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Great place to meet people, I thought, climbing out of a drunk Volkswagen crashed on an ocean bed with a tide racing in. I looked at her then and she wasn’t too bad at all.

  I’m Jack, I said, from WA.

  I know. Here, help me wrap Nigel.

  We wrapped the still-moaning Nigel and helped him walk across the rocks towards a place where the road and the bay bed were much closer together and where people had found a way down and were walking towards us. By now vehicles had stopped above us and some were calling out.

  My wife has gone to get an ambulance, yelled a man.

  Three men who had climbed down into the bay were almost with us. When they reached June and Nigel they took him back the way they had come. June turned back and grabbed at my arm.

  You’re hurt, she said.

  No, not me.

  But look.

  I looked down at my arm and saw the blood and the deep cut.

  Arrr, it’s nothing.

  What, so you West Aussies are tough, are you? Can’t feel a thing, huh?

  She poked her finger at the blood and I yelped.

  So, you wanna go for a drink later then?

  Crikey, she said. What a time to ask a girl out.

  When she smiled her entire face moved, her eyebrows lifted almost to her hairline and her upper body rocked. I thought: Maybe. But it never happened. What did happen, of course, was we all went to hospital, got stitched, bandaged, released, all except Nigel, were interviewed by the police, caught a taxi to the Pacific Hotel and got so pissed we had to catch another taxi home, even though we only lived across the road. I didn’t sleep that night, because not long after I went to bed I had to get up and throw everything I had eaten or drunk over the past week into the shower recess. It stank. I stank. When I arrived at work the next morning, I stank still.

  (From To the Highlands, a novel, 2012.)

  MARTIN CHAMBERS

  THE PIT

  Spanner, Cookie and I had been on Palmenter Station the longest. We were the old hands and knew a few things we preferred not to but it was Cookie who seemed best able to ignore it all.

  It was morning, just after breakfast. A muster and import had finished a few days ago and we were all relaxing. Arif and I were in the canteen, him talking at me, and me pretending to listen. Charles and Simms were there too. Spanner was down in his shed and Palmenter was in the office. We heard the rumble of a car approaching on the gravel. That in itself was unusual and I stood to look out the window.

  A police car drove up to the canteen building and stopped. No one got out and in each of the buildings curious eyes must have been watching for what would happen next. The police never came out here. For them to do so now, something must be serious.

  ‘Better hide the harvest,’ called Arif to Cookie who was chopping leaf in the kitchen. Arif was serious, but the joke was that an entire plantation thrived immediately out the back door.

  ‘Someone must have been caught,’ Cookie said as he came from the kitchen casually wiping his hands on his apron. He peered out the window.

  Perhaps he was right: one of the previous imports had been picked up and then said something, given up the station and Palmenter and all of us. Unlikely, but I was wondering what this would mean for me, if I’d be charged, if we’d all be charged, with people smuggling.

  Palmenter admitting anything? Ha! We’d all be for it. He’d find some way of pinning it on us and getting off scot-free. I wondered what the penalty for people smuggling was. A few years jail? And here was Cookie calmly packaging up serious quantities of dope, a crime I suspected carried a far more severe penalty, again, a crime for which Palmenter would deny all knowledge and for which I could not claim innocence.

  Hopefully the police had come about something else entirely but I realised suddenly how things were. The truth was I was working on a station that routinely broke the law and each day, by my silence or inaction, I became more complicit. And there was no way out, I was trapped. I should go and get in the police car, lock myself in it and tell them to take me away.

  But life is not that simple. Palmenter was a bully, an arrogant bastard, he was a ruthless money-hungry opportunist preying on the weak and dispossessed. Yet the people we were helping had no choice and at least they now had a chance at a new life, a better life, and I wasn’t going to be the one to end that hope. I wanted to get away from the station, but I had to do it on my own terms.

  Palmenter strolled over to the car and two policemen got out and I could hear friendly deep voices, laughter, howdyados, as Palmenter led them towards us. We drifted like ghosts back into the kitchen as they came in the canteen door. Palmenter opened beers for them at the bar while we listened from behind the swing doors.

