by Tim Buckley
I couldn’t see that reducing the footprint was going to be an option. It would take a huge amount of structural work and at least a couple of months. I didn’t have the money to even consider that kind of expense. Even if I could have afforded it, the whole plan would change and would require a new approval from the planning board. Given all of these new problems, the chances of them granting it had to be slim.
“How much for the land?”
He gave me a number and I rolled my eyes. Even before I’d discovered we were broke, I could never have justified that much money for a patch of coastal scrubland.
“And that,” he went on, “is if they would even sell it to you. It’s a public right of way and there’s a protected Nyoongar burial site on the other side of the cape. Any sale would have to go through a consultation process. You probably wouldn’t get it, but even if you did it would take time. And I’m not sure the planning board would give you that time.”
The facts had stopped moving in my head now and I understood what was happening to me. But I needed to hear it from Baxter, to make sure there was no misunderstanding.
“And if I can’t do that? If I can’t change the footprint and I can’t buy the land?”
He sighed and pinched his brow. I’m sure he’d hoped I wouldn’t ask him to set it out in words.
“Then the FTC provisions would take effect,” he said, so quietly I could hardly hear him.
“FTC?” I said. “What’s that?”
“Failure to Comply. You’d have to knock it down, Wilde. You’d have to knock the whole thing down.”
I left Baxter’s office with a pounding headache. I’d committed to come back to him with some options that might save us all going to court and, although I could tell he didn’t think there was much chance that I’d find a solution, he agreed to hold off for a week or so to give me time to come up with some ideas. I just wanted to get back to the apartment, drink a beer and lie down in the dark. I should have gone to the site and talked to Nathan about it but I needed some time to go through it in my own head, to make some sense of it all. So I went back to the apartment and replayed the conversation over and over again.
The simple truth was that I could see no way around it. There was no way we could make the changes so that the building would meet the planning regulations and, even if they agreed to sell it to me, I couldn’t afford to take the risk of buying the additional land. I was already under water, ploughing more money into the project just seemed reckless. There was a voice somewhere deep in my head telling me that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if they just knocked it down. Granted, I was on the hook for the cost of it, but I just didn’t have the money and I figured they couldn’t take what I didn’t have.
Eventually, I gave in to the reality that I had to tell Nathan sooner rather than later, before we spent any more money. And we had to make some plans before the whole thing was taken out of our hands. So I called him and arranged to go to his place – this wasn’t a conversation for the pub. In any event, even though it might not have been intentional on the part of most of the folks there, the staring and hushed voices whenever I walked in were starting to make me feel like a visitor to a backwoods town in a horror movie.
“I’m going to guess this isn’t good news, Wilde!” Nathan said with a smirk, handing me a beer and sitting down at the table beside me on the stoop.
“However bad you think it might be, Nate,” I said, taking a long swig from the beer, “you’re not even close.” I paused, trying to find the way in to what was a long story. Eventually, I decided to just knock down the front door. “You know I went to see Baxter today, to try to get him to accept the amended plans? Turns out, I needn’t have bothered. He told me someone has raised an objection with the planning board. Somehow, they found out that we’re in breach of the planning rules and, if we can’t fix it, they’ll make us knock the whole thing down. Oh and, by the way, he tells me we can’t fix it.”
He frowned, absorbing the mess we were in. He couldn’t.
“Wait,” he said, “what are you talking about? We’re not in breach?”
I told him the story as Baxter had explained it to me and, maybe for the first time that I’d seen, Nathan was speechless. He just sat there and I could almost hear the gears in his head grinding behind his slackly open mouth. Finally, he just shook his head.
“I don’t fucking believe this, Wilde,” he said. “Who the fuck objected?”
“Don’t know, Baxter wouldn’t tell me.”
“But who could have known? That’s not something that dawns on you when you’re out for a walk on the Cape. ‘That’s a nice lighthouse… hang on, it looks too big for that plot!’ Someone must have been checking. And someone at the council must have helped. Shit! This is a vendetta, mate!”
I nodded. I’d come to the same conclusion myself an hour before. A couple of weeks back, I’d assumed that the animosity I’d felt in town was harmless, that it just meant we’d find people a bit less friendly and find things a bit more awkward. I’d even assumed it would pass, in time. The graffiti and the sheep changed the game, but this was different again. Somebody had gone out of their way to do the research and to hit us where they knew it would hurt and somebody with authority had given them the information they needed.
We talked about it for hours that night, tried to find a solution where we knew really there was none.
“So now what?” Nathan said finally, bringing back a couple more stubbies from the fridge although I’d long ago had enough.
I shrugged.
“We’re left with three alternatives, as far as I can see,” I said, with the lucid certainty of someone who’s had too much to drink. “One, we make the changes so that it meets the regulations. That’s going to cost a fortune, we’d have to almost start again and we’d never meet the deadline. Two, we try to buy the extra land. But I can’t afford it and the chances of the council selling a right of way to the burial ground are somewhere between fuck all and none. We’re just going to spend time and money that I don’t have to get to the same place we are today. And three, we challenge the planning objection. See number two above.”
