Devastation Road

by Joanna Baker

  ‘I’m not saying I believe the thing really has magic powers. This Eye of Ra stuff — it’s obviously bull dust. But I do think it’s a clue of some kind.

  ‘That day at the bakery, when Debs had the necklace on — you were really stirred up about it. I mean it had been Jeanette’s necklace and, fair enough — but it was more than that.’

  ‘No,’ said Wando. The very fact that he’d answered made me think I was on to something. He turned to face me over his shoulder and just for a second I felt there was something he was about to tell me. He opened his mouth. Nothing came.

  I started to get desperate. ‘You sounded scared. You said something to Deb — she should take it off for her own sake. You knew it was dangerous.’

  ‘Je-s-u-s,’ Wando gave a long moan and threw himself back to lie on the rock, arms over his face.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Wando. This is scary. I’m bloody terrified.’

  A cool voice spoke behind us. ‘Terrified of what?’

  Tara had come down the path with two other people, a friend of hers from Beechworth and the friend’s eighteen-year-old brother. Eighteen. Year twelve. P plates. I wasted a second or two on envy and hoped that they wouldn’t find out we’d been dropped here by Wando’s mother in her Barina. The Beechworth kids ignored us and went to the water.

  They’d already been swimming somewhere. Tara’s hair was wet. It hung down her back in little coils and a few strands had strayed across to the front, making black curly lines that emphasised the smoothness of her skin. She had a bit of green fringed material tied around her waist into a tight skirt that split right up one side, and above that only a bikini top. She was curved in all the right places and flat in all the other places and she left the army boys’ girlfriends in the shade. I don't know how long I goggled at her. You could call it the Mr Commonsoli effect. I’d been staring at Wando for the last ten minutes and seeing Tara unexpectedly, looking like that, was a bit like being whammed in the chest by a bolt of lightning.

  ‘Hello,’ I squeaked.

  ‘Terrified of what?’ Tara’s eyes passed blankly from the faint marks on my neck to the darker bruises on my chest, but she didn’t say anything about them. She squatted near Wando’s feet.

  ‘The yellow rock,’ I said. ‘The Eye of Ra. I want to find out more about it.’

  Wando groaned again. He used the heels of his hands to scrub at his eyes as if they were hurting him. Then he sat up.

  ‘Why?’ said Tara.

  ‘I think it’s important.’ I sounded a complete drongo. ‘Not in a magic, seeing eye way. In some other way.’

  ‘What kind of way?’

  She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at Wando. And he was looking at her.

  I spoke weakly. ‘I don’t know really. It might have something on it. Something that proves who killed Jeanette.’

  I couldn’t even tell if they were listening to me. There was some strong message passing between them, but I had no idea what it was. I tried again to attract their attention.

  ‘Maybe there’s a letter scratched on the surface,’ I said, ‘Or a symbol — a hero … hiro … those Egyptian picture-letters, what are they?’

  But Tara wasn't Chess. ‘I don’t know.’ And she didn’t mind not knowing.

  Still, I thought I was getting somewhere. Under the wet hanks of hair, Wando’s face had a swollen look, his eyes and nose even smaller than usual. He was breathing fast again, searching Tara’s face for some clue about what to do. I began to think I’d been wrong in trying to ask him things. He knew something, but I could see now that his knowledge was confused and messy.

  Tara was the one. She was as blank as ever, but I had learned to read her now. She knew exactly what was going on and somehow that looked a lot more painful that Wando’s confusion. Behind that still, low-lidded look of hers I could see clear awareness. Awareness of something very very bad.

  It completely threw me. I started babbling on about the necklace.

  ‘Or maybe it’s some kind of key. You put the whole stone in a hole and it opens something, or it completes a pattern. Or is it a prism? When the sun hits it in the right way it beams out a picture or shows up a point on a map.’

  ‘Yeah, Matt, right,’ said Tara.

  ‘There’s a temple like that,’ I said defensively. ‘In Egypt.’ And then I had what seemed a really inspired idea. ‘Or maybe … Maybe it’s like a magnifying glass. Condensed sunlight. You hold it up to the sun and you get this bright spot! Maybe he used it to start the fires!’

