Austral

by Paul McAuley

  Brandon gave Eddie a hard look from under the brim of his Stetson and told him to stay right there, he wouldn’t be long.

  ‘You’re my backup,’ he said. ‘Keep close to your vehicle. If I come running, you better be ready to take off, show me you can outrun anything and everything. Got it?’

  Eddie swallowed dryly. ‘Got it.’

  ‘Don’t worry, kid. This ain’t my first rodeo,’ Brandon said, and swung his duffel bag onto his shoulder and led the sidekicks down the slope to the quay.

  Eddie watched their dark figures move through shadows towards the jetty where the boat had tied up. Just enough moonlight reflected from the water to see three, no, four men standing there as Brandon and the two sidekicks approached. Eddie was too far away to hear anything of what was said, could barely glimpse some kind of activity around the boat.

  The blink of a flashlight briefly revealed Brandon and another man examining a crate. And then someone gave a wordless shout and there was the sudden crackle and flash of gunfire, the sharp whirr of smart rounds, a stitching of tiny red explosions in the dark. Eddie threw himself flat on hot dirt. Terror was an elephant kneeling on his back and he was saying over and over, ‘I’ve fucked up, I’ve fucked up.’ More gunfire. Short bursts. Single shots. The boat motor started, almost immediately cut off. Silence, then two spaced shots, then nothing more.

  It took Eddie a while to work up the nerve to go down there. He was half-minded to jump in the cruiser and bail, but he knew that Leo would kill him if he returned without knowing what had happened. Shit, Leo would probably kill him anyway, but he had to find out, so he crabbed down the slope in the moonlit dark and crouched behind thorn bushes at the edge of the quay, listening hard, hearing only the beating of his heart and the soft plash of waves.

  Years later, he’d say that walking out into the open was the hardest thing he’d done in his life. Brandon Birdwell and the two sidekicks sprawled close to each other, Brandon on his back with his Stetson and half his face gone, his fancy pistol in his outflung hand. Blood black in the moonlight. The smell of it in the hot night.

  Stepping like a catburglar towards the jetty, Eddie found three men lying in their blood near plastic crates set in a row, just about jumped out of his skin when one man started to crawl like a broke-back snake towards a pistol. When Eddie kicked the gun into the water the man subsided, blood pooling under his hips. Eddie squatted next to him, asked what had happened, but the man just stared at him and after a minute or so gave a sort of sigh or groan and his head dropped and his eyes weren’t looking at anything in the world any more.

  There was no sign of the fourth man, no sign of the duffel bag that Brandon had carried down there. The boat, a big inflatable, rocked to and fro on rippling waves about a hundred metres off the end of the jetty. Eddie studied its shadow for a long time, and at last pulled off his boots and dived in and swam out to it. Trying not to think about sharks and blood in the water. Trying not to think about the missing man rising up in the boat, taking aim …

  He was curled up, the missing man, in a wash of blood and seawater at the bottom of the inflatable. Brandon Birdwell’s duffel bag lay next to him. The motor had been shot up, but Eddie found a plastic paddle clipped to the side and with some effort, because the damn thing kept trying to turn in a circle, managed to row the inflatable to shore. He heaved the duffel bag onto the jetty and clambered out and lay there a while just breathing.

  The bag was stuffed with blister packs and rolled strips of drug patches, blocks of thousand dollar bills sealed in plastic. US green, which despite the parlous and fractured state of the former superpower was still the best kind of cash currency. Packed in the crates, cradled in blocks of shaped foam, were SAW handguns, disruption rifles, heavy machine pistols and boxes of ammunition, recoilless missile launchers and fire-and-forget missiles the length of Eddie’s arm, with black shafts and red or yellow warheads.

  It wasn’t the usual deal, that was for sure. And Eddie was in the middle of it, last man standing. Alone in the dark with seven dead men, a bag of drugs and money, and enough firepower to start a small war. He could head back, tell Leo what had happened, but knew that Leo would blame him, the man was liable to go off on one when things went wrong … Or he could take off, hope that this was all of it down to Leo and not some kind of cartel deal, hope that Leo didn’t have the resources to find him.

