The Tankermen

by Margo Lanagan

  It was seven-fifteen before Jed’s bulky figure hove into sight, breaking away from the crowd and making for him in easy strides. Finn was wound up to exploding point by then, and sprang up from his seat, still glancing around.

  ‘How you feeling?’ Jed’s cheer had an edge of seriousness to it. Finn was pale and sweaty.

  ‘Not great. Let’s get off the street, hey?’

  ‘No worries.’ Jed put a hand on Finn’s shoulder and steered him through the crowd towards a coffee shop. ‘Okay,’ he said as they seated themselves, ‘what are you so jumpy about?’

  Finn felt like a dam bursting. The story came tumbling out, his fear pushing it along and forming it into sentences. It sounded truly incredible, and there was a long pause when he’d finished before Jed spoke.

  ‘They took the guy away, you reckon? Would he fit in the cab of a tanker? And,’ he wrinkled up his nose, ‘he wouldn’t exactly be a great travelling companion.’

  ‘Maybe they bunged him in the tank,’ said Finn. ‘Whatever’s in there’d dissolve a body pretty thoroughly. Bones and all.’

  They stared speculatively at each other. The waitress, bringing two coffees with a happy ‘Here you go!’ broke the silence.

  Jed put two spilling spoonfuls of sugar in his cup and looked closely at Finn. ‘How’s your chest been? Healing up okay?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s not too bad. Like, I haven’t been delirious or anything—or hallucinating,’ said Finn pointedly.

  ‘Naa, wasn’t suggesting you were, mate. Though you’ve got to admit . . .’ Jed cocked an eyebrow at him and grinned.

  ‘I know.’ Finn sank lower in his seat, watching over Jed’s shoulder as a police patrol car slid past outside. It felt good to be in here with someone who was prepared to be on his side, but he still felt it was dangerous to relax.

  ‘So what happens next?’ said Jed.

  Finn blinked at him. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.’

  ‘Well, it sounds as if you shouldn’t hang around here for a while, hey. I mean, it probably wasn’t a great idea to wait around in the open just now, even. I’m glad you did, but you probably shouldn’t have. Sounds like you were risking your skin.’

  ‘But where would I go? Don’t laugh at me, but I think they could find me wherever I am.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I don’t know how. It’s just a feeling I can’t get rid of. Like they’ll pick up my scent, you know? Or something,’ Finn qualified, catching Jed’s sidelong glance. There was another pause.

  ‘Well . . .’ said Jed. He took a slurp of his coffee. ‘If you can’t run away from them you might just have to tackle them.’

  Finn laughed. ‘Yeah! Like how?’ In his memory the tankermen’s weapon rose, red lamps beeping on and off.

  ‘Well, listen. If they’re prepared to shoot coppers over it, that stuff they’re dumping must be pretty heavy duty, and definitely not legal, wouldn’t you say? Now if you want to get the cops to believe you—and they’ll want to believe you, ‘cause these guys’ve blown away one of them—you need to be able to say, “Hey, these guys are putting poisons A, B, C and D down the drains. They’ll kill anyone who tries to stop them. And I’ve got witnesses to prove it.” You need to get a sample of the stuff tested, and you need someone to back up your story.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s easy enough to say . . .’ said Finn weakly.

  ‘I’ll be your witness—that’s not a problem. What is a problem is catching them at it again. You and me, we’ll go and have a scout around where you saw them, hey? Right after this.’

  ‘You’re cracked! If they see us, we’re dead!’ Finn’s scalp felt cold and prickly at the very thought.

  ‘We’ll be careful,’ said Jed with a shrug. ‘Come on—do you want ’em to keep on picking off people and poisoning the beaches and getting away with it?’

  ‘Just as long as they don’t pick us off!’ For a second Finn didn’t care about anyone else. He just wanted to run, hop on a train up the coast and leave the Cross behind, pretend it wasn’t happening. But Jed was looking at him, and Finn recognised the look. It was his dad’s appealing-to-Finn’s-conscience look, in a gentler, less severe form. It quietened the panic, coming from Jed, whereas coming from his dad it would just have made Finn stubborn and uncooperative.

  He drained his cup. ‘All right,’ he said, trying to cover the nervous rattle of cup in saucer. ‘Let’s go, then.’

