Devastation Road

by Joanna Baker

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you found the body.’

  I wished she could see I was sick of the topic. ‘Yeah. She was.’

  ‘I bet she didn’t help. She wouldn’t have wanted to get her hands dirty.’

  ‘Tara’s all right,’ I said. How much would Amanda have done if she’d been there? ‘It was a pretty bad thing.’ I thought of the brief warm look Tara had given me in Wilsons’ driveway. ‘She tries to be friendly.’

  ‘Oh sure.’ Amanda turned to the others. ‘Only she doesn’t talk to you unless she wants to, know what I mean?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Daniel.

  ‘She is a bit weird,’ said Robbie.

  Tara was just too different from them. She had a bigger world. I said, ‘She’s got problems. Really serious ones. You don’t know.’

  ‘Problems. Yeah, her father’s so poor they can only go to Noosa for two weeks this year.’

  ‘Did ya see their WRX?’ said Robbie. ‘Imagine taking that out on the quarry road. You could just floor it. What about when you went over the bump at the truck place? You’d fly! You’d be three metres off the ground. You’d go into … just … damn … orbit!’

  ‘Robbie is not quite all there.’ Daniel tapped his head.

  ‘A few sausages short of a barbie,’ said Bart.

  ‘He’s got almost no sausages,’ I said.

  ‘What problems has Tara got?’ Amanda wouldn’t let it go. She had her antenna up for some good gossip, or maybe for some clue that I liked Tara. I had to be careful. It would be easy to get trapped.

  I shrugged. ‘Look I don’t want to talk about it. In her past. Bad things happened to her when she was a kid.’ This was all wrong. It sounded like child abuse or something. I could see Amanda getting curious. ‘Just forget it!’

  Then Amanda went very serious, as if she was doing me a big favour giving me this advice. ‘She told me she knew something. Some crime or something. But she was just trying to impress.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘She wouldn’t tell me. She’s totally up herself, you know. You wear something, or say something she doesn’t like, and she’ll just look at you as if you’re this total moron.’

  ‘Pull in the claws, Amanda. It’s just the way she is.’ She’s afraid, I wanted to say. She saw someone die. She’s in fear for her life.

  But I couldn’t tell Amanda that. She’d laugh. Then she’d be talking about me, as soon as I left, saying what a loony I was.

  I stood up and shoved my hands in my pockets and kicked at the leg of the lamp post. It got to me sometimes. Kids like this had no idea what real problems could be. They judged everything by what was happening on the surface, whether people were being nice to them or not. These kids wouldn’t bother wondering why Tara wasn’t always friendly.

  And what would someone like Amanda make of the Carmodys? She wouldn’t see how sad they were. She’d think they were just a joke, with bad clothes and boring lives.

  But there was nothing I could say that would change that. Here, in the middle of Beechworth — with pies and skateboards, and holes in flannies — Tara and Wando’s problems, the whole Debbie and Jeanette thing, were a million miles away. None of it even seemed real.

  Well, that is what I’d wanted. A nice break.

  We went to sit on the porch of the old telegraph office. All signs of rain had disappeared. It was nearly six o’clock. The sun was low and golden, and shining right into our eyes.

  Amanda said, ‘The days just go for forever in summer.’

  Robbie agreed. ‘Yeah, well it’s the sun, isn’t it?’

  I grinned at this, but no one else seemed to think it was a stupid thing to say. I said, ‘The sun is hotter so it expands everything.’

  It got a groan and a grunt. Still, at least I was trying.

  Where the sun hit the stone walls they were a soft yellow-brown, completely different from the greyness across the road.

  I said, ‘Actually I like this late sun. It makes everything look warmer. More alive.’

  ‘Yeah, me too. And you can do evening swims. That’s nice. You know, at Woolshed Falls or something.’

  She was looking at me waiting for me to suggest we go together. I locked my hands together and stared at them.

  Daniel came across and kicked his board up against the small step we were sitting on. He sat against the wooden post of the porch, which put me in the middle. He’d heard what she said. ‘We went to the falls today. The water’s just roaring down. Be nice by tomorrow, but.’

