Thought Crimes (22 page)

‘Here to get ravished by her more likely,' Gavin added.

The teacher halted this new line of thought with ‘I think that's enough,' but the hint of a smile said that Jack and Gavin had read her mind.

‘Perhaps we should go back to using old-fashioned terms like the Will of God,' Miss Murray said by way of restoring balance.

‘The Will of Allah,' Ray corrected.

Big Higgsy Meets the Boy from the Future

The boy from the future had no idea what to expect from Bob Higgs. Mrs Peng told a white lie to the effect that Mr Higgs was from the Education Department, and Ray would need to speak to him regarding his continuing participation in class. A small staffroom was set aside for the interview.

Bob Higgs was an obese, greasy-skinned man of a type Raymond hadn't seen before. Intensely suspicious, Higgs stared at him as if he was a spy from another planet. Ray's problem, so far as Ray saw it, was not knowing how to act instinctively in an abnormal situation. Was he allowed to be tetchy? Could he tell people they were dicks if they treated him badly, or should he try to act discreetly and behave like a ‘local'? Ray now lamented his lack of specific instruction.

When Bob Higgs asked Ray why he was here, the boy said he didn't know. He was on an important assignment, but as for the whys and hows, Bob's guess was as good as his. The boy trusted that the people who sent him knew their job.

The consultant wanted to know if the boy was acting alone. Maybe Ray had some fellow agents, or was about to be put in contact with sleepers.

Once again, Ray couldn't rule out those possibilities. So far as he knew, he was acting alone. He couldn't see the benefit in creating a situation where two operatives might fall over each other. But it wasn't for him to know these things, he was just a kid.

‘You don't like your father, do you?' the fat man asserted,
apropos
of nothing.

‘How do you mean?'

‘A kid like you. Leaving your folks behind. Taking the risk that you might damage yourself and your family irreversibly.'

Ray saw harm to his family as an outside chance. The only big risk was to himself. He and his father got along fine. Ray's dad was proud that his son had volunteered to make things better.

Higgs asked why he should believe the boy. After all, Ray's interests weren't necessarily the interests of the Mintook community.

‘This is a lark of yours, isn't it? I reckon your family would be devastated if they knew what you were up to.'

Raymond didn't know how to respond. Having guessed that Higgs wasn't what Mrs Peng said he was, he now felt like strangling him. But, if Ray had a powerful impulse to strangle the man, maybe he had that for a reason … No, surely the officials would have sought his permission if they expected him to kill someone like Bob Higgs.

Did the people who chose him make the choice because they saw in him a potential for murder? These thoughts made the boy dizzy, and still the fat man continued to bait him.

‘Do any of the girls in class remind you of your mum?' Higgs asked.

Raymond couldn't say. He hadn't thought about it.

‘One of them
is
your mum, or grandma, isn't she, Ray? You saw photos of your mum as a girl, and they excited you, didn't they?'

The boy from the future said that only a sick man could impute those motives. Ray had come a long way. His mission was entirely honourable.

‘What if I said that you're just a retrograde virus from the future, a filthy little motherfucker?'

Rather than punch Higgs, Raymond laughed out loud. The man was pathetic. Good for no more than giving parking tickets to aliens.

‘Whatever you think is immaterial, Mr Higgs. Events will take their course. Whether the next thing is trivial or crucial, one thing's for sure. It's all been factored in.'

A Town Called Hypothesis

Over a period of three or four days, local speculations bred like hungry locusts.

Raymond was an assassin.

Raymond was a sacrificial lamb. His tragic death would draw attention to a person whose historic trajectory needed to be changed.

Raymond was a lost schizophrenic. His thinking was being distorted by an acute anxiety-depression.

Raymond was here to have sex with one or many local women in order to found a religious cult with controlled bloodlines.

Raymond was here to foil the sexual coupling of a man and woman who were destined to produce dangerous issue.

Raymond was here on a personal mission to leave behind evidence of a pre-history sufficient to establish his future claims to be a god-head.

