Matt Eaton - Blank

He pointed to the crumpled figure on the floor. “It was her, eh?”

“She’ll be OK, won’t she?”

“Yeah, yeah. It just sucks a lot outa you. Took me a while to get used to it. Bloody design fault if you ask me,” he added.

Luckman felt himself warming to the guy. He decided to take a chance. “The Others came for us tonight.”

“Bastards.”

“Are they gone?” Luckman inquired.

“Yeah, coast is clear.”

Luckman was awoken by the knocking on the motel room door. Judging by the persistent rapping he guessed he’d already slept through the visitor’s previous attempts to wake him. He blinked furiously in an effort to shake off his torpor. Mel was passed out on the bed next to him and didn’t stir. For one terrible moment he feared the worst but then saw her chest moving. She was stripped down to a pair of shorts and a bra. He dimly remembered helping her out of her shirt before they’d both collapsed. She had told him she didn’t want to be alone. He had passed out next to her moments after she hit the bed.

He felt a lot better after sleeping. Seeing her lying there prompted a pulse of desire and he might have been tempted to do something about it except the visitor wasn’t going away. He glanced at a clock on the bedside table. It was two thirty in the afternoon. He pulled on a T-shirt and opened the door of the motel room.

Pat Williams lifted the sunglasses from his eyes and smiled a warm greeting. Luckman was about to say something in response but Pat quickly put his finger to his lips and waved urgently for Luckman to come with him. Luckman glanced back at Mel. Pat offered a silent reassurance that she’d be OK, his expression tinged with sly admiration.

Luckman quickly pulled on a pair of runners. Pat peeled off his hooded jumper, revealing an identical jumper underneath. He threw the first one at Luckman and urged him to put it on. It stank of stale sweat, prompting Luckman to crumple up his nose in disgust. Pat was insistent. He removed his sunnies, pointed to them and then to Luckman, suggesting he find a pair. Luckman did so. Pat stepped into the room and pulled the hood up over Luckman’s head, fixing the sunglasses in place and giving him the thumbs up.

“You one of us now,” he whispered.

Luckman scribbled a quick note to let Mel know he was OK and urged her to stay put. They left the room, walking past another Aboriginal man dressed in an identical hoodie who remained behind, apparently to guard his companions. Again Pat gestured at Luckman to keep quiet then led the way through the complex, past the pool area and a rear garbage bay to a laneway onto the street behind the motel, where there was a small parking bay for deliveries and tradesmen. A crumpled and rusty once-white Ford wagon was waiting for them. Pat opened the back door and waved Luckman in first. Luckman climbed across the back seat and acknowledged the lanky young Aboriginal man behind the wheel. Pat climbed in next to him.

“Luckman – this is Shorty.”

“Which way, brudda,” said Shorty, shaking his hand.

Pat picked up a blanket from the back seat. “You better get down under ’ere for a bit,” he told Luckman.

Luckman did as Pat suggested. It was hot and uncomfortable under the weight of a jumper and a blanket in the blistering heat of a desert afternoon. The floor of the wagon reeked of stale beer and urine. Shorty launched the car onto the street like he was running late for the last train out of town.

“I borrowed this car to keep ’em guessing, in case they watchin’ you. Sorry ‘bout the smell,” said Pat.

“What now?” Luckman asked.

“We take a bit of a drive to see if anyone’s watching, then I got a few things I wanna show you.”

Luckman couldn’t help thinking it was an insalubrious way to get around town for the men he presumed had now taken charge of a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. He quickly began to feel like a human shock absorber, copping every bump and turn in his knees and elbows as the car lurched along the road. He tried to distract himself by recalling the events of the previous night. Pat had helped them to the door of Clarence Paulson’s office, but had stayed inside the secret chamber. It was cold and quiet outside. There had been no police patrol car, indeed no sound or movement to indicate disturbance of any sort. He stumbled across the river bed with Mel draped over his shoulder. She kept wanting to sit down and go to sleep. He might have been inclined to take her to a hospital, but Pat assured him sleep was all she needed. He had found Bell still in one piece, unconscious and apparently untroubled by the night’s events.

The car came to a halt. Luckman heard the driver’s door open and close again.

“You can sit up now,” Pat told him.

Luckman cast the blanket aside in relief and wiped the sweat from his brow, taking in a deep breath of hot desert air though the open car window. They were in the driveway of a single-storey red brick house, one of many in the street that had seen better days. Shorty was making his way up the front stairs. The yard was a dust bowl parking lot of banged-up wrecks. A couple of forlorn Holden sedans that clearly hadn’t been driven in years were slowly decaying alongside a late-model Toyota LandCruiser dented in nearly every panel.

“Can we talk?”

“Not yet,” Pat answered sharply.

The Aboriginal man shuffled over behind the wheel and drove the car along the side of the house and through the backyard, turning sharply to pull into a large steel shed at the end of the long yard. Luckman noticed the shed’s entrance was not visible from the street.

A tin shed.

Pat jumped out of the car and pulled down a roller door. Luckman opened the back door and stepped out. It felt like a sauna. It was a relatively modern structure, but the interior was crammed with decades worth of old car parts. Used tyres and rims were stacked along the walls. In front of them was a maze of dented panels, used oil containers, rusting tools and empty beer bottles. The space was large enough to park three cars side by side. A couple of metres away from where Pat had parked, the chassis of an old sedan lay abandoned, its wheels removed. The car body lay flat on the shed’s concrete floor. It had no doors or bonnet. Bare metal and a briar patch of internal wiring was all that remained of the dashboard.

“What are we doing in here? We’ll cook.”

“I just realised we got a flat tyre,” Pat announced, rather too loudly. “We better change it.”

Luckman circled the car – all four tyres were intact. Pat put a finger to his lips and walked over to the old car body. He grabbed a lever on the side of the driver’s seat and pushed the seat back to reveal a small square manhole in the shed floor then climbed down into the hole, waving at Luckman to join him.

A vertical shaft disappeared into the ground directly below the old car. He saw a metal ladder bolted to the wall. The top rung was all that was visible just below the manhole. The rest of the ladder vanished into pitch black. It was impossible to say how far the shaft descended until he heard Pat’s feet hit the bottom a good 10 to 15 metres below.

Taking his time, making sure he had a good footing on the ladder, Luckman set off to follow. As his eyes drew level with the shed’s concrete floor and the bottom of the chassis he spotted a tiny concrete plug tucked up underneath the driver’s seat – a makeshift manhole cover that must lower into place when the seat was returned to its normal position. It was elegant, sophisticated and knowingly disguised inside the mythology of blackfella bush mechanics.

By the time he reached the bottom of the ladder Luckman couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Pat grabbed his wrist and placed his other open hand firmly on Luckman’s back, urging him to stand still. Above them he heard a gentle whir and a dusty thud of masonry as the manhole cover lowered back into place. This seemed to trigger the lights in their chamber, a concrete bunker about 20 by 20 metres across and a good three metres high. The air was stale but not stifling, meaning the place had to be ventilated.