by Greg McLean
‘I know you know about it . . . Otherwise, why tell it? That long-haired bastard had it coming . . . Stirring up trouble. Spitting in our faces. Rubbing our noses in his shit. Think I’m gonna let some hippie run my town?’
‘Please . . .’ Kev blubbers. ‘I dinnit even know you were in Darwin.’
‘Just coincidence you bring it up? You must be in league with the boy.’
Mick freezes.
‘I dinnit even know he was listening. I swear. I was jest talkin’. You know how I get with a few beers.’
‘Yeah, real mouthy.’
‘I don’t know anything!’
‘Thing is, ya old cunt, I like things clean. If I have to bash some heads to do it, have a little fun, so be it. The badge’s for a reason, right? It’ll make it pretty easy for me to cover you up afterwards. Even pin it on you.’
‘Them hippies on the highway? I had nothin—’
‘So I’m gonna ask you again. And you’re gonna tell me how much he knows.’
Roberts raises the gun. Aims for the man’s bare foot this time. The gun kicks and Kev’s toes explode. Blood and bone disintegrate the air. The old codger gives a gargled scream. Slumps in pain, shaking in agony, his leg now ending in a gnarled mess. That’s no .22. That gun’s got a kick to it.
Roberts squats, not looking at all sickly or weak. Lights another cigarette. ‘I got a whole pack,’ he says. ‘Intend to finish it.’ There’s also a steel ammo box full of bullets at his feet. The policeman loads the gun – a .243, Mick can see now, oiled and beautifully maintained – and chambers the round. The bolt’s whisper-quiet. ‘I aim for your knee next. Then your left ball. Work me way up to your fat ugly head.’
Mick stays until he’s sure Kev doesn’t know anything else. But it’s enough. Roberts will be coming for him as soon as he clears up the loose ends.
*
‘I know who killed the couple in the van,’ Mick says.
Rose stops watering the garden, and stands open-mouthed.
‘And now he knows I know,’ Mick says. ‘He’s going to come for me.’
‘What —?’
‘It’s Roberts.’
‘How . . . How do you know?’
‘Something Kev said in the Black Shanty: this old bastard, been here forever. Mentioned a hippie agitator being taken out up in Darwin a few years back. When Roberts was stationed there. He got wind of Kev talking about it. Took him to the plains out west, along my way back from the hills. I saw it all. He killed him.’
‘Roberts shot Kev?’
‘Put a bag over his head so he couldn’t see his face. Emptied a whole box of rounds into him. Got off on it.’
‘But why . . . What’s that got to do with you? How does he know —’
‘I think he saw me,’ Mick says, thinking fast. ‘When I was trying to sneak away. I knew there was somethin’ wrong with that bloke. Kravic too. Psychos with badges.’
‘Then we have to get help. Call Perth. Get the CIB up here.’
‘No!’ He grabs her arms before she can run back to the house. ‘We need to leave. He could turn it back on us. Set us up somehow.’
She pauses, looks at him square. ‘But you didn’t do anything, right?’
‘He saw me, Rose. He knows I caught him in the act. He’ll be coming for me. For us.’
‘If you run he can say whatever he likes about you.’
‘We stay and we’re not safe. Pack some stuff and we’ll get going.’
‘Mick, none of this sounds right.’
He tries to pull her towards the house and she stumbles, puts a hand around him to steady herself. He winces at the still-inflamed wound beside his spine. He can’t help frowning at the suspicion in her face. ‘C’mon, Rose. We can argue later.’
She glances to the house, the car over near the water tank. Is she thinking of running from him? ‘I’m not leaving, Mick.’
‘I just told you —’
She pulls loose. ‘This is my home. If you want to go, then go. But this doesn’t have anything to do with me.’
‘The bloke’s a killer. There’s no telling what the fuck he’ll do.’
He reaches for her again and this time she places her hand flat against his lower back. He hisses. ‘I looked at your wound when you were asleep. You said you fell on a fencepost, but it’s too clean for that. It’s a knife cut. I know my share.’
