The Windy Season (12 page)

Michael and Shivani were in bed by the time he got home. It was after midnight but he felt wired. Overheated in his clothes,
unsettled by the events of the evening, the conversation with this father. He thought of the boy in the bar and the look on Roo Dog's face. Thought, too, about what Shivani had said. Was he really at the site of some kind of danger, being in Stark? Swimming in an undertow? He had no hope but to get thinking about what Shivani knew that he didn't. Michael, too. And the rest of the town. He felt suspicion build in himself, the compulsion that came with it.

Michael's computer was on the kitchen table. Paul sat down in front of it, scanned the search history. The Oxford University website, Department of Economics. He found a photograph of Michael standing under a dim sky in front of a world that looked ancient, buildings yellowed like old bone. His blond hair was darker. Shorter and combed. But his smile was the same. He wore a grey blazer and held a certificate. A Gibbs Prize for the best overall performance in three papers in Economics.

Paul stared at the photograph for some minutes, processed it all. It was always wounding, in a way, to uncover the secrets of people, however small they were. There was pain to confirming that things were not as they seemed.

Paul listened to the wind. He glanced up at the hallway.

It was a shitty thing to do, Paul knew. Poring over other people's information. Like rummaging through drawers in his brother's bedroom, and that same excitement. The fear of being caught, the fear of what you might find.

With Elliot, the search history was mostly surfing destinations. Remote Indian islands in the Bay of Bengal. North Sentinel Island. There were desertscapes he'd looked up, national parks in the Northern Territory. Daydreams of isolation. Elliot was rarely on the computer but Paul wondered if he had missed something, if he could uncover the necessary clue. A name. A location. When
no one spoke to each other, the computer was like a sort of oracle. The great revealer.

The Professor was brilliant with computers, of course. But he didn't seem to care enough to cover his own arse, to clear the search history and the traces left. It almost felt cruel, how easy it was to find things that his father would have thought he'd hidden well enough.

It was sometimes porn, softcore stuff. Cheerleaders. Photographs instead of videos. It was weird to come face to face with the Professor's fantasies when one could have wondered if the man was even capable of any feeling or desire at all.

Paul had found other photographs his father had searched of the first gulf war. They were mostly aftermaths of Baghdad missile strikes. Gutted government buildings, hard sunlight on mounds of debris. Bodies woven within, blood bright against the powdered rubble. The incongruent collage of hard materials and then the softness of human tissue. Concrete and iron and then a body without a face. A severed hand.

The search history was a gallery of horror. All so hideous that it was sordid. And Paul had felt the puzzling judgement in himself; knew the hypocrisy of feeling the way he did. How strangely hurt he was that his father might trawl through things so awful, when Paul knew he had done just the same.

And still he'd wondered what his father was looking for, what the destruction meant to him. He sometimes wondered if his father felt he had missed out. A Combat Systems officer who never saw combat. Paul had looked it all up. Read of the Australian clearance divers who searched for sea mines in the northern Persian Gulf. Frigates on patrols, accompanying supply vessels. But he knew that the Australian navy had never fired a shot. Did the Professor wish that he had?

The President says to me one day I'll be as tall as him but the President is the tallest fella I've ever seen. I'm not an old fella yet but I'm sure that I'm not getting much taller. It is in the blood and I know this cos my gran said my father was a small fella even when he was fully grown. He never had no shame about it or anything. He was a demon with a footy in his hands. A lot of fellas out Tennant Creek way were good with a football in their hands and could be quick over the grass but she said he was something that no one had seen before. So tricky he could run under a fella's legs. I was a baby when she told me that. It is strange the things that stick in your head. So much I don't remember. Whole years just cleaned out up there in my head. But I remember my gran.

We got so much tech equipment out here we could be in a war. Scanning for radar. Satellite-phoning bikes ahead for roadblocks. And the President talks to those boats far out at sea. The big ones. I tell the President that he is like that Osama fella. Hiding in the desert. Running the whole show from a laptop. He says he knows he ain't running nothing. Says you have to remember that you are never running the show and if you think you are then you will soon be running the whole shebang from a grave that you dug yourself.

Parachute

PAUL WOKE BEFORE SUNRISE EVEN
without the alarm. The room was hot. He slid the window open. Put on board shorts, an old yellow pair of Elliot's he'd brought from home that went below his knee. He stepped out of the house without a t-shirt.

Outside it was overcast but already warm, the air thick. He walked through the caravan park. Heard the creak of the annexes in the easterly. Smelt the sour whiff of incinerator ash.

The back beach was empty. He scanned the long lonely curve of it, bending three kilometres south of the town around to the bluff which jutted out, red and barren, like a quarter-moon. Several hundred metres down from where he sat he felt him, like he had been there only minutes before. Elliot out on the shelf, knee deep with his rod in hand, casting into the surf.

There had been a time once when they were all down there.
It was years ago. His parents, Aunty Ruth and her new husband Bob. A picnic laid out on beach towels. White rolls and peppered ham. Tomato and plastic-wrapped slices of cheese. Choc milk. Jake was about ten or twelve, teaching Elliot to fish. They would run down to where the sandbanks gave way to reef, dark as blood under the surface. Paul looked down to the bunkers of rock on the shore where he had sat and watched his brother and their older cousin. Paul never liked the fishing but got some thrill out of watching. It was weird, how he liked to spectate. Be near goings-on but not involved. He had always been that way.

Paul turned and looked north and saw a woman in a dark blue bathing suit, one-piece, standing up away from the shoreline. She threw a white towel to the sand. It was the police officer. Paul got up and shook the sand from his hands.

She eyed him as he neared her, then she looked south towards the bluff. She stretched her left arm out in front of her, straightened it out, then wedged her upper arm against her chest with her right forearm. He saw the swimming goggles wrapped around her hand.

Senior Sergeant Harvey, he said when he got to her.

Fred, she replied.

She swapped arms, holding her right arm out in front. Shoulders freckled.

I'm Paul, he said. I came in to the station.

I know. Elliot Darling. I told you to talk to the Missing Persons Unit.

So you've read the report?

Fred pulled the rubber strap of her goggles over her head and pushed the goggles up to her forehead. She looked at him. They'll tell you if they find anything, she said. As soon as they've got anything solid.

She pulled the goggles down over her eyes.

Can I come? he asked.

Fred scanned him, head to toe. You swim? she said.

Yep, he said. This wasn't untrue. Both brothers had taken after their mother's gift with technique. But it had been a long time, perhaps years since he'd swum any real distance in the ocean.

You don't have goggles.

Don't need them.

Fred looked down at his yellow board shorts. Be like swimming with a parachute wearing those, she said.

Paul looked down at them. Be fine, he said.

I swim out a fair way. South towards the point, about halfway. Right down to where the reef starts. It's a good mile there and back.

Paul looked down the beach, took in the dark beyond the sandbank. Okay, he said.

I'll be going my pace. Not waiting around.

He nodded. The woman looked puzzled by him. He was puzzled by himself. What the fuck was he doing?

Fred inhaled. She stepped into the sea.

After a pause, Paul followed. Water foamed around his ankles, cool. His breath went as each churning wall hit his legs and waist, the waves small but loud, rumbling from within, whooshing and sighing as they passed.

Fred stepped through each one, comfortable. A swell above head height reared in front of them. Paul took in the green dark within it as the wave flexed on the sandbank, glimpsed the ocean beyond it, opaque, like looking through a window when the lights are off. Paul stopped where he was as the wave broke in a clean uniform arc ten metres in front of him, a blade coming down. Then the boom and thump of water, the synchronised
upshot of vapour, suspended in front of them. Fred slipped under it. Paul crouched on the sandbank. Waited the half second for it, eyes closed. Gripped the sand with his fingers. When it hit him he felt the weight move over him, through him. It took his legs from the sand.

When he came up he had hoped the wave had washed him back towards the beach. He hoped Fred had continued on without him. But she was there, looking back at him, turned on her back and adjusting her goggles, the now-quiet sea smooth as fish-oil slick.

Before Paul was level with her Fred rolled over, put her face to the sea, hunched her shoulders and kicked out in one movement.

Her skin glowed in the murk. Salt hot in his nostrils. He tasted it at the back of his mouth. They were only just beyond the breakers but Paul was surprised at the depth of the sea. The sandbank fell steeply away and he ignored the trench it disappeared into and the misting dark and instead took his breath on every fourth stroke, when his head was turned towards the beach. The dunes bobbing in his vision, looking further away than he expected.

So he watched the rippled bottom beneath him and the whiting that hovered over the sand, the fish almost transparent but given away by their thin shadows. Closed his eyes on each breath.

He looked down along his pale abdomen. Saw how his board shorts glowed in the murky sea, a beacon.

Then he stopped and threw his head to the surface. Tried to settle his breath. He was aware of his dangling legs. Saw blood in the water around him. There was the overcoming surge of adrenalin and then he was all animal, crazed limbs and short breaths and a bleating sound that shamed him as he heard it but that he had no control over. He kicked out towards shore and
felt the sand under foot, the water still at his neck, and began bounding towards shore.

In the shallows he felt relief and defeat. The world had been restored to normal dimensions. The surf was small and the channel beyond the sandbank no longer seemed so far out. The sun had come through the clouds and the sea was shining and green and clear. But his nerves were shot and there was no going back out.

Paul stood on the beach with his towel around his shoulders. He watched Fred go off down towards the reef, felt some opportunity go with her. He thought of waiting but then left.

Undertow

ARCADIA
TRACKED SOUTH OF THE CLIFFS
, along the beaches. Shallow enough you could see the bottom, light rings of limestone, weed-covered.

Onshore it was bays. Each one like the one before. You could see the gleaming heat in the sand and dirt and rock. It hurt his eyes to look at it.

Paul had read somewhere that a landscape itself has no meaning. That it was more a mirror and anything you saw in it or felt were your own thoughts or feelings being reflected back at you. But in the long dehydrated hours spent with the land there in the distance he could swear sometimes that it was saying something. Offering a kind of warning.

Ten thousand kilometres. That was the length of the state coast, from the Territory border at the north, right around the coast to the South Australian border. Ten thousand kilometres of
coastline. Michael had told him that. The distance from Stark to Stuttgart. He had never considered the length of it before. What reason would you have to think about it? Until you're looking at it from some sort of distance. Until you're looking for something. Tracking it. Eyeing it, like Paul did each day. Haunting it from sea. And then? Then it seemed endless.