There was a time, too, when I used to come up here in the afternoon with a sixpack of beers, and just sit, maybe listen, and drink beer till I fell asleep or my phone buzzed with Sarah wondering if I was all right. Now I think maybe I’ll bring a bed up and get a little fridge I can run off the car, and the whole world can just go away. I open a beer, and enjoy the creeping autumn dusk.
As darkness falls, the noise of nature recedes with it. The birds give up, as do the remaining blowflies and insects. Even the drone from distant machinery fades. The world can be a quiet place without human things. I sit and think nothing, blissfully. Soon the only light is from my fire.
And then I see the reflection of lights glowing on the road as they approach my house. I hadn’t thought anyone would come at night because I had figured it would be too confusing in the dark if you’ve never done it before. It’s not like a town street with lights, evenly spaced housing and regular contours. All the advantage is mine. But now it’s happening and I don’t have a plan for it. If I drive down they’ll see me before I can find out who they are. It’s dark, and the moon is slim and weak, and I have about a kilometre and a half to walk, over rocks and tussocks and furrows. But I need to know who they are, so I grab the .22 rifle from the ute, make sure the fire is safe, and set off at a half-run, half-walk, careful of my footing as I watch the headlights arrive and stop at my house. The intruders are not bothering to sneak up on me, but there are no messages or missed calls on my phone from a friend wondering where I am. When I leave the trees, I pull my hat down so my face doesn’t shine in the little light there is from the moon. If they are in my house turning it upside down, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Do I have the guts to pull the rifle on them?
Where the oats paddock finishes, I cross to the garden fence, bent double, and sneak along the edge of the house until I hear the trespassers. I can’t see them, but I know they are standing at the front door. There are at least two of them.
I hear them pull roughly on the door as if they are expecting to have to break a lock, but I never lock my doors, not even now. They find a light switch, and step into my house like old friends.
My breathing is competing with my heart for loudness as I flatten myself again the wall and try to think. I decide to let them search the house. They’ll probably wreck the place, but they’ll know the money isn’t there, at least for the moment. I make my way to the kitchen window, hoping to get a look at them. But I stop after a few paces, because they have turned more lights on, and I can see them from where I stand — three of them, upending couches and emptying drawers. And suddenly my decision to let them wreck the house is the weak, pitiful choice of a loser and a coward. Rage is beating inside me like a confined demon. I take a couple of rounds out of my pocket, load the rifle, point it in the air, fire it, and then bolt around to the front door and wait. I hear them cursing, running for the door. When they burst outside, I have the rifle trained on them.
‘Stay where you are.’
They stop, and put their hands in the air. My front door LED lights them up like they are on stage.
‘Put the handguns on the ground.’ They bend, and put them down, trying to keep their eyes on me the whole time.
‘Kick them towards me.’ They obey.
‘Take it easy, buddy,’ the biggest of them says. ‘There’s no need for anyone to get hurt.’
He is built like a powerlifter. He is pale-skinned with a bleached-blond buzzcut. He gives me the sense that he is not the sort of guy to be afraid of some hick with a rifle.
‘Yes, there is.’ I sight the rifle at his barrel chest. ‘I’m going to hurt you.’
‘Hey. We weren’t going to do anything to you — we were just told to look for something.’ The man alongside him, who is nearly as big, says this. These are the muscled hard men that I had been waiting for.
The third, the tallest and leanest of the group, takes a step towards me. His hands are up, but he is beginning to smile. He knows I’m a bumpkin who is never going to fire on a human being.
‘Look, buddy. We don’t want any trouble, and I’m pretty sure you don’t want to shoot anyone. So let’s just put the rifle down, and we’ll leave you alone.’
I lower the barrel of the rifle slowly, then take aim and shoot him in an ample calf. The projectile goes right through, and splinters off the concrete paver behind him as he goes down, screaming into the half-light. The other two jump back, look to him, and then quickly look at me. Did I really just do that? Four of us are asking the question.
‘So what do you want?’
‘Boxes. Could have been accidentally sent here,’ the second-biggest of the three says, notes of panic making the words come out in fragments.
‘What’s supposed to be in the boxes?’
The big fella is whimpering on the ground, but there is hardly any blood.
‘Crockery.’
‘Crockery?’ I nearly drop the rifle.
‘Yeah, plates and mugs and shit.’
‘Plates and mugs and shit?’
The speaker looks at his big blond mate as if he might have the right answers, but Buzzcut is no help, so he looks back at me.
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Ah, yeah.’ He thinks I’m playing some sort of weird power game.
‘Righto. Get your mate, get in the car, and don’t ever come back.’ I wave the rifle barrel towards their car. ‘And when you get to the ramp, beep your horn twice so the sentries know you’re right to leave.’
He nods, and the two lean down to help their mate up and swing him to the car. I keep the rifle on them the whole time until their car is gone. I hear a car horn twice.
And then I am madly sucking air — the rush of shooting a man is surging through me. I can’t believe I did what I did. I have probably made things worse, but being able to fight back was fantastic. Next time they’ll come with the big guns. But what about the crockery? Is crockery a code word for something, or are their bosses afraid they’ll steal it if they know it’s money?
