by Mark Furness
“You know Bart Hills,” I said, “and he’s Henry East’s best buddy. Hills shit himself when he saw you at Babel last night.”
“Gar, watch your imagination. I met Hills once through work. I don’t know the Easts beyond chatting at a charity ball; you know what happens when you leave the ground. You’re sounding mentally unhinged. I’ve got to go. Call me when you want to be sensible.” She hung up.
Claire looked baffled.
“Stay away from her,” I said.
I collected my briefcase and laptop and left the building.
I’ve always thought Sylvia Plath nailed electrocution of the brain in her poem ‘The Hanging Man’. I can only ever recall the first couple of lines: By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me. I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.
I don’t remember agreeing to my electroconvulsive therapy. I refused to see Sandy when I was in the psychiatric unit. The LSD we took together triggered my psychosis, so the doctors speculated. It was more than twenty years ago. My BC period: Before Charlotte.
As I got behind the wheel of the Land Rover to drive to Moon Hill, a sick-making thought flashed inside my skull like one of Plath’s blue volts. Had Sandy been poking around at home last night inside my office while I, the dopey bull, slumbered?
XV
IT WAS late-morning when I hit the Hume Highway, heading south-west under clear sky towards the Blue Mountains. Claire phoned me and I put her on speaker.
“I did those background checks on Henry East and Bart Hills that you asked for,” she said.
“Impressions?”
“Henry’s parents must be very cold.”
“Why?”
“They sent him to boarding school, all through junior and high.”
“It’s pretty standard in their world.”
“When you live a stone’s throw across the street from your school?”
“You have a problem with boarding schools?”
“I went to one for a while, when my parents split.”
“Didn’t like it?”
“Better than home at the time.”
I left the ball in her court. She hit it. “I had a friend at boarding school. She could see her home behind the sports field. Her parents only took her out on school holidays, when they had no other choice. It broke her heart.”
“What’s she like now?”
Claire paused, then served with confidence.
“A mother hen: happily married, five children.”
“I went to boarding school,” I said. “I was seven and eight years old. I got to sleep with a nun.”
“Lucky you; at least it wasn’t a priest. Oh, one other thing. There was a fire at Redleaf Pool next to Tamerlane when Henry was a teenager. Vandals set fire to the boardwalk with petrol. The local paper reported Henry and Bart tried to put it out with another boy. One of them burnt his hand. There were suspicions they’d actually started it. Nothing proved, but Charles East paid for the pool repairs.”
“Okay. Let’s reconvene on Monday.”
About an hour later, I rolled off the bitumen onto a pale grit track inside a tall forest and wound down the windows. Overnight rain had drawn out the sharp scent of eucalyptus leaves and earthy aroma of humus-rich soil. The track narrowed and sliced into the midriff of a mountain, sending me into a concertina of relentless hairpin bends. A feral goat scurried up a slope, sending stones tumbling, forcing me to swerve to the edge of the track where I eyeballed a sheer rock-face drop of a few hundred metres to the valley floor. On the cliffs above, rivers of stones were frozen between the trees. Somehow it all held together, as it had done for thousands of years, as I hoped it would for a few seconds more while I passed by.
Several thousand seconds later, I opened the wire-mesh gate to Moon Hill and drove the dirt road to my camp, stopping near a timber deck under the branches of a giant pine.
I stepped out of the car and looked into a massive canyon, its sides carpeted by eucalypt forests, its middle split by a tannin-brown river. Mountains either side of the canyon stretched the entire width of the horizon. The place I called Moon Hill was cleared of forest a century ago, planted with pasture for raising sheep, then abandoned. The old bush was fighting back which was fine by me. I just wanted a patch to play in.
I carried my food bags from the car up a handful of steps onto the deck and looked up at the cabin of my treehouse in the lower branches. The drop-down ladder that tucks into the floor of the sleeping cabin was secured. I turned around to face the ground level cabin which functioned as a kitchen-living room, with a fridge, a stove, and a sink fed by a rainwater tank. It also housed a wooden dining table and chairs, an armchair, and a wood-burning heater for the freezing winters. The door was intact.
