11

ALICE

Tomb Creek had burned.

The highway was surrounded on each side by blackened trees that sprouted bright new growth along their trunks, a sight that went so far back into the bushland that the loss of it – all those trees, all that wildlife – made Alice loosen her grip, and Valkyrie shuddered under her hands. It was raining a little as she drove, fire season far behind them, but still she felt a small jolt of anxiety: This place is dangerous, and far from help.

The thought passed. Alice was not built for long-term fear. When Jun spoke of Cherry over the years, all his worries for her – what if she isn’t growing right, why isn’t she walking yet when her friends are, why can’t she count to a hundred yet – Alice nodded at him and held him and said ‘Yes, I know,’ but she didn’t know. She knew Cherry was doing fine, and if she wasn’t fine, well, that was a problem for later. And thus, it stood to reason, there was no point in seeing a problem here today just because two years ago, during a fire season, this place had been aflame.

She came to the centre of town. A sports oval covered in local sponsorship signs, a general store with petrol pumps outside, a beauty salon, and a sweet shop. Across the road was a large pub that looked like it could have been a hundred years old, but was freshly painted, with people spilling out onto the deck under the heaters. It was late, now, and the town was winding down for the day.

Alice parked outside the general store and picked up a bag of corn chips and a dusty jar of salsa to eat later, in case the place she was staying at didn’t serve food. She checked her phone, and grimaced at the SOS ONLY along the top. No calling anyone but the cops until she hooked up to some wi-fi. No unlocked options presented themselves, so she put her useless phone in her pocket and sighed.

A white Subaru – much like the one she’d seen before – cruised along the road, and she watched it pass by without stopping. She waited a little longer before she left and, when she did, she watched the turn-offs and driveways closely as she drove. But the Subaru was long gone.

The Creekside Motel was a dated, pale-brick two-storey building on the crest of a low hill, surrounded by clear grassy fields broken up occasionally with eucalypts. It was also not near Tomb’s eponymous creek. Alice supposed it had been creekside at some point; maybe it was built after a rainy season, when tributaries that didn’t usually exist had appeared for a brief time. Maybe the whole building had been moved from a floodplain. She would usually ask, but today she didn’t have the energy and just wanted to get to her room. She parked outside reception and told Darwin she’d be back soon.

The woman behind the counter – Chetna, Alice assumed, from the conversation with Choker – had hair from a children’s book: black, thick, shoulder-length, kicking in at the ends. She was on her computer, and there was a man and woman in front of her desk who had good suitcases and sour faces.

The woman said, ‘This is not an Airbnb.’

‘Well,’ Chetna said, with moderate pleasantness, ‘you’ll find the photos you saw are all of your room.’

Alice sat down on a wooden bench and waited.

The couple conceded that the pictures were accurate, but did not agree that the price point should have made it obvious that it wasn’t a house.

The room did, Chetna said, have more amenities than a typical motel. ‘Her room doesn’t even have a fridge,’ she said, pointing at Alice behind them, who waved. ‘Yours has a fridge and a sink.’

The couple eventually decided to stay for a night and then see how they felt, rolling away to their room with miserable faces.

‘Honeymoon,’ Chetna said, when the door shut behind them. ‘They really need to start bringing more positive vibes into that marriage, or they’ll be done before they leave this shithole of a town.’

‘You work for the tourism board with those kinds of slogans?’

Chetna laughed. ‘I sure do. I’m stuck here until I make enough money to leave. From people like them, who think this is a cheap in-between town from which to visit a lot of more interesting towns, or from people like you, who are heading somewhere else and are paying a bucketload of money just to make sure I lock that nice set of wheels behind you in a safe space. Not many people come here because they want to be here.’

Alice asked to see where Valkyrie would be staying, and Chetna took her around the back of the motel. The garage wasn’t much, just a rundown brick double, but the lock was thick and sturdy, the one brand Alice had never managed to pick open.

‘This is fine,’ Alice said, ‘but I’ll need a key for the garage.’

‘Nobody else is getting in there,’ Chetna said. ‘I can guarantee it.’

‘I’m sure you can,’ Alice said, ‘but if I don’t get one, we’re not staying here tonight.’

‘We, huh?’

Alice closed her mouth.

