Quota (8 page)

His eyes fell as he realised Charlie hadn't broken his stare.

‘You're tired, eh.'

Charlie didn't respond.

‘I can put you in a place till you work out what you're doing.'

From behind the door he produced a set of keys on a green plastic tag and flicked a hidden bank of light switches to black out various patches of the room. Charlie's drunken stare had rested on the bright colours of the Casablanca Lucky Envelopes machine. Les reached behind it with a grunt and killed the happy blipping. He opened the main door, and the cold air curled around them both.

‘Come on.'

In the street, puddles had formed around the wounded Saab. The gutter was blocked by milk cartons and shredded cardboard. Les had taken off at a reasonable speed for a big man, but as Charlie watched him from behind, he could see a limp that originated at the right knee. He was heaving the right leg completely straight through each stride, so that his head veered from side to side as he walked.

‘You done your knee?' Charlie called tactlessly to his back.

‘Long time ago, yes.'

They were heading south, the houses thinning out and gradually giving way to scrub. The footpath lost definition, trickling out into a smooth track, greasy from the rain. There were no gutters, Charlie noticed. He made a mental note to take issue with this at some later stage when things made more sense: where the hell were the gutters?

Les walked ahead of him, the wet scrub now brushing his ample flanks as he passed. They'd topped a rise and the wind hit them with renewed force as the dark mass of the ocean appeared. Les was muttering disconnected words every few steps. Charlie missed the first few, then caught one.

‘Heath.'

‘What'd you say?''

‘I said
heath
.' Les stopped. ‘That's coast beard heath. It's what makes this whole coast look dark green. Gets little white berries on it in summer. They taste like granny smiths.' He started along the path again, waving an abstract hand to his left. ‘Coastal daisy. Polygala. Dreadful shit. Introduced. Saw-sedge. Poa. Pigface.'

‘Thanks, Les,' called Charlie, failing to conceal an edge of sarcasm.

Les stopped. ‘Don't you want to know what all these are?' he asked, blinking.

‘Why would I want to know that?'

The question seemed to strike Les as impossibly trite. ‘Why
wouldn't
you want to know that?' He shook his head gently and walked on in silence, visible to Charlie only as a faint silhouette against the dark sky.

‘What are those lights?' asked Charlie, trying to rebuild whatever he'd just crushed.

‘Where?'

Les stopped and followed Charlie's gaze out to sea, to where a series of vague glows lit the horizon. There were nine of them, stretching from one end of the visible sea to the other, evenly spaced.

‘Squid boats. It's the season. They're out every night at the moment.'

Under the loose canopy of the ti-tree, a timber fence appeared. Les turned in at the gateway and crossed a small yard before lumbering his way up a few steps onto a deck. Their footsteps were louder on the boards. The house, barely visible against the thick sky, looked to Charlie much like the holiday houses he remembered from summer holidays of the past. Fibro. Bits of odd plumbing sticking out of the walls.

Les rummaged in his pocket, found a key and swung the door open. Charlie was struck by the familiar waft of seagrass matting and old curtains. The bare bulb illuminated a basic living room—vinyl and checked cloth armchairs radiating from a pine coffee table with a ceramic tile surface. The curtains he'd smelled were repeating patterns of sailing boats in horrific burnt orange. There were metallic lamps screwed into the far wall. The main windows of the living room faced perversely inland, while a modest window above the kitchen sink looked over the ocean. A laminex counter divided the armchaired room from the little kitchen.

The counter caught his attention and held it. The hypnotic arc of a hand sweeping crumbs off its surface, the wedding ring's scouring sound as it looped across. Comfort in routine. Your brother's gone to heaven. He'd learned a new word while the police sat around in his parents' lounge room, drinking his parents' coffee and writing things down.

The cunt never even stopped
, he had overheard. The hand sweeping nothing off the counter.

Where's Harry, you cunt
?

He looked away, saw a framed poster tracing the history of the Leyland P76 and a pine bookcase crammed with paperbacks. Each spine had faded down slightly to a bluish tinge and bore the linear scars of having been put down open.

‘You can bring your car around and park it in here in the morning,' said Les.

