Hostage (10 page)

Fitzroy Police Station: 25 December, 4.02a.m.

‘So you left Amanda’s house and came straight back?’ asked Constable Tognetti.

‘Not straight back,’ said Tully. ‘I paid someone else a visit first.’

Christmas Eve

They’d been talking for about an hour, Tully guessed, when she saw the Welcome to Stawell sign on her left.

‘Better slow down,’ she said, stretching her legs. ‘Hey, turn here. I want to show you something.’

Griffin followed Tully’s directions for several kays until they stopped outside a rusted farm gate.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

‘This is Mick’s farm,’ said Tully. ‘I used to live here with Mum and Craig when I was little.’

‘What a hole,’ said Griffin.

‘That’s what I thought when I first came,’ said Tully.

She peered up the driveway, which had more potholes and dips than she remembered. The house was about a kay up the driveway, partly shielded by a line of greybox gum trees.

‘The gate’s open,’ she said. ‘Can you drive in? Please?’

‘What if someone’s home?’ said Griffin.

‘We’ll just say we’re lost,’ said Tully.

As they drove up the driveway, the house came into view. It was a weatherboard and sat on brick pillars that cleared the ground, high enough for the cattle dogs to go under in search of shade.

Near the house was a woodshed—a corrugated iron lean-to that was divided into three sections. Iron horseshoes hung from the rafters in upturned smiles, leaking their good luck over the hessian bags that lay stiff with age on the ground. Lacy cobwebs covered the dark corners in delicate patterns.

‘No one here,’ said Tully.

Griffin stopped the car and Tully jumped out and pushed back the house gate. On the back door porch some swallows had made a nest above the door and had left a trail of white droppings down the back door screen and on the step. The gas bottles stood staunchly near the back door, the same as Tully remembered, but the bin was missing. She tried the back door handle. She was not surprised to find it locked.

On her way back to the car she noticed the rain gauge but didn’t bother to check it. It was obvious there had been no rain for some time. Everything was crisp at the edges. The grass around the house crunched underfoot and some fruit trees near the woodshed were dead. Only the eucalypts looked unchanged, their grey bark peeled back to reveal the creamy trunk inside.

Back out on the road they drove along the property line and Tully pointed out her favourite yabby dam, now dry, her favourite climbing tree and the rusted-out hulk of Mick’s old Chevy truck. Tully noticed the fenceline sagged in some places and in one section lay flat against the ground.

‘Do they live here anymore?’ asked Griffin.

Tully shook her head and pointed him in a new direction. ‘This used to be a gold mining town,’ she said. ‘That’s why Mick’s grandfather or great-grandfather—whatever—moved here. Mick used to tell me about it. That’s how they got enough money to buy the farm.’

‘Hard to believe anyone would want to live this far out of the city,’ said Griffin. ‘Where are we going?’

‘To the cemetery,’ said Tully.

Tully’s Story

On our way back to the city we passed through Stawell and I asked Griffin to stop at the local cemetery so I could, like, pay my respects to a friend there. Griffin wasn’t in any hurry to get home, so he didn’t mind stopping. I guess we should have tried ringing someone then—to let them know we were okay and what was going on—but we didn’t think of it.

Mum and I moved to just outside Stawell when she met Craig. Craig’s dad, Mick, had a farm. He had a few animals—some sheep and a few goats—but was mainly into crops. He grew canola, which was a waving sea of bright yellow when it was ready to be harvested. It was so bright in the sun you had to wear sunglasses to look at it. We lived on the farm with Craig and Mick. Mick was what Bamps would call a ‘good bloke’. Craig was supposed to be taking over the farm so that Mick could retire, but you could tell Mick was in charge. Mick wore the same clothes every day, even on Sundays.

Mum hated the tank water—she said it frizzed her hair more than normal—but I liked the space of the farm. The unending horizon of it. I could stand up the top of the driveway and spin around 360 degrees and the horizon remained the same. No hills. No neighbours. Just flat and dry. At the end of the day I would watch the sun dip low in the sky. Mick said if you listened hard enough you could hear the sun touch the dirt on its way down to someone else’s new day. I think I heard that sound maybe once or twice. I wondered if that person knew they were looking at my sun.

We were happy there, for a while. Mum got a job at the local pub and I got to go to a school that had a huge outdoor space for lunchtime and recess play. I was worried about Mum working at the pub but she never came home with dentist breath and she didn’t seem to get her headaches like she used to.

