Blood Junction Page 23

  Who was shooting who?

  Mikey drove onto the street, took the next left and tucked the taxi behind a truck. Heart thumping, he watched the street through his wing mirror.

  Three minutes later a silver Mercedes M-Class shot past, followed by the black Ford.

  A minute later, a black BMW cruised by. OED 128. India’s Beemer. He cursed. He still hadn’t found out who owned the sodding thing. The Panama connection had led nowhere.

  He waited another couple of minutes then started the car and sped back to the warehouse. Before he went to Scotto, he quickly checked the surrounding area. Nobody. Inside the warehouse it was empty, aside from Scotto’s still form.

  He was glad Scotto was still unconscious. As carefully as he could, Mikey untied the ropes around Scotto’s feet. There wasn’t much he could do about the handcuffs. He had to get Scotto to a hospital pronto. His heart was still banging away. He picked up Scotto. Adrenaline helped. Scotto wasn’t exactly a featherweight. Mikey eased him onto the backseat of the cab and headed for the Prince of Wales Hospital.

  The truck dropped India at North Sydney, where she took a taxi to Manly, the easiest place she could think to hide. She tried five B&Bs and three hotels without luck. The fourth hotel was on North Steyne and had a double room with ocean view at an exorbitant price. She didn’t care about the expense, she was lucky to take a last-minute cancellation; every room was fully booked for the New Year celebrations. India paid cash, glad she’d barely spent any since her last withdrawal. She didn’t want Knox to track down her credit card.

  She was so numbed, so traumatized, that she wouldn’t have believed she could feel any emotion, but when she let herself inside the room, she began to shake from head to foot.

  She closed the door and locked it. She fumbled her way into the bathroom and vomited. She bent over the loo and retched over and over again as if she could rid herself of her experience in the warehouse. She could hear Scotto’s screams, smell the cordite, see his blood. Every detail was imprinted on her senses whether her eyes were open or closed.

  She dashed water over her face and neck, cupping some and rinsing her mouth to ease the acid burning in her throat. She grabbed a towel off the floor and wiped her face, let the towel fall in the sink. At that point she glanced in the mirror.

  The years drained away.

  She was kneeling on the kitchen floor, trying to help Lauren.

  She was walking out of The Courier’s office without a backward glance. She was stubbornly refusing to go to Sydney to see Lauren. She was watching her own sanctimonious face as she condemned Whitelaw’s guilt before stalking into the street and turning her back on Cooinda. She was running away from Mikey sprawled outside the warehouse, and was deep in the heart of her worst memories. She saw herself clearly, stripped of self-regard, vanity and ego. The very foundations of her being were crumbling and toppling around her. She had thought she had outrun the person she used to be. She’d believed she had outrun the past, but she was wrong. It had followed her all the way here.

  She was six years old. She was at the rude little house in Dee Why with her mother. Her mother had returned from the hospital and was crying for Toby, who had died that morning. Her father came home and when he saw her weeping he started pushing her around the kitchen, slapping her hard, and India knew he was going to hurt her really badly this time, that he was stoking his rage, and her mother was sobbing and all the time India was shivering, huddled in the corner.

  “You bitch!” he kept yelling. “My God, I’ll kill you, you lying bitch!” And his hands clenched and he was punching her and she was bleeding from her nose and mouth and India just huddled there, so frightened, so tiny against his huge bulk and his burning rage she couldn’t move, couldn’t help her mother, and suddenly Lauren was there and she was shouting, yelling at him to stop or she’d get her parents, fetch the police, anyone, if he didn’t stop.

  He stopped. He came to Lauren and grabbed her, and she was trying to fight him but she was so skinny and small that he simply shrugged her off and handcuffed her to the radiator, and India was crawling to Lauren, desperate to reach her, when he suddenly turned and looked at her.

  His face was red and his mouth caked with spittle and he had blood on his fists and on his shirt. Holding her eyes, he reached for the baseball bat beneath the table and took a step towards her and she screamed.