‘I know you got a dead body in there,’ Chetna said. ‘I know everything. I say nobody’s getting in there, and I mean it. Nobody except that dead body, but I don’t think they can drive.’ She passed over the garage key anyway, and laughed, hoarse and long. Alice gave a cursory smile, then went to get Valkyrie and drove her inside, parking beside a beat-up Commodore with a tarp falling off it.

‘You doing that baby up?’ Alice asked, despite the dust that had settled all over the Holden’s white paint.

‘One day,’ Chetna said. ‘I always say I will, but who has the time? Well, you, I guess.’

‘You guess wrong,’ Alice said. ‘I’m just the chauffeur. The car belongs to somebody else.’

The motel room was good enough: it had a clean bed, a framed oil painting of a creek hanging above it, a TV mounted on the wall and a recently retiled bathroom with one of those annoying fucking showers with no lip that would flood the room. She was on the ground floor, on the corner, and even though she knew by the lights that there was somebody in the room beside her – what they were doing here in Tomb Creek, she couldn’t guess – no sound permeated the walls. Alice closed the curtains, got on the hotel’s wi-fi, and wrote up an update for the Drive file. Then she popped the salsa open and turned the television on, hoping not to think about Darwin too much, a handful of metres away, dead in her car.

About three months ago, she had turned up to Choker’s office one sunny Tuesday, and he told her to get Valkyrie and head to the city to pick somebody up from the church on Lonsdale Street. Alice had asked who she was picking up, and he’d said, ‘You’ll know him when you see him.’

When she pulled up to the church, small and serene in front of a towering skyscraper, Darwin was the one waiting for her on the footpath outside, talking animatedly to a priest. He got into the car before anyone else could open the door for him, and she’d said, ‘Well, it’s nice to see you again, sir.’

‘If you call me sir again, I’ll give you one star on Yelp,’ he said.

‘How do you know we don’t have Yelp for passengers?’ she asked. ‘I’ll tell everyone you opened a can of tuna in the car, and you’ll never get a ride again.’

He laughed. ‘Well, where are we going?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I was bored and had the day off from meetings. Well, I don’t have the day off, but my assistant is filling in for me while I pretend to have technical issues. It’s too sunny to be inside, and I thought it would be good to go for a drive in a nice car. So where should we go?’

‘How long do we have?’

He shrugged. ‘When do you need to be back home?’

‘I promised my kid I’d be home in time for dinner. So, six o’clock.’

‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘I’m at your disposal.’

The first place she drove them was to a bridge over the Eastern Freeway, where they got out of Valkyrie and leaned against her as they looked at the cityscape against the blue sky. There was no smog, and the view was clear, the skyscrapers sharply defined.

Darwin blew out through his mouth and said, ‘It’s a good city, isn’t it?’

‘I love it,’ Alice said without irony. ‘It stinks and there are a lot of jerks, but I don’t want to be anywhere else.’

‘As my building neighbour the priest would say, amen to that,’ Darwin said.

She drove east to Warrandyte, and he told her about the times he’d been everywhere along the way: how he’d bought a Thai restaurant in Kew because they made him a perfect son-in-law egg and said they might have to close soon due to financial difficulties, and then never charged them any rent after that; how he’d broken down once on a side street in Doncaster and somebody came out of their house, had a look under the hood, gave up, then made him a glass of cordial while they waited together for roadside assistance, and then he bought them a new SUV to say thanks; how in Ringwood he was at a meeting at a hotel and the alarms went off so everybody had to evacuate, and he ordered a bunch of pizza from every pizza place nearby and turned everyone’s rage into a party. He clearly enjoyed listing the reasons he was wonderful, but considering a lot of other people Alice worked with, she did not mind hearing it. She’d pulled in at a restaurant on the edge of an orchard, and they drank sour chardonnay on the deck while kids circled Valkyrie in delight.

Later, she drove them to the top of Mount Dandenong, and along the way gave him a sanitised version of what she did for a job. As an example, she gave him a short account of a gig for which she and Teddy had disguised themselves as Belgian blondes to case a warehouse by the docks. Belgian purely because the client liked chocolate from there, and he was paying enough for them to agree to it. In the queue for the gate to the mountain, she showed him a picture of Teddy and herself as Belgians, and he said, ‘But where are you in this?’

‘Exactly,’ she said.

‘Tell me more,’ he said to her.

