Quota (10 page)

‘They found gold up the river in the eighteen-hundreds. Dragged a fortune in wool down the main the street and out onto the wharf. Wheat, rock lobster, federal ministers…jeez, we had a state amateur tennis champ, lived in the same street as that house you're in.'

‘Gosh.'

‘Yeah, I know. You've seen it all, haven't you young fella. This place goes back a long way, goes back
deep
. And it'll outlast you and me.'

Les leaned forward on the bar, closing the space between him and Charlie. ‘I'll tell you the thing about
you
, right. You and this town. Okay?'

‘Go on.'

‘See, in the spring of 1963—I was just a little tacker but I remember—there was this terrible southeasterly gale.

‘Just blew and blew and it brought in five inches of rain on Melbourne Cup day and the swell threw boulders up onto the road, it was so wild. The whole coast and all the ports on it are shaped to cope with the sou-westers, so when it comes up hard from the other way, it gets right into everything. Rained so hard, the water came up out of the river and the entire place was knee deep in frogs. Whole thing lasted about three days all up, wrecked everything. People were wandering around dazed when the rain stopped, least that's the way it felt to me as a child. The holy and apostolic Roman Catholic Church weren't above exploiting that either, I'll have you know. Most of the adults I knew were looking into their laps for fear of raising their eyes to the lectern, by reason of their various sins, and I was asking my little self what else could He inflict upon us? And it was later that Sunday that they found it.'

Les paused for emphasis and refilled Charlie's pot. He shoved it neatly back across the bar.

‘Thanks,' said Charlie. ‘Found what?'

‘It was well known that you could pick up all sorts of useful stuff after a big blow—timbers and ropes, stuff that's come adrift from the boats. You have to understand about Gawleys, there's a wash through that bay. They call it the longshore drift. All the shit sweeps through from the river mouth towards the northeast—winds up down at the eastern end of the beach. Always working away, moving everything through, constant as gravity. The floats, yeah the timbers, like I said. Dead things, people's crap, all splintered and washed up in the high tide line down there. Anyway, someone found this thing along Gawleys and word went racing through the place—'

‘Well?' Charlie was aware, despite the insulation of the booze, of his role in the drama. ‘What was it?'

‘It was a
mine
.' Les's lips pulled back as he uttered the word. His cheeks had pulled both brows down over his eyes as though his face were sprung with unseen cables.

‘War'd been over for near twenty years, and here's this German sea mine. Six hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate.
Unstable
ammonium nitrate. They laid em all along the coast from Cape Otway to the border. Y'don't think of the Germans lurking around out there, do you? All the way from Europe, pokin around, just out there. Least I never did. They dropped em in the ocean anchored to a bloody great chain, ship-size chain. And there they sat, mostly. War ended, everyone shook hands, but no one told the mines. And it turns out they could drag the chains. Big enough swell, they'd break loose, drift towards shore. In the dead of night.'

He took a glass from the rack and poured himself a beer. Drew a thoughtful sip from the top of it.

‘You think about that. Cover of darkness, the world asleep, and these wicked bloody things creeping towards the shore, inch by inch, hour after hour. Sometimes, over the years, they'd detonate on their own chain if the links came into contact with one of the horns. Sometimes they'd take out a fishing boat—poor bastards'd just fail to come home, and people would say, you know, maybe they drifted off course or they hit a reef or something. We used to shit-scare each other at school; about how the cops were called out from time to time to collect pieces of them, blown to bits, headless, burnt. Down the end of the bloody longshore drift like everything else.'

He shrugged. ‘But as I say, this was over years and years. The war was long gone when I was a kid. Then this thing turns up on our beach. It didn't feel random, coming when it did. It felt like a curse on the town. They put a fence around it while they waited for the people to come from Melbourne who knew how to defuse it. We were all told to stay away, so of course I skipped school with a couple of mates the week after they found it and we went down there. It was sitting up with all the kelp, covered in barnacles and bits of weed. Horns like spider's fangs, hateful-looking things.

‘We'd got under the little fence pretty easy and we just walked up to it. It was taller than we were, and the thing I remember now is we were whispering. I think we all thought that if you talked too loud it'd go off. I can still see one of the others walking around it with his mouth hanging open and his hands in front of him like
that
…' He spread his fingers before him as though feeling forwards in the dark.