“And four?”
I laughed. I felt like the fiddler on the roof, with not enough hands for all of the impossible alternatives.
“Oh yeah, four… well, four is we just wind it down and cut our losses. But the council will try to make me pay to demolish it and, even if they don’t, I’m still left with nothing after all the money I’ve spent. At least if I was able to finish it, I’d have an asset that I could sell to get some of my money back. Or at least that’s fine in theory but, realistically, who’s going to buy a lighthouse in the middle of nowhere? The dream was great when I had money. Now I’m broke and it turns out poor people can’t afford dreams!”
Nathan shook his head and let out a long, weary sigh.
“Jesus Christ, Wilde. That’s not the best set of options I’ve ever heard.”
“Not great, Nathan,” I agreed. “Not great. Let’s keep going for now until I can talk to a lawyer and see just how much it would cost to challenge this. I told Baxter I’d come back to him with some options that might let us finish the job and meet the planning regulations, but I don’t think that’s going to work. We can’t take on any more cost but let’s finish what work we have in progress. We’ll have to make a call one way or the other in the next couple of weeks.”
“We have to give the boys a week’s notice.”
“OK. We’ll decide soon. Either we finish this thing, or we cut and run.”
***
The morning after a night on Nathan’s sofa was no better than after a night in Bobby’s spare room and I resolved for the second time in as many weeks that I was not going to do that again. The next time I got hammered, I was doing it at home, or at least no more than walking distance from my own bed. Nathan had already left for the s
ite when Carly woke me with a coffee.
“Aren’t you boys getting a bit old for this?” she said with the smug grin of the clean-living. “Nathan looked like shit warmed up when he left this morning!”
“I have few pleasures left in my life, Carly – please don’t take this one away from me!”
She threw me a crooked look.
“Really? Waking up on somebody else’s sofa in yesterday’s clothes with a stiff neck and a stinking hangover? That’s what you call a pleasure, is it? You really do need a change!”
She was joking, but also she wasn’t and her smile didn’t attempt to conceal the admonishment. Of course, she was right. Something did have to change and it was probably about time I acknowledged that. I drained the coffee and made my way back to the apartment. On the road out to the coast, I got caught behind a little vineyard tractor with a sprayer on the back, throwing clumps of clay off its tyres into the verges on either side of the narrow road. The driver waved to me that I was clear to overtake him, but something made me sit behind it, pootling along the road at thirty kilometres an hour. There was something reassuringly tangible about it, about the certainty of its role in life and the unhurried nature of its work. I realised that I craved something of that structure, of that simplicity in a life that seemed to be lurching from drama to crisis. Finally, he pulled off the road and into a field of vines, stopping to pull out the arms on the sprayer and giving me a friendly wave as I passed. He mustn’t recognise me, I thought.
I got back to the apartment and crashed out on the bed for an hour. I was just out of the shower and checking for messages on Cara’s web page when my phone rang.
“Wilde?” said a voice I recognised. “It’s David Napier.”
I was still angry with Napier, all the more so as more antipathy bubbled to the surface around us. He might not have created that antipathy, but his article had been the valve that released it and, since then, somebody had daubed vitriol on our wall, somebody had slaughtered a babydoll and somebody had set out to destroy the project at the lighthouse. So I was still angry, but he had convinced me that he wasn’t on a witch-hunt and that he’d at least written the story with honourable intentions. That people’s own petty jealousies and bitterness had led them to act like that was not, I had to admit, his fault. But I was still angry.
“What can I do for you, David?” I said. Apart from anything else, and whatever bones I had to pick with him, Napier wasn’t someone I wanted to antagonise given his proven, ready influence over what everybody in town thought of me and of Emily.
“It’s more about what I can do for you, actually,” he said, “any chance we could meet?”
“It’s not a great time, David, to be honest. Can’t we do it over the phone?”
“It’s about Cara. I might have a lead.”
52
I covered the two hundred-odd kilometres to Perth faster than I ever had before and I got to The Bookshelf café just as the lunchtime crowd was drifting back to the surrounding shops and office blocks. Napier was sitting at a table by the window and I took a seat beside him.
“Hey, Wilde,” he said, looking up from his phone and putting it back in the pocket of his jacket. “You must have broken a lot of speed limits, eh?!”
“What have you heard about Cara?” I said, not interested in making small talk.
He started to speak but the waitress arrived just then to take my order. I asked her for a coffee and bristled while she went through the list of other things I could have but didn’t want.
“Just a coffee, thanks,” I snapped, and she scuttled away.
“This is strictly between us, Wilde, OK?” Napier said sternly, looking me straight in the eye. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this but, well, I feel bad about what’s happened so I’m going to ignore my better judgement. But you have to give me your word it will go no further? I’m not one for idle threats, and just bear in mind what I can do if you cross me, yeah?”
I nodded, impatient for him to just cut to the chase.
“OK,” he said, and started the story.
