Quota (19 page)

‘So I'm hangin there with just the top of me head out of the water, and they've looped back around and come back to our boat. And I'm watching em—they pull alongside and I'm watching em…I watched em throw Matt over the side onto our boat. And I reckon up to that point I'm still thinkin about getting back to him, you know, maybe trying to save him. I'm shit scared, don't get me wrong, and mostly I'm just trying to save me own arse, but a part of me keeps thinkin maybe I could help him. Anyway they've chucked him over the side onto our boat, and it sits about probably four foot lower at the gunwales than theirs, so he falls a fair way before he lands on the deck, and it's pretty clear he's dead by then. He's just, um, limp. He's a dead weight, and he's come down on the deck straight on his head but he didn't flinch or anything, you know, didn't react. And he's hit the steel so hard that if there was any life in him he'd have reacted to that. It, God it made such a fucking horrible noise. So I know then he's gone.

‘They've stopped shootin by this stage and I can't work out what they're up to. They're yellin at each other like they're completely off their heads. Screaming—you fucken this and you fucken that. That went on for a while, like they had no idea what to do. Then I see Mick with a jerry can and he's givin our boat a good slosh, and I can see in the lights from their boat the petrol—I s'pose it was petrol—splashing on Matt, and he hasn't moved at all. And then they've gunned the motors and, and they've lit something, probably a rag or somethin, and they've thrown it over, and up she goes. As soon as it goes up, they're off. And from where I'm looking, I can see Matt's legs and they're not moving. He's on fire, and his legs aren't moving. I can see the sneakers he had on, these shitty old sneakers, and all of a sudden I can see him standin there at the pub and I've got a beer in me hand and so does he and I'm laughin about somethin and I'm lookin at his feet as I'm laughin and it's them same old shitty sneakers, an he's sloppin beer on em. He wore em everywhere, even out to sea. I'm tryin to explain it here, how I left him, cos I know, I know you'd find it hard to understand this, but he was gone and I was already thinkin about what comes next. I'm just treadin water out there, watchin it burn, watchin
him
burn, and I know that the town will believe these pricks, if anyone even thinks to ask. But they're probably just gonna say that Matt was up to something dodgy—everyone bloody knew he was anyway—and if I was there too then they're gonna find there's a bullet in him somewhere and the boat's on fire, and I'm in the water and I haven't got a scratch on me and it's not gonna be a good look. Not when you're well enough known like I am, eh. I mean Jesus, we didn't get on that good most of the time. We'd had a fucken ripper punch on after closing only about three weeks before this.

‘So there you go—I just start swimmin for shore. Probably go to hell for it, but that's what I did. I'm keepin half an eye on the Murchisons' boat to make sure they don't change their minds, but I kinda knew they had to get away from the fire as quick as they could, so I figured I was right. And when I get to shore I've just skulked round to home hopin I wouldn't see anybody. I was, you know, I was drippin wet, and it would've been pretty hard to explain. An so I got to home an I was just in time to dry an' change an' then Robbo turned up an' you know the statement I give him.'

‘Fuck,' said Charlie quietly. It was all he could think to say. The magnitude of what he'd just been told had sucked the air out of him. ‘What…fuck.'

He thought for a moment. ‘Where's this barrel of dope?'

‘I dunno. I guess the Murchisons got rid of it quick smart when they got back.'

They fell into silence again, each considering their position.

‘Why?'

‘Why what?'

‘Well, why meet at sea? And why did they go armed?'

Patrick shrugged. ‘Can't be too careful.'

‘What? For a handful of abalone and some cash? Come on. Don't you think the barrel of dope changes things a bit? How do you know Matt hadn't organised something much bigger and you weren't aware of it?'

‘I don't know, do I. Whatever he was doing, he's dead and there's no barrel.'

‘Exactly,' said Charlie. He suddenly felt cold despite the morning sun. ‘Sure you don't know where the barrel is?'

Patrick snorted with derision. ‘What, you think I've got it? I'm a witness in a murder trial and I'm sittin on a bloody great keg of drugs. That'd be smart, wouldn't it…'

‘So what are you going to do when you get in the witness box? You've put me in a giant fucking hole now, haven't you?'

