Quota (14 page)

Hi
, flat and disembodied.
You've rung Anna Murdoch. I'm sorry I can't take your call right now. Please leave a message
. It was just removed enough from who she was, from the girl he knew her to be, to satisfy the requirements of the clients and colleagues who expected that clinical mantra. The rain had shone the boulders of the breakwalls to rich glossy browns and blacks. The voicemail delivered its starting line bleep and he realised he had nothing to say. Things that he felt and needs that he had, but nothing to say. He fumbled with the silence, wanting to launch some conversational satellite, however flippant, into the frozen void. But he had nothing to offer. He stabbed at the button and slid the phone into his pocket.

In the distance, further along the seawall, he could see the blackened outline of the vessel he'd come to find, the lettering on the stern standing out from the pale blue of the hull.

Caravel.

Under that, smaller,
Port of Dauphin
. The boat was a leper, cast out from among the ranks of the working, the seaworthy, the undefiled. The cabin and superstructure were coated in birdshit, the metal fittings dull with corrosion. The deck area was charred, breaking away and tumbling inwards near the sides of the boat. A long, angry streak of black ran up the cabin wall, blistering the paint as it went. Charlie recognised all this from the forensics lab photos, felt he was in the company of a longstanding acquaintance. He now stood directly opposite the boat across a short stretch of water, and he could see through the grimy cabin windows to where the instruments had been unscrewed from their housings, where the refrigeration unit was gone from its steel base. Rust was slowly burning what the fire had spared. As he looked down at the waterline, he could see a thick forest of weed swaying slowly in the current from the points where it had taken hold between the timbers. A rainbow of oil seeped along the water's surface from the stern.

He pushed his way through a gap in the wire and sat on a boulder with his feet hanging just above the water. With the phone in his hands again, he breathed deeply and tried to focus his thoughts. The rain was gradually soaking him. Birds called over the water, over the poppling of the rain, but the world was otherwise empty and silent.

He bought up Weir's number and knew immediately that he, too, wouldn't be answering. On Sunday mornings he played the cello for hours at a time, by himself, with his front door locked and his phone turned off. Dvořák, Elgar and Haydn, over and over, repeated and refined to an exquisite degree. Charlie only found out about this side of Weir after he'd banged on the kitchen doors of his house in frustration that one Sunday, when they were supposed to be drafting appeal submissions together.

So he let the phone ring, waited for the tone, and this time he knew what he wanted to say.

‘Harlan, it's me. Sorry I hung up on you last night, but I needed time to think. I saw our boy again after we talked…saw him at a party. What are you doing at parties, you're going to ask me. I don't know. Probably indicates I should get out of here. Whole project's a dead loss, so…I'm sorry. I'm going to take the car to that panelbeater tomorrow and get something done about the front end so it's safe to drive, and then I'm going to hit the road back to town. I reckon I'll be in chambers Wednesday morning if you want to have a talk about it. Um, yep, sorry. Call me if you want. Okay, bye.'

The rain was getting heavier. He retreated under the awning of a tin building marked CO-OP, and scanned the phone, looking for evidence of an outside world. Weather. A frontal trough. Rain today but clearing tomorrow. A southwesterly swell decreasing overnight to one to two metres by tomorrow.

Charlie was surprised to be interested in this. For as long as he could remember, his physical environment had been subject only to the minute variations of airconditioning: the weather accounted for little more than incremental changes in the light. Here, now, the weather altered the very appearance of the world, by turns stripping and bleaching, shading and saturating the town's colours. The wind, idle at the moment, was nonetheless integral to the shape of the trees, the mood of the sea. His static surrounds had hidden this reality from him: the world was in a state of incessant upheaval.

The phone rang in his pocket. Anna. He grabbed for it, but no. It was a private number. The voice on the line was hesitant, unfamiliar.

‘Er, is that Charlie?' He was young; there was wind in the background.

‘Who's this?'

‘Oh yeah gedday, it's Patrick Lanegan. How you going?'

The petulant strain in Charlie's character surfaced, demanding that he make this difficult. ‘I'm fine,' he said shortly. ‘Bit dusty after last night maybe.'

