by P. A. Fenton
YVETTE: Ha ha ha. And did it?
DAVE: No, I’m afraid not. Made me pretty sick from what I can remember, gave me my first taste of antibiotics. So yeah, Tom warned me plenty about over-capitalising on property, and I didn’t think I had been. Still don’t know if I have.
JEFF: Do you know where Tom is now, Dave? The last reported sighting was in New York, at the UN Security Council, but that was over three weeks ago. Do you know if he’s OK?
DAVE: To be honest, I haven’t heard from him either.
JEFF: But do you have any kind of …
DAVE: What, psychic feeling? I hate to break it to you, but while we’re twins, I’ve never experienced any kind of psychic link with my brother. I don’t know when he’s in trouble, or happy, or sad, any more than you do, or Twitter does.
YVETTE: Dave, so your property endeavour isn’t looking too healthy, and it doesn’t sound like there’s much chance of a return to the court.
DAVE: Nope. None.
YVETTE: So there’s a rumour flying around that you’re in the frame to become the primary spokesperson for Weetbix. Is there any truth to that rumour?
DAVE: I, ah. I can’t comment.
YVETTE: Oh, come on. Just a hint?
DAVE: Sorry, not even a wink or a raised eyebrow.
JEFF: You just winked! I saw it!
DAVE: No Jeff, that was a blink. A wink is less subtle.
JEFF: What about Jenny? Surely she’s in favour of you getting on board.
DAVE: She has, ah, her views.
JEFF: Ha-ha, at odds with yours, eh? Trouble in paradise?
DAVE: …
JEFF: There was an article in the Daily Mirror yesterday, saying Jenny was pressuring you to relocate to the US with her. That she didn’t want to live in Australia.
DAVE: …
JEFF: Does Jenny want you both to be based out of the US?
DAVE: …
YVETTE: Where is Jenny now? We have reports she’s been spotted up in Queensland.
DAVE: Yeah, she’s spending some time at Noosa with her sister and nephew.
YVETTE: That sounds lovely, but aren’t you worried about her?
DAVE: Worried?
YVETTE: Yes, with all the trouble stirring up north. We’ve heard reports of large-scale fights and looting breaking out in towns around Mackay, and now it appears to be spreading further south. Police haven’t publicly speculated on what’s causing the unrest, but from what we can gather it seems to be a mix of feelings of economic abandonment by the southern states, and in some cases military abandonment — though that seems to be coming from the smaller factions who believe we’re about to be invaded by Indonesia.’
JEFF: Ha ha.
YVETTE: Can we get some of the recent tweets up on screen?
QLDflyer @mybad94
Cockroaches have hung us out to dry, shut down maintenance at Toowoomba now #goodluckflyingOz
Epoch @epoch
They’re gunna let the Indos have NT and QLD, it’s #BNEline all over again. We need to draw our OWN line! #drawtheline
Omnikunt @deep69
Lotta military up here in Townsville, lotta Yanks. Army, Navy, Air Force, the lot. I’ve heard boats are approaching from the north-west. Not looking good peeps. #invasionOz
DAVE: Wow. Sure are some extreme views out there. But the rioting so far, it’s where? Mackay?
YVETTE: But moving south.
DAVE: It’s moving south?
YVETTE: It’s moving south.
As Dave drove back to his apartment he felt dazed, somewhat outside himself but still seeing everything clearly. More clearly. Why was he insisting on staying in the country when his fiancée was begging him to leave with her? Did his reasons amount to any more than a misguided sense of loyalty because he had once played tennis well, and the people of Australia had determined, he is ours?
Jenny had been working on him for months, teaming up with Tom to argue the case for escape. ‘You’ve got motive and opportunity,’ Tom said to him. ‘Just fucking do it, man.’ That was the last thing Tom said to him before he vanished from the public eye. Where he was now, Dave had no idea. For all he knew, he’d decided to check out the roof of Dave’s building and scattered himself thin over the paving stones of Circular Quay.
