In jail, he’ d be vulnerable.
Whatever deal he’ d made with the APM for his protection
was now broken. He’ d betrayed them too.
It was time to run.
*
Lee returned to the Inglewood house to clean out his things, but Frankie was waiting for him at the kitchen table. Stil
dressed in her scrubs, smiling at him over the rim of a teacup.
‘Did you hear on the radio?’
‘I was there. It happened right in front of me.’
‘No, not that.’
There was a cold light in her eyes. ‘I’m talking about the
leader of the opposition, John Howard, and the leader of
the Nationals, Sinclair. They both said this morning that
Australia’s getting too Asian. That immigration should be
slowed. You know what that means? What we’ve achieved
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already? The Labor Prime Minister has to come out and respond to them, say that it’s good to have Asians walking in and taking over. That’s electoral poison. That’s a wedge, right there.’
‘I didn’t hear. But –’
‘I’m sorry about your father, I real y am. But when you turn rat, you have to expect that kind of thing.’
Lee felt a flush of anger. ‘I don’t know what my father
promised you people, but it’s –’
‘What do you mean, us people?’
Frankie stared cool y at him, but when he didn’t answer, she smiled, nodded to the gram packet on the table. His works
already there, laid upon the saucer. ‘Go on and help yourself.
I already made a start. I’m gonna head to the supermarket, get some things.’
Lee took the seat she vacated. He watched her retrieve
her car keys from the hook by the front door, exit into the morning light.
He opened the packet and tapped out a pile onto the edge
of the saucer. Pushed it across with the nub of the plunger, rubbed it around until it all dissolved.
His last shot, before he hit the road, for good.
The plan was to head north, and live off the stores at his
great-grandfather’s secret camp. Why he needed his books,
before he left.
Hide up there until he could visit his father, in prison.
Lee drew up the clear liquid and raised the syringe to the
light. Tapped it and squirted.
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He was just about to put it in his arm when he realised that the solution was bubbling.
He laid the syringe down, put his finger to his tongue and
dabbed it in the gram packet. Put his finger up to his mouth, but stopped. His fingertip burning with something caustic. He sniffed, and it smelled familiar.
Lee rose and opened the cupboard under the sink. There
was the packet of Drano, its spout crusted with powder. He
sniffed it and put it back. Now he saw the knife in the sink, powder still on the upper blade where she’ d chopped the
grains into the finest white powder.
Lee went and looked in his room.
It was cleaned out.
Bed made and sheets changed and pillows puffed with air.
Like he’ d never been there.
*
Brad’s salmon-brick house in Nol amara was the same. No
Charger parked out front. The screen door locked. No signs
of life inside. No cereal packets on the benches or dishes in the sink. No television on the milk crate in the corner of the lounge, or sheets on the bed. Lee walked down the drive and peered over the fence. No tools scattered about or clothes
on the Hil s hoist. Even the garden hose was gone from the
driveway tap that dripped into the grey earth.
217
23.
The Royal Perth Hospital waiting room was crowded. In the
first row of chairs a grey-haired Aboriginal couple leaned into one another. The man was wrapped in a red blanket and the
old woman cradled a baby that wouldn’t stop crying. A white teenager with red eyes sat beside his mother. The laces on his football boots were undone and mud from the boot-sprigs
was crumbled in a halo around his feet. A skinny man with a sunburned face leaned forward, spitting into a cup, wheezing and coughing, a blue tint on his lips. Dozens of patients behind them, all the seats taken.
Lee asked the duty nurse if he could see his father. She didn’t know the name and looked down her clipboard and made
a cal . He saw the change of expression come into her eyes, and then the glance at his jeans, his workboots, pretending that she was looking past him. She put down the phone and
took a breath. ‘Can I have a name, please? Mr Southern is stil recovering from being operated on. He isn’t conscious yet, but 218
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if you want to take a seat, and wait …’
Lee caught the tone in her voice.
‘No thanks. I’ll come back in a couple of hours.’
The Ford was parked on a sloping lot in the shadow of the
Catholic cathedral across the road. Lee unlocked the steel tray-box and took out the blue scrubs that he’ d taken from Frankie’s room. They were tucked away in a bottom drawer; likely from someone she’ d brought home. They weren’t washed, and had
yellow stains on the front legs. Smelled gastric.
Lee slipped the trousers over his jeans. Took off his t-shirt and put on the sleeveless top, smoothed it over the Luger at his waist.
*
At the service entrance he took a wheelchair and kicked off the brake and pushed it through the heavy striped doors
that were marked with black boot-prints. He walked to the
nearest lift and pressed floor number two. He didn’t know
where he was going. The corridors of the second floor were
busy with emergency staff going about their business. Men
pushing trolleys laden with soiled sheets. They wore white
uniforms. He saw a young doctor shining a light into the eyes of a child with a bleeding head, wearing the same blue scrubs that Lee wore. Theatre nurses in Frankie’s green scrubs and ward nurses wearing the white aprons gathered around. Two
orderlies in white uniforms transferred a groaning old woman from an ambulance trolley to a hospital bed. Older nurses in little ward stations separated by low glass wal s.
