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‘Me too,' said Adam.

She sat in the wheelchair with both her arms completely straight out and bandaged in a kind of ready but empty hug.

For the first time in our history we are located in the right part of the world at the right time.

Dave Kelly was not in the middle of nowhere. He was somewhere; somewhere between Newman and Marble Bar in the far north of Western Australia. Marble Bar is the hottest town on the planet. The earth is red and black and so filled with minerals that working there is like standing on the hotplate of a barbecue.

Dave crouched on top of a bullet hole–riddled wire mesh telephone cage repairing the antenna next to the solar panel. It was midday and the solar panel thrived. So did the litter of flies on Dave's sweaty shirt. They gathered and bit through the fabric and then fought to get to his mouth and eyes. The husk of a dead kangaroo lay across the road, ignored by the flies now that Dave had come along, like a godsend.

Dave felt the screwdriver start to slip through his sweat-slick fingers and leaned to catch it but missed and it dropped and disappeared in the soft red dust below. ‘Shit,' he said as he stood. That's when he saw the jeep coming towards the T-junction where he was working. It was going like the clappers, trailing dust and heading straight at Dave. Dave looked at his Telstra van parked by the solar telephone, then up at the approaching jeep which showed no signs of slowing. If Dave was a betting man he might have tried to calculate the odds of a vehicle collision between the only two cars within a three hundred kilometre radius.

The jeep tried to turn right without braking, and began to slide sideways. Dave felt a little surge of excitement as he looked to where he could jump to avoid being skittled, but the front wheels of the jeep caught as it cut across the corner and growled away, showering Dave in a wave of thick, choking dust. So he didn't see the crash. He just heard the unmistakeable thump and the sad, empty clatters.

Dave's van skidded in its own slew of dust coming to rest a hundred metres up the highway.

The jeep lay on its back, one wheel still spinning. A mobile phone was ringing amidst the bits of luggage and food and broken glass. Dave found the driver, his legs pinned under the jeep. There was a lot of blood and no pulse. The flies were already gorging. The mobile phone stopped ringing, so the only sound was the slow gurgle of liquid
escaping from some ruptured engine part.

Dave looked along the debris trail that led from the jeep to a shattered tree stump near the road. The unlucky bastard had hit the only tree in a thousand kilometres. Dave dialled on his Telstra sat phone.

Something flashed in the sun. Dave walked towards it.

‘Newman Police Station.'

‘Yeah mate. Car accident. About a hundred and fifty K north of you.'

‘Near the phone box?'

‘Yeah, very near the phone box. Anyway, the driver's dead.'

‘Oh. Okey-doke. No rush then, eh. Be up in a few hours. Don't touch anything.'

‘Wouldn't dream of it.'

Dave looked down at an aluminium case. He looked back to the man lying under the jeep and to the desultory scatter of his personal effects. He looked out at a stretch of temporarily unmined emptiness of the North-West. Maybe it was the heat and its dry crushing weight. Maybe it was that the dead man looked vaguely like Dave himself. Maybe it was the lazy backhanded bad luck of the tree stump. Whatever the cause, Dave was given to an uncharacteristic moment of soul searching.

‘You know,' said Dave to Terry on the phone later, ‘I thought of
Maverick.'

‘The film
Maverick?'

‘Yeah. He's sitting on a horse with a noose around his neck in the middle of the desert with the rattlers slithering out of the sack towards the horse's feet, and he thinks the first lines he says in the film...'

‘He thinks he should give up gambling?'

‘Not at all. No. His voiceover says, “It had been just a shitty week for me from the beginning.”'

Dave was installing a wall phone in a perfectly air-conditioned executive apartment kitchen.

The owner stood talking on her mobile in the living room. The
curtains were open and she looked out at sailboats on Perth's Swan River as though they were all hers. ‘I don't care, Richard. Sell everything European. Yes and German. Even German. They may get dragged down into this. I want to lay low until this new meltdown finishes ... melting.'

Dave checked the dial tone and gently replaced the landline telephone in its new cradle on the wall. He looked over to the lady, ignoring him as she listened to her mobile. She was dressed in a business skirt and blouse. Diamonds sparkled from her ears. More diamonds winked and twinkled from around her neck. The ‘at home' jewellery.