  It wasn’t any kind of choice, really, so he did what he’d been doing all his life.

  He ran.

  He drove through the night. North to Roebourne, using some of the cash money to pay for a flight in a puddle jumper to Perth, where he caught the loop to Adelaide. He hid out in a motel room near the airport, checking news feeds ten or twenty times a day, finding nothing about a shoot-out in the old solar salt plant at Exmouth Gulf, no mention of him or of Leo Fowler. Leo would definitely be looking for him by now, but Eddie believed that if he could get out of the country he’d have a chance of surviving this.

  He’d turned over his passport to the human resources department of the kelp farm when he’d started work there, and while he knew from novelas and such that there were people who could create new identities with your biometrics, he didn’t have the faintest idea how to go about finding them. Instead, he applied to the New Zealand consulate in Adelaide for a replacement passport and sweated out the eight days it took to be issued.

  He counted and recounted the cash – six hundred and fifty thousand dollars US – and spent a lot of time on the dark web, using half a dozen user names and the Wi-Fi in coffee shops and fast-food restaurants to sell the drugs for whatever he could get. He parcelled out less than half of the stash in various small deals, dumped the rest down the dunny. Trying to offload it to one of Adelaide’s gangs wasn’t worth the risk, and he couldn’t take it where he was going.

  The day after he got his new passport, he was back in New Zealand. Auckland. A year ago, he would have burned through the little fortune he’d lucked into quicker than thought. Drink and drugs, fancy hotels, fast cars, the usual high life that fools and fantasists think they deserve. But he’d had a shock, a big one. He believed that he had passed through the fire for a reason. He told himself that he had been given a second chance and vowed to make some changes to his life.

  He didn’t try to get in contact with his estranged family. Those bridges had been burnt long ago. And besides (he told himself), he didn’t want to put them in danger. Instead, he hitched across the North Island to Napier, rented an apartment, and lay low. Nothing happened and nothing continued to happen. Slowly, he began to relax. He became friendly with someone who was trying to start up a crab farming business, something he’d learned a little bit about while working at Lake Macleod, and invested a serious chunk of his money in the venture.

  The crab business prospered, but after helping to set it up Eddie became a sleeping partner. He bought a ten-metre sailboat, though truth be told he spent more time hanging out in the harbour bars and cafés than on the water. A tanned man in his early thirties, sunbleached blond hair, sometimes with a beard, sometimes clean-shaven, bare-chested in red cycling shorts and sandals, a straw hat or a snapback cap. A familiar figure about the town. There were girlfriends and boyfriends, no one steady. If Eddie wasn’t dating someone he’d picked up in one of the tourist spots he’d maybe spend a couple of hours at the crab farm, talking to his partner about ways to expand the old business, helping to make up orders to keep his hand in. More often than not, though, he’d cycle over to the harbour, the new one built on the drowned bones of the original, and shoot the breeze with his mates over a few cold ones.

  Life was good. Life was easy. Six years passed, and one day the service that Eddie paid to track certain key words in news sites and feeds forwarded a brief item – it seemed that a guy called Leo Fowler had been shot to death by police in the aftermath of a botched holdup in Levelland, Texas. Eddie hired a local investigator to dig up more details, learned that the Leo Fowler who had been shot was definitely his
Leo Fowler, returned to Texas three years back, fired from a position with a security firm, involved with the local chapter of a motorcycle gang … It looked like old Leo had quit Big Green and fallen on bad times, and now he was dead and Eddie no longer had to look over his shoulder.

  About a year later, New Zealand’s biggest aquaculture company made an offer on the crab farm business. It wasn’t so much about the farm itself, actually, as the expertise of Eddie’s business partner, Charlie Knowles, and the novel hatchery system he had devised, but it was still a tidy sum. Charlie, a rangy easy-going guy, was eager to go for it.

  ‘It isn’t just the money,’ he told Eddie. ‘Although the money is nice. It’s getting out from under the daily grind of running the place, and getting down to some real development work.’

  ‘I should have helped out more,’ Eddie said, happy to acknowledge his shortcomings now that he could cash in his share of the business.

