by Garry Disher
‘Utter bullshit.’
‘Please, Carmen.’
‘Get him into a MENS program. I can set it up for you.’
Carmen worked as a counsellor with the shire’s community health service. MENS—Men Exploring Non-violent Solutions—was a behaviour-change workshop for violent or abusive husbands or partners. Ludmilla knew there was a snowball’s chance in hell of Adrian entering such a program. He wasn’t some uneducated labourer but an urbane, highly educated professional; and he’d hardly ever hit her.
‘Please,’ she said miserably.
Last time they’d had this conversation Carmen had said, ‘It’s your funeral—and I mean that literally,’ but this was a birthday call, so Carmen steered the conversation onto cheerier matters. Ludmilla was soon laughing and buoyant, but glancing at the kitchen clock anxiously and keeping an ear open for Adrian, who was in the bathroom down the hall, scraping his electric razor over his lean chin. She didn’t have much time. She thanked Carmen for the call and was rinsing her cereal bowl at the sink when the phone rang again. Her mother said, ‘How’s the birthday girl?’
‘Hello, Mum.’
They chatted for a couple of minutes, then Ludmilla’s mother said, ‘Is that gorgeous husband of yours taking you somewhere nice tonight?’
Ludmilla had tried confiding in her mother several times in the past few years, but she simply failed to listen. She adored her son-in-law. Adrian could do no wrong. Bolstered by her conversation with Carmen, Ludmilla said the worst thing she’d ever said about her husband: ‘Mum, Mr Adorable punched me in the stomach last night.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly.’
‘I’m thinking seriously of leaving him.’
‘You’ve always been a complainer, Ludmilla. A marriage requires work. You need to try harder.’
Ludmilla realised with a start of fear that Adrian’s razor had fallen silent. She murmured urgently, ‘I’d better go.’
And there was Adrian, standing in the doorway, both hands behind his back. He cocked his head: ‘Your mother?’
How much had he heard? ‘Yes,’ Ludmilla said. She added reassuringly, ‘It was a quick call.’
To her relief, he nodded. Ludmilla couldn’t win sometimes. If she made a call, he’d see it as money they’d never see again. If someone called her—especially if they spoke at length—he’d feel that she’d removed herself from him. Often he’d time her, glaring pointedly at the Longines watch she’d bought him. He’d time her, calculate the distances she’d driven, count the money she’d spent on groceries.
His grins used to melt her. He grinned now, saying ‘Ta da!’ and bringing his hands out from behind his back.
He flourished a birthday cake at her. Chocolate, three candles for the thirty years, a scalloped edge and other fancy bits, ‘Happy Birthday’ scrolled across it in white icing.
Then Ludmilla frowned, looked more closely at the icing. ‘Hippy Birthday,’ it said.
Her face crumpled. ‘Adrian!’
‘Just a joke...’
‘I’m not fat.’
‘Ludmilla, it’s just a joke.’
‘I’m not fat,’ she wailed, touching her hips.
He was deadly quiet and serious now. ‘We have to face it, darling, your thighs are bigger.’
She collapsed into her chair at the kitchen table. ‘I can’t go on like this.’
Adrian was bright and shiny from the bathroom, groomed to within an inch of his life. He stood behind her chair, dug his fingers into her neck and murmured, ‘The only way you’ll leave me is in a coffin.’
She gasped, jerked away from him.
‘Mill,’ he said reasonably, ‘I could snap your neck, you know I could. Listen,’ he said, moving around now and crouching beside her, one hand stroking her between the shoulders, the other on her knee, ‘I apologise, I went too far.’ Suddenly hot tears spurted from his eyes. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you. You mean the world to me. It’s all the pressure, the disappointments, am I good at what I do, why aren’t I getting any recognition.
‘Oh, Ade,’ she said, crying too now.
‘I shouldn’t take it out on you, I know I shouldn’t.’
Ludmilla knew that Adrian was chronically depressed. Although he’d had plenty of freelance drafting and design commissions since their marriage, for which he earned reasonable money, the jobs had been small—married friends getting him to mock up preliminary drawings for a house extension, for example—or otherwise disappointing, like the shire commissioning him to design a public toilet block for the Waterloo foreshore only to reject it, calling it too outlandish. The larger commissions, the offers of a partnership with a prestige firm, had been elusive. Meanwhile there were certain types of people, the legions of the vulgar, whom Adrian Wishart could not possibly work with, and standards he would not compromise. Ludmilla felt for him sometimes. It was hard for truly creative people.
‘I know,’ she sniffled, squeezing his hand.
He hugged her affectionately, sprang to his feet and briskly went about getting himself some breakfast. She envied the way he could recover from setbacks. Then the news came on, the police still investigating the assault on the Landseer School chaplain, a car bomb in Baghdad, some footballer arrested for drunk driving—’Your honour, consider the terrible pressure my client is under,’ Adrian chortled, making her smile.
Then he patted his lips. ‘Forgot to say, I’m playing squash tonight.’
