Cara is Missing

by Tim Buckley

  Emily saw him as soon as we emerged from the narrow pass that wound its way over the mountain and squealed at me to stop. She was already fumbling with her seat belt as I pulled in a hundred metres or so past where he sat and she jumped out of the car. The road was busy with tourist traffic but nobody seemed interested in stopping, all set on getting to the park before the gates closed at dusk. I took out the map to check once again that we were on the right track – Emily’s navigating was often based more on… instinct than on what the map had to offer and more than once already we’d found ourselves at the dead end of a dirt track as darkness fell. But it seemed that, this time, we were in fact roughly where we needed to be and so I folded the map away and went to see what she was doing.

  The road ran along a narrow ledge, a towering cliff wall on one side and a deep valley on the other. I waited for a gap in the traffic and ran across the road to look down into the valley and the muddy river that ambled through it. To the west, a huge orange sun was dropping slowly towards the hilltops but the ground was still hot and the air was thick with a warm bouquet of earth, spice and dung. By the time I’d strolled back to the old man’s “shop”, Emily was already pulling rolled-up banknotes from her handbag and the old man was looking at her with a slightly bemused look on his face.

  “Wilde,” she called out to me, “how much cash have you got?”

  That was a question I’d learned to duck.

  “Why?”

  “We have to buy these, all of them. Jacob carved all of them himself, can you believe it?! They’re carved from bone, so the spirit of every animal lives on in the carvings!! You can feel it! Come here, touch them. I mean it, you can feel their spirit!”

  “How much?”

  There must have been more than a hundred little figurines on the table, and a hand-scrawled sign that said they were for sale for twenty rand each. Two hundred euros? For this roadside rubbish?

  “Whatever we have, Wilde, they’re beautiful. We’ll just have to buy as many as we can afford with whatever cash we have.”

  I looked at the old man and the old man just smiled back.

  “Tell you what,” I said, “how about we take ten? Let’s say a hundred and fifty rand?”

  But Jacob just continued to smile.

  “What are you talking about, Wilde?” Emily said. “Ten? We’ll never get this chance again. We’ll never be here again. We’ll take as many as we can.”

  “Oh come on, Emily, we don’t need a hundred little… whatever they are. Even if we did, we don’t have space in the bags. Let’s just take a few, they’ll be a nice souvenir, eh?”

  She shook her head and put her hand on Jacob’s shoulder.

  “But, Wilde, it’s getting dark and he might not be able to sell them. He’s been here all day and he still has all of these left. He has a family to feed and children to clothe – I don’t care if we take the carvings or not, we have to help him.”

  I shook my head in defeat but, for some reason that I still don’t understand, I didn’t think I was being ripped off. I was about to pay a couple of hundred quid for the carved spirits of dead animals by the side of a road so that this man could feed his unseen family, and I was somehow prepared to do it. That’s what Emily could do. She could make me feel like a churlish pig for failing to believe even the most dubious fairy story. But there was something about the old man. His smile didn’t quite make it to his eyes and there was a sadness in him, a weary sense of something close to despair. With a long sigh and a shake of the head at my own gullibility, I pulled what cash I had from my wallet and gave it to her. She shoved the notes into Jacob’s hands without counting them.

  “Thank you, lady,” he said in that rich, lazy African drawl, “thank you so much.”

  He stuffed the cash into his pockets and started to gather up the little figurines. I put out a hand to stop him.

  “No, don’t worry about it. We really don’t have room for them. You keep them and maybe you’ll sell them tomorrow, eh?”

  He looked at me for a moment with those sad eyes and then picked up two, an elephant and a zebra. He took Emily’s hand and put the zebra in it, closing her fingers around it gently. Then he gave me the elephant.

  “For luck,” he said, nodding sagely, “their spirits will bring you much good luck.”

  I suppose they did. It might have been better if they never had.

  46

  Emily wasn’t awake when I left just as the sun came up the next morning, so I left a note on the fridge saying I’d catch up with her later in the day and I headed over to the lighthouse. I didn’t need to be away quite so promptly, I just wasn’t looking forward to an awkward exchange and getting out early seemed like a good way to avoid it. Maybe she was lying awake in bed listening to me leave and thinking exactly the same thing. I had a quick look around the yard before I left. The three babydolls were still in the pen and there was no sign that anybody had been snooping around the sheds or around the cars.

  I’d expected to be first out to the lighthouse, but I saw Nathan’s jeep kicking up a cloud of dust on the road ahead as I got near the cape.

  “Blimey,” he said, looking at his watch as I got out of the jeep. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “Something like that,” I said, “but you will not fucking believe what’s happened.”

  We went to the kitchen to make some coffee and I told him about the sheep. For once, Nathan was surprised. He was shocked.

  “I can’t believe it, mate,” he said. “Fuck me. The graffiti was one thing, but this? This is a whole new level of low.”

  He’d lived in Clovelly his whole life and nothing like this, he said, had ever happened before. When any of the local animosities and feuds had flared up in the past, there was an honour in how they were settled and savagely butchering innocent livestock was not part of that code.

