Moonlight Downs

by Adrian Hyland

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  Thanks a lot, I brooded as I hung up the phone. Public servant or not, I could scratch Lance Massie from my list of helpful resources. He and the Tempests had a history.

  I’d only seen the man once. Once was enough. He’d been sitting out on the veranda of the Moonlight Homestead, Akubra hat jammed onto one end of him, RM Williams boots onto the other, cigar in between. Trying to out-cowboy the cowboy sitting next to him. The cowboy, Brick Sivvier, was a pig of the first order, to be sure, but at least his porcinity wasn’t an affectation. Throwing us off the station came natural to him. It was a Queensland thing: he was just cleaning out the deadwood.

  Massie was something else. Even at fourteen, and with a single glance at my disposal, I’d been able to see that. He was a sleek, slippery individual, a walking Hall of Mirrors. If he’d ever had a self, it had long since disappeared under a dozen different layers and accretions. He was an impersonation of an impersonation, a natural-born apparatchik who’d slithered out of the womb and sniffed to see which way the wind was blowing. If, by some miracle, Kenny Trigger’s revolution ever did come about, Massie would be the one strutting about in the Mao jacket and the Stalinesque moustache.

  I replayed the veranda scene in my mind.

  Jack had come to pick up his termination pay, and discovered that the Warlpuju were being terminated as well. We’d met them on the road to Bluebush, and Lincoln had given us the story. Sivvier had told them to pack up and piss off, and he’d followed his words with actions: he’d bulldozed the humpies, shot the dogs, shut the store, hunted the nurses, clobbered a few fellers who got in his way. When the shiny-pants government feller arrived Lincoln had complained, sought some kind of official redress, only to have Massie tell them it was a matter of private property, nothing to do with him. Indeed, should they continue to trespass, Sivvier would have every right to call in the cops.

  Now the blokes responsible were relaxing on the veranda in front of us. Jack gave them a cheerful wave. ‘That’s Sir Lancelot,’ he muttered, ‘the little government greaser.’ Sivvier maintained his usual Easter Island demeanour—whoever christened him ‘Brick’ knew what they were about—but Massie responded with a brief, starchy wave. The sort of thing the Queen trots out for the tour of Botswana.

  When we went round to the pay office, Jack spotted Sivvier’s Range Rover and a flash government four wheel drive parked under the magnificent banyan tree. Five minutes and a nifty bit of winch-work later we were on our way, Jack extending another salute to the blokes on the veranda.

  When Massie and Sivvier returned to the carpark, they found their vehicles dangling like a pair of fluffy dice, twenty foot up the tree.

  Tom McGillivray told us that a warrant for Jack’s arrest had come out from the highest levels, but that the lowest levels—he and his colleagues—were so busy pissing themselves laughing they couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to be charging him with. Word was that Massie had been gunning for Jack ever since, his only restraint being the fact that any move he made was sure to revive memories of an event he’d rather have forgotten.

  Lance Massie. Not likely to be particularly co-operative when he heard my name on the phone.

  But what if he heard somebody else’s?

  A bit of a local legend

  ‘MASSIE!’

  The voice coming down the phone sounded as if it had been having Man of the World lessons from Julio Iglesias: it was beautifully modulated, mellow and forceful. And phoney as hell. This was my man all right.

  ‘Mr Massie? My name’s Caroline Crowe. I don’t think we’ve met, but I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m with the Territory Digest.’

  ‘Caroline!’ I could feel him pulling in his paunch and sharpening his tie. The Digest was the Territory Government’s big-budget, taxpayer-funded PR rag. When it called, the faithful answered. ‘Of course, I’ve seen your work. How can I help you?’

  ‘We’re doing a cover story on investment opportunities in the Territory, and I was wondering whether you’d have an hour or two to fill me in on developments in the Bluebush Region. From what I hear you’re a bit of a local legend.’

  ‘Well, thank you.’

  ‘I’ll be coming up through Bluebush around two this afternoon. Is that too short notice?’

  ‘Of course not.’ I could hear a set of chops being vigorously licked. ‘It’ll be a pleasure. I’m slotting you into my diary as we speak.’

  ‘Great! Ciao!’

