Out of the Blue

by JR Carroll

  ‘Be seated, Teddy,’ Graham said, indicating the other bed, a single. ‘And yes, I will have one of those, since you ask.’ He accepted the can, then flounced onto his bed with one of his legs tucked under the other. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘What do you think of the Pyrenees Hotel, Teddy?’

  FOURTEEN

  ‘I’d say it’s a pushover,’ Teddy said, eyeing the maps. ‘We can get in easy through the back. Upstairs there’s just a joke lock. I could open it with me dick.’ Immediately he regretted saying this.

  ‘Really,’ Graham said, and dropped his eyes with a show of mock-horror to that part of Teddy’s anatomy. ‘Yes, I noticed that. Deadlock and bolts downstairs, though.’

  ‘Yeah. Won’t stop us, will it? We’ll come in from the top.’

  ‘You mean wait out the back somewhere until he’s closed up, then burst in. Come down the stairs at him like the Charge of the Light Brigade.’

  ‘Yeah. Put the fear of Christ into him.’

  ‘Then what? Subdue him, make him get the cash from the safe in his office, tie him up, then—’

  ‘We fuck off. Out the back where we came from.’

  ‘Sounds all right. I hope he doesn’t lock that top door, though. If we have to force it open it’ll make a noise. We don’t want to lose the element of surprise, do we? I think it’s safe to assume that Mr Gatz keeps a gun somewhere on the premises. That could be a worry. You see, we mustn’t imagine that he’s going to be totally unprepared—and remember, he used to be a copper. He might have a shotgun under the bar, for instance. Another thing. We shouldn’t assume that he’s going to be alone. Someone could be cleaning out the shithouses or whatever. Pretty boy, for instance, with the gold ringlets. There shouldn’t be any house guests still hanging around by then, but you never know. So we’ll need to keep our eyes peeled, Teddy.’

  ‘Right,’ Teddy said.

  ‘Here’s what I think. Feel free to make suggestions later. You’re right, we come in via the upstairs door—say about fifteen minutes before closing time. I’m sure it’ll be unlocked, but if it is we’ll force it and any sound we make will be drowned by the crowd noise downstairs. And the other advantage of the top door is that it’s completely out of sight, even if you’re standing right at the foot of the staircase. I checked.’

  ‘You didn’t miss much.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Details matter in this business, don’t they?’

  ‘My oath they do.’ Teddy was beginning to get the feeling that Graham was unquestionably in charge of this affair, that all Teddy did was nod like a dickhead. He hadn’t felt that way at all earlier.

  Graham said, ‘Did you notice the door marked PRIVATE, where he lives?’

  ‘Course I did. There on the right when you come in. At the end of the hall.’

  ‘Just so. I tried that door today. It wasn’t locked. Why would it be? The man lives there, he’s in and out all the time. So I think our best shot is to pop inside, hide in case he comes up for some reason, then when the time comes we sneak downstairs on tippy-toes and bail him up before he gets a chance to see us or do anything. He won’t know what hit him.’

  ‘Uh huh. Sounds good. And what happens then, Graham? How do we get the fuck out of this dump without running into a fuckin’ roadblock or something? It’s a half-hour drive to Ballarat. The road’s gonna be crawlin’ with cops.’

  ‘True. But we don’t drive to Ballarat, Teddy. That’s where the maps come in. Take a look at this.’

  Teddy sat on the edge of Graham’s bed with his can in his hand. The maps were the Military Survey type, small-scale and very detailed. As well as these, Graham had a standard RACV road map of Victoria. He watched Graham’s finger locate Avoca on one of the army maps and experienced a strange sense of growing confidence in Graham. He’d obviously put a lot of thought and preparation into this. Despite himself, Teddy was impressed. However, he thought, sounding clever when you’re sitting in a motel room was one thing: delivering on the night when the pressure’s on, everyone yelling, unexpected things happening, Gatz has a gun, whatever, that was another ball game altogether. He would have to wait and see how Graham handled himself then.

