Origin

by Greg McLean

  11

  He hits other pubs after that, in between dogging jobs. He sits up the back quietly drinking and watching people: their expressions, their reactions to things, not only to see who might be hiding their true selves, but also to copy it himself. He has to if he’s going to survive out in the world. When people talk to him he laughs and plays along with their jokes and ribbing. Even when he wants to smash their smartarse faces into the table. Pretending soon becomes second nature.

  The knife eats away at him more and more every day. But at least he’s not locked away like he was at the camp. Or even on the station.

  Thinking about Kilbarra makes him realise how much he misses it, misses Opey, Simmo and Merce. Wishes he’d been able to weather Cutter and Jock. And it makes him realise how lonely he’d been his whole life. It’s surprising that he needs to be part of the world. But hell, doesn’t every bloke?

  And as always that makes him think about Rose. Though things had changed between them – a cooling on her part, perhaps – she hadn’t kicked him out. They had an understanding now: he’s not to be relied on. As long as they can work with that it could be for the best.

  Though he should be more worried about finding the other killers, he can think only of her as he’s sitting in the King’s Head in Newtown – a small town a couple of hundred miles north of Wills – and he almost misses the flash of uniform out of the corner of his eyes. He looks up from the day’s newspaper as Roberts and Kravic walk in and head for the bar. For a sinking moment Mick wonders if the knife’s been found. But the younger policeman gives a surprised glance when he sees him and wanders over while Roberts chats to the barman.

  ‘So this’s where you’ve ended up.’ Kravic’s eyes slide over him like an oil slick then flick over the rest of the bar as if bored. There’s smething hard to read in them.

  Mick shrugs. ‘Havin’ a steak. On special.’

  As if on cue the barman’s wife – a pretty tanned thing in a short skirt – brings out his overflowing plate. He and Kravic watch her walk away. The cop’s eyes trail down.

  ‘Bet you can’t keep your hands off the fillies now you’re off the station, hey?’ Kravic says, still looking. ‘Must be like getting out of jail.’

  ‘Dunno. S’pose.’

  Kravic’s smiling at him now, his blue eyes boring deep. Mick finds it unsettling and cuts a piece of T-bone. ‘Been meaning to have a chat with you. Thought we told you to stay close.’

  Mick looks up. ‘I’m in Wills. If I was any closer I’d be in the cop shop.’

  ‘Fair point. So you’re dogging now. All that time on the station got put to good use then?’ His smile like a sneer.

  Mick thinks he’s taking the piss but can’t be sure. He chews his rubber steak.

  ‘Still haven’t found your friend. Considering lifting the media blackout so we can put some heat on him.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Still got no ideas?’

  Mick shakes his head.

  Kravic taps a finger on the table. Looks around the room distracted. ‘Something you can help me out with, though.’

  Mick swallows. It nearly sticks. ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘When we searched your mate’s quarters we found his boots stashed beneath his bed. What kind of country boy clears out without his boots?’

  Mick doesn’t even blink. ‘In a rush maybe?’ He spears a spud as casually as he can.

  ‘Interesting, don’t you think? Guess that’s something we’ll ask when we catch up with him. And we will catch up with him.’ Kravic turns his gaze on him. It’s like a heat lamp.

  Mick nods. ‘When you do,’ he says, motioning with the greasy potato, ‘tell him he’s the father of at least three lambs and an outbreak of crabs.’ He chomps the spud, grinning.

  Kravic looks at him like he’s the village idiot. Mick’s smile falters. ‘Be seeing you, boy,’ Kravic says and pushes back from the table. After a couple of steps he clicks his fingers as he remembers something. ‘You know, we looked through the records for a Mick Taylor in Queensland. Erebli, you said you were from?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘No record.’ That hot gaze. Time stretches. Mick can feel perspiration prickle his scalp. ‘But then, it is the arsehole of the world. Maybe you just weren’t important enough.’ Kravic gives a smile. ‘Guess I’ll keep checking, hey?’

