Geoff Perry's old, beat-up Holden pulled to a halt in the parking lot of Richmond Settlers Motel. Geoff climbed out and glanced around furtively, like a man who's in the wrong place and knows he's going to get caught. Of course, Geoff had always been the one to get caught, that was why he was here.
He stood uncertainly by the open door of his car for a moment, torn between flight and fight. It was easier to run from confrontation, it always had been for Geoff. But he thought maybe this time would be different. He'd overheard the man and woman talking in the pub and recognised them as kindred souls. At the bar the woman had allowed Geoff to buy her a drink and they'd struck up a conversation. As he listened to the woman speak, Geoff had realised they had a lot in common. The woman had told Geoff that she'd once been like him, timid and unsure, but that had all changed for her now. As they left she'd given Geoff a plain business card with their address and phone number on it. Geoff had agonised over it for two whole days before fully committing himself.
Well, almost fully. He still had that last step to take.
He thought of his wife, that merciless, taunting shrew who'd heckled him into marrying her and who'd now set about nagging him into an early grave, and that got him moving. Throwing the car door closed he strode resolutely across the parking lot towards Room 17. He didn't bother stopping in at reception to confirm they were there, that would only give him another reason to put it off.
The door to Room 17 was in need of a paintjob, cracked and showing the old yellow paint underneath. On either side of the door windows stretched along the front of the rooms, all of them frosted glass and heavily curtained so no curious passers-by could stickybeak.
Geoff raised his hand to push the buzzer beside the door but as he stretched out his hand the door opened. Tightly wound as he was, he almost cried out in surprise.
The woman from the pub, Cecile, stood there smiling at him. Again, as he had at the pub, Geoff felt uneasy at the sight of that smile. It wasn't human but animal, not so much a smile as a display of her teeth that Geoff found off-putting. It was as if she didn't know how to smile and found the expression uncomfortable.
"Hello, Geoff," she said. No trace of an accent. "Come in."
Sure, thought Geoff. Anything, just put away those teeth.
The room behind Cecile was dark and inky black, filled with a living blackness that seemed to reach out for Geoff in an effort to consume him and he started to back away hesitantly. Cecile stepped after him and took his arm lightly but firmly.
"It's all right, Geoff," she said. "There's nothing to be afraid of in here, you know. What's in here will only make you stronger, better. You'd like to be stronger wouldn't you? Stronger than your wife?"
"Yes, yes," agreed Geoff, his head bouncing up and down in the affirmative so quickly it might have been on a spring. "Of course I would."
"Then come on in," said Cecile in a soft, enticing voice full of hidden pleasure.
Geoff stepped through the doorway into the inky blackness and the door snapped shut behind him, closing him in.
Ben sat on his bed in the Motel and stared at the TV, not really watching it. There wasn't much on anyway, despite the fact that the Motel had Pay TV. Of course, up this way Pay TV was supplied by a company called Austar and the basic package the Motel had consisted of only about eight channels.
Even if there had been something on Ben would have had trouble concentrating on it, his mind was racing with thoughts of Kath. On one hand he couldn't wait until tonight to see her again but on the other hand he really didn't want to go tonight and see Neil and his other old school "friends".
Rather than stay cooped up in his room all afternoon Ben decided to go for a walk around town and re-familiarise himself with the place before tonight when he'd have to face up to the night out he'd stupidly agreed to.
The houses here, the streets, the shops, nothing had changed over the last six years. And had he really expected them to? He'd lived here for nineteen years growing up and the only significant changes he could remember happening in his time were three.
The Casino Returned Serviceman's Club, known, for some bizarre reason contrary to every other club of its ilk, as the RSM instead of RSL, had undergone major renovations. It had been remodelled from the squat, closed in red brick thing it had been to a blazing yellow and orange inferno. Parking spaces out the front had been converted to a drop-off and pick-up area for members and their guests, and the previously closed in front had been opened out with big display windows. The change had been quite an improvement.
Of course, the two other changes Ben could remember hadn't been nearly quite so impressive. One change was the addition of a monstrous, insectile clock to one of the roundabouts, where it crouched like a giant spider above the traffic, slowly counting off the seconds. The second change was the removal of a white timber fence from along the highway side of the golf course.
Ben shuddered to think what new havoc had been wreaked in his absence.
As he walked down the left side of Barker street towards the main drag Ben saw an old lady with blue rinse hair, a fashion that seemed to have stuck in Casino long after being passé, dressed in a battered pink, terry-towelling tracksuit and doing her gardening. She knelt in the grass, painstakingly tearing weeds from the garden. She glanced up as Ben approached and he smiled at her.
"How are you?" he said.
She stood up hurriedly, or as hurriedly as such old joints could manage, and Ben grimaced as he heard her withered knees pop like fire-crackers. The sun sat halfway down the sky and her shadow lay across the garden bed as she stepped back away from the fence.