Napier had been working on an investigation into doctors in the Perth metropolitan health service who, he had been tipped off, were “selling” prescriptions for powerful painkillers, sleeping medication, antidepressants and other drugs to patients who couldn’t get a prescription or a repeat prescription from their own doctors. There was a suspicion in local government and in the police that the practice was rampant and that it might be driving a spike in addiction levels and might even have been to blame for a number of deaths across the city. Napier and a couple of his colleagues had spent months trying to unearth the people at the core of the scandal, but they had come up with nothing.
“There were a few guys who were… flexible, let’s say, in their prescriptions policy, but it was nothing like the epidemic – pardon the pun – that we’d been led to believe. Eventually, we shut it down and moved on.”
He’d thought no more about it until, earlier that week, he’d been reading through his old notes before filing them away for good in some dark, dusty corner of his computer.
“It’s a journalist thing,” he said, “you’re always paranoid about missing the next big story when it’s been right there in front of your eyes the whole time. So whenever I’m filing stuff away, I can’t help myself but check one last time just in case…”
And in this case, something caught his eye. Napier had had a tip-off that a doctor in Carravale was the man you wanted to see if you needed painkillers with no questions asked, and so he paid him a visit. After a while chatting with him, it was clear that, while he could be fairly accommodating with his prescription book if the price was right, he was no drug lord. In the end, Napier figured there wasn’t much of a story in it but something he said, something Napier didn’t think much of at the time, jumped out at him.
“There was a mother with two kids in the waiting room, two little boys, who were running rampant around the place, knocking things over, banging into other patients, it was carnage. The mother was just sitting there, tapping on her phone, oblivious to the whole thing. The doctor was getting tired of the racket.
“‘Everybody blames the children,’ he said to me, ‘but it’s the parents that should be strung up! You need a bloody licence to have a dog but any moron can have a child!’”
Once the doctor got on the subject of children, there was no stopping him. He clearly loved kids and he got so wound up about “bloody part-time parenting” that Napier warmed to him, a little. It made him think that even if this doctor was a bit of a cowboy, he couldn’t be all bad.
“Then he started telling me about a child who’d been in with her mother a week or so earlier. They were new to the area, apparently, he hadn’t seen them before. It wasn’t this kid’s behaviour that he remembered, rather it was how sad she looked. She was so quiet, didn’t say a word. The mother seemed distracted, on edge. It wasn’t even that he blamed her for that, who knows what troubles people have, but it made him sad to see the kid so sad. She was about Cara’s age, ‘a pretty little thing,’ he called her, ‘with her little princess boots.’”
“Princess boots?” I said, sitting bolt upright in the chair. “He said that? You’re sure?”
Napier nodded. “And that’s not all. The woman had brought the little girl in because she had a cough, a barking cough.”
It was like I’d been tasered, like a bolt of electricity had flashed through my body. Napier could see my reaction and tried to temper my anticipation.
“This could be nothing, Wilde,” he warned. “I gave it to my news editor and he didn’t seem to think it was worth following up. There are probably thousands of kids out there with those boots and thousands of kids with a cough this time of year. But I checked the dates and it was right around the time Cara went missing and… I don’t know, it just seemed like a coincidence. You might put it all together and co
me up with nothing but it has to be worth a try, at least, right?”
***
Carravale is a working-class residential suburb north-east of the CBD, along the Swan river. It was made up of a criss-cross grid of arrow-straight roads lined with nondescript, single-storey houses on small lots. Here and there, empty lots were littered with plastic bottles and bags, and the containing walls were daubed with sloppy graffiti. The roads were potholed and patched and weary weeds sprouted from the cracks in the pavements. The grass planted in the roadside verges was patchy and worn away to dusty dirt every couple of hundred metres. A few retail units advertised bargain basement sales from gaudy billboards and the whole place had a depressed, run-down feel, like a neighbourhood that Perth’s boom had left behind.
The doctor’s name was Carlton and he had a surgery on the first floor of the local shopping centre, the only access to which was a steep outdoor staircase from the car park. Napier had given me the address with a warning not to blunder in like a bull in the proverbial china shop. The doctor had done nothing wrong, at least nothing that might have caused any harm to Cara. Aggression wasn’t going to achieve anything.
I did think about going to Carter with the information but even if he had the resources – or the inclination – to look into it, it might take days or even weeks, by which time it might be too late. That we could do nothing, our absolute helplessness in the face of our worst nightmare, had been probably the hardest part. We could trawl the website we’d set up for messages or clues; we could hand out flyers in the local towns; we could badger the local and national newspapers and radio stations to carry stories about Cara, but we knew in our hearts that it was for nothing. She could be, we had to accept, anywhere in the world, anywhere. And yet we were in Yallingup or Bunbury at a Saturday market asking if anybody had seen her. Our only comfort in that time was that at least the police were searching for her, with all of the resources and experience and contacts that they could bring to bear. Even if we were doing nothing, they were always on the job. But as time went on, we knew that their commitment was wavering in the face of passing time and other priorities and that became the hardest thing to take. Now I had a real lead, a tangible tip-off, and I wasn’t going to pass it on for somebody to put at the bottom of their to-do list. So I scribbled down the name and address and headed for Carravale.