Something Fishy

by Shane Maloney

  I grabbed the cane mast, wrapped my legs around the buoy and mounted it. It sank beneath my buttocks. Instead of being chin-deep in the water, I was now midriff-deep.

  From my marginally improved position, however, I could see the shore. A faint light flickered on the beach, a fire perhaps. A sound came across the water. It was almost human.

  ‘Tonight’s the night,’ wailed the voice. ‘Gonna be all right.’

  I didn’t believe a word of it. Party noises joined the music, well-oiled revelry.

  ‘Help,’ I bleated. Help me if you can. I’m feeling drowned. But help was beyond earshot. My strangulated plea was a reedy vibration.

  After Rod Stewart came Dire Straits. As if things weren’t bad enough already.

  My body heat was being leached away. My skin had turned to gooseflesh and my teeth were castanets striking up the overture to hypothermia. I had, at most, another two hours. By the time the music faded, half an hour later, my respiration rate was so high that I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs to raise a decent shout.

  I hugged the thin sliver of bamboo, jiggled up and down, braced for imminent shark attack and tried to distract myself with hot thoughts. The blazing sands of the Sahara. A steaming mug of cocoa. Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise in bed. When that didn’t work I pissed my pants, luxuriating in the brief suffusion of warmth.

  But the cold was unendurable. I slid off the polystyrene ball and examined the orange nylon rope that moored it to the pot on the floor of the sea. Somewhere far below me, a trapped lobster was facing an identical problem, racking its crustacean brain for a means of escape.

  The rope was spliced, tighter than a preference swap in a leadership spill. Impossible to untie. I bit a chunk from the polystyrene, then another. Gnawing with my teeth and tearing with my nails, I worked at the ball.

  Water flooded my mouth. My fingers were numb. My jaw jack-hammered. After an eternity, I managed to break the buoy in half. The bamboo mast toppled into the water. The rope sank without trace. I’d done what I could for my incarcerated crustacean companion. He was on his own now.

  All that remained of the buoy was two irregular hemispheres of polystyrene and a scattering of little white pellets. I stuffed the two lumps of foam up the front of my shirt and began to breaststroke, high in the water.

  This time, I didn’t fight the current. I let it carry me along, steering across it at an oblique angle, working my way gradually shoreward, alternating between backstroke and breaststroke. Gradually, the land moved closer. But Christ on a bike, I was fucking freezing.

  It was nearly five o’clock. I was hyperventilating, numb and shivering. Rolling onto my back, I twitched and gave up the ghost.

  High above me, the firmament faded to a blur. One by one, the stars went out. Through the water came the grind of icebergs. The sands of time turned to crystals of ice. A pale radiance was all that I could see. Faces looked down at me. Curious, not unkind.

  It came to me that I was passing between rows of columns like those of a temple. And that the faces staring down at me were those of ancient Greeks.

  My shoulder struck something hard. Thought flickered in my sluggish brain. The current had carried me all the way to Lorne. I was passing beneath the pier. The faces belonged to old Greek men, jigging for squid. Was there some law, I wondered, some clause in the Fisheries Act which required that at least one male of Hellenic origin with a squid rig be permanently present on every pier or jetty in Australian territorial waters?

  I rolled over and the swell surged beneath me. It hefted me forward as the current pivoted like a hinge around the point at the end of the bay. Beyond it, rimming the curve of Loutitt Bay, the town glowed. The shore was just a few metres away. I clawed at the water and felt the grainy drag of the bottom against my toes. Another surge of the swell and I was flopping through the shallows, Robinson Crusoe crawling up the beach.

  You’re alive, I told myself. Hallelujah. Praise be to Whatsisname. That little guy in your pocket. The one on the thingamabob.

  My brain was frozen. My thoughts moved at the speed of glaciers. Fingers trembling, I fished the cross from my pocket. It was important, that much I remembered. But why?

  A gaggle of youths materialised, staring down at a barefoot man with bloodshot eyes, his clothes sodden, two foam hemispheres bulging in his shirt like skewiff falsies. Unable to speak, I held up the cross.

  ‘You’re too late, mate,’ slurred one of the juveniles, a pimply half-wit with his hat on backwards, his shirt tied around his waist and a can of rum and lolly water in his hand. ‘We’ve already sold our souls to Satan.’