She was in her mid-forties and in pretty good shape, but she had one of those small mouths which seem best shaped to indicate angry disappointment. ‘And dump Asia. No, Richard. Not the Chinese. They don't count as Asian. I know the Japanese never used to be considered Asian either, but have you seen their GDP to national debt ratio?!'

Dave headed for the bathroom. It was a palace designed for an Ancient Greek. There was slate with gold trim and a wall-sized mirror. Dave lifted the phone and heard the dial tone purring again.

He went into the bedroom, frightening himself as he confronted two Daves stepping towards him. The lady sure liked her mirrors. And her telephones.

The bed was unmade and strewn with light filmy lingerie. Dave picked up the telephone on the bedside table, checking the dial tone there. She liked her diamonds too. There was a chunky diamond bracelet on the bedside table. Dave picked up his tools from the table and two pieces of snipped wire he'd missed from the installation.

‘Richard, am I going to have to spell everything out to you every step of the way this morning? I don't care whether it's night there. It's morning here. Don't be pedantic. The Indians are usually Asian but just might be a little Chinese right now.'

Dave closed the bedroom door, silencing Richard's dimness about economic racial profiling.

He picked up the bedside telephone and dialled. Daryl answered at the other end, saying the company name, ‘Sure Thing, You Betcha.'

‘Daryl, can I talk to Mungo?' asked Dave, keeping his voice down.

Daryl was one of Mungo's enforcers. He made up for his lack of physical power with hard work. ‘If you haven't got it, Dave, Mungo's not gunna be happy.'

‘Yeah, well I want everybody to be happy. So, can I talk to him?'

Dave picked up the bracelet and twirled it around his index finger watching the pretty sparkles while he waited for Mungo. There was a book on the table. Ellora's Cave.
Beg.
There was a huge-chested black man kneeling before a woman's shoulder.

‘Is this good news, Dave?' asked Mungo at the other end of the phone.

‘It's going to be excellent news, Mungo. Five hundred on Denmark Prince. That's today at Flemington.'

‘How is this good news, Dave?'

‘That's five thousand right there, only hours away.' Dave watched himself in one of the mirrors. Saw his face bright and happy and convincing.

‘Which, even if it comes in, Dave, isn't enough, is it?'

‘No, but I get to keep my legs for a few more weeks while I work on the rest, don't I?'

‘See, there you go doing it again, Dave. You think you're making a joke, but what you're really doing is describing exactly what's going to happen.'

Dave heard a noise and turned to find the woman in the bedroom, her little mouth crumpling smaller.

Dave turned back to the phone and said, ‘No Terry, it's still feeding back with the echo. I'll try calling you back from one of the other lines.'

‘Kelly!' yelled the phone as Dave hung it up and then stood to smile at the owner.

‘Looks like I still got a couple of glitches to iron out.' Dave smiled again and then politely smoothed the sheets where he'd been sitting.

‘You were placing bets.'

‘What? Oh that. No, we use certain key words to check the frequency modulation. You know, like the roadies do for a band. Check, check. L-l-l-l-l-egs. Leg-gs breaker breaker.'

‘You were placing bets on my phone.' Her eyes were fixed on the phone as if his act of defilement were visible. She started around the bed towards the phone.

Dave didn't panic so much as make a split second strategic decision which, in hindsight, proved tactically poor. He grabbed the phone and cradle with both hands and pulled hard, ripping the socket out of the wall and upending the bedside table.

The woman stood, looking in horror at the wall and then the table and finally at Dave holding her telephone.

‘Sorry. I had to do that. For your own protection. Couldn't risk feedback shock from the digital pulse through an unalloyed signal.' Dave tried to meet her eyes.

She raised the mobile telephone that was still in her hand and poked buttons.

Dave righted the table and set the broken phone back on it. He picked up the book which had fallen.

She said, ‘Yes, Complaints Department please.' She stood waiting, looking at him.

Dave's pulse quickened. His breathing got faster. His brain clicked into an extra gear. It was the feeling he got when he'd put everything from the whole meet on the last race. The longer the odds, the greater the rush.

