Marble Bar

by Robert Schofield

  ‘She’s inside, watching cartoons,’ said Kavanagh. ‘Poor kid doesn’t know what’s going on. You need to spend some time with her. Tell her about her mother.’

  Ford looked down at the ground, noticing Kavanagh’s bare feet, the toenails painted red, the varnish chipped. ‘I’ve been putting it off,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve spoken with Diane?’

  Ford raised his eyes again, looked into Kavanagh’s, taken aback by how blue they appeared in the bright sunlight. ‘Her number is still ringing out.’

  Kavanagh thought about that, put a hand to her forehead to shade her eyes. ‘We’ll just have to wait here until she shows. She’s got further to travel from Broome. Maybe her phone is out of range.’

  ‘And if Bronson comes back?’

  She didn’t answer. She reached into the pocket of her shorts and pulled out her phone. ‘Let’s see what uniform are doing,’ she said, as her fingers danced over the screen. ‘Fucking lousy internet coverage here.’ She put the phone to her ear and walked slowly away down the path, her back to Ford. He watched her go, liking the way her backside moved in the thin nylon of her shorts, then he stepped into the cool of the room.

  The blind was drawn on the narrow window and the TV was throwing flickering blue shadows on the bare brick walls. Grace was lying on the bed, pillows stacked behind her. She had the thin coverlet pulled up tight under her chin, her eyes wide and reflecting the light from the TV. Ford stopped between her and the screen, his shadow falling across her.

  ‘Dad,’ she squealed, managing to squeeze five different vowel sounds into a single syllable.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed, waiting for her to look at him, but she had ducked her head around him and her eyes were fixed on the cartoon. He blew in her ear, ruffling the hair that hung in front of it, but she didn’t flinch. ‘You not talking to me?’ he said.

  He crept his hand under the coverlet until he found the warmth of her ribs, tickling her with his fingertips. She squirmed and slapped at his hand, looking at him now, her lips pursed, her eyes narrow. ‘I want to go home,’ she said.

  He drew back his hand, then laid it gently over hers. She didn’t snatch it away. ‘We’ll go back to Newman soon, when the police have finished at the house.’

  She shook her head and her hair fell over her eyes. She pushed it away from her face with the back of her free hand, then glared at him again. ‘Not that house. I hate that house. I want to go home to Perth. Our house.’

  Ford had no words to say to her. He tried to gauge the expression in her eyes, how much of her anger was directed at him. ‘We’ll go home soon,’ he said. They were the only words he had and he knew they were not enough.

  ‘You always say that,’ said Grace. He could feel her hand beneath his, slowly balling into a fist.

  ‘This time I promise,’ said Ford. ‘We need to stay here for a while, and then we can go home to our house.’

  ‘I don’t like it here. There’s only one channel on the TV.’

  ‘We won’t be here long.’

  ‘It smells funny,’ she said. ‘Why do we have to stay here?’

  He could think of no easy answer to that. He opened his mouth to tell her about her mother but the words would not come. He could not give her hope when he had so little of it himself.

  ‘We’ll have some fun tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You and me and Rose. Do you like Rose?’

  ‘Why does she have a gun?’

  It threw him. He let go of her hand, looked around the room.

  ‘She tries to hide it from me, but I saw it,’ said Grace, the anger in her eyes changing to fear. It was the same face he had seen in the aircraft hangar as she held her mother’s hand, surrounded by men with guns, her own father holding one too.

  ‘Rose is here to protect us,’ he stammered. ‘Like she did before.’

  ‘Are those men coming back?’ she said. ‘The ones that shot you?’

  He felt a twinge of pain in his shoulder, as he did whenever he thought of that day, and out of habit he put his hand inside the collar of his shirt and rubbed the scar. When he caught himself doing it he pulled his hand back, then placed it on her head, smoothing her hair, sweeping it behind her ear.

  ‘No, sweetheart,’ he whispered. ‘They’ll never come back.’

  He heard a sniff behind him and turned to see Kavanagh standing in the centre of the room, fidgeting. ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said, tilting her head towards the door. Ford leaned forward and kissed his daughter, pausing with his lips against her forehead, taking in her smell, and then stood up.

