Bloke, page 24
‘Here,’ I said, handing him my knife, ‘cut the rest of that rope free, get some circulation back.’
Everything illuminated was brash with a crimson splash of light. Everything in shadow was pitch-black. Individual lashes on Stoker’s staring eyes were lit like the filaments in search lights. Hell would look like this. Feel like this. Except I knew hell was outside, rising and falling like Satan’s elevator.
But we had plenty of time. It would be hours before anyone could get to us.
‘Now, mate, let’s go over it again. In town they’re saying Baras had an accident. Got the line caught around —’
‘No, me and Stoker —’
‘Hang on, hang on, mate, think about it for a bit. In town they think he —’
‘No.’ He said it with a voice as flat and dead as bridge timber. ‘No, he was going to dob us in. Same as he did to old Tiger. The Long Sue thing stuffed it up. They traced it to Baras and his mates … and Stoker and me. And you.’
‘Me?’
‘But they ruled you out. Some feral coppers got onto it, not on the take. Ruled you out straight away. One of them told Stoker it was him and me. Stoker asked about Baras, but he hadn’t been charged. Baras told them it was all our idea.’
‘Was knocking Baras Stoker’s idea?’
‘Yeah, but I went along. I used the stuff. They would have found out and then … they would have put two and two together.’
‘So what was the plan? What were you going to do?’
‘Ditch Baras, swim to the cave. Hide for a while. Stoker would go to Asia. I’d … come back … you know, accident at sea type of thing. Hadn’t thought much about it. How did you find us?’
‘You told me about the cave, remember? The coral and sponges and stuff. You said no one knew the cave was here because you can’t see the entrance from the sea and you can’t get to it by land. When they couldn’t find you on the beach, there was nowhere else.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I haven’t helped at all yet. If you stuck to your story you might —’
‘No.’ Flat and lifeless. ‘No, I’ve been thinking about it out there. I could lie once, tell ’em I’d got ashore after the accident, then let it all die down, but now with Stoker …’
‘We could just let him go. He’s drowned, you’ve survived.’
‘No, no, the sea was coming in over my head, it was going to kill me, first time it’s ever turned against me. The rope in the kelp, dragging at me like that.’
‘The sea doesn’t turn on you, Bob. The sea doesn’t even know we’re here. We just make a bit of —’
‘No, no, it’s better this way. I’ll just read. Spend the time reading. Find —’
‘No, mate, think about it, it’s not like a reading holiday, it grinds you down, day after day. You might think you can read your way through the years, but they’re apes in there. Believe me, it’ll kill you. You can’t see the sky. The sea.’
The last word seemed to echo about us. He had no more to say, just lay back against the sand beside Stoker, seemingly unaware of his mate’s patient appeal to the sages on the ceiling. We lay like that for ten minutes of cave-echoing silence.
Finally I said, ‘You didn’t tell me about the paintings, Bob.’
‘Told no one. It’s a secret, their secret.’
‘There’re people who’d like to know. Family of this mob.’ I joined Stoker’s gesture at the ceiling.
Bob just stared into the vault where the images leapt in crimson disquiet. His face was impassive, closed. He looked like he’d never speak again. The flare faded, fizzled, guttered into sudden pitch.
‘No, no,’ his disembodied voice resumed, a faint low moan in the dark cathedral. ‘No, they’re better off like this, in their own world.’
‘But their families are still here, mate, they need to see this. I spent my time in Barwon with a bloke called Nugget, this is his mob here.’
‘Dived with Nugget at Thurra. Good bloke. Quiet.’
‘He was telling me about the camp at Thurra.’
‘We thought it would always be like that. Swim and fish and … stuff.’
‘Women?’
‘Oh, yeah, it was like … this painting.’
‘Nugget reckons some of ’em sold their licences for a slab.’ I was just trying to keep a reticent man talking. To fill in the time. We had heaps of it. And if Bob talked I had time to think.
‘Well, that was half the trouble. That’s what ruined it, all that money. Blokes cut each other’s throats when the big money came in. We thought it’d just go on the same. Catch some fish, sell it. But they cut back the licences.’
