by Chris Hammer
Martin pulls into the traffic, driving carefully through town; his vision somehow adrift. Liam falls silent, lulled by the sense of movement. By the time they cross the bridge spanning the Argyle, he’s asleep. Topaz lifts her feet up on the dashboard, legs flashing in the sun, golden and smooth, extending out from cut-off jeans. If she’s worried about Royce, she’s not showing it. Her boyfriend has been taken to hospital yet she’s driving in the opposite direction, apparently without a care in the world. She has her window down, the wind moving her long hair around her tanned face. She becomes aware of Martin’s attention and smiles back at him, but it seems to him there is something fragile in her expression, as if she’s unconvinced by herself.
‘So why were they fighting?’ he asks. ‘Royce and Harry?’
‘Harry hit on me. Royce thought he’d defend my honour. You know what idiots men can be.’
Martin recalls how Royce had seemed oblivious to Topaz’s flirtations previously. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he says, not so much challenging her as stating a fact.
She looks at him as if seeing something for the first time. Then she looks straight ahead and sighs as Martin passes the off-square crossroads, the caravan park to the left, the track up to Hartigan’s to the right. He accelerates up towards a hundred kilometres per hour. ‘Promise you won’t tell the cops?’ she says eventually.
‘Sure,’ says Martin.
‘Drugs,’ says Topaz. ‘Royce has shit for brains. He tried to sell some eccies at the bar in the hostel. Harry took exception.’
‘Really? Harry’s anti-drugs?’
Topaz laughs. ‘You kidding? Of course not. But he sells them. Royce was on his patch, the moron.’
‘Right,’ says Martin. It has the ring of truth about it. He wonders how much Johnson Pear knows of Harry’s sideline business.
‘It’s no big deal,’ says Topaz. ‘All those backpackers, they’re all out for a good time. There’s always drugs if you want them. If the hostels don’t deal themselves, they’ll point you to the people who do. Royce should have scoped it first. He’s a sweet guy and well endowed—just not with brains.’
‘So he got what he deserved?’
‘Depends on how bad he’s hurt.’
‘Have you heard from him?’
‘Yeah, while you were fetching the car. Sounds like they’re going to admit him for a few days’ observation.’
‘What will you do? Still try and find work?’
‘No. As soon as he’s discharged we’ll move on, probably head back to Sydney.’
‘What about your visa?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I thought you needed to get regional work.’
‘Yeah. But there are heaps of places up and down the coast. And out west, on the rivers, they tell me. I don’t want anything more to do with this shit town and that shitty hostel.’
They drive on in silence, the road straight, shearing its way through the watery scrub surrounding Mackenzie’s, the top of the mangroves at eye level. The tide must be in; the smell has abated. A pelican, then two more, glide effortlessly across above the car, heading towards the lagoon. Martin tries to imagine the landscape if St Clair’s development were to go ahead. According to the developer, enough of the scrub would be left to shield the golf course and marina from the road, so it should be no different driving through here. But somehow Martin feels it wouldn’t be the same, that it would be better if the native title claim were to succeed.
He passes by the white flash of the cross off to the right, lonely amid the scrub. How old would his sisters be now? Thirty-five? Thirty-six? In their prime, with families of their own, Martin’s mother—still alive—doting on her grandchildren. The thought saddens him and astonishes him: he has never before made that calculation, not since their deaths. Only since his return have such thoughts come to him, memories of his family bubbling up into his consciousness, quietly insisting on recognition like his own personal land claim, their ghosts asserting a continuous and uninterrupted connection with him. His mind might argue its case, assert that it’s all in the past, that today’s Port Silver is terra nullius, but there is no High Court here, no Court of Appeal. Mandy’s words return to him, asking if he believes in fate or karma. He shakes his head. Maybe he should be driving towards Longton Hospital, not away from it. And then the memorial to his mother and sisters is behind him and the Court of Human Emotions rises, temporarily adjourned. He drives on towards the turn-off to Hummingbird Beach.
‘Oh my God!’ exclaims Topaz, the archetypal American. Martin has pulled into the rough-and-ready car park and Topaz has leapt out. ‘Oh my God!’ She’s looking down at the beach. ‘This is heaven!’