  Kavanagh reached under a towel folded neatly on the counter and pulled out the pistol, keeping Ford between her and Grace. She slipped it quickly into the waistband at the back of her shorts, and as she raised her singlet Ford saw the tattoo that stretched across the small of her back, bold gothic letters that read ‘TRUTH BECOMES STRENGTH’.

  He followed Kavanagh out the door and when she turned to him, her face was lined with worry.

  ‘I called the local station,’ she said. ‘The call got redirected to Port Hedland. The sergeant and his senior constable are on a call, some drama at a remote community, three hours out. They’re waiting for the flying doctor to get there. There was one uniform left in town and he got called out on a domestic on a cattle property up north somewhere. He won’t open the station until tomorrow.’

  Ford sat down heavily on the plastic chair beside the door, resting his elbows on his knees. ‘So we’re on our own?’

  ‘I guess we’ve got these guys,’ said Kavanagh, looking across the yard to where Reynard and Dussell were sitting on a pair of chairs in the gap between the pub and the residence.The space had been blocked off with air bricks where it faced the road, and covered with a corrugated-iron roof to make a breezeway between the buildings. Dussell was smoking, and Reynard was tapping the screen on his phone. Muddy was carrying a tool box across the yard to where Ford’s LandCruiser was parked. The bonnet was already up, a square of old carpet draped over one wheel arch, and the spare tyre lay on a tarp stretched across the sand. Muddy dropped the toolbox next to the Toyota, leaned over the engine block and sucked his teeth.

  Dussell walked slowly across the yard to the LandCruiser, then stuck his head under the hood to exchange words with Muddy. He wandered slowly around to the tailgate, leaned in to put his face to the glass, shielding his eyes with his hand. He straightened up, stretched his back, then walked back to his chair in the breezeway, sat down next to Reynard and started rolling a cigarette.

  Kavanagh nudged Ford’s elbow and set off across the yard towards Reynard. The landlord looked up from his phone and eyed them suspiciously as they approached. Kavanagh picked up a chair as she crossed the patio and put it down in front of Reynard, the back facing him. She straddled it and stared at him. Ford walked up with another chair and sat down, completing the small circle under the verandah. Reynard waited a few moments, expecting one of them to speak. When the silence became too much for him he said, ‘You want to tell me who the fuck those guys in the undertaker suits were?’

  When Kavanagh didn’t reply, he looked at Ford, who shrugged. ‘I don’t really know who they are.’

  ‘Or why they punched you in the face?’ Reynard said.

  Ford put a hand to the bruise and averted his eyes, so Reynard turned back to Kavanagh. ‘You reckon they’re going to come back any time soon?’ he asked. ‘Because I’m going to open the pub again tonight, and if they walk back in and try that shit when the front bar is full, then it’s going to kick off like you wouldn’t believe.’

  Kavanagh kept staring. ‘So shut the place.’

  ‘It’s Saturday night. We’ve got a pool competition and footy on the telly. There would be a much bigger fight if I locked my regulars out. We open. Maybe it would be easier if you two weren’t here.’

  Kavanagh lowered her eyes and shook her head slowly. ‘We’re waiting for somebody. We arranged to meet them here.’

  ‘You keep saying tha
t, but the only thing that’s arrived is trouble. You might try explaining yourselves, see if you can win me over.’

  Kavanagh was still shaking her head. ‘I’m a police officer,’ she said, as if that answered everything.

  Reynard didn’t miss a beat. ‘Great,’ he said. ‘When those two next show their faces, you can arrest them.’

  ‘I’m not taking them on alone,’ Kavanagh said.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ said Reynard. ‘I’ll hold my shotgun on them and you can cuff them.’

  Kavanagh looked down at her clothes, held her hands out wide in exasperation. ‘I’m not carrying cuffs with me.’

  ‘Then go to the station and call out the local boys in blue,’ said Reynard.

  ‘They’re all out,’ she said. ‘The place is locked up.’

  ‘Then call out someone from Hedland. That’s not my problem.’

  Kavanagh smiled at him, just a curl of her mouth. ‘Sorry, mate, but it is your problem. We’re not leaving until we’ve finished our business.’