‘We can compare scars later.’
‘How’d you get it, Mick?’
‘Fuck’s sake, Rose.’
‘Tell me the truth! At least give me that.’
‘Roberts is a dangerous —’
‘Roberts? A policeman? What are you running from? Why do you even want me with you?’
‘Because . . . you’re not safe here.’
‘Safe here? Or safe with you?’
‘What?’
She’s backing away. ‘How’d you get that cut, Mick? And where were you that night in the loft? The night I covered for you.’
He’s getting angry now. This is wasting time. He’d tried to do the right thing by coming for her. And this is the crap he gets. It’s just like with his sister, always whining. ‘We don’t have time.’
‘You hold so many secrets you don’t even know when you’re lying and when you’re telling the truth. Do you?’
‘I dunno what you’re talking about.’
‘Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, remember? I’ve been around. I know people. I know when someone’s holding out on me. And right now I don’t know if you’ve ever told me one truthful thing.’
‘What does it matter?’
Her eyes harden. ‘There was somewhere . . . somewhere I wanted to take you. To help you. But I can see it’s too late now.’
He blocks her path to the house. ‘I dunno what you think you know. But it’s wrong. Now, I’m gonna try one last time.’ He reaches for her and she bats his arm away, keeps backing away, heading for the fields behind the house now. ‘Rose! I’m not gonna leave you here!’
‘Stay away from me.’
‘Listen, you stupid bit—’
She rounds on him, spitting like a snake. ‘Didn’t take much, did it? Is that what your father called your mother?’
He stumbles back from her fury. ‘That’s not what . . . I’m not like him. Look, come on, please. You’re being crazy.’
She steps back from his grasp. A dawning awareness in her eyes. A betrayal. ‘No, I’m just seeing you clearly for the first time.’
She turns and runs. He tries to keep up but falls quickly behind on the uneven ground. His stupid legs no match for her. ‘Get back!’ he yells as he chases her up the rise and across the fields stretching from her property.
Her path cuts a line through the spiked grass and he tracks her easily. He’s so focused he almost doesn’t consider that the Others could be out here somewhere watching, circling around to get the jump on him.
Jesus. He looks back and sees the house sitting marooned amongst the spreading landscape sparsely protected by the smattering of gums. At night it’s like a blazing oasis in the dark and anyone can see it for miles around. He’d often sat in his car watching it himself, knows how easy it would be to stake out. Has known all along how vulnerable they are here but hasn’t cared until now.
Those sick fucks could be out there watching even at this very moment: beyond the tree line, on the slopes of the town with scopes, maybe somewhere in the dairy pasture over the road. Though he can’t see anyone as they cross the fields, the knife Rose had given him is at his back. Hand to hand he’d hold his own – even against the Celepči brothers if it come to it. If there’s a gun trained on them, he and Rose’re dead anyway, so no point worrying about it.
But he doesn’t think it will come to that. Not during the light of day. It’d be more fun for them at night.
Because that’s what he’d do.
He still keeps warily looking around, checking the trees, the horizon, until he forces himself to concentrate. Focuses again on Rose further ahead
.
He’ll run her down, make her listen. Then take her back with him. She’ll stop fighting eventually, calm down enough to hear him out. Believe him. Whatever she thinks she knows he’ll prove wrong. He’ll find some way to convince her of Roberts’ actions. Because for fuck’s sake, he’s not lying about that. Nor is he lying about the danger she’s in.
This can all be smoothed over.
They’re a few miles from the house now and even though his legs are aching and he’s puffing he keeps the same gap between them. She’s even beginning to slow and he starts catching her as she comes to a slight hill in front of them and crests it.
He jogs faster to catch up, reaches for the knife at his back, then stops himself. That’s not what he’s trying to do, for fuck’s sake. He leaves it and pumps up the slope after her empty-handed. So close now as he reaches the top of the rise and comes over nearly caught up to her —
The dam spreads before him blue and pristine.
She’s paused for breath at the water’s edge, hands on her knees. She starts when she sees him. But he’s frozen to the spot, can only stare down.