There was no sign of Hughie Jones and the council man for our meeting. I carried my food bags over to the kitchen cabin. On inspection, a piece of folded brown paper was tucked under the door. Hughie Jones had left me a yarn written in pencil on a gravy-stained pie bag: Accident! Councillor Sims did his fetlock. I’ve took him to Canterwell Hospital. My fault. I shouted him early lunch at the pub. The big man went in hard. Cost me plenty. You wouldn’t believe it. Soon as we get here, he jumps out of my truck and sticks his hoof in a wombat hole and tips over. Nasty. Bones sticking out. I’ll be back in the morning. H”
Hughie lived with two dogs on the next property to the south.
As I walked back across the deck to collect my laptop and briefcase from the car, I crossed through the black painted circle on the deck. The phone gods were working; my handset bleeped as emails and text messages dropped from space. Steele’s message alarmed me more than Claire’s.
XVI
STEELE: Have you heard from Bruce Tyson? I got a garbled voice message from him. He’s gone AWOL from the psych hospital. No-one at his home. Phone not answering.
Claire: Feedback from London on Cavalcade and John Baker. Cavalcade was on the financial brink a few years ago, but now in rude health. No evidence of more connections with East beyond polo ponies and Trust8. Sandy Wallace has asked me out to dinner. Just ‘us two girls’. What should I do?
I sent Claire a quick reply: Postpone.
I phoned Steele’s number; I wanted a live voice call to flesh that one out. It started ringing but the signal bars disappeared. I looked around. I could have been isolated in worse places.
A handful of sulphur-crested white cockatoos spun across the sky at twelve o’clock high. They wrestled and shrieked like schoolkids after the home-time bell. A wedge-tailed eagle landed on top of a dead tree on a far hill to survey the valley. Kangaroos scratched their backs and nibbled the sweet tips of grass downhill by the dam.
It was sunny, so I stripped to my shorts and dragged the armchair from the ground cabin onto the deck. The chair had handy wooden drink rests on the tips of its arms, so I opened a cold beer and placed it one. The chair was an old art deco thing that had seen some life, heard a lot of stories. It had been my mum’s.
I felt a presence near the deck and turned slowly in order not to spook it. The male kangaroo I call Buck was nearly as tall as my car. I recognised him from a scar on the white fur of his chest, maybe ripped by barbed wire, the teeth of a dog, or a bullet. The Eastern Grey had arrived quietly with his mob of half a dozen females and joeys for a late afternoon picnic. He got my attention with his big brown eyes and long lashes, leaned back on his huge tail and put his little front paws up, rotating them like a boxer at a speed bag. I got the message about who the boss was.
“It’s going to be a cracking night,” I called to him. “Milky Way as far as you can see.”
The big feller winked at me, scratched his bum with a paw, then set back to eating grass like I was boring him. Moments later, he bounded down an old path pounded out by his ancestors, followed by his mob.
I opened a bottle of red and poured a glass. A burst of wind whistled around the rusty wire of the flying fox in the pine tree. I had hoped it might entice Hugo to spend more time her
e with me, and it did for a while. But with Hugo, I have a knack of arriving in a place just as he is leaving it behind. I closed my eyes, tired from the drive and the night with Sandy, and its aftermath.
I woke shivering in the dark. A white light was strobing behind the trees in the forest. I leaped to my feet, trying to remember where I’d put Mr Browning. Bruce Tyson’s voice echoed inside my skull: Watch your back...there’s a bloke called Zeff.
XVII
I DARTED into the kitchen cabin and pulled the pistol from its holster on the table. I backed against the cabin wall as the torchlight scanned my car and the treehouse. The flashlight wouldn’t be Hughie’s – his dogs would have been upon the deck by now. My other neighbours, the Watsons, were travelling overseas. They had given me a set of house keys and asked me to check on their place if I was visiting.
“Gar?! You here?”
I lowered my gun and stepped outside into the gloom.
“Jesus,” said Tania Watson as she climbed up to the deck carrying a flashlight and a shoulder bag. “You alright?”
