The Tattooed Man

by Alex Palmer

  As the hours passed, the road grew more straight. Flocks of grey apostle birds foraged in the red dirt either side of the bitumen. Crows, their densely black feathers glistening in the sun, settled on the roadkills. The dry, empty pastures were sapped by the drought, reduced to a scraped and pale gold marked by scattered trees and low bush-covered hills against the horizon.

  The kilometres passed without incident. Despite this, he felt a sense of unease. It had been too simple, almost effortless, swapping cars and getting out on the road. But even if there was something wrong, all he could do was drive on.

  Some five hours after he had left Campbelltown behind, Harrigan drove into the large, straggling town of Coolemon. He stopped at the police station. The duty sergeant had known him during his time there and was welcoming. The backup was on standby; they would be waiting for his call whenever they were needed. Harrigan accepted the sergeant’s invitation to a meal and spent the occasion talking about the cricket.

  By the time he left the station, it was growing dark. About a kilometre out of town, a state forest lined the roadside, the casuarinas closing in like thinned-out human figures. Eventually open pastures took their place. Harrigan opened his window to the quiet outside. Stillness stretched to the horizon. There was a full moon, scorching the surrounding paddocks to an incandescent ash. Driving in this solitary moonlit darkness, Harrigan felt a free man. In a rare moment of equilibrium, he was at ease with himself.

  Eventually, he turned off the bitumen road onto dirt. Pausing at the turn, he thought he heard a car in the distance ahead of him. A farmer on his way home. He went on, his headlights illuminating the roadside scrub. Ahead, he saw the shadows of the red gums lining Naradhan Creek. He crossed the narrow bridge and drove through Yaralla’s open gate, startling an owl roosting on a fencepost. It disappeared into the scrub with the slow, silent beat of its powerful wings, its pale feathers luminous in the white light.

  Harrigan drove up the track and into Harold’s yard. A frantic barking greeted him when he got out of the car. A light was shining brightly above the farmhouse’s back door. Harold was standing on the veranda, washing his knives at an outside sink.

  ‘Quiet!’ Harold ordered the dog and she sat down. ‘Don’t mind Rosie. She gets excited.’

  ‘She doesn’t bother me. How are you, mate? It’s good to see you.’

  ‘Could be better. My hands are a mess. I just killed a lamb. I’ve had this fella in the shed for a couple of days, calming him down. I was going to share the meat with Ambro, but I thought you might want a roast dinner while you’re here.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your hands, Harry?’

  For an answer, Harold held them out, palms upwards. They were still covered with the transparent antiseptic dressings. Even where partly hidden by the lamb’s blood, they were badly burned and blistered deep into the skin.

  ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘It’s what Stuart’s growing here. The tobacco did that to me. Come inside and I’ll show you. I’ll just wash the blood off and get cleaned up.’

  ‘Can you work with those hands?’

  ‘The doctor gave me some tablets. They help. I didn’t do anything much today. I took some sleeping pills the doc gave me last night. They knocked me out till almost midday. Killing the lamb was okay. It’s quick, and I’ve just taken some tablets. Driving’s not fun.’

  ‘Your tatts, mate.’

  Harold had taken off his bloodstained shirt and was standing naked to the waist. The bright light intensified the deep colours and intricate patterns marked on his skin. Harrigan hadn’t known that Ambrosine was using Harold’s body as a canvas.

  ‘Do you like them?’ Harold asked.

  ‘You could win a few awards with those. She’s signed them. Ambrosine only signs her best tattoos.’

  Harold put on another shirt and the tattoos disappeared. He wrapped his slaughtering and butchering knives in a leather pouch.

  ‘She likes working on me. I don’t have much bare skin left now. Come on, girl.’

  He led Rosie out across the yard to her enclosure. Once inside her kennel, she settled down on her blanket.

  ‘Do you want to put your car in the garage? Who knows? Maybe it’ll rain.’ Harold laughed.

  ‘Times are bad, Harry.’