How did he let Jenny leave? He couldn’t even remember it happening, could barely recall the arguments in any detail. It was like he’d been fighting on auto-pilot, channelling reasons and propaganda from anyone who thought he owed the country a duty of care beyond those of its ordinary citizenry, because of what Australia had given him.
He heard that one a lot. Dave, considering everything this country and its people have given you … This country has done a lot for Dave Holden. What can Dave Holden give back? Of course, this all came from publicists and advertising executives. What they were really asking was, ‘What can we wring out of Dave Holden?’ Fucking Weetbix?
He had to call Jenny. He had to try and make it right.
The police cordon and media scrum had dissolved as if it had all been drawn on with chalk before a rainstorm.
Was there chalk on the road? An outline? Did they even do that? He avoided looking too closely.
He unlocked the front door to the apartment, shuffled down the hall and saw someone sitting in his leather recliner, looking not out of the picture window but at the hallway, at him. A woman in military fatigues, a handgun held flat against her thigh.
‘Dave Holden?’ she said. Her accent was unmistakably American.
‘Y-yes,’ he said.
‘You need to come with me. Your brother wants to see you.’
Chapter 8
Epoch had no intention of getting back on that Greyhound, not with the highway traffic bricking up like a failed game of Tetris. He scrolled through the Twitter feed projected onto his eyeball, picking out accounts of chaos on the roads as travellers were forced into their cars, once they realised the airports would take longer than a day to start back up.
The traffic was all on the southbound side. From what he could piece together, this was caused by people fleeing bushfires, violence, or simple unemployment. Maybe all three, in some cases. And that was all on top of what was already an overloaded highway.
A few nut-jobs were also spreading panic about a possible or even probable invasion from some of their northern neighbours. God love the QTA. Epoch had spurred a few of them along with tweets and twitpics of Army vehicles he spotted heading north in the early morning hours. He wasn’t sure, but he thought some of them might have been US trucks, which really wound up those paramilitary kooks.
If he really wanted to get himself further south — and he did — he was going to have to find a bike. The problem was, especially in a holiday town like this, motorbikes were rarely sitting around on the street. They were locked up in double and triple garages, away from sticky fingers. His best bet, initially, was a car.
He took a detour off the main road and worked his way through the clusters of shops and cafés and other suburban businesses, and applied his sticky fingers to a car parked in the small shopping centre not far from the bus stop. There were three cars to choose from in a small lot facing a Gloria Jeans coffee shop, which was closed like all the other shops in the complex. He bypassed the Hyundai sedan and the Ford hatchback and settled, as if it was even a question, on the wicked little red Toyota Celica Mk1, a beautifully preserved example of early seventies automotive engineering. Epoch stood back and admired the simple clean lines. The styling of the vehicle represented, to him, the last era of cars designed for their present, rather than some garish vision of the future. It was, despite its age, beautiful. He reamed out the lock on the driver’s side with a small cordless drill and tore the ignition wires from under the steering column to start it up. The engine rumbled to life on the third flick of the copper strands.
The interior smelled of coffee and body odour. It handled stiffly compared to newer cars, but it gave him the feeling that he was in control. Not electric power-a
ssisted steering. Not the on-board computer. Him. His dad used to drive something of a similar age, an old MG that had pedals about three of little Epoch’s leg lengths from the front seat. The driving profile never bothered his father, but it meant joy rides were out of the question for Epoch until he was sixteen.
He looped around behind the shops and drove towards the beach for a short distance, before turning off to the southern headland. He powered on the Eyes.
‘OK Google, show me points of interest.’
Four small red push-pins popped into view ahead of him, crosshatched to indicate they weren’t in direct line of sight, but were obstructed by landmarks or geography. A small number beside each one counted off the distance to reach it. These weren’t the kind of points of interest one might normally expect, tourist attractions or restaurants or shops. Epoch had reprogrammed the keyword search of points of interest to return his personal points of interest. There were no big pineapples or natural features in his POIs. It was his well-researched shopping list.
