“You can’t knock Nile up because someone knocked her in,” I said, and smiled modestly.
“Knocked her extra genes in, anyway.” I looked across the room in surprise. That had been Animal. She was sulky still but her eyes showed some life for a change. “It’s real interesting, dad. You get these genes for fast muscles and big lungs and blood, and that, and you glue them in. Once in a blue moon it works and you’ve got a super-camel.”
“But chances are it’s sterile.”
“They love screwing around with female bodies,” Rommie said. “Humans, animals, it doesn’t matter.”
It seemed like a fair point, although I’ve heard that most of the lab techs are women themselves. I stretched and took a step back, treading with a crunch on Rebeiro’s phone. I bent and picked it up. It was made of sterner stuff than any I’d seen recently, and only a small portion of plastic was snapped off. The machine blinked at me in a deep blue request for attention. I put it back in my pocket. “So Nile can’t—couldn’t—have any little baby camels. And you reckon they’re up to speed enough with cloning to make a duplicate or two?”
“Maybe not yet,” Cookie said. “but any day now.”
“Nobody bothered telling Share,” I said.
“Rodolph the bastard and Culpepper knew,” Animal said. “Lesser thought it up, I reckon. Share probably thought it was just an ordinary camel brought in from Central Australia. That’s what she told me, anyway. Dunno if Wozza and Mutt knew.”
“Woz must have known something,” I said, “or he wouldn’t have hacked the creature’s tongue out. I hope Nile was dead already.”
“If he already knew, why didn’t he just take a buccal swab from its mouth?”
“A what?”
Juliet glanced at the Esky. “You don’t need a bloody great lump of meat to make a clone. A scrap of DNA is all you want. You can get it by running a cotton bud inside someone’s cheek.” She met my disbelieving gaze. “I edited that Scottish guy’s book, Tom. The Dolly the Sheep man?”
“Oh, all right. Maybe Wozza didn’t fancy sticking his hand inside a camel’s gob. She’d take it off at the wrist with one chomp.”
“A blood sample would do as well.”
“Uh oh.” A mental movie slotted into my head, running in fast forward. Wozza and Muttonhead messing with the bloody sugardrip needle. Mutt slipping something into his pocket and clambering up behind the hump. Racket of chopper. Thrown to the ground. I could almost hear the crackle of broken plastic. So some of the blood on his tattered riding silks wasn’t human. Simple thugs that they were, taking off after to the runaway animal with boxcutters probably seemed a really smart salvaging move once Mauricio put them on the trail. The dry ice surprised me though. Probably Culpepper’s superior suggestion, after they’d got it home with their cold beer. “Never mind. Why did the idiots put the thing in my storage unit?”
“They didn’t,” Animal said. “They gave it to Mauricio, and he gave it to Maeve and Vinnie to hold for him, and me and Grime needed your key anyway to hide the shotgun—”
“Which had never been fired.”
“He was already fuckin dead when we got here,” Rommie said, aggrieved and defensive. “We woulda done it.”
“So Maeve took the Esky along at the same time, I guess, for safe keeping, the dear silly old thing,” Animal suggested. “She probably thinks there’s fish in it.”
“No,” I said, remembering the few words I’d trolled out of her on Mauricio’s borrowed phone, “no, she knew something all right. She knew it was a tongue.” But there was no telling how much she knew of what that meant. Not much. Not very much at all. About anything, really. I sighed. “I’m about to fall over and go to sleep on the carpet,” I started to say.
“You can’t sleep here,” Animal told me, in a strong return to form.
“I have no intention of doing so.” I went to the heavily-curtained window, pulled back the drape. A sickly gray light crawled in. It looked as drab as I felt. I watched the cop walking by, miserable in his rain-proof coat but at least the rain had stopped. Maybe that was his relief in the car pulling up across the street. “You grrls will be okay,” I said. “Mr. Plod is just outside if you run into any more trouble.”
“Mr. who?” said Immie.
Animal looked at her in surprise. “Mr. Plod. From Enid Blyton?” Then her pale face blushed all the way up to her shaved awful scalp. Tough vampire grrls aren’t supposed to retain fond memories of their daddy reading them gaudy old books about Noddy and Mr. Plod and especially, her favorite, the Magic Far-Away Tree.
