Everything was a performance with Georgie. He had even found himself performing, buying a couple of waistcoats, offering her his arm, calling her ‘my dear’ in a plummy voice that he had borrowed from one of the senior partners, who was English. Georgie loved that. She called him ‘Horace’. Horace Ambrose. She had made him buy a monocle, though he hadn’t had the courage to wear it outside the bedroom. He knew that she enjoyed the contrast they presented, as they walked into a room: tall, fair, dignified Ambrose and short, dark, dangerous Georgie.
Well, he enjoyed it too – most of the time. The trouble was, being with Georgie ate up a lot of energy. She had to be cajoled, endured, looked after. She was a slob, and a heavy drinker. She could be short-tempered and surly, and she was always short of cash. Always. Working sometimes as a film producer’s dogsbody, sometimes as a life drawing model and sometimes as a waitress, Georgie suffered constantly from cash flow problems, overdrawn accounts, overextended credit card limits. Ambrose was always having to bail her out, though he didn’t make that much himself. And she had been determined to attend her grandmother’s funeral in Broken Hill, despite the fact that she had only debts to her name.
When Ambrose had offered to pay for the trip, she had been suitably grateful. But the scummy little Broken Hill motel had not come up to her expectations. Upon arriving, she had descended almost immediately on the nearest pub in a discontented frame of mind, treating the local hard cases to a shameless display of midriff, complaining loudly and profanely about the facilities, and drinking until her legs collapsed from under her. Ambrose had had to carry her all the way back to their room, where she had flopped onto the bed like a fallen tree, incapable of peeling off her velveteen hipsters or her knee-high platform boots.
The next morning they had been late for the funeral – by a mere ten minutes – but that had only been the first in a long list of offences. To begin with, Georgie’s choice of costume for the occasion had been a transparent aquamarine chiffon singlet over shiny black tights, topped off by a vast and very silly ice-blue wedding hat which she had bought in a Salvation Army opportunity shop. The hat was covered with silk flowers, and wound about by a trailing chiffon scarf.
She had worn nothing on her feet except toe rings.
‘You’re not going in that get-up, are you?’ Ambrose had queried, when he first laid eyes on it.
‘Why not?’
‘I can see your tits.’
‘So? You got a problem with that?’
Ambrose had shrugged. ‘I suppose not,’ he’d conceded. ‘Your family might, though.’
‘I don’t give a shit what my family have a problem with.’
Ain’t that the truth, Ambrose had thought. Ever since he had met Georgie, her most venomous condemnation had always been reserved for her family, which had once been based in Broken Hill, though its members were now scattered around Adelaide, Melbourne and Tasmania. Georgie had accused her mother of narcissism, her father of sadism, her stepfather of incest and her brother of just about everything under the sun. She didn’t talk about her sister at all, though she called her stepsister a ‘useless fucking junkie’.
Until now, she had gone to great lengths to ensure that she never obliged any of them.
‘If you don’t give a shit what your family have a problem with,’ Ambrose had remarked, ‘why the hell are you going to this thing? All you do is bitch about your horrible mum and your fascist dad and your subhuman brother and your cunt of a stepsister. Why are you going to this funeral at all?’
‘Because my gran was the only decent one of the lot!’ Georgie had retorted. ‘I loved her, and I’m going to miss her, and no one’s going to stop me from turning up at her funeral!’
Her eyes had filled with tears, causing Ambrose to subside. He had still been sceptical, however. As far as he knew, this display of grief was just another of Georgie’s performances. She loved a bit of drama, and he had sensed from the very beginning that she was only attending her grandmother’s funeral in order to outrage her parents by appearing in a see-through top, or screaming at her brother over the coffin, or arguing about the division of her grandmother’s estate. Frankly, he had been hoping that she would engage in some kind of disruptive behaviour, which he could enjoy from the sidelines and later recount to his brother Tom, or his friend James. They always loved to hear about the more outrageous stunts that Georgie pulled.
Ambrose probably wouldn’t have come, except that he was anticipating a few harmless fireworks. After all, he was paying for this excursion. He deserved to get something back for his money.
