‘But how did you not see the ocean? You know what it looks like, though, right?’
‘Like a big wheat field but blue? Did I get that right?’ Han didn’t bother hiding the sarcasm in his voice.
‘Maybe we should get back . . . ’ Key gestured to her keyboard.
‘Nah,’ said T-Dough, ‘I want Han here to paint me a word picture of the ocean. Surely they took you on a bus with some retards from the bush? They have that all the time on the news. They’re drooling and shit, getting their wheelchairs stuck in the sand.’
‘Jesus,’ said Jarrah standing up and stretching. ‘I want to get out of here in under 24 hours if possible.’ A tiny line of skin appeared between her shirt and her jeans.
Han thanked whatever Gods were currently available. There’d been Buddhists outside the library as he’d walked in that morning. They’d do. Buddha bared his belly after all.
Key went on, as she had all morning, staring seriously into the void of her laptop screen. She stated, seriously: ‘Storytelling has been with us for as long as we have wanted to shape the world.’
‘That’s what we started with this morning,’ said Jarrah. ‘What else do we have?’
‘I put in some bullet points underneath it.’
‘God. This is going to take forever.’
Han tapped his pen against his pad. ‘Have we even decided what order we’re talking in?’
‘Uh . . . ’ Key raised her eyes from her computer. ‘I don’t think so.’
Jarrah yawned. ‘This is what happens when you don’t actually meet until the last minute.’
‘We’re all busy modern people,’ said T-Dough. ‘It’s not the end of the world if this doesn’t get written, anyway.’
‘It’s forty percent of our mark,’ said Key.
‘Okay,’ said Jarrah. ‘It’s, what, nearly two o’clock now? Let’s just go hardcore for two hours and knock this over. I mean, it’s just a talk. We just string a few good sentences together and we pass. Yes?’
Han leant back in his chair and was about to agree when his eye snagged on the window. The sky was almost black. ‘What . . . ’ A roil of grey cloud streaked past, like the contrail of a jet. ‘The sky’s gone insane out there.’
‘Focus!’ Jarrah snapped her fingers in front of Han’s face. She drew up two fingers to her face and back to him: the silent hand movements of an army sniper. Her hair was the sort of thin blonde curtain he had never seen on anyone in his home town. Hair was hat-tucked or windblown where he was from, its only purpose to get into your eyes or stick to your neck in summer. Certainly there had been no girls who looked like Jarrah. The girls he had gone to school with were first and foremost not interested in the book-obsessed son of a failed cotton farmer, and secondly, almost comically unattractive or smokers or going out with a middle-aged drug dealer, and usually all three. Jarrah’s eyes were the exact shade of blue that made Han forget about the colour of the sky, or for that matter any other colour.
‘Narrative,’ she said. ‘Media. Storytelling. Maybe we should make a mind map.’
‘Maybe we should actually write something,’ said T-Dough. ‘I have to be out of here by three-thirty at the latest.’
‘Why?’ said Jarrah. ‘Unless you’ve got major surgery booked, this is where we’ll be.’
‘Brightman and The Ferret have this sweet competition going, but you’ve got to be down there before five.’
‘Down where?’ said Key.
‘At Four Double B. At the studio.’
‘You don’t listen to that crap, do you?’ said Jarrah. ‘Secret Stink? That Indian cab driver character? It’s so puerile.’
‘No, they’re classic. I’ve got to be down outside the studio for the final clue.’
‘The final clue?’ Han knew about Brightman and The Ferret from the billboards pasted around town. Two guys with the ubiquitous misshapen faces of radio veterans, squeezed into slim-fit T-shirts designed for men 20 years younger and 40 kilograms lighter, flanked by the incoherent buzzwords of the week. As far as he could work out, their radio show survived on a diet of prank calls and the beration of a revolving cycle of female newsreaders.
‘I wouldn’t expect any of you to understand. This schtick they do is . . . it’s unravelling the commercial radio narrative. They’re bringing the genre down from the inside.’
‘They’re douchebags. That segment where they made people tweet their wives making them sandwiches? That was abhorrent.’
