Everything smelled delicious. Sarah hadn’t realised how hungry she was. Balancing her wine on the arm of a folding chair, she jabbed a crisp samosa into the sauce and took a bite. Drake held his breath in fake anticipation, then pressed his palms together when she gave the nod. He really was a centre stage sort of person.
Matt joined them, plate piled high and with a can of Bundaberg Rum in his hand. A young woman followed him over to the fire. She had tangled, dirty-blond hair, gypsy earrings and intense blue eyes. Drake introduced her as Lisa Bade – singer, songwriter, photographer and tree-sitter. Sarah nodded hello. Lisa knelt down and held her hands out to the flames. She oozed charisma. These people were so full of passion. It dripped from their bodies and seeped through their clothes. Sarah admired their courage and indisputable resolve. There was something to be said for having a cause.
For a time they ate in silence. When Sarah finished, Drake sprang to his feet and gestured to her empty plate. ‘Seconds?’
‘You do know,’ said Lisa, ‘that our food comes from supermarket dumpster diving?’
Sarah looked to Drake for confirmation. ‘Perfectly good tucker,’ he said. ‘It’s a crime to waste it.’
The samosas didn’t appeal quite so much anymore. ‘No thanks, no seconds.’ She raised her empty plate. ‘Where’s the bin?’
‘There is no bin,’ said Lisa.
‘Where do you throw things away?’
Lisa rolled her eyes. ‘There is no away, don’t you get that? The concept of throwing things out, throwing things away – it’s just shifting your rubbish somewhere else, making it someone else’s problem.’
Sarah felt out of her depth, out of her comfort zone, as Drake took her plate. Beyond him, three children emerged from the fog and played a noisy game of chasey around the fire. ‘How do children manage here?’ she asked.
‘As well as they manage anywhere. Probably better,’ said Matt, accepting a second can of rum and coke from Drake, who seemed to have an endless supply tucked away in an icebox beneath his chair.
‘But what about school?’
‘What about it?’
‘Don’t they go to school?’
‘Of course not.’ Lisa made an expansive gesture. ‘Their school is the forest. Their teachers are the trees.’
A shocked Sarah tried to keep her expression neutral. Drake and Matt burst out laughing.
‘They go to Hills End Primary, every day,’ said Drake. ‘Their dad, Ken Murphy, owns the local sawmill. He’s here to add numbers for tomorrow’s stoush, and their mum’s camp cook this week. As a matter of fact, I’m driving those little terrors to school myself in the morning, but they’ll go to their aunty’s afterwards. Things are going to escalate.’
The joke at her expense made Sarah feel foolish, excluded. ‘You said their dad owns the sawmill. Why is he here?’
‘What?’ said Lisa. ‘You think because Ken owns the sawmill that he’ll automatically be on Burns’s side?’
Everyone looked at Sarah. She’d clearly put her foot in it again, but didn’t know how. ‘Well, it stands to reason—’
Lisa exploded in a torrent of words.
‘Enough,’ said Drake and Lisa stormed off.
‘What did I say wrong?’ asked Sarah.
Drake crouched in the empty place beside her. ‘There’s old-fashioned logging and then there’s what’s happening here in the Tuggerah. Burns Timber clear fells old-growth forests and sells the lot for woodchips. Our rarest Tassie trees are being turned into Japanese toilet paper. Sawmills are closing down for lack of logs. According to Ken, if this keeps up, our famous craftsmen and furniture makers will run out of wood. There’ll be no Wooden Boat Festival, and we’ll be restoring historic Port Arthur with plantation pine.’
Lisa returned with a plate of food and sat next to Matt, while a broad-chested, middle-aged man joined the conversation. ‘I’m Ken Murphy and I’ll speak for myself. Used to be we let the small trees grow. We harvested the forest selectively, in patches, and we didn’t waste one single piece of a tree. We sawed the best logs, tanned the bark … even the leaves went for oil. Now they chip the lot – myrtle, sassafras, leatherwood. Leatherwood’s bloody priceless. It breaks my heart.’
