Draw the Brisbane Line (6 page)

JEFF: Ha ha.

YVETTE: Can we get some of the recent tweets up on screen?

QLDflyer
@mybad94 

Cockroaches have hung us out to dry, shut down maintenance at Toowoomba now #goodluckflyingOz

Epoch
@epoch

They’re gunna let the Indos have NT and QLD, it’s #BNEline all over again.  We need to draw our OWN line! #drawtheline

Omnikunt
@deep69

Lotta military up here in Townsville, lotta Yanks.  Army, Navy, Air Force, the lot.  I’ve heard boats are approaching from the north-west.  Not looking good peeps. #invasionOz

DAVE: Wow.  Sure are some extreme views out there.  But the rioting so far, it’s where?  Mackay?

YVETTE: But moving south.

DAVE: It’s moving south?

YVETTE: It’s moving south.

As Dave drove back to his apartment he felt dazed, somewhat outside himself but still seeing everything clearly.  More clearly.  Why was he insisting on staying in the country when his fiancée was begging him to leave with her? Did his reasons amount to any more than a misguided sense of loyalty because he had once played tennis well, and the people of Australia had determined,
he is ours
?

Jenny had been working on him for months, teaming up with Tom to argue the case for escape. ‘You’ve got motive and opportunity,’ Tom said to him. ‘Just fucking do it, man.’ That was the last thing Tom said to him before he vanished from the public eye. Where he was now, Dave had no idea. For all he knew, he’d decided to check out the roof of Dave’s building and scattered himself thin over the paving stones of Circular Quay.

How did he let Jenny leave? He couldn’t even remember it happening, could barely recall the arguments in any detail. It was like he’d been fighting on auto-pilot, channelling reasons and propaganda from anyone who thought he owed the country a duty of care beyond those of its ordinary citizenry, because of what Australia had given him.

He heard that one a lot.
Dave, considering everything this country and its people have given you …
This country has done a lot for Dave Holden. What can Dave Holden give back?
Of course, this all came from publicists and advertising executives. What they were really asking was, ‘What can we wring out of Dave Holden?’ Fucking Weetbix?

He had to call Jenny.  He had to try and make it right.

The police cordon and media scrum had dissolved as if it had all been drawn on with chalk before a rainstorm.

Was there chalk on the road?  An outline?  Did they even do that?  He avoided looking too closely.

He unlocked the front door to the apartment, shuffled down the hall and saw someone sitting in his leather recliner, looking not out of the picture window but at the hallway, at him. A woman in military fatigues, a handgun held flat against her thigh.

‘Dave Holden?’ she said. Her accent was unmistakably American.

‘Y-yes,’ he said.

‘You need to come with me.  Your brother wants to see you.’

Epoch had no intention of getting back on that Greyhound, not with the highway traffic bricking up like a failed game of Tetris.  He scrolled through the Twitter feed projected onto his eyeball, picking out accounts of chaos on the roads as travellers were forced into their cars, once they realised the airports would take longer than a day to start back up.

The traffic was all on the southbound side.  From what he could piece together, this was caused by people fleeing bushfires, violence, or simple unemployment.  Maybe all three, in some cases.  And that was all on top of what was already an overloaded highway.

A few nut-jobs were also spreading panic about a possible or even probable invasion from some of their northern neighbours.  God love the QTA.  Epoch had spurred a few of them along with tweets and twitpics of Army vehicles he spotted heading north in the early morning hours.  He wasn’t sure, but he thought some of them might have been US trucks, which really wound up those paramilitary kooks.

If he really wanted to get himself further south — and he did — he was going to have to find a bike.  The problem was, especially in a holiday town like this, motorbikes were rarely sitting around on the street.  They were locked up in double and triple garages, away from sticky fingers.  His best bet, initially, was a car.