  He snatched the cross from my hand and flung it into the sea.

  Misery on a stick, I discarded my primitive flotation device and lumbered along the beach. Blue with cold, teeth hammering out the Rach 9. Heat, I needed heat.

  A downy light suffused the scene with the pearl grey of pre-dawn. Empty cans and crumpled food wrappers littered the trampled sand, the detritus of a massive communal booze-up. A faint whiff of cordite hung in the air, a reminder of the fireworks five hours earlier. Figures shifted obscurely at the periphery of my vision, hunkered down in the boulders and vegetation at the edge of the beach.

  ‘Not here,’ whispered a female voice. ‘I’ll get sand in it.’

  Lights were still blazing at the surf lifesaving club. I lurched towards it, shorts clinging, bow-legged as a crotch-kicked cowpoke. Two and a half hours deep-sea marination had done wonders for my twisted ankle. My hobble was now merely a limp. My jaw, however, was snapping so violently that I feared for my tongue. Goosebumps covered my flesh like a relief map of the Hindu Kush. Get to the lifesaving club, I urged myself, to people who know the art of defrosting. That’s why it’s called the lifesaving club.

  I reached a door, yanked it open, found a concrete-floored corridor. I wobbled inside, tottered, careened off a wall, felt a door handle, smelled disinfectant. A light switch found my hand. The changing rooms. Metal lockers, slatted benches, a row of showers.

  The water ran tepid. Tepid was encouraging. I cranked up the volume and stood beneath the stream, clothes and all. Miracle of miracles, it grew warmer and warmer, until it was so hot that I was reaching for the cold tap.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, turning from pale blue to pale pink, stripping off my clothes to find a penis so puckered and brine-bleached that it looked like an albino axolotl. I slumped to the floor and let hot water cascade over me, sobbing and retching and pissing down the plughole. Me, not the hot water.

  Just as my inner permafrost was beginning to melt, a man appeared in the doorway. He was about seventy years old. Leather face, leather arms, leather legs, immaculate white tee-shirt, shorts, socks and trainers. He blazed with irritation and rapped at the sign on the door with his knuckles.

  ‘Can’t you read, bloody idiot?’ barked the surfside ancient. ‘This is the Ladies. Gawn, out you get.’

  His steely gaze brooked no contradiction. I climbed back into my sodden clothes and beat a retreat, finger-combing my hair as I went.

  The foreshore was deserted, its swathe of couch-grass mashed and litter-strewn. At its centre sat the skeleton of a cuboid whale, the scaffolding of the deserted concert stage. I thought again about Red, wondered what kind of a night he’d had up at the Falls.

  Lorne was a hangover waiting to happen. Streetlights shone down on empty asphalt, their sodium glow bleeding into the grey wash of the imminent day. A girl in a bikini-top and denim mini tottered down the middle of Mountjoy Parade in absurdly-high platform sandals, her mascara smeared, a bottle of Malibu in one hand. Drunken shouts reverberated in the far distance, punctuated by the honking of plastic party horns. The mating call of the shitfaced dickhead. In the foreshore carpark, the flashing light of a stationary ambulance showed the limbs of crashed-out party animals protruding from car windows and the tail-gates of station wagons.

  The police temporary command centre was gone, along with the reinforcements bussed from Melbourne fo
r the revels. The only sign of the law enforcement community was a scattering of horse-shit and a few piles of orange plastic crowd barrier in the gutter.

  It was almost six o’clock. Magpies were carolling and kookaburras cackling. Where the sky met the sea, the nicotine-stained fingers of dawn were already at work, levering open the first day of the new year. Even in my half-thawed state, I could tell that it was going to be a hot one, a real stinker.

  The police station was up the hill behind the pub, a weatherboard building in a residential street, a small cellblock out the back. I took a deep breath, wiped my nose on my shoulder and pushed open the front door.

  The counter was unattended. A ragged chorus of ‘Born in the USA’ was coming from the direction of the lock-up. I pushed the buzzer. After a couple of minutes, the racket out the back subsided and a beefy young rozzer appeared. He had damp patches at the armpits and the demeanour of a man at the fag-end of a long shift. The tag on his shirt pocket identified him as Constable Leeuwyn. He gave me the once-over, unimpressed, and suppressed a yawn.

  ‘Can I help you?’ His tone implied that he hoped not.

