White Throat

by Sarah Thornton

  ‘Alice.’

  ‘…I have ways of stopping this sort of thing. Self-righteous little bitches like you—I’ll send you into a living hell. You think Cato was the first I’ve despatched?

  He’d flicked to bully mode and it fired a corresponding switch in Clem—a wick of anger sparked and flared into full flame, white hot at its centre but calm and unwavering. ‘I think you’re getting a bit worked up, Kenneth, and it’s completely unnecessary…you can fix this matter quite easily with one simple decision.’

  The sun sank lower behind the great sand island of K’gari, the darkness wrapping itself around the sword-like fronds of the backyard pandanus. A cockroach, Queensland-sized, strolled along the edge of the verandah.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Something you can do to prevent all this coming to light, Mr Chairman.’

  ‘You’re trying to blackmail me? Oh, you’re in serious trouble now, girl.’

  ‘The Galimore Foundation withdrew its funding from the Wildlife Association of the Great Sandy Straits. This organisation is leading the charge to save an endangered freshwater turtle. You need to reverse that decision and release the funds.’

  ‘What? Who is this?’

  ‘Well, you seem to remember me as Alison, so let’s run with that shall we?’ She could hear his breathing. ‘And Borman, you have exactly three days.’

  She hung up.

  As Clem scooped half a tin of Pal into the dog bowl the afternoon storm clouds rolled in, eating up the sunshine. She fed Pocket first, then put him inside to stop him sticking his snout into Sergeant’s bowl. Sarge was a slow eater for such a big dog and far too polite to shove Pocket out of the way. The two had formed a contented friendship and while Sarge would happily rip the head off the labrador up the street he couldn’t get enough of the frisky little blue heeler that had come to play.

  The first scouts of the storm front pushed across the backyard, cool puffs breaking through the heat and casting a pleasant chill on her cheeks. She walked back inside and checked the pantry for dinner. Canned tomatoes, pasta, mince in the fridge. She started working on the onions for a bolognaise, her mind drifting back to the phone call. She wasn’t confident. Borman was a player, a big, big man. Who was she to unseat him?

  Marakai Mining had been in the news again, announcing the first of many environmental approvals. She would have to read up on it, see if there was an angle, a way to drive a wedge. If not, there were plenty more stages to go, plenty of time. But the way the company’s media release was worded, it was as if the mine was inevitable, concrete and dump trucks already rumbling into Piama.

  She chopped the onions savagely. The world was marching on, trampling all over the turtle and stomping big heavy boots all over Helen.

  She was stirring in the tomato paste when she heard a knock on the door. The rain started at exactly the same time, fat drops pinging on the tin roof. No one visited. Had Borman put two and two together? She couldn’t think how, but maybe he’d tracked her down and sent someone around to sort her out, buy her silence? Compel her silence? She dropped the wooden spoon with a splash into the pot, flicked the light off and picked up the kitchen knife, feeling the heft snug in her hand. Another knock. She stepped slowly into the passageway, peeked around towards the front door. Dark outside.

  Barking from the backyard. Sarge. Of course! Get him in here! She crept back into the kitchen, opened the back door a crack and the two of them came charging through, Pocket’s high-pitched machine-gun yelp and Sarge’s thunderous baritone barrelling up the hallway. She followed them, turned the porch light on, peeked behind the curtain beside the front door. A tall, hulking figure, baseball cap, the handle of some sort of large container in his hand. The man saw the curtain move, turned towards it.

  Torrens. Thank God. With an esky.

  Pocket recognised the scent, stopped barking and began an urgent tail-wagging whimper. Sarge just looked confused, shifting from one massive paw to another, eyes flicking between the door and Pocket, a thick drop of drool hanging from the corner of his mouth.

  As she opened the door, Torrens grinned from behind a thick bush of freshly grown beard.

  ‘Saw your light on.’

  After Torrens had scooped the last of the bolognaise into his mouth, she hoped he’d take himself off to bed. She’d prepared the shed for him yesterday with a secondhand camp stretcher—he’d said he didn’t want the spare room, thankfully. She watched with regret as he pulled two more beers from his esky.

  ‘Oh no, not for me. Two’s more than enough,’ she said.

