Moonlight Downs Read online

He rolled his eyes. ‘You think you can…’

  ‘Tom, I’ve travelled through some of the roughest places in the world, including a few years hanging round the edges of the inner-city Koori scene in Melbourne. If I can survive those I oughta be able to survive whatever Moonlight can throw at me.’

  ‘And your other?’

  ‘My other what?’

  ‘Your other “but”…’

  I took a swig of coffee, studied the ground. ‘Not quite sure how to put this, Tom, but…I didn’t just come back because I wanted to reminisce about the good old days…’ My voice trailed off.

  He studied me for a moment, glanced up at the hills, where his men were busily wasting their time, then sat down in the dirt beside me.

  ‘Wanner tell me about it, Em?’

  He was a big man. Powerful once, overweight now, with a flush in his cheeks and a trickle of sweat dripping down from the inner rim of his hat. But decent, I thought, under that rugged exterior, as decent and sweet as a jar of home-made jam. When I was a kid he used to take me, Hazel and the rest of our little mob out to the waterhole in his police van. I’d often seen him let blokes off with a warning when he could have locked them up, or settle a blue with a stern word.

  ‘I’ve been away for what, twelve years now, and in all that time I never felt at home. Never knew where I was going.’

  ‘Must admit,’ he said, ‘your old man was always a little vague about exactly what you were up to.’

  ‘Don’t blame him. I was pretty vague myself.’

  ‘I heard you were studying geology. Jack said you were gonna make him rich.’

  ‘Yeah, did a year of geology. Then I got distracted by Chinese, for some reason.’

  ‘Chinese! What brought that on?’

  ‘Started off looking at old maps of the Silk Road in the Earth Sciences Library at Melbourne Uni. Before I knew it I’d spent a couple of years trying to figure them out. Then I enrolled in a law degree, when I got so pissed off with what you mob were doing to us that I thought I could fight fire with fire. Didn’t stick at any of them, though.’

  ‘And after uni?’

  ‘After uni I just…’—I shrugged my shoulders—‘floated, I suppose. Worked at whatever came along. Whenever I had enough of a stash together, I headed off overseas. Deck-handed on a yacht across North Africa. Ran a bar in Turkey. Travelled through Rajasthan—on a bloody camel, half the time. Spent six months wandering along the Silk Road itself. I was running so hard it never occurred to me that I was lost. Truth hit me a few weeks ago, back in Melbourne.’

  I gave McGillivray the story. I’d been called up for jury duty. The feller in the dock was some fabulous creature—part lawyer, part farmer—who’d been caught in a bottom-of-the-harbour tax avoidance scheme. As I watched him being sworn in, a thin smirk on his fat face, I was struck by a feeling of déjà vu. We went through the motions, but he got off of course. They always do. My fellow jurors took more note of the cut of his suit than that of his jib, and I wasn’t on the ball that day myself. My mind was elsewhere, trying to trace the memory sparked by the defendant.

  I remember the night of the court case I slept badly, my sleep lashed by dark dreams. At four in the morning I gave up. Outside there was a soft rain falling: neon lights were buzzing, hoons in crimson muscle cars were thrashing up and down the main drag. I was living in a dingy Northcote flat, working in a Turkish bar, eating a lot of pita bread and chips, drinking a lot of cheap booze. I lit a smoke, switched on the radio, fiddled with the dial and found myself listening to a station from country Victoria. An old Jimmy Little song—the old Jimmy Little song—‘Telephone to Glory’ came floating through the static.

  Suddenly it hit me, the memory that had been nagging at me all day.

  It was the only other swearing-in I’d ever witnessed: Lincoln Flinders, giving evidence at one of the early land claim hearings.

  ‘Do you swear to tell the truth?’ they asked him.

  He thought about it for a moment. ‘I might try,’ he answered.

  Might try. I loved that, especially when I knew that he was talking about his dreaming, about a belief so ingrained in his soul that he quite literally wouldn’t have lied about it to save his life.

  I pulled on a coat, went for a walk, found myself standing on an empty railway platform watching the first rays of the winter sun struggle for a spot among the carbon monoxide. Rubbish drifted, cats prowled, weeds crept along rusty fences.