  “Any idea who might have done it?” he said.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Willis reckons the graffiti was probably some kids who heard their parents talking about us, decided to dish out some justice,” I said. “But he reckons this is different. Maybe he’s right. Let’s face it, there are plenty of suspects. The first thing I thought was that it could be Gretz or one of his morons but, to be honest, I don’t see them having the balls for something like this. Anyway, Karl would probably have recognised them. I suppose it could be one of the other producers, pissed off that Emily hasn’t been spraying the vines. But then it could be anybody who read Napier’s article and decided to teach us a lesson. As Willis said, there’s been a lot of talk.”

  “You think it might have been Cooper?” he said, quietly.

  I nodded.

  “It crossed my mind. I don’t know him well enough to know if he’d do something like that. Do you think?”

  He shrugged.

  “It’d be a bit extreme… But I don’t know. He’s got a couple of bolts loose. I don’t know what he’d do. Did Emily see it?”

  I shook my head.

  “I got it cleaned up before she got back. But she was really shaken up when I told her about it, I stayed there last night so she wouldn’t be on her own. I’m not sure how good an idea that was, to be honest.”

  “What else could you do? You couldn’t leave her there alone after something like that. You going to stay there for a while?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I should and I don’t want to, but she was really upset.”

  “Would it help if Carly asked her to stay at ours?”

  “Thanks, Nate, that’s really good of you. But she was adamant that they weren’t going to drive her out of her own home. Maybe after she’s had a day to digest it, though… I don’t know.”

  “Well, the offer stands so whatever you think is best, yeah?”

  I looked at my watch.

  “Actually, if you don’t need me here for a bit, I m
ight go into the hospital? I haven’t been to see Stevie for a few days, I should check how he’s doing.”

  “Sure,” said Nathan. “Let’s hope for some good news for a change, eh?”

  ***

  It had actually been more than a week since I’d seen Stevie and I felt bad that I hadn’t been in more often. Honestly, there felt little point going in to see him. He was still in an induced coma and he had no idea that I was even there. I could do nothing for him and, the last time I’d been in, I ended up walking away thinking it had been more an exercise in salving my own conscience than doing anything for Stevie. I was also reluctant to meet his family again. That last time, I’d met his parents and I realised quickly that they didn’t want me to be there. His mother, a slight, fidgety woman, sat by his bed and dabbed his forehead with a damp cloth, whispering in his ear. It wasn’t anything she said, but she was obviously uncomfortable having me there and I felt like an outsider gatecrashing a family affair.

  His father, on the other hand, was not shy in telling me exactly what he thought. If it was my site, he said, then it was my responsibility to make sure the workers were provided for in the case of an accident. That was the Australian way, he said pointedly, in case I’d forgotten that I was a blow-in, a guest in his country. I tried to explain that we had rules on site and that we did our best to enforce them, but that we couldn’t stop the men from taking off their helmets when they chose to and that was why the insurance company had refused to pay out. We could go to court, but my solicitor had told me we had no chance of winning, it would be good money after bad.

  “Folks tell me you’re a wealthy man,” he said, swatting away my excuses with a gnarled old hand. “They tell me you won a fortune on the lottery, or something. If you got money, then you got a responsibility to look after my boy!”

  There was no point in even having that conversation and I wanted to avoid, as Nathan had put it, backing myself into a corner from where there was no way out. So I made my excuses and left, the sound of his anger echoing in the corridor behind me. The prospect of having that conversation all over again had been part of the reason I’d stayed away, but I’d heard Robbie saying earlier that week that Stevie’s folks had gone back up to Darwin for a few days and so I was pretty sure the coast was clear.

  As I was walking down the corridor to his room, I bumped into the doctor that I’d met a couple of times on previous visits. He was a huge man with a shaven head and tattoos visible on his neck through his open shirt collar. He looked more like a special forces operative than a medic and I always got the impression that visitors just annoyed him and that he was always just about stifling the urge to hit somebody.

  “Not good,” was his answer when I asked about Stevie. “Not good at all. We’d expect to see some reaction to the treatment by now, but there’s been nothing. We have him on a waiting list for a specialist bed in Perth, but my guess is there won’t be one free for a couple of months.”

  I went into the room and stood by the bed. He had shrunk, it seemed to my eyes, and his ruddy builder’s tan had faded to a pallid grey. I chatted to him for a bit, told him about the site and what the guys had been doing. I told him about Cooper and about telling him and his cronies to get off my site and that it was all going pear-shaped. I wouldn’t have told him any of that if he’d been working on the site, but he wasn’t going to tell anyone and it wouldn’t really matter if he did.

  “You’re a ray of sunshine, aren’t you?” said a voice behind me, making me jump.

  I turned to find a young woman standing in the doorway, a coffee and a chocolate bar in her hands.

  “Sorry, I er…” I stuttered, embarrassed. “I’m Wilde, Stevie works for me.”

  “I guessed,” she said. “He hasn’t had many visitors and my folks said you’d been in before. Dad reckoned he chased you out, ‘and good riddance’, he said!”

  I felt suddenly like I was at the wrong party again.

  “Look, I thought he’d be on his own. I’ll leave, I don’t want to intrude.”