Much to his relief, the funeral had lived up to all his expectations. After shocking everyone with her get-up, Georgie had proceeded to smoke throughout the service (until requested not to), criticise the floral tributes, laugh like a cockatoo at inappropriate moments, and drink copious amounts of alcohol at the gathering that had taken place afterwards in the brick-veneer project home of a family friend. She had crowned her metaphorical ‘fuck you’ by having a heated argument with her stepsister, smashing a glass on the floor and storming off to a pub down the road. There had followed an extended pub crawl, which had been quite an eye-opener (Ambrose had been exposed to the sort of people he’d only read about) and which had concluded in the ghost town of Silverton, at approximately one o’clock the next morning. They hadn’t crawled into bed until two.
As always, however, the alcohol hadn’t knocked Georgie out for long. At about three thirty she had risen again, tripping over bags and bumping into furniture, cursing and groaning, until she had found her purse, and the sleeping pills inside it. Ambrose had realised, then, that there would be no question of getting away before eight a.m. – possibly not before nine. Certainly not before nine, unless Ambrose hauled Georgie out of bed himself. Sure enough, when a knock on the door announced the arrival of their breakfast, Georgie refused to budge.
‘No-o-o,’ she moaned.
‘You’ve got to.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Come on.’ He pulled her limp white form out from beneath the covers and dragged her into the bathroom, where he propped her under the shower. By the time she was ready to support herself – two hands pressed flat against the tiles and head hanging – Ambrose’s toast was already stone cold. His eggs were tepid. Nevertheless he ate them stolidly (drawing once again on his formidable powers of endurance) and was ready for his shower when Georgie had finally finished hers. They exchanged grunts as they passed each other in the bathroom doorway, Ambrose large and tousled in his cotton pyjamas and imported dressing gown, Georgie small and damp and naked except for the towel wrapped around her wet hair. Despite her puffy eyes, she had a strangely pure and vulnerable face in the morning, before she put on all her heavy make-up and fuck-you clothes.
Ambrose normally completed his cleansing rituals in fifteen minutes. They never varied, except insofar as the bathrooms themselves might vary. A quick shower was invariably followed by a shave, a bowel movement, the donning of his clothes, the cleaning of his teeth, the application of hair gel, and a brief tidying-up period. He would emerge from the bathroom in a flawless suit or perfectly judged casual attire, smelling faintly of something expensive, his blond hair slicked back and his pink face gleaming.
Georgie, in contrast, could spend four or five hours getting ready for the day, wasting huge amounts of time reading the paper, painting her toenails, choosing an outfit then changing her mind, occasionally indulging in a bit of yoga, even watching music video clips or children’s cartoons on the television. She had absolutely no routine. Normally, this didn’t matter much to Ambrose, who left for work when he had to and was never foolish enough to arrange weekend breakfast meetings with any of their friends.
He was damned, however, if he was going to pay for another night in a crappy Broken Hill motel just because Georgie couldn’t get her act together enough to check out by the designated time.
‘No,’ he said, snatching the remote control from her chalk-white fingers. ‘No T
V.’
‘Hey, fuck you!’
‘Time is money, okay? We’ve got to be out of here by ten.’
‘I will, you dag!’
‘No you won’t. Not if you’re watching television. Come on – eat up. What are you going to wear?’
‘Nothing,’ she growled.
‘We’ll get arrested if you wear nothing,’ he joked, but she turned her face away, and he sighed.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Whatever. Come like that, if you want.’ She was clad in a rather pretty antique silk nightdress. ‘Please, Georgie. Will you get a move on? Because if we don’t leave soon, we’ll never make it to Mildura by lunchtime. And there’s no way I’m eating at that roadhouse again. No way. That pie – I’m pretty sure they must have made it out of slaughtered tourists they lured into the dunnies.’
Georgie grunted. Then she stretched. Then she got up and began to pull on her black tights.
The suspension in the old Ford was shot. As Alec drove it down the dirt road leading to Thorndale, he could feel through the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands every rut and rock and hollow that the tyres encountered. The impact even registered in his joints and his teeth, and in the back of his neck. It was like being dragged across railway sleepers.
