Soon Read online

  I sometimes think my whole life has been an ongoing sequence of stops and starts. Until, last June, I arrived at where I am now.

  Limbo.

  Li isn’t back by the time I’ve had enough of pruning the grapes. When I call her mobile she’s pissed off, has had a flat tyre on the highway 50 kilometres from Nebulah, as well as the truck’s usual routine of overheating. She’ll be another half-hour at the least.

  ‘Bloody piece-of-crap shit truck!’

  I’m impressed. It’s taken me a long time to convert Li to the fine Australian art of swearing. Unfortunately, though, she’s such a sedate woman that she has to be really, seriously incensed before she’ll let loose, and this loss of control causes her accent, as vernacular as mine or Milly’s ordinarily, to revert to strangely Asian characteristics, so her cussing never has quite the intended effect. Like now, her ‘bwoody piece-of-cwap shit twuck’. Somehow it adds a touch of Tweety Bird, perpetually entertaining rather than effective.

  There’s still a couple of hours of daylight left, nothing to be overly concerned about. But even so, the muscles in my back are tightening, and won’t unwind till she’s back.

  I stay to prepare the apples for my pie, then head home for a shower. A hot one, long.

  Milly’s ute is the only vehicle at Li’s when I get back. Felix is sniffing round by the herb pots, and lopes over to the Land Cruiser as I pull in. I lean over to let Gina out, and the two dogs immediately start tussling playfully.

  Milly has come onto the back porch, and the smell of roasting lamb follows her from the house. There’s still no sign of Li’s truck. It’s over an hour since I spoke to her. I leave the Land Cruiser’s engine running, then change my mind and switch it off. She would have called if she was in trouble. I’ll give her another fifteen minutes. I sometimes think the worst part of the way we live is the agony involved in the decisions we make, the terrible potential always hanging over the consequences.

  I’m just starting to change my mind again and am reaching for the ignition when the dogs stop wrestling and raise their heads, bursting into watchdog barks. And yes, I can hear it too, the approaching grind of a worn-out, piece-of-crap shit old truck.

  On the porch Milly smiles calmly, but I see the relief in her eyes, which had been carefully distant. She frees her hands from her old jumper, where she had wound them. I hunch my shoulders forward to stretch my tight neck muscles. The noise of the approaching truck swirls around us, diffusing the tension. The air seems to sigh with sudden domestic peace, and the scene, previously edgy with clamouring possibilities, becomes benign.

  When Li’s truck turns finally from the road, the smell of burning rubber is overpowering. Behind the wheel her face is fatigued. Even Blackie, tongue lolling, on the back of the tray, looks relieved to be home. Li climbs slowly, stiffly from the cab, leaving the engine running to cool it. She reaches over to unhook Blackie from his chain.

  ‘What time do you call this, then?’ I call out. ‘Cutting it a bit fine, aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s all your shopping,’ she shoots back. ‘Bloody fags and booze, running round like a mouse with a cat up its bum, all to help you kill yourself.’

  ‘It’s criminal.’ Milly nods.

  I reach into the cab and turn the truck’s ignition off. As it ticks to a halt the sound of boiling water is audible.

  ‘The only crook thing round here is this truck. Listen to it. You’re lucky you got back at all.’

  Li grimaces. ‘I had to rest it every twenty minutes or so, but it was getting so late I pushed it a bit towards the end.’ She and Milly start unloading bags from the back. I raise the bonnet and prop it, watching steam curl threateningly round the radiator cap. There’s nothing I can do till it cools down. I glance automatically at the lowering sun. It’ll have to wait till morning.

  I heave the last of the supplies, a milk crate full of bottles, off the truck, and dump it by the porch steps. There’s time for a last smoke. I don’t smoke inside, so once it’s dark that’s it. And it’ll give Milly time to break the news about Rolf to Li. I dawdle over my cigarette, like a coward, kicking at a scatter of dandelions and listening to the murmur of the women’s voices inside, Li’s momentarily raised in distress before settling back to her usual tone. Above the orchard the sun hangs, sinks, hangs, then plunges through a plume of colour, like a richly velvet stage curtain drawing to expose an orchestrated tragedy, the poignantly beautiful end of another day’s freedom. I can’t delay any longer. I lumber up the steps, grabbing the milk crate on my way past.

