Something Fishy

by Shane Maloney

  I reached into the glovebox for another cigarette. My second in an hour. I was practically chain-smoking. Then, squatting at the side of the road, I tried to gather my wits. The bush was motionless, monochromatic, an ancient daguerreotype. Pools of black gathered at the feet of massive trees, grey slabs of bark peeling from their trunks. The milky wash of an overcast sky seeped through their dappled foliage. The humidity was oppressive and beads of sweat trickled from my armpits.

  What the hell did I think I was doing? Right at the very moment that my life was regaining balance, when romance seemed not likely—okay—but possible, I’d headed for the hills in hot pursuit of a half-seen face. What was more important, settling the scores of the past or making something of the future?

  It was nearly ten. Down on the Lorne foreshore, beer and sunburn were brewing a heady mix, testing the tolerance of the coppers. At the Falls, Red was moshing it up with Jodie Prentice. Back at Gusto, the Domaine Chandon was flowing and an intriguing, accomplished woman in a jade-green dress was wondering, I hoped, where that Murray Whelan fellow had disappeared to.

  The bush, stilled by my noisy arrival, was coming back to life. Mopoke calls, cicada thrums, possumy ruttings in the canopy. I ground my cigarette under foot, making sure it was completely extinguished. It was time to stop chasing geese around the ranges.

  As I rose from my haunches, I heard the clunk of gears being engaged, then the muted wheeze of an engine. I dropped back into a crouch and leaned forward, every fibre straining into the variegated night. Across the gully and slightly below me, a vehicle was labouring through the bush. I squinted in the direction of the noise, attempting to pinpoint its source. I caught the whine of a gearbox, the slow crunch of tyres. But no lights. The driver, it seemed reasonable to assume, didn’t want to be noticed.

  The sound receded. I got into the Magna, manoeuvred it back onto the track and crawled forward, aircon off, window down, ears cocked, headlights off. Whoever he was, the fact that he didn’t want to be followed was reason enough to follow him.

  The track hugged the rim of the gully, switched back, then turned again, heading away from the source of the noise. The ground became flatter, the vegetation less dense, stringybarks with an understorey of scrubby vines. I cut the motor, got out, and listened. Nothing.

  I walked back along the track, eyes fixed on the ground.

  Enough light from the overcast sky made it through the canopy to throw a faint shadow in the wheel ruts. Fifty metres from the car, tyre treads had squashed the edge of the track. The treads ran into the bush. I followed them. The ground was hard-packed and thick with tufts of native grass. The tyre marks petered out.

  Maybe they’d been made by the Hilux. Maybe not. What did I know? I was no black tracker. But I’d come this far, so I figured I might as well exhaust the possibilities before turning around and going back to Gusto.

  I slipped the Magna into neutral and rolled it off the track. I left the key in the ignition ready for a fast getaway and put my wallet under the seat. I took a torch from the glovebox, pocketed my mobile phone and set off.

  Swinging the torch back and forth across the leaf litter, I advanced into the undergrowth. After a few minutes, the beam found a patch of exposed earth, the clay ploughed by wheel ruts. Somebody had come this way in a wetter season, broken the surface. But the ground had turned back to iron and the trail faded away, lost in a thicket of bracken between towering gums.

  The torch beam flickered, then faded completely. I pressed on, picking my way through a stand of flattened bracken. The terrain dropped away to a fern-filled gully, the ground spongy with rotted logs and leaf mulch. I climbed back up the slope and started again, casting about for spoor like an illustration in Scouting for Boys. Absurd figure in Bombay bloomers demonstrates correct technique for detection of rogue wildebeest. I might as well have been wearing a blindfold. It was so dark in places that a man would have been hard put to find his local member.

  My shirt was sticky with sweat, my knees caked with dirt, the bare skin of my legs and arms livid with nicks and scrapes. Fuck this shit, I thought. Time to pack it in, come at the matter from a different angle.

  For some reason, the track wasn’t where I left it. I retraced my steps, scanning the forest for previously noted landmarks. A dappled gum with a skirt of shredded bark, a cleft boulder with a sapling sprouting from it, a quartz-strewn slope. But they, too, seemed to have wandered away. I began to suspect that I might not be headed in the right direction.