  He glances at the pretty cook again on his way out with Roberts, but doesn’t look back at the kid sitting in a pool of sweat.

  Mick stops hanging out at the pubs after that. Instead, he spends his time on the ranges, surviving on the land again.

  Just as he’d done in the past.

  As he had ventured further out from the abandoned house he began taking provisions with him in case the hunt took hours or even days. But soon the desert gave up its secrets and he challenged himself by going out empty-handed.

  He learnt that the fat trunks of bottle trees held stores of water for years and all he need do was pound a hole through their bark and drink his fill, then close the gap.

  Snakes often burrowed beneath the sand around brigalow trees, using the silvery foliage as shade and he could tell just by the bump in the sand where to strike his spear.

  Witchetty grubs could be found in bulges along the roots of the occasional towering gum and he’d pull out their little white folded bodies like expanding accordions. Raw they burst in the mouth like off-fruit, but lightly heated they firmed like scrambled eggs. If cooked longer they tasted like stringy chicken.

  He’d once eaten a bush tomato raw out on the edge of the plains and it blistered his mouth. He vomited until he feared he wouldn’t be able to return to the abandoned house. After that he was more careful and was never sick again. The outer skin had to be burnt off and the seeds inside scraped out before it was safe.

  He even noticed the little air holes in the dirt further out into the desert and discovered if he dug down he’d find tiny frogs hibernating between bursts of rain, sometimes months at a time. A cooked handful would crackle in his mouth like popcorn.

  He could tell by the clouds where the wind would come from that night and hence which side of an embankment to drop his swag. And he learnt how to navigate by sun or by stars, so that he was never lost. Later, in the camp, he pretended not to know these skills so they’d underestimate him, and everyone marvelled at how quickly he learnt as a white fella. It earned him a tribe name – Jackamin – which determined who he could mate with. Not that it ever came to that.

  As he got stronger, the house became less a last point of salvation and more a place to fall back to, to escape the howling voices that rolled in from the mountains in the distance and swirled around him like some hot, natural power until he could take no more. Until he felt like his skull would split with their fury.

  So now when he sits miles out from the highway on the rugged terrain hunting the dogs, he doesn’t fear getting lost or being stranded or running out of water. If he has to he could abandon the car and walk with only the shirt on his back in the heat of the day and still find his way to civilisation. Surviving out here’s as natural to him as breathing.

  It’s just as well, because the stress of searching for the other two killers is doing his block. He can’t talk to Rose about it, so instead he’s left to stew in his own whirling thoughts as he tries to anticipate places the Others could be.

  He’d found a pile of old newspapers out the back of Bruce’s pub, and going through them had noticed a pattern of disappearances up north. A couple of tourists might have gone missing on the stretch north of Newtown – might because they hadn’t given details of their travel to anyone, and they could very well have gone missing back in the city or overseas, or even disappeared on purpose. But in every instance there’d been possible sightings of them in the north of the state near tourist centres.

  He starts parking out on the ranges, watching population points and tourist locations. He becomes used to watching from a distance, hanging back and observing people without b
eing part of their world. They become ants in the distance, scurrying about doing whatever the fuck it is people think means something.

  And as he sits alone, humanity pulls away like he’s on a drifting boat. He can’t for the life of him understand why, in the vast stretches of nothingness out here, people huddled together as if for protection. They cling together in their sporadic towns tending the land, stick to the black government-sanctioned bitumen while driving the horrendous distances between petrol stops, have to live in each other’s pockets day in day out. And they’re happy with that.

  He watches the endless tourists in their shiny new cars, or the big vans city folk seemed to hire nowadays, stopping off like clockwork at the waterholes and visitors’ centres and national parks dotted through the state, wondering what the hell they were looking for. They all hopped out of their cars and walked for a bit, peering around, then got too hot and took off again, back to the safety of their campsite or the towns. What’s the point? The land doesn’t give up its secrets that way.

  And as he watches something gnaws away inside: a dark expanding pit of certainty that he’s not like them. He’ll never be normal. Can never be part of anything. That his father was right to hate him. He doesn’t belong anywhere.

