Jean and I just stare at him. ‘Got nothing to say? About his whereabouts? About his destination?’ he asks. ‘About him being innocent and the wrath-of-the-law and the bastardry-of-me being misdirected for all these years?’
Jean tells him, ‘Get fucked.’ Which somehow doesn’t sound like her usual cool get fucked but sounds a thin and a foolish get fucked.
He stands up. ‘Nothing pertinent, then? Okay. Well, I’ll be off.’ And he tells us how he’s got to get up to town. To St Kilda Road where the forensic people have been called in off the beaches and down from the mountains and away from their Sundays-around-the-pool and are waiting, all a-twitter and all a-stir in their lab coats, he says, for the blood he is bringing them, have been waiting such a long time for this blood they’re unconcerned and even blase about whether it’s delivered in test-tube, finger, ear, dick, or a whole left leg. Long as they can get it into their centrifuge and spin it ballistic and get it under their microscope and ogle it microscopic.
And he tells us if we bump into the boy that was originally attached to the finger he’s taxiing to St Kilda Road to contact him pronto or face what he calls big-time legal ramifications.
We sit in the sand not knowing what to say. We watch south. His white car appearing and disappearing in the folds of the Great Ocean Road with its flash of red and blue light that is only a flash of red and blue light because inside the car is a finger of our friend being sped to Melbourne to be studied by scientists. We watch until it’s gone away towards Aireys Inlet.
‘You know,’ says Jean, ‘for years I’ve felt wiser, hipper, cooler and … and more moral than every other person in town because I was presuming innocence.’ She’s crying.
‘Yeah, so did I,’ I say.
‘I’ve felt so righteous.’
‘Me too. I thought we were right.’
‘Fuck him,’ she says. ‘He never acted any other way but innocent. Was never burdened by any guilt or anything.’
‘Yeah … fuck him,’ I agree. ‘You think Lunn was right about him being dead?’
‘I don’t know? I never thought guilt was an option. I never thought self-mutilation was an option. So … suicide …’ she shrugs. She stands up. ‘Let’s swim.’
The sea is flat. As cold as the day is hot. We swim hard. In our own worlds like hard swimmers always are. Both of us sad. Both of us crying. Both of us feeling betrayed. Both of us feeling stupid. Both of us feeling monumentally fucked-with.
We swim until we’re three hundred metres off-shore and into a slow swell and she stops and hangs and I stop and hang and her sad, betrayed, stupid, monumentally-fucked-with world yells across at mine, ‘We make a pretty pathetic bohemian enclave.’
And mine yells back at her, ‘Hey, I’m in real estate.’ And she laughs while crying. I swim over to her and take hold of her and pull her in to me and even in this stark moment my sad, betrayed, stupid, monumentally-fucked-with world can’t help noticing her sad, betrayed, stupid, monumentally-fucked-with world is topless and can’t help noticing how hard the cold water has made the nipples in her sad, betrayed, stupid, monumentally-fucked-with world.
People around Lorne tend more toward philosophical observation than to straight-out snide comment. It’s a safer means of communication all round and won’t get them told to go and get fucked by Jean and won’t get them thrown up against a wall by me. So they observe … casually philosophically.
When Jean opens the gallery after lunch and goes to get her cappuccino from Cafe Gondwana where she always gets her cappuccino, Varlios, who serves up the free chick-peas and free olives and the expensive drinks, and who usually greets her by making a deal of her unmatched beauty and his potentially single status and by offering to buy tickets to any place on the planet, in Greece, where they could be in love alone, looks at his pebble-mix floor and says to her he is sorry to hear of her involvements with wrong persons, any man with a heart is sorry to hear of a beautiful lady’s involvements with wrong persons. Any man with eyes would be sorry to hear of her involvements.
He tells her, One time Thaw sits at this bar and eats my olives and secretly and with underhand pokes the olive pips into the side of the lumberjack cake that sits on the bar here and when I serve it up to a lady with big hair she nearly break her teeth and she start to call me a unhygienic little wop and a grubby little spic and I have to keep apologising through all the abuse just to keep off the legal action while Thaw snicker at me up at the bar. Varlios tells Jean this solemnly like it’s further proof the boy was bad all along.
