Will
Will takes the ute round the camp to have a look-see, no more’n that, doesn’t say a word about it to Jaz, not even to Damo and Ren, just rocks up at the gate where a couple of chicks are sitting under a beach umbrella next to a table, flyers and stuff laid out with lumps of rock on them so they won’t blow away.
Taking things into his own hands.
A hot day, wind from the west, dry. Leans his arm on the window and says, What’s up? and the dark one smiles and tells him maybe he ought to come see for himself, points to where he can put the car.
That’s how simple it is.
He parks in the paddock and comes back over the gate, easy like, making as if he hangs out in these sorts of places all the time. It helps the chicks are good-looking otherwise it’d be hard to hide his feelings, joshing with them when they ask his name to put on a sheet of paper with the time and date of his arrival, which is the first sense he gets of how the camp’s run; casual on the outside, efficient inside. Ange the prettier of the two, dark hair in dreads, olive skin, wearing a man’s singlet and no bra, Thai fishermen’s pants with the top rolled down so there’s a gap between them and the singlet that lets you see the curve of a sweet little belly and the top of some tattoo at the base of her spine. Strong eyebrows and dark eyes, white teeth flashing. He asks where abouts she’s from and she says, Away, as if that was the end of it but then adding, This’s where I am now. Come and I’ll show you what we’re about. She asks the other girl, Ellie, to keep the gate while she’s gone, except before they take more than a couple of steps Ellie calls out, Hostiles! and Ange runs back to the table and gets on a walkie-talkie and Ellie has a video camera out filming, while for his part, he’s about to dive under the fucking table, but sees it’s only a four-wheel drive coming along the road, slow like. Nothing written on the door, men in white shirts taking a gander at the camp, coming almost to a stop, letting them get a good look to show they’re not worried by cameras or girls in tank tops or him because, he guesses, he looks like one of them with his hair back in its ponytail and his dusty jeans. Some sort of game, he thinks, this with the hostiles. No threat, no bombs, no guns, just faceless men in shirts and black sunglasses.
The camp’s been set up on a big flat area near the road, a hundred or so metres above the creek, upstream from where the dam wall’s gonna be, which is right where the weir is, backing up the flow. You’re not s’posed to swim there on account of it being the town’s water supply, but it’s a good hole and people always have and now the fucking hippies are in and out of it all day, naked as they come. Ange takes him down there after she’s showed him round the camp. Soon as they get there she strips off, just like that, so he can see everything, tits, pubic hair, the lot. He takes off his shirt, no harm in her seeing his pecs and abs, but keeps his jeans on, no way he’s going skinny in front of this lot. The tatt on her back is six lines, all together, equal, making like a rectangle right where her hips begin.
Hours later, in the tent, when she’s lying on her belly and he’s tracing it with his fingertips, she says it’s a hexagram from an ancient Chinese book that gives you instructions about how to live.
‘That one’s the Creative,’ she says. ‘That’s me. I write songs.’
It’s not like he’s ignorant about Asian stuff. One of the rooms at The House-on-the-Hill is set up as a dojo for Aikido. Will gets this stuff.
‘About, like, protests and the rest?’ he says.
‘Not so much,’ she says. ‘I write songs about stuff that moves me. That’s what’s important, hey? I go where the Muse leads me. I was studying literature at uni and that, but I dropped out. They were, you know, telling me what to think about books, telling me when I had to read them. But books are, like, sacred, a book comes to you at the time it needs to be read and if you’re forced to read one when it’s not the right time then the message that book has for you gets lost, don’t you reckon?’