  ‘And that,’ I said to McGillivray, who’d been sitting patiently while I told the story, ‘is when it dawned on me.’

  ‘What dawned on you?’

  ‘The reason I’d so often been drawn to other people’s deserts.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘That I was running from my own. And I knew if I was ever going to have any peace of mind I had to come back to Moonlight Downs.’

  And so it was that I found myself, a few weeks later, sitting in the dirt and baring my soul to a burly outback cop.

  ‘May be that there’s nothing for me here either, Tom, but I have to give myself a chance to find that out for myself.’

  A ripple of tenderness scudded across his face, then he nodded and grunted: ‘Okay, I hear what you’re sayin, Em. But I still dunno if you’d be wise to stay here right now. I got a bad feeling about this. A feelin like maybe it isn’t over yet.’

  He looked around the camp, his brow furrowed, then up into the hills into which Blakie had disappeared. For a moment he looked like Lincoln, troubled by a premonition he didn’t understand, and I felt a shiver rattle my backbone. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was being rash. McGillivray had, after all, spent twenty years working among whatever dark forces lurked in these parts, and may well have developed a sixth sense for them. If he was nervous, maybe I should be as well. But what else was I going to do?

  ‘You wouldn’t consider staying with your old man for a while?’

  ‘I just come from the Jenny, Tom. I love old Jack, but do I want to spend my time sitting on top of a gold mine in the middle of a salt pan with him and his trained gorillas? I don’t think so.’

  ‘You could come with us, back into Bluebush…’

  ‘Bluebush!’

  He appeared to be offended by the look of alarm that shot across my face. I was, I supposed, insulting the place he’d chosen to make his home. But Bluebush! What a dump! The sort of town where it’s easier to buy a silencer than a decent coffee. When we visited town, I’d never leave my father’s side: as a little black kid, you could feel the antagonism radiating out from the whitefellers when you passed them in the street.

  And what a mob they were themselves. A bigger collection of dickheads and drop-kicks you’d have to travel a long way to find: boozers, bruisers and substance-abusers, rockjaw Germans and lockjaw Yorkshiremen, grease monkeys and gamblers, meat-workers, meat-heads, missionaries, maniacs, men on the run, men on the dole, men on the Witness Protection Program. Peddlers, pushers, whores and bores, desperadoes of every denomination. You name it, they were there, drawn to the town like flies to a carcass.

  ‘Tom, the only way you could get me to go and live in Bluebush would be if you were to knock me out, handcuff me and throw me into the back of your paddy wagon.’

  Blue-bloody-bush

  Sssskkk@@@###~~rrrxxxttt!

  I was floating up from the bottom of a deep blue dream, but the noise ripping in through the open window of my Bluebush apartment sounded like metal on metal, and one of the metals had an ominously familiar crunch to it.

  Was this some sort of local initiation ritual: you wake up in the morning to find some bastard’s run into your car?

  I checked my watch. Ten to six. Urk. The party in the flat opposite mine had kicked off at about the time most parties were winding down, presumably after they’d been chucked out of the pub. Sounded like one of the revellers was going home via my car.

  I stumbled to the door, hesitated, then went back and slipped into a sarong. This was Bluebush, after all: if I went
out there in my present state, I’d have some ravenous meatworker devouring me for breakfast.

  Bluebush. I still couldn’t quite believe I’d been here for over a week now. Settled in, at least to the extent of picking up some underpaid bar-work at the White Dog and the overpriced abode in which I now found myself.

  It wasn’t McGillivray’s admonitions that had brought me here. On the contrary, there was nothing as likely to make me dig my heels in as being told to go. My intention to stay with the community, however, depended upon there being a community with which to stay. At Moonlight Downs there no longer was one.

  Before he died Lincoln had voiced his concerns about his people’s willingness to remain on Moonlight, and he’d been proven right. Blackfellers often move away from an area when an important person dies, but they don’t normally move hundreds of kilometres, which was what the Moonlight mob had done. Whether their motivation was fear, thirst or respect for the dead I wasn’t sure, but within a day or two of the funeral the entire community packed up and pissed off.

  Hazel and a few of the closer kin were the first to go, disappearing into the desert to complete the mourning rituals. When they’d be back nobody could tell me. Since the death, nobody seemed to be telling me anything.