And when I front for work on Monday morning Geoff Yeomans Senior blocks me at the front door and sucks his roly hard enough to make it crackle and asks me, ‘Well, Jack … isn’t this something?’ And then decides for himself, ‘This is really something. I want you to take the week off, Jack, while we see what we see.’
‘See what?’ I ask him. ‘I’ve got to show the Morgans from Toorak over that fibro in Smith Street and over nine Minapre Street and over the Kentucky Fried house this morning.’
‘That’s okay,’ he tells me. ‘I’ll do it myself. In the Mere. They probably don’t want to be glared at and pointed at anyway. And I haven’t forgotten what you said to that Halpin bloke who was concerned about the stumps under that shitbox in Albert Street, either.’
So I decide fishing. I pull in at the bowser of the She’Ll Depot to get twenty dollars worth of marine fuel for an afternoon’s trawling in Mark Daniel’s Ventura SeaSprite and old Sam Val Morbida who runs the franchise and pumps the fuel and who’s never done more than look at the sky and say, ‘Fair day considerin’ the time a year,’ whenever it was a fair day for the time of year, or look at the Go CATS sticker on Jean’s rear window and say ‘Cats are travellin’ okay,’ whenever they’d won two consecutive games, looks me in the eye and asks, ‘Twenty bucks worth?’ like it’s a suspicious amount … enough to run me way off the coast to the X that marks the spot. And I tell him, ‘Yeah, twenty.’ And then he pulls the trigger and watches the digital numbers flicker to $20.00 and says more or less just at the bowser, ‘Type a shit might go down all right in cities. But small towns are families.’
It’s this way everywhere. Everyone wants us to know they weren’t fooled. Everyone wants us to know, just philosophically and in a roundabout sort of way, we’re accessories after the fact. Everyone wants us to know they’re awake to the fact we’ve foisted a murderer on them, just for the style of the thing. Brought a murderer and a scandal right in among their children and their good names. A murderer who might still be among them. Wounded. Seven-fingered and desperate. Holed-up in some empty beach house.
I can’t even buy a milkshake at the Oxygen milk bar without Emily behind the counter looking right past me and across the street and over the waves out to sea where maybe there is some big commotion to hold a shopgirl spellbound and asking me, ‘Blue Heaven like usual?’
Through Monday and Tuesday Senior Constable Malcolm Lunn is bumping into us around town. Bumping into us on the pretext of asking us, Have we seen him? Have we heard from him? But really bumping into us to gloat. To ask us who we’ve got moving into our house next? Jack-the-Ripper maybe? The Boston Strangler? The Eboli virus? Telling us what a close-knit little bohemian enclave we are.
The forensic lab is fast-tracking our boy’s DNA results, he tells us. They should be through some time Wednesday. Then he’ll have cause and he’ll have manpower for a house-to-house search of all the holiday houses in town. Though he doesn’t expect that search to reveal any seven-fingered fugitive, he says. Because his experience with Advanced Self Mutilators and long and profitable ventures is … they don’t mix. He’d put London-to-a-brick on short, suicidal ventures.
At midday on Wednesday I’m in the main street, standing ordering Chinese at the service window of what everyone calls the S A Side Palace but which is really the Sea Side Palace with an E fallen off. I’m ordering beef with black bean sauce and fried rice and spring rolls and prawn crackers to take to Jean in the gallery.
His divisional van comes along the street conspicuous by its slowness. Holding up traffic. Prowling in first gear. He’s swivel-headed for infringement. Slit-eyed for the felonious. Checking out the caravan-park types, and the young surf types who are sleeping outside town in their panel-vans by night and driving in and parking in the main street and living out itinerant lives on our swell by day, and the types who may be tempted to double-park and sprint into a take-away shop for lunch, and the types who don’t belong to a type but look like trouble anyway. He stops behind a potential U-turn in a green Holden and reaches down and snaps his siren switch on and off and his divisional van shrieks and half-spins its blue and red lights and extinguishes the right-hand indicator of the potential U-turn in the green Holden and makes him wave sorry in his rear-view mirror and accelerate slowly down the road the way he doesn’t want to go.