Patrick's eyes never wavered from his line.

‘You chose to come here. You chose to ask me about all this. You coulda just left it alone and you wouldn't have all this…trouble. Problems like this, mate, they only appear when you go poking around in other people's shit. Like I said before, now it's your problem as well as mine.'

They continued fishing for another hour, filling the bucket with snapper. When the bait ran out, Patrick pulled in the anchor and started the motor again. The sun was high overhead now, every crevasse of the reef below them lit up. Large schools of silver fish passed below, thousands of them moving in perfect unison.

As the shore came nearer, the details of the beach and the scrub came into view. Charlie could see that Patrick was watching something, looking up the line of the tractor's imprints in the sand, up to the edge of the scrub where he'd left it. Closer in, Charlie could make out the tractor, and could see that there was a small, bright shape perched on it, a speck of red against the grey-green background. It was a boy, sitting in the drivers seat, perfectly still. He was looking straight back out to sea at them with one hand shielding his eyes against the sun. He'd drawn his knees up under his red T-shirt and was leaning both elbows on them. Patrick continued to stare at him, and the child continued to stare back, until very suddenly he jumped off the tractor and ran into the scrub.

‘You know him?' asked Charlie.

‘Nope. Just some kid.'

Onshore, Charlie sat in his car and scrolled through the handful of messages on his phone while Patrick emptied the boat. He had what he came for and he knew he had to go back to town, had to face the bloody regulators, prepare the trial and sort out his life. What had Annie said about the furniture? Patrick was sitting in the bow of the boat, which was still hitched to the tractor. He was coiling rope, looking off into the distance along the beach as his arms took in each loop. Charlie couldn't tell if that look on his face, cautious, sceptical, was something that came from years of disappointment and forced responsibility, or if something greater was eating at him.

Patrick had made a decision this morning he could never go back from—he couldn't now give evidence that his first statement was true, that he was at home on the night, because he'd equipped Charlie with the knowledge that it wasn't. The trial would either abort, or he'd turn the prosecution case into such a shambles that Murchison and McVean would walk. Either way, he was facing an uncomfortable wait for the trial. Delvene Murchison would undoubtedly work away at him, whether through Neil Robertson or more directly. Charlie would drive back to Melbourne and turn his back on all this. But Patrick had no escape. His siblings depended on him daily, a burden that seemed totally unfair, but from which there was no prospect of any relief.

He'd put the rope down and was sitting motionless in the boat. There was a despondency in his shoulders, darkness under his brows where the shadows had fallen on his eyes. Charlie reflected that he himself was accustomed to a cycle of wins and losses, a process of constant renewal by verdicts and settlements. He couldn't imagine a state of being in which life's burdens just could not be shifted.

THAT NIGHT CHARLIE unwrapped the snapper fillets Patrick had given him in a bundle of newspaper. The print had stuck to the creamy flesh, reversed but still readable in the smooth muscle fibres. He laid them in a pan and fried them until they curled, spitting flecks of hot oil on the backs of his hands as he lifted them onto a plate. There was beer in the fridge. He had no memory of buying it, and had a vague suspicion Les had dropped by and put it there, though he couldn't think why he would do such a thing.

He ate alone in front of the television. He'd begun the mental process of saying goodbye to the house, a place he initially couldn't stand, and to which he now felt attached. The empty plate lay on the coffee table as he took another beer from the fridge, then a third and a fourth. In the middle of the fifth beer he realised he needed to leave Dauphin to get his alcohol intake under control. Then he fell asleep in the chair.

He awoke hours later, desperately needing to piss. He could smell the cooled fish hanging in the air. Shuffling to the bathroom, he became aware of a sound, loud but distant. Howling.

A siren.

It was much like the air-raid sirens in old war films, though he'd never heard the sound in reality. It rose and fell, rose and fell, full of melancholy. As his bladder drained the howling was joined by the more urgent pulses of police sirens. Bad tidings. Upturned boats, mangled cars, weeping mothers. He found a jacket in the darkened hallway, stumbled outside and got in the car, not really knowing why.

