When I reached the farmer he was tugging at the car door in his town clothes and all he could say was Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, on and on, over and over. I saw that the driver was dead. The way her head tilted back on her forward-thrust body was all wrong. She was so hard up against the steering column that all my senses recoiled. Beside her, the man in the passenger seat licked his lips in slow motion. His eyes were tarred shut by blood oozing from a gouge in his forehead.
Then the bus driver came up behind us, saying: The truckie, the truckle's stuck.
I climbed the frame of the trailer chassis and groped along the wet, slippery bars of the cattle-cage towards the cab. I didn't trust the sagging front wheel for a perch, so I bellied out on the door and peered into the window beneath me like a diver looking into a reef hole. Barely a foot away, shivering in an army surplus jumper, and hanging in his seatbelt, was a big bloke with a beard and gold fillings. The window between us fogged up. I called down to him to open it, but he didn't seem to hear me. He just shook there, slowly obscured beneath the fogging, rain-pelted glass while I yelled until I was hoarse, and then the cops arrived with a rifle, and the fire truck was there, and someone much bigger hauled me down and gave me a steaming mug of Milo that I couldn't drink for the life of me.
That same night the old man drove me back into Angelus for the school social. Even though I'd asked Queenie Cookson I really didn't want to go anymore, but rny mother insisted that I show for the girl's sake, to save her the shame of being stood up. So in I went, scrubbed up in a yellow bodyshirt and flared corduroys, while the old man whiled away the hours fishing for skippy off the town jetty.
On the drive over, even at the bend with its hail of windscreen glass and crushed vegetation, neither of us said a thing. When we got to the school gym in Angelus I mumbled thanks for the ride and sloped in.
Inside a band from the city played songs by The Sweet and Status Quo. The dim lights, the music and the sight of all my classmates in their best duds made everything unreal. I felt as though I wasn't properly there. The cavernous hall was full of competing perfumes. There was so much glitter and lipstick that everybody looked like strangers and it took me ten minutes to find Queenie over by the basement stairs.
Why didn't you tell me about this morning? she shouted close to my ear.
I shrugged.
I had to get it from Polly Morgan.
I shrugged again.
Is it true they both died?
That's what they're sayin on the radio.
You looked shocking today, she said. Why didn't you say anything? You should have told me. I don't get you.
There was nothing I could think to say in reply so I shrugged once more. She scowled. I put my arm around her and this seemed to placate her somewhat. Later we danced to Sherbert and AC/DC tunes and the conversations we had with others were mostly lip-reading. We wound up in the deep shadows of the basement stairwell, clinching and kissing abstractedly until the lights flickered and it was all over.
When I got in the car the old man looked haggard.
You stink offish, I said.
And you smell like a girl.
We drove home in such a silence that I found myself fiddling noisily and pointlessly with the radio knobs. It annoyed the old man, but the agitation kept him from falling asleep at the wheel.
Back home my mother was still awake in her candlewick dressing gown.
You look handsome, love, she said.
I stood away from the sink while the old man wearily cleaned his fish. The stares of all those dead eyes made my gut flutter in a way that was new to me. When he opened their silver bellies I went to my room and did not sleep.
At school Queenie Cookson passed a note, via intermediaries, to outline my many flaws (I was moody, selfish and inattentive) and notify me that I was, forthwith, relieved of my duties as boyfriend. I did my best to take it badly but in truth I was relieved.
In the troughs between big days, Loonie was infinitely more resourceful than me. Having been addicted to danger all his life he could always find a pulse-raising challenge. That year he drilled a peephole in the pressed-tin wall of the pub's storeroom and forged an entirely new means of putting himself in peril.
There were several major swells that year as big lows rode up out of the Roaring Forties, but we spent more time waiting for them, discussing them, imagining them, than riding them. Winter had its many interludes when for weeks on end the wind turned sideshore and brought swell in at hopeless angles, and there were days and days of dark, squally chop when the sea was a misery to behold.
I watched the weather maps and waited for Sando, perpetually in a state of anguished anticipation. Somehow I'd gotten used to a certain underlying level of fear. When it was gone I missed it. After a huge day at Barney's or a rare session at Old Smoky I came home charged — the euphoria lasted for days. But when it dissipated I became restless, even anxious. I couldn't concentrate at school. Whenever I condescended to go fishing on the estuary, the old man complained that I twitched and jiggled like an alky, that I wrecked a good morning out.
I took to running in the forest. I rode out to the rivermouth and back flat-strap. I did what I could to wear myself out, but at night I still lay awake, turning, sighing, waiting.
A woman called Margaret Myers began staying weekends in the pub. Reputedly from Sydney, she was about forty and rather tall. She was dark-haired and curvy, wore kaftans and beads and smoked clove cigarettes. She was all out of sync for Sawyer, but she quickly became a regular. Loonie thought she was the most sociable woman he'd ever met, though this was before he realized that she was making a living upstairs in Room 6. During the hectic hours of the Sunday session, when it seemed that all hell was breaking loose down in the bar, he took to watching through his spyhole as she entertained her guests. He said he'd witnessed things that made his eyes sore, stuff you could barely credit. I took in every lurid detail, but I didn't really believe him. In this instance the facts didn't matter to me at all. Margaret Myers was such a fabulous creation and Loonie such a great bullshitter that the telling and the idea were satisfaction enough.
But Loonie, in his uncanny way, seemed to sense my unbelief. God knows, I never called him a liar — I wasn't stupid enough to fall for that. I didn't even press him for the more prosaic details of corroboration, stuff about the spyhole, the angle of view, the convenience of her using the same room each time, yet he called me on it anyway, for just as he had a native genius for manufacturing a physical challenge where there was none, Loonie could find an accusation in any endorsement, and before long, with barely a word on your part, he'd have himself wound into an indignant fury and you'd find you'd somehow dared him to prove himself. In the case of Room 6 there was only one way for Loonie to feel himself vindicated.
Which is how I came to be in that storeroom one day lifting a grey scab of Juicy Fruit from the pressed-tin wall with Loonie's breath hot and sour in my ear. I didn't really want to be there. The entire operation of getting from woodshed to laundry and then making the fraught bolt upstairs hardly seemed worth the risk. The room stank of mops and damp cardboard and my heart beat so hard it made me queasy. I was breathless and sweating and when I first leant against the metal wall my forehead slid off the mission-brown paint.