Winter Traffic

by Stephen Greenall

  ‘Bullcrap. Sutton is just Sutton.’

  Rawson nods in mute agreement, counts the bags beneath her eyes. She has always been composed of unusual combinations: grace and brains, looks and kindness, not much in the way of bullcrap. He knows about the bipolar; could always sense without being told. ‘I miss your dad,’ he says quietly. ‘Twice the cop I ever was.’

  ‘He didn’t think so.’ Susan looks into her coffee and makes a glum smile. ‘I mean, you only saved his life three times.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘Sydenham, Fish Markets, the house in Alexandria.’

  ‘Shit, Alex don’t count. That drongo with the shottie forgot to reload.’

  He rises and goes to the double-glazed windows, the long and lovely garden that incipient winter cannot mute. It culminates in an antique frame that time and white orchids have encased. Built by the father with loving hands to mark the daughter’s seventeenth. According to the fine print, it was a three-man job.

  —Rawson’s good for heavy lifting.

  —Is that a fact. How bout it, constable. Free to help a brother officer?

  Like you’re gonna turn down Arthur Sheldon. It isn’t rank, intimidation; the man makes model bloody airplanes. But he’s a gent, old school, it’s an honour to be asked. You’re heading round to the Artful Dodger’s? Strewth, fair set-up from all accounts. No flies on King Arthur / he married into money.

  —Be delighted, sir. Would the usual fee be plicable?

  —My word. Highly plicable. Bring an offsider if you’ve got one, someone with tools.

  —I might know a bloke, confessed the Rawson of two decades ago, reluctant as though putting up a valued asset. Young fella.

  ‘Stop looking at it.’

  ‘The garden?’

  ‘The past.’

  They began at six and worked through a sweltering day, Rawson useless but Sutton already a half-credentialled chippie. The whole time Michele was bringing out water and lemonade, attentive to their comfort but super worried they’d stuff it up or not complete. The guests are coming at five she said again and again with a wife’s nag, a mother’s angst. And Arthur reckoned It’s a lucky thing we’ve got Sutton and maybe it had been and maybe it hadn’t. At sunset the first of ninety teenage girls rolled up, abolishing any chance you had of getting Probationary Constable E. M. Rawson out the door. Behave yourself, said Arthur—though not in the direction of the nineteen-year-old carpenter who’d been so quiet / so respectful through the day. And damn near a dispute as he tried to put some loot in the kid’s hand, Sutton refusing because there’d been no talk of money. It’s been good experience, he countered, an interesting thing to build. He stayed at their insistence, drank a pair of beers and stood in the corner in his eight-dollar stubbies, sunglasses tight against the late light of day. He wished the birthday girl a dutiful happy birthday and from across the perfect yard Rawson saw her face when Sutton did it, the young cop thinking Jesus Mary Joseph / here we go.

  ‘Is that your pager?’

  And here they were still going—a twenty-year ride with many corkscrew turns and sweeping centripetal corners. ‘Do you remember what Arthur gave us for the day we put in.’

  ‘Only because you’ve told me fifty times.’

  ‘A carton of premo—that was the currency. If you stuffed up on the job, something minor, you bought a slab for the next bloke up the chain. And if someone did you a turn, same thing—only make it Crown, something imported. And there was your boy not taking the moolah.’

  ‘It was a while before he was my boy.’

  ‘Michele slipped a hundred and fifty in his toolbox. Only sneaky thing she ever did in her life.’

  He turns and feeds the last of the pastry into his rolling mandible, conscious of the device and its banal shiver. When will it learn? Rawson expects the running cliché—call Karen fucking Millar—but in the event it triggers alarm: missed call, Zoe or Sash, their bedroom line so impossible to know which one. His frown is no-frills: it’s an odd time of day, of week, of life for his girls to phone.

  ‘Lost your wallet?’ She asks because of his fidgeted search, a prolonged tapping of pockets high and low.

  ‘Lost me oxy, mate. Got two of the best here somewhere.’

  ‘Mum keeps painkillers in the study.’

  ‘Over The Counter shit is what she keeps. Show some respect.’