He said it every year. And every year she said, ‘You are not, mister. You’re taking me out to dinner.’
Mock astonished, he jabbed his chest. ‘Moi?’
‘Yes, you,’ Ludmilla said. Inside, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
‘Completely slipped my mind.’
‘It did not.’
It was almost like love. They ate their breakfast in a warm glow and when Ludmilla next got up to clear a plate away, she heard the whiplash snap of his fingers. She turned: he was holding up his coffee mug for a refill.
She fetched the pot. Just as she was pouring, the phone rang. Ludmilla didn’t know who, apart from Carmen and her mother, would be ringing at this hour. She glanced anxiously at Adrian; he glanced pointedly at his watch.
She swallowed and picked up the handset. ‘Hello?’
It was Carl Vernon in Penzance Beach, sounding deeply distressed about the old fisherman’s cottage on Bluff Road.
* * * *
17
Elsewhere in Penzance Beach that Wednesday morning, Pam Murphy was jogging. Like Carl Vernon, she lived on the bluff above the beach, but hers was a rented fibro-cement shack and it was several blocks back from any view of the sea, along a rutted dirt track at the edge of farmland. She didn’t know Vernon, and was only dimly aware of the push to save the fisherman’s cottage on the cliff top opposite his house. Still, she loved living in Penzance Beach, loved living so close to the water, which was only minutes away on foot.
Her route this morning took her first along the top of the bluff, the flat blue sea and Phillip Island showing between the dark pines on one side of her, a range of fences, yards and holiday houses on the other—silent weekenders, expensively curtained and gloomy at this hour on a weekday morning.
Then she came to a concrete cliff top bench, signs that warned of unstable edges, and a flight of wooden steps to the sand below. She pistoned down, then back up, then down again, until her legs burned and her heart hammered. She was running a marathon soon, and liked to push herself hard like this. Her body and mind crackling with alertness and energy, she began to lope along the beach, weaving in and out of the kelp drifts and exposed reefs at the edge of the water, where the sand was wet and hard. She passed old people walking dogs, a power-walker, seagulls, sharks’ eggs, the carcass of a seal. No dolphins keeping pace with her today, only a tanker far out on the water, heading for the refinery near Waterloo.
So a morning like most others, but Pam always noticed the tiny differences between one day and the next. The two breakwaters along
her route were almost covered in sand this morning, for example, and yesterday there’d been no kelp. Had the wind risen last night, the waters raced? If so, she’d slept right through it. And with the blood beating strongly through her, body zingingly alive, she thought about Andy Cree.
She came to the little stile on the low plank wall at the bottom of the cliff, stepped over it and was lost in the ti-trees, their trunks and roots like dark hanks of rope. Dodging to avoid the traps in her path, all sounds shielded from her, Pam powered up the crooked track to the cliff top. Finally she burst through the bushes and onto the road.
And stopped in her tracks. She struggled to take it all in. There was a gap in the vista, but what? Then she realised: the old fisherman’s cottage had been flattened. Heavy bulldozers were growling and scraping among the pines. People were milling about, shouting angrily, some of them in tears. Eight security guards, beefy, beer-fed thugs dressed in black, maintained a line of defence between the protesters and the demolition crew. The latter, wearing hard hats, jeans, work boots and gloves, were wielding mallets and loading dump bins in concert with the bulldozers.
It was implacable, unstoppable. It was noisy, dusty and shocking to witness. Pam felt tears spring to her eyes and she crossed the road to join the protesters.
One man detached himself from the group. He was bony, grey-haired but fit looking, and Pam recognised him as someone she saw walking along the beach from time to time. He clearly knew her, for he said, in a clear, booming voice, ‘You’re a police officer, right?’
Pam nodded. ‘What’s happening?’ she said, even though she knew it was a dumb question.
She’d always liked the old house. She passed it every morning when she burst through from the beach below. She thought of it as part of the old Penzance Beach, a pretty house amid the million-dollar architectural wet dreams on either side of it, which were constructed of smoky glass, corrugated iron and tropical rainforest timbers and referred to as ‘our beach shack’ by the Melbourne stockbrokers and cocaine lawyers who owned them.
‘Can’t you stop it?’ the man said, clutching her wrist.
She removed it gently. ‘A bit late for that, Mr...’
‘Carl Vernon,’ he said. ‘Please, do something.’
Pam weighed her options. The demolition was well advanced and well organised. She was one lonely copper. She didn’t know the facts.
‘Perhaps they have permission,’ she said lamely.
‘Permission! The house was unique! It was classified by the National Trust yesterday!’
That was enough to go on with. Pam strode toward the site, Vernon beside her, saying, ‘They have no right. There was an emergency application for heritage protection lodged with the planning minister.’
They reached the security cordon. ‘Wait here, please,’ Pam said, and she made to step between two of the guards, men built like concrete slabs, no necks, shaven skulls. In its sweet, blind way, the state government had allowed the security industry to regulate itself, with the result that many security guards had criminal records and a penchant for methamphetamine-fuelled rage. Knowing that, Pam wasn’t intimidated by these jokers. ‘I’m a police officer,’ she said levelly, looking each man in the eye. ‘If you lay one finger on me, I’ll fuck you up for good.’
