“I don’t really want to talk about it,” Lescott said, as he dropped to the ground and nestled into the shade. He looked down to the gun. “Were you going to?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t have the stomach for it.” Harris shrugged. If it was his intention to reassure Lescott, he failed. This was a man on the edge. “Turns out, I am full of shit. I took the opal.”
“I know you did.” Lescott looked to the rock. As the sun hit it, it looked like a fire burned brightly within the stone.
“I’ve been thinking about the kids.” Harris paused with a crestfallen countenance. “They didn’t deserve it. They deserved to live. Those two children might have done something great, they might have changed the fucking flow of human history and broken this merry-go-round of misery we’re riding. I should have been in the back of that car.”
Lescott lit a cigarette and stewed on his words, he wasn’t used to being the more positive in a pair.
“That… Those words you just spoke are precisely why I need you to help me to stop all this. You’re an optimist.”
Harris laughed, that caught him off guard. “Are you even listening?”
“I am. I find the most outwardly pessimistic people are amongst the most optimistic. You look at the world and you see its faults. You don’t accept it for what it is. You see that it should be better. For everyone. And you won’t be happy with yourself, until everyone is treated justly. Strangely, given your profession, you’re one of the most decent men I have ever known. And, for all of your defects…”
“Of which there are many…” Harris sullenly interrupted.
“You’re still here. And that makes you strong. Those kids didn’t have the chance to grow strong. Now it falls on us to protect them, and others.”
“How do we do that?”
“We hang in there. For as long as we can, we just keep on keeping on.” Lescott sighed as he looked out at the expanse of the Simpson Desert and at the mother holding her child somewhere between him and the horizon. What had started as a pep talk for Harris was turning into an exercise in self-encouragement. “We just keep asking questions. We keep looking for answers. One of them might help us. That’s all this gig is.”
Lescott was bemused when Harris got onto his knees and began to dig into the fine red dirt at the base of the tree. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Harris picked up the opal and looked at it with a mixture of love and heartbreak, “I’m leaving this here. It’s not right that I take it.”
Lescott shook his head and smiled. “You need to work on making better decisions. That inanimate object in your hands has the power to change lives for better and worse. Keep it. Use it. But do it the right way. Make this world a slightly better place.”
Lescott had expected the Alice Springs Police Station to be small. He hadn’t expected it to be a couple of desks and a file room inside the public library. That’s all it was. The library itself consisted of a few old copies of Reader’s Digest, agricultural textbooks and a decent array of Winnie the Pooh publications. The space was tiny; it would have fitted into the station at Darlinghurst Road several times over, per floor.
When Lescott approached the front desk, he was met by the sight of a beautiful, tanned country woman. Her skin was tanned, her hair was sun bleached and she looked lean as all hell; she looked like she knew what a day’s toil under the sun was like. He couldn’t be sure whether she was a member of the rural police force or a librarian, but she was all he had to work with. Beyond her, the place was silent; save for a young Aboriginal kid pushing a mop around the floor, it looked as though it had been abandoned. She would do.
“G’day. My name’s Fred Lescott, I’m a DS with the New South Wales Police Missing Persons squad.” She looked at him quite blankly and so he pushed on, “I need to have a look at some of your files.”
“Can’t help you there, mate.” She shrugged.
Lescott sighed a deep sigh of exasperation. “I’ve just driven up from Sydney.”
The woman looked the dusty man up and down. “Are you sure you didn’t crawl here?”
Lescott chose to ignore the jibe. “That’s a long fucking way. I think the key to a case I’m working on might be in your file room. I understand you’re busy…” Lescott looked around the abandoned station as if to make a point. “But you’d really be helping us out by skipping formalities and just letting us inside. It might even save lives.”
“No formalities. If I could let you into the file room back there, I would… What with your city charm and your tall, handsome friend over there?” The woman gave Harris a cheeky wink.