  ‘Ciao!’

  I spent the rest of the morning packing myself into the tight little yellow silk number that was the closest thing to killer bee I’d been able to pick up at the op-shop. I applied liberal helpings of mascara and lipstick, cleaned off the stray clumps with a cotton ball and blow-waved my hair until it was nearly straight. I grabbed my new pharmacy sunnies, a pair of big-framed Versace knock-offs that I hoped would prevent his recognising me if he ever spotted me in my usual ragged-arsed blackfeller outfit. And at one-thirty I climbed aboard a pair of stilettos and headed for the door.

  I thought it was all for nothing, though, when I wobbled into Massie’s monument to reflective glass and external plumbing and found my old mate Candy Wilson parked at the receptionist’s desk.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she intoned, then gawped and gasped, ‘Emily! Is that you under there?’

  I just about fell off my shoes but I didn’t have time for explanations. There was a goggle-eyed git in tight pants and a purple shirt bouncing out of the office behind her. I shot her a desperate look, then looked at him and smiled. ‘Mr Massie? Caroline Crowe.’

  ‘Please,’ he smiled, gliding past the befuddled Candy and out across the floor like something out of Disney on Ice, ‘call me Lance.’

  ‘Nice of you to make yourself available at such short notice, Lance.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ he beamed, wrapping his hand around my own and his eyes around my chest. ‘We’re always happy to co-operate with the Digest.’

  Massie was just as I remembered him, only more so. Thinner on top but with a nasty little mo for compensation. The bursting shirt and nasal capillaries suggested that happy hour had broken out and taken over the whole week. That explained why he was still in Bluebush, where your better-class alcoholic could just about go unnoticed. He was wearing a sign around his neck which said: ‘ROTARY, GOLF CLUB, PRAWN COCKTAILS IN A SILVER DISH’. Well, he wasn’t. The closest golf course was five hundred kilometres away. But he might as well have been.

  He was in his late forties, dripping with Thai silk, Italian jewellery, Spanish leather and Outback sleaze. Did he always dress like this, or had he nipped out for a grease and oil change when he heard that the Digest was coming?

  He looked me in the shades. I’m not a tall person. Neither was he: Massie by name but not by nature.

  ‘Please,’ he crooned. ‘Come in. Candy!’ A snap, this; evidently he was unimpressed with the way she was struggling to wipe the gawk off her gob. ‘Coffee, please!’ He turned back to me and smiled salaciously. ‘Or can I tempt you with something a little stronger?’

  Candy twisted her nose at his back and poked her tongue out.

  I gave him my goofiest smile and assured him that coffee would be fine. The anti-boss vibes radiating from Candy suggested that she wasn’t about to rat me out. As he waltzed me into the office, I slipped her a wink. She responded with a ‘Be careful!’ grimace.

  Massie’s inner sanctum was a rococo variation on the theme which dominated the rest of the building: outback-crypto-fascist, a veneer of public-service rectitude overlaying a profound crassness that expressed itself in singing fish, flashing mirrors, golf trophies, a bronzed bull’s scrotum and a bar that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Gold Coast brothel.

  The bookshelves were strictly motivational: Chicken Soup for the Soul, Sun Tzu and the Art of Business, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Awaken the Giant Within. The gold-framed MBA on the wall looked like a mail-order job from the University of Las Vegas.r />
  By the time Candy arrived with the coffee, Massie and I were getting along famously. I was playing it smooth and cool, he was playing it as fast and loose as his pants would let him. He leaned forward, put his chin on his fingers and fixed me with a piercing stare.

  ‘So how long have you been with the Digest?’

  ‘Not long; just a few months.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘Canberra. Aboriginal Liaison Unit with Mining and Resources.’

  ‘Uh, Canberra!’ he said dismissively. ‘I was offered a rather senior position down there recently…’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘No names, no pack drill. Turned it down, of course. Once the Outback gets into your blood,’ he sighed, ‘you’re never quite the same.’

  His only awkward moment came when I told him the angle I wanted to take in the story.

  ‘You’re looking at Aboriginal enterprise?’ he gasped, just about falling out of the papa-bear chair.