  ‘We hardly ever see you out this way. Don’t be strangers, always a meal or a beer here for you. Anytime.’

  I couldn’t make out the reply because just then the freezer motor started up. Cookie scurried out to turn it off. Last thing Palmenter wanted was cops dropping by unannounced, so him telling them not to be strangers, to drop by for a feed and a drink anytime, that was plain bullshit. I wondered if there was more going on here. It was a bit much to believe that boats could land and helicopters fly between the coast and here and not be seen. At some time someone must have reported something and Palmenter was most likely paying off the cops to keep them quiet. Probably only as a precaution. It wouldn’t be too hard to turn a blind eye when your patch is one hundred thousand square kilometres.

  We had crowded closer to hear better when Cookie came in from killing the freezer motor, slamming the door. We all jumped and he laughed and instead of joining us he continued to chop and wrap the crop. He neatened it into piles that he wrapped in alfoil the size of a half brick and then put all but two of them into the freezer.

  ‘Youse lot, garn, get outta here. See my illegal activity.’ But he didn’t mean it. He laughed then stood at the swing doors with the rest of us, weighing the packets in his hands in a way that made it obvious that this was for the coppers.

  ‘I’ll sort it, Trent. Be gone by morning. It’s all over, no problems.’ Palmenter stood, dragging his chair noisily. ‘You want some steaks. We just finished the muster, killed a couple.’ I didn’t hear an answer. ‘Plenty there, I’ll get you both a package,’ and before any of us could move he was in the kitchen, glaring at us.

  ‘Get some fucking steaks for these boys. Where’s Spanner. Shit, he’s going to pay for this. This will cost us, boys.’ No one had moved. ‘Fucking steaks, NOW.’ Not loud. Meaningful. Cookie handed him the package and sprinted into the freezer. Palmenter pointed to me and Simms.

  ‘You two, soon as they’ve gone, at the machine shed. And get fucking Spanner. Sober. The rest of you, get outta here. Go find something useful to do.’

  I found Spanner in the generator shed where he was changing the oil in the second generator. He had earmuffs on and so I signalled him to come outside. He shook his head and pointed at the machine, but I insisted. He followed me out.

  ‘What?’

  I told him about the police car and what we had seen, and that Palmenter wanted us all right away. We walked around to the shed where Palmenter was already waiting with Simms. Spanner was muttering under his breath, ‘This is not gunna be good.’

  The van was lying on its side by the edge of the track. It was one of the seven-seaters. They are more difficult to control on the softer tracks, but what had caused them to leave the highway and venture out here we would never know. What made them crash? Could have been a roo, suddenly jumping out. They had no experience of Australian wildlife. It wasn’t a blowout.

  Spanner swore nothing was wrong with the van. Steering, brakes were perfect. He serviced each of the vans thoroughly before they left the station. He might not have been one hundred per cent behind the operation but he knew as well as all of us that if the van broke down on its way to the city, if the people got into trouble, most likely someone would start asking questions. Spanner had built a nice little retreat for h
imself here at the station. He seemed happy enough to spend his days alone in the shed and drinking a steady supply of free beer, sleeping it off from early evening and then doing it all again the next day.

  They must have survived for some time. They had propped the rear door open and set up the mattresses inside. One body lay in there, shiny plastic-looking and bloated. A tarpaulin was tied between the wheels and angled with string to some shrubs. The cooker, boxes and suitcases were arranged in the lean-to and two people were leaning against the van, looking as if they were resting, except for the flies around their faces. Empty water containers were scattered around and we could imagine the slow-rising dread and the increasing thirst. The desert heat. Flies buzzed around the bodies and the open tins of food. We followed a network of footprints to another body that lay under a shrub a short distance away. Maggots crawled in open wounds. A few metres further a shallow grave had been dug up by dingoes. Half-eaten bits of body and clothing protruded. Must have been the first to die. A frypan and a pot lay nearby and I could see them weakly trying to dig a hole with the utensils, to bury their friend with the dignity he deserved. The first one to succumb to the heat and thirst. Was he their friend? I knew that many of them ended up travelling together with nothing in common but the desire to move to a new country. Thrown together by circumstance, by a small boat and even smaller van, now burying someone they might not even know the name of, but knowing that all too soon it might be them.

