Bloke, page 21
And due to the late hour and the fact that the Prime Minister and his advisers were on a trade delegation to the island of Thebes, where it was thought we had enormous trade opportunities, it was just unlucky that the first phone call to the police department was switched through to the Attorney-General’s mobile. Unlucky because he was in the generous embrace of Miss Silky and he’d just consumed a phial of amyl nitrate. He took a moment to consider his response.
‘Shoot the fucker down,’ he bellowed into his phone while trying to extricate himself from … well, extricate will do.
‘It’s a ship, sir.’
‘Well, shoot it up then.’
Eventually the Attorney-General’s press secretary was contacted. He answered the phone while standing in the darkness wearing his Garfield pyjamas. He listened thoughtfully.
‘Perhaps the Attorney-General has been a little precipitous. I will ring the Minister for Defence and the Admiral and arrange a … a response.’
Tidy hands began putting the wool back in the skein, but too late to stop it making the front pages of the tabloids. ‘Miss Silky, eh?’ the general public mused over their cornflakes, wondering whether to be outraged or jealous. Time would tell.
But Baras and Stoker knew more than the common man and stayed clear of the coast, flew to Sydney instead and made sure they had twenty witnesses to their meeting with the Sisters of Mercy at the homeless shelter in Glebe, where they offered to serve soup to the poor. But there’s always a broken sailor needing food and revenge for some captain’s accounting errors. Inevitably news filtered back to Nullakarn on the fishing net.
Sister Carmel declared in the flat resistant tone she reserved for businessmen that it was Friday night and she didn’t do soup Fridays. Fish fingers and duck under the table. All fishermen loved Sister Carmel for her prejudices.
The police couldn’t immediately charge Baras with the Long Sue importation because they had counted on intercepting him or one of his acolytes at the scene. But there was an alarming amount of loose information washing about in the aftermath of so many accidents and gradually all the bedraggled rats came ashore and, naturally, bit those closest to them. A plague of cholera infected a large proportion of the fishing industry.
In the meantime Smearcat and Nectar entertained the seal and penguin colonies on the Skerries with the wildest party ever seen that far south, and when the two brothers recovered they declared that they would retire from the industry of nefarious deeds. That promise didn’t last until Cann River, where they stole a hundred litres of fuel. Which got them to Cairns; well, they did have to refuel a couple of times, much to the consternation of the cashiers, who just hated cutlasses being waved in their face. They’d seen Pirates of the Caribbean.
You might think I was being uncharitable about my companions’ boyish exuberance but a thousand sixteen-year-old girls have gone through the windscreen to celebrate such impossible charm. You might think they were a bit cavalier about their preparations for anonymity, but they were easily bored and hadn’t conceived of life as perfect citizens to be a permanent vocation. They were a lit fuse sputtering toward my freedom.
eighteen
There was a moon.
I woke at every sound, every time she rolled over in her sleep. I listened, watched the stark moonshadows stealing about the riverbanks as a breeze moved the upper branches of a melaleuca, a fitful breeze selecting one tree, toying with it. Clouds, lone travellers, crept up from the east, frittered the moonlight, tossed swatches of darkness against the hospital brightness of the paddocks.
I was expecting something to go wrong. Someone was going to pay. I didn’t want it to be me. Or her.
Smearcat and Nectar were just accidents, little flurries of lawlessness. They might escape but not for long and then their mouths would be nests of information implicating others.
Gloomy Jacques?
I watched the long bow of her jaw lit by the moon, the individual hairs, tiny fibrils of light. She rolled inside my arm and I had to steel myself not to stroke or sculpt the magnificence of her sleeping beauty.
But the moon. My heart was trembling at the top of my rib cage, restless, uncertain. I rolled away and tried to draw my arm from beneath her neck but she rolled in toward my back and an arm clasped my waist.
‘Mmm,’ she said, ‘what’s wrong?’ Conscious of my wakefulness.
‘Nothing, nothing,’ I assured, ‘just … bit warm that’s all.’ She pressed her face against my back and in seconds I could feel her return to sleep.