He took a detour off the main road and worked his way through the clusters of shops and cafés and other suburban businesses, and applied his sticky fingers to a car parked in the small shopping centre not far from the bus stop.  There were three cars to choose from in a small lot facing a Gloria Jeans coffee shop, which was closed like all the other shops in the complex.  He bypassed the Hyundai sedan and the Ford hatchback and settled, as if it was even a question, on the wicked little red Toyota Celica Mk1, a beautifully preserved example of early seventies automotive engineering.  Epoch stood back and admired the simple clean lines. The styling of the vehicle represented, to him, the last era of cars designed for their present, rather than some garish vision of the future.  It was, despite its age, beautiful.  He reamed out the lock on the driver’s side with a small cordless drill and tore the ignition wires from under the steering column to start it up.  The engine rumbled to life on the third flick of the copper strands.

The interior smelled of coffee and body odour. It handled stiffly compared to newer cars, but it gave him the feeling that
he
was in control.  Not electric power-assisted steering.  Not the on-board computer. 
Him
.  His dad used to drive something of a similar age, an old MG that had pedals about three of little Epoch’s leg lengths from the front seat. The driving profile never bothered his father, but it meant joy rides were out of the question for Epoch until he was sixteen.

He looped around behind the shops and drove towards the beach for a short distance, before turning off to the southern headland.  He powered on the Eyes.

‘OK Google, show me points of interest.’

Four small red push-pins popped into view ahead of him, crosshatched to indicate they weren’t in direct line of sight, but were obstructed by landmarks or geography.  A small number beside each one counted off the distance to reach it.  These weren’t the kind of points of interest one might normally expect, tourist attractions or restaurants or shops.  Epoch had reprogrammed the keyword search of
points of interest
to return his personal points of interest.  There were no big pineapples or natural features in his POIs.  It was his well-researched shopping list.

‘Navigate to point A,’ he said, and a green line dutifully appeared on the road ahead of him.

The sun breached the tree line and tried to obliterate his eyeballs as he followed the directions, and if it wasn’t for the image of the green line on the road, he might have driven right off it.  He flipped the visor down and followed the line as it took him up into the elevated headland, past a mix of practical brick boxes and style-conscious timber and galvanised steel arrangements. The higher he drove, the size of the houses lifted in both size and quality, as the overhang of trees and scrubby banks gave way to glimpses of the bay.  Glass became a more evident feature, at times allowing a clear view from street to ocean.

He slowed as he approached the first of his POIs. The second POI was just a few doors up on the other side of the road.  They both looked so similar in style it seemed likely they’d been designed by the same architect.  Single-storey on the uphill side, double on the downhill.  Double-garage on the left, lots of glass, rows of solar panels praying to the sun like the owners gave a squeaky shit about the environment.  They probably set them up early enough to get the big government rebate, selling their energy back to the distributors for above market value, making a profit and pushing everyone else’s bills up in the process.  Like they needed the money more than the majority who couldn’t afford solar panels.

Epoch fucking hated these people.

One more thing both these houses had in common: they each bore identical
for sale
signs from Heads Height real estate.  Epoch had seen many similar signs in recent years, some of them so weather-worn they sometimes seemed as old as the property they were advertising.  These signs for Heads Height, Epoch could tell they positioned themselves as a premium agency.  The sign was a deep forest green, and the double-H logo occupied the bulk of the space.  It was the kind of business whose agents no doubt drove around in branded Mini Coopers and carried an attitude which let them believe they were superior in many ways to both the buyers and the sellers.  Suckers all, in their books.

Epoch had done some time in real estate.  He knew how the worst of them thought.

He pulled away from POI A and B, and while POI C didn’t bear a similar sign, many other houses in that little elevated enclave had also contracted Heads Height to sell their properties.

And this gave Epoch an idea.

Sadly, all great enterprise requires some measure of sacrifice, and this time the Celica would be the life surrendered.  He took it back down through the town and out the north side.  He kept driving until the houses started to thin and give way to the dry bush of national parkland.  He turned off a nowhere road, a houseless street which probably served as access to some undeveloped land holding, and pushed the Toyota over an unpaved track into the bush.  He took it about a hundred metres, just until he was out of sight of the road.

Birds chirped madly around him when he stepped out of the car, like they were all trying to tell him off.  In the middle of the cacophony, high up in the trees somewhere, a Kookaburra laughed.