  With a broken coughing noise, Wando leaped up. He was gone before we could speak, running over the hot rocks, not seeming to care about his feet or the loose bits that might trip him. The army boys called something out to him, but he didn’t listen to them.

  He ran straight to the edge of the Ink Well and jumped.

  Chapter 20

  We ran forward. I hadn’t been able to see what happened to him. But Tara must’ve heard a clear splash, because I got the feeling she wasn’t worried.

  Sure enough, after a few seconds, Wando burst up out of the black water and crawled onto the far rocks.

  ‘Wando!’ Tara sounded angry. Her voice was hard and demanding.

  He stood beside the pool and looked up at us. About ten long seconds went past. I glanced at Tara’s soft profile, and then back to Wando’s pale pink oval, and again there was nothing I could see from their expressions. Then he turned and headed off into the bush.

  ‘Wando! Wando!’ Now she was sounding panicky. Her eyes were glassy and intense.

  ‘He’ll be OK,’ I said.

  Without looking at me she started walking back to the towels. Over her shoulder I heard her voice, cool and flat again. ‘Phil will give you a lift back if you like. We’re going home.’

  ‘Wait on! What about Wando?’ I ran up and got in front of her. ‘What made him do that?’

  Her eyes were like stone now and just for a second I saw what Steve had been telling me. Maybe Tara was afraid, but underneath she was also strong. ‘We’ll leave his clothes in a pile. He’ll have to hitch back, but he’ll need his shoes.’

  ***

  When I got home, I rang Wando’s parents, the O’Raffertys, and told them what had happened and they went looking for Wando, and Mum went too, telling me to clean up for the Christmas picnic and then have a rest.

  As if I could do that. I went into the kitchen, half intending to eat something, but ended up sitting at the table, staring at nothing.

  I had let Wando down. First I nagged him about that stupid necklace until he chose a near-death experience just to get away from me. That was bad enough. But there was more than that and the second bit was worse, my real failure as a friend. When Wando got out of the water and turned to look at us, Tara had called out, but he hadn’t wanted that. Now, remembering, I was convinced he’d been looking at me. He’d wanted me to say something. And I’d just stood there.

  I should have called him, or started down to meet him, or asked him how the water was. Anything would’ve done. Just the fact that I made an effort would’ve given him the right message: ‘Come back, mate. Come up. We’ll forget it and just have a swim.’

  Instead, I’d just glared at him, letting him feel a freak. This wasn’t the way I was supposed to behave — trampling on other people’s feelings. I was the sensitive one. Oh, sure. Didn’t I love telling myself that?

  So what had gone wrong? Then another thought struck me. Tara had been there, her smooth skin a few inches from my right arm. Is that why I’d let Wando go?

  Tara always froze me up. Yeah, that was it. I’d been too gutless to risk yelling and sounding pathetic with her next to me.

  But it was more than that.

  I stood up suddenly, pushing the chair back and bumping my thighs on the table. I had realised something. I’d let Wando stomp off into the hot, scratching bush because I wanted to be alone with Tara.

  Great move, too. For my trouble I’d got a few cold words from her and a lift
home with Phil Watson, during which I’d been completely ignored.

  I suppose it had been an opportunity to check out Steve’s theory. I had got my own special glimpse of Tara’s strong side, but that wasn’t much help because I didn’t know what it meant. I might even have imagined it. After the Carmodys, and Craig, and Chess and Wando, I’d got to the point where I didn’t know what I was seeing.

  Just for the sake of moving, I went to the window and stared out at the back garden, fiddling with things on the bench. I put a knife between two fingers and tapped the blade sideways on the draining board, letting it bounce until it vibrated to a stop. Then I did it again.

  At the back of our tangled garden was the pottery shed, a square lump of thick stone. Once it had been painted white but most of that had peeled off. The door and window frames were ridged and silvered and didn’t quite fit, leaving big gaps for cobwebs. I could picture Dad in there, hands smeared with milky water, throwing a pot on the wheel, with his mouth pushed down into a pout that made him look depressed, but really just meant he was concentrating.

