Ecstasy Lake (29 page)

43

Fern was still alive the next day and Melody and I wanted to see her. She lay unconscious in a hospital bed, attached to tubes and monitors. There was a dressing on her cheek where Coy had pistol-whipped her. Tasso was by her side. Bert told us later that Tasso had gone straight to the hospital after the police released him and he'd been there ever since. He still looked exhausted, but there was more life in his face than I'd seen the previous day.

‘She's in an induced coma,' he said. ‘They think she might pull through.'

She did pull through. Two days later she was brought back to consciousness. She was in considerable pain in those early days, but gradually it eased and she came to terms with her injuries. The bullet had destroyed her ovaries and uterus, and a portion of her bowel had to be removed. But it had missed her spine and she was expected to be healthy again one day.

Tasso hardly left Fern's side for the first month she was in hospital. He forgave her for kidnapping Harry—in the end, she had saved the boy's life—and maybe one day she would forgive him for never having given her the children she wanted.

‘Do you think they'll last?' said Melody.

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘For a while.'

Days passed. Melody and I claimed Chad and Kane from Harlin's fortress, and Piss and Crawl offered to look after them until things settled down. Tasso started taking an interest in the gold find again, and he even made a quick trip to Parakilla, flown there by Bert. After a while, Goanna Mining was granted the exploration licence. I was the only one in the office when the official letter arrived, so it was me who opened it. I phoned Tasso and he came up with a case of beer. He was looking more like his old self. We clinked bottles.

‘I sold some shares,' he said.

‘What shares?'

‘In Goanna Mining.'

‘Who to?'

‘Joe Bettong and his mob; they have a company.'

‘Why?'

‘It seemed like the best way. It'll help with the fucken negotiation.' He had a vague look and I let it lie. He sucked his beer and came back into focus. ‘Actually to tell you the truth, it seemed to be the only way I could go through with the whole thing. I don't think I could have handled going up there, rich as shit, with Harry, and seeing the kids there still sniffing petrol.'

‘Joe said money isn't the answer.'

‘No, but maybe ownership is.'

‘How much of the company did you sell?'

‘Well, as you know, I owned ninety per cent of Goanna Mining. Now I own forty-five per cent. So me and Joe's mob are equal partners.'

‘What was your selling price?'

He held up his beer. ‘If we finish the case, and I'd like to think we'll try, the proceeds will have been spent in full. Joe's company had net assets of a hundred dollars, so he traded almost half his company for almost half mine. It was a fair deal.'

A few days later I sold half my share to the community's company for a six-pack. Five per cent was more than enough; the find would still make me a millionaire, if it existed. Anyway, I'd decided I didn't want to be rich; maybe one day I'd make a big donation to
Médecins Sans Frontières.

Tarrant dropped in to drink more of my whisky. It was almost becoming a habit.

‘We still haven't found Harlin,' he said. ‘Heard from him?'

‘No.'

‘Let me know if you ever do.'

‘Alright.' I poured him another shot. ‘You probably shouldn't be associating with me, the case still going on and all.'

‘You're probably right. They finally buried Coy, by the way, after the autopsy. I met his mother. She seems like a nice lady.'

‘How does she explain her son?'

‘She says he was hit on the head when he was a child. A swing in the playground, apparently. That's how he got his nystagmus.'

‘His what?'

‘Nystagmus. It makes your eyes swing from side to side.'

‘I didn't know it had a name.'

‘It's basically untreatable.'

‘Does it turn you into a homicidal maniac?'

‘No. There must have been other reasons for that. A combination of meth and greed, I'd say. Nystagmus does make life a bit difficult, though; it affected his eyesight and peripheral vision, among other things, and his reaction time. It explains how Tasso was able to hit him with the laptop. Coy wouldn't have even seen it coming.'

‘What's going to happen to Sonia?'

Tarrant studied his whisky. ‘Nothing. She didn't do anything illegal. We've had long conversations with her. She says she was afraid of her mother, and I believe her. Jenny was a bitter woman. She never really got over her father's death.'

‘He was cheated out of an iron-ore find, she said.'

‘According to Sonia, Jenny always carried anger about that with her. When she learned that Hiskey was going to do the same thing, albeit to her daughter, all that suppressed rage was released.'

‘She said she was entitled to the find.'

‘Yeah, we're all entitled to be billionaires, I'm sure.' Tarrant took another sip of whisky and seemed to mentally track its passage down his throat. ‘She wasn't a poor woman; far from it, she was quite rich. She didn't need the money, but she wanted more.'

‘Doesn't everyone?'

‘When did this country become so fucken selfish, West?'

‘When it became rich, I suppose. But Jenny said it wasn't about money, it was about the honour of her family.'

‘What a load of crap. Only a few things motivate people to kill other people, and family honour is way down the list. If you ask me, if it wasn't
just
about money it was about power first, money second and self-righteousness third.'

‘A lovely combination.'

‘I don't know if she would have got away with killing you all, but I'm glad she didn't do it.'

‘Sweet of you, Tarrant.'

‘She was bitter, vindictive and convinced of her own entitle­ment. Add a billion dollars or so and the power that would bring, and I doubt it would have ended well for anyone, not even Sonia. Pour me another whisky, will you? Just a little one.'

‘Alright.'

I organised a drilling crew to go up to the lease to start proving that Hiskey's ore body existed. Bert flew Melody and me to Parakilla so I could oversee the work. We flew out over those lovable, blue, burnable hills in the east before banking to the north. I watched the city pass below the wing. It was at the far end of the world, sure, but maybe it was the best end. Tasso was partly right, I thought. It
could
be a great city one day. I didn't think it needed a mining boom, although maybe a little one wouldn't hurt. What it needed was imagination and a bit of daring. I just wasn't sure it had quite enough of either. Time would tell.

