NEXT MORNING AT Smiths Gully, I prepared for my mission. I washed and scrubbed my human envelope and shaved three times. As the morning sun illuminated the opposite hillside, I was mentally composing my opening sentences. I wished to incorporate the colours of my native land, the warm pink and ivory and the bright underside of parrot wings. I placed the battered kettle on the gas, dropped two thick slices in the toaster, when bang, bang, bang, a big-beaked, square-headed kookaburra, just outside the windows, beat the shit out of a baby snake on the pergola.
I buttered my toast. The kettle boiled. I poured.
Bang, bang, bang. Nature was so violent. Looking up, I was startled to discover the kookaburra had become Wodonga Townes, slamming on the glass door with his open palm and second wedding ring. With a string of sausages he could have played the part of Punch. The kookaburra dropped the snake and swooped to retrieve it.
Celine hurried from the hallway towards the visitor and then, a metre from the glass, she paused and wrapped a towel around her hair. Did she sense what was about to happen? All I could think was, my first interview with Gaby must be aborted.
“Hoy. Let me in.” The Big Fella spread his arms and grasped the door. As I turned the locks the kookaburra ascended to its perch and resumed its murder.
Our visitor wore perfect Persil whites, a tracksuit with gold piping. He had a one-inch strip of shaven scalp, and six red stitches. “What in the fuck are you doing?” he demanded.
“We’re doing nothing, Woody,” Celine said. “What are you doing?”
For answer he drank all my coffee and ate half my toast. “Don’t fuck with me,” he said directly to Celine. “You can go to jail for harbouring a fugitive. That includes you, mate.”
“I’m working for you, remember?”
He looked astonished.
“That contract?”
“Relax Feels. I’m your biggest fan. Just tell me where you’ve got our subject hidden.”
Celine’s eyes narrowed as she turned to me, but Woody grabbed her by the wrist and jerked her violently towards him. “You must think I’m very stupid, Mum.” He was so clearly resolved to remove her by brute force that she stopped resisting. She was tiny but her cheekbones glazed with anger.
I told Woody to quit it.
“Mate,” he smiled, and reached out his hand to me and I smiled duplicitously and that was when the treacherous bastard shackled my wrist with his big red hand. Then he dragged us both behind him, out the door, up the steps, towards the dugout where he planned (it was obvious to me) to confront us with our own deceit. The kookaburra flew overhead and landed in the tree above the dugout amongst the whirling battery chargers. In the midst of all my other upsets I was certain it would drop the snake.
Our captor produced another hundred-dollar flashlight and Celine took her chance to slap him rapidly, on both cheeks. Did he really spit at her? I never saw it. Certainly his face was contorted and later I wondered if he was more frightened of her than she was of him.
Once he had us inside the dugout it was over. I flicked a switch to no effect. Inside was total silence, not a milliwatt of illumination. There was a hateful smell. The beam of Woody’s flashlight tracked across split truck batteries, wires ripped like prawn veins straight from the earthen walls. There were no computers anywhere. Blankets and sleeping bags were wet with what I first thought was gore but turned out to be the contents of the composting toilet. When Woody released my wrist I escaped into the light, trembling.
In the shadow of the entrance Celine was striking Woody’s chest. That he accepted this confirmed my fears. They had murdered her.
“What have you done to my daughter?”
“Done to her? I’ve paid half a million dollars bail for her. She’s got no choice. She has to go to trial. So where is she?”
“Woody,” I said. “She doesn’t know.”
“You’re a sucker, Feels. This one,” he nodded to Celine, “you cannot trust.”
“Me?” Celine cried. “Oh, please.”
“No, I learned it a long time ago, but I keep forgetting it. You’re a dickhead, Celine. The safest thing for you to do is go to trial.” With that he turned and strode into the bush.
As Woody crashed through the undergrowth, I put my arm around Celine and felt her strangely calm. I thought, if I had been privileged to have Gaby as a daughter I would have been going nuts, throwing myself into the metaphoric grave, pounding my head and rubbing ashes in my hair. Celine walked unsteadily to the house and turned on her computer. I thought, she’s reading bloody email.
“Come here,” she said, and pointed: the cursor was moving, seemingly of its own accord, opening files and putting them away. We were hacked and owned by who we could not know. Celine held a finger to her lips, picked up the laptop between thumb and forefinger, and I followed her to the bathroom where she placed it in the tub.
Minutes later, with our iPhones and computer drowned in bathwater, we were stomping through the bush, Celine with a rucksack and a cardboard box, me with two bottles, a corkscrew, following the story, perhaps, or running for my life. We arrived at my former kidnapper’s disgusting Holden parked in the midst of the chaotic refuse from demolition sites.
Celine opened the driver-side door and beeped the horn and here he came, her servant, my tormentor, on his way to work.
I waited while she spoke to him, but of course I understood what was about to happen. I went to the rear of the car and waited like a well-trained dog.
It was a tight fit for two, head to tail like a dirty joke and as the engine started Celine kicked and jabbed me and surprised me by farting as we set off down the rutted track. When she pushed the cardboard box at me I did not act well.
“Calm down.”
I do not like being told to calm down. We all know what that means.
It was not wine, which was what I had hoped, but a mess of papers and a huge number of objects, the smaller ones like mahjong tiles, that crutch of lazy reporters: the microcassette. Plus, also, larger cassettes, C120s as it later turned out.
“I need access,” I said.
We crossed a culvert and I banged my head. Between my disappointment and my claustrophobia, I could have wept.
“This is access,” she said. “You’ve got hours and hours of access in this box. Forget Woody,” she said. “Woody will never hear these tapes. You can write this book to please yourself.”