She gave him a nervous smile as if to say, 'It's okay, I'm harmless, you don't need to bother such an old woman as me,' and Ben felt a momentary flash of guilt as if he were intending to hurt her. He shook the feeling off and hurried on his way, not wanting to alarm the lady any further.
As he passed though, something caught his eye, and he didn't think it had been there when he walked up. All the flowers in the woman's garden were dead or dying. No, he amended to himself, not all of them, only the ones laying directly in the woman's shadow. He paused a moment longer, staring at the flowers, until the old woman told him to get away.
"Get out," she said in her old woman's quaver. "Get out or I'll call the police on you, sonny-jim!"
Ben hurried on, the conundrum of the mysteriously dead flowers quickly buried beneath more pressing matters. Such as the degradation of the town he'd grown up in. He was surprised at the pang of sadness he felt that people didn't trust strangers any more. That was a small town constant, they were always supposed to be friendly, and ready with a smile or a wave, but he guessed those days were gone.
The shops down the main street, Ben saw (amused at how close he'd come to thinking of it as the CBD), had also increased their security. All but one or two of the older shops, managed by people who'd been here all their lives and weren't about to change now, featured shining new security roller-shields across their front doors and windows. Seeing this increased security and distrust Ben wondered whether he really did want to live here.
As expected, shops had closed down and been replaced, as it was everywhere, certain buildings were black-holes for business, having seen dozens of business set-up then fold over the years. It was like a string of people determinedly sailing into the Bermuda Triangle never to return again. Other places closed their doors and simply never reopened, leaving an empty store gaping blindly out onto the street like a missing tooth from a movie-star's flawless grin.
There really was nothing that had changed around the two sides of the main street. The same old pubs, clothing stores, newsagents, butchers and video stores that he remembered, all of them looking a little more run down and dilapidated.
Ben noticed that the men's clothing store, George Gooley's had closed down and he again wondered at the loss he felt. George Gooley's was the place where the towns-people of Casino had hired their suits since time immemorial. It was where Ben h
ad hired a tuxedo for his school formal, black pants with a white jacket, and at the time he'd thought he looked pretty snazzy. All the same, he'd weighed about 110 kilos and was suffering bad acne.
He was glad there were no photos of that formal around anymore. Not in his stuff anyway.
The small town Ben knew and, despite protests to the contrary, loved, was folding quietly into itself, undergoing a slow but steady degradation. The way Ben had heard it summed up once, and it did a good job of evaluating small town life in the early parts of the twenty-first century, was that the small town was already dead and decomposing, it just didn't know it yet.
The small town ways that Australia was founded on were fast disappearing. One major employer taking on half the town's workers; people doing favours - unasked and reciprocation not expected - for other people, if a farmer had too much milk or eggs he offered them around his work, giving them away to friends. If the rains had come a little late and your cattle were a bit poor the bank manager would let repayments slide a little, waiting for you to make up the slack. Where you could go to the pub on a Friday night and still run into all your friends from school and you never had to look around to find someone you knew; where you could drive for ten minutes in any direction and be out in the country.
These ways were on their way out and almost nothing anyone could do would save them.
Ben supposed it was a vicious cycle really. Young people with scarce opportunity for employment or personal growth, bored with the monotonous stillness and lack of entertainment, headed for larger habitats, most often the big cities. Then businesses, because of the lack of patronage, lost money and closed down, thus teenagers, unable to buy what they wanted or to even get jobs to afford these things moved further afield looking for a wider range of employment and entertainment.
All the young blood was draining out and the old blood was too thin to sustain it.
Ben didn't mind though. As long as he had a phone line and mail service he could stay connected to the whole of the civilised world and work and live wherever he wanted.
Ben was yanked out of his morbid reminiscing by someone almost ploughing straight into him, rushing along on their own errands, not caring who got in their way. It was almost like being back in the city.
"Hey, watch it," snapped Ben, as the woman almost bowled him over.
"Sorry," she muttered, barely glancing at him.
As she caught Ben's eye for a brief moment he felt a thrill of fear prickle his skin into goose-bumps. The woman had been wearing a pair of sunglasses but when they'd collided the glasses had become dislodged, exposing her eyes. As Ben looked into her eyes he swore he saw that the very pupils themselves were moving, flexing and contracting and shooting out tendrils of ink through the retina.
"Your eyes..." he trailed off, not sure what the hell he was going to say.
"It's a condition," muttered the woman. "I have an allergy to sunlight." She straightened up the sunglasses on her face and bared her teeth at him in what he supposed was meant to be a smile.
"Okay, no worries," he stammered, backing away. "Sorry about running into you like that—"
"It's okay, really," she said, advancing a couple of steps after him. "It was my fault, really. Listen, would you like to grab a coffee or something, my shout?"
"No, sorry," said Ben, still seeing those twisting pupils in his mind's eye. "I have to go, really, thanks anyway, bye."
He turned and hurried off down the street, stopping himself from running only with a supreme effort of will.
CHAPTER FIVE