Detained (37 page)

Karen Fredrick’s rented cottage was derelict. Parched to grey. Entire boards gone. Every window stone blown. From the street front you could see straight past the long gone front door down the hall to the overgrown backyard. Karen had a fiancé back then. He drove long haul trucks and wasn’t around much, until the day he lost his licence for speeding, and he and Karen moved to Brisbane. The school had needed a new history teacher and Will had needed a new outlet for his restless energy. It amazed him now to think it had taken him till Shanghai to find it.

Remembering how Karen taught him more than history in that house was a warm vision amongst the curled up and dry ones.

He’d driven through the town, crawl slow, in the rented ute with Bo in the passenger seat. It’d amused them both, this reversal, but Will had been itching to drive, and in a place where the rules were less random and they’d hardly meet another car, he could do it one-handed.

It rocked Bo’s world: the vast emptiness, the distances, the way the people on the street stared open-mouthed at them as though they were aliens piloting a rocket ship.

“Makes my village look cosmopolitan,” he’d said. “And you say no one will know you here?”

“Nope. Fifteen years ago. I might recognise some old-timers, but the town was busted even back then, the population dying off or passing through.”

Will cruised to a stop outside a little park, a couple of craggy trees, a bench to sit on.

“Back then the place was bigger. The state government had a scheme to sell land off cheap, encourage people to move out here. They thought they’d build a farming community, but the blocks were too small, and the people who bought them had no idea how to farm.”

“Why did they come?”

“I guess thinking they could build a better life. For ten dollars they got a block of land with no water, sewer or power to it. The services were supposed to come. They never did. But the people were stuck. There was no industry in town, no jobs. They lived in sheds and kit garages and went on the dole. They stole power off the grid, had water when it rained, and jerry-rigged everything else with whatever was to hand.

“The townies called them blockies. Hated them. They were an invading force and they were a drain on the community.”

“Your family were blockies?”

“No, my foster family, the Dunns, they were townies.”

Bo had turned to him, “Show me the house you lived in.”

“Can’t. But I can show you were it was.” Will inclined his head, used his plastered hand to point out the window. “I bought it, razed it, put in the park and gave it to the council.”

Bo got out and walked across the dry grass, stood in the middle of the park, bordered on one side by a brick house and the other by a side street. Will had watched him, thinking of Mrs Dunn. For the two years he’d lived with the Dunns she’d been good to him, patient with him. Helped him learn to read. If Bo had looked on the back of the bench he’d have seen a plaque donating the park in her name. Will had been a fourteen your old boy who only knew how to express himself physically with his fists, with his body, and Mrs D hadn’t been around long enough to see him learn how to use his brain.

Bo got back in the car, bringing a wave of heat with him. “What happened? To them, to you?”

“Mrs D died, cancer I think. Mr D never knew what to do with me when she got sick. When she died he sent me to Pete’s dad. I was supposed to labour for him, work on his block and look out for Pete after school and weekends. One day I came home and the house was empty. He’d checked out. I had nowhere to go except to Pete’s.”

Bo had been outraged. “Didn’t anyone in authority check on you?”

Will shrugged, “Who knows. I guess I was hard to find.” He started the car, pointed it in the direction of what had become his home for three years.

“Where was Pete’s mother?”

“Shot through six months after they came here. Pete was thirteen. He never heard from her again.”

“And Pete’s father, he accepted you?”

“No, he fucking hated me. I was another mouth to feed, but I was useful as a worker and he was big man down at the pub for taking me on. I should’ve gotten out of there the first time he hit me.”

“You stayed for Peter.”

Will hadn’t wanted to lie to Bo, but the truth was tangled and hard to unwrap. “Don’t paint me a saint, Bo. I stayed because I had nowhere else to go.”

“Peter told me you took his beatings and saved his life.”

“Did Pete also tell you he did drama at university?”

In his peripheral vision Will had seen Bo shake his head, but more at the whole conversation than the question. He deserved a better answer.

“I stayed because I had nowhere to go and because of Pete. Norman used to belt him. Poor kid was always covered in bruises and cuts and I had a soft spot for him. He was smart in school, but he never laughed at me for being dumb.”

