by Steven Lang
Carl sighed, ‘Gazza, would you hold off a moment? We have to figure what he’s doing. He’s been here for months.’
‘Who gives a fuck. We just do him.You got plenty of paddocks round here.’
‘You want cops walking in lines across them? Just between you and me there are some people whose attention I want to avoid.’
Carl pushed himself away from the bench. The emptiness had spread into his chest. All day, ever since the boy hadn’t showed, he’d been angry. That feeling had now been replaced by something else. The blood flow to his brain seemed to be affected. He could feel each heartbeat individually, as if he was standing amongst waves at the point where they break on a shore, being buffeted by them, the rip pulling at his legs.
‘Kelvin,’ he said, ‘I need some help down at the yards. I forgot to slide the rails through.’
‘Sure,’ Kelvin said, standing.
He had liked the boy. That was the problem. For years he hadn’t allowed anyone close – not simply out of policy, no one had presented themselves – at least no other man. There’d been Jessica of course, but women were both easier and harder to separate from. A woman required something in return for sex which he could never supply, and sooner or later they figured that out and either threw themselves at him or stalked off, both options equally disagreeable but at least in some way final, the situation resolved. Men were different. In the moments when he had permitted himself the luxury of a future not directly related to cattle and fences he had never even considered friendship, as if it was outside the bounds of possibility. Then along came the boy. Sometimes when they’d been working he’d found himself watching him, the way his body moved, the muscles under his skin, the freshness, the aliveness of him, and he’d felt a burst of such intense pleasure, nothing to do with sex, just a kind of admiration, a sense of privilege that Kelvin could have chosen to work with him, to be his friend.Whatever could have possessed him to think that someone Kelvin’s age would want to hang out with him?
He took the torch, a long thing like a night stick, and headed outside, telling the dogs to stay.The night was clear and already cooling off, no sign of a moon. He pushed ahead towards the yards and the shed.
‘Hang on, Carl,’ Kelvin said, behind him.
He kept going. He heard Kelvin increase his pace and he stepped out a bit faster. He rounded the corner of the shed and dropped the torch.When the boy appeared he caught his arm. He pulled him forward, tripping him, using his own motion to propel him, turning him like he might a steer, slamming him into the corrugated iron with a great crash.
He brought the boy’s arm up between his shoulderblades, kicked his feet out to the side. The anger was still there all right. It took less time than you could count.
‘Now, you little cunt,’ he said, chest heaving, his face in the boy’s hair, in the smell of him. ‘Start talking.’
He pushed the arm up further and Kelvin gave a short electric yelp, like an injured dog.
‘You bastard,’ Carl said. ‘You fucking fucking bastard.’
The boy was quivering. ‘You’re hurting me,’ he said.
Carl jerked the arm again. Again the yelp.
‘Talk,’ he said.
‘About what?’
‘Who do you work for? Who sent you? Why?’
‘Nobody. I work for you, Carl.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I’m not, I swear it.’
‘When we were inside I asked you about Andy and you lied.’
‘That has nothing to do with you.’
‘Everything you do around Andy has to do with me. Are you a cop?’
‘No.’
‘So help me god you better not be.You heard what Gazza wants to do to him.’
‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Don’t count on it,’ he said, although he was fairly certain it was. Whatever else Gazza was he didn’t take him for a killer. But then in this field you never knew.
He let the boy go. His heart wasn’t in it. He stepped back a pace and picked up the torch. Shone it on Kelvin. The boy half turned, sliding down the corrugated iron, his arm limp. He made to roll over. His nose was bleeding and there was rust on his cheek. With his good hand he pulled his hurt arm around in front of him. He didn’t look up.
‘Who are you?’
‘None of your fucking business,’ Carl said.
The blood from Kelvin’s nose was running into his mouth and off his chin. The front of his T-shirt was soaking it up in a broad stain. He wiped his forearm across his mouth and in doing so spread a smear of blood and snot down its length.
