Last Long Drop

by Mike Safe

  After a perfunctory hello, Silas started peppering him with questions.

  ‘When did they go up there?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly.’ Harcourt presumed he meant the Barrier Reef.

  ‘When’s she coming back?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why won’t she take my calls or answer my texts?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He didn’t mention that Kirsten had promised in their phone conversation the previous afternoon that she’d contact Silas and ‘square it away’ with him. Whatever that meant, it obviously hadn’t happened.

  ‘Look, this whole debacle is a total embarrassment,’ Silas barked down the phone. ‘It’s making both of us, her and me, a laughing stock. I’ll break that Harrison’s skinny neck if I get hold of him.’

  ‘Silas, calm down. Tess and I are just as bewildered by this as you are.’

  Silence echoed down the line and then Silas, in a restrained voice, said, ‘The simple truth is I love Kirsten. I know we’ve been having a hard time of late, but I really thought this could be something that was going to last.’

  The conversation slowly dropped away. Both Harcourt and Tess were already cautious of Silas’s impetuousness, his alpha male tendencies and temper, but this admission of love for their daughter added a new dimension. Maybe he was genuine, maybe he was just seeking sympathy.

  ‘Hey, Silas, please let’s all keep cool,’ he said. ‘Let’s catch our breath, work out where we’re going, okay?’

  Silas grunted what seemed to sound like some sort of agreement, said goodbye and ended the call.

  Harcourt thought about it all for a frustrating minute and decided to phone Kirsten to tell her to at least contact Silas. As he expected there was no answer and so he sent a text.

  Minutes later he received a text of his own – not from Kirsten but from Jack in what was late night London. He would be home the day after tomorrow, and he had given the flight number and late afternoon arrival time. It continued ‘pick me up please?’ and then asked ‘what’s the go with K? Just saw her boobs on Brit TV!’ Harcourt texted back ‘yes’ and ‘don’t ask – too much to tell.’

  At least Jack’s homecoming details were some good news on what had been a bad morning.

  He decided to try the mobile number Burk had given him for Phil ‘Flipper’ Woodrell.

  ‘Speak,’ a voice rasped down the line. It sounded well worked over by cheap whiskey and cigarettes.

  ‘Is that Phil Woodrell?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  Harcourt told him and went into his story about Vargas, the proposed book and Tommy Woodrell’s drowning all those years ago. His decades of journalism had taught him that cold calling like this was always a risk, an easy chance for someone suspicious or reticent at the other end to say no and hang up. It was a matter of getting his spiel across succinctly and, most importantly, sympathetically, without laying it on too thick. It was an art.

  Woodrell listened in silence and remained quiet for a few seconds after Harcourt finished. Finally, he asked, ‘So who wised you up to all this? Tommy’s been dead and gone for decades.’

  ‘Ralph Jones, the former head lifeguard up here.’

  Woodrell hacked out a ragged laugh. ‘Oh, I remember him for sure. He helped my family out after my father lost his job and then I talked to him once or twice about Tommy and what’d happened. That was all a long time ago, but Ralph’s a good bloke, the kind they don’t make any more.’

  So there it is, thought Harcourt. The old lifeguard had softly pushed his own sense of what was right, his wish for disclosure, in telling him about Tommy Woodrell’s otherwise forgotten drowning. He knew Harcourt would at least look into it despite Vargas’s determination to control any telling of his life and times.

  ‘Yeah, it’s long gone, but, sure, I’ll talk to you about Mike Vargas, tell you a few truths from way back then. Come on down tomorrow. I’ve got all the time in the world.’

  THIRTEEN

  Phil Woodrell lived in a worse-for-wear fibro cottage on a leafy hillside just outside Starlight Bay, a holiday hamlet that was all but deserted during the winter months. From Harcourt’s perfunctory assessment as he approached, it was the remaining low-rent exception on a high-cost street of contemporary glass-and-concrete palaces that had sweeping views down the steep slope to the vast expanse of silver-blue Pacific that rolled and heaved under a brooding southerly wind. In Woodrell’s gravel-and-weed driveway, a battered runabout boat sat on a trailer, its outboard motor crusted with dried salt spray from more than its share of fishing trips out on the bay. The boat and trailer were hitched to an equally used up Toyota ute that dated back to the eighties or maybe earlier.