‘Sorry,’ said Sarah. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘That’s our main problem – nobody bloody knows,’ said Ken. ‘Between Premier Logan and our sorry excuse for a union and the Hobart papers? You’d think Burns was the saviour of Tasmania’s timber industry. We’re labelled traitors if we speak out.’ Ken spat in the fire. ‘Well, not anymore. It’s time to take a stand.’ And with that he stomped away.
Sarah sighed. First she’d upset Lisa, now Ken. She couldn’t take a trick with these people. Better change the subject. She turned to Drake. ‘So, you’re a doctor? What sort of a doctor?’
Drake gave her an amused look. ‘What, don’t you believe me?’
Sarah looked to Matt for help. He was standing nearby, spinning Lisa some sort of ghost story. Sarah took a second look at him – relaxed, happy, as though he was free of something. The fire flared and turned his hair to an attractive bronze. She liked his eyes, a sort of smudged brown. When they smiled it brought a pleasing balance to his face. His body was muscular, baked brown, with no hint of softness around the belly. He moved like an animal, swift and sure.
The rumble of approaching vehicles disturbed the quiet night. Several people left the fire’s circle, including Lisa, who checked her watch and hurried off. Sarah reached over and touched Matt’s leg. ‘What kind of doctor is Drake?’
Matt sat down beside her. ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but our friend Drake here has a seriously impressive resume. A medical degree for starters. A PhD in zoology and marine biology from Princeton. A Eureka Prize for entomological research. Um … and he’s written two books. Have I left anything out, Dr Drake?’
‘I do a bit of sailing.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Matt, drawing a noughts-and-crosses board in the dirt. ‘Drake spent last year as chief research officer on the Sea Steward.’
‘Shall I start?’ Drake traced a cross.
Sarah whistled low. Wow, the Sea Steward. How different Tasmania was to home. With its curious culture of understatement, of not big-noting oneself. She wished she could transport all her Los Angeles friends to this dark camp. Have these odd people look straight through them, catch them out, see the plain truth behind their masks.
The Sea Steward’s Captain Peter Weston was a hero among Sarah’s neoliberal friends back at UCLA. He’d founded a group to take direct action against sealers and whalers and long-line fishing vessels. Other conservation groups distanced themselves from Weston’s organisation, alarmed by the fearless tactics he used to disrupt Japanese whaling ships.
Matt frowned and drew a victory line in the dirt. ‘Don’t be too impressed. Drake was seasick for the first two months.’
Not missing a beat, Drake turned his weak stomach into a badge of honour. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re sick as a dog, not when the whalers go after a mother and calf. You put yourself on the line. That’s just what you do.’
‘How far south did you go?’ asked Sarah.
‘Right to the ice shelf.’
‘I’m impressed.’
‘I do hope so,’ said Drake.
Headlights shone down the road past the campfire, spotlighting Lisa and another man, both dressed in climbing gear and carrying helmets.
‘Where are they going?’ asked Sarah.
‘Up Pallawarra.’
‘What, at night? In this weather?’
‘Only way to get past the loggers,’ said Drake. ‘Don’t worry. The storm won’t hit properly until morning.’
Sarah was speechless. She couldn’t imagine the zeal that sent Lisa off to risk her life in the dark, windy forest. She felt a sharp pang of envy and fear. Drake touched her knee and topped up her glass.
‘Are you married?’ she asked him.
For the first time that night, Drake seem
ed wrong-footed. ‘I suppose you could call it that.’
He wore no ring, but for some reason she wasn’t surprised. ‘Children?’
‘Tell her, Drake,’ said Matt, his tone daring. ‘This should be interesting.’
Sarah leapt abruptly to her feet, swatted her knee and flicked a large insect to the ground. With a little shiver, she ground it beneath her heel.
‘Stay still.’ Drake reached across and stroked her bare leg. Sarah shivered again, not from fear this time. He coaxed a second insect, a shining beetle, from her thigh onto his hand. ‘A jewel beetle. Lovely, isn’t he?’
Sarah took a closer look. ‘Why, yes,’ she admitted. The beetle’s shell glowed electric blue or emerald green, depending on its angle. The beautiful beetle unfolded stained glass wings and flew away.