  Dad wouldn’t know about Wando. He wouldn’t know I’d badgered my best mate into jumping off a cliff. He wouldn’t be wondering if Deb had been deliberately murdered or worrying about Tara’s inner strength. Dad’s head was full of glazes and firing temperatures. The only time I’d ever seen him get excited in a conversation it was about an antique Japanese tea bowl. He lived for the shapes of things, textures and surfaces and let the rest of the world more or less pass him by.

  I decided to go and join him.

  I hadn’t been in the shed for ages. There wasn’t any real reason — it wasn’t out of bounds or anything and I actually liked being there, with the low murmur of the wheel, watching his hands sliding on wet clay, seeing a shape gradually appear. I even had a chair at the clean table where I could draw. But it had been a while since I’d been out to the shed, maybe a year.

  Today the wheel was still. Dad was standing by a bench under the window, doing handles for a set of mugs, and it must’ve been easy because he was looking dreamy and relaxed and his mouth went straight across instead of turned down. Not wanting to break the mood, I stood for a minute in the doorway. The pottery shed had its own smell, a complicated one that managed to be powdery and wet at the same time. It was sharp but also thick. I breathed it in, thinking it would be nice to get out the ink and brushes.

  Dad wore an old apron over a T-shirt that had been tie-dyed into hazy stripes. His grey hair was swept back from his high brown forehead. It was the sort of look that usually annoyed me, but sometimes the familiar things are what you need. He knew I was there. He didn’t look up, but that isn’t rude with him. I’m always welcome out in the shed. That’s kind of understood.

  There was a shirt thrown over my old kitchen chair but under it I could see the tight vinyl cushion, splodged with paint and cracked across one corner. I sat sideways on it and watched him.

  With one hand he held the clay at face height and with the other he pulled down on it. It was smooth and slimy and faintly disgusting, for reasons I didn’t want to think about.

  In front of my chair there was a book of fine paper, a jar of brushes and an ink block. I picked up a brush and stroked it across my fingertips. Last time I was there I’d been painting sticks and leaves, nice clean lines of ink. When I got one just right, Dad wanted to use it for a pot. From the way everything lay, I knew that my paintings would still be inside the book, just the way I’d left them. This wasn’t surprising. Time moved differently in the pottery shed, and a year isn’t really that long.

  When the tube was long enough, Dad stuck it on the end of the bench, allowing it to fall into a graceful loop. There were other handles like this, already drying. As usual, he was lost in the world of shape and line. He didn’t watch me the way Mum did, didn’t wait hungrily for me to tell him my thoughts. Mum needed that to feel OK about being a parent, but he didn’t. He felt OK anyway. And because he didn’t want it so badly, I sometimes found it easier to tell him things. It’s just another way life is unfair. I had to work hard to answer Mum’s questions, but when it came to Dad, who could take it or leave it, I almost couldn’t help talking to him.

  ‘Wando’s gone off,’ I said. I waited a few seconds and then added. ‘Up the Burrendong hills, near the falls.’

  Dad pinched at a handle to see how dry it was.

  ‘He’ll come back,’ I added quickly, trying to make it seem not so bad.

  ‘Yeah.’ Dad made it sound obvious, helping me reassure myself.

  ‘Mum and Mrs O’Rafferty have gone looking for him.’

  He reached for another piece of clay and I fell silent again. It’s OK to have pauses in the pottery shed. You can stop to think up what you’re going to say next. Or you can completely run out of things to say and that’s OK, too.

  ‘He’s angry. I let him down.’

  This time Dad looked at me. He didn’t ask what I’d done, but just the fact that he’d looked up meant that he wanted me not to beat myself up about things. He picked something up and brought it over, placing it carefully on the bench in front of me.

  It was a tall narrow-necked pot. One I hadn’t seen before.

  ‘Baluster vase,’ said Dad quietly.