  ‘But we’re on holidays,’ he said planting the cans on the table.

  He was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with a kangaroo in sunglasses, incongruous under the dark expanse of untrimmed beard covering his neck. A man this big made everything look incongruous—the tiny kitchen had surely been built for hobbits.

  ‘You are. I have stuff I need to do.’ She hadn’t mentioned Helen, or the turtle for that matter.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Oh, you know, stuff to keep me going for another day in paradise,’ she said, scooping up the plates and making for the kitchen sink.

  ‘Hey, no you don’t.’ He got up and nudged her aside. There was suddenly no room for her at the sink. ‘I invited myself here, dishes are me punishment. Now get yourself a beer and sit down.’

  She sat down and cracked her third, watching his back as he washed.

  ‘Saw your photo online,’ he said.

  ‘Mmm. Stalking me?’

  ‘With that woman that died.’

  ‘Helen. Helen Westley.’ She tried to keep her voice level but was surprised to find it a challenge. For some strange reason Helen’s signature came to mind—looping and flourishing across the page. Just like her…until someone ripped the page right out of the book.

  ‘She was your friend, yeah?’

  Torrens had heard the twang in her voice. God, must she be so transparent?

  ‘More than a friend. She looked after me when I was a kid, five months while Mum was in hospital.’ It was painful, talking about Helen. She hadn’t had to until now. She cleared her throat and found a reason to get out of the room, grabbing the kitchen garbage bin and marching outside with it half full. She emptied it and stood there a while, listening to the hush of waves expiring on the beach. No moon, and the cloud still clearing. The storm had been short and sharp, raindrops the size of buckets, a few snaps of lightning then a calmness, the lingering smell like gunpowder.

  When she came back in Torrens was wiping his hands on the back of his boardshorts, big red things that hung loose and billowy around his knees. ‘Reckon I deserve another after that!’

  He opened a beer and leaned with his back up against the sink, one hand lodged behind him on the edge of the bench, the other wrapped around the beer, legs thrust straight in front. No room left to swing a cat.

  ‘Heard it was suicide,’ he said.

  Clem raised her gaze to the window, out into the blackness of the night. She took a big breath, blew it out between pursed lips, focusing on a single pinprick of starlight in a thin veil of cloud.

  ‘You heard wrong,’ she said, more to the star than Torrens. ‘Someone pushed her off that cliff.’

  Saying it out loud for the first time to someone she knew had an immediate galvanising effect—a public declaration pinning her to the argument. But it was also awful, horrifying to hear it articulated. Helen had been murdered.

  Torrens looked up sharply. ‘What the hell?’

  Clem nodded. ‘No suicide note, no sign of depression. Nothing.’

  ‘So how come the papers said it was suicide?’

  ‘Because the cops think that.’

  ‘Oh now, don’t go telling me the pigs got something wrong.’ He held his hand high, eyes closed in mock protest. ‘Don’t say it, Jonesy, I’m just not having a bar of it.’

  ‘Only one set of tracks up at the quarry.’

  Torrens took a deep draft of beer
and belched loudly, lips thrust out, projecting forward with gusto. ‘Up there on her own, hey? An accident then?’

  ‘Helen hated the quarry. She said it was a scar on the landscape. She’d never have gone for a walk there. She loved the river and the beach and K’gari and the state forest. She was always going for hikes in the bush. Never the quarry.’

  Torrens folded one arm across his chest, looked across at Clementine sternly. ‘You told the police that?’

  ‘Of course. One-eyed bastards jumped on the suicide thing after that.’

  ‘Oh, that’s harsh, Jonesy. Bastards they may be, but one-eyed? You gotta count their arsehole too!’

  He broke into uncontrollable laughter, shoulders shaking. She couldn’t help but join in.

  CHAPTER 5

  Clem’s first purchase with the Galimore Foundation funds after the board reversed the Funding Committee’s decision was a large whiteboard. It was propped up in the shanty’s sunroom on a stepladder she’d found in the shed. Its white glare looked completely out of place surrounded by Noel’s drooping bamboo blinds and grubby grass mats. Ariel and Brady and Gaylene and Mary, along with a few of the more committed WAGSS members, sat in the mismatched sticks of chairs at the table, the dogs banished outside. She’d asked Torrens to come in at two o’clock; make up a reason to end the session. Clem didn’t want the ferals overstaying their welcome.