  Amanda stood up. ‘I’m going home.’

  And that was it. She just walked off, neat little shoulders hunched under the black and white striped T-shirt, taking short, quick steps that flicked her hips and made her hair flap crossly behind her.

  Daniel said, ‘What is it with women?’

  ‘I dunno mate. They’re a mystery to me.’

  ‘I mean there’s a lot I don’t understand, but women is something I don’t understand more than just about anything.’

  I made a sound like a deflating balloon, which was a kind way of laughing at him.

  Daniel didn’t know what a real mystery was. Sometimes I felt as if I was drowning in them. Debbie, Craig, Tara, Wando, Chess. What was going on inside any of their heads?

  Across the road, Robbie had started going slowly up and down the street, not making any effort, just standing on the board and letting it roll. He passed a gap between buildings and went through a band of light and for a second we could see him silhouetted, a sharp black figure, knees straight, arms lazily bent. Then he went into greyness again, a dim shape with blurred features.

  It reminded me of Debbie’s rippling reflection. What secrets did she have? What did she know?

  Robbie went into the sun again and then the shade.

  There was someone hiding — a murderer. Was it Craig Wilson? For the first time I had real doubts. He was bad, but he didn’t look depraved enough to kill his own sister. But then how could anyone kill anyone? And what would a killer look like?

  Forgetting I was talking to Daniel. I started thinking aloud. ‘You know what we need. Not just you and me, the whole human race. We need a different kind of light. Something like the sun, but more effective, that can see right through everything, right into everyone’s dark heart.’

  Daniel didn’t look as if he was listening. He started scraping at the step between us with a small rock. But suddenly I didn’t care if he listened. These kids were a thousand miles away from me in the things they thought about, and every day the gap just got bigger. They already thought I was going strange, so I might as well talk.

  I took the rock from him. ‘What if you could put it down, whatever it is you don’t understand …’ I used my rock to scratch an small X on the step, and then I shaded it with my hand. ‘And then you just wait, and the new kind of sun moves up and shines on it,’ I moved my hands, ‘and suddenly everything just lights up for you. You see right to the inside. You understand everything. That’s what I wish I had.’

  Daniel looked confused. ‘Why would you want to see inside an X?’

  ‘No. X just represents something.’

  But I’d completely lost him. ‘Why X?’

  ‘X! You know. The unknown quantity. Like in equations. The thing that you have to solve for.’

  But the thought had melted away. I couldn’t remember what I’d been trying to tell him and I wished I’d never started. It was a stupid idea anyway.

  Might as well turn it into a joke. ‘You know in algebra. Algebra is maths where you use x and y because you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  He didn’t get that either.

  I found myself wondering where Chess was.

  Chapter 16

  I should’ve seen it coming.

  But that’s the way it always goes. Just when you complain that nothing is happening, suddenly there’s too much happening, and just when you’ve decided life is this impossible mystery, you start finding out things you ne
ver wanted to know. Sometimes it feels like life is this slippery winding road, and you’re a hopeless driver and you keep crashing off the sides, and you just can’t get anywhere, and then you finally get the hang of it and you pick up speed, and then you go flying around a corner and run smack into someone like Craig Wilson.

  Craig Wilson. Chess had told me to go and see him, but I’d never intended to do it. Not in a million years. I’d seen the Carmodys, but I was stopping there. I was depressed, but I wasn’t insane.

  It’s all right for her. She stays logical. She knows what the questions are. I would have no idea what I should be asking Craig Wilson. And as for Chess’s riddle, how can a car be dark blue and white at the same time? I’d given up caring.

  Besides, Craig had a ute now, and it wasn’t dark blue or white, it was pink — the kind of pink that is really faded red — with powdery patches across the bonnet and rust on the chrome. It had a bull bar, spotlights above the cabin and a sticker that said ‘Chicks Dig Scars’.

  At ten o’clock that evening, on the main street of Yackandandah, I found myself staring at it.

  I knew it was Craig’s, because we’d seen him working on it when we were at his place. Besides everyone knew everyone’s car in Yack. That’s just the kind of happy, nosey little sardines we are.

  It was parked outside Noonan’s Hotel and as soon as I saw it I knew it was trouble.

  I should have left it alone.

  ***

  Wando was with me. I’d gone to his place after tea and we’d been doing nothing much. I could tell as soon as I saw him that he didn’t want to talk about the sickening Devastation Road story, so I’d just left it. We’d played a bit of Halo, and thrown a few darts, and now we were crossing to my place to watch Netflix.

  I was going to walk straight past the ute. I might’ve been looking at it closely, but that was only to make sure Craig wasn’t sitting in it. He’s not a person I ever want to meet at ten o’clock in the badly lit main street.

  He wasn’t in it, but as we walked past something caught my eye. The ute had one of those black covers over the tray, clipped down all around the edges, but one of the rear corners was turned back. The light went into this at an angle and lit up one thing inside. That thing stopped me dead.

  With all the stuff going on about Deb and Jeanette I’d almost forgotten about the fire at Crystal Corner Collectables and the mystery man who’d saved me, but now it all came back with a rush. Inside the ute was a long, thin yellow and blue cardboard box that I recognised immediately. Aluminium foil.

  I put my hands behind my back, in case the ute bit me, and stepped sideways to take a closer look.

  ‘Matt! Waddayadoin??’ squeaked Wando. He was well past the ute and not keen to come back. From inside the pub we heard a hammer of voices.

  ‘Come on!’ said Wando.

  But I needed to know more about this foil. It might be one of the boxes from the café. That would mean Craig had done the fire and the robbery. He’d either been Perry, the bloke that sneaked back for the foil (and saved my life), or he’d been in on it with him. The box would be evidence. I knew that if I left it like this I’d miss at least fifteen minutes’ sleep wondering about it, and I hate missing sleep.

  I could only see one end of the box and couldn’t tell whether it was open or not, or whether it was at all charred.

  I held my breath and reached for it. It was further in than I’d thought. By the time my hand touched it, my stomach was right up against the side of the ute. I grabbed the end of the box and rolled it over.

  Anticlimax. The foil was new, unopened, and ten metres instead of fifty. Not far from it, almost out of sight under the ute cover, was the bag of shopping it had spilled out of. Craig had been to the supermarket. I pressed my hands on the side of the ute to push myself back.

  ‘What the fuck?!’

  I leaped away from the ute and whirled around.

  It was Craig. ‘Tingle! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?!’

  I tried to tell myself everything was OK. We could talk it through. Besides, there was no real danger here. Craig was alone and I had Wando.

  Wando did a two-metre standing jump, a one-eighty spin and a foot movement that would have been a blind-side kick-flip if he’d had his skateboard under him. Any other time I would’ve been impressed. But then he made for the hills, leaving me right in it.

  It was a fair question. What had I been doing with my hand in the back of Craig’s ute? Something he had a right to know. To answer it I’d have to tell a long story — me hiding in the Rolands’ café, the rescue by the masked man, and the secret of the aluminium foil. I didn’t have long to get all this across. Craig was advancing on me, fists and teeth clenched. I tried to cover the whole story as neatly as I could.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, and ran.

  There was no way I was going to outrun him. The man was built like a whippet. He was almost on me before I’d gone twenty metres. In desperation I dived down an alley between the chemist and the hardware place, and that was the worst decision I could’ve made. There was no light at all here. The ground was wet and slippery. I half-ran, half-skied into the gloom. Bits of vine stuck out from a broken weatherboard wall, whipping me in the face. My hands kept hitting things. I could hear him coming after me. Then we were behind the yard and the whole alley seemed to be taken up with bales of straw and coils of heavy black piping. I swerved around a wheelie bin, ducked sideways, jumped over a crate. Craig was swearing, close behind me. And then I hit a wire and went sprawling into damp gravel.

  There was a whooping noise and a mad laugh and he grabbed me by the arms. He hauled me up against a cyclone wire fence, hard beside a sheet of corrugated iron. The edge of the iron pressed into my left arm. Craig pinned my right hand against my stomach. With his other arm he leaned on my chest.

  We breathed heavily into each other’s faces. I hadn’t thought up a way to explain why I’d had my hands on his groceries and he didn’t ask me. In fact, now that he had me he didn’t seem to know what to do with me. There was no hurry. Whatever he came up with was not going to be pretty.

  A strange thought came to me, one that I’ve had before — that this must be what I was put on the earth for — as a warning to others of what happens to people if they do stupid things.

  Craig smelt of beer and cigarettes — a combination of fruity fumes and stale smoke and a nasty reminder of my night in the fire. His arm was like a band of iron across my chest. He moved it towards my throat.

  Just as he cut off my air supply, I played my last card. ‘You’re Mouldy,’ I said.

  It could have really backfired, if he didn’t recognise the name. If he thought I was referring to his personal hygiene I was in for some serious organ damage. But he did recognise it. The pressure on my throat released about half a millimetre and I found that if I pushed my ribs out sideways I could draw in enough tiny breaths to stay alive a bit longer.

  His piranha mouth stretched into a sneer. ‘What’s that supposed to mean.’

  I spoke in a series of short sentences, with little gasps in between. ‘I was there that night. In the kitchen. I went out the window. Just now I recognised your laugh. You’re the one who got in first. You lit the fire in the Rolands’ café. You and your mates.’

  He didn’t say anything. He was still breathing heavily from the sprint and through his clenched teeth it sounded like a cross between Darth Vader and a lilo pump. But I had his attention, and I was granted another millimetre of airways to continue.

  ‘You lit the other fires too. All the fires along Devastation Road. Did Jeanette Carmody know something about it? She was out there sketching sheds and things. I reckon she saw you. And then later you ran her down.’

  At this point Craig let out a stream of abuse that involved almost every swear word I’d ever heard. I couldn’t help thinking it was rather good. I mean, taken at face value what he said had no meaning at all, but, like all good lyrics, it still managed to get his exact meaning acr
oss. He should’ve been writing songs.

  The reason my mind had wandered off like this was that he’d cut off my air again. And he’d moved the other arm up to my chest. I was starting to pass out. I shut my eyes. Veins started banging at the back of my skull, then in my forehead and then behind my eyeballs. My whole head felt like a big tight balloon, full of pulsing blood. It was going to explode. And my ribs were creaking and grinding. It’d be a toss-up which went first.

  Through all this, somewhere a long way away, I could hear Wando calling my name. He sounded scared and he didn’t have a clue where I was. He’d never see us down here in the dark.

  My thoughts were drifting about all on their own. I was picturing Craig’s band. They’d have mullets and tatts on their fingers, and army boots. They’d sing about dogs and beer and burning things and fighting in stinking alleys.

  I was half-dead, you see, and in preparation for being half-dead, I’d gone half-mad, and that explains what I did next. Because at this point Craig realised I was passing out and released me enough for me to suck in one huge noisy breath, and you’d think I’d have used that breath to apologise to him and beg for my life.

  But what I said was, ‘Debbie knew something about the fire at the café. Did she know it was you? Did she see you run over Jeanette? Debbie. That’s another one who died.’

  And of course that was enough to make him go past fury and actually decide to kill me. I don’t really blame him. I’d asked for it. I call this the Matt Tingle Death Wish.

  He said, ‘You’re dead, Tingle. Dead.’ Which made me sorry he’d lost his knack for poetry.

  He thumped me hard, right in the throat. I felt my Adam’s apple slam sideways. Then he yanked at my shoulders and slammed me into the fence. He jabbed me twice in the stomach, driving all the air back out, grabbed me again, spun me around and threw me to the ground. He must’ve put the boot in, too, because as well as the spine-jarring slam as I went down, I got a hot pain in the back of a hip. I drew in a sharp breath, which felt like a knife in my squashed throat.

  I could hear him whining at me. ‘Debs was my sister. My sister. She was a great little kid. I’d never have done nothin’ to Debs. I’d have done anything for her.’