Forever Shores

by Peter McNamara

  Amy’s concern was simple. If Raymond actually came from a distant time in the future, he had to constitute the best bet. Even if Ray himself was annulled, the future would still have an investment in seeing your issue get through.

  The new boy then noticed the class pausing to appraise him in a very calculated way. It was difficult to imagine Ray’s superhumanity, but maybe the young man had qualities that any bright girl should want. This troubled the sensitive boys quite as much as it excited the girls.

  Mostly very quiet, Jodi Everett was a bright, pretty girl who drew a lot of male attention. She’d clearly given the whole matter of Raymond, partner selection, and genetic transmission serious consideration.

  ‘Ray’s got it all over us in a way,’ Jodi observed. ‘I mean, I’d find it very flattering to think that I had a special purpose by virtue of the man I mated with … Virgin Mary and all that. But you’d never know whether Ray was taking advantage of his situation to have it off willy-nilly, or whether the future was choosing you. You specifically.’

  Again, this struck hard at the class’ imagination, and they were silent for a while. Jack Hunter saw the teacher lost in her own suppositions.

  ‘Maybe it’s not just girls his age,’ Jack interjected. ‘Ray might be here to have it off with Miss Murray.’

  ‘Here to get ravaged by her more likely,’ Gavin added.

  The teacher brought this new line of thought to a halt with, ‘I think that’s quite enough, Gavin,’ but the hint of a smile said that Jack and Gavin had read her mind.

  ‘Perhaps we should go back to using old-fashioned terms like The Will of God,’ Miss Murray said by way of re-establishing authority.

  ‘The Will of Allah,’ Ray corrected.

  Big Higgsy meets The Boy From the Future

  The boy from the future had no idea what to expect from Bob Higgs. Mrs Peng had told a white lie to the effect that Mr Higgs was a man from the Education Department, and Ray would need to speak to him with regard to his continuing participation in class. A small staff room was set aside for the interview.

  Bob Higgs was an obese, greasy-skinned man of a type Raymond hadn’t seen before. Intensely suspicious, Higgs stared at Ray as if he was an interloper from another planet. Ray’s only problem, so far as Ray saw it, was not knowing how to act instinctively in a situation that was so abnormal. Was he allowed to be tetchy? Could he tell people they were shits if they treated him like shit, or should he try to act discreetly and behave more like a ‘local’? Ray now lamented his lack of specific instructions.

  When Bob Higgs asked Ray why he was here, the boy said he didn’t know. He was on an important assignment, but as for the specifics, the whys and hows, Bob’s guess was as good as Ray’s. The boy trusted that the people who sent him knew their job.

  The consultant wanted to know whether the boy was acting alone. Maybe Ray had some fellow agents, or was about to be put into contact with sleepers.

  Once again, Ray couldn’t rule out those possibilities. So far as he knew, he was acting alone. He couldn’t see the benefit of creating a situation where two operatives might fall over each other. But it wasn’t for him to know these things, he was just a kid. (Did it make sense to speak in age-relative terms? It was easy to disappear up the brown arsehole of relativity.) And Bob Higgs hardly gave the impression of being someone more perceptive than Ray was.

  ‘You don’t like your father, do you?’ the fat man asserted, apropos of nothing.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘A kid like you, taking all these risks. Leaving your family behind. Taking the chance that you might damage yourself and your family irreversibly.’

  Ray saw harm to his family as an outside risk. The only considerable risk was to himself. He and his father got along fine. Ray’s dad was proud that his son had volunteered to make things better.

  Higgs asked why he should believe the boy. After all, Ray’s interests weren’t necessarily the interests of the Mintook community.

  ‘This is a lark of yours, isn’t it? I reckon your family would be devastated if they knew what you were up to.’

  Raymond didn’t know how to respond. He’d already guessed that Higgs wasn’t what Mrs Peng said he was, and he now felt like strangling Big Bob. But, if Ray had such a powerful impulse to strangle the man, maybe he had that for a reason … No, surely the officials would have sought Ray’s permission if their intention was that he should kill someone like Bob Higgs.