There was a gentle laugh. ‘You were having a hell of a crack at that fish when I left ya. How's the rain, eh?'

‘I thought you get lots of rain here.'

‘Well, we do, but not straight downwards. Normally it's going sideways.'

‘How'd you get my number?'

‘Got it from Les…is that okay?'

Jesus Charlie, snap out of it.
‘Yeah, of course it is. I guess I'm just wondering where Les got it from.'

There was a faint chuckle on the other end. ‘Les works in mysterious ways. He can get you all sorts of things if he feels like helping. You like the pub?'

‘I do. I like the pub. I didn't think you would, though. Isn't it part of the Murchison empire?' Charlie had no idea where this conversation was going.

‘Yep, but if I took that view, half the bloody town'd be off limits.'

There was a brief silence. ‘What can I do for you Patrick?'

‘Well I just—weather's gonna clear up tomorrow, and I figured no one's shown you round the place, have they?'

‘Nope. They most certainly have not.'
Although people connected with your family have shown me a comprehensive beating
.

‘Okay then, you wanna go snorkelling? Milly said she'll take the kids after school, so I'm going anyway. You're welcome to, like, tag along if you want.'

‘That'd be great. What do I need?'

‘Nothing. I'm guessing you can swim all right?'

THEY'D BEEN DRIVING for a while on gravel when Patrick slowed and started watching the fence line on his left. A high run of dunes had materialised to the south, at the end of the paddocks, the deep concaves of the western sides collecting pools of sharp afternoon sun. Pockmarks of boxthorn and rusty pump equipment scarred their smooth flanks. At intervals a fence line ran up towards the foot of a dune, disappearing into the sand shortly after it began its rise. Charlie wondered whether the fences had run at the dunes, or the dunes were creeping north over the paddocks.

Patrick slowed the Camira and turned left, towards the coast. He came to a gate and plucked a key from the scatter of objects in the console, passing it wordlessly to Charlie. An old windmill clanked away beside the gate as Charlie dealt with the padlock. A new-looking poly tank stood at the foot of the mill. Beside it slumped the shot-up remains of the previous corro tank, and lying on the ground beside the corro was a pile of rusty shards and flakes that could only have been the tank before that one.

The way was reduced to wheel ruts now, and they bounced in and out of holes at a pace that suggested Patrick had no great fondness for the Camira. A final gate at the end of the track signalled the transition from paddock to dune. Swinging it open, Charlie felt a jolt of fear as he realised that Patrick fully intended to keep going. ‘You're not going to get this thing through there,' he said by way of question and statement as he climbed back in.

‘Why not?'

‘How's it gonna go on sand?'

Patrick appeared to consider the question seriously for a moment or two.

‘I dunno.' He revved at the engine until it rattled at the high end, and then surged forward through the clumps of marram grass. Charlie could feel the top of each hummock as the floorpan flexed under his feet, could smell the seeds of the grass inside the car. They topped a low headland, and the sea burst into view, flat, dark and serene in the heavy air. Below them on the right, a beach curved away to the west, littered with driftwood and backed by scrub. Dried kelp formed linear tangles along the high tide line, scattered with worn plastic relics—tubs, bottles and baskets.

Patrick had the revs up again, and the car plunged towards the beach, still nosing its way along the wheel ruts. Scraps of vegetation made poonking noises on the headlights and the front panels, and the springs squeaked over the bleeding engine. In a gap in the scrub, Charlie saw a pile of shells as high as the car window. He knew by now they were abalone.

And then without warning they were out and streaking across the soft sand at the top of the beach, the car tilted down towards Charlie's door as it ploughed ahead. Patrick was hunched forward over the steering wheel, elbows high. The front tyres bit once or twice, and the back end developed a lazy drift, made more alarming by the presence of small boulders here and there in the sand. Patrick cackled as they collected a boulder under the front passenger wheel.

‘The trick to it'—his eyes darted across the beach looking for a line—‘is to keep the revs up. If you slow down, you're fucked.'