  In the first column she’d written a summary of the actions taken to date and they’d been brainstorming the second column, marked Allies (the various wildlife advocacy groups, the Galimore Foundation and a major local donor, Andrew Doncaster, were at the top of the list). They’d just moved on to the third column, Opponents (she’d been careful not to write Suspects), before finishing up with column four, Next Steps. This third column was the whole purpose of this strategy session as far as Clem was concerned, but the meeting had been slow going so far. In hindsight, the idea of extracting valuable intelligence from the protesters seemed a little optimistic.

  So far, they had listed Blair ‘the Mayor’ Fullerton. Jobs meant votes and he was hot for the mine, the port and everything in between. The group had advised that he had a very young, very blonde wife who spent most of her time shopping and sipping champagne in Brisbane, and a pair of teenage kids from his first marriage.

  ‘So, anything more on the mayor before we move on?’ she asked, marker pen poised.

  ‘Well, I do know he’s wonderfully effective as a politician,’ said Mary, a retired librarian who’d lived in the area for forty years. ‘Charming, people say—smarmy in my view. But then I’ve never voted Liberal in my life.’

  ‘I’d agree with that,’ said Brady. He had a forty-a-day smoker’s voice. ‘Helen always got a bit sucked in by him. Time to apply the blowtorch, I reckon.’

  Brady was always looking to apply a blowtorch to something. He was bored sitting around in meetings strategising—much preferred to get out there and take it up to the bastards. Apparently, Helen’s moderate approach had often resulted in arguments.

  ‘He’s a bloody silver-tail, got a huge powerboat called Success. What a wank,’ Brady continued. ‘My mate skippers for him sometimes. Reckon we could stage something noisy, maybe something stinky even—right there at the marina, where he keeps it.’

  To keep him happy, Clem wrote it down as a ‘possible’ under Next Steps. The group then added Ralph Bennett, the President of the Piama Progress Association, a retired plumber who lived in the new(ish) estate on the far side of the bay with his wife Selma. Clem had seen him in action at a town meeting—a bull of a man, red-faced, arm-waving and always on the verge of shouting. He and many other members of the residents’ association had been cast into something like financial slavery, sudden and wretched poverty after a lifetime spent preparing for a secure and peaceful retirement. There were about thirty of them, all retirees, who’d fallen prey to a rogue financial planner and a catastrophic fall in the share market a few years back. The port would involve acquisition of a number of Piama properties and the retirees were desperate to sell their heavily mortgaged homes at the inflated prices Marakai Mining was throwing around. It was possible, Clem thought, that some of them might be angry enough to have taken matters into their own hands.

  Next was the company itself: Marakai Mining. None of the group knew the names of anyone within the company, but Helen had mentioned a key contact: Karene Bickerstaff, Director of Public Relations, and Clem added the name to the whiteboard and wrote next to it: ‘likes a drink’, which was all she could remember from her conversations with Helen.

  It was almost two o’clock and the group seemed drained. She decided to move the discussion on quickly to some more targeted questions.

  ‘So, any of these Opponents violent?’

  Looks of surprise all around the table.

  ‘Violent?’ said Gaylene from underneath her mane of hair. Gaylene was a sixty-something hobby farmer and always the first one there when you wanted someone to chain themselves to something, provided she wasn’t off on one of her caravan holidays with husband Les.

  ‘Well, we need to know what we’re up against, don’t we?’ said Clem.

  ‘They’re pensioners, most of ’em. Probably couldn’t kill a fly in a paper bag,’ said Gaylene.

  ‘I don’t know about that. Reckon they could do some damage with their walking sticks,’ said Brady, sniggering. ‘Crush a few toes with those mobility scooters.’

  The meeting was deteriorating. Clem moved on.