  He came for her.

  India ran. She catapulted out of the house, running as fast as she could, blindly, without any plan. She ran on bitumen, on grass, sand, gravel, her bare feet pounding, and she couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop running. When at last her legs gave way, she was on a beach and she was crawling on her hands and knees, her feet raw and bleeding, her lungs and heart like razor blades, but she couldn’t stem the urge to keep running …

  It wasn’t until dawn the next day that she returned to the house, quaking and weeping with terror, to find her father gone, her mother unconscious, and Lauren still handcuffed to the radiator, but with both arms broken.

  She had left her friend like that all night.

  She was so ashamed.

  The phone was ringing and she was in Sydney, had never left Sydney. She began to cry, not as she had before, quietly and in control, but great racking shouts that tore her throat and convulsed her shoulders and lungs. Helplessly she fumbled for the towel, tried to muffle her roars. She found herself stumbling backwards and clutching at something, and she grabbed at it but there was nothing there and she began to fall, and saw Lauren as clear as day.

  Hon, you’d better get a grip, or you’ll be in serious trouble.

  Scorching pain licked at her. Her closest friend was dead. Dead, dead, dead. And by abandoning Scotto and Mikey she felt as though she had abandoned Lauren all over again.

  An hour later she still couldn’t get herself under control. Clumsily, unable to see properly, she folded the towel and hung it neatly as she could on the rail, and because she didn’t know what else to do she went out onto the balcony overlooking Manly Beach, and leaned her head on her arms and wept. After a while, she sank onto one of the chairs, exhausted, her eyes puffed almost shut and her mouth was so distorted and swollen it felt like a pig’s snout.

  She felt hollow and drained. She sat there and stared unseeingly at the surfers rising and falling on the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean. Everything looked exactly the same as it had all those years ago. Same pine trees, same angled parking, same blue ocean rimmed with booming surf. Nothing had changed, not even herself. She was the coward she always had been.

  India sat there for two hours, watching the surfers, and only went inside to use the bathroom, or drink some water. She couldn’t think about Jeremy Whitelaw sitting in jail for something he hadn’t done. She couldn’t think about anything connected with Cooinda; Polly or Albert or Mikey.

  At five-thirty that afternoon, she felt no better. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to leave the hotel. She wanted only to stay here in retreat, hiding. She watched a 747 crossing the sky and thought about flying to London, China or Brazil. She pictured herself in Rio de Janeiro, then Beijing, and came to the miserable realization that wherever she went, inside she would still be the same person.

  She watched the surfers in the late gold haze of afternoon then went inside and made some coffee, but didn’t drink it. She took the plastic wrapper off a biscuit, then threw it in the bin. She needed something to occupy her, something to take her mind outside itself and give it a rest from this continual torture.

  She left her room and went in search of a swimsuit.

  The sea was cold, colder than she’d expected, and the waves quite big, about six feet. India ducked through each as they reared above her, plumes spraying in the breeze, and snorted salt water from her nose when she broke through on the other side. It didn’t take long to get past the breakers, and after half an hour or so she trod water and looked back.

  The beach was littered with glistening bodies sprawled on multicolored towels, som
e beneath umbrellas, some not. There was a volleyball game going on, and a crowd of people carrying Eskis and picnic hampers poured down the central steps.

  India turned seawards and struck out once more in a strong, steady breaststroke. Her mind was calm, absorbed with nothing but the motion of swimming, the chop of the water, the sting of salt on her mouth and in her eyes. After an hour she began to tire, so she floated on her back for a while, staring up at the hazy overcast sky and the seagulls with their sharp-cut wings shaped like boomerangs. Then the emotional agony returned, so she swam some more, until she tried again. She floated awkwardly this time, her legs seeming to drag her down, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to keep swimming right now, but it felt so good being out there that she rolled over and continued.

