The Tankermen (11 page)

Finn felt chilled, the whole day’s worth of puzzling thoughts brought to a silent, clarified halt. He turned to Jed, who shrugged and got up, saying, ‘Blowed if I know,’ with an embarrassed grin.

Trevor was clattering around at the table with a platter of sausages and a pile of buttered bread. ‘Turn that crap off and let’s eat.’

In the silence Finn sat down at the table, took a sausage, laid it across a slice of bread and put a blat of sauce on top of it.

‘You seen anything of Douggie lately?’ Trevor asked Jed.

‘Yesterday morning I saw him going from his room to the bog. That’s all. I was running late. No time to listen to all his excuses.’

‘He owes me a month’s rent. That’s why he’s lying low.’ Trevor took an enormous bite of sausage sandwich.

‘It’s dangerous, of course,’ said Finn, rolling the bread carefully around the sausage and biting off the end.

‘What is?’ said Jed, sauce clinging to his red moustache as he chewed. ‘Not paying rent? I’ll say it is.’

‘Hitching a ride like that, on the back of a truck.’

‘Hmmm?’ Jed’s eyebrows went awry.

‘You wouldn’t want to get caught doing it,’ Finn said.

Jed took a bite and chewed, frowning hard.

‘By the driver of the truck, I mean.’ Finn’s sandwich sat forgotten on his plate. ‘Of course, they’re pretty slow off the mark, as you say.’

‘He didn’t say anything!’ said Trevor in astonishment.

‘We might just manage to hold on long enough to get through the wall,’ Finn continued. He looked up from his plate to see Jed swallow without having chewed properly. He considered Finn for a moment, then took out a crumpled handkerchief and wiped his moustache with great care.

‘What wall? What are you rabbiting on about? Jed, what’s he rabbiting on about?’ Trevor poked Jed’s massive shoulder.

‘You’re right,’ said Jed, even more calmly than Finn, ‘it would be . . .
very
dangerous. And why “we”? I saw one kid, one skateboard.’

‘I was thinking of the bike, but sure, I can pinch a skateboard from somewhere. I can wait down at the cutting by myself, no problem.’

‘There’s no cover.’

‘I’ll manage. I’ll . . . hide behind a parked car, or something.’

‘You’d have to be right out on the road, the speed those guys go.’

‘Oh, okay,’ Trevor said loudly. ‘I’ll just crawl back into my little hole and stop bothering you. This is obviously all too
important
to bother explaining to
outsiders
.’ He glared at Finn, and was ignored again.

‘You’re right. You need the bike,’ said Jed, and fell to eating again. Finn watched him. He paused before the next bite. ‘Of course, we don’t know what’s inside that wall.’

‘My father?’

‘Are you guys going to break into a prison or something? Hey Finn, you’re not leading our Jed into a life of crime, are you?’ Trevor giggled, but stopped when Finn gave him a blank look.

‘Eat up,’ Jed commanded Finn. ‘This might be your last bloody meal.’

Straight after tea they went to the cutting. It felt like late afternoon at seven; there was still plenty of light in the clear sky, and the city as they rode through it had a loose-collared, relaxed air about it, as well as the sparkle of Christmas decorations in every shop window.

At the cutting, though, they felt as if they’d been thrown into a pit. The great gap yawned at them, the walls towered and the traffic whipped past at high speed around the curve.

With difficulty Finn found the two fine lines he’d marked that afternoon. ‘Here. Feel this bit here,’ he said to Jed.

Jed flattened his hands against the wall and waited. ‘Feels like sandstone,’ he said flatly.

‘You’ve got to concentrate,’ Finn scolded, pressing his own hands on to the wall. ‘It’s like really tiny electric shocks or something.’

Jed listened some more. ‘Sorry, mate, I can’t feel a thing.
I’m not saying you’re kidding me, but I’m just not getting any messages.’

‘No?’ Finn was disappointed—it hadn’t been much of a clue, but it had been something. ‘Maybe I am just imagining it. It’s not very strong . . .’

‘Well, whatever you can feel, this looks about the right place, as far as I remember. It’s where the tanker went in.’

They took up a position behind a parked kombivan. Jed sat on the kerb near the bike, ready to jump on at the sound of the tanker’s roar, while Finn went back and forth along the cutting wall, listening with his hands.

‘It’s definitely there, that signal,’ he said, crossing the road to Jed, ‘Sort of buzzing. I’m sure it’s not just me.’