After all my big ideas of never returning to the house, collapsing on my couch in front of the TV with several beers feels like the best option, even if I won’t be able to calm down and sit for some while. But the fire is still going at my campsite, so I need to check on it, even if the risk of it getting away is very small. There is still enough adrenaline pumping through me to get me walking across the oats paddock towards the hill, thinking about Elaine and wondering what the hell it is with the crockery. They weren’t looking for the money — they were looking for ‘plates and shit’. It can only be a code word for something else. Nobody wants crockery that much. The various possibilities presented by Elaine revolve in my brain, hitting the sides as they turn.
My campsite seems further away in the dark, and the hill steeper than I remember. When I reach the site, the fire is burned to coals, and the place is dark, cold, and a bit desperate. I pour water on the fire, pack up the camp, and pull the tent down and put it with the other things in the ute.
When I get to my house, the lights of another car have turned off the main road towards me. I am stuck. The house lights have remained on, and whoever’s in the car would have seen my ute lights arrive, so there’s no point pretending I’m not here. If it’s the big guys returning, they’ve probably got bazookas with them. All I can do is take a secure point and let them come. I grab the shotgun and some shells, run to where I keep the ladder, and take it where I can climb onto the roof that looks over where the car might park. On the roof, I crawl near the edge, lie flat, and look out into the night. The light meanders its way in, and I take a bead on it. Perhaps I should shoot now — scare them, put them off — but I know the shotgun won’t do any damage until they are pretty close. The lights keep coming all the way to the house. I breathe, and take aim. I don’t think I can pull off a shot as good as the calf shot, and the shotgun won’t mak
e a clean hole: it will blow a hole the size of a watermelon.
The driver gets out of the vehicle, and I loop my finger around the trigger. I could blow a foot off from this distance. But only one person gets out of the car, and in the half-dark I see it’s Elaine. Surprisingly, she’s dishevelled — part of her shirt is hanging out, and from here her hair looks like she slept on it. She walks towards the house, steps past the two handguns lying on the grass without reacting to them, and knocks on the door. My thoughts are back in a maelstrom. I leave my gun where it is, and edge my way back off the roof. When my foot finds the ladder, I push my mouth into my jumper and yell out, ‘Coming,’ hoping it doesn’t sound like I’ve been on the roof. When I open the front door, she is smiling calmly, with an expectant look. Expecting what, I wonder.
‘Elaine.’
‘Dave.’
I have left the .22 behind the door, and I can’t think whether I should be reaching for it or not.
‘Sorry to bother you at this hour. It’s just that it’s a bit quiet at my place, and after what happened, I’m really jumpy. I thought, if you wouldn’t mind some company …’
‘Sure. Come in.’ Come in? Where did that issue from?
As she follows me in, I say, ‘I thought you were at your boyfriend’s house.’ I move swiftly to the door between the kitchen and the TV room, and pull it firmly shut. It was a mess even before Buzzcut and his mates got to it.
When she doesn’t say anything, I presume she’s wondering why I would know that. ‘The police called round.’
‘Oh, I was. We had a fight, and I guess … we split up.’ When I look at her, she is more of a mess than I had first thought, even if it is only in the context of how perfectly turned out she normally is.
‘I’m sorry about that. Do you want a drink, or a cup of tea or something?’
‘If you’ve got a white wine?’
Against my better, but faulty, judgement, I get two glasses from the cupboard, put them on the island, then grab a bottle from the fridge, hoping it isn’t from the $6 section of the supermarket. I pour for both of us. She takes hers, and drinks a little more greedily than is normal.
‘You’ve had a rough week then,’ I say. I don’t know how to talk to her about what has happened to me, and whether she is the cause of it or the sufferer. ‘They called in here, too.’
‘Who?’
‘Guys looking for crockery.’
‘I can tell.’ She quickly asks ‘Why?’ to cover her rudeness.
‘No idea.’
‘And you never received any crockery, or china, or pottery pieces in the mail?’
‘No. Should I have?’
She does a kind of shrug and eye-roll. ‘What did you do with these guys?’
‘Talked them out of it. Three of them. Big dudes.’
‘And you talked them out of it?’
I nod like it wasn’t that big a deal. I am thinking about sex for the first time since Sarah left. Not sex with Elaine, but sex in the abstract, because I am feeling powerful and in control in a weird way. Nothing has been in my control for a long time. Maybe it never has been.
‘You must be a very good talker.’ At this, I see the tip of her tongue slipping into her wine, and she rubs a hand down a thigh. I know this is getting weirder, because it’s possible she’s trying to seduce me, and I’m not really seducible. Am I?
‘They didn’t visit you tonight?’
She shakes her head.
‘Has this sort of stuff happened to you before?’ I ask.
‘I’m not sure I came here for an interrogation,’ she says.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel that way. It’s just that I’m trying really hard to make sense of the mad things that have been going on around here.’
