The Outback (18 page)

Chapter 24

‘Good riddance to the old
git is what I say.’

The group had all
gathered in the dining area to discuss the news that Sheriff Lee had delivered
just a half hour earlier. After an uncomfortable silence, Colin had been the
first to vocalise his opinion.

‘There is no need to be
like that,’ Jenny told him. ‘Rhett may not have been a very good person, but he
was still a human being all the same.’

Colin was unmoved by her
reasoning.

‘I can say whatever I
like. That scumbag gets no sympathy from me; not even in the grave. In fact, I
think it’s a shame that he didn’t kill himself a couple of months sooner and
save us all a load of misery.’

Jenny was disgusted by
what she was hearing.

‘I can understand why
you feel that way; I just think that it is disrespectful to be so flippant
about it. It is as if you are getting pleasure out of another man’s death.’

‘What about the pleasure
that old Shawshank got out of beating me in the field? You weren’t there so you
don’t know what he was capable of. He practically threatened to rape Celeste
for Christ’s sake!’ He stood up and walked away from his seat, choosing to sit
on top of an adjacent table, which placed him in a more elevated position than
the rest of the group. ‘What if he had threatened either Rose or yourself? I
bet that you would not be so quick to defend him then.’

Jenny looked around for
support, but found nobody willing to back her up against Colin. Everyone had
their head bowed as if they were reflecting on the conversation without wishing
to actually participate in it. There was not one of them who had not been
affected by the old man’s malice at some point. The dominant emotions felt by
all were relief coupled with guilt. Nobody could truthfully say that they were
not glad to have seen the last of Rhett Butler.

‘I am well aware of the
potential danger that he posed,’ said Jenny, ‘but I would much rather have seen
him in a prison cell than the grave.’

‘He got what was coming
to him,’ replied Colin.

Jenny was horrified.

‘That is a terrible
thing to say. It is almost sounds like you would have wanted to kill him
yourself had he not died.’

‘Maybe I would have. If
he’d have been stupid enough to try and attack me again, who knows what I might
have done?’

She knew that it was
obviously just meaningless macho nonsense that the Irishman was spouting, but
Jenny still felt that someone should argue on the side of logic. She bit down
on her bottom lip to compose herself before speaking.

‘If you had killed him,
you would be a murderer and even he never stooped that low.’

‘Do any of us even know
that?’ replied Colin, who was relishing his role as preacher and seemed happy
to sit and moralize for as long as required. ‘For all we are aware, there could
be a dozen bodies buried under his porch.’

‘I cannot listen to
anymore of this.’

Jenny got up and left
through the front door. She had been incensed by the Irishman’s attitude and
needed to walk off some of the tension. After a brief moment, Matt joined her outside.

‘You shouldn’t be too
harsh on him, you know. We have no idea what’s going through his head right
now. Imagine if a man had drunk himself into a stupor and then killed himself
in a car crash just hours after you’d been in a fight with him. How would you
feel?’

‘You think Colin blames
himself for Rhett’s death?’ This was not a conclusion she would have reached
herself, but she was able to follow Matt’s line of reasoning. ‘If that is the
case then he may think of himself as...’

‘...a murderer.’

Jenny at once regretted
her own stupidity.

‘I should never have
said those things to him. Do you think that I should go back and apologise?’

Matt put his hands on
her shoulders.

‘It is probably best to
leave things as they are for the time being. He knows that you didn’t mean what
you said. Just give him a little time to come to terms with what’s happened.’

‘Are you sure? I mean,
somebody should talk to him and let him know that it wasn’t his fault.’

‘And you think that you
are the best person for that? Trust me; Colin will be fine. Me and the guys
will have a drink with him later and help him to put everything into
perspective.’

‘You mean get pissed.’

He offered her his most
reassuring smile.

‘Like I said; we’ll help
him put everything into perspective.’

***

Matt picked up a six pack
of beer and took it back to the van with him to help begin Colin’s
rehabilitation. If his friend needed to let off some steam; then so be it.
After the beating that Colin had taken just days earlier he was entitled to say
whatever he liked about the man who had done it to him.

Matt found his friend
sat on his bed looking over the police report, which he had previously stolen,
whilst the pungent odour of marijuana permeated the small van. He did not take this
as a good sign. He was hoping to keep the Irishman away from the weed as it was
a much more unpredictable drug than alcohol. At least with beer he would be
better equipped to second guess what his friend was thinking.

‘I thought that you may
like a drink,’ Matt said, as he twisted a bottle out of the plastic mesh and
handed it to the seated man.

Colin accepted the
offering, but did not reply. He remained rapt in his study of the illegitimate
files, which sat in his lap. If Rhett had occupied a great deal of his thoughts
in life, he would become an obsession in death. The Irishman could not stop
thinking about what had happened, as well as what might have been.

‘You were right with
what you said earlier,’ the Englishman told him.

Matt was sat on the edge
of his own bed and did not wish to get too relaxed as he was hoping to coax
Colin outside. The Irishman glanced up, only appearing half interested in the
conversation.

‘Rhett certainly had it
coming,’ Matt continued. ‘It’s all there in that report you’re reading. Looking
at the way he lived his life, it’s a wonder he didn’t kill himself sooner, eh?’

Colin continued to flick
through the pages in front of him.

‘What do you think he
would have been like before it all went wrong?’ he asked.

