The truck bounces along the uneven streets, motoring fast. Then it brakes and skids to a halt outside Cullen Bay civil hospital. Two shirtless soldiers pull the truck’s rear tray guard down and begin hauling the bodies onto hospital stretchers. More soldiers come, reach for the hands and feet of the dead and wounded. Aubrey stands. His head spins but, to his surprise, he can actually walk now and so he staggers to the side of the tray and slides off the back.
‘You need to lie back down, mister,’ says a young soldier, hauling the dead body of an elderly woman out of the truck.
Aubrey says nothing. He coughs up a mouthful of blood and spits it onto the brown dirt by his boots, then looks down at his soiled shirt, blood-spattered and bomb-torn. He shuffles away from the army transport, his head turned to the hospital entrance where nurses and police officers and soldiers carry too many bodies into the casualty ward. Movement all around him and he moves so slow. One foot after the other. Finding his balance. In his clouded mind, he tries to find purpose. What just happened? Where was he going? What does he need to do now? And he fixes on an image in his head. Molly Hook and Greta Maze standing over him. The brown-haired gravedigger girl and the blonde-haired actress.
There is a temporary medical station under a tarpaulin outside the hospital. A nurse is handing out canvas water bags to soldiers. ‘I need two,’ Aubrey says softly, his body aching with the effort of speaking. A wooden bucket filled with fruit stands beside the nurse’s table. Aubrey reaches for a banana and two large orange and red mangoes. He sits in the gutter of the footpath outside the hospital and glugs down the water, sinks his teeth into the skin of a mango and drives his face hard into its juicy flesh like a rabid dog. Only animal now. Primal. A beast with no past. A beast with only one goal. To find the gravedigger girl and the actress.
An olive-coloured Model A Ford pulls in to the hospital driveway. The driver rushes around to the rear-left passenger door, grabs the hands of a wounded man in a suit, and drags him cumbersomely out of the seat. Aubrey recognises the driver as Frank Roach, one of the business managers at the Bank of New South Wales on Smith Street. Frank Roach pants and strains as he drags the body of his friend along the ground, his arms hooked under the man’s armpits.
Roach spots Aubrey watching him from the gutter. ‘Well, don’t just sit there,’ he barks. ‘Help me, dammit.’
Aubrey shuffles over wearily, lifts the man’s legs and helps place him on a stretcher at the hospital entrance.
‘Thank you,’ a breathless Roach says to Aubrey, who nods silently. Roach follows two soldiers as they drag the stretchered man into the casualty ward.
Aubrey turns away from the hospital and returns to the fruit and water bags he has left by the gutter. Then he walks casually to the driver’s side of Frank Roach’s Model A Ford. He starts the car and coughs up another mouthful of blood that he spits out the window. Only animal now. He slams his foot on the accelerator and the wind through the car window refreshes him. But there is something more mysterious than wind keeping him upright, keeping him breathing in one last buried pocket of air. Something dangerous and energising that is fuelling him from the inside. And as the Ford speeds south out of Darwin he knows this mystery force for what it is. He learned long ago not to underestimate its power.
Only animal now. Only hate.
NINE NORTHERN DINGOES
Her face is stained with the stomach blood of the wallaby she ate yesterday. She doesn’t bark, she moans, and the sound of that moan tells the younger ones in the pack that she is second in charge behind her partner, the dominant male who walks ahead. Her coat is fire-coloured but the fur on her feet is the colour of snow. She knows a ripple of disharmony has spread through the pack. The dry season was lean and she was forced to kill the newly born pups of another pack mother, as much to maintain her own authority as to allow the spoils of pack kills to spread further. She’s been walking through the boggy wetlands for most of the day and she is hungry and tired and wants to go home.
But, ahead, her partner stops behind the screen of a purple turkey bush, so she snorts twice and the rest of the pack instantly freeze behind her. She lightens her step and moves to her partner, stopping when her nose reaches his right hindleg. She is old, but she is younger than him and has better vision and she sees immediately the subject of his gaze. A field of bush apple trees in the distance, the likes of which neither of them has ever seen. The trees are so plentiful and so closely bunched together that the apples on their branches have formed a vast red apple roof that is now sheltering a small herd of wild water buffalo at rest.
She purrs softly to her partner, informing him that she, too, can see the buffalo calf drinking from a small water build-up some distance away from the rest of the herd.
She can twist her neck to face almost directly behind her, and her feet do not even move when she turns to signal to the rest of the pack that it’s time to hunt.
TEAR DRIVEN
Momentum. No going back, Molly, she tells