Sleeping with someone. It was new to me. In the gym, sleep was the most dangerous time. At the orphanage as well. If someone wanted to get you that’s when they did it. If I heard a noise or felt movement I could roll free of the bedding and be on my feet, hands clenched, before I knew I was awake. It was an awful feeling. Sweat sprinted down your back and you felt like someone had plugged one of those coils from an electric jug into your brain. You’d lie awake for the rest of the night, soaked in adrenaline.
I’d sometimes woken her like that, springing to my own unnecessary defence. The first time I did it, she’d screamed and rolled away. Wise. I’d once grabbed a bloke by the throat and rammed his head against the wall before realising he was just trying to search beneath my pillow. Happened a bit. If you needed to keep something safe that’s how you did it; slept on it. One movement and you were up and fighting. No need to take it personally. We frisked each other’s valuables as a way of making friends. I had to apologise to the poor bloke. But he wasn’t too upset. Eight stitches and a broken nose and three days in the infirmary leering at the nurses. But they left my pillow alone.
Giovanna was scared of that sudden leap into fight. But when she got used to it – not that it happened a lot – she’d just grab me by the arm and draw me back down beside her.
‘Shadows, Jacques, just shadows.’ She’d kiss me on the neck and massage my heart, easing the hammering of my chest. ‘Shadows, my darling, just shadows.’ Last time it happened she’d been half asleep, but she’d said darling, and no one had ever said it to me before. She was asleep again almost before she’d finished the sentence but my face flooded with tears. Darling; darling, for the boy who’d never been loved.
We were still prickly and watchful, still unsteady in each other’s company, but she called me darling. I watched the sky in wonder as the piccaninny light diluted the moon.
I heard La Paz sit up. I sensed his alertness. He growled a low soft rumble in his puppy throat. I didn’t move but let my eyes scan the yard, strained my ears to bursting, listening for a step on the verandah, a click, a whisper.
But there was no sound, no step. La Paz stared into the night and ever so carefully turned to meet my eyes. He looked at me, not like a pup at his owner, no slavish, ear-drooping smile, just stared at me, questioning. What did I hear, what did I smell? And then he returned his gaze to the yard. He was going to be a top little dog – no one would get close to us without his knowing.
I slid from the bed and her hand slipped from my thigh, but before it began to search I clasped it for a moment and filled it with the edge of the doona. I crept from the room, and La Paz followed without a sound. I knelt by a window where I could scan the verandah. The pup wasn’t tall enough to see so just stared at my face, his ears sharp with tension.
At the front door I inspected the verandah from another angle. I saw the unfamiliar thing straight away. Something hanging from the rail. I recognised it but couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t expecting two pigeons hanging by their legs.
I opened the door and looked about, allowed La Paz to go before me but kept an index finger on his back, cautioning him not to dash out into the yard barking like an idiot. Idiots got shot. But he hardly left the shelter of the door frame and peered about before walking to the verandah post and sniffing it for several minutes. I looked at the pigeons. They’d been tied together as a brace with a twine of bindweed.
La Paz went down the steps and circled the post. There’d been a dog here. Dogs. I let La Paz inspect the ground wherever he chose because I could see he was intent on one particular trail. He followed it in a line from the house to the shed, to a grove of black wattles by the dam, below the dam wall to a patch of cumbungi in the outfall, along the narrow gully to where the forest began, and then dropped off the ridge into a glade by the river.
I saw the fireplace before La Paz reached it. Three little billets of blackwood, no thicker than two fingers. Three river stones the size of your fist. One blackwood coolamon. Charred. Munt and his dogs. A present from the spirit man.
‘What’s this?’ Giovanna asked, following her nose into the kitchen. ‘Bachelor pie?’
‘Wongas. Munt left them. Man’s been watching our backs.’
‘That’s nice of him.’
‘Nice.’ She didn’t understand. ‘It’s not nice. It means someone intends us harm.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t know.’
She went to say something, then reconsidered. I turned my attention to the pot where I was searing onions and the flesh of the two birds. I tipped the meat and onions into a small dish with some tiny potatoes I’d found growing wild in the garden near an old chook shed. Bit of rosemary and thyme there too. Mixed up a bit of gravy, poured it in, capped it with a lid of pastry, slid it into the oven.
