by Jack Dann
‘You’re looking good, though, for fifty going on a week.’
‘The love of a good woman will do that,’ Tommy said with a chuckle. ‘Her love and her blood, anyway. Ageing gracefully, I call it.’
‘So you’ve been with her the whole time, eh? Feeding off each other.’ George felt the lethargy seeping into his arms and legs as the PP serum weakened its hold. He rolled another cigarette. ‘Long life and good health, and you get to keep your tan. Sweet deal.’
‘You didn’t answer me, Georgie. What would you have done if she’d asked you?’
‘I’d have stayed, done my duty. My duty to my country and to my partner. To you.’
‘You know what I think, Georgie?’ Tommy topped up their cups, dragging the question out. ‘I think you were scared when you found out that the renegades were human after all. I think you’ve spent the rest of your life trying to prove to yourself that you made the right call.’ He slurped his tea. ‘How many have you collared now?’
‘I don’t keep count.’
‘I reckon you do. Probably two separate columns for stopped and lopped.’ He stared at George, as though he could see the ledger in his eyes. ‘You ever wonder what’s it like — the real thing?’
‘No. Did you?’
‘Yeah, of course. The PP’s only so good.’
‘Is that why you … you went with her?’
‘Nope. Though I gotta tell you, it leaves the serum for dead.’ He grinned, then grew serious again. ‘I was exhausted, Georgie. I couldn’t take it any more, couldn’t face another collar, not after the shearing shed. Not all the PP in the world can wash away that stain on my soul.’
George looked around the dark room. ‘And this has?’
Tommy leaned back and smiled. ‘You don’t have any family, hey?’
George shook his head.
‘Pity. Family’s the only thing worth dying for.’
‘You’re not dying, Tommy.’
‘Everyone dies eventually.’ He looked past George’s shoulder and smiled. ‘Well, almost everyone.’
George turned in his chair as Lysandra entered with another kid holding her hand. She’d changed her top. Even without his boosted senses, he could smell the recent bloodshed, the gunpowder. She glared at him as she stalked to Tommy’s side, one hand resting with easy familiarity on his shoulder.
‘Sorry,’ George told her. ‘Instincts, you know.’
‘Instincts can be overcome,’ she said, her voice accented. Even in the gloom, or perhaps because of it, she looked beautiful, black hair shining and complexion dusky, speaking of quiet strength and resolve. And perhaps something else: resignation?
Tommy clasped the woman’s hand, then fixed George with his gaze. ‘Tell him,’ he said. ‘Tell Georgie why you asked me and not him. It’s been eating at him for twenty years.’
George held his breath, cursing Tommy with every silent blasphemy he could muster. He didn’t need — didn’t want — to hear this.
Lysandra ran her fingers through Tommy’s hair. ‘But I did.’
Tommy looked stunned, his hand frozen on her.
‘You’d walked off, to check the others, relieve yourself… something. And I asked him.’
Tommy stared at George.
‘He said no.’
George looked at his teacup, feeling the bite of regret in his throat. ‘I was doing my job. I still am.’
She turned away from him to concentrate on Tommy. ‘It’s in the past. He said no, you said yes. We should forget this. We can still run. Take our chances on the road.’
Tommy took her hands, his voice quivering as he said, ‘There’s nowhere to run to, love. Nowhere I can be sure you and the kids will be safe.’ He looked at George. ‘You are one lucky sonofabitch, you know that?’
‘And why’s that, Tommy?’
‘You’re getting a second chance.’
George lifted his head to run his gaze over both of them. ‘How do you figure that?’
‘You’re gonna have to take me in, Georgie.’
‘What?’
‘Just me. Lys and the kids stay free.’
‘Tommy …’ His fingers closed on the pistol. No chance, he knew, not without the PP-D. Not now that he was just an old, tired Hunter … He looked at Lysandra and knew — knew — he couldn’t shoot her again. Ever. His trembling fingers released the pistol; tea spilled as he gripped his cup instead. ‘This is insane.’
‘Hear me out. You give me to the Commission and close the case, retire somewhere nice. You’ve got the connections to provide for Lys and the kids.’