  Blackie is lapping loudly at his water dish; the other dogs are already inside.

  ‘Blackie!’ I call from the back door, and he lifts his head, then ambles across the porch and into the house. The sun is lost below the horizon now and already the mist is rising in the gathering dark. I close the door behind him and lock it.

  Inside, Milly and Li are double-checking the window locks and pulling the curtains. The metaphorical curtains have been opened, now it’s time for all others to close, as tightly as possible.

  My pie is good. I’m no cook, but I have a small repertoire of specialties, spaghetti bog and the like, the usual suspects, which I pull out at regular intervals. Apple pie is one of them. The regular intervals may be a little more persistent with that one – among the remains of Nebulah it is known as Pete’s Pie.

  Dinner is a fairly silent affair, under the circumstances. Li is bordering on exhaustion – everyone’s supplies are piled by the laundry door. If Liz was still around she would have phoned by now to make sure Li had got back okay. None of the others seem to have even considered this courtesy. We’ll be feeling the Swamphen’s loss for some time.

  Li’s flash of distress at the news of Rolf’s death has been quickly contained into a composed and accepting regret. ‘Alone is not good,’ she’d said, shaking her head sadly. Outside there is a sense of movement, and a tiny, chilling tapping begins at the kitchen window, a snigger.

  With a sigh Li wanders into the lounge and turns the television on and up.

  We sit for a while, listening to a politician bluster threadbare reassurances as Kerry O’Brien tears him to shreds.

  ‘I’ll have another look at the truck in the morning,’ I tell Li. ‘But I reckon its time’s up, it’s rooted. You’d be crazy to keep relying on it, it’s too dangerous.’

  Li twines her fingers and examines them intently. She has working hands: no rings; short, blunt nails. The sort of hands you’d expect Stick to have. ‘You think it’ll go another month?’

  ‘At the very most, possibly. But we have to sort out something else.’ I glance at Milly. ‘We were wondering about a trailer, with Milly’s ute it should just about do.’ There is no response from Li, who just looks grim and preoccupied.

  ‘What do you think?’

  She shrugs. ‘I reckon a month, tops, will be enough. There is wall writing at the co-op.’

  Milly frowns. ‘Graffiti?’

  ‘No. The writing that tells.’

  We realise together what she means: the writing on the wall. Li has muddled the phrasing, a sign of her exhaustion.

  ‘They are waiting to hear on a loan. If they get it, they can last the year, till the new subdivision is more established and things hopefully pick up. Otherwise …’

  Otherwise. She doesn’t have to continue. Otherwise there is only the IGA in Woodford, and Jed Pearce, who owns it, also owns shares in his brother-in-law’s wholesalers in Perth. There’s no way he’d sacrifice his own business to support her. Even the co-op does it largely out of charitable intentions. Without them she’ll have nothing.

  The borders of all we have left seem to be disintegrating. It is turning into a week I’ll never want to live through again.

  The truck has had it. I flush the radiator – again – but that isn’t the problem, the engine is shot. It might scrape one, maybe two, trips to Woodford, but even that’s a risk. Milly’s ute isn’t big enough on its own, she wouldn’t be able to take enough produc
e to cover the cost of the fuel, let alone turn a profit. There’s no point forking out for a trailer under the circumstances. And renting one isn’t viable either.

  I wipe the grease off my hands and rub the sore spot in my belly. It’s not quite one o’clock and I’m not particularly hungry; I decide to take the truck for a test drive before lunch.

  Nebulah’s not a big town. The majority of its small population used to live among the sprawling blocks that stretch listlessly from the town’s main street. Large scruffy lawns adorned mainly fibro houses, giving little visual credence to the council’s attempts to ennoble the place with historical value. Yards embraced weeds and worn-out cars, which briefly sported P-plates before subsiding permanently under tarpaulins. Wilted lawns spawned children’s play equipment or obsessive vegetable patches, depending on the demographic. It was a town without money; there was rarely any trouble beyond squabbles.