How easy it is to reduce a man.
‘Are you finished? Can I go now?’
‘No. Tell me about Andy.’
‘Kill the light.’
He shone the torch onto the ground between them.
‘I’m waiting.’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Not another one.’
Kelvin clammed up.
‘Go on then.’
Kelvin told him. He told him about Jim’s place and the diesel and the fire at Nadgee and their plan and how they had executed it. Carl listened.
When Kelvin was finished he said, ‘Whose idea was this?’
‘I don’t know. Andy’s I guess. I came in late.’
‘Does Jessica know?’
‘Shit, no.’
Carl turned the torch off.
‘You are such a stupid fuck. Did you think about her before you did this?’ He turned away, slapping the torch into the palm of his hand.
‘Don’t fucking move,’ he said over his shoulder. Kelvin said nothing. Now he was sorry for hitting the little shit. Even if he deserved every bit, and more. It seemed like it was a day for regrets. He looked up at the stars.There were billions of them. As usual. It was cold. He turned back to the boy.
‘Anything broken?’ he said.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well come up the house and we’ll get you clean.’
Kelvin made no move to get up.
‘Get up,’ Carl said.
‘Not until you tell what this is about.’
Carl turned away again. He switched on the torch and shone the beam at Arcturus. At least the boy had some guts. He gave it an instant’s thought. Such things were niceties.
‘I’ve told you who Andy is to me. Who is he to you?’ Kelvin said.
‘It doesn’t concern you.’
‘Like fuck it doesn’t. I’m bleeding here.’
‘Let’s just say there are several reasons an undercover cop might be interested in me.’
‘To do with Gazza?’
‘No.That’s nothing.When I first came to Australia we grew a crop together, him and another bloke. That’s how I bought this place.There’s another connection. Now get up.’
‘No.’
‘You want to stay here all night?’
‘I want you to explain.’
Carl laughed. ‘I don’t think you’re in a position to tell me what to do.You’ve just fucked up millions of bucks worth of logging equipment in the company of an undercover cop.’
‘You’re a bastard, Carl.’
‘It’s true. Now get up. We’ll see if we can sort this out. Gaz and I are probably your best bet.’
‘Be fucked,’ Kelvin said. But he stood up. Carl offered him his arm but he pushed him away. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he said.
They went up the hill towards the house, slowly. When they were almost within the arc of the veranda light Carl stopped.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘If you still want to know after this is finished I’ll tell you.’
The blood had clotted around Kelvin’s nose. It was smeared across his cheek.
‘I thought you’d be proud of me,’ Kelvin said.
Jesus fucking wept.
‘What the fuck did I ever say to make you think that?’
Carl started walking again. For some reason tears were streaming down his cheeks.
&nb
sp; twenty-three
Carl’s bathroom was rudimentary, built into a section of closed-in veranda as an afterthought, the old floor still sloping outwards, the walls bare timber, the ceiling unlined so you could see the corrugated iron where it was nailed onto the rough-sawn battens, you could see where the nail points had come through, splitting the wood, now smoky from lampblack, each one a narrow scaffolding for cobwebs.There was a table and chair, a tin bath and an old ceramic basin with a cold tap. A mirror hung above the basin but age and exposure had caused its silver to buckle and tarnish, and in the yellow light the images it reflected were bilious, like a cinema screen at the moment when the projector fails and the film begins to melt.
Kelvin splashed the water on his face, trying to find a way to clean himself without causing more pain. The contents of the basin were already red.Through the half-closed door he could hear Carl telling his story to Gazza, and told in that accent, as if someone was imitating a cowboy, it sounded both foolish and as if it belonged entirely to somebody else. Kelvin had ceased to notice that Carl was a foreigner, but his inflection confirmed that he came from a country radically different from his own, one with a different history and culture, different rules.