  ‘All right, any of our Opponents own a four-wheel drive?’ The police had not found any tyre tracks but Clem thought it might be possible to get a four-wheel drive up to the quarry’s edge over a rocky section of ground where it would leave no impression.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Brady again, slumped in his chair, holding a piece of celery between his fingers like a cigarette. He was trying to give up. Doing it tough, by the looks.

  ‘Cars can give an insight into personality,’ said Clem. ‘Useful information for how best to influence people.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Ariel. ‘Like star signs. I read something about that somewhere. Geminis love the little Volkswagen Polos, whereas a lot of Scorpios drive Jeep convertibles—brave and secretive…off the beaten track.’

  ‘Ralph Bennett drives a Landcruiser,’ said Brady.

  ‘Surprised he can afford one,’ said Clem.

  ‘Looks like it’s from the Second World War. Even older than he is,’ he barked, fidgeting in his seat. ‘When are we going to talk about the next action? I’ve been thinking about a siege of some sort at council chambers.’

  ‘I wonder what it means if you drive a station wagon.’ Ariel’s eyes had glazed over. She turned to her notebook and scribbled a note next to the elaborate swirling doodle she’d crafted over the course of the meeting.

  ‘Yeah, we’ll talk about our next action in a minute, Brady,’ said Clem. ‘So does Ralph go off-road much?’

  ‘Wouldn’t know,’ said Brady. ‘Heard you drove a four-wheel drive once, Clem. Prado wasn’t it?’

  She turned away from the whiteboard, checking his face for signs, trying to hide any on her own. He stared at her, took a pretend drag on his celery cigarette, pinched between his thumb and forefinger now, a reefer grip. He might be off the ciggies but that didn’t exclude anything else on the chemical menu. He exhaled and his mouth turned up in a sly smile.

  ‘And?’ she said.

  Brady rested his celery on the lunch plate like it was an ashtray.

  ‘Was that the car?’ Ariel’s question hung, unsupported, without need of explanation. Clearly she and Brady had discussed Clem’s accident. Why should she be surprised? Of course they would have. Everything came back to that. Why would she be here in this backwater otherwise? She was defined by that mistake. And how dare she use the word mistake for such a reckless, deadly act?

  ‘I don’t see it’s relevant what car I drive,’ she said firmly, pivoting back to the whiteboard.

 
‘Hell yeah, it is. Our opponents could use it against you, to undermine the campaign.’ Brady was smart enough when he chose to be.

  ‘I think we should bring death into our conversations more,’ said Ariel. ‘It’s so important. I mean how do we appreciate life without death?’—Oh God, thought Clem, her felt-tip marker stalling on the whiteboard as she wrote down the make of Ralph’s vehicle—‘I mean, I think it’s also a tribute, like a song of respect for those who’ve passed.’

  Clem blinked hard and turned to face the meeting again. Time to take control.

  ‘Okay, so shall we talk about Helen?’ It was fair enough—the group had been devastated, beating themselves up for not having seen the signs, failing to notice that their loved and apparently strong leader was suffering.

  ‘Oh yes. I mean I can feel her presence right now, in this very room.’ Ariel had everyone’s attention now.

  ‘Well, what does she think our next steps should be?’ asked Gaylene impatiently.

  ‘But the thing is,’ Ariel went on as if she hadn’t heard Gaylene, ‘you and Helen both share this amazing experience, Clementine. A truth very few people will ever know.’ She turned her eyes towards Clem. ‘Perhaps you could share, something…’

  ‘Eh?’ said Gaylene, completely confused and obviously not privy to Brady and Ariel’s previous discussions. Brady was looking fascinated, like the information might be genuinely useful in some sort of tactical way. Clem felt the marker slipping in her sweaty palm.

  ‘…something of the mystery of what it’s like to have life, there before you, and then gone.’ Ariel’s voice was a whisper now, as if sound might kill the magic.

  All eyes were on Clem. Her mind was totally stalled and she could feel her mouth gaping open stupidly when the door burst open. Torrens filled the door frame completely, fully bearded, wielding the green water pistol menacingly—just needed a Ned Kelly bucket helmet with an eye slit to complete the picture.

  His voice boomed into the sunroom, shaking the bamboo blinds. ‘Righto folks, this is a hold-up. Now off you all go. Come on, hands in the air and no one gets hurt.’