  The only thing that keeps him watching is that if someone is hunting tourists they’d be doing the same: sitting back observing, calculating, picking out the vulnerable, the far from home.

  It’s only this hunch that flushes out the Celepˇci brothers, quicker than he could rightfully expect.

  He’s out tracking a clever dingo pair on the stretch north of Newtown – a mated couple that had been sampling chunks of the herds there for some time – when he spots glints of metal near the weird Mugumbi rock formations to the east. The carpark at the entrance to the national park is a flattened handprint next to the clutching fingers of the eroded rock towers out in the desert. He can see black spots wandering between the fingers, and as usual Mick watches while the sun descends, wondering what the tourists are looking at. It’s just dirt and rock. Maybe it reminded them of skyscrapers? Made ’em feel at home or something. Who the heck knows?

  As the cars pull away one by one he notices another vehicle sitting off the highway. The other cars wouldn’t be able to see it but Mick’s in the perfect spot and he wonders at its stillness. A big Ford by the looks of it, light coloured. A tow truck with a winch on the back like a scorpion’s tail.

  There’s still one car at the park – some sort of station-wagon thing – and through the .22 scope he can see someone inside trying to start it. Two girlies get out and check under the hood. Out of sight the tow truck starts up, cruises in, unhurried. The shapes of two men inside.

  Before they can get there a group of hikers wander over to the stranded station-wagon. The tow truck stops. The men inside stare, then it U-turns and leaves.

  Mick watches their dust trail away. Did he really just see that? It was like one of them wildlife shows he’d seen on telly, with that old Pom salivating over a lion chasing down and eating a gazelle right there on camera.

  It didn’t seem like just mechanics staking out likely points for cars breaking down.

  More like they’d had a hand in it.

  Mick goes back through the stack of newspapers, reading slowly but thorough as is his want. A year ago a couple of Swedish girls went missing on a journey north to Broome. They’d bought an unreliable car in Perth and a service-station owner remembered them stopping in at Kalgoorlie and having to get a fuel pump replaced. Even though the mechanic suggested sticking to the main highway, the girls talked of stopping off at some of the sights along the way north, and so he’d made them buy more water and a jerry can of petrol in case they broke down. Which they must have. Though maybe not by chance.

  Local police said it was a case of tourists yet again driving unprepared into the outback, but Mick was beginning to see it was otherwise. There were a few follow-up stories, but no trace of the Swedes was ever found. Someone claimed to have seen them overseas – most likely mistakenly – and the story became muddled and the papers moved on.

  But it’s too close to be a coincidence.

  These guys musta been doing their trick for a while.

  Now he just needs to find that truck.

  The next chance he gets he heads north again towards the Mugumbi formations and stops at the nearest town some forty miles away – a little spit and whistle stop on the highway – and mentions he’s been having some trouble with the ute. He asks if there’s a mechanic or tow truck nearby. It turns out there’s a pair of grease monkeys operating out of the nearby mining town of Lawson, and he thanks the petrol-station attendant – a hard weather-beaten nut who’d shuffled up to the car like the already dead. The bloke tips his hat and creaks back to his office. Just as well he hadn’t been the one serving the two missing tourists. Old coot probably wouldn’t remember where he’d laid his teeth that morning.

  Lawson is built around a huge CSU-owned open-cut uranium, copper and gold mine in the foothills of the Trentham ranges, about a hundred miles northeast of Newtown. As Mick heads towards it, vast clouds of dust spiral up, hanging against the small mountain range behind like smoke signals. Thick sand’s already sticking in the back of his throat and working down into his lungs. He wonders what the life expectancy is here.

  He does a slow drive through the surprisingly large town first. There are a number of sturdily built houses sitting on quarter-acre lots, but most of the accommodation for the town is small white prefabs arranged in stretches. Once intended as temporary, the company just added more and more as the workers came in. Some have been decorated with flower boxes, and others even painted in touches of faded blue or yellow on the verandas – the woman of the house trying to spruce up the place, no doubt – but mostly it’s just a sea of dusty white lining each side of the street. The centre of town sports a post office, a couple of pubs, some sort of meeting hall, a cop station and an RSL/bowling club – and at one end, a mechanic shop littered with rusting wrecks and a line of vehicles awaiting repair. Bingo.