  ‘The suggestion’s come down from Doug’s office,’ I replied, dropping the Chief Minister’s name in the spirit of that famed Territorian informality.

  ‘Doug’s office…’ he repeated sadly, his man-of-the-world tones drizzling into the woodwork.

  ‘Yes. They’re concerned that there’s been too much negative publicity about the impact of land claims upon development—so much so that it’s scaring off potential investors. The new approach is to put a positive spin on the situation, publicise some of the more successful examples of co-operation between black owners and white partners.’

  While Massie was busy looking aghast, I glanced out through the open door, where Candy was still sending me strange signals.

  ‘This could be a little less…straightforward than I’d anticipated,’ he intoned, bending his brow and vigorously checking out the contents of his left ear with a little finger. ‘Perhaps if you could fill me in on what you’ve covered so far?’

  ‘Well, the major mines—Ranger, Gove. The Granites. Kakadu, of course. Uluru…They’re all on Aboriginal land.’

  Massie sat there looking more and more deflated as the list went on. His paunch began to reassert itself, his moustache drooped. What examples of thrusting Indigenous enterprise did he have to compete with Uluru and Kakadu? The couple of moth-eaten blackfellers they dragged out of the pub to put on a show out at the Rodeo River dude ranch? Captain Racket’s Silver Billy Tea Tours?

  ‘Perhaps in the Bluebush Region,’ I suggested sympathetically, ‘we could concentrate more on potential than on up-and-running projects?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ he replied, nodding sagely but unable to keep the relief from bubbling up at the corners of his mouth. Potential? I could almost see him thinking. Just my line. Wind me up and watch me go. He looked like he’d been feeding off ‘potential’ for twenty years. ‘That would be a sensible move. Some really exciting opportunities opening up in this region. And, loath as I am to… blow my own trumpet, this office’—he swept a grandiose arm around the room, lowered his voice and his eyebrows—‘has been a driving force behind them all.’

  I spent the next few minutes scribbling into my notebook while he got his mouth into gear and dragged a dozen projects in from the outer limits of the Never-Never. The Heartache River Nickel Project, the Wonder Gully Gold Mine, the Black Snake Tourist Park. They were all cutting edge, they were all imminent, they were all the results of his own hard work, they were all awaiting a final component, viz. nickel, gold or tourists, and they’d be off like a fleet of rockets.

  He gave me prospectuses, surveys and impact statements, he gave me shiny brochures and pamphlets. As evidence of his blackfeller bona fides, he gave me a guided tour of the little collection of artefacts on the sideboard: boomerangs and beads, coolamons, clapsticks and a dot painting.

  ‘And this,’ he said as he picked up a red chalcedony knife at the end of the sideboard, ‘is the centrepiece of our little collection. It was given to me by a dear friend, the chief of one of the local tribes.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s the weapon a kadaicha man would have used to’—he gave a wicked smile, leaning so far forward that I copped a blast of whisky breath, and inscribed a curve through the air between us—‘slice you open.’

  ‘Oh my goodness!’ I gasped in mock horror, clutching my hands to my chest.

  When we were back in our seats, I leaned back, crossed my legs, glanced at my notebook and asked, ‘And I’ve been told there are some interesting initiatives at…let me see, now—Moonlight Downs? Something to do with one of its neighbours?’

  His smile froze, stuck like a bull in a bog. ‘Moonlight Downs?’

  ‘Ye-e-es.’ I flicked back to a previous page. ‘An Aboriginal cattle enterprise. Among other things.’

  He leaned forward, flashed his lightly browned teeth. ‘Caroline—do you mind if I call you Caroline?’

  ‘My friends call me Caro.’

  ‘Caro?’ he beamed, his eyelids fluttering. ‘Moonlight Downs is at a rather…delicate stage right now. I wonder if we might discuss it over a drink, perhaps? At the Blue Lagoon?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘They do a martini which is simply’—he actually kissed his fingertips—‘superb.’

  I considered his proposal, my fear of discovery being rapidly overhauled by an intimation that with a bit of booze in him this bloke would be rabbiting on like a Kakadu bus driver. Probably hoping to be rabbiting on in other ways as well, but we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  As we walked out through reception, Candy was staring at her computer and desperately pounding away at the keyboard.