  ‘Good on you.’ Jed reached over and slapped his shoulder, then got up to pay.

  Finn went to the door and scanned the darkening street. No tanker, no cop cars. Nothing but the usual swish and sway of people and the creeping traffic.

  They didn’t say much as they eased through the crowd. The air was steamy, with heavy clouds of jasmine scent, as they left the main street for the partly-lit alleys behind it. Occasionally a guard dog would bark and fling itself against a frail paling fence or the roller door of a garage.

  ‘It was here,’ said Finn at the innocuous junction of the two lanes. ‘The cop was standing here, and I was over there, and they were parked across the lane up there. He hit this fence here and fell down.’ They gazed at the uneven paving stones showing through the asphalt. ‘There’s no mark, nothing to show what happened. Of course. Come up here and I’ll show you where they were dumping the poison.’

  The grating over the drain-hole was clean and dry.

  ‘You’ll start thinking I was hallucinating again,’ said Finn in embarrassment, ‘but I swear—’

  Jed held up a hand to stop him speaking. ‘You don’t have to swear anything, mate.’ He knelt beside the drain and peered at the grating in the fading light. Finn bent over and scoured the ground around it.

  ‘Whatever it is, it must dry up pretty quickly,’ he said. ‘There’s heaps of holes around here, and the stuff was splashing around everywhere, but there’s none left in the holes.’

  Jed didn’t answer. He picked up a pebble and scratched at the rungs of the grating. ‘I don’t know if it’s just dirt,’ he said, ‘but it looks like there’s some kind of build-up here, sort of like carbon. It scratches off.’ He sat up, threw the stone away and shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ He grinned at Finn and eased himself up.

  Finn put a hand to his chest. ‘I don’t feel too wonderful. Let’s get out of here.’ He wondered where to take Jed. He wouldn’t fit in the Good Samaritans’ box, but maybe the churchyard would be safe.

  As they came out of the lane an engine sound separated itself from the continuous low thunder of traffic noise, a heavy, rough, diesel-driven sound. Finn felt his stomach rising through his chest. He clamped his jaws shut and ducked in the front gate of a terrace house, flinging himself down behind the low brick wall. He heard the truck roar past, then Jed’s excited voice. ‘I saw them! They’ve turned into the lane!’

  Finn rolled over on to his back. ‘Aagh. I shouldn’t’ve done that. I whacked my chest again.’

  ‘You’re bleeding a bit, mate,’ said Jed.

  ‘No kidding.’ Finn glanced down at a couple of spots of dark seepage on his T-shirt.

  ‘I’m going to duck along and see what they’re up to.’

  Finn sat up in alarm. ‘Don’t! They’ll see you and blast you!’ he hissed.

  ‘Oh, look—just what we need!’ Jed plucked a jar from a crate of empties by the wall. ‘A specimen jar,’ he grinned at Finn.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Jed!’

  But Jed was sidling along the stable wall out of sight. Finn got up and followed him, saw him peep around the corner and then throw himself back, clutching his face. For a horrible fraction of a second Finn thought he’d been shot, but then he heard Jed’s swearing and coughing and almost grinned.

  ‘Pretty bad, isn’t it?’ he said.

  Jed looked at him with watering eyes. ‘You could smell this at the beach?’ Finn nodded. ‘Christ, I’m not surprised you came up in boils! But how come I couldn’t smell it?’

  ‘You probably could—you just couldn’t reco
gnise it. It’s pretty hard to forget, though, after a dose like this,’ said Finn, nodding towards the laneway.

  ‘You’re not wrong! Gaak! ’Scuse me while I spit.’ He did so, generously, into the gutter.

  ‘They won’t come back this way,’ said Finn, breathing carefully, ready to shut off his nostrils if the gas wafted his way. ‘How about we sit tight here until they go? Then we can duck around and fill up our jar from one of those potholes.’

  They crouched with their backs to the stable wall. Around the corner the tanker’s idling engine burred and the pump throbbed. Finn tried not to think of the thick column of poison being shot through the grating.

  ‘What if that stuff eats through glass?’ he hissed at Jed.

  Jed shrugged. ‘Just make sure you’re not carrying it in your pocket at the time!’ he said with a slightly hysterical laugh. Then he was serious again. ‘D’you know anywhere we can take it, once we’ve got our specimen?’ He held the jar up to a street-light and checked it for cleanliness.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Finn unwillingly.