  Mick pulls over at the end of the road and sits watching in his side mirror. A huge mining truck rumbles towards him, its immense wheels like some Tonka truck toy, and he glances up as the faces inside swivel and stare at him as they pass. Wondering what he’s doing in town, maybe. He must stick out like a sore thumb.

  If he keeps sitting here watching the mechanics’ he’s going to have the police banging on his window in no time, so once the Tonka truck’s disappeared down the hill to the open wound of the mine he gets out. He holds his mouth at the dust as he pops the bonnet and props it. He could pull out the fuel pump line and then limp in to the garage to get it fixed. He’d be able to see if he had the right tow truck at least, even see if there were any oil drums in the place, a way to come back later and break in.

  But that would mean speaking one-on-one with the men – and what if Mick gave himself away? As soon as he got nervous they’d see right through him, jump him in a heartbeat.

  Mick considers his options. No one’s in the shed at the moment. Maybe he could quickly slip inside, look around. The child-fucker had kept things: shoes, jewellery. Trophies. Maybe these two have done the same. At least he’d be sure he has the right place.

  And he could search any empty drums in there at the same time. The timeline for Cutter planting it would be right. Three or four hours here, three or four hours back. That’s about how long he was away from the station.

  Mick could end this whole thing right here and now. Then once he’d got his knife he just had to keep his head down. Stop attracting attention, getting angry, attacking people in carparks. And certainly not make people eat their dead dogs.

  Before he can do anything the ground rumbles with the sound of a V8.

  He ducks beneath the hood as a pale blue tow truck pulls in behind him every bit as overbearing as the mining truck. Its winch swings, poised to strike. Around the bonnet Mick can glimpse two faces behind the winds
hield: dark, closed off, watching him a moment. Then the men hop out and he quickly pulls the hose.

  Before he has a chance to panic he launches into a coughing fit as the dust at the back of his throat becomes a thick paste. He hears laughter in the midst of his hacking as the shadows stroll up.

  ‘Got to love that fresh air, no, prijatelj?’ one of the men says, and Mick looks up to an unshaven face, white grinning teeth, slicked jet-back hair. The man’s grease-stained blue shirt’s open to reveal black matted hair, a silver cross glinting amongst the fur.

  ‘Preeya . . .?’

  ‘Ah, sorry, friend. Matey. You come to this town, you need mask.’

  ‘You the mechanics?’

  The man blinks at him. Looks at the other ethnic then back at the car parts littering the front entrance to the shed. ‘No, we own swimming pool. It out back.’ They’re obviously brothers, one maybe mid-twenties, the other in his thirties. Sinewy and dangerous, coiled somehow.

  Mick ignores the dig. ‘I gotta problem with the car. Probably something obvious.’

  ‘Yes,’ the man says. ‘Obvious it is piece of shit. How this still running?’

  Mick bristles, but thankfully neither are looking as they stick their heads beneath the hood. He unclenches his fists. Don’t give yourself away, for fuck’s sake.

  They look like the same two from the desert with their five o’clock shadows and tow truck. But it’d been a fair distance away and he’s now beginning to second-guess what he’d seen. That they could be responsible for the disappearance of the tourists. Maybe he’s just seeing what he wants to. Maybe he’s wasting his time.

  The older man finds the loose hose immediately and nudges the other. ‘Looks like your carburettor has blown,’ the younger man says. ‘We have to order in part, should get it by afternoon. You can afford?’

  Looks like his mistake could cost him. Mick nods, but they’re looking past him. There’s a sound of clicking shoes and he glances behind at a woman walking up the dusty street. She’s dressed in a light summer dress, her hair arranged in a neat blonde bun and makeup perfect. An idle wife with plenty of hubby’s money to spend.