  ‘Candy,’ he said, ‘Ms Crowe and I are popping down to the club for a short break.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, not looking up.

  ‘Back in half an hour.’

  ‘Right.’ She continued to hammer the keys.

  ‘Or so.’

  ‘Good.’

  Massie looked at her for a moment, slightly puzzled, then guided me through the door, but we’d only gotten as far as the carpark when a great boozy bellow stopped us in our tracks.

  ‘Hey, boss!’

  Freddy Ah Fong was standing across the road, swaying like the last pickled onion in the jar, a broad beam illuminating his soggy face. He began to travel in our direction. I put on my glasses and kept my back to him, praying that he wouldn’t recognise me.

  ‘Christ!’ Massie muttered. ‘The Great Black Hope…just ignore him.’

  But thirst had given Freddy wings. He was moving faster than we could ignore.

  Massie drew a keyring from his pocket and pressed the remote. A magnificent metallic gold Range Rover fitted out with every imaginable extra—alloy wheels and winch, tinted windows, ladders and racks and rows of halogen driving lights—flashed back at him.

  ‘Hey! Boss!’ called Freddy again.

  He was almost upon us when Massie said, ‘Excuse me for a moment, Caro. Occupational hazard.’

  He turned to face Freddy, a grimace on his flushed face. The conversation I couldn’t catch, but I did spot a tenner appear and disappear. Massie was slipping the wallet back into his clingwrap daks when Freddy, mission accomplished and boozer looming, yelled a cheery farewell: ‘Thanks, boss!’ Then he slipped me a great, slobbering wink. ‘An you watch out for this feller, h’Emily, e’s a randy little bugger! Like a bit of black velvet.’

  Massie stopped, his shoulders suddenly hunched, his cheeks red, his eyes swivelling suspiciously. He turned around and asked, ‘What did you just say, Freddy?’

  I discovered a sudden itch behind my right ear, and began to back away, very slowly, to where my own car was parked.

  ‘Why nuthin, boss,’ rasped Freddy, picking up that there’d been a sea change and that it might have had something to do with him. ‘Just a little joke between me and the missus ere. Why I never even knowed you know ’er.’

  ‘You know her yourself, Freddy?’

  ‘Why h’Emily? Sure!’ He relaxed, grinned.
‘She all doo-dahed up right now, but I’d know that little girl anywhere. Daughter for ol Motor Jack!’

  ‘Motor Jack? Jack Tempest?’

  ‘Yuwayi!’

  ‘This is his daughter?’

  ‘Yuwayi,’ Freddy beamed. ‘Just about growed ’er up meself.’

  I was retreating more directly now, but I couldn’t let that one pass. ‘Bullshit, Freddy! Only thing you ever growed up was a beer gut!’

  Massie turned around, glared at me, his face flushing from bright red to deep purple. He was nearly as black as Freddy when he snapped, ‘Candy!’ She’d followed us out and was standing in the doorway. His brow buckled, the tendons in his neck leapt out. ‘If Miss Tempest enters these premises again, I want you to call the police and tell them we’ve got a trespasser.’

  I took off my shoes, walked back to my car, my feet breathing sighs of relief. As I drove away, I glanced back at Massie: he was standing beside his overblown motorcar, his fat face fuming, his fists clenched.

  And as I looked at him, another face rose to the surface of my memory: a toddler’s face, this one. A toddler who’d ascended my leg at a basketball game and turned on a similar exhibition when his mother wouldn’t give him a boiled lolly.

  The director’s cut

  I WAS lying on the couch that night, licking a Paddle-pop and my wounds, when the telephone rang and a husky voice came down the wire.

  ‘Hi, Emily.’

  ‘Candy! Well I fucked that one up good and proper, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yeah, I’d skip the Mata Hari bit if I were you. That’s what I was trying to warn you about: Massie knew you were back in town. We had Earl Marsh in here grumbling about you just the other day. It was fuckin Emily Tempest this an fuckin Emily Tempest that.’

  ‘Bastard doesn’t talk like that when his wife’s around. I have heard I’m not Earl’s favourite person; now I suppose I’ll have to add Massie to the list. Needless to say, you didn’t fess up to knowing me?’