  ‘What, cost a bit, does it, to do the test?’

  ‘No, I reckon I could get it done for nothing. Family discount.’ Finn bared his teeth in a parody of a smug grin.

  Jed’s eyebrows rose. ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘My father runs a lab. They do work for the Pollution Control Division.’

  ‘Aaah.’ Jed chewed his lower lip and a few short red beard-hairs with it. ‘Handy. But awkward?’ He threw Finn a look.

  ‘It’s okay. I’ll just drop it off at the lab, maybe, with a note.’

  ‘It might look better to the . . . authorities if you handed it over personally. Or if I did.’

  ‘I guess so. But you’d have to pay for the analysis,’ said Finn, a momentary brightness deserting him.

  The chugging of the pump stopped, and there was a great deal of metallic clanking and thumping before the tanker’s engine began a more purposeful roar. They sat silent, listening to the clash of gears and the engine noise receding.

  ‘Okay!’ Jed stood up as it died away. ‘Hold your breath and let’s go!’

  The laneway was as empty and innocent as before, but the area around the grating was shiny dark, and black puddles lay in the potholes. Jed held the jar by one lip and dipped it sideways into a puddle, half filling it.

  ‘Dote get it odd your hadds,’ said Finn.

  Jed nodded, his cheeks puffed full of held breath. Carefully he screwed the lid on the jar and tightened it. He wiped down the wet parts with some bits of newspaper torn off a stack beside someone’s back gate. ‘Where’d we be without recycling?’ he joked, then gagged and coughed some more.

  They got out of the lane as quickly as they could, and hurried away, gratefully drawing the sweet, muggy air into their starved lungs.

  ‘Well, we did it.’ Jed held up the jar, the oily solution swaying inside it.

  ‘Looks like ink. Sort of brown ink,’ said Finn, unimpressed.

  ‘Sure doesn’t smell like it, though! Will you take it to your dad’s work tomorrow, then?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’

  ‘Better change your shirt before you go.’ Finn looked down. The dark spots were now stripes, though the bleeding had stopped. ‘You been putting that cream on that the doctor gave you?’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s about time for another dose, I reckon. It’s starting to burn again.’

  ‘Give us a look.’

  Finn lifted his shirt and Jed winced at the mess underneath.

  ‘Listen, mate, you better come home to my place, and we’ll clean that up properly. One of those boils has come up again, and it looks like you busted it open when you fell down. Urk, cover it up, boy.’ He drew the cloth down over the wounds with the tips of his fingers and turned away, shuddering.

  Finn felt pretty good, despite the pain, as he followed Jed back towards Victoria Road. Maybe he could cadge a shower, and wash his greasy, sweaty hair. And maybe there’d be a couch he could crash on. Just for the night—he didn’t want to sponge.

  The thought of not spending a night in his box or some other improvised sleeping place was a deep relief. He tried not to dwell on it, but it had already so greatly reduced the fearfulness, the stooped style of his walking, that he was almost ashamed of himself. All that work he’d done toughening himself up, and at the first possibility of comfort he was like a puppy dog panting for approval!

  A clean, well-rested Finn sat on the bus up to Ryde. It would have been quicker to go home to Strathfield on the train, out of business hours, but the idea of running into Janet and Alex made him squirm, and meeting his father on his home turf didn’t appeal either. At the lab he’d be surrounded by colleagues; even if he did have his own office, the fact that he was at work would stop him getting too personal, Finn hoped.

  Finn’s T-shirt was crisp and white again—Jed had soaked it in cold water and given it a good scrub, and lent him one of his own shirts to sleep in. Finn had been most impressed, enough to forgive Jed the searing pain he’d caused him by doctoring the rawer areas of his chest. Now the burning was all gone, and overnight the damaged flesh had begun to grow a hardened layer under which to heal.

  Yesterday’s shooting seemed remote. He kept taking out the memories and inspecting them, but the shocking effect had gone from them, replaced by a vague disbelief. Finn half expected something to come along that would explain them away—maybe it had all been a stunt for Candid Camera, with someone filming Finn’s horrified reaction for the entertainment of a studio audience. He would’ve loved to believe it, but he couldn’t.

