Not a peep from the residents of Upper Penzance after his bushfire letter, but.
He always had something to write about. Like on Thursday last week he'd been passing one of the houses on Five Furlong Road and seen that they'd fastened an American-style letter box to the front gate, complete with a little red metal flag on the side. He'd been seized with fury. He wanted to sit the guy down and slap him about the face and demand to know why, since this wasn't America, he'd erected an American letter box? And what, pray tell, is the little red flag supposed to indicate? he wanted to say. Is the postie supposed to put it up whenever he pops mail into your box? If this were America you'd put it up to indicate that you had letters for him to collect-but this isn't America, arsehole. Even if the postie could give a shit one way or the other, what makes you think he's got the time or energy or inclination to shift the stupid lever?
The arm was up again today. Pearce clicked it down.
He walked on, coming to Ian Munro's fenceline and the metal sign that read 'Any person caught stealing firewood off this property will be prosecuted', the word 'prosecuted' spraypainted out and substituted by the word 'shot'.
And that's when he saw the sheep. Distressed sheep, a dozen of them, hollow-ribbed, spines bowed in exhaustion, heads drooping. Baked dirt under their feet. No water in the trough, only a greenish sludge at the bottom. A car went by him on the road, a woman driving, and he turned to face her, indicating the sorry spectacle of the sheep with a gesture of his right hand, inviting her to share his outrage.
But the car headed obliviously on up the road toward Upper Penzance, so Mostyn Pearce went home and fired off an anonymous call to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Then he glanced at his watch. Whoops. Three-thirty in the afternoon, and he started work at four. Time he was gone. He set the VCR to tape tonight's 'International Most Wanted', a true-crime program on one of the pay TV channels, kissed his wife and daughter, and left for work.
As she passed the oddball looking over a fence at some tired sheep, Ellen Destry slowed the car to scrutinise him more closely. Pinched, unhappy face, dainty Michael Jackson nose, scalp shaved within an inch of its life and full of pale, defenceless ridges. But harmless, and so she continued along Five Furlong Road and into Upper Penzance. She was bone-tired after last night, the business with Skip Lister and his father, the cleaning up this morning. And it wasn't finished. There was a leather jacket on the seat beside her. It belonged to Skip Lister and she'd found it stowed behind a sofa cushion just before lunch. It had taken all morning to make the house presentable again. The odour of cigarette smoke lingered in the curtains and upholstery. Puddles of vomit waited for her in unlikely places. The carpet was sodden with spilt beer and spirits-but not red wine, thank God. Cigarette burns on the mantelpiece. Someone's knickers-none too clean either- under a deckchair on the side verandah. A couple of condoms underneath the ti-trees at the back.
Alan was working from eight until four today, otherwise she might have done her block and shouted, 'Didn't you keep an eye on them at all last night?'
She glanced at her watch. Four in the afternoon. He'd be driving home about now. She sighed: she simply felt too fatigued and dispirited to contemplate a row with him later. Besides, in a sense he wouldn't be there but shut inside the dining room to study for another shot at the sergeants' exam. Meanwhile sex had become an infrequent and complicated transaction. Their lives sometimes collided in angry knots but mainly withered in isolation.
She drove on. She could simply have telephoned the Listers and told Skip to call around for his jacket, but she wanted to see where he lived.
Upper Penzance. It was visible from her back yard in Penzance Beach, floating above Five Furlong Road, which marked the top of the ridge above the slope of farmland that separated Upper Penzance from Penzance Beach. Upper Penzance spelt money and a kind of stubborn-yet-stupid exclusivity in the minds of most of the local people. There had been a letter to the Progress from one resident, a woman who'd brayed that she and her husband had spent 'a lot of money' establishing their property, and were 'not about to see it spoilt by paved roads, bulldozers gouging out sewage channels or the lopping of more of the Peninsula's magnificent pine tree avenues'.
So that's where Skip Lister lived, in a half-million dollar house with a fantastic view across to Phillip Island, and that's where his father had taken him last night.
There had been another man with Skip's father. No introduction: he'd emerged from Carl Lister's Mercedes, slipped through the cloud-obscured light of the moon into Skip's car, and driven it away. As for Skip's father, he'd slammed the door of his Mercedes in a businesslike way and shaken her hand and gently chastised his son and generally behaved like a responsible, apologetic father. None of the offhandedness that had so angered Ellen when she'd phoned him.
She'd taken one look at Carl Lister and disliked him on the spot. That was why she was delivering his son's leather jacket to his door instead of asking someone to come and collect it.
It wasn't Lister's manner, glossy Mercedes or Upper Penzance address. It wasn't that he was shifty or smelt wrong in any criminal sense, either, for he didn't. And he wasn't like some South Africans she'd met, who'd given off a palpable sense of wanting to firebomb Asians or regretting they no longer had coloured servants to bitch about. No, it was his energy, confidence and general oiliness at that ungodly hour of the morning. She'd watched him stride from his car, throw a stern, bucking-up arm around his son's shoulders and generally take charge, and she'd felt irrelevant and taken for granted. And Skip hadn't liked that arm either. She'd seen the way he cringed beneath the weight and chumminess of it.
Or perhaps she-and Skip-recoiled from the man's impairment. For he'd suffered burns to his face and hands at some stage. They were not particularly disfiguring, but did give a faintly skewed cast to his head, as though he had limited neck movement, and one hand was clenched in a permanent claw-like spasm.
On another man those burns might have elicited sympathy. On Carl Lister they imparted a faint cruelty, encouraged by a grin fit to bruise his face.
Ellen thought that he was probably the kind of man who placed great demands on his son. Not much love there, she concluded as she left Five Furlong Road and made her way along a narrow, potholed track that wound between pottosporums, gumtrees and wattles. There were big houses set well back from the track on either side. Most were two-storey, architectural wet-dreams with tricky bits of modular concrete slabs, corrugated iron or radially sawn weatherboards here and there on the angular walls.
At least the Listers lived in a standard-looking house, even if it did belong more to Toorak or Brighton than the coast. It was Georgian baronial, she supposed, squat and box-like, and reached via a driveway that hooked around a grassy slope set behind an avenue of golden cypresses. The words 'Costa del Sol' had been picked out in mosaic chips on a board fastened to the front gate. Costa Packet, Ellen thought, remembering an old Punch cartoon.
The front gate was locked. No answer when she pressed the buzzer next to the intercom.
Ellen crammed Skip's jacket into the letter box then walked along the fenceline until she had a partial view of the rear of the house. Plenty of lawn, mown to within an inch of its life, well-kept shrubs, garden sheds, two vast white concrete rainwater tanks partly buried into an incline, and some other kinds of fancy landscaping, which gave the rear slope a terraced look.
She sniffed. You were always getting the odd unpleasant whiff on rural properties. Weed killer, sheep dip, fuel, creosote.