“That’s all right, Annabelle,” I told her reassuringly, and kissed her on one metal-knobbed cheek as she cringed away. “I’ll never tell.”
§
The clouds were gone. I yawned, my shoulders cracking. I was still walking with a limp, lugging the piece of dead camel. It was starting to feel like an albatross. Daylight brightened perceptibly. The air smelled fresh.
“You reckon you’ll be sleeping at my place, do you?” Juliet said. Her tone seemed odd. We leaned on either side of the ute’s tray. More large heavy cars stood parked across from the Holden ute than I remembered. You couldn’t see through their tinted windows. Oh well, it was only a matter of time before we were picked up. I ignored them and so did Juliet.
“Well, it’s that or at the People’s Palace.” God bless the Salvation Army, I thought. “Wait a minute, Mauricio said he had something lined up for me.” I found Rebeiro’s phone and flicked it to life. Surprisingly, it was still active. What a gentleman. I’d have had the connection cancelled. Maybe there were too many other things on his mind, not least Francis Stonecraft, Q.C., and the brute’s entire high-octane law chambers. “What’s Uncle Morry’s number, Jules?”
“Uncle Morry?”
“That’s what my daughter with the engaging hair style calls him.”
“That’s all right, then.” She gave it to me and I punched it in. “You do know it’s six in the morning.”
“Bastard sleeps too much anyway. Oh, it’s you, Mauricio. This is Roderick from Fit as a Fiddle. How are you today?”
“You rotten knob, Purdue. I just got to sleep. What cunt gave you this number?”
“Please don’t refer to your sister that way. Her prayers saved your worthless hide once.”
“Yeah, right, sorry.” That actually gave him pause. He brightened. “Hey, fuck-knuckle, did I tell you I’ve found that great place for you, come by sometime and you can have the key. For a month, mate, the owner’s...away, you know?”
“Yeah, I have a parking spot with a man in the same holiday destination. Where’s the pad, my man?”
“You’ll love it, I was trying to tell you earlier, right near your place, it’ll bring back memories.”
I started to laugh and couldn’t stop until a gob of spit caught in my throat. Juliet watched me, puzzled but starting to grin from the contagion of it. “You bastard! You’ve got me a unit in....”
“Pentridge Village, mate. Between Governor’s Road and Quarry Circuit. It’s right across from the Father Brosnon Community Park.”
I wheezed for a while and wiped tears from my eyes. “Okay, mate, you’re a prince,” I said. I put the pilfered phone back in my pocket, found my wife’s car keys and threw them across the top of the cabin to her, and put my hand to the passenger door.
A large heavy man in a boring suit climbed out of the car in front and marched toward the Lesser driveway, followed by two other large heavy men in boring suits from the back seat. A large heavy hand grabbed my wrist from behind and a second plucked the Esky away. Christ, they were everywhere.
“It’s the Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” I shouted to Juliet. “Run for your life. They’ll steal your very soul!” I spun around with my spare fist pulled back but instantly thought better of it. I could have decked one of them but where was the percentage? No point in an extra charge of resisting arrest. Besides, my hip was giving me hell. I leaned back against the tray of th
e ute.
“That’s private property,” I said. “Give it back.”
“It’s property of the Government of Australia,” the federale told me. He kept his grip on my wrist and marched me back to his car. Another of the drab fellows was inviting my wife to assist the Federal Police with their enquiries. She was coming quietly. Very sensible.
From the corner of one eye, I saw the Lesser door being cracked open by a large heavy shoulder, and a distant hoarse voice from the porch calling, “Seize all the computers, software, ancillaries, peripherals and phone equipment. CDs. Floppies. Paper. Don’t forget the Palm PAs.” I paused, jerking my custodian’s arm, and watched in admiration as this crack team vanished through the front door and three dark ninja Goth grrls squirted out the back way and over the side fence like drops of oily sweat from a bad conscience.
“Poor Cookie,” I called to Juliet. “On a hiding to nothing.”
“Life’s a gamble,” Juliet said.