They blinked. She passed through to another thickset man, who wore the hard, unimpressed face of work-site bosses the world over. One foot propped on a pile of fence palings, he was watching a bulldozer tip rubble into a skip. Pam was astonished to see a mattress complete with a woollen underlay go tumbling in, followed by a refrigerator and a microwave. Then another ‘dozer roared in: a splintered wardrobe, a dusty rug, shards of glass, corrugated roofing iron, a woollen overcoat.
The foreman gave her a quizzical look and spat unhurriedly at her feet. ‘How did you get in here?’
‘I’m a police officer.’
Watching her wordlessly, he fished a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. It was warm from his body, almost moist. She scanned it: a demolition permit.
‘But as I understand it,’ she said, returning the document, ‘the house was classified by the National Trust yesterday.’
‘But not protected’, the foreman said. ‘Besides, the Trust is weak as piss. A hobby for the idle rich.’
He looked as though he were about to give an explosive lecture on the subject but thought better of it. ‘Look, a call came in last night, flatten the place first thing this morning. I checked out the legal situation, me and my boys are in the clear.’
Pam was disgusted. ‘You couldn’t even empty the rooms first?’ she asked, shouting above the sounds of the bulldozers as a scoop of planks and a leather armchair were tipped into the skip.
The foreman snarled, ‘Because of those loonies—’ he pointed to the protesters’—it had to be done this way. People like that, nothing better to do...’ he finished, shaking his head.
‘What’s going up in its place?’
‘Fucked if I know,’ the man said, looking pointedly at the houses on either side, monstrosities that blocked the sun.
‘Who’s developing it? Who called you?’
‘That’s confidential information.’
Dispirited by the waste, greed and contempt, Pam crossed the road to where Vernon had rejoined the protesters. ‘There’s nothing I can do. Sorry.’
‘Arrest them,’ a woman said, tears in her eyes.
‘They have a valid demolition permit.’
‘That’s not the point. We were under the impression that the Ebelings valued the house.’
‘The Ebelings?’
‘Hugh Ebeling and his wife.’
Pam had never heard of them. ‘I’m very sorry, I’m as heartsick as you are, but it’s a civil, not a police matter. I suggest you take it up with the shire.’
That made the teary woman angry. ‘The shire? Don’t you think it’s significant that the house was heritage listed yesterday, and demolished by the Ebelings today, just before an emergency protection order could be granted? They were tipped off by someone on the inside.’
‘Are you reporting a crime?’
The woman looked flustered. Carl Vernon took charge, thanking Pam and speaking calming words to the men and women who milled about helplessly. He said, as Pam began her slow jog toward home, ‘If we can prove anything, will you look into it?’
Pam waved, her way of saying yes. She was tired, hungry, needed a coffee. She jogged past the site; already the guards were piling into two black Range Rovers with tinted windows, the demolition workers beginning to load the bulldozers onto semitrailers.
Thirty minutes later, Pam returned, driving past on her way to work, hair damp, coffee and porridge sitting comfortably in her belly. The site was empty. She braked cautiously: no it wasn’t. Some of the locals were fishing around in the rubbish skips, retrieving electrical goods, furniture, clothing and books.
Good luck to them. She tried to figure out what kind of person would authorise and abet the bulldozing of that pretty little house and saw only a terrible barrenness.
She drove away slowly. She saw Carl Vernon outside a nearby cottage, beside a silver Golf, talking to a young woman with red hair. At the bottom of the hill she braked suddenly for a red Citroen. She tracked it as it passed, seeing it slip into the shadows beneath a plane tree near the crest and remain there.
Pam Murphy shrugged, accelerated and headed to the police station in Waterloo, where she parked in a corner of the yard, away from the bird-shit gums. She entered by the rear doors, using her swipe card, collected a sheaf of circulars and memos from her pigeonhole, and climbed the stairs to CIU. She had things to do.
She was bemused to find that she’d beaten the others to work: usually she was late. Thinking she should mark the occasion by brewing the coffee, Pam wandered into the tearoom and stared doubtfully at the coffee machine that Challis had installed. The boss loved his coffee. Never drank instant. Made terrific coffee, too, and had shown her how to load the machine, but now a
ll of that information had vanished into thin air.
Challis saved her from making a fool of herself. He came easily up the stairs, looking fresh and benign, as though he’d had a good shag this morning. Perhaps he had: living with Sergeant Destry seemed to be doing him good. He would never be called Laughing Boy by the troops—his face saw to that, with its narrow planes, dark cast and air of permanent scepticism—but he was lighter on his feet these days, burned more slowly, as if a great weight had been removed from his shoulders.
They stood about for a while, waiting for the coffee to brew. She told him about the bulldozed house, about the man named Hugh Ebeling and his contemptuous act, but Challis was distracted. ‘Ebeling,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t know anything about the guy.’