  ‘You’re right about the road to Ballarat,’ Graham said. ‘That’s out. If someone manages to raise the alarm quickly and the local cops get on the radio, we wouldn’t have a chance. Of course, it’s possible that no one will raise the alarm for some time, but why take that risk? It’s all about percentages, isn’t it? So we don’t go to Ballarat at all.’ His long finger traced barely visible lines on the map. ‘We take these little backroads here through Talbot, to Maryborough. That’s about a half-hour trip. Then we change cars, go to Daylesford and come back that way, keeping off freeways at all times. What do you think?’

  Following the route traced by Graham’s finger, Teddy found himself nodding once more. On paper it looked the goods. Cops’d have no idea where to start looking for them once they got off the main roads. At that time of night it’d take ’em an hour to get their shit together anyway, dozy fuckin’ bush wallopers. He only had one reservation. ‘What about these backroads to Maryborough?’ he said, putting his stubby digit on the map. ‘Any chance we could get lost?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But we’ll test it anyway. We’ll go home that way tomorrow. Give it a dry run.’ He shook his can, indicating that it too was dry.

  ‘Okay,’ Teddy said. He got them another can each, and Graham accepted his with an unaffected and distracted ‘Thanks,’ still poring over the map. Teddy thought, when he’s not stacking on his camp act he’s not such a bad bloke as far as poofs go.

  ‘Next Saturday,’ Graham said, sitting up with the can resting on his thigh, ‘they have a race meeting here. It’s a big day, one of two such events held annually. All the local winemakers and restaurateurs are represented at the track, dispensing their wares. The town will be awash with tourists and the Pyrenees will be booked out. A lot of money will be spent. I think Sunday night will be ideal for our purposes, Teddy. The crowd’s gone, Mr Gatz has all the weekend’s cash he can’t do anything with until the banks open Monday. I noticed today that he closes early on Sundays, ten o’clock. We don’t show our faces in the hotel at all that day, in fact we don’t show them anywhere in Avoca. We’ll be like the cat that crept into the crypt, crapped, and crept out again.’

  Teddy laughed, and so did Graham. They drank their beers for a while without speaking, each going over the plan in his own mind, looking for flaws. Teddy couldn’t see how anything could go wrong, except in an unexpected way, and you couldn’t plan for that.

  ‘How much do you think he’ll have?’ Teddy asked.

  ‘Good question. Fucked if I know, Teddy. Could be upwards of twenty grand.’

  ‘What about guns?’

  ‘We’ll meet during the week. As I told you earlier, I’ll handle that end of it. Two sawn-off shotguns should be enough, don’t you think?’

  Sawn-offs, Teddy thought. Where the fuck does he get sawn-offs from, down the local gay centre? This guy is full of surprises. So that’s what ordnance means.

  ‘Ever handled a sawn-off before, Graham?’

  ‘Never. Have you?’

  Teddy took a deep swallow and finished off his can. ‘Yeah,’ he lied, avoiding Graham’s eye. ‘Main thing is not to blow your own fuckin’ foot off.’

  Graham laughed. His can was empty too. There were none left. It was quarter past six and Teddy was sick of being cooped up in a room. ‘Think I’ll head back to the pub,’ he said, and headed for the door. ‘You coming, or what?’

  ‘Which one?’

  Teddy shrugged. It made no difference. ‘The Blind Eagle, I guess.’

  ‘Hm. Bit common, isn’t it? Still … Hang on while I get something on my feet.’

  As they walked down the street in the mild, windless dusk Teddy said the thing that had been preying on his mind most of all.

  ‘Graham, you’ve never done anything like this in your life, have you?’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’
Graham said. ‘Are you worried, Teddy? Do you think I won’t be able to hack it?’

  ‘I dunno. Will you?’

  Graham thought about it while they walked along in step. ‘I won’t let the team down, Teddy. You can count on that.’

  When Teddy had tried to ring Elaine at five o’clock she was having a cup of tea and biscuit with her mother at the family home in Broadmeadows, a heavily-populated working-class suburb to the north which, at the time her parents had moved there in the sixties, had mostly been bare hills covered with Scotch thistles, with old farmhouses scattered about. Now it was crammed with packaged houses built to a budget along circular roads and cul-de-sacs, a sea of shimmering tile roofs and high TV aerials that swayed in the wind. In Elaine’s memory this had always been a windy place—hot northerlies in summer and freezing ones in winter when she was pushing her bike up and down hills to school.