‘Okay. You're probably the richest, most powerful woman I've ever met. Right now, this very second, I've got to tell you, you look like one of the sexiest. And most powerful.'

Her eyes widened.

‘I can tell you work too hard. All these phones. All those calls. Work work work. And for what? What about you in all this. You have needs. I can see from these mirrors, the bathroom, these soft, delicate nightclothes – that you're a sensuous woman.'

She looked down at her bed, possibly aghast. But maybe, just maybe – not aghast.

Dave said, ‘Let's not leave this room wondering all our lives what might have been. Say “no” to the rest of the world. Say, “Yes. Let's go a bit crazy, and both make wild, passionate love together, right now.”'

Dave was panting, just a little. He smiled. Knew he had the shy thing going in the smile that women had said made him look like a cute, naughty boy.

She was looking. She had looked at him and then to the bed,
calculating the potential profit/loss perhaps. For that frozen moment, Dave knew, she was starting to think about it.

Then her mobile, still at her ear, said, ‘Telstra, Complaints.'

Dave said, ‘What do you say? Want to take a chance?' He tossed the book on the bed.

‘Yes,' she said to the telephone. ‘I'd like to make a complaint about one of your workers.'

Dave sighed. Throwing the book on the bed had probably been a touch too much.

‘Actually, it's a large number of complaints that include malicious damage and sexual harassment.'

She smiled at Dave, her mouth like a paper cut.

‘You used to be a lawyer, didn't you?' he said.

‘That was the job I came back from.'

‘I know.'

‘You were on the phone when I got back from it.'

‘I remember.'

Dave's desk abutted Terry's in their workshop/office area. There was one piece of paper on Dave's desk and nothing else.

On Terry's desk were two computers, two blotters, two staplers, two paper punches and two telephones, one of which was at Terry's ear.

‘Keep the Telstra shares and the Commonwealth, for sure, but I want to get into insurance. Any big company. Right.'

Dave looked at the paper on his desk, then back up to Terry as Terry put down the phone.

Dave said, ‘Can I use one of your phones?'

‘Nope.'

Dave looked over his empty desk. ‘My chair?'

‘What are you going to sit on?'

‘Who says I'm going to lose?'

‘You always lose. Ray's looking for you, by the way.'

Dave looked down at the piece of paper in the middle of his desk.

‘Yeah, well maybe I'll get my reprimand a bit later.'

Terry smiled in the smug way he had.

‘Get stuffed.'

Terry smiled and said, ‘Okay. Your chair against one of my phones.' He took the well-worn deck of cards from his drawer. The cards had once been Dave's. ‘Why don't you use your mobile?'

‘No credit.'

Terry shuffled, looking up at Dave. ‘Don't take this the wrong way, mate.'

‘I'm pretty sure I will, but get it out of your system.'

‘You sure you're not spinning out of control?'

‘Is this a roulette wheel image, Terry, or a crashing plane image?'

Terry put the cards down on the desk, face down. ‘Hmmm,' he said. ‘Maybe I'm thinking of a ferris wheel. More your style. At the fair. Next to the bearded lady.'

‘Maybe I like spinning.' Dave cut the deck, holding up the face card. It was a five, not good when high card wins.

‘But the ground is rushing up to slap you on the face.'

‘That's beautiful, Terry. That's a beautiful turn of phrase. You were at the fair, I could tell and the thing
was
a ferris wheel and it spun me off, didn't it?'

Terry nodded.

Dave said, ‘Now are you going to cut the fucking cards?'

Terry cut the deck. Kept his hand face down a moment for dramatic effect, then showed Dave and watched Dave's face to see, but Dave gave him absolutely nothing, forcing him to look at his three of diamonds.

‘Get stuffed.'

Dave said, ‘My luck's turning,' as he dragged one of the phones back onto his desk.

‘Watch out for the ground.'

Smug. Very smug.

Dave's flat was nearly empty. There was one black vinyl armchair, a phone and an answering machine in the living room. Dave believed that message bank was a rip-off. Some racing formguides were scattered across the floor.

Dave switched on the answering machine, and headed for the kitchen.

‘Hi. Dave Kelly. Speak to me nicely.' Beep.