Raymond was a vagrant who told a strange story convincingly well.

Raymond was the Son of God.

Raymond was Satan incarnate.

Raymond was a personified force of entropy.

Raymond should be prevented from doing anything.

Preventing Raymond from doing anything would only satisfy whatever expectation the future had of the past.

Raymond was an unnecessary distraction.

Raymond should be given carte blanche to do whatever he
had to do.

Raymond should be tortured unmercifully to discourage the
future from meddling with God's plan.

Raymond should be hypnotised to see whether he carried
useful knowledge with regard to precious metal deposits, or
future agricultural practices.

Raymond should be treated just like you'd want your own
children to be treated if they were stranded in a far-off country.

Uncertainties

Ray would recall wandering down a rusty track separating luminous fields of canola, and feeling sad with regard to a recent episode.

He'd been visiting Jodi Everett at her dad's farm. While her parents had gone off to see their business partners, she had taken him into her bedroom to listen to music. He found Jodi's music less captivating than her boundless enthusiasm for it. The bassline pulled at his stomach.

‘You can only really understand this music if you take drugs,' Jodi told him, and Ray would happily have shared drugs with her, but she had none.

He remembered feeling uncertain about what she might expect from him. He didn't know Jodi well, but he liked her, and she was pretty. Ray wanted to kiss her, and to be wanted by her, but her overt friendliness seemed forced. Out of character. As Ray lay on her bed, examining the cover of a compact disc, Jodi stretched to kiss him gently on the lips.

Even before he could register this, and invite her to join him in a passionate embrace, the girl was above him, taking off her T-shirt. Jodi's body was young, and beautifully proportioned – but she was trembling uncontrollably and not far off tears, despite her earnest attempts to smile.

Ray couldn't remember exactly what he said next, or why he'd chosen to deny her what they both wanted. He might have said something about wanting to, but needing to remember that a stronger force was guiding him. Even as he said this, he knew that he was making excuses for his own confusion.

This was a girl Ray should have been able to love wholeheartedly, but all he'd done was confuse and embarrass her.

Covering her breasts with her arms, Jodi told Ray to leave. Even as he backed out of the room, he felt that he'd seen her face, that expression, those exact same tears, somewhere before. And he could have killed himself for not embracing Jodi and trying to comfort her.

He was walking aimlessly down the dirt track, trying to make sense of his true motives and desires, when he met Gavin McGibbon riding his bike in the opposite direction. When Ray said Hi to Gavin, the local boy dropped an abrupt broadie.

‘You recognise me, don't you?' Gavin asked.

‘From school.'

‘Before that, or since then. However you want to put it.
We
know each other
.'

Ray knew nothing of the sort.

Gavin was certain that Ray must know about the terms of his agency. He said that Ray had been sent back to perform an assassination. He'd been asked to kill Gavin before he fucked Jodi. And Gavin refused to believe the boy from the future when he said that he'd been given no precise mission.

‘The thing is,' Gavin told him. ‘I don't give a fuck how badly the history of this planet turns out, and I'm certainly not going to stand back and let you do whatever you want to me or Jode. I'm not going to kill you, Ray, I'm going to annul you. I've got you factored in.'

Raymond remembered a struggle over the knife, the fierce determination on Gavin's face, a punch in the gut that might have been a stab wound. He remembered thinking that Gavin was the dragon he had to slay.

The two boys from the future were grappling for control of the knife when Ray woke in a sweaty panic. Collecting the details of this dream did nothing to relieve his confusion.

Ray was a vagrant in time. This new life, for all true intents and purposes, was aimless. Although he desperately wanted to believe in Allah's will, Ray could no longer feel certain he was an agent of that will.

The Dragon Slays Himself

Bob Higgs was never going to admit his impotence to Jack Carr or Mrs Peng. Dealing with aliens had taught him that sometimes it's best to bluff and draw things out, to let events take their course before claiming credit for the result. The best possible outcome.

