44

The house in Parramatta from which Uncle Security had operated carried a FOR SALE BY AUCTION sign with a date which had already passed. Diagonally across it a red and white SOLD sticker had been pasted, so that all the sign did now was satisfy the pride of the realtor. Delaney noticed the notation “4 B/rms” and suffered an image of the Gold and Blue pennant of the Sisters of Mercy declaring Danielle’s triumph in the fifteen-year 800 meters. The sweat and tension of that contest, forgotten by now by the nuns themselves, struck him like a fragrance, like something uncorked she had left behind her when packing up.

He drove over the Blue Mountains the next Saturday morning. The lies were on again: He told Gina it was a conditioning run at Katoomba for the whole team, who had a bye that weekend. It was credible. Some of the forwards needed it. He crossed the mountains morbidly. The switchbacks above Lithgow, which he had once greeted as a trying ground, going into them with a Nikki Lauda style, terrified him, looked set to silence him before he’d spoken to the two women who had to be spoken to. When the suicide bends at last brought him down to the plains, he turned north. Either side of the road, which soon turned to dirt, great gray ledges of sandstone rose covered with dull green foliage—“Ancient, ancient,” as Gina had said at the lighthouse. Farms looked large and vacant, the sort of farms at whose core, in the farmhouse kitchen, sat a crotchety owner with a shotgun handy. It had never been a great place for crops and cattle, but that gave it its grandeur and a loneliness which, if you were pushing down this rock-based red-dust road for the fun of it, you could find lovely and intriguing and say to your wife, “I wish we had a weekend cottage here!”

This was the country you would choose to hide in too if you were certain the world would unravel. It was easy to believe this would remain no matter what else befell the balance of the world. He stopped at the pub at Newnes to ask about the Kabbels, and a tanned cooperative drinker wearing a blue undershirt drew a map for him. “Little shack on two acres,” said the drinker, drawing a roof.

“He’s got more than two acres now though.”

“Not yet. Bought up all the country behind, Heather’s Gully it’s called. But they haven’t got round to signing contracts.”

The road got so rough Delaney wondered how the stone marks and the dust on his car could be explained to Gina. The cliffs narrowed in to verge the road, gum-tree roots grew thick and sinewy across its surface, and his car ascended and descended platforms of rock. At last he had to leave it for fear his sump would be punctured, his muffler cracked. He began to jog, watching his feet. A professional shouldn’t run in uneven country, but the breath of night was in this defile. He wanted to be back at the car by dark.

At a point where a cliff rose on his left and another fell away below him on his right, he came upon the gate. It sported an orderly sign, good lettering, none of the consonants running from too much turpentine. R, W, D, S KABBEL—TRESPASSING PROHIBITED. You could vault it, but was there a minefield beyond? The Kabbels had taught him to ask questions of that kind. You could jiggle the lock, but would it leave you with your thumb intact? He was a professional footballer and his limbs were his fortune. Even if they weren’t, the gate terrified him, and he looked over the edge of the road, into a gully already filling with turquoise shadows, and felt an urgency to get out, wash his car, sit with Gina all evening.

For the child’s sake he levered himself upright on the crossbar of the gate and looked down into a widening valley, a natural pen, a perfect pound, gulch, hole in the wall. Down in the bed of the pound, sheltered by she-oaks, an old low-sunk farmhouse waited with vacant windows. No smoke came from its chimney. There were no farm boots lying around drying on its veranda. Behind it on a rise sat a newer structure—cement-based, steel-framed—you could see the steel rooftree emerging from the eaves. Secure, well-ventilated, waterproof. “If they store it anywhere damp,” the CID man had told him, “you’ll be playing five-eighth in a wheelchair.” But the Kabbels had too much professionalism to store it somewhere unsafe. Especially if the kingdom afterwards depended on it.

People would drag their desperate limbs up this road only to have them blown off by Warwick. They talked in those terms, bearded and well-built young men Delaney saw on the satellite news, infecting the world with their cool blue-eyed panic. They had no doubt that once the Wave struck or the sun fell they would have to defend their chosen acre against those other members of the race who stumbled up to their fence. They couldn’t wait. You needed a wealth of landmines, plastique, shotgun pellets, because the darkness—or so they boasted—would last an age.

Delaney began to call but knew there was no one there. His voice went racing away into that gorge beyond the house, into that unownable country on which the contracts had not yet been signed.