Quota (16 page)

‘So anyway, that's Dad. Mum hung in there for another five years. I remember I had my eighteenth at the footy club, an' she died a few months after that. Still don't really know what happened, but she'd wandered out into the dunes at the far end of Antonias. God knows what the hell she was up to, but she was a fair way from the house, like five or six k's away. Anyway, they sort of worked it out afterwards, after they found her out there. She was lyin in a little scoop between the sandhills, on the clear sand where the marram grass wasn't growing. She'd been there for three days and we were all just freakin back at home, had search parties out everywhere. I even went and pulled a rake through the dam. You have to understand, Dad mighta nicked off pretty often, but Mum never did. She was just chained to the house with all them kids. So there she was. Fishermen found her. Not a scratch on her. But she'd left these marks in the sand all round herself—I don't know what you'd call em. Swirls, half circles. In the end we figured she'd had a fit of some kind and her hands and feet made the marks. Personally I think she had a feeling. A premonition, whatever, and she'd taken herself out there to die. But there wasn't too much point speculatin about it eh? She was dead. No one else had done it—there were only her tracks leading to the spot from one direction, and the fishermen's tracks in from the other. It was sad all right, but I s'pose we were all a bit over it by that stage. We were having money troubles and Mum was never the same after Dad died, so you know, it was more just a case of get on with it by then. Mags took her rainjacket off before the undertaker took her away, and Milly still wears it around the place.

‘But you gotta die at some stage, hey. Mum'd had enough, and you compare it to what Dad went through an'…anyway. That's that.'

Another long silence. Another chance, thought Charlie, to let it rest. Later there would be time to ask himself why he pushed it.

‘What are you going to do about all this, Patrick?'

‘About what?'

‘About your evidence.'

‘Fuck. Right down to business, eh? I've told you what happened.'

‘I don't think you have. You've been through a lot and I don't want to be disrespectful, but I think what you've told us is probably bullshit. Which happens a fair bit, but in your case it's a pity because if you don't fix it up, you're going to wind up in the witness box and they're going to tear you to pieces. These two cretins are going to walk and, shit, in those circumstances you'd have to say it'd be largely your doing.'

‘Righto. Suppose for a minute you're right. Let's say I was there and I saw everything and I give you a new statement or whatever you want, and I get in the witness box and I tell everyone what I saw. What happens then?'

‘They're likely to be convicted.'

‘And then?'

‘They'll go to jail—they'll do—I dunno—fifteen, seventeen years.'

‘Okay, so they go off to jail, right. What happens to me? What happens to my family? You go on to your next one, and the one after that, and one day you could be a judge or whatever. The witness welfare lady, she'll find a rape victim or somethin and good on her. Someone else'll shoot someone else. See, the whole circus moves on. You're all obsessed with getting this one over the line, but it's just the match of the day, isn't it? And after I've bared my arse in public for you people, I still don't have a brother, no fucken parents, and life just goes on, doesn't it? Still a leaky water tank, still a busted-arse car, kids' lunches.' His voice rose and cracked. ‘Ha! Kids' lunches…'

He flicked the dying smoke in his hand at the back bumper of the Camira. ‘So really…why bother?'

‘Because it's the right thing to do.' Charlie groaned inwardly.

‘Right thing to do. Pretty fucken cold comfort, isn't it?' Patrick's agitation was mounting again, and Charlie was now worrying that he hadn't plotted an exit from this conversation.

‘I'll give you the other side of it. I get in the box, I tell it exactly like it is in my statement and I walk away at the end of the day. Still be a shitfight back home, but at least I've got around the cross-examination bit, I get no fucken nonsense round the town from the Murchisons. And ya never know, they might get convicted anyway…' The anxious darting of the hands had returned, his eyes starting to oscillate sharply from side to side. He poked viciously at the file with the metal rod.

‘It'd be perjury.'

‘Hang on, I thought this was hypothetical. I didn't say it wasn't the truth.' Patrick gulped at the beer.

‘It isn't, mate. We both know that.'

