The Broken Shore (23 page)

Mick Cashin and Michael both made the choice.

This was not something to think about.

His father was always laughing. Even after he’d said something serious, scolding, he would say something funny and laugh.

Why did his mother still say it was an accident? She told Michael she would tell him his father had killed himself. And she couldn’t, after all this time. She had probably changed her mind about what happened. Sybil had mastered reality. No need to tolerate the uncomfortable bits.

But why had no one else told him? He had come back and lived in the Doogue house, they all knew, they never said a word, never mentioned his father. The children must have been told not to speak about Mick Cashin. No one ever said the word
suicide.

In the hospital, in the early days, when he had no idea of time, Vincentia had sat with him, held his hand, run fingers up his arm to the elbow. She had long fingers and short nails.

The Cashin suicide gene. How many Cashins had killed themselves? After they’d reproduced, created the next generation of depressives.

Michael hadn’t done that. He was a full stop.

So am I, Cashin thought, I’m another dead end.

But he wasn’t. The day he saw the boy walking from the school gate he knew he was his own beyond question—his long face, the long nose, the midnight hair, the hollow in his chin.

His son carried the gene. He should tell Vickie. She should know.

Rubbish. He wasn’t a depressive. He felt low sometimes, that was all. It passed, as the nausea passed and the pain and the ghostly frozen images passed. He’d been fine before Rai Sarris. Now he was someone recovering from an accident, an assault. A murderous attack by a fucking madman.

Rai Sarris. Afterwards, in the hospital, he began to see how obsessed he’d become with him. Sarris wasn’t an ordinary killer. Sarris had burnt two men to death in a lock-up near the airport. Croatian drug mules. He tortured them and then he burnt them alive. It took five years to get to the point when there was enough evidence to charge him.

And then Sarris vanished.

Where was Rai at this moment? What was he doing? Pouring a drink in some gated canal estate in Queensland, the boat outside, the whole place owned by drug dealers and white-collar criminals and slave-brothel owners and property crooks?

Had Rai been prepared to die the day he drove his vehicle into them? He was mad. Dying had probably never entered his mind.

Cashin remembered sitting with Shane Diab in the battered red Sigma from surveillance, looking at the grainy little monitor showing the two-metre-high gates down the street.

When they began to slide apart, he felt no alarm.

He remembered seeing bullbars, the nose of a big four-wheel-drive.

He didn’t see the station wagon coming down the street, the chidren in the back, strapped into their seats.

The driver of the tank didn’t care about station wagons with children in them.

Watching the monitor, Cashin saw the tank gun out of the gate and swing right.

There was a moment when he knew what was going to happen. It was when he saw the face of Rai Sarris. He knew Rai Sarris, he had spent seven hours in a small room with Rai Sarris.

But by then the Nissan Patrol was metres away.

Forensic estimated the Nissan was doing more than sixty when it hit the red car, rolled it, half-mounted it, rode it through a low garden wall, across a small garden, into the bay window of a house, into a sitting room with a piano, photographs in silver frames on it, a sentimental painting of a gum tree on the wall behind it.

The vehicles demolished that wall too, and, load-bearing structures having been removed, the roof fell on them.

Slowly.

The driver of the station wagon said the four-wheel-drive reversed out of the ruins, out of the suburban front garden, and drove away. It was found six kilometres away, in a shopping centre carpark.

Shane Diab died in the crushed little car. Rai Sarris was never found. Rai was gone.

Cashin got up and made another big whisky, he was feeling the drink. Music, he needed music.

He put on a Callas CD, settled in the chair. The diva’s voice went to the high ceiling and came back, disturbed the dogs. They raised their heads, slumped back to sleep. They knew opera, possibly even liked it.

He closed his eyes, time to think about something else.

How many people like Dave Rebb were there out there, people who chose to be ghosts? One day they were solid people with identities, the next they were invisible, floating over the country, passing through the state’s walls. Tax file numbers, Medicare numbers, drivers’ licences, bank accounts, they had no use for them in their own names. Ghosts worked for cash. They kept their money in their pockets or in other people’s accounts.