He swivels his gaze along past the Oxygen where people are drinking milkshakes in disposable containers and are thus potential litterbugs. Looks on toward Bill’s Chook Event where a family is feeding the chicken bones of their lunch to a Labrador, which isn’t illegal but isn’t recommended by vets. Draws level with me at the S A Side Palace just as I’m telling Ashley Chan I’ll put some extra sweet chili sauce on the spring rolls and looks on past me with maybe the merest stutter of recognition, of double-take … or maybe was just a routine check of an unknown man reaching over the service counter deep into a Chinese restaurant.
Moves up a gear then into second and cruises off south. Swings out around a Mitsubishi Sigma double-parked with its hazard lights flashing provocatively opposite the newsagency and swings back onto his side of the road and keeps travelling. Ignores a full-on gang of actual youths kicking a football on the footpath amidst strolling holiday-makers.
It’s not his neglect of the illegally parked Mitsubishi Sigma tips me off. Though I know the flagrant misuse of hazard lights for trivial expeditions galls him. What tips me off is the youths. Their footballing. Their passionate kick-to-kick. A screamer taken by one of them on the shoulders of another that sends him pitching forward into half a dozen geriatrics clearly marked as holiday-makers by their Panama hats.
Until he ignores actual youths I think he hasn’t seen me. Hasn’t recognised me, bending into that darkness and all that Chinese ambience as I was. But Senior Constable Malcolm Lunn has an inability to ignore the kick-to-kick mayhem of actual youths in his town as a normal thing. So when he ignores the actual youths I know he’s seen me. Has passed up this opportunity to bump into me and gloat. Has shifted up a gear because of me. Has even forgone the pleasure of taking hold of some youth by his collar and pulling him up close to where his hatbrim touches youthful fringe and advising him on the significant difference between a Sporting Field and a Public Thoroughfare. Because of me.
He turned up the hill to the police station. I pay Ashley Chan and follow him up there with my bag of Chinese. His divisional van is parked outside in the shade of a huge blue gum. It’s empty. I go inside without giving the knock the sign on the door tells me to give before entering. At the sound of the door he comes out from a back room with his forehead all knotted up ready to let someone know what he thinks about the lack of knock. He’s got something impossible to answer like, ‘Were you born in a tent?’ on his lips. Then he sees it’s me and he loses the knots in his brow and forgets his question and he takes hold of his belt and lifts his trousers and swivels them clockwise and anti-clockwise until they’re back low where he lifted them from and he looks to the left of me and enquires, ‘Yeah?
And I look straight at him and ask, ‘Well?’
And he puts his arms out with his palms down on the counter and asks, ‘Well what?’
‘You know, “Well What?” What did his blood say?’ I ask.
He goes into the grave-scowl he uses against the whole gamut of usual evil from unindicated lane-swapping to surfie-backchat. He rubs the back of his neck and sighs like the evil is heavy there today and giving him more than the normal pain. ‘Your boy,’ he says, ‘is a serious drunk driver as well as all his other faults. Blood alcohol level in that finger of point-two-four. He’s putting the lives of his fellow road users at risk driving ‘round in that state.’
‘He didn’t kill that girl?’
‘He’s bound to kill someone driving in that state.’
‘He didn’t kill her.’
The grave-scowl goes all limp and he looks at me mostly with his bottom lip which is full-on erect at me. And his eyes go sorry about himself and ask me to feel the same because isn’t this guilt-and-innocence trick the hardest one a man ever has to master, and because of his chosen vocation he has to try and master it over and over, and it’s treacherous and traitorous to a degree that will take no mastery from man. Pulls the rug from under him just when he thinks he is familiar with innocence and knocks the wind from his sails just when he thinks he’s fully awake to guilt. And a sure-fire full-on felon turns out to be something else.
I try and ease his burden by telling him, ‘Mal, you’d be the second greatest fuck-up I’ve ever met.’ And instead of his eyes lighting with curiosity about who was the greatest they harden and narrow and he retracts his bottom lip and asks me, ‘You got any more enquiries I can help you with, or not?’
