Before It Breaks (2 page)

It was di Rivi who found the words. The partner, a young guy about her age, was frozen.

Clement put them at ease. ‘It's okay, I was on my way in and I heard the call. You're di Rivi?'

‘Yes, sir.'

She must have twigged he didn't know her partner's name and indicated him. ‘Nathan Restoff.'

The men nodded a greeting. Restoff, slim for a cop up this way, filled him in.

A person from the historical society, a Mr Symonds, had driven out to take a photograph for his ‘Old Broome' Facebook page, but had heard sounds inside and what might have been somebody crying in pain. He'd called the station.

While Restoff was talking di Rivi examined the padlocked gate. ‘No one got in this way.'

Clement jerked a thumb. ‘It's hardly Fort Knox. Let's check the perimeter.'

It took them about three minutes to find an unsecured part of the fence that had probably been used for years as a doorway. Jo di Rivi held up the wire for him to crawl under.

‘You armed, sir?'

‘No.'

Restoff offered him a taser. He was worried he'd use it incorrectly, look an idiot so he waved it off.

‘I'll be right. I'll stay out of it.'

A gaping doorway led into gloom. Restoff and di Rivi approached cautiously and in a firm but calm voice Restoff called, ‘It's the police. Anybody there?'

When there was no answer they edged inside. Already Clement was regretting his decision to reject the taser. He couldn't very well follow them now.

Standing outside he heard them call again. Both had torches but
there was enough tin ripped off the roof that they wouldn't need them. Then Clement heard a quiet shuffling footfall which seemed to come from around the corner of the building where he stood. He edged over and peeked. In the middle of what had been a space between this larger shed and a smaller one was mound of dirt, as if a bulldozer had pushed everything into a lazy heap, sand, old brick, rotten wood and wire. The mound was just high enough to prevent him being able to see what might lie behind it. Arming himself with a crumbling half brick, he edged carefully around the heap.

The intruder turned and looked at him with the cold glare of one who has absolutely nothing to lose.

Clement put out his left hand to placate her. ‘Easy.'

She was lean, her hair matted, her teeth bared, her wiry tail low but taut. She could have been part dingo, part shepherd, but she was fully alert.

‘I'm not going to hurt you.'

His calming words had about the same effect they had on Marilyn. She snarled and sprinted at him and leapt for his throat. Only his years as a very average opening batsman saved Clement. He pivoted inside her arc and swung his right hand, the one holding the half brick. It hit the bitch's head with a crack. The dog dropped at his feet.

Restoff and di Rivi came running, weapons drawn, which only made him feel worse standing over the prone body. What kind of man starts his day by clubbing a starving dog with a brick?

In what was otherwise a large open-plan space Clement had managed to secure himself one of three discrete offices. The others belonged to his boss, Scott Risely, and Anna Warren, the Assistant Regional Commander. She was on long service leave and rarely in Broome anyway, usually flying between the mining camps and far-flung communities. It was as well Clement was afforded privacy, for three hours on from the abattoir, he still sat staring at his desk. His blow had not killed the dog but it may as well have. It hadn't had much of a life but it had been something, a living organism. Maybe it was a mother trying to fend for her pups and now it had been hauled away to a pound, most likely with a fractured skull. It would be euthanised for sure. And it had all been for nothing. There had been no sign of any other intruder, just that one skinny hound which maybe had uncovered some long-buried cattle bones.

Clement was thirsty. Even in the air-conditioning the heat dried you out. He left his office and headed to the water cooler. The Major Crime section was near deserted. Mal Gross appeared to be taking a statement from an aboriginal couple. It sounded like their place had been burgled. Even paradise has its thieves. Clement drank the cold water. It made his tooth ache and he remembered that was something else he'd been putting off.

‘What kind of axe?' Gross was asking.

‘You know, for chopping wood,' the man answered, like Gross was an idiot. The woman, who seemed around fifty, slightly younger than her husband, said she thought she heard something Sunday night. Gross made a note. ‘We didn't know it was missing till he went to chop wood this morning.'

Stolen tools, bicycles and mobile phones, this was what the crime landscape looked like all the way to the horizon. Clement ditched the plastic cup and headed out the back door to the carpark.

He thought he'd drive to the shops and get some proper food into him but once he was driving he admitted to himself he had no appetite so he kept going, no destination in mind. At some point the car began heading out of town as if of its own will. Around five k on, past the servo, he swung right. Whether he actually recognised these trees he wasn't sure but he definitely felt he did. This grove had been the boundary of his early years, the geographical zone beyond which ‘home' became ‘elsewhere', or more correctly, as he was heading in the opposite direction right now, where elsewhere became home. Marilyn was happy to overlook the fact he'd grown up here too. Sure his lineage was far less grand, no pearl farm, just the caravan park his mum and dad worked up from scratch but this had been his home for fifteen years. He had almost escaped it.