He ran a fresh basin and soaped up a facecloth. Most of the blood was gone but one cheek was rust-grazed and his nose was swollen, the nostrils plugged with dark clots, a bruise forming above the right eye. His hands were shaking and when he touched the cloth to his face it hurt so much that he had to stop and hold the sides of the basin. His mind registered that he was in shock, but this information seemed to offer little help. He was taken with a shameful desire to cry, as if he were a little boy who had been pushed over in the playground, crying not simply because it hurt but also out of the indignity of it, of being forced to recognise that the world was not necessarily a nice place, something Kelvin thought he had known, but had clearly forgotten or ignored, or both. Jessica had insisted that the world was benevolent, that when she went into the forest it was to reassert this awareness. At the time he had had no idea what she meant. Now he would simply tell her that she was wrong.
Maybe it wasn’t the world, just people. Certainly he seemed to know very little about them. Without, it appeared, due consideration, he had taken action, and that action was already having its effect. Policemen, angry loggers, their wives, their children, were starting to seek him out. Tame, innocent, midwestern backwoodsmen whom he’d regarded with a sort of homely affection, as if they were slightly stupid or slow, but endearingly so, had proved to be effective employers of violence, players in some much bigger game. Misguided, drug-addled, ill-appointed hippies of no account, fantasists whom he’d thought to turn to his own advantage, had shown themselves to be the ones in control. He’d been making up stories for himself. This was what he saw in the mirror.
Back in the kitchen Gazza was, outrageously, unimaginably, serious. He wanted to kill Andy. Kelvin had never knowingly met anyone who had killed a man, or thought about it as a solution to a problem.
And what was even more disconcerting was that Carl was sympathetic, only opposing the idea because he thought it inefficient. ‘I’m as keen as you to be rid of him,’ he said. ‘But we’ve got Kelvin with his Save the Forests program.We’ve got the problem of what Andy was doing on the Farm.’
‘Fuck the forests,’ Gazza said.
‘Maybe we can just stop it,’ Kelvin said. ‘I mean, I … I could ring them up and tell them what we’ve done, then there’d be no damage.There’s still time, they only went back to work today.’
Gazza, with his drooping moustaches, gave him a look of terrible disdain. ‘This isn’t just about you,’ he said.
‘It’s too late, there’ll be some of that fuel in the machines by now,’ Carl said. ‘Besides, I don’t reckon what you did will hurt. Might even make them think.’
‘I doubt it,’ Gazza said. ‘They’re going to be mighty pissed.’
‘The insurance will cover them,’ Kelvin said.
The two men turned to him, incredulous.
‘You what?’
‘The insurance’ll pay. That’s why we did it this way. All the machines are insured.We’re not hurting people, just big money. It’s like you said, Carl, this industry is owned – ’
‘Insurance companies don’t pay,’ Carl said. His tone was full of derision. ‘Not in the long run.They’re not in the business of paying. It’s the timberworkers who’ll be hurt by this. I thought you’d figured that. I thought that’s why you did it.’
‘What do you mean?’
Gazza glanced from one to the other, trying to parse the meaning of this exchange. Kelvin could see the pattern of Carl’s thoughts, all the different ideas coming together in the same way that the spinning icons on a slot machine come to rest, but it wasn’t right, nothing to win on this pull, he thought, except he couldn’t fail to recognise it was the same lack of pattern he had felt in Eden with Jessica. Why, he wondered, were things that were so obvious to other people so difficult for him?
‘It wasn’t like that,’ he said.
‘Now,’ Gazza said, ‘here’s a thing. If you could hand this narc to the loggers, they’d sort him out.’
‘Gazza, my man,’ Carl said, ‘now you are talking. There’s what you might call a certain elegance in that.’
twenty-four
The function room they have been assigned for the committee’s social evening is long and broad. It’s part of the new building but manages to maintain some of the grandeur of the old. High windows look out over the Domain to where the fig trees on the art gallery road cast long shadows. There are perhaps fifty people present, although, Jessica thinks, the numbers have thinned now that the Premier, a smaller, plumper man than she had expected from his photographs, has been in and shaken a few hands, offered them all his smile.