He nods his head, but he’s not big on reading. The only books he reads are manuals and even then he prefers the thing itself, the machine. She rummages around in the back of the tent, she’s naked, completely, her gorgeous fucking arse in his face while she’s digging in her bag, he can’t believe he’s there with her like that, he’s never had much luck with women, never been like this with one before ever, really. When he was at school he kept pretty much to himself. He had acne real bad. He kept so far away from the girls he couldn’t get near them; even if he’d managed to cross the distance he knew they wouldn’t be able to see him, wouldn’t want a pimply boy from off of one of the local dairy farms, mud between their toes, unless they were pissed, or he was, or they both were. Later, in the army, when he’d built himself up, when his face had cleaned up, if you don’t count the craters where it’d been, he’d gone to cat houses, but even there it didn’t always work out. When you got in the room with the girl it wasn’t what you thought it was going to be, no matter that she was selling herself. Perhaps he didn’t pay enough; maybe if he’d gone to a better class of place, an officers’ joint, things might have been different, but the girls he met were like plastic dolls, seamless. No way in. One time this girl got him off with a handjob, but casually, like she was pumping up a tyre or something. It all happened within the first couple of minutes. When she was done, she wiped up his mess, very efficient, then asked him what he wanted to do next, he still had twenty minutes to go, did he want to talk? and he said yes so they sat down together and she asked him about what he was doing and if he liked it and it was about the best fucking thing that had ever happened to him with a girl so he went back the next week to see her again but she wasn’t there, she’d moved on.
When Ange took him into the tent and started having sex with him he came in about thirty seconds flat, shooting his load all over the inside of her thigh, not even getting it inside her, like he was some kind of adolescent.
The thing is, she wasn’t fazed.
‘It’s all right,’ she says, ‘happens to lots of blokes, doesn’t it? It’ll come back up again in a minute, won’t it?’ Which it did and this time he was able to do it better, fucking like, well, like a man, looking down at her while he was pushing himself into her and she’s making like she’s enjoying it, running her hands over the muscles on his stomach and his pecs, saying how handsome he is and making noises like a woman in a porn clip and it’s so fucking good he comes pretty quick again. Even then she’s all right about it. She brings out this I Ching book and three coins and says she’s going to do a reading for him. She sits up cross-legged with all that dark hair between her legs, as if it’s perfectly natural which, he realises – a stupid little kind of thought, but there you are – that for her it is, those breasts, the weight of them, the curve of them with their small nipples with the brown skin around them, the outward swell of her belly with its inset button, is her body, she doesn’t know anything else, just like him in his body, but even knowing that doesn’t make it any less magical. She has this thin band of multi-coloured cord around her ankle, a tiny little silver bell hanging off it, and that’s extraordinary, too, because it’s on her, the light from the torch spilling onto her skin. She smells of patchouli oil and sweat and sex.
She unwraps the coins from a piece of silk, laying the cloth down in front of her, placing the book and the coins on it and performs this little ceremony with her hands over them before shaking the coins out on the cloth six times until she’s made one of these hexagrams for him which is pretty, but wouldn’t you know it, it’s called Stagnation, which even he knows means stuck, and he’s pissed off at that, as much because maybe it’ll mean she won’t like him now, as because, in truth, he knows it sums him up, he’s still marking time, still caught in that eddy he got washed up in after he left the forces, his life so close to a pile of shit it was all he could do to get out of bed. Just because he’s with a bunch of blokes who do training in the morning doesn’t make up for it.
The hexagram says it all. Ange reads it out to him, but it doesn’t say what he should do about it, least not as he can understand. When she’s done with it they lie together and she’s small and alive in the curve of his arm.
‘Such a strong man,’ she says. ‘Feel those muscles. I like a man with a bit of weight to him.’ She puts a hand on his belly just below his sternum, rubbing it around. ‘But the Ching was right, hey? I feel you blocked in here, like all your energy gets up this far but can’t get any further. We need to get you moving in here, eh?’
‘I know a way to make that happen,’ he says, and rolls over onto her and kisses her and she kisses him back and he’s wonderfully grateful that she’s not rejected him for his bad hexagram and this time when they do it he’s suddenly got all the time in the world and if it’s like a porno clip then it’s not one he’s ever seen because even though they’re doing that stuff it’s not outside of him, not separate, it’s him at her and her at him like legendary wild animals, like fucking gods and he feels the strength in himself like he hasn’t for so long and he thinks that what’s happening is that she’s unblocking him, she’s releasing him from the prison he’s been in for as long as he can remember.