  Her father, a tram driver, was at work; her younger brother Shawn, in his final year as an apprentice plumber, was out somewhere on his motorbike, a 500cc Honda just like Wayne Gardner used to have. Wayne Gardner had been Shawn’s hero for years, since before Wayne became world champion in 1987. Shawn even dressed in the same red, white and blue leathers that Wayne used to wear in his races. He wrote to him in Monaco once, asking for an autographed photo, just putting ‘Wayne Gardner, Monaco’ on the envelope, but Wayne couldn’t have got it because he never answered.

  Elaine had an elder sister, Jillian, who married a Perth man and reluctantly moved across the Nullarbor with him, since, as he explained, people from Perth cannot live anywhere else. Elaine and Jillian occasionally phoned each other, but not often. There had never been much between them, and Elaine’s memories of living with her sister were mostly that Jillian was out with boys all the time and then being depressed and withdrawn for long periods when they ditched her. Elaine had always felt much closer to Shawn, who was like her in many ways, even to look at. He was tall and thin with delicate features and long brown hair swept straight back from his pale forehead.

  ‘You don’t look very well,’ Elaine’s mother said, studying her daughter over the steaming cup in her hands. ‘Have you been eating properly, Elaine?’

  ‘Of course I have, Mum.’

  ‘You’re much thinner in the face.’

  ‘Mu-um! Stop treating me like a child, will you? I’m twenty-four, remember? I know how to look after myself now.’

  ‘I don’t know whether you do or not. That’s what worries me.’ Elaine sighed but didn’t speak, and her mother added, more quietly, ‘Not to mention that man you live with.’ She didn’t like Teddy at all, and never actually used his name.

  ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ Elaine mumbled.

  ‘Like hell he is. He’s a brute.’

  ‘Mu-um.’

  ‘He hits you. He’s a brute. Neither your father nor I can understand what you possibly see in him, Elaine.’

  At that moment the sound of Shawn’s motorbike coming in the driveway distracted them both.

  ‘Here’s the boy,’ Elaine said.

  ‘Been out on that machine of his. They’re such dangerous things. More, people are killed on motorcycles than in cars, you know. In proportion, I mean.’

  ‘Are they?’ Elaine rolled her eyes privately, waiting for Shawn to come in so he could take the pressure off her. When he did it was in full uniform, Wayne Gardner to the last detail. He took off his helmet and said, ‘Hi!’ to his sister.

  ‘Hi, skinny.’

  ‘Skinny yourself,’ Shawn said, dropping onto the couch and running a hand back through his hair. ‘You don’t look too good. Been sick or something?’

  ‘See?’ her mother said.

  ‘I’m all right.’ In truth she did feel unwell, physically and mentally poised on the brink of a massive breakdown, but would never admit this in her mother’s presence because of the ceaseless punishing she’d get. Shawn, however, was another matter. She could talk to him. ‘How’s the bike?’ she asked.

  ‘Great now,’ he said. ‘Since I got it tuned. Wanna come for a burn?’

  ‘All right. Why not.’

  ‘She hasn’t got a helmet,’ mother said.

  ‘Yes she has. She can use my old one,’ Shawn said, getting up and grinning at Elaine.

  They rode out along Mickleham Road, passing below the Tullamarine Freeway and continuing west in the direction of Keilor. Elaine surrendered herself confidently to the obvious skill and assurance with which Shawn controlled the bike, listening to him change up and down the gears and hugging his back, protected from the wind. Beneath her the motor roared, sending vibrations up her body. She could feel how connected both of them were to the bike and to each other and understood why Shawn loved being on it, weaving between cars, accelerating quickly, leaning slightly on the turns. Shawn had his freedom while Elaine did not. She could see her helmet-framed face in the side mirror, a blanched face devoid of life, a trapped face, and she wondered what would become of her. Something had to give before much longer, but she could not see how the thing could end any way except badly. But end it had to all the same.

  Shawn took the old road to Keilor, mostly disused now, that wound to the top of a hill where there was a picnic area with a barbecue and lookout over the City of Keilor and the surrounding hills and valleys, mostly populated now with high-tension electricity pylons that stretched away into the distance and newer homes, like Broadmeadows. But here the homes were bigger and fancier, many of them with swimming pools and a few with tennis courts that could be seen from the lookout.

