Before It Breaks

by Dave Warner

  2

  JASPER’S CREEK, WESTERN AUSTRALIA

  As if exhausted from an arduous day keeping itself aloft and baking the earth below the dull, rusty red of blood, the sun plummeted quickly. This was the way up here, night falling more like a guillotine than a handkerchief. Almost every night for the last thirty years he had gone to sleep alone. He could seek company and usually did, at least for a few hours, normally in a bar, sometimes in a café, very infrequently over dinner at the home of an acquaintance. There had even been the occasional night he had slept with a woman but not for a while now. Human company he had discovered was no longer effective in reducing his sense of being an island. Indeed, the opposite was true. He felt less isolated here on the other side of the world than those last years in his hometown. Solitude was the natural state here. A man could stand silent knowing no other heart was beating within a hundred kilometres. But isolation did not equate to loneliness.

  Back then he’d had real friends, not just people you met in a bar, men he had gone to school with, worked with, but especially in their company he had felt a desperate loneliness. It was as if it were his avatar interacting with them while his real self skulked in a dungeon. But, you make your bed, you lie in it … alone.

  His fingertips travelled over his whiskers. If he really willed it he could remember his wife’s fingers doing that. She had eventually grown tired of his detachment and struck out for a new life free of the burden of what he had become.

  And why had he become that again?

  The voice asking him was always there, asking in the same measured tones, dragging him back to smoky bars, leather jackets, a crackling radio somewhere in a corner. Funny, a face could slowly erase over time but not a voice, a voice did not age. He did not offer an answer to the question—what was the point? It was a long time ago and it was too late now to change anything. All life after forty was regret.

  A sound that did not belong to nature pulled him from his contemplation. It was a vehicle somewhere on the other side of the creek, which really wasn’t that far away. It was probably twenty metres from his little camp here to the water’s edge, and no more than fifty across the span of the creek, so less than a hundred metres all up. As long as they kept to themselves, what did he care?

  He set up the small tent with great facility, sat back on the front seat of the car and popped a beer can. Warm, but so what? He was after the faint buzz, not the taste. The creek was still, only shadows created an illusion of movement. He drained the can quickly and tossed it on the floor in back with the others. At the roadhouse he’d bought a cooked chicken. Now he pulled it from its foil wrapper and ripped off a drumstick. Mosquitoes buzzed around him but for some reason they never bothered with him much. There were flies but only a fraction of what there would have been in daylight. He chewed the chicken meat slowly and thought about South America. That was one place he had always wanted to visit. Another failed aspiration, along with a boat trip through Alaska and a hotel romp involving Britt Ekland. His life was a series of joined dots that drew the picture of a fat zero. It was fortunate how things had fallen into place here, remarkable in fact. He had taken a gamble which could have backfired badly but then there was not so much to lose, was there. He had owed money all over Hamburg, HSV were playing like crap, staying there was validation of his failure. Even so, at least he was alive there. His gamble could have cost him that life, miserable as it was. But it had proved the right move. This was where all the tributaries of his life were destined to pool. It was where he would die.

  He turned the key far enough to ignite the CD player. Country music, what else for a single man who could no longer lie to himself he was even middle-aged?

  He sat for a long time listening to the music, drifting. A memory would constitute itself: his parents, his father’s braces worn even at dinner-time. That memory would crumble but reconstitute as another, and another: the street where he grew up, a school friend, a shopkeeper who was particularly generous, a girl he fancied who preferred one of his friends, the game of handball where he broke his little finger. What had become of those whose lives had intersected his? Some would be dead but others might be sitting in a little flat, or hunched over a campfire on a sweeping plain in Argentina eating roast beef, the strum of a guitar in the background floating over a starry sky like the one above him now. And they might be reflecting on their parents, generous shopkeepers and maybe even him.