The truth is, lying with her like that he’s prepared to believe anything she says.
In the morning she’s still there. In the bed next to him. Naked. Getting in close, resting her head on his shoulder, her breasts against him. After a time they get up so as to go over to the kitchen for breakfast. It’s not a big tent, they’re getting dressed and he’s putting his side-pick in his boot and she says, ‘What the fuck is that?’ So he gets it out, shows it to her. It’s a beautiful thing, spear point, quick draw, made of AUS8 steel, with a full tang. It has this empty circle in the middle, between the handle and the blade which works as a kind of hand protector but also just looks cool. It slips down inside of his boot like it was never there. He explains to her how you hold it and she takes it and holds it like it’s a thing of power, like it’s dangerous just to touch, which it is. ‘Have you used it?’ she asks. ‘I mean, have you hurt someone with it?’ and he tells her he hasn’t but that they train with them, all the blokes carry them, you never know when you might need it, they like to be prepared and she hands it back to him and then kisses him and before you know it they’re doing it again and he can’t believe it, can’t get over how good it is.
When they go over for breakfast he’s got this glow on him from what’s happened in the tent, it’s making the world lighter, it’s filling him up to some kind of bursting, but that’s not even the total of it because he’s also right there in the middle of the camp, surrounded by all these arseholes, and nobody thinks shit about it. He’s with Ange so they figure he’s okay. He can watch what’s going on and take notes, not literally, not with a pen and paper, but he can listen and keep it in his mind like he’s on a mission. Damo should see him.
A few days before they’d been hanging out at the house, the four of them, talking about the hippies, the usual shit about them squatting out there, living on the dole, skinny fuckers with dreads, skanky girls with nose rings and shit, all sorts of weirdos coming from who-the-fuck-knows-where acting like they owned the place, this sort of thing, and Jaz said, One of yous should go over there, check it out, do a bit of recce. That way we could figure how best to mess with them. That’d have to be you, Will, wouldn’t it? You’ve got the hair for it, eh?
Jaz is the one who calls it The House-on-the-Hill. He pays the rent. Pays for a whole lot of other stuff, too. Not clear where the money comes from. Something to do with a church Damo says. It’s an old place out on the east side of town, sat by itself in the paddocks with nothing round it but grass and cows, the best views in the world because the land drops right away there steep as anything. A wrecked car someone drove out into the paddock sitting perched on the edge, it’s back door open, like a cardboard cut-out of itself. A shell. Nothing but sea and sky beyond.
Jaz was special forces; he’s a big dude, neck and shoulders on him like a steer. Sometimes, late at night, he’ll talk about what he’s seen, just a little bit, in Africa, Europe, Iraq, Afghanistan. More often he talks about what happened after. When he got into drugs and shit, hit the bottom hard before finding a way back up; how that happened.
You had to have an invite to go there. Mostly it was blokes who’d been with the services. Will didn’t even know about it until one night Damo just said, Come’n I’ll get you to meet Jaz. They’d been at school together. Damo always a skinny kid, this thin streak with a long face and a great snoz, a snoz as wild as he was. When he’d had a few he’d do anything, drove like a maniac. Best driver he’d ever met. They’d be out in the middle of the night doing donuts at Pike’s turn-off and Damo’d be at the wheel of his Holden spinning and spinning with the blue smoke from the tyres rising up in the headlights of the other cars and each time he came round you could see his eyes shining out from behind the wheel, his eyes and teeth flashing in this crazy smile, a weird excitement in him like he didn’t care, just wanted everything to go faster. Another bastard of a father. But there you go. They went in the army together but Damo’d gone elsewhere. Into the line of fire. Will was in the machine corps. He’d been in some remote camps in Afghanistan when there was fighting going on round them. Shots being fired. People he knew had gotten killed, lost a limb, you name it. His work, but, was in the compounds, fixing the vehicles. He never saw action. He didn’t want to make out he’d done more than he had. Which isn’t to say it hadn’t affected him. When he got back he still had a year or so on his contract and he’d been sent up north building roads for Aboriginals. Doing maintenance on the machines. Couldn’t wait to get out, get on with his life. Thought he’d get a job in the mines, earn some real money, looking after the haulpaks and dozers. But when it happened, when he was free, instead of there being opportunity, he fell into this pit, living around these people who hadn’t the faintest idea of where he’d been or what he’d seen and no way to talk about it. He came back to Winderran because of his mum and ended up staying not because he wanted to but because he couldn’t get himself up and at it, like there was this fucking boulder sitting on his shoulders. People he’d grown up with still where he’d left them, working Monday to Friday, getting pissed on the weekend while the world passed them by. Which was pretty much why he’d gone in the first place.