He searched the boot of the car, found some sand crusted board shorts and swim-fins, and a couple of heavily creased t-shirts.  He picked the longest of the shirts and tore it down the middle, twisting it into a short cotton rope.

Then he twisted off the petrol cap.

Qld Fire & Emergency
@QldFES

Residents in the Noosa Heads region are urged to evacuate.  Fires have been reported in the state forest, strong winds pushing them south. #bushfires

Someone was trying to break into her car.  Jenny was stuffing the last unwashed t-shirt into her suitcase when she heard the alarm begin to howl and whoop from the street three storeys below, and not for the first time that day she thought: Fucking Dave.

She walked on the marble-tiled floor as though balancing a bowl of hot soup on her head, careful not to scare her volatile stomach out of its current ceasefire.  It had been nine hours since she’d last thrown up.  Her feet welcomed the wool carpet of the bedroom floor, the yielding pressure of the deep pile on the soles of her feet still springy enough to be therapeutic.  She wondered whether it would ever be worn flat by
her
feet.  She doubted it.

Jenny yanked the thick canvas curtains across the balcony door hard enough to shake most of the dust loose, hoping it might be enough to scare off the would-be car thief.  She slid open the glass door with equal force and crossed to the railing.  A young man, probably in his early twenties, was crouched down next to her car, trying to stick what appeared to be an unwound wire coat-hanger down the side of the door.  Somewhere nearby glass was breaking, and traffic sounded like it was everywhere.

‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ she shouted down.  ‘You’re trying to break into a Lexus LFX with a coat-hanger?’

He glanced up for half a heartbeat, long enough for her to get a look at his face before he snapped it back down towards the ground.  Jenny took an involuntary step back when she realised she knew the guy.  Well, not so much knew him as recognised him.  He worked in one of the surf fashion shops near Hastings Street, a good-looking kid with a short scruff of sun-bleached hair, with a kind of perma-grin which kept a lot of girls window-shopping.  Wearing board-shorts and a t-shirt and a pair of black Chuck Taylors without socks, he wrestled with the hanger, though whether he was trying to get it in or out she couldn’t tell.

‘Just … just don’t make it any worse, OK?’ she called out.  ‘I’m coming down.’

She backed away from the railing and he picked up the pace of his twisting and wriggling.  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ she muttered.  Her bag was packed but for the zipping, which she did before switching off the lights. 

Her sister Kirsty had left with her little boy Doyle in their big Jeep Cherokee over an hour ago, not long after a small procession of ragtag soldiers had passed through making their announcements, tossing fliers into the air like the world’s shittiest attempt at confetti.  They looked like they’d bought their uniforms themselves from various army disposals stores — one of them appeared to have dressed himself in UN Peacekeeper blue.  Jenny and Kirsty had watched from the balcony as they walked down the street, shadowed by a couple of pace cars, sticking the fliers in and on anything they could find: letterboxes, car windscreen wipers, telegraph poles, trees, and the excess went into the air for the wind to deliver.

Jenny dashed down when they were out of sight and picked up one of the yellow sheets.  The two sisters read it with bemusement and concern.

EVACUATE?

Australia is at risk!

FACTS:

●
    
Australian armed forces are massing in North Queensland and in the Gulf of Carpentaria!

●
    
Massive Indonesian troop movements have been observed in Jakarta, and the naval assets have begun moving towards Australian waters!

●
    
US armed forces have begun mobilising in Australia, diverting focus from the war in the Middle East!

Conflict is inevitable.  Residents are advised to evacuate south of Queensland!!

‘Also,’ Jenny said, ‘Aliens are reading your thoughts and making you fat.’

Jenny and Kirsty both agreed that the author and distributors of the pamphlet were irreversibly fuck-headed.  They even laughed about it, until they saw the first panicked neighbour run out to their car with two hastily-packed suitcases, bundle them into the boot and drive off without checking for other traffic.  He kissed the side of a passing Hilux with the leading edge of his Hyundai.  The driver of the Hilux must have been in a hurry, because he only landed one punch to the apologetic man’s head before continuing on his own journey.