  Could the people who chose him have made that choice because they saw a potential for killing? These thoughts made the boy dizzy, and still the fat man continued to bait him.

  ‘Do any of the girls in your class remind you of your mother?’ Higgs asked.

  Raymond couldn’t say. He hadn’t thought about it.

  ‘One of them is your mother, or grandmother, isn’t she, Ray? You saw the photographs of your mother as a young woman, and they excited you, didn’t they?’

  The boy from the future told Higgs that he was a sick man. Only a sick man could impute those motives. Ray had come a long way. His mission was entirely honourable.

  ‘What if I said that you’re just a retrograde virus from the future, a filthy little motherfucker?’

  Rather than punch Higgs, Raymond laughed out loud. The man was pathetic. Good for not much more than giving parking tickets to aliens. Taking Bob seriously would be a waste of energy.

  ‘Whatever you think is immaterial, Mr Higgs. Events will take their course. Whether the next thing is trivial or crucial, one thing’s for sure. It’s all been factored in.’

  A Town Called Hypothesis

  Over a period of three or four days, local speculations bred and multiplied like ravenous locusts.

  Raymond was an assassin.

  Raymond was a sacrificial lamb. His tragic death would draw attention to a person whose historic trajectory needed to be changed.

  Raymond was nothing more than a lost schizophrenic. His thinking was being distorted by an acute anxiety-depression.

  Raymond was here to have sex with one or many local women in order to found a religious cult with controlled bloodlines.

  Raymond was here to foil the sexual coupling of a man and woman who were destined to produce dangerous issue.

  Raymond was here on a personal mission to leave behind evidence of a pre-history sufficient to establish his future claims to be a god-head.

  Raymond was a vagrant who tells a strange story convincingly well.

  Raymond was the Son of God.

  Raymond was Satan incarnate.

  Raymond was a personified force of entropy.

  Raymond should be prevented from doing anything.

  Preventing Raymond from doing anything would only satisfy whatever expectation the distant future had of the distant past.

  Raymond was an unnecessary distraction.

  Raymond should be given carte blanche to do whatever he had to do.

  Raymond should be tortured unmercifully to discourage the future from interfering with God’s plan.

  Raymond should be hypnotised to see whether he carried any useful knowledge with regard to precious metal deposits, or future agricultural practices.

  Raymond should be treated just like you’d want your own children to be treated if they were stranded or lost in a far-off country.

  Uncertainties

  Ray would remember wandering down a rusty track between luminously yellow fields of canola, and feeling sad with regard to an episode recently past.

  He’d been visiting Jodi Everett at her parents’ farm, and while her parents had gone off to see their business partners, she’d taken him into her bedroom to listen to music. He found Jodi’s music less captivating than her boundless enthusiasm for it. The bassline pulled at Ray’s stomach.

  ‘You can only really understand this music if you take drugs with it,’ Jodi told him, and Ray would have happily shared drugs with her, but she had none.

  He remembered feeling uncertain about what she might e
xpect from him. He didn’t know Jodi well, but he liked her, and she was pretty. Ray very much wanted to kiss her, and to be wanted by her, but this overt friendliness seemed forced. Out of character. As Ray lay on her bed, examining the cover of a compact disc, Jodi bent over to kiss him on the lips.

  Before he could register what happened, and invite her to join him in a passionate embrace, the girl was above the bed, taking off her T-shirt. Though Jodi’s body was young, and beautifully proportioned, she was trembling uncontrollably, and not far off tears, despite earnest attempts to smile.

  He couldn’t remember exactly what he said next, or why he’d chosen to deny her what they both wanted. Ray might have said something about wanting to, but needing to be aware that a stronger force was guiding him. But even as he said it, he knew that he was making excuses for his own confusion.

  This was a girl Ray should have been able to love wholeheartedly. All he’d managed to do was confuse and embarrass her.

  Covering her breasts with her arms, Jodi told Ray to leave. Even as he backed out of the room, he felt that he’d seen her face, that expression, those exact same tears, somewhere before. And he could have killed himself for not embracing Jodi and trying to comfort her.

