“All right,” I said. Her hair was wild and uncombed, a look I approved of, and I still couldn’t remember, but it would have been a good idea. “I’ll tell you. You get a jug and you put some water in it. Then you put some sugar in the water and stir it with a stick.”
“And the horse drinks it?”
“No. You get a plastic tube, a funnel and the bottom half of a hypodermic. You connect them all up and jam the hypodermic into a vein in the nag’s neck. Blood spurts out through the needle and into the tube, so you’ve got to raise the tube to a height greater than the animal’s heart can pump the blood.” The roof of my mouth felt dry, all the wine and vodka presumably. “Are you sure you don’t want to take notes? I could help you draw a diagram.”
“I think I can remember all this, Purdue.”
“So you need a chair. It’s very important to have the chair ready before you start. Otherwise blood goes everywhere. You stand on the chair and hold the tube with the funnel above your head with one hand and pour the sugar solution from the jug with the other. Gravity does the rest. The solution pushes the blood back into the horse and then trickles in after it.”
“Shit, really, you just pour the stuff straight into the bloodstream, no digestion necessary.”
“That’s about right,” I said. “You want to know this why?” “We might have forgotten the chair.” She got to her feet, stepped into the pantry, came out with a half-height aluminum stepladder she lifted easily in one hand. “I assume this’d do the trick.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“You and me, Mr. Purdue. After I’ve made a phone call or two to line up the equipment, we’re going for a little drive into the country.”
“No need to be formal, Share,” I said. “Call me Tom.”
§
I blame my name for leading me into a life of crime. What I told Share was true, as far as it went, but it didn’t go all the way, not by a long chalk. My mad parents were flower children years before Rupert Murdoch and his yellow press mates ever heard of the term. With a handful of their arty mates, they raised us kids in a pile of dirty mud brick mansions and hovels out Eltham way, miles north of Melbourne, still the edge of the scrub when I was a boy. Other artist colonies had the same idea, but my mob was the weirdest of the lot. From the beginning none of the men had shaved, and none of the women either, and this had started before Women’s Lib or third stage feminism had ever been heard of. These hirsute seekers after truth wove their own cloth, milked their own scrawny goats, and taught us in a kind of Steiner curriculum designed by Martin Kundalini Richardson, king of the loonies, a sort of unsuccessful mix of L. Ron Hubbard, George Adamski and ancient aboriginal myths as interpreted on the back of a Corn Flakes’ packet.
You wouldn’t credit the extent of the brain-damaging crap they shoveled down our gullets. Transforming into bandicoots by the light of the full moon. A tunnel reached from the depths of Ayers Rock to the lair of the Hidden Masters in Tibet. “Ayers Rock” is what we whites used to call Uluru, that big slab of red stone in the middle of the Australian continent that the aborigines revere. The navel of the universe, we were taught. Joe Bannister and I used to snigger and wonder if the arse of the world would fall off if you got a really big fucking Phillips head and unscrewed it. That earned us gentle reprimands and extra hours churning up the slurry for the mud bricks. I didn’t mind that one bit, although it could get cold sloshing in the wet; it was better than learning the sixteen portals of the reptile mutants who secretly ran the world. The Queen of England and the rest of the royal family were among their number. In fact, they and certain other leading Jewish dynasties were the world’s leading reptile invaders. I swallowed it all until I was about fourteen, when I was already a bad kid, and then one day I woke up and looked around me at the real world and started shaking my head. I suppose I can’t complain; it gave me a rich line of bullshit for my future careers.
None of this is what turned me to crime, not directly. That happened when I was twelve and three badly dressed State education department heavies, one male and two females, visited our classroom and sent in a report that eventually reached the Minister. “Damned jackbooted busybodies!” thundered Kundalini Richardson, but it was too late, we were pinched. I spent the next six years at Eltham High, going through culture shock roughly equivalent to a Stone Age Papuan being hijacked and put to work for Amway.
“Children, we have three new students joining us for class today. Stand up, boys. I’ll ask you each to tell us your name, then sit down and open your geography book at page 121, the Principal Imports of Peru. You there, son.”
