As if exhausted from an arduous day keeping itself aloft and baking the earth below the dull, rusty red of blood, the sun plummeted quickly. This was the way up here, night falling more like a guillotine than a handkerchief. Almost every night for the last thirty years he had gone to sleep alone. He could seek company and usually did, at least for a few hours, normally in a bar, sometimes in a café, very infrequently over dinner at the home of an acquaintance. There had even been the occasional night he had slept with a woman but not for a while now. Human company he had discovered was no longer effective in reducing his sense of being an island. Indeed, the opposite was true. He felt less isolated here on the other side of the world than those last years in his hometown. Solitude was the natural state here. A man could stand silent knowing no other heart was beating within a hundred kilometres. But isolation did not equate to loneliness.
Back then he’d had real friends, not just people you met in a bar, men he had gone to school with, worked with, but especially in their company he had felt a desperate loneliness. It was as if it were his avatar interacting with them while his real self skulked in a dungeon. But, you make your bed, you lie in it … alone.
His fingertips travelled over his whiskers. If he really willed it he could remember his wife’s fingers doing that. She had eventually grown tired of his detachment and struck out for a new life free of the burden of what he had become.
And why had he become that again?
The voice asking him was always there, asking in the same measured tones, dragging him back to smoky bars, leather jackets, a crackling radio somewhere in a corner. Funny, a face could slowly erase over time but not a voice, a voice did not age. He did not offer an answer to the question—what was the point? It was a long time ago and it was too late now to change anything. All life after forty was regret.
A sound that did not belong to nature pulled him from his contemplation. It was a vehicle somewhere on the other side of the creek, which really wasn’t that far away. It was probably twenty metres from his little camp here to the water’s edge, and no more than fifty across the span of the creek, so less than a hundred metres all up. As long as they kept to themselves, what did he care?
He set up the small tent with great facility, sat back on the front seat of the car and popped a beer can. Warm, but so what? He was after the faint buzz, not the taste. The creek was still, only shadows created an illusion of movement. He drained the can quickly and tossed it on the floor in back with the others. At the roadhouse he’d bought a cooked chicken. Now he pulled it from its foil wrapper and ripped off a drumstick. Mosquitoes buzzed around him but for some reason they never bothered with him much. There were flies but only a fraction of what there would have been in daylight. He chewed the chicken meat slowly and thought about South America. That was one place he had always wanted to visit. Another failed aspiration, along with a boat trip through Alaska and a hotel romp involving Britt Ekland. His life was a series of joined dots that drew the picture of a fat zero. It was fortunate how things had fallen into place here, remarkable in fact. He had taken a gamble which could have backfired badly but then there was not so much to lose, was there. He had owed money all over Hamburg, HSV were playing like crap, staying there was validation of his failure. Even so, at least he was alive there. His gamble could have cost him that life, miserable as it was. But it had proved the right move. This was where all the tributaries of his life were destined to pool. It was where he would die.
He turned the key far enough to ignite the CD player. Country music, what else for a single man who could no longer lie to himself he was even middle-aged?
He sat for a long time listening to the music, drifting. A memory would constitute itself: his parents, his father’s braces worn even at dinner-time. That memory would crumble but reconstitute as another, and another: the street where he grew up, a school friend, a shopkeeper who was particularly generous, a girl he fancied who preferred one of his friends, the game of handball where he broke his little finger. What had become of those whose lives had intersected his? Some would be dead but others might be sitting in a little flat, or hunched over a campfire on a sweeping plain in Argentina eating roast beef, the strum of a guitar in the background floating over a starry sky like the one above him now. And they might be reflecting on their parents, generous shopkeepers and maybe even him.
His legs had stiffened by the time he swung back out of the car and pulled the aluminium dinghy, the tinny, off the roof of his old Pajero. Still strong, he enjoyed the weight of the boat on his arms for it confirmed he was real, not just one of his memories. He placed the boat by the muddy bank then dragged the outboard from the back of the Pajero. Fishing and drinking beer, two worthy occupations to pass the time until the next sunset. The proximity of crocodiles did not worry him though he would take no foolish risks. While he had heard stories of crocs flipping over tinnies in the Territory, nobody he knew here had ever witnessed it, and given that men exaggerate any such brush with death, he had to wonder if this absence was proof such things were myth. As he attached the outboard his thoughts meandered back to last night, those two fresh-faced women laughing with him as he spun tales. The young fellows with them were pissed off, he could tell, but that was just the way the world worked. He had what the women wanted, so they’d sat with him and drank his beer and laughed at his stories, genuinely, he believed, for he wasn’t one to dissemble. He caught sight of himself in the wing mirror. The last year or so the lines had deepened, the brightness in his eyes had dulled. He was drifting inevitably towards old age and death. Not yet though, there were still beers to drink and fish to catch.
He caught a sound back in the bush towards the track down which he’d driven. He turned the radio right down and strained to hear.
Nothing. Yet he felt it out there, a presence. There were many feral pigs in these parts. He’d shot and eaten more than his fair share. In fact he’d toyed with the idea of sending them back home where boar was a delicacy but then discovered somebody else was already doing that. Whenever he came up with some exciting idea it was inevitable he would discover he was too late. His ears stayed alert for any sound but there was nothing more.
He wrapped his chicken back in the foil and slid it into the tent. He would have it later after a spot of fishing. As he was about to zip up the tent, he heard something approaching rapidly through scrub from behind and swung around fast. Before he could identify what it was, white sizzled his eyes.
‘Who’s that?’ he said trying to block the torch beam. The answer was something heavy and cold, slicing into his head. His knees hit hard ground, his body throbbed, his head ached yet seemed distant at the same time. Through all this he understood he was being murdered. A voice came from the darkness. The voice from before, as if like the serpent spirit of the aborigines, it had slithered over continents and through years to find him.
Reason told him it was not possible, it could not be the voice, so he must already be dead. Yet the pain was intense and multiplying. Blows rained on his body, he fell to the ground and tried to call out but it was beyond him. Hell, which he had postponed for so long, had taken him to its bosom. The choice he’d made had stalked him as efficiently as any reptile of the deep and was destroying him now. He comprehended in some distant way the absolute rightness of this.
‘I’m sorry,’ he heard himself gasp but that was a trick of the brain.
He was dead before the thought had moved his tongue.