  Harcourt had welcomed the lone drive south, down beyond the supposed working-men’s paradises of Wollongong and Port Kembla, into the greenery of the south coast holiday strip. With his phone turned off, he’d finally had respite from the Kirsten–Harrison imbroglio that had received a second outing in the morning’s newspaper. This time it was at least confined to the gossip pages. The item had offered no new angle except to say they were ‘bunkered down in their luxury cabana on the beach’ and remained ‘the talk of the upmarket resort.’ Apparently, the unlikely combination of the ‘literary world’ and ‘the Sydney social scene’ were ‘awaiting the intriguing couple’s next move with bated breath’.

  Overnight, Tess had managed a brief conversation with Kirsten, whose mood appeared to have darkened somewhat. She and Harrison were looking to get off the island, as Harrison now needed to fly urgently to New York to make peace with his publishers who, although saying nothing publicly, were said to be far from impressed with the tabloid and social media circuses now being played out in the wake of his Adelaide appearances. Even the New York Times had run the photograph of Kirsten and Harrison embracing on the beach in what passed as its gossip column with an appropriately spicy, if condescending, telling of the affair. So far, Tess remained unscathed as far as her employers were concerned. God, thought Harcourt, the old coots in New York were probably surreptitiously getting off on the full selection of photographs.

  And so despite the unhurried drive south he pulled up outside Phil Woodrell’s cottage with the Kirsten–Harrison confusion still swirling somewhere in the back of his brain. He was greeted by a yapping blue heeler dog as he walked up the drive. Its tail was wagging like a revved-up windscreen wiper and it seemed friendly enough.

  ‘Shudup!’ a gravelly voice called from somewhere and Phil Woodrell, or a man Harcourt assumed was Woodrell, emerged from what turned out to be an overgrown backyard. He was squat and powerful looking, below six feet in the old money, but about as wide. His forearms and hands were like roofing beams and his legs under sagging baggy shorts the same, although he walked with a limp as if his left knee or hip was crying out for replacement. Still, he had a gap-toothed smile on his face, weathered as it was by probably decades of sun and salt spray and being caught at the bottom of too many rugby league scrums.

  ‘How are yah,’ said Woodrell, gripping Harcourt’s hand. ‘I’m Phil, but call me Flipper.’

  His hand was calloused, his grip strong. ‘Come inside out of this wind.’

  The interior of the house was tidy and clean, if sparsely furnished, a new giant-sized flat screen television looking out of place among the other beach house bits and pieces.

  While making instant coffee, he told Harcourt he’d lived here for thirty something years, his wife having quit on him a decade or so ago because of his ongoing drinking and rabble rousing. He claimed to have since expunged much of that from his life. Well, some of the time, but his wife was back in the city, where their two adult children had also long moved. He got by doing handyman jobs around the district and as an occasional deckhand on fishing boats, although catches weren’t what they used to be.

  Bringing the coffee into the front room with its panoramic view of the sea, he said, ‘Now that’s my superannuation – I can pretty well name my own price with an
outlook like that. I don’t want to sell, but I’m not getting any younger and I might have to pick up sticks if the money dries up down here. But at least I’ve got the jump on any rich fuckers who want to buy in. If push comes to shoving me out, they’ll pay and they’ll pay plenty.’ He laughed at the prospect.

  As Harcourt filled him in on details of the proposed book, Flipper listened but said little, a reaction that suggested he wasn’t impressed, at least with the way Vargas wanted it written. The conversation turned to football and surfing, both of which Flipper had by now all but lost interest in, and then to people they might both know, the key being Ralph Jones, the ex-lifeguard.

  ‘Like I told you on the phone, after Tommy’s drowning I had a couple of quiet chats with him,’ Flipper said. ‘In his line of work he saw people drown – he understood.’ He paused and looked hard at Harcourt. ‘He was one of the few from your beach back then who gave a hoot. Yeah, we were a couple of beaches down the coast, but all the young ones in particular, including some of ours, had their own agendas, their own little dramas, not all of them nice. The thing is at that age you think you’re bulletproof and in the end they didn’t give a rat’s arse about Tommy.’ He grunted bitterly before adding, ‘And I guess that brings us back to Mike fucking Vargas.’

