Bloke, page 12
And there were people who’d do the job, because that was their profession, harming people. But blackfellas were a tough team to crack; they were tighter than other blokes because they’d been protecting each other from the day they could tell black from white. But you had to be careful; there was such a thing as too much protection. Hatchets, cutlasses, boomerangs and divided cats could be counted in that category.
Another complication was that suddenly I’d been granted bail. It could have been the benevolence of the law, but could just as easily have been someone’s plan to gain access to my pulse. Soloman and his team of lifers decided I needed connections. I would be surrounded by cousins who knew twice as much about me as I knew about myself. They were taking the threat seriously because while fishing, like most industries, had its share of butterfly experts and trainspotters, the smell of ridiculous amounts of money attracted a certain type of person, the type who saw profit and the pain of others as inseparable elements in any business transaction.
The plan devised by the brothers called for me to take the train to Melbourne and immediately take another to Bairnsdale. From Bairnsdale I was to go to a farm at Orbost and keep moving until it was considered the trouble had passed. It might seem elaborate, but these were prisoners, remember, and plans eat time like white-ants eat wood. From the outside everything looks normal, but on the inside it’s about as substantial as an Aero bar.
I felt less secure than ever. I was being protected from physical harm but left exposed to the invisible machinations of power. How badly did the bad people want me dead, and how long would their fascination with my pulse last? And why, exactly, did they need me so dead? If in fact Soloman’s informants were correct and not just up for a bit of drama.
ten
Jim was in it deep. Up to his neck. Aunty Victoria sent me the cutting from the Advertiser describing the attack on Baras. If it was Jim’s idea it was clumsy and ignorant. I couldn’t imagine that he would be out to hurt enemies, or even that he’d be stupid enough to make enemies of people he didn’t know.
I knew Baras and I didn’t hate him. I had loved the man. Or at least, at nineteen, I believed that what I felt was love and what he felt for me was … something like it. Baras liked women. Just not for very long. He could flatter and spoil. I was vulnerable to both. My father and mother had a relationship like warring twins. They had been together a long time and were implacable in their loyalty to each other, but you never saw them touch. My father probably thought expressions of physical warmth were homosexual or something. Australian men were famous for such idiocy. They called it toughness, one-man-against-the-universe stuff, afraid of no man, dependent on no woman. Except he was. He’d have gone under long ago but for her stewardship of his chaotic inclination. And he knew that but he was damned if he was going to show it.
My excuse was that Baras was so different. He’d never think twice about kissing you in public or listening to your opinion. It took me almost a year to realise it depended on the public and whether or not he agreed with your opinion.
He could talk about art and foreign countries. He’d pour wine for you in such understated style that it made you feel special. Women swallowed hard when they saw him, made ridiculous excuses to get close to him. But he chose to get close to me. He’d take my arm as we walked through city art galleries where people waved to him and called him Bruno. Of course I was flattered by his attention.
This makes me sound like a complete fool but I was nineteen, remember – well, twenty by then, but he took me to the Maldives for our honeymoon. Swam with me, dined with me, rubbed sunscreen into my body, listened when I read things from the paper. I was convinced it was the real deal.
When we returned from the holiday there were the businesses to deal with. He wasn’t diving any more by this time, he had others to do that for him because his time was taken up by all these other schemes. The resort on the Barrier Reef, the tour boats, the aquaculture schemes. People in Nullakarn thought that was Stoker’s particular genius but it was all Bruno Baras. His scheme, his capital, his cunning, Stoker’s work.
Stoker would occasionally believe it was his very own brilliance that had brought success to the venture, but Baras just turned a look on him that cryovacced Stoker on the spot.
I saw that look from time to time. Directed at anyone stupid enough to tread on his toes or who failed to show him the kind of slavish regard he thought his due. I was a kid but became more and more uncomfortable with his business methods. It started out as a game. He was competing with his mates to see who could make the most money, devise the most outrageous schemes. It was exciting for a while but then he started to brood. It got too big, consumed all his time, all his humour.
One day he humiliated the manager of the resort. We were drinking champagne at the bar and I could see Baras’s shoulders bunching in anger. The manager didn’t notice and continued to explain the reason why business expectations had fallen short. None of the manager’s fault, of course: economic climate, global warming, coral bleaching, cane toads.
Baras swivelled to face him. ‘No, Burdekin, no, it’s because you’re out of your depth. Suburban accountants can add up, but not all of them can think their way past counting the cellar stock. This is a business, my business, and you’re out of a job. Piss off. And if you whinge about rights and entitlements I’ll get someone to cut them off for you.’
Burdekin was just what Baras said, an accountant with inflated ideas about his business acumen, but he had brought his wife and kids from Victoria to run this show after selling his own business. Baras had convinced him he was indispensable. And I suppose a lot of Victorians are sucked in by white sand, coconut trees and sunsets. He swallowed hard and I could see him thinking, Shit, now I’ve got nothing. And I have to tell the wife.
‘Keys,’ was all Baras said to the accountant’s appeal that he’d brought his family all — ‘Keys,’ Baras repeated. The accountant handed them over. ‘Now fuck off.’