“Fell asleep,” I said, hugging my arms around my naked chest, clutching Mr Browning.
Tania and I embraced, kissing each other on the cheek. Her skin was a shock, rough and dry like I was kissing bark. I saw in the moonlight that her skin was indeed rutted, cracked. I reached inside the cabin and turned on a deck light. It took me a few seconds to grasp. Her cheeks, temples, nose, and neck were streaked with red, blue, green and yellow. Her long hair was pulled into a top knot speared with white feathers. Her face was covered with thick layers of paint; acrylics or artist’s oils of some sort, I guessed.
“Bird of paradise?” I asked.
“If that’s what you see.”
Tania was an uncertified nutcase, but also a fine illustrator of animals and a decent landscape painter. She had a strong following in Japan and China, getting stronger from what I read in the media. On a wall at home, I had her painting of five hundred galahs coiffed with thinning chestnut-coloured hair, dressed in blue suits, white shirts and red ties, seated soberly in straight lines in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
She explained to me that she and her husband, Steve, had returned early from their overseas trip.
While Tania built a campfire, I dressed in warm clothes in the ground cabin. Steve, she called to me, had gone to the south coast to do his carpenter’s job.
I collected folding chairs from my car and we sat by the fire with glasses of wine. Tania rummaged in her big bag.
“Got something for you.” She pulled out a thin, hand-made cigarette, lit it with a stick from the fire and released the sweet smoke of hashish. She passed it to me. Then she pulled another object from her bag. A kangaroo’s head!
“Relax,” said Tania.
It was a mask. Just to cover the wearer’s forehead, eyes and nose, with an elastic strap at the back. It had large eyeholes with great dark eyelashes lining the rims, and large ears pointing up and alert. I saw the face of Buck.
“You can join the mob,” she said, handing it to me.
The mask’s base was made of papier-mache so it was lightweight, she explained, then it was covered with fake fur and its nose painted black. I put it on and wondered what the real Buck would make of the weird bird and kangaroo sitting around the fire.
“Steve did a great job,” I said, nodding at the treehouse. I had handed him the tools, banged in a few nails, made the tea, chilled the beers, cooked the BBQ.
“Can I have a look? I’ve not been up since you painted and put the beds in.”
I followed her up the ladder. Inside, she lit a candle in a glass lantern on the windowsill, sending light prancing around the walls and ceiling, adding shadows to her face.
“How does it go in a storm?” she said as a gust rocked the branches. The cabin swayed and then steadied, like a boat bouncing over a wave into clear water.
“You know you’re alive up here.”
I was sitting on one of the two single beds. She stepped across the floor, gently lifted my mask away, and put her arm around my shoulder. We both looked at the candle inside the lantern. Tania and Charlotte had been close.
“I still miss mine too,” she said. “I walk with him in the forest sometimes. Like tonight.”
The Watson’s six-year old boy, Dizzy, slipped off his father’s sunscreen-oiled back at the beach into a freak wave that pounded the boy’s head into a sand bar and snapped his neck.
Tania and I climbed down. We sat around the fire, saying little, staring at the flames, then looking at the stars, Tania telling me a little about Aboriginal dreaming in the sky. Her veins flowed with the blood of the local Gandangara people, though I couldn’t tell to look at her. I wondered how she felt purchasing her rural plot from a white farmer whose family took it from her ancestors with a gun. She never mentioned it, so nor did I.
An hour or two later, she walked back into the trees and home. I cleaned up around the fire. I found a flat bottle of tequila under Tania’s chair where her shoulder bag had been. Angels Tears was a typically exotic Tania item, a brand I’d never heard of. The night was cold and the fire was almost out. I took a few hefty swigs and carried the bottle and my rubbish bag up the steps. I passed back through the black circle on my way to the kitchen. My phone beeped. I pulled it from my pocket. An email from Steele had downloaded.
Subject: “Celebrity Doctor’s Son Dead from Heroin” by Tom Steele, Crime Editor.
“The son of a prominent Sydney obstetrician has died from a heroin overdose in his luxury Bondi Beach flat. Bart Hills was 26.