Did Dave ever have an earthly identity? He was more like an alien than a ghost, landed from a spaceship on some dirt-brown cattle station where the stars seemed closer than the nearest town.

An imperfect world. Don’t obsess. Move on.

Sensible advice from Villani. Villani was the best friend he’d had. Something not to be forgotten. Best friend in a small field. Of how many? Relations excluded, relations didn’t qualify as friends. Not many.

Cashin had never sought friends, never tried to keep friendships in good repair. What was a friend? Someone who’d help you move house? Go to the pub with you, to the football? Woody did that, they’d drunk together, gone to the races, the cricket. On the day before Rai Sarris, they’d eaten at the Thai place in Elwood. Woody’s new ambition, Sandra, the high-cheekboned computer woman, was looking at Woody and laughing and she ran her bare stockinged foot up Cashin’s shinbone.

Instant erection. That was the last time he’d felt anything like that.

Woody came to the hospital a few times but, afterwards, Cashin didn’t see him, they couldn’t do the same things as before. No, that wasn’t it. Shane Diab lay between them. People thought he was responsible for Shane’s death.

They were right.

Shane was dead because Cashin had taken him along to see if his hunch was right that Sarris would come back to the house of his drug-trader partner. Shane had asked to come. But that didn’t exonerate Cashin. He was a senior officer. He had no right to involve a naïve kid in his obsession with finding Sarris.

Singo never blamed him. Singo came to see him once a week after he was out of danger. On the first visit, he put his head close and said: ‘Listen, you prick, you were right. The bastard came back.’

More drink. Think about the present, he told himself. People wanted Donny and Luke to be Bourgoyne’s killers. If they were, it justified the deaths of Luke and Corey. And Donny’s suicide, it explained that—the act of a guilty person.

Innocent boys branded as the killers of a good man, a decent, generous man. Two injustices. And whoever did it was out there, like Rai Sarris—free, laughing, sneering. Cashin closed his eyes and he saw the boys, unlined faces, one barely breathing, chest crushed, one gasping, spraying a dark mist, dying in the drenched night, the lights gleaming off the puddles of rain, of blood.

He had another drink, another, fell asleep in the chair and woke in alarm, freezing, fire low, rain heavy on the roof. The microwave clock said 3:57. He took two tablets with half a litre of water, put out the lights and went to bed fully clothed.

The dogs joined him, one on each side, happy to have been spared the middle passage of exile to their quarters.

THE LIGHT came back to a freezing world, wind from the west, bursts of rain, hail spits the size of pomegranate pips.

Cashin didn’t care about the weather. He was beyond weather, felt terrible, in need of punishment. He took the dogs to the sea, walked to the mouth in a whipping wind, no sand blowing, the dunes soaked, the beach tightly muscled.

Today, Stone’s Creek was strong, the inlet wide, the sandbars erased. On the other side, a man in an old raincoat, a baseball cap, was fishing with a light rod, casting to the line where the creek flow met the salt, reeling. A small brown dog at his feet saw the poodles and rushed to the creek’s edge, barking, levitating on stiff legs with each hoarse expulsion.

The poodles stood together, silent, front paws in the water, studying the incensed animal. Their tails moved in slow, interested scientific wags.

Cashin waved to the man, who took a hand off his rod. There was little of him to see—a nose, a chin—but Cashin knew him from Port, he was an odd-job man for the elderly, the infirm, the inept, replaced tap washers, fuses, patched gutters, unblocked drains. How is it, he thought, that you can recognise people from a great distance, sense the presence of someone in a crowd, know their absence in the instant of opening a door?

On impulse, he turned left, walked along the creek, threading his way through the dune scrub. The dogs approved, brushed past him,
went ahead and found a path worn by human feet over a long time. The land rose, the creek was soon a few metres below the path, glass-clear, shoals of tiny fish flashing light. They walked for about ten minutes, the path diverging from the creek, entering a region of dunes like big ocean swells. At the top of the highest one, the coastal plain was revealed. Cashin could see the creek winding away to the right, a truck on the distant highway, and, beyond it, the dark thread that was the road climbing the hill to The Heights.

Below, the path ran in a gentle curve to a clearing of several hectares, cut from bushland now coming back. It led to a roofless building, to the remains of other structures, one a tapering chimney standing amid ruins, a brick finger sticking out of a black fist.

