by Paul Collis
Stealing a motor vehicle.
Evading apprehension.
Et cetera, et cetera, et-fucking-cetera …
McWilliams looked to Blackie that he was as happy as a pig in shit.
‘Fuck ya, you dog. I’d never even piss on you if you was on fire,’ Blackie said to himself as he watched McWilliams outa his one good eye.
All the charges, save the stealing a motor vehicle, were bodgie. Both cop and crim knew it, but no one else knew it, and that’s what mattered most to McWilliams. Blackie was tired and wanted to lie down. He wanted to be away from where all the bright lights shone. He wanted to be in a quiet cell, alone and resting. McWilliams finally offered Blackie a coffee which Blackie accepted graciously.
‘Finished at last!’ McWilliams said, letting out a long breath. ‘Have ya in a cell in a minute, Blackie.’
Blackie was not amused with McWilliams’ change in mood and attitude towards him. Blackie knew that McWilliams had what he wanted and that was all there was to it. Had Blackie played hardball, then the ‘interview’ and ‘negotiations’ would have gone on and bloody on, well into the night and early morning. Blackie just didn’t give a shit anymore.
McWilliams was true to his word though. He brought Fingers back to Blackie to say goodbye, and had Blackie uncuffed and resting in a quiet cell alone within the hour.
The cell was just as dingy as cells could be – steel walls surrounded Blackie. There was a steel basin and sink, a bunk made of steel, no mattress, no blanket, no pillow. Just scratches on the walls – the word ‘Judy’ was etched on the steel wall. ‘Judy’ was framed inside a crude-looking love heart, a memory to a someone from an unknown prisoner that once spent time in the very place Blackie now found himself.
No longer was Blackie a ‘person of interest’. All the police procedures went out the window with Blackie’s arrest and charges. There was no phone afforded him. No contact made with the Aboriginal Legal Service. No Aboriginal Police Liaison Officer available. No medical assessment or treatment offered. No watch was kept on him in his lonely prison cell. Blackie was just another black crim locked up, and society would be able to sleep easily again.
But Blackie was glad at last to be alone. He could just hear the rain on the roof above the sound of the air conditioner.
McWilliams told him that a truck would arrive as soon as he could arrange it and transport him to Wellington Correctional Centre for the night, and then he’d be off to Silverwater in the morning. Blackie just nodded, and that was the last he saw of his captor.
Blackie rolled on his side on the little bed and faced the wall. He still had something up his sleeve – literally. Taped to the inside of his left arm was almost two grams of high-quality speed and some cocaine that Rips had given him. Blackie was right when he assumed that the police wouldn’t bother to remove the surgical tape from his arm. He was right when he assumed that they’d be more interested in checking him for weapons than to do a proper ‘pat-down’.
Blackie thought of his old mate Crusoe as he swallowed the lot. He got up to gulp down water from the tap at the basin. In a short minute, the coke made him feel like he’d never felt before. Looking into the polished steel wall, Blackie could just make out his reflection, dulled, but visible still. He had to look hard, but his reflection was there, staring back out from the gaolhouse wall at him.
‘Everything’s softer … better now, thank God,’ he said.
The coming of evening brought for Blackie a clearer high. His rush was faster than usual. He was flyin within a couple of minutes. He felt strangely relaxed. He felt alright. He splashed his face with water. The cold water refreshed him, as if giving him a new pair of eyes. He spoke to the face staring back.
‘Ahh! Fuck that feels good. Goin downtown tonight, man.’
‘Look in da mirror, bra. Bet I can’t see me.’
‘No?’
‘It’s the other me. Other me has taken me place! I’m the other me?’
‘Hmm?’
‘G’day you cunt!’ the ‘other’ him said.
He kept staring. Listened hard. But the bloody air conditioner and the noise in his head made it impossible to be sure, to be certain, what he thought the reflection said. The face was beginning to fade. Blackie rubbed the steel with his shirt sleeve to make it shine. He spat at the wall. He cleaned the spit with his shirt. It was only after that, that the spit-polished steel revealed the image he was looking for.
‘Ahh … there you are,’ Blackie whispered. ‘Welcome back, brother.’
The reflection kept fading in and out of focus. He wiped his eyes to clear them. He heard the reflected face say to him, ‘Yeah! Ahh yeah! Good to be fucken back!’