They’d been on the highway five minutes out from the Vessy block when Will explained how he and Pete owned all the land they could see. How he’d bought all the remaining families out. Gave them enough to make a new start. How everything they could see was Parker land.

“Good land,” Bo had said.

“Not when I lived here.”

“But beautiful.”

Was it?
Will had never thought of his blockie land as beautiful. He’d gone to sleep in the tray of the ute that night, thinking about it. It’d been an obligation, then a debt to pay off, then nothing. He hadn’t thought about owning this land for years. He’d never wanted to come back to Tara and now he was about to make a cup of tea in his little kit house on Norman Vessy’s block, right where the old shipping container had sat and rusted.

He didn’t feel at peace, but days of smacking steel, wood and colourbond together had tired him out and given him the gift of proper sleep, untainted by drugs or dreams.

Tonight, Bo was going to teach him to cook pasta in case the freezer meals ran out while he was on his road trip, so he’d have something else in his repertoire other than eggs and beans and a slab of steak seared over a flame.

Tomorrow, he’d be on his own, fractured memories and ghosts who wouldn’t stay dead for company. Tomorrow he was going down to that fucking creek bank and sit there all day if he had to. To remember, to summon up that night; the drunk, the angry boy, and the man who was ashamed to have built his wealth on lies. And finally put them all to rest.

“Reviewing what you have learned and learning anew, you are fit to be a teacher.” — Confucius

Darcy was hopelessly lost and her convertible was hopelessly silly, marking her out as a city chick even before she got recognised as the woman on the cover of
TV Week
.

The man at the paper shop said five minutes down the highway she’d see a gate. She’d been driving for twenty and all she saw was trees and scrub. Even if she found the gate, there was no guarantee the man who’d built a kit house there was Will. But she’d promised Peter she’d look for him, and if that meant finding an invisible gate she’d do it.

She U-turned and drove back the way she’d come at half the speed, squinting in the windshield glare at the heat haze on road ahead. She saw what passed as a driveway before she saw the gate. A strip of uneven grass flattened by tire tracks, like a runway to the never-never. The gate was wood, so sun bleached it blended into the surrounding grasses. She pulled up on the tarmac level with it. There could be anything or nothing the other side. It seemed an unlikely place for Will to want to hole up in a hand-built house.

The more she’d thought about him coming home to Tara, the more it had seemed the right guess, until she braked on the edge of town and realised she could see clear though the other side of it. So far Tara was all about thoroughfares and dead ends. Peter was right, why would he come here?

She got out of the car and unlatched the gate. Drove through, got out, went back and relatched the gate. A palaver designed to keep animals in, or maybe strangers like her out. There was every chance she’d meet a shotgun at the end of the drive and an unintelligible instruction phrased entirely in swear words; that was perfectly clear, and had to do with latching the gate on her way out.

The only sound other than the burble of the car was the rhythmic vibration of cicadas punctuated by lazy birdsong. It should’ve been relaxing, the sun, the endless blue sky, the solitude. No photographer was going to find her here. No bystander was going to tweet about what she was wearing. But her neck was stiff from driving, and the milkshake she’d drunk in town was curdling in her gut, making yoghurt with her nervousness. If the mad bloke who’d built a kit house on the old blockies site was Will, what the hell was she going to say to him?

She eased the car up the drive, praying for no potholes. This was four-wheel drive country, snake country, get lost and die of thirst if you weren’t careful country. Possibly even unknown serial killer country. She was freaking out.

It was a relief to see the roof of the house appear; a steely blue colour, then the rest of it, a neat box with a wide wooden verandah on one side. The front door was wide open. There was no sign of life, not even another car.

A man appeared from around the side of the house, a farmer type. He came towards her. Boots, torn denim, dirty shirt. He had his head down, and a battered Akubra hid his face. The owner, the builder, not limping, not Will. She got out of the car. She’d ask if she might use the bathroom and see if he knew of anyone fitting Will’s description.

Then he lifted his head and she saw enough of his face for her lungs to stop functioning. He pulled a headphone plug from his ear and stopped a half-dozen paces in front of her.