The people of Lorne say even before the finger they knew it. Knew it from the moment they met him. Never even contemplated what they call the other possibility. Everyone says, and everyone nods and agrees with whoever else is saying it, that even before the finger proved it they saw it in his eye and saw it in his manner. Saw something True Blue and saw something called character. Saw he was all right. Was innocent.
And everyone said it was just like the bloody cops to need a whole right ring-finger, or at a bare minimum the two knuckles of it they got, to be able to work out what the rest of them could see in his eye and in his actions. That he was a little foul-mouthed and long-haired and that his choice of intoxicant wasn’t theirs and maybe he was a little fast and loose with British vehicles, but that he was, for all that, the genuine article, and couldn’t have, not in a million years, done it.
And now it’s proved he’s innocent they want to put their arms around him and tell him they knew all along what science just proved. So where is he? They’re asking me. Where is he to put their arms around and to tell how he fills a valuable niche in the community here? Where?
Part 6
17
Mollycoddled Recidivists
The BBK men say what brought them up off their flushes and their straights and out of their air-conned site-vans into the heat of the day was the speed-roar of gravel on underbody. Starting low and building fast into speculations about some drunken idiot or some drunken abo trying to get himself killed. Even above old Bridget Slee’s voice on the audio tape they have cranked up to eight they can hear it. So by the time the vehicle is close they’re all outside watching to see what manner of fuckwit it is will drive so fast on a gravel road. A drunken one? A black one? A white one? A running-late one? An Ayrton Senna fan fuckwit? A fuckwit late back for his three-week shift on the rigs of the north-west shelf? They wince into the heat mirage to see which one.
The metallic green Range Rover comes floating off the highway over the groomed desert into Johnson Street still in top gear with its boiling wake of red dust behind it and the BBK men back up against their site-vans and swear Stupid Prick and Mad Bastard as it slides sideways and rocks into stillness out front of my mother’s house and the red dust goes boiling on past it and pirouettes around it and washes up against them and swirls around them. The engine dies and the car thuds with music for a second before that dies too and the door pops open soundless and the manner of fuckwit that falls out is Thaw.
He falls onto his hands and knees on the hot red rock and his mirror-glasses drop off his face and a lens cracks and the stubby in his right hand breaks. He swears and puts his glasses back on with his left hand and stands up and asks above the holiday soliloquy of old Bridget Slee, ‘F
uck are you mollycoddled recidivists gawking at?’ His right hand is in a plastic bag taped onto his wrist with silver duct tape. The bag started out transparent but has gone black with days’-old blood and the BBK men can only guess at how much hand is in there.
Thaw cocks his head to listen to Bridget Slee. Stands there swaying, amazed at the old woman’s voice. Bridget Slee is telling of the beauty of New England, USA, while her husband Mai corrects place-names and distances over her shoulder and tells her not to forget to mention how friendly the Americans are and not to forget to mention how fat the Americans are and not to forget to tell her what reasonable prices the Howard Johnsons are if she’s ever in the States. And they listen to Bridget hope my mother had a Merry Christmas and tell my mother her and Mal, for the first time ever, had a white one which was an exciting fairy tale of a Christmas.
‘Fuck’s that?’ Thaw wants to know.
And Phil, who is foreman again for this fortnight, tells him, A tape. Audio mail. Friends of Belle getting in touch. We play it for her. Keep her from getting lonely.’
‘Turn it off,’ Thaw says. And the BBK men look at each other and Phil nods, yes turn it off, to one of them because he knows even somewhat sleep-deprived Thaw will smash a good sound system and he doesn’t want to see what he’ll do to one injured and drunk.
The old woman’s voice stops mid-reverie about how far from Hannah and the old days they are now and how different it is and how they get served huge piles of meat with every meal in America and how she’s got to constantly watch Mal’s intake of calories.
In the silence Thaw says, ‘That’s better. I’ve brought you mollycoddled recidivists some fresh fish. Picked it up in Port Augusta on the way through.’ He leans across the driver’s seat of the Range Rover and comes out holding a small foam esky by its rope handle and hands it to Phil. ‘Boarfish,’ he says. ‘South Aussie fish that tastes better than everything else in the Bight. What the Crow-Eaters reckon anyway.’
Silences Long Gone Page 25