I thought about it over the next few days. I’d never argued with him and knew it was because I’d never been confident enough in my own opinion. I knew next to nothing about business, so it was easy to be convinced by anything he said.
But this was about morals, about how to treat people. I didn’t like Stoker, so what Baras said to him hardly concerned me at all, but Burdekin had a wife and I liked her. She was a suburban girl who thought she’d married a solid, sensible man. Next minute she was supposed to suck up to the excessively rich who had a mosquito in their room. I felt sorry for her.
‘His wife has to get the kids out of school at Rockhampton, you know. It’s not her fault her husband couldn’t run a chook raffle.’
‘That’s his business. I’ve employed him to get a level of occupancy into this resort. He can’t do it.’
‘But you talked him into bringing his family up here. You must have thought he could do it. You —’ But I never got past the third you.
‘And you can fuck off too if you don’t like it.’ He gave me the look I’d seen emasculate Stoker. I knew he wouldn’t tolerate being questioned, knew that my days of elegant wine pours and suntan oil, diminished in the last few months, were now in serious peril. Felt a feeling of doom as I prepared my next sentence, a kind of exhilaration at the end play rocketing into the script.
‘You’re only saying that because you don’t want to admit —’ I’d expected the look, the scorn, but didn’t see the punch coming. I didn’t even think I was in range, but he hardly moved his feet and I was crumpled in a corner, too scared to move because I could feel my jawbone waggling about in my face.
‘Fuck off,’ was the last thing he said to me, ‘and if you’re so smart start your own business and employ imbeciles. Start a charity.’ He left the room. I left the island by air ambulance. No staff member, doctor or policeman ever asked me how I came by my injuries, and by the time I was wired up and the swelling began to disappear I wasn’t interested either. I was gun-shy now, no man would let a weapon off in my presence again.
His words stayed with me. Not that I intended starting a business, but I was certainly going to be in charge of my own life.
I didn’t know much about Baras, really. I thought I had some kind of hold on him, but now saw that I was just his woman. I’d thought the way we joked, the way he touched me, was love. Laugh if you like, but that’s what I thought; perhaps I was trying to convince myself, not willing to admit I’d deliberately fallen for the facade – and the life money could buy.
He never got close enough to hit me again but I wondered if the punch surprised and disappointed him too. Wondered if he’d had to battle that simple resolution of dispute. And failed. I wasn’t about to acquit him because of a troubled childhood or whatever but I knew that Baras had something really decent and thoughtful in his heart, but he couldn’t control the other side of his nature, which never rested from calculating advantage and power.
I guessed most of his relationships had ended similarly and I also guessed there were times when he wished they hadn’t, wished he had a friend, wished he could find one who thought – well, perhaps it would be better if he found one that didn’t think.
eleven
I took the train to Bairnsdale in accordance with the Black plan, but from there I caught a bus to Nullakarn. I needed more information. As the bus stitched its way through the forests I pondered the approach most likely to extract information from Bob Phillips.
This time I didn’t bother knocking at his door, just went straight round the back and found him reading in the shade of the banksia. When I spoke he turned and stared at me like Kathetostoma laeve, the Stargazer. Big vacant eyes. I was pretty sure how some of that white powder was being put to use.
We stared at each other for a while but he lost interest and his gaze drifted back to the page of the magazine he was reading. Fish.
I went inside and made a pot of tea and took a cup out to Bob, setting it on a bench by the vegie garden. I didn’t want to spook him by being too direct. Better to wait for the fog to lift off the sea and not disturb the glassy surface of his brain. A disturbed Bob could turn the others into a nest of wasps attacked by a stick.
I needed to know who my most dangerous enemies were. I gambled that it wasn’t my favourite fish and surely Stoker wasn’t smart enough to run this himself. He was canny, ruthless and violent, but he was a man who liked big, dark-windowed utes, a caricature of the shady businessman. Calculating and sharp in his negotiations, but a man like that needs a more sophisticated, more influential connection.
And Bob might know those men’s names. Flying Bobby Phillips. I was knocking together a pesto when Bobby lumbered in from the garden like a seal on a beach. The pasta was boiling, a bottle of red on the table. I offered to grate the parmesan while he poured the wine. I saw his Adam’s apple gulp like a plug in a sink.
When we were eating he murmured his compliments for the meal. The basil and parsley had come from his own garden, fertilised with abalone and fish guts. Of course.
‘I’ve been in gaol, Bob. They reckon I imported heroin.’
His eyes assented but his lips said nothing.
‘They set me up, just like that kid who drowned. And Giovanna’s old man. We’ve all been used by some clever fox with no grease on his chin. Stoker? Doesn’t seem smart enough to me.’
He visibly grimaced, but pretended it was a difficult bit of pasta tangling in his throat like ribbon kelp.
‘There has to be someone else, don’t you think, Bob, someone rich and slick enough, powerful enough to dump us all in the shit when the going gets tough, some mean sort of bastard who couldn’t care less if his old mates went to gaol?’
Bob collected the plates, pretending not to notice that I hadn’t finished eating.