  Then Bindi and a car-load of young men went off to the neighbouring Strangeways station. And finally what little was left of the community simply chucked their gear into the three or four working cars and took the ominous road to town.

  I joined them. No way was I up to camping out at Moonlight on my own, not with the Wet on the way and Blakie on the loose. It was only a temporary move, I told myself, a place to stay until something better came along.

  From somewhere outside I heard an engine roar, a dog bark and a voice bellow, ‘Shuddup, ya mongrel!’

  I opened the door and spotted a monstrous four-wheel-drive ute, obligatory Rottweiler on the back, obligatory moron in the front, negotiating its way out of the opposite flat’s driveway. From the dent in my own Toyota, I figured the driver belonged to the von Ribbentrop school of negotiation.

  Surely he wasn’t going to do it again?

  ‘Oi!!’

  He did it again, the bastard. Nonchalantly rammed my car out of the way and gunned the motor for a getaway down the drive.

  I raced over and thumped his window. The bloke at the wheel gazed at me, a what-have-I-done-wrong look on his raised palms and curled lip.

  Oh Christ, I thought, looking into his bloodshot eyes, I’m in Bluebush. This is what you get: head like a weathered gumboot, great wobbly arms covered in great wobbly tatts, face bedecked with something that wouldn’t look out of place on a rotten grapefruit. Skinny in places, fat in others. Twenty-five going on fifty. Been taking deportment lessons from the Rottweiler.

  ‘You got a problem?’ he rasped. He sounded like he gargled on Handy Andy.

  ‘Yeah! You! You just hit me car! Twice!’

  The bloke glanced at the dented fender.

  ‘Your fault,’ he declared.

  ‘My fault? Jesus, mate, you got more front than a bloody bulldozer. How is it supposed to be my fault?’

  ‘Yer blockin the exit.’

  I waved an arm in the general direction of the driveway. ‘There’s plenty of room for a car—didn’t know you’d be coming along in a fuckin aircraft carrier.’

  I was being a little disingenuous here: the block of flats in which I’d made my home was nicknamed Toyota Towers because of its popularity as a base for miners and other workers from out bush. The four wheel drives just about outnumbered the cockroaches.

  My neighbour knew it as well. ‘’T’s what ya need out here, lady,’ he retorted, ‘somethin with a bit of grunt.’ He glanced disdainfully at my little ute, then began to drive off.

  ‘Hold it you!’ I yelled.

  He ignored me, came very close to running over my toes. I thumped his dropsides. The rottie snarled, but it was held back by a chain. I judged I’d be out of range, and I was. Just. I grabbed hold of what looked like the most valuable items within reach—a Kanga jack-hammer and a theodolite—and dragged them onto the ground.

  The bloke hit the anchors, jumped out and looked at the gear, his sneer rapidly transmogrifying into a full-blown glare. From the wobble in his beard and the spittle on his lips it appeared that he was getting a little agitato. Looking, in fact, like he was about ready to clobber me. His knuckles had gone white, his nostrils were standing at attention.

  I braced myself, prepared to duck, weave or kick him in the nuts. But then he took a closer look at me and changed his mind. When I get fired up I’m like a thorny devil: small but fierce-looking. Not as horny, thank Christ.

  Doors in the surrounding flats were creeping open, curtains were being dragged back, bedraggled faces were appearing. The rest of the neighbourhood was crawling out to enjoy the show.

  You could read the bubble floating over his head: enough of a shame job belting a woman in public without making a mess of it.

  ‘Look, lady,’ he whined, ostentatiously studying his watch. ‘I haven’t got time for this crap. Got a job to go to.’ When he’d picked up his gear he scribbled a number onto a cigarette packet: ‘This is Brad, me panel-beater…’

  ‘Got your own panel-beater, have you? You do this sort of thing often?’

  He handed me the packet, picked up his gear, climbed into the cab. ‘Tell em Camel sent ya. They’ll give yer a discount.’

  That gave me a moment’s pause. This fuckwit was called Camel? That had to be the worst name I’d heard since Galloping Big Dick died.

  He used the pause to make an escape, picking up his gear and jumping back into the driver’s seat.