A twang of jealousy ran through Lescott. He didn’t want to sleep with the woman, but it’s never nice to be the less appreciated of a pair. It’s a pride-eroding moment. “We drove for two days… That’s two thousand excruciating miles I spent listening to that tall handsome friend proclaiming that life is as fleeting as it is meaningless. I didn’t enjoy learning the ins and outs of ancient Greco-Roman philosophy. I especially didn’t enjoy hearing that we are all just living in a cave, watching shadows on the cave wall. Apparently, it’s a story that foretold the myth of capitalist and consumerist happiness several thousands of years ago.” Lescott paused to let that one sink in but the woman still seemed quite enamoured by the stranger in the doorway. “Now I don’t know about that. I just know I’m not leaving until we’ve had a look at your files.”
“Excuse my friend, as you can see, he’s had a difficult couple of days.” Seeing that Lescott had temporarily lost his grasp on human interaction, Harris stepped forward and did what Harris always did in such situations. Without taking his eyes off the woman, he moved forward while breaking a couple of notes off his ill-gotten roll. “What’s your name?”
“Christina…”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“I see you’re the progressive type.” The woman laughed. It was mocking, but it was flirtatious.
Lescott looked away and shook his head. “Fucking unbelievable.”
Harris slid a couple of notes onto the counter in front of the woman and looked deep into her eyes. “A pretty name for a pretty girl who would probably look quite stunning in a couple of pretty new dresses.”
Lescott cringed. “Idiot.”
The woman took the notes and stuffed them into her bra. “If you’ve got any more of these you can spend them at the pub later, and buy me a drink.”
Lescott looked back at the pair as they leant towards one another over the desk. Had Lescott not been there, he thought, they looked like they might have ripped each other’s clothes off and just got straight down to it. “Did that actually just work?”
“God no,” The woman laughed and shook her head. “I don’t know how things work in the city, but around here you can’t bribe the local librarian to get into the constabulary’s filing cabinets.” The woman smiled as she saw Harris and Lescott sharing an embarrassed glance. “Do you not have phones in Sydney? Did it not occur to you that you could have called ahead? If you had, you’d know you need to speak to Sergeant Hawke. And as you can see, he’s not here.”
Lescott scratched at his jaw. “Where is he?”
“The pub,” Christina answered, without looking away from Harris.
“When will he be back?”
“Some time after the pub shuts.”
“Should I just leave you two to it?” Lescott asked sarcastically, having had just about enough of the pair giving each other the “come to bed” eyes.
“If you don’t mind.”
Lescott looked up and down the street as he waited outside for Harris and Christina to make whatever plans they were making. The town was quite incredible. Life in Sydney was easy. In the favourable coastal conditions, man had overcome nature. The wilderness had been eradicated from the region. But here, man was fighting, nature was winning. It was wild and untameable. The land wasn’t made for intensive farming or dense populations. The ground was dry and cracked. It offered nothing to us, bu
t the spinifex grass that grew from it needed very little. It grew in small patches and protected itself from trampling feet by growing teeth. As Lescott reached down to touch it, his hand burned fiercely. It drew no blood, but it had punctured his epidermal layer with ease. Once the grass had lived its life and spread its seed, it would die and dry out. It would then begin a second life as a shady reprieve for the hardy creatures that called the desert their home, namely lizards and snakes. It would become a hunting ground for the desert’s two apex predators, the dingo, and the people of the Arrernte nation. In fact, the only thing it offered nothing but pain to was modern mankind, at least those members of the group stupid enough to reach down and touched it.
“This grass has fangs.” Lescott looked up to see Harris walking out of the building with a cigarette in his teeth. “I don’t know what manner of dark witchcraft you just performed there, but one of these days, you’re going to have to teach me.
“You’re a fool if you think I had any control over that,” Harris laughed. “So, what now?”
“We should try that tailors. The one the boy’s suit came from.”
Harris shook his head. “I went by earlier while you were impersonating a rock. It was just an empty store front. Looked like it had been closed for years.”
“Fuck.”