‘You know, Bob, they never let me go below on the Star. The cops got that package and I never saw that fishmeal. Saw them unload it but they didn’t know I was watching. Since the disease got going they’ve been looking for someone to blame. This will be all over the papers, they’ll start tracing the Arafura Star’s movements, find all those who’ve had anything to do with her, and the owner.’ I stopped there, so as not to render the information into threat.
‘If we knew that bastard’s name we could save a lot of trouble. Keep them from coming down here and sniffing about the wharf, sticking their noses into everyone’s boat, weighing the catches, road-worthying trailers and that. Looking for drugs.’ I let that sink in. ‘You know what they’re like, Bob, someone has to take the blame and it won’t be them.’
That levered Bob off his rock. ‘The abs are crook with the disease. Fisheries are shitting themselves. It’s travelling ten kilometres a month. Wipe out the whole industry.’
‘I know.’
‘They import other stuff too.’
‘They took a package off me while we were still out at sea. Cops say it was heroin. They put me inside because of it.’ He just looked down at his hands. ‘I’m out on bail, Bob, but it’s not over yet.’
He roused himself at last. Straightened, cleared his throat. ‘They’ve been doing it for years. Don’t care who they hurt, make sure it’s not them. Powerful people to protect them. And they hate publicity.’
‘Like what’s happening with the fishmeal?’
‘They hate it. Especially if they think someone might talk.’
‘Me?’
‘Not just you.’
‘It’s Baras, isn’t it? And Stoker? I’m just trying not to get killed, Bob – I need to know who to watch out for.’
‘Watch ’em all. Drug Squad too. Some are good mates of Baras. They’ve already been here looking for you.’
‘When?’
‘Today. They thought you’d come here.’
‘Thanks.’ I stared at him blankly for a second, wondering if they were watching the house. I went to the back door and looked about. Dusk was becoming night. A possum was working out a scheme to get to the tomatoes, and as nothing in the yard had distracted him from that plan I thought the coast might be clear for me too. I stepped out quickly, ducked under the mahogany gum, climbed the back fence and hoped the neighbour didn’t have a dog.
Then over their fence and down into the gully. Listen. Boobooks still calling. I followed the creek upstream, had a bit of a look around where the jungle finished and opened into forest. A fox stepped onto the path and headed off at a trot to inspect gardens for late chooks. Perhaps Mrs McKenzie was so engrossed by Who Wants to be a Millionaire that she couldn’t tear herself away to lock up the hens. So if the fox wasn’t man-scared, neither was I.
But I was still stuffed. Couldn’t even risk catching the bus back to Bairnsdale. Shanks’s pony. I camped in an abandoned school one night and under a bloodwood tree on another and picked the ticks off myself in the first light. In a mill town I slept on the verandah of a house I thought was empty and woke to find a dog staring at me. A nice dog. He was wondering what a human could do so wrong that he had to sleep rough. An old broken-down heeler. Too old to be possessive, reclining into the years when he could afford compassion. ‘Thanks, mate,’ I told the dog, ‘thanks for not blowing the whistle.’ The dog just stared, neither happy nor alarmed, just amazed that a human could have the luck of a dog.
Two weeks later, I was sitting in one of the worst kitchens I’d ever seen. The kind of ugliness only poverty can produce. I felt uncomfortable and awkward. Full of embarrassment and shame. Trying not to notice the crack in the teacup, turned grey like a dying tooth.
They knew all about me. Who my aunties were, where my father had picked beans, the street in Footscray where my grandmother lived, the fact that they were my cousins. And I knew nothing.
They excused me because I was an orphan, but I was embarrassed because I’d made no attempt to find my family. Every now and then there’d be a tiny, awkward hesitation in the talk, a brief collapse and redirection of conversation. They were embarrassed because I knew so little despite having enough information to find out more. They seemed to resent me for leaving all the disadvantages to them – all the meetings trying to convince the council to connect water or electricity to the house, having to suck up to awful people to prevent the house from being condemned or the car from being repossessed.
The scars of the weary, beaten army were still livid, and none of those welts were on me. Or so it seemed to them, I suppose. Two stints in gaol were par for the course.
They were beaten but not defeated. Beaten, beaten down, but they never raised the white flag. Most had learnt to hate the colour anyway.
I couldn’t look into a corner without noticing the sagging plaster, the disembowelled chair, the daylight between windowsill and wall, and the walls themselves, which might once have been cream and now were a jaundiced green with holes where fists and cricket balls had burrowed. The lightglobes were naked, giving the room a prison-like glare. I’d slept in abandoned houses better than this. They watched my eyes register every element of their shame.
I was over living like this, on the way up, determined never to revisit the discomforts of the poor. A two-term gym freak with aspirations.
A cornflake box glazed a window so that when you stood there to do the dishes you saw a rooster on its head, but still a better view than the yard – a parking lot for the wrecks of EJ and EH Holdens, one-wheeled bicycles, defeated prams, sick cats and a featherless cockatoo. The chairs you might sit on beneath the apricot tree were upturned in rank weeds. Three limbs on the tree were broken where kids had probably used them as a swing, or a desultory mechanic had attempted to use it as a hoist to remove an engine from one of the cars. A 44-gallon drum spewed a damp black smoke. In a doomed attempt to incinerate … something.
