The Maskeys, page 22
Leanne’s face appeared at the top of the ladder.
Rodney cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry, about before.’
Leanne whispered, ‘Please. Don’t fuck with Jay’s head.’
Rodney blushed.
Leanne climbed back down the ladder. She hesitated on the landing. ‘Goodnight, Rodney,’ she called up to him tersely, and added, as an afterthought, ‘Goodnight, Gayle.’
After the annoying disruption of Leanne, Gayle showered, brushed her teeth, and then – in an exercise not too different to delousing – stripped and remade the bed.
Between the fresh sheets, she set an alarm, and with hardly a consideration of the fact that her captive, Rodney, was no longer locked in his room and was free to move about her flat, she swiftly fell asleep.
2
When a few hours later the alarm went off, Gayle threw on a robe and went to Rodney’s room. Receiving no answer when she tapped on the door, she went in and was relieved to find him sleeping. She took him by the shoulder and roused him.
He woke with a start.
‘We’re going to your … place,’ Gayle said, fumbling for a term.
‘What? – Why?’
‘Let’s have some breakfast quickly. Leanne can open the shop for me.’
He sat up. ‘I wouldn’t risk it, Mrs Reynolds – it ain’t safe,’ he said, uncomfortable about the idea.
‘Hurry.’
‘But cops are likely gonna be there any time now.’
Gayle went into the kitchen and put on the kettle.
Rodney put his feet on the floor. ‘You ain’t fallin for Serenade’s silly nonsense, are ya? The Maskeys will have found everything. I know.’
‘We’re going,’ Gayle said, from the kitchen.
Sitting at the table over a mug of tea, Rodney continued to pester Gayle about the sense of visiting his camp. But it was to no avail: she was determined to see the site for herself.
Leanne was sorting out the cash drawer when the pair descended the stairs, shortly after.
‘We’ll be an hour, no more,’ Gayle said, striding past.
Leanne gave Gayle her most capable smile. But for Rodney, who followed, she offered only a curt acknowledgement. Her cold glance was not lost on him, who smarted that he was in her bad books. But he had no time to dwell on hurt feelings, struggling as he was to keep pace with his captor.
Boarding Gayle’s Nissan, Rodney hadn’t given up on persuading her that a trip to his camp was unnecessary. ‘Police are lazy, Mrs Reynolds. They ain’t gonna find anything.’
She faced him. ‘I want to see where you live, Rodney.’
They set off, and soon they were bashing up the poorly maintained fire-trail that led to his encampment.
When they arrived at the clearing, not far from the tent, Rodney leapt from the vehicle. ‘I’ll have a scout around. I suppose there could be somethin the Maskeys ain’t picked up.’
He darted here and there, like a bird, alert to the risk of a threat. ‘You sure put a lot of faith in Serenade, don’t you, Mrs Reynolds?’ He laughed, kind of forced, as he darted.
‘She was right about my son, wasn’t she?’
Gayle opened her eyes to her surroundings. In the light of early morning, she looked about in wonder at the surprising beauty of the location. There was a very strong smell that she found unpleasant. ‘What’s that strange odour?’ she asked Rodney.
‘Could be my dunny.’
Gayle followed her nose to the three-sided bunker that stored his blood and bone.
Rodney watched on apprehensively. ‘My fertiliser, Mrs Reynolds.’
‘What is it?’
His brow furrowed. ‘Compost stuff – roo droppings. The usual.’
‘It’s very strong.’
He faltered. ‘All organic, Mrs Reynolds.’
She welcomed the distraction of his thriving vegetable garden. She went to admire his carrots, tomatoes, lettuce and silver beet.
‘You sleep in there?’ she asked, of his tent nearby.
‘Yes, Mrs Reynolds. Lived here since I were a teen.’
‘How do you stand it up here with all the rain?’
‘Wet ain’t the worst thing you can be,’ he said.
‘What is?’ she asked, walking closer for a look.
‘Scared.’
She saw a petrol-operated wood-chipper in the shade by his dwelling.
‘Chipper ain’t working,’ he said, struggling to pull a nearby tarp over it. ‘I tried to fix it.’
He entered his tent. Looking back at Gayle, he was happy to see she had moved on from the broken-down machine.
He checked under his camp-bed and inside a little trunk at its foot, where his few items of clothing had been stored; finding it emptied, he then saw his library book poking from a strut above his head. Its discovery was welcome. ‘Serenade were right, Mrs Reynolds. This book can be traced back to me. Nothin else here to find. We can go now,’ he said, flicking through the pages. He shut the book. He looked out. ‘I wouldn’t touch that, Mrs Reynolds,’ he said, alarmed to see her tugging at a length of nylon rope behind the tree.
‘What is this?’ she said, persisting to yank at it.
‘Please don’t —’
Suddenly Gayle catapulted off the ground in a flurry of dead leaves and startled birdlife.
She screamed.
Rodney ran out, tripping over his feet.
Swallowed by the netting and swinging in the branches, she clambered about, trying to free herself. ‘Get me out of this.’ She struggled.
‘I will, Mrs —’ He hurried over to the counterweight of river stones that she had released. He set about hacking at the rope with a cane knife. ‘Just a tick, Mrs Reynolds. It’s only an animal trap – you pulled the cable.’ He sliced through it, but nothing budged. ‘Not again.’ He cursed under his breath. ‘Must be snagged on the branches,’ he said, despairing, as he looked up into the tree.
He saw Sandra, on the move.
‘I don’t give a fuck. Get me down. Cut me down – do anything,’ Gayle cried, as she swung about.
‘I will, Mrs —’ he said, trying to appear calm.
Gayle was struggling to push the netting away from her face and off her body more generally, when she saw the giant snake stirring in the branches above.
She froze.
Rigid.
Rodney became all thumbs. ‘Please don’t panic, Mrs Reynolds.’
But this was not possible. Many people have an irrational fear of snakes, and Gayle was one of these people: little snakes no wider than a worm; harmless snakes, fangless too, with not a drop of poison; cartoon snakes, even colour plates in National Geographic – all were terrifying. Signalling an asthma attack, her airways constricted. She tried to grope about in her pockets for a puffer. But it was in the truck.
Sandra, loping from the tree like a fat forest vine, nudged at the top of the netting with her snout.
Desperate, and with no other plan, Rodney jumped up onto the net in an attempt to pull it down using his body weight. Whispering under his breath, ‘No, Sandra, no, Sandra, not this time,’ he jumped and jumped and jumped to free the jammed pulleys – and at last, he and Gayle crash-landed onto the forest floor.
As the snake watched on, he got to his feet and fumbled to pull the netting off Gayle’s body.
She made it to her knees, wheezing – but unable to crawl, she pointed to the truck. Rodney ran, and scrabbled about until he found her puffer in the consol. Finally getting it to her mouth, she drew deep, deep hits until she could breathe once more.
A shaken Rodney began to apologise profusely for the mishap. ‘It’s a trap, Mrs —’
Gayle breathed sweet air.
‘For pigs, mainly —’
She staggered away from the sight of the reptile, still moving above. She got in the truck and buried her face into the steering wheel, while Rodney dragged the netting into the undergrowth.
‘It’s just new, I’m still ironing out the bugs,’ he said of the trap’s workings.
Gayle started the engine and, throwing the truck into reverse, began to leave without Rodney.
‘Wait,’ he cried after her. He found his book and ran, just managing to board before she sped from the scene.
‘I’m really sorry about that, Mrs Reynolds,’ he said, out of breath, as he fastened his seatbelt.
She ignored him.
‘Mrs Reynolds?’
They thumped back down the fire-trail.
‘Did Duncan ever visit you here?’ Gayle asked, white-knuckling the steering wheel.
‘Yes, Mrs Reynolds – he knew where I lived,’ Rodney said as he bounced about.
They careered on in uneasy silence until, nearing the un stumped house at the base of the trail, Rodney saw cops about to enter from the Naples Road.
‘In here, quick,’ he said. He seized the steering wheel and, yanking it hard, turned the vehicle sharply off the trail and behind overgrown privet, past the un stumped house and fallen-down bales, into a mass of old mango trees, where, with low branches bashing on the roof and sides, and braids of buttressed tree roots under wheel – the truck stalled.
The pair panted.
Rodney watched the convoy from behind foliage. When the vehicles had disappeared up the fire-trail, he got back in the truck, telling Gayle it was safe to leave.
Gingerly, she reversed them out.
Reaching outside to clear a small mango branch from the windscreen, Rodney caught sight of a steel 44-gallon drum lying in the grass: stuffed to the brim with fifty-dollar bills, his life savings. He realised as it shrank from view that if the cops found it, too bad.
He was employed in a lucrative field, after all. And he had amassed three more just like it: hidden here and there, where the cops, or thieves like Duncan, would never think to look.
Worn out from the drama at his camp site, Rodney was pensive, watching the familiar scenery as it rolled by: the hills, with their sloping green spines and bulbous snouts, pointy ears and sleepy heads, prehistoric monsters appearing to haul themselves out of the caldera, and all of them company to him since his adolescence.
Approaching the turn-off to Longwhile, he sighed sadly when he saw the buckled wooden sprawl that gave most of the Maskey family their shelter. Not him.
‘More cops,’ he said, indicating a line of vehicles approaching.
Gayle shrank into her seat as the convoy flew past.
‘That creature, the snake —’ she said, shuddering; still not properly making sense of what she had been through.
‘If you hadn’t been tugging at the rope.’
‘I want nothing more to do with those plants. Leanne and the boy can have it all. I want all of you, all of it, out of my home.’
‘Sure, Mrs Reynolds, whatever you want,’ Rodney said. ‘It’s your marijuana. You stole it fair and square.’
The day after Child Welfare searched for Rodney in the roof of Naples public school, two snake-catchers arrived to remove a large east-coast diamond python that had been found living there.
Watching in secret from nearby, Rodney saw Snakeman’s Toyota and trailer pull up in the school grounds. He hurried over to the wagon’s rear door, with the hope of discovering a hiding space inside. He climbed in and removed the metal lid above the cavity that housed the spare wheel. Then, with difficulty, he rolled the wheel down toward the school bins. After this, he forced his small body into the uncomfortable space and pulled the carpeted steel lid over himself.
Sandra was not fully grown back then, but when the snakecatchers returned to load the cage to the Toyota’s trailer, Rodney heard them remark, not without pride, that she was the finest they had ever caught.
‘Do you think she’ll come back to the school?’ the snake-catcher’s apprentice asked, of the territorial reptile.
‘Not where we’re taking her,’ came Snakeman’s reply, as they drove from the schoolyard.
Rodney wondered how far that might be. The road was bumpy, and it became clear to the inexperienced boy that automotive travel was overrated. In time, though, the gears changed down, and the vehicle slowed. He breathed a sigh of relief that lasted only for as long as the truck and trailer took to turn off the Naples Road. And then the real thrashing about began, as they journeyed to the top of the fire-trail and into the clearing that would soon become Rodney’s home.
When at last the truck reached its destination, a rattled Rodney struggled out of the wheel cavity and into the twilight.
Snakeman’s apprentice thought he saw something escape into the trees but guessed it was just a startled pademelon.
Hiding in foliage, Rodney watched Sandra disappear up into a tall tree, and when the snake-catchers had driven off, the boy set about making a dry bed to sleep on for his first ever night on the Knuckle.
The next day, Rodney hitched a lift into town to scavenge supplies, and then again the day after, and in time he improved his dwelling. But he soon realised he was raising the eyebrows of tourists who were giving him lifts and who felt uneasy about dropping a small thirteen-year-old boy in the middle of nowhere.
So, Rodney stole the letterbox from the house that his mother had squatted and died in, and he erected it on the Naples Road at the beginning of the fire-trail. And from then on, his ‘lifts’ believed it belonged to a house. A house that the puny kid shared with his big sister – Sandra.
His guardian.
Naples Lodge
1
The Lodge has never changed. Only become more. This local landmark, built of solid ironbark, has sat high on Main Street at the southern entrance to Naples, almost since uninvited white feet first showed up in the caldera, cutting down trees.
Stepping inside the gloomy building after so long away, Hilda recognised it to be just as she recalled from her youth, when she would overnight on her very first visits to Naples. Holding her bag close to her bosom – like it might be snatched by a shadow lurking in a corner – she recalled the crappy pictures, hung to conceal the damage done to walls by rowdy guests, and even became nostalgic at the familiar smell of the boarding house: duelling aromas of mould, patchouli and marijuana, steeped in subtropical humidity, with notes of old sock and methamphetamine. No televisions at the Lodge, nor radio, just the ambient hum of window-rattlers in their endless struggle to cool the guestrooms.
Hilda progressed up the long hallway.
She was conflicted about returning to the place where she had been staying when she’d met Billy’s father. Where her life and destiny in Naples had begun and been foretold, by those with skills in that area. She wondered what human-casings were lurking these days behind the doors that she passed on her way to her room, located off the rambling Queenslander’s high front verandah.
Stepping out onto it, Hilda looked down into the garden: a no-trans land of overgrown bamboo, bags of discarded clothes, single-use mobile phones, used fits, and privet and other sticky pungent weeds that would snag on your legs and your nostrils if ever you risked a broken hip venturing down the mossy paths. The dilapidated water feature at the base of the stairs, once Italianate, had become a murky urinal and a suitable hiding place in the heat for cane toads, as well as a landing place for joint roaches – regularly hurled, like chesty coughs, from those leaning over the banisters above.
A hard-faced unsmiling soul, known by other guests to be very behind in her rent – it has to be said, she was taking the piss – occupied a tiny table in the corner, penning a novel that she hoped one day to see published. Just the glow of her fag end’s red-eye and the furious scratching of her Bic biro on paper gave any clue of her presence, should the Lodge’s junkie manager come down finally to chuck her out.
Hilda viewed the author with suspicion and went into her room.
On such a grey afternoon, it was quite dark. She flicked on a light. It blew. She opened a curtain and sat on the bed, with her bag on her knees. The mattress was as hard as she remembered from years ago, when she would stay to get high; the sheets were old and unclean-looking, and the four flat pillows were laid out like sloppy herringbone, in some futile pretence of housekeeping.
Hilda took a pee in her little ensuite – all the rooms have ensuites, it’s very convenient – and then took from her bag a photograph. She looked at it. Impatient for a consultation, she re-entered the hallway and went to the door of room number three, where Serenade had lived for many years. With no rent arrears. Ever.
Before Hilda could knock, Serenade surprised her by opening the door.
Hilda started. ‘I need a reading, Serenade. Can you do one now?’
Serenade – who sees everything, and who, as well, never says no to anything or anyone – fanned out the elegant fingers of her uninjured right hand to usher her customer inside.
She closed the door and escorted her through the candlelit bedroom, past a phalanx of dozing rescue cats; a one-eyed neuter, Serenade’s favourite, rattled rather than purred when she stroked its balding chin on the way past.
Out in the sunroom, a Koori sista sat on the floor, pulverising herbs for a poultice with mortar and pestle. Hilda smiled and apologised for her intrusion, but the woman had nothing to say.
Serenade rested a finger on Hilda’s sturdy wrist and directed her to sit at a small table. ‘It’s been a long time, Hilda.’
‘I have a photo.’ She passed over a Polaroid snap, taken of Rodney when he was still a teenager.
‘My favourite,’ Serenade said, admiring the photo. ‘Got his old man’s looks, hmm.’
She went to the sunroom’s long north-facing window and nudged a pile of comfrey leaves out of the way with her bunion. The poultice-maker bristled, pulling the leaves in close.
Jumping ship from grey sky, a bolt of sunlight blasted Serenade’s lustrous hair, the shade of iron-ore. ‘I was there at his creation, you know,’ she said, pushing her fingers up into her curls.
‘George told me,’ Hilda said.
‘That night it was a supermoon, like none I ever seen since.’
