The Windy Season (14 page)

To Oxford? No sir.

Ruth was waiting in the car park when they arrived at the inlet. Paul and Michael approached the open driver-side window.

Here. She held a phone out to Paul through the car window.
Seeing as you are too brain dead and dumb to look after your phone, you can have this one.

He took the phone from her hand. It was no longer in its packaging but it looked new. Thanks, he said.

Call your parents. Your mum says she hasn't heard a word.

Okay.

I can't have her calling me every bloody day wondering what the fuck is going on.

Ruth reached over to the passenger seat for a neatly folded piece of paper. Your new number is on that. She cleared her throat, leant her head out of the window and spat at the ground near their boots. Michael put his hand over his face as if to hide a smile. I've put my number on there, too.

Paul nodded.

Right, I've got shit to do, she said, starting the car. And you'd better not be causing my Jake any trouble. Enough on his mind as it is.

Thank you, Ruth, Paul said.

She drove off.

Me and the President talk some fair amount of shit because his generals don't say much of anything.

The President once said I remind him of one of those clever Swiss knives. Not just good for one trick. He gave me one and I keep it in my pocket. It is a fancy one too. Still small enough to fit in your pocket but only just. Stainless steel. You can gut a roo with the blade on it, easy.

I told the President he calls me Swiss because he thinks he has me in his pocket. He denies it but I know it's what he thinks.

He reckons I'm too quick and clever to be cooking meth. Which is good, cos all that business is in my bones now. I feel like an old
fella some mornings. Knees and elbows give me shit. My teeth hurt and I got blood coming up from my lungs.

The President has me shooting. Whenever we stop, which is all the time. Every hour just about. On the sandy desert tracks the bikes get hot real quick. We put them in any shade we can find and the generals do the navigating and run the radar while I shoot cans with the .308 and the President lies next to me with the spotting scope. Talks over my shoulder like a coach. Says you need to be as close to dead as possible cos no one is as still as a dead man. Says to hold the shot till your lungs are empty. Fire the round between heartbeats. Has me hitting whisky cans and chocolate milk bottles from three hundred metres. I shoot a roo stone dead from twice as far.

The President don't touch a gun no more. Won't lay a finger on one. He says he has earned the right to keep his prints off things.

The way he spins it, he says I'm like a son to him. Says he wants to make me a President like him so he is teaching me the ropes. The President can sound almost like one of those missionary types when he talks like that and I know he is out to right some wrong in his own head. I wonder if he has God on his mind sometimes.

There are days I almost like him. He is nicer to me than those young bikie fellas are. Some of them are sick in the head. The President isn't like that to me and maybe he does think about my situation with my parents being long under the ground.

But I know things the President has done and when you have seen a man do certain things there is just no way you can forget it.

Moby Dick on a handline

JULES HAD ONLY JUST PLACED HIS BURGER
on the counter when the news broadcast started on the television above the bar. The deckhands carried on chatting, Jungle recounting some old misbehaviour of Zach's down the bar, and Michael, next to him, explaining Hubble's theory of an expanding universe to Elmo, while Paul watched the screen.

The story was being broadcast live from a street in the southeast border town of Eucla. Paul became aware of the men going quiet around him. Perhaps it was the hyperventilating tone of it all, the large bold headings and details scrolling on repeat at the bottom of the screen, like it was CNN. Or maybe it was the tight pink blouse of the reporter. But soon they were all watching.

The reporter stood in front of a rural police station, lights flashing silently in the darkness beside her. She explained how, several hours earlier, detectives had pulled over four men in a
LandCruiser as they crossed the border out of Western Australia, seventy kilograms of methamphetamine and ecstasy in a hollow metal tube welded to the underside of the car. An image flashed on the screen of a four-wheel drive cordoned off by tape on the edge of a desert road.

Police had launched coordinated raids across the state, the reporter continued. They seized a house in the northern suburbs of Perth and a half-million-dollar boat. A Perth woman was arrested and further drugs were discovered in an apartment in Esperance on the south coast.

A lone detective stood behind a table, turning over packages with gloved hands, answering questions with a bewildered expression.

They are not novices, he said, frowning towards the TV cameras. This is a highly sophisticated network.

These are professionals, the German mimicked aloud, stumbling over the word. Jungle laughed. This, Michael said, right here, this is the real deal.

The investigators believed the four men and one woman may have had connections to a larger organised crime network, though a link was yet to be established. The methamphetamine was most likely produced overseas, but they were as yet unable to determine how such a volume could have entered the country, or where it might have come from.

The detective was out of his depth. That was obvious. Michael said he was like an angler who had hooked a creature that his gear couldn't take, a species he couldn't identify or comprehend. Jungle declared it was like he had Moby Dick on a handline, and smiled in the wake of the words, pleased with himself.

Paul said nothing.

