by J. M. Green
Now it became clear. The fire had been a distraction. Ben knew it would take all day before I realised he’d stolen it. He probably intended to offer the DVD to Cesarelli; problem was, Cesarelli was dead. I wondered if Ben had heard that news yet. What would he do if there were no one alive to sell the DVD to?
I grabbed my bag and started shoving my stuff in it. I wrote a quick note to Mum and ran out onto the road. It was four kilometres to the highway. It would take me over an hour, with the damn empty laptop satchel bouncing on my hip. After a gruelling twenty minutes schlepping over the pitted road, a car heading in the opposite direction slowed. A black V8 Commodore with fat tyres. It stopped and I hurried over. A tinted window lowered.
‘Get in, Stella.’ Shane Farquar.
I backed up. ‘Fuck off.’
‘Come on. Where you headed?’
‘Bus stop. Melbourne bus.’
He grinned. ‘No worries. Get in.’
I was desperate. I opened a door and threw my bags onto the backseat, beside a child’s car seat. Dear God, he’d procreated. I pitied the poor woman who’d joined her DNA with this specimen. He accelerated to an alarming speed and skidded to a halt at the highway. He turned left and drove like a lunatic towards Woolburn.
‘So, going back to Melbourne, hang out with your arty mates.’
I ignored him.
‘Bloke in town tells me your mum’s been checking out units in Ouyen. To live in.’
Delia would never leave the farm, let alone live in a unit. ‘I think you’ve been sniffing the sheep-dip fumes again.’
Shane rolled his eyes. ‘Grow up, Hardy. I’m trying to discuss business. He reckons she’s been talking about putting the farm on the market, what’s left of it.’
Could Delia really leave the farm? Ted had a lot of influence over her, and he was the kind of man who called a shed a studio, or a unit a townhouse. He sold lifestyles; perhaps he’d sold one to my mother. There was Delia’s odd humming at breakfast, like she was up to something. It was a horrible idea but I began to think Shane Farquar was right.
Mortified, I turned away to hide the angry tears filling my eyes. I was not ashamed of my justifiable sorrow at the property changing hands; the real betrayal was the secrecy.
Was it too much to ask? A little honest, open communication in the family? But no, I had to hear the news from a Farquar.
‘Well, even if she is, what do you care?’
‘I’m interested.’
Oh, boy! My nemesis, my tormentor, swanning about in my childhood home, touching the door knobs with his meaty hands, walking on the floors with his cloven feet. The moment called for fury, revenge, cursing his family unto eternity. Instead, another part of me, stubborn and disgustingly reasonable, refused to cooperate with this descent into hate. The farm was a mausoleum, a monument to catastrophe. Let the Farquar have it. ‘So ask her.’
‘Every time I try to, she says she’s busy.’
I chortled. The woman did lead an active life.
He grabbed my arm. ‘You’ve been telling her not to sell to me,’ he said, with a flush rising from his neck. ‘Haven’t you?’
‘What? That’s silly.’
‘Bit of harmless teasing in school. You’re all uptight about it still, arn’cha? On your high-fucking-horse.’
‘Don’t know what you’re on about.’
He stopped near a row of abandoned shops on the main street, where a thin pole had been erected with a V/Line sign stuck to it. I was surprised to be still alive.
‘You take the bus to Ballarat,’ he said. ‘Then the train to Melbourne.’
‘Thanks,’ I said stiffly. I unclicked my belt, but didn’t get out. ‘Shane, if you’re so keen to buy why don’t you talk to Delia? Make a time — let’s call it an appointment — and go see her. Make an offer.’
He faced me, suspicion and hope in his eyes.
‘And just so we’re clear, I have never said a word to Mum about not selling to you. I had no idea you were even interested. You’re feeling guilty about the crap you did in your past. Stuff that I’ve completely forgotten about, and I don’t give a shit about now.’ I pointed at my chest, feeling teary again. ‘I’ve left that all behind. Right? I don’t hold on to shit that happened twenty years ago.’