It was a cold night and there was a mist in the air. There was static on the radio and the heater was blowing cold. Nothing moved in the streets between his house and the town, but as he came nearer, the air above the buildings seemed to be illuminated. It took a moment to register, but the sky was glowing orange. Then he swung into the main street and the source of the noise became apparent: cars were everywhere—police, CFA, ambulances and onlookers. People milled on the street and there was running and shouting wherever he looked. The Normans Woe was on fire.

He parked the car and turned it off, clutching the coat over his ribs. Fire trucks had arranged themselves parallel to the kerb on both sides of the pub. The crews were trying to attach hoses to the two hydrants in the street. A man with a large wrench in his hand was arguing with two others at the hydrant, one of whom was pointing back at the truck. The other crew had got their hose connected and had started to direct a long jet of water onto the roof of the pub, but the fire had outpaced them. It was licking through the iron sheets of the roof, lifting their edges and buckling them. It tore greedily at the windows, exploding through the few remaining panes of glass and consuming the old timber frames. Sparks curled above the building, borne on a thick column of smoke. The smoke, the nearby trees, everything glowed orange even well above the rooftop.

The second hose was now concentrated on the blaze. One of the upstairs attic windows had begun to slump to one side. A group of firefighters burst out the front door of the building wearing breathing apparatus, running like astronauts in the cumbersome gear. There was a crashing noise from deep inside the pub as a section of roof collapsed, and, freed from constraint, the flames reached confidently into the night sky. The structure of the building—its doorways, windows and pillars—the firemen running past, had become silhouettes and nothing more: the intensity of the light was everything. It was like staring at the sun.

Charlie watched all this with dismay. Unthinking, he got out, slammed the door and sat on the front of the car. A man approached out of the darkness on a kids bike, pedalling hard, wobbling comically as he slowed. It was Les. He rolled to a stop next to Charlie and watched the flames without speaking, his elbows resting on the handlebars and his chin in his hands. After a while, Charlie looked at him, his face lit by the fire and the lights of the trucks. There were tears on his cheeks. Charlie saw the flashing lights reflected in his wet eyes and wished he knew what to do. He reached out and put a hand on the slumped shoulder, rested it there for a moment or two and then felt awkward and removed it. Les drew the back of his own hand across his nose, making a snotty sound as he did so.

‘This is the worst of it, mate,' he said, his voice thin with distress. He lifted the front wheel of the bike off the ground and let it spin slowly. ‘Of all the fucking dreadful things these people have done, this has got to be the worst of it.'

Water ran down the footpath, lit up orange by the flames. The wind swirled and pushed the smoke across the two of them, carrying a wave of heat with it.

‘What do you mean?'

Les looked directly at him.

‘This'll be their work. Bloody Alan and Del. They've had this place on the market for two years cos the council knocked back their planning application. They were gonna do a bloody apartment complex and pokies and that,' he waved a hand dismissively at the burning pub. ‘An' they took it to the tribunal and they knocked em back again and they did tons of dough on it. An' the bloody thing's been like a millstone round their necks ever since. You know, I'd go to buy stuff, stock and that. Or I'd ask em to pay for repairs to the temprites or fix up the lighting out the back, and they wouldn't spend a fucking cent. I sat in the office all the time mate, I seen these things. They had it insured for nine hundred grand. Nine hundred…you might get half that at an auction. This is a stocktake, mate.'

‘If they've torched it, the cops'll figure it out, Les. They never seem to have too much trouble figuring out if a fire's deliberately lit.'

There was a loud bang from deep in the rear of the building. A plume of fire swelled above the walls, and the crowd shuffled back as the heat intensified. Charlie could see among them the priest from the football, the girls who'd made him coffee, and in the front of the gathering, Delvene Murchison, apparently racked with grief and horror, clutching a man who must have been her husband. The pitiful state of her face didn't tally at all with the imperious woman he'd met at the Chinese restaurant.