‘Nugget didn’t renew his.’
‘Lot of them didn’t. Then got bitter when others got rich and they weren’t allowed to fish. Then the poaching started, then they were shooting at each other out at sea. Ruined it. Better off at Thurra when we just had beer and tucker money. Like this mob.’
I guessed he was gesturing at the ceiling, the ocean dancers in their own world. Just like Bob with his water world, his chemical world. I couldn’t help but think he was making a mistake, giving up too easily.
‘Bob …’ I began.
‘No, the sea tried to kill me.’
I tried to think of a way of committing Bob to allowing the town to believe a story they’d find plausible. Half of them were already inclined to something of the sort.
‘No,’ he said again, ‘I’m not going to be diving again. Nugget can have my licence.’
‘Bullshit, it’s worth millions.’
‘Hmmm,’ he answered in a chillingly disinterested voice.
I drew a breath and began to phrase a plea, an argument of clinical logic, but I heard a sound, a ragged, scratching sound. I listened, wondering what it was. A rat. A seal that had come home from the sea. Penguins. No, it was like … but now there was a blubbing sound too. I rolled over and scrambled to the back of the cave.
Lit another flare. Orange like a factory fire. I turned reluctantly to where Bob and Stoker were. Crawled toward them. Saw in the poisonous light that Bob had cut his throat. Well. Sharp knife. Inconvenient, I thought. My bloody knife. Thanks, Bob. Now I’m in the shit. Two dead men in a cave, one out at sea. One man alive. Owner of the knife. Lovely. At least I was thinking logically.
You may be sceptical, consider that a mind doesn’t work like that while lying beside two dead men, one of them a mate, but it does. I was coolly analytical, wishing I’d talked up gaol a bit more, made it sound like a plush library with nice chairs. Bob hadn’t warmed to my description of the reality, now he was cooling to it.
It was a long few hours waiting, listening for a motor. Even after the flare’s light had sputtered into a sick ochre fog I could see the dancing figures above me. The nets and spears, the leaping legs, the sprayed hands. In total darkness that ancient life was still burnt on my retina, still crept and leapt across the vault of the ceiling. I strained so hard listening for a motor that all I heard was the blood in my ears, a pulsing drone, a rhythm for the dancing legs, a voice for the open mouths. I just watched the darkness, not sad, not scared, just amazed at how things went, wondering if fisherfolk had always lived this mad race.
But the old mob hadn’t painted a mad race … they had painted a dance of spirits in a dark cave filled with the moan and echo of the sea; they had painted themselves in dance with the sea. That’s exactly what it was, and you might only realise that if you spent two hours staring at it in the pitch-dark beside the bodies of two dead men. The leaping legs and swarming hands, the nets, the great fish – that it was just the old battle between people and the sea. Deft feet, and deft hands winning treasures from the clasp of the great water.
At last I heard a boat motor, saw a clip of light as someone flashed a beam along the wave line. I left my mates sunning on their dark beach, crawled down the slope and swam from the cave. It was a lot easier swimming through the surf than trying to hold a position within it. I ducked beneath a set of breakers and allowed the outgoing rip to sweep me over the reef to where a zodiac coursed just outside the surf. Dom was there looking like he wanted to cry, but Giovanna wasn’t. Just three coppers in wetsuits. They hauled me aboard the lifeboat and I sat up facing them. Waiting.
‘Where are the others?’ boss copper asked.
I jerked a thumb behind me. ‘They’re in a cave back there. They’re dead.’
‘Right.’
Boss copper nodded to one of the others, who curled himself over the rubber gunwale, and we watched as he swam toward the cave, rising and falling with the diminishing pitch. The sea had had enough. Dawn’s first flush lipped the horizon.
They fed me sandwiches and soup and coffee. Fancy sports drinks. Full of life-restoring electrolytes. No one said anything. Dom looked like he’d shit himself. We sat like that for maybe forty minutes. At last swimming copper returned and they hauled him aboard. I saw him nod once to the boss and that was it.
