The Windy Season (7 page)

The tavern car park was almost empty with only a few four-wheel drives parked close to the unlit back steps. Laughter drifted from the doors.

Inside there was no music playing, just the percussion of loud talk, and the trebly call of dog racing coming from the bar televisions. At a far counter, sitting under the glow of the televisions, there were men who looked scarcely alive. Their skin was a dark, patchy red. Their eyes were red too, and all settled on the woman behind the bar. They hadn't noticed Paul.

Jules, said one of the men, I've got an itch that needs scratching.

You better get that looked at, Anvil, the woman said.

The man grunted, smiled. A couple of the others snickered. He was huge, much bigger than the rest of them.

You look tired, Jules, he said. Let me take you home. Give you a back rub.

Christmas is it? I thought that was still a couple weeks away?

Nah, just your lucky day. We can fuck too, if you want.

The other men laughed.

What are you feeding this one, Arthur? she said. He's got a horrible look in his eye.

The woman saw Paul and made her way over, collecting empties on the bar. She was pretty, but looked overtired. There were deep creases around her eyes and at the sides of her mouth, puckered like old scars. Her black top was pulled down over the small paunch of her stomach.

What you having? she said to him.

Paul looked for a menu along the counter. He sensed the group become aware of his presence, backing themselves away from the bar to sit upright. They fell silent.

You look like shit, kiddo, she said to him, grinning. You alright?

He nodded. Hoping I could still get some food?

Jules shook her head. Kitchen is shut. Jolix has gone home. Got chips. Burger Rings. That's it.

Can I have some Burger Rings? And a bottle of Coke?

Only cans, darling. Vending machine is behind you. I'll get your chips. Three bucks.

She reached up to the shelf of chip packets behind her. Paul looked back across to the group at the bar and saw one of them watching him, gazing blankly through long hair, such an odd, clownish expression that Paul thought for a moment that he
was joking. He looked the youngest of the group. He was the smallest by a long way, and he had a dying man's skinniness, the skin of his face tight against the skull underneath, squared bones of his elbow and wrist clearly visible. There was no white at all to his eyes, and in the way he stared, hunched low over the bar with his eyes locked on Paul's, he had all the menace of a dog leering through a gate.

You want a bowl? Jules said to Paul.

No thank you, Paul replied.

He looked back across the bar. The skeleton's gaze remained on him. His head was drooped forward and his mouth hung in a sort of grin, nostrils flared as though he was trying to smell him.

I can give you a glass, Jules said. Some ice.

I'm okay, Paul replied, looking back to her and trying his best to smile.

Suit yourself. You go have a lie-down somewhere.

Paul walked to the door and heard the laughter at his back.

The concrete floor of the phone booth was dusted with white sand. There were names scratched into its Perspex walls and short, hard-won statements that had been etched with the edge of a coin or a knife. The plastic of the phone was cold against his cheek. It smelt of cigarettes and perfume.

Dad.

Paul? You calling from a pay phone?

Yeah. My phone's not working. You asleep?

Um, no, his father said softly. Not really. Was watching something. He yawned. Must have gone under. What's the time?

Around ten, I think.

His father yawned again. I should put myself to bed. Everything alright up there?

Yeah, good, Paul said. Just letting you know I got up here.

Oh, okay.

How are you, Dad?

Tired. Ringo's been keeping me up. Got that thing with his ears again. Your mum is going to take him to the vet tomorrow, get more of those drops.

Haven't heard anything?

About what?

Elliot.

No, his father replied. I have not heard anything.

What about Elliot's birthday? Paul said.

Yes, it is his birthday this month, he said.

Paul had known the weakness of his question, how it reached for an answer that his father couldn't provide. His brother's birthday was in three weeks, but what about it? What would his birthday mean? Could they celebrate it? Would they wait for him to call, on that one day, as if that was what he had been waiting for? It made no sense. The idea seemed laughable, almost cruel. But still Paul could feel a kind of hope in him that he couldn't control, the belief that maybe Elliot's birthday might deliver them something. He wondered if his father hoped for that too.