The question seemed
vague and almost rhetorical, making Matt unsure if he was actually expected to
reply.

‘You mean before the
first arrest?’ he asked.

‘It says here that he
was just twenty one when he was first taken into custody.’ Colin was finally
beginning to connect. ‘There must have been a time when the old git had some
kind of dreams or aspirations. Do you think that he would have been much
different to us?’

‘Yes, I do. I think he
would have been nothing like us.’

‘You cannot be sure of
that.’

Colin paused, briefly
lost in his own thoughts. ‘What’s the best you’ve ever hoped for?’ he then
asked.

Matt shrugged away the
question. He was not sure where his friend was leading him on this.

‘I mean in life,’ the
Irishman elaborated. ‘What do you hope to gain from it all?’

‘I can’t say that I’ve
really given it that much thought. I suppose I just take each day as it comes
and hope for the best. Life will sort itself out sooner or later.’

Colin laughed, but it
was a laugh of the most condescending kind.

‘Life will sort itself
out. That’s a brilliant philosophy. Life certainly sorted itself out for Rhett,
didn’t it?’

The Irishman tilted his
bottle vertical as he finished off the last of the liquid inside and then took
a replacement from the pack. Matt was barely halfway through his own beverage.

‘You can’t compare us to
him,’ said Matt. ‘He chose his path and paid the consequences.’

‘How do you know that
you won’t make the same mistakes? We don’t know what it was that triggered his
descent. One moment of drunken stupidity and your entire future could be flushed
down the pan.’

The conversation was
beginning to make Matt uneasy.

‘There is a line that I
would never cross. That’s what the difference is. Rhett had that inside of him
from the start, but I don’t.’

‘All I am saying is that
you never know what will happen in life.’ He passed the picture across to Matt.
‘Are you religious at all?’

Matt was distracted by
being handed the photograph and struggled to see what relevance religion had to
the conversation. As he glanced down at the picture, Colin started taking increasingly
large gulps from his beer.

‘I was dragged along to
church a few times when I was younger,’ said Matt. ‘My mother had a habit of
rediscovering God following any family bereavement. My brothers and I were
normally made to attend for about three weeks after the funeral, but then she
would give up on it all again.’

‘So you believe in
salvation then?’

‘Well, my mother
obviously did. As for me; I’m happy to be an agnostic. You’ll never know the
answer until you die anyway; so why let it bother you?’

‘Agnostic; antagonistic
more like. At least atheists have the balls to actually take a stance. Where
I’m from we don’t have the luxury of simply ignoring the big questions. We have
Christ the Redeemer thrust upon us from birth.’

Matt finally saw the
point that his friend was trying to make.

‘Redemption; that’s what
this is about, isn’t it? You are wondering if Rhett repented for his
wrongdoings.’

‘Oh, I’m sure Shawshank
repented all right. During those last excruciating seconds when the flesh
melted from his bones, I’m pretty sure that he did nothing but repent. It would
be just like the old man to live a life without conscience or remorse and the
moment that it all ended, he was a born again believer.’

Matt finished his first
bottle. As he reached for a second, Colin beckoned him to pass over his third.

‘Isn’t everyone entitled
to forgiveness?’

Colin’s fingers rested
on the screw top. There was a hiss as he loosened the cap, but he did not
remove it immediately.

‘It’s just that with men
like Shawshank you always expect that one day they will get their just
desserts.’

‘And he did. Would you
have preferred him to spend his last years leaching off the state in some rest
home?’

‘That’s not what I
mean.’ He finally removed the cap, discarding it onto the bedside table.
‘People like him should be held accountable for what they’ve done. He should
have been made to confront the misery that he caused.’

‘I think that you are
reading far too much into this. Rhett was not some cartoon super villain; he
was just some miserable old criminal who died as a result of his own
negligence. These things happen every day.’

‘It shouldn’t have
happened to Shawshank though. Not before somebody had the chance to confront
him over what he did.’

He had become agitated
and started to drink even more fervently than before. It did not take long for
him to finish off the bottle.

‘Someone like you, you
mean?’ asked Matt.

Colin did not reply. His
eyes were contemplating the final beer bottle, but he did not reach for it.

‘It is not Rhett redeeming
himself that we are talking about, but you, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know what you
mean. What do I need to redeem myself for?’

Matt finished his own
drink and then took the final bottle. He was determined not to let his friend
get a lead on him.

‘You never got closure
after he attacked you. When you talk about just desserts, you are talking about
Rhett being punished for what he did to you specifically. Now that he’s gone,
you have all of this anger building up inside of you and no way to release it.’

‘So what do you suggest?
How do I take out my frustrations on a dead man; desecrate his grave?’

Colin’s words got Matt
thinking.

‘It’s not a bad idea.’

‘I was taking the piss,’
the Irishman scoffed.

‘At least hear me out,’
urged Matt, whilst he wracked his brains trying to remember something that he
had been told earlier. ‘After you and Rose left the police station that time,
Jenny told me something on the way home. She had some story about a face being
covered on one of the photographs on the wall of the interview room.’

‘Was that the picture
frame with a bit of duct tape on it? I noticed that when we were being
interviewed. I thought it was just covering a crack in the glass.’

‘No; there was more to
it than that. You know what Jenny’s like when it comes to culture. She
recounted this whole story about Aboriginal superstitions. If only I could
remember it.’