Some of their neighbours were apparently quite fuck-headed too.

When Yvette Winterson on Good Morning Today interrupted a segment with a semi-celebrity chef imparting his perfect omelette wisdom with news of small-scale looting breaking out in Noosa and other parts of the Sunshine Coast, amid the growing chaos of an apparently spontaneous evacuation, the humour just kind of drained out of the situation.

And then news of the fires leapfrogged everything to top the local headlines.

They’d started the day with plans of walking to the beach in the morning, coffee and tea leading to lunch at a yet-to-be-determined restaurant, maybe pizza delivered later on for dinner.  Now, suddenly, their new plan seemed to be more or less aligned with the instructions of the wacky paper flier.

Kirsty wanted to get a head-start on the inevitable traffic hell, so she strapped Doyle squealing into his car seat and threw all of their gear, and probably some of Jenny’s, loosely into the back of the beast.  The plan had been to go to Brisbane airport for southbound flights, but the nationwide airport strikes had put the skids on that.  Jenny argued they should all stay put, but she knew Kirsty would never go for it. Both girls had prior experience of riots, and they knew there was no safe harbour when the crazies came out.

Even if there were flights running, Jenny had to admit her preference was the car.  It hadn’t been easy to buy in the first place, uncommon as it was, and it represented her defiance of the Way of Dave.  And now some kid thought he could take that away with a coat-hanger, her worth-more-than-a-lot-of-houses super-car?  She didn’t fucking think so.

She pulled the apartment door closed, did the same with her eyes, just for a few seconds.  One breath, two breaths, think about the mundane.  Think about the check-up with Dr Mui next week, the scans and the measurements and the now predictable admission that, no, she didn’t have a birth plan yet beyond "have the baby".  Think about the dozens of scripts waiting for her back in LA, scripts her agent is supposed to be vetting, but his selection criteria are based on who sent it, not what’s in it.  Think about the interview next week on Good Morning Australia, where she’s going to plug the upcoming movie "Little Park".

It was her first lead role.  Maybe her last, if the reviews didn’t fall on the favourable side.  She knew her performance wouldn’t win any awards. She just hoped they’d like her.

She tried to calm herself, but as she closed her eyes and slowed her breathing, the thread of her focus was roughly unravelled by a long grinding hum.  Some kind of tinnitus.  It started a couple of days ago.  She made a mental note to talk to Dr Mui about that.

The lifts were out of order, probably switched off by the building manager before he hit the road like everyone else, so she had to haul her suitcase down the stairs with an overstuffed tote dragging on her shoulder.  She was tempted just to kick the case down the stairs, and decided she might as well give into temptation.  She released the handle and gave it a nudge and it tumbled to the landing between the fourth and fifth floors.  Nobody’s doors were opened, no complaints were voiced, because nobody was left to complain.  She kicked it all the way to the ground floor and stepped out into the car park through the back entrance.  Her car was there, apparently unscratched, but the kid was nowhere to be seen.  He probably legged it as soon as she closed the window.

It was only about five metres to the car, in laser-bright daylight, but she still felt her insides clench as she crossed the pavement.  She scanned left and right along the length of the street but saw no sign of the kid.  The dominant sound on the street should have been the surf’s gentle whisper and the seagulls’ harsh response, but that soothing soundtrack had been beaten down by traffic, by shouting, by the thunder of brute force being brought to bear on windows and doors and security shutters.

The rioting was in full swing. 
Jesus
, she thought,
what had I been thinking, dawdling around the apartment, running through my rituals of applying makeup and testing every outfit available to minimise my belly’s faint swell?
  Her stupid vanity had dropped her right in the shit this time.  Kirsty had made her promise she wouldn’t waste any time getting on the road, and she said
sure, sure
, like she always said when she didn’t really mean something.

She hoped Kirsty and Doyle got away before it all kicked off.  She thought, at least I hadn’t held her back.