Everyone called Mick
Mick,
even Craig, but I didn’t call him anything because Craig had only introduced him to me as ‘this is my dad’. Whenever Mick wanted my attention he’d nod his head in my direction or call out ‘girl’. At first I was scared of his grumpy ways and the way one side of his face never moved. He could speak perfectly fine and when he smiled, which was hardly ever, it was a nice kind of a lopsided grin. Eventually we got into a routine. Dinner had to be finished before seven so Mick could watch the news on the ABC. Craig used to have a shower before dinner then off to the pub after the dishes.

Sometimes Mick would help me with my home reading. His thick pointer finger would move along the words that danced on the page before me. If I got the word wrong he would keep his finger on the word until I had another go.

‘Break it up,’ he’d say.

So I’d try to break the word up into smaller pieces until he gave me a hint or just straight out told me the word.

Mick had a room that he called his office, which was really just a room with a bookcase and a table and a filing cabinet and a picture of him as a young guy with a young woman in a wedding dress. I figured it must have been his wife but I never asked about her and he never told me. Mick had some old books which didn’t have many pictures in so I didn’t really like them that much, although there was one book,
Famous People in History,
which he would go through with me. He also had a book with a green leather cover and gold for the title, which said
The Greenedges Book of Famous Quotes.
He would tell me one famous quote a day and if I liked it I would write it down and try to remember it. Sometimes we would look at the
Guinness Book of World Records
that he’d pull down from the top shelf of the bookcase. It was filled with wonderful pictures and stories of people doing incredible things. My favourite world record was the man with the longest fingernails. I wanted to grow my own fingernails so I could set a new record, but I kept forgetting and bit them instead.

At the weekends Mick would take me to the footy to watch the local boys slog it out and I could get a pie from the canteen. If it was too cold we would sit in the car with the radio blaring and turn the fan on when the windows got too foggy. Craig still played—he was one of the stars of the team—and Mum would sometimes come to watch and cheer him on. It was hard for her to get out of bed early because she worked on Friday nights and she had a shift on Saturday night as well. When she came, I would sit on the wire boundary fence and she would hold onto me so I wouldn’t fall, and happiness would settle in my stomach like a drink of hot chocolate.

Some Sundays, Mick would take me yabbying. We’d open up a tin of cat food and shove it down into the toe end of a nylon stocking or sock. I never asked him where the stocking came from, though I know it wasn’t Mum’s because she didn’t wear stockings. Then we’d tie the stocking or sock into the bottom of a net Mick called ‘the Opera House’ which was a cool net that the yabbies could crawl into but not get out of again. Mick would let me sit on the tractor seat next to him and we’d drive out to the yabby dam and throw the net as far out into the middle of the dam as we could get it. You could tell where we’d thrown it because Mick tied a large orange float to the net that bobbed along the top of the water. A couple of hours later we’d go back with a long pole with a hook at the end and pull the net in.

Some days there would be nothing but weed, but other days the basket would be filled with grey-green yabbies, clacking their claws like they were tapping out morse code or something. Then Mick and I would have a fight. I would always want to let the yabbies go and he would always want to cook them. He couldn’t understand why I would want to go yabbying if I didn’t want to end up eating them. I could never understand how he could put them in a boiling pot of water that turned their beautiful grey-green colour to red. At least he’d always put the ones with eggs back into the dam.

Most times we let them all go.

Sometimes, when Mum was at work at night, Craig and Mick and I would go out in the truck to shoot roos. Craig told me not to tell Mum. He knew she hated guns. I hated spotlighting. Hated the crack of the gun as it rang out into the night. Hated Craig’s shout of joy when a roo hit the dirt dead or, worse, just wounded. Mick hated the roos. He said they ate the crops and ruined the land. Craig agreed, but I could tell he just liked hunting them down. I only went spotlighting a few times until I started having nightmares and Mum found out where I’d been going. Her and Craig had a fight that lasted from the machinery shed all the way to the front gate. Mick and I heard every word as I tried to sound out my reader words in the kitchen.

Mum hated working on a Saturday night, but apart from that she liked her job at the pub. Sometimes Craig would take me into the dining room and we’d have dinner. My shoes would catch on the carpets which were sticky from spilled alcohol and tomato sauce from counter meals. I never got used to the sour smell of beer. The ceilings were high and there was panelling on the wall. The inside of the pub was dark, even during the day. The only brightness came from the juke box in the corner that was lit up like the carousel at the zoo and a large TV screen in the corner of the public bar so the drinkers could watch the races or the footy. Sometimes I’d sit on a stool at the bar and sip my raspberry drink while I watched Mum wiping down or pouring drinks or ringing up the money in the till. Everyone seemed to like her. They’d call out a joke or a passing hello as she wiped and poured and jingled change back into their hands.