It worried him that with this kind of vibration going on, Del wouldn’t be able to focus her eyeballs, let alone hold her gun still long enough to take aim.
‘You can push ’er a bit more than that,’ Del told him – for he was creeping along, trying to reduce the jolts and avoid the worst potholes. ‘She was built to last, this one.’
‘Yeah, but I wasn’t,’ Alec replied sourly.
‘’Course you were! Big boy like you?’
Alec said nothing. He wasn’t in the mood for banter, and in any case, he didn’t want Del distracted – not when it was her job to watch out for anybody who might want to use them as a target. Alec had to keep his eyes on the road; he couldn’t be expected to do anything else. Not in this car. Not on this surface.
‘We’re comin up to the creek,’ he said. ‘There’s more cover, round the creek.’
‘We’ll be fine,’ Del answered serenely.
‘Where did you see the . . . um . . . the victims?’ asked Ross, raising his voice so as to be heard above the rattle and clank of every loose part in the whole vehicle. Seeing the track fall away ahead of them, Alec hit the brake – which was so sloppy and slow that he was forced to apply more and more pressure, until it felt as if he had his foot through the floor.
‘Not far now,’ he replied. ‘We’ll be there soon.’
‘Keep a lookout,’ said Del. ‘There may be more, by this time.’
‘That ute we passed,’ said Ross, but Alec didn’t allow him to continue.
‘I told you,’ Alec interrupted, ‘it was there before. It hasn’t moved since.’
‘I was going to say, did you notice if there was any petrol in the tank?’
‘We’ll check it out,’ Del promised. ‘On the way back.’
They jounced and lurched gradually down into the creek bed, which didn’t treat them as well as it had treated Chris’s fancy new Land Rover. Something vicious scraped the underside of Del’s car near its front axle, and the old tyres churned up sand. Maybe Alec had picked the wrong place to cross, or maybe the Ford’s engine didn’t have much bite. Whatever the reason, they almost got stuck twice on their way out.
But they made it at last, and the struggle kept Alec busy, forcing from his mind all thoughts of what lay just ahead. He was still preoccupied with the question of whether something had been damaged during their last surge over the crest of the stony bank – there was a funny, unfamiliar thumping noise under the bonnet – when Ross suddenly cried out.
‘Oh, my God!’
Mongrel barked a couple of times, perhaps in alarm at the sudden flurry around him. Alec stamped on the brake. Del groaned.
‘Is that them?’ she inquired huskily.
‘Yeah.’ Alec didn’t want to look. The bodies on the road were still some distance away, but even from his vantage point Alec could see the mantle of flies that each was wearing. More flies swarmed above them. It occurred to him, all at once, that there was going to be a smell – a really bad one. ‘They’re dead. I checked,’ he continued, in a choked voice. ‘We can’t do anything for ’em.’
‘Can yiz drive around?’ Del queried, sounding very subdued.
‘I could try.’
‘We can’t move them,’ Ross remarked shrilly. ‘Scene of the crime – that sort of thing. We might destroy evidence.’
‘We’re not gunna move ’em,’ said Alec. There was no way on God’s earth that he was about to go anywhere near those corpses again, let alone touch them. Try to drag one of them to the side of the road, he thought, and you’d probably pull its leg off. ‘We managed to get around ’em in the Land Rover. It shouldn’t be too hard in this thing,’ he went on.
‘Well let’s go, then.’ Del shifted her position, so that the gun-butt was tucked under her arm, and its barrel poking out the window. ‘May God have mercy on our souls.’
Alec didn’t stop to wonder what she meant by that. He changed gears, dragged at the steering wheel, and coaxed the old Ford up over a low ridge of dirt beside the track. This ridge had obviously been formed by excavated material when the track was first created; beyond it lay an uneven surface of tussocks, hollows, fissures and rocks. Fortunately, Alec didn’t have to get tangled up with any trees or bushes. He just had to pick his way between smaller obstructions, wincing at every jolt, every crunch, every ominous squealing, scraping sound. What he was really worried about was wire. A piece of wire could easily spring up, wrap itself around the inside of the wheel and snap the brake line. Bloody farmers were always leaving bits of wire about.