She blipped the car open and threw her bag onto the passenger seat before carefully lowering herself in behind the wheel.  The contoured leather cupped her as she sat back into it.  Would it still be able to do that in a month’s time?  Two months?  Kirsty had expanded all over when she was pregnant with Doyle, like she was suffering some severe allergic reaction, but the two sisters were so different in so many ways.  She hit the start button, and even over the sound of the engine growling awake she could hear a fresh and nearby torrent of shouts and crashes.  She locked the doors.  The speedometer on the LCD dash slid into view and she reversed out of the parking space, careful to keep the revs as low as possible.  The LFX was a super-car, a nose-thumbing to Dave and his man-of-the-people complex.  No more than three of them in the whole country, as far as she was aware.

What she wouldn’t give right then for an ugly and beaten old Nissan, something with as much appeal to looters as a VCR.  She rolled the car out of the parking space and into the street.  She moved slowly, scanning for trouble, and in a couple of turns she was onto the main street.  To her left and to her right were men, women, boys and girls, all joined together in an awesome display of hand-to-shop-front fighting.  The shop-fronts never stood a chance, not against all those boots and bricks and sledgehammers.  Right in front of her as she watched, a man who looked as though he were dressed for a round of golf, stepped out of the wreckage of a jewellery store window with two large shopping bags.  Judging by the strain in his arms and on his face, the bags were heavy.  He saw Jenny watching him and put down one of the bags so he could smile and wave.

‘Hi Jenny,’ he called out.

She lowered the window.  ‘Armen?  What the fuck are you doing?’

He picked up the bag and walked over, a stupid smile shining out from his deep tan.  Armen was Dave’s conveyancing solicitor on the Sunshine Coast.  He helped with the purchase of the dull apartment she’d just left behind, and also the recent sale of the riverfront house, the one she loved.

Fucking Dave.

‘Just saving what I can before the looters take it.  We all are.’

‘Armen,
you’re
looting.’

‘Salvaging, Jenny.’

‘
Salvaging
and
Rolex
aren’t two words I’d normally pair up.’

Armen opened the bags and looked inside.  ‘I’ve got a few Rolex, yeah.  Some Breitlings, half a dozen Patek Philippes, Franck Mullers, Longines … oh, and a Glashutte I’ve had my eye on for a while, bloody gorgeous it is.’

‘Armen, you broke into the store with a fucking, what?  A brick?’

He shook his head.  ‘Pot plant.  Big bastard of a palm in this huge square terracotta job.  Nearly did my back in.’

‘So you threw a large potted plant into the window of a jewellery store, stepped in, and helped yourself to a couple of bags of watches.’

‘Well, when you put it like that,’ he grinned at her, and as the sunlight itself seemed to be swallowed by the blackness of his eyes, she had to remind herself that despite the smiles and the cases of Champagne at Christmas, and the presence of his name on Dave’s iPhone contact list, Armen Heck was still a lawyer.  He was therefore fashioned in the lower circles of Hell and educated by the shades of Hitler and Mussolini. Not only was such innate evil to be avoided in situations of chaos and corruption, it was also worth remembering that if a man with such an easy grasp of the law and its consequences was cheerily ransacking a jewellery store and calling it fair play, it really was time to get the hell out of town.

She raised the window on Armen’s insidiously beaming face, and that stupid smile never wavered, not for an instant.  As she drove along Hastings she glanced up at the rear-view mirror to see Armen still waving to her.  She wanted to give him the finger, but her hands were gripping the wheel so tightly it would have taken electrical current to open them up.

She had to roll the car down the street a hair’s breadth faster than walking pace, not because of vehicle traffic but because of human traffic.  Pedestrian looters.  Sunday morning smash-and-grabbers.  Kids carrying designer clothes by the armful.  Young couples wheeling Kitchenaid appliances and Wedgewood dinner sets in Swedish-designed prams.  At one stage she was brought to a complete halt by an elderly couple in matching white tracksuits, crossing the street carrying a piece of framed Aboriginal artwork almost as big as her car.

She drove on.

She was half expecting to be car-jacked, but it never seemed close to happening.  If people took notice of her as she passed them by, it was only to tip a hat or to wave or to offer her a share of their haul.