  His legs had stiffened by the time he swung back out of the car and pulled the aluminium dinghy, the tinny, off the roof of his old Pajero. Still strong, he enjoyed the weight of the boat on his arms for it confirmed he was real, not just one of his memories. He placed the boat by the muddy bank then dragged the outboard from the back of the Pajero. Fishing and drinking beer, two worthy occupations to pass the time until the next sunset. The proximity of crocodiles did not worry him though he would take no foolish risks. While he had heard stories of crocs flipping over tinnies in the Territory, nobody he knew here had ever witnessed it, and given that men exaggerate any such brush with death, he had to wonder if this absence was proof such things were myth. As he attached the outboard his thoughts meandered back to last night, those two fresh-faced women laughing with him as he spun tales. The young fellows with them were pissed off, he could tell, but that was just the way the world worked. He had what the women wanted, so they’d sat with him and drank his beer and laughed at his stories, genuinely, he believed, for he wasn’t one to dissemble. He caught sight of himself in the wing mirror. The last year or so the lines had deepened, the brightness in his eyes had dulled. He was drifting inevitably towards old age and death. Not yet though, there were still beers to drink and fish to catch.

  He caught a sound back in the bush towards the track down which he’d driven. He turned the radio right down and strained to hear.

  Nothing. Yet he felt it out there, a presence. There were many feral pigs in these parts. He’d shot and eaten more than his fair share. In fact he’d toyed with the idea of sending them back home where boar was a delicacy but then discovered somebody else was already doing that. Whenever he came up with some exciting idea it was inevitable he would discover he was too late. His ears stayed alert for any sound but there was nothing more.

  He wrapped his chicken back in the foil and slid it into the tent. He would have it later after a spot of fishing. As he was about to zip up the tent, he heard something approaching rapidly through scrub from behind and swung around fast. Before he could identify what it was, white sizzled his eyes.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he said trying to block the torch beam. The answer was something heavy and cold, slicing into his head. His knees hit hard ground, his body throbbed, his head ached yet seemed distant at the same time. Through all this he understood he was being murdered. A voice came from the darkness. The voice from before, as if like the serpent spirit of the aborigines, it had slithered over continents and through years to find him.

  Reason told him it was not possible, it could not be the voice, so he must already be dead. Yet the pain was intense and multiplying. Blows rained on his body, he fell to the ground and tried to call out but it was beyond him. Hell, which he had postponed for so long, had taken him to its bosom. The choice he’d made had stalked him as efficiently as any reptile of the deep and was destroying him now. He comprehended in some distant way the absolute rightness of this.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he heard himself gasp but that was a trick of the brain.

  He was dead before the thought had moved his tongue.

  3

  The report of shots fired came from some adventurous tourists who had foregone ceiling fans, sachets of hair conditioner, soft sheets and high-priced grog to brave bush, crocs and mosquitoes and thereby experience the True Australia. If he’d ever had any idea what the True Australia was, Clement had long since admitted defeat in capturing it. So far as he could tell, True Australia was Maoris and Sri Lankans singing their lungs out on TV to impress a bunch of overseas judges to
win a career singing American songs someplace other than here. True Australia definitely wasn’t the front bar of the Picador late on Saturday night. At least he hoped it wasn’t. Yet people had it in their heads that drunk losers breaking pool cues over one another’s heads was a link in a chain that stretched all the way back to Anzac Cove.

  ‘True Australia.’

  He gave a bitter grunt and pushed the accelerator flat. He wished the Net had never been invented. He longed for a return to the days of high-cost air-travel when only the wealthy could afford to see another country. Then these adventurous tourists from Tokyo or Oslo or Rio would never have had a clue about the Kimberley region in the north-west of the Great Southland and he wouldn’t have to worry about shots fired and the possibility somebody was illegally taking crocodiles, a job that should have been left to Fisheries or Parks and Wildlife. Unfortunately they were thin on the ground, the call had come to the station and the tourists were probably tweeting now about their ‘brush with death’. Somebody had to take the trouble to check it out. He could have left it, but the uniforms were all run off their feet. Hagan and Lalor were still hours inland sorting out the tribal stoush, and di Rivi and Restoff had their hands full processing a grand final party that had got out of hand. As for his fellow detectives, his sergeant, Graeme Earle, was off fishing and his junior, Josh Shepherd, tied up in court on the domestic violence case so, senior detective or not, he was left to do the dirty work.