  What was going to happen, though? With that policeman missing, were the cops going to suspect him, Finn? Was he now wanted for suspected murder? He slid down in his seat at the thought, glancing about uneasily. Maybe they’d told his dad already—maybe they’d have police at the office, even, waiting in case he turned up.

  Outside the suburbs jounced by, wearing a fresh look that would fade as the temperature climbed during the morning. The sky was absolutely clear, the sun zeroing in without interruption and bouncing brightly off every surface. Finn decided not to give his dad too much background information about the oil sample; it was not a morning for believing paranoid crazy talk about tankermen. He wouldn’t tell him much at all, in fact, just drop off the sample and get out as quickly as he could. He didn’t want to get caught up in any explanations of his own behaviour, or to sit through any of his dad’s tirades.

  The bus started along the slow roller-coaster of Epping Road, grinding up and swooping down the hills. Finn came out of his thoughts and tried to remember just where his father’s lab was. It was a few years since he’d been there, and he wasn’t sure whether the building would even be visible from the road any more, the way it’d been half buried in plantings of native trees. He craned forward.

  A brand-new sign with the FinCom logo made it easy for him in the end. He got off the bus, walked back, cut across the double highway and followed the drive up to the low white rectangle of the lab.

  ‘Hullo, Don! How are you?’ The receptionist didn’t look at all surprised to see him, just delighted. ‘Dropped in to have lunch with Dad, have you?’

  ‘Oh no, I just have to see him for a minute about something.’

  ‘Well, I know he’s waiting on a call from America, but I’ll give him a buzz and let him know you’re here.’

  Finn tried to seem as relaxed as she was, feeling a bit sick inside. He sloshed the sample around in its jar.

  ‘He says to go on up,’ said the receptionist, putting the phone down and smiling at him. Finn felt as if he were trying to hold time still, but it was pulling him along anyway.

  By the time he got to his father’s office he was sure his thumping heart must be audible. The plastic plaque on the door, ‘Dr Richard Finley’, helped; the name seemed foreign, formal, not connected with Finn at all. He knocked twice and opened the door.

  His father was sitting at his desk writing, and looked up and put his pe
n down as Finn entered. ‘Hullo, Don,’ he said in a fairly amiable voice, but Finn could see some kind of fight going on in his face—the eyes crinkled but the mouth stayed open anxiously—and his father sat back and then forward again as if undecided about standing up.

  ‘Hi, Dad. I can’t stay,’ Finn said quickly. He put the jar on the desk and stepped back. ‘I just brought you this.’ The sample in its second-hand jar looked very shoddy in the antiseptic office. Dr Finley regarded it a moment, then picked it up and swirled the liquid around. Finn continued, ‘I think it’s some kind of poison. I collected it up the Cross last night. Some guys in gas masks and rubber suits were pumping it into a drain.’

  ‘Right. We heard you were around the Cross somewhere,’ Dr Finley said, staring at the contents of the jar.

  Finn bit his lower lip. ‘Yeah, well . . .’

  ‘The police said you didn’t look too good, but—’ He cast a narrow glance over his son. ‘—you seem okay now. A bit pale, maybe. And thin . . .’ Finn shrugged, and Dr Finley sat back. ‘You eating okay? I’m asking for Janet—she’s always saying “I hope he’s not just eating junk food!”’ A tight little smile escaped on to his face.

  ‘Yeah, I know, Dad. It’s not like you care.’ Finn mimicked the smile. He heard the force behind his own words as his father’s smile vanished. ‘Yeah, I’m eating okay,’ he added quickly. ‘Honest, you don’t have to worry about me. This sample—’

  ‘I can run it through today and you can call for the results this afternoon,’ his father said, almost dismissively, Finn thought. ‘We usually send out a written confirmation . . . I understand you’re receiving mail poste restante at King’s Cross?’

  Finn looked up, surprise and dismay playing for equal time on his face. His father knew, but hadn’t sent anything?

  ‘The staff at your grandmother’s nursing home told us,’ said his dad. ‘We thought you might turn up there, so we contacted them. And then, of course, the police sighted you yesterday. At the station, they said, which surprised us. We thought you must have been in some sort of trouble, the way you ran off. I must say, Don—’