She just looked at me. ‘Are we in deep shit?’ she asked.
‘Don’t know,’ I replied. ‘Might just be the ordinary kind of shit you get as soon as you think everything’s going well.’
‘Well, at least we’ve got Munt watching out for us.’
‘And La Paz. You picked a brilliant dog. He acts like he’s about eight with a degree in criminology. Trust that little pink-bellied prick. He’s on our side.’
‘And the pigeon pie recipe? Munt?’
‘Maybe originally, but no, this is Aunty Cookup’s.’
‘And you remembered it?’
‘Well, won’t be the same as hers. She used some little potato thing she got from the bush, but the ones from the chook shed will have to do. And she used turnips too … but I’m glad I can’t find any of them. They fed that muck to us in the home.’
‘Smells all right.’ She turned to the window. ‘Who’s that?’ she said, listening to a motor on the river.
A boat idled into the shore, expertly picking the channel between the sandbanks. A big woman stepped up onto the gunwale, rope in hand ready to tie up. Sailor. But even at this distance her giant golden earrings were flashing a decadent morse.
‘Bloody Madeleine,’ Giovanna said. ‘Captain bloody Madeleine.’
We went out to the verandah as she stalked up through the paddock. She had big ostentatious sunnies. Huge, declaring the debauchery of their price. She chucked a club of wattle branch at a tiger snake that had had the temerity to question her progress to the house. ‘What’s that ya cooking?’ she yelled, still fifty metres from the verandah.
‘Pigeon pie.’
‘Pigeon fuckin pie? Haven’t had that since Uncle Kitchener last taunted the park rangers. You must be Jim.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’m Madeleine. Madeleine Stevens.’ I nodded. ‘Saw you playin footy for Nullakarn last season. G’day, Vanna. Surprise, surprise, eh?’
‘Well, yes, it is, not many people know we’re here.’
‘You’d be surprised. This is your Uncle Marco’s joint. Heard you were here. Anyway, sometimes a girl needs to go fishing on her own. Especially if she thinks she’s about to take the breadknife to her beloved or several of the kids and the cat. Fishing always helps. I don’t feel like killing anyone for a while.’ Well that was good news. She could see the way her declaration of murderlessness affected us and laughed, a big, bottle-blonde belly laugh.
‘Joke, Joyce. But it is what I’ve come to see you about. I’ll swap you two flatties for a bit of that pigeon pie. And looky, looky, a bottle of French bubbles. Is it a deal?’
It was ten-thirty on a Wednesday morning but who could refuse. What was going to be a lazy late breakfast became a lunch with a woman who promised not to murder us. Couldn’t be cosier.
‘Bit of red wine in that?’ Madeleine said, rolling pie in her mouth like a handyman’s cement mixer.
‘Yeah, mixed it with the gravy.’
‘Uncle Kitchener didn’t like wine, but I’m a snob, eh Vanna. Anyone finished Year Nine in this town is a Rhodes scholar. Except we spell it Road.’ She laughed expansively at her own joke and I hoped La Paz was onto it, chance of pigeon and pastry all over the verandah. ‘Comes with marryin into royalty, I suppose. Abalone royalty, that is. We get a royalty on every bloody fish.’ She laughed again and I looked about for La Paz.
‘Us girls get about. Last year we all hired a plane and went to Singas fa lunch. We were in Sydney anyway and the boys were talkin abs to the Japs so we said, fuck it, let’s fly to bloody Singapore. And we bloody did. Ate a bucket of chicken feet and fried lotus flowers, few bottles of plonk and back home to the boys. They just stared at us, hadn’t even noticed we’d been gone. And to think that if I hadn’t sucked him off after the footy finals this might never have happened. Shocked? Don’t be, darls, it’s how things bloody are. I just want an ordinary life, that’s all.’
‘Lunch in Singapore!’ I couldn’t help myself. She laughed again. La Paz.
‘We just did that because we could. Business expenses. You could’ve fed me a ham sandwich at the Nullakarn wharf and I’d have been as happy. We were just bored, showing off. Something to screech about.’ She gestured to us with her fork. ‘You think Stoker’s a prick and you’re right, but he’s my prick and I’m forty-two and he’s the last prick I’ll get. I want to go on a caravan holiday with the miserable bastard. Imagine us, eh, happy hour at Seal Rocks with all the lawn bowlers.’