  ‘They’ll give you a bloody discount, Camel!’ I yelled at his tailgate, giving it a farewell thump as it rattled down the drive. ‘Don’t think I’m paying for this!’

  I surveyed the scene around me. The sun had risen, as had the contents of the coloured jocks worn by the blue-singletted gorillas who stood in every other doorway of the courtyard surveying me back. All this early morning excitement was proving a bit much for their delicate sensibilities.

  ‘What are you lot gawking at?’ I roared.

  They scuttled.

  The debris of last night’s party—maybe last month’s party— bottles and bongs, pizza boxes and porno—lay scattered among the dogshit on Camel’s little patch of weedery. The front door of his unit was agape, as was the gob of the bearded, beefy bastard enveloping the couch like a layer of molten mozzarella. Charmingly attired in a blue singlet, yellow Y-fronts and an empty rum bottle, this one was presumably too hungover to go to work.

  A bracing aroma, a blend of smoke, sperm and stale beer, drifted out on the early morning breeze. Lighting for this depressing tableau was provided by a set of fluorescent tubes glowing with that ugly pallor they assume as the day dawns around them, sound by a distant bass guitar and a set of hands unseen making mincemeat out of ‘Smoke on the Water’. Duh duh duuh, duh duh duh-duuh, duh duh duuh, duh-duh.

  I sat on the steps, head in hands, heart sunk. Christ, I thought. Bluebush!

  The town had a population of some fifty million: a thousand blacks, a thousand whites, the rest cockroaches. The cockroaches were on the go early this morning, crawling around blinking at the light of day, their dark brown armour glistening in the sun, their feelers flickering. The weedy geranium bush at the doorstep looked as though it had struggled up through a hole in the concrete, taken a quick look around and was heading back down. Even the dogs yelping in the distance were wondering what canine-karma they’d accumulated to end up in this pissant town.

  I was wondering the same thing myself. I stood up to admire the view. Still life in a mining town. Well, not that still, actually: the smokestacks at the smelter were pumping it up and pouring it out, as they did, morning, noon and night. The furnaces were blazing away with enough firepower to blind the angels. The battery was rumbling.

  Over to the west, the green mountains—of mullock—were simmer
ing and stinking. Further on was a chemical inferno: the retention ponds, with their hissing blue cyanic waters, their evil green banks, their sagging fences, their odd little toxic rainbows leaching out into the desert.

  I’d been to the ponds once. Never again. Skull and cross-bones country. You could feel the cancer stirring in your cells just looking at it.

  Food smells began to waft through the air.

  Meatworkers and miners were staggering out to tables all over town and getting down to the serious business of making their selection from the enormous smorgasbord of dead animals and their parts which comprised the Bluebush breakfast: schnitzels and mince, chicken wings, red gum, sausages and cutlets, rib bones, lamb shanks, pigs’ heads, bulls’ balls—you name it, it was being battered, baked or boiled in oil, chilled, grilled or charred in lard, filleted, fricasseed, skewered, stewed or brewed and demolished by the ravenous men and rough women of Bluebush.

  Driven indoors by the radiant depression, I put on some coffee and some Louvin Brothers, made toast, lit a smoke. Charlie and Ira were singing ‘When I Stop Dreaming’. Sweet harmonies and sweet aromas filled the room, but did little to ease my mind.

  Another mess you’ve gotten yourself into, girl, I admonished myself. Another fine fucking mess.

  When I’d thought about coming back to the Centre, the prospect of being stuck in this dirty dust-hole, this monument to red neckery and black despair, hadn’t figured in my calculations.

  Like a lot of other people, I’d ended up in Bluebush because I didn’t know what else to do.

  I found myself idly scratching shapes in some sugar I’d spilt on the kitchen table the night before. Almost of their own accord, it seemed, the shapes formed themselves into letters and the letters turned into a word: ‘haze’.

  Haze. The word was open to a couple of interpretations, and between them they might have been bookends to the state of mind in which I found myself. On the one hand, a haze was what I seemed to have been floating along in ever since I first left Moonlight, years before.

  On the other hand, something told me that if there was a way out of the fog, if I were ever to find a home, Hazel Flinders would be part of it. If I were ever to get a foothold in this country, it could only be with her assistance.