  ‘Believing I could make a go of it, kicking in the seed money, that was more than enough,’ Charlie said. ‘So, what will you do now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Buy a bigger boat, maybe. I could explore the coast, find a good place to build a house …’

  ‘Why not?’ Charlie said, even though both of them knew it was unlikely Eddie would settle down any time soon.

  The paperwork on the deal was still being processed when Eddie’s father died. Felled by a massive heart attack while he was doing volunteer work on the neighbourhood flood-control walls. Eddie went back to Auckland for the funeral and had a strange stiff reunion with his mother and his two brothers and their wives, saw his nephews and nieces for the first time, and met up with a bunch of old mates, most of them married too. One, recently returned from the Antarctic Peninsula, told Eddie that Esperanza and O’Higgins were boom towns where anyone with a bit of grit and know-how could make a fortune. After decades of instability, an uptick in the global economy was driving demand for the untapped resources of the peninsula. Transnats were investing in new mining and construction projects, there was talk of gaining independence from the Antarctic Authority, declaring statehood …

  ‘You have citizenship, don’t you? If you ever thought of going back,’ Eddie’s friend said, ‘now’s the time to do it.’

  When he returned to Napier, Eddie realised that there was nothing to keep him there. He was still living in his rented flat, and he’d lately noticed that the women and men he hooked up with were all at least ten years younger than him. For the first time in a long while he thought of Isabella Morales and the life he could have shared with her. Except, let’s face it, he wasn’t cut out to be an ecopoet. He couldn’t go back to that, but maybe he could check in with her. Show her he’d made something of himself.

  One night, he’d had a few drinks, he called his friend, asked about contacts on the peninsula. A month later he was aboard a clipper ship, sailing south. Just to see how the place had changed. If he didn’t like it, if his friend’s contacts didn’t play out, he could always move on. But he never did, and never got around to looking up his old honeyboo, either. He told himself that he really was done with all that. As usual, he was wrong.

  12

  ‘Bad people were forcing grandfather to help them steal from the company,’ the girl said. ‘That much is true. But there weren’t any drugs, and there wasn’t a shoot-out either. What happened, he was driving through the desert one day and saw scraps of paper blowing across the road. One of them stuck to the windscreen of his truck, he saw it was a hundred dollar bill, so he stopped and followed the paper trail to a crashed drone stuffed with cash. He saw his chance to get away, and that’s what he did. He ran all the way to New Zealand because he guessed the drone and the cash had something to do with the bad people, he knew they would find him if he stayed in Australia.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the cleaned up version Eddie Toomy gave to his family and friends,’ I said. ‘But when he met with my grandmother, years later, he told her the truth. He wanted to make full confession. Wanted to apologise for abandoning her and their son.’

  ‘I bet you can’t prove any of that foolishness really happened.’

  ‘And I bet you can’t prove it didn’t.’

  The girl thought for a moment, the fingers of her right hand picking at the orange bracelet around her left wrist, even though she knew by now she couldn’t get it off, it had bonded to her skin.

  She said, ‘Would your father’s life have been different if my grandfather had got to know him?’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘Your grandmother was an ecopoet. And so was your father. Because that’s how he was raised.’

  ‘In the tradition.’

  ‘In the tradition. But what if my grandfather had stayed in touch? What if your father had lived with him some of the time?’

  ‘Salix.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘My father’s name. Salix.’

  ‘OK. So would things have been any different if Salix had visited with grandfather now and then?’

  ‘You mean, would Salix have become like your father, the Honourable Deputy? I don’t think so.’

  ‘So no matter what my grandfather did, Salix would have become an ecopoet. He would have married your mother and they would have had you, exactly as you are now.’

  ‘A husky. You can say it.’

  ‘You’d still be a husky. And your parents would still have been arrested, because they were ecopoets who broke the law and refused to accept the amnesty.’

  ‘I don’t see your point.’

  ‘The point being,’ the girl said, ‘why are you punishing me for something my family couldn’t prevent?’

