‘Flame?’
‘Calm down, fellas. Everyone knows I used to screw a girl in Bomb Squad.’
-4
Bercovitch is in a high-level meeting on an elevated floor when an aide rushes in without apology. She whispers in his ear but before she has delivered the message four pagers have erupted, three phones. Twenty-two minutes later he is on-scene, caught in a world of antic emergency. A siren is a vehicle on fire and giving news to that effect.
Sydney is burning with desire to know. Choppers everywhere and the approaching streets thick: media, rubberneckers, a dozen branded vans. They heard the blast from miles away, a dozen blocks at least.
‘Radio’s saying gas main.’
‘Anybody hurt?’
Fuck hurt. How many dead.
—
Staggered roadblocks at the mouth of Ithaca, ambulances coming out—no lights, no bells—and his own car admitted after brief interrogation. Bercovitch is ferried on, snapped by snappers. The lightning flare that criminals cop when leaving court: he wears the same grim mask.
Six red water bearers and half the fireys in New South fucken Wales.
Their helmets, their axes.
—
‘People will be talking about this for twenty fucken years.’
Bercovitch feels the driver’s awe but comes to different conclusions. People don’t talk about anything for twenty years. This will be catastrophe for a day, circus for a week, cause for a month, agenda for a year.
After that the fade is fast, total. The hottest ticket in the state loses temperature, all its prior radioactive. Uranium becomes thorium becomes radium becomes lead.
‘Fucken blowflies.’
The driver means the helicopters. He’s on safer ground now. When and why do blowflies congregate?
Flesh, open to the sky.
—
He moves inside the perimeter, keeping distance between himself and the B&R crews, the cosmonaut techs from CSU. He mills in silence, nodding to known faces.
It’s not his circus—Daniels is the man in the big tent, calling himself Control. Bercovitch is simply here, too senior to be told to piss off, widely known to be Macquarie Street anointed.
Not too long before he is respectfully apprised.
—
The scarred husk of what was maybe a Pintara.
Fucken Belfast: the thing is fried, buckled outwards from the force of the spasm, its fierce combustion internal but complete. The shell sits halfway in the crater it brought into being, a matchbox car they sold to the wrong demented child.
Yes: a passing giant picked it up and gave it to the fire, arched its spine with trauma, with crude and brutal device.
—
Away to the right a second tent, paramedics and sworn persons passing in, out, all of them subject to the stares of faraway gawkers on apartment-building balconies. It is the type of tent they erect around a body to protect the evidence from weather, to obscure grisly details from unofficial eyes.
The cop updating Bercovitch: ‘Best initial is the driver and the bloke in the back died instant. More or less. The other one, front passenger—well, he took less of the blast. Was still kicking when the ambos hit.’
‘But did not make it.’
‘First-degree burns to eighty per cent.’
‘Okay. Better off then.’
‘Thousand per cent.’
‘Nasty way to go but.’
—
Bercovitch left his phone in the car. Deliberate. Peace in the eye of the storm / you learn to cultivate it. He paces nearer the wreck, gratified that the cop follows. Attaché. The outlines of two bodies with blackened skulls, jaws open and distended, a pairing of souls that were crucified by heat. Did they go merged into the after? ‘Forensic says the bloke in the back is Chris Slane.’
‘You fucken what.’
‘Yep—fished the wallet out ten minutes ago. Everything full melt, but you can read the licence.’
‘Jesus…Driver?’
‘Unknown. Tavish is giving Daniels a statement.’
‘Tavish?’
‘Was on site, sir. Had the car under surveillance.’
Bercovitch rounds. ‘Solo?’
‘Negative. Karen Millar—she’s en route to Vincent. Apparently she was walking up to the car when it detonated, got caught in the zone.’