  As well, that dog yesterday was still at the back of his mind, his tooth continued to flare, and the bloke with the hammer had been at it again before six, none of which helped his disposition. He forced himself to take a deep breath. Phoebe had taken to referring to him as Mr Cranky though he had no doubt the words were her mother’s. Marilyn still hadn’t forgiven him for transferring here. ‘Chasing us’ had been the phrase she’d used. Marilyn was angry because she believed he’d made the kind of sacrifice for their daughter he never would have for her. She was probably right but he would always love her, part of him anyway, the part you couldn’t explain any more than the part of him that wedged itself between them like a crowbar. And she wasn’t snow-white, this wasn’t all at his feet. Surprisingly, she hadn’t married that turkey, Brian, yet. Maybe Brian hadn’t asked or maybe she treated him the same way she’d treated Dan, like he never quite measured up. If her old man had still been alive Clement would have had an ally. Nick might have died a rich pearl farmer but he started as a bloody boat mechanic. Geraldine was the problem, she always had been. She loved to play the Lady of the Manor, and Clement had been the stablehand, never good enough for her daughter. It had taken a dozen years, but Marilyn had eventually synched with her mother on that. Sometimes Clement toyed with the idea she might be having second thoughts, might have at least understood her role in their demise and that’s why she hadn’t walked down the aisle again.

  He had calmed now. This wasn’t so bad, getting out of the office and away from petty crap a rookie could handle. The low, dry scrub either side of the road reminded him of those baking hot days when, as a boy, he’d played at being a soldier sliding towards his imagined enemy. Experience had taught him the enemy was generally not where you thought or even who you thought.

  The turn-off was up ahead. Australians signposted their roads in the same laconic style they spoke. For a hundred years nobody visited Australia except English cricket teams or Russian circus performers, and no circus performers or cricketers ever bothered to come to places like this. So signs were a waste of time. If you weren’t local you wouldn’t be here, simple as that. If you weren’t local and you were here, you shouldn’t be. You were a freak, not the kind of person desired and therefore not to be encouraged by signage.

  Many things might have changed but that attitude was buried so deep in the national psyche that it persisted. Unless you knew there was a track about to come up on your left that led down to the waterhole you’d eventually be in Darwin still looking for the nonexistent sign that said Jasper’s Creek.

  But Clement knew.

  He braked and turned easily down the wide dirt track. A four-wheel drive was as necessary as insect repellent up here. Clement passed a bullet-riddled Parks and Wildlife sign showing a crocodile and the word DANGER. They couldn’t signpost a road but the odd spectacular death by croc had put the wind up the bureaucrats in the Tourism department enough to get every little creek for five hundred k covered. He could see rust around the edges of the bullet holes so he knew they weren’t anything to do with the shots reported as coming from here in the early hours. Over the phone the tourists had given him a precise location for where they were when they heard the gunshots so Clement drove towards a waterhole he’d always known as Jasper’s. Who the hell Jasper was, nobody had been able to tell him. The waterhole wasn’t named on any map, it was too small down in mangrove territory. The bush was denser here, with paperbark, blackboy, even a few big gums. Clement pulled up at the point where the car-trail narrowed.

  No matter how long you lived up here you never got used to the dry blast of hot air that hit you the moment you stepped out of air-conditioning. Clement felt it now, that morbid, unfriendly heat. He began walking through bush toward the creek bank. Flies greeted him like a lost king.

  Having read up thoroughly about crocs, the tourists had slept on the roof of their camper van for safety. It was a practice Clement didn’t recommend. Already since he’d transferred he’d dealt with two incidents of people falling from their perch during the night and cracking bones in the dirt below. One bloke was pissed and had overbalanced. The other had woken up at dawn, forgotten where he was and rolled straight off the roof. Better to scrunch up in your car or move further away from the water. Still, they’d been wise to be cautious. There’d recently been reports of a large croc in the area that had taken a pig-dog.