He held my gaze and didn’t reply, but the menace in his eyes was gone. I stepped out, and he did a burn-out and roared away.
I waited beside my satchel and bag. Time. Moved. Slowly. A quiet town, Woolburn. Dead almost. There was the odd ute. Distant trucks on the highway. An epoch passed. I aged, and yet I was no wiser, nor more mature. God help you if you lived around here and didn’t drive. It was late afternoon when a woman pulled up and yelled across the road to me. ‘If you’re waiting for the bus, you’ve missed it.’
‘When’s the next one?’
‘Tomorrow morning. Seven-thirty.’
‘No. Seriously. When’s the next one.’
‘There’s only one a day. Leaves at seven-thirty in the morning.’ The woman laughed. Then she got out of her car and came over. ‘Are you okay?’
I kicked a veranda post. ‘Utter, utter, utter bastard.’
Both her hands went up, palms out, ‘Calm down.’
‘Gah!’
‘Just take it easy.’
‘Grrrrraaaagh!’
She backed away slowly, got in her car, and sped off.
As her car receded into the distance, the place returned to its torpor. I stood in the middle of the road, my hands balled into fists, desperately conjuring an alternative getaway plan. There was one possibility, but it called for a last desperate effort. I wiped my nose on my sleeve and trudged towards the pub.
21
HALF THE town was in Woolburn’s Victoria Hotel, playing pool, reading the paper, sitting at the bar making jokes. It was a small, single-storey pub that had remained unchanged for years. The place had never been lovely, but now it was exhausted; the walls had yellowed, and the furnishings and fittings were elderly. Framed photos of footy teams covered the wall. I went looking and found the team portrait from the famous 1968 grand final. Woolburn lost the game but it had been a noble failure, with tales of blokes spitting out teeth, of a punctured lung, broken ribs, of blokes manfully staying on the field and playing on but missing set shots — and in the end, they lost by two points. In the back row, second from the left was Russell Hardy. His arms were folded and he had the sneer that he used for a smile. I had to get out of here.
I stood in the middle of the public bar and, in a loud voice, said, ‘Who do you have to sleep with around here to get a lift to Melbourne?’
All activity stopped, the farmers hushed, the boys rested their cue sticks. The barmaid leaned both elbows on the soggy mats. ‘You’re Delia Hardy’s eldest, aren’t you? That poor woman. How is she?’
‘Mum? She’s good, thanks. Considering.’
‘Terrible shock for her though, your dad’s plane and all.’
‘It was only the sheds.’
‘Made of titanium that one,’ the barmaid said. Everyone present agreed my mother was tough.
‘I hear she and Ted are selling up, moving to Ouyen.’
‘Yep. Apparently. That’s what they’re doing.’
An old bloke folded his paper. Hair shot out in wiry clumps from above his eyes, and from his ears and even from the top of his whiskey nose but there was none on his head. He nodded and said to me. ‘A Hardy, eh? Well, I’m about to head off to Melbourne. Got me truck outside. And no funny business,’ he added with a wink.
I suppressed a squeal and gave him a short nod instead. ‘Thanks, mate.’
He put on his hat — not an old cockie’s felt hat, but a truckie’s cap advertising a brand of tractor — and went out.
I followed him outside to a vehicle for
which ‘truck’ was too strong a word. It could transport five sheep at the most. But it would do, and soon we were on the highway. In fact the doughty little engine seemed capable of driving all day, carrying on to Queensland if required — a thought that crossed my mind. But for now, the brown smudge on the horizon, a city of four million people, beckoned — and, at last, I was headed there. At last I was, as an old state slogan had it, on the move.
A strange mood took hold of me, bitter, aggrieved. I grizzled internally about how the old catchphrase Victoria: on the move applied to a place that was so often not. Not the capital anyway, with its choked heart, its hardened arterials. And there was not much fluid movement in the social fabric either, with its postcode apartheid, organised crime, disorganised crime. Its cold-blooded politicking and its hot-headed sports lust. A city whose idea of sophistication began and ended with caffeine.