The Chief Inspector looks beyond his aide-de-camp, past the striped epaulette to a water garden in which a single bird is emerging out of darkness, out of Sydney. A creature built for wading, extending wings in the night like a sorcerer who lost his magic but not his life, a pantomime ghost scaring no one / all his conjuring in vain. The perfect S-bend of the greyhearted swan, its neck as it skates the glass of harbour and asks the elegant friend in the water was it worth it—this skyless bargain, this Faustian mess.
‘You’re saying Karen was in the blast zone.’
‘Copped it bad, sir. They reckon fifty-fifty.’
‘No. No.’
‘Fifty-fifty, maybe slightly less.’
-5
It is some queer desert.
Weeks elapse in minutes, a hot dry world revolving in cosmic fast forward—moon and sun and moon again, a rapid repeating cycle. The frenzied bleed of colours turns rhythmic, hypnotic, but there is never time to name them. Creation is too rich, too promiscuous.
He is not sure that he exists in three dimensions.
—
The wall has always been there, an escarpment that fills his north horizon. It has the look of something taboo. Gigantic letters float to issue blue-ink admonition.
I’M AT PIEC—
—
Put me off in Orange.
‘Ha, nice sign. Reckon it’s fair dinkum?’
‘Why not. Remember Muggins waking up in Berowra that time? Two a.m., we had to go and get her.’
‘What’s this we shit.’
‘Go on—give him a shake.’
‘Don’t poke me, poke him.’
He can relate to these words but they cannot relate to him. He is awake already.
Isn’t he? He opens his eyes and the whole bright world.
—
Trees and sheds; someone banished the sand. Low sun shines through a green-tint window and he waits for it to set in the course of a moment. Instead it stays fixed in place, beleaguered in a red-swamp haze, soaking richly / tilting to retrograde. He theorises without fear that the universe has accelerated to insane velocity, busted.
The room comes into better focus. It has roved across the landscape becoming Australia and he sees it through tears, through eyes thick with sleep. The man blinks and looks at his one good wing and then he understands.
I’M AT PIECE.
The wall. It’s just his arm.
—
‘You made it.’
He looks at the source of the sound and sees a face strong and old. Blue uniform / conductor. ‘Thought I was gonna have to come back and give you a shake.’ The advisory means nothing but he grasps the need to rise, exit. The man gags but makes it upright, put off balance by waters that gyroscope madly.
‘Don’t forget your bloke.’
‘Never.’
A handle pressing into fingers, Sutton almost dropping the carrier because its weight is unexpected. He tilts his neck to peer beyond the grill, sees a lump of sleeping marmalade.
The becatted man goes unsteady along the platform, moving ghostlike on the deck of tall and heaving ships. Ships that brought out ancestors, forebears. Brightness hits Sutton in the middle of nowhere and he is alone, alone…But then the piece becomes whole, the sound of her a music that once was past and now will be future. Master collapses into Susan and there is no pain, not anymore—just a worn and country memory that rings down steel forever.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In bringing this novel to publication, the editorial guidance of Alaina Gougoulis was sage, just and indispensable; AG, my enduring thanks. I am similarly grateful to the small but inimitable tribe tha
t is Text Publishing.
An incorrigible fosterer of other people’s careers, Toni Jordan was at it again in the case at hand; she championed, she advised. Some genuine alpha betas in Karen Abey, Jenny Kaldor and Edoardo Bigazzi provided generous advice on later drafts (early ones were inflicted upon N. Clarke, A. Foley and T. Lunney, all of whom responded graciously). To my iron reader, Bobby Hunt—thank you, brother.
The dedicatees of this work, Jim Greenall and Margaret Guest, offered unstinting love and support throughout its development. The same is true of a Kooloona crew marshalled by the incomparable Joan O’Shea and peopled by magnificent hounds: Scamp, Quentin, Georgie Best. Richard Redman, Michael O’Connor and Davey Higgins gave me rooms to work in, and I am indebted to Clementine Marcq for her French and musicianship.
A final thanks to CHH, who was central to the making of this book.
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