  ‘I guess it does,’ said Harcourt, content to let Flipper set the running.

  The blue heeler sauntered into the front room where the two men sat side by side in mismatched easy chairs, the view laid out before them like a silent witness to their conversation. Flipper scratched at the dog’s ears and it huffed to itself before settling to sleep at his feet.

  ‘I was five years older than Tommy so I was pretty much the big brother, sort of a protective thing,’ Flipper said. ‘But then I got into football which meant I spent less time around the surf crowd, although Tommy and me would still get in the water now and then. It was like the grommets learning from the older guys as they still do today.’

  The Woodrells had been a working-class family, who typically had now been all but squeezed out as the beaches had turned into real estate bonanzas. Flipper’s father, Bob, had worked as a fitter and turner at a small engineering plant in the then industrial inner suburbs while his mother, Raelene, had a part-time job making sandwiches and hamburgers in a milk bar near his work.

  ‘They were good people,’ Woodrell said. ‘Money was tight but there was always food on the table. They had our best interests at heart.’

  Neither of the boys did particularly well at school but Flipper had the promise of a rugby league contract while Tommy had his surfing. ‘He was still at school, or supposed to be, but I was out in the world working part-time in a sports store.’

  There was a rough patch when their father was laid off after sections of the plant were automated but through a friend of a friend who knew Ralph Jones, the then head lifeguard who knew everybody, he found a new job soon enough. ‘So that started a link with our family and, like I say, Ralph was there for us, me in particular, after Tommy’s death.’

  Somewhere along the way, Tommy fell in with a kid called Michalis Vargas, better known as Mike, who always seemed to have plenty of money, the latest surfboards and a new car, a hot Holden Torana which had just come on the market and a rarity for a teenager to own back then. ‘Apparently, they’d met at the beach. Surfing brought them together like it did with a lot of kids back then and I suppose it still does today.’ Flipper shrugged. ‘His old man was making a fortune, his mum had died in a road accident, and so the father let the kid have whatever he wanted as a sort of compensation, I guess. By then, Tommy wasn’t doing too well at school and I think he came to resent me a bit, being the big brother who was leaving him behind after scoring my footy deal. So he was kind of vulnerable and then this Vargas shows up with money to splash around and he could sweet talk the girls, or so they said. Anyway, it was always handy to be tight with someone like him so you could catch a ride up or down the coast to surf and Vargas had new boards whenever he wanted them plus his way of pulling the chicks – all the things that Tommy didn’t have.’

  Flipper took a final drink of his coffee. ‘But there was something else about Vargas. I saw him surf once or twice and he had ability but he could be pretty reckless – just go for it when others wouldn’t, drop in on anyone, no respect. That carried over into other parts of his life too – and Tommy got caught up in it.’

  He paused and turned to face Harcourt, his face now sombre. ‘I barely mentioned any of this, not to my parents, or not even later to my wife and kids. But I did mention it to Ralph Jones, a bloke I barely knew. When it was fresh, still raw, I had to tell somebody and I realised he was somebody who’d understand, keep faith with me. I had to get it off my chest and I knew from how he’d helped my father that I could trust him and I wasn’t wrong about that.’

  He went on to tell how Tommy, the kid who had nothing, had ended up being seemingly mesmerised by Vargas, the kid who had everything. ‘I don’t know how else to put it.’

  Vargas’s recklessness in the surf began to rub off on Tommy and, in a disturbing way, this also came to play out on land. Tommy started skipping out at night with Vargas, hotwiring cars and heading off to other parts of Sydney to rob petrol stations and convenience stores which, back then, had next to no security or surveillance. ‘They did it, I don’t know, five or six times after getting off on pills, speed or some sort of uppers that were around in a big way back then, or so Tommy eventually told me,’ said Woodrell. ‘Just for the thrill, for the dare, just because they could. It was all driven by Vargas and Tommy went along with it. They had balaclavas and Vargas even had a fake pistol, or at least he told Tommy it was fake.’