I jumped up breezily, grinned around at the class. The other kids had been nervous, scared even. I’m the extroverted type, I knew I was in for heaps of fun.
“Recherché,” I said loudly.
Ears pricked up. A ripple of manic joy passed across the classroom, but I was too dumb to understand what it was that had happened.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m Recherché,” I said, “and this here is my cousin Con, that’s short for Contrapuntal, and this bloke’s—”
The ripple had became a haze of muttering. Some residue of survival instinct made me stumble into silence. The teacher was a burly youth with hair parted firmly on the left, some hapless bonded victim of the Education Department fated by his contract to penal servitude in the sticks, or near enough. He stepped forward and his fists clenched.
“Are you taking the piss, son? You having a lend of me?”
I blinked at him. “Eh?”
“I asked for your name. Just tell us your name.” He consulted a list. “If he’s Con, you’d be Tom, is that right?”
Triumphant glances were being exchanged across the rows of desks, and a soggy spitball hit me behind the ear. I flinched, rubbed at it, stared around. A fat kid with boils stared at me with hatred. I looked back at the teacher.
“My name is Recherché Doubting Thomas Purdue,” I said carefully. “Sometimes Outsiders just call me Tom....” But the room was in uproar. That set the tone for the next few years. One day I’m going to borrow Mauricio’s gun and drive out to Eltham and blow fucking Martin Kundalini Richardson’s noble Alzheimerish head right off his fucking shoulders.
Share stowed the step ladder in the back of the Cobra, which somehow I’d parked in the brick carport at the side without smashing it. The ladder didn’t fold up as neatly as Mauricio. It stuck straight into the air like some mediaeval torture rack. There was no way we could carry the thing and put the canopy up. I didn’t really feel like uncocooned driving. But there again, maybe the wind in my face would be good for the hangover. Share looked at me with undisguised mistrust.
“Sure you are up to driving?”
“No,” I said.
“Give me the keys.”
I handed them over meekly.
§
For a while Share drove in silence. She was heading East. I fumbled in the glove box and found a pair of shades and put them on. They cut down the glare a bit, but did nothing for the headache. I decided to take my mind off my condition with some polite conversation.
“So what line of work are you in, Share,” I said. Jesus, I must have quizzed her on all this last night over ten kinds of lamb.
“Christ, Tom, you’ve got a memory like a sieve. Alzheimer’s already? Or did they smack you around the head a bit too much in prison?”
Fuck, she knew that as well. “Disgraceful, I know. I put it down to the vodka.”
She shot me a tired look, reconciled to my inadequacies. “Investment advice. Risk assessment. Risk management. Financial services. Import/export. That sort of thing.”
“Sounds interesting,” I said, and my eyes drifted away to the passing street life.
“Somebody’s got to do it.”
“Big firm?”
“Big enough. Just me.”
“A one woman outfit?”
“Exactly.”
“Saving on the secretarial
side of things. I do it myself.”
“Christ no, I’ve got secretaries. Two of them.”
“A three woman outfit, then.”
“I don’t think Wozza and Muttonhead would like to hear that.”
“Wozza?” I said. “Wozza O’Toole? Muttonhead Lamb?” “Those are my men.”
“They’re your secretaries?”
“You got problems with that?”
“I...um...I had occasion to meet Mr. O’Toole once.”
“Yeah, he told me: Remand yard, Pentridge, 1993.”
Pentridge. Good god, that brought back memories, and a hundred years of scuttlebutt traded by old crims. The great gray terrible walls, topped with barbed wire, guard towers with guns at each corner. Jika-Jika, the dreadful hell hole for the worst of men. Gardens where bodies were buried in shallow graves, they said. The place had been closed for years. And now some hungry bastards had reopened it as a district of expensive homes. A veritable walled and gated community, Pentridge Village, not five miles from Vinnie’s shop. Lovely view of the Coburg Lake, now they’d removed the razor wire. Fuck, nothing was beyond parody in this day and age.
