It hadn’t been a problem for Harold when Harrigan had rung him late one night to ask if he could give Ambro and her children shelter. He had a cottage on the Creek Lane, about two kilometres along from the Coolemon Bridge, he’d been happy to let them have. They had arrived first thing the next morning, sleepy-eyed and exhausted, Harrigan delivering them to Yaralla in person. It was lonely out here for a woman with three children. The cottage had no landline phone, and while there was a mobile phone signal it was unreliable. Supposedly it was only temporary until Harrigan could sort out something else. That was months ago now.
Harold had checked the electricity and the water, then poisoned the white ants, making the cottage as liveable as he could. Through winter, he supplied Ambrosine with firewood. Her children spent days glueing bright papier-mache figures onto the doors and window frames, covering the filigreed tunnels the ants had eaten out of the wood. The shapes were small pieces of radiance in the drab house.
He drove into Ambrosine’s yard. In the early evening light, the moon was visible as a huge orange globe low to the horizon behind the house. At the door, a voice yelled at him to come inside.
Ambrosine was in her frowsy kitchen stacking dirty dishes next to the sink. He heard the blare of the television set from the room her three children shared.
‘I was wondering when you were going to get here,’ she said, reaching for a burning cigarette perched on an ashtray. ‘Want a drink first? I’ll finish up here and then we’ll get started.’
She poured a generous measure of whisky and handed him the glass. ‘Jesus, mate,’ she said. ‘What happened to your fucking hands?’
The doctor had covered his hands with clear, plastic-like dressings which he’d said would give greater protection. The burns were clearly visible.
‘Something on the farm today. I wasn’t being careful enough. It makes it hard to touch the steering wheel.’
‘I fucking bet it does. That’s nasty. Are you okay for this with those hands?’
‘Yeah, the doc gave me enough painkillers for an elephant.’
She grinned. ‘You won’t feel a thing then.’
He sat at her table drinking while she finished her cursory cleanup. Her paintings covered the walls in the sour-smelling room, scraps of paper as short-lived as her tattoos were permanent. They closed in on you, each one crowded with obsessive details. He looked at them: vistas of her kitchen with its unhinged cupboards, scraps of old food covering the table, piles of unwashed dishes scoured by mice, cockroaches and ants; her three children perched on disintegrating chairs on the front veranda, staring at the watcher; a disarray of broken toys, bones and debris covering the bare ground in front of a tiny house that was isolated under a huge blue sky. Harold had once asked her why she painted things this way. ‘It’s my life,’ she’d said. ‘What else is there? I want us to know where we are when we eat. Nowhere.’
‘Did you hear the news?’ he asked, finishing his whisky.
‘About the killings up at Pittwater? Yeah, it was on TV.’ She frowned. ‘It doesn’t make any fucking difference to us whether Mike’s dead or not. We’re still stuck here. If we got in my van and drove away somewhere else, I’d open the front door one day and there’d be someone standing there with a shotgun. But what if we do stay here? How safe are we then? I know this place is your home, but every day I think we’re going to die. I wake up at night and I feel like I’m at the end of the world.’
‘Don’t think like that. You won’t be able to get up in the morning.’
‘There’s no chance of that. The kids get me up, no matter what. They like it here better than I do. Come on, mate. You’re late enough as it is. It’s time we got going.’
‘There’s something I want to ask you first.’
She sat down at the table with him. ‘What?’
‘Do you know anything about this Natalie Edwards?’
‘Why do you want to know about her?’ ‘She was up at my property about a week ago. Her, old Stewie and the other bloke who got shot with her. Jerome. He’s the one they haven’t named yet. I saw him on the TV at the hospital.’
‘Shit, mate. I’m glad they didn’t know I was here. You want to know about Nattie Edwards? She was a bitch. A fucking ruthless bitch who didn’t care who she walked over for a dollar. What were they doing here?’
‘I don’t want to tell you. It’s too dangerous. It’s to do with this.’ He opened his hands for her to look at once again.
‘Jesus, mate. Ring Harrigan. He’s running that show. I saw him on the TV. Fucking talk to him.’
‘You think I should?’
‘Yeah, I do.’
‘I’ve lived here all my life,’ he said. ‘I’m frightened. I’ve never been frightened before.’
‘Harry, ring him. Go home and call him now. You can come back tomorrow.’
‘No, we’ll do a bit first. Just half an hour. I need the time to work out what I want to say. It’ll settle me down. Then I’ll go home and call.’
‘If that’s what we’re going to do, get in the front room and strip for me.’
Ambrosine called the lounge room her studio even though Harold was her only canvas. He stripped in front of a dark mirror, becoming both naked and dressed. His thin, strong body was webbed with her gorgeous tattoos-an image of his property as it used to be when there was rain. His torso was a waistcoat of brightly coloured birds, and the trunks of eucalyptus trees curled around the hard muscles of his legs. The topography of his ten thousand acres was compressed into an imprint etched onto the stretch of his back. Ambrosine had left her signature-AMBRO-drawn in a spider’s trace of blue ink beneath his ribcage.
She appeared beside him in the mirror. Her body was large in her loose black dress, her long dark hair spilled over an array of stars tattooed on her neck. She ran a finger around an image on his shoulders and he shivered. She had done all these tattoos for nothing because she needed to. She had to work, she said, otherwise she wouldn’t survive.
‘I don’t ever want you to die. That way, there’ll always be these tattoos. It’ll be something I’ll have done with my life. Apart from my kids.’
‘I don’t know how possible that is,’ he said, half-smiling.
He lay down on her table, willing his body to relax.
‘I’ll do a bit more work on the owl,’ she said, speaking of a tattoo she was working on across his torso.
‘Yeah.’
She rolled up her sleeves and began to mark his skin to guide her needle. He could see the psoriatic lesions covering her forearms. Where she hadn’t covered them with tattoos, the lesions marked much of her body. She called them her personal tattoo, one worked from the inside through the genes that made up her skin.
Tonight, his own tattoo would be missing one of its strange and necessary accompaniments, one that was as fundamental to the ritual as the permanent markings left behind. The thin rivers of pain that followed her needle would be dulled by the doctor’s painkillers. There were times Ambrosine worked on him when the world disappeared and there was only him, his tattooist and his pain. It was worth it to him. He was this property, every bit of red dirt that made it. Nothing would shift him from here, including death, even if they were the deaths of others and not his own.
He lay there while Ambrosine worked, in his mind forming the words he would use to persuade Harrigan to come all the way out here. They came down to a simple sentence. I need your help.
13
Harrigan sat at his desk listening to the voices of the dead. They did not whisper but spoke in ordinary tones, spinning off his miniature cassette player thin and low. The first was a voice Harrigan hadn’t heard before. It had a guttural intonation: Beck’s. The other two, Freeman and Cassatt, were too well known. The recording started with Freeman giving a place, time and date before he got out of his car and walked into the pub where they were meeting. Harrigan listened to the sounds of greetings, drinks being brought to the table. The background noise was a low hum broken by the occasional sound of a phone ringing somewhere.