The strange thing is, but, it’s home. As if it takes going that far away to know it. He and Damo grew up on dairy farms just out of town. All gone now. Subdivided into hobby farms for these fuckers with Mercedes four-wheel drives to build mansions on. Raise Belted Galloways because they like the way they look.
He and Damo’d spent their time down in the creek, or on the dam, or riding motorbikes round the paddocks. One day they took the bikes out after it’d rained, following an old fire trail into the forest, the dirt shot by the wheels coming up behind them in great fountains, turning them into mud-men, riding for miles and miles with the taste of it in his mouth, which is what it meant to ride dirt bikes, the machine and you and the ground all connected, until eventually they reached a ridge where you got this view through the trees down towards the Brisbane River. They’d stopped the bikes and in the silence after the motors there’d been this feeling, their ears ringing, the mud already drying on their faces, cracking around their mouths as they smiled, extraordinary to be in the forest like that, alone, places nobody else went that they’d taken themselves to, the tall straight trunks of the trees and the view through them and the smell of the eucalyptus in the air. That was the day they decided to join up. They were stopped up there in the forest and Damo’d asked him what he thought and Will had said yeah, he’d do it and Damo said, Would you? I mean, we could do it together. And Will had said, Yeah, that’d be right.
Damo’d been there when he got back from up north. Different but. Something happened to him. Still wild but more contained. Like a fucking grenade. He’s not so far off that himself, but Damo’s scary with it. Then one night he tells him about Jaz, like it’s some big deal. This ex–special forces freak who’s running a house for blokes like them. You got to watch out but, he says, ’cos he’s got God, which Will’d have to say didn’t sound so good, except Damo says he doesn’t rub your nose in it, it’s just there.
When they go around it’s only a few blokes having a drink, smoking some cones, a couple of chicks visiting and it doesn’t seem anything special. Jaz a whole lot older than the rest of them, not drinking, and you had to wonder what he was doing hanging around with these younger blokes who’re listening to everything he says as if he’s some sort of teacher, but – and maybe it’s the dope or something, the dope is strong – he finds himself listening too. He’s never met anyone like Jaz. He has a kind of authority that’s not been given him by a uniform, or by someone else, but inside.
He tells them there’s a war on.
No kidding.
The Middle East, Afghanistan, all that, they’re just a small part of it, he says, the war’s going on right across the world, it’s in Australia too, a war between cultures. He says the Middle East’s a fucking trap, the whole fucking Iraq thing was a grand fucking trap they walked right into, and now this thing with Syria’s another one. The West going in there’s exactly what the fundamentalists want.
‘These Islamists,’ he says, ‘you’ve seen them, haven’t you?’ Talking right at Will, past the others. ‘You’ve seen them in the madrassas, haven’t you?’
Will’s not used to being picked out like that. But he says he has, because it’s true, he’s been in Helmand. He’s seen the young men in the doorways of the mud-brick buildings with the big books open on their crossed legs.
‘You’ve seen how they persuade these young men to join them? They work with them, individually, that’s what they do. They listen to them, they build relationships with them. These young guys, they’ve got fuck all, they’ve never had fucking anything and they can see – they’re not stupid – that they’re never going to have anything. It’s all stacked against them. They can’t even get a fucking job and along come these people who talk to them, man to man, about higher purpose, about divine right, about being part of something.’