“Why are you smiling? Fond memories of your cell in Pentridge?”
“No. Thinking of Wozza as a secretary, that’d make anyone smile. Bloke couldn’t write his name. Couldn’t add two and two.”
Share shrugged. “The education system had totally failed him. He was a lost cause from day one at kindergarten.”
“So, how come...?”
“You’ve got to do something inside, you should know that. Might as well do a bit of Adult Literacy. Get yourself a cushy billet in the prison library, read a few books. Matriculate. Enroll in a TAFE. Get yourself a degree. It impresses the bejesus out of the parole board.”
“A degree? Wozza?”
“Bachelor of Information Technology.”
“Fuck me, all I did in Seattle was lift weights.”
“Wozza won’t talk down to you, Tom. He’s an egalitarian sort—wears his distinction lightly.”
“What about Muttonhead?” I said. “You’re not going to tell me
Muttonhead is now a doctor of semiotics.”
“No, Mutton’s more your action type.”
“Standover man?” Mutt was about three feet tall.
“Don’t be unkind. Somebody’s got to hold the ladder.”
“What ladder?”
“The one behind your head.”
“Mutton’s going to be at the track?”
“Wozza too. We do these sorts of things as a team.”
“Look,” I said. “Just what sort of ham-hocked nag do you have on the card?”
Share Lesser gave me a bland look. “Who’s talking about horses?”
“I thought we were going to some country race meeting.”
“After a fashion, but it’s private. And the sheikh’s not interested in horses.”
“What sheikh?”
“Abdul bin Sahal al Din.”
I was getting fed up. “I think you’d better explain things, Share. This is starting to look like false pretenses. This is starting to look like kidnapping, and in my own car at that.”
“All will be revealed, Tom. And I wouldn’t fuss about the car after what your oaf did to mine last night.”
I looked sideways at Share. She was driving with considerable aplomb—that’s the only word to describe it. If there was an opening in the traffic, she’d switched lanes and taken advantage almost before the guy in the other lane blinked. Quite often the guy in the other lane registered his displeasure with his horn. Share ignored them all. I did too. I decided against pursuing the matter of the race meeting. Just go with the flow. Even if the flow took us straight into the dubious company of Wozza O’Toole and Muttonhead Lamb.
Share was right. I’d met Wozza and Mutton years ago in Pentridge. We’d all been on remand. Me on a charge of grievous bodily harm against my father-in-law, and the other two on a bog-standard bank hold-up: stockings, sawn-offs, plastic shopping bag for the contents of the till, hotwired getaway car and a wheelman who drove straight through a set of red lights and was sideswiped by a mob of hoons in a lowered Customline. The hoons piled out of the wreck brimming with righteous road rage, and were settling to the task of beating the shit out of Wozza, Mutton and the hapless wheelman when they discovered the plastic bag. By the time the cops arrived the hoons had done a runner with the proceeds, leaving the other three to begin their life behind bars with nothing in the kitty. I’d hired a Queen’s Counsel by the name of Muldoon who charged like a tax collector and drank with the vice squad. Despite my prior record in the USA, the case against me proved very arguable, the terrible strain of the circumstances, your honor, and the police evidence curiously muted. I left court a free man without a stain on my character and never saw my in-laws again. Wozza and co. were on legal aid. They got eight years each with remissions.
§
Share was pointing the Cobra straight at the Dandenongs. I knew of no race course in this direction, but I said nothing. The traffic thinned. As the Cobra picked up speed, the wind began to howl in the rungs of the ladder. Civilized discourse was now impossible anyway. The Cobra comes into its own on a hill climb and Share exercised it to its full potential on the roads that dipped and twisted through the greenery of the Dandenongs. By the time she suddenly left the road, shot down an unmarked track between towering rows of mountain ash and swung round onto a gravel drive in front of a mansion, I had no idea where we were. Share didn’t stop but continued past the mansion and over a cattle grid. Finally she ground to a halt outside a row of fake half-timber stables, painted black and white like a Christmas card.