  She was tiring again and thinking about flipping onto her back and floating some more when she heard a voice behind her.

  “G’day.”

  Treading water, she saw a very brown, very lean man in his midtwenties sitting astride his surfboard.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “You sure are a long way from shore.”

  India looked back. Her hotel was a sugar lump on the horizon and she could only see the thin yellow strip of beach when a wave came and lifted her. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “Going anywhere in particular?”

  “Just felt like a swim.”

  “Mighty long swim.”

  She squinted at him. “What are you doing out here, then?”

  “I’m a lifesaver.”

  India was surprised into laughter. “I don’t need saving.”

  He gave her a smile. “Are you tired yet?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “If you want to tag onto my board while I paddle back, you’re welcome. It’s no extra effort for me.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks.” India turned away from the kind young face that reminded her of Tiger’s and continued swimming. It wasn’t until fifteen minutes later, when she paused for breath, that she saw him out of the corner of her eye, just over her shoulder, lying flat on his board, paddling easily with his sinewy arms.

  “Don’t mind if I come along, do you?” he asked.

  “It’s a free ocean.”

  India floated for a bit while the lifesaver sat on his board, humming an operatic tune she recognized from Carmen. When she tilted onto her front again, facing east towards the northernmost tip of New Zealand, he said nothing, merely paddled after her silently, just out of her vision.

  She didn’t really think about what she was doing, register how far she was from shore and how close she was to exhaustion. All she knew was that her conscience had eased, her guilt had abated, and that her psyche wasn’t in perpetual pain.

  A wave, larger than the rest, slapped her in the face and she swallowed half of it the wrong way. She was choking, coughing, trying to grab a breath of air when the next wave hit her. She felt she’d taken in half the ocean and was sinking with the weight of water in her lungs when the lifesaver came into view.

  “Need some help?”

  She continued to choke, but she didn’t take his outstretched hand.

  He raised his head, looked into the distance before glancing back at her, his expression serious. “Looks like a ship the size of the Titanic cruised past a while back. We’ve got some real big waves coming.”

  India gave one final cough, hauled air into her lungs.

  “Why don’t you hang on to my board ’til they’ve gone, then we’ll get back to what we were doing before.”

  For a minute she thought he was making up a story about big waves to get her onto his board, but then she saw it. It wasn’t that high, but it was travelling hard and fast for them.

  I can dive through that, no problem, she thought.

  “There’s about eight of them back to back,” he said, quite calmly, as if he’d read her mind. “And you won’t get a breath between the last five.”

  The wave came closer, a greeny-blue opaque curve with no white cap, no spume. She thought she saw a shadow move inside it. It was shaped like a torpedo and could have been a porpoise, but her mind yelled: Shark!

  “Shit,” said India, and grabbed the board.

  It was as if the lifesaver had been waiting for that exact moment. In one swift and powerful movement, he grabbed her wrists and hauled her up in front of him, straddling her legs around his board and hugging her from behind, her fingers clamped beneath his. His chest was pressed against her back, his chin on her shoulder.

  The wave sped towards them.

  “Sit tight,” the lifesaver said into her ear, “and let me do the steering.”

  Then they were rising to meet the wave. The board’s nose tilted sharply and she thought she might slide backwards, but he was there behind her, solid and impregnable … Suddenly they reached the top of the wave. The surfboard levelled out, and for a single, breathtaking second, paused.

  She could see the other waves—no time to count them—ranked ahead in varying shades of blue, cobalt blue and black, and then they were sliding downwards. Barely had they reached the bottom of the trough than they were climbing again. Another swift climb up another wave to the crest, a second’s pause to marvel at the view, and then the exhilarating swoop down the wave’s back before the next climb.

  All the time the lifesaver held her tightly, cheek against hers, their hands like limpets around the edge of the board.

