Peter Corris - White Meat

“Jesus,” she said when I’d finished, “I was lucky; he might’ve done me.

“That’s right. Will you answer my questions?”

“Yeah, what were they?”

I repeated them and she drank some gin and smoked while she thought it over.

“I can’t remember that she called him anything,” she said at last. “They weren’t getting on too well seemed to me. You know Noni?”

I shook my head and produced the photograph.

“That’s her, the slut. Well, the bloke’s not big, about five foot six or seven, not more. He’s thin but sort of flabby thin, you know?”

I said I didn’t know.

“Well, there’s not much meat on him but what there is looks sort of soft. His chest’s sort of slid down to his gut. Can’t make it no clearer. Gimme another smoke.”

I got out the makings and started to roll one but she reached over impatiently and took the packet away. Her fingernails were black-rimmed and the thin skin on her hands was stretched tight like the fabric on a model plane. She made a fat cigarette and twisted the ends.

“Anything else about him?”

“You mean clothes and that?”

“Anything.”

“He had an old suit on, blue with a sort of checked shirt under it, like tartan. Looked a bit funny with the suit. He was real pale, like he’s been in hospital. Oh, and his ears stuck out, like this.” She fanned her ears out from under her lank, greasy hair.

“What did they talk about? Did they say where they were going?”

“Let’s think.” She put a black fingernail through the black hair and scratched. “He didn’t say much but Noni blabbed a bit. She was pissed and I reckon she was taking something else as well. You know?”

“I know. What did she say?”

“Well, I went out to do somethin’ and I heard her say, when I was coming back, that it was a long time ago and he should forget it and it was only money.”

“What did he say?”

“Told her to shut up. Then she said something about Macleay and he told her to shut up again. Listen, did they take the car?”

“Was it parked out front?”

“Yes.”

“They took it.”

“Fuck ‘em. They leave the big one?”

“The Chev? Yes.”

Her thin, ratty eyebrows went up. “Is that a fact? Reckon I can keep it?”

I thought of Ricky Simmonds, slumped down dead in a ditch around a fort built to repel invaders of an already invaded land. Crouched over like an Aboriginal warrior buried with all ceremony as in the time before horses and guns and arsenic and venereal disease.

His car had been his shield and his weapon and now it was discarded beside a house where black men were banned by a yellow woman. Australia.

A man in a dressing gown and three days of stubble came through the passage door before I could answer about the car. He shuffled into the kitchen and stopped short when he saw the gin.

“Piss off, Darby,” Lorraine said sharply.

The man looked at her with bleary eyes that sagged down into deep pouches about his cheekbones. With the eyes and the stubble and the grizzled grey hair poking through the top of the dressing gown he looked like a tired old owl who’d lost his way.

“Go on Lorraine,” he whined. “Just a small one.”

She shrugged and nodded at me. I poured some gin and handed him the glass; he didn’t seem to notice me, just lifted his hand and let the liquor slide down his throat. His neck convulsed once and he set the glass down carefully on the table. He let it sit for a few seconds, then tilted it again and got a few drops on his tongue.

“Right, piss off,” Lorraine snapped.

He pulled the dressing gown around him and dragged himself out of the room. I looked at the woman.

“A bum,” she said. “Probably came out to piss in the sink. Now, about that car?”

“Not up to me. Give me the details on the ute.”

She did, the number and colour and a description of the frame mounted over the tray. I picked up my gun from the bench and tucked it away. I nodded to her and headed for the door. She ignored me, her hand snaked out for the gin bottle and she wasn’t worried about her glass.

Outside the drizzle was steady and the ground was slippery underfoot. I walked slowly along the side of the house and pulled open the driver’s side of the Chevy. The interior light came on. A profusion of wires and fuses spilled out over the floor like a heap of multi-coloured guts.

I was tired and Macleay was three hours away by road if I didn’t kill myself by falling asleep at the wheel. It was three a.m. and I needed some sleep badly. I drove to Newcastle airport and bought a seat on the flight leaving for Macleay, Coffs Harbour and points north at six a.m. I parked my car in the airport lot and locked it after taking out the duffel coat and the whisky. I wrapped the. 38 in a scarf and stuffed it into the coat pocket. The bottle went into the other pocket. I found the dimmest corner of the passenger lounge, stretched out on the seat and took a long pull at the whisky. It hit hard and started to close down some departments in my mind. I pulled the coat over my legs and went to sleep.

Three hours later I was awake with stiff joints, a headache and a vile taste in my mouth. The lounge canteen wasn’t open this early so I went into the toilet and swilled water around in my mouth and lapped it into my face. The black-bristled dial that looked back at me from the mirror was red-eyed and pale-skinned.

“You look terrible,” I said to it and it insulted me right back.

There were a few people standing around in the drafty lounge. There was a sleek guy in a suit carrying a steel-rimmed briefcase and a girl in overalls and a fringed shawl straddling a big New Guinea-style string bag who looked aggressively at me when I glanced at her. A clutch of kids swarmed around a woman in black who had the long-suffering, my-reward-is-not-of-this-world look of an Italian matron. A young man with a thin aquiline face like a Spanish gypsy was reading a paper and seemed to be taking some trouble to ignore me as I walked through to the seat allocation desk. The clerk ripped leaves out of the ticket and when I looked around again the gypsy had gone and left his paper behind. I went over and picked it up. It was the Newcastle Herald of three days before.

More people turned up and about twenty of us got on the plane. We look off dead on time and ran straight into a headwind which we battled for the whole trip. The dark widow fed sweets to the children like a conveyor belt. The executive type took papers out of his briefcase and worked on them with a gold ballpoint pen. The girl in the overalls dug a paperback copy of The Golden Notebook out of her bag and didn’t lift her head from it the whole way. I looked down across the wing of the plane as the central coast of New South Wales slipped past beneath us. The mountains and valleys were wrapped in swirling blue mist and the ground, when it showed through, was a patchwork of brown and green and white like camouflage. I rubbed my hand across my face and promised myself a shave and some breakfast in Macleay. The eight hour sleep in a soft bed would have to wait.

The plane bucked about on the descent but the weather up here, a few degrees north of Sydney, was clear and the moist wind blowing across the little runway was warm. The terminal was a fibro-cement affair with a galvanised iron roof, the whole structure sitting up on yard-high brick piers. We trooped across the tarmac, went up some rickety wooden steps and into the arrivals lounge which was also the departure lounge and the cargo despatch. I had all my luggage in my pockets so I went through the building and out into the real world before anyone else. The executive was hot on my tail but I caught the first taxi going. The driver seemed half asleep when I got into the cab and he stayed that way. We ran out of the airport standing area and along a road that was only wide enough for one car to drive on the metal; the gravel beside the road was washed thin and runnels threatened to undermine the surfaced section. I sat in the back seat and rolled a cigarette for want of anything else to do. The rainforest grew close to the road on either side and screened out everything else, only the occasional track running in, showing deep caterpillar treads, betrayed the logging going on inside that would eventually thin the forest away to nothing.