The curve of the beach pinched tighter at the western end, and the space available for the car to continue its high line was shrinking fast. Without warning, Patrick swung it violently downwards, crunching through the kelp and fizzing out onto the damp tidal flats. The end of the beach was approaching fast, where the reef took over and the headland met the sea. He looped extravagantly across the sandbank and slowed to a stop, then reversed straight up the slope of the beach until the depth of the sand prevented any further climb. They were perched about ten feet above the water level now, and armed with a good enough forward run-up to allow easy escape.

As the Camira settled on the soft sand, burning grasses smouldered in the engine bay. There was a sharper smell too, possibly brake linings. Charlie decided not to sniff too deeply. From the boot of the car, Patrick started pulling out diving equipment made of old-fashioned black rubber: a sleeveless wetsuit that did up over the shoulder, long black fins, a steel-rimmed mask. He made two piles of gear and quickly dressed himself from the first pile, throwing a heavy weight-belt around his waist and his mask and a pair of gloves—they looked like gardening gloves—into a catch bag.

Charlie stood at the tailgate, which Patrick had wedged open with a piece of radiator hosing, and pulled on the old wetsuit. The sun emerged from behind the slow-moving haze in the northwest and the sea lit up as though a dial had been turned. The forbidding grey-green hue moved through a spectrum of turquoise to a brilliant emerald green as a warm glow fell on his back. Charlie looked up to see birds circling in the sun. Not seagulls as he'd expected them to be, but larger, heavier birds with cruel-looking beaks and mottled plumage. Their wings stretched nearly as wide as his arms, swept back in a predator's arc. As Charlie watched, one bird suddenly angled itself straight at the shallows, metres from the dry sand, smashed violently into the surface and disappeared under the boil of whitewater. It re-emerged with a hand-sized crab in its beak and hauled itself heavily into flight. The crab pawed frantically as the bird lifted it higher, one clay-orange leg probing at the bird's eye, trying to prise an advantage in the unequal struggle, until the bird took it over an outcrop of rock and let it go.

Charlie felt a strange urge to involve himself, but he could see from the raised ground beside the car that the crab had disintegrated on impact, and now the killer's squawking competitors were fighting over the scattered fragments. The brawling settled quickly as the birds devoured their spoils on separate rocks, but the image wouldn't clear from Charlie's mind: the legs windmilling forlornly against the sky as the crab was taken up.

He shuffled down the beach after Patrick, worked his way from boulder to boulder, looking up only when he'd reached the water's edge. The mask felt foreign as he fitted it, the strap yanking painfully at his hair. Remembering summers forever ago, he took it off again and spat in it. Repositioned it, with another painful tug.

Patrick had slid into the water without a word while Charlie was fiddling with the equipment. He marked Patrick's direction of travel by the trailing wake of the snorkel, and flopped forward off the rock. He coughed some water free of the snorkel, surprised to find the mouthpiece had stayed in position, and waited for the water's aerated fizz to clear.

The sound had changed. The birds, the gentle lift of air around his ears, the faraway waves, gone. There was no less sound in here, but it was unearthly—an orchestra of gloops and tinkles, even the highest registers somehow blurred. The water had a wobbly translucence, unlike anything he'd seen in the air, and he found he couldn't grapple with it—his mind didn't have a word, a corollary, anything. It was like an incomplete mix of oil and water, or hot and cold, swirling within itself and confusing his sense of distance, his understanding of colour.

His breath was loud in his ears. One ankle popped and rolled reluctantly as he finned his way over the shallows and the straps of the fins cut into the sides of his feet. It took a moment or two to find Patrick, reduced in the middle distance to a pair of pulsing black fins leaving stabs of silver bubbles, chattering consonants among the blue-green vowels of the reef. Charlie tried to keep him in sight, craning his neck forward as the sea floor fell rapidly away.

Once when he and Harry were little, they'd discovered the contrast control on the family TV. They turned it down slowly until the objects on screen drowned in a darkness that robbed them of definition, merging everything into cathode grey-black. Something like that was happening below him. There were fish moving around down there, dark and secretive, nosing their way to nowhere in particular. Either the arrangement of their eyes was such that they were unaware of him hanging in the sky above them, or they knew somehow that they were beyond his reach.