  ‘Omigod is that clock right?’

  ‘Dunno, love—it’s your bloody house.’

  ‘Shivers. I have to call Nevada.’

  ‘Vegas, is it? Loan shark or bookie.’

  ‘Try, bloody, the head of the entire project.’

  Pay dirt, internal jacket pocket, the clear outline of tablets; Rawson is relief, confusion. ‘I thought it lived in Arizona?’

  Dr Sheldon shakes her head and explains—the ungodly device in one state but the admin stuff in the next. Something about tax, a twenty-minute drive, she did it every day when she was up there.

  ‘Ah, the Sin-o-gram. What’s it do again?’

  It is meant for fun—a pale running joke—but the groan in her voice unmasks a broader distress. The task at hand is a crisis, not onerous in itself just the hundredth such wave in heavy succession. Rawson has surfed in the place where Susan treads / he reaches for her hand.

  Too late: the mathematical girl is breathing, swimming strong, heading for the upstairs phone and telling him to Eat.

  —

  The face of Arthur became a smile, happiness to see him of a secondary kind. Rawson could detect the engine behind, a process of refraction in effect. The man’s little girl had finally come home.

  —You look well, said the emeritus Inspector, conducting him in. The etiquette of an elder age, its politesse convincing, making the tin of untruth a hard one to assay. Even for master metal detectors. It’s very fine to see you, said the Big Ship in reply, a warmth of honest platinum. Where is she?

  He heard the answer, the girl in the rainroom with her mother, the pair laughing like nightingales despite the welcoming weather’s inclemency; it struck him in that moment that Arthur’s wealth was beyond accounting. Rawson could barely credit how young and happy and long-of-hair she looked, thirty looking twenty as she bear-hugged the bear.

  And did not wince at the sight of him, a break with latest convention. Still got the mop, she marvelled at his shaggy seventies do. You’ve got to let me cut it.

  —What, and give the brass their satisfaction?

  —They’d probably recommission you, Arthur murmured. Fourth time lucky.

  —Break me own record you reckon.

  —Rawse, meet Hristo. He’s been helping me in the garden.

  —It is a great honour to—

  —Edward Michael Rawson at your service.

  —I am a great admirer from—

  —God, Arthur, I knew had a ringer on the go. Look at those foxgloves!

  —Do you still take it white with three sugars, Michael?

  —Four now, Shell. Inflation.

  —Four! No, I’m not making that.

  —How gorgeous is this daughter of yours looking?

  —Edward, I first saw you many—

  —The girl is in love; look, her eyes are full of stardust. No ring, eh? Must be the indecisive type. I hope he’s not some fellow astrologer?

  —Astronomer, Michael.

  —He gets it wrong on purpose, Mum. Thinks it’s clever.

  —Cleverer than this prevaricatin boffin you’ve shacked up with. Admit it, Suzie Q: you’ve fallen for a scientist.

  —For science, said Arthur proudly. Again.

  —I was very new here, this country—

  —Hold that thought, Wristy. So what happened to the chooks, Inspector? Rabble.

  —At least none are wanted for murder; that Steve Mavin can slaughter a try. Hristo here used to barrack for—

  —So what’s all this about a doomsday device in the desert?

  She took his hand like a lover, said Come with me / I want to tell you all about
it.

  —

  The detective directs himself to the study, resolving to solve the riddle of his child’s missed call. Voicemail, Sash, the noise of her tears for one-point-two of a second. ‘Dad you’ve gotta—’

  Gotta what? The bloody thing cuts out but she sounds anguished, the high authentic tone of upset he knows but rarely hears. Astounding to Rawson, deeply wounding, the noise of her inhaling between syllables but never letting up for air.

  ‘Corrupt,’ says the operator when he rouses them. ‘Whole system’s down, but I can page it through as fragments.’

  ‘Fragments.’

  ‘Yeah—scrambled, out of order. It’s been that kind of day.’

  ‘No shit,’ he says to the phone when he puts it down. Rawson picks up again; maybe this is the instant to strike, to skewer fate with a bolt like some electro-magnetic Jupiter.