  He was walking aimlessly down this dirt track, trying to make sense of his true motives and desires, when he met his classmate Gavin McGibbon riding a bike in the opposite direction. When Ray said hi to Gavin, the local boy dropped an abrupt broadie.

  ‘You recognise me, don’t you?’ Gavin asked.

  ‘From school.’

  ‘Before that, or since then. However you want to put it. We know each other.’

  Ray knew nothing of the sort.

  Gavin was certain Ray knew about his own agency. He said that Ray had been sent back to perform an assassination. He’d been required to kill Gavin before he fucked Jodi. And Gavin refused to believe the boy from the future when he said that he’d been given no precise mission.

  ‘The thing is,’ Gavin told him, ‘I don’t give a fuck how badly the history of this planet turns out, and I’m certainly not going to stand back and let you do whatever you’re intending to do to me or Jode. I’m not going to kill you, Ray, I’m going to annul you. I’ve got you factored in.’

  Raymond remembered struggling over the knife, the fierce determination on Gavin’s face, a punch in the gut that might have been a stab wound, and his own desire to take hold of Gavin’s knife and kill him. He remembered thinking that Gavin was the dragon he had to slay.

  The two boys from the future were grappling for control of the knife when Ray woke in a sweaty panic. Collecting the details of this dream did nothing to relieve his confusion.

  Ray was a vagrant in time. His new life, for all true intents and purposes, was aimless. Though he desperately wanted to believe in Allah’s will, Ray could no longer feel certain he was an agent of that will.

  The Dragon Slays Himself

  Bob Higgs was never going to admit his impotence to Jack Carter or Mrs Peng. Dealing with aliens taught him that sometimes it’s best to bluff and draw things out, to let events take their course before claiming any course of events was a consequence of your decisive intervention. The best possible outcome.

  Caught in a tricky situation, an experienced practitioner always floats the need for random, apparently irrational measures designed to suggest that only he could know what needed to be done to safeguard Mintook and surrounding shires from the worst case ramifications of having a motherfucker in their midst.

  Bob Higgs instructed Jack Carter to close down the local bakery on Thursdays. He told Mrs Peng to introduce a prayer before each class. Rear-angle parking in town must be immediately replaced by parallel parking.

  He insisted that the boy from the future be sniffed by Ted Anguin’s border collie cross every morning. Dogs were unusually sensitive to a scent of life beyond their own deaths. Ted’s dog would go rabid if Raymond was on the verge of annulling himself.

  To Mrs Peng, Bob Higgs confided an absolute certainty that the boy knew far more than he’d been letting on. Raymond’s claim that interventions were irrevocably factored in was a bluff.

  When the woman lamented that they couldn’t possibly know whether they were doing more harm than good, Higgs assured her that they could always know what they felt in their hearts. Intentions counted.

  As the pair were discussing putting Ray on a strict braised chicken and rice diet, Jack Carter and a young constable arrived with news that Jodi Everett was missing. The bedroom window was wide open, and her bed hadn’t been slept in. The most recent entry in the girl’s diary expressed a desire to have a child by the boy from the future.

  Carter wanted Big Higgsy to tell him whether they should get a specialist search team sent up from Melbourne.

  Bob Higgs was curiously unmoved by the Inspector’s distress.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother,’ the fat man told Carter. ‘You’ll find her soon enough. He will have vaporised before he could hide the body.’

  ‘You reckon he’s killed her?’

  ‘Nothing more certain. Fucked her, then left her to rot. When you DNA test the semen, you’ll find that the Everett girl was our boy Raymond’s mum.’

  Mrs Peng couldn’t make it to the door before a stream of vomit forced its way through her fingers. Not even this shook the consultant’s air of calm. Everything Higgs first predicted had come to fruition.

  ‘Sickest way to commit suicide. Scouring time for a way to annul yourself … But that’s the terrorist mentality. They resent the fact that our values are enduring values.’