‘Whatever you say. But stay away from there, hey? I’m petrified a bloody great truck’s going to come bowling out of nowhere and flatten you.’

‘Yeah, but I guess they won’t come out for a while. What’s the earliest we’ve seen them? Ten o’clock?’

‘Last night, yeah. But you saw ’em yesterday morning, and other mornings pretty early. Sounds like they go out all the time, whenever they feel like it.’

Finn sat down beside him and stared past the kombi at the marked section of the wall. For the moment there was no traffic, and the quietness, beneath the deepening blue sky, was like a lovely lie Finn wanted desperately to believe. But he was awake to everything, suspicious of the peace and inactivity, expecting danger and noise to burst out at any second.

‘Stop twitching, Finn. I keep thinking you’re hearing something I’ve missed.’

‘Sorry. I just hate the idea of waiting around here for hours. It’s so frustrating. If Dad’s in there, and we’re out here, and we can’t do anything . . .’

‘We can’t, and that’s all there is to it. Sit tight, mate. This is the best place for us. We can see ’em come and go, and we might just get through that wall with ’em and find your Dad.’

‘But they probably know we’re here. If they followed me yesterday—’

‘They’d be on your tail right now. And they’re not, are they? I tell you, they’re smart in some ways and thick in others. I’ve been thinking about it. Why shoot that copper and not you? Why blast the fountain to bits over at Wynyard and let you run off home? Seems to me their security system’s got holes in it you could get a road train through—well, a motorbike, anyway.’ Jed grinned and stuck an elbow into Finn’s ribs.

Finn didn’t smile back. ‘Gee, I hope you’re right.’

‘Course I am. Here, have some dessert.’ Jed pulled a handful of muesli bars from his jacket pocket.

‘No, thanks. We just had dinner!’

‘Yeah, but that was a whole half-hour ago!’

‘But how can you eat, now? I feel sick just thinking about it.’

Jed shrugged and tore open a wrapper. ‘It’s not so bad for me, I guess. These guys aren’t after me—yet, anyway. And it’s not my dad inside there. I don’t wanna sound heartless, but I guess that makes a difference. Anyway, it’s all so hard to believe, it’s a bit like watching television, isn’t it? As if it’s happening to someone else.’

Finn shivered. ‘I wish I felt like that.’

Jed watched him, chewing. ‘So,’ he said, crumpling up the muesli bar wrapper and stowing it in his pocket, ‘you’re not so pissed off with your dad that you want to let him rot in there?’

‘Well,’ said Finn after thinking for a while, ‘I wanted to get back at him, but not like
this
—not hurt, or kidnapped or
whatever. I just wanted to worry him a bit, that’s all.’

‘Hmm. Well, I guess you did that, all right. He probably thought he was saving
your
skin, bailing up those guys in that back lane.’

‘I know,’ said Finn wretchedly.

‘Well, you did warn him, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah, but he didn’t believe me. I should have made sure he believed me.’

‘Huh, that’d be pretty impossible. There are a lot of things you have to see to believe, and these guys with the tanker are one of them.’

‘I should’ve told him it was all connected with that “bomb” at Wynyard, just so he’d know what he was up against.’

‘Shut up, will you, Finn?’ said Jed kindly. ‘What’s the point of letting all that stuff get to you? Just concentrate on what we’ve got to do now.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Wait. Just watch and wait.’

Finn groaned and lay back on the pavement. Almost immediately there was a roar beyond his feet. Jed grabbed his arm and he sat up to see the tanker slip out of the rock-face, swerve left and drive straight past them towards the city.

Finn jumped up and ran after them around the curve in the road. The tanker trundled away.

‘Yay!’ said Jed, standing and stretching. ‘I guess that means we don’t have to wait all night.’

‘How long do you reckon we’ve got before they get back?’

‘Half an hour, maybe, if they’re going up to the Cross. Did you
see
those guys? With those silly gas masks, it’s no wonder they’re so slow on the uptake—they must be half blind. It’s a wonder the cops haven’t stopped ’em—oh. They probably have, haven’t they?’

Finn’s heart was still racing from the false alarm, and from having seen the tankermen again. It was thoroughly unpleasant, that tanker slipping out through the rock—it made him fear that the men could pop up anywhere unannounced. He wasn’t even safe with his back to a wall.