Finally the drilling was done and the core samples sent off to the assay lab. The crew headed back to Adelaide, but Melody and I decided to stay in Parakilla for a while. Bert flew in with Marianne, Hiskey's girlfriend. It was her first visit to Parakilla since she was a kid. She liked it. The next time, she said, she would bring her sons.

‘I always knew she'd come back,' said Joe.

Marianne and Myrna, Joe's wife, seemed to get on well. Joe noticed, too.

‘Myrna and me have a lot to catch up on,' said Marianne. ‘Haven't we, Myrna?'

‘Too right we have,' said Myrna, the first words I'd ever heard her say in English.

‘You and me will fix this place up, won't we?' said Marianne.

‘Too right we will.'

Joe gave his car-starter laugh. ‘The women will fix this place up,' he said to me. ‘I bloody hope they do.'

The assay results started to come in; Hiskey's find was at least as big as he had thought.

‘So your mob now has a half-share in a massive gold deposit,' I said to Joe. ‘What're you going to do?'

‘A goldmine would change this place.'

‘It would.'

‘The place needs to change. It's the Third World here. No one wants to live in the Third World.'

‘It's going to make a very large hole in the ground, you know.'

‘I know.'

‘You need to dig up a fair bit of dirt to extract twelve million tonnes of gold.'

‘I know.'

‘Ecstasy Mountain, we'll call it.'

‘Nah, that's what I'm going to call my dick after it's been gold-plated.'

‘It probably won't go back in, once it's out, you know. The dirt, I mean.'

‘I know.' He scratched his chin. ‘The place needs to change. The question is, does it need this kind of change?'

‘That's up to you. And your other shareholders.'

Joe clapped me on the back. ‘Brothers and sisters, mate. We don't call ourselves shareholders here, alright?'

‘Alright.'

Melody and I went in search of Ecstasy Lake at the northern end of the lease. We plugged the coordinates into the car's navigation system, which guided us along rough tracks and then no tracks for several hours. Eventually we stood on a saltbush-strewn hill. Below us was a small, shrivelled-up saltpan roughly the shape of a human skull. It was almost pure white. The brown land that surrounded it was studded with mulga trees, gnarled like old men, stooped and poised, as if they had forgotten where they were going and what they would do when they got there.

‘Whoever named that lake must have been on some mighty fine drugs,' said Melody. She stared at it for a while. Her oval face gleamed with innocent sweat. ‘I assume it would look better after rain.'

‘For a short while it would be magnificent.'

We camped there that night, sleeping on a mattress we rolled out on the crusty white surface of the lake. I gathered wood from the surrounding landscape so we could light a fire to cook a meal and brew tea. I wondered how much Melody wished the tea were vodka. We watched the sun go down, and there was no sound except for the crackle of the fire and the crunch of the salt when we moved on it.

‘It's so peaceful,' said Melody. ‘Are we the only people left in the world?'

‘No, just the only two who matter.'

She smiled gently, warmly. ‘I don't think that's quite true, but it's the most romantic thing I've ever heard you say.'

We lay on the mattress. I was touching her body in many places, and her body was moving.

‘I love your passion,' I said.

‘I love you.'

‘I love how your nipples go as hard as rocks.'

‘I can't believe you just said that.'

‘I can't believe how hard they get.'

‘Can we talk about something else?'

‘Let's not talk at all.'

‘Alright.'

For some time thereafter I filled my five senses with her; the scent of her, the feel of her, the look of her, the sound of her and the taste of her. Beneath us, the crystalline surface of Ecstasy Lake had a soft glow from the reflected light of many billions of stars. Later, as we lay looking at those damned stars, warm in each other's arms, I thought of Hiskey. He was gone now, like all of us one day would be gone. We emerge, for a moment, with our imperfections and dreams. We laugh and cry, we take drugs and booze, we plan for the future and act on impulse, we bash, caress, snigger and grieve. We struggle and strive, and in the depths of the night, when the stars stare back at us with those cold twinkling eyes, measuring time on a scale we cannot comprehend, we wonder why the hell we do it at all.

Hiskey'
s life had been a mess, but a possibility had kept him going, a one in a thousand chance that nonetheless had been worth striving for. Most of us have an Ecstasy Lake in our minds, a crazy dream that drives us on and keeps our hope alive. Some are sordid, I suppose, and some are inspired. Most are somewhere in the middle, and they light the planet far more than the nasty glint of gold ever could.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the following people for providing stories, information and perspectives on the mining industry: Greg Hall, Mark McGeough, Tony Meyers and Helen Thomas; also Blair, Bob, Gary and Richard. Ken Thorsen, former head of major crime at the South Australia Police, kindly gave up his time to talk to me about policing in this state. Gerard Dutton, a forensic firearms expert, provided invaluable counsel, and Sophia Thompkins gave excellent advice on medical matters. Thanks to the book-club boys for their humour and encouragement. Special thanks to Julia Beaven, at Wakefield, whose critiques greatly strengthened the novel, and whose lunchtime chats about writing and especially footy are always fun. Thanks to Margot Lloyd, also at Wakefield, for her intelligent suggestions. The following people read drafts of the novel, or parts thereof, and gave valuable feedback: Cal, Catherine, Greg, Ian, Judy, Mark, Nancy, Patricia, Pippa, Stephen, Suzanne and Tom. Thanks to you all; you know that I, alone, am responsible for any flaws in this work, although I bloody well wish you'd pointed them out at the time.