The dogs reached the scene well ahead of Cashin, stopped, eyed the place, tails down. They looked back at him, got the signal, kicked off, running for a pile of bricks and rubble. Rabbits unfroze, scattered, bewildered the dogs for choice.

Cashin walked to the edge of the settlement, stood in the spattering rain. The flat area to the left had been a sports field. Three football posts remained, sunk in long grass, paint gone, wood bleached white. He became aware of the sounds the wind was making as it passed through the ruins—a tapping noise, a creaking like a nail being pulled from shrunken hardwood, a variety of low moans.

He went to the roofless timber structure, four rooms, a passage between them, looked in a window socket, saw a vandalised, pillaged space where fires had been made and people had defecated on bare earth once covered by floorboards. Fifty metres beyond it stood the chimney. He crossed to it, went around to the highway side. Once the brickwork had housed two stoves in big recesses, between them an oven. The cast-iron door lay rusting on the brick hearth, broken from its hinges.

The dogs were running around frantically, demented by rabbit scents everywhere. But the rabbits were gone, safe beneath the broken bricks and rusted sheets of corrugated iron. Behind the kitchen, in the grass on the other side of an expanse of cracked concrete, Cashin found the brick footings of a long building, two rooms wide. The top bricks were blackened and, inside the footings, he stumbled over a charred floor joist.

That’s history, been nothing there since the fire. Companions are history too.

Cecily Addison’s words.

Cashin whistled, a chirpy sound in the forlorn place. The dogs appeared, joined at the mouths by something, tugging at it. He made them sit and release the object.

It was a leather belt, stiff and cracked—a boy’s belt, a size to span a waist no bigger than a football. Cashin picked it up. On the rusted buckle, he could make out a fleur-de-lis and parts of words:
B Prepa.

Be Prepared.
It was a boy scout buckle.

He raised his arm to cast it away and then he could not. He walked across the overgrown playing field and bent the small hard belt around a goalpost, buckled it, let it slide into the grass.

On the highest dune, Cashin looked back. The wind was moving the goalposts, waving the grass. From the highway came the sound of a truck’s airhorn, lonely somehow, nocturnal. He called the dogs and walked.

They drove home on empty roads, past houses sunk in their hollows, greenwood smoke being snatched from chimneys. The age of cheap dry wood from a million ringbarked trees was over.

He thought about Bourgoyne. Short of a startling piece of luck, it would never be known who bashed him, killed him. But it would always be stuck on the boys, their families, stuck on the whole Daunt, and even on people like Bern and his kids. Bourgoyne’s killing was ammunition for all the casual haters everywhere.

Takin out those two Daunt coons. Pity it wasn’t a whole fuckin busload.

Most of Derry Callahan’s customers would have said Fuckin A to that.

Don’t obsess, he thought. Listen to Villani, leave the business alone.

Rebb was waiting, out of the wind, he had heard the vehicle. He walked across, flat cigarette in mouth. Cashin got out, released the dogs. Rebb held his hands low, palms up, the dogs went to them and didn’t jump, waggled their whole bodies.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you going to town today?’

‘I am,’ said Cashin, deciding in the instant. ‘You eaten?’

‘No, just come from the cows.’

‘We can eat somewhere. Give me ten, I need to shower.’

THEY ORDERED bacon and eggs at the truckstop on the edge of Cromarty. An anorexic girl with a moustache and a pink-caked pimple between her eyebrows brought the food. The eggs lay on tissue-paper bread, the yokes small and pasta-coloured. Narrow pink steaks of meat could be seen in the grey pig fat.

Rebb ate some egg. ‘Not from chooks living out the back,’ he said. ‘You in a position to pay wages?’

Cashin closed his eyes. He hadn’t paid Rebb anything for the work done at the house, the fence. It had not entered his mind. ‘Jesus, sorry,’ he said. ‘I just forgot.’

Rebb carried on eating, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. He reached inside his coat and produced a folded sheet of paper torn from a notebook. ‘I reckon it’s twenty-six hours. Ten an hour okay?’

‘Don’t you get the minimum rate?’