‘Yeah? Who’s that?’
‘Robert Colburne.’
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Robbo.’
‘Remember him?’
‘Oh yeah. What happened?’
‘Drugs. Accidental overdose.’
Terry whistled, shook his head. ‘Robbo. Mad, bad and dangerous to know.’
‘Knew him well?’
‘Yeah. A bit. Came in year eleven. Clever bloke, very smart. Went to uni after. Him and Janice Eller were the only ones.’
‘Know his family?’
‘Only Mrs Reilly.’
‘A relation?’
‘His auntie. She went back to England, oh, six, seven years ago. Robbo said his mum and dad split up when he was a kid, left him with someone. Then his dad got some tropical wog, PNG, I can’t remember, he died. His mum didn’t want to know him, she was in England, I think.’
He paused, sniffed. ‘Mind you, Robbo was a bit of a bullshitter. Bit of the poof in him, too. Arty-farty.’
‘So Robbie wasn’t part of the Forestry move up here?’
‘Nah. Just came the same year.’
A projectile-nosed woman with a scarf tied over her narrow head came to the counter, copy of New Knitting in hand.
‘Sellin things today?’ she said. ‘Or just natterin?’
Terry didn’t look at her, took the magazine and passed a barcode reader over it. It appeared not to work. He sighed, jabbed at the till keyboard.
‘Voted for this government, mate,’ he said. ‘Make no secret of it, never have. I can tell you, never again. This GST…no, don’t get me goin on the subject.’
‘Shockin, the price of this,’ the woman said. ‘You put it up every second month.’
‘Don’t blame me,’ said Terry. ‘That’s the pound done that, pound and the GST. Beats me how the pound can be worth more than the dollar. I need that explained to me. That’s four twenty-five change. Thank you, Mrs Lucas.’
‘Profiteerin goin on, no doubt in my mind.’
He watched her go, slit-eyed. ‘Old bitch,’ he said. ‘Shit I have to put up with.’
‘So there’s no family around that you know of?’
‘Nah.’
‘He didn’t come back here?’
‘Nah. I heard he dropped out of uni, Janice Eller’s mum told me that.’
I said, ‘I might talk to Janice Eller. How would I do that?’
He blinked, ran a knuckle over his pink lower lip. ‘Dead, mate,’ he said. ‘Thredbo.’
Thredbo was a one-word Australian story, a tragedy on the snowfields, a large piece of hillside coming unstuck, people dying under collapsed buildings.
‘What about her family?’
‘Only had a mum. She died.’
Not your most profitable expedition, this trip to Walkley. Nothing gained and nothing in prospect but an indigestible meal and a night in some sagging motel bed.
‘Anyone around here who’d know anything about Robbie?’
He shook his head. ‘Nah, don’t think so. This girl came up here from Sydney with the Forestry, hung around Robbo. What was her name? My mate Sim had a thing for her…Sandra someone.’
‘Your mate around?’
‘Gone barra fishin, way up there in the Territory, lucky bugger. Should be back soon.’
I got out a card. ‘I’d appreciate it if you could ask him to give me a ring.’
15
I got as far as Lithgow. I’d got as far as Lithgow once before, in the largely blank period after my second wife, Isabel, was murdered by a client of mine. At least I think it was Lithgow. I wasn’t paying much attention in those days, only sober for as long as it took me to drive from one town to another, any town with a pub to any other town with a pub. If it was Lithgow I remembered, some kind of miners’ strike was going on and, in the pub, a drunk miner accused me of being a journalist from Sydney. I didn’t deny it, didn’t care to, just had a fight with him.
No pub fights on this visit. I drove into the cold valley town, breathed the coal smoke from the fires, bought two stubbies of Boag and a bottle of mineral water from a drive-in bottle shop, found a place that made hamburgers and got one with the lot, except the egg. In a room at an unlovely brick-veneer motel, I drank the beer and ate my supper in front of a television set that changed channels on its own. Then, tired in many ways, I went to bed with my book, Dying High: Lies About a Climber’s Life, bought on impulse months before, grabbed on my way out to get a taxi to the airport. There is something about the stupidity of climbing mountains that appeals. Perhaps it’s the clinging by the fingertips to inhospitable surfaces. I could claim some experience in this area.
In the night, I was woken by the sounds of quick sex close by, intimately close, centimetres away, just beyond the plasterboard wall. Startled, for a moment unsure of where I was, saddened when I remembered, I wrapped the sour foam pillow around my head, lay thinking about Robbie Colburne. Then I moved on to Cynthia and her attacker with the Saint tattoo, drifted off, listening to the trucks hissing, groaning, whining on the highway, thinking about my life, why equilibrium escaped me, why I couldn’t find a steady state, chose to ask questions of strangers, lie down in beds too short, turn and turn again between cold, slithery, electric nylon sheets.
I rose just after dawn, creaks in my knees, happy to be going. I’d only had brief times in my life when I wasn’t happy to be going. Sneakily, shamefully happy. Cleansed in a cramped, stained fibreglass chamber, I went outside. In the coal valley, the air was freezing. White breath hung on the face of a man walking two small dogs, clung to a few pale shift-workers coughing on the first of the day. They were all I saw on my way to the steep, winding road out of the valley. There was a moment on the heights when I could look back: nothing to see, the place gone, buried in sallow, yellow dawn-mist.
On the plane home, I sat next to a middle-aged dentist from Collaroy. Shortly after take-off, and without the slightest encouragement, he told me that he was leaving his wife and two children, aged eleven and thirteen, to be with a Melbourne person he had met at a cosmetic dentistry conference in Hawaii.
‘These things happen,’ I said. Another man grateful to be going.
‘I wasn’t looking for it to happen. It just happened. Like a…like a bolt of lightning. Can you understand that?’
‘Without any difficulty.’ I got out my book, found my place.
‘Well, you don’t do something like this lightly, do you?’
‘No. You wouldn’t.’
The dentist leaned over, looked at me from close range. I suppose they get used to doing that, a life of looking into people’s mouths. After a while, you lose the feeling of intruding.
‘I feel like I’m on a personal journey,’ he said. ‘The road less travelled.’
I looked at him briefly, a mistake.
‘Know what I mean?’ he said, licked his lips.
‘Yes.’
Complicit, I didn’t say that it was not so much a personal journey on a road less travelled as a trip in a crammed bus on a six-lane freeway. All I wanted to do was read. This would stop me thinking about the distinctly unhealthy coughing note I’d detected in the port engine.
My companion went on exploring metaphors for his condition all the way to Melbourne. From time to time, I