The helmsman swung us about and we roared nor’-east, the sea hammering the rubber hull, the twin motors screaming, the spray battering our faces. Apart from that, merciful silence.
twenty-one
I decided to become an invalid. Giovanna waited until they got me out of the zodiac and then just held me and sobbed.
‘I thought I’d never see you again,’ she said.
‘Me too, mate.’ But that was around the time I decided to be an invalid. I was so tired I could hardly keep my head upright on my shoulders. I slept for a day. Then another day.
The police were keen to talk to me. But not as keen as I expected. As if they were used to handling multiple deaths in sea caves. Later, earnest detectives raked through different parts of the story, even asked me to spell ‘Cookup’. I was sure she wouldn’t be thankful for me having introduced them into her life. Lawyers came and went. Clergymen. Local district politicians and attendant photographers. Keen to have their photo taken with a hero. Well, not hero, just anyone on the front page. They’d pick up my hand off the sheet and smile at the camera. Giovanna showed me the result in the next issue of East Country Chronicle. I remember seeing a photo of Angus McMillan, one of the more efficient murderers of Gippsland, and he was holding the hand of an Aboriginal. McMillan smiles broadly at the camera. The black man is worried about the company his hand is keeping. His shoulder is slightly recoiled from McMillan’s. He knows he’s holding the hand of someone who despises him.
I don’t know whether the politician despised me or was just calculating the ability of voters to remember his face and recognise his name on a ballot paper. There’s probably not a lot of difference but what did I care, I was an invalid. I managed two days in bed but chose the verandah chair for the remainder of my convalescence. La Paz was a good nurse. A little enthusiastic dog licking your chin is very efficacious. A tiny snore from inside your shirt is even better.
When everyone who thought they had to interrogate me had gone Giovanna clasped me in her arms and pressed the woman of her to my body and I took its warmth as greedy as you like. I just stood there soaking up that warmth – that love.
‘When I saw you swimming away from the boat, Jim …’ She didn’t say anything more. Neither of us did, didn’t need to.
Over the next few days Dom drank a lot of tea on our verandah. He was badly shaken by the events. Managed to buy himself a new pair of Billabongs but that’s as close as he got to organising his life. He didn’t know Baras very well, few in Nullakarn did, but Stoker and Bob were part of the furniture and he’d worked for them both, played footy with them too.
Most of his concern was with himself, of course, he thought his part in the proceedings might get him in strife. In my own case, Madeleine had been right, the police considered me a complete idiot, incapable of any serious involvement. They bracketed me alongside Dom. Hurt the pride a bit.
It was good for the police to stitch up Baras’s drug importations, helped make their pay claim look reasonable, and the state and federal governments were delighted to shift all the blame for the fishmeal/ abalone-disease debacle onto Baras and Stoker. The fact that the disease was going to wipe out the whole abalone population and, as a result, collapse the food chain for crayfish and octopus was not nearly as fascinating to the press as two dead men in a sea cave.
Dom and I drank many pots of convalescent tea, unsure whether we were mourning the loss of a good mate or celebrating our escape from blame.
Days later, after La Paz and I had had our sleep of convalescence and Dom had rediscovered his libido, Giovanna brought me another invalid tea. ‘There’s one thing I still can’t work out, Vanna, how could they be so sure I didn’t kill Bob?’
‘Are you left-handed, Jacques?’
‘Oh.’ The science of policing versus the natural guilt of the gymnast.
‘Carsten’s a decent copper, he pointed out a few obvious facts to the city detectives, as well as the history of past events. He’s seen it all. And the autopsies showed how long Stoker had been dead. And they knew when we left the harbour because they’d been watching you. There were plenty hated Baras, and the police had no trouble putting the scheme together. Burdekin, the resort manager he sacked, was a very keen witness apparently.’
La Paz and I considered the state of events for another hour or so. La Paz had had a big day with the geese. Didn’t want to go back in their yard at ten in the morning. Exhausting for a pup.