“Where are we?”
“Shangri-La,” she said.
“I can believe it.”
We left the car and entered the stables. They were gloomy and empty of horseflesh. The only inhabitants were two guys in overalls sitting on a feed bin drinking tea from a thermos. Well, it might have been tea.
“Purdue, you old bastard. Long time no see, fella!”
“G’day, Wozza,” I said.
“Looking fit, Purdue, me old mate, looking bloody fit.”
“Not that fit,” I said.
“You could go a few rounds these days, don’t tell me you couldn’t.”
Wozza bounded from the feed bin and playfully danced up to me, sparring with his fists. His fingers still carried prison tats. Written across the knuckles of both hands was a crude invitation to sex—one letter per knuckle. I hadn’t run across the guy for years, but he hadn’t changed much, you still wouldn’t trust him as far as you could kick him. I sidestepped Wozza and made my way to the feed bin. Mutton, on the other hand, had changed. Someone had cut or bitten his nose off.
“G’day, Mutton,” I said, extending my hand and trying to look at his face without surprise. He was a shrimp of a man, hardly bigger than a twelve year old, too small to be a jockey which had been the disappointment of his life.
Mutton shook my hand without leaving the feed bin. His greeting was indistinct. The nose job hadn’t done much for his diction. I turned back to Wozza.
“Share tells me you’re into Information Technology these days.”
“It’s the future,” Wozza said. “Information is power. Simple as that.”
“I wouldn’t mind a bit of information about what we’re doing here,” I said. “Pleasant though these surroundings are, and however delightful the company.”
“We’re expediting things,” Share said. “Speeding them up.” “What things?”
“Come and take a squizz, Purdue, me old china,” Wozza said. “Come and take a decko.”
Wozza and Share turned and walked out of the stables, I followed and behind me I could hear Muttonhead lumbering his way off the feed bin. We followed a well-worn track through the forest for a few hundred meters. The track ended at a gate and beyond the gate was a small paddock. It was well hidden, entirely surrounded by trees. With a slig
ht shock I realized that the field was completely free of marijuana plants. Something moved against the trees at the other end of the field. I leaned against the gate and studied the shape, the slightly rocking motion of the dappled pale brown against the grays and green of the forest.
“Bloody hell,” I said.
“Ship of the desert,” Wozza said.
§
I stared in disbelief at the animal. It’s not the sort of thing you expect to stumble over in a Victorian paddock, not outside a circus. I wouldn’t have been more surprised if it had been an elephant. “We’re not going to try and dope that thing,” I said.
“Nile Fever,” Share said. “She’s fast, but could be faster.” “Why the buggeration do you want a fast camel?”
“They race them in Saudi and the United Arab Emirates,” Share said. “It’s big time. Very big money indeed.”
“Forgive the observation,” I said, “but we are not in Saudi. Saudi is a very long way from here. So too was Dubai last time I consulted my atlas.”
“Jeez, I hope your passport’s up to date,” Wozza said. “Hasn’t been impounded by the police or nothing.”
“Get knotted,” I said.
“Just kidding,” Wozza said.
I looked at Mutton’s face. “Don’t tell me the camel bit your schnozz off?”
The Mutt expressed disappointment in me. “Nile’s as gentle as a baby!”
“The sheikh is dropping in for a road test at eleven o’clock,”
Share said. “By then we want Nile Fever at her tip top best.”
“In the pink of condition,” Wozza said. “The mistress of the track. Nile Fever, Queen of the Desert. Export quality DNA.”
“You want the animal full of sugar,” I said.
“Right in one,” Share said. “Correct weight.”
Behind me Muttonhead said something I didn’t catch, but Wozza said, “Yeah, right, Mutton, no worries.”
“This sheikh guy is buying Australian camels with a view to racing them in the Middle East?” I said. How would you get them out of the country? Not the sort of thing you could smuggle in your underpants. DNA, Woz had said. Did they want the sperm? Ova, I corrected myself. Could you get viable, transportable ova out of a camel? Or even fertilized embryos?
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