There was a long silence. ‘Well if I was lyin, why would I put all that stuff in me statement about the drugs? Wouldn't I just pretend I didn't know anything about it? See, it's you that wants me comin up with some big story about how I saw it all and there's the guy that done it and all that. I'm not stupid, man. I know you got sent over here and someone's expecting you to come home and say yep, he's gonna co-operate, and I talked him round and ra ra ra…'

His face darkened.

‘That shit's all about
you
isn't it. It's a bit fucken rude sayin it's about truth and justice like yer a superhero that goes round rescuing kittens from trees. You call me mate and you talk as if this is you and me working out some problem we both got and you're here to help, but that's not what's going on. You still got yer lawyer head on in there somewhere, and to be honest I'm half expectin that everythin I say to you is gonna wind up in some statement. And the first thing the coppers are gonna do when you get a new statement from me is take it to those fuckers in remand and say, “Here you go boys, we've got the whole thing from Lanegan, and yer both goners, so how bout pleading up?” I done enough remand to know that routine. You can make all the promises you want, and I'm not doubting you, you'd mean it, but in the end, the Murchison family'll know it was me, and that just makes life difficult, or more like fucken impossible, so…no.'

He got up and walked away from the fire and began pissing on the marram grass with his back to Charlie.

‘Don't you owe this to Mags? They shot him. He never saw it coming. Shit, they tried to set his body on fire. Don't you feel like he'd want you to defend him?

‘Oh fuck off,' Patrick called over his shoulder. ‘For one thing he didn't work like that, and for another he's gone. He's gone an I have to work out how the rest of us are s'posed to get along without the welfare comin round and draggin off the little ones.'

He took the cray out of the water and studied it closely. As he tipped it over, the legs fell outwards limply, and he seemed satisfied, hefting the pot onto the fire and gently placing the cray back on the rock beside him.

‘You tell me—how am I s'posed to run the boat on my own? Shark fisherman—hah!—there's fuck all sharks out there now anyway. I'm goin halfway to King Island to get a load, and it's pretty much gettin taken up in fuel.' He had a driftwood plank in one hand, and pressing the cray onto it, he ran a knife around its body, then ripped away the front of the animal with a twist of the other hand. Hot brown fluid dripped onto the timber as Charlie watched. Patrick ran the knife down the middle of the segmented tail, cleaving it neatly, and handed one half to Charlie.

‘Chuck out the poo pipe,' he muttered. Charlie took it as a ceasefire.

Patrick pinched the pale worm of intestine out of the white flesh and flicked it away, before scooping a chunk of the meat into his mouth. Once again, the heat seemed to ebb out of him as he sloshed down the cray meat with a gulp of beer. He ripped the legs off the carcass and tossed a few towards Charlie.

‘Maybe we'll talk about what happened some time. But if I told you about that, we'd have to think about…about
how
I'm telling you, see?'

He looked quizzically at Charlie. ‘Put it to you another way. You'd have to think about why you were listening, what you were going to do with it once I'd told you.'

Charlie studied the delicate pink filigrees of a new layer of shell under the hard carapace of the tail. ‘I don't follow you.'

‘Comes back to this thing about you and the law. I don't know you that well, but this is what I see. You don't like people much, but you're bloody obsessed with the law. I reckon it's just one way of solving problems, and there's a whole lot of other ones. You can beat the shit out of each other like cavemen, right, or you can talk it through. People round here didn't really have the law to fall back on for a long time. Just didn't reach them out here, no cops, no courts. So they made up their own ways of dealing with shit. We can put aside all this crap about perjury and sworn statements and whatever else, and maybe I can just explain it all to you and you'll see it my way. But right now, you've got us in boxes. Witness and prosecutor, and you've got all these rules. I don't see it that way, and I got no respect for this bloody great system you got wrapped around everything.'

He was cracking open the cray's legs as he spoke, using the end of one antenna to push the tubes of pink flesh out of them. When the pile of discarded legs in front of him was complete, he stood up.