When he said her name she felt his voice all the way to her feet, a low sexy sound, an instruction, a commission, a plea.

“What the hell are you doing here? How did you find me?” he said, soft, demanding.

A dairy in the back of her throat, Darcy shoved her hands in the pockets of her shorts as if that might settle her stomach and anchor her to the spot. “I had help.”

“Fucking Bo.”

“No. You.”

“Me! I never said—”

“You said you were going home.”

He grunted acknowledgement. She could only see his chin, the line of his jaw, not his eyes. She couldn’t measure his mood by his voice or the way he stood there, legs braced apart, shoulders squared, arms loose by his sides. He looked strong. He looked oddly like he belonged here. It reinforced just how much she didn’t.

She blurted, “I wanted to see you,” before she chickened out entirely and got back in the car. “I thought you might need someone to talk to.”

“Like a friend.”

Her stomach clenched. She was desperate to touch him. “I could be. I’d like to be.”

“You’re selling something.”

He didn’t sound angry, but cautious, on guard. She dropped her eyes.

“I’m not buying—but God it’s good to see you.”

She brought her head up, felt her pulse leap. “That’s some hat.” It was several shades of worn, sweat stained with a hole in the crown from where it’d been repeatedly pinched to take on and off.

“This is a great hat.”

“You couldn’t afford a new one?”

He grinned. “You don’t toss a good hat like this. You stick it in a storage locker you pay rent on for about fifteen years, because you know a hat like this doesn’t come around every day.”

She wanted to touch him so badly, to see his eyes. But she didn’t trust herself, didn’t know if he’d want it. She closed the distance between them and put her hand up to skim the brim of the hat. “This hat is an old friend.”

He ducked his head a little and she moved her hand to the crown, pinched the brim and lifted if off his head. There were those dark blue eyes and the shock of his straight nose. He was tanned and relaxed and young again, remade. What was she doing here? She’d only mess him up again. She took a step away.

“Darcy.” A hand came up to push his hair back, tousle out the weight of the hat.

“I’m sorry, Will. I shouldn’t have come. I’m bad news for you, we both know it.”

He frowned, his lips flat-lined. He chased her with one stride, bringing a heatwave to her chest. He lifted his hand to her cheek, knuckles bent, scratchy, work roughened. “God help me, I love your kind of bad news.”

If she tilted her head, he’d kiss her. If she tilted her head, her whole world would rotate off its axis and collide with his. Beings in other galaxies would feel the blast. She tilted her head.

His lips touched, parted, his breath on her mouth, so gentle. He opened his hand, trailing it to the back of her neck, then pulled the band on her hair until it released, groaning his approval as it fell about her shoulders. She didn’t touch him. She couldn’t make this a worse lie.

“How long are you here?” he said, lips against her neck.

Hard to form words. “I’m only stopping by.”

“Stay.” Not a request.

“Here with you? No I...”

He leaned in to kiss away the protest, then stopped short. The old Will would have read her mind, told her she wanted to stay—would stay. This reborn Will held his insistence.

“A cup of tea then, before you’re on your way?”

He turned abruptly towards the house, leaving her swaying unsteadily in the too thick heat. That’s what she’d come for after all, to see him, to sell him, and a cup of tea wasn’t unexpected. But she couldn’t help but crave the old Will, and regret what she’d done to him to change his ways.

He was on the steps to the verandah watching her.

“Darcy, I’m not going to bite you, enslave you or fall apart because you’re here.”

She must have looked dubious because he followed up with, “Trust me,” then dropped his head and laughed as though that was the best joke he’d heard in a long time. She watched him, trying to decide how dangerous it was to go into the house with him. In the doorway he said, “If you’re not coming in, leave the hat,” and was swallowed up by the darkness.

When her eyes adjusted, she could see she was in a living room with a small kitchen and wet area off it. Will was at the sink, filling a kettle. She tossed the hat onto a wooden dining table. Everything was out of the box new. The house was fully equipped, from the front door mat to ceiling fans. It had a swanky sound system but no television. There were two bedrooms off to the left. It was smaller than the Palace Suite but it suited this pared back version of Will.