When caught in a tricky situation, an experienced practitioner will float the need for random, apparently irrational measures designed to suggest that only he knows how to save Mintook from the worst-case ramifications of having a motherfucker in its midst.

Higgs instructed Jack Carr to close down the local bakery on Thursdays. He told Mrs Peng to introduce a prayer before each class. Rear-angle parking should be immediately replaced by parallel parking.

He insisted that the boy from the future be sniffed by Ted Anguin's border collie every morning. Dogs were unusually sensitive to a scent of life beyond their own deaths. Ted's dog would go rabid if Ray was on the verge of annulling himself.

To Mrs Peng, Bob confided an absolute certainty that Ray knew far more than he'd been letting on. His claim that interventions were irrevocably factored-in was a bluff.

When the woman lamented that they couldn't know whether they were doing more harm than good, Higgs assured her that they would always know what they felt in their hearts. Intentions counted.

As the pair were discussing the utility of putting Ray on a strict chicken and rice diet, Jack Carr and a young constable arrived with news that Jodi Everett was missing. Her window was open, and her bed hadn't been slept in. The most recent entry in the girl's diary expressed a desire to have a child by the boy from the future.

Carr wanted Higgs to get a search team sent up from Melbourne, but the big man was curiously unmoved by the inspector's distress.

‘I wouldn't bother,' he told Carr. ‘You'll find her soon enough.

He will vaporise before he can hide the body.'

‘
You reckon he's killed her?
'

‘Nothing more certain. Fucked her, then left her to rot. When you DNA-test the semen, you'll find that the Everett girl was Raymond's mum.'

Mrs Peng couldn't make it to the door before a stream of vomit forced its way through her fingers. Not even this shook the consultant's calm. Everything Higgs first predicted had come to fruition.

‘Sickest way to commit suicide. Scouring time for a way to annul yourself … But that's the terrorist mentality. They resent the fact that our values are enduring values.'

Higgs shook the inspector by the hand. He was sorry things had turned out the way they had, but there was nothing they could have done. This stuff happened a lot more often than you heard about.

The expert from Melbourne rubbed the distraught principal's shoulder and told her not to blame herself. At least one thing Ray said was true. Everything was factored in. Ray's intervention turned each of them into unwitting agents. Now it was time for Bob Higgs to get back to his family. He asked Mrs Peng to pass on his regards to Mr Peng and the boys.

While these farewells were being exchanged, Catherine O'Shaunessy, editor of the
Mintook Times
, burst into the lounge. She had excellent news. Jodi Everett was safe and well. After deciding not to give her virginity to Ray, she'd spent the night in the cemetery. She was cold and hungry. More embarrassed than anything.

Embarrassments gathered like a storm.

Just after lunch, Bob Higgs checked out of the Railway Hotel, directing his Statesman towards the affluent eastern suburbs of the state capital. In their subsequent conversations, neither Jack Carr nor Mrs Peng ever mentioned Bob Higgs or the consultant's outrageous fee.

Waiting

Mintook's harvest that year was a clinker, and twenty-three Year Twelve students were offered university places. After two years of solid toiling, Narelle Tyler became pregnant. Despite this, she and Kim were keen for Ray to stay on as their guest. The boy from the future had a sweet manner and made friends easily. Dogs were especially fond of him. Ray could master even the most unruly mutt.

Raymond proved to be an intelligent, attentive student with a predictable interest in history. Even with so much doubt surrounding the length of his stay, the boy hoped to win a scholarship to continue his studies beyond Year Twelve.

The young men who might have found Ray to be an insuperable foe were finally won over by his capacity to tell a killer yarn. Ray's stories were several shades bluer than anything heard in Mintook, and his audience left it for Ray to judge whether speaking such filth conflicted with his regular vague references to Allah.

But it was as a cricketer that Ray really made his mark. Blessed with elastic wrists, the bat was a wand in his hands. As the boy from the future chalked up a succession of massive scores, observers surmised that Ray must have been privy to sophisticated coaching. Few believed him when he said he'd never heard of cricket before.