‘He had his fingertips maybe two inches off the surface of the thing. I was so scared I was shaking, I couldn't suck a decent breath outta the air. Then this other kid, he produces a ruler from his bag, and the minute he took it out I was thinking, no, don't, but I didn't say a thing because the whole trip out there, it was like a dare, you know? Who's the toughest. So he taps it on the hull of the bomb before we could stop him. It just made this little
tink
, and in that instant my heart stopped and I thought I was going to be torn into scraps of shredded meat, the bits all sandy, and they'd never quite find all of me. The seagulls'd be fighting over the little bloody shreds o' me.
Tink
. I ran for me life, didn't stop running till I got home. I was so frightened I told my parents everything and I got a hell of a beating for it but I didn't even care, I was so glad to be away from the thing.

‘Anyway that was that. But thing is, the fear in the town got to a point that they actually stopped the men from Melbourne, when they got to us. Wouldn't let 'em out there to do their work because they were so afraid they'd accidentally detonate it and take us all out. The mine was a couple of miles out of town, for godsake, but they wouldn't see reason. These men must've been dumbfounded—they'd driven all the way out here, probably expected a pretty fond reception, coming to eliminate the menace, so to speak. But no, not this lot.'

‘I don't get that at all,' said Charlie. ‘That's ridiculous.'

‘No, it sounds ridiculous to you because you're seeing it from the outside. Look at it their way: first the storm, then the mine, then this crew turns up, city people, wanting to fix the problem.'

‘Well the locals were hardly going to fix it, were they?'

‘Doesn't matter. They'd take…well, paralysis—doin nothing—over some risky intervention from up the highway. The problem was
theirs
, and they weren't going to cop outsiders pushing a solution on them.' He leaned forward. ‘Sound familiar at all?'

Charlie didn't respond.

‘So they ignored em at first, wouldn't put em up or sell em a drink. Rudeness, just like you're gettin. Bomb fellers wouldn't leave, the Atchesons parked a tractor across the beach access down there, someone else messed with the army truck. Stupid, juvenile stuff—just harassment really—so they had to work at night, under big lights…

‘Only took them about half an hour in the end, though. I saw it on the back of the truck in the main street. Just a harmless ball of rusty iron after all that. Heavy thing, mind you. They had it lashed down to the bed of the truck to stop it rolling around, which only made it look more like some beast they'd had to subdue. The locals wouldn't even look at it, wouldn't acknowledge the army blokes. They just wanted to see it gone. They wanted the army blokes gone and they wanted the mine gone. It affected people around here very badly.'

His tone had softened as he spoke, and now he fell silent.

‘Why the hell are you telling me this?' asked Charlie after a little while.

‘Because you don't understand what you're dealing with here. There's a deep core to this place. There is in any small town. People in close confinement. Sure, there's plenty of the outside world here now, but a part of this community is still looking out through their venetians at people like you. They associate you with bad things. Taking a spanner to their mine. Everyone knows those boys, the ones who done it, and Paddy's brother, the dead one. Everyone feels like they're on trial.'

He snorted and waved vaguely at the interior of the pub. ‘Everyone needs a Murchison, one way or another. So they want you to start up your truck and leave.'

‘What do I do?'

Les had his pot glass tipped on an angle, regarding it with a worried look. He drank the remaining beer and poked the glass into another tray with a sigh.

‘Do it his way. Don't do it your way.'

A group of newcomers walked in the door and Les resumed his public face, beaming and taking orders. Whatever it was in the man that had just surfaced was now hidden from view.