  ‘Wait till you see the place in the daylight. It’ll break your heart. Come into the kitchen once you’ve put your car away. Have you had anything to eat?’

  ‘Yeah, I ate back in town.’

  ‘We’ll have a beer then.’

  The farmhouse at Yaralla had the sense of time stopped. The kitchen was a large room with a window that looked out to the north-east. An ancient wood stove stood next to an electric one, now almost as much a museum piece as its companion. When Harold’s mother, a woman from a family of wealthy Victorian graziers, had cooked here she had always had others to help her do it; sometimes young Aboriginal girls sent from the home at Cootamundra, sometimes white girls from other homes. They had slept in the room beside the washhouse and spent the rest of their time cleaning the house and washing basketloads of dirty laundry.

  Harold put his knives away in a drawer. He opened two beers and then sat at the table without speaking. Harrigan had come to know Harold well during his years out here and he knew there was no point in rushing him. Tonight, he was tense, fatigued.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do really,’ he said at last. ‘Every day you wake up, there’s no rain. You wonder if it’s ever going to end. Then something like this happens.’

  He looked at his hands. Harrigan could only sidestep something so uncontainable as despair.

  ‘What’s going on out here, Harry?’

  Harold’s tobacco lay on the table. He picked it up, rolled a cigarette and lit it.

  ‘Come with me. I’ll show you something.’

  They walked through to the front of the house. Pale incandescent lights lit the hallway. Worn carpet runners covered the floor. Harold led him to the front sitting room where he turned on the light. The furniture in this room was old and in its time had been expensive, from the years when the property had been profitable. The windows looked onto the veranda and, beyond, to the gardens that Harold’s mother had once cultivated but which were now mostly dead.

  ‘You see this room.’ Harold looked around as if peopling it. ‘This is my house. I’ve lived here all my life. A bit more than a week ago, Stuart was sitting in this room with this Jerome and that Edwards woman, drinking my whisky and treating me like I was dirt. They were going to do things with my property without even talking to me about it. Next thing I hear, they’re both dead.’

  He went to an old writing desk and opened it. He took out four plastic bags containing crop specimens and put them on the coffee table.

  ‘I thought this was as good a place as any to keep them,’ he said.

  ‘Is this the one that burnt your hands?’

  ‘I’m pretty certain it was. Be careful. I put some air holes into the bags. Make sure you don’t touch it.’

  Harrigan could see nothing out of ordinary about any of these four crops, among the most commonly grown food and cash crops in the world.

  ‘Where are these being grown?’ he asked.

  ‘In this enclosure Stewie had built—I call the Cage. It’s huge. It’s got greenhouses, water tanks, fences around it you can’t climb over. Stewie even had his own access road put in right up to the gate.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you about it?’

  ‘He just went and did it. After that it was too late. It was built and there was nothing I could do unless I went to the law. I can’t afford to do that and he knows it. He never let me in that Cage, not once. People would come and go all the time. But not me. He’d locked me out. Then the same day I hear on the news that those people are dead, this comes to me by courier.’

  He handed Harrigan the small box containing the keys and note. ‘That’s that Jerome’s keyring,’ he said. ‘I saw it on the table the day he was here.
The people who killed him sent me this stuff, didn’t they?’

  ‘They must have done. They would have taken it off him when they killed him. Did these people know what touching that tobacco would do to your hands?’

  Harold could only shrug. He rubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray already dirtied with ancient stubs.

  ‘Come outside. I’ll show you something else.’

  Yaralla stood at the top of a low rise in the lightly undulating landscape. They walked through the silhouettes of what had once been ornamental trees and shrubs, then through the gate and into the house paddock. The night noises were muted, the silence all pervasive. The scattered trees in the landscape were dark shadows, the distant houses small nubs in the moonlight.

  ‘It’s quiet,’ Harrigan said.

  ‘Too quiet. It feels like everything’s dead. Sometimes I think there’s only me and Rosie left alive out here. And Ambro and her kids of course.’