‘But that’s just it! They’re flipping the lid.’
‘You’re fucking brainwashed.’
‘What’s that about the clue, though?’
Key coughed loudly, but when she spoke, her tone was apologetic. ‘We need to focus. I need to pass this.’
T-Dough ignored them all. ‘It’s this competition where they fake a kid’s disappearance.’
Jarrah put both her palms to her forehead. ‘What?’
‘It’s this whole campaign. They’ve been promoting it for weeks. It’s like, you’ve got to find what’s happened to this girl based on the clues they give you. It’s insane.’
‘That’s awful,’ said Han. ‘There’s been all those people going missing just, what, in the last few weeks.’
‘That’s why it works. There’s so much interest in it.’
‘How on earth did they get permission to do it?’
‘I read about it,’ said Key resignedly. ‘They say it’s a community service. Like having a reward for witnesses.’
‘Exactly,’ said T-Dough. ‘It’s the same, but so many more people are getting involved. Fifty grand prize for the winner.’
‘Well I think it’s disgusting.’ Jarrah opened her laptop with severe force.
‘You don’t need the money,’ said T-Dough, ‘so why would you care?’
‘It’s profiting from these people who have already gone missing.’
‘It’s smart. We’re closing in. That final clue is going to crack it. I want to be the one to crack it.’
‘You’re so deluded. I mean, I don’t even understand what you’re supposed to be.’
‘What I’m supposed to be?’
‘The emo hair, the skate shoes, the Star Trek T-shirt. You need to pick a subculture and stick to it.’
T-Dough laughed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We all need a little box to live in. Can’t have anyone sticking out.’
Jarrah shot her chair back with an exasperated sigh, stood up and stormed towards a shelf of thick philosophy books that shielded them from the door.
Han could feel the heat rising in the room. He wondered if they’d get special dispensation if two group members actually killed each other. A rumbling came up through the floor: someone rolling a trolley of heavy books somewhere. Maybe that would be a better life, Han thought. Just shelving books all day for a wage. It would certainly hold more purpose than wherever it was an Arts degree was supposed to get him. At least he’d be able to tell his dad exactly what he did in any given day. Books going from point A to point B.
‘We can use this,’ said Key, looking at Han.
‘Use what?’
‘This radio stunt. This is narrative. Taken from real life, turned . . . inside out.’
T-Dough sat back with a pleased Jabba the Hutt smile. ‘Like I say, like I say.’
Jarrah shook her head. ‘That’s a long bow.’ But even as she said it, she nodded. ‘But I guess we haven’t got much else.’
‘It’s exactly the right fit,’ said Key. ‘A constructed narrative both influenced by and influencing reality.’
‘Write that shit down!’ called T-Dough. ‘The first clue was a vase. A blue vase!’ His hands flailed: the most movement he’d made all day. ‘Then there’s a samurai sword. Mad. There’s this poem about a willow tree and a temple. Pretty gay, put I reckon I’m close to cracking it.’
‘Okay,’ said Jarrah, walking back to the table. ‘This could be good.’ She took off her cardigan. ‘Anyone else getting hot, though?’
‘It’s a little warm,’ s
aid T-Dough, flipping back his fringe. Little globes of sweat had begun to spring up on his forehead.
‘Let’s not get distracted,’ said Key. ‘This is what we use, and we can all—’
A loud deep wail cracked into the air.
T-Dough sprang up in his chair. ‘The fuck was that?’
‘Maybe those Buddhists,’ said Han. ‘They were playing those long mountaineer trumpets when I came in.’
‘Dungchen,’ said Key. ‘Tibetan horns.’
‘Han has never seen a mountain,’ said T-Dough. ‘That’s why he doesn’t know about Dungbongs.’
‘Dungchen.’
‘Whatever.’
‘No way that was a horn,’ said Jarrah. She wiped her brow. ‘What’s going on out there?’