‘Navigate to point A,’ he said, and a green line dutifully appeared on the road ahead of him.
The sun breached the tree line and tried to obliterate his eyeballs as he followed the directions, and if it wasn’t for the image of the green line on the road, he might have driven right off it. He flipped the visor down and followed the line as it took him up into the elevated headland, past a mix of practical brick boxes and style-conscious timber and galvanised steel arrangements. The higher he drove, the size of the houses lifted in both size and quality, as the overhang of trees and scrubby banks gave way to glimpses of the bay. Glass became a more evident feature, at times allowing a clear view from street to ocean.
He slowed as he approached the first of his POIs. The second POI was just a few doors up on the other side of the road. They both looked so similar in style it seemed likely they’d been designed by the same architect. Single-storey on the uphill side, double on the downhill. Double-garage on the left, lots of glass, rows of solar panels praying to the sun like the owners gave a squeaky shit about the environment. They probably set them up early enough to get the big government rebate, selling their energy back to the distributors for above market value, making a profit and pushing everyone else’s bills up in the process. Like they needed the money more than the majority who couldn’t afford solar panels.
Epoch fucking hated these people.
One more thing both these houses had in common: they each bore identical for sale signs from Heads Height real estate. Epoch had seen many similar signs in recent years, some of them so weather-worn they sometimes seemed as old as the property they were advertising. These signs for Heads Height, Epoch could tell they positioned themselves as a premium agency. The sign was a deep forest green, and the double-H logo occupied the bulk of the space. It was the kind of business whose agents no doubt drove around in branded Mini Coopers and carried an attitude which let them believe they were superior in many ways to both the buyers and the sellers. Suckers all, in their books.
Epoch had done some time in real estate. He knew how the worst of them thought.
He pulled away from POI A and B, and while POI C didn’t bear a similar sign, many other houses in that little elevated enclave had also contracted Heads Height to sell their properties.
And this gave Epoch an idea.
Sadly, all great enterprise requires some measure of sacrifice, and this time the Celica would be the life surrendered. He took it back down through the town and out the north side. He kept driving until the houses started to thin and give way to the dry bush of national parkland. He turned off a nowhere road, a houseless street which probably served as access to some undeveloped land holding, and pushed the Toyota over an unpaved track into the bush. He took it about a hundred metres, just until he was out of sight of the road.
Birds chirped madly around him when he stepped out of the car, like they were all trying to tell him off. In the middle of the cacophony, high up in the trees somewhere, a Kookaburra laughed.
He searched the boot of the car, found some sand crusted board shorts and swim-fins, and a couple of heavily creased t-shirts. He picked the longest of the shirts and tore it down the middle, twisting it into a short cotton rope.
Then he twisted off the petrol cap.
#Twitter Board
Qld Fire & Emergency @QldFES
Residents in the Noosa Heads region are urged to evacuate. Fires have been reported in the state forest, strong winds pushing them south. #bushfires
Chapter 9
Someone was trying to break into her car. Jenny was stuffing the last unwashed t-shirt into her suitcase when she heard the alarm begin to howl and whoop from the street three storeys below, and not for the first time that day she thought: Fucking Dave.
She walked on the marble-tiled floor as though balancing a bowl of hot soup on her head, careful not to scare her volatile stomach out of its current ceasefire. It had been nine hours since she’d last thrown up. Her feet welcomed the wool carpet of the bedroom floor, the yielding pressure of the deep pile on the soles of her feet still springy enough to be therapeutic. She wondered whether it would ever be worn flat by her feet. She doubted it.
Jenny yanked the thick canvas curtains across the balcony door hard enough to shake most of the dust loose, hoping it might be enough to scare off the would-be car thief. She slid open the glass door with equal force and crossed to the railing. A young man, probably in his early twenties, was crouched down next to her car, trying to stick what appeared to be an unwound wire coat-hanger down the side of the door. Somewhere nearby glass was breaking, and traffic sounded like it was everywhere.
‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ she shouted down. ‘You’re trying to break into a Lexus LFX with a coat-hanger?’
He glanced up for half a heartbeat, long enough for her to get a look at his face before he snapped it back down towards the ground. Jenny took an involuntary step back when she realised she knew the guy. Well, not so much knew him as recognised him. He worked in one of the surf fashion shops near Hastings Street, a good-looking kid with a short scruff of sun-bleached hair, with a kind of perma-grin which kept a lot of girls window-shopping. Wearing board-shorts and a t-shirt and a pair of black Chuck Taylors without socks, he wrestled with the hanger, though whether he was trying to get it in or out she couldn’t tell.
‘Just … just don’t make it any worse, OK?’ she called out. ‘I’m coming down.’
She backed away from the railing and he picked up the pace of his twisting and wriggling. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ she muttered. Her bag was packed but for the zipping, which she did before switching off the lights.
Her sister Kirsty had left with her little boy Doyle in their big Jeep Cherokee over an hour ago, not long after a small procession of ragtag soldiers had passed through making their announcements, tossing fliers into the air like the world’s shittiest attempt at confetti. They looked like they’d bought their uniforms themselves from various army disposals stores — one of them appeared to have dressed himself in UN Peacekeeper blue. Jenny and Kirsty had watched from the balcony as they walked down the street, shadowed by a couple of pace cars, sticking the fliers in and on anything they could find: letterboxes, car windscreen wipers, telegraph poles, trees, and the excess went into the air for the wind to deliver.
Jenny dashed down when they were out of sight and picked up one of the yellow sheets. The two sisters read it with bemusement and concern.
EVACUATE?
Australia is at risk!
FACTS:
● Australian armed forces are massing in North Queensland and in the Gulf of Carpentaria!
● Massive Indonesian troop movements have been observed in Jakarta, and the naval assets have begun moving towards Australian waters!
● US armed forces have begun mobilising in Australia, diverting focus from the war in the Middle East!
Conflict is inevitable. Residents are advised to evacuate south of Queensland!!
‘Also,’ Jenny said, ‘Aliens are reading your thoughts and making you fat.’
Jenny and Kirsty both agreed that the author and distributors of the pamphlet were irreversibly fuck-headed. They even laughed about it, until they saw the first panicked neighbour run out to their car with two hastily-packed suitcases, bundle them into the boot and drive off without checking for other traffic. He kissed the side of a passing Hilux with the leading edge of his Hyundai. The driver of the Hilux must have been in a hurry, because he only landed one punch to the apologetic man’s head before continuing on his own journey.
Some of their neighbours were apparently quite fuck-headed too.
When Yvette Winterson on Good Morning Today interrupted a segment with a semi-celebrity chef imparting his perfect omelette wisdom with news of small-scale looting breaking out in Noosa and other parts of the Sunshine Coast, amid the growing chaos of an apparently spontaneous evacuation, the humour just kind of drained out of the situation.
And then news of the fires leapfrogged everything to top the local headlines.
They’d started the day with plans of walking to the beach in the morning, coffee and tea leading to lunch at a yet-to-be-determined restaurant, maybe pizza delivered later on for dinner. Now, suddenly, their new plan seemed to be more or less aligned with the instructions of the wacky paper flier.
Kirsty wanted to get a head-start on the inevitable traffic hell, so she strapped Doyle squealing into his car seat and threw all of their gear, and probably some of Jenny’s, loosely into the back of the beast. The plan had been to go to Brisbane airport for southbound flights, but the nationwide airport strikes had put the skids on that. Jenny argued they should all stay put, but she knew Kirsty would never go for it. Both girls had prior experience of riots, and they knew there was no safe harbour when the crazies came out.