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All the doctors and nurses wore ID tags and different
lanyards, but not the orderlies.
Lee wasn’t going to pass for a doctor.
He found a bank of desks that were covered with clipboards
and files of different colours. He took one of the files and entered the room behind the desks. It was a linen room where staff also kept their valuables. He didn’t touch the handbags and shoulder bags but took up a pile of white folded uniforms like the orderlies wore, and felt his way through the col ars until he found his size. He locked the door and took off the doctor’s scrubs and dressed himself like an orderly. Stowed the soiled doctor’s scrubs behind a pile of white sheets. Exchanged the wheelchair out in the triage room for a trolley containing toiletry materials – paper towels, liquid soap, fresh bedpans and adult nappies.
Lee got out of the lift at the highest floor. He didn’t know where the operation had taken place. He only knew that his
father was still a prisoner, and that he’ d be under guard. It made sense that he’ d be kept on the higher floors.
This floor was made up of wards and private rooms. Through
the windows in the various wards he could see the city skyline and the river to the south, the tops of giant eucalypts swaying in the sea breeze. He pushed the trolley around the different rooms, keeping his eyes down when he passed a nurse or a
doctor. The rooms smelled of disinfectant and fresh laundry.
Within the wards, most of the beds were curtained, and he
had to stop and peer into each one. It was while opening
another curtain to reveal a sleeping young woman with her
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hands clasped around a teddy bear that he heard the voice.
The old man’s voice – coming from the television bolted to
the ceiling. Lee parked his trolley in the hall and sat on the chair beside the sleeping woman.
There was no doubt about it.
It was the old man – Kinslow’s superior – the leader of the APM. The same accent and intonation.
A strap of text at the bottom of the screen read General Brian Paxton.
Now there was a face to go with the voice. Lee listened
to the words but was captivated by the man’s dark eyes, his imperious hand gestures, his angled head when he thought a
question unworthy.
He was being interviewed because it’ d been leaked that
General Paxton was about to be announced by the Premier as
the new Governor of the State of Western Australia, subject to the Queen’s approval. A man with a long and distinguished military career. Started out as a ranking commando officer
in WW2, was there at the St Nazaire Raid where he won a
Victoria Cross. Had migrated to Australia in the early 1950s, became a lawyer but then joined the Australian Regular Army as a second lieutenant to fight in Korea, then saw service with the SAS in Malaya, Borneo, and final y Vietnam.
‘I’m flattered by your questions, but I am not able to confirm or deny this rumour. Saying that, I have dedicated my life to the service of this nation, and I couldn’t think of a higher honour. Thank you.’
With that, Paxton turned on his heels and went up the
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veranda stairs and into the dark house, the cameras still
rolling. Lee could smell the jasmine flowers that clumped
over the veranda railings, because he’ d been there, and
smelled them. Could remember the sound of boots on the
bare boards, the wiping of feet on the doormat, the smell
of polished wood and Brasso inside the house until he was
dragged down into the limestone cellar.
The vision was cut, and the television news segued to
coverage of the right-wing ral y outside Parliament House,
a sea of Australian and Southern Cross flags, Kinslow
addressing the assembled skinheads and others wearing the
Celtic cross on t-shirts and peaked caps. Not a Nazi flag to be seen, just a banner reading Australian Patriotic Movement.
Men and women, young and old. A few children, the wind-
buffeted voice of Kinslow, speaking through a megaphone:
‘… Even our federal parliamentarians have seen reason and
made their voices known, as we all must do at the coming
election.’
Someone passed outside the curtain, humming a Neil
Diamond tune. Lee waited until they’ d gone and took his
trolley, the front left wheel squeaking on the linoleum floor.
There were a few private rooms toward the end of the hall,
two of them dark and three of them lit up. The darkened
rooms contained a sleeping shape that was too large to be
his father. A sad whistling snore emanated from an old
woman in the next room. Lee bypassed the next two rooms
and arrived at the corner room whose curtains were pulled
and door shut. There was no scrawled patient name tag on
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this door, unlike the others. He listened for a while, and
then turned the doorknob. He saw the copper’s polished
boots this side of the bed. There was an ensuite shower and toilet to the side, and Lee wheeled in the trolley and parked it against the wall. The young constable looked at him and
shrugged, made exasperated eyes. He was tall and thin and
had a pronounced Adam’s apple and a long nose. He glanced
at his watch and shook his head.
‘I’m gonna be here a minute, cleaning up, if you want a
break.’
The constable looked wary, but when Lee began unpacking
some paper towels and took up a large bottle of pink liquid soap, clearly not caring either way, he scratched his nose and looked at his watch again. Lee followed him in the reflection off the bathroom mirror through the open door.