It was then that Han put his finger on something that had been bothering him for the past hour. There was no other sound. When they’d arrived, there’d been the inevitable throat-clearing and quiet conversation coming from all over the library, especially just after ten when the doors had opened and students had flooded in. Now, after the punctuation of the horn, or whatever it was, the silence was intensely obvious. ‘Where’s all the—’
The sound curved back at them but this time came with a piercing undertone, a shearing-metal shriek. Han clamped his hands over his ears and caught another contrail crossing the window. The same rumble under his feet. This wasn’t right. Han got up and climbed onto the table. Key pulled her laptop out of the way just in time as he stepped past to peer up and out the window.
Han had long considered himself someone open to the world’s possibilities, but even he almost refused to process what he saw through the slender pane of glass. Swung up against the river bank opposite was a ship, a luxury cruiser, tipped over on its side, a series of chaotic gashes ripped down its side. The river had turned coffee brown and churned over itself in a manic roil. The tears in the ship’s hull, resembling some near-realised foreign alphabet, seemed like gills on a fish, taking in and sending out the water. Bright white antennae and a satellite dish hung off the ship’s roof, swinging by a single cable.
The strange thing was that Han could still see cars whizzing past on the motorway, and a bus making its way across the bridge to the city. It was as if Han was the only person who could see the ship, its component parts flailing vaguely like a creature running slowly out of breath. Before he could tell the others, a black shape came flying through the air directly at the window, curling in with a weird velocity. It hit the window with a ferocious thud and Han’s view filled with a mushy jewelled glint that he only realised too late was a pair of jet-black eyes and the squashed remains of a fruit bat.
He swung his head back from the window and felt the table shaking under him. His body tipped back, his stomach lurched, and he tensed for the sharp impact of a bookshelf or chairback but something strong held him up and supported him, 45 degrees to the ground.
‘You need to lay off the surf and turf,’ said T-Dough, arms straining as he helped Han lower himself to the ground. ‘Lose some weight. Although you wouldn’t know about the surf, though. Just turf.’ He chuckled at his own joke.
Jarrah rose half out of her chair in some important pose of a minor martial art. ‘What the hell is that on the window?’
‘A . . . a bat.’
‘But it’s the middle of the day.’ Key had her arms wrapped protectively around her laptop.
‘The sky’s just . . . fucked,’ said Han, who couldn’t think of a better way to put it. ‘And there’s this ship that’s just been torn open.’
‘What?’ T-Dough climbed onto the table and pressed his face to the window. ‘Can’t see shit past this bat.’
‘It’s so hot,’ said Key.
The lights dimmed down and then flickered off.
‘This is crazy,’ said Jarrah. ‘We need to know what’s going on.’
‘Too right,’ said Han, gathering up his things and stuffing them in his backpack.
‘What if it’s a terrorist attack?’ said T-Dough.
‘Terrorists can’t throw bats through the air,’ said Key. ‘Internet’s gone,’ she added, rapping her fingers against the silver back of her laptop.
‘They could be filled with chemical weapons.’
Han shook his head. ‘I’m going to see what’s going on.’ He’d felt cooped up all day, and the idea of getting outside, even among suicide-bombing bats and crashing ships was immensely appealing. He slung his backpack over his shoulder for protection, even though it held nothing more than his notebook, a copy of Moby Dick three weeks overdue from the uni library and a long-forgotten muesli bar that had enjoyed the zenith of its freshness about the time of the Sydney Olympics.
‘I’ll come too,’ said Jarrah. ‘It’s probably just a storm. A tropical storm.’ The tone of her voice was too even, as though she was trying to convince herself along with the others.
T-Dough was still at the window. ‘A storm that tears open a ship?’
‘Doesn’t sound right,’ agreed Key.
‘I’m sure it’s not torn open,’ said Jarrah. ‘It probably just unmoored. It happened in the floods last year.’
‘It looked pretty torn up to me,’ said Han. He’d still be at home when the floods hit Brisbane the year before. He’d followed it on the news, like everyone else, signed up to be a volunteer through the Rural Fire Service, but they never figured out how to transport everyone all the way there, especially when the water came inland and cut the town off completely. It never reached the houses, just hung around outside the town’s edge like a pack of dogs. And he certainly hadn’t seen bats flung through the air. He started walking back towards the exit. He didn’t see any point hanging around with the old maps. If the apocalypse really was coming, maybe they’d all get a partial credit.