  ‘Isn’t that what the Maori said?’ Reynard looked at Dussell, who grinned, smoke escaping from between his teeth. ‘Everyone’s got business to attend to, but nobody wants to tell me why it has to disrupt my business. How long will this take?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Kavanagh said. ‘Could be this afternoon, might be tomorrow.’

  She stood up and looked out over the yard, turning to check the line of the fence along the boundary. ‘How secure can you make this place?’ she asked.

  ‘You reckon there’s going to be a siege?’ said Reynard, his eyes twinkling, enjoying it. Dussell tipped the wide brim of his hat forward so he could stare at Kavanagh’s legs unnoticed.

  ‘If they come back there might be more of them,’ said Ford.

  ‘Doesn’t matter how many. We can lock this place down. We can make this place like the Eureka Stockade. The fence keeps most people out. If they get over the barbed wire then there’s the dogs to deal with.’

  Ford looked for the dogs. He hadn’t seen them since he had driven into the yard. They were in the shade under his LandCruiser, lying on their sides, tongues hanging out, their eyes slyly watching Muddy. He was cross-legged on the tarp, the tyre resting between his knees, patching the puncture. ‘They don’t look like guard dogs,’ said Ford.

  ‘They’re not,’ said Reynard, ‘but they make a hell of a racket if anyone they don’t like comes in the yard, and then I come out with the shotgun.’

  ‘What about the buildings?’ asked Kavanagh. ‘Are they secure?’

  Reynard stood up and pushed his chest out. ‘About once a year the tail end of a cyclone comes through here,’ he said. ‘They stray inland from the coast. We’ve got storm shutters on what few windows we have. We can lock all the doors too, so the only way in and out becomes the front door, and we can guard that easy enough.’

  ‘You going to stand there all night?’ said Ford.

  ‘Nah,’ said Reynard, looking pleased with himself. ‘I just texted my man Curtis. He’ll be here any second. Lives round the corner. He’ll be working the door.’

  ‘So you planned all this before we came over?’ said Ford. ‘You knew we wouldn’t leave?’

  ‘I hoped you wouldn’t,’ said Reynard. ‘We don’t get much excitement round here.’

  Kavanagh sat back down and waved Reynard down into the chair next to her. She waited until she had his full attention. ‘I don’t like being bottled up in that room, only one exit,’ she said. ‘Especially with the kid.’ She nodded towards the residence and raised an eyebrow.

  Reynard smiled. ‘Alright, you can stay in my place,’ he said. ‘Nice touch that, using the kid. You must know I’ve got a heart of gold. One condition, though, you tell me what this is about.’

  Ford looked at Kavanagh and she nodded. ‘We’re supposed to meet my wife here,’ he said.

  Reynard looked from one to the other, frowning. ‘Does your wife know you brought your girlfriend?’

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ Ford said.

  Kavanagh laughed. ‘He keeps saying that. I don’t know why he finds the idea so offensive.’

  Dussell coughed on his cigarette, then pushed his hat back so he could look at her face. ‘If you were with me, I’d be happy for people to get the wrong idea.’

  Ford watched her smiling at Dussell. An open, natural smile that creased her eyes and pulled the skin taut across her cheekbones. He noticed a blush of embarrassment in her cheeks, and realised that all three men were staring at her. She seemed to be enjoying the attention.

  ‘So who are those guys?’ asked Reynard.

  Ford took a long breath before he spoke. ‘My wife has been living with a guy in Macau. We think they work for him. She left him. They’re here to take her back.’

  There was a cough behind Ford and he turned to see a big man in the doorway. He was huge, filling the frame. Ford guessed he was at least two metres tall, maybe a hundred and thirty kilos, and had a belly that hung over his tracksuit pants. He stood there a moment, scratching at his bare stomach with one hand and at the stubble around his jowls with the other, before he nodded to Reynard.

  ‘My man Curtis,’ said Reynard, and raised an arm, palm outwards. Curtis took a couple of waddling steps into the breezeway and slapped the outstretched hand.

  ‘This is your doorman?’ asked Kavanagh.

  ‘The best in the Bar,’ said Reynard. ‘Ain’t that right, Curtis?’ The big man just nodded slowly, the rolls of fat under his chin bulging in and out. He ran a hand over the cropped hair on the top of his head and gave a shy smile.