Will doesn’t know why Jaz has chosen him to talk to. As if he, Will, is the only one in the room who understands. It could be the dope. It could be he’s imagining that it’s him Jaz is talking to, but there’s no way of checking on that and anyway Jaz’s looking directly at him.
‘These guys take the time to listen, that’s the thing, to find out what matters to them. They listen and they show how they can help. We’ve got no hope against that kind of shit, you know? Even if we turn their economies round so they have jobs we’re not going to have that relationship with them. In this country we’ve lost that amongst our fucking selves. That’s the truth of it. We’ve killed it off by the way we’re living. We think we can just throw fucking technology at our problems and it’ll solve them but it won’t. We need to get back to what’s real. If we don’t we’ll be fucked. These people want to see us dead. Our technology will not avail us shit against that.’
A couple of days later Damo finds him at his mum’s place. He says that Jaz liked him and he can come and live in the house if he wants, even though he hardly said shit the whole time he was there. ‘What did he say about me?’ he asks.
Damo shrugs his shoulders. ‘That you’re fucking crazy. That’s the way Jaz likes it.’
It’s not an offer he’s going to refuse. His mum’s getting older and shriller by the day, squashed in a little worker’s cottage on Burke Street, like there’s no hope, like she’s been left behind. Hippies playing music at all hours in the rental next door. His father down Maroochydore working for Bunnings, living with a co-worker. The Bunnies, his mum and him call them, but not in a nice way. There’s not been so much good said about his old man for a long time. Not since the dairies collapsed and he lost his job and went downhill, took it out on his family. It’s not something you tend to forget. So he moves out to The House, gets given a bed in the sleep-out, up early in the morning to train with the rest of them, like they were still in the forces, working part-time at the dodgy mechanic’s in town so he’s often not there during the days and it’s better, it has to be better than it was except it’s been three months now of not hardly being even noticed, of feeling like he’s there but still on the outside, as if there was something else going on in the house that he wasn’t part of, that was just over there but out of reach. But then that’s what it’s been like everywhere for a long time. Like a wall between him and everything else; only difference being that in the house it feels like there’s something he wants.
Ange takes him round the camp. Introduces him to people, tells him everything about it. She knows everyone and they know her. Must be a hundred or more people from all over living there, old people going round Australia in their rigs, young people who’ve come from other campaigns, battles, they call them, everyone talking all kinds of shit, global warming and fracking and Aboriginals and land rights, like they’ve never been up north and seen those folk and how they live, drinking and fighting.
It’s all fucking lies, of course, they’re professionals is what they are, professional protesters: rent-a-crowds. This is what they do. No idea what a fucking battle’s like. One bloke from Israel, another from New York. People sitting on bales of hay next to their van beating drums, drinking chai tea, talking shit about the End of Capitalism. The thing is, with Ange it feels different. She believes this stuff and even if he wanted to speak he doesn’t seem to have the words to show them how fucked they all are, the ones he’s heard Jaz say enough times you’d think they’d just roll off his tongue.
When people ask Will what he does, he says he’s a mechanic. He doesn’t mention the army, but then they don’t ask. When he says he’s a local it’s like they lose interest, as if someone from around there isn’t worth anything, like their opinion doesn’t count.
There’s a committee that runs the place, organising the water, the dunnies and showers, who works in the kitchen, but at the centre of it there seems to be, really, just one bloke, a Canadian, called Alt.
Will’s helping an old bloke with his motor – Ange has gone to do a shift in the kitchen – when he comes over to say hello.
He’s about medium height, with a scrappy beard, rangy. He doesn’t look any different from the others, wearing loose Indian clothes, dusty feet in sandals, but he’s onto Will right away. He leans on the mudguard of the Cruiser, just chatting, but it’s in a kind of close way.
‘Which part were you in?’ he says.
‘Of where?’ Will says.