Charlie felt suddenly the completeness of his exile.

‘If I turn up at the footy tomorrow, how will I pick him?' The tacky after-effects of the beer tripped his tongue.

‘Patrick? Well let's see, eh? Tallish. Thin. He'll be the only bloke at the footy who's had his brother shot by the guys who own the pub. He's the bloke who's on first names with the local magistrate cos he's got so much form, and he's the one trying to feed twin eight-year-old brothers and a sister cos both his parents and his big brother are dead. So if I were you, I'd look for the guy who
doesn't
look like he wants to chat.'

Les looked around the room with a final air of assessment. ‘I'll figure out the rate for you. S'pose the Queen pays the bill, eh?'

Receiving no reply, he turned towards the door. ‘Have a nice stay.'

As the door slammed behind him, Charlie slid into one of the armchairs and dropped his head into his hands.

HE BEGAN WALKING soon after the sun came up.

He'd showered the muck off himself, but wiping his teeth with a square of toilet paper did nothing to expunge the sour taste. The bathroom cupboards had mouse shit but no aspirin. His hands were light and shaky, and he could feel the early gnawing of a gut ache he knew would plague him all day. The wind outside had slowed, and played lightly over a world washed clean and still damp in the cool air. Slamming the door behind him, he wandered up the rise of the dune and squinted at the great bowl of the ocean below.

In the distance, out towards the horizon, it looked the way it always did when he summoned it in his mind: foreign, secretive. A blank sheet over what had gone before and what continued to occur beneath. His eyes passed over the water, anticipating some thing, some object, that would break up the conspiracy of nothingness. A fin. A breaching whale. Something floating.

Fixing his sight on a point on the surface, he tried to picture the colossal blue cathedral of depth beneath, the first and mightiest truth that the ocean hid. Huge creatures, huge agglomerations of tiny creatures, had passed through this column of space. Silent giants and gelatinous microbes, the chrome-sided everyfish passing through the dim light with all of their eyes, all of their thousands of eyes, fixed ahead on the ineluctable business of sex and predation.

When they were little, he and Harry had believed that one day, scanning the surface like this, they'd see the mournful drift of a dead man trailing the shreds of his clothes in the face of a wave.

But the flat sheen of the ocean, lying glossy under the morning's still air, offered him nothing.

Except nearer to shore, where black boulders stretched out and joined in a loop to form a wide lagoon. Inching away from the beach and across the lagoon was a small wooden boat.

Charlie could see, even from this distance, that the man who sat steadily rowing the boat was very old. His movements were concise, but there was no power in his stroke. After a couple of dozen strokes he stopped, both fists resting on his knees. Then he resumed, steady again: another two dozen strokes, and another rest, repeating the sequence until he reached the rocks on the seaward side of the lagoon. Charlie watched him turn the little craft through ninety degrees then rest it, beam-on to the rocks. He reached out one hand from the boat, leaning slightly, until he was holding a rock, resting his hand on it while he looked further out to sea.

He sat like that for a long time, while the birds came and went, the waves rose and fell in gangs of four or five. Then, without any other movement, he let the rock go and the boat turned itself in a familiar way towards shore. When its nose came to be pointing directly at the beach, the old man took up the oars again and began to row.

Charlie, who was not inclined to any activity that involved effort for its own sake, watched all of this in silent scepticism. His first reaction was to assume the old man was disturbed in some way. His second was to admire the simple beauty of the little ritual.

He stood, dusted the sand off himself and began to retrace the previous night's steps towards the centre of town, down through the scrub off the back of the dune, onto the flats and into the marked streets. The footpath reappeared, followed by the houses.

Someone had got to these people with a metal cladding scam. In cemetery rows behind the trunks of Norfolk pines stood the sober weatherboards of the interwar years, all of them converted into tin cans. He imagined the salesman at the door, in a slim tie and hat, explaining patiently to women in floral aprons that their husbands would never have to paint again. He saw the nervous touching of earrings, the resting of wedding bands on the doorjamb; the brief, immodest thought of inviting him in.

