Silences Long Gone Read online

His life is a misery of coastal postings. Him long ago fattening up and fucking up on free lunches from the Vietnamese of Richmond and getting sent rural and windswept.

  Fucking up in particular one day when he was in the Ng Ng Castle in Victoria Street hunkered over his third Crown Lager and his second plate of satay prawns with lemongrass while a boy was stabbed to death on the footpath right outside. Never came up off those prawns for investigation. Never came up off the Crownies for enforcement.

  Only rose up after the lychees and after the banana cake with cashews. And strolled out straight past the register without breaking stride and onto the footpath where there was a great spread of bok choy and basil and string beans and people and where the paramedics were standing back with their gloves all red with boy saying their variations of, ‘You win some, you lose some.’ And asked them, ‘What’s happening?’ And they looked at him in his uniform and looked at the door he’d walked out of only a few metres away and looked at the dead boy who’d reddened their gloves and one of them said, ‘Mayhem,’ and another one of them said, Lunch apparently.’

  So now he’s coastal and backwater where, his Chief Superintendent told him, the quality of the cuisine makes it just about impossible for a fellow to fuck up his working life with lunch.

  He’s learnt to dislike people for a misdemeanour and to despise them for a felony and to hate them outright for an indictable offence. Can grade the evil in people by just what infringement they’re committing and, now he’s on-line, by punching the appropriate buttons on his Toshiba desktop and bringing Central Office files up and seeing just what infringement they’ve committed in the past, whereupon he usually pushes his chair back from the screen and shakes his head in disbelief and says, ‘My fellow countrymen. Jesus.’ And he’s gone even further than that. Further than technology. Can grade the evil in people now by guessing wildly what sort of infringement they might commit. Which he calls preemptive law enforcement.

  But in Lorne he hardly has a miscreant to dislike and hardly has a felon to despise. Even of the potential variety who need the preemptive variety of enforcement. So in Lorne his emotions are largely unemployed, and would be wholly unemployed if it wasn’t for Lorne’s saving grace as a police posting, which is its full-on indictable offender to hate outright, which indictable offender he works overtime and works night-shifts at hating outright.

  As he walks past one of the old stool-sat liars he pats him on the shoulder and asks, ‘How’s your bum, Barry?’ Barry looks at him. ‘All right. Why?’

  ‘Mine’s got a crack in it,’ he says. That’s his joke. He’s enquired about every bum in town over the years.

  He walks up to Thaw and the Samoan-tattooed girl with the black hair. Gets right between them with a shoulder just touching her and a shoulder nearly touching Thaw. Takes the girl’s dark drink off the bar and drinks it. Says, ‘Mmmm.’ She’s looking at people all around her to witness the harassment, witness the intimidation. No one meets her eyes. He leans right into her face and says something and flicks his fingers at her, shooing her away. She takes a step back and stares at Thaw like he’s something swinging from the fish co-op crane on the end of the pier, pulled up from way down on the sea floor where no light gets. Thaw just shakes his head.

  She steps back again and knocks over a chair and picks it up and mumbles thanks to Senior Sergeant Malcolm Lunn and turns and walks out, ducking her hips from side-to-side through the chairs. He does a little bow at her like he’s gallant and not aged and bellied with a nose exploded by Bundaberg rum.

  He leans into Thaw and says loud for us all, ‘A boy good lookin’ as you should have better luck gettin’ a root. Really should. But lonely nights are here again by the look.’ He smiles and jerks an air cock.

  Thaw is expressionless with anger. The bar is quiet, thinking maybe this time it will turn into what it’s long promised to turn into. Hoping it will. Senior Sergeant Malcolm Lunn is willing it to happen. Waiting for it. Leaning into the possibility. A chance at Thaw’s blood. Thaw raises his left hand slowly and points into the policeman’s face with two fingers. His forefinger and middle finger. Forks them like snake’s tongue and points them at those eyes slit for battle. ‘Fact is,’ he says, ‘I think you might’ve saved me a medical episode there. Her eyes were real jaundiced.’ He moves his fingers closer to the slit eyes of the policeman, right up under the hat-brim into personal space. ‘Just like yours,’ he says. ‘Extra yellow. She’s probably got about eight different strains of pox running in her veins is my guess.’