  It took only a few minutes to find the car tracks and the broken scrub from where the tourists had driven out. According to them the shots had come from the west side of the creek but as it was night, they’d seen nothing and simply hightailed it out of there. Clement didn’t blame them. He suspected it was probably a couple of drunk hoons firing at the stars but it could have been some dickhead after a croc. Close to the creek, the trees bent in and leaned over the dark water, boughs sprawled across the muddy bank like a party-goer who’d never made it home. The light was dappled, the smell of rotting weeds and dead wood bringing to mind dragonflies and mosquitoes. Here Clement was extremely careful. Coming out of the bright light into this shadowy grove your eyes took time to adjust and you could literally trip over a big croc lazing in its muddy bed. He made sure the logs near the bank were logs then advanced close enough to be able to look west to the other bank, a distance he estimated might be a swimming pool and a half, say eighty metres. His first scan registered nothing out of the ordinary but when he looked again, he sensed rather than saw something wasn’t right. His focus narrowed to a shag levitating above the water but without its wings extended. Closer inspection revealed it was sitting on something curved and silver, the bottom of an upturned tinny. It was in shallow water right near the edge of the opposite bank. Despite the proximity there was no way Clement was swimming across. Foreboding thudded in Clement’s chest, not a salvo, not a flurry, just one solid thump. He started around to the other side of the creek.

  ‘Anybody there?’

  His words spun around the empty space and slapped him.

  No reply.

  The bush was thick and spikey through here. Sharp, stiff foliage poked into his neck and the backs of his legs, tangled branches scratched his arms. It was as if the bush was saying, keep away, leave me alone, I don’t want you here. Even pushing as quickly as he could it took him a good ten minutes to circumnavigate the creek and get to the opposite side from where he’d started. His position now was about twenty-five metres from the water, in bush but directly in line with the partly submerged tinny. A gap in the foliage surrounding the creek at this point meant there were no trees obstructing
his line of sight. He guessed the easy access might be why you’d launch your tinny from here. No outboard motor was visible on the tinny, and alarms bells sounded a fraction louder. Every tinny up here had some kind of motor.

  He called out again but heard only the ghost of his own voice. He continued on his arc, shoving his way through a tight screen of bush, sweating like a pig, moving sideways rather than down to the water because he was after the vehicle that had carried the tinny. About ten metres on, in a small clearing, was an early model Pajero, the driver door open. A low hum turned him around to a one-man tent that looked like somebody had poured a sack of tea over it: bush flies, thousands of them. Off the nearest tree, Clement snapped a small branch and waved its dead leaves around near the tent. The flies scattered long enough for him to recognise they’d been feasting on blood, quite a deal of it from the looks, tacky, not fresh but relatively recent, over the nylon tent and in the dark earth.

  Steeling himself, Clement flipped back the tent flap.

  Another dense army of flies. Fifty or so launched themselves at his eyes and nostrils, the rest remained undisturbed, clumped on what had once been a cooked chicken. Apart from a sleeping bag, a couple of utensils and plastic drinking cup, nothing else was in the tent. No blood from what he could see. If the blood on the tent was from an animal killed on a hunt, there was no sign of the carcass. His guts tightened fractionally. Something bad had happened to somebody here.

  ‘Hello. Is there anybody here?’

  He yelled it as loud as he could but all tone was flattened by the vast emptiness around him. He yelled again. And again. There was no response. He turned his attention to the vehicle, put it at eight to ten years old, small dents in the body and paintwork, scratches spanning a few years. His guess: either bought second-hand in this condition cheap, or the owner was a drinker who preferred to save his money for grog. The roof bore racks for transporting the tinny. Through the back window he could see fishing rods and tackle, a bucket, esky, various crap, old towels and a tarp. Making sure to touch nothing he peered down at the back seat. A pair of wading boots, shoes, three empty cans of VB. He moved to the open driver door and was surprised to find the key in the ignition. Closer inspection showed the lights were switched to on but the car headlights weren’t illuminated. He carefully twisted the key in the ignition with as little grip as possible already aware fingerprints might be important.