  Harrigan looked upwards. The moon was at the high arc of the sky, bright and small, the stars dimmed by its light.

  ‘That’s the Creek Lane down there,’ Harold was saying. ‘Standing out here, you’d say everything you could see was peaceful. About fifteen minutes before you got here, Rosie started barking. She’d heard a car. Whoever it was, they didn’t come across the creek the way you did. They kept going along the Coolemon Road. Now that road crosses the creek about three miles further on from here and then goes on around the back of my place. At first, I thought it was you. Then I knew it wasn’t. For one thing, they were going too fast. This is what’s happening to me, mate, and I don’t like it. You hear a car at night. Why shouldn’t it be someone going home? People live out on that road. Why should it make me so fucking nervous just to hear a car?’

  ‘Did it come back?’

  ‘No. It’ll be miles away by now, the way it was travelling.’

  ‘Did you hear or see any other cars come along here this evening?’

  ‘I saw Barry on his way home about seven. That’s it.’

  ‘It’s lonely out here, mate,’ Harrigan said after a pause. ‘Ambro’s cottage is over in that direction, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. You can see her.’

  Harold pointed across the moonlit darkness to the hard and dark outline of a small cottage on the Creek Road. A faint light gleamed from one of the windows.

  ‘Did you tell her I was coming?’

  Harold grinned. ‘Yeah, mate. I’m not going to repeat what she said in reply. She uses a few words I don’t.’

  ‘I can guess. Harry, I don’t feel right about this. I’m going down there now. I want to get Ambro and her kids back to Coolemon as soon as I can. I’ll feel safer when I do.’

  ‘Let me take you in my ute. We’ll go across the paddocks. It’ll be quicker. You don’t want to take your car over there. It’s too rough.’

  ‘If the man in that car you heard just now is who I think it could be, he’s a killer. He shot dead an ex-policeman yesterday. I ought to tell you now, I’m armed.’

  ‘Then I’ll get my shotgun. I’m sick of people walking all over my property doing what they want to do. They can pay attention to me for a change.’

  ‘You can’t drive with those hands. Tell me where to go and I’ll drive.’

  ‘I took a couple of tablets a little while ago. They’re still working. If it gets too bad, I’ll let you take over. But I’m not going to sit around. I’m not having all this turn me into something useless.’

  Before they left, Harrigan rang through to local police asking for backup. He needed an escort to bring a woman and her three children into Coolemon, he said. They would be on their way as soon as possible, the duty sergeant said: half an hour to assemble and hit the road. Harrigan told them to hurry.

  Outside in the yard, Harrigan stopped to look at the garage, next to Rosie’s enclosure, where he had left his car. The door had a lock, but one that was so easy to break it wasn’t worth securing.

  ‘Harry, that car you heard earlier,’ he said. ‘Is there any other way it can get on to your property from where you think it went? What about the road Stewie put in?’

  ‘Yeah, they could come in that way. But that’d just take you up to the Cage. You’d still have to know how to get from there to here across my paddocks.’

  ‘What if he came back here through the main gate while we were gone?’

  ‘We’d see him if he had his lights on. He couldn’t be that close. I’d have heard him if he was. You can hear things for miles around here.’

  Uneasily, Harrigan got into the ute. Rosie’s disappointed barking followed them out into the night. They drove directly across Harold’s pastures. The roar of the engine and the glare of the headlights must have carried for miles.

  ‘If anyone’s out there, they have to see us coming,’ Harrigan said.

  Harold grinned in a way that surprised him. He realised how angry the man was. ‘Maybe we’ll scare them off,’ Harold said.

  They pulled up at the back of Ambrosine’s cottage. The lights had been turned off. A sense of urgency took hold of Harrigan. Without waiting, he was out of the cabin and pounding on the back door.

  ‘Ambro? It’s Paul Harrigan. Are you in there? Open the door. Open it now or I’ll break it down!’