  The pot was glazed in a twilight blue-green and on the side he’d copied one of my twig paintings. From the way he’d spoken I could tell he thought he’d made something special. And he had.

  I sat staring at it. The twigs were painted delicately in fine black, in a way that set off the graceful curves of the sides. The vase was a very good shape. It had that amazing thing you get sometimes with a really nice pot. It looked heavy but at the same time light, and something about it held the eye and stopped me talking.

  We looked at it in silence for a long time.

  ‘It’s good,’ I said.

  Dad nodded slowly, with a small smile, then sighed some air in and out and went back to his handles. There was another long pause, then my mind drifted back to Wando.

  Dad was right. Wando’d be OK.

  ‘It’s no big deal.’ I said. ‘I’ll catch up with him later. We left his shoes for him.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Tara was there.’

  There wasn’t anything else to say. I stared at the Baluster vase.

  Three twigs. Two leaves. Very still, silent. I’d tried to catch that silence with the brush and now that it was transferred to the glassy sides of the pot, it was clearer.

  I just sat there staring at it. I don’t usually waste my time like this, but I had kind of run out of steam. It had happened once before, when I had ’flu and was really tired, and I must have been tired again today. Brain-tired.

  Perfect stillness. If you look at a pot like this long enough the stillness goes into you. You feel as if you are part of the pot and the pot is part of you. You feel as if you’re touching it when you aren’t, and everything around you becomes very quiet, as if the whole world is holding its breath.

  I had a feeling I was about to discover something important. Dad had something to tell me, or had the ability to make me see something I was missing. But I didn’t know what to ask him.

  I started thinking about Tara. She could be strong. Steve and I had both seen that. I hadn’t imagined it. She was so strong it was impossible to ask her questions. But did that mean she’d be able to protect herself from a murderer? Steve had said if things got tough, Tara’d surprise me. I wondered how.

  All these intense locked-eye sessions she’d had with Wando. It was as if he wanted to tell me something and she’d told him not to, and she was trying to keep him from talking by sheer willpower. She was trying to keep him calm.

  That scene she’d had with Craig, the one Steve had seen. Maybe she wasn’t afraid of Craig. Maybe she was keeping quiet, not out of fear, but because she wanted to. Maybe she had a plan of some kind, was going to get proof, and then she’d reveal everything. Maybe she was just waiting for the right time.

  Is that w
hy she wouldn’t talk to me? But if she told me her plan I’d go along with it. I’d do anything to help her if only I knew how.

  If only I knew what she was thinking.

  ‘What do you do?’ I said aloud, fairly meaninglessly. ‘I mean, it’s weird isn’t it, how some people hide things. Why do they?’

  I saw Tara at the falls, walking back up to the towels ahead of me. She had grabbed her wet hair with both hands and given it a flick to unstick it from her back, revealing for a second a pair of delicate shoulder blades.

  ‘The thing is, if you’re only trying to help a person, and they’ve got this huge issue, but you just can’t get started …’

  It was lucky Dad was so patient. I wasn’t making much sense.

  ‘I know I could help if people would just talk to me. It’s just that they can’t see that. But just because someone doesn’t want to be helped, it doesn’t really get you out of it, does it. You still feel … responsible.’

  For a second Dad’s hands stopped moving. That was a word he never thought I’d use.

  I’d lost track of what I was saying. I went back to staring at the pot. The thing about a perfect shape, it goes beyond being just a thing on a table and gets another meaning. It makes you think about space, and time, and the whole universe.

  ‘You see,’ I said, as if the pot had proved something. ‘I mean we’re all on this world together, aren’t we? So we are responsible for other people, even if they don’t want to be helped. So I’m supposed to keep trying, aren’t I?’

  Dad was no help. He didn’t seem to be even listening.

  ‘Or am I supposed to just wait? Let the truth come to me?’

  Finally Dad did seem to have found an answer. He does this. You think he’s off on another plane altogether, and suddenly he comes out with something that shows he got the whole thing.

  But this time he had completely the wrong angle. ‘Chess and you are so close. Don’t worry too much. You help her by just being around. She’ll talk to you when she’s ready.’