Almost.

The bush hadn't changed at all in thirty years but up the road was a different story. The caravan park started by his parents was gone and in its place was an industrial complex: two large pre-fab-type buildings, some sort of muffler centre and several smaller units, spray shops, a tyre place. He pulled in on the crumbling bitumen lip of the road and tried to remember it how it was. This was the first time he'd returned since he'd been back, first time in fact since he'd left all those years ago. His parents now lived in Albany near the southern tip of the state. He'd lost track of friends. There'd been
nothing to pull him back here to the heat and dirt. He wasn't sure exactly why he'd chosen now to visit his heritage location but knew it had something to do with the dog and Phoebe and all the things in his life he'd messed up. From the look of them, the buildings were a decade old. How long after his parents had sold up had the caravan park survived, he wondered? He had expected they would have at least kept the old shower block but he couldn't spy it, not from here. It could be behind the units but he was not inclined to get out for a stroll.

Not for the first time he felt a stranger in what had been his homeland, and he sensed a swell within him to act, to turn the car onto the main road and head south all the way back to Perth. He quelled it easily enough but knew it had not left him anymore than that sour feeling over the dog, knew it would linger and eventually may prove stronger than his ability to resist.

As if exhausted from an arduous day keeping itself aloft and baking the earth below the dull, rusty red of blood, the sun plummeted quickly. This was the way up here, night falling more like a guillotine than a handkerchief. Almost every night for the last thirty years he had gone to sleep alone. He could seek company and usually did, at least for a few hours, normally in a bar, sometimes in a café, very infrequently over dinner at the home of an acquaintance. There had even been the occasional night he had slept with a woman but not for a while now. Human company he had discovered was no longer effective in reducing his sense of being an island. Indeed, the opposite was true. He felt less isolated here on the other side of the world than those last years in his hometown. Solitude was the natural state here. A man could stand silent knowing no other heart was beating within a hundred kilometres. But isolation did not equate to loneliness.

Back then he'd had real friends, not just people you met in a bar, men he had gone to school with, worked with, but especially in their company he had felt a desperate loneliness. It was as if it were his avatar interacting with them while his real self skulked in a dungeon. But, you make your bed, you lie in it … alone.

His fingertips travelled over his whiskers. If he really willed it he could remember his wife's fingers doing that. She had eventually grown tired of his detachment and struck out for a new life free of the burden of what he had become.

And why had he become that again?

The voice asking him was always there, asking in the same measured tones, dragging him back to smoky bars, leather jackets, a crackling radio somewhere in a corner. Funny, a face could slowly erase over time but not a voice, a voice did not age. He did not offer an answer to the question—what was the point? It was a long time
ago and it was too late now to change anything. All life after forty was regret.

A sound that did not belong to nature pulled him from his contemplation. It was a vehicle somewhere on the other side of the creek, which really wasn't that far away. It was probably twenty metres from his little camp here to the water's edge, and no more than fifty across the span of the creek, so less than a hundred metres all up. As long as they kept to themselves, what did he care?

He set up the small tent with great facility, sat back on the front seat of the car and popped a beer can. Warm, but so what? He was after the faint buzz, not the taste. The creek was still, only shadows created an illusion of movement. He drained the can quickly and tossed it on the floor in back with the others. At the roadhouse he'd bought a cooked chicken. Now he pulled it from its foil wrapper and ripped off a drumstick. Mosquitoes buzzed around him but for some reason they never bothered with him much. There were flies but only a fraction of what there would have been in daylight. He chewed the chicken meat slowly and thought about South America. That was one place he had always wanted to visit. Another failed aspiration, along with a boat trip through Alaska and a hotel romp involving Britt Ekland. His life was a series of joined dots that drew the picture of a fat zero. It was fortunate how things had fallen into place here, remarkable in fact. He had taken a gamble which could have backfired badly but then there was not so much to lose, was there. He had owed money all over Hamburg, HSV were playing like crap, staying there was validation of his failure. Even so, at least he was alive there. His gamble could have cost him that life, miserable as it was. But it had proved the right move. This was where all the tributaries of his life were destined to pool. It was where he would die.

He turned the key far enough to ignite the CD player. Country music, what else for a single man who could no longer lie to himself he was even middle-aged?

He sat for a long time listening to the music, drifting. A memory would constitute itself: his parents, his father's braces worn even at dinner-time. That memory would crumble but reconstitute as another, and another: the street where he grew up, a school friend, a shopkeeper who was particularly generous, a girl he fancied who preferred one of his friends, the game of handball where he broke his little finger. What had become of those whose lives had intersected his? Some would be dead but others might be sitting
in a little flat, or hunched over a campfire on a sweeping plain in Argentina eating roast beef, the strum of a guitar in the background floating over a starry sky like the one above him now. And they might be reflecting on their parents, generous shopkeepers and maybe even him.