Anyway, mate, his father said, you should be in bed. Won't make Jake too happy if you're late tomorrow.

Yeah. Okay.

Goodnight, Paul, his father said.

Paul hung up the phone and stood listening to the wind, looking through the scarred Perspex to the splintered image of the main street.

In the hostel lounge Paul went on a computer, lights off around him, enveloped by the light of the screen.

He searched his brother's name. He was good at digging through databases. Combing forums and chatrooms. He had been like that for years, long before Elliot went missing. It was just the way he was. It wasn't something to be proud of, but it had become something of a skill.

It was on the blog of a retired naval officer that Paul once found a record of his father from the first gulf war. A photograph taken on the black deck of an aircraft carrier. The image was overexposed, hard sunlight fuzzing the figure standing proudly at its centre. But it was clearly his father. Thin-faced and smiling, in a green jumpsuit and black boots. A clear blue sky behind him. Sandy fringe in a breeze. In his right hand he was holding a small novelty American flag. Paul had read the caption beneath the photograph enough times that he could recite it word perfect. Thomas Darling. Combat Systems officer. Operation Desert Storm. Persian Gulf. January 1991. Two years before Elliot was born.

The Professor of Statistical Science had been to war and he'd never said a word. There was not a physical record of the tour in the house, for all of Paul's searching over the years. But the internet had delivered the secret to him.

And a secret like that was hard to take on. Because he knew when he found it, when his heart was beating with it all settling in his mind, that it was something that Paul would never be able to speak of. He'd die with it.

In the dorm most of the curtains were pulled on the beds. He drew the thin bedsheet over himself and thought about the girl he'd seen in the kitchen the night before, the sun-darkened skin of her legs and shoulders. He wondered if she was behind any of those curtains, then he fell asleep.

Shadow

PAUL
.

He felt the hand on his shoulder.

Paul, the voice repeated.

He looked up into the gloom and saw brown eyes, and such a look of terror that Paul sat up in his bed. Through the dorm window it was almost light.

You are Paul? the man said, the words rolling at the tip of his tongue, gentle but urgent.

Paul nodded.

Someone has come for you.

Paul leapt from the bunk. He peered into his bag, swore into the black of it.

You know this person? the man asked.

Yes, Paul said. He sat back on the low bed, pulling on his jeans.

He has been yelling in the street, a girl said above him, accusation clear in her South American husk. She rubbed her eyes. He has been hitting the doors. How did you not hear this?

Paul stood up without answering and ran through the corridor with his boots in his hand. Some backpackers stood in the doorways of their dorms, all boxer shorts and harem pyjama pants, foot stink and yeasty breath, blinking at him as he dashed past.

Out in the half-light a shadow paced the front lawn, lurching back and forth. Jake's arms were braced by his side and he was bent forward, as if there were a great pain in his stomach. When he saw Paul he came at him. Four steps and Jake had a hand underneath Paul's face, fingertips pressed hard into his jaw like he was trying to break it. Paul heard the strange note come from his mouth. Jake let him go and leant onto his heels, and Paul could see the man considering coming again, contemplating sending his knuckles across Paul's face. But instead he turned and, after a breathless moment, Paul followed him to the waiting ute and climbed into the dinghy.

He lay in the same cold damp, wondering what was wrong with him. He should have run. Had never seen such a look in a person's eyes. Even in the tray Paul heard his older cousin's muffled screams from within the cabin. He palmed his throbbing jaw, could feel the trembling in every part of him.

He didn't see Jake for the rest of the day. The skipper rarely came down the ladder. Paul did his best to keep up with Michael. And the day went as an uncomfortable dream, unhinged from time, unending. Wind and light. The perpetual slamming of the hull against sea swell. The sound of the horn, a pause over a float. And then the cry of the engines as
Arcadia
raged onwards, like a tortured horse. Pot pull after pot pull. Hard bodies clicking
and crunching in his gloved hand. Carrying traps to the stern. Kicking the deadly rope from his feet. Retching into the windy sea. And those shadows flitting underneath the hull, their movements short, direct bursts.