The pair spent an idle moment listening to the sounds of the desert. Birds, insects, snakes, and kangaroos all made their various sounds, and they came together to create a buzzing harmony. “Pub?”
A deeply hungover Lescott almost gagged at the suggestion, but the alcoholic in him felt just a touch of excitement, he fought that feeling as best he could. “Why don’t we drive to the rock? We could be there for nightfall? Might see the sunset”
“What about the pub?” Harris asked, unconvinced.
“What about history? Culture? A connection to the land?” Lescott tried appealing to the intellectual in Harris.
“It’s a nine-hour drive.”
The pub in Alice Springs was a far cry from what the men were used to in Sydney, in fact it was unlike any example that Lescott had ever stepped foot inside. It looked more like an abattoir than a watering hole. Its walls and floor were entirely tiled over, and old dirt had seeped into the ceramic stones. It wouldn’t have looked so bad had the lights not been so damn bright. The harsh glare shone into every nook and every cranny, illuminating the old filth and human waste in the grouting. The bar, which had likely been a fine piece of carpentry when the place was constructed decades before, was now damp, rotting and releasing the ammonia-laced scent of piss. The place was festering.
A doorway without a door ought to be a welcoming thing, but as Harris and Lescott entered they were met by the distrusting stare of the locals. The men were country boys, wearing worker’s gear, with dirty hands and faces. They had ghastly bushy beards that seemed to rise up and meet the lowered brims of their stockman’s hats. They were drovers, cattle-station hands, and other kinds of bushwhacker. Their faces were weather beaten, their bodies lean, and their patience for outsiders non-existent.
“No sheilas in here,” one of them called out to Harris and Lescott.
“I think he’s talking to you,” Harris muttered to Lescott as they walked over to the bar.
Lescott took a look around and his hangover seemed to intensify under the harsh lights and the harsher glares of the locals. “Let’s just get out of here.”
Harris shook his head and turned to the barman. “Couple of beers please, barman.”
Lescott held his fist to his mouth at the idea of placing a full pint of beer in his stomach. “Whisky for me.”
“Pretty interesting interior design you’ve got here,” Lescott innocently tried to strike up a conversation with the barman.
“Interior design?” The barman scoffed as he went to hand them their drinks. Then he thought better of it for a moment. “Youse two aren’t a pair of those poofters are you? We don’t serve them homosexual types in here.”
Lescott laughed. The barman didn’t. “No. We are not homosexuals. The lifestyle doesn’t suit me. Too much dancing.” Again, Lescott laughed. Again, the barman didn’t.
“The interior design, as you put it, isn’t really for how it looks. It’s functional. Lads out here love a drink and they love a fight. At the end of the night, I hose the bar down. Quickest way to get rid of the… Messes.”
“That’s a good idea.” Lescott was no stranger to the pitfalls of a drinking habit. He’d woken up hungover to find diarrhoea, vomit and blood, in his carpet more than once. Perhaps, he thought, he ought to look into tiles upon his return to Sydney.
“We don’t get too many city boys in suits here,” the barman observed.
“It’s not a holiday to Australia, without a trip to the rock and the red dirt.” Harris lied.
“Don’t have anything like that in England, do ya?” the barman gloated.
“Rocks? We’ve got a few. I think you find them everywhere.”
After a couple of drinks, Lescott settled into the place, forgot his hangover, and started looking positively chirpy. “It’s good this. I feel like a kid on holiday.”
Harris was preoccupied, since he’d woken up from a sleep filled with bad dreams, he couldn’t shake an uneasiness somewhere within.
“Did your parents take you on holiday as a kid?” Lescott asked.
“Mainly the Lake District. Blackpool. I used to spend summers in Sunderland in the north east of the country, not too far from Scotland, my uncle Bellerby ran a sea-side fairground up there.”
“Sounds fun.”
Harris shrugged. “He was a gypsy. Bent as a nine-bob note.”
“I used to go to this place on the Murray. Tocumwal, a tiny little town. I always thought the river there looked like a postcard. I used to fish for cod. Never caught any. Just fucking carp.” Lescott laughed to himself. “Life’s slow out there. I used to think that’s where I’d go to retire.”