‘Afghanistan.’
‘How d’you know that?’
‘It takes one to know one. Just the look of you tells me. I can’t tell where you’ve been but I look at you, how old you are, and I figure it has to be there.’
So he tells him and they talk a bit about what it was like over there. Alt wasn’t in Afghanistan, he was in Iraq, like Jaz. Or maybe not. You can never tell with those guys. They keep their cards close. You tell them stuff, not the other way round.
‘So, you still get the nightmares?’ Alt asks, just like that, no beating around the bush.
He’s got one arm still inside the Cruiser’s bonnet. He looks in at the motor and nods.
‘And the moods?’
He nods again. The moods. Is that what you call them? The fucking rage. And this curious guy, hard like, you can see it in him, he touches him on the shoulder with his closed fist and says, ‘It gets better man. In time. Trust me.’
Not so sure what to say to that. Fucking hopes it’s true.
‘What you doing here, then?’ Alt asks and again, like before, there’s no notice given, the questions just come and Will’s almost caught out this time, as if being there’s a crime. He says he’s with Ange, but, and that seems to satisfy him.
‘We can always use a mechanic,’ Alt says.
Around midday Ange takes him down the creek. Not to the weir, further upstream where the creek’s still flowing through forest, to a pool where they can be by themselves and this time he takes off his clothes, why wouldn’t he, except of course as soon as they’re in the water a couple of old biddies appear and stand there the whole time watching while he comes out and dresses himself. Ange there, stark naked, talking to them. Turns out the older one owns the land. It’s her who’s put up the monitoring box on the tree. Says she’s doing it to record frogs. It’s the frogs’ll stop the dam, she says.
After these old girls piss off they’re not so much into it next to the creek so they go back up the tent and do it there even though it’s hot inside, like being in a fucking sauna. When he wakes up Ange’s gone and he’s lying in a pool of sweat with his head pounding. It’s all he can do to crawl outside, take himself down to the waterhole to cool off.
It doesn’t get rid of the headache but at least it’s eased. He finds Ange up at the kitchens, helping a band set up for a gig. He sees her before she sees him. She’s leaning against a stack of speakers. She’s got her hands behind her back pushing her tits out at this bloke she’s talking to, looking up at him, head tilted back and laughing. Ange’s got this really wide mouth. When she laughs it’s like her whole face cracks open, like it’s a kind of weather station for what she’s feeling. When she sees Will coming the smile just drops right out of it. One side dips into a scowl; you wouldn’t think such a small thing could say so much. It gets him in the stomach like he’s been hit. He goes up to them but she doesn’t even introduce him. It’s like he’s an embarrassment. He has to hold out his hand to the bloke and say his name to get him to say his, which is, of course, Steve. He’s the guitarist with the band and he knows Ange from some other place. Will hangs there, waiting for something to happen, for Steve to go tune his guitar or whatever, but he doesn’t seem to notice he’s not wanted. Ange is off on one of her raves, telling this long story about someone they both know. When she finishes she gives this big laugh and Steve puts his hand on her arm for no reason at all and leaves it there. Something just switches in Will, it’s like fuck off dude, and he reaches out, calm-like, and lifts the man’s hand off of her and Ange says, ‘What the fuck?’ and Steve pushes back, ‘Don’t touch me, man,’ he says. He goes to throw Will’s hand off of him and Will simply goes with the movement, this is what Aikido’s for, he just lets the man’s force take him where he wants to go which, it turns out, is onto the ground, face down, hard, Will coming down onto him to make sure he stays put, his knee in his back, the air going out of the cunt in a great puff of dust, Steve’s arm up behind his back, not fucking moving now.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Ange screams, pulling at him, so he lets the guy up. Not so cocky anymore.
‘I’m just looking out for you,’ he tells her.
Steve takes a couple of steps back, holding onto his arm like he’s injured it. ‘Hey man, that’s not cool,’ he says. ‘I need to play, man. You can’t fucking hurt me like that.’