‘Insects are evolution’s greatest success story. They saw the dinosaurs come and go. But their numbers are plummeting all over the world, so we really shouldn’t stomp on them.’
‘I asked if you had children,’ said Sarah, irritated by Drake’s disapproval.
‘No. I’m a voluntary extinctionist,’ said Drake.
‘A what?’
‘Our motto. May we live long and die out.’
Matt grinned and cracked another can.
‘The basic concept,’ said Drake, ‘is that we don’t breed. The alternative to the extinction of millions of species is the voluntary extinction of just one – us.’
His words made Sarah’s skin prickle. What on earth was he talking about? These people were utterly bewildering.
Drake went on. ‘Deciding not to have children is the morally correct choice. Humans are a plague, doctor, a planetary disease like the tumours on your devils. Their actions over the past few hundred years exhibit all the characteristics of malignant process. Rapid, uncontrolled growth. Invasion and destruction of neighbouring ecosystems. For metastasise, read colonise and urbanise. For dedifferentiation, read loss of diversity. Read a McDonald’s in every country on earth. And what are the usual implications of a malignancy?’
‘Death of the host,’ said Sarah.
‘Exactly. As special as we think we are, humans present a clear and present danger to life on this planet. It’s time we went extinct.’
‘You’ll never convince me,’ said Sarah, although there was a certain insane logic to his position. But there was also a logic to survival. More than that, it was a biological imperative. Any extinction was a disaster. That was why she’d got involved with the devils in the first place – so they wouldn’t go the way of their cousins, the thylacines, vanished from Tasmania within living memory.
‘A woman at the post office swears that she once saw a thylacine,’ said Sarah.
Drake laughed. ‘Half the population of this island thinks they’ve seen one, but there’s not a scrap of proof. No remains, no photos, not even a footprint.’
‘What do you think, Matt?’ Sarah turned to him in the firelight.
Matt took his time answering. ‘People want to believe,’ he said at last. ‘But there are no thylacines anymore. And do you know what?’ He snapped a stick in half. ‘I’m glad.’
Sarah gasped. ‘How can you say that?’
‘Since it seems to be a day for stories, let me tell you the story of the last thylacine known to walk this earth. A young female called Benjamin – they couldn’t even get her sex right. The only person who cared about this extraordinary animal was a woman called Alison Reid.’
‘The museum curator told me about her,’ said Sarah. ‘Forced from her job running the Hobart Zoo because she was female.’
Matt nodded. ‘After that Benjamin was left alone, twenty-four seven, in an open concrete cage without access to her den. No shade from the sun or shelter from the cold. Benjamin died of exposure sometime during the night of the seventh of September, 1936. They didn’t even bother to preserve her body – it went to the tip. And Australia has the nerve to declare the seventh of September, National Endangered Species Day. Let’s celebrate our grand indifference, shall we?’ Matt hurled his can into the fire. It caused a little hissing explosion. ‘Benjamin and her kind are better off dead. What’s the point of all this striving for life anyway?’
Sarah was speechless.
‘Matt’s drunk,’ said Drake. ‘You two had better stay here tonight.’
Matt burped loudly. ‘Fine by me.’
The three of them were the only ones left at the fire.
‘And what about you, doctor? Is it fine by you?’ Drake sneaked his arm around Sarah’s waist.
She let it linger awhile before slipping sideways. ‘I’d better turn in.’
Drake sighed. ‘Come on then, Lisa’s bunk is empty.’
Sarah wrapped herself tight in Ray’s coat and followed him to the tents.
Drake returned to the fire, as yet another vehicle arrived to help fill the camp. ‘You’re in quite a mood tonight.’ He tossed Matt a swag. ‘Want to talk about it?’
Matt looked away. Of course he wanted to. He longed to take up his friend’s offer, longed to unburden himself. But he couldn’t risk telling Drake about Theo. He couldn’t risk telling anybody. So instead he shrugged and slapped a mosquito into oblivion.
‘Does it have anything to do with our beautiful young doctor?’
‘Mate, you know me. I’m happily married.’
