When I awoke, I was troubled by the strength of the light stealing in through the gap in the curtains. How late was it? I checked my watch. Not too bad. Just after nine. It had been a long few days. I climbed out of bed warily. There was some general soreness in my back and some evil bruising across my right thigh, but none of the fainting fits or nausea I’d felt on the first days after the assault. I experienced a shooting pain in my ribs when I breathed too deeply, but that was okay – I wasn’t planning on breathing too deeply. Maybe that would change if things with Nash worked out better than expected.
Lucy was cooking porridge. They lived on porridge round here, especially in winter. Dad came in and the three of us chatted as we ate. I asked if I could borrow a car, but he wasn’t happy about me driving, insisted on taking me back to Satellite himself. I agreed, though after taking my prescribed painkillers and antibiotics, I was feeling good, at least by my lousy standards. I rang the vet, got through to Charlie, the nurse. Flinders was getting used to hobbling about on three legs, but they’d prefer to hang on to him for another day or two; they were still worried about infection. That was probably for the best. Nash might benefit from a prior warning about his truncated hound.
Dad drove me up to Satellite and dropped me off at the pub, where my car still sat in the car park. I went in and thanked Annie and Libby for the flowers they’d sent me and grabbed the keys. Dad followed me all the way home and insisted on entering the house first, lump of wood in hand, just to be sure there weren’t any more killers lurking within. There weren’t. He helped me restore some order to the place – wood stacked, blood mopped, furniture back where it belonged – then left me to it, said I should get some rest.
As soon as he’d gone, I set out for Nash’s house in Wycliff. As I approached the community I noticed a lonely chimney standing out in a paddock alongside a patch of winter daffodils blooming in what must have once been a cottage garden. I pulled over and picked a bunch, figuring Nash might appreciate a burst of honey-scented yellow when he walked into the lounge room.
As I resumed the drive, I wondered again what the future held for us. Would we remain a couple of hermits who got together for the occasional buddy-fuck or would we be something more?
I pulled into the driveway and looked around. No sign of his car. Had Forensics taken it away? Or had he come home early and driven off somewhere? I prayed it hadn’t been stolen. That would really make his week.
I walked to the front door. Locked. The police must have repaired the damage they’d inflicted. But I found a side door that was unlocked. It gave an eerie creak as I pushed it open and entered the room. My boot heels echoed off the wooden floor, the fridge hummed.
It was only a couple of weeks since I was last here, but the house appeared to have visibly aged. The cold, the silence, the lack of occupation – it was nothing like the snug abode I’d stepped into that first night.
I walked across to the lounge room window and gazed out over Nash’s farm. This was the first time I’d had a good look at it in the light of day. There was an orchard of budding apple trees, a pile of chopped wood in an upturned water tank, bits of machinery and equipment poking their noses out of a steel shed. The sky was relatively clear, but the western horizon was roiling with those never-ending storm clouds. From the look of them they were still a couple of hours away.
I could see nothing resembling a vase, but there was a pitcher on the kitchen bench, so I put the flowers into that and placed them on the table. They looked cheerful and bright. I took a dishcloth from the sink and began to wipe away the dust that had accumulated. There was a broad shaft of light slanting through the big bay window, but the building still felt uncomfortably chilled. Should I light a fire? Maybe not a wise move until I knew for sure what was going to happen. I had no idea when Nash would be here, how he’d be feeling. But setting the fire, making sure it was ready to go as soon as he arrived, I could see no harm in that.
I went across to the fireplace and noticed an envelope sitting on the mantelpiece. I took it down and saw my name on the front.
I opened it with trembling fingers and a sinking feeling in my chest.
There was a folded sheet of paper inside, on it a handwritten note. It was as bad as I’d feared.
Sorry Jesse need some time alone, Nash.
