by Chris Hammer
He comes awake with a start; Vern’s hand on his shoulder. ‘C’mon, soldier, let’s get you home.’
Martin struggles to his feet, full awareness taking its time. Josie has gone. ‘Shit, how long was I asleep?’
‘Not long. A few minutes. Let’s go. I’ll take you back.’
‘You can drive?’
‘Not a car. Not with the coppers about. We’ll go by river. Levi can take us.’
‘Right.’
‘You’re welcome to stay, Martin, but I was thinking your girl might be getting worried.’
That wakes Martin up properly. Mandy. He checks his phone, sees it’s only ten o’clock. It feels more like midnight. He sends her a quick text: Leaving now. Back soon.
Levi leads them down to the river. He has a lantern, its shape old-fashioned, its LED bulb casting a wide pool of light. The path is well worn and easy to follow. At the river there is a small inlet, a tinnie lying low on the sandy mud, tied to a casuarina tree. The tide must be out. They haul the boat into the water, Levi holding it steady while his father and Martin climb aboard. Levi wades out with the tinnie, then nimbly boards. He tilts the motor into the water, fires the engine with a couple of effortless yanks on the starter cord. The engine catches and settles into a gentle putter.
Out on the black-ink water, the moon is rising in the east, bats circle and Martin sees a fish plop, radiating concentric circles of reflected light. The glow of Port Silver comes closer, the stars glimmer from above. The Milky Way is mirrored in the surface, breaking apart as the bow waves wash out. For a long moment, Martin feels a sense of profound peace, of belonging. Perhaps Port Silver will prove to be a sanctuary after all, providing a space for him and Mandy to heal, to raise Liam, to build a life together. Vern, Josie. Cousins. Family.
At the caravan park, there is a wharf hovering in the darkness under a solitary light. A steel ladder drops into the darkness. Levi manoeuvres the tinnie in beside it with practised ease, standing to grip the ladder, holding the boat steady so Martin can clamber up the slippery rungs. Before he does, he addresses his uncle. ‘I’m sorry, Vern. Sorry for not staying in touch. It’s unforgiveable.’
‘Don’t trouble yourself. I was there, remember? I knew how much you were hurting.’
‘You knew?’
‘Of course.’
There is more to say, much more. But there will be plenty more time to say it. Martin climbs up the ladder out of the darkness and into the small circle of light.
chapter nine
Liam is happy in his booster seat; the same can’t be said for those in front. Mandy is driving Martin to collect his car from Vern’s. Martin’s remorseful, Mandy’s resentful; he wants to apologise, she turns up the radio news. He sighs. She had said he could go to dinner at his uncle’s, but he now realises it was a mistake to take her words at face value. He returned to the cabin late, drunk and stinking of dope. Then found himself sleeping in a bunk bed in a lesser room. Only now, as he’s getting out of the car, does she speak. ‘I’m meeting Winifred in town. I’ll call you if we need you.’ If. And he’s left standing in the driveway, watching her go. She doesn’t look back. Lesson learnt.
He knocks on the door of the ramshackle house, but except for a cacophony of dogs, there’s no one home. The cars have gone, the truck, the van and the hatchback; only the trail bike remains. He’s about to get into his car to leave when he hears the whine of a power saw. He circumnavigates the house, past discarded trikes, a vegetable garden and a chook yard, to find Lucy May out the back, working on the deck. She’s wearing headphones over a baseball cap, dark hair tied in a ponytail, safety glasses over her eyes. In her sensory cocoon, she doesn’t notice him at first. Martin looks on for a long moment, bewitched by her competence, by her ease and assurance. A memory comes to him of his father, his father before the accident, working out in the back shed, those hands of his, his magical scarred and roughened hands, hands that could make or fix anything. Martin recalls something else as he watches. Something from when he was very young: how he believed his father’s hands operated somehow separately from the man himself, fixing and mending, creating, repairing lawn mowers and washing machines and television aerials and making chairs and tables and chicken coops, dismantling car engines with the assurance of a heart surgeon. Ron Scarsden’s hands had a life of their own. Martin looks at his own hands, soft white-collar hands. They have no independent life; they belong resolutely to him. He’s happy enough with that; there was a time when they had felt foreign to him. He decides the days he longed for hands like his father’s, magical hands, are long gone.
‘Hello there.’ It’s Lucy May, becoming aware of him at last, removing her headphones and glasses. She looks very young, her unblemished face at odds with her obvious skill.
‘G’day,’ says Martin. ‘Vern and Josie gone?’
‘Yeah. Chaos over for another morning. Kids at school, parents at work.’ She wipes her brow; the morning is still cool, but the physical work has drawn perspiration. ‘Anything urgent?’
‘No. I left my car here last night. Just came to pick it up.’
‘Goodo. You got a minute? I could do with a hand.’
‘Sure.’
‘Thanks. It’s easier with two.’
It’s almost as if she’s been expecting him, conjured him up with her own pair of magic hands. She has just cut two joists to length, the last two supporting cross members for the far end of the deck. He helps her lift them into place one at a time, then he holds them steady while she taps them into perfect alignment with a rubber mallet before fixing them with a couple of angled nails, deftly struck. Martin admires her, this slight young girl, the disguised power in her slim arms.
‘You’ve had a bit of practice. Vern teach you?’
She smiles. ‘Ever since I was a little kid. More like I caught it from him.’
‘How old are you now?’
‘Almost seventeen.’
‘And an apprentice?’
‘Yeah. TAFE day today. Just getting a bit done before heading up to Longton.’ She checks her watch. ‘I’d better get a move on. Thanks for the help.’
‘No problem. Say hi to Vern and Josie for me.’
Driving back towards town, he thinks of his uncle and his wife, feeling a sense of wonder at their mixed family, how they’re making it work. And clearly it does, through the pandemonium and competing needs, Vern’s laconic calm and Josie’s warm competence. He considers if he and Mandy will ever be able to relax into that same calm assurance, that go-with-the-flow confidence. He’s not optimistic; they both seem too wired, too on edge. Or maybe that’s the death of Jasper Speight, the unsolved crime, standing like an obstacle between them and their future. All the more reason for him to do what he can to help the police find the killer.
He’s almost back to town when he sees the sign for Ressling Road. By the time he brakes, he’s past it and needs to double back. But there it is. Ressling Road, running off through the cane fields into memory. There’s another sign under it, white letters on blue: WASTE MANAGEMENT DEPOT. He takes the turn, passing another sign: NO THROUGH ROAD. The surface is a mosaic, patches of bitumen upon patches of bitumen, so that none of the original is left exposed, with new potholes demanding yet more patching. He only has to travel half a kilometre and the cane fields end. And there it is: the Settlement, four blocks, as straight and rectangular as any suburban grid, but dropped in the middle of nowhere, out of sight and out of mind, the streets not even worthy of names, just A, B and C avenues in one direction and First, Second and Third streets in the other. He reaches the first houses and stops the car, knowing without opening his door that little has changed. Here the air will be hotter, drier and dustier, removed from the town, exiled from the sea breeze. He knows it all too well, can taste it on his tongue, the acrid tang of poverty, the flies wafting in from the tip. There is a house directly in front of him, as neat as a pin, lawn mown and watered, roses in the garden, a birdbath, with an ancient Holden in the drive, t
he car polished to a gleam despite blotches of bog and corrosion. And next door, a house where the screen door is hanging from its hinges, a yard of bare earth and dead grass half a metre high, with an abandoned fridge and half a motorbike rusting by the porch. And on the roof, a satellite dish, and in the drive, a brand-new Jeep, dusty and mud-spattered. The inhabitants will be different from his youth, but their stories look the same. He can’t see any people; there is no one on the streets, only dogs, the descendants of the mongrels and bitsers that roamed the neighbourhood when he was a kid, wandering aimlessly, noses to the ground. He knows these streets too well, could walk to his old home blindfolded, to 13 C Street. But he doesn’t. He turns the car around and heads back the way he came.
By the time he gets to the main road, he’s decided on a course of action: to concentrate on the here and now, to secure the future before venturing too far into the past. He wants to see Hummingbird Beach, the heart of the development plans for the north shore of the Argyle. He drives past the fast-food outlets, a petrol station and a low-slung motel, crossing the bridge above the Argyle, the river glittering in the morning light. Beyond the bridge the speed limit increases and Martin accelerates. Dunes Road carves a straight line through tea-tree scrub, the land low and flat, the verges sandy, the salt-laden wind whipping in through his open window. To his right, he can see the scrub rising from the brackish water, proper trees emerging as the slope climbs higher towards the coastal cliffs; to his left, through the veil of vegetation, he catches glimpses of water and mudflats. They may call it Crystal Lagoon, but with the tide out it still smells like Mackenzie’s Swamp.
Suddenly he’s crossing a smaller bridge, the one above the inlet to the swamp. He’s come too far, missing the turn to Hummingbird Beach. Another hundred metres and the road begins to deteriorate rapidly from a wide and well-maintained blacktop to a winding track with a single strip of potholed and patched tarmac running along its middle. He pulls up, recalling Denise Speight’s map: the road keeps going, winding through the dunes, linking remote beach access to the east and a scattering of dairy farms and cane fields to the west before petering out altogether. A road to nowhere. He edges the car around, begins to return the way he has come, but just as he’s approaching the good road, an SUV comes hurtling across the bridge towards him before braking sharply, its garish markings catching his attention as it turns left: a Channel Ten news car, its windows tinted, heading through a set of open gates. A news crew. Here. Why?
Martin follows, journalistic curiosity firing. There’s not a television station for hundreds of kilometres. Has Channel Ten discovered something newsworthy? He slows as he reaches the gates. The cyclone wire fence bears a large sign, the original message still visible under a thin coat of paint: MACKENZIE’S CHEESE AND PICKLES. The rest of the original sign is obscured by new lettering, official and red: PRIVATE PROPERTY—KEEP OUT and TRESPASSERS PROSECUTED, and beneath it another sign: 24-HOUR SURVEILLANCE—OMNIVU SECURITY. But the gate is open. He drives through it. One of his old editor’s maxims comes to him: forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission.
He knows almost nothing about the former factory. Only that it closed down some years ago and that a local property developer called Tyson St Clair has plans for a golf clubhouse; plans opposed by Vern and Josie. And by Jasper Speight. Another memory comes, another recollection of before: the kitchen table, twins in their dual-seater high chair, his father drinking beer, in an expansive mood. His mother serving dinner. Not sausages, not stew, but meat, pinkish grey and unbelievably tender, like a revelation to his child’s tongue. ‘Pulled a couple of shifts at the cheese factory,’ says his dad, laughing, although his mother shares none of his father’s glee and none of Martin’s delight.
Martin frowns, feeling put out, not by the memory itself, but by its spontaneous surfacing after so many years.
The factory drive is wide, built for milk trucks and refrigerated vans, its asphalt surface potholed and starting to fall into disrepair. It rises gradually through tall trees, circling a wooded hillock. Martin is trying to remember Denise Speight’s map, to visualise his location, when he emerges from the trees and brings his car to a standstill. The factory is laid out before him at an angle, not the low-rise brick and corrugated-iron functionality he’s anticipated, but something altogether grander, more poetic: a building of cement-rendered permanence and frosted windows, like a still from Studio Ghibli. It has three levels, each floor smaller than the one below, rimmed between floors by a skirting of red corrugated-iron. The top level is long and thin, completely glassed in along the sides, an extended, two-sided skylight sitting under a gabled roof of the same red roofing, rising at the same pitch as the lower skirting. The building is older than he’d imagined, 1920s, possibly older. The whitewashed render has taken on the multiple hues of neglect. And growing up the front wall and curling around the sides are vines and ivy and climbing plants, some boasting large red blooms, the rainforest reclaiming the building.
There are three loading docks facing him, their doors of painted green wood, patinaed with age, swing doors, not the roller doors of the modern era. Parked in front of the loading docks are the television SUV, a large van and a four-wheel drive. On the far side, beyond the vehicles, he can see the lagoon glinting, framed by a row of fat palm trees and a jetty. He eases the Corolla down the slope and parks by the other vehicles. He’s just getting out when two people emerge from the side of the building not ten metres away, a man and a woman dressed in white boiler suits and wearing industrial dust masks. They both appear to be carrying metal detectors, like cordless vacuum cleaners except with large circular bases. They stop, surprised.
‘Morning,’ Martin says cheerfully. ‘How’s it going?’
The two people don’t move.
‘Saw the gate was open. Thought I might have a look about.’ He’s reached them now.
The man turns to the woman. ‘Get Mike,’ he says to her, and she goes back inside the building. The man faces Martin again. ‘Just a moment,’ he says, voice neutral.
‘Sure,’ says Martin, maintaining his lightness of tone, arms spread in a gesture of openness. He notices the man has protective covers over his shoes, like repurposed shower caps. ‘What are you up to? I thought this place was mothballed.’
The man just looks at Martin, not responding. Martin is considering some other gambit when a huge man, a Maori or an Islander, emerges from the shed, followed by the woman. This man is dressed in black—black jeans, black sunglasses, a black t-shirt with a single word—SECURITY—in white. He has the same shower-cap protectors stretching over his black boots. One arm boasts a tribal collar tattoo circling a mighty bicep; he looks like he could play for the All Blacks. He walks right up to Martin, right into his personal space, stopping with his face mere centimetres above Martin’s. The man is sweating and Martin can smell him, the scent of testosterone and aggression. He must be a good two metres tall. ‘What … the fuck … do you want?’ he asks, voice slow with menace, each word enunciated, stretched for effect. Martin takes a step back but the man simply steps forward, this time jabbing his finger ever so softly into Martin’s chest. ‘Who … the fuck … are you?’
Martin shrugs, hands wide, as if he has nothing to hide. ‘Sorry. I just wanted to take a look. It’s no big deal. I’ll leave.’ But his conciliatory tone has no impact.
‘I’m … going … to break … your fucking … arms,’ whispers the giant.
Martin feels a surge of real fear; the man is serious.
Then, out from the cheese factory, out from the recent past, steps a familiar face, a smiling face: Doug Thunkleton, television newsman. ‘Martin?’
‘Doug?’
‘You know this arsehole?’ the enforcer asks Doug, his speech no longer disjointed.
‘Yeah. He’s a colleague.’
‘He’s working with you?’
‘No, not exactly. But there’s no need to heavy him.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes,’ says Doug.
‘Never, ever heavy a journo. Don’t they teach you guys anything?’
The security man looks again at Martin, as if examining vermin. ‘Well, I’ll leave you love birds alone then.’ He turns to the couple with the metal detectors. ‘C’mon, you two. The camera crew are ready.’ The three head into the cheese factory.
‘Your director?’ asks Martin.
‘Yeah, thinks he’s Ingmar bloody Bergman.’ Doug laughs. ‘No, he’s just security. Chock-full of steroids. Like an unexploded bomb. Try not to get in his way.’
‘Lucky you.’
‘What are you doing here, Martin?’
‘I saw your car. I was curious.’
‘I mean in Port Silver. I thought you lost your job?’
‘I did, thanks to you.’
That has Thunkleton squirming. He’d done a hatchet job on Martin down in the Riverina. He apologised later, claimed he’d been put up to it by a malevolent producer, but that didn’t get Martin his job back.
‘I’m not working, Doug. I’ve moved up here with Mandalay Blonde. Remember her?’
‘How could I forget,’ says Doug. ‘You guys are still together?’
‘We’re working on it.’
‘Half your luck. She’s hot.’
‘What brings you here, Doug?’
Thunkleton frowns. ‘Sure you’re not working on something?’
‘No. Just editing the book on Riversend.’
‘True crime,’ says Thunkleton.
‘Yeah. That’s what the publisher calls it.’
‘No, not that—this. True crime. It’s why I’m here. A cold case. They want a news special, maybe a full-blown doco if I can stand it up. And a podcast. It’s all the go, you know. Podcasts, cold cases, true crime. Punters love it.’
‘Right,’ says Martin, looking at the factory. ‘I thought you were daily news?’