  No immediate cause for alarm, I told myself. The track must be somewhere nearby, it’s just a matter of taking a methodical approach, applying your mind to the problem. You are not lost. You have merely paused to orient yourself.

  Five minutes later, I conceded that I was utterly bushed.

  According to received wisdom, the correct procedure when lost in the bush is to remain where you are. Do not risk exacerbating the situation by wandering around. If you have a pack of cards, deal yourself a hand of patience. Before long someone will lean over your shoulder and point out that the red queen goes on the black king. Failing that, simply wait for your absence to be noted and a search initiated.

  On the other hand, I could ring for help. I pulled out my mobile phone, switched it on and looked down at the keypad.

  Ring who, I wondered? Roadside assistance. The Hansel and Gretel helpline. The House Ways and Means Committee? I dialled 000 and pushed the send button. ‘Out of Range’ glowed the LCD. I tried again, my number in Melbourne, testing. Same result. Zip.

  I scrabbled uphill, hoping for a better outcome on higher ground. Still no luck. The ground kept dropping away, always some gully yawning before me. The understorey was so thick that I almost needed a machete to get through it. And still no signal. If I kept punching at the phone, it would go the way of the torch, battery flat. Panic began to take hold. I was trapped in a labyrinth, hoist on my own petard, an idiot.

  I changed strategy. Rather than heading uphill in search of a signal, I hunted the lower ground, plunging down gullies, hoping to reach a creek bed. If I was not entirely mistaken, always a possibility, I was somewhere on the seaward side of the divide. If I followed a creek downstream, it would lead me in the right direction.

  Down, down, I went, momentum building. Then my left foot hooked a root and I fell, crying out as a bolt of pain shot through my ankle. Flat on my arse, I skidded and skittered down a sharp incline, snatching at branches to slow my descent.

  I landed hard, ankle throbbing, chest heaving. Keep thrashing through the mulga like this, I decided, and I’d do myself a serious damage. No point in continuing to buggerise around in the dark, risking a fatal accident. Follow the manual, stay put, wait until morning. I pressed my back against a tree fern and tried to get comfortable.

  As the thump of my heartbeat slowed and the rasp of my breathing settled, I became acutely aware that night was filled with sound, alive with movement. Faint rustlings in the leaf litter, reptilian slitherings, bandicoot scuttlings, the snick and hum of insects, the omnipresent chorus of cicadas. Soon, my every sinew was tuned to the concert of the forest. I was in the dress circle.

  Gradually, I became aware of an intermittent murmur at the far periphery of my hearing. Two distinct components, two alternating tones, snatches. It was coming from further along the debris-choked gully in which I was sitting.

  I stood up and began limping towards it, picking my way over rotting logs and lichen-covered boulders. The sound grew clearer. Somebody was talking.

  I heard the words quite clearly.

  ‘A pizza.’

  There was a contemptuous hoot, then silence.

  I kept going, all my senses alert, creeping through the undergrowth. Maybe the owner of the voice was benevolent, a potential rescuer. Or maybe it was Syce.

  A hundred metres along, the gully became a dry creek bed, a floor of sand and pebbles between sharply rising banks. High above, the canopy parted a little and a milky wash leaked down from the night sky, creating
a chiaroscuro world of deep shadows and luminous space. I felt my way forward, ankle throbbing but not unbearable.

  ‘Bag of ice. Any warmer, you could poach an egg in this beer.’

  ‘I’m not your fucken errand boy, you know?’

  The voices had started again, just above me now, at the top of a steep rock wall. Snatches. Two men, it sounded like. Bickering about who was responsible for the poor quality of the catering.

  ‘Anything’d be better than this canned crap you’ve been feeding me.’

  ‘Yap, yap, yap…nothing but bitch the whole time.’

  The exchange was intermittent, lethargic, rehearsed, like the conversation of a long-married couple. But it offered no clue as to the identity of the speakers, apart from the fact that there were two of them and they were men. Neither was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Both spoke a flat, workaday Australian, one with a tinge of second-generation wog.