She shrieked at the image. La Paz licked at a piece of liberated pastry. ‘I’m not bullshitting, I’d settle for that. Love it. Don’t know if he’s into it, but here’s hoping. We’ve got to get out of here for a while, anyway. Everyone in town reckons they’re Inspector Clouseau. You two are all right, it’s us that have to watch out.’
‘You’re sure of that, are you?’
‘Of course, someone’s going to cop it, that much is certain, but it won’t be you, that’s the way I’m looking at it anyway.’
‘What, even after they’ve spent half a year trying to stitch me up?’
‘Yeah, but think of it, darl. Are the courts going to buy the fact that little old you is responsible for the whole bloody thing? Corrupt politicians, a mountain of heroin, a hill of fishmeal, dodgy police, bloody disappearance of the aba-bloody-lone? Come off it, Jim, anyone can see you’re a halfwit. Joke, Joyce.
‘It’s out of control. Everyone’s dobbin everyone else. Dobbin you would have worked for the heroin, you look the part, but once the fish started to die everyone shit ’emselves. Boats got confiscated, friends got shafted, businesses disappeared off an accountant’s hard drive. Shit hit the fan. No one’s going to believe you’ve got it in you. No, what I’ve really come for is to ask Vanna to play netball for Pretty in Pink. Wednesday at seven. And you to umpire. Special request from the girls. They reckon you’re dumb but you look all right.’
‘That’s what you came for?’
‘Oh, I knew you’d be worried about the other stuff. Maybe you’re not out of the woods, but I’m just acting on instinct, bigger fish will fry, I think. Half-coon gaolbird deckhands aren’t going to satisfy no one. It’s got too big. But don’t forget the netball. Vanna an’ me are old schoolmates, see.’
‘She was two years ahead of me, Jim,’ Giovanna assured. Women like to get the chronology right.
‘Geez, you’re right, Jimmy boy. If she’s tryin to convince you of her youth you’re in like Flynn.’
‘Thanks, Madeleine,’ Giovanna added.
‘Jesus, she’s even blushing. Think it might be time for me to go. But don’t forget the netball. It’s no bullshit, no soft soap, we’re bloody desperate, we’ll take anyone.’
Watching her walk back down to her boat was like seeing a duststorm depart. All your flowerpots are upside down, the sheets are off the line and the house is full of grit. But you couldn’t say it wasn’t an experience.
‘That’s not what she came for,’ Giovanna speculated. ‘She’s not as confident as she sounds. There’s still something fishy about the whole thing. Makes me nervous.’
The Haines Hunter leapt into full throttle and banked in a hard turn, weaving between the sand banks, and disappeared behind the melaleuca groves. We could hear her singing to herself. Giovanna thought it was ‘Shepherd on a Rock’ but I was sure it was ‘Bad to the Bone’.
‘Sensitive little thing,’ I remarked.
‘She’s been like that since she was three. She was a legend by the time she went to school. Says the first thing that comes into her head. Usually crude but I’ve never known her nasty. I’m not saying I wasn’t scared of her, Stoker really, but I always … I admired her honesty. Well, honest might be a bit much, but her upfront, no-bullshit thing. You know where you stand with her. Makes me almost cry thinking of her hanging about for happy hour at Noosa.’
‘Seal Rocks.’
‘Yeah, not even as upmarket as Noosa. Is she right, do you think?’
‘About Seal Rocks?’
She punched my arm. A fisherwoman’s punch, right where the muscle connects to the bone.
‘You getting shot. Or are you as dumb as she says?’
‘Well, I’m not as dumb as her, I didn’t marry Stoker.’
‘Who knows why people marry, Jacques.’
‘I have no experience in the area.’
‘Maybe it’s love.’
‘Maybe it’s accidental oral sex.’
‘She’s a hooer, isn’t she? I think the netball thing isn’t such a bad idea. All the abalone wives. If we can’t get a feel for how the ground lies there, where will we?’
‘The morgue.’
‘That’s just morbid.’
‘I’ve been awake since dawn looking for strangers.’