  ‘How many in this van?’ asked Palmenter.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Simms.

  Palmenter hit him. He swung his arm full-length and caught Simms on the jaw. Not hard, but deliberate.

  ‘What the fuck, don’t know,’ he yelled. ‘It’s your job to know.’

  ‘You said not to write anything down.’

  Palmenter hit him again, this time hard enough to knock Simms to the ground. ‘You remember. Don’t write it down. How hard is it to remember?’ He looked around at the scrub. ‘We got to know if this is all of them.’

  ‘Five, boss,’ I said. I had no idea, but then neither did he. He looked at me. Spanner had moved away when Palmenter hit Simms but I stood my ground. ‘Five. This was the last van to leave, I remember it had five.’

  No such thing, I made it up but it must have sounded believable. I had counted five bodies and I did not want to spend any longer here scouting around for more. Palmenter grunted.

  ‘Well done, at least someone’s got a brain. All right then. Spanner, get a rope on it to pull it back up. You two,’ Simms and me, ‘put the bodies in the back. Quick smart. Lucky for us no one is ever going to miss these blokes.’

  We dragged the bodies into the van. We had to climb inside, then back over them to get out, but it would have seemed disrespectful to just shove them in. We wanted to lay them out carefully but it was difficult as the bodies were putrid and flyblown. Simms began retching when we dragged the maggoty body from under the shrub. It had been eaten, an arm came off and although I tried to avoid looking it was impossible not to look at the face that was half-chewed and crawling. Simms was vomiting but something in me allowed me to hold my breath and keep going. I was thinking how unpredictable Palmenter might be, what he might do if we both stopped working and knelt in the sand with spit dribble, dry-retching. Spanner rigged the 4WD and pulled the van upright, then hitched up a towline.

  Simms was quick to volunteer when we needed someone in the van to steer it. It might have been an attempt to redeem himself or perhaps it was to avoid being in the car with Palmenter. I couldn’t tell. He kept touching his jaw and it looked more like the pathetic subservient gesture of a minion than for the soreness he might have felt. Anyway, I breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t want to be in with those five stinking bodies that, despite our reverently laying them out, had all tumbled to a mess on the floor as we righted the van.

  At the pit Palmenter instructed us to unhitch the van and push it over the edge and torch it. It rolled to the bottom and parked itself remarkably, as if someone had driven it there. Palmenter stood at the top of the pit watching while we gathered a few clumps of dried spinifex and climbed down to stick them under the wheels. Spanner took off the fuel cap and drained some fuel into a tin. He splashed this around inside the van and onto the bodies, then he flipped the seat and pulled the fuel line from the motor and let it fall to the ground. Petrol began to leak out and soak into the ground.

  ‘Stand back!’ he called.

  He dribbled a line of fuel and lit it. The flame marched slowly across the sand towards the van and almost went out. Simms was halfway up the slope but Spanner and I stood together watching, only metres from the flame that seemed in no hurry to arrive. I thought Spanner was going to say something about the bomb about to go off but he didn’t.

  ‘Farewell, you unlucky buggers,’ he said.

  By the time we got to the top of the pit we could feel the intense heat on our backs and smell blistering paint. Neither of us looked back.

  On the drive back to the station Palmenter regained control.

  ‘Good job, boys. Could have been a monumental fuck-up.’

  The tension in the car was thick. Spanner was fuming because Palmenter had accused him of not fixing the van properly. I was worried what would happen if he spoke up.

  ‘What were they doing on that road anyway?’ I asked nobody. ‘You need experience to drive on these sand tracks. In future we need to make sure they only go on the highway, give them a good map, maybe escort them to the turn-off.’

  I often came up with useful ways to improve how we did things. Later, when Palmenter and his mates changed how we ran the operation by collecting the vans themselves and driving off-site to meet the imports, I thought it was because I had suggested it.

