Peter Corris - Beware of the Dog

A question you normally answer without a thought. I couldn’t do it. I said something meaningless, maybe cryptic again. Terry sounded puzzled.

The next day I caught the 8.03 to the Blue Mountains. Rabbit at Rest was one of the paperbacks Glen had bought me and I was working slowly through it. It was a good book to read when you were on the right side of fifty and didn’t look like dying just yet. The book held my attention, but I looked up from time to time to observe the passengers coming and going, boarding and alighting. It was good to feel like part of the moving scene again, not confined within walls. To be out there in the world where something interesting might happen. On the train, nothing did, except that Rabbit’s son came back from the drug rehabilitation program as a born-again Christian. Not for the first time, I was glad I hadn’t had any kids.

I was in Katoomba shortly after ten. In the city it had been overcast and gloomy but the day was clear and bright in the mountains. And cold. I’d come prepared for it in a thick shirt and heavy sweater but the cold cut through the layers of cotton and wool and I could feel the places where I’d been burned and lacerated stiffening. I walked up the steep main street to the police station thinking that it was a different world up here-Sydney belonged to the ocean, the mountains belonged to the enormous country behind them. Dangerous thoughts, these, they tend to make you feel that human beings have no place on the continent at all.

The reception I got from the Katoomba cops couldn’t have been more different from that in Sydney. Here, I was something of a hero-the man who’d dragged the woman from the inferno and might have saved her life if help had arrived in time. No fault of his. Some city cops had been up, asking around and making themselves unpopular. Nobody gave a shit about the Loggins and Brewster case up here. There was no question of charges for bringing the Cruiser in or housing it. They told me they’d started it up every few days or so and that it was running fine. I thanked them, produced my ID, accepted their good wishes for my recovery from my injuries, and that was virtually that. I started the Cruiser and drove it out of the police car park.

A hundred metres down the road I pulled over to the kerb. I got out and opened the back of the truck. There were all the things I had hastily thrown together that morning four weeks ago-the bedroll, sleeping bag, thermos. There was no sign of the leather jacket. I was sure I’d left it in the back. I yanked open the back door and looked on the seat. The newspaper I’d bought was there along with the binoculars, which must have been taken from where I’d been observing the house. They were back in their case, safely tucked away. No whisky, that’d have been too much to ask, but where was the jacket? I swore and searched again but it wasn’t in the Land Cruiser.

I sat behind the wheel while the light morning traffic crawled past. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry. I’d been feeling fine when I’d arrived in Katoomba, now I didn’t feel so good. The morning sun coming through the windscreen made me hot inside my sweater but I’d been warned against sudden changes in temperature so I didn’t take it off. I sat, sweated and swore. I’d been warned about getting emotionally upset, too, but I kept on swearing. You nearly died and were on drugs for a couple of weeks, I thought. That could have screwed up your memory. I tried to recall in detail my actions before I’d gone up the rock pile and I found that I couldn’t.

I started the motor and headed towards Mount Victoria. The weather changed abruptly the way it can in the mountains. Some cloud came over and some mist came down, a heavy mist, needing an occasional swipe from the windscreen wipers. Not ideal conditions for searching for something brown in a couple of hundred hectares of bush. I took the back way in and bumped along the tracks until I found where I’d parked before going up to watch the house. This was the right place, surely-right rocks, right trees. I convinced myself and got out to search. The mist was almost a drizzle. I grabbed the groundsheet from among the camping gear and draped it over my head.

There had been a fair bit of rain up there and the ground was slushy. Things started to come back to me as I probed around. I’d worn the jacket into town but I’d put the parka on when I got back here because I’d thought I might have a long cold wait up on the rocks. I’d got the binoculars and the whisky from the seat, put them on the ground and taken off the jacket. Then… I remembered. I’d slung the jacket up onto the top of the Cruiser intending to put it away safely. And something had broken the chain of thought. It came back to me-a train whistle from the track across the valley, a long, clear sound that had cut through the chill morning air.

When had they found the Cruiser? I didn’t know. If it had been late in the day they might not have seen the jacket and just checked the vehicle over before driving off. In which direction? I searched both ways on both sides of the track for about twenty minutes before I found it. An overhanging branch must have brushed it off the roof. The jacket had fallen into a bush and lay, scarcely disturbed from the way I’d folded it, in a natural leafy shelter.

It was wet and slimy and a white mildew had formed around the seams. I stood under a tree, water dripping from the groundsheet and felt the jacket. The photograph was still there, not as crisp as before, but still there.

I ran back to the Cruiser, put the jacket on the seat beside Rabbit at Rest and got moving. I needed the wipers now and the heater. My hands and feet had become cold during the search and aches and pains had started up in various places. The warm air circulated around me and I took a few experimental deep breaths. No wheezing, chest clear. It was some minutes before I realised that I’d turned onto the Electricity Commission service track automatically and was now heading for Salisbury Road. I had an impulse to turn around and go back the way I’d come, difficult though the manoeuvre would be on the narrow road. I’ve never understood old soldiers’ desires to visit the battlefields where they’d fought and bled. I never wanted to see mine in Malaya ever again, and I felt the same about the Lambertes’ cabin.

But I kept going and there it was-a collection of blackened foundation pillars, a chimney and fireplace and a set of stone steps that led nowhere at all. The fire had consumed everything combustible. The iron roof had collapsed and lay in a jumbled heap where people had once sat and talked, ate and drunk and made love. I stopped and looked at the ruin through the streaming windscreen and the slapping wiper blades. The barbecue and water tank were intact; the burnt-out 4WD had been removed. Trees on all sides of the house were charred and heavy wheels had churned the ground into a sea of blackened mud. I had a mental flash of the woman gyrating in terror in her high heeled shoes and erotic underwear, and of Patrick Lamberte, big and commanding in his country squire’s outfit, lightly tossing the package he’d picked up at the Post Office. He had looked like a man turning over his cards, confidently expecting an ace. Unaccountably, it was the image of the man that was most disturbing. Although by now I was warm and relatively dry inside the Cruiser, I shivered. I engaged the gear and drove fast down Salisbury Road, away from the death and destruction.

I drove straight through Mount Victoria and down to Katoomba before I felt like stopping. The visibility was bad, the road was slick and it took all my concentration to make the run safely. Good. I was in no fit state for letting my mind drift to other matters, to faces and movements and all the other half-collected impressions. Through my association with Helen Broadway, who read philosophy and Jungian psychology, I was aware of the rag-bag of memories and intuitions that make up our unconscious understanding of the world. I resisted them, always. I preferred to deal with the concrete and known- the facts, hidden and revealed, that defined the world in which work could be done, results achieved. I had a sense that I was moving beyond that world and it alarmed and disturbed me as such feelings always have.