  Hunched, darting, all very commando, I worked my way along the narrow watercourse to where the bank became less steep and overhanging. Looking back, I caught a flicker of movement, elongated shadows reaching up into the branches, thrown by the white glow of a camping lantern.

  I caught the glint of water, a necklace of shallow pools, hovering mosquitoes, the ribbit of a frog. A low wall of sand-filled plastic bags had been laid across the creek bed. Water was banked up behind it, its surface flecked with dead leaves, busy with bugs. A heavy-duty hose emerged from the pond and disappeared into the darkness. I raised a cupped palm of the tepid, musty-tasting water to my lips, then skirted the pool and continued, my ear tuned to the murmur of voices at the top of the bank.

  A few metres past the dam, the creek bed widened into a flat wash of gritty sand and loose pebbles, maybe ten metres wide. Tyre tracks led downstream and a vehicle had been driven up onto a flat area on the bank. It was the Hilux. I put my hand on the hood to be sure, felt the lingering heat of the engine.

  The bank was low, easy to scale, but the ground was uneven and densely thicketed. I tiptoed up the bank, my left ankle still not pulling its weight, trying to get some sense of the set-up without betraying my presence. The dam and the creek bed roadway pointed to an established campsite. Illegal, in that the state forest was off-limits to campers, but playing fast and loose with forestry by-laws was hardly a federal case, not in itself. Point was, whose camp was it?

  Wired, every nerve at battle stations, I circled around, looking for the best approach to the light. At least now I had a potential exit route, the creek bed. If the driver of the Hilux turned out to be Rodney Syce, or if things just got too hairy for me, I could follow the tyre ruts to the nearest police station.

  In the meantime, I was edging through a clump of saw-toothed shrubs, the ground between them cut with shallow trenches. I plucked a leaf, crushed it between my fingers and sniffed. Cannabis. A small crop of it, irregularly spaced, twenty or thirty plants, head-high.

  Okay. So we had a dope-growing operation of some sort. That accounted for the dam, the hose, the concealed location. And weren’t petty crims sometimes employed to baby-sit dope plantations? The Syce scenario was firming.

  And my nostrils were twitching, picking up a pungent smell. Not the dope but something fishy, its source closer to the light. I edged forward, the hiss of the gas lantern now audible. A square-edged structure loomed in faint silhouette.

  I waited, letting my eyes adjust to the complexities of the near-total darkness, until the outline became an aluminium shed, garage-sized, its metal surface camouflaged with rough dabs of paint. The pong was coming from inside. A dark-on-dark rectangle suggested an open door. From the other side of the shed’s thin walls came the voice I had come to think of as The Grumbler. It was grumbling.

  ‘Jesus, what a way to spend New Year’s Eve, hanging around this god-forsaken dump with a half-wit possum fucker. What’s keeping him, for Chrissake? You said he’d be here in half an hour, it’s been twice that.’

  ‘Sooner he turns up the better,’ said the other voice. ‘Ten days of listening to your fucken belly-aching, I’m fed up.’

  Easing the torch from my pocket, I stepped to the opening in the shed. The flashlight summoned its reserves, glowed wanly for a few seconds, then expired once again. Before it did, I glimpsed an earthen floor, a pump, a generator, gas bottles, a bench with a four-ring burner and grimy sink, a cooking pot. By the look of it, and the smell, the cultivation of marijuana was not the only illicit activity taking place here. If I wasn’t mistaken, this was some sort of abalone-processing set-up. It seemed reasonable to assume that it was not a government-licensed, industry-standard, health-inspected facility. The fishy smell was vile, overwhelming.

  A weathered aluminium dinghy on a boat-trailer was parked beside the shed, brick wheel chocks. Above it, a tarpaulin was slung between the shed and the branches of a tree. Even from a helicopter, the place would be almost impossible to spot. Peering between the shed and the boat, I saw a clearing lit by the spill from a Primus lantern, a gas bottle with a glowing white mantle above it. The lantern sat on a folding table in a tent walled with insect-screen, the side flaps rolled up. Tiny moths swarmed over the screen.

  A man was sitting at the table, his back to me. Shorts, work shirt, the outline of a beard. My suspect. I could see that he was playing solitaire, hear the faint slap of the cards. A man well equipped for the bush. But I couldn’t see his face.

  ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘How many fucken times I gotta tell ya? You want a slash, go into the bush. Stop fucken stinking up the place.’

  The other bloke was standing a few metres away, at the far edge of the circle of light. He, too, had his back to me. He was stocky, roughly the same shape as the card player. He was naked except for a pair of mustard-coloured jockettes and rubber flip-flops. His hairy shoulders drooped above the sagging flesh of his torso. He was pissing loudly against the trunk of the tree.

  ‘Yeah, like it doesn’t stink already, those abs you been cooking up.’ He shook himself and turned. Sweat glistened on his high, domed forehead and stubble crawled down his face, thickening into a goatee.

  I saw but I didn’t believe. It was Tony Melina, proprietor of La Luna restaurant, steaks and seafood a speciality. Tony Melina, runaway spouse.

  Dumbfounded, I squeezed my eyes shut, shook my head and looked again. Yup, it was Tony all right. But what was he doing here? It didn’t make sense. According to his wife, Tony Melina was disporting himself with some floozie in the fleshpots of Asia. That, at least, was plausible. This was utterly baffling, as incomprehensible as Section 27(a) of the Health Insurance Act. More mystifying even than a Liberal’s ethical framework. Tony Melina? Here? With Rodney Syce? I sniffed my fingertips. That dope, maybe it was some hybrid superstrain. Perhaps I was hallucinating.

  Tony stepped forward into the light. He looked like a washed-up gorilla, the missing link between man and doormat. He raised his foot and shook it.

  ‘You want a hygienic camp?’ he said. ‘Try showing a little trust.’

  A chain rattled. It was connected to his ankle, running across the ground to the screened tent. The card player gave a derisory snort and shuffled the cards.

  ‘And have you take off again? Not on your nellie.’

  ‘Why would I take off now?’ Tony whined. ‘Soon as he arrives, we do the business, I’m out of here.’

  ‘Just doing my job, pal. You’ll get unlocked when he gets here, not before. You know the drill.’

  Tony grunted, then shuffled into the tent, dragging the chain after him. ‘Far as I’m concerned, it won’t be a minute too soon,’ he said, plonking himself down and curling his fist around a can.

  Things were getting weirder by the second.

  Tony was obviously a prisoner, yet his demeanour suggested that to some degree he accepted the situation. Did Rita have a hand in this? Was some sort of rough justice being dispensed here? It was one thing to dob her philandering husband in to the authorities, quite another to chain him up in the Otway Forest wearing
only last week’s underpants. Who was the card player? Was he Rodney Syce or not? And what was that fucking terrible smell?

  Every fibre of my being was telling me to get the hell out of there, follow the creek bed downhill, find a road, summon the cavalry. Let the coppers sort it out.

  But I couldn’t leave yet, not without getting a clearer view of the card player’s face, enough to satisfy me on the Syce front. Heart pounding, I inched into the gap between the boat-trailer and the shed. The inky shadow of the tarpaulin canopy ran right to the edge of the clearing, as close as I could creep without giving myself away. But to get a well-lit view of the man’s face, I needed a bit of altitude and a better angle. Slowly, heartbeat by heartbeat, I put my right foot, the good one, on the mudguard of the boat-trailer. Easing down on the springs, I hoisted myself upright. Left leg jutting sideways for balance, I leaned over the boat, craning for a clearer view.

  That’s when I saw the mutt. It was lying on an old sack beside the screened tent, licking its balls. A short-haired mongrel of a thing, a stump with legs, some sort of kelpie-pitbull cross.

  The trailer’s springs squeaked beneath me. The sound couldn’t have been softer. The dog pricked up its ears and raised its muzzle, did a radar sweep. I froze. The bloke at the table turned over a card, oblivious. The dog stood up. I stared at it, not daring to breathe, my mouth dry, my ears filled with the boomf, boomf, boomfing of my heart.

  The dog’s ears quivered. It took a step forward, sniffed the air, tensed. Somewhere in its canine recesses, input was being assessed, conclusions drawn, sinews mobilised. It swung its snout in my direction and emitted a low, carnivorous growl.