Still, Melbourne did have its attractions. Specifically, Brophy. And towards it I gravitated with grim determination, reluctant to stop. But after a couple of hours the truckie wanted a piss and pulled in at a lonely service station, a vast concrete bauble in the middle of nowhere. I found a working public phone and inserted some change. The police-complex reception put me through to Phuong. ‘Stella? How’s the countryside?’
‘Countryside? This isn’t fucking England.’
‘You’re having a nice time then,’ Phuong said dryly.
‘Any news?’
‘Cesarelli’s dead.’
‘I know, I’m on my way back to Melbourne now. Listen, Ben stole my laptop. Set up a manhunt, a BOTLO, send cars to all the junkie dens and pawnshops.’
‘Stella …’
‘I messed up. Everything is my fault. I didn’t understand the danger Tania was in, I could have helped her.’
‘You’re not at fault here. Tania wasn’t a drug user, that’s what you said. This isn’t some gangland hit. It’s probably about ransom.’
She had a point. Yet there had to be a connection between Adut and Tania. ‘All the time, I thought that address in the book was mine. I was paranoid and stupid. If I’d realised Adut had written down Tania’s flat rather than mine … I don’t know, maybe I could have done something, acted sooner. I’d give the book to you and —’
‘What have you got to be paranoid about?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Stella? What have you done?’
I couldn’t tell her, I couldn’t speak.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about the book straight away?’
‘I stuffed everything up,’ I wailed. ‘I have to fix this. Tania’s life is in danger, and it’s all on me.’
‘Wait, go back. Tell me what you —’
I hung up on her. I looked to see if my truck-driving son of a gun was ready to go. He was still in the gents. There was a dollar in twenties left in my hand. What the heck. I prepared a soliloquy for Brophy’s machine, but he picked up. The words flew away.
‘Still in the sticks?’ He made it sound exotic.
‘I’m on my way home now.’
‘Can’t wait.’
I put the phone down and beamed at the world. The service station was bathed in the light of a hundred fluorescent battens, illuminating the lovely industrial-sized waste bins and revealing the beauty of the litter that collected in the weed-choked shrubbery. A truck swept past; the back-draft showered me in a rain of warm dirt. If there was a more beautiful purveyor of petroleum products, I would like to see it.
I stood, smiling stupidly until a fellow in shorts, with a gut the size of an exercise ball, approached me. His body odour arrived a second later, a sour, rotten stench that snapped me out of my reverie.
‘Finished with the phone, love?’ he asked, breath like a half-full wheelie bin.
‘Yes,’ I muttered, and hurried away.
The truck came in to town on the Princes Highway and had just passed Flemington Racecourse. ‘This’ll do,’ I said and my mate pulled over. I thanked him and walked the rest of the way, along Epsom Road. Somewhere, a siren wailed. Overhead, a jumbo whined as it cruised low enough for me to read the numbers on the tailfin. Every toxic greenhouse fume, every grating noise, was a greeting for me, an urban welcome-home party. I muttered an apology. It was a city of wonders in a handsome corner of the country.
Half an hour later, I was home at last, standing in front of PineView, about to climb the steps to my building, when I remembered. Behind me, across the street, it lay. I estimated the trajectory of the arc.
The garden was neat, one of those little-old-lady gardens with a square of clipped lawn and a row of standard roses behind the picket fence. No one seemed to be at home. I lifted the latch on the gate and a security light came on. I walked along the front perimeter, peering into freshly spread mulch.
‘Can I help you?’
An elderly woman was coming down the driveway towards me, in an elegant blue wool-crêpe pantsuit, stooped from the mid-back, with a superb head of lavender hair.
‘Yes. I’ve lost my phone. I think it’s in your yard.’
‘Ay?’
‘My. Phone.’ I shouted.
‘Ay?’
‘My. Mobile. Phone.’ I opened my palm and pressed invisible buttons then put my hand to my ear. ‘Phone.’ I studied the ground, slowly walking, searching. The old woman must have shovelled tons of mulch since Saturday.