  They were climbing a wave, she had no idea whether it was the fifth, sixth, or seventh, when he said, laughingly, delighted, “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  A flash, a thunderbolt from nowhere: “You’re not enjoying this, Miss Kane, are you?”

  She gave a single cry, an inhuman sound like a seagull’s shrill scream, full of anger and rage and grief. The lifesaver’s grip tightened but she made nothing of it; she thought her cry was lost in the spray of sea, the sound of water churning.

  Finally, the ocean returned to its habitual chop and occasionally unpredictable waves. India sat limply on the board, motionless. Her skin was cold, her mind smooth. Eventually she felt the lifesaver lift his head from where it rested against her shoulder blade.

  “Will you come quietly now?” he asked, his voice amused. “Or will I have to tranquillize you?”

  She gazed at the seemingly endless silver-blue ocean. “I’m already tranquillized.”

  “Okay then. It’s best if we lie flat, you on the back. Is that okay?”

  “It’s fine.”

  She did as he said and lay with her chest and belly on the board, her legs in the water, while his wiry shoulders and arms paddled them both.

  The beach was busy when they returned. Groups of people had started celebrating New Year’s Eve early and she could hear laughter, the sound of music blasting from boom boxes. She saw another group of people standing by the twin flags at the far south end, and lots of surfers, in the water and out, about twenty of them.

  India found her legs wouldn’t work properly when she clambered off the surfboard and tried to walk. She stumbled and fell to her knees, the surf churning around her waist, beating her and remorselessly keeping her off balance.

  “Here,” said the lifesaver, and took her hand and slid it across his back to hook her fingers with his over one shoulder. His other arm went around her waist and like lovers they walked through the kicking, churning, white-bearded surf and up the beach. Each time she stumbled, it was only his strength that kept her upright. She concentrated on nothing but putting one foot in front of the other, leaning against him, battling with the soft sand underfoot and her exhaustion.

  He deposited her gently on the bank of warm sand outside her hotel and sank down next to her. He sat up, looking alertly out to sea while India sagged, empty and drained.

  “Did you leave a note?” the lifesaver suddenly asked. “Write up your obituary?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” God, it was an effort to speak.

  He was matter-of-fact when he said, “Suicides rarely do.
Sad for their relatives. They seem to like an explanation. It exonerates them from guilt, I suppose. Helps them understand what’s going on.”

  India didn’t know what to say to that, but she faintly registered the fact that she didn’t particularly like being categorized as suicidal.

  “Leave me alone.” She was surprised at the strength of her voice.

  He gave a shrug. She felt his right hand sweep up her spine, encircle the nape of her neck and squeeze it briefly, affectionately, as a fellow footballer might to another, and then he got up and walked away without another word. She realized she hadn’t even thanked him.

  TWENTY-TWO

  INDIA SAT IN HER ROOM, SIPPING CHAMPAGNE WHILE SHE watched the millennium celebrations on television. Millions of people thronged the foreshores; specks of flag-waving and face-painted humanity in good-humored mayhem. She saw the Cahill Expressway was packed and wondered if Mikey was there. She thought about Whitelaw in jail, Scotto with his smashed knee.

  Through her open balcony door she heard claxons and happy shouts and the occasional bang of a flare being let off.

  She watched the Harbour Bridge light into a giant smiley face, above which hung the word Eternity in gold.

  She finished her champagne and went to bed. She slept deeply.

  The next morning, she went in search of her lifesaver. It was breezy on the beach and the surf was booming in, making the air hazy with salt spray. The safety flags were at the far southern end of the beach, indicating a dangerous rip farther north, and two lifeguards stood ten yards back from the twin red markers, muscular arms crossed, chatting to a sun-oiled girl with cropped blonde hair and short legs.

  India introduced herself, allowed them to do the same—Lance and Trevor—then she quickly explained the events of the previous evening and asked where her lifesaver was.

  Both of them looked blank. “We were the only ones here,” said Lance, the taller of the two.