  ‘You’re a smart boy, Son,’ said Palmenter. ‘Always thinking ahead. That’s the way to do business, think ahead, plan for things.’ He looked at me, then to Spanner and Simms. ‘Sorry I lost it back there, boys.’

  Fuckin’ arsehole, I thought. Me and him. Arseholes both.

  (From How I Became the Mr Big of People Smuggling, a novel, 2014.)

  AMANDA CURTIN

  THE SOUND OF A ROOM

  The house is on death row. Two more days, according to the Condemned sign nailed to the lurching picket fence. Two days before estate agents bring in a team to dismantle and carry away what’s salvageable — there won’t be much — of the jarrah floorboards and plaster cornices, the Metters stove, the granite laundry trough, the rusted cast-iron bath. The rest will be reduced to rubble.

  He’d approached the agents after hearing the news of poor Hughie’s death, and they’d passed on his request to the solicitors, but no one had been able to grasp just what it was he was asking for. It was clear they thought him a time-waster, possibly unbalanced.

  If he could have managed a third mortgage, he would have made an offer. But even his accountant had looked flinty at the notion of his buying a structurally unsound house with no intention of demolishing it — or altering it in any way. What kind of fool investment is that?

  So it has come to this. To secure what he wants, he will have to steal it.

  In the late hours, he takes up watch opposite the house, concealed behind a wild privet hedge that backs onto a stormwater drain. He has dressed the part. Black cargo pants. Black jacket. Black beanie on his head, pulled down low over knotted hair the colour of toast. Thin black gloves, black socks and runners. Of course, the smears of soot from the barbecue are pure melodrama. But the fact is: he does have an exceedingly white face, the result of working eighteen hours a day in sunless isolation. He’d had to do something about the contrast between skin and so much matt black. Providing he keeps his mouth closed, he can bleed into the night, just like a real cat burglar.

  Footsteps approach. Good leather soles striking concrete, clean and sharp. His head tilts to catch the rhythm. A trifle uneven? Yes. The woman passing by favours her left, her gait pulled off centre by the heft of a briefcase. A briefcase, can you bel
ieve it, at this hour!

  Ten minutes go by. Fifteen. A cat-shaped phantom ripples over a wall, a plastic bag cartwheels along the gutter with a rustling ssshhh, but it’s beginning to look a safe bet that no one will see him slip across the road and round to the back verandah of the condemned house.

  He listens, to make sure.

  What he hears, others would call silence. The absence of definable noise. But there is no such thing as silence.

  Water trickles along the open drain, altering in pitch as it gurgles around the leaves of fallen branches. Ten blocks to the west vehicles drone on the freeway, each engine contributing a cadence of its own to the muted hum. White ants move unseen within powdering pickets. A snail silvering the footpath displaces granules of dirt, making infinitesimal scuffs on the soundscape of night.

  It is benign, its register reassuringly free of human notes. A perfect night for thieves, for stealing the sound of a room.

  What does a room sound like? Students often ask him that. The question shows how much they have to learn, these young apprentices, about acoustics, about the nature of ambient noise. No two rooms have the same acoustic profile, he tells them, even if they are built from the same plan. What a room sounds like depends on its size and shape — the volume and configuration of air — but also on what is in it. Hard surfaces like glass and wood will bounce sound waves back and forward, prolonging reverberation. (Here he demonstrates, positioning sheets of glass and ply and masonite. He claps his hands, strikes a gong with a rubber mallet. There are always one or two students who volunteer to join in, making strangulated cries and listening in awe to the echo of their own voices.) Cloth and carpet will soak up the waves — the degree of absorption varying with the thickness and density of the materials and their placement in the room. (He makes his point using insulated panels, and heads nod appreciatively. Students enjoy a good comparison.) Minuscule gaps above lintels and around the frames of windows, cracks in walls, apertures created by fretted seals — these all allow an exchange of air between one room and another, or between a room and the world at large, a barely perceptible leakage of fugitive life: air conditioners, the scraping of hair through a comb, the singing of electricity on overhead wires. It is subtle, like breathing, but not soundless. (Some students look at him doubtfully. It doesn’t sound very scientific.)