Sidney Turner woke with the smell of dry dirt in his nostrils. Forcing open his eyes, he saw rotting wood and mudflat close up. He was on his right side. He went to push himself up off the ground but realised his hands were tied behind his back, and feet bound. Tilting his head as far as he could manage, his left eye detected a darkening blue sky. Late arvo? Somewhere in the near distance birds were screeching and chattering. His head felt like it had been kicked by a kangaroo. He split the smell of dirt and bush apart, zeroed in on a cloying odour of sap and wild honey mixed with something else … still water. His muscles had melted. He had no strength. Where was he? Sleep still held him in a headlock but it was not normal sleep, this one made you dizzy and weak. The recent past came to him, not in a fluid stream but like one of those old black and white movies he’d seen on some show on Aunty’s TV, movies that had no sound, and where the images came in jumps and jerks. He remembered looking through wattle, then turning and wham! Somebody had hit him from behind. Mongoose, must have been, must have suckered him. Got out of his car and been waiting, knowing he would come out of the back door.
Panic gripped him. In his balls was where he felt it most.
‘Listen, man, I didn’t tell the cops nothin’. ’
His words were sucked into a maw of dead silence. What was happening? If it was around 5.00 now, he must have been out for hours. He was so thirsty. As his brain thawed, thoughts broke free in chunks and fear rose like so much mist, slowly forming into a solid shape, a knowledge: they were going to kill him and bury his body where it would never be found.
The adrenaline jolt helped him roll on his back. Insects buzzed around him.
‘Mongoose?’ Even though his throat was raw he called as loud as he could. He had to explain he hadn’t talked. Beg for a chance to let Aunty pay off his debts.
Yet again his voice choked on itself. Maybe they’d gone somewhere thinking he was still out to it. Or it could be this was just a warning. A warning he didn’t need. They’d dumped him in the bush. He’d have to find his way home. Now his brain was functioning better, he seemed to grow in physical strength too. He summoned his energy and tried a sit-up but couldn’t hold it. As he dropped back down, this time to the left side, his eyes tracked a grey shape, log-like, spitting distance. He felt his bowels shift. His heart jumped to his throat. He couldn’t breathe. Was it …?
Using hip and shoulder but with the greatest care he was able to fractionally lift himself to confirm …
Oh fuck.
Less than three metres from him, a big croc lay on the creek bank just the other side of a narrow strand of low bush. Sidney’s bladder wanted to release but he did not dare. He barely dared draw breath. Had it not heard him, smelt him? Perhaps it had been preoccupied with the birds dotting trees like toilet paper chucked around by some naughty kid. He had to be so careful now. If he made a sound, the croc would come for him but he couldn’t just lie there. The volume of birds’ cries seemed to come in waves, he noticed. Scattered individual cries would start to congregate and then swell for a second or two in one big mass before breaking apart again. With great care Sidney drew his legs behind him. He waited until the cries reached peak volume, then using his arms in concert with his legs he pushed backwards, once, twice … and then rested as the sound fell away. He fought to raise himself again but this time as he lifted, the croc, as if sensing him, swung its head around. He dropped into the earth, his heart thumping out of his chest. Please, please … his muscles tensed, his ears primed for the sound of the croc’s advance. He did not want to go that way, dragged into a creek by a crocodile, death-rolled till he drowned, stashed underwater and eaten in stages. The birds’ cries were swelling again. They reached a crescendo. Did he dare? Closing his eyes, Sidney Turner pushed again, once, twice. He expected at any moment to be seized by jaws of iron. The painful throb in his head did not even register, for every other internal organ seemed to be fizzing, whizzing, clattering, clanging, thumping, pumping. The next time the birds’ cries massed, he pushed again, once, twice, three times now, a worm slithering away through spiky grass. He followed his routine twice more before he started to feel some optimism. For the first time he had driven himself back towards some proper trees, paperbark. He rolled onto his back and, wedging his flank and hip into the trunk, managed to sit up. He’d dragged himself maybe ten metres from his original position but the sun must have dropped, for the air was charcoal now and he couldn’t be sure where the croc was. While the rope on his hands was tied tight, the rope around his ankles was much less so, and had been loosened during his wriggling escape. He tried rolling onto his back and rubbing his ankles against the trunk of the tree but all he did was scrape his legs with crumbling bark. However, by alternately stretching his legs, pulling ankles apart as far as he could, and trying to crisscross them, he began slowly lessening the tension, working a wider circle in the rope each time. Finally he was able to angle his right foot down and then slide it up through the hole. Once that was out he was able to stand, albeit shakily. He felt an incredible burst of joy in his body and, heedless of the sticks and thistle that poked into his bare feet, walked, or more accurately stumbled, from the creek to a distance he thought was safe. The rope around his left foot snagged and dragged so he stopped and used his right toe to further free up the rope until he was eventually able to drag it off his leg. By now dark had dropped. Once more the ache in his head and the dryness of his throat surfaced.