I’d been half expecting it, but still, the message knocked the breath out of me. He must have been released earlier than expected. He’d anticipated my arrival, not wanted to see me. He’d been and gone. I leaned against the mantelpiece and sighed. That’s what you get, I told myself, hooking up with an unstable recluse. What had Dr Rush said about people with psychiatric profiles like Nash’s? Solitude can be their preferred mode of existence. They find relationships too intimidating.
I willed myself not to be judgemental. He couldn’t have known what I’d gone through to get him out of gaol. He was weird, but – what the fuck – we’re all weird. He was a self-centred arsehole, but who wasn’t? He had a better excuse than most of us – traumatised from childhood by a bunch of crazy cultists, stitched up by a serial killer. And, I told myself, never forget that Nash had acted heroically in his youth and brought down the Revelators, an astonishing achievement for a thirteen-year-old boy. The universe owed him a bit of breathing space. Incarceration must have been a nightmare for him. He clearly wanted peace and quiet, not a complicated relationship with another rogue cop. Probably a wise move on his part. I wasn’t partner material.
I flopped down into an armchair, feeling exhausted, deflated. And slightly cross. He could have written a longer note. Or been a bit friendlier. Maybe even had the guts to tell me to my face.
Let it go, I told myself. Some people – you included – aren’t built for long-term relationships. For love. I wondered where he’d gone. Somewhere out bush, I presumed. Maybe up to the Wiregrass and his little hide and his precious bloody eagles.
Fair enough, I told him. It’s your choice.
I found a pen and wrote a message of my own on the back of the envelope:
Nash,
Understood.
Happy to catch up when you feel like company. Flinders is at the vet’s – leg injured but he’s doing okay. I’ll take care of him until you’re ready. Call me sometime.
Jess
I added my phone number, assuming he didn’t have it.
I put the envelope back on the mantelpiece with no idea of when he’d get it. Maybe days, maybe weeks. I walked towards the door, my footsteps – and my heart – heavy.
Then I paused, my downcast eye caught by a flash of metallic sheen in the dust on the floor. It was a feather, long and brown, with dark stripes and a pointed tip. Nash’s eagle. As I bent to pick it up, I noticed the hat from which it had fallen, upside down, partially crumpled and concealed under a chair.
What the hell were that feather and hat doing here? I knew Nash had them with him when he was lifted into the ambulance – I’d put them on his head myself. The guards would have taken them when he was signed into the remand centre, and returned them when he was released.
Nash needed that hat, that feather. He’d risked his freedom – his life, really – when he snuck back home to retrieve them. The feather was his lucky charm. He’d even been wearing it in the middle of the storm when I first met him. If he was heading off to spend some time alone in the bush, surely he would have taken it with him?
A volley of questions helter-skeltered through my head, threatening to overwhelm me. I felt desperate. Who could help me? No one. I had to figure this out myself. For reasons I couldn’t explain – something to do with the speed at which things were happening in this case – I sensed that time was of the essence. Whoever these people were – if they even existed – they reacted at lightning speed.
But it wasn’t just time I was lacking. It was perspective. I was desperate to work out what was going on, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t see the bloody thing. I felt like a crow caught in a tornado. I needed distance, balance, a bird’s-eye view.
I stared at the feather then turned my gaze to the distant bush.
The answer was somewhere out there. I could feel it. My trouble was that I didn’t know the country round here well enough. I was still finding my way.
I thought back to my last days in the Territory. Elsie Napanangka and a couple of her little old lady friends had invited me on a drive to some of their important places. The four of us travelled quietly through the Tanami Desert for days. At night, they’d sit by the fire and sing. They weren’t just singing about the places we’d been to, they were singing them up. Manifesting them in song. So intimately did they know that world, to them it was alive, interconnected.
That was my problem now. I didn’t understand the country and its connections. I needed a lens to look at the matter objectively. I needed to rise above it. How was I going to do that? I wasn’t a bloody eagle.
For some reason, a song I’d heard recently came to mind. Kev Carmody’s ‘On the Wire’.
I hummed a few bars of the song, then knew what I had to do. I stood up and strode out to the car.