Scrublands(123)

The day is hot and the day is dry and the day is barren. The morning’s breeze has died and the sun hangs over Riversend like a sentencing judge. The shops, having opened ever so briefly, have closed again, shut for the week or shut forever: the bank, the art gallery, the op shop, the real estate agent, the hair salon. The wine saloon sits in shuttered anonymity, its ghosts back in sole possession. Smoke still drifts skywards from the ruins of the pub, and journalists roam the streets like jackals. At the crossroads, the soldier stands unmoving on his plinth, keeping his head down, observing the same moment’s silence he’s been observing for the best part of a century. Next to the pub, unscathed by fire, the general store remains locked, its bottled water inaccessible. After ten days, the town has grown familiar; Martin feels he knows every building, every fixture, that he knows every person, by name or face. And now he knows their tawdry secret. He knows the town, the town knows him, and he knows it’s time to leave. There is nothing left for him here. Wellington Smith is waiting with his money and his promises and his enthusiasm.

In the end, they’d argued. There’d been a moment there, with her in his arms, when he’d hoped for more, believed he might be embracing the future. But then he ruined it. He hadn’t fully appreciated what she’d endured: left grieving by her mother, deceived by Swift, betrayed by Snouch. Martin hadn’t anticipated how much his revelations would wound her. She now knew the priest hadn’t trusted her, hadn’t disclosed who he really was, even as he’d professed his love for her. Even as he’d impregnated her. He’d perpetrated his fraud upon her just as he’d perpetrated it upon everyone else. So when Martin suggested that Swift’s final act—the murder of the five men—might have been a misguided attempt to protect her, this did not placate her. Her anger flared, directed at Swift and directed at Martin. How dare the priest, this violent man with his violent past, kill in her defence, as if she were incapable of defending herself against the predations of Craig Landers and his ilk? Landers hadn’t left her pregnant, Swift had.

And then Martin, compounding her anger and despair, revealed the true nature of her father, Harley Snouch, dashing her scarcely acknowledged hopes for all time. Thirty years after he had violated her mother, there was no remorse. None. He’d schemed to win her affection, pretending to be her half-brother, plotting to deceive her while manoeuvring to steal her inheritance, the inheritance of Liam, his own grandson. She cried then, really cried: cried for everything she’d lost, everything she’d never had. She cried for herself and she cried for her son and she cried for his future, when he would learn the truth of his father and his grandfather. And in comforting her, Martin offered himself to her, with the implicit promise that he was different, that he was genuine, that he was not deceiving her. And for a moment she believed it and so did he, believed that he was a better man. She believed it long enough to stop crying, long enough to take him to bed and weep a different quality of tear.

But the pretence didn’t last; the story got in the way, his need to tell the world. For as they lay there, planning their escape, planning their future, he told her of Wellington Smith’s promise of salvation, of his reputation restored, of how he intended to write a book, to set the record straight, to reveal to the great Australian public the truth, to expose the secrets and reveal the lies of Riversend. He presented it as a wonderful opportunity: they could go anywhere, live anywhere. She had her wealth; he could write the book as they built a new life together. She fell silent then, saying nothing. Her silence should have warned him, but he’d prattled on, oblivious.

In that moment she saw him as he was, as he’d always been: the journalist, putting his vocation before all else, a secular priest worshipping at the shrine of truth, careless of who might get hurt in its telling. And eventually she spoke, in a voice soft and cautious. She wanted to know, quietly demanded to know, if he intended to write it all, without exception, to set down everything he knew. Not just condemning Byron Swift and Harley Snouch, but exposing all those people who had helped Martin: Robbie Haus-Jones and Fran Landers and Errol Ryding. And herself. The entire town. Were they all expendable, all to be sacrificed on the altar of journalism? ‘It’s what I do,’ he said. And when her temper flared again, he responded in kind, demanding to know how she could possibly judge him, she who’d manipulated him into uncovering Swift’s ugly past, all the time hiding her knowledge of the drug operation and Robbie’s involvement. He accused her of lies and deceit; she accused him of selfishness and thoughtless disregard for others. They fought; he yelled, Liam cried, she threw him out.

Martin gets to Thames Street, the end of the shops, the end of the shade. He steps out into the cauldron, the heat bleeding into him, as he continues up Hay Road, up onto the old wooden bridge, oblivious to the temperature. As if it could hurt him now. Finally he pauses, places his hands on the rail, feels the burning heat of the wood, leaves them there. The riverbed is still dry and broken; the fridge still sits there, offering the mirage of beer.

When he first crossed this bridge ten days ago, he’d come to recover, to put his demons behind him, to come to terms with spending his fortieth birthday locked in the boot of a Mercedes-Benz in the Gaza Strip. Max Fuller had sent him, hoping that being back on the road, covering a story away from head office, might help restore him to the journalist he’d once been. But standing on the bridge, Martin realises he’ll never again be that journalist, never again be that person. Heraclitus’s dictum comes to him: that a man cannot step into the same river twice. He regards the empty riverbed. Does it hold for waterless rivers? It had always puzzled him, even through the hours of counselling, why being abandoned in the Mercedes had had such a profound impact on him. It was accumulated stress, they told him, that he had seen and heard too much, and the experience in Gaza had tipped him over the edge. After all, he had witnessed far worse things: prisoners executed by machine gun, their families forced to watch; the deaths of babies in refugee camps, their mothers ululating with grief; the hollow eyes of survivors, their loved ones erased by ethnic cleansing. What was being shut in the boot of a car for a few days compared to that?