What to do? What to do? What to do?
Had Mongoose left him there by the creek hoping he would be taken? Or was that just a coincidence? If Mongoose knew there was a croc in the creek, why not toss him in? Shit. He wished he could think straight. If it was just a warning then maybe it was safe to try and get back home. But where was he? Before he could think anything through, he saw headlights appearing through the bush. It might be Mongoose coming to check on him, see if he was dead, and finish the job if not. Sidney began running fast, blindly through bush, the headlights bouncing with the car over uneven ground and threatening to expose him. He hit a bare patch of ground that allowed him to hit top speed. In a few seconds he would be safe in the thicket ahead. Just as he reached the very apex of his acceleration, something, a twisting tree root most likely, but something absolutely solid, dark, unseen, low down like a devil’s fist, grabbed his ankle. He heard the snap and felt the rest of his body continue at an unnatural plane, so he spun in the air and flipped like a TV wrestler. With his hands behind his back he could not break his fall in any way. Instead of canvas, his head landed on hard rocky earth with a terrible thump.
Richie Laidlaw, everybody called him Richie Rich, stopped his truck and climbed out. He thought he’d seen a shape, running in the distance, probably a roo but he couldn’t be sure. The police had asked all the Parks and Wildlife people to keep a special eye out for a white girl and her boyfriend driving a Landcruiser, and when he’d asked old Warry, who was camped a few k east cooking up a parrot for dinner, whether he’d seen anything unusual, he’d said earlier today he’d seen a car heading through the bush towards the waterhole. Bloody stupid he reckoned, everybody knew there was a croc down there, you could hear the birds going crazy. Warry hadn’t seen the car coming out but admitted he might have been sleeping. He’d had a good nap. He wasn’t sure how long ago it was he’d seen the car as he didn’t eat lunch today and that usually helped with time. Maybe three or four hours he thought.
Richie Laidlaw stood totally still, listening to the rhythm of the breathing bush the way a mother listens to a sleeping child. It seemed as it should, undisturbed, normal. And yet, the ranger sensed something, some alien presence.
‘Hello? Is there anybody there?’ he called out loud and clear. He thought there was the faintest sound, a low one, like a gum groaning. He grabbed a flashlight and walked forward twenty metres calling out again, sweeping the torch left and right. He held his breath but this time he heard nothing. He waited in the same spot for nearly five minutes. A fluttering above made him shine the torch: black-shouldered kite.
He walked slowly back to the car and waited another ten minutes, listening in vain. He drove as close to the creek as he dared and shone his spotties. The water was dark as blood. He thought he could see a flattened area a metre or two from the bank that looked as if a croc might have lain there, probably after a lazy bird at sunset. The croc and whatever birds may have been there had since gone. Reluctantly he climbed back into the car making a note in his head to check in with Warry every couple of days. That old fella was almost as good as having twenty-four-hour CCTV. He slowed one final time where he thought he’d seen the roo and wound the windows down but again heard only the same sounds this bush had yielded up for a thousand years. He was hungry now. He had pasta back at the house. He bet a thousand years ago his ancestors would have killed for a microwave.