  She shook her head and sipped the vending machine coffee.

  “Stay, I don’t mind. Glad of the company, to be honest.”

  She was a pretty girl with short, blonde hair and wide, mischievous eyes that gave her an elfin look. She sat down on the bed and squeezed Stevie’s hand.

  “That’s right, isn’t it, bro? We could use the company.”

  “You’re Stevie’s sister? You live in Sydney, right?” I said, pulling up the plastic chair from behind the door and sitting beside the bed.

  “That’s right, I’m Karen. I came in yesterday, to give Mum and Dad a chance to go home and get a few things sorted out. I heard you talking to the doc. He’s a bundle of laughs and all, isn’t he?”

  “Maybe not the best bedside manner… !” I said.

  “But he doesn’t know Stevie,” she said, smiling at him. “Stubborn bugger, he is. He’s always been a clumsy bugger, too. He’s three years younger than me and I spent my whole childhood getting slapped by my folks for letting him get hurt! Stevie fell out of a tree, Karen got a slap. Stevie fell off his bike, Karen got a slap. I ended up with more bruises than him and he was the klutz! Never listened to anybody, just kept going until he’d always gone one step too far.”

  “He’s a good worker,” I said, weakly, searching in my head for something personal to say about him. I wanted to laugh with her about an idiosyncrasy that we all laughed about or an irrational obsession or some little habit, but I had nothing. I’d only known him from being on the site with him and, like most of the guys, I didn’t really know anything about him despite spending months in his company. “All the guys liked him.”

  She smiled.

  “That’s Stevie, everybody’s buddy!”

  Suddenly, something flashed into my mind from one night with Nathan and the crew in the Schoolhouse, after work on a Friday.

  “He loves bikes, doesn’t he? Motorbikes, I mean?” I said, clutching the memory from the air around my head.

  She rolled her eyes but there was affection even in that.

  “He does! – and Christ, what a combination that is, a thousand CCs of motorbike engine under the world’s clumsiest man! Yeah, he loves them. Races them back home, dirt bikes mostly. Follows the professional races whenever he has the money. Which is why he never has any money!”

  I smiled, selfishly relieved to have found at least one connection.

  At that, a nurse came in to check on Stevie and asked us to step outside. Karen kissed his cheek as she stood up and for just a moment the airy bravado slipped from her face.

  “I’ll just be outside, Stevie,” she whispered.

  She was easy to talk to and we chatted for a while, about this and that, while the nurse was making his bed and plumping his pillows.

  “You want to get another coffee?” I said.

  “Sure. I don’t really drink coffee, but it’s something to do!”

  So we wandered down to the canteen and then back to his room and she chatted all the way. It felt like she was glad of the company and I was glad to be able to at least give her that. The nurse had finished by the time we got back and so we sat for a while with Stevie. Another nurse came in to check his drip and I looked at my watch.

  “Listen, I need to get away,” I said, “but I’ll come back in soon. You going to be around?”

  She nodded.

  “My folks won’t be back for a few days – I’ll stay until they get back.”

  “OK. Well, I guess I’ll see you then?”

  “Yeah, see you then.”

  47

  It was a couple of days later that I got a message from Nathan that Robbie’s chat with Cooper and the others seemed to have worked. He said they’d be out on the site the next morning and it might be a good day to get out there ahead of the men. Nathan was there when I arrived, as usual, getting the place o
pened up and ready for the day. I went to the little kitchen and made a couple of coffees and took one out to him.

  “You know,” he said, slowly, picking his words, “I still see you coming up the track, pulling into the lot and parking the jeep, and I still expect to see you walking over with her in your arms. Or see her toddling along beside you…”

  He paused, and I wanted to tell him “Thanks”, for keeping her in his head, but the words wouldn’t come out.

  “Sorry, mate, sorry,” he blustered, embarrassed to have brought it up and trying to put it away. “That was a dumb thing to say. ‘Not-a-clue Nathan’ they call me! Sorry…”

  “It’s OK, Nate,” I managed, “thanks, man.”

  A truck pulled up to the little parking lot outside and some of the crew made their way onto the site.

  “Morning, boys,” Nathan shouted, recovering his stride. “Coffee’s on.”

  The crew started their morning routine of unsheathing tools and opening cans of paint and creosote and stirring them to get them ready for the day. Someone fired up the generator and somebody else turned on the radio that scratched out the tinny soundtrack to every day’s work. There was more of the banter and complaining and laughing that I remembered from before and the guys all came to get a coffee to take with them to wherever they were working that morning.

  “Hey, Rob,” Nathan called out as Robbie poured himself some coffee, “what time did Cooper say they’d be here?”

  “They said first thing, boss. Should be here soon, I reckon.”

  Nathan turned to me and raised his eyebrows.

  “You ready, then? To talk to them?”

  I nodded. After all that had happened in the week gone by, they’d picked the wrong day for a fight. Right on cue, another truck pulled into the lot. The engine was cut and the four renegades piled out and came walking over to where Nathan and I were standing. The other workers stopped what they were doing and watched them stride over. There were a few “G’days” and a few jokes, but there was suddenly a tension in the air.