Prohibited Zone (22 page)

‘Jesus, Westie, that don't look good,' he said. ‘Does it?' he asked the waitress.

‘Oh my God,' she said. ‘You poor thing. Does it hurt?'

‘It hurts to look at it, that's for sure,' said Baz. ‘You'll give Katy nightmares if you keep hanging around. Why don't you grab a coffee and go sit in the corner? Preferably facing the wall.' Katy laughed. ‘I'll join you in a minute,' said Baz.

‘I'm fine, thanks for your concern.'

I armed myself with a double espresso and a straw to drink it with and found a place to sit against a large concertina glass door with an Australian oak frame that could be opened when the weather was agreeable. It was shut today and the air-conditioning was at full crank. I sweated anyway. Cars were dawdling their way along O'Connell Street. Over by the bar, a coffee grinder buzzed almost perpetually. Baz eventually prised himself away and joined me.

‘So, tell me the story of how someone ran over your face,' he said.

I recounted the event, slowly, trying to remember as much detail as possible. By the time I'd finished I'd had four shots of caffeine and was wired; my diction had improved a little, too. Baz asked a few questions but generally listened in silence, giving me his full attention and about half of a half-smile. When I finished he sat rubbing his chin for a while. He had a couple of days' worth of holiday stubble and looked horribly handsome. ‘Any idea who it was?' he asked eventually.

‘Nope. I'd never heard that voice before, I'm sure of that. So it wasn't that prick Janeway. I don't think the other one was, either, just by the way he moved.'

‘You said the guy who spoke had a strange accent.'

‘Yeah, sort of South African.'

Baz looked thoughtful. ‘It could be connected with Janeway, or at least Corrections Australia. They employ a few South Africans, most of them with a vicious streak.'

‘It's possible. Kidnapping seems a bit extreme for the sake of a few thousand dollars reward money, though.'

‘What about the place? Reckon you could find it again?'

‘I doubt it. I tried memorising the turns but there were too many of them.' I thought back. ‘We left the freeway at Bridgewater, I'd say, and then we turned left and immediately right. After that I lost track.'

‘Hang on a sec,' said Baz. He grabbed his car keys from the table. He was gone a few minutes and came back holding a large, orange, spiral-bound book. He flicked through it.

‘This is what the fireys use,' he said. ‘CFS map book. It shows every goddamned dirt track in the Hills.' He came to the page he was looking for and turned the book on an angle so I could see it. It was an A4-size contour map showing a section of the Hills from Norton Summit in the north to Mylor in the south. In the lower half of the map, the dual carriageway of the South Eastern Freeway bent its way around the towns of Stirling, Aldgate and Bridgewater in the direction of Hahndorf. Baz traced it with the end of his teaspoon to the Bridgewater exit.

‘Did you know that “Hahndorf” means Cocktown in German?' asked Baz.

‘Interesting fact.'

‘So you got off here,' he said. ‘At the end of the exit you reckon you turned left' – his spoon handle negotiated the corner – ‘then right again. That puts you on Waters Road.' We both studied it. Waters Road seemed to go nowhere, bending around a bit before coming to a dead end. I thought back.

‘At some point we seemed to do a three-point turn,' I said. ‘After that we drove for quite a while.'

‘So you re-traced your steps,' said Baz. ‘The buggers were lost.'

‘Or they were just trying to disorientate us, or shake a tail, or make us spew.'

Baz moved the spoon handle to the top of Waters Road, a T-junction. ‘Which way do you reckon you went when you got back here?'

‘Right,' I said. ‘We did a hill start and turned right. But by then I wasn't trying to remember the turns. I didn't realise we were back where we started.'

‘Doesn't matter,' said Baz, tracing. ‘There aren't too many places you could've turned off.' The spoon was now on Peacock Road. It wound its way north through what looked like quite steep terrain, past one turn-off to the left and a very minor one, depicted in brown, to the right, before terminating at a T-junction with Gum Flat Road.

‘We took one definite turn to the right just before we got to the house,' I said.

‘It might have been at this T-junction,' mused Baz. ‘Or it might have been this sidetrack.' He tapped the short brown line with his spoon. ‘It's only a few hundred metres long and peters out to nothing. Might be a good place for a nice little interrogation.'

I got up. ‘Feel like a drive in the country?'

We went in Baz's car, a Toyota Prado diesel. I parked Rolley's old Holden, with its multi-coloured panels, in a lot behind the cafe and shoved five dollars' worth of coins into the ticket machine to keep it safe from the parking inspector. We sauntered through the city and onto Glen Osmond Road, which took us past the Arkaba, looking garish and as guilty as sin in the daylight, to the start of the freeway.

‘So what's your take on these detention centres?' I asked. ‘Kara seems to think they compare well with Auschwitz.'

He chuckled. ‘I like her passion.' I wondered how much he knew about her passion. Somehow I didn't like the idea of her whispering ‘sweetie' in his ear. He was reflecting. ‘I have mixed feelings about them. The problem with any given boatload of refugees is sorting the good guys out from the arseholes. You need to screen them, which takes time. Should they all be running around loose while you work out if they're genocidal maniacs? No, they shouldn't. But should you be locking up four-year-olds and pretty young women? Or even ugly ones? No, you shouldn't. There's no easy answer.' We had stopped at the traffic lights at the bottom of the freeway. They turned green and he worked his way through the gears as we started up the escarpment and into the hundred kilometre zone.

‘Maybe the centres don't need to be so harsh, but it's a deliberate policy. The government reckons that if word gets out that refugees are treated like shit here then the boats will stop coming. And to be honest, it seems to have worked. There's hardly been a boat in the last twelve months. And who cares if a few of the detainees get a bit sooky? The Honourable Prime Minister certainly doesn't because detainees can't vote.'