‘The office is down there in the old house,’ says Martin, pointing. ‘Let me fetch Liam and I’ll see you there.’ The boy has started to wake now the car has come to a standstill. Martin gives him a hug, holds him aloft to smell his bum, then carries him one-handed as he opens the back up, feeling as if he is getting the hang of it. He even manages to extract the baby carrier and lower the child into it, strapping him in, without dropping him. Liam is looking at him quizzically, as if unsure what’s going on. He reaches out, as if to point at Martin’s face. Perhaps he’s seen the creeping bruise.
By the time they get down to the office, Topaz is already deep in negotiations with Jay Jay Hayes.
‘Martin, back so soon. Not looking for a place to stay as well?’ asks Jay Jay.
‘No. But I did want to apologise for before.’
‘He gave me a lift out here,’ Topaz explains.
‘Did you now?’ says Jay Jay, cocking an amused eyebrow. ‘What happened to your face?’
‘That thug who runs the hostel, Harry the Lad. He hit me.’
The eyebrow falls, the amusement fades. ‘Really? Don’t get on the wrong side of him.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘He’s got a temper.’ She’s frowning, but smiles when she turns back to the young American. ‘Now, let me get Topaz here sorted.’
The cheapest option is a bunk bed in a dorm, followed by renting a tent. Instead, the American decides to hire a cabin. While Jay Jay gets her kitted out with linen, Martin goes and gets the two packs from the car, Topaz’s and Royce’s. He can only haul one to the office with him, encumbered as he is with Liam’s weight on his own back.
He reaches the deck as Topaz is heading off towards her cabin; he drops the pack and tells her the other one is up by the cars. ‘Good on you, Martin,’ she says, planting a provocative kiss on his lips, smirking at his discomfort as she ruffles Liam’s head.
Martin returns to the office, where Jay Jay is sitting behind her desk. He looks; the box with the scans is nowhere to be seen.
‘I wanted to apologise,’ he says.
‘So you said.’
‘I wasn’t looking for anything. Not really. I was just curious. An occupational habit.’
‘Okay, forget about it.’
‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘Jay Jay, I need to do everything I can to help Mandy. I think Jasper’s death is tied up somehow with the plans to develop your land and Mackenzie’s Swamp. I just can’t work out how.’
Jay Jay considers him for a moment before letting her breath out in a long sigh, as if giving in to Martin’s imperative. ‘What do you want to know?’
Martin lowers the carrier, lifting Liam out, holding the boy against his chest as he sits, all the while wondering how to frame his next question. In the end, he’s blunt. ‘What happens when you die?’ he asks her.
Jay Jay’s eyes widen at the question and she studies him intently for a moment, then she bursts out laughing, surprising Martin. It’s a proper laugh, belly deep, not some pretence. ‘I’m not going to die, Martin. Not any time soon.’
‘The scans,’ says Martin. ‘Healthy people don’t have scans. Not like that, not that many.’
The humour drops from the surfer’s face. ‘Did you look at them?’
‘No, just the envelopes.’ He spreads one arm wide, a
gesture of innocence. ‘They were just sitting there. I wouldn’t be the first to see them.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ says Jay Jay. She stands, turns her back, reaches down and lifts her singlet over her head. And there on her back, running under her bra strap, are two large triangles of scar tissue, smooth and pink, recessed into the freckled skin, each about twelve centimetres long and half as wide. ‘There,’ she says, ‘cop an eyeful.’ Then she drops the top, turns, and resumes her seat.
‘Skin cancer,’ says Martin.
‘Melanomas,’ says Jay Jay. ‘All those years surfing without a wetsuit. It catches up with you.’
Martin is unsure how to proceed. ‘Are you … ?’
‘Am I all right? Yes. They were cut out six years ago. After five years you’re clear. If I sprout another one now, it will almost certainly be new, not a relapse. I get a visual check every three months, and up until last year I got a scan every six. But I’m done with scans now. I put them all in that box to chuck them out. I don’t need them anymore.’
‘So you’re okay?’
‘Never better.’
‘That’s great, Jay Jay. It really is. And I’m sorry to pry.’
She laughs at that. ‘Right. Says the journo.’
Martin smiles, as if she’s paying him a compliment. ‘Tell me, though: who knew you were sick?’
Jay Jay shrugs. ‘My doctor. The pharmacist. Some people up at Longton Hospital. A few friends.’
‘Jasper Speight?’
‘No. Not that I know of. I didn’t discuss it with him.’
‘Tyson St Clair seems convinced you will sell.’
‘Does he now? Well, sorry to disappoint him, but who sells paradise?’
She’s right. He imagines himself in her position. Maybe he wouldn’t run a campground, maybe he wouldn’t house a guru, maybe he wouldn’t host bacchanalian parties, but he definitely wouldn’t sell. Not if he could avoid it. ‘I’m sorry, Jay Jay,’ he says, standing, careful not to drop Liam.
‘Let me know how you go, Martin. If I can help you, I will. I owe that to Jasper.’
‘Right,’ says Martin. ‘There is one thing. What do you know about the disappearance of Amory Ashton?’
The smiles eases from Jay Jay’s face. ‘Ashton? What about him?’
‘There’s a TV crew over at the old cheese factory looking for his body.’
‘What TV crew?’
‘Channel Ten. Up from Sydney. Filming a cold-case crime special.’
‘I don’t know anything more than anyone else,’ she says. ‘He went missing years ago. His car was found burnt out somewhere up on Treachery Bay. There was speculation he was murdered, but nobody knows why.’
‘Say he was dead. Any idea who would inherit his property?’
She shakes her head, frowning. ‘No. I don’t think he had any family. I never heard of one, anyway.’
Martin drives out of the campsite, his mind awash with questions. Jay Jay is not selling and she’s not ill, so the plans of Tyson St Clair or anybody else to develop Hummingbird Beach and the swamp are going nowhere. So why does Doug Thunkleton think St Clair is about to demolish the cheese factory? And why does St Clair seem so confident Jay Jay will sell Hummingbird? And why was Jasper Speight killed? Did someone make the same mistake as Martin, believe that Jay Jay was seriously ill and the whole development plan was back in play?
The bruise on his cheek is beginning to pulse, connected by some tendril to the headache threatening to re-emerge at the base of his skull. He feels as if he’s gathering more and more information that’s meaning less and less. It’s flowing in a torrent, but threatening to drown him rather than float him, the water growing murkier and murkier, full of cross-currents and rips.
The Subaru rattles across the cattle grid, the whole car vibrating. Liam issues an ominous howl. Martin slows down a tad. Where the track merges with the larger road, he stops. The signpost at the fork has him reconsidering. Fingers point towards the clifftop properties: Sergi, Cromwell and Hartigan. Liam gives an impatient squawk, wanting the car to resume its motion. Martin turns left.
The gravel road is runnelled and corrugated, in need of grading. It winds up the hill beneath a canopy of spotted gums, tall and imperious, interspersed with lesser trees cloaked in creepers and vines, while ferns and grass trees compete in the undergrowth, a remnant of coastal rainforest from back before the logging trucks and the dairy farms. He drives with the window open, breathing in the warm air, bird call bouncing all around. A wallaby, small and dark-furred, watches him approach from a bank above the road before bounding unhurried into the scrub. The track winds upwards for a kilometre or two before curling southwards. Martin can’t be sure, surrounded by the forest, but he feels that he must be close to the clifftop. There’s a sense of altitude. He checks his phone: one bar, the signal creeping up the coast. He passes a small clearing to the left where there’s a break in the trees. There’s a distant sound; it might be surf hitting the base of the cliff or it might be wind in the treetops.
He’s always loved this feeling, this exploration of a new pathway, following it for the first time. As a kid, walking or riding a bike, trying to find shortcuts through the cane fields or paths along the base of the escarpment; as a reporter, entering a new country, a new conflict, discovering a new reality. And this track is new to him; he was never aware Ridge Road existed. As boys, they rarely ventured out along the long flat road towards the cheese factory. There was no destination back then, just twenty kilometres to nowhere: a swamp, a cheese factory and, beyond them, the rip-riven beaches of Treachery Bay.