Harris clearly wasn’t listening. The locals had been unreservedly mocking the two outsiders from the moment they’d walked in. Harris hadn’t looked over, but he’d been listening. “You should get out of here.”
“What do you mean?” Lescott’s trip down memory lane abruptly came to a halt, “Why?”
“I’m going to pick a fight with those arseholes behind us,” Harris spoke quietly, he didn’t want to lose the element of surprise.
“Why would you do that?” Lescott discretely looked over and began counting bushy beards. “There’s seven of them,” he muttered in an attempt to dissuade the Englishmen.
“I didn’t say I was going to win.”
One of the locals noticed Lescott looking in their direction, “What are you looking at sweetheart? If your date’s boring you, why don’t you come over here and sit on my lap?”
Lescott didn’t get a chance to react. Harris abruptly stood up and sent his chair crashing behind him.
“Calm down, mate. I’m just having a laugh. Where’s your sense of humour?” the local quipped, sarcastically.
Lescott was disinterested in male pride, for he had little, but he was compelled by the brotherly bond with his broken partner in law and crime. And so, he raised himself to his feet and he stood there in that hellish place, shoulder to shoulder with Harris. “I bet the last time you had a humorous bone in your body, you were back at school… Being fucked by the class clown.”
The sound of wood, glass, and bones breaking drifted out of the side door of the pub. The sounds of carnage travelled on a soft breeze through the darkness. The noise carried through the air and amongst the spinifex grass that lay all about. Animals scurried from their underground dwellings and hopped, slithered, or crawled off into the night.
Contrary to their reputation as fearsome beasts, brown snakes don’t much like humans. One big, mean brown got quite a fright that night, as it slithered from the door and into the emptiness. The poor thing had been sleeping in the shadows by the entrance when the ruckus began. Snakes have lived in that des
ert for millions of years, only in the last hundred or so have they been subjected to bar fights in rural pubs.
In its rush to slip and slide to safety, it didn’t realise it was slithering straight over a foot in the darkness. Someone, just a few short feet into the shadowy infinity that lay beyond the door, was watching. They had been for some time. A growing pile of discarded cigarette ends lay at their feet. Had you been inside the pub, you’d have been too busy dodging flying glass to notice, but had you looked out, you’d have seen the bright flash of a camera and the faint glow of a burning cigarette.
It was a good, honest fight, where each man gave a strong account of himself. There were no winners, and certainly no losers. Just a line-up of spent men with heads clearer than a moment before. When the fighting was done, the men got back to the drinking. A calm catharsis had taken the place of the testosterone-fuelled madness.
The barman was decent enough to do a round of the pub, dispersing ice amongst the beaten-up brawlers as he went. When Lescott placed a cube of ice in his mouth to soothe a sore tooth, he noticed something was amiss. Indeed, when he spat the ice back out and into the palm of his hand, it was joined there by two premolars. They looked quite out of place there. It had been a bad day, but he took some comfort in the fact that at least his swindler of a dentist would be happy. “Fuck he’s going to rinse me.”
Harris, holding ice to one of his temples, blinked a couple of times and peered in Lescott’s direction through squinted eyes, “Which one of you said that?
“I take it you boys managed to figure out which one of you has the biggest dick?” Lescott mustered a weak smile when he saw Christina standing in the doorway. He gave Harris a gentle nudge in the ribs and gestured in her direction.
“It certainly wasn’t me.” Lescott screwed up his eyes under the bright ceiling lights: he estimated there was a ninety percent chance he had a concussion.
Harris stood up on unsteady legs. “Me neither.”
Lescott looked over at one of the big barrel-chested locals, at his scarred face and his lumberjack beard. The man had, not moments before, had Lescott’s head in his vice-like grip. It had felt, to Lescott, like the man was slowly squeezing his eyes out of his head. “I think it was Robinson Crusoe over there.
THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER Page 32