Silence settled, the kids’ gazes boring into him. ‘What do you think about all this?’ George asked Lysandra.
‘I think I should’ve killed you when I had the chance. I think I should’ve turned Thomas a decade ago and run away with him to Asia. But I didn’t, and now I have to do what’s right for the children, for our family. We always knew this day might come. We just didn’t know how we’d deal with it.’ Her grip tightened on Tommy’s shoulder, her knuckles showing white. Red tears rimmed her eyes, but she blinked them away, not letting them fall. ‘So now I think I need someone to protect us from the Commission. Someone to watch over us during the day and bring us the blood we need, without anyone getting hurt. I think, Mr George, that you can help us and I can offer you something you need. You wouldn’t want to make the same mistake twice.’
George rubbed his arms, feeling the scars through the material. ‘The Commission will never believe it. They think you’re dead, Tommy’
‘The Commission needs a collar if they’re going to be prevented from digging around. The only way to keep them off Lysandra’s tail is to give them one. I have the history that we can use, right down to that empty grave up at Charleville. You can tell them you were wrong back in ‘72. That I must’ve escaped the fire and got infected, lived off livestock and backpackers till I got sloppy and killed that kid out at Black Creek. You’re the investigating officer. Tell them whatever you need to, to keep my family safe.’
‘If I take you back, they’ll make you talk. We’ll all go down.’ He gestured to Lysandra and the kids. ‘You, me, them.’
‘I know that.’ Tommy squeezed Lysandra’s hand again, flashed George a grim smile, fangs showing. ‘Taking me in alive — you know what I mean — isn’t an option.’
George clasped his hands under the table, trying to stop the shaking. ‘Fuck, Tommy. I dunno. I just dunno if I can do this.’
‘A second chance, Georgie. A man with a cough like yours should be grateful for it.’ He flashed a sad smile. ‘Then think about it some more. We’ve got till morning.’ Tommy shepherded his family out of the kitchen, leaving George alone with his smokes and the teapot.
The tea was cold when Tommy came back, cheeks wet with pinkish tears. ‘You made a decision, Georgie?’
‘You love them that much?’
‘You will too, in time.’ Tommy smiled. ‘Don’t feel bad. Second chances don’t come cheap. We’ve both paid the price.’
George nodded, a single, determined gesture. ‘Put the kettle on, eh?’
They sat, and drank tea, and talked, just like two old mates who hadn’t seen each other for years, rather than two old mates who’d never see each other again. When the sky started to get light, they went out and sat on the stairs, and smoked, waiting for the dawn.
AFTERWORD
‘Smoking, Waiting for the Dawn’ was born during a road trip. My father and I drove through western Queensland, where he had worked during the ‘50s, hoping to meet up with some of his mates from that era. Unfortunately, most had died. This story was also influenced by Australia’s sorry handling of refugees.
— Jason Nahrung
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THE LANES OF CAMBERWELL
CECILIA DART-THORNTON
CECILIA DART-THORNTON was first ‘discovered’ on the Internet after she posted the first chapter of her unpublished trilogy to an online writing workshop. Subsequently a literary agent signed
her, and within a few weeks a major New York publisher bought her three-part Bitterbynde series (which includes The Ill-Made Mute, The Lady of Sorrows, and The Battle of Evernight). On publication the books were acclaimed in Amazon’s ‘Best of 2001’, Locus Magazine’s ‘Best First Novels of 2001’, and the Australian Publishers’ Association Award. ‘Australia’s Favourite Read of 2001’. They also reached the top of the Sydney Morning Herald bestseller list and received accolades in the Washington Post, The Times, Good Reading Magazine, Kirkus Reviews and more.
Grand Master of Science Fiction Andre Norton wrote of The Ill-Made Mute: ‘Not since The Fellowship of the Ring fell into my hands have I been so impressed by a beautifully spun fantasy. This is indeed a find!… The writing is very close to poetry. Many fantasies are compared to Tolkien these days but few really have the excellent writing and good characterisation that this work offers. This is far above the usual offering in the fantasy field and the reader is left longing for the adventures to continue. I feel honoured to be asked to read and comment on such work.’