In the misting water deep beneath
Arcadia
he sometimes thought he saw someone, sure for a moment he had caught the pale outline of a figure in a shaft of sunlight, or seen a face materialise in the eddies of silt, looking yearningly up at him. Doomed at mid-water, imprisoned.

Out on the horizon he sometimes saw figures standing on the water, thin and skeletal, shimmery. They were reef markers, he guessed, but he couldn't take his eyes off them when he got thinking of them that way.

Like most thoughts Paul had, there was no resisting them when they came.

He saw Elliot's four-wheel drive rolled, hidden by scrub. He smelt fuel in those moments. Felt weight on his limbs and on his chest.

He imagined his brother dead. A leathery, dark heap on the fringe of a desert track. Ribs exposed, eye sockets empty and rimmed by soldier ants. Or he would see a slick body, melting into the car seat, hear the energetic song of the flies, deafening. And there would be Elliot's face, black.

In another version, his brother fought to stay afloat in a windy sea, heavy in his fishing boots and flannelette, gloves on his reaching hands. Paul heard the drawing and breathing of swell, the foaming water white as teeth. He would feel short of breath for several minutes, the image lingering on him like a scent.

He wondered how much of these visions he controlled, and if he was choosing them. He didn't think of them as premonitions, but the violence in them was real.

Elliot could be dead. That was true. The police had told them as much. Be prepared for the worst. Whatever that meant. He was there when the constable delivered those words to his mother at the front door all those weeks after his brother had disappeared, returning the box of letters and photos the unit had taken. Prepare for the worst. He hated the man for saying it, how useful he might have felt offering those words. It was like telling someone to be prepared for a bullet to the head. There was no preparing for it.

When
Arcadia
reached the inlet Paul felt as if his limbs were hollow, the wind cutting through him as if he were only a phantom. Mouth bitter with bile, his legs weak.

Inside the deli it smelt of bait and cigarettes. The icy breeze of the air con on his sunburnt arms. He walked quickly to the soft drink fridges, the orange linoleum cold under his bare feet.

At the counter the clerk was talking to an older customer about the afternoon's wind, guessing the speed of it. She held out her palm to Paul without breaking the conversation and Paul levered the coins into it.

He stood out front of the deli under the sun, warming himself. The Coke made his eyes water.

Hey.

Behind him a man in a black hooded jumper stepped out from under the shade of the shopfront, head down, and closed in on him in a burst of energetic steps. Paul backed away a few metres, braced himself. The man looked up as he neared, grinning without any teeth that Paul could see.

Don't normally ask this but I need a few groceries mate and the missus would kill me if she knew I was asking but it's tough this time of year with Christmas lurking around the corner like a
bloody thief and we got kids and all that and there's no work and you know how it is. Think you could spare some coin?

Sure, Paul said, hearing the feebleness of his voice. He could not have guessed the man's age. There was a disconnect between the man's head and the clothes that surrounded it. The worn face peering out from under a baseball cap, his skin pale and potholed in the hard light. The hoodie and tracksuit pants and skate shoes, the body underneath thin and formless. It had a strange dress-up effect, like an old man in teenager's clothing. But he could have been eighteen.

Paul reached for his wallet.

Anything you've got, my friend.

Don't think I have many coins.

Anything at all.

Paul peered into the leather laggings of his wallet.

You a deckie? the man asked.

Yeah.

Oh cool. Yeah, fucking knew it. You look strong, hey. No shit. Can see it in your arms.

Paul looked up at him, tried to smile.

I used to work boats too, he continued. Good work if you can get it. But I'm no fisherman. Skipper said I'd be better as bait. The man laughed.

Paul had used the last of his change on the can of Coke. There was only a twenty dollar note. He handed it to him.

Fuck, you're a saint. Really, man. You're a fucking saint, hey.

Paul shook his head and turned for the hostel.

When he was some distance away he glanced back to see the man walking quickly down the main street, a fast stumbling walk as if he was being blown along with the wind.