  About a third of us lived beyond the street signs of the town’s centre, on modest acreages that were little more than personal indulgences. The larger holdings had long since decided there was more profit in real estate: farms were carved up, like carcasses reduced to the manageable packages of meat on supermarket shelves. There were a handful of hobby farms, a small amount of livestock, but apart from Li only Tom Reid had retained a holding big enough to support any serious agriculture, working land that his great-grandfather had cleared. But once his flocks perished in the first outbreaks of the mist, he gave up, and cleared out to try starting from scratch further north. But it takes capital to start again, as any previous resident of Nebulah well knows; last I heard of Tom he was working at the abattoir in Harvey.

  It’s said that the skeletons of his flocks still roam the paddocks, mournfully grazing the muddy fields, while the For sale sign hangs pointlessly on the main gate, but I haven’t ever been out there after dark to establish whether or not this is true.

  All in all, Nebulah was a lethargic town, peaceful through its lack of prosperity. A place for retirees and families on welfare, where you could live cheaply out of the fast lane, but where there was not nearly enough work to keep the younger generation around. Most of our young ones would have cleared off up to Perth or over east anyway, with or without the mist.

  It was typical of a country town in that everyone knew everyone – or at least their business. Everyone followed – and eventually yawned through – the dreary battles going on along McKenzie’s Rise above the falls, over kids on unlicenced dirt bikes, a problem long redundant now, as the bikes are either gone or rusting in the sheds of empty houses.

  And the silence, so long fought for, is as empty as the echo of lost life.

  I head towards Pearson Street, the main drag of town, gunning the truck hard, listening for telltale rattles from the gasket. Both Gina and Blackie are on the back, Li despairing of a dog that would always choose a ride in the truck over the company of his owner.

  On the outskirts of town the deserted primary school is starting to show advanced signs of decay, weeds reaching up the flimsy walls of the portables, and sprouting defiantly from the tarmac of the netball court. The huge old pepper tree at the junction of Mason and Pearson sits unmolested at last, liberated from decades of kids clambering up its branches or scratching initials into its trunk.

  Once I’ve turned into Pearson, I cruise along the empty road, the two-hour parking signs uselessly guarding the steeply kerbed roadsides, which are gradually disappearing under drifts of debris.

  After a block of wilting houses the shops begin, boarded-up and smeared, a handful of token Business for sale and Commercial premises for lease signs still propped crookedly on the shuttering.

  I try to come down here about twice a week, to check that there hasn’t been any unwelcome attention. Although we’ve had surprisingly little trouble. Looters and vandals tend to prefer the cover of darkness. The government managed to post a cop out here on temporary assignment for a few weeks when there were some ‘mishaps’. He was a useless prick no one wanted elsewhere – made me look dynamic – but nevertheless he was a deterrent, as were the few remaining locals still trying to stay in their homes, who didn’t treat any of the window-shoppers they encountered with gentleness. Gordon Toms and his boys used to escort them out to the cemetery, where they’d relieve them of their mobile phones and chain them to the gates.

  Gordon would give me a call and let me know they were there, and I’d ‘happen’ to turn up later on, pretend to stumble accidentally over the poor sods, who, after a stretch of the cemetery’s isolation, reflecting on the stories going round of what happens in Nebulah after dark, would be literally crapping themselves.

  I’d give them the routine: You’re bloody lucky, I don’t normally come this way. Hate to think what would have happened to you out here, holy shit. Etcetera. By now the guys would be blubbering with relief, all thoughts of rummaging through the garages of empty houses, or squeezing through jemmied windows at the back of bolted shops, long gone.

  But the padlocks! I’d need keys to free them, did they have any idea who’d chained them up? I’d need to find the guys responsible and persuade them to hand over the keys (Gordon’s spares in my glove box). Could they describe the men who did this? Mmm, that could be … maybe so-and-so – hope it’s not him, for your sake, I passed him heading out of town on the Woodford Highway, twenty minutes ago.

  Mmm, it’s tricky. I’ll have to ask around, see if I can find out. Worried look at the sky. Not much time, though.