The Federal Police didn’t read us any rights, because this was the land of the only nominally free, not the United States of America where on Australian TV every night of the week they do things differently and according to the Constitution. We both were herded into the same back seat from opposite doors and sat comfortably together. I heard the boot slam as the last vital, if cryogenic, portion of Nile Fever was locked away. Unless they had samples stored in the lab. Well, of course they did, I realized. The idea wasn’t to recover Nile’s pacy being from this particular scrap of tongue but to stop anyone else trying and maybe succeeding. Sheikh Abdul bin Sahal al Din, for example. The tongue would be in a furnace before noon.
May her cells revive, I thought sentimentally. May a hundred sprightly young camels burst forth from a hundred homely camel host wombs, bearing her likeness from their twisted and infertile but athletically gifted DNA. I wouldn’t have laid odds that they’d be champions, though. There’s more to a man or a camel than their genes. Look at Mauricio and Juliet, for example. Same parents, I assumed—a safe assumption unless the sainted mother had conceived miraculously, and they weren’t doing in vitro when Mauricio was a fetus. Same upbringing, more or less, allowing for gender. And look at them now. Not so much chalk and cheese as rough red rotgut and Penfold Grange Hermitage 1955.
“I was hoping to meet the Sheikh and his wives,” Juliet told me. “His wives, anyway. An odd way to live. Horrible, really.”
“Well, at least they’d get some sex occasionally.”
“None of that filth in my authorized vehicle, mate,” the federale said, accelerating smartly toward the city. An early morning tram was just nosing toward us in the brightening light. We passed a pair of golden arches, and my stomach cried out for an Egg McMuffin.
“And children,” Juliet said wistfully.
“Unlike poor old sterile Nile Fever,” I said. I watched the morning’s first joggers and rebuked myself for a lazy slackarse. It’d been days since I’d had a decent workout. Aside from the dip at the nude beach. I tried to sniff at my armpit without being obvious.
“Musky,” Juliet said.
“I was afraid ‘stinky’ was the word.”
“Musky,” she said, and somehow she was a little closer, even with our seat belts and her vow of celibacy holding us apart. “I think it’s nice.”
“Jesus, you two, knock it off,” the cop said.
“We’re man and wife,” I said frostily. “And the two shall cleave together and be one flesh, it’s in the Bible.”
“Never read it,” he said. “I’m a Buddhist.” It’s a multicultural force, and good on it, I say.
“Yeah, poor old Nile,” I said, leaning a bit further toward the center of the seat. I could smell her now as well. “I suppose a fuck was always out of the question for her.”
“For her,” Juliet agreed. Her lips looked oddly damp, and in the morning daylight her eyes were darker than usual and glistened in a way I hadn’t seen for years. “Not necessarily for everyone.”
“Steady on, I say,” the cop said.
“Jesus, Jules,” I said. We were coming out of the suburbs and headed fast toward Latrobe Street in the city proper, where the Federal cops hang their hats. In fact they rarely wear hats these days, but you’d never mistake them for a businessman or a lawyer, not even the lawyers among their number. “What about the sacred vow? How about your promise to God and the Virgin Mary.”
“You incredible fuckwit,” she said. “You really have no idea of the passage of time, do you?”
I blinked. Something troubled me but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then again I’ve had a few blows to the head in my time. “Ten years,” I said. “Good Christ, your Mauricio miracle happened ten years ago.”
“Nine years, eleven months, and twenty-three days,” my wife said lasciviously. “Can you wait eight more days?”
“My bloody oath,” I said, and squeezed her hand for all I was worth.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Damien Broderick met up with Rory Barnes (who’d learned to walk and talk in a tribal mud hut in Northern Rhodesia) more than forty years ago at Australia’s Monash University. They shared various student houses with a motley crew of would-be writers who did what students did in the ’60s: got pissed, screwed around, smoked some pot, engaged in a small amount of semi-violent protest and wrote a lot of essays. Broderick sold some stories and books and eventually got a Ph.D., Barnes did some teaching then wandered around Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Since 1983, they have co-authored seven novels. Barnes and his two sons live in Adelaide, South Australia. Broderick shares several houses with his American wife Barbara in San Antonio, Texas. They are both far more law-abiding than their raffish hero, to their regret.
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