‘We’ll stay here,’ called out T-Dough, ‘see if I can get any news on my phone.’ He pulled a large flat handset from his pocket.
‘Net’s down,’ said Key. ‘I tried my phone, too, already.’
T-Dough looked imperiously at Key’s boxy Nokia. ‘Of course your phone’s down. I’ll be able to get something going though. I’ve made a few modifications to this bad boy. I’ll be able to get something up.’
‘Suit yourselves,’ said Han. ‘We’ll be back in a sec, once we know what’s going on.’ He felt a hand slip into his and looked back to see Jarrah matching him stride for stride. Although it was the last thing he should have been thinking of, he realised straight away that Jarrah’s hand was the first physical contact he’d had with someone in nearly two months. The last—God, was it the last?—was a rough handshake from his dad just before Han folded himself into his car for the long trip west. The creases in his dad’s forehead relaxing for an instant, the white skin between the furrows showing for one tiny moment that betrayed his emotions. It was this Han thought about as he drew his mouth into a grim line and nodded like men do, only breaking into tears once he had driven down the long drive and out of sight, pulling the car to the side of the road so he could lean properly on the wheel, bracing himself, watching his tears making dark starbursts against the faded denim of his one good pair of jeans.
He’d stopped only once on the eight hour drive, pulling up in Marburg to refuel and wolf down a series of awful service station pies. Then it was straight on to the sharehouse he’d already paid a deposit on sight unseen, the first in a series of moments in his new hometown that were severe and intense disappointments. He would have used the phrase crack den after seeing his sharehouse for the first time if the word den didn’t suggest the actual ability to withstand light winds and rain. This place was a collection of walls and a ceiling with only the barest resemblance to an actual human dwelling. The photographer who had put together the shots for the real estate website was a true master of forced perspective and selective shadow, and despite it all, Han had to respect his work.
At first, it all seemed a personal affront. Han had never been a popular person at any time in his life—the given name o
f Hansel Minton had seen to that—but at least he had found people to be, at their base public level, polite. Brisbane, at least the parts he had experienced, was affronted by any sort of genuine attempt warmth. Even the simplest hello seemed to put everyone he’d met at uni on edge, as if you weren’t allowed to greet anyone without an ulterior motive. The best he got when he sat next to someone in a lecture was a curt nod. The worst was outright hostility: physically leaning away from him or moving chairs completely. Han knew that when rivers rose and bats flew into windows and ships careened into bridges, people weren’t at their most genuine, but he appreciated Jarrah’s touch nonetheless.
‘Han!’
‘Sorry. What?’
‘Which way?’
Han shook himself from his own thoughts. They stood outside the collections room on the landing. The silence remained, broken only by gusts of wind finding their way up from some open area below. Han leaned over the balcony, but the lower levels were obscured by some sort of fog. He could see vague shadows, but they were swathed in the white haze.
Jarrah leaned over next to him. ‘What the hell?’
Han shrugged. ‘Told you something was up.’ Han went over to the lift and pressed the button. No response. ‘I guess we take the stairs,’ he said, pushing open the emergency exit with his shoulder, bracing for the warning alarm that never came. The stairwell was almost pitch black.
‘I left my phone back in the room with my bag,’ said Jarrah. ‘You got yours?’
‘Ah, yeah.’ Han pulled his phone reluctantly from his pocket, wishing already that he’d remembered to charge it that morning. He’d kept it out of sight before, as it was even older and daggier than Key’s. His dad had given it to him after one of the seasonal workers left it behind. Probably deliberately. It was the sort of hopelessly inefficient device you would gladly abandon in a far-flung town in Western Queensland like a witness to a crime you couldn’t quite bring yourself to kill. It lit the way in front of them in a weak blue. Their footsteps echoed in a horror-movie way, and Han thought he could hear water dripping.
‘We’ll go back in a second, right?’ said Jarrah.
‘If you want to go back up, I can try and find someone and come back and get you.’
Willow Pattern Page 11