Chapter 32
KASH WALKED OUT of the interview room, veins beginning to creep up from beneath the skin near his sweaty temples. Snale followed. I went to sit in the chair Kash had vacated and put my feet up on the table.
‘Is that tosser your partner?’ Zac asked.
‘At the moment.’ I took an intake form from beside the recorder and tossed a pen at the kid. ‘Fill in this form.’ I would take the paper and compare Zac’s handwriting against the diarist’s. The kid sighed and began writing.
‘So that guy’s your boyfriend, then,’ he said eventually.
‘Certainly not.’
‘I thought that was the whole deal, though,’ he snorted. ‘When dude and lady cops work together they get into dangerous situations. Have to save each other’s lives. Then they fuck.’
‘I’m no lady,’ I told the kid. ‘And you should be less concerned with who’s fucking who and more concerned about the townsfolk lynching you the moment they get a chance.’
‘The townspeople can blow me.’ He sat back in his chair. This kid had a real fascination with fellatio. ‘You ask me, it’s the Old Man you lot should be looking at.’
‘Who’s the old man?’
‘The dude,’ he waved vaguely behind him, in a westerly direction, ‘I don’t know his name. Us kids just call him the Old Man. He lives out there in the never-never. His people and Dez’s people had some drama back in the day, when Last Chance was first settled. He won’t be friendly, join the town. But won’t fuck off, either. You’ll know him when you see him. He’s scary and old.’
‘Scary and old,’ I said. ‘Right. I’ll make a note of it. Until then you’re going to have to stay low. People around here want your blood.’
‘What else is new? Everything around here falls on me. You get used to it. I’m too big for this joint. They won’t know who to pin shit on when I bust outta here.’
‘You’ve got plans to leave?’
‘End of the term, I can legally leave school,’ he said. ‘I’m getting out of here and I’m never coming back. I don’t care if I have to work at a McDonald’s and sleep under a bridge. You’ve gotta start somewhere, man.’
‘Is that what people do?’ I asked. ‘Take off as soon as they get the chance?’
‘No way.’ He put his arms behind his head. ‘Around here you take over your family farms or you go work for the mines and send your money back here. That’s the only reason people have kids in this town – because if they don’t, their farms will close down. If everybody leaves, the whole town closes down, so anyone who makes plans to go hasta keep it secret or people will start calling you a traitor, talking about how you’re abandoning the place. It’s supposed to be one for all, all for one. So people keep having kids, and their kids take over the farms, and then they have kids. It’s an endless, meaningless cycle of bullshit.’
‘So what happens if you’re a kid around here and you don’t want to be a farmer?’
He made a gun with his fingers, put it to his head. ‘Bang!’ ‘Don’t they try going into the cities?’
‘How are you gonna leave and start again in the big city when you grew up your whole life in a hole in the Earth? You got no money. No friends. No family backing you. No work experience. You don’t know the city ways. You try to climb out, it just sucks you back in.’
‘But you’re not going to get sucked back in.’
‘No way.’ He stretched, reached for the ceiling. ‘I’ve got a plan.’
‘Oh yeah? What’s that?’
‘None of your business.’
He settled back in his chair and knitted his fingers over his skinny chest like he was planning on going to sleep. I knew that kind of calm. The emotionless resolve that comes with knowing you’ve reached rock bottom, that there’s no more trouble that you can get into. No expectations. Maximum ostracism. I’d been that kind of teenager. Wandering around the city at night on my own, spray-painting trains, breaking windows, lighting rubbish bins on fire.
It was actually while I was sitting in a holding cell at Maroubra Police Station, listening to the goings-on in the office, that I’d found my calling. An old lady had wandered in bleeding after being knocked down only a couple of blocks away, her handbag stolen. I’d watched through the bars as two female officers brought her to a chair by one of the desks, tended to her, soothed her, made her a cup of tea. They were like two daughters caring for their frightened, befuddled mother. And the old lady’s eyes wandered over their immaculate blue uniforms, their faces, with awe and joy. I’d imagined someone looking at me like that one day. Like I was their hero.
Zac Taby needed to decide how he wanted to be looked at. Right now it was only me looking at him, seeing myself. But I knew what he was in the eyes of the people here. Their runt. The enemy in their midst.
‘You’re going to go home and stay there,’ I said. I shoved the kid’s phone back towards him. ‘Play Xbox or something until this whole thing blows over. If I hear or see you around town before I leave, I’ll kick your arse.’
The kid took his phone and gave a dismissive laugh. He didn’t know how serious I was.