SHE TRIES TO make a decent fist of it under cross-examination. Woollacott does a serviceable job for the other side without breaking a sweat: there are enough problems for Hayley Swan to explain that it doesn't take any great feat of advocacy to tie her up. The older kid's got Asperger's. The little one's fine except for a bit of eczema. They'd have got on, struggled through, because she loves them fiercely. But there are peds circling their lives like sharks, waiting without expenditure of energy for a swimmer to tire. Her mother's de facto, for one: the one who likes to call himself a step-grandpa, the one with the knowing look behind his creepy little santa-claus smile. The social workers can't say for sure that he's breached the feeble walls of her protection, but there's a sense of inevitability about it. If he hasn't already, he's going to. She's been living at her mother's, with the old bastard in a caravan out the back due to orders made years ago which prevented him associating with minors. And the aluminium shell of the Jayco isn't going to hold him back forever. She watches over them but she falters; she'll fall for men who tie her off and ease the needle in, send her nodding while those children sleep. So they sleep, hair askew and mouths open in peace, and one of those men, or the one in the caravan, will move watchfully in the night, will slip into the room that smells of schoolbags and stale bedding. Creeping and feeling forwards in the gloom, murmuring reassurances. Slumping against the woodgrain plastic of the stereo, she will never know. The promises and threats they weave around her children will ensure she'll never know.

So she's trying to tell the magistrate that she's done the course. She's been to the office where she's tearfully explained the smack and the men who visit and the need she has for the two forlorn little shadows she tows through life. She's told him the social workers are impressed by her efforts, but everyone knows they aren't. She's told him she's completed urine screens, learning to use the clinical jargon rather than talk about pissing in a cup. The language in the social workers' reports is not for Hayley, it's for the consumption of others, even though the reports are built from the aggregate of her admissions, the very enzymes in her piss. To Charlie, over the course of four hearings, the language has remained clear in its intent: this girl cannot go on as a mother. Biology is beside the point. No one can conceive at fifteen and again at seventeen in the midst of multiple, all-consuming addictions and a deviant cavalcade of sexual partners, each of them enmeshed in separate tangles of lives and courts; no one can walk the streets and no one can hawk their skinny ribs to the prodding fingers of strangers and be a mother.

So little Hayley Swan stands there in her tracky dacks and pulls at one side of her hair as Charlie takes her through her evidence. Yes, she washes the children. No, nobody else does, except occasionally her mum. Yes, she tries to wash their clothes when she has coins for the laundry and can get a machine to herself. Yes, she cooks a bit, and yes, the kids get takeaway when they're good. Yes, she receives a single parents pension, and yes there have been times when she's had a de facto living with her and shouldn't have qualified at that rate. No, she's never bought drugs with the children in her care. No, she's never denied buying drugs, and yes, the drugs are mainly meth and mull, but there have been periods on smack as well. Yes, she's been given cash by people who've stayed with her and her mother, and yes, she's had sex with some of those people, but it's never been discussed, the sex and the money. It's just money that helps cover the cost of these people being there. The sex, she agrees, is independent of that. It just happens. Most of the time she agrees to it happening.

Charlie leaves her to the Department's lawyer for cross-examination, thinking she's given herself a slim chance, where before she'd had none. If dull honesty can feed the machine the same way bureaucracy does, then the machine should be sated. Each problem he's handed her from the report he holds in front of him, she's wrestled into a response with her awkward language, wrapping her thin words around it until it seems she's smothered that one, the next and the next. Sometimes she sounds feisty; she's got explanations for some of the barbs in those reports. The social workers are perched on their generous arses in the gallery, looking grim. Charlie knows if they fail today they'll be back within months. A new report, another twenty urine screens and another chance to prise the children from Hayley Swan.

But the moment the cross-examination begins, it's clear they've already won. As the morning wears on she's tiring, and worse than that, she's hanging out. Charlie knows the lost concentration, the picking at the skin, the repetitive drumming of the fingers. She's looking at the clock while unanswered questions hang in the air. The magistrate is losing patience and he's a bastard at the best of times. Underneath the cheap lace edging, her top may as well bear the words ‘Need to score urgently'. Time is slipping away towards the lunch adjournment, when she'll be on her own for an hour, and he can do nothing to hasten the cross-examination, which by now is raking over things that interest no one. The magistrate keeps feeding questions to the cross-examiner, fuel for the bonfire. ‘Ms Woollacott, I don't think you asked her about the urinary tract infections…' When the old turd adjourns for lunch, Hayley bolts from the building without a word, Charlie following in time to see her heading east down the laneway in the rain. The social workers cluck around him, talking over each other in their eagerness to condescend. You gave it a shot dear. She's gone. It's for the best.