  ‘I’d like to speak to the senior officer on duty,’ I said.

  ‘I’m the watchhouse keeper, if that’s senior enough for you. Or you can wait for the sergeant. He’ll be here at seven.’

  ‘Is there a CIB attached to this station?’

  ‘Nearest CIB’s Torquay,’ he said. Torquay was nearly an hour’s drive away. ‘What’s it concerning?’

  ‘A murder,’ I said. ‘And the whereabouts of Rodney Syce. The Remand Centre escapee. He’s got a bush camp somewhere up there.’ I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the hills behind the town. ‘There’s a fair chance of collaring him if you’re quick enough.’

  The cop narrowed his eyes, letting me know that he’d spent a long night listening to bullshit and his tolerance was pretty well exhausted. ‘Is that right, sir?’

  ‘I can assure you this is not a joke. I’m not crazy. I’m a member of parliament.’

  Constable Leeuwyn’s expression suggested he did not consider these categories to be mutually exclusive.

  ‘And I’m not drunk, either,’ I went on. ‘If I look like crap, it’s because I’ve spent half the night in the sea in fear for my life. I am not playing funny buggers here, officer. I’m here because I’ve just witnessed a number of very serious crimes involving a wanted fugitive.’

  My high-horse tone did the trick. The copper, alert now, laid a clip-board on the counter between us. ‘Do you have any identification, sir?’

  ‘Not on me,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure you can check. My name is Murray Whelan. I’m the member for Melbourne Upper in the Legislative Council.’

  The constable took down my name, address and DOB, then disappeared through a door into a muster room with computers on the desks. I paced the worn linoleum of the vestibule in bare feet, keeping the blood flowing to my still-chilled extremities. The walls were hung with framed certificates of appreciation and commemorative photographs of civic events. In one picture, a representative of the Rotary Club was shown presenting the results of a fund-raising fun-run to an officer of the Country Fire Authority. Jake Martyn was holding one end of the cheque.

  After ten minutes, the constable reappeared. Word had evidently come down the line that I was to be treated with kid gloves. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr Whelan,’ he said. ‘The sergeant will be here shortly to take charge of matters. In the meantime, you’d better tell me all about it.’ He raised the flap on the counter, inviting me to step through. ‘Can I get you a cup of something?’

  ‘Tea with milk and sugar,’ I said, my gratitude unfeigned. ‘Please.’

  We went through to the muster-room where I dictated my statement between sips of hot tea. Three cups, it took, and twenty minutes. Leeuwyn two-finger typed my account of the night’s doings straight into a computer, interrupted only by periodic visits to the cells to quell outbreaks of communal singing. I stuck to the bare bones and he tapped at the keys without comment or question, even when I mentioned Jake Martyn, whose name was almost certainly known to him.

  When I got to the part where Syce fed Tony Melina’s ear to the dog, the young copper looked up from the keyboard and opened his mouth as if about to warn me that telling outrageous fibs to the wallopers is a chargeable offence. I held his gaze until he turned back to the computer.

  He printed out the finished statement and, as I was signing it, the sergeant arrived.

  He was a solid man in his iron-grey fifties, with a military moustache and the bearing to match. His cheeks and chin were still raw from the razor and, judging by the bags under his eyes, the shave had come on the heels of a minimum of sleep. The buttons of his powder-blue shirt were taut over a midriff like a sack of concrete.

  He introduced himself as Sergeant Terry Pendergast, took the statement from my hand and led me into his office, his demeanour correct and businesslike.

  The sergeant’s office was a cubby hole off the muster room. There was a large map of the district on the wall and a stand of fishing rods in the corner. He wedged himself behind an almost-bare desk and invited me to sit on the other side of it. He put on a pair of reading glasses and studied my statement. He took his time. Occasionally his gaze shifted from the page to my face, then back again. He stroked his moustache once or twice. There was coming and going in the outer office. I may have tapped my feet and chewed on a knuckle or two.

  ‘Hmmm,’ said the sergeant at last. ‘Quite a story.’ He laid down the statement, folded his reading glasses and slipped them into his shirt pocket. He pushed his seat back and crossed his hands on his stomach. The ball, I understood, was in my court.