Five years earlier, Teddy and Alice were obliged to lay low for a while when some kid saw them boosting a car that’d already been stolen from someone else. Alice had said to Teddy after Choker grounded them like children: ‘We should’ve worn a disguise.’

Teddy, wanting her own speciality, like Alice had with driving, had started watching makeup videos without telling anyone, practising at home, as she had with traditional makeup when she was thirteen. Rusty had helped a little, and then Teddy took lessons for a while from Syd, the drag king who lived up the road from her father, learning about prosthetics and lace-front wigs and contact lenses and eyelid tape. Eventually she proudly told Alice about her secret plan, and then improved further while teaching Alice how to disguise herself too. Teddy was always better at it, and the day Teddy took Alice into Choker’s office remade as a blonde called Julia, and fooled him until they couldn’t bear it any longer, she was elated. He gave her a pay rise of a dollar an hour, called her industrious, and told them they could never fucking do that to him again.

When they got to the mountain’s peak, Alice parked in a corner of the lot and sat together with Darwin on Valkyrie’s hood, armed with vanilla Cornettos, watching a raincloud in the distance come for the city. He said to her, ‘This was exactly what I wanted. Just a day out somewhere with a friend.’

Alice wasn’t entirely listening. Two men had walked behind Valkyrie, taking such pains to not look directly at her and Darwin that she knew that they were observing them. They stopped in the empty car spot beside them and the taller man – dark moustache, mid-twenties, reflective sunglasses – said, ‘Must be nice.’

‘Excuse me?’ Darwin said.

‘Must be nice,’ he repeated. ‘To be able to go out somewhere with a friend.’

Alice, without taking her eyes off them, slid off the bonnet and walked around the other side of Valkyrie, away from everyone’s eyeline. She opened the passenger door and slid the baton under the seat into her sleeve, then came back with a tissue in hand, like that’s what she’d been retrieving.

When she returned to Darwin’s side, the smaller man – sixties, maybe, with a soft grey ponytail – said, ‘This has nothing to do with you, love.’

She sighed, and looked at Darwin. He was not a man who had much cause to be afraid, and he gave them a relaxed smile, although his hands by his sides, she saw, were unsteady.

She said, ‘What’s the problem, friends?’

‘We’re not your friends,’ the younger man said. ‘Fuck off.’

‘He fucking ruined me,’ the older man said, staring at Darwin. ‘I had a perfectly good mower company down there.’ He pointed a finger down the mountain. Lilydale, Alice thought. ‘Steady trade. My son worked there too.’ He nodded towards the taller man, who glared and stood up straighter, and went on. ‘You, you fucking prick, opened up another store down the road. Marked everything down. Why the hell would anyone shop with us when everything was hundreds of dollars less where you were?’

Darwin raised his hands in defence. ‘Opening that store was a favour to a friend of mine.’

‘And you didn’t care that we were nearby?’

‘I didn’t know,’ Darwin said, and then the older man moved forward, and Alice braced.

‘Of course you knew. You came in once, do you remember? You bought the last one of our best fucking mowers at full price and went back to sell it at your friend’s place to one of our most loyal customers just so you could say that we didn’t have it and you did. Then you gave them a discount and they never came back to us again. A bit above and beyond for a favour, don’t you reckon?’

‘We’re closing down next week,’ the son said. ‘That’s fucking it. Can’t pay our debts. Up here trying to sell the last of our stock to the gardeners on this mountain here and, well, who do we fucking see having a great old time with his girlfriend.’

‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ Darwin said. ‘She’s my chauffeur. A worker, just like you.’

‘Except she has a job,’ the father said. ‘And we won’t.’

‘I can help out,’ Darwin said. ‘I wasn’t trying to get you shut down.’

‘Then why the hell did you open a goddamn store near ours?’

‘It was the only vacant property around,’ Darwin said. ‘We can work this out.’

‘We sure can,’ the father said, and he shook out his shoulders, raised his fists and took a step towards Darwin. ‘I reckon I could sleep a lot better thinking about how I broke your fucking nose and threw you off a cliff. I reckon that’d be a favour for a lot of people, not just my family.’

‘Maybe if you aren’t around that other shop then they’ll have to close,’ the son said, squaring up next to his father. ‘Wouldn’t that be a goddamn shame?’