The forest gives way abruptly at a fence line, replaced by the vibrant green of pasture, dairy cows raising their heads from grazing, curious at the intrusion. The road crosses a cattle grid and runs through the middle of a paddock. He slows right down. Cows saunter across in front of him, asserting their ownership, forcing him to give way. Liam vocalises his wonderment. ‘Cows, Liam,’ says Martin. ‘Cows.’ Liam answers with some strange articulation of his own. To the left, up towards the horizon, Martin can see a house nestled into a hollow below the lip of the hill, surrounded by farm buildings. To his right the land flows downwards, to a distant fence line and a screen of trees. A driveway for the house forks off the road. A sign says SERGI. Martin keeps driving, passing across another grid, through the fence line and back into forest. The road narrows: it’s single lane now, grass sprouting on the rise between the wheel tracks. Another kilometre or two and it veers left, through a gate. There’s a sign: CROMWELL-PARKES. He pushes on, the track twisting upwards. He emerges from the bush, arriving at a house. It’s new, architect designed. Not big, not built to impress, but light and airy, a mixture of wood and stone and pre-rusted steel, with wide windows protected by strategically positioned awnings. And instead of sheltering from the weather like the Sergi farmhouse, this house lifts into it, perching on the clifftop, with nothing beyond it but the open sky and, presumably, the ocean. Martin is confused: the track leads to the house and no further. He pushes on, the Subaru in low gear. A figure appears in the doorway, a silver mop of hair.
Martin cuts the engine, climbs out, walks up towards the man who has descended some stairs to meet him. He’s tall, almost gaunt, twenty or twenty-five years older than Martin. He’s wearing canvas pants and an old blue shirt, both spattered with paint, as are his hands. A painter, at a guess, an artist.
‘Hello there,’ says the man as they converge. ‘Can I help you?’ His voice is rich and resonant and self-confident, a voice born of old-school privilege.
‘Yes,’ says Martin. ‘I was trying to get through to the Hartigan place.’
‘Can’t be done,’ says the man. ‘At least not in that.’ He gestures towards Martin’s car, as if it lacks the pedigree.
‘I saw a signpost,’ replies Martin. ‘Down near Hummingbird Beach. Said the road went through to Hartigan’s.’
‘It used to, but there’s a bridge halfway along. It collapsed years ago. So no cars. Th
e occasional bushwalker, dirt bikes and push bikes, an intrepid fisherman or two, but that’s it. The track is still there. Down in the bush there, right next to our gate.’
‘You don’t want the council to fix it up? Shorten your drive to town?’
‘Certainly not.’ The man pauses, examining Martin more closely. ‘Why are you so interested?’
‘My name is Martin Scarsden. My partner, Mandalay Blonde, has inherited the Hartigan house. We’re going to move into it.’
‘Ah, I see,’ says the man. ‘Well, we’ll be neighbours then. I’m Bede Cromwell.’ He has a smile on his face; if he likes his solitude he obviously sees little threat in his prospective neighbour. The men shake hands.
‘So you’re an artist?’ asks Martin.
‘You’ve heard of me?’ Bede says.
‘Yes, I think I might have.’
But the man laughs, amused at Martin’s polite lie. ‘Yes. I can imagine.’ His eyes are bright with humour, brown and warm. Martin likes him. Then Bede becomes more serious. ‘You don’t want to open the old road, do you?’
Martin shakes his head. ‘Can’t imagine why we would. We can access Dunes Road directly. Sounds like it’s better left the way it is.’
‘That’s good to hear. Just what I told that other fellow.’
‘What other fellow?’
‘Jasper Speight. The real estate chap.’
Bede Cromwell is most forthcoming, any residual aloofness dissolved by the knowledge Martin is to be his neighbour. He invites him in, curious rather than indulgent at the sight of Liam. They pass through a lounge room of bohemian chic, wall space at a premium: large abstract canvases compete with overflowing bookshelves and, trumping them both, an entire wall of glass, filled with sky and sea, a panorama of blues. Bede’s partner, a taciturn bloke named Alexander, some sort of writer, is busy in the lounge staring at a computer screen and is not to be disturbed, so Bede leads Martin and Liam out onto the deck. And what a deck, more like a nest, perched right on the lip of the cliff. There’s a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree view out to sea and along the clifftops, eighty metres above the surf. To the north the cliff line runs for kilometres, folding back and forth, rising and falling, while to the south it cuts inwards before doubling back out towards a point. ‘That’s you out there, on the point, almost hidden by the trees,’ says Bede. ‘The other side of the ravine. About two or three kilometres.’