Blackie spun on his heels like Michael Jackson when he danced, and said aloud to the room that had suddenly turned to black:
‘Yeah! Good to be fucken back.’
Blackie lay down.
He wondered where Rips was, and what he was doing.
He missed Dot, and smiled when he thought of the magic moment when he first saw Vince and Rrrrralllph.
In his mind, he saw the face of his old nan smiling at him; her arms held open, welcoming him. The ghost image of his grandmother was a moody shade of grey. The only colour of her beside that grey, was her jet-black eyes. In the darkened cell, her eyes shone more than any light in the interview room where Blackie had signed his life away. They were brighter than the twin boys’ smiles. Her eyes were pure love. Blackie reached for her and closed his eyes. None of his injuries bothered him then. He didn’t feel a thing.
He was glad he’d come to Dubbo after all.
Outside, the storm raged … The wind howled around the corners of the police station. It battered and sand-blasted the building as if trying to free Blackie by knocking the station down. Rain spat stinging little drops at the door, the roof, the whole bloody thing. Mother Nature hadn’t forgotten her black son being held in custody. She was throwing her disgust at the dirty deeds done by the dirty policeman, with all the fury of a mother’s love when her boys are being harmed. The wind howled louder, and all the lights went out for the town.
Chapter 16
Leave It to the Wind
Rips hummed a tune as he rubbed Tegan’s leg as he and Tegan drove on towards Coonamble. Rips figured that coppers would be watching his mother’s place for him to arrive back in Walgett and said, ‘Better we go this way to my brother’s place in Coonamble and stay there for a while.’
Tegan nodded in agreement and through the storm they went. The rain pelted the little car, and the window wipers were doing their best to clear a view.
‘Fuck this storm, babe!’ Rips cursed.
A bright flash lit up the world about a mile farther down the road.
‘Pull up! Pull up, quick!’ he yelled.
Tegan stopped the car at the side of the road, near the tree.
He got out and walked to the back of the car. The rain eased, and then stopped completely. The world went very quiet for a few moments, like they were in the eye of a storm.
Walking towards the burnt tree, Rips felt the wind start up again, turning everything icy cold. Cold, like death. It shook Rips as he stood there, transfixed, staring at the charred trunk. He didn’t even hear Tegan slam the car door or approach him. He just stood there.
Tegan looked at him and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Blackie’s gorn!’ Big Rips said.
‘Whatcha mean? How ya know that?’ she asked.
‘Said he’d show me when it happened. He’s in the tree. Thas why the white gum’s all black. It’s Blackie,’ Rips said.
Tegan was shocked, because she believed what Rips said to be true. She knew Blackie had a special kind of magic, but this kind of thing, she thought, was just old Dreamtime stories that her mother used to tell her and the other kids when she was younger. No one really believed th
em anymore, did they? They were just stories to frighten kids to sleep, to warn them not to go wandering around where wild things are. But here she stood, shocked by the magic. She didn’t notice that tears streamed down her face. She didn’t feel them. She just stood there holding on.
Rips fished from his pocket an eight-ball of the Force. He dipped his finger right in until it reached the bottom. Satisfied with his finger being completely coated with the ‘gas’, he broke from Tegan and walked the entire distance around the trunk of the tree, rubbing speed into every nook and cranny he found.
‘There, bra!’ was all he spoke.
He took a long last look at the tree. He was happy thinking that his warrior mate was no longer in chains … that Blackie’s spirit soared with the wind. That he was free.
As free as the fucken wind …
First published 2017 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
www.uqp.com.au
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Copyright © Paul Collis 2017
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Cover design by Josh Durham, Design by Committee
Front cover images: Pegs: Priit Kallas/FreeImages; Car: stock.xchng; Driver: Gary Radler Photography/Stocksy; Passenger: kerriekerr/iStock Back cover image: Josh Durham
Typeset in 12.5/18 pt Adobe Caslon Pro by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane
Quote from ‘The Highwayman’ reproduced with permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Alfred Noyes.
This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
The University of Queensland Press is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available at http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
ISBN
978 0 7022 5975 3 (pbk)
978 0 7022 5943 2 (ePDF)
978 0 7022 5944 9 (ePub)
978 0 7022 5945 6 (Kindle)