  ‘Nobody gets past Curtis,’ said Reynard. ‘If the shit hits the fan we just wedge the fat fucker in the doorway and nobody gets in or out.’ Kavanagh still looked unsure but Reynard continued. ‘It’s all muscle under that blubber. He got shot in the belly one time, didn’t feel the pain for an hour. When he did he just thought he was hungry. Didn’t lose much blood. I think the skin and the fat just sort of rolled over itself and stopped the bleeding.’

  ‘If this place is locked down, how did Curtis get in?’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘I let him in,’ said Stacey, standing in the doorway.

  ‘Just who we need,’ said Reynard. ‘I want you to show our guests round the house. They’re squatting in there tonight. I’d better go put the shutters up and find a place to roll out my swag for the night.’

  Stacey stepped across the breezeway, dodging between the chairs, and opened the door to the residence. She tilted her head for Ford and Kavanagh to follow her and led them into a corridor that ran down the centre of the house. Unlit, it was cool and dark. She opened doors on either side in turn to show them two bedrooms and a living room. They were sparsely furnished, the walls bare. Neither the double bed in the first bedroom, nor the old iron hospital bed in the second was made up. The living room had a sofa, a ripped leather armchair, a chipped coffee table and a large television. A sleeping bag was strewn across the couch and the coffee table was crowded with empty beer cans and food wrappers.

  The corridor opened out into a kitchen that ran the full width of the building, with a laundry on one side with an old copper tub. A back door led into the yard. Kavanagh opened it, looked out to where Muddy was packing up his tools, the LandCruiser idling, then she closed the door and inspected the dead bolts. She walked to the opposite wall and pulled back the blind to check the window on to the street. Reynard was standing outside, the loose storm shutter leaning against his leg. He winked at her before lifting it into position over the window. Kavanagh turned to face Stacey, her eyes sweeping the room, taking it all in. ‘This place is built like a battleship,’ she said. ‘Is that how the Ironclad got its name?’

  Stacey leaned against the fridge, biting her nails and toying with the ends of her hair. ‘It’s named after the original gold lease that was on this block,’ she said. ‘They started this hotel and made more money selling grog than digging for gold.’

  ‘You’re a student of local history?’ as
ked Kavanagh.

  ‘Nah,’ Stacey said. ‘But you stand across the bar from Bobby Dazzler for long enough and you pick up a few things.’

  ‘Like geology?’

  ‘He took me out one time, to the hills. Showed me a few of the old workings.’

  As she played with her hair, she stared idly at a series of photographs stuck to the fridge. Kavanagh stepped forward to examine them. There were twelve pictures, arranged in a grid, showing different women of Stacey’s age and build, each one standing behind the bar. There was a mixture of blondes and brunettes, a single redhead, some with short hair and some with long, but all with the same curves as Stacey.

  ‘Them’s all the girls he’s had working the bar in the last few years,’ said Stacey, squinting at the nearest photo. ‘Backpackers mostly. The girl before me was a German. He puts an ad on the internet, hires them that way. Most only stay a few months then move on.’

  ‘Do they know what they’re letting themselves in for when they come up here?’ asked Kavanagh.

  ‘What, Tom?’ Stacey said. ‘He’s not so bad, once you get to know him.’

  ‘I meant the heat, the isolation.’

  ‘Some like it. Some turn and run after a week. You get all sorts.’

  ‘But he seems to have a type. All the girls are similar.’

  ‘You mean the tits?’ Stacey said. ‘Tom says he picks them that way because he sells more beer, but I don’t believe him for a second.’

  ‘You seem to know your way around the house pretty well,’ said Kavanagh.

  Stacey didn’t take the bait. ‘I live in one of the dongas out the back of the yard.’

  ‘Is that where he’ll be dossing while we’re in here?’

  ‘I dare say he’ll come knocking on my door with that hangdog face of his.’

  ‘That part of your job description?’

  ‘Only as little as necessary to stop him drooling down my shirt front when we’re behind the bar together.’ She pulled herself upright and crossed the room. ‘I’ll go get you some clean sheets for the beds,’ she said, and walked off down the corridor, her thongs slapping on the tiled floor.