Norton Rawlings, the Independent Member for Eden-Monaro, has her pinioned against a wall near the bar. His hand is spread against the plaster beside her; he rests the bulk of his weight on it, the other arm stuck out behind him so the smoke from the cigarette lodged between his fingers blows the other way. Courteous to a fault, she thinks. But nonetheless predatory. He would, she thinks, be courteous in bed. It is not an irrelevant thought; it is implicit in his pose and the accompanying flattery. They are talking business but the language is sexual.
‘You should consider politics,’ he says. ‘We need more of your sort up here, and not just because you’re young and pretty. Politics is about style as much as anything, it’s about getting your words out where people can hear them. The media love anything that’s different. What they don’t want is the humdrum. They’d love you.You’re every bit a woman and you can speak.’
Norton is a big man, not overweight, just large in every way, well presented. He’s loosened his tie and the top button of his shirt and the whiteness of the cotton and the blueness of his tie and the quality of his suit heighten the colour of his eyes. He is pleased at his own success, it has brought him a confidence which is in itself desirable. She doesn’t want him but it’s fascinating to be desired by him, to have the opportunity to take him if she so chose. He’s interesting and he knows it. In another circumstance she might have seen it as demeaning to be wanted in this way, but he doesn’t make her feel like a sex object, he makes out that he’s interested in her; perhaps, even mildly, he actually is.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he says. ‘I’m not suggesting you’re only about style, I’m just saying you could do well here. Me, I sympathise with your position. The problem is you’re way ahead of your time. This country isn’t ready for you. Anyone with any intelligence can see these issues have legs. But it’s not there yet, it’s not on people’s minds yet.’
Jessica has never been in receipt of the individual focus of a skilled parliamentarian. Norton is something of a wunderkind, the honest independent, a brandisher of private member’s bills, uncoverer of corruption in places both high and low. In the glow of his attention she is, for a moment, alive. She�
�s almost persuaded to consider a career in politics. For too long she’s been accustomed to the sloppy thinking on the Farm, where the dominant ideas have emerged from the Californian social laboratories of the seventies, suggesting that the western mind is too much in control, an argument for which she has some sympathy; except on the Farm such a belief has been taken as an excuse to leave the brain at the door.
‘If the government moves too fast the people affected get left behind,’ Norton says. ‘You get a backlash. If we did what you want us to do we’d be up to our necks in logging trucks in Macquarie Street, the government would be out on its ear. You’d have the other mob to deal with, and I’ll tell you what, if you think this lot are difficult …’
She is tempted by the suggestion that she might fit in. That she could be part of something important. She thinks only rarely of Kelvin. On the first night in town she and Claire and Michael had ducked across the Bridge to Surry Hills for dinner, the car weaving in and out of streams of tail-lights while the buildings reared above them, driving towards a restaurant where they ate bolognaise at long bench tables in a loft along with hordes of strangers, while up the end of the room unlikely middle-aged Italians produced huge vats of spaghetti; everyone talking at once, drinking red wine, everything interesting and exciting and, above all, new, as though out there in the bush she’d forgotten what was happening in the world, this great experiment, Humanity, and all its works.
Amongst the clatter and noise Claire had leaned across the table to her and said, ‘So. How’s your love life?’ and she had waved the question aside, as if to say, it does not exist. This to Claire, her little sister, with whom she shared houses when they were at university, who has witnessed everything, and those events she hasn’t actually seen, which have occurred at too great a distance, she has heard about in detail, has commented on. Claire, who has listened patiently while Jessica outlined the advantages and disadvantages of a relationship with not just one married man but two, Jessica being not a serial monogamist but a serial adulterer, although she is never sure whether or not it is adultery when you are the other party, or if it is only the married one who adulterates, the other being just the foreign body disturbing the purity of the marriage. To Claire she denied the existence of Kelvin.