  Higgs shook the Inspector by the hand. He was sorry things had turned out the way they had, but there was nothing they could have done. This stuff happened a lot more than you heard about. The only unusual aspect of this case was that the killer had gone out of his way to draw attention to himself.

  The expert from Melbourne rubbed the distraught Principal’s shoulder and told her not to blame herself. At least one thing Raymond said had been true. Everything was factored in. Ray’s intervention turned each of them into unwitting agents. Now it was time for Bob Higgs to get back to his own family in the city. He asked Mrs Peng to pass on his regards to Mr Peng and the boys.

  While these farewells were being exchanged, Catherine O’Shaunessy, editor of the Mintook Times, burst into the lounge. She had excellent news. Jodi Everett was safe and well. After deciding against surrendering her virginity to Ray, she’d spent the night in the cemetery. She was cold and hungry. More embarrassed than anything.

  Embarrassments gathered like a storm.

  Just after lunch, Bob Higgs, a man reputed to be expert in all things alien, checked out of the Railway Hotel at Mintook, and directed his metal-green Statesman toward the affluent south-eastern suburbs of the state capital. In their subsequent conversations, neither Jack Carter nor Mrs Peng ever mentioned Bob Higgs or the consultant’s outrageous fee.

  Waiting

  Mintook’s harvest that year was a clinker, and a record twenty-three Year 12 students were offered university places. After two years of solid toiling, Narelle Tyler became pregnant. Despite this, she and Kim were keen for Raymond to stay on as their guest. The boy from the future had a sweet manner and made friends easily. Dogs were especially fond of him. Ray could get even the most unruly mongrel to do anything.

  Raymond proved to be an intelligent, attentive student with a predictable interest in history. Even with so much doubt surrounding the length of his stay, the boy hoped to win a scholarship to continue his studies beyond Year 12.

  The young men who might have imagined Ray to be an insuperable adversary were finally won over by the outsider’s capacity to tell a killer yarn. Ray’s blue stories were several shades bluer than anything ever told in Mintook, and his audience left it for Ray to judge whether speaking this filth conflicted with his regular vague references to Allah.

  It was as a cricketer that Ray really made his mark. Blessed with elastic wrists, the cricket bat was a wand in h
is hands. As the boy from the future chalked up a succession of massive scores, observers expressed the view that Ray must have been privy to sophisticated coaching. Few believed him when he said that he’d never heard of cricket before.

  So huge was his enjoyment of the game, Ray began to hope that his mission was to save cricket from extinction. So far as the newcomer could gather, cricket was all about marshalling the forces of time; a game of patience and opportunism.

  Once the initial excitement wore off, girls were less obvious in their attempts to win Ray’s attention. Many chose to refer to him as the local cricket star before mentioning that this visitor from another time was Mintook’s harbinger of destiny.

  The most enthusiastic of Ray’s female admirers, Jodi, and the boy from the future soon became thought of as an item. This affection notwithstanding, Jodi made no more nocturnal flights, and declared herself to be in no rush to give up her ‘virtue’. Knowing too well what these declarations meant in local terms, Kim Tyler always made sure that Ray had condoms to safeguard against a moment when present and future might conspire to merge rather too dramatically.

  At first, everyone waited, but gradually consciousness of the wait diminished, and Mintook people began to think of Raymond as just one of many agents of destiny rather than time’s ultimate cannibal. Newspapers were printed, bread was baked, buses were caught and missed. Children were born and several older residents died. The McGibbon family shifted back to Melbourne. If Mintook’s boy from the future was going to evaporate, he’d do so when the time suited and not before. After the final of the cricket, hopefully.

  Even Mrs Peng began to think of Ray as just another boy in whites who cycled down her street on his way to the cricket ground every Saturday. These assimilations were pretty much her experience of life in the towns around Koorook. Outsiders came, and they were a big deal for a while. You often wondered what they thought this community could possibly do for them. Violent conflict seemed inevitable. Then, the sun rose one day, and it was as if they’d always been there, hand-picked for the town by some greater force of necessity.