  Senior Sergeant Malcolm Lunn could go either way. His knees drop him a couple of centimetres for power and balance. He considers. Then he breaks into smile and lifts again into maximum height and fondles his felon-reducing accessories and settles them low on his belt. ‘Pox’d be a sight less trouble to you than what’s running in your veins already, son,’ he says. And he nods the full truth of his statement right up close in Thaw’s face.

  Jean tells me, ‘Fuck him.’ And makes a megaphone of her hands and starts yelling across the room, ‘The Range Rovers. The Range Rovers. Crack the case, you lumbering fuckwit. The Range Rovers. Innocent citizens don’t count. Car thieves do. The Range Rovers. The Range Rovers.’

  The Range Rovers are a sore point with Senior Constable Malcolm Lunn. A black mark on his work record that insurance companies keep ringing the Major Crime Squad about and making blacker. Saying what we have in Lorne is a Black Hole for hundred-thousand-dollar vehicles and asking who’s in charge there and asking what are you going to do about it?

  But he ignores Jean because of her father, Tom Turner, donating the surf boats to the Lorne Surf Life Saving Club. The beautiful Tasmanian Oak boats. The Tom Turner I, the Tom Turner 2, the Tom Turner 3. All the Tom Turners right up to the Tom Turner 6. The half-dozen lacquered Tom Turners that Malcolm Lunn sweeps in a pillar of bellied strength at surf carnivals up and down the eastern coast. Him standing wide-legged in the stern, hip-deep in boiling wave in the only heroic pose of his life. And this heroic pose paid for by Jean’s father.

  He just smiles at Jean yelling behind his back as if he’s a good bloke who can take a joke from a wild girl. Then he stocktakes his felon-reducing accessories. Makes sure the dog-walloping device is just here on his right hip, makes sure his .38 is just here on his left hip, makes sure his handcuffs and makes sure his two-way are atop a bumcheek each. When he’s satisfied all the power and all the majesty is right there about his waist where it should be he walks out of the bar.

  The job he came to do is done anyway. He’s scared off the girl with the Samoan tattoo and the dyed black hair. Which is another step in his campaign to starve Thaw of the marginalised women he wields his libido at. Another step in his campaign to get Thaw’s lust risen high enough and unheeding enough to where he’ll try to jump on the bones of an orthodox woman. One that might even be a plainclothes cop sent to seduce him into unheeding fornication and then to creep back to St Kilda Road HQ with precious millilitres of Thaw’s sperm swabbed from the encounter.

  6

  Bleeding

  Or precious millilitres of his blood. They want that too. Spun in their centrifuge and ogled under their microscope. Held trophy high. Stored exhibit deep. Refrigerated into longevity.

  Wanted it one day a few years back when he hadn’t been in Lorne long and he was out surfing off the point between the pier and the beach and he dropped down the front of eight foot of seriously travelling water, he called it, onto his tri-fin and tri-sliced his head open. Water exaggerated the blood all down his face and neck and chest until he looked like he was turned inside out. All the other surfers were yelling at him. Man, get off the water. You look like slaughter house five, get out of here. You’re a dinner gong for Great Whites, piss off. You need stitches. Go, man. Get some beach.

  Thaw stayed sitting there on his blood-covered board, looking at the red marbling into the clear green water. Saying softly down at the blood across his stomach and thighs, ‘Man, I’m bleeding. I’m bleed
ing. In broad daylight.’ Not moving. Ignoring the shouts of the other surfers. Ignoring them through escalating stages of viciousness until, one by one, they shake their heads and paddle in to shore. Not wanting to be floating out there in that spread of blood.

  Until they’re all sitting on the beach furious. With one of the best swells of the year coming at them, organised in perfect easy-to-read sets. And Thaw’s out beyond the break. Paddling back off it. Bleeding into it. The sea to himself and the high probability of sharks.

  But what turns up for Thaw’s blood isn’t sharks. It’s authority. It’s maybe justice. It’s cops, anyway. Within ten minutes they’re leaning on the rail of the Lorne Surf Life Saving Club with Thaw big in their disc of binocular vision. Senior Sergeant Mal Lunn and Constable Scott. Talking to the magically close him. Come on in, boy. Come on in. You’ll attract yourself any number of Noah’s Arks out there. You’re bleeding a burley trail, boy. Come on in.