The sun hits the rippling water and sparkles in shards. The sound of frogs on the opposite bank. That coolness in the air he remembers so well.
She’s about to run but sees the look on his face and hesitates. ‘This is where I thought, if I took you here . . .’ After a moment of empty silence, her voice like it’s miles away, she asks, ‘What happened at the lake, Mick? What did your father do? Or . . . or what did you do?’
He walks in a daze down the slope past her. A heavy branch rocks in the shallows, like the walking stick he had as a child. He stands staring at it.
She shies away, but he’s so unmoving she’s drawn back to him. ‘I know something happened in the past. Whatever’s wrong with you now, it’s to do with that, isn’t it? Maybe . . . maybe I can still help you. If you have done something, an accident even, we could use this. Mitigating circumstances. Enter a plea.’ Her voice quiet when she next speaks. ‘Mick, have you done something?’
He looks back up at the embankment: the angle of the slope towards the muddy edge of the water, his vision slipping in and out of memory.
The woman behind takes a step towards him, doesn’t senses the shaking deep within him, the coil of anger breaking free, stupidly thinking she can still help him even now. Fix him.
‘Mick?’
‘You shouldn’ta brought me here,’ he says, grabbing the branch. Turns and clubs her in the face.
16
The anger began to fill him until he could no longer sleep and he would smash his fists against the wooden palings until the house cracked beneath his hands. His blood splashed everywhere from lacerated skin and all he could smell was that copper taint. The scent of revenge, of death, of pain. The wind howled into him as he lay exhausted each night on the bare boards, searing him with memories as if reliving them once more.
And when he felt he could take it no longer – like his head would burst with the pressure building inside – he emerged from the abandoned house in the desert like a death’s head moth from its cocoon.
Stripped of everything but that anger to guide him.
He knew to head west and he followed the stars and ate his fill off the land until coming to the roads north of Erebli and he waited out in a ditch on the plain for nightfall with the winds at his back screaming him on.
The family house had fallen to ruin. His father’s ute propped wheel-less on brick stilts, its engine gutted. Rubbish lay strewn around the yard and the windmill had lost a strut and collapsed dangerously inwards. A dead chicken bred maggots by the back door.
The bedroom window had been broken, no doubt in rage by his father after he left, and Mick slipped in beneath the tacked sheet, his hair wild like a wolf, face streaked and caked with dirt, clothes tattered. He must have looked already dead, and the great bloat of his mother woke at his shadow and drew in breath to scream. He leapt at her and held his stinking hand over her mouth.
So his father hadn’t killed her. Mick’s voice, unused for so long, sounded like rust when he spoke: ‘It’s okay, Ma. I’m gonna fix everything.’ He climbed onto her and brought up the crudely hewn spear.
He felt her only struggle for a moment as it sank into her. At the last she drew him down into her undulating rolls, held him to her like he was a newborn again, and he cried into her neck as she finally stilled beneath him. She’d kicked the sheets off and her vast nakedness spread beneath him and he shut his eyes as he slipped off her, nearly skidded in her thick blood dripping to the floor. He didn’t look back at her lying there splayed and silent.
How long Mick stood in the hallway he didn’t know. Once the tears ran out he raised his head and blinked back to consciousness – and looked down the hallway to the sound of snoring.
His father lay passed out on the mouldy couch, bottles scattered at his feet, the radio crackling like it had lost reception. Mick crept unchallenged through the house, navigating only by memory, and stopped to edge one of the slaughterhouse knives from the wall. Then he came up on the stretched shape.
He nicked the tendons at the back of his father’s ankles as he’d learnt to do with the roos. The man cried out and tried to rise and Mick slashed the insides of both armpits and those big hands that had beaten his wife and son so many times fell into his lap, unmoving and useless.
The man blinked tears of pain in the near dark. Saw the child before him. His face twisted with surprise. ‘You,’ he croaked.