  ‘If you’ve spoken to Melbourne,’ I said, ‘you’ll be aware that I have a history in regard to Syce. You might even have been told that I’ve got a tendency to imagine I’ve seen him.’

  Pendergast gave a slight nod, confiming that he’d been backgrounded. ‘And do you?’

  ‘Syce killed the woman I loved,’ I said, ‘and our unborn child. So, yes, I’ll admit to a degree of obsession. But this isn’t like those other times. I realise it all sounds pretty far fetched, Jake Martyn’s involvement and so on. And I don’t have anything to substantiate my claims. But I’d have to be certifiably mad to make up something as unlikely as this.’

  Pendergast gave me the copper’s eyeball, as though considering the possibility. The salt encrusted on my printed hibiscus didn’t help. Then, abruptly, he swivelled in his seat and directed his freshly shaven chin at the map on the wall. ‘So where do you reckon this bush camp is, Mr Whelan?’

  The map was large-scale, the contours of the hills so dense they showed as crumples in the paper. Filaments of blue ran between the wrinkles, dozens of creeks and rivers. I got up, put my finger on Lorne, ran it up to Mount Sabine Road and traced the route along the ridge of the ranges to an unnamed road that led back down to the coast.

  ‘Somewhere here,’ I said, placing my palm on an area of perhaps a hundred square kilometres. ‘It’s hard to be more precise. You’ll need to get in a helicopter.’

  ‘Let’s start by trying to find your car,’ said Pendergast.

  A Constable Heinze was summoned. He didn’t look more than twenty, a sinewy lad with a flat-top and a lazy drawl.

  ‘Any sign of this Syce,’ the sergeant instructed, ‘let me know immediately. Do not approach.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Heinze. ‘No worries. This way, sir.’

  He rustled me up a pair of thongs, fed me into a police 4x4, dropped a pair of mirror shades over his eyes and hauled me back up into the hills. It was a tad more civilised than the trip down.

  The sun was climbing, turning the sea to tinfoil and flooding the town with a harsh light. Work crews were clearing the foreshore of rubbish and stay-over party beasts were emerging from parked cars, blinking and wincing.

  I tried to make myself comfortable, damp knickers wedged up my bum crack, eyes puffy with salt and glare. I wis
hed I had a pair of sunglasses and some lounging pyjamas. I wished I were waking up in Barbara Prentice’s bed, but the last time I thought about her was a lifetime ago.

  ‘Busy night for you blokes,’ I said, making conversation.

  ‘Not as bad as usual,’ said the young constable. ‘So they tell me. Only twelve arrests.’

  ‘How about the Falls?’ I said. ‘How’d that go?’

  ‘No problems, if that’s what you mean,’ he said. ‘Hunters and Collectors stole the show, I heard.’

  ‘Were they charged?’ I said.

  ‘Very amusing, sir,’ said Heinze. ‘Where to from here?’

  At first, I had no great difficulty in retracing the route I’d taken the previous evening. Landmarks and side-roads appeared in the right places. The twists and turns of the track resonated in my memory. But as we advanced deeper into the bush, my self-assurance began to wane. The whole aspect of the terrain was transformed by the daylight, even if that daylight was strained through a rainforest canopy. The tracks and trails, no longer revealed by headlights, twisted and forked in ways I didn’t anticipate. The sheer vastness of the bush threatened to overwhelm me.

  I hunched forward in my seat, staring through the windscreen, scanning the sides of the track, directing Heinze down dead-end tracks that were little more than faint ruts in the hillsides. We backed up and tried again. And again.

  ‘It’s around here somewhere,’ I kept repeating. ‘It has to be.’

  But the damned thing had vanished, swallowed up by the landscape like some dingo-snaffled Adventist infant.

  After an hour of buggerising around, Heinze got a call on the radio, a string of letters and numbers, unintelligible code.

  ‘A4, copy that, 7–11,’ he replied, or words to that effect.

  We’d been summoned back to Lorne. Developments had occurred.

  ‘What developments?’

  ‘Sarge’ll fill you in,’ said young Heinze.

  Hitting the nearest sealed road, we dropped down to the sea. I scanned the outline of the hills, concluding that this was probably the road I’d ridden in the boat with Tony Melina. Syce had turned south-west at the Great Ocean Road. We turned north-east. The tide was coming back in. Tony’s body was out there somewhere, catering to the bottom feeders.