  They wait. They make the drink machine cough up a free Coke and free Solo by shuffling their feet back and forward at its base and zapping it with static electricity by way of their car keys in a place only the knowledgeable and righteous know it needs to be zapped. And they wait sipping. Wait watching, while the LSLSC rig a motor onto an inflatable to send it out there.

  Word goes through the town. Jean and I wait out on the deck at our place. Knowing there’s nothing we can do. Wandering up and down its length swearing. Returning always to the Tasco Moonbuster on its tripod there aimed down through the blue gums at him in the surf. It bringing him so close we can keep track on his fits of shiver and his shades of pale and see his MOTHER tattoo standing out black on his skin.

  *

  He’s done some things. He’s told Jean and me stories about carnally knowledgeable girls he’s had in the shelter sheds of their schools. He’s told us about wheat-belt wives whose groceries and infidelities he’s delivered right onto the linoleum of their kitchen floors. And told us what terrible dermatological damage 1950s lino can wreak on a man’s knees, and unveiled those knees and shown us the white islands on his skin there that look very much like birthmarks but he insists are housewife and kitchen scars by telling us, ‘Fucksakes. You wouldn’t know. If you never were a grocery boy you wouldn’t know how a forty-year-old lino and a ten-year-old marriage can add up to third-degree burns on a grocery boy.’

  And he’s told us how a man of his acquaintance who deserved to be hit on the head with a star picket and killed outright for what he was doing to his wife got a tickle in his throat at the last minute and got bent over by that throat tickle into a painful sounding cough as the star picket his head deserved came down and so got hit on the neck with a star picket instead and got left in a wheelchair instead, from where, anyway, he couldn’t do to his wife what he had deserved the star picket on the head for and the outright death for in the first place.

  So he’s done some things. But not, probably, the thing the cops want his blood for or want his semen for or want a hank of his hair for or want his spit for. Not the thing they want to drown him about.

  Only one time did I ever ask about that girl whose memory and whose justice is in need of Thaw’s DNA. It was New Year’s Day. Mid-morning and we were coming out of our deep drunkenness into what promised to be our deep hangovers. On the beach waxing our boards half-heartedly for a small break that was edging along the rocks. I was angry with him for making a pass at Jean the night before when we were at a New Year’s Eve party in Wye River. He and Jean were dancing together and he was holding her in close by her hips, grinding into her, and he asked her didn’t she want to feel what it was like to fuck a man whose orgasm could kill. A man whose angry tool, he called it, was a known method of euthanasia. Only me twirling past with a schoolgirl’s arse in my hands for balance and eavesdropping his offer and dumping him flat on his back with a shove to his face stopped Jean from answering his question, which, given her inquisitive nature, was a lucky eavesdrop on my part.

  So we’re on the beach waxing our boards. No conversation between us. Me still angry about the night before and thinking that him wearing his silence around town like a fashion item is no longer an option if he’s going to mouth-off when he gets drunk. So I throw my wax down into the sand and ask him, ‘Did you kill that black girl?’

  And he drops his wax into the sand and looks away from me out at the skinny waves edging along the rocks and studies them so hard and so long I almost expect to be able to look out there and see that black girl struggling and screaming. Until I have to ask him, ‘Well?’

  ‘I had a hand in it,’ he tells me. ‘I made it possible. Organised the event, I suppose. Was the impresario. Got her alone with us white men by chasing off with red heelers anyone who was black and who loved her.’ Two sets of waves later he’s still staring out there at whatever he sees of what happened to that girl, or maybe just at the waves themselves.

  ‘But you want to know if I killed her,’ he says. ‘Actually killed her. Well,’ he says, ‘steal some hair off my pillow and take it to the cops. Then come and tell me if they want the rest of me.’

  I took this to mean he outright didn’t know if he’d killed her or not. Was left in a darkness by alcohol like the rest of us were left in a darkness by not being there. And after we assumed, Jean and me, that he didn’t know whether he’d done it or not we went ahead and assumed he hadn’t done it.

  But now he’s out there in the water. Bleeding. Maybe drowning. And we’ve got to ask ourselves all over again why he won’t come in and give up his blood.

  Jean’s staring down at him through the Tasco Moonbuster. ‘He’s weak,’ she tells me. ‘White as a ghost.’ She starts to cry and goes and gets a bottle of Stoli from the fridge and we drink it in shots in between trips to the Tasco Moonbuster and Thaw out there bleeding.

  They don’t want him to come in. In case he’s innocent. They want to drown him. Jean sweeps the Moonbuster along the beach over the crowd looking out to sea. Over the mothers there craning their necks out to sea and over the school kids there throwing their frisbee and over the holiday-makers there who have whitened their noses with sun cream on even this dullest day and over the men there curious enough to be thigh-deep in white water as they scan the swell for whoever is bleeding out there. ‘This is mediaeval,’ she tells me. ‘This is a witch drowning.’ And says at me, who hasn’t got use of a Tasco Moonbuster at present and can’t check anything long-distance, ‘Check those people. Those ghouls. Those people.’

  The Lorne Surf Life Saving Club send out their rubber ducky and they insist he gets in. He refuses. Knows them to party with and knows them to surf with. And just looks them in the eye now and tells them, ‘Fuck off, Rick. Fuck off, Dennis.’ They threaten and beg. But they come in without him. There’s a crowd on the beach watching by this time. Villi is sitting in the shallows howling and won’t fetch the sticks teenagers throw for him and won’t eat the chicken bones people bounce off him.

  At dusk Thaw is still out there. Lying down now. Weak. Paddling with his hands but not with his arms, just enough to keep beyond the break. The cops are eating Dinner Packs from Bill’s Chook Event. Getting him central in their binoculars between drumsticks. Saying the silly bastard will go unconscious and drown if the lazy fucking sharks around here aren’t interested. Not even bothering to send a boat of their own. Knowing he’d refuse to get in it and knowing they’d have to force him in it and knowing that would render their evidence inadmissible.

  The crowd on the beach is restless for something uniformed or sharkskinned to take a hand in proceedings. Arguments break out about what actually attracts sharks. The young and scientific opting for electric impulses given off into the water by working muscles. The old and the fishermen and the deeply Australian knowing it’s blood. The water borne reek of leaking life.

  By the time it’s dark everyone has maybe seen a dorsal fin that’s keeping them on the beach horrified. And can maybe make out on the blackening sea a paleness that is maybe Thaw. Glimpses of
it between the flattening waves.

  Jean goes down with a length of rope and brings back Villi. She’s had her half-bottle of Stoli and shouts at the crowd, ‘You fucking ghouls,’ and shouts at the cops, ‘You fucking arseholes.’ And the crowd look at her like she’s a madwoman and one or two of the men thigh-deep in white water call out, ‘Show us your tits.’ And the two cops lower their binoculars and look at her, and Mal Lunn puckers his lips and squirts some spit back and forward between his incisors and then raises his binoculars again and looks out to sea again.

  Jean loops the rope over Villi’s head and drags him away whining and digging his paws into the sand and shaking his head trying to slip free.

  Next day Thaw turns up sixteen-stitched and jovial in Waterborne where the surf people eat vegetarian and say nothing, then talk about the surf, then say nothing again. They’re angry about his marathon bleed into the best waves of summer. They’re demanding, ‘What the …?’ He holds up his hand and looks away from them out to sea and then turns halfway back to them and looks at them out of one eye until their questions have ended. Then he asks loudly, ‘Haven’t you people heard of the link between fear and sexual excitation?’ And raises his eyebrows and asks, ‘Eh?’ And looks from unamused face to unamused face and tells them anyway, ‘The explanation is this … after I cut my head the fear of sharks gave me a fat,’ he grabs the crotch of his jeans to show just where he got the fat. ‘Amazing, but there it is. There it was. In my Speedos. And then I looked in at the beach and there’s this crowd gathered there … seem all to be watching me, in full knowledge of my fat, or something. So of course a shy bloke like me isn’t going to walk up onto a crowded beach that prominent in his Speedos. So I stayed out there. Waiting for the fat to go. Waiting for the crowd to go. Neither of which would.’ He looks at them then sitting hunched over health food not smiling at his joke and not saying anything. Waiting for the real explanation.