  Bugger that, get a saw, cut the fucking chain, for fuck’s sake! They were usually a tad stressed by this point, as predictable as Gail’s tears.

  Well, all the good saws have been pinched. Bloody looters, you wouldn’t credit it, would you, putting people’s lives at risk. Only got a crappy hacksaw left, pretty blunt. Don’t reckon there’s enough time for that. Still, better than nothing, I suppose.

  And I’d leave them snarling and ready to throttle each other for the single hacksaw blade. In about half an hour I’d return: Wow, how lucky are you? I managed to convince the guys responsible that they’d be hit with felony charges if I couldn’t get you out. Just in the nick of time, I’d say.

  They would extend wrists shallowly shredded from fumbling efforts with the hacksaw. Boy, you’re gonna have some scarring there, what a mess! People will think you tried to slit your wrists when they see that. Permanent, I’d reckon.

  Then I’d helpfully point out that they only had about twenty minutes before sunset to get out of town. Their vehicles would still be back where they’d left them, usually at a distance out of sight. Of course there wasn’t time to get to them on foot, but no way would I drive them, no, no – my place was in the other direction and I needed to get myself home before dark.

  Some would get threatening at this point, but a snarling Alsatian is a pretty effective sidekick, and I suspect Gina enjoyed these routines at least as much as I did – she never missed her cue. And Gordon’s boys would be on stand-by at the turn-off, just in case of trouble.

  After a protracted period of refusals – the sun menacingly lowering as we argued – I would reluctantly relent, and accept the generous offer of the contents of their wallets as compensation for my personal risk.

  I’d usually split fifty-fifty with Gordon. It was a strategy more effective as a deterrent than the useless slob of a cop they’d sent us. No one had missed the irony of his presence. When the town was fully populated, the station was closed down – we only got another cop when there was hardly anyone left. Money will always be found for the protection of property. So we justified our own little form of justice. And it was great stress relief.

  That was while Gordon was still around, though, before he followed his boys out to Hedland. Shit of a place, he’d said, last time he rang, back when I was still answering the phone. $1500 a week for a dogbox that’s barely livable, but you have to be grateful for anything at all. At least you can spend your evenings outside, have a fire or a barbie. Not shut up every night like a flo
ck of goddamn chickens with the foxes circling. You can’t do that to people, drives them insane.

  There was a protracted pause. I know he meant well.

  Apart from the usual tattered cardboard boxes blowing round the shopfronts (God only knows where they come from), Pearson Street is unchanged. The pub bolted and the post office security-shuttered; the rest a medley of broken windows and sheets of warped untreated pine.

  So far the truck’s behaving itself, but I haven’t covered much distance. At the end of Pearson I turn left for the highway, thinking that a twenty-k jaunt and back should give a fair indication of its capabilities. I’ve only covered about eight k’s and I’m concentrating on gunning the engine and watching the temperature gauge, so when the blue Camry passes me I’m taken by surprise. I don’t get time to take down the rego or note anything more than the fact that it only seems to contain one person.

  A woman. Heading into town.

  I keep driving, watching the gauge which has started to rise steadily, the Camry’s presence an added ripple of concern.

  After another five k’s I turn back, unable to shrug the car’s presence off as someone who’s just taken a wrong turn. Usually sightseers, if they bother to come at all, are in groups. Nebulah’s not the sort of place people tend to visit on their own.

  Something about the car has me worried – you don’t spend as much time on the force as I did, albeit with my head in the sand, without learning to follow your intuition.

  Which isn’t always fail-safe. I’ve left it too late; the temperature gauge’s needle suddenly stirs from its usual position, hovering just over halfway, and creeps towards the red zone.

  To keep driving would be madness. I have to pull over. And wait.

  I let the dogs down and lift the bonnet, listening to the ominous sound of water boiling in the radiator, the engine’s unhappy tick. I have a smoke, then cover the cap with a thick towel and slowly release it, liberating a geyser of steaming liquid. When it’s subsided I start the engine and top up the radiator, willing myself to take it slowly and not become careless in my haste to get back to town.