‘Now you listen to me. If you don’t leave this instant I’m calling my son —’
There, near the tap, an odd shape. I dropped to my knees and dug the phone out of the pile of sticks. Back in my possession at last, it seemed pleased to see me, too. It blinked courageously, made a pathetic beep, and died.
‘There!’ I waved it at her. ‘See? I found it.’
The senior mouth opened.
‘Now, excuse me,’ I said. ‘I’ve got stuff to do.’
22
I RAN up the steps to my flat, two at a time. Once inside I turned on the heater and found my phone charger. I plugged in the phone and stood with my back to the heater. Now what? Ben had my laptop and the report and he was probably trying to sell it to the highest bidder. I had no idea who that might be now that Cesarelli was dead. In order to work it out, I needed to think like Ben — in other words, like an imbecile. I tried for a while, but it was useless. All I could think about was Brophy. I picked up my landline and called him.
‘S’up?’ A young voice.
‘Is Peter there?’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘Stella.’
‘Yo, Stella, it’s Marigold. Dad briefed me about you.’
Briefed? One side of my face twitched. First impressions counted for a lot. Ted’s mistake, coming over all parental from day one, had strained relations, and he had never recovered. ‘Yo, he told me about you, too. Is he at home?’
‘He’s meditating. For reals. Does it every day. Seriously.’
‘Can you tell him I’m back in Melbourne?’
‘S’up, shorty? You sound upset.’
Shorty? Did Peter tell her I was short? I was five-five in my socks. That’s not short. Of course, nowadays young girls were towering giants, raised on a diet of chicken hormones and chemically enhanced infant formulae. ‘I’ve had a tough few days.’
‘True that. Bad thing happen ev’y day. You chillax, now, aiight?’
‘Um, okay.’
‘I’ll tell him. Take care, aiight?’
‘Bye, Marigold.’
‘Lates, yo.’
I put the phone down and bit both lips. My frown could not have been deeper if my eyebrows had crossed sides. Peter’s daughter had clearly watched one too many episodes of The Wire. Did ten year olds even watch The Wire? Perhaps — with the subtitles on. Innocence only lasts about five minutes now. Once you’re weened, you’re exposed to
every dodgy human behaviour the imagination can muster, real and cyber. For the first time, I had a sense of the awful day-to-day dilemmas of the modern parent. The internet, Facebook, reality TV, porn, celebrity culture — a potpourri of moral predicaments. Poor, mixed-up kid. I was feeling appreciative of my sheltered upbringing.
There was no knowing how long I might be waiting for Brophy. I turned on the TV in time for the late edition news. The usual guff: factory closures, a celebrity marriage break-up, a Collingwood president hits out. Then:
Police Minister Marcus Pugh said today that police were close to solving the murder of notorious gangland figure Gaetano Cesarelli.
PUGH: Public safety is a matter of the highest priority for this government. I have every faith in the hardworking men and women of the homicide squad. There are several leads being followed and I trust the matter will be resolved soon.
I held a glass under the cask in the fridge and worked the tap. A single drop trembled and refused to fall. No wine left — things were worse than I had imagined. Time to visit my local bottleshop. I put one arm up a coat sleeve and before the other arm found its place, there were three raps on my door. It reminded me of the way Tania knocked: soft, almost apologetic. I took the coat off, slotted the chain across the door and opened it a crack.
‘Wondered if I might have a word?’
I spied a portion of Brodtmann in a buttoned-up double-breasted coat, fur collar turned up. ‘Of course.’ I undid the chain and stepped back.
Chin jutting, shoulders twitching, he stood in the middle of the room. It didn’t feel big enough to contain him.
‘Take your coat?’
‘No, thank you.’
I pointed to the kitchen table, but he looked confused. I sat there myself, a demonstration. He frowned, hesitated, and looked around like he couldn’t believe the place could support human habitation. I drummed my fingers. I was late for wine. I was upset. I missed Brophy. My guest perched on my hardwood chair as one might a befouled public lavatory.
‘Are you all right, Mr Brodtmann?’