by Alex Palmer
‘No, Grace. I know you. You like to take risks. You take them whenever you’re upset. That’s what you were doing today and you almost got shot! It doesn’t matter how professional you are, one day your judgement’s going to be wrong. It has to be. I’ve got a reconstructed jaw to prove it.’
‘I did what I did because I thought it would help you. You can’t say it won’t. All that information is invaluable and you know it.’
‘I’d never ask you to do anything like that for me.’
‘Then maybe I won’t in future. See you.’
She walked off quickly. Exasperated, he went after her.
‘That wasn’t an insult. I know how valuable this information is. That goes without saying. All I meant is that you don’t have to risk your life for me.’
She was at the door to the stairs, opened it. ‘I need to think. I’ll talk to you later.’
‘All right, whatever you want.’ He’d had enough. ‘My door is open if you want to come and see me tonight. If you don’t, fine, but that’s your decision. I want you there. If you don’t want to be there, that’s up to you. I’ll see you.’
The door to the stairs slammed shut. She was gone. He drove out of the garage into the late afternoon with a sense of finality, of leaving and never coming back. She could come to him if she wanted him this time. There were times when there was nothing else to do but leave it to her. He drove towards the city feeling drained of any emotion.
12
The television blared at the crowded waiting room in Coolemon District Hospital, a news update being broadcast during a break in the one-day cricket match. A smiling blonde-haired woman appeared sitting at the desk.
‘Police have released no further details concerning the second unnamed man found dead in the house of businesswoman Natalie Edwards, despite the release on the internet of photographs of the victims earlier today. John Makaris begins our exclusive coverage at the scene. A warning that some viewers may find the following scenes disturbing.’
It was the first time Harold had seen the photograph. He had no computer and hadn’t turned on his television that day. It shocked him so much he forgot briefly the pain of his burned hands. Jerome, a dead man at the table, stared out at him from the television screen. The name of the other dead man, ex-Detective Senior Sergeant Michael Cassatt, was repeated with endless close-ups of his mummified body.
‘Harold Morrissey.’
The doctor was calling him in his impenetrable accent. Originally from Glasgow, William Campbell had been despatched to the isolated confines of Coolemon District Hospital for four years by the Department of Immigration as a condition of his permanent residence in Australia. It had been said that when he first arrived, people needed subtitles to understand his dialect. Still, they’d found him to be a good doctor and trusted him.
He swabbed Harold’s hands clean and examined them.
‘How did you do this? Did you touch any kind of acid or corrosive substance today?’
‘I don’t know what caused it, Doc. Something out on the farm I picked up.’
‘Didn’t you notice at the time?’
‘No.’
‘That’s hard to believe. Whatever it was, it’s burned through the skin almost down to the flesh. You’d have very hard hands normally, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’ve been a farmer all my life. They’re not soft.’
‘I don’t know what state your hands would be in now if they were. I’ve not seen anything like this before. It’s beyond the treatment I can give you here. You need to see a burns specialist.’
‘I can’t leave my farm,’ Harold said.
‘You’ll have to,’ the young man replied firmly. ‘I’ll make the arrangements. In the meantime, I’ll prescribe you painkillers and we’ll get those wounds dressed. I’ll give you some sleeping tablets as well. The pain might keep you awake tonight.’
It was a lengthy process. Harold’s hands were photographed and samples taken of the burnt skin. When he was finished, the doctor handed him a letter with the details of his appointment at the burns unit at Concord Hospital within the week. Harold could barely thank him. A trip to Sydney was the last thing he had time for right now.
‘You have to go,’ the doctor reiterated. ‘How did you get here today?’
‘My neighbours. She drove me in their car and he drove my ute for me.’
‘You’re not going to drive home!’
‘I have to, Doc. I can’t live where I do and not drive. You’ve just shot me full of painkillers and I’ve got a whole packet here. I’ve got to use my hands.’