There was one guy named Jock, a friend of Craig’s, who always gave Mum a tip. He said things to her that made her embarrassed, I could tell by the way she ducked her head, but he seemed friendly enough and Mum said it was just harmless fun. I could see that Craig didn’t like it, though. He sat quietly, his eyes narrowing into slits as Jock joked and laughed and pressed extra cash into Mum’s hand.

Then one Saturday night, after the end of footy season, Craig and Jock and another guy called Millsy decided to go spotlighting. Craig said I could go with them if I didn’t tell Mum, but I didn’t want to. Instead I stayed home with Mick, who sat in his favourite brown leather chair, and we watched a war movie that was really boring. It was so boring that I fell asleep in front of the gas heater.

I woke up to the slam of Craig’s truck door outside and the murmuring of voices. Then somebody used the phone just outside the lounge room door. Mick’s chair was empty. I stood up and looked out the window through the gap where the lace curtains didn’t quite fit across the window frame. Craig’s truck was spotlighted in the pinkness of the carport fluorescent light. Millsy and Mick seemed to be fussing around Jock who was half-sitting, half-lying on the back seat. But Craig wasn’t paying Jock any attention. Instead he was sloshing water against the car door as if cleaning his car in the middle of the night was a normal thing to do. He knew I was watching, even before he turned around to look at me peering through the window. When Mick came inside later, I was curled up in front of the heater, my heart still racing like I’d just run a 50 metre sprint. The truck started up again. I heard it go through its gear changes all the way up the drive then stop and idle while someone opened the gate. Then it moved forward again. It didn’t stop, so the driveway gate must have been left open. I was thinking that Mick would be mad, that there was a chance some of the stock would get out. Then the next thing I knew I was awake in my bed and it was morning.

I never saw Jock again. Mum and I left the farm soon after that. I never asked about what happened that night.

Christmas Eve

The cemetery was another couple of kays away from Mick’s farm and it was doing a roaring trade. There were at least six cars parked outside its fence boundary as people paid their Christmas respects to relatives and friends.

‘So here we are, the dead centre of town,’ joked Griffin.

Tully sat still in her seat, her seatbelt still buckled over her shoulder.

‘Hey, I was just joking...’ said Griffin.

Tully shrugged. ‘It’s okay. I was just remembering ... come on.’

Tully marched into the cemetery grounds and followed a trail only she could see. At one point she bent down and plucked two fresh flowers from someone else’s plot, then moved forward again.

‘I’d never want to end up in a place like this,’ said Griffin, puffing slightly as he caught up to her.

‘We all have to die sometime,’ said Tully.

‘Doesn’t mean I’d have to end up like this,’ said Griffin pointing to the bleak grey headstones that surrounded them.

‘Like you’re going to know,’ said Tully.

Griffin shrugged. ‘I’d want to be cremated. Have my ashes scattered in a place I liked.’

‘Which is...?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought too hard about it,’ said Griffin.

‘I like the idea of someone visiting my grave,’ said Tully. ‘Having someone come and talk to me and bring me flowers.’

‘So
you’ve
thought hard about?’ said Griffin.

Tully stopped abruptly and placed a flower at the foot of the headstone in front of her.

‘Michael Hamill,’ Griffin read aloud. ‘Is that the guy who owned the farm?’

Tully nodded. ‘Craig’s dad. Mick was always nice to me. Mum heard he’d had another stroke after we left but we didn’t get to the funeral. They let Craig out for that.’

‘Out?’

‘He went to jail.’

‘What for?’ asked Griffin.

Tully shrugged. ‘I can’t remember what for. Can you just give me a minute?’

Griffin walked back to the main path and watched Tully lean forward and touch the headstone. The slight breeze of the day had picked up and gusted about his legs. Even while the sun shone warmly on his back, it made him shiver. Tully finally stood up straight and walked towards him, one flower still in her hand.

‘All done?’ he asked.

Tully nodded and Griffin turned back towards the car.

‘When was the last time you saw Craig?’ Griffin asked as he dug for the keys in his back pocket.

‘I don’t remember,’ said Tully. ‘He and Mum had this huge break up, which is why we moved away from here ... Oh!’

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. I just had a thought.’

Griffin didn’t notice Tully drop the flower onto a pathside grave. The polish from its black marble headstone had dimmed and some of its gold lettering had weathered away.