  ‘Shane Metcalf’s—’

  Nope: down again, the Incremental startled by his own stupidity; like any man could revive his fortune from beneath this million-tonne hangover. His hand grips the larynx of the Macallan 18.

  ‘What are you up to down there?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he cries, shocked by the timing of Susan’s multi-storey question; Nevada must have her on hold. ‘Just giving your mother’s aspirin a razz.’

  He pours and releases the oxy from height, prompts a double dissolution. Dying fizz, the tumble of the pager in his hands, Rawson throwing back half the acrid brew and receiving instant dividend. A spasm in the device, its excited utterance of We can’t find Mitchell / Dad you gotta come round and fix it.

  Strewth—the second husband, Heather’s pet pooch. Maybe the bastard shot through? Rawson bloody hopes not / Mitch is a top provider. The scrap fades from the tiny screen, becomes the past, and the so-so provider rummages the desk to locate a weapon of writing.

  —

  Come with me, she said, and took his hand like a lover. I want to tell you all about it.

  Special treatment: Michael had earned it over time, a patent adoration for all talk of her work, Susan’s parsing of ideas digestible but awe-inspiring. The pair plonked themselves in the study and she ranged from macro to micro and back again, the girl fresh from America like a theory of gravity they wanted to grill because, well, apparently gravity was All. She knew it was too attractive to be true—too neat to answer chaos—but when she spoke her throat was primal with a faith in magic numbers.

  —Huge, she said, describing her own eyes. Twenty-eight kilometres of titanium track in the shape of mobius strip, the whole thing built two hundred metres beneath the surface.

  —Whoa, said the Incremental. And the implications are what?

  —God, where to start…If we can instantiate Litvonin’s model then we’ve made a case for ITER. The Japanese are in and the Europeans are finalising budgets. This thing could happen in our lifetime, Michael. The ionisation of hydrogen!

  —Give it to me in English, doc.

  —Cold fusion, a star the size of a car that will power every car on the planet.

  —Cool.

  —But it’s not about cars; not even about energ y. The Cynosure can give us a GUT.

  —Got one, thanks.

  —Grand Unified Theory, a baseline grasp of how the quantum field elaborates, polices itself. Litvonin’s quantum-lineal can unmask the rogue of time.

  —The rogue of time!

  Susan’s blush was abashed but pretty. His favourite expression. The latest findings suggest…

  —Go on.

  —Suggest the present is actually happening some time ago. In the past.

  —Ease up, girl, you’re hurtin me brain.

  —Please; I know about your brain. The thing is, no one’s sure about magnitude. The Portuguese think it’s just a few minutes but the Germans are talking years.

  —I know who I’d back. What about the future?

  She licked her lips but it wasn’t salacious; it was doubt a civilian could hack it. He wouldn’t forget the palpable sense of detour, Susan going to a place of more straightforward joy. The beauty of the Cynosure is how they’ve managed to trick it. Remember us talking about the Uncertainty Principle?

  —Course. Schopenhauer’s Cat.

  —The particle changes under the burden of observance. You can still arrive at coherence, sure, but now you’re part of the system.

  —The little bastard just knows.

  —And you can’t critique a model from inside it. You’ll only arrive at relative truths, never absolute ones.

  —Useless. Hopeless.

  —But that’s an x the Cynosure dispenses with. It’s hard to explain, not my field, but imagine a series of tiny specialised mirrors, hundreds of them in a sequence bending light.

  —Bending truth.

  —Exactly. And at the heart there’s a chamber, a pair of observance platforms——A pair of aortas.

  —That are perfect g yroscopes. I’m talking about a zero-gravity environment.

  —Lookatya, bloody astronaut.

  —One watcher per platform, but we have to enter from opposite sides. We’re not allowed to see each other, have the slightest contact. That would be…

  —Observance.

  —Uncertainty, yes. So you’re suspended, buckled in a chair pulling three g’s and this machine the size of an aircraft carrier is all around you—humming, accelerating, speeds approaching light while you revolve and invert, start wondering if it’s your bloody particles about to get smashed. Then you spin to face the Aperture and…

  —And?

  —You see it. God.