Cecilia’s books, including the four-part Crowthistle series (The Iron Tree, The Well of Tears, Weatherwitch, and Fallowblade), are available in more than seventy countries and have been translated into several languages.
‘The Lanes of Camberwell’ is pure magic… and pure Melbourne.
In March that year, when autumn was already beginning to pick out amber tints across the leafy suburbs, I visited Julia, who had been my friend during our early school years. We’d somewhat lost touch, and I would scarcely have recognised her if it were not for the fact that she still lived at the same address.
She was thin, a wraith of her former self, and she came in late — having forgotten our appointment — ragged in her green dress, even barefoot, her skin like chalk. It was with true affection that she welcomed me, mingled with regret that she had inconvenienced me by making me wait. ‘Oh Jenny,’ she cried, ‘I’m so sorry. I had forgotten … my memory these days … can’t seem to get organised …’ Her sentences were broken, as if wounded. And there was truth in all she said, because the house was in a state of disarray. This was not the Julia I had known. What had happened on that day, some twelve months ago? Why had she gone to pieces? She made me sit on a couch in her living room while she brewed a pot of tea, and as she disappeared into the kitchen I mused in some dismay about her deterioration.
Julia had lived a normal life until one day about a year earlier, when she had gone missing. Eventually she had been discovered wandering the streets alone, unable to find her way home or offer any explanation for her plight. Since then she’d taken to roaming regularly, and some called her ‘the Bag Lady of Surrey Hills’, though she was only twenty, and the beauty of youth clung to her as tenaciously as the tendrils of the Boston Ivy that smothered the fences of her back garden. In autumn that vine decorated the weathered bones of the palings with splashes of deepest crimson; almost the colour of her hair.
I’d heard she now spent her days walking the local footpaths in a trance-like state, sometimes muttering to herself, ignoring passers-by with their quizzical glances. Occasionally she was to be found sitting on the nature strip with her back against the mottled bole of a plane tree, staring into space with a puzzled expression. She always, however, found her way home in the evenings.
Reentering the room empty-handed Julia said, just as if she’d read my mind, ‘Isn’t “nature strip” a funny term?’
Personally, I couldn’t see why it should be, but I nodded. We’d always laughed about Julia’s uncanny knack of apparently picking up other people’s thoughts.
‘Most suburban streets have grassy verges,’ she elaborated, ‘but I think Australia must be the only country in the world where they’re called “nature strips”.’ She was looking out of the window into the street. From here you could see the gracious, wide-spreading branches of the plane tree that grew outside her house, its leaves, as large as splayed hands, just beginning to turn gold and brown as the days became shorter. My hostess had forgotten about the tea. Instead she walked across the room to the dining table where, on the faded tablecloth, a journal lay open. ‘This is Daniel’s,’ she said. ‘He wrote this more than a year ago.’ Picking up the book she handed it to me and I read:
February: Last month of Summer.
The Lanes of Camberwell. What is it about them that draws me so? In dreams I walk them. Waking, I revisit them in my mind, think about actually returning to see them, then think again; no. Why not? Because I have grown to be over-awed. And because in any case I’ll never be free of them. They are with me always, inside my skull; their pattern, their layout, their connections, corners and angles, their feeling.
And what is that feeling?
It is made of wonder and excitement, eager expectation and the slightest tinge of fear. It is the sense of imminence; that something is about to happen, and that the something is only a hair’s-breadth away, an instant away, if only you knew how to break through. The slim, dim, dusky Lanes of Camberwell, where no matter whether the summer sun is blasting its heat across the shimmering roofs of the suburbs, there is always a breath of freshness, a hint of moisture; cool shadows caught in the long swathes of peppercorn leaves overhanging the fences like the hair of tree-giants; a gleam of syrupy gold from the five-petalled buttercups that grow at the entrance to one of the lanes, and which appear nowhere else that I have ever seen. We used to hold those flowers beneath one another’s chins, chanting, ‘Do you like butter?’, and if a golden reflection appeared on our friend’s skin, it was supposed to mean they did. But whence comes the sudden, incongruous moisture that nurtures these blossoms of yellow silk? For here in this single patch the ground is damp, as if the tiniest corner of some English marsh has appeared from nowhere, complete with bright green grass and shiny flowers floating on their stems. Everywhere else the ground is dry and hard, baked by yet another drought. Perhaps the remnant of some age-old underground spring still seeps below the Lanes, heedless of mankind’s attempts to divert and drain, to capture it with metal fetters and enclose it in pipes; a free, wild waterway that won’t be tamed but remains secret, running hidden beneath the footpaths, the foundations of the paling fences, the roots of the peppercorns, the lawns and hydrangea beds of the suburban gardens abutting the Lanes of Camberwell.
Secret, like the Lanes themselves.
For you would not know of their existence unless, walking along one of the Surrey Hills streets, you chanced to glance sideways at exactly the right moment.
Then, unexpectedly.
You’ve passed house after neat house, each perched in the centre of its tidy garden behind a front fence of bricks or pickets, each building different from its neighbours, each with its painted letter box. Here a fully-grown pomegranate overhangs ceramic fence-caps, its ripe fruit like red lanterns; there a japonica, its startlingly black boughs splashed with blood-flowers in spring. Elsewhere the gently nodding foliage of a dogwood, a crepe myrtle or a glossy lilly pilly. House-block after perfectly rectangular house-block, they rub shoulders with each other, jammed up close with no room to spare, marked out by six-foot high fences along their boundaries.
The rows of houses form a barrier. You are walking along the street because there’s nowhere else you can go. You have not been invited into any dwellings; you cannot even see what lies behind them, because they won’t let you past the front gate. They are private property and you have no business there. A formidable barrier they are indeed, though pretty, with their terracotta-tiled roofs and wrought-iron verandas, their benevolent-eyed windows winking from half-drawn fringed blinds. There is nothing ominous about the homes of Surrey Hills; they are where people live, that is all, and welcome their friends to afternoon tea, and tend their gardens — lawns silver-frosted in winter, daisy-starred in summer.
But you, a stranger walking along the street, may not enter. You have two choices: to keep walking in the same direction or to turn around and walk the other way. Two directions; two dimension
s.
Until.
You look to the right and there’s a disjunction. Unexpectedly, one suburban plot slams to a halt up against its fence-line and before the next one begins, there’s a gap.
One more step and you would have missed it.
To your right the land rises. The houses sit proudly above the level of the street. Between them — between the green-eaved house where two elderly ladies live and the white weatherboard house deep amongst its shrubberies, a stab of brightness flashes: daylight.
Daylight at the far end of a tunnel. And the tunnel is dead straight narrow, deep-walled, sudden. You are staring along one of the Camberwell Lanes.
I closed the journal and replaced it on the table. ‘Daniel?’ I enquired. ‘Who’s that? And why do you have his diary?’
My friend looked at me and smiled. That smile was so profoundly enigmatic, it disconcerted me. She said, ‘Don’t you remember him, Jen? The blond boy who used to live down the street when we were children? He was a couple of years older than us, and Mum made us walk with him to school. He and his parents moved away about twelve years ago but by chance I met him again last year.’
‘Oh, that Daniel!’ I said, my interest awakening further. ‘I rather fancied him. We all did. What’s he like now?’
‘He’s tall’
‘Of course he’s taller, but —’
‘Oh, he looks like an angel.’
Love was written all over Julia’s face. She showed me a photograph of Daniel, which she kept on the windowsill beside a potted plant with jagged leaves. He was sitting on the beach wearing a swimsuit, the white-hot sun casting hard shadows across his tanned features. The picture must have had been taken at Christmas time, because beside him, stuck in the sand at a rakish angle, was a sawn-off pine tree decorated with tinsel and shiny baubles. I had to agree, Daniel had grown up to be gorgeous. They’d met by chance, she told me, at a meeting of an environmental action group, and reaffirmed their earlier acquaintance, settling into an easy-going, platonic relationship. He regularly invited her to visit him at his home across town, where they’d reminisce about old school days, and discuss the world’s problems and how to fix them, and many other topics besides. He was very busy in those days, with his career as a freelance journalist, and had not yet been able to find the time to visit her.