‘Anyway, that was good, eh.' Patrick looked out over the darkened sea. ‘Have to do that again sometime. Try not to drown ya.'

He had the length of steel in his hand again, and walked silently around to the front of the Camira. When he lifted the bonnet and slid it into the motor, Charlie realised he'd been poking the fire with the dipstick. Patrick gathered the remnants of the shell in front of him and scooped them into the dying fire. When he was done, he ploughed sand over the embers with the side of his foot, and loaded the car without another word. It was only when he'd got into the drivers seat and started the engine that Charlie reacted, jumping in and slamming the tinny door just as the Camira rolled down the beach in a cloud of exhaust. He didn't dare look sideways. Patrick seemed to be deep in thought.

AFTER A WEEK, Lewis the panelbeater called to say he'd put a new front quarter panel on the Saab and the car was ready for collection. He then felt the need to correct himself and clarify that the quarter panel was in fact secondhand, from the wreckers, and not strictly new. Charlie assured him that was fine.

He was now accustomed to walking the town, and felt almost disappointed when he reached the industrial estate and saw the car waiting for him. When Lewis turned up at the little office window in the corner of his shed, Charlie already had cash on the counter. He couldn't remember the last time he'd managed to use a card in Dauphin, and the routine was starting to bring him a secret pleasure: the slow, careful handwriting on the invoice pad, thumb on the carbon to tear it off, the deliberate counting of the notes. Charlie had kept each receipt from recent days, not because he thought he could claim anything back, but because of the affection he felt for this little ritual.
Curlewis Sports and Leisure
,
Dawkins Pharmacy
,
Bowman Family Grocers.

On his way back through town he passed the Normans Woe, and knew he couldn't take another pub meal, a seventh consecutive wander over the chalkboard menu, another side-serve of boiled carrots and peas. Most of the shops were dead in the early evening, the street largely deserted, a handful of locals shuffling into the supermarket, talking beside their cars. Random pools of light spilled from half-lit shop windows, and a blinking neon sign drew his attention.
Fortune Palace Chinese Restaurant
. The old tiling along the street frontage suggested it might once have been a butcher's shop. Inside Charlie could see dozens of vacant chairs and an Asian man he assumed to be the proprietor, seated down the back near the kitchen servery, absorbed in a book. Near the door, the glass was festooned with photos of the Fortune Palace's dishes: empress chicken, salt and pepper squid, Szechuan beef. Each of the photos had faded to various shades of blue, the food indistinguishable.

He entered past a glowing fish tank. The proprietor dropped his book and hurried forward, waving a menu folder at the booths along the far wall, and Charlie slid onto a bench in the nearest booth. The cushion exhaled softly as he sat: the Bee Gees were singing ‘How Deep Is Your Love' softly in the background. He ordered a beer and ran his finger over the menu folder, unable to place exactly what he wanted to think about. Sometimes at these moments he thought it was Annie. But then that seemed more like a mental puzzle than anything emotional, and he let it go.

The sequence, as he saw it, was: get the car fixed, get Patrick to co-operate, go home. The car was done, therefore going home didn't present insurmountable difficulty. But what about Patrick? He'd set out his position in no uncertain terms, but even as he'd spoken he seemed to be exploring the limits of that position. Charlie had felt his mind working on the drive back from Gawleys. Patrick was working away at a knot, and he wasn't done.

Charlie had postponed all further work back in Melbourne until he could be sure about a return date, but he knew, whatever Harlan said, that the OPP wouldn't keep paying him to kick around this town indefinitely. In the meantime he'd decided to let Patrick be. Leave him to drift to the right decision in his own time. Of course he might never do that; if Charlie was honest, it also had something to do with giving himself some room. He needed to let the thing with Annie settle in his mind. He needed to leave her alone for a while, too. He needed, more than anything, to sort himself out before he stood up in front of the next magistrate, who might be every bit as intransigent as Lefcovics.

And he'd been right to conclude that there was no point rushing any of this. But the longer he hung around, the more attention he was drawing to himself. This community seemed congenitally obsessed with other people's business.