He was so intent on the performance of the car, and his handling of it, that he hardly noticed the smell when it hit them. Ross grunted, and Del clicked her tongue, but Alec barely registered the odour (which didn’t last long, in any event) until they were through it. Ross suggested they wind up the windows, but Del pointed out that they couldn’t. Not if she wanted to be ready for anything.
‘I can’t aim me gun unless the windows are open,’ she said. ‘On Alec’s side, as well as this one.’
‘For God’s sake, Del,’ Alec exclaimed testily, ‘watch what you’re doin with that thing!’ The barrel had clattered against the rim of the window as they hit a particularly nasty bump. ‘Is the safety on?’
‘’Course it is.’
‘Well don’t wave it around, I can’t see where I’m goin!’
He was sweating profusely by the time he made it back onto the track. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, he saw the dark shapes of the bodies sprawled on the road behind them, and Ross craning his neck to watch these shapes recede. Del, however, didn’t turn around.
Nothing ahead of Alec was at all familiar. There was quite a lot of mulga about, and some boxthorn. The road curved, disappearing behind a screen of foliage, and that made him nervous. But they were lucky. When Alec cleared the corner, he was confronted by an empty track, a distant gate, and the gleam of a roof at the top of a rise, half hidden by more boxthorn. The gate was standing open.
There was no one about.
‘This is it,’ said Alec, his heart in his throat.
‘Keep goin,’ said Del, not taking her eyes off the hedge of scrub to their left. The station wagon crept forward. A crow flapped heavily skyward. Alec licked his dry lips, scanning the immediate vicinity for any other signs of life.
They passed through the gate and were plunged into a rubbish tip.
‘Fuckin hell,’ Alec whispered. It was sniper heaven. Great towering piles of rusty old farm equipment and fencing wire, disintegrating oil drums, punctured inner tubes, splintered window frames and broken furniture lay on both sides of the track. In between were patches of saltbush, some of them quite high and thick. Beyond this obstacle course, Alec could see the corner of a house; its blank windows
stared at him through ragged flyscreens.
‘It’s deserted,’ said Ross, in a very low voice.
‘Watch our backs, Ross,’ Del warned.
‘Yes, all right. I know. But we won’t find anything useful here – it can’t have been lived in for a fair while.’
‘Whaddaya mean? There’s nothing wrong with it.’
Something about her offended tone made Alec wonder what her house was like. This one, he decided, was worse than his dad’s. Feral country. He noticed, however, that there was a telephone cable attached to it. The cable swooped across the driveway and over a peppercorn tree before clearing the fence and heading west, towards the highway.
It didn’t follow the track.
‘They’ve got a phone,’ he said.
‘Yeah. I can see that.’
‘Look!’ Ross squawked. Having rounded a pile of junk that seemed to consist mostly of bed springs and firewood, they finally had a clear view of the house and the outbuildings beyond it. They were also diagonally opposite the peppercorn tree.
Alec instantly recognised the car that had fetched up against its sturdy trunk.
‘Oh, Christ,’ he gasped, slowing to a halt. But Ross was pointing at something else.
‘There!’ he said. ‘There!’
‘Don’t lose the plot, mate,’ Del remonstrated. She was glancing around, paying particular attention to the house. But Alec was sure that she had spotted the body near the garage. How could she have missed it? He swallowed, and swallowed again.
His hands were trembling.
‘All right, keep goin,’ Del ordered. ‘Do a lap round the house. There’s a track, see?’
‘What about the . . . ?’
‘First things first. Three more minutes won’t make much difference.’
She was probably right, Alec thought. Whoever it was, there on the ground, he didn’t look too spry. There was a lot of dried blood, and the flies were busy. As they drew close to the spread-eagled body, and then passed it, Alec kept his gaze fixed firmly ahead. He couldn’t have seen much, anyway – he was on the wrong side of the car. Del and Ross did the looking for him.