Mick slammed one knee onto his chest to hold him, pinned his right shoulder with the other then wrenched his father’s head back. Grabbed his tongue like a hefty slug and cut it off before he could say anything more. The man tried to scream and just erupted blood.
‘Hi Dad,’ Mick said. And then he laid the knife flat at his jawline and slid it in against the bone and started working it neatly up around the scalp, sinking his hips to stop the bucking beneath him like any animal.
A light rain spat from the thunder-dark sky as Mick walked towards the broken windmill. The huge wooden arms had always overshadowed the house like a church cross and he raised his hands to it, stretching his arms to the side and spinning slowly as the rain got heavier and ran with blood.
His father’s hugging skin pooled in great sags beneath his arms and around his feet like curdled jelly. The clammy underside stuck hot and slimy against him, the smell nearly making him vomit, and the gaping mouth hung far below his own and made it hard to breathe. He could barely see out of the jagged eyeholes.
Soon there was only the bullet-hits of rain, his own tears, as he roared up at the windmill and the sky beyond, crying with frustration and rage and the sudden bolt of awareness of what he’d finally done.
Then the rain eased and he stopped turning, sank to his knees and stared back at the house.
And felt: nothing. He thought he’d be filled with power.
But that hollowness was still there inside. Black, limitless.
Nothing he’d done had meant anything.
Rose comes to as he’s hauling her up on the chain. Groans at the tightening of her stretched arms. The ligaments of her shoulders creak in protest.
She screams as he emerges out of the dark. Bucks her back at his calm smile.
‘Mick . . .’
‘You want the truth?’
And he tells her then, about the man in the car and his sister falling. Bending over her and watching her die, the feel of her. The cover up and his father killing the innocent man, then chasing his son from the house with a shotgun when he suspected the truth. His trip to madness in the desert before returning to slaughter both his broken, failed parents.
How killing them hadn’t taken away his anger, hadn’t made him feel anything at all at their deaths. He told her how he’d stripped off the useless cling of his father’s skin and thrown it on his steaming corpse, poured a jerry can of petrol from the shed through the house and over his parent’s bodies and set the whole thi
ng alight. How he’d sat back in the last of the rain as the building blazed and they’d found him there as a gas bottle inside exploded and sent up shards of wood and burnt body parts into the air.
His neighbours had placed a blanket around his shivering wet nakedness and he heard them tell rushing police that they hadn’t seen the poor nine-year-old for some time – his father not letting anyone on the property in recent months – and from the look of child’s streaked face and dirty hair, the man must’ve locked him up since then.
Mick had been unspeaking as if in shock as they’d taken him away. The police couldn’t be sure if his sister’s killer had returned to terrorise the family once more and the local policeman, Vic Winston, arranged for Mick to be taken into foster care. They swept the whole incident under the carpet, not telling the press, swearing his neighbours to secrecy, to which they agreed for the sake of the boy. It was his friend Eddie’s gruff father, fighting to control his tears at the catatonic sight of Mick, who suggested they send him interstate to the camp and away from Queensland for good. Get him away from the hell he’s lived through. And so Vic had arranged for the transfer, even for Mick’s surname to be changed to Eddie Taylor’s family name in case anyone tried to track him down, and Mick was shipped off, still unspeaking as if shocked into near vegetation by witnessing his parents die. He hadn’t spoken to Eddie when he left, didn’t react when his friend’s mother hugged him, didn’t say a word when Vic personally drove him halfway across the country. It was months before Ma Tikalee and Old Tommo could even draw anything out of him. Bluetongue, they called him at first with sadness, and he grew up under their watch wishing he were different, that the horror inside wouldn’t govern him again. He’d fought it and fought it, and then he couldn’t control it anymore, and he’d nearly killed a boy and they’d sensed the darkness in him – had perhaps begun to suspect he’d had some hand in his parents’ deaths – and sent him away. But fuck ’em, he never belonged there anyway.
‘So I can’t think about returning,’ Mick says. ‘I already killed my bastard father. And it changed nothing. Which makes you full of shit. I already faced me fears. And it got me nowhere.’