The doctor admitted defeat. ‘If you need more, ring me. Try to be as careful as you can. And keep that appointment.’
Harold left the hospital and drove back to Yaralla. His progress was slow; even with painkillers it was difficult to drive. Eventually Naradhan Creek came into view, marked by a thick line of old red gums and low scrub. He crossed the creek, but instead of going straight ahead through his main gate, he turned left onto the Creek Lane. He was visiting Ambrosine.
It hadn’t been a problem for Harold when Harrigan had rung him late one night to ask if he could give Ambro and her children shelter. He had a cottage on the Creek Lane, about two kilometres along from the Coolemon Bridge, he’d been happy to let them have. They had arrived first thing the next morning, sleepy-eyed and exhausted, Harrigan delivering them to Yaralla in person. It was lonely out here for a woman with three children. The cottage had no landline phone, and while there was a mobile phone signal it was unreliable. Supposedly it was only temporary until Harrigan could sort out something else. That was months ago now.
Harold had checked the electricity and the water, then poisoned the white ants, making the cottage as liveable as he could. Through winter, he supplied Ambrosine with firewood. Her children spent days glueing bright papier-mâché figures onto the doors and window frames, covering the filigreed tunnels the ants had eaten out of the wood. The shapes were small pieces of radiance in the drab house.
He drove into Ambrosine’s yard. In the early evening light, the moon was visible as a huge orange globe low to the horizon behind the house. At the door, a voice yelled at him to come inside.
Ambrosine was in her frowsy kitchen stacking dirty dishes next to the sink. He heard the blare of the television set from the room her three children shared.
‘I was wondering when you were going to get here,’ she said, reaching for a burning cigarette perched on an ashtray. ‘Want a drink first? I’ll finish up here and then we’ll get started.’
She poured a generous measure of whisky and handed him the glass. ‘Jesus, mate,’ she said. ‘What happened to your fucking hands?’
The doctor had covered his hands with clear, plastic-like dressings which he’d said would give greater protection. The burns were clearly visible.
‘Something on the farm today. I wasn’t being careful enough. It makes it hard to touch the steering wheel.’
‘I fucking bet it does. That’s nasty. Are you okay for this with those hands?’
‘Yeah, the doc gave me enough painkillers for an elephant.’
She grinned. ‘You won’t feel a thing then.’
He sat at her table drinking while she finished her cursory cleanup. Her paintings covered the walls in the sour-smelling room, scraps of paper as short-lived as her tattoos were permanent. They closed in on you, each one crowded with obsessive details. He looked at them: vistas of her kitchen with its unhinged cupboards, scraps of old food covering the table, piles of unwashed dishes scoured by mice, cockroaches and ants; her three children perched on disintegrating chairs on the front veranda, staring at the watcher; a disarray of broken toys, bones and debris covering the bare ground in front of a tiny house that was isolated under a huge blue sky. Harold had once asked her why she painted things this way. ‘It’s my life,’ she’d said. ‘What else is there? I want us to know where we are when we eat. Nowhere.’
‘Did you hear the news?’ he asked, finishin
g his whisky.
‘About the killings up at Pittwater? Yeah, it was on TV.’ She frowned. ‘It doesn’t make any fucking difference to us whether Mike’s dead or not. We’re still stuck here. If we got in my van and drove away somewhere else, I’d open the front door one day and there’d be someone standing there with a shotgun. But what if we do stay here? How safe are we then? I know this place is your home, but every day I think we’re going to die. I wake up at night and I feel like I’m at the end of the world.’
‘Don’t think like that. You won’t be able to get up in the morning.’
‘There’s no chance of that. The kids get me up, no matter what. They like it here better than I do. Come on, mate. You’re late enough as it is. It’s time we got going.’
‘There’s something I want to ask you first.’
She sat down at the table with him. ‘What?’
‘Do you know anything about this Natalie Edwards?’