‘Like working there?'

‘The money's good, mate.'

‘Bloodsucker.'

He grinned. ‘Actually, I quite like it. It's not easy. A lot of shit happens, we work bloody hard, we have to put up with a lot of arseholes. There's a lot of tension, a lot of agro, a lot of us and them. Let's face it, we're on the frontline in the clash of civilisations. We don't understand them, they don't understand us. But you also see love, passion, some kind of common humanity. It's kind of intoxicating.'

He glanced at me and I could see that he meant what he said. He looked at the road ahead, and then back at me again. ‘What?'

‘Nothing. I just thought I saw a glimmer of sincerity on your face. I was surprised.'

He laughed. ‘I'm an idealist to the core, mate. If you don't believe me, ask me mum.'

I had known Baz for more than a year but I realised I didn't know much about him. He had stayed in my house at Roxby Downs a few times and we had spent several alcohol-saturated evenings competing for the local talent. We had sometimes even made out we were brothers and most of the time people believed us. I'd never known him to last more than a week with the same woman.

‘I didn't even know you had a mother.'

‘Well, I do. She lives in Adelaide. I stay with her when I'm down here. Bit of a God-botherer, but I love her.'

‘What about your old man?'

‘Yeah, he's around. Mum puts up with him, dunno why. Maybe Jesus says she should.'

‘Difficult, is he?'

‘You could say that.'

‘Sounds like my old man.'

We had already passed Stirling and were approaching the Bridgewater exit. Baz put on his indicator and we veered to the left, coming to a halt at a T-junction. There was no signpost.

‘So we turn left here, right?'

‘Yes,' I said, looking at the map. ‘This is Peacock Road.'

We wound our way along a narrow sealed road past a sign that said ‘Mount George' and a series of rural properties. The view opened up to the left across a heavily dissected, largely forested landscape. A small rise in the foreground might have been Mount George and an undulating ridge in the distance formed the two ears of Mount Lofty. Close to the road, cows were grazing on brown stubble.

‘This should be it,' said Baz, slowing down and putting on his indicator again. We turned right onto a nameless dirt road and meandered along it for a few hundred metres.

‘Then I think we turned right again into a driveway or something,' I said.

Baz was now driving at a crawl. He turned into the first driveway we came to and followed it around. The house, which was obscured from the road, appeared in our view as the drive bent to the left. It was a fine-looking, Colonial-style house with a large, wooden veranda and two newish cars parked out the front. A child's bicycle rested against the wall of the house.

‘I don't think this is it,' I said. ‘We're looking for a dump, not a family home.'

Baz examined the place for a few seconds and then backed out of the driveway. We continued up the nameless dirt road but there were no more exits to the right and nothing that looked abandoned. Even the farm sheds looked respectable. We headed back to Peacock Road and continued north along it. We passed Worden Road, which veered to the left, and, a kilometre or so further on, came to Gum Flat Road. On the map it had looked like a T-junction but in fact Peacock Road continued on by bending around to the left. Gum Flat Road was gravel.

‘Let's take a look,' said Baz, turning onto Gum Flat. ‘See if anything strikes you.'

We explored several driveways to the right, but there was little there to excite us. One old stone cottage with a rusty tin roof and a flimsy front door excited us for a while but it was discarded as a possibility when we discovered it was full of hay. Eventually we turned back. We drove to the end of Peacock Road and explored two other roads that came off it to the right, but it all proved a bust. Eventually we turned around and drove back the way we had come.

‘We're probably missing something very simple,' said Baz. We passed Worden Road, which was now on our right. ‘You know, you could have veered onto that without noticing. It's almost a fork in the road. You could go either way and it would just feel like another bend. You would hardly even need to slow down.' He pulled over on a straight stretch of road, did a u-turn and steered us left onto Worden Road. He was right, he could take it at a speed consistent with negotiating a bend in the road; it didn't feel like a hard left.

We had a last glimpse of the communication towers on Mount Lofty before descending the winding road into a small valley. On the right was a narrow paddock still tinged with green; it sloped down to a small creek lined with willows. A farmer on a tractor was dumping hay bales for the benefit of twenty or so steers, who were ambling after him. Ferns grew on the valley floor and the creek was punctuated towards the bottom by a small green pond. On the left of the road was a thicket of tall stringybarks, the occasional smooth-barked blue gum, and a dry and brittle understorey of scraggly acacias, she-oaks and native cherries. We came to a T-junction with another paved road.

‘So we turn right, right?' said Baz.

‘Right.'

The new road, Muller Road, degraded quickly into gravel.

‘This could be it,' I said. ‘I think it did become gravel at some point.' The tyres started crunching their way over the rough, slightly corrugated surface.

‘Sound familiar?'

I closed my eyes. ‘Yeah, I'd recognise that gravel anywhere.'

‘What about this?' asked Baz. I opened my eyes. We had stopped opposite a poorly hung gate across a track that led up to the right behind a dilapidated fence lined with a cypress hedge.

‘Let's have a look.' I hopped out of the car and opened the gate, which was latched with a chain but not locked. Baz drove through and I motioned him past, deciding to walk. If this was the place, it wouldn't be far.

It was a ramshackle, besa-brick house that maybe had once rung with the happy and sad cries of children but, judging from its state of disrepair, hadn't been called home by anyone for several years. The driveway was empty of cars and the house devoid of human life. The two windows that fronted the driveway on either side of the front entrance were boarded up from the inside with plywood, although the glass was still intact, giving it the odd appearance of a face with no eyes wearing a pair of spectacles. There had been a garden once, but now the rhododendrons had gone feral and a couple of ornamental plums seemed to be the only surviving original trees. Blackberry and hawthorn had taken over. Baz tested the weathered front door and found it locked. He leant on it but it didn't give. He looked at me.