  The back door was opened. Ambrosine stood there, dishevelled and sleepy-eyed. A smell of dope wafted past her.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing out here at this time of night?’

  Harrigan pushed past her into the kitchen. Harold followed him, carrying the shotgun.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘What are you doing with that? What’s going on?’

  ‘It’s okay, mate,’ Harold told her. He spoke to Harrigan. ‘I’m going back outside. I’ll keep a watch to see if that car comes back.’

  ‘What fucking car?’

  ‘Just wait,’ Harrigan snapped.

  Used plates, the remains of a meal, were stacked on the bench. A tiny mouse scurried down to the floor and out of sight. Harrigan looked around at the walls covered with Ambrosine’s paintings. Their luminescent colours and obsessive details crowded in on him. One of them showed the cottage isolated between a vast sky and a bare red ochre foreground. Harrigan felt the sense of vulnerability powerfully. Out here, there was nothing to protect a person other than the huge distances. He should never have brought Ambrosine and her children here in the first place.

  ‘What do you want?’ Ambrosine interrupted him. ‘For months you don’t fucking bother getting in touch with me or coming to see me. Now you turn up in the middle of the night talking about some fucking car! What is it?’

  ‘I’m taking you all back into Coolemon now. Get your kids and let’s go.’

  ‘You don’t think I’m safe here any more? Why?’

  Leaving her unanswered, he walked into the hallway. The front room had its door open. He could see it was her bedroom. There was another room opposite with its door shut. He guessed this was where her children slept. He looked through into the lounge where the moonlight cut silver-white patches onto the cracked linoleum. It was empty. He went to the front door and opened it. The dark tree line of Naradhan Creek was visible on the other side of the road. He walked outside and looked along the lane but saw nothing other than the curve of the empty road, whitened to grey by the moon. He went back inside to the kitchen.

  ‘Did the Ice Cream Man find you out here before he went missing?’ he said. ‘I asked you that question once before and you said no. You can tell me the truth now.’

  ‘It’s a story, mate,’ she said. ‘If you’re in a hurry, you don’t have time for it now.’

  ‘Did anyone follow him here?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Because right now, I think he’s out there. He didn’t come here for you, he came for me. I’ve got something he wants. But now he’s here, he won’t mind finishing you and your kids off as well.’

  ‘Fuck!’ She hit the table. Her fingers were stained with nicotine. ‘I knew he’d fucking c
ome back for us.’

  She pushed past him, opened the door to the second room and switched on the light. There were the confused sounds of children crying.

  ‘Get up, all of you. Get your shoes. We’re getting out of here right now. Laurie, get your little sister. Come on, hurry. No, Little Man, don’t pick that up. Come on!’

  They tumbled out of the room, still pulling on their clothes and shoes. Laurie, a boy of eleven; Jen, a tiny girl of eight; and the youngest, Little Man, five years old and golden-haired like a cherub. They were sleepy and frightened. Most of their lives, they had been pushed from one bit of makeshift accommodation to another. Quickly, Ambrosine took them outside. Harrigan sat them all in the cabin of the ute.

  ‘Mate,’ Harold said quietly, ‘I didn’t hear or see a car on the Creek Lane. But I did hear something in the distance. Sounded like it was coming from the north. On the other side of the house. I thought I heard Rosie barking as well.’

  ‘We’re all getting out of here as soon as we can,’ Harrigan said. ‘I’ll take us to Coolemon in my car. Drive straight back to your garage, Harry. Give me your shotgun. I’ll ride in the back.’

  He climbed onto the tray of the ute and pounded on the window for Harold to go. The ute roared across the paddocks, bouncing over the ground, forcing Harrigan to hang on for dear life. They had driven through the last open gate before the house when the ute suddenly lurched to the right, almost upending itself. It shuddered to a halt with its right front wheel snagged deep in the ground. Harrigan was rolled hard against the side of the tray. He lay against it for a few moments getting his breath, then scrambled out, the shotgun in hand. They were on the edge of the old garden beds at the front of the house.