‘Why do you want to know about her?’ ‘She was up at my property about a week ago. Her, old Stewie and the other bloke who got shot with her. Jerome. He’s the one they haven’t named yet. I saw him on the TV at the hospital.’
‘Shit, mate. I’m glad they didn’t know I was here. You want to know about Nattie Edwards? She was a bitch. A fucking ruthless bitch who didn’t care who she walked over for a dollar. What were they doing here?’
‘I don’t want to tell you. It’s too dangerous. It’s to do with this.’ He opened his hands for her to look at once again.
‘Jesus, mate. Ring Harrigan. He’s running that show. I saw him on the TV. Fucking talk to him.’
‘You think I should?’
‘Yeah, I do.’
‘I’ve lived here all my life,’ he said. ‘I’m frightened. I’ve never been frightened before.’
‘Harry, ring him. Go home and call him now. You can come back tomorrow.’
‘No, we’ll do a bit first. Just half an hour. I need the time to work out what I want to say. It’ll settle me down. Then I’ll go home and call.’
‘If that’s what we’re going to do, get in the front room and strip for me.’
Ambrosine called the lounge room her studio even though Harold was her only canvas. He stripped in front of a dark mirror, becoming both naked and dressed. His thin, strong body was webbed with her gorgeous tattoos—an image of his property as it used to be when there was rain. His torso was a waistcoat of brightly coloured birds, and the trunks of eucalyptus trees curled around the hard muscles of his legs. The topography of his ten thousand acres was compressed into an imprint etched onto the stretch of his back. Ambrosine had left her signature—AMBRO—drawn in a spider’s trace of blue ink beneath his ribcage.
She appeared beside him in the mirror. Her body was large in her loose black dress, her long dark hair spilled over an array of stars tattooed on her neck. She ran a finger around an image on his shoulders and he shivered. She had done all these tattoos for nothing because she needed to. She had to work, she said, otherwise she wouldn’t survive.
‘I don’t ever want you to die. That way, there’ll always be these tattoos. It’ll be something I’ll have done with my life. Apart from my kids.’
‘I don’t know how possible that is,’ he said, half-smiling.
He lay down on her table, willing his body to relax.
‘I’ll do a bit more work on the owl,’ she said, speaking of a tattoo she was working on across his torso.
‘Yeah.’
She rolled up her sleeves and began to mark his skin to guide her needle. He could see the psoriatic lesions covering her forearms. Where she hadn’t covered them with tattoos, the lesions marked much of her body. She called them her personal tattoo, one worked from the inside through the genes that made up her skin.
Tonight, his own tattoo would be missing one of its strange and necessary accompaniments, one that was as fundamental to the ritual as the permanent markings left behind. The thin rivers of pain that followed her needle would be dulled by the doctor’s painkillers. There were times Ambrosine worked on him when the world disappeared and there was only him, his tattooist and his pain. It was worth it to him. He was this property, every bit of red dirt that made it. Nothing would shift him from here, including death, even if they were the deaths of others and not his own.
He lay there while Ambrosine worked, in his mind forming the words he would use to persuade Harrigan to come all the way out here. They came down to a simple sentence. I need your help.
13
Harrigan sat at his desk listening to the voices of the dead. They did not whisper but spoke in ordinary tones, spinning off his miniature cassette player thin and low. The first was a voice Harrigan hadn’t heard before. It had a guttural intonation: Beck’s. The other two, Freeman and Cassatt, were too well known. The recording started with Freeman giving a place, time and date before he got out of his car and walked into the pub where they were meeting. Harrigan listened to the sounds of greetings, drinks being brought to the table. The background noise was a low hum broken by the occasional sound of a phone ringing somewhere.
Beck: Your beers. My whisky. Why do we come here? It’s a pig sty.
Freeman: No one’s going to be watching us here. There’s nothing wrong with the beer.
Cassatt: This is what I got to show you, Jerry. It looks like nothing but it fucking got me inside.
Freeman: Is that a key? Looks like a little metal badge. What’s the logo?
Beck: LPS. Life Patent Strategies. I thought your mate here might want to expand his horizons. That’s a key to a locked door, Mike. You keep it in your wallet. You’ll need it next time you go back.
Cassatt: There won’t be a next time. That place gave me the fucking creeps. It’s a fucking prison. Getting out of the can is a piece of piss compared to getting out of there. And it was in the middle of fucking nowhere. It’s a long way out to Campbelltown that time of night.
Beck: It doesn’t matter when you go, that place never stops. It’s real money. Another world. You don’t walk away from chances like that, you take them. I’m getting another whisky.
Freeman: You got through that one quickly enough, mate. Jesus, he gives me the shits sometimes. What was he doing taking you to that place?
Cassatt: What he’s always doing. Fucking jerking himself off. Another world. Crap! I don’t need it if it is.
Freeman: You going to keep that little badge thing?
Cassatt: Yeah, think I will. Might be handy if I’m dealing with old Jerome one day. You never know. Might be a problem for him that he gave it to me. Did you see the news last night?
Freeman: No, mate. I don’t bother with all that shit.
Cassatt: I turn on the TV and it’s fucking Paulie talking about something or other. I thought, yeah, you cunt, where’s Ambro? The way the fucking press talk about him, it’s like he’s Christ on skates. They should talk to me. I’ll tell them how I fucking near knocked his front teeth out—
Freeman: Mate—
Cassatt: No, he says, I won’t shoot him. You fucking cunt, Paulie. If I tell you to shoot Eddie, you fucking shoot him. He’s there on the carpet at your feet. Do it!
Freeman: Matey, keep your mouth shut. You’re fucking on tape. Beck’s back.
Beck: You should listen to me. You can manufacture there, you can experiment there. You can turn out something new. You can do a good business out of that place.
Freeman: I thought we came here to talk about sparklers.
Cassatt: No one’s going to let us into that place. Everyone wears a white coat.
Beck: If you pay the rent, why not? It’s what everybody else does.
Cassatt: We don’t need a setup like that for the shit we sell. Who was that joker you met in the corridor? The one with no fucking hair or ears, like he came out of some horror movie. He knew who you were, mate, and you knew him. It looked to me like the last thing you two wanted was to see each other.
Beck: He’s nobody.
Cassatt: He wasn�
�t acting like that. He acted like you were the nobody and he didn’t know what the fuck you were doing there. What were you trying to prove? The guards fucking near spat in our eyes when you walked in. They don’t like you there. They let you in because they had to. No, mate. You don’t have that to offer.
Beck: You don’t know who I am. I do have that to offer. But those guards, they’re like you. They won’t see the realities. I’m the side of the business they don’t like to think about. I’m just reminding God’s daughter who I am and who she really is. She won’t insult me again. If she doesn’t like it, too bad.
Cassatt: Who the fuck is God’s daughter?
Beck: (laughter)
Freeman: Something tickle your funny bone, mate? Must be a pretty funny joke.
Beck: It is, believe me.
Freeman: How come you can get into a place like that?
Beck: Because I know where the money comes from. I know how it gets spent. That building is the biggest washing machine in the world.
Cassatt: Where does that much money come from?
Beck: From the old man. God the Father. The Alpha and the Omega. That’s how he sees himself.
Freeman: That tells us a lot.
Beck: Then don’t ask questions. You said we were here to talk diamonds. Okay, we will. I want to get another shipment over here. The same arrangement as last time. Can we do it?
Cassatt: Just where do you get your rocks from, mate?
Beck: Why?
Cassatt: I’m curious.
Beck: From a place called Kisangani. I’ve got people there.
Freeman: Kisangani? Sounds like kiss my arse.
Beck: It’s a town in the Congo, a diamond market. The last time I was there, four years ago, it was a war zone. You wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.
Cassatt: What were you doing there then?
Beck: We went there because we were hiding something.