wasn’t like Jason was going to hire a random procession of backpackers to sleep in his spare room and look after his kid. Although Taylor would probably enjoy that. He could learn to talk the ear off people in multiple different languages.