Alice leapt. The men hadn’t been looking at her, and she hit the older man in the side of the head with the baton, right on his ear, and he fell with almost no noise. The younger son stumbled as his father landed on top of his feet, and Alice stepped in to hit him in the kidneys and swept his knees with her leg. The son landed on the road and wheezed, while the father started to howl.

‘It’s called competition, you dumb shits,’ she said, standing above them. ‘You don’t fucking jump people in a car park to solve your problems. Get fucked, and don’t come near him again.’ The father tried to get up, and she pushed him in the forehead with the end of her baton until he fell back. ‘Don’t get up until we’re gone.’

She got back into Valkyrie, and Darwin hurried around to the other side. She reversed out, careful not to hit them – a forensic clean on the car meant Valkyrie would be out of action for too long – and drove away.

‘Jesus, Alice,’ Darwin said, when they were past the tollbooth and back on their way down the mountain. ‘What if people saw?’

‘Then they saw that old fucker with his fists up first,’ Alice said. ‘They started it.’

‘And you goddamn finished it,’ he said with admiration.

‘Yeah, well, it’s my job.’

‘That’s not why I hired you for this drive.’

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but that’s why I cost more than your average driver.’

It wasn’t until they were back on the freeway, heading to the city again, that Alice said, ‘Why did you help open a business right next to those guys?’

‘It was a favour,’ Darwin said quietly.

‘Selling mowers is a very specific favour.’

‘The favour was to get rid of those two,’ Darwin said.

‘You’re telling me,’ Alice said, ‘that I just beat up two hard-working men in defence of a capitalist asshole?’

‘Yes,’ Darwin said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What did they do?’

Darwin started to laugh. ‘You will never drive me anywhere after this.’

‘Will I kick you out on the freeway on the way to the city?’

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘So I won’t tell you until we’re past Hoddle Street. At least I can catch a tram back to my office, then.’

True to his word, he didn’t say anything until they got off the freeway. At Victoria Parade, he said, ‘They did some maintenance work on the side. That older guy – Gavin, his name is – he did my grandmother’s garden. Ran over her roses with his ride-on. Didn’t say sorry.’

Alice was quiet. ‘The favour was to you?’

‘Well, I did have some friends out there needing a business to run, so it helped them too. My grandmother is very elderly now, and moved to the country. But my mother will be thrilled when she hears they closed down. She spent a long time helping with those roses.’

Alice did not kick him out, but she couldn’t reply. She hadn’t held back when she hit them. Kidneys could be a bad place to get hit, and for roses?

‘Why didn’t you just pay someone to kick the shit out of them?’

‘Well, if I knew it was that easy, maybe I would have. I guess it didn’t occur to me. Also, I don’t know the kind of people who could organise that.’

‘Trust me,’ she said, ‘you definitely know those kinds of people.’

‘I guess I do,’ he said, watching her.

At the hotel, he handed her an envelope from the inside of his jacket. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know if I need a bodyguard.’

Alice had hurt people before, of course; she couldn’t count how many. Sometimes she didn’t know why, but she could always guess, and she’d never felt bad about it, until now. ‘I don’t think I can kick the shit out of another person for a flower, Darwin,’ she said.

‘Destroying their business was enough,’ he told her. ‘The violence was a bit much. I’ll set it right, Alice. I promise.’

When she got to a traffic light, she checked the envelope. There was a thousand dollars inside in cash, on top of what she was getting paid for the day. She flexed her knuckles; the hit had been smooth, and they hadn’t fought back, so she felt all right. At home, she put the money in a drawer and decided to sit on it for a while, just in case.

A few weeks later, when she was back in Choker’s office picking up the keys for one of his other cars for a job, he said, ‘Oh, I have a message for you. That guy from the church.’

‘Oh yeah?’

Choker picked up a note. ‘Word for word: “I paid out their debts and gave them a written reference for their future. They’ll be fine. No lasting effects. Except for the dad’s hearing.”’

Alice held the keys tight in her hand.

‘Something I should know?’ said Choker.

‘I had to do a bit of deterring,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we’ll hear more.’

‘At least you did it for someone who could afford to pay your bail.’

‘You’re saying you wouldn’t pay it?’

‘I’d do it,’ Choker said, ‘but you’d never hear the end of it.’