That’s when we heard another vehicle wearing out our track. The Labor Party come a-calling. He was a young bloke with a beard, Akubra, R. M. Williams boots. Tried to pretend he was an old bushie. Thought that’s who he was dealing with. Never occurred to him that no real bushie could afford to wear R. M. Williams. All ‘mate’ and ‘too right’ and ‘fair dinkum’. What a lot of crap.
He was someone’s parliamentary secretary, I didn’t even listen properly.
‘Jim, how’s it going, mate, I’m Evan.’ That sort of bullshit.
‘Looks like the Libs have been trying to get you to blow the whistle on the Minister for the fishmeal thing. But look, mate, it’s the bloody public servants, they’re hopeless. We’ve called for an inquiry and we’re going to put the torch to their feet.’
‘Took your time,’ Giovanna observed. I wasn’t sure if that was really helpful.
He Jimmed and mated and fair-goed and justiced for about half an hour. Said how they were going to put the Libs to the rack, bust the drug cartels, save the whale, and I just listened. Giovanna kept on slipping verbal stilettos between his ribs but he hardly noticed – you could hook around inside his chest for three minutes and never hit a pumping organ.
‘Look,’ I interrupted him, rousing myself from convalescence. ‘I’ll go to the inquiry and tell my side of the story, I’ve said that to a dozen or so people already, but it’ll just be what I know, nothing more. And if you wanted to be useful there are a few things you could do.’
‘Of course, mate, anything to help.’
‘You’ve been trying to close down a Koorie school in the valley.’
‘Well, mate, I’m sure you’re aware that it’s a state responsibility to —’
‘It’s still your party and that’s what you can do to help. Your party has been trying to close that school for years but you’ve never staffed it properly. There are six Aboriginal language teachers you promised training to eight years ago. That school deserves to stay open and those women deserve to be trained. Then you can talk about standards. And I want two scholarships for two members of my family.’ Giovanna held up three fingers. ‘Three.’ But what Darce or Aunty Cookup were going to do with theirs was anyone’s guess. ‘Three Koorie scholarships.’
‘Of course, certainly, our policy is to address dis—’
I held up my hand to silence him. ‘And the river. You’ve had representations from the Goongerah Aboriginal Co-op about a water policy – guaranteed flows, that sort of thing.’
‘Yes, and we’re committed to environmental fl—’
‘So committed your local Labor councillor tried to get Mrs Thomas kicked off the Catchment Management Authority.’
‘Oh, I can assure you —’
‘I don’t want to be assured, I want her on the committee. And her cousin, the local willow man. As you know, they want a fairly radical reform – water in the river.’
He took a breath to stress the party’s full and open community liaison and … but I lifted my hand again.
‘You’ve had your say. The school, teacher training and four scholarships.’ Bugger it, Uncle Binny could do a degree in chainsaw, Nugget could become an art critic. ‘And the Catchment Management Committee so that … so that my family can …’
‘Of course, we —’ good old Evan began.
‘Shut up,’ Giovanna warned.
‘So that my family can look after themselves and not have to wait for bastards who are colour blind until three weeks before an election.’
La Paz had no idea the discussion was going to turn political, and promptly pissed himself inside my shirt. I looked like I’d had a colostomy-bag malfunction. Evan was aghast. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, and went inside to clean up. I put La Paz out in the yard and got myself a beer. Evan wouldn’t want one, there was no Corona.
I let the sharp cold beer strip my throat of bile and too much recuperation.
‘So that,’ I heard Giovanna begin, ‘will all happen before the inquiry. Including the scholarships.’ I hoped he didn’t back out. But she was right. Evan needed us. His party needed to show the world how egalitarian it was. How tough it was on drugs and Liberals, quarantine protection of our rural industries. What a bunch of heroes.
I heard his car drive away and I came back out to the verandah. ‘And a new colostomy bag, ya mongrel.’
I sat back down. Cuddled La Paz to my chest. Thank God he wasn’t a proud dog. ‘I’m stuffed,’ I said.
‘Been a busy month or so.’
‘Year.’
‘Look,’ Giovanna said, ‘we need to get away for a while. Try and put it behind us.’ Fat chance of that, I thought. ‘It will give us time to sort things out.’