‘Now, just cool it, Finn.’ Jed leaned against the Kombi, which rocked with his weight. ‘The idea is to be as calm and cold as they are. We’re taking a calculated risk here, but I like our chances. They’re based on some pretty crazy evidence, but put ’em together and they look good.’

Finn tried to keep still. ‘You reckon? Nothing looks good, if you ask me,’ he said dolefully.

Jed chuckled. ‘No? What about your grandma? She was looking pretty healthy, going on what you’ve told me.’

‘Yeah, but it couldn’t have been her. It was a younger woman. They said after the stroke, the second one, there wasn’t much chance of her having a normal life again. She certainly wasn’t getting any better all this year, when I was visiting her.’

‘But she sent you a postcard, and somehow she got on the TV. Something’s going on up there.’

Finn gave a non-committal shrug, but what Jed had said was perfectly true. And what had Danielle written—that Sarah was coming to Sydney with ‘important news’? Maybe Gran had made a miraculous recovery, as soon as her family were out of her hair. What, and taken a quick trip down to the Victorian coast to sneak on to the set of
Paradise Row?
Come
on
, if she were that healthy she’d have come bouncing down to Sydney to give him this message in person. He knew his gran—she was incredibly stubborn when she had her mind set on something. She’d have kept watch at the post office for him, day after day until he’d shown up.

Finn shook his head: it wasn’t possible. But even if it
hadn’t been Gran on
Paradise Row
, how had she known what was going to happen in the background of that scene? How had she written the postcard? He knew she could talk, or at least make herself understood, when she wanted to, but writing? Her right hand was useless, and she could never have produced such a neat job with her left. It didn’t make sense—but not a lot
did
make sense these days, he had to admit. His mother gone, his father missing, his step-family’s lives turned upside down—who knew what might have happened to his gran?

The few scraps of visible cloud were turning petrol-pink, and the cutting, as it darkened, seemed to grow higher and narrower. Finn would have liked to race through the tunnel like the cars, and out on to the broad street that ran along beside the docks, where he could breathe in the watery air and see a more distant horizon. Here it was all closed in, by the warehouse walls and the great doors of the disused pier buildings. The darkness gathered faster.

Jed stood up suddenly and tipped his head to one side. ‘I think I hear, with my little ear—’

Finn listened too, and heard the rough engine noise distinguish itself from the city’s low hum. Jed leapt on to the bike and started it up, then stood to peer through the kombi’s windows at the road beyond. Finn climbed on behind him, fear clotting in his stomach.

‘Yep, it’s them! And they’re slowing down . . .’ Jed snapped his visor down. Finn hooked his thumbs into the big man’s belt loops and hunched down behind him. Howling down through the gears, the grimy tanker passed them. The bike slid out of its hiding place and straight up to the tanker’s rear end.

‘Not so close!’ muttered Finn. The tanker loomed above them, its brake lights burning. There was just space between
the right mudflap and the bottom rung of a ladder that went up the back of the tank for Jed to nose in the bike’s front wheel. But what about when they turned? Finn thought, waiting for disaster to strike.

Jed grabbed the ladder with his left hand as he killed the bike’s engine with his right. Finn at once felt the pins-and-needles sensation, but this time it was strong, to a point just short of discomfort, and it was all over his body, inside and out, as if every molecule of him was jittering. But he hardly had time to notice it before the tanker turned in the cutting. Jed steered the bike around smoothly with it.

Finn saw the rock wall coming at them around the tanker. For a split second it was solid in front of them, with only Jed’s hand plunged into it as if into water. Finn drew back instinctively and for another moment the wall bit down between him and Jed before it flowed back over him and they were all inside.

He thought he’d been blinded; whiteness overtook his eyes. Then he thought he was dead, the blank brilliance was so inhuman. But he could feel Jed’s belt loops cutting into his thumbs, and the bike beneath them, and hear the tanker’s engine growling. Gradually he was able to see Jed’s helmet and jacket, pale as if in an overexposed photograph, and the tanker ladder rising into the whiteness. But the most convincing evidence that he was still in his own body was its awareness of a powerful, choking humidity in the air around him. That, and a foul, unnameable smell. Finn opened his visor and gasped for air.

Jed let go of the ladder and curved the bike to a stop close behind the tanker. Finn slid off and ducked below the chassis, and Jed kicked down the bike stand and followed him. Behind them the place where they’d entered was a hole in the whiteness, a square of normality. Finn could see the far wall
of the cutting, and a car zipped by in front of it.