Drake fixed him with searching blue eyes. ‘So happily married that you haven’t called Penny?’
Matt groaned and buried his head in his hands. He’d messaged her about going to the Tuggerah, but that was hours ago. He hadn’t called to say he wouldn’t be home tonight. The alcohol that had made him briefly forget about Theo, had also made him forget about Penny. It was unforgivable.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Drake. ‘I rang her for you – said your phone had no reception.’
Matt let out a great grateful breath. ‘I owe you one.’
Drake offered him the last can from the icebox. ‘All yours. I need to be good for the morning.’
‘Bit late for that, isn’t it?’ Matt tossed the can in the air, caught it and opened it. He’d have a hangover tomorrow.
Drake tucked the camp chair under his arm and gave Matt a final look. ‘Remember mate, I’m here when you want to talk.’
* * *
When Drake had returned to the tents, Matt poked at the dying fire. Its embers flamed once and died in a sad twist of smoke. The black forest pressed in around him, eerie and quiet – not even the friendly call of a boobook owl to punctuate the night. According to Penny, boobook owls were spirit guides of the dreaming. Lucky charms. But Camp Clementine was on the rim of the logging coupe, and the wise little owls had fled. Good fortune would have fled with them. He sat for the longest time, drinking alone while a chill seeped into his bones. Only when his teeth began chattering did he zip up his jacket, climb into the swag and close his eyes.
* * *
Matt awoke in the dark with a searing jolt, burning up by the fire, unaware at first of where he was. He rolled away from the hot coals and lurched to his feet, the dream still vivid. His eyes slowly adjusted and objects emerged from the gloom. His scorched swag lay where he’d fought his way out of it, ripped at the zip, in a crumpled heap on the ground. Why was this happening again? This nightmare where he turned into a monster.
Matt shivered. He’d seen his reflection in the dream river. The square head of a lion stared back at him; a marsupial lion, with fangs bared in a snarl – a creature extinct for twenty thousand years. It always ended the same way, this dream. It always ended in a successful hunt. And it felt very right to pound through the spectral forest after his shrieking prey, so sure in the dark. To seize it in his jaws, to gut it with his clawed thumbs in a rain of blood. The face of his prey came into focus – his father’s face.
It began to rain. Matt pulled his swag under the cover of a canvas awning near the tents, climbed back in and lay rigid. The wind moaned like a banshee through the trees, and he hoped sleep would not come to him aga
in that night.
Chapter 13
Fraser took off his pyjama trousers in front of the mirror, and stared at the place where his balls used to be. They produced too much testosterone, that’s what his specialist had said. They had to go. Bilateral orchiectomy, they called it. But that wasn’t what it was. It was gelding. They’d turned Fraser Burns Abbott into a eunuch.
He studied the body that had so betrayed him. His body used to be a mere thing, like any other thing. Something to be pushed, to be used and abused as required. Its deadly mutiny took him by surprise. It was testosterone that fed the cancer, that gave it the energy to metastasise, to escape his diseased prostate gland and launch an imperial army of invading cells. He could feel them in his bones. Now, without its life-giving hormone, the tumour had shrunk, relieving Fraser’s backache overnight. It was a temporary reprieve. Sooner or later, the frustrated cancer cells would evolve, discover new ways to rob his ravaged body of nourishment, resume their deadly duplication. But right now he was close to pain-free. Just a dull lumbar ache that never let him forget. It gave Fraser great satisfaction to know that when he died, so would the cancer.
Fraser stepped into the shower. Steady, hot and strong, no water-saving rose for him. He fingered his empty sac and wondered again about prostheses. His surgeon wanted to put implants in his scrotum, ‘to maintain a natural appearance’. But what was the point? There were no women in his life, no lovers. And since becoming impotent, there weren’t likely to be any. Make no mistake, he still had desires. The mind was the seat of desire, he knew that now, and there was nothing wrong with his mind. If anything, his thinking had acquired an extra clarity since the surgery, like he’d emerged from some sort of mental fog. No sign of the depression his doctors had warned of. But physical sex was finished. Fraser was a realist. The old credentials didn’t stack up, and no amount of desire could change that.
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