‘I might do that. Thanks. Got another six hours of this and I’ve gone through the gossip mags already. Whaddo I care if Kylie and Craig are getting it off? Hard to tell ’em apart, with that poodle hair.’
‘No worries. Like I say, I’m gonna be here.’
The copper took a packet of Winfield Blues from his shirt
pocket and tapped one out, shuffled toward the door.
Lee had avoided looking at his father and he was glad of it.
The sight of him so small and thin, his bony shoulders above the bandages that wrapped his chest, would have given him
away.
His eyes were shut, and air snickered through his nose.
His long hair was sweat-plastered on his forehead, despite
223
the chill in the room. His lips were grey and his sunken eye sockets caught shadow.
At least he wasn’t handcuffed to the bed. No need for that, just yet.
Lee sat in the copper’s seat, dragged himself alongside the bed, took his father’s hand in his own.
He looked at each of the tattoos that were so familiar. The wedge-tailed eagle, coming in to land on his chest with its talons out, smudged now with age. The equal y smudged
dagger and motto of the SAS, on his forearm. Lee’s solid black handprint on the ball of his shoulder, which he’ d done when Lee was seven. His father had made Lee photocopy his hand
in the council library and then took him to the backyard bikie tattooist in Dongara, whose homemade gun drilled away on
its buzzing elastic band while he wiped the irritated skin with a green and white dishrag. The pair of them talked about
bikes and American bands while Lee pretended to read from
the latest Commando comic that he bought weekly from the newsagent. Every now and then the tattooist would shake the hair from his sweaty face and look at Lee and shout ‘Donner und Blitzen!’ or ‘Gott im Himmel’ or ‘Raus, raus, raus!’ then crack up laughing.
His father moaned softly now, and his lips moved, his
tongue searching for moisture inside his open mouth, making a shucking sound.
Lee squeezed his father’s hand, and whispered, ‘I’m here,’
but his father’s eyes never opened. He had always been wiry and lean, the product of hard work, a starvation diet and too 224
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much speed, but now the muscles in his arms were pliant and soft.
Lee heard the squeak of two sets of shoes in the hal way, and he replaced his father’s hand on the bed, but he didn’t move the chair back to its position.
When the copper returned he was going to lie, and say that
the man had woken, had asked him to sit there for a while, to not leave him.
But it wasn’t the copper.
Lee saw her profile through the glass and the face of the
man beside. It was Robbie, Kinslow’s boy, with Frankie.
They rolled into the room, both of them registering surprise when they saw him. Frankie’s mouth made a snarl, and Robbie, wearing the same white orderly’s uniform as Lee, reached
behind his back and drew out the cattle prod.
Frankie was carrying a tray. On the tray was a syringe, and a swab.
&nb
sp; Lee stood to protect his father.
Frankie had access to all kinds of medicine, but she’ d chosen Drano to put into Lee’s arm. She’ d wanted him to suffer as he died.
‘Paxton’s your father, isn’t he? The old man.’
She didn’t answer. Very careful y, she picked up the syringe, tossed the tray onto the bed, held the syringe underhand like a knife. Lee could see the training in her movements.
But Robbie put his hand in front of her, stepped forward,
smiling perversely, waving the crackling prod.
Lee had his Luger, but remembered his father’s words, to
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never draw a weapon unless you were prepared to use it.
Gunshots in the hospital – he didn’t want that.
They both came at him.
Lee got inside the prod and watched the needle catch in
his shirt, the world slowing down as Lee’s hand on Robbie’s forearm brought the prod onto Frankie’s shoulder. He heard
her cry out, her right arm gone dead, her limp fingers a frozen point in the blur of hands as she took the syringe into her left hand and thrust it toward him. Lee dropped a knee and took
Robbie’s weight, threw him onto the syringe.
Frankie stood back. Robbie didn’t feel it at first. Struggled with Lee’s hand at his throat, fingers closing on the carotids while his knee sank itself home. He felt Robbie begin to close down. The tension left his body. Frankie backed out of the
room, cradling her deadened arm. Lee watched the lights go
out in Robbie’s eyes, surprise and then fear as one eye drooped shut, while in the open eye blood vessels began to burst like fireworks, and then he was on the floor.
Lee stood and straightened his shirt. Dragged Robbie into
the bathroom and pushed in the trolley and shut the door.
He looked down at his father, unconscious stil . There was a cannula in his left forearm connected to a drip. Lee pulled it out of his arm, put a blanket over him to hide the bleeding.
Kicked at each of the wheel brakes and shoved the bed around the room and into the hal .
The lift was down the other end of the corridor. He didn’t
know where Frankie had gone. Any moment he expected the
lift to open and the copper to emerge, but it didn’t happen 226
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like that. Lee elbowed the button and waited, and when the