  They dismounted, removing their helmets and hanging them on the handlebars. A gusty wind blew up the hill directly at them, sending Shawn’s long locks flying back like a ragged brown flag. They stood gazing at the view for a while, and Elaine could feel the silence between them build to the point where it had to break. Shawn broke it.

  ‘So how are you, Sis? Really.’

  ‘Really? Oh, not too good, I s’pose.’ She took a deep breath and wondered how soon the tears would come. They were not far away.

  ‘Is he still belting you?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said, and the dam burst violently. Shawn didn’t look at her and she turned away, sobbing and coughing into her hand. ‘I dunno what I’m gonna do, Shawn. I can’t leave him ’cause he’d come after me, I know he would. He said so.’ She felt Shawn’s hand on her shoulder and tried to control her sobs. ‘I just dunno what I’m gonna do,’ she said again.

  ‘You’ve got to get out of there, Elaine. He’s a fucking madman.’

  ‘He didn’t used to be,’ she said pathetically. ‘Lately he’s got worse, though. I don’t know what he does when he goes away, but he’s up to something. He’s up to something right now, I can tell. He’s so bloody secretive. He hasn’t got a job, but he produces these wads of money. If I ask any questions he tells me to mind my own business. And he goes right off for no reason. He thinks I’m having an affair, for Christ’s sake. As if I’d be game.’

  ‘You’ve got to get out. Christ, Elaine. The man did time for manslaughter.’

  ‘I honestly thought all that was behind him, Shawn.’

  ‘Once a crim, always a fucking crim,’ Shawn said with bitterness. ‘Men like him don’t change.’

  ‘He raped me a while ago,’ she said quietly, feeling a twinge of ghost pain from between her legs.

  ‘Oh Christ!’ Shawn said, then stormed away, pushing his hand through his hair and swearing loudly, the words half-carried off in the wind so that he sounded like an intermittent radio signal. He stopped five metres away with his back to her, a skinny twenty-year-old in Wayne Gardner leathers, his back trembling, head down, one heel digging the ground. Then he turned around and shouted, ‘Do you want me to help you?’

  She wiped tears from her face and nodded, a sharp splinter of fear in her heart.

  Shawn advanced two steps, raised a gloved hand and stabbed a finger at her. ‘He touches you again, I kill him. Elaine? He touches you again, I kill him.’

 
; She stared at Shawn, the least violent of young men. To her knowledge he had never once been in a fight. The very idea of Shawn taking on Teddy was preposterous and frightening. He stood facing her in his shining suit, slender and tremulous, legs apart, hands by his sides. He seemed magnificent to Elaine then. Her brother had meant what he’d said. She saw that a crucial moment had been created between them on this windy hilltop. Peering hard into his narrow and hair-streaked face she also saw why Shawn had not come any closer. He was crying too.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘Did you cop that pair yesterday?’ Brett said. ‘Talk about the Odd Couple.’

  Dennis remembered them, the effeminate one in moleskins with whom he’d had a polite few words and the shorter one who’d stood back a little and not said anything. They were certainly a strange combination, Dennis had thought, picking up their empty glasses after they’d gone from the bar and watching them through the leadlight window as they crossed the dried-out plantation and headed for the Blind Eagle. But all kinds of people come into hotels, after all, and he hadn’t given them much thought afterwards, distracted too by Graham’s presence and certainly not expecting the man who had taken Pipic’s truck and killed Karen with it to wander in large as life for a counter-lunch. But their faces were printed in his memory all the same.

  Dennis and Brett were driving along a dirt road outside Avoca in Brett’s car, a 1975 one-tonne Holden utility, with an aluminium tray, onto which Brett had fitted a moulded cabin. Brett was fond of his one-tonne and went bush in it several times a year, throwing a foam-rubber mattress and sleeping bag in the back and driving wherever his mood took him, often covering vast distances. He maintained that, with proper handling and a few bags of cement over the rear wheels, the one-tonne could go nearly anywhere a four-wheel-drive could. Last year he and a mate had taken it to Cape York during the dry season and got as far as the Jardine River before conceding defeat. After the Jardine there was only Bamaga, the Aboriginal reserve, then the Tip itself. Brett was disappointed at not being able to go all the way because he’d wanted to be photographed outside each of the four pubs on Thursday Island.