There’s a whole bunch of people looking. Steve brushes himself off, Will hasn’t hurt him, barely touched him.
‘I don’t want you to look out for me,’ Ange says. Still fucking yelling. He’s screwed up in some serious way. She’s really fucking angry.
At least Steve figures out it might be time to go. ‘I’ll catch up with you later, Ange,’ he says, giving a little kind of a wave. Pissing right off.
‘You don’t get to do that,’ she says to him.
‘What?’
‘You don’t get to tell me what to do.’
It doesn’t matter that he wasn’t trying to tell her what to do. Which is to say, he was, sort of, but not like that. And he doesn’t know how to say whatever it is that he was trying to do.
‘Just because I’ve let you fuck me,’ she says, ‘doesn’t mean you own me.’
And that’s it. He’s in the dog-house. She won’t talk to him, never mind that it was her that did it. That night, at the dance, there’s a whole bunch of people he’s not seen before come in from the surrounding district. A fundraiser. The band’s playing loud and everyone’s dancing, Ange getting in amongst them. He tries to dance with her but he’s not much of a dancer, never has been, and anyway she keeps moving away, spinning around and slipping off between the other people. It’s like a game for her, he sees that; he watches her as she goes to the stage and throws herself around in front of Steve, shaking every bit of herself like she wants to have sex with the whole world. He wants her to stop and come back to the tent like she did the previous night, but she won’t, she dances on, with everyone and no-one, with anyone except him. Then, when the band takes a break, she goes off with them, leaving him like some dewy-eyed fuck, sitting by himself on a bale of hay.
He can’t take it. He finds where he’s parked the ute and drives back to The House. Doesn’t go in, but. It’s late. He walks out into the paddock, out to the edge where the dead car is, where you can see the ocean way off in the moonlight, past the towns along the coast and he sits there with this hurricane whirling around inside him, this giant fucking wind that he has to keep pressed down but which is just too strong, will always be too strong, carving him open to the night. He knows what it is, he isn’t stupid, he’s jealous, but it feels so unfair because it was so good in the tent before. He fell asleep after they fucked and when he woke up she was someone else.
She was the one made him like that, she would have made anyone like that, she did it on purpose; words coming into his mind, slut, cock-tease and worse. All this shit bubbling and boiling inside so it’s like, up there on the edge of the world, he’s never hated anyone quite so much as he hates her and yet the stupid thing is at exactly the same moment he wants her, would do anything for her.
He comes in out of the moonlight onto the back veranda, doesn’t see Jaz there on the old couch, the one Ren’s dog sleeps on during the day, until he all but trips over his legs.
‘Will,’ he says, ‘Willie Will Bill. Where you been? What you doing up at this time of the morning?’
He’s not ready for him to be there. In all the excitement with Ange he’s managed to forget about this being some sort of a mission. He’s been in this ecstasy that he’s not seen before in his sad fucking life and it’s made everything around him look good too.
He tells Jaz what he’s been doing, about meeting up with a woman and getting on the inside. Jaz listens. Real calm. Asks questions about everything. Gives special attention to this bloke Alt, who Will wishes he’d thought more about at the time; but also how the camp is run; who’s there (an Israeli? What does he look like?); about the frog stuff down the creek.
Jaz doesn’t ask him to sit so he stays where he is, leaning on a veranda post, talking to this shadowy figure who kind of pulls stuff out of him, as if all the time Will had been taking notes and was just waiting for the right questions for the details to spill out. He wonders what the fuck Jaz was doing sitting there anyway, but doesn’t ask. You don’t ask Jaz things like that.
‘Well Billy, you’ve done good, haven’t you? Better than I could’ve thought. Good on you mate.’
He says thanks. Praise from Jaz doesn’t come often and maybe he’d feel better about it if it wasn’t that he was so cut about Ange. The moon’s gone over the house now, pouring its light out on the hill in front of them as bright as day, so bright you can almost see colour. He’s no idea what time it is, close to dawn maybe. If he thought there was any chance he’d sleep he’d go to bed.