  ‘Of course they could have prevented it. Eddie Toomy had friends in high places. Political influence. He could have campaigned for the rights of ecopoets. He could have stopped that stupid law being passed. Or he could at least have helped my parents after they were arrested. And Salix would still be alive, and I wouldn’t have spent half my childhood in a fucking orphanage, packing trays of printed chicken steaks to earn my keep.’

  The girl flinched. I’d been shouting. After a short silence, she said, ‘I know I have advantages.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘But I can’t help being who I am. Unless you want to blame me for being born.’

  ‘I don’t blame you for anything,’ I said.

  But I did. Of course I did. I was my mother’s daughter, and Mama had taught me all about the unfairness of the world. It isn’t just that the rich have more money than us. It’s all the rest. All the social privilege that so-called ordinary people lack. The life chances that privilege opens up. The sense of belonging, of being part of a storied lineage. The rich know exactly where they come from, who they are. The rest of us inherit only fragments of lives memorialised in hand-me-down stories whose details are exaggerated and altered with every telling, or glimpsed in corrupted files from dead media. Footage of the long-lost wearing antique clothes, capering on holiday, posing at long-forgotten weddings and christenings. And yes, I know that this is one such story. But I’m trying to tell it as true as I can, even though conversations like the one I’m recounting here are patched from scraps of memory, from what I think we talked about, from what I think we should have talked about. And isn’t that what all stories turn into, in the end? Even the histories of the rich eventually turn into myth. Nothing recedes into the vanishing point of time’s rear-view faster than the truth.

  I asked the girl if she wanted to hear the rest of the true history of our family. How Eddie and Isabella finally met again. What happened afterwards.

  ‘If it’s about how he did all kinds of bad stuff to your family, not really. I’m still awfully tired from yesterday. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go back to bed,’ the girl said, and stretched and yawned as unselfconsciously as a child half her age.

  ‘No problem, I’ll tell you all about it later,’ I said, because, truth be told, I was talked out. ‘I’ll tell you e
verything before this is over.’

  I went outside to check the weather again. The short day was almost done and it was still snowing hard. I cursed my stupid luck. If we were still socked in tomorrow we’d just about be out of food and I’d be forced to go ahead with my plan. Leave the girl in the refuge and head out into the blizzard a ways so that my fone signal couldn’t be traced back to where I’d hidden her, call Alberto Toomy and tell him to pay the ransom into my offshore account right away. No police or funny stuff if he wanted to see her alive. Just a straightforward business transaction.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, and if the weather didn’t ease up all kinds of things could go wrong. I could get lost in the blizzard’s white-out. I could fall into a crevasse. The rescue party might not be able to find the refuge. And if Alberto Toomy called my bluff and refused to pay I knew I’d have to give up the girl’s location anyway. Or tell the police. Let them know that Honourable Deputy Alberto Toomy had refused to save the life of his daughter, hope to cause some kind of scandal …

  Every part of the wretched enterprise was chancy, but there was no going back. Somehow or other I would have to make it work. I fell asleep rehearsing what I needed to do, woke with my stomach full of slimy snakes writhing over and around each other, made it to the toilet just in time. When I was done, the girl was still asleep. Or was pretending to be. She didn’t stir when I pulled on my boots and coat and went out.

  We’d slept late. It was ten in the morning. First light. It was still snowing, but hardly at all. A light curtain of small flakes twirling through windless air. So quiet that I could hear my heart beating. The whisper of air in my lungs.

  It was minus fifteen degrees Celsius and I was bareheaded and wasn’t wearing any survival gear, but I wasn’t especially cold. I remembered winters on Deception Island, playing in the snow with the other husky kids in the floodlit yard of the little school – the exiled ecopoets hadn’t been allowed to build a children’s house, kids lived with their parents and went to school instead, part of what our jailers called the renormalisation programme. Anyway, I remembered Mama waiting at the gate, a worn-down woman bulked out by layers under her windproof jacket, the other parents likewise swaddled while us kids were dressed in little more than T-shirts and sweaters and trousers. No scarves or gloves, no hats or the little neckpieces the adults wore, chinking every possible gap against the cold. Sometimes, when the wind wasn’t blowing too hard, I’d strip off my sweater because I was burning like a furnace.