STONEHOUSE HADN’T STRUCK ME as the kind of place where visitors would be dropping in on a regular basis, so I was surprised when we heard an engine revving in the distance.
‘Who’s this?’ I asked Meg. We were sitting picking nits out of the kids’ hair.
She put a hand to her ear. ‘Preacher feller—man of God.’
Sure enough a vehicle which, like the great white shark, came with its own ambience, rolled into camp. It was a massive four-wheel-drive campervan, clearly fitted with all the comforts of home. On its door, a logo lifted from a fast-food franchise and the words Aboriginal Evangelical Fellowship.
The Aboriginal Evangelical Fellow himself—Pastor Bodycombe, I recalled from our meeting at the roadhouse—stepped down from the cab, headed for Magpie. Gave him an enthusiastic crunch of the metacarpals and a slap of the shoulders, and proceeded to press any other flesh that couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. He did the rounds Canberra-style, rabbiting on in pidgin, making a show of tasting bush tucker. Licking his lips at a witchetty grub and grinning: ‘Mmmm—proper juicy one!’ I wouldn’t have been surprised if he whipped out the dentures and tried to stun the natives with his whitefeller tooth magic.
Even without the patronising bullshit, the very existence of the fellow, the underlying arrogance of the missionary endeavour, annoyed the hell out of me. But I held back. This wasn’t my country, and giving in to the familiar stirring of my hackles would only get me into trouble.
In any case, nobody else seemed to mind. They listened politely when he gave them a reading from the Bible, lined up when he dished out the bread and red cordial. They partook of the feeble food and feebler prayers, offered each other signs of peace, mumbled their agreement when he exhorted them to thank the Lord for His gifts.
I suffered it all in silence—until the very end. As the pastor was packing away the tools of his trade, he spotted the demolition donkeys in the distance.
‘Ah—God’s ponies!’
‘What that?’ asked Meg.
‘The donkeys.’ He favoured us with a knowing smile. ‘That animal Jesus bin ride.’
That was too much. I tilted my hat back, took a swig of tea, raised the cup at him. ‘I wouldn’t get too excited, padre. So did Bruno.’
‘Sorry?’ The pastor turned around, trying to settle on the source of this puzzling intervention. Sussed me out.
‘Bruno Giordano. Figured out the earth revolved around the sun. Your mob put him on a donkey and paraded him through the streets of Rome, then burned him alive.’
He blinked. ‘My mob?’
‘Friars of St John the Beheaded.’
He jerked his head back. ‘Hardly my mob.’
‘Oh, sorry—thought you were a Christian.’
He would have scratched his chin if there’d been one to scratch. ‘And you would be…?’
‘Emily Tempest.’
‘Have we met before?’
‘Green Swamp, the day Doc died.’
A cattle prod smile. ‘Ah yes, I remember.’
‘I was with the cops.’
‘Quite.’
The smile didn’t budge, looked like it had been whittled into his face. But when he climbed back into his truck soon afterwards, he glanced back at me, and the eyes boiled with malevolence. Somebody had stolen his pissy little thunder and he wasn’t happy.