  Somehow, the pair managed to get away with it – and no more than a handful of dollars in total – but as the stickups continued Vargas grew even more reckless, insisting they do over a service station and late night corner-store within five minutes’ drive of each other on the same night. By then, Tommy was becoming increasingly apprehensive of what he had gotten into and where it was headed. ‘So one night after he sneaked back in he woke me and told me what was going on. I was shocked, I couldn’t believe it, and he pleaded with me not to tell our parents. I wouldn’t have told them anyway – it would have killed our mother, who wasn’t very well to start with as our father was drinking fairly heavily, starting to lose the plot. Anyway, I told Tommy to get away from this idiot, that he was totally fucked in the head and the only outcome was the pair of them ending up in jail, juvenile detention or wherever. If he didn’t sort it out quick, I’d find Vargas and sort him out myself. He listened to me and agreed he had to get out, but I don’t know … the guy had this hold on him.

  ‘Then Tommy said he was supposed to be seeing Vargas in the morning after Mum and Dad had left for work. It was the summer school holidays and they were planning to go surfing, probably down the coast somewhere. He promised that he’d talk to Vargas, tell him he was done with the robbery stuff. I told him to stay home, not go down the coast with him, but he didn’t say anything to that. I had to go to pre-season football training early the next morning – we were being flogged by the coach because we’d come off a bad season and as a young guy trying to make it I couldn’t afford to miss a session or I would have made sure he laid it on Vargas.’

  Next morning Flipper had returned home after the promised heavy training run to find a scrawled note from Tommy sitting on his bedside table. It read: ‘Gone to Boomers. It’s pumping. Don’t worry – taking care of what we talked about.’ On the way home, Flipper had driven by the beach – he had the loan of a club sponsor’s car for a couple of weeks – and seen that heavy southerly waves were pounding in.

  The east coast aftermath of the swell that had claimed Harold Holt down in Victoria a couple of days before, thought Harcourt.

  ‘It was big and dangerous – there was no one out on the beach breaks which were smashing down in total closeouts and only a few experienced guys who really knew what they were doing were ou
t on the more sheltered points,’ Flipper said. ‘I thought, well, at least Tommy would have forgotten surfing with Vargas, but then I drove home and found the note. I thought, oh, no. I’d only surfed Boomers once, when I was about Tommy’s age, and it’d been small, but it still caught me out badly a couple of times and that was it for me. Until this happened I’d never been back. So I did the only thing I could do – I jumped in the car and just hammered down there.’

  Flipper excused himself, went out to the kitchen and came back with two cans of Tooheys beer.

  ‘Sorry, need one of these,’ he said almost apologetically. He offered the second can to Harcourt, who felt obliged to accept. Flipper snapped back his can’s tab and took a hard pull. Harcourt, who had barely touched his coffee, did likewise, minus the hard pull.

  The two-hour drive down to Boomers had seemed like five. The traffic had been considerably lighter back then and he’d broken the speed limit much of the way, especially after clearing Sydney’s southern suburbs. He described the experience as ‘like being inside a bubble, all on my own.’

  ‘Anyway, I finally made it and there was a solitary car on the cliff, Vargas’s Torana. There was no one out surfing and then I looked down to the sand and saw Vargas. He was crouched down in his wetsuit, his board beside him. There was a bunch of clothes there where they’d changed before going in the water. There was no sign of Tommy and I felt this tremor of dread run through me. I yelled down at him, but he couldn’t hear me over the noise of the surf that was coming across the reef, just smashing down.’ Flipper had duly scrambled down the cliff and confronted Vargas, who was shaking and appeared disorientated.

  ‘I asked him what had happened – as if I didn’t already know – and he just looked at me like he was in a trance. I screamed at him and was about to slap him one when he stood up and started crying. I still remember exactly what he said … “I lost him, I couldn’t find him, he just disappeared.” Then he sank back onto the sand and cried some more. I looked out to sea and it was just a mass of white water except for the channel where you could get out to the reef, but that had a massive rip running through it. I felt hopeless. Tommy was gone, not even a miracle could have brought him back by then. I looked at Vargas and screamed at him, just unloaded on him for taking Tommy out there. Then I let him have it about everything else – what an arrogant prick he was, how he had fucked up Tommy’s life, about the robberies and how he was responsible for his death. He just stayed crouched there, I don’t even know if he heard a word I said.’