‘What’s up?’ Jaz says.
‘The chick I told you about,’ he says, as if that sums it up.
‘I could see something’s eating you.’
Jaz’s the last person he expects to lend him an ear but right then anything’s possible, really, and if he doesn’t talk about it chances are he’s going to fucking implode. He tells Jaz how she was there one minute and gone the next. About how they’d spent the night together, not the details, just that it had been good. About swimming down the waterhole.
When he’s finished Jaz doesn’t say anything for a time. He just leaves Will’s words hanging there like he’s been talking to nothing.
‘See those cunts at the camp,’ Jaz says, eventually, ‘they don’t care about anyone but themselves. They don’t give a shit if nobody’s got a job, it’s all the same to them. They’d have everyone living back in humpies if it were up to them. They’ve got what they want and now they’re going to stop any other bastard getting it.’
The thing he likes about Jaz is that he sees things the way they are. It’s not just at the camp, but, it’s in the town too. These in-comers have taken over everything, filling up the place with their fancy cars and shops, with their fucking crazy ideas of the land, as if they’d know a bit of clover from kikuyu, planting fucking trees every which where, like they’re fucking forest animals so there’s no room for him anymore, doesn’t matter what he’s done for his country in foreign places.
‘I’m here to tell you. When I came back I went down. You know about it. You don’t need to hear any more of that shit. What I haven’t said was why it happened. I won’t bore you with it. Thing is, I see the same thing in you. I came back here and I didn’t like the place anymore. Australia. You know what I mean? I’d seen all this shit. I’d done stuff which nobody ought to have done. Nobody should’ve ever have fucking seen. I mean it. And I came back here and I couldn’t figure what it had been for. Everywhere I looked were just people queuing up to buy shit, filling their lives with junk like that was the meaning of life, filling up their bodies with it, cunts stuffing themselves so hard they have to wear special-sized shorts and shirts.
‘You do these things as a soldier which are just, you know, in the line of duty,’ he says. ‘Nobody’s going to pat you on the back for them, but no-one’s going to put you in jail for them neither, if you see what I mean. They’re things that happened and that’s all there is to it, but they have a way of staying with you, and there’s no-one can take them away.’
Will’s not sure about this bit, he isn’t one of those who did stuff they shouldn’t have done, seen a whole lot of shit that no-one ought to see. He’d fixed machines. That’s all. He’s still waiting for Jaz to bring it back around to Ange, to what’s eating him, but then this thought comes to him – maybe it’s because of Jaz talking about people who only think about themselves – that something’s bothering Jaz, this is why he’s up there at four o’clock in the morning on the dog sofa. It occurs to him that Jaz wants someone to listen to him.
‘You okay, Jaz?’ he says.
There’s another of these silences. Will allows himself to think, for just a moment, that he’s right, that out here on the veranda in the very early morning, they’re on the level.
‘Nothing for you to worry about, mate,’ Jaz says.
Putting him back in his box. He’s got it wrong. Jaz could be talking to any fucker. There’s this silence into which he wants to put an apology for even thinking what he thought.
Then Jaz says, ‘Circumstances beyond one’s control, eh? Shit going down. Things I’ve got to make right. You do your fucking best for people and sometimes it’s not good enough. But Billy, I’ll say this. You done good these last couple of days. I’m listening to you and I’m thinking there’s maybe a way to kill two birds with one stone, fuck with these turkeys at the camp and do a little service for someone else at the same time. That’s what I’m thinking.
‘I reckon you need to go back. See your girl again,’ he says. ‘We need someone on the inside. Never mind that crap about her going off with another bloke. You did the right thing to leave. You’ll see. Before you know it she’ll be begging for you. You can’t be seen to want them, no girl wants a man who’s weeping for it.’
Hitting him where it hurts. He wasn’t weeping for it. Well, maybe a bit.
Later that morning, though, when they’re out the back on the grass doing their stretches, all of them out in the early light, getting ready for their run, there’s the ping of a text on his phone:
