Devastation Road

by Joanna Baker

  There was another stabbing pain in a thigh, and then another in the same place as the first. I felt a deep wave of mortal fear. My kidneys would rupture. Internal bleeding …

  ‘She knew I done the café, but she never would’ve said. She knew I didn’t burn down the Rolands’ shed — or kill Jeanette. She said the necklace would prove I didn’t do it. I want that necklace back. I’ve got to have it. Who’d take a necklace from a dead girl?’

  He’d forgotten to kick me for a minute and I’d tried crawling away. The whole of my lower body was cramping and electric currents were shooting across my throat. I could hear my breath sucking and hiccupping. Over that I thought I heard my name called again, faintly and only once. But now Craig came down over me, leaning on my shoulders, hissing into an ear. ‘If I can get hold of the bastard … If you find out who killed her and who took it, you tell me.’

  I stopped struggling, dimly aware that he’d said something important. ‘If you find out’. He was half-thinking I might live. Suddenly my mangled heart leaped with hope — and I thought of Wando.

  I couldn’t crawl with Craig on me like that, and my voice was pretty much out of action, but I wasn’t far from the fence now and I could still move my feet. And near my left leg was a big sheet of corrugated iron. Grimacing against the pain, I hooked my foot behind it and twisted up and forward with all my puny strength. The thing came down with a clang that would’ve brought old Ra himself up from the underworld.

  The clang made Craig jump, and most of that movement went down onto me. I went flat on my face into the rough ground, and he pushed down onto the back of my ribs. Then he rolled me over and pressed on my neck again. I shut my eyes.

  But I could hear footsteps. Big heavy, dopey footsteps in soft ollie-grip soles. Wando’s voice said, ‘Matt?’

  And the pressure released from my neck.

  I didn’t see much of what happened next because I was curled up in a pool of mud, coughing and holding my chest and wondering how much abuse an Adam’s apple can take before it caves in and you start talking like an android.

  But Wando is a big boy, and Craig isn’t, and I reckon even Craig could do enough maths to know that he’d be better off running for it. I didn’t hear any kind of scuffle, but when I looked up there was only Wando, a strange kind of hero, looking down at me, tree-trunk arms hanging limply by his side, mouth open, haloed by stiff white hanks of hair.

  ***

  I sat with my head on my knees, trying not to be sick. Then I was sick and felt better. Then I felt worse again and tried to think about something else.

  I was nearly dead, but I had found out something. Craig was Mouldy. He had burnt down the Rolands’ café. I didn’t have evidence and I didn’t know who else had been there, but that was a start. He had also said he didn’t know who had killed Debbie, although that could’ve been a lie.

  After a while, Wando got me to my feet and we headed toward the Windham Street end of the lane. Before we got there, a figure came running around to meet us. He had a white shirt on and he was huge. It was Debbie’s fiancé, Andrew.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

  Wando said, ‘Nothing,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ at the same time.

  We started to go past him.

  ‘I wouldn’t go wandering around,’ he said. ‘Craig’s back at the pub whining to his pig-shooting mates about you. They might come back out.’

  ‘We’ll go home,’ I rasped. Talking hurt my throat.

  Andrew stepped back and peered up Windham Street towards the back of the pub. ‘I think they’ll be out in High Street. I wouldn’t walk anywhere.’

  ‘We’re going the other way,’ said Wando.

  ‘I’ll drive you. The car’s just there.’ He pointed towards the back of the pub. It was dark but we could make out a white shape.

  We didn’t move. It seemed a bad idea to be going in that direction — almost like a trap. Then we heard voices from up the lane, the High Street end, and we decided Andrew was our safest bet. We walked quickly towards the car. Andrew looked around nervously all the way and unlocked it well before we got there.

  ‘They won’t do anything with me here,’ he said, trying to sound confident. ‘But I’d prefer not to have any trouble, wouldn’t you? And Craig is a bit unpredictable.’

  Unpredictable. Accountant talk for ‘raving maniac’.

  Wando took the front seat and I opened the back.

  ‘Just push those things over,’ said Andrew. ‘Sorry about the mess.’

  I shoved aside a sports bag, a pile of papers and folders, and a dark woolly rug and got in. Sitting down pushed my kidneys down into my hips, and the grunt of pain I made got jammed in my windpipe.

  To get home we had to enter High Street at the top end.

  ‘This is going to sound stupid,’ said Andrew, ‘But I’m going to have to ask you to duck your heads. Just in case they see me. I promised Annie I’d try to keep Craig out of trouble and I don’t want him anywhere near you.’

  So, as we approached the corner, Wando curled down over his legs. I tried that, but found all my bruises started screaming in pain, so I had to lean over sideways with my head on Andrew’s things.

  And then something strange happened to my brain. It was as if, finally, it all got to me. My meeting with Mouldy-Craig had started me thinking about the fire and now, in the back of this car, memories were coming thick and fast. The smoke, the choking burning throat, the heat on my face. I didn’t have any control over it.

  I could hear Andrew’s voice, calling something out the window, and Craig answering, then we were moving again, and Andrew was giving us some advice.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you what he’s like. He seems to have it in for you two. He thinks you’ve taken that necklace of Debbie’s.’

  I was hardly listening. I could smell the fire again. My throat was closing off, my chest felt crushed, and I was trapped. I started to sweat with panic.

  ‘And he’s unstable at the moment, for obvious reasons. I really think you’d be best off just staying out of his way.’

  Wando’s muffled voice agreed with this enthusiastically. Then the car was stopping and we sat up. I scrabbled in the dark for the door handle.

  ‘I mean it.’ Andrew twisted around to take me in. His face was a black silhouette. He sounded stern and a bit sinister. ‘This isn’t a game. There’s something strange going on and no one knows exactly what it is. But it’s quite likely to be dangerous.’

  There was something sticky on the side of my face. I put my hand up to it and it came down dark and wet — mud or blood, or both. I had smeared it all over Andrew’s rug.

  ‘Oh, jeez, sorry,’ I said. I just wanted to get out of there. I started rubbing at the furry surface.

  ‘That’ll make it worse.’ He grabbed it away from me. ‘Never mind. Really.’ He shoved it on to his knee.

  Wando was already out of the car. I started to follow.

  ‘I mean what I said,’ called Andrew. ‘Forget about Debbie. Have your holidays. Just stay out of it.’

  He drove away and Wando started for our front gate. Now that I was out, my panic had vanished. I stopped on the side of the road, trying to remember everything he’d said. There was something I was close to realising, but couldn’t quite get hold of.

  ‘Are you coming?’ said Wando.

  ‘Yeah.’ I rubbed at my throat, watching the tail lights disappear around a corner, wondering what I’d missed.

  Chapter 17

  ‘You get too carried away by things,’ said Chess. ‘You’re too theatrical. You need to toughen up. Keep a clear head.’

  She’d come around the next morning to pick up Debbie’s envelope and to hear how I’d gone with the Carmodys. As it was about eleven o’clock, I was asleep when she arrived. Mum was at work and Dad was in his pottery shed.

  Chess hadn’t asked me about the graze on my face or why I was limping, bent over like an old man. She just said she wanted me to tell her every
thing. So, while I pulled some pants over my boxer shorts and hunted the floor for a T-shirt, she squeezed oranges and found some nectarines, and then we ended up on the floor of the family room, in front of the empty fireplace. Things could have been worse. I had a sore throat and the bruises hurt when I moved, but my voice seemed to be working and, as far as I could tell, I hadn’t died in the night from internal bleeding. I piled up four or five cushions on the Indian rug and tried to pretend I was still in bed. Somehow Chess had got hold of my artists’ quality water-soluble pencil. While I talked, she sat cross-legged against an armchair and doodled on my new cartridge pad.

  I closed my eyes and tried not to worry about her wasting my good paper. It felt good to tell her things, and before I’d really planned it I found myself giving her the lot — the glowing colours in the picture of Ra, my images of the dead girls, Mrs Carmody crying, and a full run-down of my meeting with Craig. I was even thinking of showing her my bruised chest, but before I could roll up my T-shirt, she launched into a lecture.

  ‘No one is going to benefit from you going to pieces, or accusing Craig of things with no evidence. You need to order your thoughts.’

  ‘But that’s just it.’ I shoved my hair off my face. ‘There’s nothing to order. We’ve got some ideas, but no real facts. We don’t really know anything.’

  ‘Don’t we?’

  I became instantly suspicious. ‘Why? Do you?’

  Absentmindedly, Chess drew some arrows on my pad. ‘I think there are a lot of clues that point to the killer. Not big things, but fairly significant, if you look at them the right way.’

  ‘You think you know who killed them?’

  ‘I think I know who killed Debbie.’

  ‘Then you’d better tell me.’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said looking serious. ‘There are one or two things I have to work out. The person who killed Debbie is also supposed to be the person who killed Jeanette, but it doesn’t quite fit together. And what’s more, I’m not sure I want it to. It’s not a nice answer.’

  ‘It was never going to be nice.’

  ‘Oh, I think it’s much worse than you have imagined.’

  Smart-arse. She had no idea what I’d imagined. ‘Now you’re the one who’s being theatrical.’

  Chess grimaced and nodded. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I agree with you. The whole thing is just putrid. I don’t even want to think about it any more.’

  ‘That’s part of your trouble.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I punched at one of my cushions.

  ‘You’re too wrapped up in the sadness of it all. It is sad, but that’s not very helpful, is it?’

  ‘God you talk some garbage, Chess.’

  But she wasn’t going to be put off. ‘Pain doesn’t get better if you give up. You have to keep working away at life, no matter how bad things are.’

  This made me think of something. I sat up. ‘How’s your Dad?’

  Chess gave a funny little smile that I couldn’t quite read. ‘We won’t be seeing him for a while.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said, remembering. ‘He’s gone to pick that herbal stuff. Bring you some money.’ I did a face of mock delight and rubbed my hands together. I said it again, ‘Money, money!’ But my heart wasn’t in it and it didn’t seem to cheer her up.

  ‘He’ll work for about three days, twelve hours a day out in the sun. He’ll make a lot of money.’

  ‘Great.’

  She shrugged. ‘He’ll send me a bank cheque for exactly half, to pay bills and things, and then he’ll take the rest and go off.’

  ‘Off where?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter where. He’ll go on a bender.’

  ‘A what?’ I knew the word was old, something my mother would say, but then Chess used a lot of words like that. She spent more time talking to adults than she did to kids, especially about her father. Whatever a bender was, she would have discussed it with my mother, and the school counsellor and a hundred other people.

  Chess jiggled her knees up and down. She looked away towards the window. ‘Drinking. Binge drinking. He can usually go for four or five days on his half of the wort-picking money.’

  I was floored. This was completely unknown territory to me. I’d always thought binge drinking meant having a huge Friday night. I didn’t know people did it for four days in a row. Thoughts raced through my head. What was a bender like? What did he drink? Did he sleep or just drink all the time? Where would he sleep? And what was he like when he got home?

  ‘Oh … that’s …’ I should say something helpful. Anything. ‘You can stay here.’

  Totally lame. So lame that Chess was actually sorry for me now. She made herself sound brighter. ‘I am here. I always come, don’t I?’

  ‘Errr …’ I’d never realised. She spent a lot of time here, some weeks more than others, and I knew her father was often away, and I knew he was a drunk, but I hadn’t ever really thought it through.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Chess. ‘I’ll be off home later to feed the geese.’

  ‘Chess, it’s the pits.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  I couldn’t find an answer.

  She tried to explain. ‘I’m used to it. He started this when Mum first died. Or he started when she left, really, and then got worse when she died. Actually there’s a lesson in it for you, so I might as well tell you.’

  I hated the sound of that, but I couldn’t very well stop her now. She started drawing again while she talked. Rows and rows of arrows.

  ‘I used to stay with my Auntie Prue. She’s just a friend, really, and she’s in Perth now. I was four or five. She would read me fairy stories to take my mind off it. She’d do it for hours. I suppose it cheered me up in a way. And it helped her too. She was very kind. But that doesn’t work for me any more.’

  ‘What do you do now? Watch movies?’

  ‘I try to control it. I do experiments with his food and things, see if I can stop it happening.’

  Experiments on her own father. There was something insane about it, but at the same time sad.

  ‘What’s the point of that?’ I said.

  Chess looked me right in the eyes for a second. Her chin came forward. ‘Well the fairy stories weren’t helping.’

  ‘So that’s my lesson, is it? All this stuff about Deb and Jeanette and the Carmodys and Craig …’

  ‘Try to control it. Use your brain.’

  I didn’t want to be lectured today. My back was hurting. Terrible things had happened. Things were still awful. It was stupid to pretend they weren’t. ‘But even if we do use our brains, even if we succeed and find out everything … I mean it’s not going to help, is it?’

  Chess pulled her head up at this, as if she’d heard something that really shocked her. She pressed her lips together, making some kind of decision.

  She said, ‘I think there’s something else I need to tell you.’ She wouldn’t look at me. ‘About my mother.’

  I felt my lungs go tight and a twinge of pain went up from my bruised neck. Chess never talked about her mother.

  Chess said, ‘I mean what happened to her. How she died.’

  No one had ever told me anything about Chess’s mother. I knew she left when Chess was about four. She went overseas and Chess never saw her again because, in England or somewhere, she died. But no one had ever said what happened.

  ‘How, Chess?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Chess was looking at me steadily, as if she’d told me something important.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘That’s the point. I don’t know. My own mother and no one will tell me what happened to her.’

  ‘But your Dad —’

  ‘He won’t talk about it. I’ve even emailed Prue and she said to ask my father.’

  ‘Bummer.’

  ‘It’s more than a bummer.’ The word sounded stupid when she said it. ‘Can you see, Matt? My own mother. I don’t know if it was an accident or a disease,
or suicide or … anything. She might’ve had cancer, or fallen from a high building, or drowned …’

  Chess’s lips started wobbling. That had never happened before. It was the worst thing I’d ever seen her do. She ducked her head forwards for a minute and when she looked up she was OK.

  ‘And that’s the trouble, you see. It’s the worst thing. No knowledge. No facts. No truth. Nothing to think about.’ She pushed her chin up, feebly. ‘I mean I don’t let it worry me. I used to make up different stories about it, but no one story is any good because it probably isn’t true, so I can’t even feel sad about it. But it’s frustrating. It’s the sort of thing a person needs to know. Part of my own history. You see? Sometimes I feel as if I can’t even start my life until I find out.’ Then she reminded herself, ‘I don’t let it worry me.’

  ‘Are you sure your Dad won’t tell you? Have you really tried?’

  ‘He goes mad when I even mention her.’

  ‘So that’s what you were getting at, about needing to know the truth about Debbie, even if it’s really bad.’

  She didn’t answer. I thought about it for a while. Chess started drawing boxes under her arrows. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. After a while she put the pencil down and pulled her knees up in front of her.

  ‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘I’ll make you some toast.’

  Getting up was no picnic. I really did it to get away from her and I stayed in the kitchen while the toast cooked, staring at the hot orange slits, holding the butter and a knife, thinking about Chess’s mother.

  It explained a lot — Chess’s love for maths and computers and chess and puzzles. I mean partly she liked them because they were simple compared with dealing with her father. But it was also because of this big mystery surrounding her mother. All those things had answers, nice clear ones. Right or wrong. Two plus two. Knight to King’s Bishop Four. That would be a good feeling for her. If my life had that huge hole in it, I reckon I’d like to play with numbers too.

  Working with plates and things, and the smell of Vegemite, helped me get back to normal. I decided to change the subject. As I carried the toast in, I was thinking of telling her my joke about algebra.