“Hills’ flatmate called an ambulance when he discovered Hills unconscious in bed. Hills, a corporate lawyer, was pronounced dead on arrival at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst.
“His father, Maximilian Hills, is known as the ‘Doctor to the Stars’ after delivering the children of some of Australia’s most famous families....”
I dialled Steele’s number; the screen went black. Dead battery. I realised the phone had exhausted itself by constantly searching for a non-existent network connection, trying to find something that wasn’t there. I chuckled; it was a bit like journalism at times - a lot of times.
I took another swig of Tania’s tequila against the cold and searched my car and the cabins for my phone charger. After about half-an-hour of fruitless endeavour, I concluded that I’d left the charger in Sydney. I stood on the deck tossing up whether or not to drive back to the city in the night to talk to Steele about Hills.
The wind whistled like panpipes through the needle-leaves of the pine. I made out the silhouette of a roosting crow on a branch. Moonlight shimmered on the painted ring of the black circle on the deck. The black ring uncoiled into a snake ...
AS I STAGGERED BACKWARDS from the writhing serpent, shrieking burst from the canopy of the pine. A black blotch shot out and was sucked into the sky and torn apart. The branches began squirming. Snakes: a tree full of black snakes.
I jumped off the deck, bouncing as if landing on a trampoline by the campfire. I threw dry leaves and twigs on the dwindling flames and kick-started the blaze. The fire surged. Flaming dogs jumped up at me. I stumbled back. The frenzied animals tried to bite me.
Squealing, terrible squealing from the forest; I turned. A line of bedraggled figures had gathered at the forest’s edge. The blackened shapes of deformed people swayed drunkenly, edging towards me. I bounded up the steps and found Mr Browning on the kitchen table. I heard my father’s voice as I picked it up: “That’s it. Do the world a favour, you fucking waste of space. Put it in. Go on. Put it in, you weak cunt!”
I put Mr Browning’s muzzle inside my mouth. It would get me out of this place. I’d been here before. Plath’s blue volts flickered around the cabin.
“Get the angle right, you moron. Ah, I get it. Half a job by half a man. That’s you, Gar. End up in hospital. A fucking veggie. People blubbering over you. That’d be right. A fucking burden.”
I turned to the door. Outside, som
eone was sitting in my mother’s armchair; they beckoned me with a hand. The deck rose and fell like an ocean swell as I traversed it, stumbling. I saw that I held Mr Browning in one hand and a flashlight in the other. My mother pointed at the hillside by the deck. I followed her line with my light to the opening of a cave. I stepped downstairs from the deck, across grass, up to the mouth of the hole. I lay on my stomach and crawled in, pushing my torch on the dirt in front of me. It was tight upon my chest. The earth was breathing, expanding and contracting, suffocating me. I pushed past its sphincter into a massive, glistening chamber. In a corner, Charlotte, Alice, and Hugo squatted naked and filthy around a fire. I tapped Charlotte on the shoulder. My fingers travelled through her flesh, but I felt her bones and took comfort that she had substance of some sort. She scratched the spot where I had touched her like it was an itch.
“His mind is shot,” said Alice.
“I’m here!” I screamed. None of them noticed me.
Alice was missing an arm and a leg. There was a red hole in her face where an eyeball should have been. Hugo’s ears and nose were missing.
“My turn,” said Charlotte, who pulled off one of her arms and threw it in the fire in a crackle of flames.
A black snake slipped out of Charlotte’s anus. It wormed into Alice’s and I tried to catch it, but I failed. The snake’s head appeared in Alice’s mouth, flicking its tongue, dot-eyes fixed on mine. I opened my mouth and the snake wriggled slowly in. I put Mr Browning’s muzzle in after the snake and pulled the trigger ...
“GAR. GAR!” A DULL, distant voice.
My eyes hurt. There was grit in them. Dirt in my mouth. Rays of light flickered from behind my right ear. Thirsty. So thirsty. Cramp knifed my right thigh, a sadist stabbing me and twisting the blade. I howled.