‘You shouldn’t spy on me, you know.’
I’m gagging on bullshit responses. ‘No.’
‘I knew you were in the house. I could see your ute at the sheds.’ She pauses, and I wait for both barrels, but instead she says, ‘I appreciate you looking out for me.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘No more snooping, though.’
‘No.’ I should be grateful that she is not screaming at me, and I am, but not grateful enough to swallow a question. ‘That blond guy who was with you — that was your boyfriend?’
‘Yes.’ She says this in an offhand way, because we are talking about a past she no longer wants to talk about. ‘You must get lonely up here. On your own.’
‘Not really.’
‘I do. Even when Tito was around. It’s worse now.’ She runs a careless hand through her hair.
Is something stirring in me? Am I up for this? For a moment, there is nothing to say. I decide to persist. ‘One last question. The bloke who robbed you — can you tell me what he looked like?’
She blanches. ‘He had his head covered.’
‘Was he big?’
‘Muscly. Like a gym junkie. Not very tall. Really strong.’
‘That’s what the guys that were here looked like.’
She drinks her wine, pretty well glugging it down. ‘Maybe we should be at my place. At least they got what they wanted there. There’s no reason to come back. I’ve got plenty of spare beds. You could stay over.’
It seems to me, in the weird rattle of things going on in my head, that going to Elaine’s house is the perfect solution. It gets me out of my own house, and I might find some answers at hers. I am aware she’s probably made the invitation knowing I won’t take it up, giving her an excuse to get out.
‘Actually, would you mind if we did go to yours?’
She studies me over her empty glass.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by that. I’m not trying to … you know. I’d just like to get out of here.’
She puts the glass down and says, ‘Okay. Let’s go. You need to pack some things?’
‘All packed.’
She raises one perfect eyebrow.
‘I was going camping.’
‘Right.’ She rinses her glass, says, ‘See you there,’ and leaves.
I wonder what Ian would think if he found out the place I ‘went away to’ was Elaine’s. He’d probably say, good for me. I take the half-bottle of wine with me, and then remember I don’t have anything decent to sleep in, so I go to my bedroom and toss through clothes for something respectable. I take the shorts and T-shirt that will do the job, collect the .222 and some ammunition, and head to my ute. I know that I am going because I am too frightened to stay still, and even if I won’t admit it, I am intrigued by the possibility. There’s a chance the boyfriend will turn up, and that just adds heat to the growing fire.
She is waiting for me when I walk in, perched on a shiny designer kitchen stool, a glass in her hand, and another next to a bottle, already poured. I put my bag down and look around. I don’t know which is a more weird scenario: that we are sleeping together, or that we aren’t. Common sense would tell me she has just, maybe temporarily, broken up with a boyfriend, and I am split from the wife I love, and am generally damaged goods, so there is no likelihood of us being together. Common sense doesn’t know everything, though. I arch my eyebrows, and say without any shame of inanity: ‘Made it.’
‘I see.’
She is no longer dishevelled. The old Elaine has returned, or almost. I pull up a stool, and she offers the wine. It is smooth and dry and a little spicy, and I am surprised she could have even ingested my version of white wine.
‘Things move pretty quickly round here, don’t they?’ I say.
‘How’s that?’ She is looking at me closely, and it is not unpleasant.
‘Well, it was only a couple of days ago that you called in to see about your box, and I had hardly ever spoken to you.’
‘And now?’ She says it as a caution to a presumption she thinks she’s heard.
‘And now I’m staying over, after you’ve been burgled and assaulted, and I’ve been threatened.’
‘Slumber party.’ She giggles just a little bit. It is a lovely sound I haven’t heard before. I almost ask her to do it again. Instead the wrong question comes to mind. It is one of those that I have developed a burning desire to know the answer to.
‘How did Tito die?’
‘I killed him.’
And then, with the kind of timing you’d expect from a TV cliffhanger, a rifle shot zings through the room, radiating the sound of making a neat hole in the glass of the front door. Behind Elaine, a plate on the wall collapses and falls to the floor in pieces. We are on the ground before it is. I point furiously towards the back, telling her to go-go-go, and as she slides away along the floor I reach for my bag and the rifle. I take the rifle and load it, then drag myself to the safest place I can find: under the island. I’m trying to look in five places at once. Would they have gone round the back? Why would they have fired first? On the verandah, at the door, looking through the glass at the kitchen, are two of my muscle friends. The blond buzzcut pushes the door open, and says, ‘Elaine?’ He pauses in the doorway. ‘That’s enough games now. You need to give us what we want.’
There is no reply from Elaine. Does she know them, or do they just know her name?
‘We’ve already given that neighbour of yours a seeing-to. And if you don’t cooperate, you’re next.’
He looks kind of satisfied with this. A man in control. Then he sees my gun barrel, and his cool disappears.
‘Drop your guns,’ I say.
‘You don’t need to get involved in this, man. It’s not your fight.’ He is almost wincing at the pain of having to say this instead of bolting out the door to his ute and his warm, safe home. ‘It’s more complex that it seems.’
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