  —Crikey…Beard?

  —It’s this laser-thin horizon, the oldest light in the cosmos. The sharpest, the most concentrated thing you’ll ever see. That’s ever been. And you want to cry or tell someone but you can’t and six feet away behind two feet of kevlar another person is looking at the exact same thing but from the converse quantum-lineal.

  —The what now?

  —The other side of the Universe.

  —Fark.

  —Yes. Fark. She looked at him differently then, like a soul now recognised through many shared lifetimes. And when you’ve seen them both—invigilated in one aorta, then the other—everything seems to fit. Life, I mean. You walk around for weeks feeling happy.

  —Happy.

  —Whole, as though…Christ, I don’t know how this is going to sound, but it’s like the two essential types of light that exist are inside you, talking to each other, and they don’t ever meet in nature but they’ve somehow met in you and you can’t ever feel dark again.

  Silence for a time, a contented moment perhaps minutes / perhaps centuries old. Sounds like a helluva thing you’re doing, Suze.

  —I love it, Rawse. I love knowing what I’m on this planet to do.

  —Yeah, def.

  —So tell me, how are you? Do you see very much of Jamie?

  —

  When Susan descends for a second time he is loitering at the Shero with an aura of plain nausea. He sniffs at a pomegranate and recoils, straying into a shaft of light. Mistake: the sun hits his face like Lester Ellis.

  ‘What are you hiding under that paper?’

  ‘Nothing, coffee. How’d you go with the yanks?’

  Susan broods. ‘They’re calling me back. The person I need is actually in the machine.’

  ‘The lucky duck.’ Rawson builds a modest pile of snags, proceeds to chase them round the plate with his fork. He too is brooding, about Sash / about bloody technology. In time he notices her stillness, Susan’s dormancy in mufti.

  ‘Chucking a sickie are we.’

  ‘Are you.’

  ‘Piss off,’ says the double/triple saviour of Arthur Sheldon. ‘I’m hard at it, flat out like a lizard drinkin.’

  ‘Whatever…I’m taking a break.’

  ‘Break.’

  She cups her neck with her hand, elbow high like Balinese figurine; the massaging yaw of right to left is made for multiple purpose. ‘I got an offer. Parkes.’


  ‘Crikey—Big Dish country. You really want to live in Parkes?’

  ‘It’s a promotion, means getting back to data and not having to manage anybody.’

  ‘Righto.’

  ‘What does righto mean.’

  ‘Nothing. Tough decision.’

  ‘Say it.’

  The man exhales. He shouldn’t. ‘Maybe you were looking for something to give. And then, on the weekend, you got it.’

  ‘That is so far from fair I can’t even—’

  ‘Okay-okay, what would I know.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The grimace of Bobby Cobra, the sense of minefield and the ever-explosive question: what is it they want? He realises with a start that something has neutered / has cancelled the pain in his melon.

  ‘Where do you think he is.’

  ‘Jem?’ He turns his mind to the question, grave but curious about his dramatic upturn in health. ‘Copperhead, probably. Staring at the sea.’

  ‘Do you think he understands?’

  ‘Um—’

  Saved by the bell, the one that chimes like a butler announcing company. Susan goes out and returns with Hristo, the green man doffing his blue cloth hat.

  ‘Wristy! How is-ya.’

  But not at Rawson; the nod he gives the cop is sober and his small talk with Suze an agony, earnest chat about plant life that quickly turns to fertiliser. It makes the Incremental plan a daring and imminent vamoose, his other Black-eyed Susans calling loudly for attention. But then yanks sound the blower and she runs off to catch it, fucken hell / he’s one on one with Hristo.

  He’d go the sprint himself, but Rawson is suddenly rolling, riding on waves that are oddly friendly / want him to have a nice day. Perhaps even get philosophical: ‘Every woman is a land of contrasts,’ he declares as Susan’s ankles round the upstairs turn.

  The gardener watches their disappearance wretchedly. ‘What.’

  ‘Every woman is a land of contrasts, but some are Belgium, Belize, you can do it in a day. Others are bloody Chinas, mate, keep you occupied for years.’