In the dark

TWO BOYS STAND AT THE EDGE OF THE REEF
. The night ocean is warm around their legs. The sun is an hour from rising and the city is in shadow behind them, strange in its quietness. The older brother stares purposefully out into the dark. He eyes the tip of his rod. Feels each tremble of the line on his fingertip. Reads it. The younger boy watches the water, trying to settle his thoughts. He has just seen a giant octopus emerge from the darkness, the tentacles reaching into the night air and gripping each boy around the waist, thrashing them about in the dark victoriously while the world is asleep.

He draws in a deep breath and focuses on the catch bag in his hands, how he
must
make sure any fish his brother hooks gets in that bag. Paul has lost one already, the herring bucking in his hands as he pulled the hook from its mouth. Elliot isn't talking to him now. And it is still so dark, the sea. Almost black. Paul peers
over his shoulder in hope that he will see the sun peering back at him above the vast silhouettes of the houses on West Coast Drive. But there is no sign of it.

And it is then that the shark surprises them in a scream of white water, a great white shark, as big as the bus they take to school, even bigger, surging over the shelf and on them before either has a chance to yell. And in a moment they are gone, deep into the animal's gullet, in one horrific crush of its jaws.

Elliot hoots as the rod comes to life, jittering and arching down towards the water. Get the bag ready, he says.

But Paul can see their blood in the water. He imagines their mother and father tracing the shoreline for pieces of them. A newspaper headline appears in his mind as real as anything.

And he turns, without offering an explanation. He steps as quickly as he can over the shelf of reef, navigating the holes and trenches, stumbling over heads of coral, kicking his toes. Elliot shouts out after him, pleads for him to come back, but Paul keeps going, hopping over the shelf until he reaches the shoreline. And then he breaks into a sprint, tearing away from the night sea and the giant octopus and the shark, and away from his brother standing alone in the dark at the edge of the reef.

Containment

PAUL SWAM BREASTSTROKE IN THE SHALLOWS
, his knees grazing the sandbank with each circular kick, glancing over his shoulder every now and again as if he were walking down a dodgy alley. The sky was cloudless, the water clear. He looked for Fred. But the beach was empty.

Two swallows flew in hard arcs near him, wheeling above the water. The birds came closer, untroubled by his presence. He knew their metallic blue, their grey breasts. They saw them often on the water when they were working. And he couldn't take his eyes off them.

Elliot had always told him that the birds meant danger. He had said so since they were little. Particularly the swallows and martins that buzzed low across the water in the summer months. They were scanning for sharks, Elliot had said. He told Paul the sailors called the swallows warning birds. It meant a boat was
being shadowed, that they should keep their limbs clear of the water. A swallow was death itself.

Paul suspected warning birds had the ring of bullshit, and his mother said it wasn't true. Sailors had given them the name welcome swallows, she said. The sight of welcome swallows meant a ship was near to land. But he had given way too much thought to them over the years. That was Elliot's point all along, understanding how it played into Paul's weakness for superstition.

Late-night searches on the internet only confirmed Elliot's half-truth, as it confirmed all half-truths. A swallow flying through your house was a sign of imminent death. Of course everything was a symbol of bad luck in some place or other. An audible fart in Ecuador was the sound of your soul leaving your body.

He knew a fart was just a fart, and a swallow was just another fucking bird. But with the water to himself, it was hard to not think of them as some kind of omen, to sense the shadow of something in deeper water.

On the beach he lay back on his towel and felt the sharp grip of the sun on his skin. He closed his eyes and saw Kasia next to him. The heat flash-drying her skin. The easterly coaxing goosebumps down the length of her body. When he thought of leaning over her and kissing her the image disappeared, and he felt something like sadness. There was such an impossibility to his daydreams. He was gutless with girls. It was in his DNA. For all of Elliot's bravado in the sea, his brother was the same. And girls threw themselves at Elliot. It was the moths-to-a-flame deal with him. But whenever Paul saw his older brother talking to a girl, there was the same hesitancy and timidness that he recognised in himself. The brothers had never spoken about it, why love and sex were such perplexing frontiers for both of them.
Elliot did have Tess, of course, but he never talked about her to Paul.

And Paul never told him of his one experience, a couple of years before, when he found himself alone in a pantry at a house party with a short, square-shouldered girl named Claire. She was from a state school east of the freeway. Claire had dragged him in to the kitchen for a supposed joke that only she seemed to know and he remembered being aware of her yellowish teeth under the counter light and a sarcastic laugh that rounded off everything she said. But in the pantry it was dark and once she had closed the door her laughter subsided until all he heard was her breathing. He remembered the sour, rich taste of McDonald's on her lips and on her tongue and the wine on her breath and the scent of their bodies in the heat, and the smell of flour and stale bread and honey from the shelves. He had felt for her breasts and only seemed to find the barrier of her bra that was either too large or had come loose, the cup folding in his hand. They were in there for all of twenty minutes. Later Claire vomited in one of the bedrooms of the house and fell asleep there. He never saw her again, but when he was alone he had sometimes thought of her. It was the only memory like that he had. And it was better than porn or one of the girls in Elliot's surfing magazines if just for the realness of it. At night, alone his bed and with the lights off, Claire transformed into something close to perfection, the smell of her saliva, slicked above his lip, became a perfume.