The lawns were unlike anything he'd ever seen. Thick, spiky, pale couch grass shredded into submission, edges cut to a humped right angle against the footpath. The only softening touch was agapanthus, livid green and rude with health. Snails ventured from under the protective clumps and spotted their way across the footpath. Charlie took care to tread on every one he saw.

He passed a milk bar with a plaster pie suspended above its awning; two doors further on, a fish and chip shop had a grey plastic shark. The trickle of isolated shopfronts, still dark and silent, became a strip: a video library, then an op shop in which everything appeared to be crocheted, a churchy-looking bookstore full of images of Jesus looking like a menswear salesman. A shop called Marg's Beads 'n' Things; hardware, a coin laundry, a supermarket. He passed the Normans Woe, saw his car awaiting him with its smashed panels. A waft of sour beer struck him from the open door of the building, the unmistakable smell of a pub at low tide. Two doors down, a barber in a white coat was unloading cartons of cigarettes from the boot of an XD Falcon, assisted by an old man in a cardigan.

Charlie sat down on the cold concrete plinth of the war memorial at the top of the street. It was an equestrian statue of a very severe-looking man and his equally severe horse. The dead were listed alphabetically in neat capitals. Half a dozen Lanegans. Below them, four Murchisons. The main street stretched before him, wide and empty. The silence pressing for his attention the same way noise normally would. He could see now that the east side of the street was taken up almost entirely by a series of shopfronts strung together under one awning marked with confident capitals—MURCHISON AND SONS FURNITURE AND TRADING EST. 1983.

Outside the milk bar a girl in polarfleece was putting out a sandwich board. When he got there she was inside, stacking newspapers under the rows of magazines. He ordered a coffee and she wrestled the machine into hissing compliance, producing a surprisingly good espresso that he clutched in his warming fingers as he continued northwards, away from the beach and into the paddocks. He was following a road that had fallen into disuse: the edges broken into little fragments like pack ice. He saw a length of fencing wire, pieces of a dead rabbit, stubbies with bleached labels and a plastic hubcap. Grass—thick, vigorous clumps of the stuff—climbing all over everything.

He came to a house, set well back from the road behind a bank of cypress hedges and four car bodies in varying states of decay. The verandah was painted in undercoat and a cluster of pine framing sprang from the back, weathered as if the project had long since defeated the residents. He'd slowed to an amble and was studying the place when he realised he was being watched. A small girl had made herself a nest at the farm gate. She had a group of stuffed toys arranged on blocks of wood in the overgrowth behind the brick gateway. Her hair was matted but her face was bright and forthright.

‘Hello,' she said evenly. She'd lost her top front teeth.

‘I like your friends,' said Charlie, nodding at the furry ensemble. He always felt he was acting the part of someone else when he spoke to small children. He was fairly sure they could pick it.

‘They're at the movies,' the girl replied happily, sucking a fast breath so she could crowd her sentences forward. ‘They're watching a nature film. Mum took us to watch a film. It had a volcano!' Her eyes grew wide as she mimed an explosion.

Charlie leaned both arms on the gate. ‘How old are you?'

Her expression changed, and she was silent. She looked down at her chest for a moment, then peered carefully at him. ‘You look sad,' she concluded.

‘Do I?' In Charlie's world, such exchanges worked responsively. Questions, even antagonistic ones, had related answers.

‘You got sad eyes. They're like a elephant's.' She nodded solemnly, closing her own eyes for added gravity.

‘Really?'

‘Elephants are very big,' she explained, her voice falling away as she spoke. She returned to gently adjusting the animals with tiny strokes and nudges of her perfect hands.

Charlie hurried on, surprised and stung.

Beyond the house he passed large agricultural sheds, a saleyard and a CFA depot. It was low land, even to Charlie's eye, pocked with boulders and thistles. The smell of cowshit and wet grass was lifting warmly off the paddocks now that the sun had begun its arc over the town. More rows of dark cypress, pasture and foliage, deeper and shallower greens.

He'd reached the eighty sign on the edge of town when the sorrow overtook him. The land was arranged in a code he couldn't decipher. He had left the language of his world behind and this place would offer him no translation, merely reflecting his troubles blankly back at him.